旷世奇书《神秘化学(Occult Chemistry)》的故事（一）

摘自《The Secret Life of Nature》

作者 Peter Tompkins

出版社 HarperSanFrancisco

出版时间 First Edition published 1997

                                                Preface

Researching for The Secret Life of plants in the 1970s, I accumulated 

some extraordinary material on nature spirits, but the book was already 

too long and — said my publisher — too “far out”. Better not strain 

credulity.   

    Years passed, more material accumulated, and in the late 1980s I 

found a way to include a chapter in the appendix to Secret of the Soil.  

That chapter, “Three Quarks for Muster Mark,” in which I observed that 

theosophists as effective clairvoyants could match and even improve

on the efforts of particle physicists, was to change my whole approach

to the nature spirits and to nature.

    In that chapter I recount how , at the end of the last century, theo-

sophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater described in a book 

called Occult Chemistry the physical makeup of every then-known 

chemical element, including some isotopes not yet discovered. This

extraordinary feat they claimed to have accomplished by means of 

intensive yoga training in India under expert guidance, which provided 

them with the faculty known in the extensive literature of India yoga as

siddhi. This psychic power allow yogis to develop an inner organ of 

perception that enables them to attune their vision to microscopic levels.

    The tow theosophists’ feat was carried out partly in Europe and 

partly in India. Charles Leadbeater, lying prone under the ministrations

of a masseur, would psychically visualize the interior of the various 

atoms, while Annie Besant, sitting cross-legged on a rug with a pad in

her lap, would sketch the inner makeup of all the then-known elements,

one by one.

    The impact on the world of the resulting extraordinary opus was 

minimal. When Occult Chemistry was first published in 1895, scientists

rejected its amazing revelations as pure fantasy. Almost century was to

pass until the mid-1980s, when an English authority on particle physics,

Dr. Stephen M. Phillips, browsing rare books in Los Angeles, Happen-

ed to run across a copy of an old theosophical book, Kingsland’s Phy-

sics of the Secret Doctrine; it contained a few of the Occult Chemistry 

diagrams.

    Back in England, Phillips, his curiosity aroused, found a copy of the 

third edition of Occult Chemistry and, as he puts it, “was hooked.”

Armed with the advantage of the most recent theories in particle physics,

Phillips was quickly convinced by the accuracy of the diagrams with

which Besant and Leadbeater had illustrated their book. With uncanny

detail, they had described every element known in their time—from

hydrogen to uranium, including several isotopes as yet unknown—

each with its correct number of what today are named quark, particles 

discovered well after the death of Besant and Leadbeater, and sub-

quarks, the subject of today’s intense inquiry. But more of this later.

    Not until the end of the 1970s were particle physicists able to pos-

tulate the existence of six different kinds of quarks—to which they gave

the facetious names of up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom—

along with their corresponding antiquarks. The theosophists had gone

further, clearly depicting subquarks, the next smaller particles of matter

so strenuously being researched by modern physicists with their super-

colliding smashers of atoms.

    Stephe Phillips’s summary of the theosophists’ feat posed a chal-

lenge to the world of physics when he declared, “The new patterns 

derived by application of the rules of theoretical physics tally perfectly

with the diagrams which illustrate Occult chemistry.”

    My own deduction seemed equally provocative. If Besant and Lead-

beater, using their yogic powers, could accurately describe matter 

down to its ultimate physical particles, what of their equally detailed

des**tions of the Third Kingdom, the realm of nature spirits? If the 

tow theosophist could describe unseeable quarks, why not pay atten-

tion to their equally detailed des**tion of another whole world equally

unseen by most of us but perfectly real to sensitives from Paracelsus

to Blavatsky, from John Dee to Rudolf Steiner, depicted by every race

on earth—a world of gnomes and nymphs, of sylphs and salamanders?

    Such an approach might provide data as surprising as was accumu-

lated in The Secret Life of Plants, perhaps even more so. Might not the

mystery of plant growth—from the strange and beautiful specimens of 

the Amazon to the common buttercup or daisy—be better explained by

the tender care of invisible nature spirits as described by clairvoyant

theosophists than by the impersonal formulae of mathematics or the 

sourceless promptings of gene and DNA?

    While Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian clairvoyant, perhaps the greatest 

philosopher of the century, developer of anthroposophy from theosophy, 

was declaring that the elements—from hydrogen all the way up the

scale—could be consciously motivated by intelligence, Besant and

Leadbeater were pursuing their ultimate physical atom into the “astral”

land of fairy. Why not follow in their foot steps？

    What had so far ······

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                                               CHAPTER 7

                                            Occult Chemistry

The thust of my thesis is simple: if Hodson’ clairvoyant faculties could 

enable him to “see” inside  an electron, and if Annie Besant and Charles

Leadbeater could accurately describe the inner makeup of the known

chemical elements, then their des**tions of nature spirits would have 

to be taken seriously. But first I had to be sure there really was an ac-

ceptable correspondence between the theosophists’ des**tion of ma-

terial atoms and the “reality” of orthodox physicists.

