Astral Projection

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Astral projection names a practice and the doctrine that warrants it: that the human being wears a second, finer body inside the first, and that this body — trained, or surprised at the edge of sleep — can come loose, travel where the flesh cannot, and return. The traditions that taught it disagreed about almost everything else — what the second body is made of, where it goes, what it risks — and agreed on the anatomy: a vehicle; somewhere for it to go; a way home.

The oldest worked-out form of the vehicle is Neoplatonic. Philosophers from Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305) to Proclus (412–485) held the incorporeal soul to be joined to the gross body by subtle envelopes — the ochēma, the “vehicle” — a doctrine assembled out of Plato’s chariot myth and the Timaeus. Proclus’s systematized version counts three: a luminous vehicle permanently housing the rational soul, a pneumatic one for the non-rational soul, a shell-like third acquired at incarnation. The scheme was not ornament: it explained how an immaterial soul can be linked to a body at all, how souls move in space, how they suffer after death, where imagination resides. Whether ritual could actually move the soul was disputed inside the school itself: Porphyry, in the Letter to Anebo, doubted that rites reached past nature, and Iamblichus (c. 245–c. 325) — for whom, in the scholarship’s account, the vehicle serves as an interface between soul and bodies — answered him with a defense of theurgy, salvation by ritual means. Proclus described the gods as seen with closed eyes, through the luminous garment of the soul. The standard scholarly treatment of Proclus draws the line outright: the vehicle theory is “the psychic ‘astral body,’ familiar nowadays from modern theosophic theories.”

Renaissance magic inherited both the scheme and the exercise. Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) transmits the mediating substance — a spirit of the world by which celestial virtues are united to the bodies below — and Ficino, Agrippa, and Diacceto theorized the vis imaginativa, the trained image-making power, in terms a Victorian magical order would later recapitulate; the visualization exercise itself reaches back to Plotinus, who taught the building of a maximally vivid image of the cosmos as a receptacle for vision. Paracelsus (1493–1541) is the tradition’s standard Renaissance anchor for a sidereal body in man, though the attribution comes down as the nineteenth century read him, not from his own pages, and is reported here on that basis.

The word “astral” became a system in Paris in the 1850s. Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse-Louis Constant, 1810–1875), in Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–56) and the Histoire de la magie (1860), taught the astral light: “an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form” — the imagination of Nature, storing every image, through which a trained will can act. Lévi substantially conceded the debt himself: the astral light was Reichenbach’s odic force dilated into a cosmology. Lévi also read Paracelsian medicine as addressed not to the material body but to an interior, luminous body, vehicle and source of sensation — the retro-reading on which the Paracelsus link mostly rests.

Theosophy made the vocabulary English and the feat an ambition. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York on 8 September 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and William Quan Judge, and its first decade was operatively minded: the period’s scholarly history records that projecting the double was esteemed “the highest achievement of magic.” Blavatsky’s table of the human principles (The Key to Theosophy, 1889) places the astral body precisely — the linga sharira, “The Double, the phantom body,” distinct from the kama rupa, seat of the animal desires. After her death in 1891 the second generation codified the scheme and quietly moved the words. Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane (1895) maps the plane as a country — seven subdivisions, scenery, inhabitants — under a stated rule of evidence: no fact admitted unless “confirmed by the testimony of at least two independent trained investigators.” Besant’s Man and His Bodies (1896) teaches an astral body that can be purified into a usable vehicle of consciousness, separating in sleep to hover above the sleeper. But in Besant–Leadbeater usage “astral body” now named the emotional body, and a new term, “etheric double,” took over Blavatsky’s older sense — a fork the tradition’s own encyclopedia flags as a source of doctrinal disagreement. A sentence about what Theosophy held the astral body to be must say which generation is speaking.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) is where the practice survives as procedure on paper. Its inner order taught what the instructional papers — the Flying Rolls — call skrying and “travelling in the spirit vision”: a banishing ritual; prolonged contemplation of a symbol, typically a Tattwa card, until it persists as a vision; the vibration of divine names; first skrying, perceiving a scene reflected in the symbol as in a mirror, then travelling — projecting, in Moina Mathers’s instruction, “the astral beyond the sphere of Sensation,” passing through the symbol into the scene — with symbol- tests at every stage to expose illusion. The adepts themselves differed about what was happening. Mathers writes operationally, as of a journey. J. W. Brodie-Innes proposes that the symbol merely sensitizes a portion of the brain to images, concedes the resulting worlds are to him “no more solid than the pictures of a Kinetoscope,” and describes consciousness extruding into a body either created for the purpose or invoked out of the astral sphere — he declines to decide which. The papers reached print late, through Regardie’s The Golden Dawn (1937–40) and Francis King’s 1971 anthology, whose title — Astral Projection, Ritual Magic, and Alchemy — retroactively filed the work under a name the order had not used.

