A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  Notes

  1 As mentioned, Rudolf Steiner adopted Ahriman as one of the spiritual entities interfering with human evolution; the other he named Lucifer. Ahriman is the embodiment of cold, factual, materialist thought. Following Milton, in Lucifer Steiner sees the archetype of impulsive, rash, overweening arrogance.

  2 Francis King, article on Satanism in Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, editor Richard Cavendish (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) p. 219.

  3 That a similar form of `reversal' was a common practice in earlier times is well documented; one thinks of the ancient Saturnalia, when slaves were made kings and virgins prostitutes. One also thinks of the Greek practice of enduring some selfinflicting suffering to offset a piece of good luck, as a kind of inoculation against the jealousy of the gods. The basic mechanism is a kind of regulatory process, whereby a desirable mean between good and evil, yang and yin, is maintained. In the 1960s, student radicals employed a strategy of `reversal' against the `establishment' that is strikingly similar to that used in the Black Mass. See my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001).

  4 An altogether more satanic character, the notorious Aleister Crowley, engaged in very similar activities, filing his canines and subjecting female acquaintances to his `serpent's kiss' and, at least on one occasion, hanging his current Scarlet Woman upside down from a ceiling.

  5 He also knew Verlaine, and it was Bretagne who suggested to Rimbaud that he send the older poet copies of his poems.

  6 Enid Starkie Arthur Rimbaud (London: Faber and Faber, 1961) p. 98.

  7 Ibid. pp. 165-167.

  8 The parallel's with Lautreamont are worth mentioning. Poesie, written after Maldoror, is Lautreamont's complete rejection of his earlier, `satanic' work.

  9 Colin Wilson The Books in My Life (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 1998) p. 240

  10 He also served as a model for Proust's Charlus in A Remembrance of Things Past.

  11 Quoted in Robert Baldick The Life of j..K. Huysmans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955) p. 77.

  12 Ibid. p. 141.

  13 Ibid. p. 140.

  14 Both de Guaita and Dubus would die of overdoses. De Guaita died in 1897, at the age of 36; in his last years his life sunk into unrelieved decadence, and he emerged from his scarlet and black apartments only to search for books on occultism, and drugs. In 1895, Dubus was found dead in the urinal of a restaurant in the Place Maubert. He had been released from an insane asylum a few months earlier. A few days before his death, he had complained to Huysmans about voices that pursued him, and confessed to having practised black magic.

  15 Quoted in Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival (London: Rider, 1972) p. 178. Baldick, p. 138.

  16 Quoted in Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity, tr. Francis Amery (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1992) pp. 170-171.

  17 The entire story can be found in Baldick and in McIntosh. McIntosh also provides fascinating material on De Guaita's and Peladan's brief collaboration in the Cabalistic Order of the Rosy Cross, before splitting up into rival Rosicrucian groups. Neither Peladan nor de Guaita had any connection to the 17th Century Rosicrucians, other than name. Peladan had a brief celebrity as the host of a series of Rosicrucian salons, which aimed to unite mysticism and art. Some of the people involved were Erik Satie, Gustave Moreau, and Puvis de Chavannes.

  18 Hermann Hesse "The Brothers Karamazov or The Decline of Europe" in My Belief (London:Jonathan Cape, 1976) pp. 71-73.

  19 For a full account of the satanic world of the Russian fin de siecle see Kristi A Groberg's essay "The Shade of Lucifer's Dark Wing: Satanism in Silver Age Russia," in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal ed., (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997) pp. 99-133.

  20 Prokofief based his 1919 opera of the same name on Briusov's novel, adding his own contribution to a late flare of Russian occultism.

  21 The Diary of Valery Briusov edited and translated by Joan Delaney Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) p. 36.

  22 Both The Balance and Scorpion have clear astrological associations: Libra and Scorpio, signs of the pervasive occult atmosphere of the time.

