PRESENT DAY THEOSOPHY, INFLUENCES

The Theosophical Society

 
At its strongest in membership and intensity during the 1920s the parent Theosophical Society had around 7,000 members in the USA. The largest section of The Theosophical Society, the Indian section, at one time had more than 20,000 members, is now around 13,000. In the last several decades, there was a steady increase in membership in India, whereas outside India, the membership has been dropping. In the US, the current membership is around 3,900 which is about the same as it was in 1913, ninety-six years ago.

Theosophy was closely linked to the Indian independence movement: the Indian National Congress was founded during a Theosophical conference, and many of its leaders, including M. K. Gandhi were associated with theosophy.

The present-day New Age movement is to a considerable extent based on the teachings of Blavatsky, though some writers have described Alice Bailey as the founder of the "New Age movement". However, the term was used prior to Bailey; a weekly Journal of Christian liberalism and Socialism called The New Age was published as early as 1894. James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, in Perspectives on the New Age wrote, "The most important though certainly not the only source of this transformative metaphor, as well as the term "New Age," was Theosophy, particularly as the Theosophical perspective was mediated to the movement by the works of Alice Bailey."

Scholar Alvin Boyd Kuhn wrote his thesis, Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom, on the subject - perhaps the first instance in which an individual has been "permitted" by any modern American or European university to obtain his doctorate with a thesis on Theosophy.

Artists and authors who investigated Theosophy, aside from the musicians listed below, include Aldous Huxley , Wassily Kandinsky , Piet Mondrian , Franz Kafka , William Butler Yeats , George William Russell, Owen Barfield , and T. S. Eliot , in Europe, Lawren S. Harris in Canada, and Arthur Dove, George Lucas , Katherine Dreier , Robert Duncan, Marsden Hartley, Wallace Stevens, and James Jones in America.

Musicians and composers influences by Theosophy include Ruth Crawford-Seeger, Dane Rudhyar, Gustav Holst, AgustĖn Barrios Mangore, and most famously Alexander Scriabin. All were Theosophists whose beliefs influenced their music, especially by providing a justification or rationale for their dissonant counterpoint. According to Rudhyar, Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician." and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group." Scriabin devised a quartal synthetic chord, often called his "mystic" chord, and before his death Scriabin planned a multimedia work to be performed in the Himalayas that would bring about the armageddon; "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world.". This piece, Mysterium, was never realized, due to his death in 1915.