Theos-Talk Archives (November 2006 Message tt01049)

Friends, 
 
In the last years of her life,  Mrs. Annie Besant seems to have lost her mental balance.  
 
The problem started as she had to face the  final crisis of the Christ-Krishnamurti Messianic Project (1924-1929). 
 
Mary Lutyens, a lifelong and close friend of J. Krishnamurti?s, as well as his main biographer, wrote in  an 1993 article:  
 
?I saw Mrs. Besant again at Castle Eerde in Holland (...). (...)  I discovered  only later that  she was already greatly troubled by Krishnaji?s gradual break from Theosophy and the role of World Teacher assigned to him by the TS leaders.  Yet her love for him and his for her never wavered. One of the greatest of her many qualities was loyalty. Her trust, once given, was impossible to shake, hence her terrible dilemma when she found in the last years of her life that the people she trusted most were pulling apart in irreconcilable directions.  It was too much; and when she failed to reconcile them her mind gave way.? (1) 
 
This was not without a reason, therefore. 
 
In the Chapter Seven  of  the  ?The Life and Death of Krishnamurti?, by Mary Lutiens (copyright 1990), one finds plenty of evidences of a collectively  deranged mental state,  with the so-called ?Festival of Initiations?. In the first half of this Chapter 7  one sees that Kkrishnamurti  comments in 1926 to the author, Ms. Lutyens: ?Poor Amma? (referring to A. Besant) .  And Lutyens writes: ?He understood that her mind was deteriorating and that she believed in everyhing Wedgwood told her?.  
 
One can see also the book ?Krishnamurti, the Years of Awakening?, by Mary Lutiens (2).  In this book the ?festival of initiations?  is fully described at chapter 25, and A. Besant delivers a really eccentric  speach at p. 213 (year 1925).
 
In his significant book ?Is This Theosophy??(3),  Ernest Wood describes various scenes and personal dialogues which show A.B.?s great loss of memory and common sense.    
 
Born in October 1847 under the sign of Libra, A.B. was almost 80 years old in  1925, when the ?Festival of Initiations? and the failure of the ?Christ-Krishnamurti Project? started  to cause her loss of  balance in mental perceptions.  
 
Regards,  Carlos. 
 
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NOTE:
 
 (1) ?Recollections of Mrs. Besant?, an article by Mary Lutyens published in the monthly magazine ?The Theosophist?, Adyar, India, December 1993, pp. 88-92, see especially pp. 90-91. 
 
(2) ?Krishnamurti, the Years of Awakening?, Mary Lutiens,  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1975, 326 pp.
 
(3) Rider & Co., and later Kessinger Publishing.  See pp. 313-314. 
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