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Zusatztext “There is just no getting around the Theosophical Society in the history of modern esoteric movements! and this firsthand account of its origins is both entertaining and revealing.” —The Hermetic Library Blog Informationen zum Autor Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) was a key figure in nineteenth-century alternative spirituality, cofounding the Theosophical Society with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875. This edition reproduces the first volume of his published diaries and includes a new timeline of his storied life. Klappentext Theosophical Society cofounder Colonel Henry Steel Olcott's memoirs cover his years with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the birth of the American occult—part of the new Tarcher Supernatural Library. There are few more intriguing, or polarizing, figures in modern American spiritual history than Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The cofounder of the Theosophical Society, Blavatsky remains a figure of fascination more than a century after her death. In Isis in America—one of the most unique documents of recent American spiritual history—we get a closer look at Blavatsky, through the eyes of Theosophical Society cofounder, writer, lawyer, investigator, and Blavatsky confidant Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott spent years by Blavatsky's side, witnessing acts of aura projection and spontaneously produced objects—and undergoing his own spiritual awakening—as they laid the foundations for a new era in esoteric spirituality. This special edition features a comprehensive timeline of the life of Henry Steel Olcott by Mitch Horowitz. The first three titles released in Tarcher's Supernatural Library are Ghost Hunter (by Hans Holzer), Romance of Sorcery (by Sax Rohmer) and Isis in America (by Henry Steel Olcott). FOREWORD In the history of public bodies, the chapter which relates the origin and vicissitudes of the Theosophical Society should be unique. Whether viewed from the friendly or the unfriendly standpoint, it is equally strange that such a body should have come into existence when it did, and that it has not only been able to withstand the shocks it has had, but actually to have grown stronger proportionately with the bitter unfairness of its adversaries. One class of critics says that this fact strikingly proves a recrudescence of human credulity, and a religious unrest which is preliminary to a final subsidence upon Western conservative lines. The others see in the progress of the movement the sign of a world-wide acceptance of Eastern philosophical ideas, which must work for the reinvigoration and incalculable broadening of the spiritual sympathies of mankind. The patent, the undeniable fact, is that up to the close of the year 1894, as the result of but nineteen years of activity, charters had been granted for 394 branches of the Society, in almost all parts of the habitable globe; and that those issued in that latest year outnumbered the yearly average since the foundation, in 1875, by 29.9 per cent. Statistically viewed, the relentless and unfair attack which the Society for Psychical Research and the Scottish Missionaries delivered against it in 1884, and which it was hoped would destroy it, merely resulted in very largely augmenting its prosperity and usefulness. The latest assault—that through the Westminster Gazette —must inevitably have the same ending. The simple reason is that, however thoroughly the private faults and shortcomings of its individual leaders may be exposed, the excellence of the Society’s ideas is not impugned in the least. To kill the Theosophical Society, it is first necessary to prove its declared objects hostile to the public welfare, the teachings of its spokesmen pernicious and demoralising. It being impossible to do either the one or the other, the world takes the Society as a great fact, a distinct individuality, which is neither to be condemn...
