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THE ATOMIC INVESTIGATIONS MADE BY LEADBEATER AND BESANT



(The following article is a summary of the study made by the Chemistry Department of Yale University and the full text you can read here.)


 Title:

Serious Scientific Lessons from Direct Observation of Atoms through Clairvoyance


 Index:

      1.  Introduction
      2.  The people involved
      3.  The method
      4.  First publication
      5.  An example of their discoveries
      6.  The theories on which they supported
      7.  Were they crackpots or charlatans?





1.  INTRODUCTION

In August, 1895, a small group of Theosophists gathered for a weekend in Box Hill, Surrey, to escape "malevolent thought-forms"[N2 p.49]. There, and at a subsequent meeting on a sloping bank beside the Finchley Road on Hampstead Heath, they exercised clairvoyant powers to achieve direct observation of atoms.

They considered this possible because the observer's "conception of himself can be so minimized that objects which normally are small appear to him as large", although "as each object is in rapid motion" it was necessary to use "a special form of will-power, so as to make its movement slow enough to observe the details". [OC3 p.1]

Close examination of the work of the Occult Chemists sheds light on one corner of the intellectual scene a century ago. In some ways the story is amusing, but amid the hoopla of the millennium, it can also provide science students at all levels an important lesson on the nature of scientific proof and the place of authority in science. It might help their teachers consider what lessons are most important to convey through a science curriculum.







2.  THE PEOPLE INVOLVED



Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1847-1932, a renegade Anglican clergyman, is shown left in later life as Presiding Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church, a church with six bishops for fewer than 1000 members [W p. 271, N2 p.311]. He was the first to "see" atoms and continued this line of research intermittently over a period of 38 years.



Under Leadbeater's coaching Mrs. Annie Besant, 1847-1933, acquired the same skill. She is pictured above in 1897 as a leader of the Theosophical Society. She was also an influential advocate of Indian - and Irish - Home Rule following her successive careers as an Anglican clergyman's wife, an atheist, a birth-control advocate, a university chemistry student, an executive of the socialist Fabian Society, and a radical labor organizer.



Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, 1877?-1953, Leadbeater's young Singhalese companion since 1889 (shown above right in later life) attended these scientific sessions with his white kitten, Ji [W p. 314, N1 p. 327, N2 pp. 47,49]. Although he could not himself see atoms, "Raja" took verbatim notes of the accounts of Leadbeater and Besant, and prepared diagrams for the publications. As described below, he was also charged with counting anu and dividing by 18. [OC3 p.3,6]







3.  THE METHOD

As Mrs. Besant would write 14 years later in Occult Chemistry, a series of Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements (1909):

« The method of examination employed was that of clairvoyance; there were only two observers - Mr. Leadbeater and myself - and it is very desirable that our results should be tested by others who can use the same extension of physical sight.

The researches being carried on upon the physical plane - the forms examined being gaseous and etheric only - a very slight intensification of ordinary vision is all that is necessary, and many should, therefore, be able to test our observations.

They cannot be regarded as established, by the outside world, until others have corroborated them; and we put them forward in the hope of stimulating work along this line, and of thus bringing to science, when its instruments fail it, the old, old instrument of enlarged human vision.

We then took various substances - common salt, etc. ... fragments of metals, as iron, tin, zinc, silver, gold ... pieces of ore, mineral waters, etc., etc., and, for the rarest substances, Mr. Leadbeater visited a mineralogical museum, a few miles off. In all, 57 chemical elements were examined, out of the 78 recognised by modern chemistry»
[OC1 p.2]

The latter paragraph refers to a second phase of experimentation that took place near Dresden in 1907. [OC3 p.3]







4.  FIRST PUBLICATION

Because gold proved too challenging for early observation, only hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen were reported in the first publication "Occult Chemistry", an article in the Theosophical magazine Lucifer for November, 1895 [reprinted in OC1 pp. xi-xix]. It is notable that this same month marked Röntgen's discovery of x-rays, the tool that would make atoms visible to conventional science. Subsequent observations of all the elements, and then some, would be serialized in The Theosophist and collected in three editions of Occult Chemistry (1909, 1919, 1951).







