A Textbook of Theosophy (Annotated)

By Charles Webster Leadbeater

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: Charles Webster Leadbeater, an eminence of spirituality surrounded by controversy

First published in 1912, "A Textbook of Theosophy” is a theosophical treatise by Charles Webster Leadbeater, an influential member of the Theosophical Society and one of the most controversial English writers.

"A Textbook of Theosophy" is considered by many to be the definitive guide to Theosophy. Theosophy is thought to be a part of the broader field of esotericism, referring to wisdom that offers the individual enlightenment and salvation. The theosopher seeks to understand the mysteries of the universe and the relationships that unite the universe, humanity, and the divine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ePembaBooks
• Release date: Jan 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9791221378139

Book preview

Charles Webster Leadbeater

A Textbook of Theosophy

Table of contents

Charles Webster Leadbeater, an eminence of spirituality surrounded by controversy

A TEXTBOOK OF THEOSOPHY

Chapter 1. What Theosophy Is

Chapter 2. From The Absolute To Man

Chapter 3. The Formation Of A Solar System

Chapter 4. The Evolution Of Life

Chapter 5. The Constitution Of Man

Chapter 6. After Death

Chapter 7. Reincarnation

Chapter 8. The Purpose Of Life

Chapter 9. The Planetary Chains

Chapter 10. The Result Of Theosophical Study

Note

Charles Webster Leadbeater, an eminence of spirituality surrounded by controversy

Charles Webster Leadbeater was an influential member of the Theosophical Society and one of the most controversial English writers, for his books related to the mysteries of the universe and the human being. Leadbeater was the co-founder, with J. I. Wedgwood, of the liberal Catholic Church in which he was appointed bishop.

Leadbeater was born in Stockport, England. His father, Charles Leadbeater, was born in Lincoln, his mother Emma in Liverpool. According to public records, he was the only child of the couple. In 1861 the family moved to London, where his father worked on the railroad, and he died of tuberculosis when Leadbeater was still eight years old. Four years later, the bank where the family kept their savings disappeared.

With no possibility of studying at university, Leadbeater began working in the workshops after graduating from high school to help his mother financially. His uncle, William Wolfe Capes, his late father's brother and politician, was a well-known Anglican priest. Due to his influence, Leadbeater was ordained an Anglican priest in 1879 in Farnham by the Bishop of Winchester. From 1881 he lived with his mother in a cottage his uncle had built in Bramshott. During that period Leadbeater became interested in spirituality and the occult, after attending lessons in spiritualism at the home of Daniel Dunglas, a supposed medium. His interest in the occult was stimulated by Alfred Percy Sinnett's book Occult world, and he joined the Theosophical Society , of which Sinnett was a member, in 1883, leaving the Anglican Church. The following year Leadbeater met Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Society, when she visited London; after accepting him as her pupil, Blavatsky pushed him to become a vegetarian. At that time he read the book Letters from the Mahatma, which tempted him to go to India. He arrived in Adyar in 1884 and while in India, Leadbeater wrote books, received visits and training from his teachers who, according to Blavatsky, were an inspiration for the formation of the Theosophical Society and occult guides. In 1889, Sinnett asked Leadbeater to return to England to act as tutor to his son and George Arundale. Leadbeater accepted and brought with him one of his students, Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa. Leadbeater later became one of the main interlocutors of the Society, but lasted only a few years, and Secretary of the London Lodge. In 1885, Leadbeater travelled with Henry Steel Olcott, the first president of the Theosophical Society, to Burma and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In Ceylon they jointly founded the English Buddhist Academy, where Leadbeater acted as the first director of the facility, under very austere conditions. The school gradually expanded and became Ananda College. After Madame Blavatsky left Adyar in 1886 to return to Europe, Leadbeater returned to India and began working at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. There he met Master Kuthumi, who suggested that he practice Kundalini Yoga to develop the power of clairvoyance; after 42 years of continuous effort, Leadbeater claimed to have obtained an awareness of the astral while still in the waking state, which, according to the Theosophical Society, is the ability to perceive the vibrations of the highest state of matter immediately superior to the physical. This theme would be developed by Leadbeater in his renowned work The Astral Plane (1895).

In 1891, after the death of Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant took control of the Theosophical Society together with Olcott. Leadbeater met with her in 1894, and was invited by her to live at the Theosophical headquarters in London. In 1906 Leadbeater was accused of forcing teenagers, pupils under his education, to masturbate. Mary Lutyens collected the testimonies of such students in the book Krishnamurti: the Years of Awakening, where she affirms that the children in question would reveal these practices to their parents; the Theosophical Society of Chicago had launched similar reproaches against Leadbeater. In 1906, a commission of the American branch of the society was appointed to investigate the acts of pederasty in which Leadbater was involved, but, prior to the meeting, Leadbeater resigned to " save the society from embarrassment, as Henry Steel Olcott wrote. Leadbeater responded to the allegations by claiming that compelling adolescent sexuality would lead his students to have meetings with prostitutes, and therefore to protect" them he had to teach them to regularly discharge sexual energy through masturbation to avoid the karmic and moral consequences of allegedly illicit sexual relations with girls.

