ecosophia | Tracing an Occult Tradition

A little while ago I reread Peter Kelder's classic early 20th century occult exercise book, The Eye of Revelation. It's partly a classic because of its framing -- it retails the standard cod story about a seeker finding a strange lamasery in Tibet where he learned mysterious exercises that he brought back to the Western world, and does so in high style -- but it's also a classic because the exercises it teaches, the Five Rites, are good solid physical culture exercises with reliable effects on the material and subtle bodies, and they have a substantial following all over the world these days. (You can read a good description of them here.)

There are a few odd things about the Rites, however, and one of them -- to my mind, the most important of them -- is the set of energy centers described briefly in Kelder's text. Here's what he has to say about them:

“The first important thing I was taught after entering the Lamasery,” he began, “was this. The body has seven centres which, in English, could be called Vortexes. These are kind of magnetic centers. They revolve at great speed in the healthy body, but when slowed down – well, that is just another name for old age, ill-health, and senility.

“There are two of these Vortexes in the brain; one at the base of the throat; another in the right side of the body opposite the liver; one in the sexual center; and one in each knee. These spinning centres of activity extend beyond the flesh in the healthy individual, but in the old, weak, senile person they hardly reach the surface, except in the knees. The quickest way to regain health, youth, and vitality is to start these magnetic centres spinning again.

"There are SEVEN Psychic Vortexes in the physical body. They are located as follows:

Vortex “A” is located deep within the forehead
Vortex “B” is in the posterior part of the brain
Vortex “C” located in throat at the base of the neck
Vortex “D” located in the right side of the body (waist line)
Vortex “E” is in the reproductive anatomy or organs
Vortexes “F” and “G” located one in either knee."

In the illustration that accompanies the text, shown on the right, the placement of vortex D is shown as though you're looking in the mirror. Earlier that led me to confuse it with the Theosophical idea of the spleen center as a major chakra, but this time, I was smart enough to pay attention and notice what the text actually says.

There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the source of the Five Rites, most of it based on the assumption that Kelder's claim of a Tibetan origin should be taken literally. Those seven energy centers, however, point in a different direction. You can find them discussed at length in the pages of Max Heindel's Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, from which I took the diagram at the top of this post. The same centers described in Kelder's book are shown in that diagram as points around which the desire body (astral body or aura) forms vortices. Here's one bit of Heindel on the subject:

"There are no organs in the desire body, as in the dense and vital bodies, but there are centers of perception, which, when active, appear as vortices, always remaining in the same relative position to the dense body, most of them about the head. In the majority of people they are mere eddies and are of no use as centers of perception. They may be awakened in all, however, but different methods produce different results."

Heindel got most of his ideas originally from Rudolf Steiner, whose student he was back before he came to the United States. I don't know Steiner's voluminous works well enough to know whether these same centers appear in them; I do know that they were picked up and used by some other Rosicrucian groups in the United States during the twentieth century. There was a great deal of interest in energy centers other than the standard chakras at that time, not least because a rush of incautious students in the 1920s tried to practice it using Sir John Woodroffe's book The Serpent Power as their manual, with disastrous results. (According to Manly P. Hall, the body count was considerable.) Since the Five Rites work quite well -- I've practiced them with good results -- and Heindel's Rosicrucian Fellowship has earned a solid reputation as one of the saner occult groups out there (I'd probably be a member myself if I was a Christian and could handle a vegetarian diet), tracing the lore of these centers and seeing if there are other practices that make use of them is one of my current research projects.

Current Mood: geeky

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Fascinating, given the status of spirituality in the west I sometimes forget that many people in the not too distant past have studied all this with great attention. When I am doing my practices, meditating or just sitting quietly and withdrawn to myself I started to notice that the center between my eyebrows spins and does so more strongly if I focus on it. I can tell it to switch direction too. I have no idea what would be the effects of doing that so I don’t but I found that interesting and think it is perhaps related to how each of the two main pathways switches in dominance every 90 minutes or so.

One thing that I find interesting as well about similar exercises like Hatha Yoga done in a particular order is that they seem to activate the vortexes in a particular way, for example the whole set of Surya Namaskar of twelve steps done properly attunes your energy body to the 12 years and a bit cycle of the sun.

When you do the Five Rites, do you do them focusing at any given point in your body and if you do have you seen particular effects of it?

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Tracing an Occult Tradition

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