Leadbeater, C. W.

Charles Webster Leadbeater (February 16, 1854 - March 1, 1934) was a prominent early member of the Theosophical Society, author on the occult and co-founder with J. I. Wedgwood of the Liberal Catholic Church. Originally a clergyman in the Church of England, his interest in spiritualism led him to give up the Church in favour of the Theosophical Society, where he became a protege of Annie Besant. He quickly rose to the upper echelons of that society, but resigned abruptly in 1906 in the midst of accusations that he had been engaging in mutual masturbation with teenage boys left in his care. With Besant's support he was readmitted a few years later, and although similar rumours were to follow him throughout his career, Leadbeater's talents as a prolific author on occult subjects kept him at the forefront of the Theosophical Movement until his death in 1934.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Joins the Theosophical Society 3 Headmaster in Ceylon 4 Return to England 5 Reputed occult powers 6 Accused of pederasty 7 Readmission to the Theosophical Society 8 Discovers Krishnamurti 9 Australia and The Science of the Sacraments 10 Reputed clairvoyance and legacy 11 Selected writings 12 See also 13 References and notes 14 Bibliography 15 External links

[edit] Early life

Leadbeater was born in Stockport, Cheshire, in 1854. His father, Charles Sr., was born in Lincoln and his mother Emma was born in Liverpool. Public records indicate that he was an only child. By 1861 the family had moved to London, where his father was a railway contractor's clerk.^[1] Charles Sr. died from tuberculosis in 1862, when Leadbeater was only eight years old. Four years later another misfortune appears to have struck the family when a bank in which their savings were invested collapsed. Thus without finances for college, Leadbeater sought work right after graduating from high school in order to support his mother and himself. This he did in various clerical jobs.^[2] During the evenings he became largely self-educated. For example, he studied astronomy and had a 12-inch reflector telescope (which would have been highly expensive at the time and quite possibly state of the art) to observe the heavens at night. He also learned French, Latin and Greek.

An uncle, his father's brother-in-law, was the prominent Anglican clergyman, William Wolfe Capes. By this uncle's influence, Leadbeater was ordained an Anglican priest in 1879 at Farnham by the Bishop of Winchester. By 1881, he was living with his widowed mother at Bramshott in a cottage which his uncle had built, where he is listed as "Curate of Bramshott".^[3] He was an active minister, teacher and youth leader who was later remembered as "a bright and cheerful and kindhearted man."^[4] About this time, after reading about the séances of medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886), Leadbeater developed an active interest in spiritualism.

[edit] Joins the Theosophical Society

Part of a series on
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Founders of the T. S.
Helena Blavatsky · Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
Theosophists
Annie Besant · Abner Doubleday Geoffrey Hodson  · Archibald Keightley C.W. Leadbeater  · G. R. S. Mead William Scott-Elliot · Alfred Percy Sinnett Katherine Tingley · Ernest Wood
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Seven Rays · Root Races Round · Initiation Spiritual Hierarchy
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Theosophical Society TS Adyar · TS Pasadena TS Point Loma-Covina · TSA Hargrove United Lodge of Theosophists
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His interest in occultism was stimulated by A.P. Sinnett's Occult World, and he joined the Theosophical Society in 1883. The next year he met Helena Petrovna Blavatsky when she came to London. "When she accepted him [as a pupil], he gave up the church, became a vegetarian, severed all ties with England, and followed her to India."^[5]

At this time he was the recipient of a few Mahatma letters which influenced him to go to India, where he arrived at Adyar in 1884. In India he wrote that he had received visits and training from some of Blavatsky's Masters.^[6] This was the start of a long career in the Theosophical Society.

[edit] Headmaster in Ceylon

In 1885, Leadbeater traveled with Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), first President of the Theosophical Society, to Burma, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In Ceylon they founded the English Buddhist Academy, with Leadbeater staying behind to serve as its first headmaster under the most austere conditions.^[7] This school gradually expanded to become Ananda College, which today has over 6,000 students and has a building named in Leadbeater's honor.^[8]

[edit] Return to England

In 1889, Sinnett asked Leadbeater to return to England to tutor his son and George Arundale (1878–1945). He agreed and brought with him one of his pupils C Jinarajadasa (1875–1953). Although struggling in poverty himself, Leadbeater managed to send both Arundale and Jinarajadasa to Cambridge University. Both would eventually serve as International Presidents of the Theosophical Society.

At the time London was a center of intellectual activity. The United States had not yet emerged as a world power, Europe was still old world, and London was the hub of the British Empire. And with such distinguished members as Sir William Crookes, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir Edwin Arnold and the Rt. Hon. William Ewart Gladstone,^[9] the Theosophical Society was an intellectual vortex of the first order.

