New York, 17 November 1875

The Theosophical Society is formally constituted in New York City by Blavatsky, Olcott, Judge and sixteen others. The stated initial object: the "study and elucidation of Occultism, the Cabala etc."

Read that founding phrase again. The Society did not begin as an Eastern movement — it began as an occult and Cabala society in Manhattan, in the same decade and out of much the same reading as the men who would found the Golden Dawn in London thirteen years later. The turn to India came after.