Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Article

Tingley, Point Loma, and Pasadena

Learn More
Tingley, Point Loma, and Pasadena

Judge died in March 1896, less than a year after the split, and leadership of the American Society passed to Katherine Tingley, an American spiritualist and social reformer who had worked closely with him in his final years. Tingley reorganized the body in 1898 as the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, folding Theosophy into a broader program of social and educational reform, and in 1900 she established a utopian community, school and headquarters compound at Point Loma, overlooking San Diego Bay, that became one of the most visible intentional communities in early twentieth century California, complete with a Greek theater, schools for children, and craft and agricultural programs meant to demonstrate theosophical principles in daily communal life. The Point Loma community drew both admiration and suspicion from its San Diego neighbors and faced repeated financial strain, and after Tingley's death in 1929 her successors gradually scaled back the communal experiment; the organization sold the Point Loma property during the Depression and relocated its headquarters to Pasadena in 1942, adopting the shorter name Theosophical Society Pasadena in the years that followed. The Pasadena body continues today as an active, considerably smaller organization than its Adyar counterpart, maintaining a publishing program, the Theosophical University Press, and continuing to teach the version of Blavatsky and Judge's original synthesis that split from Adyar in 1895.

Connections

Article On

Source Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
Sources
Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.