The Astral Plane

The Astral Plane is, in Theosophical and modern occult cosmology, a subtle level of reality lying between the physical world and the higher spiritual planes, composed of a finer, more fluid substance that is directly responsive to thought and emotion. In the layered cosmos mapped by nineteenth- and twentieth-century esotericism (Theosophy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and their successors), the human being possesses, besides the physical body, an astral body of this subtler substance, and it is on the astral plane that dreams, visions, apparitions, and after-death states are located.

Because astral matter takes shape according to feeling and imagination, the plane is described as a world where thoughts become visible forms, beautiful or terrible according to the mind that generates them. A central practice built on this idea is astral projection (or the "out-of-body experience"), in which the practitioner claims to separate the astral body from the physical and travel consciously through this realm. The concept, though it borrows older language of soul and spirit, is characteristically modern in its systematic mapping of planes and bodies, and it became one of the most widely diffused ideas of Western esotericism, feeding directly into New Age and popular spirituality's vocabulary of "energy," dreams, and the journeys of the soul.

The astral plane as a described region with subdivisions, inhabitants and rules of travel is a product of the late nineteenth century. Charles Leadbeater's short book of 1895 laid out seven subplanes, the kinds of entity found on each, and what a trained clairvoyant would see, and that scheme is the direct ancestor of essentially everything written on the subject since, including material that presents itself as much older.

The vocabulary was borrowed from India. Theosophy took terms for the sheaths and worlds of Vedantic and tantric literature and mapped them onto a Western frame, which is why the same authors use kama-rupa and etheric double in the same paragraph. The Sanskrit sources are being used as raw material for a new system, not summarised.

A practical literature followed. The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, published in 1929, gave techniques and case reports and set the template for a genre that is still being written. From the 1960s researchers approached the same experience as a psychological question, under the name of the out-of-body experience, and the resulting work by Charles Tart, Susan Blackmore and others is a separate and better-evidenced literature that reaches quite different conclusions about what is happening.