Theosophy


Book Description




Religious Individualisation


Book Description

This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.




The Dawn of the New Cycle


Book Description

In considering a group that identified with Victorian American culture and its anxieties while adhering to an occult worldview that most of their contemporaries found strange, if not dangerous, the book explains why these middle-class Americans found Theosophy so persuasive and why they left family and friends behind to take up residence at this California settlement."--BOOK JACKET.




The Friendly Philosopher


Book Description

This is a new release of the original 1945 edition.




The Theosophical Movement, 1875-1950


Book Description

A continuation of The theosophical movement, 1875-1925, a history and a survey, with a "consolidation of the treatment of earlier events."




Teachers of the Eternal Doctrine


Book Description

Raghavan Iyer founded "HERMES," a journal of Theosophical Wisdom, as one of several vehicles for the current behind the 7th Century Impulsion just prior to the beginning of the 1975 Cycle in Santa Barbara, California. In that journal, he illustrated the ways in which Mahatmas have worked and continue to work in the world. In the lead article of this volume, "The Seventh Impulsion: 1963-2000," he made clear that the Mahatmic impulsions were concentrated in the last quarter of each century, but that preparations for them occurred earlier, and that their reverberations lasted far beyond the conclusion of each quarter-century cycle in an unfailing continuous stream. Near the beginning of 1976, after a year of guiding the golden "HERMES" current, Professor Iyer determined that those thinkers and teachers most involved in the Seven Century Plan should be honored through writings-called the Teacher Articles-that described the hidden current behind their lives and the timeless context for their work within the cycles of time. All of the Teacher Articles were written from a Theosophical perspective based, in large part, upon the philosophy expounded in H. P. Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine," This collection of essays contains those articles that first appeared in "HERMES" as an exploration of the Seven Century Plan.