Theosophical Society

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 17th of November 1875, a group of twenty people gathered in New York City and declared themselves an organization unlike any other. They called themselves "an unsectarian body of seekers after Truth, who endeavor to promote Brotherhood and strive to serve humanity." Among them stood Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian mystic who would become the movement's principal thinker, and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who would serve as its first president until his death in 1907.

  The Theosophical Society set out to do something genuinely ambitious: synthesize science, religion, and philosophy into a single unified framework. It drew from Neoplatonism and European occultism, from Hinduism and Buddhism, weaving them into a doctrine that held human life to have one overriding purpose. That purpose was spiritual emancipation, achieved through reincarnation governed by karma.

  What followed over the next several decades was a story of bold declarations, bitter splits, an extraordinary adolescent boy proclaimed as a future world teacher, and a philosopher who ultimately refused the role prepared for him. The questions the Society planted in the late nineteenth century are still argued over in branches from Chennai to Pasadena today.

• 2. Three Objects

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  William Quan Judge was one of the sixteen original co-founders who signed on in 1875, and in the early months of that same year he and Olcott had come to believe that Blavatsky was no ordinary spiritualist. The Society's initial stated objective was direct: the study and elucidation of occultism and the Cabala.

  Over subsequent years those goals were refined. After Olcott and Blavatsky moved to India and established international headquarters at Adyar in Madras, the Society's formal objectives were incorporated on the 3rd of April 1905 in Chennai. Three objects crystallized into official standing. First, to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour. Second, to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science. Third, to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.

  The Society organized itself as strictly non-sectarian. Its constitution was explicit on two points that would prove telling. Any fellow who attempted to involve the Society in political disputes would face immediate expulsion. No fellow, officer, or council could promulgate any doctrine as the Society's own official position. A resolution passed by the General Council on the 23rd of December 1924 reaffirmed this stance, and sympathy with the three objects remained the sole condition of membership throughout.

• 3. Hidden Masters

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  Blavatsky's 1888 magnum opus, the Secret Doctrine, laid out the Society's most elaborate philosophical claim: that all of existence undergoes intelligent evolution on a cosmic scale, encompassing both physical and non-physical dimensions of the universe, affecting every constituent part regardless of apparent size.

  Humanity's evolution on Earth, she argued, was one thread inside this cosmic process. Overseeing it was a hidden spiritual hierarchy she named the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom. The upper echelons of this hierarchy consisted of advanced spiritual beings whose influence, she held, stretched back through the millennia.

  Blavatsky positioned the Theosophical Society not as a novelty but as one of many attempts by this hidden hierarchy to guide humanity toward what she described as its ultimate immutable evolutionary objective: the attainment of perfection and the conscious, willing participation in the evolutionary process itself. These periodic attempts, in her framing, required earthly infrastructure, and the Society was the current expression of that infrastructure, ultimately inspired by beings called Mahatmas. The practical consequence was that the Society's work was presented as participation in a process far larger than any single generation of members.

• 4. Schisms and Splinters

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  Helena Blavatsky died in 1891, and for a time those who remained seemed capable of holding things together. That period was brief. William Quan Judge was accused by both Olcott and the prominent Theosophist Annie Besant of forging letters from the Mahatmas. Judge severed his connection with Olcott and Besant in 1895 and took the majority of the Society's American Section with him.

  Judge died in 1896, and his faction immediately fractured again. Katherine Tingley led one group, which survives today as the Theosophical Society with headquarters in Pasadena, California. Ernest Temple Hargrove, Judge's former secretary, led another faction that split off in 1898 and no longer survives. The United Lodge of Theosophists broke away from the Tingley organization in 1909.

  In 1902 Rudolf Steiner became general secretary of the German-Austrian division of the Adyar Society. He pursued a Western-oriented course relatively independent of the Adyar headquarters, and after serious philosophical conflicts with Annie Besant over the spiritual significance of Christ and the status of a young boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti, most of the German and Austrian members separated in 1913. Under Steiner's leadership they formed the Anthroposophical Society, which subsequently expanded to many other countries.

  The Spanish Sociedad Teosófica, whose institutive charter was signed in 1921, developed local branches in Madrid, Terrasa, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Alicante, Zanoni, Cádiz, and Dharma. The Theosophical Society in Ireland, based in Pembroke Road in Dublin, claims its charter came directly from Blavatsky and operates as a wholly independent body; its founding membership included the poet and mystic George William Russell, known by the pen name Æ.

• 5. The World Teacher

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  As early as 1889 Blavatsky made a public declaration that went beyond the Society's three stated objects. The real purpose of founding the organization, she said, was to prepare humanity for the arrival of a World Teacher: a manifested aspect of an advanced spiritual entity called the Maitreya, who periodically appears on Earth to direct human evolution.

  She envisioned this Teacher finding an organization already in place, a literature ready to hand, and minds already prepared for a new message. In her own words, she described the scale of what such an opportunity could accomplish compared to what the Society had achieved in its first fourteen years without any of those advantages and surrounded by obstacles.

  Blavatsky's writings placed this arrival no earlier than the last quarter of the twentieth century. Annie Besant, who became Society president in 1907, disagreed. When Besant repeated the declaration in 1896, five years after Blavatsky's death, she believed the World Teacher would appear considerably sooner than Blavatsky's timeline allowed.

• 6. Jiddu Krishnamurti

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  Charles Webster Leadbeater, an influential Theosophist and occultist, was among those who believed the Maitreya's appearance was imminent. In 1909 he encountered a young Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti near the Society's headquarters at Adyar, India. Krishnamurti's family had relocated to the area only a few months earlier. Leadbeater proclaimed him the most suitable candidate to serve as the "vehicle" of the World Teacher.

  The Society took Krishnamurti under its wing and spent years preparing him for the mission its leaders had defined. A worldwide organization called the Order of the Star was created specifically to prepare the world for the Coming of the Maitreya, with Krishnamurti as its focus.

  By 1925 Krishnamurti had begun moving away from the role the Society's leadership had mapped out for him. In 1929 he publicly dissolved the Order of the Star and renounced his assumed role as the World Teacher's vehicle. He parted from the Theosophical Society entirely, though he maintained friendly relations with individual members. He spent the remainder of his life as an independent speaker traveling the world, becoming widely recognized as an original thinker on spiritual, philosophical, and psychological subjects. Thomas Edison and William Butler Yeats were among the well-known figures elsewhere associated with the Theosophical Society during its broader reach.