The Ancient Wisdom

"Right thought is necessary to right conduct, right understanding to right living." That is the first sentence of the book, and it explains why a work about invisible planes, karma and the birth of universes opens with how people behave.

Besant is not offering a pretty cosmology to admire from a distance. Her bet is that what you believe the universe is quietly decides what you think a life is for, and so what you actually do on an ordinary afternoon. Get the map wrong, and the conduct drifts with it.

That is why she calls the Divine Wisdom, Brahma Vidya in Sanskrit and Theosophia in Greek, a philosophy, a religion and an ethic all at once. For her these are not three subjects. They are one subject seen from three sides.

She borrows a line a devotee once said of the Bible: it has "shallows in which a child could wade and depths in which a giant must swim." Theosophy, she says, is built the same way. Some of its teachings are plain enough to live by tomorrow. Others leave the ablest mind straining and sinking, worn out by the effort.

Her book is written from the shallow end, on purpose. An elementary textbook, she says, should leave the student with much to add and little to unlearn: an outline clear enough that later study paints in the details instead of overturning the picture.

It is a bold promise for a subject this strange. It means the simple parts and the lofty parts are meant to belong to one coherent picture of the universe, not to a heap of separate revelations.

Why does a book about planes, karma and rebirth open with the claim that right thought is necessary to right conduct?

• Because Besant held that the picture of the universe you carry shapes the way you live.✓Correct answer
• Because Besant wanted to keep ethics carefully separate from the book's cosmology.
• Because Besant thought correct conduct alone would reveal the invisible planes to you.
• Because Besant believed good behaviour matters far more than any belief about the universe.

For Besant, philosophy, religion and ethics are one subject seen from three sides, so the map comes first because conduct follows from it. She is not ranking behaviour above belief, and she is certainly not keeping the two apart.

Lay the scriptures of the world side by side and the echoes are hard to miss: similar moral codes, similar stories of divine teachers, similar talk of a hidden self and a way of purification. In 1897 nobody serious denied it, and Besant does not either. The shared ideas, she writes, are admitted on all hands.

The quarrel was over what the likeness means. Two very different stories can explain the same fact, and the whole book rests on choosing between them.

This is the place most readers skim, and it is worth slowing down. If you reject her answer here, the chapters on planes and karma read as a clever mosaic of borrowed pieces. If you accept it, they read as a map that was lost and is being redrawn.

The first story belonged to the scholars Besant calls the doctors of Comparative Mythology. In their account, religions grew up out of human ignorance, with imagination doing the farming.

Early people, frightened and curious, turned the powers of nature into persons. Priests played on their terrors and their hopes. Over centuries myths hardened into scriptures, and symbols were taken for facts. One school found the master key in sun and star worship, another in phallic cults. Since every tribe faced the same sky and the same fears, their religions naturally came out looking alike.

On this view the likeness is a family resemblance of ignorance. The ideas are shared because the mistakes were shared, and even the loftiest faith is only a savage original that has been polished for a very long time.

Besant does not answer the scholars with a counter-proof. She answers with a question she thinks ordinary people already feel. Under the rain of evidence, she says, plain people are "silenced but not convinced."

What troubles them is the consequence. If the theory is right, then humanity's dearest hopes are nothing more than savage fancy, and its martyrs and heroes lived, suffered and died deluded, for what amounts to astronomy dressed up as gods.

Be exact about what kind of objection this is. She does not say the likenesses are unreal or the scholarship fake. She says the explanation is too small for the height of what was produced. Fear and fancy can account for a crude myth. Besant doubts they can account for a saint.