Three Objects, and One Investigation That Would Not Go Away

The society declared three objects and they have barely changed: 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 the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity. The first is the reason the society matters historically. It committed itself, in the 1870s, to a position on race and sex that most institutions around it did not hold.

The society's Indian phase had consequences nobody planned. Working from Adyar, its members supported Sanskrit scholarship and Buddhist revival, and Olcott's work in Ceylon fed directly into a Sinhalese Buddhist revival that outlasted the society's involvement. A great deal of what the twentieth century West thought it knew about karma, reincarnation and the subtle body arrived through this channel.

The investigation is the Hodgson report. The Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson to Adyar and published his conclusion in 1885 that the Mahatma letters were written by Blavatsky and her associates. The finding stood for a century. In 1986 the same society published Vernon Harrison's reassessment, which found Hodgson's handwriting analysis unsound and his procedure prosecutorial, without establishing that the letters were genuine. Both documents are on the record and neither settles the question.