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NLA News - home January 2006 Volume XVI Number 4

Connecting Asia and Australia

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Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875
Cooper Collection
Manuscript Collection
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Unknown photographer
Portrait of Alfred Deakin [between 1879 to 1891]
sepia toned photograph on
carte-de-visite mount; 10.6 x 6.3 cm
Stewart & Co. (Melbourne, Vic.)
Manuscript Collection
nla.ms-ms1540-19-613-s5-b2

Deakin was attracted to theosophy in the years before he became prime minister of Australia

Andrew Gosling examines the influence of the Theosophical Society’s teachings

While writing this article I remembered the opening words of the late Professor A.L. Basham at his Indian civilisation lectures, ‘If anybody is here to learn about the mysteries of the East, please leave now’. Perhaps I should issue a similar disclaimer. I am not writing about Eastern (or Western) occult wisdom to be found in theosophy. Rather, this is a brief examination of the Theosophical Society’s influence on certain Asian and Australian leaders, as well as of theosophical connections between Asia and Australia. It is based on the National Library’s extensive holdings, in particular the Dr John Cooper Theosophy Collection, which was presented to the Library in 2003.

The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 in the United States, though it traces its origins back to ancient teachings based on direct knowledge of God. Theosophists believe that all religions and philosophies are reflections of a greater and secret truth. They draw on Asian and Western traditions. The three objectives of the Society are: to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour; to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science; and to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in the human being.

The main founders of the Society were a Russian émigré occultist and author of major theosophical texts, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and two Americans, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, first president of the Society, and William Quan Judge, who became leader of the movement in the United States. Blavatsky and Olcott moved to India shortly after founding the Society and Adyar, Chennai (formerly Madras), remains the Society’s international headquarters to this day. Theosophy has placed a strong emphasis on Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which originated in India.

After Olcott’s death in 1907, the charismatic former Fabian socialist Annie Besant led the Society from 1907 to 1933, which was to be the period of its greatest growth. During this time Besant remained politically active, most notably as president of the Indian National Congress from 1917 to 1923.

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Charles Webster Leadbeater, leading theosophist and a bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church in Sydney
Cooper Collection
Manuscript Collection

In Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879–1939, Jill Roe makes the point that while theosophy has been a peripheral force in modern history, in colonial contexts, such as India and Indonesia, ‘it provided a non-racist forum and was a catalyst for nationalist movements’.

John Legge, Australian biographer of President Sukarno of Indonesia, agrees that theosophy played a significant part in the rise of nationalism in Indonesia, and even more so in India. However, Legge regards theosophy as a ‘rather artificial current of Western spiritualism seeking an Eastern dress’ and believes there was ‘something patronising in the earnestness with which Western enthusiasts urged Eastern wisdom upon India’. Regardless of whether or not Legge’s comments are fair, it is easy to understand why leaders of the cultural renewal and nationalist struggles in countries including India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia were attracted to those aspects of theosophy which opposed discrimination, in particular racial discrimination, and promoted Asian beliefs. According to Roe, it is also true that ‘with the theosophical movement a little of the Indian experience of empire and nationhood filtered through to White Australia’. For example, Besant, one of the greatest orators of her day, lectured about Indian self-rule to large, enthusiastic audiences during her Australian visits.

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Frank Hurley (1885–1962)
Columns of amphitheatre with inscription ‘Let That Light Shine’, erected in 1924 by the Order of the Star in the East, Sydney Harbour, New South Wales 1940s
glass negative; full plate
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23381860
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Minister for External Affairs, Spender, received by President and Mrs Fatmawati Sukarno at Istana Merdeka, 3 January 1950
photograph; 31.5 x 6.0 cm
Australian participation in the three nation Good Offices Committee (G.O.C.) in Indonesia Photograph by Indonesian Press
Photo Service (IPPHOS)
Pictures Collection
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Theosophy flourished in Australia in the late 19th and early20th centuries, but today its influence has been largely forgotten. For instance, most 2GB listeners would be surprised to learn that the station was founded in 1926 to broadcast theosophical ideas. The ‘GB’ stood for ‘Giordano Bruno’, the Italian pantheistic philosopher regarded as an early theosophist. It is perhaps an unfortunate name for what is now a popular talkback radio station, as Bruno was tried by the Inquisition and burnt at the stake for his unorthodox views.

