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Wikimedia Commons · Public domain · Hover to magnify, click for fullscreen
Original fileSudden fright - Annie Besant Thought Form - Project Gutenberg eText 16269
Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater
The image features a dark black background upon which a series of V-shaped, grey streaks move diagonally from the bottom left toward the upper right. Each streak terminates in a crescent moon shape, with the innermost cluster of these forms highlighted with a bright magenta or deep red core. The composition suggests rapid motion or an outward explosion of energy, characteristic of the Theosophical attempt to map the unseen vibrations of human emotion onto a two-dimensional plane.
This image is a plate from the 1901 work 'Thought-Forms' by Theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, which sought to categorize emotional states as observable, color-coded psychic phenomena. It represents an early 20th-century attempt to provide a pseudo-scientific, visual taxonomy for human consciousness within the Theosophical tradition.
Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (1901)
This artwork is a primary illustration documenting the authors' theories on the visualization of psychic energy.
Object
lithography
paper
Modern
English
allegory
Digital Source
Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
640 × 435 px
Linked Data
AI AI-cataloged fields generated by gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview on April 19, 2026. Getty identifiers are AI-inferred and may require verification.