Tingley, Point Loma, and Pasadena

Judge died in March 1896, less than a year after the split, and leadership of the American Society passed to Katherine Tingley, an American spiritualist and social reformer who had worked closely with him in his final years. Tingley reorganized the body in 1898 as the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, folding Theosophy into a broader program of social and educational reform, and in 1900 she established a utopian community, school and headquarters compound at Point Loma, overlooking San Diego Bay, that became one of the most visible intentional communities in early twentieth century California, complete with a Greek theater, schools for children, and craft and agricultural programs meant to demonstrate theosophical principles in daily communal life. The Point Loma community drew both admiration and suspicion from its San Diego neighbors and faced repeated financial strain, and after Tingley's death in 1929 her successors gradually scaled back the communal experiment; the organization sold the Point Loma property during the Depression and relocated its headquarters to Pasadena in 1942, adopting the shorter name Theosophical Society Pasadena in the years that followed. The Pasadena body continues today as an active, considerably smaller organization than its Adyar counterpart, maintaining a publishing program, the Theosophical University Press, and continuing to teach the version of Blavatsky and Judge's original synthesis that split from Adyar in 1895.