Background
Henry Steel Olcott was born on August 2, 1832, in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Henry Wyckoff and Emily (Steel) Olcott.
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(Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (2 August 1832 – 17 February 1...)
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (2 August 1832 – 17 February 1907) was an American military officer, journalist, lawyer and the co-founder and first President of the Theosophical Society. Olcott was the first well-known American of European ancestry to make a formal conversion to Buddhism. His subsequent actions as president of the Theosophical Society helped create a renaissance in the study of Buddhism. Olcott is considered a Buddhist modernist for his efforts in interpreting Buddhism through a Westernized lens. Olcott was a major revivalist of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and he is still honored in Sri Lanka for these efforts. Olcott has been called by Sri Lankans "one of the heroes in the struggle of our independence and a pioneer of the present religious, national and cultural revival".
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Henry Steel Olcott was born on August 2, 1832, in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Henry Wyckoff and Emily (Steel) Olcott.
Henry Olcott was educated in the schools of New York City, and for one year attended the University of the City of New York. Later in life he took a course in agricultural chemistry and studied law.
From 1848 to 1853 Henry Olcott was engaged in farming in northern Ohio. While there he became interested in spiritualism which, however, did not yet displace agriculture in his affections. In 1853 he returned to New York and, after taking a course in agricultural chemistry, started the Westchester Farm School at Mount Vernon, New York, where he attempted the culture of sorghum, on which he published a treatise, Sorgho and Imphee (1857). Olcott visited Europe in 1858 to study its agricultural conditions and for the next two years was associate agricultural editor of the New York Tribune.
At the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted and served as signal officer in Burnside's North Carolina campaign until he caught fever and was invalided home. Appointed by Secretary Stanton a special commissioner, with the title of colonel, to investigate military arsenals and navy yards, he is said to have uncovered a great deal of corruption.
After the war Olcott studied law, was admitted to the bar, and practised for some years in New York City. In the summer of 1874 he published in the New York Daily Graphic a series of articles on the alleged spiritualistic phenomena of the Eddy brothers at Chittenden, Vermont. These were later published, with supplementary material, in book form as People from the Other World (1875). They sufficiently convict their author of credulity or chicanery or both.
At Chittenden Olcott made the acquaintance of Helena Petrovna Hahn Blavatsky, and during the ensuing winter they became very intimate. Under her tutelage he plunged into a study of occultism. When the Theosophical Society was formed in September 1875, he became its first president. He edited Madame Blavatsky's imperfect English in her Isis Unveiled (1877), and for years was her devoted press agent. But with all his efforts, the Society did not prosper; so on December 18, 1878, "the Theosophic Twins, " as Madame Blavatsky called them, sailed for India to carry Hindu philosophy to the Hindus. They settled first at Bombay, later at Adyar, a suburb of Madras. While Madame Blavatsky spread the faith of occultism by means of her "physic phenomena, " Olcott attempted mesmeric healing but had so many failures that his colleague begged him to desist. As a lecturer he was more successful, particularly among the Buddhists, whose religion he formally adopted. In 1881 on a trip to Ceylon he urged the Buddhists to establish their own schools, and for use as a textbook compiled A Buddhist Catechism (1881), which was translated into twenty-three languages.
When, in 1885, Madame Blavatsky was exposed by the London Society for Psychical Research, opinions differed as to whether Olcott had been her dupe or her accomplice. It now seems probable that he began as the first and ended as the second. But although he can hardly be vindicated from some complicity in Madame Blavatsky's frauds, he was temperamentally an organizer rather than an occultist, and after her departure had left him in peace he settled down to the sober work of developing the Theosophical Society on a legitimate basis. For its enormous growth during the next twenty years the credit should be largely his. Tireless in lecturing and writing on its behalf, he paid several trips to Europe for the sake of harmonizing discordant factions. He edited until his death its official organ, the Theosophist, and wrote Theosophy, Religion and Occult Languages (1885), and Old Diary Leaves, an intimate history of the movement, in three volumes (1895, 1900, 1904). At the time of his death the Society had over six hundred branches in forty-two different countries. Olcott also opened in India four free schools for pariahs which came to have 1, 700 members.
In 1889, on a lecture tour to Japan in response to an invitation from the eight Japanese Buddhist sects, he formulated fourteen points of agreement among all Buddhists, and persuaded the Japanese to enter into cordial relations with the Ceylonese Buddhists for the first time in history. He was on equally good terms with the Brahmins and received from one of their pundits, Taranath Tarka Vachaspati, the sacred thread of the Brahmin caste and adoption into his gotra - a unique favor to a foreigner. While traces of the charlatan remained with him till the end - seen in the occasional trick, learned from Madame Blavatsky, of invoking the authority of the Mahatmas for his own plans - nevertheless his genial kindliness of heart and genuine love of spiritual things made him, in the long run, a friend of humanity.
(Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (2 August 1832 – 17 February 1...)
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Olcott was a man of plausible manners and dignified appearance, with a long sage-like beard, but one eye did not focus properly; it is said that occasionally that eye "got loose and began to stray suspiciously and knavishly, and confidence [in him] vanished in a moment. "
Quotes from others about the person
David McMahan wrote, "Henry Steel Olcott saw the Buddha as a figure much like the ideal liberal freethinker – someone full of benevolence, gratitude, and tolerance, who promoted brotherhood among all men as well as lessons in manly self-reliance. "
On April 26, 1860, Henty Olcott was married to Mary E. Morgan of New Rochelle, New York, from whom he was later divorced.