What Theosophy did for us – III: Cartographers of the Occult – II

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Occult  |  January 7th 2019  |  About poster:

“Each man travels through space enclosed within a case of his own building, surrounded by a mass of the forms created by his habitual thoughts. Through this medium he looks out upon the world, and naturally he sees everything tinged with its predominant colours. … until the man learns complete control of thought and feeling, he sees nothing as it really is, since all his observations must be made through this medium, which distorts and colours everything like badly-made glass.”
Thought-forms 1901

The concept of Thought-Forms – the belief that thoughts can exist independently of mind and cognition and can become entities in their own right is, of course, a staple of popular occult belief, and although it featured in early Theosophical texts, it was the writing of Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater that did much to popularise and systematize the concept. Many of the assertions concerning the nature of thought made by Besant and Leadbeater have become the explanatory logic behind a wide range of occult phenomena ranging from Tibetan Tulpas, ¹ group Egregores, to Chaos Servitors. Continuing from the previous post I will examine Theosophical theories of Thought-Forms and how they reflected wider cultural concerns in the early twentieth century.

Annie Besant describes Thought-forms as follows:

“A thought-form, is a mental image, created–or molded-by the mind out of the subtle matter of the (mental) plane. This form, composed of the rapidly vibrating forms of the matter of (the mental plane) sets up vibrations all around it…these vibrations thrill out as a singing-color in every direction, and call to the thought-form whence they proceed the Elementals belonging to that color… Elementals are addressed by colors, and that color-words are as intelligible to them as spoken words are to men…Men are continually talking in this color language quite unconsciously, and thus calling round them these swarms of Elementals, who take up their abodes in the various thought-forms…”

Every thought gives rise to a set of correlated vibrations in the mental body, accompanied by colours – Besant and Leadbeater use the analogy of figures made by sand on a disk vibrating to a musical note ². Thought-forms are, in a sense, living entities of intense activity generated by an originating idea – and can be most potent when directed by a strong and steady will.

When energy flows outwards towards external objects – or is occupied in passionate or emotional activities, this energy works in a less subtle order of matter than the mental – that of the astral world – and works in respect of what they term the Desire-body. Where the man is “of a gross type” the desire-body is composed of the denser matter of the astral plane – it is dull in hue, with browns, dirty greens and reds playing a greater part in it. A man “of a higher type” has a desire-body composed of the higher qualities of astral matter. Besant and Leadbeater say that this Desire-Body gives rise to its own class of thought-entities, which are generated by the mind under the dominion of the “animal nature”. These thought-forms have for their “soul” the desire or passion that originated them – they are called “artificial elementals” and they are by far the most common.

Each definite thought, they say, produces both a radiant vibration and a floating form. For example, when someone is gripped by sudden emotion, the astral body is thrown into agitation, and its normal colours are obscured by those that correspond to the rate of vibration of that particular emotion. This usually passes quickly, yet every rush of feeling produces a permanent effect – it always adds a little of its hue to the normal colouring of the astral body, so that once one yields to a certain emotion, it becomes easier for one to do so again.

If one’s thought or feeling is directly connected with another person, the resulting thought-form moves towards that person and discharges itself upon his mental and astral bodies. If one’s thought is personal (as they note, the majority of thoughts are) it hovers around its creator and is always ready to react upon him when he is in a passive condition (an example being thoughts of impurity).

If the thought-form is neither definitely personal or aimed at someone else, it simply floats detached in the atmosphere, all the time radiating vibrations similar to those originally sent forth by its creator. This form usually decays, unless it can succeed in awakening a sympathetic vibration in any mental body near at hand.

Besant and Leadbeater distinguish between 3 classes of Thought-Form:

That which takes the image of the thinker.
So for example when a man thinks of himself in some distant place, he makes a thought-form in his own image which appears there. This they note, explains the phenomena of apparitions.

That which takes the form of a material object.
Examples being a novelist describing a scene in his imagination or a painter visualising an image. These mental images may be seen by clairvoyants and can be affected – rearranged – by someone other than their creator. Sometimes, such thought-forms become “ensouled” by playful nature-spirits – or even can be affected by some ‘dead’ novelist who is trying to assist a fellow-author.

The third class are thought-forms which take a form entirely of their own, expressing their inherent qualities in the matter which they draw around themselves. Such Thought-Forms invariably manifest on the astral plane.

