Annie Besant

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

One Existence from which proceeds a Logos that does relate

Both personal and impersonalStated explicitly

Annie Besant came to Theosophy from militant atheism: in My Path to Atheism (1877) she had rejected the Christian God. As a Theosophist, in The Ancient Wisdom (1897) she starts from one Existence, infinite and unknowable, the root of all, from which proceeds the Logos or manifested God, triple in nature, who shapes a universe and relates to it. Unlike Blavatsky, who stresses the rejection of a personal God, Besant grants this Logos features of consciousness, will and love, and in Esoteric Christianity (1901) she rereads the Christian Trinity as an expression of that triplicity. The divine thus has an impersonal, formless ground and a manifested face to which devotion can be addressed; both are true, each at its level, and human evolution consists in coming to recognise them.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

We are an immortal Ego that puts on bodies in order to learn

An evolving soulStated explicitly

Annie Besant popularised Theosophical anthropology with a more didactic scheme than Blavatsky's. In The Seven Principles of Man (1892) and Man and His Bodies (1896) she distinguishes between the Ego or soul, which persists, and the bodies — physical, etheric, astral, mental — which it uses in each incarnation and which are renewed. Above the Ego she places the Monad, a spark of the divine. The everyday self, with its desires and opinions, is the personality of a single life; the true self is the Ego which, from existence to existence, learns to master its vehicles and to express divine qualities. In The Ancient Wisdom (1897) she presents reincarnation and karma as the laws of this evolution. To know oneself is, for Besant, to identify progressively with the soul and not with the bodies that clothe it.

Why do we suffer?

Each pain is a debt being paid and a lesson being learned

Karma and the soul's learningStated explicitly

Annie Besant devoted an early book to karma, Karma (1895), and years later a broader study, A Study in Karma (1912). There she presents it as natural law, not sanction: thoughts, desires and acts generate forces that return to whoever emitted them. Thoughts shape the character of the next life, desires determine opportunities and environment, and acts produce favourable or painful circumstances. Suffering is the way old debts are paid, and Besant insists that knowing the law frees one from resentment: nothing comes by anyone's whim. Yet karma is not fatalism, since the present always adds new causes and the will can modify the future. In her evolutionary vision, pain teaches what the soul did not learn by other means and pushes it to grow.

What happens after death?

Death is a change of garment in a long series of lives

Rebirth according to karmaStated explicitly

Annie Besant popularised the Theosophical doctrine of death in short, clear manuals: Death—and After? and Reincarnation, both from the 1890s, and later in The Ancient Wisdom. She holds that death affects only the vehicles of the human being. The Thinker, the immortal Ego, leaves the physical body, passes through the astral world or kamaloka, where desires are purified, and rests in the heavenly world or devachan, where it turns the experiences of life into faculties. Afterwards it returns to a new body, determined by its karma and by what it needs to learn. Besant stresses the moral value of this view: it explains inequalities of birth without resorting to divine arbitrariness, takes the terror out of death and makes each person responsible for their future, until the evolution of the soul frees it from the need to be reborn.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

A path of discipleship with precise requirements culminating in successive initiations

Through disciplined practiceStated explicitly

Annie Besant describes liberation as the last stage of an evolution of consciousness that spans many lives and can be deliberately accelerated. In In the Outer Court and The Path of Discipleship she sets out the requirements for entering the path, taken from the Vedantic tradition: discrimination between the real and the unreal, dispassion, a set of virtues of mental conduct, and longing for liberation. On that basis are built the purification of the bodies, meditation and service. In Initiation: The Perfecting of Man she presents the great initiations as steps the disciple takes under the guidance of the Masters. For Besant yoga is an applied science governed by laws, not a reverie: freedom is worked at with method.

Is a teacher necessary?

The disciple advances under a Master who accepts and initiates him

IndispensableStated explicitly

Annie Besant systematised the Theosophical doctrine of discipleship. In In the Outer Court and The Path of Discipleship she describes the stages through which the aspirant, after cultivating the required qualities, is tested, accepted and finally taken in charge by a Master of the occult Hierarchy. In Initiation: The Perfecting of Man she presents the great initiations as acts in which that Master and the Hierarchy intervene. The outer teacher is therefore a structural part of the accelerated path, although Besant insists that the aspirant should not seek him anxiously: it is the Master who appears when the disciple is ready. It was this conception that led her to proclaim the young Krishnamurti as the vehicle of the World Teacher.

Is the world real?

Human beings live on several planes at once, with corresponding bodies

Planes of existenceStated explicitly

Annie Besant systematically popularised Theosophical cosmology. In The Ancient Wisdom and Man and His Bodies she describes a universe formed of planes of matter of decreasing density, physical, astral, mental and higher ones, which interpenetrate. To each plane corresponds a body or vehicle of the human being, so that the person lives simultaneously on several of them, though normally aware only of the physical. The visible world is real, but it is only the densest of these levels, and evolution consists in consciousness learning to function on ever subtler planes. With C. W. Leadbeater she held that thoughts create observable forms in mental matter.

What is love?

