Founding and the Move to Adyar

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian born occultist, and Henry Steel Olcott, an American lawyer and former Civil War officer, founded the Theosophical Society in New York City on 17 November 1875, together with the Irish American lawyer William Quan Judge, drawing an initial membership from New York's community of spiritualists and freethinkers interested in a more systematic esoteric philosophy than seance room phenomena alone could offer. The Society adopted three formal objects that have remained its stated mission since: to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed or class, to encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy and science, and to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.

Blavatsky and Olcott relocated to India in 1879, seeking closer contact with the Hindu and Buddhist traditions that increasingly shaped the Society's teaching, and in 1882 they purchased an estate on the Adyar river near Madras that became the Society's permanent international headquarters, housing its growing library and archive. Olcott served as the Society's first president until his death in 1907, presiding over rapid growth across India, Ceylon and Europe even as the Society's early years were also marked by the first of several controversies over the authenticity of the phenomena its founders claimed to produce.