THEOSOPHY
indianexpress.com
Theosophy, Annie Besant and a forgotten lodge in Pune
Founded in 1882 by Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, the Poona Lodge Theosophical Society still draws followers in Pune, though the numbers have been dwindling.
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theconversation.com
White Lotus Day celebrates the ‘founding mother of occult in America,’ Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Every May 8, thousands of people celebrate White Lotus Day, commemorating a remarkable and controversial Russian American woman: spiritual leader Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who died in 1891.
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scroll.in
How an American helped revive Buddhism in Sri Lanka after moving to India
Henry Steel Olcott was a journalist and an agricultural expert before he founded Theosophy and became celebrated in Sri Lanka.
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patheos.com
INDO-GOTHIC YOGA
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (pronounced all-caught by the natives and all-talk by the Europeans) left the Theosophical Headquarters in Adyar on August 4, 1888. After a two-day journey by train, he was now approaching the new Victoria Terminus in Bombay.
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patheos.com
DENIZEN OF ETERNITY
Now that we have the Theosophical Publishing Society, I want to print your stories. I want to make a volume of novels under which Russian names will be sold,” Blavatsky told her sister, Vera Petrovna.
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patheos.com
CARELESS WHENCE COMES YOUR GOLD
I will not go into the question whether it is desirable that women should work in factories or workshops, for it would be useless to do so,” said Clementina Black.
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ART
christies.com
The mystical, biological and parallel worlds of Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian
They were, however, fellow travellers on the strange, astral path of Theosophical enlightenment. Theosophy was an occult movement that espoused belief in the mystic powers of life and matter, and a cosmic connection to other spiritual realms.
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news.artnet.com
In Pictures: Tate Modern Pairs Abstract Art Pioneers Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian—Who Never Met in Life But Shared a Love of Nature
At the same time, the Dutch artist’s interest grew in movements like theosophy and anthroposophy.
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theguardian.com
Ouija board wonder: how Hilma af Klint’s occult dabblings made her an outcast
Mondrian, like Af Klint, became involved in theosophical circles and their ideas permeated his art.
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fadmagazine.com
Hilma Af Klint and Piet Mondrian ‘Forms of Life’ at Tate Modern
In 1920 af Klint created ‘Series II’, a group of geometrical artworks featuring circles and crosses inspired by different religions including Theosophy.
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theartsdesk.com
Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, Tate Modern review - the hidden depths of abstract art revealed
Af Klint’s mysticism was far from unusual. In fact, the pioneers of abstraction were all spiritualists. Like af Klint, Piet Mondrian – whose primary coloured paintings are the epitome of modernist abstraction – was a member of the Theosophical Society.
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artlyst.com
The Art Diary May 2023 – Rev Jonathan Evens
Their early abstract works preceded the abstract art of Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, both influenced, as was af Klint, by Theosophy. Across Europe at that time, artists and thinkers like af Klint and Mondrian turned to spiritual movements like Theosophy and anthroposophy to reconcile religion with the modern world.
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thecollector.com
10 Modern Artists Who Were Influenced by the Occult
The occult roots of modern art are way more profound than it might seem. Take a look at 10 modern artists who were influenced by the world of occultism.
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e-flux.com
Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn: Deep Knowledge
Her life as a woman, a researcher, a mystic, and an artist is fascinating. In the culturally and politically difficult years prior to World War II, she immersed herself in theosophy and East Asian philosophy, assembled a huge image archive, and promoted interaction between
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thenation.com
The Curious Case of the Transcendental Painting Group
Though their individual persuasions varied, the artists shared a potpourri of proto–New Age beliefs like theosophy and an interest in painting invisible forces operating at the limits of consciousness.
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thecollector.com
5 Famous Works by Beatrice Wood You Should Know
Although not religious, Wood’s spirituality defined her life alongside her creativity. Her study of Theosophy and esoteric teachings were a significant part of her life. In Theosophical color theory, spiritual cleansing is believed to be possible through the purification of color.
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artreview.com
Just the Two of Us: The Rise of the Blockbuster Dialogue Exhibition
Af Klint and Mondrian never met, though they were born a decade apart in Sweden and the Netherlands respectively. Both were deeply involved in Theosophy, an occultist religion established in the nineteenth century—af Klint went furthest,
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artnews.com
Who Was Charmion von Wiegand and Why Is She Important?
Hard-edged geometric shapes came slowly into Von Wiegand’s work, linked to her interest in theosophy. In the late 1940s and mid 1950s she looked toward East Asian art as an extension of her search for spiritual models. She studied the writings and drawings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society, and similar texts with diagrams and illustrations of chakras, mandalas, and cosmograms.
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thekashmirimages.com
The Emergence of Abstract Art: A Revolution in the Art World
Kandinsky began his artistic career as a figurative painter, but he soon became dissatisfied with the limitations of representational art. He was deeply influenced by theosophy
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washingtonpost.com
Ellsworth Kelly at 100’: Sensational in more ways than one
It seems that both Piet Mondrian’s jazz compositions and Hilma af Klint’s mystical pastels share at their root a late-19th-century theory about the natural world known as theosophy — or at least that’s the case the museum is making.
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whitehotmagazine.com
"Fresh" at the Debbie Dickinson Gallery by Anthony Haden-Guest
Hilma af Klimt, the recently rediscovered early abstractionist, Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian were all, heavily influenced by Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement.
