Seen through Deep Time: Occult Clairvoyance and Palaeoscientific Imagination.

This article examines how nineteenth-century Anglo-American paranormal researchers, notably the psychometers William and Elizabeth Denton and members of the Theosophical Society including Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, claimed to access prehistoric pasts through clairvoyance. It argues that their narratives of deep time were heavily influenced not only by contemporary geological and palaeontological science but also by the figurative language, metaphors, and visual iconography used by mainstream palaeoscientists and science writers. Theosophical clairvoyance evolved from psychometric methods into a system accessing the "akashic records," an ethereal archive of all past events, which was employed to construct occult cosmogonies placing humans centrally in deep history. The article highlights the interplay between scientific imagination and occult thought, showing how these paranormal researchers literalized the figurative language of palaeoscience to claim direct visionary insight into prehistoric worlds, thereby asserting individual agency within the vast timescales of geology and evolution.