The Sources of the Theosophical Doctrine

The present chapter will examine the degree of the Theosophical doctrine’s uniqueness and originality. The author seeks to show that many of the Theosophical ideas were borrowed from diverse Western sources, and were worked by the theologians of the Society into a single doctrine. The author tries to answer the question under investigation by isolating and analysing these sources, while locating Theosophy on the map of the history of ideas, and show that it was part of an intellectual current that began long before Blavatsky.