Wheaton may be the holiest city in Illinois. Like Jerusalem, it contains the shrines of many faiths. Wheaton College was the training ground of fundamentalist Billy Graham. Gary Memorial United Methodist Church is renowned for its stained glass windows. And on the northern fringe of town, set like a country manse among 42 arbored acres, is Olcott, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America.
The theosophistswho begin their day with meditation, hold yoga classes at lunchtime, and may end with an evening lecture on Anglo-Saxon runesare grandparents of the New Age movement. But the society likes to think of itself as “more intellectual, more concerned with philosophy,” says Algeo. The Theosophical Society was instrumental in introducing Oriental religion to the West. William Butler Yeats was a member. His poemsespecially “The Second Coming”were influenced by theosophy’s belief that history is cyclic. Theosophists were into the Dalai Lama way before Richard Gere was: their publishing arm, Quest Books, issued a volume of his teachings in 1968. When the Dalai Lama visited the United States in 1981, he spent a night at Olcott.
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The concept that all faiths spring from one source is an old idea, say theosophists, but it was revived for the modern age by the society’s founder, Madame Helena Blavatsky, a 19th-century Russian-born mystic. Blavatsky traveled to Tibet in the late 1850s in search of religious knowledge. In the 1870s she emigrated to New York (she supposedly traded her deluxe accommodations on the steamship to a poor family in steerage) and set herself up in an apartment called the “lamasery,” a salon for the discussion of Egyptian symbolism, the cabala, and various occult topics. While investigating reports of ghosts at a Vermont farmhouse, Blavatsky met Henry Steel Olcott, a retired Civil War colonel, lawyer, and newspaperman. They founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, then sailed off to India together a few years later. Blavatsky, who revered Indian religions, set up the society’s world headquarters in the city of Adyar, near Madras (now Chennai). Eventually she retired to London, where she wrote The Secret Doctrine, which lays out the basics of her extremely esoteric philosophy.
Theosophy found its way to the western suburbs in the 1920s. At that time the president of the society’s American chapter, L.W. Rogers, was a Chicagoan. Traditionally the national headquarters had been in the president’s hometown. But Rogers decided that this country’s theosophists needed their own shrine and study center. The spiritand a good deal on some landdrew him to Wheaton.
“I’ve integrated it so much into my life, being a resident staffer,” he says. “This is really my faith community. Something that we very often say to people is we’re not a religion, but if it fulfills the role of religion, then what’s the difference?”
As a businessman, Kettering believes the Theosophical Society was ahead of its time in the care and feeding of its employees. The 8:30 AM gatherings in the meditation room and the free vegetarian lunches presaged companies that offer massages and other perks to make the workplace feel homey. “The society has always looked at the whole person,” Kettering says.
“The Jesuits converted me,” he says from behind a desk in his office, which is cluttered with papers and religious artifacts. “I was studying for confirmation. The parish library had a series of little booklets on dangerous heresies, and one of them was on theosophy. I thought, doesn’t this sound interesting? Then I read an ad in the Miami Herald, and I went to a meeting. And they were nice people, these dangerous heretics.”
