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Henry Steel Olcott

People · Articulation · 1832–1907 · documented

The Society’s first president and its most worldly founder — a lawyer and army officer who built the institution while Blavatsky built the doctrine.123

Documented connection

Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, an American officer, lawyer, and journalist, co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and served as its first President until his death in 1907. He moved the headquarters to Adyar, where he founded the Adyar Library and Research Centre. In Ceylon he formally became a Buddhist, worked to revive Buddhism, and wrote the Buddhist Catechism (1881), still in use; the Society founded Buddhist schools — Ananda College (1886) among them — and he is honored in Sri Lanka to this day.

Role in the thesis

The administrative half of the founding: where Blavatsky supplies the esoteric doctrine (the Masters, the coming evolution), Olcott supplies the organization — the charter, the presidency, the library, the schools. He is the reminder that the esoteric idiom, like the others in this study, ran on committees and buildings as much as on visions; the institution outlived the séance.

  1. Theosophical Society (Adyar), official biography of Henry Steel Olcott — co-founder and first President; the move to Adyar; the Adyar Library — https://www.ts-adyar.org/henry-steel-olcott ↩︎

  2. Henry Steel Olcott, The Buddhist Catechism (1881) — his exposition for the Ceylon Buddhist revival, still in use ↩︎

  3. Wikipedia, 'Henry Steel Olcott' — American officer, lawyer and journalist; formal conversion to Buddhism in Ceylon; the Buddhist schools (Ananda College 1886, etc.) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Steel_Olcott ↩︎

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  • The Nucleus That Split — “Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and William Quan Judge founded the Theosophical Society on three stated objects — universal brotherhood, the comparative study of "religion, philosophy, and science," and the investigation of "unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.”