A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  Jones made his impressive occult library available to Lowry, and we get an idea of the kind of world Malcolm was entering by the checklist of occult titles that appears in Under the Volcano. When Hugh, Geoffrey's brother, arrives in Cuernavaca," Mexico, where the novel takes place, and inspects his brother's library, he finds an odd collection:

  ... on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous kabbalistic and alchemical books, though, some looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King ...52

  There were other books as well: the Mahabharata, William Blake, the Upanishads, the Rig Veda, but also Peter Rabbit. " `Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,' the Consul liked to say," Hugh recalls: a touch of humour added for leavening, perhaps; but perhaps also a nod to the kabbalistic notion that deep, profound secrets can be found in the simplest text.

  By the time Lowry met Jones, he was ready for the initiation. Occult, or at least metaphysical literature was not foreign to him. He was a great reader of Ouspensky and in a letter to his mother-in-law, who shared his esoteric interests, he suggested she read A New Model of the Universe and Tertium Organum; in the same letter he praised J.W. Dunne's An Experiment With Time and spoke highly of Charles Fort's books. He even plagiarized Ouspensky, saying that he has "always believed that, that which impedes the motion of thought is false," a slight paraphrase of Ouspensky's coda to Tertium Organum itself. (In later years he would also repeat Ouspensky's dictum that "If we could put questions rightly, we should know the answers," an insight that finds an odd echo in some of Wittgenstein's aphorisms.53) Ouspensky's speculations on time and eternal recurrence find their way into Lowry's magnum opus, most clearly in the symbolism of the wheel that turns up in several places, most powerfully in the Ferris wheel, which, significantly, at the close of the opening chapter, revolves backwards over the setting for the Consul's trials, a subtle yet striking image of return.54 Lowry also identified strongly with Ouspensky's description of the Hanged Man from the Tarot, another image of suffering.

  In later years, Lowry would visit Haiti and stumble - literally - into the dark world of voodoo. On one occasion he attended a voodoo ceremony that lasted two days and two nights, and returned befuddled with drugs. "The voodoo priest," he wrote to his friend Alfred Erskine, "perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit, has promised to initiate me by fire when I return ... I really would like to be a voodoo priest."ss Although, as is common knowledge, Lowry had frequent and excessive experience of other spirits - alcohol in a variety of forms - he was always keen on making contact with more transcendental kinds. This is something, to his ultimate regret, his fictional counterpart seems to achieve.

  A detailed, chapter-by-chapter account of the kabbalistic symbolism that fills Under the Volcano can be found in Perle Epstein's exhaustive study, The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry; Lowry himself offers an apology for it in his long letter to Jonathan Cape, his publisher, defending his use of occult symbols. I can only touch on a few examples of it here.56 The novel depicts the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic ex-British Consul, with an interest in mysticism, especially Kabbalah.57 The day in question is 2 November, the Day of the Dead, the Mexican equivalent of All Soul's Day, when the dead are believed to come back and visit the living. In Geoffrey's case, two of his dead have recently arrived: his brother Hugh, and his ex-wife Yvonne, whose affair with Hugh, compounded by Geoffrey's incurable drinking, precipitated their divorce. Number symbolism saturates the book, as do dozens of other references: like many modernist works, the book is highly allusive, and along with Kabbalah and Ouspensky, into his strange brew Lowry puts German expressionist films (The Hands of Orlac and The Student of Prague, both occult films), Faust, Swedenborg, the Rosicrucians, astrology, alchemy and much more. The action takes place in exactly twelve hours depicted over twelve chapters: along with other references, twelve is an important kabbalistic number. The Tree of Life is used, Lowry tells us, "for poetical purposes because it symbolizes man's spiritual aspiration."Ss The Consul's domain is the Qliphoth, the world of shells and demons, a kind of inverse tree, growing downwards into hell. And while the Consul's alcoholism, manifest in his insatiable thirst for mescal, is clearly Lowry's own (he is throughout the book perfectamente borracho, perfectly drunk) his magical preoccupations raise the novel beyond the realism of Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, published while Lowry was engaged in one of his obsessive revisions. "William James," he told Jonathan Cape, "would certainly agree with me when I say that the agonies of the drunkard find their most accurate poetic analogue in the agonies of the mystic who has abused his powers."5" Although Lowry was briefly on the wagon when they met, Charles Stansfeld Jones was sure to have cautioned him that in Kabbalah, the misuse of magical powers is compared to drunkenness. At any rate, one thing he did tell him was that "a black magician who fell into the abyss was in the unenviable position of having all the elements in the universe against him."" Throughout his life, Lowry had an intimation of this, and perhaps in the end he, like the Consul, recognized that the only way to escape this fate was to leave the universe itself.