Jinarajadasa relates how Leadbeater had already done some occult investigations, then in May 1894, did his first Past life reading.

He became one of the most known speakers in the Theosophical Society for quite a number of years^[10] and was also Secretary of the London Lodge.^[11]

It is not known when or why he added seven years to his life, i.e., on a ship's manifest in 1903, he lists his age as 56, and occupation "Lecturer" when he did a lecture tour to Vancouver and San Francisco. He also notes that he had previously come to Seattle in 1893.^[12]

[edit] Reputed occult powers

With Annie Besant, starting in 1895, Leadbeater is reputed to have made "...occult investigations together into the cosmos, the beginnings of mankind, chemistry and the constitution of the elements, as well as frequently visiting the Masters together in their astral bodies."^[13]

[edit] Accused of pederasty

Mary Lutyens in Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening writes:

Then in 1906, after Leadbeater's return to England, the fourteen-year-old son of the Corresponding Secretary of the Esoteric Section in Chicago, whom Leadbeater had taken with him to San Francisco on his first lecture tour, confessed to his parents the reason for the antipathy he had conceived for his mentor, to whom he had at first been greatly devoted—Leadbeater had encouraged him in the habit of masturbation. Almost simultaneously the son of another Theosophical official in Chicago charged Leadbeater with the same offense without apparently there being any collusion between the two boys. Then a typewritten, unsigned, undated, cipher-letter was produced; it had been picked up by a suspicious cleaner on the floor of a flat in Toronto in which Leadbeater had stayed with the second boy and was said to have been written by Leadbeater. The code was simple and when broken revealed one passage of such obscenity, for those days, that the letter could not by law be printed in England. When decoded the offending passage read: "Glad sensation is so pleasant. Thousand kisses darling."^[14]

A commission was appointed by the American Section, but before the meeting Leadbeater resigned from the Society to, as he told Olcott, "save the Society from embarrassment."^[15] On the nature of the accusation itself, Leadbeater wrote to Annie Besant in the following words:

So when boys came under my care, I mentioned this matter to them [masturbation], among other things, always trying to avoid all sorts of false shame, and to make the whole appear as natural and simple as possible.^[16]

Another such accusation came later from Hubert van Hook of Chicago, who at age 11 was selected by Leadbeater as a candidate for the "vehicle" of the World Teacher.^[17] Of this accusation, Mary Lutyens states: "Hubert later swore to Mrs Besant that Leadbeater had 'misused' him, but as he was extremely vindictive by that time, his testimony, though unshaken, was perhaps not altogether reliable."^[18] In a separate occasion, Lutyens had this to say regarding Leadbeater and another of his favorite boys:

[Leadbeater] came prancing down the wharf like a great lion, hatless and in a long purple cloak, holding on to the arm of a very good-looking blond boy of about fifteen. This was Theodore St John, an Australian boy of great charm and sweetness, who was Leadbeater's current favourite and who slept in his room.^[19]

Author John Kersey in Arnold Harris Mathew and the Old Catholic Movement in England 1908-52, offers the following assessment:

Leadbeater was not interested in defending his position, but in a letter to Annie Besant wrote: "a natural function exists, which in itself is no more wrong than eating or drinking." Besant did not agree with this, taking an attitude more typical of her time... Leadbeater's approach was not that of the libertine, for he taught self control and moderation in sexual habits... but certainly he was frank in his talk of sex, as well as promoting a generally open attitude to the body that was forward-looking in the early years of the century.^[20]

Leadbeater... believed that by teaching masturbation and encouraging it, he was making it less likely that sexual experimentation would lead to unwanted pregnancies, since contraception was not widely available at this time. A factor in this approach was also that initiates in the Theosophical Society, including Leadbeater himself, were expected to remain chaste and not engage in sexual relationships with others. In this context, Leadbeater's teachings on auto-eroticism were a means, as he saw it, to enable initiates to remain within these bounds.^[21]

None of the accusations lead to trials in a court of law. An Indian judge in a related custody case (Naranian vs. Besant, regarding the legal guardianship of Krishnamurti and Nityananda Jiddu) remarked in his ruling that Leadbeater held "immoral ideas" - this prompted Annie Besant to write a letter in support of Leadbeater regarding the facts of the case and its coverage by The Times of London.^[22][23]

[edit] Readmission to the Theosophical Society

After Olcott died in February 1907, Annie Besant, after a political struggle, became President of the Society. By the end of 1908, the International Sections voted for Leadbeater's readmission. He accepted and came to Adyar on 10 February 1909.

