The Akashic Records are a concept of modern Western esotericism, given the name and its wide currency by Theosophy in the late nineteenth century, postulating a non-physical, universal repository that stores the complete history of everything: every thought, word, event, and experience that has ever occurred, imprinted on a subtle cosmic substance.
The name draws on the Sanskrit akasha, "ether" or "space," the subtlest of the elements in Indian thought, reinterpreted by Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky and later popularizers (notably the American psychic Edgar Cayce, who claimed to read them) as the medium on which this cosmic memory is inscribed. The claim is that certain seers, in altered or meditative states, can access this record to recover knowledge of the distant past, of former lives, or of events remote in space, a kind of clairvoyant library of all that is and has been. The idea has no basis in the older Indian traditions it borrows its vocabulary from, and it belongs squarely to the modern esoteric and New Age imagination, where it serves as an explanatory framework for claims of past-life recall, prophecy, and intuitive knowledge. As a religious-cultural phenomenon it expresses a characteristically modern hope: that nothing is truly lost, and that the whole of reality is, in principle, legible to the awakened mind.