﻿Astral Travel is considered by many Magic practitioners as a significant part of
their practice or otherwise acknowledged as a possible, even desirable technique to master
along one’s esoteric path. But what is Astral Travel,
and what types were exercised in the 19th and 20th centuries within the Theosophical Society
and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn? Stay tuned to find out.
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Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium.
I’m a PhD and a University lecturer and this is your online resource for the
academic study of Magic, Esotericism, Paganism, and all things occult.
Astral Travel can be defined as the act of leaving one’s physical
body to travel to other realms of reality, other dimensions or to places in the world
that allow for interactions with various entities, objects and structures otherwise
not accessible within the ordinary inhabitation of our physical body.
Similarly to other techniques employed in Magic, Astral Travel has been perceived and entertained
in different ways over the years. In my research with contemporary practitioners, I have
witnessed different perceptions of what Astral Travel entails and what it is. Astral Travel is
sometimes perceived as a state or a place accessed during the dream state, sometimes during the
waking states – spontaneously or purposefully - and other times during meditative practices
or through altered states of consciousness. Leaving aside the contemporary discourse
around Astral Travel, I want to present to you its historical origin and theoretical roots.
The concept of Astral Travel as we understand it today is, in fact, relatively recent and has
its roots in the Western occult tradition and more specifically in the 19th and 20th Century.
Indeed, in 1895, the Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater published ‘The Astral Plane’, which
described the various sceneries, phenomena, human, and non-human inhabitants one might encounter
in the astral environment. For the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn travelling or “descrying” on
the astral plane was an important activity an initiate was required to master in order
to “obtain a clear idea of the relation of Man to the Universe, and to the spiritual planes”.
Later on, these concepts of the astral and the
techniques to travel in it were adopted by many occultists, including Aleister Crowley
and Edgar Cayce. They then permeated through the twentieth century and - by the mid-to-late
twentieth century these ideas and techniques were diffused and incorporated into numerous
groups and esoteric religions, including New Age circles and contemporary Paganism.
Yet, it might be of historical interest to know that the idea of an astral plane as a distinct
realm emerged during the late nineteenth century. It stemmed from a specific perception of the
cosmos, the self and its relationship to the body. Particularly,
by closing the divide between this world and the next, and the emergence of the perception of the
self as being separable from the body. By the end of the nineteenth century,
occultists like Leadbeater could assert that the astral plane is an “absolute reality” and that
“the objects and inhabitants of the astral plane are real in the exact the same way as our bodies”.
Yet, this was not the only way the astral plane was understood at the time.
For members of the Golden Dawn, for instance, the astral plane existed
symbolically and was structured according to elaborate systems of correspondences.
Now, looking at how the concept of Astral Travel could have begun to be conceived,
we ought to grasp that the very possibility to leave the physical body behind and
enter another world requires a specific conceptual understanding of the self.
As John L. Crow explains, foundational to our modern understanding of the astral plane
was the sense of self that emerged from Cartesian dualism. The sense of self
coming out of Christianity, especially Pauline Christianity, is one in which the self is
internal and personal. This changed with the philosophy of René Descartes, which identified
the mind with consciousness and self-awareness. Mind was then placed in opposition to the body.
Esoteric traditions, therefore, combined a Cartesian dualistic understanding of
the consciousness as being separate and separable
from the physical body with other existing esoteric models of the self. For instance,
in Neoplatonism, we also have the notion of the physical body as separate from the soul.
Bridging the divide body-consciousness - or material vs immaterial self - is what
Wouter Hanegraaff describes as “subtle bodies”, whose divisions, enumeration and constitution
differ from tradition to tradition, but are often seen as mediating or comprising parts of a person.
There are indeed numerous influences that contributed to the synthesis
operated by the Theosophical understandings of the self.
the Historian Julie Hall traces them back to Neoplatonism, Egyptian cosmologies, Kabbalah,
Paracelsianism, Spiritualism - just to mention a few.
Now, we’ve seen that Astral Travel underlies a substantial difference between the
physical and the non-physical, both in the world and in the self, such that a
‘subtle’ – less material or non-material part of us can travel through the material
and the non-material realms of the cosmos. To do that, you need to have a distinction
between the traveller and the place you travel to. I – Angela – wouldn’t be able to travel to Italy
unless Italy was something separate and distinct from me. If I and Italy were the
same thing, I would already be Italy and no travel would be possible, nor required
because there wouldn’t be a distance between the subject travelling and the object travelled to.
Astral Travel also underlies a distinction between a more material self and a spiritual one,
with the latter being seen as able to directly connect with the transcendent.
The result of this perception was the creation of a double-self,
or simply “the double” as it was frequently called in Theosophical circles, which caused
individuals to identify the self as both mind (subject) and body (object) simultaneously.
Time now to explore the types of Astral Travel.
There are two types of Astral Travel discussed in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries occult tradition. The first type sees the individual leave their
body and travel to the astral side of the material world,
either in the present, the past or the future. Crow, labels this as “geo-temporal Astral Travel”.
The second type sees the individual travel in a world very different from the material one;
an environment controlled by symbols and symbolic correspondences rather than
natural laws and is labelled by Crow as “symbolic Astral Travel”.
Both in the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, practitioners engaged
in each type of Astral Travel, but the members of the Theosophical Society were more concerned
with issues regarding the astral and its relation to the material world.
For Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the astral plane was simply another dimension of the physical
world, but one not controlled by the ordinary laws of physics. When the double travelled,
it travelled in the astral dimension of the physical world. Yet the two were so
close that when the double left the physical body it could see the material world as if
it was looking at it while embodied. Those in the material world could also see the double,
which generally looked like the physical body, including clothing. I would be a Goth double.
In the early years of the Theosophical society, Astral Travelling (also called
“liberating the double”) was seen as the highest possible achievement in Magic.
In contrast, the members of the Golden Dawn understood their Astral Travel experiences
as part of a magical and initiatory journey as travelling on the astral plane helped develop a
deeper understanding of the self and the universe. An example of this would be an Astral Travel
experience where a member entered a symbolic astral environment using a tarot card as a portal.
Differently from the Theosophists, the symbolic Astral Travel was experienced while awake. The
Golden Dawn’s internal organizational instructions, called “Flying Rolls”,
give detailed instructions as to how to interact with the astral as well as examples
of what one should experience. The Golden Dawn divided their work into three types:
Descrying in the Spirit Vision, Astral Projection, and Rising on the Planes.
And what is your knowledge or indeed experience with Astral Travel? Is
there something you’d like me to cover in further details in another episode?
Let me know all of your thoughts down in the comments section!
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