5.  AN EXAMPLE OF THEIR DISCOVERIES



Columns of the 1895 figure (right) show successive dissection and magnification of Hydrogen (left column), Oxygen (center column), and Nitrogen (right column) from the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of the entire atom (at the bottom) rising through three intermediate "etherial" levels to a common particle (at the top). "The ultimate physical atom is marked a, and is drawn only once, although it is the same throughout." [OC1 p. xiii]

Later the Occult Chemists would identify this ultimate particle with "anu", the term for the indivisible elementary particle of matter in Jain metaphysics.

The plural of anu is also anu [OC3 p.4]. It is not to be confused with the atomic mass unit (amu) of conventional science.

As indicated in the lower right corner of the top frames, H contains in all 18 anu, O contains 290 anu, and N contains 261 anu.

They noted the analogy between the anu and "protyle" which had entered Prout's theory of the elements in 1815 and was being reconsidered by Crookes and others in the late 19th Century. [OC1 p. xii]

Prout had thought that all atoms were composed of hydrogen atoms [P3,B6 pp. 82-108]. In 1902 Crookes suggested the ultimate particle might be the electron, discovered by Thomson in 1897 [C3,B6 p.195].

Having seen the anu directly, the Occult Chemists did not join Crookes, their consultant in many scientific matters, in identifying the electron with the fundamental "protyle". [OC3 p.2,6]

Although the Occult Chemists took the name of the anu from ancient Indian metaphysics, they apparently took its form from an American source less than 20 years old.







6.  THE THEORIES ON WHICH THEY SUPPORTED

The form of the anu is strongly reminiscent of the drawing of the atom concocted by Edwin D. Babbitt in 1878 to explain bonding, heat, electricity, light, color, friction, psychic power, and nearly everything else in his 290-page work: The Principles of Light and Color:



Some of the nutty ideas of Babbitt and the Occult Chemists are traceable to naive perceptions of conventional contemporary science. For example in the 1860s Lord Kelvin had been suggesting that an atom could be understood as a "vortex" in the "ether". [T]

Of course Babbitt's "spirillae" are reminiscent of the windings of electromagnetic coils, and his "torrents" look like Faraday's lines of force.

Having "seen" atoms, Besant and Leadbeater were in a position to confirm that "A fairly accurate drawing is given in Babbitt's Principles of Light and Colour, p.102" [the above figure], but they went on to claim:

« The illustrations there given of atomic combination are entirely wrong and misleading, but if the stovepipe run through the centre of the single atom be removed, the picture may be taken as correct, and will give some idea of the complexity of this fundamental unit of the physical universe»
[OC1 p. xiv]

This is somewhat confusing because Babbitt was drawing the atom, while at high astral resolution they were seeing anu within the atom.

Besant and Leadbeater added a "twist" to Babbitt's atom by publishing pictures of mirror-image (enantiomeric) "Male" and "Female" (or "positive" and "negative") anu in 1909. [OC1 p.5]



Mrs. Besant had been intensively involved with chemistry during the period 1878-1883, when, in her early thirties, she was one of the first female students and assistants in London University. At this time van't Hoff's recent proposal of mirror-image carbon compounds was a topic of intense discussion. [N1 p.176-182]

In another leap of imagination the Occult Chemists claimed that the mirror-image anu:

« These two type of anu are alike in everything save the direction of their whorls and of the force which pours through them. In the one case force pours in from the 'outside,' from the fourth-dimensional space, and passing through the atom, pours into the physical world. In the second, it pours in from the physical world, and out through the atom into the 'outside' again, i.e., vanishes from the physical world»
[OC1, 5]