  23 Nicholas Berdyaev Dream and Reality (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950) p. 200.

  Fin de siecle Occultism

  The twenty-four years between 1890 and the beginning of World War I saw a remarkable eruption of creative energy and speculation, a fantastic melange of alternative and progressive ideas wedding ancient beliefs and modern science. Central to this ideological flood was the occult, the elements of which reached from the dim, primeval past to the unimagined future. Notions of prehistoric lost civilizations and evolutionary supermen shared the same intellectual space as a profound rediscovery of magic and a dizzying preoccupation with higher dimensions. As in some aspects of current New Age philosophy, science and mysticism were seen to support each other, with Einstein's theory of relativity and ideas about `non-Euclidean space' bolstering accounts of astral travel and visions of the Akashic Record. Philosophy, too, was conscripted, and Nietzsche's prophecy of the Ubermensch blended with eastern ideas of karma and reincarnation. A deep dissatisfaction with the mechanical picture of the universe professed by rationalist science primed western consciousness for a cultural journey to the east, and an influx of oriental philosophies invaded Europe, the results of which we still see today. In fact many of the preoccupations that we associate with New Age thought have their roots in the turn of the 19th century. Yoga, meditation, vegetarianism; multiculturalism, homeopathy, and higher consciousness; visions of an alternative society, anticapitalism, and interest in primitive beliefs; a fascination with ancient stone monuments, religious cults, and communes; progressive education, free love, feminism and openness to homosexuality and lesbianism; experimentation with drugs, a rejection of cold reason in favour of feeling and intuition, paganism and nature worship; a turning away from modernity and progress as well as a feverish millennialism: in the years leading up to World War I these and other ingredients com bined to produce an effervescent, highly charged atmosphere in which anything seemed possible and in which the new century just dawning seemed a blank slate on which mankind could now write its own destiny.

  Like today, much of this optimism took place on the lunatic fringe, and books like James Webb's The Occult Underground, which charts the history of a variety of occult, mystical and in some way alternative societies at the turn of the 19th century, are an entertaining and sobering read. But a good deal of this activity had firmer foundations and found its way into some of the most intelligent minds of the time, influencing the literature, art, and social theory of the era. In the concluding essay "The Modernist Occultist" I will touch on some of the results of this influence.

  Probably the most immediate name to come to mind associated with the occult revival of the late 19th century is W.B. Yeats. Yeats was drawn to the occult early on and was a member of two of the most celebrated magical organizations of modern times: the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, both of which we will hear more of shortly. But poets were not the only individuals drawn to the dark side of the mind. The psychologist and philosopher William James was deeply interested in the phenomenology of mystical experience, so much so that he sought some first hand evidence, experimenting with both nitrous oxide and peyote. One result of this was his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, which argued for the validity and importance of supernatural experience, over the uniform strictures of dogma. James was also profoundly drawn to a study of the paranormal, being at one time a president of the Society for Psychical Research, a position he shared with his friend and fellow philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson, too, was a student of the non-rational areas of consciousness, and along with studies of telepathy and other paranormal abilities he wrote on dreams, mysticism, and altered states of consciousness. Bergson was also one of the first philosophers to
draw on the new advances in biology and to argue against the mechanistic vision of positivist science. In books like Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896) Bergson advanced the idea that reason and the intellect were evolutionary tools developed by the mind in order to deal with the necessities of survival. To be effective they must falsify reality and present as a static, solid world of material things what is really a ceaseless flow of experience. A truer, deeper rapport with reality, Bergson argued, can be achieved only through our intuition, something the Romantics had claimed a century earlier. One writer profoundly influenced by Bergson's ideas was Marcel Proust, whose Remembrance of Things Past is an extended essay in Bergson's duration.

