Charles Webster Leadbeater - Accusations of Pederasty

Accusations of Pederasty

In 1906 Leadbeater was accused of having encouraged adolescent boys, pupils under his spiritual and secular instruction, to masturbate. Mary Lutyens wrote in Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening:

Then in 1906, after Leadbeater's return to England, the fourteen-year-old son of the Corresponding Secretary of the Esoteric Section in Chicago, whom Leadbeater had taken with him to San Francisco on his first lecture tour, confessed to his parents the reason for the antipathy he had conceived for his mentor, to whom he had at first been greatly devoted—- Leadbeater had encouraged him in the habit of masturbation. Almost simultaneously the son of another Theosophical official in Chicago charged Leadbeater with the same offense without apparently there being any collusion between the two boys. Then a typewritten, unsigned, undated, cipher-letter was produced; it had been picked up by a suspicious cleaner on the floor of a flat in Toronto in which Leadbeater had stayed with the second boy and was said to have been written by Leadbeater. The code was simple and when broken revealed one passage of such obscenity, for those days, that the letter could not by law be printed in England. When decoded the offending passage read: "Glad sensation is so pleasant. Thousand kisses darling."

A commission was appointed by the American Section, but before the meeting Leadbeater resigned from the society to, as he told Olcott, "save the Society from embarrassment." On the nature of the accusation itself, Leadbeater wrote to Annie Besant:

So when boys came under my care, I mentioned this matter to them, among other things, always trying to avoid all sorts of false shame, and to make the whole appear as natural and simple as possible.

Leadbeater argued that the build-up of natural sexual pressure could lead boys to seek sexual relief either with prostitutes or with each other. He claimed that by discharging the pressure at regular intervals through masturbation, the boys could avoid the more serious karmic and moral consequences of illicit sexual encounters: "If he finds any accumulation, he should relieve."

A similar accusation was made later by Hubert van Hook of Chicago, who at age 11 was selected by Leadbeater as a candidate for the "vehicle" of an expected "World Teacher". Of this accusation, Mary Lutyens states: "Hubert later swore to Mrs Besant that Leadbeater had 'misused' him, but as he was extremely vindictive by that time, his testimony, though unshaken, was perhaps not altogether reliable." On a separate occasion, Lutyens had this to say regarding Leadbeater and another of his favorite boys:

came prancing down the wharf like a great lion, hatless and in a long purple cloak, holding on to the arm of a very good-looking blond boy of about fifteen. This was Theodore St John, an Australian boy of great charm and sweetness, who was Leadbeater's current favourite and who slept in his room.

Author John Kersey, in Arnold Harris Mathew and the Old Catholic Movement in England 1908-52, offers the following assessment:

Leadbeater was not interested in defending his position, but in a letter to Annie Besant wrote: "a natural function exists, which in itself is no more wrong than eating or drinking." Besant did not agree with this, taking an attitude more typical of her time... Leadbeater's approach was not that of the libertine, for he taught self control and moderation in sexual habits... but certainly he was frank in his talk of sex, as well as promoting a generally open attitude to the body that was forward-looking in the early years of the century.

Leadbeater... believed that by teaching masturbation and encouraging it, he was making it less likely that sexual experimentation would lead to unwanted pregnancies, since contraception was not widely available at this time. A factor in this approach was also that initiates in the Theosophical Society, including Leadbeater himself, were expected to remain chaste and not engage in sexual relationships with others. In this context, Leadbeater's teachings on auto-eroticism were a means, as he saw it, to enable initiates to remain within these bounds.

In Victorian England such ideas and practices were considered shocking and unacceptable; they were universally condemned even by the most radical of medical writers. Medical warnings about the physical and emotional damage caused by "self abuse" were seconded by clergymen, and the consequent fears were exploited by quacks who touted patent devices and heroic cures for the affliction of masturbation. Scores of books and pamphlets encouraged young men to a higher standard of chastity. These pamphlets blended medical rhetoric with religious exhortation, and encouraged boys to store up these sexual energies for a more moral use.

None of the accusations resulted in trials in a court of law. A judge in a related custody case in India (Naranian vs. Besant, regarding the legal guardianship of Jiddu Krishnamurti and his brother Nityananda) remarked in his ruling that Leadbeater held "immoral ideas" – this prompted Annie Besant to support Leadbeater in a letter regarding the facts of the case and its coverage by The Times of London.