The modern popular doctrine descends largely from one Wisconsin youth and one psychical researcher. Sylvan Muldoon (1903–1969) dated his first projection to 1915, at twelve, at a spiritualist camp in Clinton, Iowa: waking paralysis, vibration, pressure at the back of the head, then floating horizontally above his own sleeping body — joined to it, he reported, by an “elastic-like cable” from the sleeping forehead to the back of the double’s head, whose tug eventually snapped him home. He wrote to Hereward Carrington (1880–1958), disputing the claim that a French study had said everything on the subject; the collaboration produced The Projection of the Astral Body (1929), the practice’s modern manual, and The Phenomena of Astral Projection (1951), which argued from collected cases — the cord a recurring feature — for an etheric body and for survival. The silver cord of later popular literature, and the canonical sequence of paralysis, vibrations, separation, cord, and return, descend from these books more than from any older source.

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) arrived from outside the lineage altogether. A radio broadcasting executive, he had set up a research division in 1956 to study what sound does to consciousness; in spring 1958, during those experiments, the sequence began unbidden — vibrations, paralysis, then floating against the ceiling, looking down at his own body. Journeys Out of the Body (1971) carried the experience to a mass audience under the laboratory’s neutral name rather than the tradition’s. The institutional turn followed. His team seized on binaural beats — a nineteenth-century auditory discovery: two slightly mismatched tones, one to each ear, produce a perceived beat — and built audio programs claimed to entrain brain waves and synchronize the cerebral hemispheres: Hemi-Sync, first patented in 1975. Workshops at Esalen in 1973 grew into a public program; the first Gateway course ran in 1977 with forty participants, and the organization took the name The Monroe Institute. That the recordings carry a listener toward the projection state is the institute’s claim, made in the institute’s voice.

The doctrine’s oddest documentary episode is military. In 1983 Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell, tasked by the commander of the US Army Operational Group, produced “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” — an attempt, with input from the biomedical engineer Itzhak Bentov, to give the institute’s training a non-occult frame — biofeedback, hypnosis, holography, physics — and advise the Army on its uses. The checkable record it preserves is negative: coast-to-coast exercises in which participants tried to read numbers from a distant screen never came out exactly right. The CIA approved declassification in 2003 — with page 25 missing and page 24 ending mid-sentence. A TikTok-driven revival of interest in 2021 made the gap a minor internet mystery, complete with a petition and FOIA requests the agency answered: it had never had the page. The journalist Thobey Campion resolved it: the institute had held the complete report all along — it had sat, in its own description, “in a barn” — and after an organizational change the page was released. It opens on the Absolute: energy uncontained by time or space, consciousness attaining self-knowledge by projecting a hologram of itself — Bentov’s cosmology in staff-officer prose. A high-resolution reinterpretation of the page was later sold as an NFT.

The same first-person event has a laboratory history — case collections, induction experiments, target tests — which belongs to the entry on the out-of- body experience. What belongs here is the difference of grammar. The tradition’s vocabulary decides the ontology in advance: something, in the doctrine’s terms, actually departs, moves on a real plane, stays tethered, returns. Yet the tradition’s most careful documents already contain the rival reading — Brodie-Innes wondering whether travelling was more than extended perception, the one military assessment in the lineage recording that its checkable exercises failed.

A last observation is editorial: the doctrine’s most arresting property is not any single claim but its constancy of shape. Across fifteen centuries the anatomy has held — a vehicle, a plane, a tether, a way back — while the dress has changed completely, and the dress is always the most authoritative idiom the age can offer: school-philosophy in late antiquity, medicine in the Renaissance, Victorian imponderables in Lévi, rules of evidence in Theosophy, patents and hemisphere language at the institute, holograms and staff-study prose in the Army’s one assessment. Each age lends the doctrine its idiom and takes it back; none has ever touched the anatomy. It is the oldest part, unchanged since Proclus: something finer than the body, held to leave it, and to come back.

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