Network
Analysis

A small editorial cabal, with a long fringe

Sixteen hubs carry most of the conversation; nineteen figures hold a single tie. The graph is centralised, and its centre turns out to be quite small.

• Besant (k=79), Blavatsky, Leadbeater and Olcott take the top four slots; nineteen figures hold one tie.
• The CCDF bends down at the tail. A clean preferential-attachment process would draw a straight diagonal — the four super-hubs are louder than that.
• Less rich-get-richer, more editorial cabal with a long fringe.

method · friendly degree per node; CCDF on log-log axes. source · friendly co-occurrence graph, n=822 edges.

Who talks to whom, by tradition

A diverging matrix of over- and under-representation. The diagonal was always going to be loud; the off-diagonal is where any actual argument lives.

• The hinge. Anthroposophy × Modernist arts is the strongest off-diagonal cell. The bridge between organised esotericism and twentieth-century cultural production runs through Steiner, not Adyar.
• Borrowed legitimacy. Philosophy/religion × Science is the runner-up — the corpus's preferred figure for occultism dressing in scientific clothes.
• The adversary row. Mostly negative against legitimate traditions, with two giveaways: hostility leaks into Music (Crowley's afterlife) and into the occult-adjacent column, where the rival/colleague boundary was the editors' real work.

method · cells are log₂(observed/expected) against the marginal expectation; diagonals outlined and muted so the argument lives off-diagonal. source · friendly edges + tradition labels.

Who would fracture the graph if removed

Betweenness against degree, with names plotted as the marks. Figures above the line broker more than their reach has any business buying them.

• Degree tells you who's loud. Betweenness tells you who, if removed, would fracture the graph. The two correlate, but not tightly.
• Above the line. Crowley (BC 1585, degree 15) and Maharishi (BC 307, degree 5) broker far more than their reach predicts. Short acquaintance lists, but the acquaintances point in incompatible directions — useful social capital in a small pond.
• On the line. Blavatsky, Olcott, Leadbeater. Loud and broadly contained, their ties pointing into the same Adyar dense pack.
• Loud and brokering. Besant and Krishnamurti, for organisational reasons the corpus is not quiet about.

method · Brandes (2001) unweighted betweenness on the giant component (124/138 nodes); dashed line is the linear fit. source · friendly graph, isolates excluded.

When the edges were born

A centred streamgraph of new ties per year. The annotation rail runs above the stream, so the events and the silhouettes can stop fighting for the same line.

• Early 1900s. The Besant-Leadbeater consolidation. Adyar is recruiting, The Theosophist's editorial reach is being talked up.
• 1925-1929. The Krishnamurti crisis years. The cultural-modernist endpoints arrive in lockstep with the institution's own fracture.
• 1931 spike (55 new edges, the year's high). The TS Founders' Centenary. Long retrospective columns yoke the long dead to the still living in the same paragraph.
• 1933 follow-on (36 edges). Same mechanic around the William Crookes retrospective in vol. 55.
• Read both spikes as commemorative editorial bookkeeping doing the work of relationship, rather than as relationship doing its own.

method · each edge anchored to its first_year of attested co-mention; stacked by non-Adyar endpoint tradition; centred streamgraph. 144 undatable edges are held back. source · friendly edges with at least one dated snippet, n=678/822.

Friendly and hostile, the same people, two registers

Each figure plotted by friendly and hostile degree. Distance from the diagonal is register asymmetry; the labels have been nudged apart to keep the cloud legible.

• Most densely-mentioned figures are densely-mentioned in both registers. Running an organisation at this scale generates allegiance and grievance in roughly equal measure; the corpus spares no one the second.
• Hodgson is the one figure whose hostile degree exceeds his friendly one — the SPR investigator the Adyar volumes never forgave.
• Just under the line. The Coulombs, Westcott of the Golden Dawn, Solovyov: the corpus engages them more often as opposition than the friendly graph alone would suggest.
• Well below. The modernist-cultural names — appear in The Theosophist almost only as approving citation, never as fight.

method · x = friendly degree, y = hostile degree; dashed diagonal is parity. Labels nudged apart by a small repulsion pass; deterministic jitter at low values. source · friendly (n=822) + hostile (n=194).

The Blavatsky number, in distribution

Each square is a figure. The number the front page hands you is one draw from this histogram.

• Mean reachable distance from HPB: 1.72 hops. Diameter from her vantage: four. Small-world, the shape one would expect of a movement organised around a single editorial centre.
• The infinity column collects 13 unreachable nodes.
• Ten are TS members attested only in Wikidata — no footprint in the corpus prose. Their absence is itself a methodological note about which kinds of membership archival visibility favours.
• Two (Foster Bailey, Sai Baba of Shirdi) are in the lexicon for adjacent reasons but never resolved into a co-mention.
• One is Guénon, who critiqued theosophy from outside the tent and was never platformed inside it.

method · BFS shortest-path from HPB over the friendly graph; one square = one figure. source · 124 reachable nodes.