In the following years, Lutyens investigated the safeguarding of Leadbeater's favorite pupils, some of whom slept with him in his own room and with whom Leadbeater would have actual sexual relations. Other members of the Society accused him of touching the genitals of a prepubescent boy. Despite this and the repetition of similar episodes over the years, none of the accusations made against him led to legal proceedings or trials against Leadbeater, especially since he always managed to escape just in time. A judge in a reported custody case in India (concerning the legal guardian of Jiddu Krishnamurti and his brother Nityananda) noted in his ruling that Leadbeater was anchored in " immoral ideas. This led Annie Besant, Leadbeater's friend and collaborator, to publish articles in his defence in the Times of London. However, it was well known in the Theosophical Society that Leadbeater had a problematic and ambiguous relationship, especially sexual, with the young students he was dealing with. Later, in 1909, he was reinstated in the Theosophical Society as a result of pressure that Annie Besant, who became President after intense infighting in the organization, had exerted on the other members. Leadbeater then took charge of his ward Krishnamurti, then fourteen years old, discovered on a private beach near the Theosophical Society's Adyar headquarters. Leadbeater believed that Krishnamurti was the vessel" into which the world teacher, whose imminent appearance was awaited by the Theosophists, would be channelled. Like Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, Krishnamurti would also create a new religion, according to Leadbeater. Leadbeater moved permanently to Adyar in 1915 to educate Krishnamurti; but he lived out his old age in Australia, in Sydney, where he remained permanently.

During this last phase of his life, Krishnamurti renounced the role he and other theosophists would have wanted him to play. Krishnamurti dissociated himself from the Theosophical Society, its doctrines and practices, and during the following decades became known as an influential religious and philosophical speaker, highly critical of Theosophy. Leadbeater met in the same year James Ingall Wedgwood, Theosophist and first bishop of the liberal Catholic Church , who on June 12, 1915 initiated him into Freemasonry and later consecrated him bishop in 1916. From this time on, public interest in Theosophy grew in Australia and New Zealand, and Sydney at that time could be compared with Adyar as the Center of Theosophical activity. In 1922 the Theosophical Society rented a villa known as the Mansion, located in the suburbs of Mosman. Leadbeater came to reside in this place where he led his own community of Theosophists. The mansion expanded, becoming a great theosophical centre, recognized as the greatest house of occult forces. In the same year there was a new scandal about Leadbeater, accused of having been found in bed with Oscar Kellerstrom, son of a priest of the liberal Catholic Church. The mansion also began to accept the presence of women Theosophists, among whom the best known were Clara Codd, future president of the American Theosophical Society, the clairvoyant Dora van Gelder and Mary Lutyens, who wrote an authorized biography of Krishnamurti. In these years Leadbeater worked to change the Catholic liturgy of the liberal Catholic Church, removing from the Creed of the last elements of the Bible and Christianity that he considered inappropriate. Leadbeater died of diabetes and a heart attack in Perth in 1934.

For years Leadbeater had felt a desire to push himself beyond the sensory limit of space and time, to know what already is, but which we can only describe as what will be, with the limits of perception of the present. Leadbeater was also instrumental in the theosophical movement in strengthening the trend toward marriage with Christianity, which began with Annie Besant and continued with James Ingall Wedgwood. The interest in the Christian tradition, and in particular the Catholic awakened in Leadbeater as a result of an experience he lived in a Sicilian village, during a mass, in which he says he witnessed the phenomenon of transubstantiation, with his seer's eyes at the moment of the Eucharist.

Controversial personage and repeatedly accused of pederasty, Charles Webster Leadbeater is also for many the father and master of the Theosophical movement and the study of occultism and the mysteries of the universe and nature. Among his most outstanding works are The Astral Plane (1895), Clairvoyance (1899), An Outline of Theosophy (1902), The Inner Life (1911) and " A Textbook Of Theosophy " (1912) .

The Editor, P.C. 2022

A TEXTBOOK OF THEOSOPHY

Charles Webster Leadbeater

Chapter 1. What Theosophy Is

There is a school of philosophy still in existence of which modern culture has lost sight. In these words Mr. A.P. Sinnett began his book, The Occult World, the first popular exposition of Theosophy, published thirty years ago. [Namely in 1881.] During the years that have passed since then, many thousands have learned wisdom in that school, yet to the majority its teachings are still unknown, and they can give only the vaguest of replies to the query, What is Theosophy?

Two books already exist which answer that question: Mr. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism and Dr. Besant's The Ancient Wisdom. I have no thought of entering into competition with those standard works; what I desire is to present a statement, as clear and simple as I can make it, which may be regarded as introductory to them.

We often speak of Theosophy as not in itself a religion, but the truth which lies behind all religions alike. That is so; yet, from another point of view, we may surely say that it is at once a philosophy, a religion and a science. It is a philosophy, because it puts plainly before us an explanation of the scheme of evolution of both the souls and the bodies contained in our solar system. It is a religion in so far as, having shown us the course of ordinary evolution, it also puts before us and advises a method of shortening that course, so that by conscious effort we may progress more directly towards the goal. It is a science, because it treats both these subjects as matters not of theological belief but of direct knowledge obtainable by study and investigation. It asserts that man has no need to trust to blind faith, because he has within him latent powers which, when aroused, enable him to see and examine for himself, and it proceeds to prove its case by showing how those powers may be awakened. It is itself a result of the awakening of such powers by men, for the teachings which it puts before us are founded upon direct observations made in the past, and rendered possible only by such development.

As a philosophy, it explains to us that the solar system is a carefully-ordered mechanism, a manifestation of a magnificent life, of which man is but a small part. Nevertheless, it takes up that small part which immediately concerns us, and treats it exhaustively under three heads—present, past and future.

It deals with the present by describing what man really is, as seen by means of developed faculties. It is customary to speak of man as having a soul. Theosophy, as the result of direct investigation, reverses that dictum, and states that man is a soul, and has a body—in fact several bodies, which are his vehicles and instruments in various worlds. These worlds are not separate in space; they