Theos-Talk Archives (July 2001 Message tt00087)

THE THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT, as interesting as it is (in both significantly 
different editions), cannot be described as a "documentary history". 
There is no documentation of most of the sources, for example. It is 
written entirely on the basis of the ULT position: nothing wrong with 
that so long as it's clear that this is the perspective of the author, 
but it hardly equates with "documentary history" (any more than, say, 
Josephine Ransom's history does, or Joy Mill's recent history of 
(essentially the Adyar) Theosophical movement in America, which manages 
to omit substantial amounts of history, presumably because Adyar would 
prefer not to recall them). It is difficult to know how any work without 
a named author or authors can expect to be taken seriously, although in 
the case of THE THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT, the publisher's identity discloses 
its perspective. One might wonder, of course, why there is no reference 
in that work to the DES.

Dr Gregory Tillett