THEOSOPHY. - From θεός "God" and σοφία "wisdom," it is the knowledge of God, and generally of divine things, obtained not so much through a discursive process of the intellect as through the ardor of religious feeling that yearns for a mystical union with the divinity and a deeper penetration of its essence. It differs from theology (v.), which is rational demonstration on the basis of a revelation of God, in that the knowledge of God in theosophy occurs intuitively through imagination and feeling. Its mental products, even if rich in ideas, are more images than concepts. Theosophical were Gnosticism (v.), Neoplatonism (v.) and in modern times the speculations of G. Böhme (v.) and E. Swedenborg (v.).
With the 19th century, thanks to the development of Indology (philosophy of the Upanishads, elements of the Sankhya and Yoga systems, Mahayana Buddhism) and of the physical and natural sciences, theosophy took on a more objective physiognomy and a scientific cloak without however losing its fundamental character of fantastic intuition of the real.
Its fundamental canons were fixed by Helena Blavatsky (v.), Russian occultist (b. at Yekaterinoslav on 31 July 1831, d. at London on 8 May 1891) who, after a stay in India, founded in 1875 in New York, together with Colonel H. S. Olcott, who was its true organizer, the Theosophical Society with the threefold purpose of: 1) forming the nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color; 2) encouraging the comparative study of religions, philosophy and sciences; 3) investigating the unexplained laws of nature and the latent powers of man. She was succeeded in the direction of the Theosophical Society by Annie Besant (b. at London on 1 Oct. 1847, d. at Adyar on 20 Sept. 1933), who emphasized its consequences on the ethical plane. The current seat of the Theosophical Society is at Adyar (Madras) where, as a testimony to the universalistic vision of theosophy, the first stone was laid in 1925 of 4 sanctuaries dedicated to the religions of Zoroaster, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, in addition to those of Hinduism and Buddhism, which theosophy considers as so many vehicles through which theosophical thought has come down to the present day. Concerning the vicissitudes of the Theosophical Society v. BESANT ANNIE.
In its current constitution, given to it by Blavatsky, theosophy, while declaring itself adogmatic, ends up being a complete system (however much it rejects all dogmatic constraint and considers "truth" as a prize to be attained) of philosophy from gnoseology, to cosmology, to ethics. The teaching concerning these greatest problems of thought and life it claims to have received from the Masters (Mahatma) whose chain begins in an era prior to that of present humanity, and whose doctrines spread from India to Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, forming the basis of all religions, without identifying itself with any.
The provenance of theosophical doctrine from the uninterrupted chain of the Masters distinguishes theosophy from spiritism, which instead receives its illuminations from the consultation of the dead, generally illustrious, through the performance of mediums who reveal their responses by making use of a fairly uniform baggage of manifestations: talking or self-moving tables, apparitions, materializations, various apports and which therefore is less organic and more fluctuating as that which depends at bottom on the culture and preparation of the mediums while theosophy possesses a body of doctrine beautiful and formed, to which the theosophist adheres, with a true and proper act of faith, because there is no study nor individual intuition that can demonstrate the theosophical vision of cosmic origins, verify the uninterrupted continuity of the chain of the Masters in the eras prior to the appearance of man on earth.
The elements of the cosmic vision proper to theosophy are the following: 1) before the existence of things there exists the One, inconceivable, beyond the limits of personality; 2) from this One (in esoteric terminology "superconsciousness") is, by its desire, derived the producer of the world (in the same terminology "center of consciousness") who in the various religions is called Ishvara, Logos, God. This producer has a personality not single but triple, is a triad (trimurti), in that it exercises the three functions: Being (Mahadeva), Love (Vishnu), Intelli-
Intelligence (Brahma) through which the Universe can reach its perfect completeness.
The regions of the cosmos are distributed according to seven planes which proceed from the lowest to the highest and are: 1) physical plane or of matter in its various forms; 2) astral (stellar) plane of feeling and emotions; 3) mental plane or of thought; 4) buddhic plane or of beatitude; 5) nirvanic plane or of pure existence; 6) paranirvanic plane, beyond the Nirvana; 7) mahaparanirvanic plane, greater than the paranirvanic: of which last two it is not possible to speak because they are beyond human comprehension.
The difference found among the elements or atoms of these seven planes is due to the greater or lesser intensity of the vibrations that invest them, not to a diversity of substance which is in them constant. It is not advisable to forget that vibration, manifestation of life, is the essential factor of evolution which is in turn the necessary postulate of theosophy; the whole hierarchy of atoms, from those of the physical plane to those of the archetypal ideas is founded on a different dosage of vibratory waves.
Intelligence (Brahma) is that which has arranged the seven planes with their relative sub-planes; Love (Vishnu) makes their forms evolve; and Being (Mahadeva) fashions the human monad which has as its fundamental character self-consciousness and can traverse all seven planes of the cosmos which are mutually communicating and allow the human monad to reach the supreme vision.
But to reach this vision a single life is not enough; a series of lives is required, each of which is conditioned by the actions performed during the preceding life (law of Karma: v. KARMAN). Reincarnation (v.) is a fundamental dogma of theosophy.
Only through an indeterminable lapse of time is it possible for the human monad to pass from initial animality to reach the consciousness of its identity with that One from which the Universe proceeds. For it is a fundamental thesis of theosophy that all souls are sparks of the universal Soul; that the life of the world is a manifestation of the life of God; that man has within himself the nature of God; that the fundamental purpose of each one is to render free the divine that he has within himself. It is therefore a question of a pantheism with a materialistic foundation, new only in that it appeals to science to justify, thanks to the concept of evolution, the presumed chain of the teaching of the "Masters."
The term theosophy is used by Rosmini in the comprehensive sense of doctrine of being: it therefore embraces ontology (v.), cosmology (v.), natural theology (v.) and from this point of view can be considered as the doctrine of the Supreme Being, studied in its totality. The 5 volumes that bear this title (Teosofia, Turin 1859-74) are incomplete and treat only of ontology (v. ROSMINI).