Astral Ascent in the Occult Revival
Culture and Cosmos October 1, 2015 Joscelyn Godwin
Later 19th-century occultists inherited Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas about astral ascent and planetary spirits but felt compelled to reconcile them with contemporary astronomy. Andrew Jackson Davis adapted Swedenborgian ideas into a semi-scientific cosmology that became the norm for spiritualists. In the 1870s, occultism separated from spiritualism and made its own pact with science, visible in the works of Emma Hardinge Britten, H. P. Blavatsky, and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Cyrus Teed, known as Koresh, taught that the earth is a concave sphere with heavenly bodies at the center, reviving themes of astral immortality through ascesis and an alchemical relation of humans to a closed cosmos. His system was the basis for one of America's more successful utopian communities, which outlasted Teed for more than 50 years.