Among the many prominent Australians attracted to theosophy were Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, the war historian Charles Bean and the romantic novelist Rosa Praed. Deakin was drawn to spiritualism as a youth. In his early twenties he read Blavatsky’s first major theosophical work, Isis Unveiled, not long after its publication in 1877. Based on a visit to India and Sri Lanka in 1890, Deakin wrote Temple and Tomb in India, which was sympathetic to ‘the great spiritual revival and development known as Buddhism’. In the same book he wrote: ‘It is from India that the latest doctrine has appeared, which under the name of theosophy, has made some converts among modern-minded men and women.’ Deakin himself was for a time active in the Theosophical Society, and founding secretary of a branch which met at his South Yarra home.

From 1914, one of theosophy’s most controversial leaders, Charles Webster Leadbeater, was based in Sydney. A close confidant of Besant, he identified the young Indian, Jiddu Krishnamurti, as the next great world teacher (Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad having been previous incarnations). The Star Amphitheatre was built in 1923–24 at Balmoral Beach in Sydney, as a platform for the world teacher. However Krishnamurti became increasingly uneasy with the role for which he was being groomed. He repudiated the title of world teacher and, in 1930, resigned from the Theosophical Society. This was one reason for the decline of the movement, both in Australia and internationally. There were also allegations of child abuse against Leadbeater, but he was not charged with any offence.

Gandhi, the most revered figure of the Indian independence movement, was influenced by theosophy in his youth. He studied law in London between 1888 and 1890. As a young Indian student on the fringes of late Victorian English society, he moved among what Ved Mehta in Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles describes as ‘a variety of cranks, radicals, obscurantists, and romantics who subscribed to many ideologies born of the Darwinian and Marxist revolutions: anarchism, feminism, Fabianism, atheism’. Among these groups, theosophy had a certain appeal with its ideal of universal brotherhood and high regard for Indian thought. Gandhi attended meetings of the Theosophical Society, met Blavatsky and Besant, but did not become a member. Nevertheless it was through the theosophists that he became more aware of India’s own religious tradition, in particular the Hindu philosophical masterpiece, the Bhagavad Gita, which he first encountered in its English translation by Edwin Arnold.

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Dr John Cooper, whose major theosophy collection was donated to the National Library in 2003
Courtesy of Shirley Cooper

For Sukarno, first president of an independent Indonesia, the Theosophical Society was a source of books and liberating ideas from the world outside colonial Java. In his autobiography he says of his teens in Surabaya: ‘We had a rich library in town run by the Theosophical Society. Father was a Theosophist; therefore I had access to this treasure chest in which there was no limit to a poor boy. I moved wholly into this inner world. There I met with great men.’ These great men included Voltaire, George Washington and Karl Marx. Sukarno acknowledged the influence of his father Sukemi’s ‘Javanese Muslim–Theosophist’ ideas. Many other Indonesians prominent in the independence movement, including the founding vice-president, Mohammad Hatta, were also influenced by theosophy.

Australian theosophist Molly Bondan played a significant role in Indonesia’s independence struggle and the early development of the Republic. She attended the Theosophical Society’s Garden School in Balmoral, near the Star Amphitheatre. A fellow pupil was Peter Finch, later one of Australia’s most successful film actors. He lived with his grandmother at the Society’s headquarters in India, before joining a group of theosophists bound for Sydney. Bondan’s autobiography, In Love with a Nation, is based in part on an oral history interview conducted for the National Library. In it she mentions that during her teenage years Australian theosophists maintained ‘close contacts with India, and to a lesser extent what was then known as the Netherlands East Indies’. As a girl she first met Indonesians while attending theosophical conferences in Sydney. She later married an Indonesian nationalist, lived in Indonesia during the war for independence, worked for the Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs and was the English speech-writer for President Sukarno.

