A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult Read online

  A DARK MUSE

  A DARK MUSE

  A HISTORY OF THE OCCULT

  GARY LACHMAN

  THE AUTHOR

  Gary Lachman is the author of In Search of PD. Ouspensky (2004), A Secret History of Consciousness (2003) and Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001). As Gary Valentine he is the author of New York Rocker: My Life In the Blank Generation (2002), an account of his years as a composer and performer with Blondie and Iggy Pop. He's written for TLS, Literary Review, Guardian, Independent, Mojo and Bizarre, and is a regular contributor to Fortean Times. He lives in London.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the Swedenborg Foundation for their gracious permission to reprint a section of George F. Dole's translation of Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell. Many thanks also go to Stephen Ash for his generous and indispensable suggestions, and to Mike Jay and Antonio Melechi for their invaluable expertise in editing anthologies. I am also once again indebted more than I can say to the staff of the British Library. Special thanks, however, go to the individual or individuals who, on a crisp September morning in 2002, stole my son Max's pushchair at Camden Lock, Camden Town. I had carelessly stashed my bag under the seat, and within it were all of the notes for this book. Because of this chance encounter, however, my acquaintance with the material became doubly intimate.

  CONTENTS

  Part 1

  Introduction: A Dark Muse 13

  Enlightenment Occultism 17

  Romantic Occultism 64

  Satanic Occultism 127

  Fin de siecle Occultism 152

  The Modernist Occultist 226

  Part 2

  Selected Texts 271

  Selected Bibliography 381

  "Initiates' wandering did not differ from ordinary travels for study except that their itinerary, though apparently haphazard, rigorously coincided with the adept's most secret aspirations and gifts ...

  O.V. de L. Milosz

  Part 1

  INTRODUCTION

  A Dark Muse

  Hidden, secret, esoteric, unknown: these are some dictionary definitions for "occult." The word itself has its roots in the Latin occulo, to hide, and is linked to the technical astronomical term "occultation," as when one heavenly body obscures or "occludes" another by passing in front of it. In the popular mind however, "the occult" is an all-purpose term indicating a variety of things, from Satanism, witchcraft and tabloid horoscopes, to internet psychics and UFOs. Although not entirely incorrect, this catch-all phrase indicates the kind of deterioration language undergoes over time. The occult or "occultism" is an umbrella term for a number of disciplines and beliefs which are generally agreed to be scientifically invalid and, in practice, worthless. Erroneous and misguided at best, at their worst - in, for example, the gruesome activities of some overzealous Satanists' - some forms of occultism can indeed be dangerous. And yet, the origin of this popular notion of the occult is as occult - that is, unknown - as these practices themselves.

  Although the several mystical and religious philosophies that make up the basic world view of occultism reach back to antiquity, the notion of the occult, as we understand it today, stems from relatively more recent times. Babylonian astrology, the Greek mysteries, hermetic philosophy, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, alchemy and other forms of occult thought are millennia old, but it was not until the rise of science in the late 17th century that these and other disciplines related to them became hidden and esoteric in the way they are seen to be today. Throughout the ages, the spiritual demands placed on practitioners of these arts were rigorous and hence, only the elite were allowed to engage in them, thus making them esoteric or secret to the profane. But they were nevertheless recognized as significant pursuits, worthy of respect and deference. One sign of the importance hermeticism, for example, held can be seen in the fact that in 1460, Cosimo de' Medici, patron of the great Renaissance magician Marsilio Ficino, commanded his scribe to break off translating Plato, in order to concentrate on a newly found batch of manuscripts, purported to be the work of Hermes Trismegistus himself. Not long after, Isaac Newton, father of the modern scientific worldview, would busy himself much more with his explorations of alchemy and Biblical exegeses than with the theory of gravity for which he is remembered today. Newton is perhaps the last of his breed, for with the triumph of the Age of Reason, which, ironically, he helped bring about, the occult ideas and theories which he devoted innumerable hours to, became unquestionably passe. Materialism, scientific reason, mathematical logic and an amenability to being measured - the epistemological criteria that still reign with us today - became the sine qua non of truth and any knowledge or belief that did not meet these astringent requirements was summarily jettisoned. Which is exactly what happened to the occult.

