GATES OF THE ASTRAL WORLD: Dreams, Trance, and Invisible Realms in Modern Occultism - Couverture souple

Minichini, Roberto

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798194186556

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

Very large-format volume.

“GATES OF THE ASTRAL WORLD” — “Dreams, Trance, and Invisible Realms in Modern Occultism” by Roberto Minichini is a historical and intellectual study of one of the central ideas of modern esotericism: the belief that consciousness can enter invisible regions beyond ordinary bodily perception. Rather than presenting the astral world as an unchanged doctrine inherited from antiquity, the book reconstructs the long process through which this concept was gradually formed.
Platonic and Neoplatonic theories of the soul, subtle vehicles, imagination, and intermediary realities provided important philosophical foundations. Paracelsian medicine added ideas of sidereal humanity, invisible influences, elemental beings, and the relationship between microcosm and cosmos. Eighteenth-century animal magnetism then transformed altered consciousness into an object of deliberate experimentation. Mesmeric trance, somnambulism, clairvoyance, second sight, divided memory, and distant perception raised new questions about the limits of human awareness.
Particular attention is devoted to Éliphas Lévi and his influential conception of the “astral light,” an invisible medium through which images, forces, passions, and magical intentions could operate. French occultists later developed theories of the double, fluidic bodies, exteriorized sensitivity, hypnotism, and psychic experimentation. Theosophy brought another decisive transformation. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Charles Webster Leadbeater combined Western occultism with reinterpreted Indian terminology, creating elaborate systems of subtle bodies, planes, postmortem states, thought-forms, and clairvoyant perception. “The Astral Plane” helped turn invisible existence into a mapped geography with levels, inhabitants, laws, and different forms of consciousness.
Ceremonial practice within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn added disciplined visionary techniques based on ritual preparation, visualization, symbolic correspondences, and “scrying in the spirit vision.” Psychical researchers collected accounts of apparitions, telepathy, doubles, dreams, and unusual states while often refusing the stronger cosmological conclusions adopted by occultists. During the twentieth century, Sylvan Muldoon, Hereward Carrington, Oliver Fox, Robert Crookall, and Robert Monroe helped transform separation from the body into an individual practice supposedly accessible through relaxation, sleep, concentration, lucid awareness, and deliberate control of altered states.
“GATES OF THE ASTRAL WORLD” approaches these traditions historically, without treating extraordinary experiences either as unquestionable supernatural facts or as material to be dismissed without examination. The result is a documented history of how the modern astral world became thinkable, explorable, and eventually teachable.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roberto Minichini was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1973, to an Italian father and a Croatian mother. He is a writer, poet, essayist, astrologer, esotericist, and independent scholar whose interests include Western esotericism, comparative religion, mysticism, philosophy, astrology, initiatory traditions, and European intellectual history. His work focuses particularly on the transmission and transformation of religious, philosophical, and occult ideas across different cultures and periods.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798194186556
• Reliure: Taschenbuch
• Nombre de pages: 404
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.de/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg