Co-founded by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). Born in the Ukraine, Blavatsky developed a great interest in the occult. While traveling in the United States she met and married Olcott.
Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and in 1882 traveled to Adyar, India where they established an International Headquarters. Today there are an estimated 30,000 Theosophists in 60 countries; approximately 5,500 of them in the US The largest concentration remains in India where there are about 10,000 adherents.
The goals of the Society are:
1) to form a nucleus of Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without the distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color;
2) to study comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and
3) to explore the unexplained laws of nature and man’s untapped power.
As a philosophical and theological system based on direct experience with the divine, Theosophy teaches that it is the universal thread running throughout all religions, binding them together.
A New Age type religion, it teaches:
1) God is impersonal,
2) Jesus is the fifth reincarnation in the Aryan race of the “Supreme Teacher of the World,”
3) a version of reincarnation in which one comes back as a person, never an animal as taught in classic Hinduism, and
4) as with gnosticism, man is part of God and in time all men will become “Christs.”
Followers of Theosophy are encouraged to participate in occult and paranormal phenomenon; while embracing aspects of all religion, even selecting elements of Christianity. Theosophy still denies the essential  Christian doctrines of man’s nature, God’s nature, the Creator/creature distinction, and Christ’s atoning sacrifice for sin.
By David Henke