  To be sure, immense gains and much profit came from this advance. But there were also many losses. One central loss was that, with the rise of scientism - the belief that the above criteria were sufficient to account for all the phenomena of existence - the sense of meaning that, in different ways, accompanied belief in religion, dissolved. Another was that with the increasing power of the metaphor of the machine - Newton's clockwork universe - the specifically human world of feelings, emotions, aesthetics, moral values and other immeasurable phenomena, were more and more seen to be illusory, or, at best, a pleasant but ultimately insignificant by-product of the purely material processes going in the human body.

  The utilitarian advantages of the scientific worldview understandably occluded these more subtle considerations. Yet a sensitive minority remained troubled and sought support for their resistance. And it was at this point, I believe, that `the occult' came into existence. In it the Enlightenment figures and early Romantics who questioned the new paradigm found a body of rejected knowledge, a counter-history and alternative narrative to human existence, one that ran parallel to the increasingly successful scientistic view. And as it dealt primarily with inner, spiritual things, it was one that readily lent itself to this sensitive minority, comprised, for the most part, of artists, poets and writers. In their battle against the encroaching complete scientification of human experience, in the last few centuries poets, artists, and writers have often found considerable assistance in the strange yet sometimes oddly beautiful array of rejected knowledge that makes up the occult.

  Starting with the Enlightenment and continuing on to the modern period, what follows is, I believe, a representative, though not exhaustive, survey of some of the main characters who over the last few hundred years have dipped into this magic bag, along with samples of some of the occult texts they drew out, and, glimpses of some of the figures responsible for them. What these adventurous souls came away with was often crazy, sometimes hilarious, and, on occasion, clearly insane. But it was just as often profound and, in more than one instance, possessed of a transformative, supernatural beauty .

  The book is slanted towards writers and poets, but other studies, drawing on composers and artists, could tell a similar tale. Yet there is some fundamental link between magic and writing. We speak of magic spells. The grimoires of witchcraft have their roots in grammars. In ceremonial magic, reciting the correct word at the proper time determines the success or failure of the operation. Kabbalah, from which most of modern magic derives, is based almost exclusively on the secret meaning of language. And Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, with whom the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, author of some 365 books, was linked, was also a god of magic. Clearly the power of words is shared by both the poet and the mage.

  Welcome, then, to the world of the occult. And to the dreams and occasional nightmares inspired by its dark muse.
r />   Note

  1 See "Blood-drinking devil worshippers face life for ritual Satanic killing." Guardian 1 February 2002. On 30 January 2002, Daniel and Manuela Ruda were found guilty of the ritual slaying of their friend, Franck Hackert. The couple - 26 and 23 years old respectively - repeatedly hit 33 year old Hackert with a hammer, then stabbed him 66 times, before carving a pentagram on his chest, and collecting his blood to drink. When the police arrived a scalpel remained embedded in Hackert's stomach, and his body lay beneath a banner which read "When Satan Lives." The two explained that Hackert was an appropriate victim because of his mild temperament and fondness for the Beatles.

  Enlightenment Occultism

  It may seem a paradox to speak of an `Occult Enlightenment'. After all, the Enlightenment saw the triumph of reason and science over superstition and religious prejudice. But there is rarely a sudden and absolute disappearance of a practice or belief that has been a central part of human culture. This is especially true for magic, which has been around for millennia, and is still with us today. For the scientific account of things, the magical view had indeed been eclipsed. But for the popular mind, it was clearly present.

