(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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