by Gary Lachman
Another novel, The Zborowskis, was started in 1910, as well as the poems making up The Elements. In the next year Milosz wrote the first of his mystery plays, Miguel Manara, inspired by an article he read in Le Temps while sitting in the bar, Le Fouquet, in the Champs Elysees. After writing the first four acts, Milosz wrote to his friend, the sculptor Leon Vogt, that the work is of an "extraordinary beauty" and that now he could "die without regrets." More translations appeared, as well as another mystery play, Mephiboseth. 1913 saw a trip to Rome, as well as Milosz's introduction to the esoteric circle surrounding the journal L'Affranchi ("The Liberated"). Les Veilleurs ("The Watchers") included the alchemist and eccentric Egyptologist Rene Schwaller; a few years later, Milosz would bestow upon Schwaller his heraldic title of de Lubicz.43 It was also at this time that Milosz contracted xanthoma, a skin condition that made him speak of himself as "a leper."
1914 saw more translations and poems appear, but it was in December of that year that Milosz underwent the profound experience that would change both his life and his work. Exactly what took place on the night of 14 December 1914 is unclear. In writing of his relative's illumination, Czeslaw Milosz compares it to the more famous transfiguration of Blaise Pascal, who, "from half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve" on 23 November 1654, experienced "FIRE/God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God ofJacob" and felt "Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."
To remind himself of what he experienced that night, Pascal wrote a note on a piece of paper which, after his death, was found sewn into his jacket. A decade after his experience, in 1924 Milosz published his first metaphysical work, the long hermetic prose poem Ars Magna, followed three years later in 1927 by The Arcana. At that point, Milosz abandoned writing poetry for a decade, returning to it only once, in 1936, to write his last poem, "Psalm of the Morning Star."
For many of Milosz's admirers, this transition from poet to metaphysician was a disaster. Milosz himself believed that everything he had written up till then was a mere preparation for the mystical vision it was his destiny to communicate. Although there is a distinct shift in voice from the more melancholy, slightly cynical late-Romanticism of his early work, and his later, hermetic tone, Czeslaw Milosz is correct in seeing in this development a continual growth, rather than a radical change of direction. In many ways, what Milosz in his hermetic works did is to bring the concern of the early Romantics in line with the latest discoveries of science. In Ars Magna and The Arcana we find a wedding of Einstein and Swedenborg.
The metaphysics of Ars Magna and The Arcana is difficult to explain, even to readers familiar with the mystical tradition to which it belongs; after reading the poems several times, I'm not sure I even understand it myself. Perhaps the simplest approach is to see Milosz as the inheritor of the Romantic struggle against the by-now triumphant materialist account of the universe. With Blake, Milosz saw in Newton's idea of an abstract, absolute space and time the source of the satanic mills that blackened the early 19th century skies. For Newton, space is simply infinite empty extension, with planets, stars and galaxies mere clumps of matter, floating in the void. The same is also true of time, which is another kind of extension. For Milosz, this vision of an infinite empty space and an eternal, neutral time, is the very vision of Hell; it is, as in Blake, the fallen world humanity entered having been jettisoned from Paradise. Such a void, in which humanity appears the merest speck, if at all, makes meaningless any sense of value, any notion of the good, true and beautiful; or, at best, it limits these to purely utilitarian terms. What Milosz found important in Einstein - and what led him to believe that through his work there emerged the possibility of healing the split between the inner human world and the outer mechanical one (again, another characteristic of Hell) - was his discovery that space and time were relative to the observer. This did away with Newton's abstract space, and, at least to Milosz, returned humanity to the centre of the universe, a theme common to the hermetic tradition. Milosz claimed that until his illumination, he had only a superficial acquaintance with hermetic literature. What is known is that after his experience, Milosz began a deep and thorough study of the entire corpus of esoteric writings, looking for confirmation of his vision.