The visual appeal of the Babbitt-Besant-Leadbeater atom-anu has given it a measure of permanence. It has cropped up recently not only in many a fringe science web page (for example one where it is called the "Compton Radius Vortex"), but also in a series of publications where it is proposed as the structure for subquarks. [P2]







7.  WERE THEY CRACKPOTS OR CHARLATANS?

In the introduction to Occult Chemistry (1909) Mrs. Besant modestly wrote:

« An observer's duty is to state clearly his observations; it is for others to judge of their value, and to decide whether they indicate lines of research that may be profitably followed up by scientists»
[OC1 p.1]

Experimental x-ray diffraction and spectroscopy, and quantum mechanical calculations which have been amply justified by cross checking with a great variety of experimental techniques, have yielded a consistent picture of the atom that is completely different from that of the Occult Chemists.

Near the end Jinarajadasa was backing and filling in his argument that the physicists' pictures might have been distorted by the electric and magnetic fields of their experiments.

In his view "the occult investigators and the physicists are working from two sides of a great [mountain] range", still he felt "sure that some day in the future they will meet." [OC3 p.6]

Though a true believer can never be converted, it is long since clear to any fair-minded observer that conventional and occult chemistry will never meet, because Besant and Leadbeater were totally wrong. They were plainly not seeing atoms.


However deluded they may have been, one can ask whether they were faithful in truthfully reporting what they thought they saw. Were they innocent, earnest crackpots or cynical mountebanks?


Chemist Anthony Butler has given a charitable interpretation of the motivation of Besant, Leadbeater and Jinarajadasa,

« With their fanciful descriptions, did they set out to deceive a gullible public? I think this is unlikely and quite out of character for Annie and her companions.

She may have been wayward and impetuous but never dishonest.
The explanation must be one of collective self-deception. In a state of semitrance, the normal inhibitory processes in the brain were modified and a suggestion of one of the group, probably based on scientific knowledge, was taken up and embroidered by others. Without the scientific knowledge we have today to act as a check, the process could continue with greater and greater flights of fancy»
[B7 p.42]


Many of his contemporary Theosophists did not view Leadbeater so charitably:

«  [When a former Theosophist] "looked at the collection of books Leadbeater had in his personal library, he said to himself, 'He has read all the ancient histories of practically every civilization in the world. No wonder he could fit Krishnamurti's past lives into these histories.' That confirmed his scepticism about Leadbeater's powers of clairvoyance"»
[K, Chapter 3]

Further skepticism about Leadbeater's character is evident in documents from the notorious Leadbeater Affair of 1906-1908, the same period when he was observing atoms and preparing the first edition of Occult Chemistry for publication.

Unknowingly the Occult Chemists left quantitative evidence suggesting that, from the beginning, at least Leadbeater or Jinarajadasa, and perhaps Besant or all three, cynically intended to deceive.

Quantitative Evidence of Skulduggery. Already in 1895, when they had counted 18 anu in Hydrogen, 290 in Oxygen, and 261 in Nitrogen. They perceived that this did not fit well with the atomic weights of those elements, But despite those differences they kept insisting with their mistakes.







OBSERVATIONS

Here, I only put the most relevant part, because it is a very long study that also contains a lot of scientific information that for those who are not familiar only going to confuse them.

And I completely agree with his author, except for the fact that clairvoyance is being dismissed only because Leadbeater and Besant said many falsehoods.

However, my research has led me to conclude that clairvoyance is very likely a real faculty, and that among many other things, clairvoyance does have the capacity to see in the immensely small.

But the detail is that clairvoyance is not something that is easily accessible to humans, since the wisdom teachers explained that it takes many years to develop clairvoyance, and still many more years to master it.

Therefore, it is not something that is within our reach. And that is why when an esoteric instructor boasts that his clairvoyance is very developed, this is a factor that makes me distrust his credibility, because until now all those who have asseverated it have turned out to be liars.

And that has been the case: Rudolf Steiner, Samael Aun Weor, and as this article demonstrates, also Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant.












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