This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City on 17 November 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, William Quan Judge and sixteen others, describing itself as an unsectarian body pledged to promote universal brotherhood. It did not stay in New York. Within a few years Blavatsky and Olcott relocated to India and established the society's international headquarters at Adyar, near Madras, a move that shifted the young organisation from its original grounding in Western occultism toward incorporating Hindu and Buddhist material directly into its teaching. Olcott went further, founding the Buddhist Theosophical Society in Ceylon and working for a Buddhist revival there, a project separate from, though carried out under, the parent society's name.
Blavatsky's death in 1891 did not settle who spoke for her legacy. William Quan Judge, running the society's American work, was accused of forging letters purporting to come from the hidden Mahatmas Blavatsky claimed as her teachers, and in 1895 he broke from Henry Olcott and Annie Besant's Adyar leadership, taking most of the American membership with him. The split produced two enduring lines rather than one society: the India based Theosophical Society Adyar, which Olcott and then Besant continued to lead and which remains the most widespread body still carrying the name, and Judge's American organisation, which after his own death passed to Katherine Tingley and relocated to Point Loma, California, later known as the Theosophical Society Pasadena.
Both descendant societies are still active, smaller now than at their turn of the century height, and the split is part of why no single membership figure describes Theosophy today: one rival body's roll is not the movement's.