Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [93]
In 1889, following a difficult school year in which Gandhi struggled with his studies at London University (and later failed his matriculation exams), he met two friendly Englishmen who called themselves Theosophists. The law student recognized Theosophy as the pro-Hindu, anticolonial movement that had been spreading about his homeland through the American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and his mysterious partner, Madame Blavatsky. These two Theosophical “brothers” asked the young Indian if he could help them read the original Sanskrit of the central holy text of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita (“Song of God”). “I felt ashamed,” Gandhi wrote in his memoirs, “as I had read the divine poem neither in Sanskrit nor in Gujarati. I was constrained to tell them that I had not read the Gita, but that I would gladly read it with them.”
The three began meeting together, and Gandhi became unexpectedly enchanted: “The Gita became an infallible guide of conduct. It became my dictionary of daily reference.” As for his new friends, they were not just any Theosophists but a wealthy nephew and uncle who had recently opened their Notting Hill home to Blavatsky, who was fleeing charges of fraud and scandals in India. They made Gandhi an offer that filled him with intrigue and dread: Would he like to personally meet the high priestess of the occult—along with her most recent “convert,” the esteemed British orator and social reformer Annie Besant? “I was a mere Bombay matriculate,” he recalled. “I could not understand the British accent. I felt quite unworthy of going to Mrs. Besant.”
But Gandhi did go. And while no records survive of the meeting between Blavatsky, Besant, and Gandhi, he later credited Theosophy for instilling in him the principle of equality among the world’s religions, a revolutionary idea to a student from a caste-based society. In this sense, he explained in 1946 to biographer Louis Fischer, “Theosophy … is Hinduism at its best. Theosophy is the brotherhood of man.” The organization’s motto—No Religion Higher than Truth—appeared to move Gandhi toward one of his central principles: that “all religions are true,” to which he carefully added, “all have some error in them.” A generation later, Gandhi’s ideal of universal brotherhood and his ethic of nonviolence touched the heart of an American social reformer and seminary student named Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gandhi partnered with the Theosophical Society during India’s independence movement, crediting it with easing relations between Hindu and Moslem delegates to the Indian National Congress, the movement’s policy-making body. So prominent was Theosophy in India’s political life that even the Congress’s founding in 1885 had been instigated by an early Theosophist, A. O. Hume, a retired Anglo–Indian government secretary who said that he was acting under “advice and guidance of advanced initiates.” In 1917, Blavatsky’s successor, Annie Besant, was elected president of the Congress, making the Theosophist the first woman and last European to hold the position. Besant herself bestowed upon Gandhi the title by which he became world famous: Mahatma, a Hindu term for “Great Soul” and the same name by which Theosophy called its own Masters.
For all that Gandhi discovered within Theosophy, however, he was suspicious of the organization’s secrecy, including its communiqués from hidden Masters. He declined to become a member. (Lodge records from London show that he did briefly join in 1891, his last year there.) Unlike Henry A. Wallace,