A. P. Sinnett

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Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840–1921) was an English journalist and one of the most influential early members of the Theosophical Society, the author whose books gave the movement’s teaching its first wide English readership. He edited The Pioneer, a prominent Anglo-Indian newspaper at Allahabad, when Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott arrived in India in 1879, and his interest in their claims drew him into the circle around them.

What made Sinnett’s name was correspondence. He held that he was receiving letters from two of the hidden adepts — the “Mahatmas” or “Masters” Koot Hoomi and Morya — whom Blavatsky said stood behind the Society, beings of advanced spiritual attainment living in seclusion in Tibet. The letters, often appearing by means he reported as paranormal, answered his questions on the structure of the cosmos and the destiny of the soul. From them he drew the material of two books: The Occult World (1881), which laid out the phenomena and his case for them, and Esoteric Buddhism (1883), which set the teaching in systematic form.

Esoteric Buddhism was the work that travelled. It presented, in the orderly prose of a Victorian man of letters rather than the dense sprawl of Blavatsky’s own writing, a scheme of evolving “rounds” and “races,” a sevenfold human constitution, and the twin laws of karma and rebirth governing the soul’s long ascent. For many English readers it was the first accessible statement of these ideas, and its title fixed — misleadingly, scholars note, since the system owes little to Buddhism as practised — a lasting association between Theosophy and the religions of the East.

The letters themselves became the movement’s most disputed document. The bundle Sinnett preserved was published after his death as The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (1923), and it remains a primary source for what the early Society taught. Whether the Masters were real, whether Blavatsky composed the letters herself, or whether something stranger occurred, was contested in his lifetime and is contested still; the Society for Psychical Research investigated the phenomena in 1885 and returned a damning verdict that Theosophists rejected. Sinnett held to his belief in the Masters to the end of his life in London in 1921, and to a conviction that he remained in contact with them long after the damning verdict and long after his estrangement from the Society’s later leadership.

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