The Subtle Body A Genealogy

Simon Paul Cox, PhD, is an independent scholar and translator who works primarily in Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek. His research focuses on mysticism and the body.

Introduction: Restoring the Body of Light

1. Resurrecting an Old Idea
2. Morphologies of the Subtle Body

Chapter One: Vehicles of the Soul from Plato to Philoponus

1. Porphyry's Compounded Vehicle
2. The Divine Iamblichus
3. Platonism in Theory and Practice
4. Proclus: The Great Systematizer
5. Damascius: The Last Scholarch
6. John Philoponus and the Incredible Myth

Chapter Two: The Body of Light in Renaissance England

1. Subtle Bodies, Descartes, and Hobbes
2. Ralph Cudworth's Vehicles of the Soul
3. Plastick Nature as Ontological Mediator
4. Henry More's Cosmology
5. The Philosophical Romance of Joseph Glanvill
6. Anne Conway's Spiritual Monism
7. Cambridge Kabbalah
8. Arguing with Machines

Chapter Three: Oriental Origins

1. Chevalier de Ramsay and Chinese Orientalism
2. Henry Thomas Colebrooke
3. The Sheaths of Vedanta
4. Beyond Colebrooke
5. Max Müller's Six Systems

Kuden: Day of the Samurai

Chapter Four: The Wisdom of the Mahatmas

1. Tibetological Foundations
2. Helena Blavatsky and the Tibetan Mahatmas
3. Subtle Embodiment in Isis Unveiled
4. Subtle Bodies in The Secret Doctrine
5. The Creolization of the Subtle Body
6. Tibet Beyond Blavatsky

Kuden: The Secret Body of the Ninja

Chapter Five: Theosophical Gnosis and Astral Hermeneutics

1. Blavatsky's Astral Bodies
2. Annie Besant's Esoteric Christianity
3. Leadbeater's Christian Gnosis
4. G.R.S. Mead, the Subtle Body, and the Esoteric Tradition
5. Gnostic Bodies Unleashed

Chapter Six: Crowley, Orient, and Occult

1. From Theosophy to Crowleyanity
2. The Magus and the Orient
3. Crowley's Ontology?
4. The Subtle Body in Practice
5. From Creole to Hybrid

Kuden: The Daoist Alchemical Body

Chapter Seven: The Alchemical Body of Carl Jung

1. From Mead to Jung
2. The Secret of the Golden Flower
3. Subtle Bodies Top-Down or Ground-Up?
4. The Yogas of India and Tibet
5. Nietzsche, Snake, and Eagle
6. Subtle Body and Eschaton

Kuden: The Tibetan Vajra Body

Chapter Eight: From Eranos to Esalen

1. The Religion of No-Religion
2. Stanford Counterculture
3. Out of Esalen

Conclusion: What is the Subtle Body?

1. Radical Somatic Mutability
2. Last Thoughts on the Subtle Body

Bibliography