Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation

By Annie Besant, Charles Webster Leadbeater and Mitch Horowitz

First released in 1901, Thought-Forms was an in-depth exploration on the visual manifestations of thoughts and the notion that they exist as objects. Conceived by renowned theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, the book consists of 58 illustrations based on Besant and Leadbeater’s clairvoyant observations on how music, emotions, experiences, and colors affect thought forms. Expanding beyond its original readership, the book would have great influence on twentieth-century art and go on to inspire many artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee. This updated edition features a new introduction by famed occult author, Mitch Horowitz.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sacred Bones Books
• Release date: Dec 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781736146903

Annie Besant

Annie Besant (1847 - 1933) fue una destacada figura británica, reconocida por su papel en diversas esferas como el activismo social, la teosofía y la política. Se unió a la Sociedad Teosófica, atraída por sus enseñanzas espirituales y esotéricas. Fue discípula de Helena Blavatsky y asumió un papel de liderazgo dentro de la organización. Su trabajo en la Sociedad Teosófica la llevó a viajar extensamente por el mundo, difundiendo sus ideas sobre la espiritualidad, la reencarnación y el Karma.Uno de los aspectos más destacados de su vida fue su compromiso con la lucha por la independencia de India y se convirtió en una figura clave en el Movimiento por la Independencia. Fue presidenta del Congreso Nacional Indio en 1917 y trabajó incansablemente por la reforma social y política en el país. Fue una pionera en la lucha por los derechos de las mujeres, una defensora de la educación secular y una ferviente promotora de la espiritualidad teosófica. Su vida estuvo marcada por una búsqueda constante de la verdad y la justicia, influenciando a generaciones de pensadores y activistas.

Book preview

Thought Forms

Copyright © 1905 Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-9996099-9-6

Published by Sacred Bones Books, 2020

Printed in China

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All requests and correspondence can be addressed to

Sacred Bones Books

144 N. 7th Street #413

Brooklyn, NY 11249

CLARIFICATIONS

There is a disparity between the title on the cover, "Thought Forms, and how thought-forms" is written in the interior. Throughout the book’s publication this discrepancy has been consistently upheld. We’ve chosen to continue this disparity as a matter of historical record.

There is bibliographical confusion about the publication date of Thought Forms, which is often listed as 1901. Historical records indicate that 1901 was introduced in error in a later printing and was subsequently repeated. John L. Crow has made a convincing case for the 1905 origin date. More information can be found in his wonderfully researched article: L. Crow, John. "Thought Forms: A Bibliographic Error," Theosophical History XVI, No.3 – 4 (July – October 2012); 126 – 27.

PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS

Lucy Lord Campana is an artist whose observational based painting practice explores the limits of our collective vision. Recent projects include images from the Hubble Space Telescope, a series around X-ray use in diamond mining, and methane detection with infrared technology. She teaches drawing and painting at Columbia University.

Dr. Victoria Ferentinou is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ioannina where she teaches art theory and history of art. She is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on international Surrealism and women artists, and on the relationship between modern art and esotericism. She is also a co-editor of Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge 2017).

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian whose books include Occult America, One Simple Idea, and The Miracle Club. His book Awakened Mind is one of the first works of New Thought translated and published in Arabic. The Chinese government has censored his work. Twitter @MitchHorowitz | Instagram @MitchHorowitz23

Troy Conrad Therrien is the curator of architecture and digital initiatives at the Guggenheim Museum and adjunct faculty at Columbia University and the Architectural Association where he teaches design studios and theory seminars to re-contextualize architecture through magical, animist, and other esoteric perspectives.

PREFACE

Ironically, the first copy of Thought Forms I was able to find was printed entirely in black and white. Originally printed in 1905, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater created one of the first attempts to put form to thoughts and emotions previously deemed beyond vision.

Over one hundred years later, I am still fascinated with the ideas presented in this book. The possibility of making the unseen visible and giving form to that which is outside of normal vision, continues to expand through artistic practice, scientific invention, and imaging technologies.

Besant emphasizes the task of the artist in the foreword to this book: to paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds is a hard and thankless task; so much the more gratitude is due to those who have attempted it. They needed coloured fire, and had only ground earths.

I want to thank Sacred Bones for making this beautiful book accessible once again in the way it was originally intended to be. Thought Forms is a reminder that we still need coloured fire, a vehicle to understand our past a little clearer and bring the present into sharper focus.

—Lucy Lord Campana

VISIONS FROM SOMEWHERE: THE OCCULT BACKGROUND OF THOUGHT FORMS

by Mitch Horowitz

It is sometimes difficult to appreciate the impact that the late-nineteenth century (and ongoing) occult movement called Theosophy had on global culture —spiritually, politically, and artistically.

