Tradition
Theosophical Society
A late-nineteenth-century esoteric movement that introduced South and East Asian religious vocabulary into Western occultism and shaped almost every subsequent Western esoteric current of the twentieth century.
The Theosophical Society is an esoteric organisation founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and William Quan Judge. It declared three guiding objects: to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinction of race or creed, to encourage the comparative study of religion and philosophy, and to investigate “unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.”
Blavatsky claimed her teachings derived from a hidden brotherhood of advanced masters — the Mahatmas — located in Tibet and elsewhere in Asia. The doctrines she set out, particularly in The Secret Doctrine (1888), reframed Hindu and Buddhist concepts within a sweeping cosmological synthesis and became a major channel through which those traditions entered Western esoteric vocabulary.
