The Subtle Body

A Genealogy

By: Simon Cox

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Hardcover | 7 June 2022

At a Glance

Hardcover
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
16.3 x 24.1 x 2.0

Hardcover

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How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the subtle body, positing some sort of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the
two. Simon Cox traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years.

This study is an intellectual history of the subtle body concept from its origins in late antiquity through the Renaissance into the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. It begins with a prehistory of the idea, rooted as it is in third-century Neoplatonism. It then proceeds to the
signifier subtle body in its earliest English uses amongst the Cambridge Platonists. After that, it looks forward to those Orientalist fathers of Indology, who, in their earliest translations of Sanskrit philosophy relied heavily on the Cambridge Platonist lexicon, and thereby brought Indian
philosophy into what had hitherto been a distinctly platonic discourse. At this point, the story takes a little reflexive stroll into the source of the author's own interest in this strange concept, looking at Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical import, expression, and popularization of the
concept. Cox then zeroes in on Aleister Crowley, focusing on the subtle body in fin de si¨cle occultism. Finally, he turns to Carl Jung, his colleague Frederic Spiegelberg, and the popularization of the idea of the subtle body in the Euro-American counterculture. This book is for anyone interested
in yogic, somatic, or energetic practices, and will be very useful to scholars and area specialists who rely on this term in dealing with Hindu, Daoist, and Buddhist texts.

Industry Reviews

"FinallyDLa book that tracks the idea of a subtle body within Western history. Cox starts from early Greek formulations of a subtle body through its renaissance renditions up through the especially fruitful period of modernity, with the West's extensive borrowing from Indian traditions, to offer a history of how we acquired that ubiquitous phantasm of the new-age subtle body. With his own story interspersed, Cox's delightful history captivates throughout." -- Loriliai Biernacki, author of Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra "How do we imagine, experience, and discuss the phenomenology of embodied being? Is there an essential subtle body? And if so, what is it? In this book, we join Simon Cox on his comparative journey from late antiquity to modernity, from East to West and back again, to track and catch the sparrow. The journey to track subtle matter and particles, pneuma and meridians, energies and light is deep and rich DS even glorious. At the end of the journey, we find ourselves at the top of a spiral staircase, looking out, wondering at the mutability of our perceptions of a subtle body. We are challenged to consider whether the subtle body can be sufficiently analyzed as an object of knowledge at all, or whether, as Cox determines, the subtle body is what it does." -- April D. DeConick, author of The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today

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