He found it in many places, but most of all in Swedenborg. For Swedenborg, as for Blake, Goethe, Paracelsus and other hermetic thinkers, man is the central mystery of the world, and is not, as in the rationalist view, one chance creature among others in an accidental universe. For Swedenborg, the universe in fact is man, cosmic man, the Anthropos, Adam Kadmon of the kabbalists. For Milosz, Einstein, in his way - and of whose works at the time of his experience he had not the slightest idea - was only putting into contemporary mathematical language the insights known to hermeticists for centuries.
Yet all of this sounds fairly abstract when compared to Milosz's calm yet almost hallucinatory prose:
On the fourteenth of December, nineteen hundred and fourteen, at about eleven o'clock in the evening, in a state of perfect wakefulness, having said my prayer and meditated my daily verse from the Bible, I suddenly felt, without the slightest amazement, a completely unexpected change occurring in my whole body. At first I noticed that I was granted a power, until that day unknown, of soaring freely through space; and a moment later I found myself near the summit of a mighty mountain shrouded with bluish mists of indescribable fineness and sweetness. From this moment on, I was spared the effort of rising with my own movement. For the mountain, tearing its roots out of the earth, carried me rapidly towards unimaginable heights, towards nebulous regions silent and streaked by immense flashes of lightning.
Milosz's ascent, however, did not last long. And when the movement stopped, he could see:
... a very dense cloud, which, despite its coppery tinge, I compared to the freshly discharged seed of man. Above the top of my skull, a little to the rear, a glow then appeared like that of a torch reflected by still water or an old mirror.
During these visions, Milosz was in complete command of his senses, and felt neither dread, nor curiosity nor amazement. Yet:
an instant later, from regions which I knew were far behind me, a sort of gigantic and reddish egg shot forth, hurled with extraordinary force into space, it reached the line of my forehead in an instant; and there, suddenly changing its movement and colour, it became round and small, turned into a golden lamp, lowered itself until it brushed my face, climbed again, grew in size, recovered its oval shape of an angelic sun, stopped not far above my forehead and looked deeply into my eyes.'
This was the "spiritual sun" he told Carlos Larronde he had seen.
It is impossible to do more than touch on Milosz's 20th century contribution to the hermetic tradition. Ars Magna and The Arcana are extremely difficult works; the "Exegetic Notes" to The Arcana alone run some hundred pages. He was in many ways a man out of time; his spiritual milieu was that of Saint-Martin, Cagliostro, Goethe, the Enlightenment Illuminati discussed in the first section of this book. Like Swedenborg, he combined a mystical sensibility with a practical capability rarely exhibited in poets.
In his last days, Milosz wrote an eccentric interpretation of the Book of Revelations, after having read the work some 50 times over a fortnight. He believed that the year 1944 would see a universal conflagration, and although World War II fell short of this, he had also predicted its arrival several years in advance. He spent his last years at Fontainebleau, where he loved to walk in the gardens and where he displayed an uncommon intimacy with the birds. On one occasion, after an absence of some months, upon his return he was greeted with a chorus of song, "paths, woods and bushes resounded with calls," presenting a "light-headed joy by all kinds of species." His love of his aerial friends was demanding, and on one occasion, after carrying a case of seeds, he collapsed in a faint, falling into the December snow, almost dying. He did die on 2 March 1939. One particular bird he let free in a room reserved for it, and it was only put into its cage at night. On that evening the bird refused to go into its cag
e, and, Milosz, desperate, attempted to catch it. Finally getting his hands on it after several attempts, but frantic and exhausted after the chase, Milosz collapsed. He was dead. The symbolism will not escape the attentive reader.
Malcolm Lowry
At the summer solstice of 1916, Frater Achad - otherwise known as Charles Stansfeld Jones, a London accountant and devoted student of the occult - stood before his altar in his temple in Vancouver, Canada, and acknowledged a remarkable fact. He had, he realized, undergone a significant transformation. From humble Neophyte in the order of the Argentinum Astrum, or Silver Star, he had metamorphosed into a Master of the Temple. Confirmation of this exalted change came in the form of visitation by the Secret Chiefs who, Achad realized, had called upon him to accept the obligations of his new status. Taking the solemn oath of his new office, Frater Achad swore to fulfil his duties and to work diligently to execute all the responsibilities that were attendant upon him now.