  In Creative Evolution (1907) Bergson developed these ideas and argued against the by-then triumphant Darwinian picture of a mechanistic evolution, propelled by chance mutation and the blind will to survive, offering instead an eloquent and persuasive vision of an elan vital, a transcendent `life force' which penetrates matter and moulds it to its end. That end, Bergson argued, was a kind of evolutionary spirituality. As he wrote in his last book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) - written well after his celebrity had dimmed - the universe, it seemed, was "a machine for making gods." One writer who agreed with Bergson was the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who, in his philosophical comedy Man and Superman (1904) (which includes a satanic dream episode, the brilliant Don Juan in Hell), combined Bergson's elan vital with Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Later, Shaw drew on Bergson's ideas again for his futurist fantasy Back to Methuselah (1924), which introduces a race of supermen living in some unthinkable future, semi-divine human beings who have transcended the earthly lot and occupy themselves solely with the eternal. Critics like D.H. Lawrence thought Shaw's Ancients a dismal bore, having given up the flesh for a life of pure mind, an accusation often made against Shaw himself. Most people agreed. But Shaw's vision of a coming super race had it roots in more than his own supposed lack of interest in the delights of corporality.

  Although Bergson became the most well-known opponent of strict Darwinian thought, he was not the first. That honour most go to the author of a book published in 1877, decades before Creative Evolution. The author of the book, Isis Unveiled, a 1,300 page compendium of occult thought, mysticism, and weird speculation was an unusual critic of biological theory in more ways than one. In the first place, she was a woman; in the second, she was Russian. In the third place Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had led an unconventional life, having, among other things, founded what would quickly become a worldwide religious cult, theosophy. The stamp of theosophy falls across practically every aspect of fin de siecle occultism. This is true whether or not the occultists in question were ever theosophists in a strict sense. Along with ideas of hidden masters, reincarnation and cosmic evolution, what theosophy brought to occultism was the belief that it and science were not enemies, but complementary approaches to uncovering the secrets of the universe. There had been earlier exponents of this idea: Mesmer, for one, and later both Poe and BulwerLytton argued that occult phenomena were really the result of forces not yet understood by science. Goethe believed that his own scientific work in botany, morphology and optics was as important as his poetry, an opinion not shared by many. One occultist who did agree with Goethe, however, was Rudolf Steiner, a Goethe scholar, philosopher and theosophist who broke away from theosophy and inaugurated his own form of "spiritual science", anthroposophy, arguably the most successful school of alternative thought to emerge from the 20th century. Needless to say, for the alchemists of an earlier time, occultism itself was a branch of science, perhaps the most important one.

  Yet, while a sense of optimism and expectation greeted the new century, darker visions were also present. Along with intimations of a leap in human evolution, atavistic forces and primal ancient energies also rose to the surface. We have seen some evidence for this in the previous section, in the rise of Satanism and witchcraft. But the shadow took other forms as well. The chasm between the two worlds widened, and the Symbolist rejection of the "mundane shell" (Blake's phrase) reached its peaked. No longer content to ignore the modern world, the late-Romantic consciousness now heaped contempt upon it, and sought refuge in visions of some glittering golden past, or found itself alone in an abyss of cosmic isolation. A sense of apocalypse pervaded the psyche, appearing in some as the approach of madness, in others as the trumpet call of the last days. In a few cases, the two were synonymous. By the summer of 1914, darkness fell, and old Europe was no more.

  Madame Blavatsky

  As noted earlier, 1875 was an important year for occultism. It saw the death of Eliphas Levi and the birth of Aleister Crowley, two significant events by any standard. But even more significant, it was in that year that three eccentric individuals founded an organization that would profoundly influence not only modern occultism, but modern culture in general. In New York .City on 13 September 1875, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge came together to form a successor to their previous occult organization, `the Miracle Club', as one member had ironically referred to it. In its first stages the Theosophical Society was an outgrowth of the popular occultism of the time, and included among its founding members a spirit medium, a kabbalist, and other characters familiar with the traditions of European occultism. The last few decades had seen an obsession with spiritualism on both sides of the Atlantic. It began in upstate New York with the famous Fox sisters in 1848; by the early 1870s, Madame Blavatsky herself had acquired a considerable reputation as a medium. It was in this capacity that she met the earnest and soon-to-be devoted Colonel Olcott. A reporter with a deep interest in the supernatural, Olcott had heard of a pair of remarkable spirit mediums, the Eddys, who lived on a farm in Vermont. Arriving there he was immediately captivated by the appearance of an even more remarkable figure, Madame Blavatsky. Although it was her red Garibaldi shirt, forthright manner, ample proportions and powerful charisma that first caught his attention, Olcott soon discovered that Blavatsky was endowed with psychic abilities that easily outstripped those of the mediums he intended to investigate. A lifetime association began, and soon after the two became Platonic flat mates in Manhattan.

