The Elder Brother

A Biography of Charles Webster Leadbeater

Gregory Tillett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317311317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

A leading figure in the Theosophical Society, Leadbeater was a prolific author, writing on subjects ranging from Buddhism, Masonic history and the origins of Christianity through to the power of thought and the fourth dimension. Leadbeater was also the force behind Annie Besant, the discoverer and educator if Krishnamurti, and became Presiding Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church.

For all his influence Charles Leadbeater remains largely unknown as a man. This biography, first published in 1982, dispels many of the mysteries surrounding his life, and Leadbeater emerges as neither evil degenerate or infallible saint, but as a complex and eccentric adventurer into the realm of the occult. This title will be of particular interest to students of history and theology.

1

The man and the myth

The standard portrait of Charles Webster Leadbeater shows an elderly gentleman with sparkling eyes and a dignified face, the barest hint of a smile, and a patriarchal beard. He sits on what appears to be a throne, a large ring prominently displayed on his right hand, and a jewelled cross suspended on his chest. Upon closer examination one might notice the gnarled knuckles and distorted fingers characteristic of rheumatism. The same dignified gaze is to be found in almost every formal photograph of him; the face, it has been commented, seems like a mask, revealing nothing of the man behind it except his ability to remain untouched by the external world.

He was a man who made the most startling claims for himself, and made them in a very matter-of-fact way; he declared that he had penetrated the depths of the atom by his psychic powers, discovered the ultimate unit of physical matter whilst sitting in a park on the Finchley Road in London, and had extracted individual atoms of various elements psychically from the showcases in the Dresden Museum whilst he reclined several miles away. He had also, it might be mentioned casually, sent sea spirits to dig atoms of another element out of the mines of Sabaraganuwa in Ceylon, whilst he lay on his bed in Madras. He had explored most of the planets in the solar system whilst his body remained on earth, and described their climates and inhabitants in some detail. He was in regular communication with the Powers that govern the earth from the Inner Planes, the Masters or Mahatmas, the Supermen who constitute the Occult Hierarchy of this planet, and had visited Their homes, and had several of Them visit him. And he conducted parties of his pupils to the secret places in Tibet where these same Masters resided, whilst both the pupils and their guide slept securely in bed. He was acquainted with all the members of the Inner Government of the World, with whose bureaucratic structure he was completely familiar, from the lowliest to the Highest. Indeed, as he mentioned to an incredulous judge in the Madras High Court, he had seen the Solar Logos, Who is God as far as mortals are concerned, in human form, and had conversed with Him. Thus had he ranged from the occultly microscopic depths of the atom and the molecule to the occultly cosmic ranges of the solar system and beyond. With civilizations on the moon and life on Mercury – small animals, ‘like a rabbit’, cacti and butterflies – he was familiar.

The history of Man and the earth held few secrets from him. He had followed human evolution from its beginnings with his clairvoyant gaze, observed man emerge from animal into human, and even located the precise moment at which that individualization happened for given human beings. In sacrificing herself for love of one of the Masters, he said, Mrs Annie Besant had individualized out of the animal kingdom and into the human in a distant civilization on the moon. From the akashic records, the memory of the Logos, he traced the rise and fall of earth’s civilization from its earliest times until the present day. He saw Lemuria and Atlantis come and go, and followed the root races of mankind as they evolved and progressed. From the Occult Hall of Records in a cave in Tibet he brought maps of the earth’s geography in those far-distant times, and information drawn from ancient books and manuscripts. And into that museum he placed the manuscript of his own first book, sending it by mysterious occult means, much as he later transmitted his old typewriter to one of the Masters. He traced the past lives of many of his associates, friends and enemies, in graphic detail, describing their inter-relationships over hundreds of thousands of years, and drawing elaborate genealogical charts to show the descent of incarnational ancestors.

