The words she gave the West, and what they came to mean.

Blavatsky

An adept is a living human being who, by long discipline, has mastered the lower principles and can use occult laws that ordinary people cannot.

New Age

Often a vague honorific for any advanced channel, healer, or ‘high-vibe’ teacher.

Blavatsky

Akasha is the primordial, homogeneous substance of the cosmos — the fifth element, subtler than air, from which the other elements differentiate.

New Age

A luminous spiritual internet.

Blavatsky

Blavatsky did not use the phrase ‘Akashic Records.’ She wrote of ‘indestructible tablets of the astral light’ that register thought and deed, past and future — a memory of natur…

New Age

A cosmic library, often with a ‘record keeper’ or ‘lords of the records,’ which a reader can enter in trance to retrieve a client’s soul history, contracts, and future potentials.

Blavatsky

She never taught ‘Ascended Masters.’ Her Mahatmas — Morya, Koot Hoomi, and others — were living adepts in the Himalayas and elsewhere, still in physical bodies, who might die li…

New Age

A pantheon of named, usually discarnate teachers — Saint Germain, Kuthumi, El Morya, Serapis Bey, Djwal Khul, plus later additions (Hilarion, Lady Nada, Sananda as Jesus).

Blavatsky

In her sevenfold constitution the astral body is the linga-śarīra: the model-body or design-body, a subtle double that is the mold of the physical form.

New Age

The body you ‘leave’ in astral projection, lucid dreaming, and death.

Blavatsky

The invisible, plastic medium surrounding the earth — a storehouse of all terrestrial impressions, the workshop of elementals, and the source of much that passes for spirit comm…

New Age

Rarely named as such.

Blavatsky

Atlantis is not a single island that sank in a night, but a chain of landmasses inhabited by the Fourth Root-Race over immense geological time.

New Age

A lost high civilization of crystals, flying machines, and priest-scientists, often remembered through channelled ‘past-life’ recall.

Blavatsky

Atman is not the personal soul.

New Age

Often a poetic synonym for ‘soul,’ ‘higher self,’ or the inner child of light — something personal you can ‘connect with’ in meditation and whose job is to make this life go bet…

Blavatsky

The aura is the radiation of the human constitution — a magnetic, vital, and psychic atmosphere.

New Age

A multilayered egg of color around the body, readable in a ten-minute session, cleanable with sage, crystals, or ‘cord cutting,’ and photographed by aura cameras at fairs.

Blavatsky

An avatar is a descent of a divine principle into a human form for a cyclic purpose — Rama, Krishna, and, in her comparative scheme, other world-teachers.

New Age

A title available to charismatic teachers, or a past-life memory (‘I was an avatar in Atlantis’).

Blavatsky

A hidden fraternity of living adepts of various nations who watch the karmic development of humanity and occasionally sponsor a public movement (the Theosophical Society being o…

New Age

An inner-plane government of Ascended Masters, often headquartered at Shamballa, Darjeeling, or Mount Shasta, issuing decrees and overlighting workshops.

Blavatsky

The sixth principle: the spiritual soul, vehicle of Atman, the faculty of direct discernment rather than reason.

New Age

Usually dissolved into ‘intuition,’ ‘heart wisdom,’ or ‘higher guidance,’ without the seven-principle map that kept Buddhi distinct from ordinary feeling.

Blavatsky

She knew the tantric cakras as centres in the subtle body and mentioned them in connection with kundalini and the siddhis, but she did not teach the now-standard seven rainbow c…

New Age

Seven coloured wheels along the spine, each with a gland, a stone, a tone, a trauma, and a retail category.

Blavatsky

A chela is a probationary pupil of a living Master, accepted only after moral tests that may span years and lives.

New Age

Softened into ‘student of the Masters’ or ‘lightworker in training.’ Formal probation, secrecy, and the possibility of ruin are replaced by newsletters and initiation-by-webinar.

Blavatsky

The subjective, blissful interlude between incarnations for the higher Ego, after kama-loka has been passed.

New Age

The word itself is uncommon.

Blavatsky

Dharma is the law of a being’s true nature and the duty that follows from it — not a lifestyle brand.

New Age

A soul-purpose statement, often discovered in a workshop: ‘my dharma is to create’ / ‘to heal’ / ‘to speak my truth.’ Close cousin of the ‘soul contract.’

Blavatsky

Semi-conscious forces of nature, lacking a human ego, that inhabit the elements and the astral light.

New Age

Friendly nature-spirits, crystal devas, and garden elves who cooperate with humans in co-creating a better earth (Findhorn is the classic bridge).

