Method
How this dictionary was made
New Age English is full of words that sound ancient because, in another language, they are. A large share of the ones that feel “spiritual but not religious” entered the West through Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society she co-founded in 1875. This site is a comparative glossary of that transfer: 38 terms that still circulate, set beside the meanings she actually gave them.
Blavatsky did not invent karma, māyā, ātman, or yoga. She invented a Western occult system that used those words, mixed them with Hermeticism, Buddhism as she understood it, and a sevenfold physics, and taught the mix as a lost “wisdom-religion.” A century of popular religion then kept the nouns and loosened the system. Alice Bailey, C. W. Leadbeater, the I AM movement, Edgar Cayce, and 1970s–90s workshop culture are the usual middlemen. Where a meaning is really theirs rather than hers, the entry says so.
What “original meaning” means here
For each term, the left-hand sense is the one attributable to Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled (1877), The Secret Doctrine (1888), The Key to Theosophy (1889), The Voice of the Silence (1889), the posthumous Theosophical Glossary (1892), and related letters. Quotes are her wording when a stable passage exists; a few are close paraphrases, labelled as such. She was not always consistent, and the Glossary was unfinished at her death — the entries note that when it matters.
What “New Age” means here
A cluster, not a church: post-Theosophical occultism, mid-century flying-saucer religion, the human-potential movement, and the retail spirituality that followed. Typical use is taken from that cluster as it actually talks — workshops, channelled books, wellness copy — not from a straw man. Some New Age writers are closer to her than others. The drift labels describe the centre of gravity, not every speaker.
Drift
- Largely preserved — rare; the popular sense is still hers.
- Simplified — same core, less metaphysics.
- Displaced — the word now names a different object.
- Inverted — popular use runs against her stated intent.
- Rebranded — a new name was built on her concept (Ascended Masters from Mahatmas; Akashic Records from tablets of the astral light).
What this is not
Not a conversion tract, not a debunking pamphlet, and not a complete concordance of the Secret Doctrine. Terms she used that never became New Age English are out of scope. Root-race material is included because Lemuria and Atlantis in popular spirituality come from it; it is treated as intellectual history, with a warning, not as anthropology.
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