Leadbeater could see thoughts, and described them in vivid detail to artists who enthusiastically painted them. He could observe the inner constitution of man, and was a noted authority on chakras, auras, kundalini, and all those aspects of anatomy and physiology unseen by and unknown to orthodox science. Death held no mysteries for him; he regularly assisted the so-called dead in their after-life states, conveying messages to and from them with no effort at all, and thereby providing great consolation to the loved ones remaining on this side of the Veil. He had been to heaven and hell and purgatory without ever leaving this world, and enrolled a band of Invisible Helpers who took over from the angels the duties of caring for those who had died unhappily, or who refused to recognize that they were dead. He was given to speaking quite casually of conversations not only with the dead but with angels and archangels, with nature spirits and devas; he observed the consciousness of rocks, and discovered one large rock that had fallen in love with a young boy and enjoyed having him sit upon it. He gathered water spirits from Sydney Harbour whilst travelling across it by ferry, scooping them out with a psychic sieve and sending them to attach themselves to the auras of those he knew to be unhappy or depressed.

Leadbeater observed the inner side of just about everything; he knew precisely how and why the ceremonies of the Christian Church operated, and the exact process whereby Transubstantiation – the changing of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the Body and Blood of Christ according to traditional Catholic theology – took place. He had observed it all, described it all, and any unresolved mysteries he took to Christ Himself for clarification. Leadbeater’s compilations of clairvoyant discoveries provided details of the occult effects of ceremonies and eating meat, of jazz and large cities, of the evil elementals that attach themselves to drunks and the psychedelic pink and green clouds that swirl about as a result of Wagner’s music. From the Highest Power in the Solar System, to the evolution of Man, the nature of matter and energy, the cause of cancer, life on Mercury, the after-death state of someone’s beloved tomcat, the aura of a shipwreck to the real authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, the validity of Anglican Orders and the future evolution of man on earth – on all these subjects and a thousand more Leadbeater wrote in his usual semi-scientific, almost mundane style, much as though he were describing events in his garden or meetings with friends for tea. However exalted the perception he claimed, he described it in a prosaic, unexcited fashion.

Given the range of his remarkable discoveries and explorations – or, anyway, the range he claimed – it can readily be understood that his disciples held him in the greatest awe and reverence, regarding him as the world’s greatest occultist, psychic and seer, and, as Mrs Besant declared, ‘a man on the threshold of divinity’. He was the chosen messenger of the Masters, to whom he led pupils. He was the highest source of information on occultism and the mysteries of life, and his books were held to be the final authority in such matters.

The range of his writing, and the wealth of material that flowed from his prolific pen, was vast. Some forty volumes, even more pamphlets, and for much of his life probably five or six journal articles a week – not to mention lectures and sermons, plus an extensive correspondence with people on matters requiring his psychic investigation – constituted his literary output. His subject-matter ranged from Buddhist catechetics, pedagogy and Masonic history to the origins of Christianity, the causes of war, and the nature of the soul; from life after death, reincarnation, heaven and hell, to the evolution of man, the unseen effects of sunlight and the value of vegetarianism, and the inner side of just about everything. Most of his books remain in print, and continue to sell. The Theosophical Publishing House in the USA reports that its best seller from the time that it was written in 1927 up until the present day is Leadbeater’s The Chakras, closely followed by two of his other books, Man Visible and Invisible and Thought Forms. And in any range of occult books, however recent, one finds clear traces of Leadbeater, usually acknowledged.

The modern occult revival owes more to him than to anyone else; his concepts and ideas, his popularizing of occult and Theosophical terms and principles, run through all modern works on these subjects. The idea of reincarnation, and of investigations into life before birth as much as life after death, ideas of ‘reincarnational therapy’ and examinations of the akashic records derive directly from Leadbeater’s work. The concept of the aura, the bio-energetic field surrounding the human body, which is currently attracting serious attention even in orthodox scientific circles, was first made popular in his writings, and first extensively described by his accounts of his clairvoyant investigations. The modern notion of ‘vibrations’, and the psychic atmosphere of places, first appeared in his work, as, for the West, did the idea of vegetarianism, a return to nature, long hair and bare feet in the spiritual life.

