Henry Steel Olcott’s Old Diary Leaves

Record summary

Henry Steel Olcott’s Old Diary Leaves began appearing in the 1890s and records the formation and travels of the Theosophical Society, including its work in India and Ceylon. The memoir preserves a first-person institutional account of occult claims, alleged phenomena and encounters with spiritual authorities that later readers sometimes place alongside UFO contact traditions. It is useful for tracing transmission, memory and source formation in South Asian esoteric networks. The work is retrospective, partisan and shaped by the author’s organizational commitments, so individual episodes need checking against contemporary newspapers and correspondence.