Theosophical Society

Serpent. Return Theosophical Society. Conjunctio Rosarium Philosophorum. Androgyny. Separatio. Hermetic Yantras. Trinity Fire. Philisophical Egg. Matrix. Fountain. Christ-... 

Verbatim reports of five lectures given in the Blavatsky lodge, London, at the headquarters of the European section of the Theosophical society, during August, 1895. Contents Purification.—Thought control.—The building of character.—Spiritual alchemy.--On the threshold. 

Theosophical Society. Scottish Lodge, ed. The Transactions of the Scottish Lodge of the Theosophical Society part I + II, 189-. 

In 1875, spiritualist circles in New York helped launch the Theosophical Society, another major component of the occult revival. The Society was founded by H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). Blavatsky, who was born in the Russian Ukraine, claimed to have studied for seven years under Hindu mahatmas and even to have traveled in Tibet at a time when few Westerners were permitted into the country. Olcott had worked in the Navy Department during the Civil War he had even been one of three members of the special commission to investigate the assassination... 

Those who joined the G. D. during the 1890s had access to a store of hidden or rejected knowledge... that had no contemporary counterpart in the west. It was certainly far more elaborately codified than anything the Theosophical Society could offer. (Howe 1972, xxii-xxiii)... 

But no account of occultism s engagement with modem atomic science could be even adequate without addressing the occult chemistry of one of the most successful occult institutions of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Theosophical Society. It is to Annie Besant and C. W. Lead-beater s efforts to ground Theosophical knowledge in a scientific research program that we must now turn. 

Catholic Order of the Rosy Cross of Temple and Grail. And in 1892, he even established a series of annual Rosicrucian salons to promote art, music, and theater, arguing in his 1894 L Art ide aliste et mystique that From year to year the Rosicrucian idea wins over both artists and the public (quoted in McIntosh 1972, 174). The Theosophical Society opened a branch headed by Lady Caithness, Duchesse de Pomar, who felt that she was the reincarnation of Mary Queen of Scots (McIntosh 157). 

Freemasonry. (What alchemists there were in this period seem to have been just as active as Freemasons as they were alchemists, such as Dom Pernety and Cagliostro.) After Karl von Eckartshausen s Chemische Versuch was published in 1802, the trail seems to go cold. But as the century progressed, there was a revival of interest in Hermetic and occult traditions. It was not just concerned with alchemy, however, and figures such as Mrs Besant and Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn concerned themselves with all of the Hermetic arts. 

When Westcott founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888 he intended it to be a secret and highly-exclusive alternative to the Theosophical Society in fact a school of occultism based on the Western hermetic-Qabalistic tradition, and hence without any Hindu or Buddhist elements. The Theosophical Society was open to all who wished to join it, but the door that led to the G.D. was closely guarded. 

Colonel Henry S. Olcott was a founder member of the Theosophical Society (with H.P.B. and William Q. Judge) in New York City in 1875. 

I should be very doubtful about Mrs B. but will suspend judgment till I see her, Ayton wrote on 25 July 1889. Mrs B. was none other than Annie Besant (1847-1933), the Theosophical Society s latest and almost unbelievably spectacular recruit. Arthur H. Nethercott described her road to the T.S. in the first chapter of his masterly The First Five Lives of Annie Besant (1961) ... 

Shortly after 1885 she was to become still more notorious as a strike leader and union organiser - anathema to the conventional and conservative in both church and state. But by 1893 she had cut completely loose from her rebellious and sensational past and had embarked upon her even more rebellious and sensational future. She was to become the successor to the fantastic Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the international president of the stormy and mystical Theosophical Society. Later, in India, she would be a conspicuous and idolised religious, educational, and political leader one-time president of the Indian National Congress and an admired older friend and example to Mohanadas Gandhi whose eventual break with her over the best methods of achieving Indian independence led to his fame and martyrdom and her eclipse. 

Ayton did not refer to Madame Blavatsky s death on 8 May 1891 in any of his surviving letters to F. L. Gardner.. The- prospectively memorable convention of the European Section of the Theosophical Society was due to meet on 9 July. See The Theosophical Movement i8j5 ig25 A History> and a Survey (New York, 1925), chapters 18-20 for an account of contemporary T.S. politics and personalities. 

He was active in the Theosophical Society milieu, knew Madame Blavatsky personally, belonged to her well-known Blavatsky Lodge in 1890 and attended her cremation at Woking when she died in 1891. In 1902, however, he was reported in the Chiswick Times as having latterly taken less interest in the movement owing to his lack of sympathy with the present... 

The Esoteric Section was an Inner Group, almost a cult, within the Theosophical Society. It had already created a great deal of dissension and was to cause more. W. B. Yeats joined it in October 1889. He resigned in c. August 1890, having already become a member of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. 

When H. P. Blavatsky s The Secret Doctrine was published in March 1889 Stead gave it to Annie Besant to review. He knew about her recent interest in Spiritualism and potentially occultism, although at this time she cannot have known much about the latter. Stead had met Madame Blavatsky but did not know her well. Fascinated by H.P.B. s vast compendium of occult lore, Mrs Besant asked Stead for an introduction to her. When she first visited 17 Lansdowne Road in March 1889 she was accompanied by her younger friend Herbert Burrows. During the previous decade he had been prominent in a wide spectrum of radical groups (e.g., H. M. Hyndeman s pronouncedly Marxist Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society) and had recently helped Annie Besant to form a trade union for the underpaid girls who made matches. Both joined the Theosophical Society in May 1889. 

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