[edit] Discovers Krishnamurti

His most well-known activity was the "discovery", in 1909, of Jiddu Krishnamurti on the private beach of the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar, India. Fourteen-year-old Krishnamurti and his family had been living next to the headquarters estate for a few months before the "discovery". Leadbeater believed Krishnamurti to be a very promising candidate as the "vessel" for the indwelling of the World Teacher, whose imminent appearance he, and many Theosophists, were expecting. The new teacher would, in the pattern of Moses, Siddhārtha Gautama, Zarathustra (Zoroaster), Jesus of Nazareth, and Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh, divulge a new dispensation, a new religious teaching. Many (but not all) Theosophists believed that the teacher, a spiritual being called Maitreya, would likely use Krishnamurti as its "vehicle".

Leadbeater believed he could read past lives, and did so on Krishnamurti who he code-named Alcyone. He published 30 such past lives, in a series in The Theosophist magazine beginning April 1910, as "The Lives of Alcyone": "They ranged from 20,000 BC to 624 AD... Alcyone was a female in eleven of them."^[24]

During 1910, Leadbeater conducted further research into the akashic records which he said he clairvoyantly inspected at the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar. He recorded the results in his book Man: How, Whence, and Whither?^[25] The book records the past history of Atlantis and other civilizations. The alleged past lives of "Alcyone" are described. The future society of Earth in the 28th century is depicted as being powered by nuclear power.

Leadbeater stayed in India for some time overseeing the raising of Krishnamurti, but eventually felt that he was being called to go to Australia for the cause. In the meantime, in the late 1920s, Krishnamurti would disavow the role that Leadbeater and other Theosophists expected him to fulfil.^[26] He disassociated himself from the Theosophical Society and its doctrines and practices,^[27] and over the next six decades pursued an independent course, becoming widely known as an influential thinker and speaker on philosophical and religious subjects.

[edit] Australia and The Science of the Sacraments

Annie Besant had come to see Leadbeater as a liability and was relieved when, in 1915, he went to live in Sydney. He was responsible for the construction of the Star Amphitheatre at Balmoral Beach in 1924. While in Australia he came in closer contact with J. I. Wedgwood who initiated him into Co-Masonry in 1915 and then, in 1916, as a bishop himself, consecrated Leadbeater as a bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church.

Public interest in theosophy in Australia and New Zealand increased greatly as a result of Leadbeater's presence there. To this day Sydney is comparable to Adyar as a centre of Theosophical activity.^[28]

In 1922, the Theosophical Society began renting a mansion known as The Manor in the Sydney suburb of Mosman. Leadbeater took up residence there as the leader of a community of Theosophists. The Manor became a major centre and was regarded as "the greatest of occult forcing houses".^[29] There he accepted young women students. They included Clara Codd, future President of the TS in America, clairvoyant Dora van Gelder, another future President of the TS in America who in the 1970s also worked with Delores Krieger to develop the technique of Therapeutic Touch, and Mary Lutyens, who would write the Krishnamurti biography.^[30] Lutyens stayed there in 1925, while Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya stayed at another house nearby. The Manor became one of three major TS centres, the others being the one at Adyar and one in Holland. The TS bought The Manor in 1925 and in 1951 created The Manor Foundation Ltd, to own and administer the house, which is still used by the Theosophical Society.^[31]

It was also during his stay in Australia that Leadbeater became the Presiding Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church and co-wrote the Liturgy Book for that denomination, still in use today. This work represents a careful revision of the Roman Catholic liturgy of his day, in which Leadbeater sought to remove its disfiguring elements, such as its crude anthropomorphisms and expressions of the fear and wrath of God, which he regarded "as derogatory alike to the idea of a loving Father and to the men (sic) He has created in His own image. If Christians," he wrote, "had been content to take what Christ taught of the Father in heaven, they would never have saddled themselves with the jealous, angry, bloodthirsty Jehovah of Ezra, Nehemiah and the others - a god that needs propitiating and to whose 'mercy' constant appeals must be made."^[32]

Thus the 'Credo' of the LCC Liturgy written by Leadbeater - typically in the non-inclusive language of his time - reads:

"We believe that God is Love and Power and Truth and Light; that perfect justice rules the world; that all His sons shall one day reach His Feet, however far they stray. We hold the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of man; we know that we do serve Him best when best we serve our brother man. So shall His blessing rest upon us and peace for evermore. Amen."^[33]

