Rama Prasad

The essays appeared in The Theosophist, the Society's journal at Adyar, between 1887 and 1889, and were issued as a book in 1890 under the title Nature's Finer Forces: The Science of Breath and the Philosophy of the Tattvas. The argument is that the five tattvas, akasha, vayu, tejas, apas and prithivi, are not abstract categories but working modes of a subtle substance; that each is dominant in the breath for a fixed period in turn; and that knowing which is active tells you what an action begun now will come to.

The material is not his invention. He was drawing on the Sanskrit literature of svara, the breath, and on the prognostication built on it, a body of practical texts with a long history of its own in India. What he added was the presentation: a systematic exposition in English, with tables, aimed at readers who had heard the word tattva and had no way into the thing.

Reception inside the Theosophical Society was not uniform and the book was argued over there as well as outside it. What is not in dispute is that it was read, and that it was read by exactly the people then assembling a Western magical system out of whatever Eastern material came to hand. That timing, more than the content, is why the book matters.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn took the tattvas out of Rama Prasad's book and turned them into an instrument. Each was given a geometrical figure and a colour: a dark oval for akasha, a blue circle for vayu, a red triangle for tejas, a silver crescent for apas, a yellow square for prithivi. Combined figures, a small triangle set on a square and so on, produced a grid of subdivisions covering every pairing.

The cards were used for scrying. The practitioner gazed at the coloured figure until the complementary afterimage rose, then used that as a doorway into a visionary landscape belonging to the element, a technique taught in the order's inner work and practised extensively by its members.

The route matters more than the technique. A term from Indian cosmology reached Victorian London through a Theosophical journal, was fitted to the four classical elements of Western magic plus spirit, given a colour scheme owing more to nineteenth-century optics than to any Indian source, and became a standard practice of ceremonial magic. The atlas records Rama Prasad against the English transmission rather than against the tattvas themselves, because that distinction is exactly what gets lost when the practice is described as ancient and Indian without qualification.