Aura and Magnetism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 5 pages

An unusually direct source: a transcription copied by Dara Eklund from a microfilm of the Blavatsky Lodge Minutes Book, recording a discussion at a meeting held at Maycot on 16 June 1887 about the aura and the magnetism of an individual. It is a record of what was said rather than a composed essay, and the distinction it draws is correspondingly compact.

Magnetism was stated to be an emanation arising from all things — the earth, animal and vegetable life alike — a physiological thing arising from prana, the individual life principle. The aura is something else: an individualisation of the universal life principle, Jiva, which endures with a man in spite of his periodical changes of state and plane. It is a magnetic emanation of prana, but in combination with manas and buddhi, and it is given as the origin of the feeling of sympathy and antipathy between people. Two further remarks are recorded in the same passage: that memory is the effect of buddhi upon manas, and that the process of psychologizing is performed by will-power, working by and upon the aura.

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