A change in her teaching took place around 1880-81, in an interaction between American, European and Indian theosophists which distinguishes her two major works Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). Focus is on a central period in late 19th-century when the Theosophical Society and its most significant forefront, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (HPB), first presented her doctrine of subtle anatomy. This article traces essential sources behind the Western reception of Sanskrit terminology relating to subtle anatomy. This, in turn, helps us understand the emergence of certain New Age perspectives on Kabbalah that are indebted to that cultural milieu, especially the alliance between Kabbalah and alternative health that is almost taken for granted today. ![]() Understanding the multiple overlapping religious, medical, and scientific cultures represented in Pancoast's unique vision of Kabbalah is important in reaching an understanding the historical, cultural, and religious contexts in which it formed. The apparent inconsistencies in Pancoast's understanding of physics make more sense when we understand Pancoast's theological understanding of light, which was probably influenced by the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light as well as occultist theories of the Astral Light, among other things. It must also be contextualised in Pancoast's anachronistic attachment to the concept of the ray of light, his embrace of the ether as a medium through which rays were said to travel, and his rejection of the wave theory of light (which, paradoxically, was closely related to the rise of the concept of the ether). ![]() I argue that Pancoast's Kabbalistic therapy must be understood in the context of the medical pluralism that characterised late-1870s Philadelphia. ![]() It was a late-nineteenth century melange of occultist Kabbalah with aspects of Quakerism, Mesmerism, Theosophy, and chromotherapy, (the use or colour in healing), as well as contemporary medical and scientific theories in orthodox and heterodox varieties. Seth Pancoast was the author of "The Kabbalah, Or, The True Science of Light" (1877) a book that elucidated a form of therapy based on the administration of rays of light in colours corresponding the Kabbalistic sephiroth.
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