Theosophical Society

The Theosophical Society did more than almost any nineteenth-century body to move Indian and Buddhist vocabulary into Western popular religion, and its internal history is a record of how unstable a movement built on claimed hidden Masters can be.

Three objects and a doctrine

Founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge, and headquartered from 1882 at Adyar near Madras, the society set out three objects, the first being a nucleus of universal human fellowship without distinction of race, creed or sex. Its books, above all The Secret Doctrine, described a perennial wisdom underlying all traditions, the evolution of the soul through many lives, and a hierarchy of Masters.

Schism as a way of life

Because authority rested on communication with unseen Masters rather than on an institution, the society fractured repeatedly, after the death of Blavatsky in 1891 and again over the leadership of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. The proclamation of the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the coming world-teacher, and his later repudiation of that role, drove the largest breaks, including the departure of Rudolf Steiner. Scholars such as Godwin and Hammer treat the society as the seedbed of a great deal of twentieth-century alternative spirituality, whatever one makes of its claims.

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.