The Subtle Body: A Genealogy(Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism)

About the Book

How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the "subtle body," positing some sort of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. Simon Cox traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years.This study is an intellectual history of the subtle body concept from its origins in late antiquity through the Renaissance into the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. It begins with a prehistory of the idea, rooted as it is in third-century Neoplatonism. It then proceeds to the signifier "subtle body" in its earliest English uses amongst the Cambridge Platonists. After that, it looks forward to those Orientalist fathers of Indology, who, in their earliest translations of Sanskrit philosophy relied heavily on the Cambridge Platonist lexicon, and thereby brought Indian philosophy into what had hitherto been a distinctly platonic discourse. At this point, the story takes a little reflexive stroll into the source of the author's own interest in this strange concept, looking at Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical import, expression, and popularization of the concept. Cox then zeroes in on Aleister Crowley, focusing on the subtle body in fin de siecle occultism. Finally, he turns to Carl Jung, his colleague Frederic Spiegelberg, and the popularization of the idea of the subtle body in the Euro-American counterculture. This book is for anyone interested in yogic, somatic, or energetic practices, and will be very useful to scholars and area specialists who rely on this term in dealing with Hindu, Daoist, and Buddhist texts.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Restoring the Body of Light 1. Resurrecting an Old Idea 2. Morphologies of the Subtle Body Chapter One: Vehicles of the Soul from Plato to Philoponus 1. Porphyry's Compounded Vehicle 2. The Divine Iamblichus 3. Platonism in Theory and Practice 4. Proclus: The Great Systematizer 5. Damascius: The Last Scholarch 6. John Philoponus and the Incredible Myth Chapter Two: The Body of Light in Renaissance England 1. Subtle Bodies, Descartes, and Hobbes 2. Ralph Cudworth's Vehicles of the Soul 3. Plastick Nature as Ontological Mediator 4. Henry More's Cosmology 5. The Philosophical Romance of Joseph Glanvill 6. Anne Conway's Spiritual Monism 7. Cambridge Kabbalah 8. Arguing with Machines Chapter Three: Oriental Origins 1. Chevalier de Ramsay and Chinese Orientalism 2. Henry Thomas Colebrooke 3. The Sheaths of Vedanta 4. Beyond Colebrooke 5. Max Müller's Six Systems Kuden: Day of the Samurai Chapter Four: The Wisdom of the Mahatmas 1. Tibetological Foundations 2. Helena Blavatsky and the Tibetan Mahatmas 3. Subtle Embodiment in Isis Unveiled 4. Subtle Bodies in The Secret Doctrine 5. The Creolization of the Subtle Body 6. Tibet Beyond Blavatsky Kuden: The Secret Body of the Ninja Chapter Five: Theosophical Gnosis and Astral Hermeneutics 1. Blavatsky's Astral Bodies 2. Annie Besant's Esoteric Christianity 3. Leadbeater's Christian Gnosis 4. G.R.S. Mead, the Subtle Body, and the Esoteric Tradition 5. Gnostic Bodies Unleashed Chapter Six: Crowley, Orient, and Occult 1. From Theosophy to Crowleyanity 2. The Magus and the Orient 3. Crowley's Ontology? 4. The Subtle Body in Practice 5. From Creole to Hybrid Kuden: The Daoist Alchemical Body Chapter Seven: The Alchemical Body of Carl Jung 1. From Mead to Jung 2. The Secret of the Golden Flower 3. Subtle Bodies Top-Down or Ground-Up? 4. The Yogas of India and Tibet 5. Nietzsche, Snake, and Eagle 6. Subtle Body and Eschaton Kuden: The Tibetan Vajra Body Chapter Eight: From Eranos to Esalen 1. The Religion of No-Religion 2. Stanford Counterculture 3. Out of Esalen Conclusion: What is the Subtle Body? 1. Radical Somatic Mutability 2. Last Thoughts on the Subtle Body Bibliography

About the Author :
Simon Paul Cox, PhD, is an independent scholar and translator who works primarily in Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek. His research focuses on mysticism and the body.

Review :
Finally—a book that tracks the idea of a subtle body within Western history. Cox starts from early Greek formulations of a subtle body through its renaissance renditions up through the especially fruitful period of modernity, with the West's extensive borrowing from Indian traditions, to offer a history of how we acquired that ubiquitous phantasm of the new-age subtle body. With his own story interspersed, Cox's delightful history captivates throughout. How do we imagine, experience, and discuss the phenomenology of embodied being? Is there an essential subtle body? And if so, what is it? In this book, we join Simon Cox on his comparative journey from late antiquity to modernity, from East to West and back again, to track and catch the sparrow. The journey to track subtle matter and particles, pneuma and meridians, energies and light is deep and rich – even glorious. At the end of the journey, we find ourselves at the top of a spiral staircase, looking out, wondering at the mutability of our perceptions of a subtle body. We are challenged to consider whether the subtle body can be sufficiently analyzed as an object of knowledge at all, or whether, as Cox determines, the subtle body is what it does.