    To find out I went in search of the first qualified theoretical physicist 

to reevaluate the theosophists’ pioneering work in Occult Chemistry, 

Dr. Stephen M. Phillips, a professor of particle physics. Phillips’s book 

Extrasensory Perception of Quarks, published in 1980s, while dealing

with the most advanced nuclear theories, including the nature of quarks, 

postulated particles even smaller than quarks as yet undiscovered by

science. Analyzing twenty-two diagrams of the hundred or so chemical 

atoms described in Occult Chemistry by his two co-nationals at the turn

of the century, Phillips found it hard to avoid the conclusion that

“Besant and Leadbeater did truly observe quarks using ESP some 70 

years before physicists proposed their existence.” What is more, their 

diagrams indicated “ultimate physical particles” even smaller than

quarks.

    By the time I discovered Phillips on the southern coast of England 

in the seaside resort of Bournemouth, he had checked another eighty-

four of the theosophists’ atoms: all were see by him to be 100 percent

consonant with the most recent findings of particle physicists. Every

one of the 3,546 subquarks counted by Leadbeater in the element of

gold could be correctly accounted for by Phillips. Were Phillips’ con-

clusion to be substantiated by his peers, it would adduce evidence that

the theosophists with their yogi powers had effectively opened a win-

dow from the world of matter into the world of spirit.

    Prompt and committed approval of Phillips’s conclusions had al-

ready come from the noted biochemist and Fellow of the Royal Society, 

E. Lester Smith, discoverer of vitamin B12. At home in both the 

mathematical language of physics and the arcane language of theoso-

phy, Smith spelled out his support in a small volume, Occult chemistry

re-evaluated. And Professor Brian Josephson of Cambridge University,

a Nobel Prize winner in physics, was sufficiently impressed by Phillips’s 

radical thesis to invite him to lecture on the subject at the famous 

Cavendish Laboratory in 1985.

    Yet few in the ranks of orthodoxy had the courage to risk their posi-

tions by supporting anything so wild as notion that psychics could see 

better into the basic constituents of matter than could physicists armed 

with billion-dollar supercolliders.

    Already at the end of the last century when the theosophists first 

directed their clairvoyant vision upon the atoms of the chemical ele-

ments, they had found themselves up against contemporary physicists

who still thought of atoms as the “solid, massy, impenetrable, movable

particles” about which Newton had conjectured two centuries earlier 

and which the Creek philosopher Democritus had envisaged as tiny, 

hard, indivisible balls that no one but God could dissect.

   The most that the renowned French chemist Antoine Lavoisier could 

realize—before losing his head to the guillotine in 1794—was that the 

same element could exist in three states: solid, liquid, and “vapeur.”

    Newton’s view was only slightly improved upon in 1808, three years 

after Nelson defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar, when the Englishman 

John Dalton declared the atom to be the basic unit of all chemical ele-

ments—such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen—and that each element 

had its own particular weight. In Dalton’s day, some forty elements 

were known, though no one had a clue as to the size or makeup of an 

atom.

    By 1831, as Louis-Phillippe ascended the French throne in the 

guise of a citizen king, physicist Michael Faraday in England produced 

an electric current by rotating a copper disk between the poles of a 

magnet. To define a unit of this nonstatic electricity, the Irish physicist 

George Johnstone Stoney coined the name electron—not that either 

Faraday or Stoney had any idea what an electron might look like or 

what size it might be, let alone what electricity might be.

    Only in 1898, three yeas after the theosophists had begun their psy-

chic investigation of the atom, did Professor Joseph John Thomson, 

experimenting in his laboratory at Cambridge University, suddenly 

conclude that luminous rays emitted by his cathode ray tube did not 

consist of charged molecules of gas but of fundamental particles that 

must be part of all matter. Nailing this first truly elementary particle,

separable from Democritus’s uncuttable atom, Thomson called it after 

Stoney’s “electron,” thereby inaugurating the scienceof particle physics.

    Meanwhile, Leadbeater and Besant, approaching matter from their 

own point of view, using their siddhi powers to peer into the heart of 

chemical atoms, had entred a mysterious world still pluperfectly invis-

ible to orthodox physicists. Their method had been described in the 

second century B.C.E. by the  Indian sage Pantanjali in his Yoga sutras,

where he explained how to “obtain knowledge of the small, the hidden 

or the distant by directing the light of a superphysical faculty.” Ever 

since, Eastern yogis have been using this siddhi form of perception 

described as “magnifying clairvoyance.” The trick consists not in actually 

magnifying a small object but, conversely, in “making oneself (or rather

one’s viewpoint) infinitesimally small at will.”

