Theosophy

Theosophy is the tradition of the Ancient Wisdom: the teaching that a single esoteric doctrine underlies the world's religions, preserved by a brotherhood of perfected adepts in Tibet, and revealed to the modern world in the writings of its founders. Its doctrines form the system much of modern esotericism inherited: the evolution of consciousness through vast cosmic cycles and root races; the sevenfold constitution of the human being, body and vitality and astral body and soul and spirit; reincarnation and karma as a worked-out mechanism rather than a borrowed idea; and the Masters, the Mahatmas whose letters purportedly dictated the foundational texts. What Theosophists do today follows from the society's founding objects, the formation of a universal brotherhood of humanity, the comparative study of religion and philosophy and science, and the investigation of nature's unexplained laws: lodge meetings of talks and book study, the meditation that opens and closes them, the schools of the wisdom and the summer schools, the correspondence courses, and the service order the tradition maintains. The society's own freedom-of-thought resolution makes the remarkable provision that no teacher's doctrine is binding, not even the founder's, which keeps the tradition a study society rather than a church.

Where it came from, briefly: the Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian emigre whose writings became its canon and the American lawyer who carried it to India, the headquarters settled at Adyar near Madras in 1882 where they remain. The Mahatma letters' authenticity was the society's founding controversy, the Society for Psychical Research's investigation concluding the phenomena fraudulent in 1885, a verdict whose handwriting evidence a later society member re-examined and found unreliable while the spy-application letter the scholarship discovered kept the founder's character contested. The founder died in 1891, the succession split the society in 1895 into the American line and the Adyar line, the California community of the American line became a distinguished intellectual colony before its decline, and the Adyar line's prominence rose with the find of the boy declared the World Teacher's vehicle, the order built around him dissolved by the young man himself in 1929 with the declaration that truth is a pathless land, the society losing a third of its members in the aftermath.

The tradition's influence is its most documented feature: the anthroposophy and the Bailey school and the I AM movement descend from it directly; the concepts it popularized, reincarnation and karma and the aura and the chakras and the ascended masters, permeated the whole of the New Age's vocabulary, the handbook of the Theosophical current documenting its influence on more than a hundred movements; and the first systematic interfaith work, the western yoga vocabulary, even the young Gandhi's Bhagavad Gita, trace to the society's networks. The scholarship treats the revelation-from-Masters framing as the founder's authorial device and the movement as the modern era's most important occult organization, the study of it matured at the intersection of new religious movement studies and Western esotericism.

The society's numbers run to some twenty-seven thousand members across seventy countries today, down from the interwar peak of forty-five thousand, the Adyar estate's acres and the American campus in Illinois the tradition's visible centers, and the membership's demographics educated and individual as they have always been, the artists and scientists the movement drew in its first decades having made its history a cultural one. Access is open: sympathy with the three objects is the only condition, the books public domain, the doctrine optional. Its counsel is the society's own motto: there is no religion higher than truth, and the truth sought is the study's, pursued without creed and without compulsion.