Theosophy (Blavatsky)

• Founded: 1875, New York. Headquarters moved to Adyar, near Madras (Chennai), in 1882.
• Founders: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 to 1891), Henry Steel Olcott (1832 to 1907), William Quan Judge (1851 to 1896).
• Family: The Eastern import, with Western occultism underneath.
• Still active: Yes, in several societies that split from one another after 1895.

What it is

Theosophy is the movement that brought Eastern religious ideas into Western spirituality on a mass scale, and it is the single largest source of what people now call the New Age. Nearly every modern use of karma, reincarnation, chakras, astral bodies, hidden masters, or the idea that all religions share one secret core comes through this door.

Its founder was a Russian aristocrat's daughter who had spent two decades travelling, by her own account through Egypt, India, and Tibet, before arriving in New York in 1873. Blavatsky was formidable, funny, chain-smoking, and impossible to pin down. She was also either a genuine bearer of an ancient wisdom or one of the great inventors of the nineteenth century, and the argument has never been settled. What is not in dispute is her effect. Within fifteen years of founding a small study circle in a Manhattan apartment, she had lodges on four continents, and within fifty, her vocabulary was the common speech of Western alternative religion.

What it is made of

The map shows Theosophy rooted in the Hindu and Buddhist import, and that is right for its mature form. But the roots are more mixed than one arrow shows, and the mixture changed over time.

Spiritualism first. Blavatsky arrived in America as a spiritualist and made her name investigating and defending mediums. Theosophy grew directly out of that scene and then turned on it: she came to argue that séance phenomena were real but that the "spirits" were not the dead, and that spiritualism was dangerous precisely because it was undirected. The movement was founded by disillusioned spiritualists looking for a theory.

Western occultism second. Her first great book, Isis Unveiled (1877), is almost entirely a Western production: Hermetic philosophy, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah as filtered through Renaissance Christian writers, Rosicrucian legend, Egyptian mystery religion, and Masonic lore. She held a diploma from an irregular Masonic rite and was proud of it. In 1877 there is very little India in her.

The Eastern turn third. In 1879 Blavatsky and Olcott sailed for India, and the movement changed. Its centre moved to Adyar, its patrons became Hindu and Buddhist reformers, Olcott became a public champion of Buddhist revival in Ceylon, and the vocabulary shifted to Sanskrit. The Secret Doctrine (1888) is the result: a cosmology of cycles and races and planes, presented as commentary on stanzas from a Tibetan book no one else has ever seen.

Her own invention throughout. The Masters, or Mahatmas, hidden adepts in Tibet who supposedly guided the Society by letters that appeared in cabinets, are Blavatsky's creation whatever one thinks of their reality. So is the scheme of seven root races evolving through seven rounds of the planet, the seven principles of the human being, and the claim to a single secret doctrine underlying every religion on earth. The Society's own investigators, and the Society for Psychical Research in 1885, concluded that the Master letters were written by Blavatsky herself. Her defenders have contested that finding ever since, and the SPR itself softened its position a century later. This page takes no side; it notes that the movement's authority rests on a source that cannot be examined.

How it is practised

Theosophy is a study movement rather than a ritual one. It has no sacraments, no liturgy, and in its main line no magical ceremony at all.

1. The three objects. Every lodge is bound to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour; to encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science; and to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity. The first of these was radical in 1875 and remains the part of Theosophy that most deserves respect.

2. Reading and lodge discussion. The core practice is study of the founding texts and the classics of Eastern religion, in local lodges that meet to read and debate. Theosophy made the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads household books in the West.

3. Meditation and ethical discipline. The Voice of the Silence (1889) and later works lay out a path of meditation, vegetarianism, and service, modelled on Buddhist and Hindu ascetic practice as Blavatsky understood it.

4. The Esoteric Section. From 1888 an inner circle, under pledge, received Blavatsky's private instructions. This is the seed of the graded, initiatory Theosophy that Besant and Leadbeater later built into a full hierarchy of Masters and initiations. See Adyar Theosophy.

Ritual entered only through the side door: the Co-Masonic movement, the Liberal Catholic Church, and Leadbeater's ceremonial work, all of which belong to the Adyar branch rather than to Blavatsky herself.

What people value in it

The brotherhood clause, which was decades ahead of its time and which Olcott and Besant actually lived, in India, at some cost. The seriousness with which it took non-Christian scripture. The permission it gave a generation of Westerners to think about the soul outside the church. Its influence on art is out of all proportion to its size: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Scriabin, and Yeats all passed through it, and Yeats went from the Theosophical Society straight into the Golden Dawn.

Where the wall tends to appear

Three places.

The source cannot be checked. The Stanzas of Dzyan, the Masters, the Tibetan brotherhood: none of it can be read, visited, or verified. A student who begins by trusting the doctrine and ends by asking for the text finds there is no text, only Blavatsky's word for one. Every downstream movement inherits this problem and most of them add a further layer of revelation on top.

The race doctrine. The scheme of root races, with its talk of higher and lower evolutionary stages of humanity, was a nineteenth-century idea and reads badly now. It was later borrowed, stripped of Blavatsky's insistence on brotherhood, by people who wanted a mystical justification for racial hierarchy. The Society has spent a century distancing itself from that misuse, and the distancing is sincere, but the material is in the founding book.

The turn from study to hierarchy. Blavatsky's Theosophy was a reading movement. Within twenty years of her death it had become a system of initiations administered by leaders who claimed to see the Masters directly. The route from an open study circle to a closed order with clairvoyant authorities took a single generation, and it is worth asking why that route is so well worn on this map.

What grew out of it

Adyar Theosophy under Besant and Leadbeater, with its hierarchy of Masters and initiations; Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, which split off in 1912 over the promotion of Krishnamurti as World Teacher; Alice Bailey's Arcane School, which turned the Adyar machinery into the vocabulary of the New Age; the "I AM" Activity of the 1930s, which took the ascended masters and gave them an American accent; and, at a distance and against his will, the Gnostic and Eastern reading that fed Jung's Red Book period. Beyond the map, most of the twentieth-century Western interest in yoga, Buddhism, and comparative religion has a Theosophical parent somewhere in its family.

Read next on this map

• Spiritualism (1848): where Blavatsky started
• Hermetic philosophy: the Western half of Isis Unveiled
• Adyar Theosophy (Besant and Leadbeater): the hierarchy she did not build
• Alice Bailey: the New Age vocabulary
• Jung, Red Book period: the psychologist who took the sources and refused the doctrine

Sources

• H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (1877); The Secret Doctrine (1888); The Key to Theosophy (1889); The Voice of the Silence (1889).
• Henry Steel Olcott, Old Diary Leaves (1895 to 1935), the founding history from the inside.
• Society for Psychical Research, "Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Phenomena Connected with the Theosophical Society" (the Hodgson Report), 1885; Vernon Harrison's 1986 critique of it in the SPR's own journal.
• Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (1994), on the Western occult roots.
• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996), on the line from Theosophy to the New Age.