Akashic records: what they are and where the idea came from

The Akashic records would be a memory of everything that has ever happened in the universe, every event, every word and every thought, kept in a subtle substance called akasha and readable by some seers. The word ākāśa is Sanskrit and very old, and means "space" or "ether"; the idea that everything that happened stays written in that space is much more recent: it took shape in Theosophy between 1877 and 1899, and the name "Akashic records" is already there, in so many words, in a book of 1899.¹²⁵ The previous article was about the first attempt to measure forgetting; this one closes the part on memory with the largest memory ever imagined, the memory of everything. It is not a mockery: it is the history of an idea, with its sources, read in Sanskrit, English and German.

What does "akasha" mean?

In Sanskrit, ākāśa is open space, the sky, and in Indian philosophy it became one of the five elements, the subtlest: the ether, whose own quality is sound.⁸ The most quoted ancient passage is in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Someone asks: "What is the goal of this world?" And the answer is: "Space." It goes on, in Sanskrit: sarvāṇi ha vā imāni bhūtāny ākāśād eva samutpadyante, "all these beings arise from space, and into space they return; space is greater than they, space is their final resting place".¹ Max Müller, who translated it in 1879, wrote "ether" and noted that it could also be translated as "space".

What the passage does not say is that space remembers anything. In the text, ākāśa is where things come from and where they go back to, not an archive of what they did. The memory was added much later.

1877: the "memory of God"

The first step was taken by Helena Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society, in Isis Unveiled (1877). There Blavatsky explains that akasa means "sky" in Sanskrit, and in its mystic sense the invisible sky; that in its latent state it matches the "universal ether" of the science of the day; and that it is the same as the "astral light" of European occultists.² And of that astral light the book says something new: that "it keeps an unmutilated record of all that was, that is, or ever will be", that the smallest acts and even thoughts are imprinted on it, and that it is, "in short, the MEMORY of GOD!"²

Where did this come from? The same chapter tells of experiments in "psychometry": people who, with an object held to the forehead, described scenes from that object's past. The book says the faculty was first demonstrated in 1841, and quotes the American physician J. R. Buchanan and the geologist William Denton, for whom nature "has been busy photographing everything": "What a picture-gallery is hers!"² This was the age of photography and of the ether. The idea of a universe that records everything was born, in part, from those two novelties. In what I read, Blavatsky does not use the word "Akashic".

1881-1884: Olcott, Sinnett and "records in the Akasa"

In 1881, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, published A Buddhist Catechism in Ceylon. Question 113 says that the Buddha taught that two things are eternal, "Akasa" and "Nirvana", and that everything has come out of Akasa "in obedience to a law inherent in it".³ Not every Buddhist school sees it that way: according to Wikipedia, the Theravada tradition, the one of Ceylon, does not count space among the unconditioned, what is neither born nor passes away.⁸

The sentence usually quoted as the origin of the records is in Alfred Percy Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism (1883). In the 1884 edition I read, Sinnett does not write it in Sinnett's own voice: the book copies an appendix from a later edition of Olcott's catechism, which says that early Buddhism "clearly held to a permanency of records in the Akasa, and the potential capacity of man to read the same".⁴ In the two editions of the catechism I could read, the first of 1881 and one of 1915, that sentence is not there.³ So the idea of the "records" begins as a Theosophical reading of Buddhism, and reaches the public inside someone else's book.

1899: Leadbeater gives them a name

The name people search for today appears clearly in Clairvoyance (1899) by Charles W. Leadbeater, another Theosophist. Asked how a clairvoyant sees the remote past, the book answers: "it is read from the akashic records".⁵ And it admits something rarely repeated: that the word akasha "has been very loosely used" in Theosophical books, sometimes as a synonym for astral light and sometimes for any invisible matter, and that the name "is in truth somewhat of a misnomer". It also calls the records "the memory of the Logos".⁵

Leadbeater explains how they are used. The investigator can pass the records by at any speed desired, "at the rate of a year in a second". And to date what is seen, the book takes as a fixed point an event it treats as settled: "the sinking of Poseidonis in the year 9,564 B.C.", the last island of Atlantis.⁵ That number, with its four digits, comes from no excavation and no document: it comes from the reading itself.

