The Ancient Wisdom

The Ancient Wisdom is a book by Annie Besant, published in 1897, in which she sets out in systematic form the basic doctrines of theosophy as she understood them at that time. Besant, who had by then joined the Theosophical Society and become one of its best-known lecturers, wrote the work as an accessible summary of a body of ideas that she believed lay beneath the great religions and philosophies of East and West.

The book starts from the idea of a single and ancient spiritual tradition, handed down through a succession of teachers or adepts, from which later religions would emerge as partial expressions of one and the same truth. Besant presents the universe as a whole governed by spiritual laws, in which the human being takes part in a process of evolution that unfolds across many lives. Among the subjects she treats are the constitution of the human being in several planes or bodies, reincarnation, the law of cause and effect known as karma, and the existence of a hierarchy of beings who guide the development of humanity.

The work is arranged in chapters that move from the most general matters, such as the existence of an ultimate reality and the nature of manifestation, to the more concrete, such as life after death and the individual's path of moral and spiritual improvement. Its tone is expository and didactic, aimed at readers with no prior training in Eastern philosophy, and it often draws on examples and comparisons from Hindu thought, Buddhism and Neoplatonism.

The book was well received within the theosophical movement, where it became one of the most widely circulated introductions to the doctrine. Outside that circle its value has been debated: some readers see it as a useful synthesis of the esoteric ideas of the period, while others regard it chiefly as an example of the eclectic mixture of sources typical of late nineteenth-century theosophy. It nevertheless belongs to the current of popular writing on Eastern thought that reached a wide audience in Britain and the United States in its day.