  At the beginning of the novel, Geoffrey's friend M. Laruelle, with whom Yvonne (modelled on Lowry's first wife) has had an affair as well, reads a letter Geoffrey wrote to Yvonne but never sent. ". . . do you see me as still working on the book," the Consul asks his lost Shekinah, the female spiritual principle of the Kabbalah:

  still trying to answer such questions as: Is there an ultimate reality, external, conscious, and ever-present, etc ... Or do you find me between Mercy and Understanding, between Chesed and Binah, ... my equilibrium, and equilibrium is all, precarious - balancing, teetering over the awful unbridgeable void, the all-but-unretraceable path of God's lightning back to God? As if I were in Chesed! More like the Qliphoth.b'

  Earlier in the letter, Geoffrey tells Yvonne that, "this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. "12 Like Rimbaud, another believer in the spiritual value of suffering, Lowry did spend his season in the underworld. In Under the Volcano he passed on to those more fortunate than himself a moving account of its terrifying terrain.

  Notes

  1 A Centenary Pessoa, Eugenio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor, editors (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997) p. 17.

  2 "The modern period" is admittedly a vague term and, given our own placement in a "post-postmodern" era, doubly doubtful. Exactly when and where modernism began is debatable and, in the sense of providing a starting date for a well-defined literary and artistic movement, it's more than likely an impossible question to answer. The first non-representational painting is said to be Kandinsky's "First Abstract Watercolour" (1910), although some art historians give the credit to the Czech Frantisek Kupka. Literary modernism is said to begin with Apollonaire, and its debatable whether Mahler's Ninth Symphony is the last work of late-romanticism or an early atonal effort; indeed, for critics like Charles Rosen, Beethoven's late string quartets embody practically all the elements to be found in Schoenberg's less accessible works. For my purposes I'm considering modern the period beginning slightly before World War I, and continuing on until, say, the 1950s and the rise of Beat poetry, although all of the works I will here examine were written before then.

  3 The `crisis of the word' experienced in the early 20th century took on many forms, perhaps none more emblematic than the philosopher Wittgenstein's dictum that, "Of that which we cannot speak we must remain silent." Wittgenstein's silence was felt by many others: Karl Kraus, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, Ernst Bloch, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Maeterlink, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka and, in a later form, Samuel Beckett. For a good account of this `retreat from the word' see George Steiner's Language and Silence (1967) and Extraterrito
rial (1972).

  4 Schoenberg also believed in a kind of number mysticism on which he based a system of angelology. It took on a troubling form, however, in his fear of the number thirteen. Schoenberg was born on 13 September 1874 and died on 13 July 1951.

  5 Cage's particular occult interest was the I Ching or Book of Changes, a Chinese form of divination employing yarrow sticks or, in a more simple form, coins. For one composition, Cage is reported to have throw his I Ching coins 16,000 times.

  6 Had space allowed, I would have liked to have included separate sections on both David Lindsay and John Cowper Powys, two of the most important novelists working in the gnostic tradition, although neither of them could be considered modernists. Powys, most famous for his Dorset Quartet, including the mammoth A Glastonbury Romance, not only professed a profound magical philosophy of life - espoused in his many nonfiction works - but apparently possessed some occult powers himself. In his magnificent Autobiography, Powys writes of his evil eye, which caused him no small measure of concern, as well as his experiences of bi-location, one of which involved the novelist Theodore Dreiser. Lindsay, best know for his masterpiece A Voyage to Arcturus, though not an occultist per se, nevertheless wrote perhaps the most metaphysical novel in the English language, his late, unfinished The Witch. In Devil's Tor, Lindsay took the theme of the reincarnated avatar and wed it to notions of pre-civilization goddess culture (decades before this became popular in the 1980s and 90s) and created a powerful philosophical drama, as well as a gripping occult thriller.

  7 This is not inclusive of writers who took occultism or the supernatural as their central theme, a criterion I have tried to maintain, with a few exceptions, throughout this study.

  8 For more on Eliot and Pound see Leon Surrette's highly dismissive study The Birth of Modernism (Montreal & Kingston: Mcgill - Queens University Press, 1993).

