Theosophy

‘Theosophy is Hinduism at its best’

‘Theosophy is Hinduism at its best’, Mahatma Gandhi declared in an interview given in 1946. One of the founding figures of theosophy, Madame H.P. Blavatsky, believed there is but one infinite divine life, which is everything and in everything, though she primarily sought wisdom in the East. As such, the Theosophical Society (founded 1875) provided the first introduction of Eastern spirituality to the Western world. The BPH offers first editions of Blavatsky’s works and those of her immediate colleagues and successors. It is an interesting detail that G.R.S. Mead, for a while private secretary to Blavatsky, was one of the first to provide a scholarly edition of the Hermetic works in his Thrice Great Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis, published by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1906: ‘The sympathetic study of this materual may well prove an initiatory process towards an understanding of that Archaic Gnosis’, he wrote in the preface.