  In the Paris of 1784, for example, alchemists, kabbalists, astrologers and other wonder workers could be found practically everywhere. Street venders sold engravings of the mysterious Comte de Saint-Germain. Booksellers hawked hefty volumes on the secret occult arts. Faith-healers and alchemical physicians did a brisk trade among the poorer classes. Newspapers ran accounts of extraordinary characters like Leon le Juif, who possessed a magical mirror, and M. Ruer, who had discovered the Philosopher's Stone. Talking dogs, a child who could see underground, men who walked on water, and reports of strange creatures like the monster with a man's face, lion's mane, bull's horns, snake's scales and bat's wings, peppered the daily press. Even eminent authorities like Restif de la Bretonne and Mirabeau accepted the idea that Frederick II had produced satyrs and centaurs via experiments with sodomy ... Magic had so firm a grip on the French popular consciousness that, according to the historian Robert Darnton, the authorities found alchemists, sorcerers and fortune tellers much better placed as spies and police informants than their usual source, the priests.' This fascination with occultism was not limited to the French, and a similar, if less extroverted appeal was exhibited across the channel, in England, as well as in other cities on the continent.

  The popular press of Enlightenment France may strike us as not too dissimilar to today's tabloids; but there remained other, less suspect areas in which a more serious interest in occultism prospered. One, the central one with which this book is concerned, was literature. The other was politics. The following selection on Enlightenment Occultism aims to give some idea of how these currents came together and helped shape the culture of the time.

  Swedenborg

  Perhaps the greatest occult figure of the 18th century was Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), whose sober and methodical approach to the hidden mysteries set a standard too often ignored by later devotees. For most of his adult life a brilliant and prolific scientist, Swedenborg wrote an immense number of scientific studies on everything from metallurgy to the anatomy of the brain. He was also a statesman and assessor of Swedish mines, as well as an inventor of considerable talent: when given the task of transporting several ships inland across mountains, Swedenborg managed it successfully, well ahead of schedule. Many of his scientific insights were also well ahead of their time, and if for nothing else, he would be remembered for these today in his native Sweden. But in 1745, at the age of 57, something happened. A profound spiritual crisis involving weird prophetic dreams and shattering hypnagogic visions - including a visitation from Christ - shook Swedenborg's strictly scientific consciousness and launched him on a new career as a cartographer of strange inner landscapes and occult worlds. He spoke with the dead, journeyed to other planets, and most strikingly, visited heaven and hell, returning to write an immense book about what he saw there. He wrote other immense books as well, most of them explaining in a dry, scholarly style the true meaning of the Bible. Swedenborg's influence on western culture has been great; his readers have included Goethe, William Blake, Coleridge, Balzac, Baudelaire, Yeats, Strindberg and Arnold Schoenberg. What appealed to them was the air of sanity and common sense with which Swedenborg made even the most incredible pronouncements: that people on the moon speak from their stomachs, for example, or that Martians have two-tone faces. But in the same book he could speak of hell as a psychological condition, an idea which at the time seemed radical, but which today we can appreciate readily.

  The standard account of Swedenborg's career has his plunge into other worlds happening out of the blue, but Swedenborg's initiation into the occult was not quite as precipitous as that. Before his voyages to heaven and hell, Swedenborg had devoted a considerable time to various occult practices: breath control, meditation, automatic writing, as well as visionary methods based on a form of sexual mysticism. Swedenborg's links to London were many, and during an early visit in 1710, he may have joined a Jacobin Masonic Lodge. During a later visit, in 1744, there is reason to believe Swedenborg became a member of the Moravians, a secret society led by the eccentric Count Zinzendorf. Zinzendorf propagated a mystical political doctrine whose aim was to bring about the millennium by uniting Christians and Jews through kabbalism - a theme common to many Enlightenment mystics. Swedenborg was in London, staying in Wellclose Square, when his mystical experience occurred, and he may at that time have received some kabbalistic tutoring from Samuel Jacob Chayyim Falk, mentor perhaps to another Enlightenment occultist, Cagliostro. Falk, who was born into a Polish community of the followers of the `false Messiah', Sabbatai Zevi, came to England in 1742, and set up shop - literally - on the old London Bridge, which in those days was lined with houses. Here he ran an alchemical laboratory, while maintaining from his home in the East End a secret occult school. Although Swedenborg later claimed not to have studied Kabbalah, he is known to have visited Jewish districts in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Prague and Rome, and evidence from his own writings suggests a familiarity with kabbalistic thought. Loving erotic union is part of the ritual worship of the Jewish mystical community, reflecting the original creative act of the Godhead, as well as the reunification of male and female energies. In his own work, Swedenborg emphasized that in heaven, angels continue to make love, and in the Latin version of his book Conjugal Love, Swedenborg spelled out in detail methods of breath control and meditation enabling a practitioner to maintain an erection and remain within an orgasmic trance for considerable periods.2

