“Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms” takes its name and inspiration from the eponymous book Thought-Forms (1901) by the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, who, after the death of the prominent Theosophist Madame Blavatsky (1831–91), expanded and re-conceptualized her attempt to extrapolate Newton’s theory of color into a syncretic cosmology.(1) According to Besant and Leadbeater, “thoughts are things,” and as such, they can manifest as visible auras. Thought-Forms is a detailed account of “what kind of thing a thought is,” in which Besant and Leadbeater document the “spiritual vibrations” which emanate from ideas, emotions, and sounds as visual shapes, colors, and forms.
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