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sore_ass_losers ago

One of the prominent Theosophists was also a pedophile, Charles Webster Leadbeater. There was a critical book Madame Blavatsky's Baboon (she had a stuffed baboon), this is from a reviewer of that book at U. of Michigan:

But the women have not been entirely alone in their mystic fane. There was, in those days (the fin de siécle), a love that dared not speak its name, but was, even so, hot to trot. Enter the pedophile and psychopathic liar Charles Webster Leadbeater, whose biopic might more suitably be filmed by Ken Russell. Leadbeater’s account of his own early life is, like Blavatsky’s and Gurdjieff’s official CVs, a parcel of succulent lies, but the life the lies were designed to camouflage was just as juicy. Pedophilia was to be, more than once, the spur to travel, both before and after Leadbeater’s ascension to the rank of bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church, an apostate institution in which bishoprics were to be had for the asking. Liberal Catholics chiefly believed in candles, incense, and glitzy vestments, along with Atlantis, Mu, and all that is divinely decadent. It was an enduring tradition. In the early sixties I came upon a remnant of the creed, one Bishop Itkin, who was often noted, in the newspapers of the day, for his prominent episcopal presence at rallies of the peace movement. Like Leadbeater, Itkin found that if you called yourself a bishop and wore a pectoral cross you would be treated with the same deference as the genuine article, both by the media and by altar boys. Leadbeater is the Mr. Micawber of Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, a deliciously predictable reprobate and opportunist. In the course of his career he scored at least as well as Father Bruce Ritter in our own era. He was disgraced repeatedly, but he would just expatriate himself and keep on scoring. Theosophy, by shrugging off a moral code, possessed a special attraction for homosexuals who wanted to love both God and man. Now that the more liberal Protestant churches have welcomed homosexuals into the ranks of the clergy, gays of a religious bent need not venture as far afield as Theosophy to enjoy the rites and consolations of the Christian faith. Only time will tell if Theosophy is strong enough to survive that loss.

Leadbeater’s penchant for ephebes leads to the next, and most amazing biopic opportunity of this history—Krishnamurti. “One evening in the spring of 1909,” Washington recounts, “Leadbeater noticed an extra-ordinary aura surrounding one of the Indian boys paddling in the shallows. The boy was dirty and unkempt . . . . The boy took his fancy, and within days Leadbeater had told his followers that this child was destined to be a great teacher. . . .”

The charm of Krishnamurti’s story is much like that of the movie Forrest Gump, a fairy tale in which a simpleton, after only a little adversity, is blessed with all possible blessings because his heart is pure. Leadbeater intuited that young Krishna, known in the spirit realm as Alcyone, had lived thirty lives already, ranging in time from 22662 B.C to A.D. 624, which Leadbeater began to chronicle in the pages of The Theosophist: “It turned out that in each of these thirty lives everyone else known to Leadbeater also figured, but with different identities and sometimes different sexes. Some had been famous historical characters. Others had lived on the moon and Venus.” Alcyone’s long saga became the means by which Leadbeater revenged himself on old enemies and theosophical rivals. Thus, in an earlier life, Mrs. Besant (in this life, too, a serial monogamist) “acquired twelve husbands for whom she roasted rats.” Another Leadbeater scoop: Julius Caesar’s marriage to Jesus Christ. The bishop could out-tabloid even the Weekly World News, and in this he prefigured the can-you-top-this spirituality of our own era, in which sheer imagination is confused with causality. Such fads as creative visualization, UFO abductions, and incest survivalism [!!] all conflate dreams and matters-of-fact, and they are licensed to do so by the intellectual deference long accorded to crackpot religions. Leadbeater’s tales of his divine Alcyone soon put the teenage Krishnamurti on the theosophical map. Mrs. Besant adopted “Krishna” and his sibling, Nitya, transported them to London, and put them on a new dietary regimen of porridge, eggs, and milk. Leadbeater, a fanatic about good hygiene, personally attended their daily ablutions. The boys’ father sued for repossession of his offspring, charging Leadbeater with “deification and sodomy.” That is only the beginning of Krishnamurti’s golden legend. By the sound of it, he was a rather nice fellow, his Godhead notwithstanding—a bit like Bertie Wooster in his happy blindness to his own astonishing privilege.

https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472068968-30.pdf