Annie Besant – { feuilleton }

Desert Sunrise (no date) by Kay Robinson.

• RIP Richard Horowitz, a composer and musician whose soundtrack work makes the headlines but who I’ve always known best via his appearances on albums by Jon Hassell and others, and his collaborations with his partner, Sussan Deyhim. Majoun (1996) is my favourite among the Horowitz and Deyhim albums but it’s one of those releases that received little attention at the time and hasn’t been reissued since. Related: Revisiting Morocco, Magic, Majoun, Horowitz and Deyhim: Robert Phoenix talks to Horowitz and Deyhim for the final issue of Mondo 2000. | Desert Equations (For Brion Gysin) (1986).

• “A typeface is like an orchestra, and the type designer is its conductor.” Dr Nadine Chahine on the music of type design.

• At Colossal: Flip through more than 5,000 pages of this sprawling 19th-century atlas of natural history.

• At Unquiet Things: Become one with the moss, mushrooms, and magic in the art of Brett Manning.

• At Public Domain Review: Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Occult Chemistry (1908).

• New music: Reality Engine by 36, and Transformation Sonor by Hannes Strobl.

• Photos of undersea life for the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – April 2024 at Ambientblog.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Book.

• The Blue Flame (1981) by David Byrne (with Richard Horowitz) | Ravinia/Vancouver (1987) by Jon Hassell (with Richard Horowitz) | Bade Saba (The Wind Of Saba) (2000) by Sussan Deyhim (with Richard Horowitz)

Like yesterday’s squid, some of these Theosophist illustrations from Thought-Forms (1905) by Charles Webster Leadbeater & Annie Besant, and Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of different types of men as seen by means of trained clairvoyance (1902) by Leadbeater alone, have been reproduced for years in books yet you seldom see the complete set. The University of Heidelberg has scans of both volumes so I’ll direct the curious there for detailed explanations of the illustrations which were intended to graphically portray mental states, and the auras which Theosophists believed surrounded the human body. The diagrams above are harmonographs created by pendulum motion, and evidently seemed sufficiently strange for Leadbeater and Besant to interpret them as representations of emotional experience. They’ve always made me think of the similar pendulum drawings used by Saul Bass in his Vertigo title sequence, although I’ve never seen any indication that Bass had these particular diagrams in mind. In the pictures below there’s also a suitably spiky depiction of an angry person’s aura, and representations of music emerging from a cathedral in the form of polychrome mushroom clouds.

Continue reading “Thought-Forms and Auras”

Tag: Annie Besant

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Thought-Forms and Auras