Neo-Theosophy

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Neo-Theosophy began as an insult. Followers loyal to Helena Blavatsky coined the label. It described a body of Theosophical teaching that Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater set out after Blavatsky died in 1891. Those teachings departed sharply from what Blavatsky herself had written, yet Theosophists in many countries still accept them as genuinely Theosophical today. Behind that one word sits a fight over who could speak for Blavatsky's legacy. It also covers a set of new doctrines that unsettled the movement's older guard. And it covers a term that eventually escaped Theosophy altogether, later labeling groups that had nothing to do with it. What follows traces the split, the doctrines Besant and Leadbeater built, and who first hurled the word "Neo-Theosophy" as an insult. It also follows where that word ended up decades later.

• 2. A Society Divides

  ›

  William Quan Judge stood accused of forging letters from the Theosophical movement's Mahatmas. The charge put him at odds with Henry Steel Olcott and Annie Besant. In 1895 Judge broke away entirely, taking most of the Society's American Section with him into a separate organization. He ran that new body for about a year before he died in New York City, after which Katherine Tingley took over as manager.

  The faction that stayed with Olcott and Besant settled in India and became known as the Theosophical Society - Adyar. Judge's own organization survives under the plain name Theosophical Society, usually specified as headquartered in Pasadena, California. It is the Adyar society, not the Pasadena one, that Judge's followers denounce as Neo-Theosophy. They reject what they see as its departure from Blavatsky's original teaching.

• 3. New Doctrines, New Rituals

  ›

  Clairvoyant investigation into past lives and the astral plane became the signature method of Besant and Leadbeater's new Theosophy. Alongside that method, the pair promoted a young Indian boy named Krishnamurti as the coming vehicle of a "World Teacher." That claim reshaped the movement's public identity. They also brought Catholic ritual into Theosophical practice, channeling it through an organization called the Liberal Catholic Church. Together those three moves defined the material that Blavatsky's loyalists would soon put a name to.

• 4. Naming The Term

  ›

  F.T. Brooks introduced the phrase "Neo-Theosophy" in 1914, inside a book titled Neo Theosophy Exposed. That book formed the second part of an earlier work, The Theosophical Society and its Esoteric Bogeydom. Around 1924, Margaret Thomas published Theosophy Versus Neo-Theosophy, now available online, laying out a detailed comparison between Blavatsky's original teaching and the newer material.

  G. R. S. Mead remained loyal to Blavatskyian Theosophy and grew highly critical of Besant's movement. He nonetheless applied the same term, "Neo-Theosophy," to describe it. For Mead, the word "Theosophy" itself meant something narrower: the wisdom element running through the world's great religions and philosophies.

• 5. Beyond The Theosophical Society

  ›

  Robert S. Ellwood's 1973 book Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America extended the label past the Theosophical Society itself. Ellwood called organizations founded by former Theosophists "devolutions of Theosophy." The category included Neo-Gnostic and Neo-Rosicrucian groups, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, Alice Bailey's various groups, Guy Ballard's "I AM" Activity, and Max Heindel's Rosicrucianism. In a later book, Alternative Altars, published in 1979, Ellwood singled out two figures by name. Alice Bailey, who lived 1880-1949, founded the Arcane School and the Full Moon Meditation Groups. Guy Ballard, who lived 1878-1930, led the "I AM" movement. He described both as representative of people who built new activities on claimed communications from Theosophical Masters.

  Writer Daryl S. Paulson later linked the term "Neo-Theosophy" specifically to Bailey. Other figures grouped under the same label include Peter Deunov, a contemporary of Steiner, and Samael Aun Weor, who carried Theosophical teaching into Latin America. Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley shaped, and were shaped by, this branch of the movement. That branch in turn fed into Anton LaVey's Satanism, L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology, Wicca, and the New Age and New Thought movements that followed. It was Bailey herself who coined the term "New Age."

• 6. Neo-Theosophists Today

  ›

  Benjamin Creme, Douglas Baker, and Victor Skumin represent the label's most recent generation of adherents. In 1990, Skumin extended Theosophical ideas about spiritual evolution into a new proposal. He classified a stage he called Homo spiritalis, Latin for "spiritual man," identifying it as the sixth root race.