2. THE HISTORY OF ASTRAL PROJECTION

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light” – Plato

Astral projection has fascinated people for decades. Some people believe it is hard for a human being to transcend space and time by leaving their physical body. This doubt was further aggravated by the ancient shamans who astral traveled to seek answers to questions or get a glimpse of the future but protected their astral travel secret out of fear that their power would vanish if more people were able to project. Throughout decades, more and more people have encountered spontaneous astral travel episodes, a factor that led to a sudden interest in learning the art of projection.

The idea of humans leaving the physical body state during dreams is ancient. Many people from the shamans to new agers around the world believe it is possible to communicate intelligently through vivid dreams and visions that are experienced during astral projection also referred to as OBE, or Out of Body Experience. Further, surveys suggest that about 10 to 20 percent of people may have encountered something similar or close to OBE at one point in their lives. Though most of these experiences occur under hypnosis or during sleep, some people claim to have had the encounters while relaxing.

Mythology and history offer numerous examples of astral body visits to other locations and times. The theory of astral projection and the ability for projectors to transcend and get through space and time dates back to ancient Greece, Tibet, China, India, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Additionally, the Norse and Hindus knew and practiced astral traveling. Astral projection magickal powers were also accredited to fakirs, alchemists and yogins.

In Tibet, astral travellers were referred to as delogs which means people who return from beyond. Egyptians had acknowledged that astral projection was possible. They named the astral double (Ka), the soul and spirit (Ba). They believed that both Ka and Ba would leave and return to the physical body at will. There is an old story in the Druidic tradition about a druid known as Mog Ruith who had the power to fly over the heads of opposing armies while in a bird’s costume and return to give the druid army details of the enemy. This is documented as a good account of astral traveling.

However, astral projection practical and spiritual abilities were much appreciated during the matriarchal culture times. During the mythological period of civilization, the flying ability was considered to be a part of goddess mysteries. Conversely, the link between matriarchal connections and goddesses was dubbed the reason as to why Christians sought after pagans and witches in a destructive manner. Hence, the belief that those destructive witch trials took place during dark ages which is not the case. Though there were cases of witch trials during the matriarchal period, the most notorious and concentrated witch trials took place during the 15th and 18th centuries.

The most prominent witch trials features were confessions from tortured women who were said to fly on brooms or animals that resembled a Sabbat to meet at points where they cavorted with old pagan deities or demons. Most of the witch confessions that were obtained during this period tell of the use of ointments that were made from dangerous plants to aid with astral travel. However, none of the flying ointment translations are accurate since most contain weird ingredients like children’s fat and bat’s blood. Though it is believed that such weird and dangerous flying ointment ingredients were quoted to confuse people who were not initiated to the astral projection world, the witches used the drugs to astral travel because they either had not mastered the art of astral traveling consciously or had forgotten how to. It is not advisable to trigger an astral travel experience using plant concoctions because some cause delusion and rapid heartbeats that could easily cause death. Moreover, a drug induced astral travel leaves you with little to no control over your experience which could lead to strange encounters with the other beings that live in the astral world.

In a bid to dispel the notion that these witches used flying ointments, Henry More, a student and Christian of the occult philosophy, in 1647 wrote that the witches were not traveling in their physical bodies but in their astral form. Surprisingly, the authorities and the church used his words to justify the persecutions that were extended to anyone who acknowledged astral traveling. During this time, the churches and authorities described the witches and wizards as those who cast no shadows. Given that astral bodies do not cast shadows, astral travellers were said to be witches. They upheld that such powers were not God given and were practiced by pagans and therefore, their misguided and unbelieving souls deserved to be tortured and eliminated for their own good and that of the Christian community. Unfortunately, their actions then were as a result of lack of information and acknowledgement that there are other worlds around us that are accessible with the right mind, body and soul awareness.

Alice Kyteler was the first witch to be tried and tortured by the church in 1324. During the trial she described how she galloped her staff through thick and thin to achieve her flying abilities. Later, astral writers defined her meaning of thick and thin as her description of astral traveling through the different layers of other worlds. Since she admitted to greasing her staff with flying ointments, she may have experienced both astral traveling with the astral body as well as physical riding on the ground.

Soon after Alice’s trial, the church and authorities prohibited witch practices and black magick during a Council of Constance that was held between 1414 and 1418. They came up with a list of offenses that would be used to describe a witch and black magick but astral traveling was not on that list mainly because they were not aware of astral projection. Later, when the church discovered astral projection and flying, it was added on the list.

