On January 10, an Angelino Heights woman was walking her dog when she spotted a burnt fragment of paper on the ground. The paper, she knew, had likely blown over from one of Los Angeles’s current raging fires.
She picked up the blackened scrap and set it aside to show her duplex neighbor, Scott Collette. A screenwriter and LA historian, Collette runs a Los Angeles history Instagram account, Forgotten History LA, which has more than 100,000 followers. He was the perfect person to uncover the page’s origins.
He was able to make out a few words on the charred scrap: “Swapna field” and “Sushupti.” Using a keyword Google search, he came across the original text: an article called The Three Planes of Human Life from an 1880s magazine called The Path.
The magazine was edited by William Quan Judge, an occultist, mystic and one of the founders of a spiritual and philosophical system called Theosophy. The page could have only come from one place: Pasadena’s Theosophical Library Center. The library, founded in 1951 and filled with 40,000 volumes, had burned to the ground in the Eaton fire just a few days earlier, on January 7. Collette’s yard is more than 11 miles from Altadena, but the page made its way to his home in the strong Santa Ana winds.
Altadena’s Theosophical Library Center was located in the old Cobb garage on the southeast corner of Marcheta Street and Lake Avenue. It held tens of thousands of texts covering philosophy, science and the world’s religions, including sacred texts and commentaries on ancient traditions from the Americas, Asia, the Near East, Africa, Europe and Australia. “They definitely had a very substantial library and a lot of very, very rare materials,” said Janet Kerschner, an archivist at the Theosophical Society in America in Wheaton, Illinois. “It’s a tremendous loss of scholarship.”
Beyond books, the library housed many irreplaceable items: artwork, Theosophy membership records dating to 1875, and around 10,000 unpublished letters related to Theosophy’s founders Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, William Quan Judge and Katherine Tingley. Also lost was the library’s publishing house, the Theosophical University Press, which printed and distributed, among other texts, the works of Theosophy’s founders.
The library’s website confirmed the destruction, and its phone line remains disconnected. The library’s caretakers, Ina and Jim Belderis, who lived above it, declined a request for comment.
“Like the other fire victims, they have lost much of the infrastructure of their lives, in addition to much of their beloved life work,” said Kerschner. “This fire has sent a shock wave around the world, and Theosophists everywhere are grieving.”
For Theosophists, the loss of a library—a place where generations of knowledge were stored—was especially profound.
“Theosophists are just nuts about books,” Kerschner said. “Books and magazines. They really, really love books, and most Theosophists have pretty big libraries and also continually buy more books or write books. The loss of a library is just such a visceral pain to us.”
The reason? The practice of Theosophy is to seek a “higher truth,” a pursuit grounded in the study and reflection of physical texts. “You can be a Hindu Theosophist, a Buddhist Theosophist, a Christian Theosophist, a random Theosophist,” said Avinash Lago, librarian for the Theosophical Society branch in Glasgow, Scotland. “It goes back down to its motto: ‘There is no religion higher than truth.’”
Theosophy isn’t broadly known today, but its texts and teachings serve as the foundation of many spiritual and mindfulness practices that are now an assumed part of 20th-century California identity. Theosophy began in 1875 in New York City. Its practitioners believe that all religions share common truths and that all people are part of a universal brotherhood—an interest that helped seed modern fascination with the esoteric, yoga, meditation, tarot and astrology.
The Pasadena Theosophy branch’s main headquarters, just a few blocks away, survived the fire. The complex was the main public-facing branch of the society, where they hosted events, gatherings and workshops. At the northeast corner of Mariposa Street and Santa Rosa Avenue, the home is a Deco-era mansion. It housed a painting called The Path, which is deeply meaningful to Theosophists. Painted by Reginald W. Machell, it depicts a human soul’s evolution to “full spiritual self-consciousness.”
Information is incomplete about what exactly was lost in the library. Digitization projects had been in progress before the fire, Kerschner said, and the Theosophical University Press does offer an online archive with free digital publications. However, “it may be months before we know the extent of the damage,” she said. If materials were not properly archived and indexed prior to the fire, the community may never know the entirety of what was lost.
Even if books were digitized, a digital document could never fully replace or recreate a lost object. Books carry little fingerprints of all who have handled them.
“There is something different about the physical book,” said Michael Carter, an LA-based artist, lecturer, and writer who has been involved with Theosophy for over a decade. “It has a different energy and it carries something of its own history.”
Carter spent a lot of time in the library before it burned. As an example of the value of physical texts, he recalled an insert in one of the library’s books: an image of a young man from the early 1900s with a collection of hand-bound tomes. “He’s clearly very proud of this small library he has of spiritual wisdom and ancient knowledge,” Carter said.
Losing a library is also the loss of a space for community building and knowledge sharing. Lago, the Scottish Theosophical librarian, is in his 30s. He thinks spending time in a library leads to opportunities to share knowledge, especially between elders and younger members.
“[When] I’m in the library and I’m shoulder to shoulder and talking to them, they go, ‘OK, we didn’t think that,’ or ‘Wow, did you read this? Have you done this?’ It creates a human value.”
While many books and letters can never be recovered, the Theosophical movement’s contributions to California’s spiritual and cultural history will live on. Los Angeles’s history, Carter says many Angelenos take for granted.
Collette, the historian who found the page, agrees. The loss of the library, for him, was another opportunity to learn about the city’s history.
“The weirdness of L.A. is that people will come to this misunderstanding that this is a city that doesn’t have any history or that doesn’t value its history,” he said. “But the city has one of the most incredible, richest histories of any place in the country.”