The Turn East

The Society was founded in 1875 to study "Occultism, the Cabala etc." Within five years its headquarters were in India, its vocabulary was Sanskrit and Pali, and its cosmology was rounds, chains, karma and reincarnation.

The move that separates this bench from the other one. The Golden Dawn kept the Western frame and put Egypt on top; Theosophy kept the same Christian-Kabbalist scaffolding and put India on top. Which is why the splice happens here and not there: once the scaffolding is Kabbalistic and the vocabulary is Sanskrit, a correspondence table between sephirot and chakras is nearly inevitable. Nobody had to decide to make it. The architecture made it.