The Theosophical Society did more than almost any nineteenth-century body to move Indian and Buddhist vocabulary into Western popular religion, and its internal history is a record of how unstable a movement built on claimed hidden Masters can be.
Three objects and a doctrine
Founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge, and headquartered from 1882 at Adyar near Madras, the society set out three objects, the first being a nucleus of universal human fellowship without distinction of race, creed or sex. Its books, above all The Secret Doctrine, described a perennial wisdom underlying all traditions, the evolution of the soul through many lives, and a hierarchy of Masters.
Schism as a way of life
Because authority rested on communication with unseen Masters rather than on an institution, the society fractured repeatedly, after the death of Blavatsky in 1891 and again over the leadership of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. The proclamation of the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the coming world-teacher, and his later repudiation of that role, drove the largest breaks, including the departure of Rudolf Steiner. Scholars such as Godwin and Hammer treat the society as the seedbed of a great deal of twentieth-century alternative spirituality, whatever one makes of its claims.