Orthodox Cosmos
Adeptly clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsentient, Leadbeater and
Besant claimed to have learned from Indian and Tibetan masters to
break through to continuous "astral consciousness, with the body
awake or asleep," and thus be able to investigate "the constitution of su-
perphysical matter in the structure of man and the universe, as well as
the nature of occult chemistry."
To these two investigators the basic constituent of matter, an ulti-
mate physical atom, or UPA, smaller than a proton, smaller by far than a
quark, appeared as "a little miniature sun," dual in nature, positive, but
with a negative mirror image. Ovoid in shape, each consists of ten
closed stringlike spirals made up of progressively smaller "spirillae." Its
ever-diminishing spirillae consist of millions of dots of energy whirling
in and out from what the investigators called a fourth-dimensional as-
tral plane, entering the male UPA and exiting the female. "Bright lines7'
or "streams of light" that linked the UPAS were called by the
theosophists "lines of force."
Leadbeater specialized in the geometric arrangement of these UPAS,
identifjing and counting their number in each element examined,
while Annie Besant studied the configuration of the "lines of force"
linking and holding together the groups of these particles. Force, said
Leadbeater, "pours into the heart-shaped depression at the top of the
UPA and issues from that point, and is changed in character by its pas-
sage as it rushes through every spiral and every spirilla, changing shades
of color that flash out from the rapidly revolving and vibrating UPA."
These color changes appeared to Leadbeater to depend on different ac-
tivities of the ten whorls, each of 1,680 spirillae, as one or another was