Previously Leadbeater had investigated the energies of the Christian Sacraments and written 'The Science of Sacraments: An Occult and Clairvoyant Study of the Christian Eucharist' - one of the most significant works in Christian esotericism. In his prologue to the latest edition of this book, John Kersey refers to the Eucharist proposed by Leadbeater as "a radical reinterpretation of the context of the Eucharist seen within a theological standpoint of esoteric magic and universal salvation; it is Catholicism expressing the love of God to the full without the burdens of needless guilt and fear, and the false totem of the temporal powers of the church."^[34]

[edit] Reputed clairvoyance and legacy

Leadbeater remains well-known and influential in his work through his reputed clairvoyance with, for instance, his books The Chakras and Man, Visible and Invisible dealing with the human aura and chakras. Leadbeater's reputed clairvoyance, however, was not without grave errors. In his book The Inner Life he wrote that there is a population of human-like beings on the planet Mars^[35].

His writings on the sacraments and Christian esotericism remain popular to this day, with a constant stream of new editions and translations of his opus magnum 'The Science of the Sacraments'. His Liturgy book is still in use by many Liberal and Independent Catholic Churches across the world.

[edit] Selected writings

• Dreams (What they are and how they are caused) (1893)
• Theosophical Manual Nº5: The Astral Plane (Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena) (1896)
• Theosophical Manual Nº6: The Devachanic Plane or The Heaven World Its Characteristics and Inhabitants (1896)
• The Story of Atlantis (with William Scott-Elliot) (1896)
• Reincarnation (1898)
• Our Relation to Our Children (1898)
• Clairvoyance (1899)
• Thought Forms (With Annie Besant) (1901)
• An Outline of Theosophy (1902)
• Man Visible and Invisible (1902)
• Some Glimpses of Occultism, Ancient and Modern (1903)
• The Christian Creed (1904)
• The Inner Life (1911)
• The Perfume of Egypt and Other Weird Stories (1911)
• The Power and Use of Thought (1911)
• The Life After Death and How Theosophy Unveils It (1912)
• A Textbook of Theosophy (1912)
• Man: Whence, How and Whither (With Annie Besant) (1913)
• Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913)
• The Hidden Side of Things (1913)
• Occult Chemistry (book) (1916)
• The Monad and Other Essays Upon the Higher Consciousness (1920)
• The Inner Side Of Christian Festivals (1920)
• The Science of the Sacraments (1920)
• The Lives of Alcyone (With Annie Besant) (1924)
• The Liturgy According to the Use of the Liberal Catholic Church (With J.I. Wedgwood) (Second Edition) (1924)
• The Masters and the Path (1925)
• Talks on the Path of Occultism (1926)
• Glimpses of Masonic History (1926)
• The Hidden Life in Freemasonry (1926)
• The Chakras (1927) (published by the Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Illinois, USA)
• Spiritualism and Theosophy Scientifically Examined and Carefully Described (1928)
• The Noble Eightfold Path (1955)
• Messages from the Unseen (1931)

[edit] See also

• Akashic records
• Chakras
• Clairvoyance
• Christian mythology
• Liberal Catholic Church
• Reincarnation
• Root race
• Theosophy

[edit] References and notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Caldwell, Daniel. Charles Webster Leadbeater: His Life, Writings & Theosophical Teachings.
• Kersey, John. Arnold Harris Matthew and the Old Catholic Movement in England: 1908-52
• Kersey, John. The Science of the Sacraments by Charles Webster Leadbeater. New 2007 Edition with a Preface by John Kersey
• Michel, Peter. Charles W. Leadbeater:Mit den Augen des Geistes ISBN 3-89427-107-8 (In German; No English translation available)
• Tillett, Gregory. The Elder Brother: A Biography of Charles Webster Leadbeater.
• Lutyens, Mary. Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening; Avon Books (Discus), New York. 1983 ISBN 0380007347

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Charles Webster Leadbeater

• A Chronological Listing of C.W. Leadbeater's Books and Pamphlets.
• Leadbeater.NET
• Charles Webster Leadbeater: His Life, Writings & Theosophical Teachings
• Biography, bibliography and digital Library
• Leadbeater Collection online at global.org
• Singapore Lodge - C. W. Leadbeater Biography
• Spirit Writings Biography
• articles by and about C.W. Leadbeater
• Occult Investigations
• Picture and short bio
• Works by Charles Webster Leadbeater at Project Gutenberg
• CWL World
• Articles by and about C.W. Leadbeater

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Name	Leadbeater, Charles Webster
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Date of birth	February 16, 1854
Place of birth
Date of death	March 1, 1934
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