by Colin Wilson
In spite of these setbacks, Lévi persisted and, according to his own account, was able to consult the spirit on two more occasions on some fine points of cabalism.
Lévi was a widely respected magician for the remainder of his life, and attracted many disciples. That he had occult powers—or that his disciples were convinced he had—is certain. A disciple to whom Lévi had given a prayer to recite before he fell asleep found that the words of the prayer were glowing in the dark, and that Lévi’s spirit was standing by his bed. It seems likely that Lévi possessed the power of projecting his astral body.
His books strike the modern reader as wildly imaginative and confused, but they exerted an immense influence on a whole generation of students of the occult. His death in 1875 was mourned by hundreds of occultists in France, Germany, and England, who regarded him as the great master.
In 1831, when Lévi was still studying for the priesthood, there was born in Russia a woman who was to exert an even greater influence than he on 19th-century occultism: Elena Hahn, later Petrovna, but known as Madame Blavatsky. Born into an aristocratic family, she married at 16, left her husband soon after, and began to travel around the world. She was an explosive, charming, delightful personality. For a while she worked as a bareback rider in a circus, and dabbled in many odd interests. She had undoubted mediumistic powers, and throughout her life odd manifestations were apt to occur in her presence: inexplicable rappings, ringing of bells, and movements of objects. In fact, it seems that she had the power of raising poltergeists. After living carelessly until she was just past 40, and then wondering how to make a living, she decided to turn her occult abilities to account and become a medium.
On going to the United States she met Colonel Olcott, a lawyer and journalist who became her lifelong admirer and tireless publicist. She told Olcott that she was in touch with a certain spiritual Brotherhood of Luxor, presumably priests of ancient Egypt, and he believed her—as he believed everything else she told him. Together they formed the Theosophical Society, a movement for the study of ancient wisdom. For three years it flourished in America. In 1879, as interest seemed to wane, they decided to move to India, which Madame Blavatsky regarded as the fountainhead of spiritual wisdom.
In Bombay, Theosophy was an immediate success. The charismatic personality of Madame Blavatsky fascinated the Hindus even more than it had fascinated the Americans. She claimed that the Secret Masters in Tibet, a group of spiritual initiates, had imparted their wisdom to her. When disciples asked her questions about these matters, paper notes fell from the air. The notes contained detailed replies to the questions and were signed ‘Koot Hoomi’. These notes later became famous as the Mahatma Letters. Koot Hoomi, a semi-divine Master, was even seen by some devotees one moonlight night.
In 1884 the bombshell cane. A housekeeper with whom Madame Blavatsky had quarrelled told a Western journalist that most of the magical effects were merely tricks. The Mahatma Letters were simply dropped through a crack in the ceiling of the room in which the disciples had gathered, and the seven-foot-tall Koot Hoomi was actually a model carried around on someone’s shoulders. Examination of a cabinet in which many manifestations had occurred revealed a secret panel. The Society for Psychical Research, which had been investigating her powers, issued a sceptical report.
It might seem that the Blavatsky reputation was irretrievable. Not a bit of it. Madame Blavatsky set sail for London—and soon the Theosophical Society was flourishing again, although it never achieved anything like its earlier success. Once again, accounts of Madame Blavatsky’s magical powers began to circulate among occultists. The poet W. B. Yeats, a serious and long-term student of the occult—reported that when he visited Madame Blavatsky, her cuckoo clock made hooting noises at him. A. P. Sinnett, who later became her faithful disciple, complained when he visited her that he had attempted to raise spirits at seances, but could not even get rapping sounds. ‘Oh, raps are the easiest thing to get,’ she replied—and raps immediately sounded from all parts of the room.
When Madame Blavatsky died in 1891, six years after the fiasco that drove her out of India, she left behind a host of disciples who firmly believed in the existence of Koot Hoomi and the Tibetan Masters. She also left behind two huge books, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, in which she explains that the earth is destined to evolve through seven ‘root races’, of which we are tie fifth. Much of these enormous, bewildering books is taken up with descriptions of the root races.
In retrospect, it seems fairly certain that Madame Blavatsky was a genuine medium of unusual powers. It is more certain that, when her somewhat erratic powers were feeble, she helped them out with trickery—a temptation to which dozens of bona fide mediums and magicians have succumbed. She was in short both a charlatan and a genuine magician, and her hypnotically powerful personality made her one of the most remarkable women of the 19th century.
The next major step in the history of magic was the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. One day in 1885 a middle-aged clergyman named Woodford was passing an idle hour at a secondhand bookstall on Farringdon Street in London. Among the dusty volumes he came upon a bound, handwritten manuscript that was obviously in cipher. Woodford was a student of the occult, and he recognised certain symbols of the Cabala in the text. He bought the manuscript but, after several unsuccessful attempts to decode it, put it aside. Two years later, in the summer of 1887, he sent the manuscript to a friend, Dr William Wynn Westcott, a coroner who was interested in occultism and freemasonry. Westcott was familiar with the first major work on ciphers, the Steganographia by the 15th-century alchemist Abbot Johann Trithemius, and it did not take him long to conclude that the mysterious pages were actually written in Trithemius’s code. When deciphered they proved to be five magical rituals for introducing newcomers into a secret society, together with notes on various cabalistic matters.
