It is often unacknowledged how deep a debt modern ancient astronaut theorists owe to the nineteenth-century Theosophical movement, a Victorian-era amalgam of Spiritualism, Eastern religions, and good old-fashioned hokum. The Theosophists proposed that beings from Venus and other planets visited earth in the deep past and were responsible for ancient ruins and the foundations of religion. This book presents early texts from noted Theosophists and those who encountered Theosophy, covering the beings from other worlds that came to the ancient earth to "civilize our planet." These texts provide an interesting window into the origins of the modern ancient astronaut theory and demonstrate just how much the talking heads of cable TV and the modern authors of alternative history owe to the pioneering work of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultists. This volume features W. Scott-Elliot's complete The Lost Lemuria and H. P. Blavatsky's Stanzas of Dzyan among other selections.

Theosophy across Boundaries brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, philosophy, art, and politics. The first half of the book consists of seven perspectives on the activities of the Theosophical Society in very different regional contexts, ranging from India, Vietnam, China, and Japan to Victorian Britain and Israel, shedding new light on the entanglement of "Western" and "Oriental" ideas around 1900. The second half explores specific cultural influences that Theosophy exerted in the spheres of literature, art, and politics, using case studies from Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Russia. The examples clearly show that Theosophy 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.