Are there characters like H.P. Blavatsky and other Theosophists that are alive today?

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To understand theosophy, you have to understand the Western occult tradition. To understand the Western occult tradition, you have to understand the human urge towards arbitrariness. If I told a room full of people, very seriously, the sky is blue, then there is always going to be the guy that gets up and wants to argue that the sky really isn’t blue.

This person isn’t so much reacting to the statement I made, but rather the position of authority I made it from. Humans are always intensely conscious of status and some people are just driven to be the highest-status person in the room. Early Christianity was chock-full of alternative prophets who wanted to be Jesus.

Political opposition to the authority of the church collected under the banner of Gnosticism. The basic idea behind gnosticism is that you can be Jesus, not just worship him. They rejected the idea of Jesus as messiah and ruler of the kingdom of Heaven. Rather than submission to, and faith in, Jesus, salvation from the inherent sinful nature of existence is obtained through knowledge.

And so occultism was born. Rather than collect into communities as Jesus taught, occultists studied in private or in small groups. They syncretised information from countless theological traditions into their own forms of mysticism.

The common thread running through all of these traditions is the focus on accruing divine power to the self, through study and ritual. But the way people get rich and famous is the same way anyone gets rich and famous, by creating a following. You create a following by saying fantastic things and making promises.

So at the advent of modernity in the 1800s, the gnostics of the day created “secret” orders that glorified this approach to spirituality. How do we know that they were mostly just cons separating the gullible from their money? Well, we have the writings of Aleister Crowley to thank for that.

Crowley had a truly Dickensian childhood, Victorian society was not kind to him, and he retreated into spirituality at a very early age. He was the sort of precocious youth that just wouldn’t stop until he had real answers, and he wanted to understand real magick. So he entered into theosophy looking for it.

He single-handedly destroyed the entire Golden Dawn.

He encouraged young people who wanted to learn magick to join his orders, two of which survive to this day. He was a prolific author and now that his writings are public domain, more people will be able to get a sense for what gnosticism is like.

Will there ever again be charismatic figures who use gnostic themes to capture the public attention? Undoubtedly. But it was a pretty rare thing, even back then. Remember what gnosticism is fundamentally, the belief that knowledge brings about salvation, rather than faith or works. You work alone. That pretty much guarantees that only a very small number of people are ever going to reach its heights.

Christianity is built on community, it was ‘engineered’ to spread. It represented a seismic shift in the spiritual landscape. The real Christian faith is more powerful than secret knowledge ever could be. Even a figure as amazing and complicated and powerful as Crowley couldn’t even come close to the kind of impact Paul had on history.