Janet Kerschner/Sandbox

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Michael Gomes with Subba Row Medal, 2025

Michael Gomes (1951- ) is a Canadian-American theosophical historian, writer, and researcher. In 2025 the General Council of the Theosophical Society awarded him the Subba Row Medal in recognition of his contribution to theosophical literature. Since 1995 he has been the director of the Emily Sellon Memorial Library in New York City.

Early life

Gomes was born a British subject on the Crown colony of Trinidad, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1965. He became a member of the Theosophical Society in 1968 at the age of 17, joining through the historic Toronto TS. Since 1973 he has lived in New York City. During the 1970s he was an assistant to the British American designer, Charles James, working in his archives, and after that as a director of publicity for a New York music company. He studied South Asian history and culture at Columbia University and spent three years at the International Headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, working mainly in the archives. He has travelled widely in India, spending time at the major locations connected with the spread of Theosophy—Bombay, Calcutta, Varanasi, Amritsar, Simla, and, of course, Madras, now Chennai. He was invited by the Theosophical Society in England to deliver their prestigious Blavatsky Lecture on three occasions, an honor shared only with Radha Burnier and E. L. Gardner.

Beatrice Hastings Collection

Michael Gomes began his career as a theosophical researcher in the early 1970s by cataloguing the collection of books, papers, typescripts and correspondence of the English theosophical historian, Beatrice Hastings (1879-1943). Mrs. Hastings published her defining studies on the case for H. P. Blavatsky, including the only analysis of Emma Coulomb’s accusatory pamphlet, in England in 1937-38. Before writing about Blavatsky, Hasting had been an editor of one of England’s most noted literary magazines and had later moved to Paris and served as a muse for the Italian painter, Amodeo Modigliani, who did several paintings of her. After her death, her papers were sent to A. E. S. Smythe, General Secretary of the Canadian Section of the TS, who deposited them at the HPB Library in British Columbia. Having access to Hastings’ material and cataloguing her vast correspondence provided Gomes with valuable skills in the years to come. A tireless researcher, he travelled to Worthing, England, to meet the executor of Hastings’ estate, who knew her personally. Some of the results of his research are cited in Stephen Gray’s comprehensive biography Beatrice Hastings: A Literary Life, and his own “Beatrice Hastings and ‘The Defence of Madame Blavatsky.’” Assessing her contribution, he concludes that “Beatrice Hastings brought a new impetus to the field of theosophical research, and in the decades following her death, her insistence on thorough documentation proved a marked influence on other writers.” Hastings’ rigorous standards proved a marked influence on those who took up the case after her, the late K.F. Vania of Bombay, and Walter A. Carrithers of Fresno, California.

Theosophical History

After exhausting the resources of libraries and archives in North America and England, Gomes spent a year at the Archives at the International Headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, India, where he would return for another two years. During his stay in 1984-85, he would have the opportunity of perusing the numerous volumes of press scrapbooks put together by Mme. Blavatsky, the handwritten diaries of Col. Olcott, their correspondence and other artifacts relating to the history of the Theosophical Society. While there he arranged and catalogued HPB’s collection of books in the archives. He claims to be the only person known to have gone through the entire card catalog of the Adyar Library. The results of his research appeared in 1987 as The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement, the first full examination of the origins of the movement.

Supplemental to this, was a seven-part series titled "Studies in Early American Theosophical History." Published in The Canadian Theosophist from Jan. 1989 to Jan. 1991, it dealt “with those issues which although only slightly mentioned in that book, could have more to say” using in-depth analysis of original documents, such as the Minute Book of the Theosophical Society for 1875/76.

Gomes followed this with a massive bibliography on Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century in 1994. Providing annotated commentary for over a thousand items related to the subject, it covered not only material about Blavatsky and the movement but also gave the first inventory of theosophical literature published in the nineteenth century. It was the result of a seven-year search through libraries and archives in the U.S., Canada, England and India. The author of a number of studies, articles and monographs, such as The Coulomb Case—1884-1984, (1985, 2005), an examination of the events contributing to this incident and its results; “Nehru’s Theosophical Tutor: F.T. Brooks” (1998), a portrait of the person who introduced the future prime minister of India to Theosophy; “The Making of The Secret Doctrine” (1988) written for the centenary of the book’s publication, and translated into French, Dutch, Swedish and Italian; and the entry on “H.P. Blavatsky and Theosophy” in The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism (2016), his writings have brought increased recognition to the subject outside of the theosophical movement.

The Blavatsky Writings Project

Commemorating the centenary of HPB’s passing in 1991, the Theosophical Publishing House at Adyar issued HPB Teaches, a one volume anthology of Mme. Blavatsky’s vast magazine and newspaper output compiled by Gomes. This began a project that would oversee the production of six volumes of HPB’s writings. In 1997 Quest Books in the U.S. released his abridgement of Blavatsky’s two volume Isis Unveiled. Removing some 1,200 pages, the abridgement brought into sharp relief the basic assumptions that the book was trying to argue for. His abridgement of The Secret Doctrine released by Tarcher/Penguin in 2009 provided the first critical edition of the famous stanzas that form the book, based on the various readings of the text. The next year, his transcription of Blavatsky’s comments on The Secret Doctrine from stenographic reports of the 1889 meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge in London, was issued in The Hague in the Netherlands. A bibliography put together by him of the numerous studies about The Secret Doctrine was published in the December 2013 Theosophist. In 2015 his edition of HPB’s Esoteric Instructions, featuring the original color and black and white folding plates, was released by TPH Adyar, making this material more available. The publication in 2025 of the H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings Russian Serials volume edited by Gomes, which also concluded the series, brought the first English translations of Blavatsky’s writings about life in America during her stay in the 1870s and personal insights about her views on life in India. His editions have helped make H. P. Blavatsky’s voluminous writings more approachable and accessible.