Thought-Forms directed towards individuals produce definite effects, being either reproduced in the aura of the recipient or repelled from it. A thought of love, for example, goes to the person thought of and remains in their aura as a shielding and protecting agent. A pure heart and mind will construct an astral and mental body of fine and subtle materials, and the vibrations of these bodies cannot respond to vibrations that demand coarse and dense matter. If an evil thought strikes such a body, it will rebound from it, flung backwards with all its own energy along the path of least resistance. Evil thoughts will strike their projector, throwing his astral and mental bodies into respondent vibrations, and so will suffer the destructive effects he had intended to cause to another.

Mental Contagion

In a pamphlet entitled The Power and Use of Thought (1911) Leadbeater enlarges on some of the themes began in Thought-forms. Here, he states that those Thought-Forms produced which are neither personal or directed at another remain “idly floating” wherever they were called into existence:

“as we walk along we are, as it were, picking our way through vast masses of them; and if our minds are not already definitely occupied, these wandering fragments of other people’s thought will seriously affect us.”

It is due to the effects of these stray thoughts, says Leadbeater that account for the ordinary person being in a state of continual agitation – which has a knock-on affect of communicating this agitation to others. It is because of this, he says, that it is difficult for a sensitive person to live in a large city, or to go into a crowd.

From the late nineteenth century, theories of mental contagion were proposed to account for a wide range of social phenomena, from crowd behaviour to religious feeling. These theories were greatly influenced by studies of hypnotism and suggestibility in the 1880s and by the work of the Scottish Philosopher Dugald Stewart who, in 1827 ³ proposed a principle or law of “sympathetic Imitation” by which an affection can be propagated throughout a crowd, operating “somehow or other, through the medium of the mind. One of the most popular theories of mental contagion was Gustav Le Bon’s 1895 work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon believed that crowds had ‘souls’ and were driven, not by rationality, but by suggestion and mental contagion, and that the leaders of crowds exerted a kind of hypnotic suggestion over the masses.

“When defining crowds, we said that one of their general characteristics was excessive suggestibility, and we have shown to what extent suggestions are contagious in every human agglomeration; a fact which explains the rapid turning of the sentiments of a crowd in a definite direction. However indifferent it may be supposed, a crowd, as a rule, is in a state of expectant attention, which renders suggestion easy. The first suggestion formulated which arises implants itself immediately by a process of contagion in the brains of all assembled, and the identical bent of the sentiments of the crowd is immediately an accomplished fact.
As is the case with all persons under the influence of suggestion, the idea which has entered the brain tends to transform itself into an act. Whether the act is that of setting fire to a palace, or involves self-sacrifice, a crowd lends itself to it with equal facility. All will depend on the nature of the exciting cause, and no longer, as in the case of the isolated individual, on the relations existing between the act suggested and the sum total of the reasons which may be urged against its realisation.”
Le Bon, 1895, p23

Leadbeater’s remarks about the difficulties of a ‘sensitive person’ to live in a city also reflected the growing concerns of the effect of urban life. By 1880, for example, an estimated 80% of the British population lived in towns and cities. This led to new anxieties about the inescapability of urban life and a new interest in public health. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the city itself became a marker for social and moral degeneration and its inhabitants – particularly the urban poor – frequently described as though they were a race apart. One Arthur Morrison, writing in The Palace Journal in 1889 described the inhabitants of Whitechapel as ‘human vermin’:

“Black and noisome, the road sticky with slime, and palsied houses, rotten from chimney to cellar, leaning together, apparently by the mere coherence of their ingrained corruption. Dark, silent, uneasy shadows passing and crossing – human vermin in this reeking sink, like goblin exhalations from all that is noxious around. Women with sunken, black-rimmed eyes, whose pallid faces appear and vanish by the light of an occasional gas lamp, and look so like ill-covered skulls that we start at their stare.” ⁴

The American Sociologist, Edward A. Ross echoes similar concerns:

“These faults are due in part to the nervous strains of great cities. The continual bombardment of the attention by innumerable sense impressions is known to produce neurasthenia or hysteria, the peculiar malady of the city dweller. Then, too, there thrive in the sheltered life of the city many mental degenerates that would be unsparingly eliminated by the sterner conditions of existence in the country. But aside from this the behavior of city dwellers under excitement can best be understood as the result of mental contacts made possible by easy communication. While the crowd, with its elbow-touch and its heat has no doubt a maddening all its own, the main thing in it is the contact of minds.”
The Mob Mind

For Ross, the “contact of minds” is made possible via the “space-annihilating” devices such as the telegraph and print media, but it is easy to see how these ideas of mental contagion influenced Theosophical ideas and afforded them scientific legitimacy.

