About the book
What, in Annie Besant’s account, remains the same when a person’s bodies change? Man and His Bodies (1896) follows the conscious individual through the physical, etheric, astral and mental worlds of Theosophical thought, and closes with her emphasis on understanding and service to others.
The book is especially useful for terms that recur throughout Theosophical writing but do not always mean the same thing: the etheric double is not the astral body here, and remembering a dream is a different question from remembering a past life. It is a historical religious and philosophical work, not an anatomy textbook or a modern account of brain function.
This HIPS Books edition follows the 1896 printing rather than silently adopting later revisions. The historical text, original notes and older terminology are retained in readable, searchable type, with labelled HIPS vocabulary, section guides and questions alongside.
What this edition includes
168 pages. The 1896 Preface, Introduction and all five main chapters; a HIPS editorial introduction; six section vocabularies (47 entries); six reader guides with questions; a 47-term glossary; clickable contents and 26 PDF bookmarks; all seven original notes with links in both directions; original Society notices and publisher back matter, labelled as historical documents.
Inside the book: selected contents
A reading overview, not the complete text.
- The Physical Body: the dense body and its etheric double, and why etheric is not astral in Besant’s scheme.
- The Astral Body: emotion, dreams and the problem of remembering experiences.
- The Mental Bodies: the lower mind body and the enduring causal body.
- Other Bodies and the aura: the aura described as an aggregate of interpenetrating bodies.
- The Man: karma, reincarnation and the continuity of the individual.
Key concepts for reading
HIPS editorial explanations of the historical text.
- Etheric double: Besant’s finer counterpart of the physical body, distinct from the astral body.
- Astral body: in this book, the vehicle she associates with desire and emotion.
- Causal body: the enduring vehicle she links with individuality across lives; a Theosophical teaching, not an empirical finding.
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How is this different from an archive scan?
An archive scan preserves photographed pages. This is a prepared reading edition: reset text and modern reading support, with the historical author’s words kept distinct. The edition details and preview pages above show what is included in this particular book.
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