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0 - Astral Projection in Theory and Practice
'... there appeared to me a brightness in the West, and a darkening of the East; and whilst perplexed by
this matter, I find I have entered a dirty street, and see near me a young child sitting on the doorstep of
a very squalid house.
'I approached the house, and seeing me, the child scrambled to his feet and beckoned me to follow
him. Pushing open the ricketty door, he pointed out to me a rotten wooden staircase. This I mounted
and entered a room ...
'... I found a little old man, but could not see him distinctly, as the blinds were drawn.
'... he opened a book which was lying on the table before him and showed me a sigil. After I had
looked at it carefully, he explained to me how I should use it, and finished by telling me that it was
used to summon things of earth.
'As I looked incredulously at him he took hold of the sigil, and no sooner had he done so than from out
of every crack and seam in the floor there wriggled forth a multitude of rats and other vermin.
'... I saw a naked woman ... The Adept turned from me and said: "She is in a trance; she is dead; she
has been dead long." And immediately her flesh becoming rotten, fell from her bones.'
So reads an extract from the diary, or Magical Record, of Julian Baker for December 1898. Baker, a
friend of Aleister Crowley's and, like him, an initiate of the Golden Dawn was neither mad nor
suffering from an acute attack of delirium tremens. He was recording an experiment in what some
magicians call 'skrying in the spirit vision' and what is sometimes referred to as astral projection.
In our first chapter we have already made a mention of the importance which occultists attach to the
astral body and its projection. Before we outline the basic techniques for achieving the latter -
techniques identical with those used by Julian Baker to obtain the vision described above - we think it
worthwhile to briefly examine the historical development of occult beliefs regarding non-physical
vehicles of consciousness.
The idea that each human being has an 'astral body' capable of separating itself from the physical body
and engaging in 'astral journeying' is very old. Ancient Hindu writings describing the eight Siddhis
(magical powers) obtained through the practice of Yoga refer to one of them as 'the power of flying
through the air'. This almost certainly refers not to physical levitation but to astral travel. In pre-
communist Tibet and China belief in astral projection was widespread, as it still is in places so remote
from one another as Haiti and Greenland.
In the western world belief in the astral body and the possibility of astral projection may well have
evolved quite independently of any oriental influence. Certainly the Neoplatonic philosophers of the
early Christian era derived their theories regarding the astral body from late developments of Plato's
doctrine of the existence of 'the souls of the stars' (hence the word 'astral' from the Latin 'astrum', star)
and from the Aristotelian conception of the 'sensitive soul' supposedly 'analogous to that element from
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