IN HIS ADDRESS at the cremation of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1891, a young Englishman called G. R. S. Mead, who, two years earlier, had been appointed General Secretary of the European Section of the Theosophical Society, professed that

Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, founded in New York City in 1875, had offered a radically new structure of spiritual belief fixed initially in spiritualism and, slightly later, in a syncretic approach to Buddhism and Hinduism which sought to create an ecumenical fraternity in which, as the Society’s motto states, ‘There is no religion higher than the truth’. Blavatsky wasn’t striving to create a new religion, but a combinatory system of spiritual belief and a universalising cultural vision that brought together diffuse spiritual traditions. The decisive influences of the Theosophical Society on late Victorian culture, on the history of Indian Home Rule, and on the emergence of the spiritual New Age of the second half of the twentieth century have been well documented. Mahatma Gandhi had an early meaningful interest in theosophy, modern artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were deeply influenced by the precepts of the Society, and the notable work of Italian psychoanalyst Roberto Assagioli was unquestionably shaped by his theosophical interests. What has been less thoroughly examined are the Theosophical Society’s cadet lines, those early twentieth-century offshoots which, following Mead’s directive to ‘shape our own characters and lives that the truth may be thereby commended to others’, restyled the substance and form of Blavatsky’s teachings in the light of the profound social and aesthetic transformations of the modernist era.

Fractured into a wide collection of outgrowths and offshoots during the decades following Blavatsky’s death, the Theosophical Society gave birth to a range of prominent twentieth-century spiritual teachers including Alice Bailey, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Catherine Tingley, G. R. S. Mead and Rudolf Steiner.