    Phillips, analyzing the theosophists’ claims, concluded they could 

vary the size of the images at will and that there appeared to be no limit

to the level of magnification attainable, although a practical limit was set

by the ability of the viewer and by the strain felt when viewing magnified 

objects. Unlike other forms of extrsensory perception, this particular 

state, though taxing, says Phillips, could be induced or terminated at will.

    Among the first elements investigated by the two psychics was 

hydrogen, considered the lightest and simplest. As Leadbeater reduced 

his viewpoint to a subatomic level, he was able to describe to Annie 

Besant—squatting on the floor, ready with sketch pad—an ovoid body 

within which appeared a pattern of two interlaced triangles whose 

corners held smaller spherical objects, six in all. Each of these spheres

contained three oints of light, which appeared as three-dimensional 

particles, the whole structure was seen to rotate on its axis with great 

rapidity, at the same time vibrating as its internal bodies performed 

similar gyrations.

    This observation, made in 1895, says phillips, was remarkable 

enough because the property of spin in atomic particles was yet 

unknown to science. To slow down the spinning and quivering of their 

“chemical atom”—as the theosophists believed it to be—Leadbeater 

claimed a special form of willpower that enable him to hold the object 

still enough for closer examination. Both Leadbeater and Besant 

subscribed to the theosophical view that in the physical plane of our 

normal reality, matter exists in seven distinct states: solid, liquid, and

gaseous, plus four finer “etheric” states, the latter visible only to 

clairvoyants. They therefore believed that what they were studying 

as they progressively disintegrated chemical atoms were their various

“etheric” levels, 1, 2, 3, and 4, until they reached a particle that, if 

further attacked, disappeared from their field of vision. This precious 

particle they called an “ultimate physical atom,” or UPA. As the atoms 

of all the elements they investigated—from hydrogen to uranium—

consisted uniformly of UPAs in different numbers and arrangements, 

they surmised, quite naturally, that these must be the smallest, 

fundamentally indivisible, constituent of matter and concluded that 

their disappearance must be from the etheric into the finer astral.

   Eighteen such UPA particles appeared in their hydrogen “chemical 

atom” and 290 in their atom of oxygen. Hold steady by Leadbeater, 

these minute UPAs were found to be uniformly composed of ten 

distinct, convoluted, closed spiral curves or “whorls” three of which 

appeared brighter and thicker than the other seven, the latter 

changing color incessantly as the whole heart-shaped UPA pulsated 

and spun on its central axis.

    Counting and recounting the coiled strands of ten whorls, Lead-

beater consistently came up with 1,680 turns of each heliacal whorl, 

making a total of 16,800 in each UPA, a number to which Leadbeater 

attached great significance—correctly, as matters turned out later, 

much later.

    Both Leadbeater and besant noted two varieties of UPA, one a 

mirror image of the other, labled by them male and female or “positive”

and “negative.” The two UPA differed solely in the direction taken by 

the ten whorls spiraling around, down, and up again through the core 

in every tighter spirals, the male ones moving in a clockwise direction, 

the female counterclockwise.

    Force in the male atom seemed to well up as if from another dimen-

sion—“from the astral plane,” as the psychics put it. A corresponding 

force seemed to disappear from the female atom back into the astral.(1)

(1). In the language of modern physics, these ins and outs of energy would 

be labeled “sources and sinks of magnetic flux.” But such language had not

yet been invented by physicists.

   Another surprising feature—as illustrated in Occult chemistry—

appeared to be common to all the UPAs disintegrated by the psychics 

from all the known chemical atoms: all appeared to be enclosed in a 

“wall” or a “hole” in space, Pulled out of this surrounding “hole” by the 

psychics’ occult power, the UPAs invariably flew apart “as if released 

from great pressure,” the contents being “extensively rearranged into 

astral matter.” This feature was not rationally comprehensible to 

orthodox science until the 1980s with the further development of 

supercolliders and the discovery that space, rather than being a void, 

appears to be a plenum.

    To pursue their analysis of chemical elements, the theosophists 

found they did not need to have the targeted element in a free state. 

By an act of willpower they could sever the bonds of chemical 

compounds to release their constituent atoms. Common salt (NaCl) 

thus provided ready specimens of both sodium (Na) and chlorine 

(Cl). For harder-to-come-by specimens, the two theosophists relied 

on their close friend, Sir William Crookes, England’s most eminent 

chemist, who provided them sample in a pure state.

    In 1907, during a summer holiday in Germany, their Hindu associ-

ate, Charles Janarajadasa, with an M.A. from Cambridge University, 

managed to located for them in the Dresden Museum a source of rare

minerals. But when Leadbeater found it distracting to try to make a 

detailed clairvoyant examination of each specimen on the spot in the

busting museum, he discovered another system. He found that at

night he could visit the museum “in one of his subtler bodies” yet still 

manage to dictate his observations to Jinarajadasa as the latter, still in

the physical, took notes and made sketches.

   （未完待续）