Soon after his experience, Jones telegrammed his mentor in London, with whom he had been carrying on a magical correspondence course, and announced what had happened. Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast and Jones' master, was delighted at the news, but more importantly, he was struck by the remarkable coincidence it seemed to portend. Just nine months previously, with two of his Scarlet Women, Crowley had performed a series of magical operations, the aim of which was to produce a "magical child," an heir to the mysteries inherent in his sacred text, The Book of the Law. Jones' telegram seemed to confirm that Crowley's efforts - which included for the most part having sex in a variety of ways - had been successful. Frater Achad, he felt certain, was the one predicted by the Book, who would come and elucidate its many secrets. Achad, encouraged by his master's delight, embarked on a long and complicated kabbalistic analysis of Crowley's inspired work, which eventually took shape in 1919 as the revelation that God combines within himself both being and non-being.45 This discovery heartened Crowley and, at least for him, cleared up some of the more obscure points in The Book of the Law. Yet, as happened with practically everyone who got involved with him, the Great Beast eventually turned on Frater Achad. The fact, however, that in 1926, Jones went mad could not have helped their relations. During a brief stay in England, Crowley's magical child joined the Roman Catholic Church with the intention of converting it to Crowley's religion of thelema. He then returned to Vancouver where, on a particularly auspicious day, wearing only a rain coat, he flung it open, revealed his nakedness, and announced that he had abandoned the Veil of Illusion.
Frater Achad soon recovered from his mania, and jettisoning Crowley's yolk, declared that Aiwass, the Great Beast's Holy Guardian Angel, was a malignant intelligence. He did not abandon his magical studies though, and hereafter announced that a New Aeon was indeed upon the world, but not the one that Crowley had in mind. Crowley, hearing of Jones's apostasy, realized his journey across the abyss - the necessary prerequisite to becoming a Master of the Temple - had been precipitous, and expelled him from his order. And to make sure that his ex-student learned his lesson, he evoked a handful of demons to destroy him.
Frater Achad's magical career, however, was not over, and his influence would inform two significant occult streams in the 20th century. One would originate in Pasadena, California, and include important figures like Jack Parsons, Robert Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard.46 The other would begin closer to home, in Vancouver, and would have a profound effect on Jones' fellow Englishman, Malcolm Lowry, and his important modernist novel, Under the Volcano. Lowry seems an apt inheritor ofJones' wisdom: if anyone had ever entered an abyss, Lowry, with his haunted, demonridden life, full of minor and major tragedies, surely had.47
Malcolm Lowry was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire in 1909 and died in Ripe, Sussex in 1957; much of his life, however, was spent in foreign lands. On the coroner's report the cause of death was given as "misadventure" - he had apparently choked on his own vomit - but the exact details are unknown. After a night of heavy drinking and a violent quarrel with his second wife, Margerie Bonner, Lowry was found dead the next morning, lying in a pool of gin and broken glass. He was not quite forty-eight, and the possibility of suicide cannot be ruled out: a bottle that had contained twenty sodium amytal sleeping pills was found empty. At the time of his death, aside from a few friends and aficionados of his work, Lowry was unknown. Under the Volcano, his major work, is now considered one of the most important novels of the 20th century. It is, by most accounts, a masterwork of modernist technique. It is also a book given over to Lowry's obsessions with occult ideas of initiation, trial, rebirth and the tragic fate of a black magician. The central framework of the book is the Kabbalah, the esoteric meaning of which he learned first hand from his teacher, Charles Stansfeld Jones.
