The Consolation of Theosophy

Leadbeater was also instrumental in engineering the Theosophical Society’s greatest and most ironic success, the grooming and selling of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the “World Teacher”—supposedly an incarnation of Maitreya, the Messianic Buddha—to a holiness- parched international public. Washington leaves us to surmise whether Leadbeater’s quasi-abduction in 1909 of this fourteen-year-old son of an impoverished Indian Theosophist was motivated more by lust or by ambition to play John the Baptist to a new savior. What we do know is that Krishnamurti, who confessed after twenty years of grooming for guruhood that he had never finished reading a single Theosophical book, remained a virtual prisoner of the society’s directorate from 1909 until the day in 1929 when he publicly renounced not only occultism, ceremony, and hierarchy in general but the society in particular.