Theosophy

What it is

The teaching of the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge, and the movement that grew from it.

Its three declared objects: 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 unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.

Its central claim is a perennial wisdom: one ancient body of truth underlying every religion, preserved by hidden adepts, and now being partially released.

Where it came from

The society emerged from the American spiritualist milieu of the 1870s, and rapidly moved away from mediumship toward Eastern sources. Its headquarters relocated to Adyar, near Madras, in 1882.

The doctrine came chiefly through Blavatsky's two enormous books, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), the latter presented as a commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan, an ancient text in a language called Senzar that no one has located and no independent evidence supports.

Its core teachings: Masters or Mahatmas — adepts, chiefly Morya and Koot Hoomi, directing the work from Tibet; karma and reincarnation; a scheme of planes and subtle bodies; and a cosmology of root races and rounds through which humanity evolves.

Later leadership produced the movement's second phase. Annie Besant — previously a prominent secularist, birth control campaigner and trade union organiser — became president in 1907 and later president of the Indian National Congress, and C.W. Leadbeater supplied the detailed clairvoyant descriptions of chakras and auras that shaped everything after.

The two of them identified a Tamil boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, as the vehicle of the coming World Teacher and built an organisation around him. In 1929 he dissolved it in front of thousands of followers, declaring that truth is a pathless land which cannot be approached by any organisation or creed, resigned every position and returned the money and property. He spent the next sixty years teaching that no one should follow anyone, including him.

How it is practised

Study, lectures, meditation and the cultivation of ethical character, within a lodge structure. Theosophy is more a body of teaching and a study society than a ritual tradition.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the influence on modern spirituality is greater than any other single source in this section, and almost entirely unacknowledged.

Karma and reincarnation as concepts available to Western lay audiences; the astral plane; the etheric and subtle bodies; the aura and its colour meanings; the modern chakra system; the akashic records; "the ancient wisdom"; the assumption that all religions teach the same thing underneath — these entered English-language spiritual discourse substantially through Theosophy, and most people using them have never heard the word.

We can say the society did real and creditable things. Olcott's work in Sri Lanka was substantial: he campaigned for Buddhist education and civil rights under colonial rule, wrote a Buddhist catechism, helped design the Buddhist flag now used internationally, and is still honoured there with a national holiday. Theosophy was broadly anti-colonial in practice, admitted women to leadership from the outset, and Besant's political work in India was serious.

And we have to state the root race doctrine plainly. The Secret Doctrine sets out a scheme of successive root races — Lemurian, Atlantean, Aryan and others — as stages of spiritual evolution, and it assigns existing human populations to positions within that hierarchy. The language is explicitly evolutionary and explicitly ranks races.

This material fed directly into worse things. Ariosophy — Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in Austria — adapted Theosophical race doctrine into an explicitly Aryan-supremacist mysticism, which fed into the völkisch milieu and into Nazi occultism. The runic material discussed under runes comes through this channel.

The relationship is genuinely complicated and should not be flattened in either direction. Theosophy's own commitments were universalist and anti-racist in intent; Blavatsky's scheme was about spiritual evolution rather than political supremacy; the society opposed colonialism and included Indian leadership. And the doctrine supplied a ready structure to people who wanted a mystical racial hierarchy, and they took it.

We cannot say what the Masters were. The evidence for their existence rests on Blavatsky's testimony and on letters whose authenticity is the subject of the dispute described in her own article.

Further reading

• H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (1888) — enormous, and worth sampling to see what actually spread.
• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) — the Ariosophy connection, careful and unsensational.
• Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist (1996) — on Olcott and Sri Lanka.