7. Occult Chemistry
Leadbeater attached great significance-correctly, as matters turned
out later, much later.
Both Leadbeater and Besant noted two varieties of UPA, one a mir-
ror image of the other, labeled by them male and female or "positive"
and "negative."The two UPAS differed solely in the direction taken by
the ten whorls spiraling around, down, and up again through the core
in ever tighter spirals, the male ones moving in a clockwise direction,
the female counterclockwise.
Force in the male atom seemed to well up as if from another di-
mension-"from the astral plane," as the psychics put it. A correspond-
ing force seemed to disappear from the female atom back into the
astral.'
Another surprising feature-as illustrated in Occult Chemistryap-
peared to be common to all the UPAS disintegrated by the psychics
from all the known chemical atoms: all appeared to be enclosed in a
"wall" or a "hole" in space. Pulled out of this surrounding"ho1e" by the
psychics' occult power, the UPAS invariably flew apart "as if released
from great pressure," the contents being "extensively rearranged into
astral matter." This feature was not rationally comprehensible to ortho-
dox science until the 1980s with the further development of supercol-
lider~ and the discovery that space, rather than being a void, appears to
be a plenum.
To pursue their analysis of chemical elements, the theosophists
found they did not need to have the targeted element in a free state. By
an act of willpower they could sever the bonds of chemical compounds
to release their constituent atoms. Common salt (NaC1) thus provided
ready specimens of both sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl). For harder-
to-come-by specimens, the two theosophists relied on their close
friend, Sir William Crookes, England's most eminent chemist, who
provided them samples in a pure state.
In 1907, during a summer holiday in Germany, their Hindu associ-
ate, Charles Janarajadasa, with an M.A. from Cambridge University,
- In the language of modern physics, these ins and outs of energy would be labeled
"sources and sinks of magnetic flux."But such language had not yet been invented
by physicists.