Charles Webster Leadbeater was born on 17 February 1854 in Stockport, England. He was ordained a Church of England clergyman as a young man, but left conventional ministry after joining the Theosophical Society in 1883, drawn by its claims of contact with hidden spiritual masters and its promise of direct clairvoyant investigation of unseen worlds. He traveled to India and Ceylon with the Society's co-founder Henry Steel Olcott, studying meditation and claiming to develop advanced clairvoyant faculties that became the basis for his prolific later writing.
Leadbeater's career within the Society was repeatedly disrupted by controversy over his conduct toward boys in his care, allegations that led to his formal resignation in 1906 and a second period of separation in the early 1920s, though on each occasion Annie Besant, by then the Society's president, worked to see him reinstated, a pattern that remains a genuinely contested part of his legacy rather than a settled footnote. He continued writing and teaching within Theosophical circles, based mainly in Australia in his later years, until his death on 1 March 1934.
Beyond his authorship, Leadbeater played an active role in the Liberal Catholic Church, an independent sacramental body with close Theosophical ties that he helped shape liturgically, blending Christian ritual forms with Theosophical doctrine in a way that extended his influence beyond the Theosophical Society itself. He also trained and mentored a circle of younger Theosophical writers during his Australian years, several of whom carried his clairvoyant investigative method forward into their own later publications after his death.