Re-orienting the Astral Plane
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.
The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.
After another otherwise unremarkable day as a high school freshman, I remember gazing out the bus window, staring at the bright blue Texas sky. “Is it possible to fly outside my body and travel around?” I wondered. When I got home, I typed my question into the search engine Lycos, and I was led to a forum (the internet was in its infancy). Astral projection caught my eye, and my interest has remained piqued ever since.
Forum participants posted links to Robert Bruce’s now-defunct website “The Astral Pulse” and his “Treatise on Astral Projection,” which was later revised and published. I eventually saved enough money to order his book, Astral Dynamics, published in 1999 and still in print. I never had success with Bruce’s methods; maybe I wasn’t doing them right. The adjective “astral” in English refers to stars—preserved in the English word “asterism,” a cluster of stars—but it also indicates different, non-physical worlds or planes; astral projection travels to those worlds or planes. My research reveals South Asian sources for such astral matters, suggesting the history of the astral plane ought to be re-oriented.
As a pastor’s kid in Texas, I had encountered otherworldly imagery in the visions of Daniel, Ezekiel, Paul, and John in the Book of Revelation, but no one at my church wanted to talk about how a prophet, let alone a normal person, could access other dimensions or could fly, talk to, and learn from strange creatures, angels, and spirits there. Encountering the heavens was framed a “gift” rather than a learned “ability.”
Astral beings inhabit an infinite number of planes or worlds; a person can acquire the ability to access the planes and worlds mapped in Astral Dynamics. “Other worlds and dimensions exist all around us, every minute of every day, that very few people see or step into, even though they believe or know them to be there.” But Astral Dynamics was not unique; such ideas flourished around the world long before the 1990s.
The founders of the Theosophical Society, especially Henry Olcott (1832–1907), inspired modern theories about astral worlds and planes. Theosophists popularized the noun akasha and the adjective akashic (the adjective of akasha). Originally a Sanskrit word meaning sky and space, they connected akasha, a fifth physical but imperceptible element, to ether (or aether), a classical element from Aristotle’s philosophy. Theosophists considered akasha a subtle substance mediating physical matter and pure spirit but also a cosmic archive of the world’s knowledge, what they call the akashic record. South Asians used the language of yogic philosophy and deities instead of stars—though stars and planets were not absent—to develop instructions for stepping into what Astral Dynamics calls “other worlds and dimensions.”
South Asians like the Tamil yogi Sri Sabhapati Swami (ca. 1828–1923/4), writing at the same time and having connections to Theosophy’s astral pioneers, combined Hindu ideas about enacting pilgrimage within the temple of the human body and engaging mental ritual worship with cutting-edge occult concepts and language borrowed from Theosophy. These included “occult sciences” (a medieval category including astrology, alchemy, and magic), “mesmerism” (initiatory exchange of subtle energy between individuals), and many “kingdoms” (subtle structures in the body). Sabhapati proposed and diagramed a pure ether (shuddh-akasha) beyond theosophy’s interpretation of akasha as an elemental principle. Pure ether is filled with “gnosis” (jnana) accessed by yogic meditation that realizes unity with or dissolution into Shiva’s cosmic linga, Shiva’s universal generative form (Figure 1). Sabhapati’s diagrams were considered, though he did not use the term, a South Asian “astral body.”
Olcott owned Sabhapati’s first book (Figure 2), and he published a lecture on two of Sabhapati’s earliest linga diagrams. The first of these (Figure 3) depicts pure etheric or pure akashic gnosis flows throughout a meditating body, mediating internal and external universes. Olcott interpreted Sabhapati’s meditation practice to be the same as projecting a “‘double’ outside the body,” and in his interpretation of Sabhapati’s second diagram, he claimed that the yogi sees in “pure Akása (astral light, or ether) all that concerns the orbs of space, as well as all that is transpiring upon our globe.”
I continue to translate Sabhapati’s vernacular writings. Olcott was not wrong interpreting Sabhapati, though he only read Sabhapati’s work in English with Sanskrit terms archaically transliterated, and he layered current occult language onto his presentation of Sabhapati who only used adjectives like “occult” when writing in English. The Sanskrit- or Tamil-based terms in Sabhapati’s English publications tell a deeper story about the astral body in South Asia that includes Hindu deities, temple architecture, festivals, and yogic vocabulary.
Sabhapati’s intricate diagrams were practical and cosmological maps that circulated the occult world. Interpreted by occult authors, these diagrams profoundly influenced the astral plane in Theosophy and subsequent metaphysical literature, including its articulation in the Thelema of Aleister Crowley, another fascinating story. Sabhapati’s influence is apparent in Astral Dynamics, the book that started me thinking about the names, landscapes, and entities in astral planes, astral bodies, and the astral universe. Perhaps young me heard astral Sabhapati speaking across time and space.