Blavatsky

The dynamic energy of cosmic ideation — the bridge between mind and matter, the ‘messenger’ that stamps the ideas of the Logos into primordial substance.

New Age

The name vanished.

Blavatsky

The Higher Self is not a spirit-guide.

New Age

A kindly inner mentor you can interview for dating advice, brand strategy, and trauma healing.

Blavatsky

Initiation is a real, graded expansion of consciousness, traditionally guarded by schools, involving tests of character and occult knowledge.

New Age

A weekend, a reiki attunement, a ‘activation,’ or a spontaneous kundalini event.

Blavatsky

The fourth principle: the form of desire.

New Age

The term is rare.

Blavatsky

Karma is not a judge, not a lesson-planner, and not a score.

New Age

A personal boomerang, often fast: be kind, receive kindness; think wealth, attract wealth.

Blavatsky

The coiled fiery power at the base of the spine which, in the trained adept, rises through the centres and becomes a vehicle of higher knowledge.

New Age

A desirable activation, available in a workshop, sometimes indistinguishable from a panic attack or a psychedelic peak.

Blavatsky

Lemuria is the continental system of the Third Root-Race, stretching through what is now the Indian and Pacific oceans.

New Age

A pacific, crystal-hearted, often feminine civilization of telepaths, later fleeing to Mount Shasta or inner earth.

Blavatsky

Logos is the manifested reason of the cosmos, in a triple aspect (unmanifest, manifested, and the Logos in matter).

New Age

Usually dissolved into ‘Source,’ ‘God-consciousness,’ or a vaguely Christian ‘Word.’ When kept, ‘Solar Logos’ is a lofty being who overlights Earth, closer to Bailey than to Bla…

Blavatsky

A mahatma is a man (in her circle, specifically her teachers Morya and Koot Hoomi) who has evolved faculties the rest of humanity will reach only after long ages, and who still …

New Age

Replaced, in practice, by Ascended Masters.

Blavatsky

The fifth principle, the thinker.

New Age

Usually just ‘the mind,’ something to silence in meditation or to program with affirmations.

Blavatsky

Maya is the illusion of regarding the phenomenal, differentiated universe as the ultimate real.

New Age

‘The illusion’ as a permission structure: the 3D world is fake, so you can rewrite it with belief, or ignore politics and pain as ‘low vibration.’ Simulation-theory talk is a se…

Blavatsky

The monad is the immortal spark — Atma-Buddhi — which journeys through kingdoms of nature (the ‘pilgrim’) and only in the human stage adds Manas, self-consciousness.

New Age

A synonym for soul or Higher Self, often with a galactic origin (‘my monad is from the Pleiades’).

Blavatsky

Nirvana is the extinction of the separate, personal self in the unconditioned — not a holiday, not a bliss-state you visit in meditation, and not annihilation of spirit.

New Age

A synonym for peak bliss, flow, or a spa-like calm.

Blavatsky

Occultism is the disciplined study of hidden laws of nature, requiring a purified life.

New Age

Split in two: either a spooky aesthetic (occult jewelry, horror-adjacent witchcraft) or something the lightworker must avoid as ‘dark.’ Serious occult study exists, but the popu…

Blavatsky

Reality is sevenfold: a stack of states of matter-consciousness, from the physical up to the atmic.

New Age

A travel brochure: the astral plane for dreaming and the dead, the mental for ideas, sometimes a ‘fifth dimension’ that is more Ascension culture than Theosophy.

Blavatsky

Prana is the life-principle of the physical and astral man, a specialized working of the universal jiva.

New Age

A generic wellness fuel: breathwork, pranic healing, ‘top up your prana’ with sun-gazing or raw food.

Blavatsky

The reincarnating entity is the higher Ego (Manas), not the personality.

New Age

A choose-your-own-adventure: souls pick parents, sign contracts, and return quickly to ‘learn lessons.’ Past-life regression is a clinical and party technique.

Blavatsky

Humanity evolves through seven great ‘root-races,’ each with seven sub-races, across enormous periods and changing continents.

New Age

The racial ladder is usually dropped or coded.

Blavatsky

Theosophy, she said, is not a new religion and not her invention.

New Age

Either an unknown word, or a slightly dusty ancestor mentioned in a footnote.

Blavatsky

Thought, she taught, is a force that shapes subtle matter.

New Age

Visualization, vision boards, and manifestation.

Blavatsky

Yoga means union of the lower with the higher, and she praised raja-yoga — ethical and mental discipline aimed at that union.

New Age

A global fitness and wellness practice, sometimes with a side of spirituality.