The Wisdom of the Mahatmas

This chapter begins with the early formation of academic Tibetology and examines how Tibet was folded into Europe’s nineteenth-century India-centric Orientalism. The chapter then moves on to the story of Helena Blavatsky and the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875, examining how the subtle body was portrayed in her books published in the 1870s and 1880s. It shows how her engagement with the subtle body—that is, her weaving together of Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic, Darwninan, German idealist, Transcendentalist, and Orientalist strands—significantly laid the groundwork for future permutations of the subtle body in both popular and academic arenas.

Theosophical Gnosis and Astral Hermeneutics

This chapter traces the subtle body concept through the writings of Blavatsky’s heirs, the major figures in the second generation of theosophy, zeroing in specifically on their reformulations of a mystical form of Christianity informed by the yoga of the subtle body. First, it examines the life and works of Annie Besant and her mythological subtle body interpretations of the Bible. Next, it moves on to Charles Leadbeater, his Kundalini experiences, and how these informed his own subtle body ideas drawn from Kabbalah, Hindu philosophy, and his own personal experience. Lastly, the chapter examines Blavatsky’s former secretary, G. R. S. Mead, and how the subtle body concept is formulated in his numerous books. It ends by looking at Mead’s prognostications about a future wherein the sciences, parapsychology, and humanities are brought together to answer questions about the nature and function of the subtle body.

The Alchemical Body of Carl Jung

This chapter traces the subtle body concept through the work of Carl Jung, who is introduced to the idea by G. R. S. Mead’s theosophical books. After tracing Jung’s early engagement with the Orient, the chapter moves to an analysis of the subtle body concept in his work, specifically in his engagements with Eastern traditions: Daoism, Kundalini Yoga, and Tibetan Bardo Yoga. After examining Jung’s use of the subtle body concept in his translation-commentaries on Eastern texts, the chapter turns to how Jung incorporates the concept into his own psychology of individuation based on the techniques of active imagination and dream analysis. The chapter turns to Jung’s seminars on Nietzsche, where he presents the subtle body concept with a unique dose of critical reflexivity and Kantian rigor. It ends with Jung’s late-life speculation about a future where, following the quantum revolution and spitting of the atom, humans evolve into subtle body–dwelling creatures who occupy a world of psychical substance.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the idea of the subtle body and frames the problematics in the treating the concept in a rigorous way. It treats popular ontological, epistemological, and methodological frameworks that are commonly used to address it before proposing the utility of an historical genealogy. It introduces the reader to the broad philosophical and historical scope of the rest of the book.

The Body of Light in Renaissance England

This chapter engages with the first Anglophone attestations of the term “subtle body.” It appears first in the contentious correspondence between Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes between whom there was some disagreement over who plagiarized the idea from whom. Most of the chapter is taken up with the Cambridge Platonists who came in their wake, who formulated complex philosophical and mythological views of the Neoplatonic vehicles of the soul, now under the English name “subtle body.” It ends with Lady Anne Conway, who fuses the Platonism of the Cambridge group with Kabbalah to create a new form of spiritual monism. This chapter is significantly about how the subtle body concept was employed by Renaissance Platonists arguing against the reductive materialism of Cartesian mechanical philosophy.

Oriental Origins

This chapter shows how the subtle body concept as established by the Cambridge Platonists was carried forward in popular and literary domains and later used as a stock concept in the earliest English translations of Sanskrit texts. It takes the reader through the birth of Indology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing the subtle body concept through early translations of yoga and Sāṃkhya philosophy, focusing on how the authors posited historical connections between Neoplatonic and Hindu philosophies, laying the groundwork for future understandings of the subtle body as a concept spanning a great East-West divide.

Vehicles of the Soul from Plato to Philoponus

This chapter traces the prehistory of the subtle body, developing out of late antique Neoplatonic conceptions of the ochema-pneuma, “vehicles of the soul,” which bear souls from one incarnation to the next. It goes through the entire history of late antique Neoplatonism surveying how major thinkers engaged with and formulated ideas about these soul-bearing vehicles, from the mystical existentialism of Porphyry and Iamblichus (third century) to the detailed and philosophically sophisticated descriptions of Damascius and John Philoponus (sixth century). It ends with the ascendance of Christianity for which this notion was no longer useful, jettisoning the subtle body and sending the idea into a thousand-year slumber.

From Eranos to Esalen

This chapter traces the subtle body concept from Jung’s Kundalini seminars to the early work of one of its attendees, Frederic Spiegelberg, who would wind up becoming a professor at Stanford in the 1950s after the Nazis purged German academia of Jewish faculty and staff. Spiegelberg would go on to have a huge impact on a whole generation of Stanford graduates at the very beginning of the counterculture. This chapter focuses on Michael Murphy, the founder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which would go on to become a countercultural and later New Age mecca during the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter focuses on the subtle body concept in the work of Spiegelberg and Murphy, zeroing in on the points of difference between the teacher and his student. It ends with the proliferation of subtle body discourses and forms of praxis that spin out of Esalen during and after the counterculture, laying the groundwork for the hyperpopularity of yoga and martial arts in 1990s American culture, which the author grew up in, leading to his interest in writing this book in the first place.

The Subtle Body

How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages many religions and intellectual movements have posed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the subtle body, positing some kind of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. This book traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years. The book begins in the late Roman Empire, moving chronologically through the Renaissance, the British project of colonial Indology, the development of theosophy and occultism in the nineteenth century, and the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Crowley, the Orient, and the Occult

This chapter examines the life and work of the British magus Aleister Crowley, focusing on the place of Orientalism and the subtle body in the development of his magical system. After a short biographical section where the chapter traces his life to the age of thirty when his occult vocation began in earnest, the chapter shifts to Crowley’s interest in the Orient, analyzing his engagement with Kabbalah, Daoism, yoga, and Islamic mysticism. The chapter then zeroes in on Crowley’s presentation of the subtle body in his magnum opus before moving on to theoretical analysis of the basic philosophical tenets of Crowley’s system, interrogating his skepticism and inductive method in engaging with occult and Astral phenomena. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on the process of cultural transformation, following the subtle body as it moves from a term of translation to a creolized fusion (ala Blavatsky) where Oriental terminology forms a sort of veneer over a Neoplatonic concept, to a fully hybrid concept (as in Crowley) that is neither fully a Neoplatonic idea nor an Oriental import, but something in between.