  For the literary minded, one theme stands out from Swedenborg's massive edifice: the idea of `correspondences'. This will turn up in a host of different ways in the centuries after his death, both as a central axiom of magical thinking as well as a core theme of symbolist poetry. Swedenborg argued that the physical world is rooted in a higher, spiritual world, and that correspondences exist between the two. In grasping the links between the physical and the spiritual worlds, we come closer to understanding the divine design. Swedenborg's correspondences are perhaps the most thorough expression of the alchemical axiom `as above, so below'; they are also a powerful embodiment - literally - of the idea that man is a microcosm, containing within himself the entire cosmos. In an age moving inexorably toward the `trousered ape' of Darwinian thought, Swedenborg argued conversely that man is truly made in the image of the divine, and spoke of the ultimate reality as Universal Man, the Anthropos, a theme central to kabbalistic and hermetic teachings.

  In the 19th century, Baudelaire took the idea of correspondences and infused it with elements of synesthesia and the notion of the unity of the arts. But for his own time and immediately after, Swedenborg was known mostly as a prophet of a new age. The Church of the New Jerusalem, of which William Blake was a member, was founded after Swedenborg's death and preached an apocalyptic doctrine that went well with the social and political ferment brewing across Europe.

  Other central f
igures of the Occult Enlightenment, like Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), Giuseppe Balsamo (1743-1795) - better known as Cagliostro - and the Comte de Saint-Germain (1710-1784?) weren't writers. Most balanced accounts admit there was something of the charlatan in all three. Yet it is difficult to accept this as a complete assessment of their careers, and some idea of their life and times is essential in any survey of magic in the 18th century.

  Mesmer

  Mesmer, who considered himself a strict scientist, began life in Iznang, a village on the German shore of Lake Constance. He studied at a Jesuit Theological School, and later registered as a law student in Vienna. He then turned his attention to medicine and in 1766 earned his medical degree with a dissertation on the influence of the planets on human diseases - evidence' that ancient hermetic ideas were still respectable in the mid18th century. Little is known of Mesmer's youth, and there is some question as to how he supported himself during his university days. In his monumental Discovery of the Unconscious, Henri E•Ellenberger speculates that Mesmer may have been helped by secret societies. If so, this would not be unusual; the late 18th century was a time rife with secret societies and occult organizations. As the Baroness d' Oberkirch, an aristocratic socialite and intimate of mesmeric circles in Paris and Strasbourg, remarked: "Never, certainly, were Rosicrucians, alchemists, prophets, and everything related to them so numerous and so influential. Conversation turns almost entirely upon these matters; they fill everyone's thoughts, they strike everyone's imagination ... Looking around us, we see only sorcerers, initiates, necromancers and prophets.s'

  Mesmer's financial problems were solved when he married a wealthy widow and set himself up in Vienna. He became a patron of the arts and his friends include Gluck, Haydn (both masons) and the Mozart family. Wolfgang Mozart - who as a Freemason and quite possibly a member of the Illuminati would be no stranger to secret societies - performed his first opera, Bastien and Bastienne, in Mesmer's private theatre.' Of Mesmer's estate, Leopold, Wolfgang's father, had this to say: "The garden is incomparable, with its avenues and statues, a theatre, a birdhouse, a dovecote and a belvedere on the summit. i5