Theosophy was assembled in the 1870s and 1880s by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the society she founded with Henry Steel Olcott, and its account of death was built partly to answer Spiritualism, which it regarded as sincere and badly mistaken about what it was talking to.
The framework starts from a sevenfold anatomy. A human being consists of the physical body, the vital principle, the astral double, kama or desire, manas or mind, buddhi, and atma — the last three constituting the enduring individuality and the first four a temporary vehicle. Death separates them on a schedule. The body decays. The vital principle disperses. What remains descends into kama-loka, an astral region adjacent to the physical world, where the desire-nature gradually exhausts itself. This period is longer and more turbulent for a person whose life was dominated by appetite and brief for one whose was not. Suicides and violent deaths were held to linger there abnormally.
The polemical use of kama-loka is central. Theosophists argued that when a medium contacts a departed friend, what usually answers is not the individuality at all but the kama-rupa — the discarded desire-shell, still carrying memories and mannerisms, decaying and increasingly incoherent, capable of a convincing performance and of nothing else. This is why the Society and the Spiritualists, who might have been allies, spent decades at odds.
What survives kama-loka enters devachan, and this is the system's most distinctive proposal. Devachan is not a place of reward and not a social heaven. It is a long dream, subjective and unbroken, in which the ego experiences the fulfilment of every spiritual aspiration the life contained — reunion with those it loved, the completion of what it wanted — and it is real to the dreamer and unreachable from outside. Nothing painful enters, because nothing enters at all; the dead are not aware of the living. Its duration is proportional to the spiritual material the life generated and is measured in centuries. Then the store is exhausted, the ego descends, and a new incarnation begins, carrying the karmic account forward. Only the wholly soulless, in Blavatsky's account, fail to reach devachan at all.
Theosophy's own truth claims aged badly, and the racial doctrine of the root races embedded in its historical scheme is repugnant and was influential in ways worth naming. But its afterlife vocabulary escaped into general circulation: astral plane, astral body, karma as a Western word, planes and subplanes, the etheric double, the idea of a rest between lives. Most of what the twentieth-century New Age assumed about death it inherited from this system, usually without knowing the source.