Despite all the opposition astral projection faced from the church in ancient times, the Shamans always knew about it and even practiced it for their benefit. Note that Shamanism was not limited to Native Americans from the Western Hemisphere, Lapps, and Eskimos; shamanic practices were rampant throughout the Mediterranean area and Europe. To the Shamans, astral traveling was a crucial part of their rituals and ceremonies. The Shamans would attest to riding their staff or horse while on a mystical journey aimed at seeking answers or gathering information. The staff or horse was said to travel through the air to different times and places. The horses were described as having eight legs which was a resemblance to Sleipnir, the Norse god Odhinn’s horse. The shamans symbolized the horse by sitting on mare skin of a white horse or burning white horse hair.

Notably, the magickal flying symbolism extended beyond witchcraft and shamanism to universal magick. This is because it played a crucial role in the different religious practices that were celebrated before witchcraft and shamanism was discovered. There are stories of a magician who attained the astral flying state by climbing a tent pole, tree or ladder after which they would turn into a bird, ride on an arrow or flying horse. In addition, the Mithraic religion defined a ladder with seven rungs that facilitated an initiate to climb to heaven. Shamans from Siberia used a tree or tent pole with seven to nine notches to initiate the astral body for travel. Jacob and Mohammed defined seeing stairs that reach to heaven. Jacob, a Christian saint, defined a seven step stairway that leads to heaven. The Orphic Greek tradition required an astral initiate to climb a ladder to the sky world. The Greek god Apollo’s followers experienced astral travel as depicted in Abaris' story. Abaris was said to fly while on a golden arrow that he was given by Apollo. Note, it is believed that Apollo had a shamanic background since he was from the northern country of Hyperboreans.

In ancient India, the importance of an astral flight was attributed to the development of a person’s soul. The Brahmanic scriptures describe that a spiritual ascent was achieved through climbing a tree. Additionally, Buddha took only seven steps and saw the entire world. Magicians from India’s non-Aryan group are said to still dance into ecstasy with the help of a horse-headed stick. The Rig Veda talks of how priests and magicians in India have the ability to recover a lost soul by flying into the realms of other beings. The astral projection doctrine is still applied in the Hindu cultural beliefs because they believe that a sleeping person must not be awakened suddenly.

Though the broomstick is the most mentioned item that was used by ancient witches to astral fly, it is just one of the many astral steeds that were used. The ancient broom has no resemblance to the broom used in the modern world. It featured a stout central pole on one end where broom bunches (heather or birch twigs) were tied. The broom was an ordinary implement for women and a pitchfork was the implement for men. As such, the Christians dubbed a broom flying females’ witches and pitchfork flying males’ devils. According to the Celtic people from Scotland, the witches flew on bune wand which they described as a staff or a forked stick. Later, a bune wand was used to define anything that witches used to astral fly including plant stalks and stems.

Ironically, the sexual and mystical magick of broomsticks has been reintroduced to the world in the form of nursery toys and rhymes. For instance, sticks with horse heads (hobby horses) are ridden by small children as play toys but people do not take offense because they do not know their original meaning. In the ancient times, a broomstick was used to symbolize a sacred sexual union between the pagan god and goddess. Here is an example of a nursery rhyme:

Riding to Banbury cross on a cock horse
to meet a fine lady on a white horse.
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, She has music wherever she goes.

This nursery rhyme has a hidden sacred and sexual symbolism. The white horse was the goddess’s consort or its physical representative white the cock horse was the penis. The fine lady is the goddess and the lady riding the cock horse is symbolic of a woman on top of a man during sexual intercourse, a position that the Christian leaders forbid because it was believed to symbolize loss of power and control for the men. On the contrary, the position symbolized the power of a woman to the pagans. According to the Greeks, the sacred union was used to call up great magickal powers for a specific course.

The Sufi mystics rode on horse-headed canes that were referred to as zamalzain during their ecstatic dances in the middle ages. The dancing groups were made up of thirteen members made up of six men and women with the thirteenth member being a man representing the Rabba or god. Banbury cross was the potent place where the rituals were held since the time of Hecate worship. She had many rings on her fingers as a symbol of prosperity and blessings and the toes bells symbolized the sacred dance music. Whatever the goddess touched or walked on was considered blessed. The hands and feet refer to the power centers being the palms and soles.

Mythology and history are full of examples of astral projection meaning that it is not new to the world. As aforementioned, astral travel was at some point considered a crucial part of spiritual development for humans who dared to try the “forbidden.” Most people still fear astral projection as something evil and associated with witchcraft. Astral projection is part of a human’s psychic composition and we engage in it every night in the form of dreams whether we remember the encounters or not.

Scientific Background

The first scientific astral travel experiments were performed in the 19th Century by a French scientist known as Hector Durville. His experiment subject was an astral traveller who claimed to leave his physical body at will. He consciously got off the body during the experiment and managed to rapping sounds on a table that was placed at the far end of a room, make calcium sulphide screens brighter and create a fog effect on photographic plates.