The concept of the Occult Hierarchy, centred at Shamballa, with its Masters and progressive initiations appeared first in his writings, and was first publicized by him. Whether or not he derived it from Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine is irrelevant; her works remain obscure and largely unread outside a select circle. His books made the concepts popular and reached a wide reading public. They also reached other authors who took them up, amended them a little, and reproduced them as their own. This is most clearly evident in the terms Leadbeater used from Eastern religions. Words like karma, chakra, chela, Mahatma, atma, Buddhi, manas, Maitreya, and concepts like the Wesak festival, Shamballa and Initiation which he derived from Hinduism or Buddhism, and misinterpreted or reinterpreted to suit his own scheme of things, have continued to be used in the sense in which he used them, regardless of their original meanings, by writers and theorists who give no acknowledgment to Leadbeater as the origin of their ideas. Even the modern idea of evolution as a spiritual concept – from minerals to Man and beyond to Superman – derives essentially from his writings. It is true that it is to be found in Blavatsky’s work, but it is equally true that it is Leadbeater’s version of it that has been repeated in popular occultism, with its notions of root races, and Lemuria and Atlantis, and reincarnation and the continuity of ‘something’ in man which remains throughout all the changes, from mineral to Man and beyond. Likewise, it is very much his view of life after death that pervades popular occultism, and stands in clear contradiction to that presented by Blavatsky.

His authority as the world’s greatest occultist and seer (apart from, he would have added, Mrs Annie Besant) was unquestioned by his disciples, including Mrs Annie Besant, either during his lifetime or since. He was described as ‘one of the world’s foremost scientists in spiritual research’ and ‘a great physicist of the spiritual worlds’.¹ He was hailed as ‘a giant amongst men, and a great teacher and light-bringer to mankind’, ‘a great occultist, a seer, a sage, and a selfless servant of the human race’.²

Yet for every enthusiastic disciple who hailed him there was a critic to denounce him. Even within the Theosophical movement there were those who held, and still hold, that he had perverted and corrupted Theosophy from its original doctrines to his own interpretation of them, and had, by various means, imposed that interpretation upon the Theosophical Society and, indeed, the world, since his books were well publicized and other presentations of Theosophy ignored. At least one journal came into existence solely to attack and criticise him, and did so consistently for several years, and others made denunciations of him a major part of their work. Not only was he condemned for perverting Theosophy and true occultism, but also for corrupting young boys, being a sexual pervert, a tool of the Black Powers, if not a Black Magician himself. In Australia a Theosophical journal³ denounced him:

His psychopathic tendencies get him into trouble, but the dear devoted souls rally round him again and again, fighting heroically for a bad cause. … He has a Rasputin-like influence over boys and old women who, when his vileness is exposed, shout ‘Judge not … be tolerant’. … He binds his dupes with the old charm of priestcraft and ceremonial magic.

Outside the Theosophical movement he was attacked by such occultists as Dion Fortune, who declared he was a Black Magician employing sexual perversion for depraved occult ends, and Aleister Crowley, who, ironically enough, denounced him as a ‘senile sex-pervert’ and hinted that he was also a Black Magician.

Newspapers in Australia initiated campaigns against him, alleging all manner of sexual perversion with his boy pupils and encouraging the police to investigate and presumably prosecute him, and suggesting that the Minister for Immigration should refuse to allow him to return to the country. In London, John Bull said he should be horse-whipped, and the New Statesman declared that no modern adventurer had built up such a police dossier. Yet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who met him in Sydney, was quite impressed, describing Leadbeater as ‘venerable and picturesque’. Count Hermann Keyserling,⁴ who met Leadbeater at Adyar in 1911, wrote:

I have found his writings, in spite of the frequency of childish traits in them, more instructive than others of their kind. He is the only one whom I know, whose power of observation is more or less on the level of a scientist, and he is the only one whose descriptions are plain and simple. In the ordinary sense of the word he is not talented enough to invent what he declares he has seen, nor, like Rudolf Steiner, is he capable of working upon his material in such a way that it would be difficult to differentiate between that which he has perceived and that which he has added. He is hardly intellectually equal to his material. Nevertheless, again and again I meet with assertions on his part, which, on the one hand, are probable, and, on the other, correspond to philosophical truths. What he sees after his own fashion (very often without understanding it) is in the highest degree full of significance. He will, therefore, in all probability have seen something which really exists.

Some twenty years later he again commented:⁵

Leadbeater had genuine occult powers – infinitely more than Annie Besant – and it was quite true that he suddenly ‘saw’ occult colour images of your character, a country or an event. But it was just like having a fine voice, or eyes of a particular colour. He was stupid, yet I liked him for his quaint mixture of occult gifts and an incredible naïveté. His occultism was as genuine as his pomposity.

Leadbeater’s relationship with Mrs Annie Besant was almost as widely discussed as his relationships, real or alleged, with his boy pupils. One of her biographers described him as ‘her astral Svengali’.⁶ It was suggested by various critics that he kept Mrs Besant hypnotized, or under some bizarre form of astral spell, and there is no question that he dominated her life virtually from the time he met her. Mahatma Gandhi⁷ declared:

I do not think that Mrs Besant is a hypocrite; she is credulous and she is duped by Leadbeater. When an Englishman suggested to me to read Leadbeater’s The Life after Death, I flatly refused to do so as I had grown suspicious of him after reading his other writings. As to his humbug, I came to know of it later.

Who was Charles Webster Leadbeater, this man acclaimed on the one hand as being on the threshold of divinity and on the other as an evil sex pervert and Black Magician? What sort of a man was he, and why did he never respond to his critics and slanderers? Why did allegations of sexual relations between him and his pupils follow him throughout his Theosophical career? Was there, as Mrs Besant claimed, a conspiracy of malicious intrigue conducted against him under the influence of the Dark Powers, or were the accusations simply true? And why did no biography of him appear during his lifetime, when thousands of eager disciples would have read it enthusiastically?

There are many mysteries in the life of this elderly gentleman with the sparkling eyes and the benign expression, and the lack of a biography is one of them. There were, during his life and after his death, many calls for one to be written. Yet the question of why none has appeared from those who have access to all the materials a biographer could need remains a mystery – or remains a mystery until one comes to write the biography.

For, like all around whom a myth develops, making them seem larger and better than human beings in real life can possibly be, he was a combination of diverse, often contradictory qualities. He was almost unbearably pompous in some matters, yet had a rather loud sense of humour in others. He spoke in hushed and reverent terms about his superiors in public conversation, yet was scathingly sarcastic about them in private conversation with close friends. He was dogmatic and condescending to those whom he regarded as his inferiors, but friendly and encouraging in his conversations with children, treating them as equals and confiding in them as friends. For most of his life he treated women with contempt; yet his relationship with Mrs Besant was closer than any other in his life. He treated women with titles and status with respect. He was, as one of his students mused, a ‘crusty old Tory’, believing in King and Empire and loyalty and the status quo, that the Powers governing the world had ordered things according to the best and most equitable scheme, and that it was not the right of a mere human being to propose radical changes. He disapproved of social reforms, political changes and democracy, and firmly believed that people should be governed by their betters and accept their positions in the hierarchy which evolution had established. Between the savage at the bottom and the disciple at the top were ranged the peasant, the unskilled labourer, the skilled artisan, the middle classes, the upper classes, the nobility and the Theosophists; this was the natural order of things, and change should occur only through the evolutionary movement upwards.

He believed intensely in loyalty, first to those who had been appointed to high office like the monarchy, and second to the ideals of institutions. When confronted with an instance of a close colleague making a statement he regarded as simply false, he refused the suggestion that he should counter it, lest the organization suffer through this disagreement. He declared to his closest disciples that loyalty was more important than truth, and believed that there were, effectively, two moralities. First that of the ordinary man who was bound to tell the truth all the time, and second, that of the occultist who worked on a higher level and migh...