Soul Aristocrats

At a meeting of a prominent theosophical society held in the early years of the twentieth century, Theodore Burne Bramble delivered a lecture on the matter of “the Smaller Worlds within the Large.” Attempting to address the great disparity in physical size to be observed among the different classes of spirits—pixies, ogres, and so on—Bramble posited a unique cosmological theory. The world these creatures live in, he explained, is not our world per se. “It is another world entirely . . . enclosed within this one,” he noted, adding that “the other world is composed of a series of concentric rings, which as one penetrates deeper into the other world, grow larger.”