viii 9 The Secret L+ ofNature
to pass until the mid-1980s, when an English authority on particle
physics, Dr. Stephen M. Phfips, browsing for rare books in Los
Angeles, happened to run across a copy of an old theosophical book,
Kingsland's Physics ofthe Secret Doctrine; it contained a few of the Occult
Chemistry diagrams.
Back in England, Phdips, 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 dustrated their book.With un-
canny detail, they had described every element known in their time-
from hydrogen to uranium, includng several isotopes as yet unknown-
each with its correct number ofwhat today are named quarks, 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 dfferent kinds of quarks-to which they
gave the facetious names of up, down, charm, strange, top, and bot-
tom-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
supercolliding smashers of atoms.
Stephen Phillips's summary of the theosophists' feat posed a chal-
lenge to the world of physics when he declared,"The new patterns de-
rived 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
Leadbeater, using their yogic powers, could accurately describe matter
down to its ultimate physical particles, what of their equally detailed
descriptions of the Third Kingdom, the realm of nature spirits? If the
two theosophists could describe unseeable quarks, why not pay atten-
tion to their equally detailed description 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?