The students at Point Loma
The name A Student appeared on a series of introductory manuals prepared at Point Loma in California. Katherine Tingley had moved the international headquarters of her branch of the Theosophical Society there in 1900. Children studied at its Raja-Yoga school, adults took part in lectures and theatrical productions, and the community maintained its own press. The manuals belonged to that wider educational undertaking.
The preface describes students taking responsibility for explaining a subject to newcomers. Individual writers receded behind their shared byline. A contemporary list offered each booklet separately in paper or cloth, at prices that let a reader acquire one subject at a time. Surviving copies and later revisions preserve different stages of what the community meant as an introductory library.
The manuals and their readers
Reincarnation set out the community’s belief that an individual develops across successive lives. The Angel and the Demon treated a conflict closer to home, the contrary impulses a person experiences within one life. Placed together, these two subjects show how the series connected a long account of human spiritual development to ordinary decisions about conduct.
Tingley’s leadership explains why the manuals are associated with her name in histories of the movement. The title pages and the series preface credit the students who undertook the writing collectively. The works listed here can therefore be read as publications of a particular community at a particular time, even where the individual who prepared a volume remains unnamed.