In 1875, Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York. She claimed that she had spent 40 years traveling the East and learning astral traveling from masters there. Her society became a great influence in the promotion of astral traveling education as well as other eastern philosophy aspects about life. For instance, the society pitched the idea that human beings are not just a product of the physical body but are also made up of at least other 7 bodies.

In the 1960s, a retired geologist by the name of Dr. Robert Crookall gathered different accounts of astral travelers and carefully evaluated them in a bid to determine a pattern that would help him understand the astral projection phenomenon. Out of the 750 different accounts he evaluated, he narrowed down to 6 characteristics that applied to all the astral projectors.

According to his findings, astral projectors:

• Feel that they are leaving their physical body from the top of their head.

• Blackout for about a second immediately the physical and astral bodies separate.

• Astral body floats over the physical body for a short while before traveling to the astral world and before returning to the physical body.

• Blackout again as the astral body returns to the physical body.

• Body jolts or buffets in instances where the astral body returns too fast.

After the study and findings presented by Dr. Crookall, numerous scientists developed an interest in exploring out of body experiences and astral projection. One of the scientists is Celia Green who, through her Institute of Psychophysical Research, gathered more cases of OBE. Her study is believed to have been the most thorough since she used press advertisements to locate people who had experienced OBE from different walks of life.

Though the results of the findings varied from country to country, it was clear that close to 20 percent of the world’s population experiences OBE some without knowing. Also, university students/younger people were more likely to experience OBE than older people. Out of all the people she examined, Celia Green discovered that 30 percent of the Oxford undergraduate students who participated in the 1968 study had left their bodies at some point.

A larger survey was conducted in 1975 and it also revealed that 25 percent of the students who participated had had OBE as compared to 14 percent of the general population that had participated. Additionally, when an American magazine posed the question to its readers whether they had had OBE, 700 of the 1500 responses claimed to have astral travelled; that’s equivalent to 46 percent of the responders.

Another survey was conducted by Dr. Stewart Twemlow in 1980 and he presented his findings during the annual American Psychiatric Association. According to his findings, 85 percent of the people who had experienced astral travel enjoyed the experience and described it as a joyful experience. Another 43 percent described their experience as the greatest thing they had ever encountered. Most of the survey participants said that they would wish to astral travel again.

Today, astral traveling is still a topic of discussion as some scientists still try to understand its concept and theory. For instance, quite a number of parapsychologists have joined hands to explore remote viewing as a form of astral traveling. In remote viewing exploration, the person under evaluation is asked to define locations that may be miles away, objects present and activities that could be taking place in the location at a particular time.

Apart from the scientific evidence that astral traveling has been there for decades, there are some recorded personal accounts of people who left the body consciously and managed to accomplish their intended purpose. For instance, the story of Mr. Beard was recorded in Edmund Gurney’s book, Phantasms of Living, where he recounts 702 astral travel experiences. Mr. Beard recounts having successfully traveled to his fiancées bedroom in November 1881. Though Mr. Beard lived 3 miles away from his girlfriend’s apartment, he managed to be present in the girlfriend’s bedroom in spirit. He had not told his girlfriend of his intentions but when they met the following Thursday, the girlfriend admitted that she had seen him standing beside her bed the previous Sunday and she had gotten really terrified when he started walking towards her. Having been pleased with the results of his experiment, Mr. Beard astral projected to his fiancée’s house two more times and later tried to explain to her how he left the body to travel to her place in spirit.

One of the well-known astral travellers was Edgar Cayce. Edgar would enter into trance mode at will and conduct medical diagnoses of sick people who sometimes would be thousands of miles away. While in the trance mode, all his vital body functions would slow down until he appeared to be in what was likened to a near death coma. At that point, he would travel in his spirit body to the subconscious minds of his patients in order to determine what was really making them unwell. Note that Edgar never allowed anyone to pass anything over his body while he was in trance mode as he believed that doing so would damage the invisible silver cord that connected the physical and non-physical body.

In 2002, the part in the brain responsible for inducing an OBE was discovered by a Swiss neurosurgeon known as Olaf Blanke. Dr. Olaf and his team were operating on a woman who had been suffering from frequent epileptic episodes for 11 years. Since her condition had failed to respond to medication, the epileptic focus site had to be located in order for her to be treated. The epileptic focus site is the area of the brain where seizures begin before they spread to other parts of the brain. Since doctors had failed to locate the focus site, advanced techniques that required stimulation of different brain surfaces had to be applied. While at it, the surgeons would measure resulting seizures to determine the actual focus site.

