=PARA 5PAR@ ` eTEXT ` WTingley, Katherine Augusta Westcott
1847╨1929
theosophist
Born in Newbury, Massachusetts, on July 6, 1847, Katherine Westcott was educated in public schools and briefly in a convent school in Montreal. Much of her early life is obscure. An early marriage ended within months, and she may have acted with a traveling theatrical troupe. In April 1888 in New York City she married her third husband, Philo B. Tingley, an engineer. She was interested in various charitable activities as well as in spiritualism, and in her mission work on the Lower East Side she often attempted to combine the two. In the winter of 1892╨1893 she met William Quan Judge, who in 1875 had helped Helena Blavatsky form the Theosophical Society.
In 1895 Judge led the American branch of the society out of the international movement based in Adyar, India, and reorganized it as the Theosophical Society in America. On his death in 1896 a secret diary, supposed to be Judge╒s, was found, and in it were numerous references to an unidentified person whom he had secretly appointed to succeed him as ╥Outer Head╙ of the society╒s Esoteric Section. The mysteriously described ╥Promise,╙ ╥Veiled Mahatma,╙ ╥Light of the Lodge,╙ and ╥Purple Mother,╙ it soon became clear, was Tingley. She moved confidently to assume power, installed her own nominee as president of the society (a position of less influence than her own), and began to reshape the organization according to her own notions. She raised funds to establish the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity. In 1896╨1897 she and a few followers made a world tour, during which, she later claimed, she met with a Tibetan mahatma.
In 1897 she founded the International Brotherhood League to work for the benefit of convicts, ╥fallen women,╙ and ordinary workingmen and to promote racial harmony. In April 1898 she promulgated a new constitution under which the league and the Theosophical Society were merged into the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, of which she had absolute control as ╥Leader and Official Head.╙
In February 1897 Tingley had dedicated a new headquarters for the society at Point Loma, a picturesque promontory north of San Diego, and in 1900 she established herself there. A remarkable ╥white city╙ of eclectic Asian architecture grew up at Point Loma and became a center for artists, poets, and sightseers. An active and experimental horticultural program greatly added to the beauty of the site. The School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity was transferred there and evolved into the Theosophical University, which was chartered by the state of California in 1919. The Raja Yoga school and college educated about 300 children, some as a charity, with a program combining shared labor, calisthenics, music and drama, and live-in teachers. Katherine Tingley edited the weekly Century Path from 1907 to 1911, its successor the Theosophical Path from 1911 to 1929, and the bi-monthly Rëja Yoga Messenger from 1912 to 1929.
She established theosophical schools in Cuba, Sweden, Germany, England, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, but nearly all were short-lived. Her single-minded devotion to Point Loma left the society at large open to schism; some local lodges rejoined the Adyar group, while others formed the United Lodge of Theosophists. She was sued successfully for alienation of affections in 1925 by the wife of one of her followers and lived thereafter mainly in Europe. She was severely injured in an automobile accident in Germany in 1929, and she died two months later, on July 11, 1929, at the theosophist community at VisingsÜ, Sweden.
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