1904: Steiner and the "Akasha Chronicle"

In German, the idea took another name. Between 1904 and 1908, Rudolf Steiner published in the journal Lucifer-Gnosis a series of articles called Aus der Akasha-Chronik, "From the Akasha Chronicle". The preface explains that written history reaches back only a few millennia and changes whenever a new document turns up, and that whoever develops certain faculties can read a history that is not destroyed, written "in other letters than the ordinary one".⁶

Steiner adds a warning worth knowing: that this spiritual vision is not infallible either, that it "can be deceived", and so no one should be surprised if what different sources report "does not always fully agree". And in the same preface the story of Atlantis begins: a continent between America and Europe, the scene of a culture for "about a million years", whose last remains sank in the tenth millennium before Christ. For those facts the reader is sent to a little book by W. Scott-Elliot, Atlantis, nach okkulten Quellen, "Atlantis, according to occult sources".⁶

1908: a gospel "transcribed" from the records

In 1908, the American Levi H. Dowling published The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, whose title page presents it as "transcribed from the Book of God's Remembrances, known as the Akashic Records". Among other things, it tells of the years of Jesus that the gospels leave out, with journeys to India, Tibet, Persia, Greece and Egypt.⁷ The introduction by Eva S. Dowling explains that akasha is a substance so sensitive that the slightest vibration leaves on it "an indelible impression"; that every person has a distinct vibration; and that the reader of the records tunes in to one alone, a principle, it says, "demonstrated in wireless telegraphy". It concludes that all of Levi's transcriptions "are true to the letter".⁷

More readers came later. The best known was Edgar Cayce, who gave "readings" in trance in the United States and, according to Wikipedia, gave some fourteen thousand over a lifetime.⁸

Are the Akashic records real?

There is no known way to check that they exist, and the authors who read them do not offer one: the method is always the reader's own faculty. What can be checked are two things these books took for granted.

The first is the ether. Blavatsky identified akasha with the "universal ether", and the Dowlings with something that vibrates like the waves of the wireless. In physics, the luminiferous ether was abandoned: the Michelson-Morley experiment (1887) found no trace of it, and special relativity (1905) showed it was not needed, according to Wikipedia.⁸ The substance the records were tied to stopped existing for science just as the records were becoming popular.

The second is Atlantis. Leadbeater gives it an exact date, Steiner a million years. Plato placed its war about nine thousand years before his own time, and plate tectonics, accepted in the 1960s, showed that no continent could have sunk in the Atlantic in the recent geological past, according to Wikipedia.⁸ What the readings say about the past that can be checked has not survived the check.

That does not answer the big question, whether the world keeps a memory of itself, which is old and which this Diary has already visited with the world soul. It answers a smaller one: when and how the idea was written down. And that one has a date.

From space to memory

This piece goes through the texts in order of date: each step brings the original sentence, in Sanskrit, English or German, and its translation.

What I could not read

I read the passage of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (I.9.1) in Sanskrit in the Wikisource edition, with Müller's translation (1879).¹ I read the passages quoted from Isis Unveiled, vol. 1 (1877),² Olcott's Buddhist Catechism in its editions of 1881 and 1915,³ Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism in the Boston edition of 1884,⁴ the chapters of Leadbeater's Clairvoyance (1899) on the past and the ending,⁵ Steiner's preface to Aus der Akasha-Chronik⁶ and the title page and introduction of The Aquarian Gospel.⁷ I did not find the edition of the catechism that Sinnett quotes ("14th thousand"), so I have not seen the sentence about the records in Olcott's book, only in Sinnett's quotation. I did not read Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888), Scott-Elliot, Cayce's readings, Alice Bailey, or the rest of The Aquarian Gospel. What I say about the Buddhist schools, the ether, Atlantis and Cayce comes from Wikipedia.⁸ Translations from Sanskrit and German are mine.

What we do with this

Anima Mundis carries the soul of the world in its name, and in this part we have seen memory as an art, as a trial and as a measurement. The Akashic records are imagined memory at its largest. What they leave us is a question that works far beyond them: when an old word arrives with a new meaning, the date of the word is not enough; look for the date of the meaning. Ākāśa is thousands of years old. The records, little more than a century. In the Observatory we keep only what can be counted, and we say when the counting began.