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Rukmini Devi Arundale, wife of George Arundale, the third president of the Theosophical Society. The Arundales were leaders of the theosophical movement in Australia during the 1920s. In 1977, Rukmini was nominated for the position of president of India
Cooper Collection
Manuscript Collection

There is a vast literature on theosophy by its supporters, detractors and less partisan writers. In Jill Roe’s words, ‘the record of theosophy … is remarkably full for so small and obscure an organisation’. The National Library’s considerable resources on the subject now include the Dr John Cooper Theosophy Collection. John Cooper (1930–98) was a leading historian of Australian and international theosophy. He received a Master of Arts degree in Religious Studies from the University of Sydney for his thesis, ‘The Theosophical Crisis in Australia: The Story of the Breakup of the Theosophical Society in Sydney from 1913 to 1923’. It covered the acrimonious split in the Society’s influential Sydney branch, which was partly doctrinal and partly caused by the allegations of impropriety against Leadbeater. Cooper described the two sides as being like Catholics and Protestants after the Reformation, both claiming to be the one true faith. At the time of his death Cooper was working on a multi-volume scholarly edition of the correspondence of Blavatsky. He was posthumously awarded a doctorate from the University of Sydney for his three-volume analytic study of this correspondence. Copies of Cooper’s writings are in the manuscript component of his collection.

The Cooper Collection, donated by his family after he died, consists of nearly 4000 books, 240 serial titles and 30 large boxes of archival material. The books have been kept together as a formed collection, the serials integrated into the Library’s general holdings and the archives housed in the Manuscript Collection. A bibliography of the books and serials is available on the Library’s website at <www.nla.gov.au/collect/cooper.html>.

Cooper amassed a large resource of books, periodicals, pamphlets, papers and photographs. These relate not only to the Theosophical Society, but also to many of its offshoots and related bodies, such as the Liberal Catholic Church, of which Leadbeater was a bishop; the Order of the Star in the East, set up to support the coming world teacher; as well as break away organisations, including Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society in which Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony were active members. Cooper collected theosophical writings by Blavatsky, Olcott, Judge, Besant, Krishnamurti and Leadbeater, often including several variant editions of the same work. He managed to obtain much rare and valuable ephemera relating to his studies of Blavatsky and theosophy in Australia, particularly Sydney. He acquired many titles on religions and philosophies of interest to theosophists, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism, but also other Asian and Western beliefs, from Confucianism and Taoism to Gnostic Christianity and witchcraft. To take just one example, he collected more than 100 titles on Tibetan Buddhism and culture, as indicated in my article on the Library’s Tibetan holdings in the April 2004 issue of the National Library of Australia News. In an obituary his friend and fellow historian of theosophy, Dr Gregory Tillett, the biographer of Leadbeater, described Cooper as ‘an enthusiastic (one might almost say obsessive) collector of books and documents, [who] never returned from his travels without an accompanying collection of books, if not boxes of books. He rescued many rare works from forgotten repositories’.

The Theosophical Society, now 130 years old, continues to operate in Australia and around the world. Theosophists have remained active in many fields. A good example is Rukmini Devi Arundale, who married George Arundale, third president of the Theosophical Society after Olcott and Besant. The Arundales were theosophical leaders in Australia during the 1920s. Later, Rukmini was a respected Indian parliamentarian, exponent of Indian dance and campaigner against cruelty to animals. In 1977, she was nominated for the position of president of India.

Dr John Cooper’s family decided to donate his collection to the National Library to allow readers access to a rich resource about the theosophical movement and its members—such as the Arundales, Besant, Deakin and Krishnamurti—who in various ways connected Asia and Australia.

ANDREW GOSLING, former Chief Librarian in Asian Collections at the National Library, writes about Asian studies and libraries

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