Theosophy

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Theosophy, in its modern sense, is the esoteric movement organized around the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian émigrée Helena Blavatsky, the American lawyer and journalist Henry Steel Olcott, and a small circle around them. The word itself is far older — Greek for “divine wisdom,” used in antiquity and later of Christian visionaries like Jacob Boehme — and the borrowing was a claim: that the new society was recovering something, not inventing it.

What it taught, principally through Blavatsky’s enormous books — Isis Unveiled in 1877, The Secret Doctrine in 1888, the catechism-style Key to Theosophy the library holds — was that beneath all religions lies one ancient wisdom-tradition, preserved by hidden adepts and disclosed now in part; that the cosmos and the soul evolve together through vast cycles; and that karma and reincarnation, not heaven and judgment, govern the soul’s career. The Society’s declared objects were broader and almost secular: universal brotherhood without distinction of race or creed, the comparative study of religions, and the investigation of nature’s unexplained laws. The teachings were Blavatsky’s; the platform, anyone could stand on.

The founding itself was small and concrete. The Society was formally constituted on November 17, 1875, after September meetings in Blavatsky’s New York rooms — Olcott its first president, the Dublin-born lawyer William Quan Judge, then twenty-four, third among the founders. The Society held that its teaching came from living Masters — Morya and Koot Hoomi, adepts said to dwell beyond the Himalayas. Between 1880 and 1884 letters attributed to them reached A. P. Sinnett, editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, whose The Occult World (1881) and Esoteric Buddhism (1883) made the correspondence into Theosophy’s first popular books. The originals sit in the British Library, the authorship argued still.

The movement’s history is inseparable from its scandals and its reach, and both were large. The founders moved to India in 1879, fixing the Society’s permanent headquarters at Adyar near Madras in 1882, and Theosophy became one of the first Western movements to take Asian religions seriously as living teachers rather than mission fields — Olcott campaigned for Buddhist education in Ceylon, where he and Blavatsky took the Buddhist precepts at Galle in 1880, among the first Westerners to do so, and his 1881 Buddhist Catechism remains in use there; the Society’s prestige fed back into Hindu and Buddhist revival movements. In 1885 Richard Hodgson, an investigator for the Society for Psychical Research, concluded that Blavatsky’s miraculous phenomena — letters from hidden Masters among them — were fraudulent, a verdict that dogged her remaining years and has been argued over since. None of this stopped the diffusion: by the early twentieth century Theosophical vocabulary — karma, astral bodies, root races, ascended Masters, the perennial wisdom — had soaked into Western occultism, new religious movements, and modern art, where painters including Kandinsky and Mondrian worked under its influence; one item in that vocabulary carried a darker charge — the root-race doctrine graded humanity into a hierarchy of racial development, and völkisch occultism later made of it what the Society’s first object — brotherhood without distinction of race — expressly forbade.

After Blavatsky’s death in 1891 the movement split repeatedly, Annie Besant leading its largest branch. Judge, accused by Olcott and Besant of forging Mahatma letters, led most of the American Section out in 1895 and died within the year. The Adyar society passed to Besant at Olcott’s death in 1907, and under her found its strangest hour: in 1909 C. W. Leadbeater picked out a boy on the Adyar beach — Jiddu Krishnamurti — as vehicle of the coming World Teacher. The Order of the Star in the East, founded around him in 1911, cost the Society Rudolf Steiner’s German section, gone by 1913 into Anthroposophy; Krishnamurti dissolved the Order himself in 1929, telling its members that truth was a pathless land.

The Indian entanglement ran past religion into politics. Allan Octavian Hume, founding president of the Society’s Simla lodge, convened the Indian National Congress in 1885; Besant founded the Central Hindu College at Benares in 1898, launched a Home Rule League in 1916, and in 1917 became the Congress’s first woman president. However the Masters are weighed, the political record is plain: a society charged with inventing an imaginary East helped organize the politics of a real one.

Scholarship treats Theosophy as the great clearing-house of modern esotericism: it gathered Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Hermetic literature, and newly translated Asian texts into one system and broadcast the result at industrial scale. Critics, then and now, answer that the synthesis was bought with bad philology and invented authorities. Both descriptions fit the record. What the movement claimed was a single ancient truth behind all traditions; what it demonstrably built was a single modern channel through which those traditions reached millions — which is not the same achievement, but is not a small one.

→ In the library: Blavatsky — The Key to Theosophy (1889)

→ Related: Helena Blavatsky · Henry Steel Olcott · A P Sinnett · Jiddu Krishnamurti · Akashic Records · Spiritualism · Neoplatonism