  Soon after its inception, the vague interest in latent powers and occult phenomena that characterized the early Theosophical Society was complicated by a host of eastern metaphysical ideas brought in by Olcott and Blavatsky. The term "theosophy" itself had been around for centuries, Jacob Boehme makes much use of it, and literally means `God wisdom'. But since the founding of the Theosophical Society, the term has been synonymous with the kind of generic eastern spirituality and occultism associated with the group. Yet if all the Theosophical Society had going for it was the hodgepodge of mystical ideas loosely knitted together into its philosophy, it would never have had the kind of influence on 20th century thought it undoubtedly did. At the centre of the mass of doctrines about reincarnation, past lives, astral planes, higher consciousness and spiritual evolution was the formidable, electric and roguish figure of Madame Blavatsky. It is true that the world was waiting for something like theosophy to arrive. Bereft of God through the rise of science, and flooded with a triumphant materialist doctrine, thousands of individuals who sought spiritual guidance found themselves adrift in an indifferent universe. With its broad message of universal brotherhood, spiritual truth and cosmic mysteries, theosophy appealed to both the devout ascetic and the late-Romantic. Yet it's difficult to see how its message would have got across without the captivating personality of its spokeswoman.

  Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (or HPB, as her followers called her), was born Helena von Hahn in 1831 in Ekaterinoslav in the Ukraine. Like her fellow Russian G.I. Gurdjieff, Blavatsky's early life is shrouded in mystery. She was married at eighteen to Nikifor Blavatsky, the Vice-Governor of the province of Erivan, but the marriage was never consummated. Indeed, it is doubtful whether HPB ever had sex, or if she had, that the experience was at all pleasant. All of her remarks o
n it are disparaging, and she constantly advised her followers to abstain from the beastly business, considering carnal activity a major impediment to the spiritual path. Leaving her husband, Blavatsky went to Constantinople, where she worked as a bareback rider in a circus; here she is supposed to have sustained an injury that made sex in any case impossible, prompting the thought that her abstemious virtue was founded on necessity. For a time she worked as the assistant of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home; later she directed the Serbian Royal Choir. She owned an artificial flower factory, worked as a journalist, short story writer and piano teacher, and was one of the few survivors of the wreck of the Eumonia. Finding herself stranded in Cairo, she conducted bogus seances, aided by large helpings of hashish, a taste for which she maintained throughout her life.

  Before turning up in New York, HPB is alleged to have travelled extensively in Tibet, a remarkable claim at the time, and doubly so for a woman, one matched only by the equally redoubtable Alexandra David Neel, author of the occult classic Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Tibet and its remote fastness became in Blavatsky's mind a central symbol and source of spiritual truth and wisdom. Earlier in her career this position was occupied by Egypt. Perhaps Egypt was too close, or maybe there was little left of it that had not been explored; possibly the hidden masters - with whom she claimed to be in constant communication - wanted a change of scenery. Whatever the reason, by the time the theosophical ball really got rolling, all roads, paths and ways led to the remote Himalayan peaks. This journey to the east reached the popular mind in hundreds of ways, among others novels like James Hilton's Lost Horizon, made into a 1937 film starring Ronald Coleman, and W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which was also made into a film, in 1946, starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney.'