What Theosophy did for us – III: Cartographers of the Occult – II
“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. Continue reading »
Notes:
- primarily due to the influence of Walter Y. Evans-Wentz and Alexandra David-Neel. ↩
