This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1895, three years after Blavatsky's death removed the Society's central doctrinal authority, a dispute over Judge's own claims to occult authority and leadership led him to split the American Section away from Olcott's Adyar based Society entirely, rather than remaining a subordinate section under Olcott's continuing presidency.
Judge founded a rival Theosophical Society in America, an institution that survives today as the Theosophical Society (Pasadena), one of several rival Theosophical bodies that all trace their descent back to the single 1875 founding in New York rather than to independent origins of their own.
Whether that 1895 split was a principled response to a genuine leadership dispute, or itself an overreaching claim to the kind of occult authority Blavatsky alone had previously held, remains a live question historians of the movement answer differently; what is not disputed is the practical consequence, that the Theosophical Society's present day organizational landscape, several distinct bodies rather than one, traces directly to the division Judge's own 1895 departure created.