Table of Contents
This page follows chapter I, “Preliminaries”, of Man: Whence, How and Whither (1913) by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. They present the book as a record of clairvoyant investigation. What follows is their scheme of chains and globes, as they describe it.
The book opens with the big question and then narrows it at once:
In the fullest answer we can only say : Man, as a spiritual Being, comes forth from God and returns to God
Besant and Leadbeater, Man: Whence, How and Whither, ch. I
Schemes, Chains and Globes
A chain of seven links
The authors build everything out of sevens. A Scheme of evolution passes through seven Chains, and each Chain is made of seven Globes, lettered A to G:
A Scheme of Evolution passes through seven great evolutionary stages, each of which is called a Chain.
Besant and Leadbeater, ch. I
This name is derived from the fact that a Chain consists of seven Globes, mutually interrelated ; it is a chain of seven links, each link a globe.
Besant and Leadbeater, ch. I
They name seven Schemes in our Solar System after their globe D: Vulcan, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They also say the Solar System has ten departments, rooted in the seven.
Down and up again
In the first Chain, they say, the globes sit in pairs on the planes of matter. A and G are on the spiritual plane, B and F on the intuitional, the next pair on the higher mental, and D, the turning point, on the lower part of the mental plane. Life goes down from A to D and climbs back up to G. Each pair works as a team:
These pairs of globes in every Chain are ever closely allied, but the one is the rough sketch, the other the finished picture.
Besant and Leadbeater, ch. I
With every Chain the globes sink one stage lower into matter. In the second Chain globe D is on the emotional plane. In the third there is one physical globe. The fourth Chain is the densest, with three physical globes, C, D and E. After that the Chains climb back the same way.
Our Earth Chain
According to the book, the Chain before ours was the lunar Chain, and its globe D is now our Moon. Our own Chain is the fourth, which is why it has three physical globes:
our Earth Chain, or terrene Chain, is the fourth in succession, and has therefore three of its seven globes in physical manifestation, its third globe, C, being what is called the planet Mars, and its fifth globe, E, what is called the planet Mercury.
Besant and Leadbeater, ch. I
So in their picture Mars, Earth and Mercury are three globes of one chain. They add that the Venus Scheme is reaching the end of its fifth Chain, and that Vulcan may be in its sixth, though they say they have no information on that.
Rounds
Life does not visit each globe once. The wave of evolution circles the whole chain, and each circuit is a Round:
In a single Chain the evolutionary wave sweeps from A to G, using each globe in turn as the field of growth ; this circling round the Chain is appropriately named a Round, and seven times the wave sweeps round, ere the life of the Chain is over, its work complete.
Besant and Leadbeater, ch. I
Life streams, failures and the seven paths
The chapter also follows the life streams from kingdom to kingdom. A stream of life from the LOGOS enters as the first Elemental Kingdom, and moves one kingdom up with each Chain: elemental, mineral, vegetable, animal and finally human. Laggards stay behind and join the stream that comes after them. The authors use Diagrams III and IV to show this.
Not everyone makes it. Those who fall short of a Chain’s level by its “Day of Judgment” are its “failures” and carry on in the next Chain. Those who finish the human stage stand before seven paths. According to the book, these include Nirvana, staying in the Occult Hierarchy, joining the Deva evolution, and serving the LOGOS directly on what they call his General Staff.
The scheme is built on sevens: seven Schemes, seven Chains, seven Globes, seven Rounds and seven paths. You can read the whole chapter in the 1913 edition on archive.org or on our book page.
