Thought Forms. Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater 1925

The influential book by the late-Victorian theosophists Annie Besant and C.W Leadbeater which examines the aesthetic experience through the lens of early twentieth-century Theosophy. Originally published in 1905, ‘Thought Forms’ emerged a time of intense debate around materialist secularism and the New Age thought of Theosophy, a debate which closely informed the development of early modern art and which has re-emerged as a concern for contemporary art practices responding to the current crisis of materialism. Besant and Leadbetaer claimed that each definite thought produces a double effect—a radiating vibration and a floating form. Their book reproduces 54 illustrations of these “thought-forms”, each accompanied by a short description along with a chart detailing the meaning of the individual colours used. Writing at a time when centuries of power and politics dictated by the propertied upper classes had resulted in widespread poverty, intolerable working conditions and large-scale civil unrest, Besant and Leadbeater envisaged a spiritually democratised new millennium reaching the zenith of Humanity’s spiritual progress. As Besant makes clear in the introduction, by visualising the impact of the outer world on the inner, it was hoped that the book would “serve as a striking moral lesson to every reader, making [them] realise the nature and power of [their] thoughts, acting as a stimulus to the noble, a curb on the base”

Title: Thought-Forms
Author: Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater
Publisher: The Theosophical Publishing House Ltd., London
Publication date: 1925 (second reprint of the 1905 first edition)
Format: pale green cloth bound boards with gilt titles to upper and spine
Pages: 84pp on heavy stock
Images: 54 colour illustrations
Condition: Near Fine. Corners slightly bumped. Faint spotting to prelims.
Stock Number: RB01916