Overcoming the Drawing Power of the Astral Light

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 8 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. VII, No. 39, November 1890, pages 177–85; this excerpt is from Blavatsky Collected Writings XII pages 372–74, under the heading “Psychic and Noetic Action.” The full text appears under the title “Kamic versus Manasic Action” in the Confusing Words series, so a reader wanting the whole argument should go there. The running head asks: who is lord and master?

The passage begins by defining its term rather than assuming it. A medium, when the word is not applied simply to things and objects, is supposed to be a person through whom the action of another person or being is manifested or transmitted. The disagreement is then set out plainly and without misrepresenting the other side: Spiritualists, believing in communication with disembodied spirits and that these can impress sensitives to transmit messages, regard mediumship as a blessing and a great privilege; Theosophists, who do not believe in the communion of spirits as Spiritualists do, regard the same gift as one of the most dangerous of abnormal nervous diseases. The explanation offered for that judgment is physiological rather than moral, which is what makes it worth reading: a medium is described as one in whose personal Ego or terrestrial mind the percentage of astral light so preponderates as to impregnate the whole physical constitution, every organ and cell being thereby attuned and subjected to an enormous and abnormal tension, with the mind permanently immersed in that deceptive light. The title's phrase indicates what the file is finally about — not condemnation of the faculty but the question of which of the two is to command the other.

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