Theosophy: Cult of the Occult

In the days when student dissent took milder forms than it does now and the Death of God had not yet been widely announced, small groups of seminarians from fundamentalist Wheaton College used to appear at the edge of a 40-acre estate on the outskirts of Wheaton, Ill. They would kneel briefly in prayer and then scurry nervously away. Thirty years ago, it was an act that took courage: the estate had become headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America, a mysterious non-Christian movement often suspected of being more occult than cult. Praying for the souls of the...