Finally—a book that tracks the idea of a subtle body within Western history. Cox starts from early Greek formulations of a subtle body through its renaissance renditions up through the especially fruitful period of modernity, with the West's extensive borrowing from Indian traditions, to offer a history of how we acquired that ubiquitous phantasm of the new-age subtle body. With his own story interspersed, Cox's delightful history captivates throughout.
Loriliai Biernacki, author of Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra
How do we imagine, experience, and discuss the phenomenology of embodied being? Is there an essential subtle body? And if so, what is it? In this book, we join Simon Cox on his comparative journey from late antiquity to modernity, from East to West and back again, to track and catch the sparrow. The journey to track subtle matter and particles, pneuma and meridians, energies and light is deep and rich – even glorious. At the end of the journey, we find ourselves at the top of a spiral staircase, looking out, wondering at the mutability of our perceptions of a subtle body. We are challenged to consider whether the subtle body can be sufficiently analyzed as an object of knowledge at all, or whether, as Cox determines, the subtle body is what it does.
April D. DeConick, author of The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today