Thought Forms, which emerged in 1905 from what might be considered the second generation of the Theosophical Society’s leaders, Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, while not possessed of the arousing title and thunderous impact of earlier Theosophical works like The Secret Doctrine (1888) by founder Madame H.P. Blavatsky, may, in its concision and intrepidness, prove the most widely read, lasting, and directly influential book to emerge from the revolution that Theosophy ignited. By many estimates, Thought Forms marks the germination of abstract art.

To speak of revolutions can seem exaggerated. But there is no other term for what this cluster of esoteric seekers accomplished, and how that appears in the endurance of Thought Forms.

The Theosophical Society emerged in New York City in 1875, where it was founded by a small circle of seekers—who months earlier had briefly called themselves The Miracle Club —and led by the Russian world traveler Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, a retired staff colonel from the Civil War who had made some of the earliest arrests in the Lincoln assassination. The society’s aim was to explore the esoteric truths of all religions. Blavatsky and Olcott were first united in their fascination with Spiritualism, or talking to the dead, but less as an end to itself and more as a doorway to Blavatsky’s real aim: opening the West to Eastern spirituality and revealing a primeval occult philosophy that underscored all faiths.

Within a brief time Blavatsky attracted widespread press coverage and influential acolytes (including Thomas Edison) —only for her and Olcott to depart New York City for India in 1878, relocating to a nation then as unfamiliar to most Westerners as the surface of Mars. Nearly a century before the Beatles’ trek to Rishikesh—and decades before the literary sojourns of W. Somerset Maugham and the Eastern imaginings of books and movies like Lost Horizon —Blavatsky and Olcott laid the template for the Westerner seeking wisdom in the East.

Blavatsky and Olcott’s travels made a lasting impact. Olcott ignited Buddhist revivals in nations pressed under the joint machinery of colonialism and missionary campaigns. His passing is marked as a national holiday today in Sri Lanka. The pair also helped spark the Indian independence revolution completed by Gandhi. In 1885, Theosophists founded the Indian National Congress, the movement’s policy-making body. Blavatsky’s successor, English reformer Annie Besant, the coauthor of this volume, was elected its first woman president in 1917.

It was Besant herself who bestowed upon Gandhi the title by which he became world famous: Mahatma, a Hindu term for Great Soul and the same term by which Theosophy called its own reputedly hidden Masters, advanced adepts said to clandestinely direct the group’s activities.

When Besant and her collaborator Leadbeater, an iron-willed and sometimes ruthless British seeker and author, collaborated on Thought Forms, Theosophy was riding a wave of cultural significance. Allies, students, and members included poets W.B. Yeats and George William Russell (Æ), composer Igor Stravinsky, American reformer and vice president Henry A. Wallace, and artists Piet Mondrian, Nicholas Roerich, Agnes Pelton, and Hilma af Klint, whose own work has recently undergone revelatory reassessment in light of its Theosophical influences. This almost hard-to-believe (yet still fragmentary) roster returns us to the significance of Thought Forms.

Even a glance through the plates in Thought Forms reveals the nascence of psychedelia, spiritual expressionism, and abstract art itself. Thought Forms was a widely acknowledged influence on pioneering abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944), a member of the Theosophical Society who owned his own copy. Hence, to call the book visionary, as with calling the authors’ backgrounds revolutionary, is not hyperbole. What was the inspiration for such unprecedented visuals?

I mentioned earlier that Theosophy considered itself an occult movement —by occult I mean belief in extra-physical forces whose effects are felt on and through us. The term is rooted in the Latin occultus, for unseen or hidden, popularized during the Renaissance to refer to primeval and vanished religious traditions, which Blavatsky said emerged from a still older and unifying

Reviews for Thought Forms

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and CW Leadbeater is both a classic of theosophy and an explanation of how, for those attune to it, those thoughts present themselves.

While I am not fully convinced (because I haven't experienced it rather than denying the possibility) of the ability to see thoughts in quite this way, I also accept that we emit far more than most of us realize. This book offers some guidance for what we might see/look for. As for how one opens oneself to the possibility of seeing these I don't know, though I would be interested in finding out.

This work, along with the excellent illustrations and explanations, took me in a slightly different direction because of my interests. I think it would be interesting to reread both works of fiction and biographical books (especially autobiographies and memoirs) and pay close attention to how people are portrayed. Perhaps without conscious realization writers known for wonderful descriptions are in fact seeing some elements of these thought-forms. Again, just the direction my mind took, I may in fact be misusing these ideas.

I would recommend this to readers who like intellectual history as well as those seeking ways to better exist in the here and now.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.