If you're not Canadian, it's likely that you haven't heard of the Group of Seven, a group of landscape artists prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, and who had a huge influence on Canadian art that continues to this day.
The de facto leader of the Group was Lawren Harris, born into a wealthy family, who was notable for his mystic leanings, and an occasionally scandalous lifestyle. Harris' paintings now sell in the millions of dollars. I have a print of this one handing on our rec room wall.
A few years ago, Toronto Life published a long article about Harris, with many details that I'd never heard about including the influence of Theosophy on his art.
Spiritualism had always intrigued him, and in 1918 it became a lifeline. Theosophy, which dates back to the second century, was revived and reimagined by Helena Blavatsky, the magnetic, mysterious Russo-German occultist sometimes called the Mother of the New Age. Madame Blavatsky, as she was known, co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 with the lawyer William Quan Judge. She was a foul-mouthed fabulist, huckster and high priestess, her body draped in Indian robes, perpetually enveloped in tobacco smoke. Through psychic transmissions from long-dead Tibetan mahatmas, she claimed to have discovered the hidden source of the world’s religions, which would guide her followers toward enlightenment.
Theosophy had no rituals per se—practising it basically meant getting together with other theosophists and talking about it—but it did have holy books, including the immense, pseudo-scientific Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled, in which Blavatsky details the origins of the universe and the evolution of humanity. In Blavatsky’s teachings, prayer was forbidden, an anthropomorphic god derided; true reality lay behind a dissolvable physical plane. Blavatsky borrowed a lot of her concepts from Eastern religions (the books can read like Hinduism for Dummies ghostwritten by L. Ron Hubbard), but theosophy had serious supporters, including Yeats and Gandhi.
If you are in the Toronto area, both the Art Gallery of Ontario and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection have many of his works.
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