A while back on an occult books group, someone was looking for books in Latin about astral projection. Not any books that mentioned it, mind — books in Latin, presumably older than 18th century, on the topic.
And I knew right away: they weren’t going to find it.
That’s not because the concept doesn’t exist in older magical literature. You can certainly find accounts of soul flight, dream visions, bilocation, remote spirit-walking, or being “carried forth in ecstasy” — from the Pythagoreans all the way to 19th-century spiritualists. But you’re not going to find the phrase astral projection in Latin. You’re not even going to find it in English until fairly late in the game.
That’s because astral projection isn’t an ancient concept. It’s an old idea in a new hat. And the hat, in this case, seems to date from somewhere around the 1880s.
Using Google Books’ advanced search, you’ll find that the term barely shows up in print before the 1890s. The earliest reference I’ve been able to confirm is from an 1887 novel called Mohammed Benani, where the term is already being used as jargon. By that point, the Theosophical Society had been spreading its hybridized system of Eastern metaphysics, Western esotericism, and imaginative fiction for about a decade. Much of the vocabulary we associate with “astral” anything — astral plane, astral light, astral body — solidified in that milieu.
In the decades that followed, “astral projection” became the catch-all term for any experience where the consciousness or spirit seemed to leave the body. But it was applied retroactively. Earlier traditions had their own frameworks and terminology — and they weren’t necessarily interchangeable with this new one.
Take, for example, the case cited by William Walker Atkinson in his book Psychomancy and Crystal Gazing:
One morning in December, 1836, he had the following dream, or, he would prefer to call it, revelation. He found himself suddenly at the gate of Major N. M.'s avenue, many miles from his home. Close to him was a group of persons, one of whom was a woman with a basket on her arm, the rest men, four of whom were tenants of his own, while the others were unknown to him. Some of the strangers seemed to be murderously assaulting H. W., one of his tenants, and he interfered. "I struck violently at the man on my left, and then with greater violence at the man's face on my right. Finding, to my surprise, that I had not knocked down either, I struck again and again with all the violence of a man frenzied at the sight of my poor friend's murder. To my great amazement I saw my arms, although visible to my eye, were without substance, and the bodies of the men I struck at and my own came close together after each blow through the shadowy arms I struck with. My blows were delivered with more extreme violence than I ever think I exerted, but I became painfully convinced of my incompetency. I have no consciousness of what happened after this feeling of unsubstantiality came upon me." Next morning he experienced the stiffness and soreness of violent bodily exercise, and was informed by his wife that in the course of the night he had much alarmed her by striking out again and again with his arms in a terrific manner, 'as if fighting for his life.' He, in turn, informed her of his dream, and begged her to remember the names of those actors in it who were known to him. On the morning of the following day (Wednesday) he received a letter from his agent, who resided in the town close to the scene of the dream, informing him that his tenant had been found on Tuesday morning at Major N. M.'s gate, speechless and apparently dying from a fracture of the skull, and that there was no trace of the murderers. That night he started for the town, and arrived there on Thursday morning. On his way to a meeting of magistrates he met the senior magistrate of that part of the country, and requested him to give orders for the arrest of the three men whom, besides H. W., he had recognised in his dream, and to have them examined separately. This was at once done. The three men gave identical accounts of the occurrence, and all named the woman who was with them. She was then arrested, and gave precisely similar testimony. They said that between eleven and twelve on the Monday night they had been walking homewards along the road, when they were overtaken by three strangers, two of whom savagely assaulted H. W., while the other prevented his friends from interfering. H. W. did not die, but was never the same man afterwards; he subsequently emigrated. (Vol. I. p. 142.)
In what he termed a “dream, or revelation,” a man dreamed he had intervened in a murder — only to wake up with sore limbs and learn the event had truly occurred, exactly as seen, at the same time he was dreaming it. His limbs had lashed out during the night, alarming his wife, and he had the sense — in the dream — that his arms were unsubstantial, his blows ineffectual, his body intangible. The whole episode reads like a classic case of what we’d now label astral projection, down to the sense of being present-but-ineffectual at a remote scene. But the term wasn’t available to him. He had no framework for the idea of a spirit-body leaving the physical one; instead, he understood it as a kind of dream-witnessing, with perhaps divine intervention.
Likewise, older folk beliefs have long held that witches travel by night while their bodies lie sleeping. This is especially common in hoodoo accounts from the American South, where being “ridden” by a witch was a known experience — you might feel pinned to your bed, unable to move, or wake up exhausted and sore, with stories of strange dreams. But again, this wasn’t “astral projection” in the modern sense. It was interpreted within its own system of meaning: witchcraft, spiritual attack, or nocturnal visitations.
Even in antiquity, you’ll find concepts like the eidolon (spirit-double), the daimonion (personal spirit), and various ecstatic or prophetic states described in mystical literature — but the authors never treat these as intentional “projections” of the self in the modern sense.
And that brings us to the real issue: modern occultists love to backdate their jargon. We see a term that sounds old — astral is Latin-derived, after all — and assume it’s ancient. But just because a word has Latin roots doesn’t mean it was ever used in Latin. It’s the same kind of mistake that leads people to assume that a 20th-century term like “energy work” must appear in The Key of Solomon, or that there must be a medieval grimoire called The Book of Shadows because the name sounds arcane.
This sort of thing isn’t always harmless. It can obscure real history and warp our understanding of older traditions. There’s a value in tracing the actual development of magical vocabulary — not to diminish it, but to understand what it meant to the people who used it.
The word astral, for example, didn’t originally have anything to do with soul flight. In earlier magical literature, “astral influences” meant planetary and star-born forces, as understood in astrological medicine. An “astral body” in Paracelsus might mean the body’s connection to these celestial currents — not a ghostly duplicate that flits around while you sleep.
It was Theosophy — that grand 19th-century melting pot of borrowed Sanskrit, Western ceremonialism, and Victorian spiritual ambition — that took “astral” and tied it to the personal soul’s travel outside the body. And from there, the term spread into spiritualist, occult, and eventually New Age literature. By the time of the 1960s, you’d find entire bookshelves promising instructions on how to consciously project your astral self, visit other realms, or spy on your enemies from the comfort of your sofa.
So no — you won’t find astral projection in Latin. You won’t find Agrippa using it. You won’t see it in the Picatrix or Arbatel. The concept might be there under different names, in different guises. But the term itself is new. And like all new terms, it’s worth asking: what exactly are we claiming, and where did the claim come from?
Because if we’re going to treat modern jargon as ancient wisdom, we should at least be honest about where the wisdom started — and whose dream it was.