Concealed among the pages Westcott found a letter in German, which stated that anyone interested in these rituals should contact a certain Fräulein Sprengel at an address in Stuttgart. Westcott lost no time in writing to her. Fräulein Sprengel replied, divulging that she was a member of a German magical order. A correspondence about magic ensued, and eventually Fräulein Sprengel gave Westcott permission to found an English branch of the order, and to use the rituals to initiate members. Accordingly, in 1888, Westcott founded a society called The Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn. (Its pretentious title perhaps reflects the influence of Madame Blavatsky, who had arrived in London from India a few months previously.) Two other students of the occult were co-founders: William Woodman, a retired doctor who had studied the Cabala in Hebrew, and Samuel Liddell Mathers, an eccentric scholar of aristocratic leanings. Before long the Golden Dawn had branches in Edinburgh, Weston-super-Mare, and Bradford, and an enthusiastic following of displaced intellectuals and cranks. Its members included the beautiful actress Florence Farr, the poet W. B. Yeats, and the young and as yet unknown Aleister Crowley.
This, at any rate, is the story of the founding of the Golden Dawn as put about by Westcott and Mathers. In recent years Ellic Howe, the historian of magic, has looked into the matter closely, and has concluded that Fräulein Sprengel never existed. The cipher manuscript was probably genuine, but it came from a collection of occultist Fred Hockley, who died in 1885, and not from a bookstall in Farringdon Street. Westcott, probably with the connivance of Mathers, forged various letters in German purporting to come from Fräulein Sprengel. His aim evidently was to give the society a certain authority rooted in ancient practices. Mathers was later to denounce the Sprengel letters as forgeries, although he must have known about them from the beginning. Westcott seems to have been a Jekyll and Hyde character. Indeed, his split personality was so marked that he wrote in two completely different styles of handwriting. As for Mathers, who was to change his name to MacGregor Mathers and pose as a Scottish aristocrat, he was one of those curious figures who seem to occur so often in the history of magic—a kind of confid
ence trickster whose aim was not so much to swindle as to gain respect, admiration, and power.
Does all this mean, then, that the Order of the Golden Dawn was nothing more than a combination of chicanery and wishful thinking? By no means. Its members did, beyond question, pursue serious and genuine studies of the magical arts. At this point, then, we must have a closer look at the whole subject of magic and those who practice it.
First of all, we have to admit that common-sense insists that magic is bound to be nonsense. How could some semi-religious ceremony have the slightest influence on the real world? Clergymen in church may pray for rain, or prosperity, or victory in battle, but they do not expect their prayers to produce a definite effect; they merely hope that God will pay attention. So why should some magic ceremony, not even addressed to God, have the power to influence actual events?
This is, I repeat, the commonsense view, the so-called scientific approach. But every day, thousands of events occur that science refuses to recognise because they appear to flout scientific laws. Dowsing, telepathy, precognition of future events, and spectres of the living are only a few examples. Perhaps we cannot really blame scientists for declining to pay too much attention to these things. The aim of science is to describe the universe in terms of natural laws, especially laws that forge unbreakable links between cause and effect—between an occurrence and the forces that make it happen. It is the apparent absence of such a link in magical events that makes scientists sceptical of them. The occultist responds to such scepticism by claiming that scientists refuse, or are unable, to spread their net of inquiry wide enough to encompass strange events. What is beyond dispute is that such events do occur.
When we try to take account of occult events, and to devise some kind of theory that helps to account for them, we discover an interesting thing. Such a theory has already existed for thousands of years. It does not matter whether we call it magic, occultism, shamanism, the Hermetic tradition as based on the works of Hermes Trismegistus. It all amounts to the same thing. Its basic assertion is that there is a far more intimate connection between man and nature than we are inclined to believe. The world is full of unseen forces, and of laws of whose nature we have no inkling. Perhaps there is some strange medium that stretches throughout space—such as Eliphas Lévi’s astral light—that transmits these forces as the air transmits sound waves.
How do we make contact with such forces? The answer seems to be that you have to want to with an intense inner compulsion. In his autobiography, the painter Oscar Kokoschka tells of how his mother, who was having tea with his aunt one day in Prague, Czechoslovakia, suddenly leaped to her feet and announced that she must rush home because her youngest son was bleeding. The aunt tried to persuade her that her idea was nonsense, but his mother hurried home—and found that her son had cut his leg with a hatchet while trying to chop down a tree. He would certainly have bled to death if she had arrived any later. This story—and hundred of others like it equally well attested—indicates that strange powers come into operation where our deepest desires or needs are involved. As we go through our everyday lives, we do not need to exercise much will power; but occasionally, something stirs us to some really deep effort. It is this kind of effort that is likely to produce magical effects. The 20th-century poet Robert Graves has remarked that many young men use a form of unconscious ‘sorcery’ to seduce young women. This is another word for thought pressure.
