Auras of Mediums and Adepts

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 6 pages

Six pages, and in origin a single editorial footnote. A correspondent writing in The Theosophist in 1884 had relayed a puzzle: a learned English occultist, asking a clairvoyant why he himself was insensible to spirit influence, was told that the clairvoyant saw sensitives surrounded by a dispersed cloud of aura about the head, while in others the same aura appeared in pyramidal form — and that this form was what prevented spirit influence making itself felt. The correspondent asked the editor to throw some light on it, and Blavatsky's reply is the substance of this file.

The distinction matters more than its brevity suggests, because it separates two conditions that popular spiritualism ran together: the medium, open and therefore vulnerable, and the adept, self-contained and therefore not. The frontispiece is the Aura of the Yogi in Samadhi, taken from The True Colours of Man in the Major Works series, where the correspondences of colour and form are treated at length. A small document, but a useful one for anyone trying to hold the two categories apart.

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