The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by a group of like-minded spiritualists and occultists, including Helena Blavatsky, H. S. Olcott, and William Quan Judge. This organization, which took as its motto “there is no religion higher than truth,” blossomed in its early years, spreading across the globe as it began to embrace the study of eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism alongside western esoteric traditions like Gnosticism and kabbalah. The foundation of the society's worldview were the writings of Blavatsky, especially Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. The noted literary critic Gauri Viswanathan writes of Blavatsky’s achievement:

By 1891, the year of her death, the organization could claim a truly transnational network of institutions, addressing, especially in Europe and the United States, a dissatisfaction with organized religion and the souring promise of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution. However, Blavatsky died without declaring a spiritual heir for the organization, setting up an internecine struggle for power between Anne Besant from England and William Quan Judge from the United States with H. S. Olcott, the Society’s Founder-President, caught in the middle. In 1895 Judge led the secession of almost the entire American section of the society and the formation of a rival organization. By 1896 he was dead, succeeded as leader by a dynamic New York social worker with a mysterious past, Katherine Tingley. Under her leadership she rebranded her organization the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society. Immediately she went on an offensive to win more adherents to her sect while laying the groundwork to fundamentally transform her organization from a loose network of lodges (the structure used by the Theosophical Society-Adyar) to a centralized utopian educational colony at Point Loma in California.