Besant

Address D Shivsagar Estate, 6th Floor Dr. Annie Besant... 

Besant, Annie Wood and Charles Webster Leadbeater. Occult chemistry. 1st ed ed. 

Besant, Annie Wood and Charles Webster Leadbeater.Occult chemistry investigations by clairvoyant magnification into the structure of the atoms of the periodic table and of some compounds edited by C. Jinarajadasa, assisted by Elizabeth W. 

Besant, Annie Wood and Charles Webster Leadbeater.Occult chemistry clairvoyant observations on the chemical elements Revised ed., edited by A. P. Sinnett. Edited by Alfred Percy Sinnett. London Theosophical Publishing House, 1919. iv, p., 1 1., 109, x p. 

Besant, Annie Wood. In the outer court. Madras Theosophical Publishing House, 1895. 164p. 

But no account of occultism s engagement with modem atomic science could be even adequate without addressing the occult chemistry of one of the most successful occult institutions of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Theosophical Society. It is to Annie Besant and C. W. Lead-beater s efforts to ground Theosophical knowledge in a scientific research program that we must now turn. 

Leadbeater and Besant s occult chemistry clearly participated in the privileging of visual data emerging in the physics and chemistry of the day,... 

But in spite of Theosophical vitalism (to which I shall return below) and the Theosophical attack on mechanistic science and philosophy, the atomic theory Besant and Leadbeater developed in Occult Chemistry and elsewhere was in many ways a mechanical theory involving interactions of ever-more-rarified particles and their vibrations. It adapted many assumptions of Victorian ether mechanics. 

But Besant and Leadbeater created an even more complex system of atoms. The schema extended to all seven planes posited by Theosophy. Leadbeater, in... 

Leadbeater and Besant both emphasized in their writings that these worlds were co-extensive with one another, that they were merely composed of different, increasingly rarified, forms of matter. And as Besant emphasized in The Ancient Wisdom (1897), her major contribution to making a working system from the vast sprawl of Blavatsky s tomes, humans have existences in these other planes. Each person possesses, for instance, an astral body that coexists with the physical one. The senses appropriate to these other states of matter, however, were largely underdeveloped. 

Crookes, Lodge s fellow scientist and psychic investigator, contributed an al-chemically inflected ether/matter theory that gained wide acceptance amongst Theosophists and helped lay the groundwork for Besant and Leadbeater s occult chemistry. On February 18, 1887, some twenty years after Kelvin s... 

I want to emphasize, above all, that these theories of matter as stresses, strains, singularities, or vortices of ether, were mechanical (and even hydro-dynamic) theories. When scientists such as Crookes and Lodge, and Theoso-phists such as Besant and Leadbeater, melded physics with spiritual and psychic forces via theories of the ether (and the additional particles that Theosophy added to the equation), they were lending scientific credibility to spiritual ideas. Paradoxically, in their critique of scientific materialism, they asserted a mechanical theory of spirituality. Theosophy thus required a form of vitalism to counterbalance the mechanistic tendencies of its physics. 

There were a few disagreeable facts to sidestep. Leadbeater had developed his clairvoyance in only forty-two days (Phillips 1999, 5) rather than in a lifetime of study and discipline, and, as Washington puts it, Besant s hitherto limited psychic gifts had expanded overnight as a result of meeting Leadbeater ... 

Indeed, the Theosophical infusion of matter with life, and the ability of life force and will to effect the changes in matter demanded by spiritual alchemy and occult chemistry, seemed to find some support from the newly discovered phenomenon of radiation. Besant s On the Watch-Tower column, for instance, noted with excitement an article on the origin of life by Butler Burke published in the Daily Chronicle in 1905. There, Burke noted that radium may be that state of matter that separates, or perhaps unites, the organic and the inorganic worlds, and that radioactivity endows matter with some of the properties of organic matter (quoted in [Besant] 1905a, 481). 

Yet it is on the issues of reproducibility and instrumentation that Occult Chemistry failed to persuade, at least outside of Theosophical circles and the small group of scientists in recent years who have been willing to work entirely at the level of theory. Besant and Leadbeater could move beyond older models of science, which based themselves upon deductions from revealed principles (alchemical or scientific deductions from the writings of the Hermetic tradition, for instance, or from the revelations of H. P. Blavatsky), by turning to experimentation. Not surprisingly, their form of experimentation did not admit of reproducibility. In spite of efforts by Stephen Phillips to conduct blind trials using a Buddhist clairvoyant to confirm Besant and Lead-beater s micro-psi visions (1996,48), direct experience is neither convincingly verifiable nor falsifiable. 

Phillips s entire argument, across the more than twenty years during which he has worked on Occult Chemistry, is that Besant and Leadbeater must have been right—not hallucinating, not fabricating their findings—because their research correlates with that of sciences that did not yet exist when they wrote Occult Chemistry. This correlation, for Phillips, seems to offer unprecedented, unassailable proof of paranormal powers ... 

Phillips believed he had found such an instance in Occult Chemistry—and that it even provided evidence that quarks were not fundamental particles. Yet in this boundary skirmish between physics and parapsychology over the subatomic world, Phillips, Smith, and Besant and Leadbeater ultimately will not persuade the scientific world. The boundaries between occultism and... 

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