Annie Besant

From Philosopedia

Besant, Annie (1 October 1847 - 20 September 1933)

An English freethinker who later became a Theosophist, Besant was a close associate of Charles Bradlaugh. Edward Royle has described her contribution to freethought and radicalism, calling her the greatest female orator of her day, and saying she can be credited for much of the success of the National Secular Society between 1874 and 1886 in England. George Bernard Shaw knew her well:

• Annie Besant, a player of genius, was a tragedian. Comedy was not her clue to life: she had a healthy sense of fun; but no truth came to her first as a joke. Injustice, waste, and the defeat of noble aspirations did not revolt her by way of irony or paradox: they stirred her to direct and powerful indignation and to active resistance.

In 1878 when a petition in Chancery was presented to deprive her of her child on the ground of her atheistic and Malthusian views, Sir G. Jessell granted the petition. When Besant encountered the famed Russian occultist and theosophist, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in 1889, she converted and within two years had become theosophy’s main leader, spending the rest of her life in India, where she led the Congress Party (1917).

Theosophy, a mystical view that insight into the nature of God and the world can be obtained through direct knowledge, is found in Oriental theologies and has included adherents such as Jakob Boehme, F. W. J. Schelling, and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Anne Taylor has written Annie Besant: A Biography (1992), which details her series of emotional (but apparently not physical) attachments to Charles Bradlaugh, Edward Aveling J. M. Robertson, Bernard Shaw, William Stead, and Herbert Burrows.

J. Gordon Melton has edited The Origins of Theosophy: Annie Besant—The Atheist Years (1990). From 1883 to 1888,

Besant once edited the weekly London publication, Our Corner.

Charles Leadbeater, who at the Australian Convention of Theosophists in 1922 was accused of everything from ventriloquism to pederasty, said “spirits” once informed him that in other ages Mrs. Besant acquired twelve husbands for whom she roasted rats and Julius Caesar married Jesus Christ, stories which gullible theosophists repeated as truths.

The theosophy part of Besant’s career has little to do with secularism, but the Besant-Bradlaugh partnership between 1874 and 1886 was immensely important. Arthur Moss’s verdict in 1915 was that in England Besant “was unquestionably the most learned, the most eloquent, and the most powerful lady advocate of Freethought that this country every produced.”

She also, Paul Edwards wrote in Reincarnation (1996), was a foolish believer in reincarnation.

(See entry for Sex Education and Beatrice Wood.)

{BDF; CE; EU, Edward Royle; FUK; FUS; PUT; RSR; SWW; TRI; WSS}