We could say, then, that organizations such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn set out to experiment with will power, and to explore the possibilities of reaching deep subconscious levels of the will. Perhaps their magic was a hit-and-miss affair that worked only occasionally; but at least they were trying to learn about the possibilities of the true will.
The magic practiced by the members of the Golden Dawn was based on a number of simple principles. To begin with, they believed that certain basic symbols or ideas have a deep meaning for all human beings. On one occasion, Mathers handed Florence Farr a piece of cardboard with a geometrical symbol on it, and told her to close her eyes and place it against her forehead. She immediately saw in her mind’s eye a cliff top above the sea, with gulls shrieking. Mathers had shown her the water symbol from the Cabala. There is a close connection between such symbols and the theory of archetypes of the psychologist Carl Jung, who believed that certain symbols are able to strike a chord in the unconscious mind of every human being.
The Golden Dawn taught its students to try to train their imagination, which is the trigger of the will, and gain control over it. One of their exercises was to control likes and dislikes until they could like something they normally hated, and hate something they usually liked. Another exercise was to attempt to see the world through other people’s eyes rather than their own—in other words, to completely change their normal point of view. Many modern psychologists would agree that such exercises are valuable and healthy. They are, in fact, similar to exercises practised in yoga and other meditation disciplines.
The Golden Dawn also made a genuine attempt to draw together all that was best in the ancient magical traditions: Hermeticism, Cabalism, Enochian magic (based on the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, which tells of the fall of the Angels and their magic practices), and such magic textbooks as The Key of Solomon, The Magic of Abrahemelin the Mage, and the Grimoire of Pope Honorius.
On the face of it, the Golden Dawn should have been a wholly beneficial and healthy influence. Unfortunately, too many of its leading figures were driven by the craving that has been the downfall of so many magicians: the will to power, not only over themselves but also over everyone else. Gerald Yorke, a friend of Aleister Crowley, concluded that the story of the Golden Dawn showed that ‘the majority of those who attempt to tread the occult path of power become the victims of their creative imagination, inflate their egos, and fall’. There was a great deal of infighting for the leadership of the Golden Dawn. Dr Westcott saw himself as the leader, but MacGregor Mathers felt the position should rightly be his. Mathers claimed to be in direct touch with the Secret Chiefs, semi-divine spirits, who dictated new rituals to him through his wife as a medium. Then there was A. E. Waite, a learned American historian of magic. His interests, however, were more mystical than magical, and he was not a very inspiring person. Finally, there was Aleister Crowley, a remarkable and demonic magician whose career brought ruin to many others as well as himself.
Crowley was the son of a wealthy and puritanical brewer. He was born in Leamington near Stratford-upon-Avon in 1875. His birthplace gave him opportunity to remark with typical bombast and arrogance: ‘It is a strange coincidence that one small county [Leamington and Stratford are in Warwickshire] should have given England her two greatest poets—for one must not forget Shakespeare.’ It sounds like a joke, but in fact Crowley was convinced that he was a great poet. However, though his verse shows considerable talent, he lacked the discipline and sense of language to be even a good poet.
Crowley was a spoiled child who developed an intense dislike of the Plymouth Brethren, the strict religious sect to which his father belonged. He was also obsessed by sex. His first of numerous seductions occurred with a young servant when he was 14 years old. At university he wrote a great deal of poetry, which he published at his own expense. He also developed an incurable desire that lasted all his life to shock respectable people. In his late teens he discovered Mathers’ translation of a book called The Kabbalah Unveiled, as well as a work by A. E. Waite on ceremonial magic. He quickly established contact with the Golden Dawn.
By the time Crowley entered the Golden Dawn in 1898, the struggle for its control had already been going on for some time. In 1891 Mathers had returned from France to announce that he had met three of the Secret Chiefs in Paris, and had had various magical secrets imparted to him. Dr Woodman died that year and for the next six years there was a certain amount of tension within the movement. Dr Westcott resigned from the Order—apparently having been told by his superiors on the London Counci
l that magic was not a suitable occupation for a respectable public official. Mathers spent a great deal of time in Paris working on magical manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale, so the struggle for leadership of the movement continued.
In August 1899 Crowley rented a house in Boleskine, Scotland on the shores of Loch Ness, conferred on himself the title ‘Laird of Boleskine’, donned a kilt, and proceeded to practise the magic of Abrahamelin the Mage—a system which, he claimed, he had learned about in the writings of John Dee.