As Joy Dixon explores in her book Divine Feminine many Theosophists were actively engaged in campaigning against urban “social evils” such as prostitution and alcoholism, and the dangers of such vices, according to the theory of thought-forms, were not merely social and physical, but moral and spiritual. Annie Besant, writing in the Theosophical journal Lucifer in the January 1896 issue, states, in an article entitled “Man and his Bodies”:

“Drunkards who have lost their physical bodies, and can therefore no longer satisfy their hateful longing for intoxicants, hang round places where drink is taken, and round those who take it, endeavouring to push themselves into the bodies of people who are drinking and thus to share the low pleasure to which they surrender themselves. Women of refinement would shrink from their wines if they could see the loathly creatures who seek to partake in their enjoyment, and the close connection which they thus set up with beings of the most disgusting kind. Evil elementals also cluster round, the thoughts of drunkards clad in elemental essence, while the physical body attracts to itself from the surrounding atmosphere other gross particles given off from drunken and profligate bodies, and these also are built into it, coarsening and degrading it.”

She writes, in the same article of the horrors of the urban environment:

“In a town like London, or indeed in any western town, we cannot walk through the streets without being offended at every turn, and the more we refine the body the more delicately acute do the physical senses become, and the more we must suffer in a civilization so coarse and animal as is the present. Walking through the poorer and the business streets where there are beerhouses at every corner, we can scarcely ever escape the smell of drink, the effluvium from one drinking-place over-lapping that from the next—even reputedly respectable streets being thus poisoned. So again we have to pass slaughter-houses and butchers’ shops, and to travel in trains and omnibuses with bodies reeking with flesh and alcohol. Of course one knows that when civilization is a little more advanced better arrangements will be made, and something will be gained when all these unclean things are gathered in special quarters where those can seek them who want them.”

The theosophical answer to these problems is one of unstinting prophylaxis against contagion; cultivation of purity which extends beyond the physical into the realm of mental activity. In Power and Use of Thought for example, Leadbeater asserts that “unnecessary argument” should be avoided. The wise man, he says, knows that truth is a many-sided thing – and that there is room for diversity of opinion. He states that “the student of occultism will therefore decline to waste his time in argument; if he is asked for information he is quite willing to give it, but does not waste his time and strength in unprofitable wrangling.”

Further, the “wise man” opines Leadbeater utterly declines to take offence at what is said or done by someone else. However, he goes on to say that gossip and scandal-mongering is a “horrible wickedness” and he says that thoughts of bad qualities directed at a person actually work to create that evil quality in the person being gossiped about – and that if that quality is latent in the victim, it might well emerge. Evil qualities, he says, emerge because, over successive previous lives, that strength has been allowed to accumulate.

“From this consideration it follows that the habit of gossip and scandal, in which many people thoughtlessly indulge themselves, is in reality a horrible wickedness, in condemning which no expression can be too strong. When people are guilty of the impertinence of discussing others, it is not usually upon the good qualities that they most insist. We have therefore a number of people fixing their thought upon some alleged evil in another, calling to that evil the attention of others who might perhaps not have observed it; and in this way, if that bad quality really exists in the person whom they are so improperly criticizing, they distinctly increase it by strengthening the vibration which is its expression. If, as is usually the case, the depravity exists only in their own prurient imagination, and is not present in the person about whom they are gossiping, then they are doing the utmost in their power to create that evil quality in that person, and if there be any latent germ of it existing in their victim, their nefarious effort is only too likely to be successful.”

It is somewhat ironical, that at the time of this publication’s issue, Leadbeater was himself the subject of much “gossip and scandal” stemming from the charges laid against him in 1906 that he was teaching boys in his care “habits of self-abuse” (see my series A thousand kisses darling”: Sex, scandal and spirituality in the life of Charles Webster Leadbeater for more discussion).

Sources
Besant, A. & Leadbeater, C.W. 1901. Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation. London. Theosophical Publishing Society.
Le Bon, Gustav. 1896. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. London. T. Fisher Unwin.
Dixon, Joy. 2001. Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore and London. The John Hopkins University Press.
Leadbeater, C.W. 1911. Power and Use of Thought. Adyar. Theosophical Publishing House.
Mitchell, Peta. 2013. Contagious Metaphor. London. Bloomsbury Academic.
Ross, Edward A. 1897. The Mob Mind. Popular Science Monthly.

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