A newspaper editor in India
Alfred Percy Sinnett edited the Pioneer at Allahabad. His position brought him into contact with Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott after their arrival in India in 1879. In 1880 he began receiving letters attributed to teachers whom Theosophists called Mahatmas. He regarded them as living men with extraordinary powers, and their explanations became central to his writing.
The Occult World appeared in 1881, followed by Esoteric Buddhism in 1883. Sinnett carried his advocacy back to England and remained active in the Theosophical Society. The correspondence had a life beyond his own books. A. T. Barker published The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett in 1923, two years after Sinnett’s death. The manuscript collection is now held by the British Library.
The argument of The Occult World
Lumitheca’s 1884 fourth edition preserves the dedication to Koothoomi and a preface describing how much Sinnett believed he had learned since the first publication. His case moves between reported events, letters and analogies with technological discoveries. Electricity offers him a familiar example of a force once poorly understood. He asks readers to imagine that the adepts have made comparable discoveries about further powers of nature. His preface to W. Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis later extended this defence of occult knowledge to accounts of the remote past.
