Theosophy across Boundaries Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement

Offers a new approach to Theosophy that takes into account its global dimensions and its interaction with highly diverse cultural contexts. Theosophy across Boundaries brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, philosophy, art, and politics. The first half of the book consists of seven perspectives on the activities of the Theosophical Society in very different regional contexts, ranging from India, Vietnam, China, and Japan to Victorian Britain and Israel, shedding new light on the entanglement of “Western” and “Oriental” ideas around 1900. The second half explores specific cultural influences that Theosophy exerted in the spheres of literature, art, and politics, using case studies from Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Russia. The examples clearly show that Theosophy was part of a truly global movement, thus providing an outstanding example of the complex entanglements of the global religious history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hans Martin Krämer is Professor of Japanese Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany, and the author of Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan. Julian Strube is a Research Fellow in Religious Studies at the University of Münster, Germany.