Conclusion What Is the Subtle Body?
1 ABSTRACT This dissertation traces the historical genealogy of the term “subtle body,” following it from its initial coinage among the Cambridge Platonists back to the Neoplatonic sources from which they drew, then forward into Indology, Theosophy, Carl Jung, and the American Counterculture, showing the expansion of the term’s semantic range to include Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese materials. 2 Acknowledgements First thanks go to my committee members. I never would have entertained the possibility of doing a project like this were it not for the iconoclastic tendencies of Jeff Kripal and Anne Klein under whom a conventional dissertation would be nigh impossible to write. Thanks Jeff for helping me contact the daimon , and Anne for teaching me to read between the lines, to see the basic space in which text dances. Thanks to Deborah Harter for her careful, aesthetic editorial gaze. Beyond the committee, Bill Parsons’ genealogy of mysticism exerted no small impact on my own method. Niki Clements showed me the cool side of Hegel. And thanks to Claire Fanger, for the esotericism, and April DeConick, for the gnosis. Thanks to Gregory Shaw for the secrets of Iamblichean theurgy and to Michael Murphy for the siddhi camps out of which this genealogy was born. Thanks also to Pierre Delattre for reading an early version and providing magical feedback. I constantly bounced ideas off my infinitely patient classmates: Justin Kelley, Claire Villareal, Erin Prophet, Ben Mayo, Renee Ford, Anne Parker, Justine Bakker, Gregory Perron, Tim Grieve-Carlson, Tommy Symmes, Kassim Abdulbassit, Victor Nardo, Oihane Iglesias Telleria, and Namleela Free Jones.
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