From its inception throughout the period of its highest influence in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the theosophist movement has constantly transgressed boundaries. It has gone beyond geographical boundaries, from Europe to India and on to other Asian countries. It has blurred boundaries between religious traditions, mixing elements from various European and Asian traditions, also appealing to individuals from a variety of religious backgrounds. And it has transgressed the boundaries between categories such as religion, philosophy, politics, or science.

Dealing with theosophy may challenge our way of looking at things – such as the division of religion and science – because it challenged them. One challenge lies in recognizing theosophy as a crucial agent of global transfers of religion (somewhat ironically, because it wanted to transcend religion) and transfers of Western knowledge. Indeed, it is perhaps the most overlooked agent in this latter transfer. This is largely due to the fact that theosophy has so far mostly been studied within the disciplinary framework of Western Esotericism Studies. Yet, theosophy is not just a part of “Western esotericism,” i.e. the product of a purely western Orientalist imagination, in which Western audiences defined their own identity with implicit or explicit reference to the “Otherness” of the East. Instead, theosophy, in particular the Theosophical Society, 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. For people in Asia, esotericism could function as an entry point into orientalist discourse and, at the same time, provide opportunities for a critical resignification of its contents, which in turn impacted on orientalist notions.

In order to acknowledge that esotericism played an important role in the global religious history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the current academic paradigm of a purely “Western Esotericism” requires revision. The conference will try to bring together Western Esotericism Studies and Asian Area Studies and, equally importantly, draw in contributions from other disciplines, especially History, Literary Studies, and Art History. By not just narrowly focusing on theosophy and the usual suspects thought to have been its main agents, the goal of the conference is to contextualize theosophy as a global movement, to take effects upon theosophy and effects of theosophy in unlikely places into account, and to go across (disciplinary) borders just as theosophy has also transgressed them historically.