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94 Chapter Four “Buggery and Humbuggery” Sex, Magic, and Occult Authority Many controversies occupied the Theosophical Society from Annie Besant ’s election as president in 1907 until her death in 1933: debates over the Esoteric Section, over Krishnamurti and the Coming Christ, and over subsidiary organizations like the Liberal Catholic Church and CoMasonry . These produced innumerable pamphlet wars, schisms, and secessions. During all these controversies, disgruntled members of the TS returned to the role of Besant’s most prominent associate, Charles Webster Leadbeater, in their troubles. The difficulties began early in 1906, when Besant and Leadbeater received copies of a letter signed by the highest ranking officials in the American Section of the TS (Adyar) and its Esoteric Section. The letter detailed serious charges. Leadbeater was accused of “teaching boys given into his care, habits of self abuse and demoralizing personal practices.”1 At the time when Leadbeater gave his teaching, the boys in question were fourteen or fifteen years old. The leaders of the American Section began to agitate for Leadbeater ’s expulsion from the society. On May 16, 1906, an Advisory Board met at the Grosvenor Hotel in London to consider the Theosophical Society ’s response to the charges. Presided over by the president-founder, Henry Olcott, the committee examined the documents in the case, crossexamined Leadbeater, and then voted to accept his resignation. The Advisory Board hoped that it had laid the scandal to rest. Two years later, however, the society, under Besant’s leadership, voted to readmit Leadbeater on the grounds that his forced resignation had violated the theosophical commitment to freedom of thought. At the 1908 convention of the British Section of the TS, the question of Leadbeater’s readmission raised a storm of opposition. A special committee was formed in Britain to prepare a report on the question, a committee dominated by some of Leadbeater’s most outspoken opponents . The special committee’s report, which did not support Leadbeater , was suppressed by Maud Sharpe and the Executive Committee of the British Section, and the Executive Committee voted 9 to 5 in favor of Leadbeater’s reinstatement.2 “buggery and humbuggery” 95 The scandal resurfaced a few years later, in 1912, when Jiddu Narayaniah , the father of Krishnamurti and his brother Nityananda, filed a suit in the court of the district judge of Chingleput claiming that Besant was unfit to hold guardianship of his sons. The charges revolved in part around Krishnamurti’s role as the Coming Christ. The most inflammatory charges accused Leadbeater of a sexual relationship with the seventeen-year-old Krishnamurti.3 The scandal was revived yet again, and even more virulently, in the early 1920s when the accusations against Leadbeater were brought up again and amplified. This time, Wedgwood and three of his associates in the Liberal Catholic Church were also accused of “sodomy with boys.”4 Each of the Leadbeater crises forced members of the TS to confront a range of explosive issues: masturbation, child sexual abuse, and male homosexuality. Each had been the focus of a moral panic in Britain in the preceding years, in which the clergy, medical and legal professionals , feminist activists, and the popular press had competed to define how they would be discussed. The accusations against Leadbeater were especially troubling for theosophists because they also raised the question of the relationship of spiritual authority to sexual deviance. Sexological writings had begun to establish close links between spirituality and sexual desire, and the suggestion that Leadbeater was sexually deviant was used to argue that his spiritual teachings were equally perverse . Discussions of what was originally known to members as the “X. Case” have tended to focus almost exclusively on the question of Leadbeater’s innocence or guilt, on whether he should be praised as a great spiritual teacher or condemned as a so-called sexual pervert. My focus, in contrast, is on the ways in which the discussion of the Leadbeater case engaged with larger debates about the multiple meanings of sexuality, and particularly of male homosexuality, in relationship to spirituality during the first decades of the twentieth century. Opponents of the Adyar TS saw Leadbeater’s prominence as the most glaring evidence of the society’s departure from Blavatsky’s original teachings. Alice Leighton Cleather, who had been a member of HPB’s Inner Group in London in the 1880s, conflated Leadbeater’s spiritual and sexual “perversions”: Besant, Cleather argued, had led the TS astray through her “blind...

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