Lives of Alcyone (book)
Clara Codd narrative
When she was at Adyar as a young woman in 1910-1911, Clara Codd assisted with the preparation of materials for this book. In her autobiography, So Rich a Life, she gave this account of the work:
[Don Fabrizio Ruspoli] was for quite a time helping Mr. Leadbeater with the preparation of a long series of lives, The Lives of Alcyone, which was the ‘star’ name of Jeddu Krishnamurti. I would help Don Ruspoli draw up enormous tables of the past relationships of more than 250 people who seemed to have been more or less in some sort of relationship to each other all through about thirty-three past lives, going back to about 20,000 B.C., in the days of ancient Atlantis. To distinguish a person from life to life, when of course the name of the personality altered, Mr. Leadbeater, who had been a great student of astronomy at one time, gave most of them the names of stars. There was generally some private clue to his method of bestowing these names. For instance, he found me and called me ‘Pisces’ because my surname is Codd. The connection is obvious. Then an extremely stout Indian received the name of ‘Colossus’.
Don Ruspoli and I drew out these charts, putting a male incarnation in red ink and a female incarnation in black…
‘The Lives’ stimulated much interest. One of Don Fabrizio’s favourite jokes was to tell people: “Hush! don’t say a word, but I have three wives on the compound.” Wives of past lives, of course, he meant.
Once at a meeting in Bradford, England, a big, burly farmer asked me if I had ever met anyone I had been married to in past lives.
“Yes,” I replied, “many of them, but I don’t feel like getting married to any of them this time! ”
There were some people at Adyar whom, for the moment, C.W.L. had not found in that particular past. So these members made up a series of lives for themselves, and gave themselves names such as Cyclops. They also composed a poem which they set to music, the chorus of which went like this:
- ‘In the Lives ! In the Lives!
- We’ve had all sorts of husbands and wives.
- In spite of all irk
- We were devils for work.
- In the Lives! In the Lives!’
Someone sang this at one of Mr. [Albert] Schwarz’s musical afternoons, and Mr. Leadbeater had a good laugh.
It may interest some people to know how this investigation of past lives may be done. Let me try to put it simply. Different orders or degrees of matter exist one within the other, permeating and pervading all space. With each degree of matter, time and space valuations are different. Every deed, every word, every thought, every impulse and desire, sent out from that dynamic centre of consciousness which is the individual, express themselves as vibratory rhythms at different levels of matter. These set up synchronous rhythms in the subtler planes. Finally they reach the primeval form of matter called by Hindu philosophers the ’’Akasha’’. There they register themselves permanently and are called the Akashic Records, held to be under the care of the ’’Lipika’’, the recorders, deities of unfathomable height and power. We have the same idea in Christianity in the so-called Book of Life, and the Recording Angel who keeps it. In that living, self-written record, the highly trained seer can trace the pathway of the immortal ego through many lives or incarnations in physical bodies. But such clairvoyance is extremely rare. It should not be confused with the pictures so often seen in the astral light, which may, or may not, refer to the person near whom they appear.[1]
Star names of some prominent Theosophists
- Alcyone - Jiddu Krishnamurti
- Fides - George S. Arundale
- Helios - Marie Russak Hotchener
- Herakles - Annie Besant
- Phocea - William Quan Judge
- Pisces - Clara Codd
- Selene - C. Jinarājadāsa
- Ulyses - Henry Steel Olcott
- Vajra - Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Comments by Hugh Shearman
Hugh Shearman wrote of the Lives:
When Bishop Leadbeater gave accounts of the past lives of any of his colleagues and acquaintances, what he decribed often seemed in some way to fit the individual whom one knew in this life.
Some will hold that this as evidence of objective truth in what Bishop Leadbeater described,others that what he wrote embodied at least a sound intuition.
The case of Clara Codd is a good example. Amusingly, Bishop Leadbeater allotted to her, as a reinarnating ego, the name of the constellation Pisces, the Fishes, making play of the fact that a cod is a kind of fish. Anybody who cares to trace the lives of Pisces, in the extensive tables given in The Lives of Alcyone,who find that the character with that name always had a different marriage partner in every life. Others might return to former partners, but Pisces always turned each time adventurously to somebody new.
This view of her past way of choice which the lives offer serves admirably to express and symbolize something that was very deep in Clara Codd's nature. She was nobody's "twin soul".[2]
Online version
- Lives of Alcyone in three parts at Anandgholap.net