Lowry's first meeting with Jones has all the romantic qualities we would expect from a magical encounter, although, as is clear from Gordon Bowker's exhaustive biography, Lowry, like many drawn to the occult, had a penchant for mythologizing his life." In a letter to his German translator, Clemens ten Holder, Lowry describes how he first came across Crowley's disinherited son. He and his wife Margerie had been living not far from Vancouver in a shack in Dollarton, British Columbia. Here Lowry worked obsessively on several revisions of his novel, which, by this time, had been rejected by twelve publishers. Walking in the forest, and contemplating the growing similarities between the intoxicated Geoffrey Firmin, the ex-British Consul, drinking himself to death in Mexico - Lowry's fictional alter ego - and Faust, Lowry reflected that his tragic hero was "in the position, as it were, of a black magician." If this were so, he thought, "had I not better learn something about what really haunted him? Fatal supposition! Indeed no sooner had I thought that than I actually encountered a strange personage in the forest here, who, ostensibly a canvasser for votes, was in reality just such a magician ... "49Lowry hastened to add that he -Jones - was a white magician and that Lowry himself did not practice the craft. Synchronicities of this sort - to use C.G.Jung's term for `meaningful coincidences' - seem to crowd Lowry's life, as well as his fiction: Under the Volcano can be read as an extended stream of consciousness exercise in the hermetic theme of correspondences.
After that meeting, which more than likely took place in June 1941 - although in the extant correspondence, the first mention of Jones is in a postcard to Lowry's friend Gerald Noxon nearly two years later - Jones returned to Lowry's shack, bringing with him copies of two books he had written: Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception and The Anatomy of the Body of God. Both dealt with Kabbalah, although Frater Achad's other main interest was the Parsifal legend, his studies in which produced The Chalice of Ecstasy, being the Inmost Secret of PAR- ZIVAL by a Companion of the Holy Grail, a Magical and Qabalistic Interpretation of the Drama of Parzival, published in 1923 by the same small Chicago firm that produced his other works. Jones also brought along a diagram of the Tree of Life, the graphic representation of the ten sephiroth or levels of existence emanating from the unmanifest godhead. Lowry was so taken with this that he asked Jones to teach him everything he knew about Kabbalah. Stan, as Lowry came to call him, agreed, and lent him a book about the "sacred magic" of Abra-Melin the mage. This was more than likely The Book of the Sacred Magic ofAbra-Melin the Mage, a translation of a manuscript that Samuel Liddell Mathers (later MacGregor), the head of the Golden Dawn when Crowley first joined, had discovered in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris. The text was written by Abraham the Jew in 1458, and recounts Abraham's years as a student of a seer known as Abramelin. Years later, he committed the knowledge he had gained to writing, and this was translated into French sometime in 1700; it was this French translation that Mathers came across. Mathers was not the only one to have known of the book: both Eliphas Levi and Bulwer-Lytton were conversant with it.
The aim of the rituals included in the text is to bring the practitioner to the "knowledge and conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel." To achieve this, the magician must learn how to master the lower demonic forces; legend has it tha
t when Crowley himself attempted the operation - in his magical lodge in Boleskine, near Loch Ness - he failed to do this: hence the shadows that surrounded his later career. In Lowry's case, the demonic voices the mescal inspired Consul hears come straight out ofMathers' text.'°
Lowry and Margerie visited Jones often. Stan lived with his wife Rubina in Deep Cove, a hamlet not far from Dollarton, where they were more or less the resident eccentrics. Aside from his magical pursuits, Jones had a degree in philosophy, was a painter as well as the head of the College Ad Spiritum Sanctum, whose base was located in Chicago. Rubina shared Charles' interest in the occult, and was also a great reader, although she had less enthusiasm for Lowry than her husband had. The two couples became good friends nevertheless, and soon the Lowrys were spending a few evenings a week at Jones's house. There he introduced them to a variety of mystical practices: yoga, the I Ching, astral travel and meditation. Jones believed that the myth of the Holy Grail was the archetype of the quest for hidden knowledge, and more and more Lowry came to agree. Since his childhood he had believed that he was in some way different from others, had been set apart for some special fate, and that, like his predecessors Poe and Baudelaire, he was destined for a life of suffering, through which he would acquire deep spiritual understanding. It was another of those odd coincidences that among the writers Jones introduced to Lowry was Eliphas Levi who, as we've seen, also believed that the true magus must pass through the fires of suffering.