Elisabeth Trumpler, Michael Gomes, and Lakshmi Narayanaswami in June, 2000

Library and archives work

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In 1995, Michael Gomes became director of the Emily Sellon Memorial Library, housed in the New York Theosophical Society's building in Manhattan.

A library union catalog was first established in June, 2000, with funding from the Sellon family and the Kern Foundation. A new automated library system was established to support a Web-based catalog at the Henry S. Olcott Memorial Library, shared with the Krotona Library and the Emily Sellon Memorial Library. Librarians Elisabeth Trumpler of Olcott, Lakshmi Narayanaswami of the Krotona Institute and Michael Gomes of New York spent a week in training sessions before the system was implemented.

Presentations and lectures

Apart from his numerous publications, Michael Gomes has been an active participant in a number of major academic conferences on the subject of Theosophy. He was a presenter at the first academic conference devoted to Theosophy; chaired by James Santucci at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Chicago, 1994, the panel included Antoine Faivre, Jean-Pierre Laurent and others who had defined esotericism as a field of academic study. He has presented papers at the Legacies of Theosophy Conference at the University of Sydney in 2010, the Enchanted Modernities Conference at Columbia University, 2015, and Theosophy and the Study of Religion Conference at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, 2019, among others. He has also presented on the subject at non-theosophical conferences, such as the Buddhist Themes in Modern Indian Literature National Seminar held by the Institute of Asian Studies, University of Madras, in 1991, the first all-India conference on the subject.

Regarded as “one of today’s most respected writers on esoteric movements, as well known to readers of occult and esoteric literature as to students and scholars of modern religion,” his work helped fuel what has been described as “A Blavatsky Renaissance” in the 1980s and 1990s. Joy Mills wrote in the 1980s that “Among the best and most careful researchers into theosophical history, both thorough in method and objective in presentation, is Michael Gomes.” In his letter announcing the award of the Subba Row Medal to Gomes in 2025, Tim Boyd, International President of the Theosophical Society, noted that a deciding factor was that “Over the past four decades your contribution to the literature related to Theosophy and the theosophical movement has been substantial.”

“Aside from accessing the mental world that the people around Blavatsky inhabited, there is the temporal aspect of their lives, the physicality of it, the geography of place,” Gomes wrote in a note to his 2017 Blavatsky Lecture, describing his historical process and method. “This is why I have always stressed the value of on-the-ground research. Locating A. O. Hume’s home in Simla, North India, gave a spatial understanding of the events that had occurred when Blavatsky was his guest. In knowing the limitations and extremes of these situations one begins to understand and appreciate the remarkable contribution of those early Theosophists who risked ridicule and scorn so one could enjoy freedom of belief.”

Writings

Cover of The Secret Doctrine

Articles

The Union Index of Theosophical Periodicals lists [110 articles by Michael Gomes].

• Ancient Wisdom for a New Age: Theosophical Translations of Hindu Scriptures]. Quest 108 no.4, (Fall, 2020): 19-23.

Published Blavatsky Lectures

• Creating the New Age: Theosophy's Origins in the British Isles. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 2000. 73 pages, illustrations. The Blavatsky Lecture was delivered at the Summer School of The Theosophical Society in England, The College of Ripon & York St John, Ripon, Yorkshire, Sunday 31 July 2000.

• Colonel Olcott and the Healing Arts. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 2007. 49 pages, illustrations, portraits. The Blavatsky Lecture was delivered at the Summer School of the Foundation for Theosophical Studies, the University of Leicester, Sunday 5 August 2007.

• A Multitudinous Universe. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 2017. 25 pages: illustrations (portraits). The Blavatsky Lecture was delivered at the Summer School of The Foundation for Theosophical Studies Hillscourt, Rose Hill Rednall, Birmingham B45 8RS on Sunday 6 August 2017.

Additional resources

Articles

The Union Index of Theosophical Periodicals lists [least 58 articles mentioning Michael Gomes. Many are reviews of his books.

• A Blavatsky Revival: An Interview with Michael Gomes by Richard Smoley. Published in Quest 100 no.3 (Summer 2012): 90-94.

Video

• Keynote Address: 150 Years of Theosophy , followed by presentation to Mr. Gomes of the Subba Row Medal by Tim Boyd at the Twelfth World Congress, Vancouver, 2025.

• HPB’s Esoteric Instructions, presented on July 18, 2016. This presentation, given at the 130th Summer National Convention of the Theosophical Society in America, explores the fascinating life and work of H. P. Blavatsky and invites us to discover transformative potentials in our own lives and for the world we live in.

• The Dawning of the Theosophical Age Presented on February 16, 2012. Twenty-five years ago, Michael Gomes' defining history, "The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement," was published. Celebrating the book's quarter-century in print, Michael Gomes speaks about the function of esoteric history, the use of tradition and lineage, and additional discoveries that he's made about the subject since 1987 when his book was first published.

• The Secret of the Secret Doctrine Part 1 presented Dec 28, 2023 at the European School of Theosophy.

• The Secret of the Secret Doctrine Part 3 presented Dec 28, 2023 at the European School of Theosophy.

• The Secret of the Secret Doctrine Part 4 presented Dec 28, 2023 at the European School of Theosophy.

• Who Was HPB? Presented on July 16, 2016 at the 130th Summer National Convention of the Theosophical Society in America.

• Upon this Foundation is Wisdom Established presented Dec 27, 2014 at international convention in Adyar.