Love is the force that unites the divided Self and proves itself in service

Boundless compassionInferred from their doctrine

Annie Besant came to Theosophy after a long secularist and socialist militancy, and kept from it the conviction that love is measured in service. In her atheist period she dreamed of a brotherhood in which service of Man would take the place of service of God. As a Theosophist she reinterprets that same passion: in The Ancient Wisdom and in her lectures on the higher life she describes love as the force of attraction by which the one Self, divided into many forms, tends to reunite, and hatred as a force of separation. The disciple must transform personal affection, which chooses and excludes, into an impersonal love offered to all that expects nothing. Her translation of the Bhagavad Gita and her defence of devotion complete this view, but the final criterion remains effective help to those who suffer.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Karma is natural law: by knowing it, the human being builds his future

Karma and choiceStated explicitly

Besant devoted two works to karma, *Karma* (1895) and *A Study in Karma* (1912), and in both she treats it as a natural law comparable to those of physics, not as punishment. Her argument distinguishes three levels: thought generates character, desire attracts circumstances and action determines the environment of the next life. What comes from the past is unavoidable, but the way of responding to it is open, and whoever understands the law stops suffering it and starts using it. Hence her insistence that theosophy is a doctrine of responsibility and hope: no one is condemned, because every present thought is a new cause. Her exposition systematises Blavatsky's in a more didactic tone, with scientific analogies.

Why meditate or pray?

Yoga is a science for consciousness to discover the Self

Returning to the source of the IStated explicitly

Besant presents meditation as a rational discipline, not a drifting. In *An Introduction to Yoga* (1908) she defines yoga as the rational application of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness to an individual case, and warns that it is an applied science with a definite end. That end is that consciousness, having identified successively with body, emotions and mind, should recognise itself as the Self that uses them. In *Thought Power* (1901) she describes the method: concentration to make the mind a docile instrument, and meditation so that, once stilled, it lets the light of the Higher Self through. Practising it, she insists, also transforms ordinary life and character.

Can reason know the ultimate?

From freethinking reason to the ancient wisdom, without abandoning method

Esoteric knowledgeStated explicitly

Besant came to theosophy from militant atheism and freethought, and kept from that period the demand for rational coherence. In her *Autobiography* she recounts that on reading *The Secret Doctrine* in 1889 she felt her mind leap ahead to the conclusions, so natural, coherent and subtle did the whole seem, and in *Why I Became a Theosophist* she explains the step as an answer to problems materialism could not solve. In *The Ancient Wisdom* (1897) she presents that doctrine as a knowledge transmitted by the masters and, at the same time, verifiable through the development of higher faculties. For her yoga is an applied science: reason leads to the threshold and inner experience confirms what the tradition teaches.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

From the matchgirls' strike to Indian Home Rule

Engage with the worldStated explicitly

Few spiritual figures of her time committed themselves to public action as much as Annie Besant. Before Theosophy she was a secularist, an advocate of birth control — which earned her a prosecution — and a Fabian socialist; in 1888 she supported the strike of the Bryant & May matchgirls, whose words she records in her autobiography: it was time someone came and helped them. Converted to Theosophy, she did not abandon action but carried it to India: she founded the Central Hindu College in Benares, launched the Home Rule League in 1916 and was president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. For her the spiritual life proves itself in service, and universal brotherhood had to be translated into education, social justice and political freedom, in London as much as in Madras.

Adyar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu · India

International headquarters of the Theosophical Society, Adyar

The Theosophical Society (Adyar)

The Adyar campus, on the river of the same name in Chennai, has been the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society since 1882, a few years after Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott founded it in New York in 1875. Annie Besant presided over it for more than a quarter of a century and died there in 1933. The grounds hold the headquarters building, the Adyar Library and Research Centre, the archives, gardens with shrines of different religions and a famous banyan tree. It hosts the International Convention around each new year and offers accommodation for visitors and members.

Wheaton, Illinois · Estados Unidos

Theosophical Society in America (Olcott, Wheaton)

The Theosophical Society in America

The Theosophical Society in America is the US section of the society founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott. Its national centre in Wheaton, near Chicago, runs a weekly lecture series, spiritual workshops, meditation retreats, yoga classes and study groups, and keeps an extensive library devoted to the traditions of East and West, with particular attention to Theosophy. It also offers online webinars, a distance school of Theosophy and Quest magazine, making it possible to study Blavatsky and Besant without travelling to its campus.

Ramas en Madrid, Barcelona y otras ciudades · España

Spanish Theosophical Society: summer school and retreats

Sociedad Teosófica Española

The Spanish Theosophical Society is the Spanish section of the Theosophical Society headquartered at Adyar. Through its branches in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities it organises lectures, study groups and an annual summer school, as well as silent retreats reserved for members and joint gatherings with the Portuguese section. It marks the movement's own dates, such as White Lotus Day in memory of Helena Blavatsky, and keeps an online programme of talks and video meetings. It is the most accessible route in Spanish for studying the work of Blavatsky and Annie Besant in a group.

Adyar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu · India

School of the Wisdom, Adyar

The Theosophical Society (Adyar)

The School of the Wisdom is the intensive study programme the Theosophical Society runs at its international headquarters in Adyar. Its multi-day sessions are devoted to particular themes in Theosophy and its founding texts, those of Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant among them, as well as to dialogue between religious and philosophical traditions. Classes are concentrated in the morning, leaving time for personal study in the library and gardens of the campus. It draws members and scholars from many countries who wish to go deeper into the movement's sources in the very place where its leading figures lived and worked.