Occult Chemistry fl 73scientists to conclude that atomic nuclei must consist of neutrons and
protons-the two theosophists had accurately depicted the number
of protons and neutrons in the nuclei of both arsenic and aluminum.
Yet neither they nor their contemporary scientists yet knew that
atomic nuclei differed from one another only by the number of pro-
tons and neutrons they contained.
During this same period, fifty-six more elements were studied and
described by the theosophists, including five as yet unknown to sci-
ence-promethium, astatine, fancium, protoactium, and technitium-
plus six isotopes, though it was not then known that an element could
have atoms of more than one weight: its isotopes. Isotopes consist of
nuclei with the same number of protons but a different number of neu-
trons, and an element can have as many as ten or more isotopes. Neon
(mass number 20) and a variant meta-neon (mass number 22) were
correctly described in The Theosophist in 1908, some six years before
Frederick Soddy, another British physicist, introduced the concept of
isotopes to science, for which he, too, received a Nobel Prize.
The theosophists, whose estimates of the atomic weight of ele-
ments, specified to two decimals, showed remarkable agreement with
accepted scientific values, were simply describing what they could see
with the use of their siddhi powers. As later physicists admitted, there
was no scientific reason for them or anyone else to suspect a second va-
riety of neon and certainly no purpose in the theosophists fabricating
one. What Leadbeater and Besant were trying to accomplish was
merely to bring what they were seeing inside their "atoms" into line
with the table of elements formulated in mid-nineteenth century by
the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev.The table predicted
that if elements were appropriately tabulated by atomic weight, they
would fall into groups of families having similar chemical properties.
The theosophists simply came across the isotopes as they noted that el-
ements in the same group in the table, with the same properties, all had
the same complex geometric shapes, which they painstakingly de-
picted in their diagrams.
With few exceptions, all the inner structures of their "chemical
atoms" appeared in seven basic shapes: spikes, dumbbells, tetrahedra,
cubes, octahedra, bars, and star groups. All the inert gases appeared to