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pressenza.com
Nikolai Roerich, from the Himalayas
Helena Roerich was an exceptionally gifted woman, a talented pianist and the author of numerous books, including The Basics of Buddhism and a Russian translation of Helena Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine.
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MISC
fairobserver.com
How Astrology Returned to Favor in the West
The story of Theosophy is vital to the revival of astrology as we know it today. Established by the Ukraine-born Helena Blavatsky as a society in New York City in 1875, it brought the ideas of Karma and Reincarnation to the West for the first time.
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easterneye.biz
Ramachandra Guha wins Elizabeth Longford Prize
The author said Indians may have heard of “Annie Besant because of her theosophy and also because she was the first female president of Congress” and Mira Behn, an admiral’s daughter who had changed her name from Madeleine Slade and was played by Geraldine James in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning, Gandhi.
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dtnext.in
PAST & PRESENT, with a river connecting them all
The Theosophical Movement of Adyar was instrumental in opening up this movement for Indian boys. Theosophists saw that the Scout Movement shared many of its values and Besant is known to have said often: “There were two great movements which stood for Universal Brotherhood.
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mutualart.com
Book Review: Ithell Colquhoun Lonely Surrealist Path
Like Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Pelton, Colquhoun has recently become a favorite subject for art historians hungry for female heroines, and it is not coincidental that these four should have a shared interest in occultism, for during the turning decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was within the speculative realms of theosophy and esoterica that strong women were able to take prominent roles as respected leaders.
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explorersweb.com
Pseudo-Archaeology: More Fun, Less Facts
Capitalizing on Donnelly’s hypothesis, another controversial figure named Madame Blavatsky popped up around the same time. She was a Russian mystic who became the founder of a new esoteric religion called theosophy. Theosophy split humanity’s evolution into seven stages, or “root races.” Blavatsky perpetuated that humanity’s fourth root race lived in Atlantis, where people had psychic abilities and advanced technology. This supposedly took place around 900,000 years ago.
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dtnext.in
Madras’ tryst with labour movement
He was also deeply spiritualistic and believed in theosophy. Not surprisingly, Wadia was the last person one would expect to get involved in the trade union movement.
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pr.com
FASERIP.com Releases "CROM: Rivers of Blood Await You," Takes Gaming in Bold New Direction
CROM is based on the Gardner Fox comic book character from the 1940s and the then-current fringe science theories about Earth's distant prehistoric past. It incorporated ideas from Theosophy, Catastrophism, and the then-prevalent theories of ancient mass migrations of different peoples.
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lithub.com
Umberto Eco’s Favorite Books Give New Meaning to the Phrase “Deep Cut”
If one types Robert Fludd into Wikipedia, the first definitions that appear are these: “He was a British physician, alchemist and astrologer, an expert in theosophy.”
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boingboing.net
The world's largest occult library has a public online archive
Amsterdam's Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (AKA "The Ritman Library) houses more ths 25,000 occult texts, covering "Hermetics, Rosicrucians, Theosophy, alchemy, mysticism, Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Sufism, Kabbalah, Anthroposophy, Catharism, Freemasonry,
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hindupost.in
‘Nehru and Indira may enjoy beef in private’: US govt. document from Indian PM’s 1956 visit goes viral
Motilal Nehru, was a shrewd and successful lawyer who lived in the manner of a wealthy English gentleman and brought up his children in Western fashion….Jawaharlal Nehru’s education, until he was 16, was entrusted to tutors. One, a part‐Irish teacher named Ferdinand T. Brooks, interested the young Nehru in theosophy…
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bigissue.com
Aleister Crowley and the secret history of UK witches in World War II
Dion Fortune (1890-1946) is one of the central figures of British occultism from the generation before Valiente, responsible for popularising the movement in the 1920s, initially in a Christian context, through psychotherapy and Theosophy (the history of which underlies so much of modern culture, but which has now been largely forgotten).
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stream.org
There’s Nothing New About Worshiping Abortion, or Linking Feminism to Satan
Shelley’s radical ideas took root and eventually influenced first Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1892), who founded Theosophy. A Russian noblewoman, Blavatsky traveled the world, supporting herself as a medium.
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island.lk
More on having foreign mothers in then Ceylon
All four were members of the Theosophical Society and this is perhaps a good place to mention again that when India gained Independence, most of Nehru’s first Cabinet were likewise members of the Theosophical Society and had been influenced by that great Englishwoman, Annie Besant.
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island.lk
Ven. Buddhaghosa no betrayer
In late 19th century, when Olcott and Blavatsky were spearheading the revival of Buddhism, they incorporated this concept to their Theosophy (Gombrich 1988).
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lankaweb.com
We need another “Panadurawadaya” – a National debate on the attacks to Buddha & his teachings
As a result of this event, American Col. Henry Steele Olcott and Russian Helena Blavatsky (who later co-founded the Theosophical Society) arrived in Sri Lanka on 16 May 1880.
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getbengal.com
Why Tagore took refuge in Planchette sessions to connect with the dead
Rabindranath’s eldest brother, the poet and essayist Dwijendranath (1840-1926), was a founding member of the Bengal Theosophical Society, which set great store by communication with the dead. His sister Swarnakumari was the Secretary of its women’s chapter. Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, founders of the Society, were frequent visitors at her Kasia Bagan residence in the 1880s.
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This is a disaster, but I…
Thanks for your View Steven.
Thanks for your View Steven.