To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

What Is Theosophy? / 5
What is this theosophy which has been passed on from
sage to sage through untold ages — from Vivasvat, the sun,
who told it to Manu, who in turn handed it down to rishis
and seers until ‘‘the mighty art was lost’’?* It is the core
inspiration of sacred scripture, and the wisdom that we distill
from daily experience. Theosophy has no creed, no
dogma, no set of beliefs that must be accepted, because
truth is not something beyond or outside us, but in fact is
within. Nonetheless, it comprises a coherent body of teachings
about man and nature that have been expressed in various
ways in the sacred traditions of the world.
The modern theosophical movement began in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century — a timely intervention,
for the preceding decades had witnessed a radical upheaval
in spiritual and intellectual thought. Theologians and scientists
had been thrown into confusion and often bitter
conflict after the publication in 1830‒33 of Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology, which gave irrefutable evidence of
earth’s immense age. This was followed in 1859 by Charles
Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
and The Descent of Man in 1871 which purported to
trace man’s origin to an ancient form which diverged from
the Catarrhine monkey stock — arousing a controversy still
very much alive today. Archaeology further revolutionized
Western perspectives on man’s spiritual history by revealing
an Egyptian civilization of splendor and a Babylonian story
of Noah and the Deluge that antedated the biblical one;
moreover, the Orient, which until the 1780s had been a
*Cf. Bhagavad-Gītā 4:1‒3 ( Judge recension, p. 23).