Podcast episode
December 29, 2021
Episode 130: Methodologies for Studying the Subtle Body
In this episode we discuss the ancient and modern ideas about ‘subtle bodies’ found in western esoteric currents and more widely in cultures around the world. The problematic status of such invisible entities – they cannot be seen, smelled, or touched, but are often seen as possessing a greater, more fundamental reality than the more accessible physical body – raises serious methodological problems for scholars studying them.
How should we even talk about these strange entities? Is ‘subtle body’, a term arising in western esotericism rather than scholarship, the best candidate for a useful descriptor?
How are we to interpret statements, often phenomenological, about subtle-body experiences?
Can we, or should we, assume that subtle bodies are not real when dealing with material that claims they are?
These questions and more are raised in this episode. We do not answer any of them in a definitive way – they are, it turns out, really tough questions – but we try to draw some lines on the map, which will come in handy in the course of the podcast, as it turns out that there are a lot of subtle bodies in the western esoteric traditions.
Works Cited in this Episode:
- Cox 2019 (see below): we quote p. 8.
- E. R. Dodds. Proclus: The Elements of Theology. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963. We cite pp. 315–18.
- Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, Strange Tales 110, Marvel Comics, July 1963.
- Robert Christian Kissling. The OXHMA-ΠΝΕΥΜΑ of the Neo-Platonists and the De insomniis of Synesius of Cyrene. American Journal of Philology, 43(4):318–30, 1922.
- G.R.S. Mead. The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition: An Outline of What the Philosophers Thought & Christians Taught on the Subject. Watkins, London, 1919.
- Christopher Partridge. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, two volumes. T and T Clark, London/New York, NY, 2004-2005.
- Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston. General Introduction. In Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston, editors, Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body, pages 1–9. Routledge, London, 2013. We quote p. 3.
Recommended Reading:
- William Behun. The Body of Light and the Body without Organs. SubStance, 39(1): 125–40, 2010.
- John J. Collins. The Angelic Life. In Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Økland, editors, Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, pages 291–310. De Gruyter, Berlin, 2009.
- Anna Corrias. Imagination and Memory in Marsilio Ficino’s Theory of the Vehicles of the Soul. The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 6(1):81–114, 2012.
- Simon Paul Cox. A Genealogy of the Subtle Body. PhD thesis, Rice University, 2019 [soon to be a book].
- Jay Johnston. Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics. Equinox, New York, NY, 2008.
- Jeffrey J. Kripal. Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2017.
- M. D. Litwa. Posthuman Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021.
- D.E. Moerman. Meaning, Medicine, and the ‘Placebo Effect’. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York, NY, 2002.
- Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston, editors. Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body. Routledge, London, 2013.
- Garry Trompf, Jason BeDuhn, Jay Johnston, and Damon Zacharias Lycourinos, editors. Ritual Embodiment in Modern Western Magic: Becoming the Magician. Routledge, 2017.
- J.M. Wilce, editor. Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems. Routledge, London/New York, NY, 2003.
Themes
Astral Influences, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Iamblichus, Methodology, Occultism, Occulture, Perennialism, Plotinus, Pneuma, Porphyry, Soul, Subtle Body, Tantra, Theosophical Society
Steve Dempsey
January 20, 2022
Loving the Dr Strange, but as Modern Materialist Steve, I’m happy not to think we have direct experience of reality, but it’s mediated by our brains, epiphenomenally. We just don’t have the bandwidth to experience everything directly.
Steve Dempsey
January 20, 2022
As to why we put up with this hypothesis? Partly from a lazy Ockham’s razor kind of view, partly that the multifarious and contradictory extra body ideas have very little explanatory power, but also, because we’re happy to say that we don’t know yet.
Of course, we, at least I, am very interested in the development of the ideas around human experience.
Earl Fontainelle
January 20, 2022
Steve,
It’s great to have an epiphenomenologist putting their head above the parapet here at the SHWEP (in more mainstream spheres epiphenomenologist positions ARE the parapet, but I’m guessing not here). I would however put it to you that Ockham’s razor might be taken to shave away explanations based on magical thinking (e.g. ‘Consciousness just arises from brains because brains have a sort of magic power that no other form of matter seems to have’) and instead go for something which, while not explanatory, is at least not prima facie absurd (e.g. ‘We must posit something which, unlike what we know of matter, can plausibly give rise to consciousness, and we’ll call it soul, because that’s traditional’).
Of course, one way to save materialist epiphenomonological approaches which is gaining a lot of traction nowadays is a return to panpsychism: matter actually IS capable of producing consciousness when configured rightly, because consciousness is inherent in matter. But that’s not your grandma’s materialism.
I wonder what Doctor Strange would say to these conundra?
Saeeduddin Ahmed
March 4, 2022
Yes.
Neurophilosphic positions are evolving.
No longer “mind is the brain”, or even “mind is what the brain does”, but something different
This “different” thing itself has not settled
Steve Dempsey
January 20, 2022
By hoary hounds of Hoggoth (!), that is certainly not my grandma’s materialism.
I have certain leanings towards a Harman kind of materialism, particularly when it comes to subjectivity, but I don’t see it as to having necessarily lead to panpsychism
My view of consciousness is a bit like the one I have of UFOs. Invariably the photos are in poor light, not from the right angle to see properly etc, and so the data is wrong or poor. But that doesn’t mean they all have little green beings in them. That’s opening a whole other kettle of Mi-go. We just don’t know what they are, the clue is in the name. So there’s no need to posit this extra step about what it contains when we don’t even know what container we’re looking at. It feels like the epicycles in Geocentric Astronomy – ever smaller circles being added because the thinking was based on poor assumptions. Which isn’t to say that the speculation can’t be entertaining or even sometimes illuminating.
Similarly just because some matter can produce consciousness doesn’t mean it all can. Some matter can produce rain (clouds for example), but that doesn’t mean all matter can.
Earl Fontainelle
January 20, 2022
By the Vishanti! I must bind this discussion in the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak before it grows to monstrous size and devours our very universe!
Thus I point you in the direction of the Stanford online encyclopædia of philosophy, which has a nice article on panpsychism (not because I want to convince you, but because you might find them interesting!)
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#AntiEmerArgu]
There are great arguments on many sides of this issue, for sure, but some of the consciousness-based ones against ‘nonpsychic’ materialism are pretty impossible to overcome (which doesn’t mean they need to be right. And no one can defeat Bishop Berkeley in an argument, but no one believes he’s right either).
Agreed about UFO’s and epicycles.
Steve Dempsey
January 20, 2022
By the Wondrous Winds of Watoomb, I shall seek out this knowledge! Thanks. I’m really just a voyager from another sphere (applied maths) so any hints are welcome.
Saeeduddin Ahmed
March 4, 2022
By the arms of Kali the destroyer…. This is fun!