To accomplish this, they had to open up the woman’s skull to access the brain surface where they would apply an array of subdural electrodes. Meaning that the electrodes were spread out underneath the brain’s tough outer membrane. While the electrodes were being passed through the different parts of the brain, the patient could stay awake because there are no pain receptors in the brain. Therefore, the patient could answer questions as well as report what she felt or experienced. While stimulating the different brain surfaces, the surgeons noted different effects some of which they had not expected. This includes areas that trigger specific body sensations and others that triggered muscle movement. Of importance is that they managed to find the focus point and remove it.

They noted the patient’s reaction when they triggered a spot on her right side of the brain. Immediately as they applied a gentle current, the woman said that she felt as though she was falling from a high point or sinking in the bed. Additionally, her legs and arms seemed to change position and she noted that she felt lighter. When a stronger current was applied, she said that she felt as though she was floating near the ceiling just like most people who have experienced OBE describe. In this case, the surgeons had unknowingly induced an OBE. The brain section that had been touched to trigger OBE is the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) that is located in the right hemisphere. This is where the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe meet.

Back in the 1930s, there had been a few clues that pointed towards the TPJ as the brain part responsible for out of body experiences. A Canadian neurosurgeon, Dr. Wilder Penfield, operated on epileptic patients when they failed to respond to medication and there was no other treatment option. Just like Dr. Olaf and his team, he once stimulated the right temporal lobe while operating on a female patient and she immediately said that she was leaving the body. Dr. Wilder, however, did not investigate the occurrence further.

Further evidence pointing towards TPJ being the trigger point for OBEs was arrived at after studying damaged brains. People who see doubles tend to have damaged right parietal lobes; this was discovered after patients’ bodies were dissected after death. Modern health technology allows surgeons to find the damaged brain sites while their patients are still alive. In one brain study that featured 9 patients who had reported OBE and 8 patients who had not; Swiss researchers found out that 8 of the 9 OBE patients had damages in the parietal cortex or right temporal mainly at the TPJ.

An OBE was caught by a Swiss neuroscientist as it happened to a 10 year old epileptic boy. The neuroscientist, Dr. Lukas examined the boy’s brain activity as he suffered a seizure. The boy told the doctor as the seizure began because he could feel his left hand hurt and begin to move. After about 2 minutes, the boy became unconscious and when he came around, he told the doctor that he experienced a vivid sensation that he projected out of his body and hovered below the ceiling where he was able to look down and see the people in the room. The boy also added that he seemed to fly above the ceiling into the world and he felt very light. According to the doctor’s electroencephalogram and MRI reports, the boy’s focus point was the right temporal lobe and the right angular gyrus had a lesion which is the same point that Dr. Blanke had identified as the OBE trigger point.

Despite the fact that scientists have found the OBE trigger point in the brain, different people are bound to interpret the findings differently. To some, it simply means the OBE is a natural phenomenon that we should all embrace while to others it means that a disturbed brain is responsible for releasing the spirit from the body. Others would also argue that there are two types of out of body experiences; one that is induced which may also be dubbed a hallucination and another that is fully spiritual and must be invoked consciously.

The three possibilities can be considered as follows;

• Referring to the dualist theories that involve the soul and astral/spirit body, something leaves the body during astral projection. This explains the theory that the body releases a person’s soul after death. In light of this, if the brain is stimulated right during a person’s life the same can be achieved. Alternatively, perhaps the brain works to prevent the soul from departing the physical body but should it fail, the soul is released accidentally and OBE happens.

• The dual is mtheory is not real: the brain and mind are not separate and there is no astral/spirit body and soul.

• The brain sometimes creates the illusion of something leaving the physical body. It is believed that the brain constructs a normal sense of being in the body and when this sense malfunctions, the victim may feel as though they are leaving the body.

• There are two types of OBE: the real OBE where something leaves the physical body and the illusion or hallucinations that are also dubbed as fake OBE.

The ability to astral project can be useful in many ways, as aforementioned. You can find out how other people perceive you, obtain answers to questions you deem disturbing, visit loved ones and friends as demonstrated by the story of Mr. Beard as well as travel the world from the safety of your room. It can be a way to kill boredom but you must have the right purpose for astral projecting. For most, astral projection is a way of eliminating the fear of death by simply understanding that there is life after death. In support of this, scientists have proven that at death, the physical body loses about two and half ounces of weight and a mist leaves the body from the head. This is a great illustration that humans have an astral body and soul that takes effect at the end of life. With the right education, you do not have to wait until you die to astral travel.

Chapter Summary

• Astral projection has been practiced since ancient times but it is yet to get the full recognition it deserves within the society.

• There is scientific evidence of astral travel and OBE encounters but they are yet to be fully acknowledged.

• In the next chapter you will learn how astral projection works.