In the days when student dissent took milder forms than it does now and the Death of God had not yet been widely announced, small groups of seminarians from fundamentalist Wheaton College used to appear at the edge of a 40-acre estate on the outskirts of Wheaton, Ill. They would kneel briefly in prayer and then scurry nervously away. Thirty years ago, it was an act that took courage: the estate had become headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America, a mysterious non-Christian movement often suspected of being more occult than cult. Praying for the souls of the benighted Theosophists, the seminarians feared that both they and the town would be hexed by the Devil.
Nothing ever happened to substantiate their fears. The Theosophists gradually became accepted by the community. They even joined the Chamber of Commerce. Last week, when leaders of the society's 4,500 U.S. members met in Wheaton for their annual national convention, theosophy was once again under some suspicion. The scarcely adequate reason is that Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's accused assassin, had asked for and received a copy of the society's most sacred book, The Secret Doctrine. Its author: Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91), the Russian-born founder and high priestess of the movement.
Ancient Practice. Among Madame Blavatsky's teachings, charged Author Truman Capote on television appearance, "was a theory of how you could undermine the morale of a country and create a vacuum for revolution by systematically assassinating a series of prominent people." Not so, replied Theosophical Society President Joy Mills, a former schoolteacher, when the convention opened last week. "Mr. Capote is in complete confusion or abysmally ignorant of the society, its aims and teachings."
By definition, theosophy is a cross between theology and philosophy. In practice, it is a religion—although its 34,000 practitioners in 45 countries maintain that it is not. Theosophists have always claimed divine insight, revealed in some cases on shafts of mystical "astral light."
Their practice is an ancient one. Theosophy was taught by the sun-worshiping Egyptians, the oracular Greeks, the fire burners of Zarathustra. To one degree or another, its tenets are alive today among the Brahmans, Buddhists and Hindus of India, not to mention all the world's hippies. In the West, however, theosophical thought had been all but dead since the 7th century, when Moslem armies swept out of Arabia and disrupted communications between Europe and the East. Then, in the 19th century, came Madame Blavatsky.