  9 Pessoa and Benjamin have much in common. Besides their mutual penchant for the fragment - Benjamin's Arcades Project and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet are both works that refused completion - Pessoa and Benjamin shared an equal ineptitude with dealing with reality or the necessities of life. Both lived more in books than in the world, and both had great difficulties maintaining relationships with women. Both shared an interest in forms of occultism (Kabbalah and graphology for Benjamin) and both died at a tragically young age, Pessoa at 47, Benjamin 48. The valise Benjamin hauled across the Pyrenees in his attempt to reach Spain held the contents of his monumentally unfinished magnum opus. A very readable fictional account of this disastrous venture can be found in Jay Parini's Benjamin's Crossing (1996).

  10 Although a commonplace childhood experience, the vividness of Pessoa's invented friends bears comparison to the similar early pastime of the psychologist C.G. Jung. In his childhood, Jung became convinced of the reality of a separate self, whom he called Personality No. 2, an old gentleman of the 18th century, who dressed in buckles and frock coat, and who was possessed of an uncommon wisdom and insight. Jung became so immersed in the world of No. 2 that he came to believe he had been the gentleman in a past life. For detractors of Jung, this is early evidence of his later psychosis; for his followers, it was a manifestation of the autonomous contents of the psyche. Following his break with Freud, Jung underwent a shattering mental breakdown in which he had visions and, most importantly for his later ideas, held conversations with autonomous personalities resident in his own mind.

  11 Fernando Pessoa Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2000) p. 11.

  12 A Centenary Pessoa p. 262.

  13 Selected Poems p. 12.

  14 Ricardo Reis is the subject of a novel by the contemporary Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1991).

  15 The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa translated by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2001) p. 256.

  16 Alvaro de Campos was another compensatory figure. A world traveller, he smoked opium, studied naval engineering at Glasgow, voyaged to the Orient, drank absinthe and wore a monocle. On occasions, de Campos would appear in Pessoa's stead at social gatherings, and in 1929 he broke off Pessoa's single romantic liason, writing to the girl and telling her to flush any idea of their union "down the toilet."

  17 Selected Prose pp. 103 and 110.

  18 Ibid. pp. 101-102. The shapes, designs and symbols Pessoa saw suggest that this was a hypnagogic experience.

  19 Selected Poems translated by John Grim, p. 70.

  20 See Marco Pasi's, "The Influence of Aleister Crowley on Fernando Pessoa's Esoteric Writings" in Gnostics 3: Esoterisme, Gnoses & Imaginaire Symbolique (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2001) pp. 693-711.

  21 Selected Prose p. 259.

  22 Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet translated by Richard Zenith (London: Penguin Books, 2001) pp. 217, 222-223.

  23 Rene Daumal The Powers of the Word translated by Mark Poliz- zoti (San Francisco: City Lights, 1991) p. 164.

  24 Something P.D. Ouspensky engaged in a generation earlier. See "On the Study of Dreams and Hypnotism" in A New Model of the Universe (New York: Knopf, 1969) pp. 242-273.

  25 The Powers of the Word p. 6.

  26 Rene Daumal Mount Analogue (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1986) p. 13.

  27 Oddly, another mystical novel dealing with a mountain, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, revolves around the fate of its tubercular characters. Daumal was a keen alpinist, yet the magic mountain he sought was strictly metaphorical. Had he taken his doctor's advice, however, and entered a sanatorium like Hans Castorp, he might have lived long enough to complete Mount Analogue. For a study of the alchemical and other occult motifs in Mann's novel, see Wouter J. Hanegraaf "Ironic Esotericism: Alchemy and Grail Mythology in Thomas Mann's Zauberberg", Esoterisme, Gnoses & Imaginaire Symbolique (above) pp. 575-594.

  28 Ibid. p.81 Daumal's description here is reminiscent of Poe's earlier symbolic voyage "A Descent into the Maelstrom."

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid. p. 82.

  31 Ibid. pp. 78-79.

  32 Ibid. p. 84.

  33 Ibid.

  34 Ibid. p. 104.

  35 Among other responsibilities, Milosz was a leading member of the Lithuanian delegation to the League of Nations, and for many years was Charge d'Affaires of the Lithuanian Legation in Paris.

  36 O.V. de L. Milosz The Noble Traveller: The Life and Writings of O. V. de L. Milosz, Christopher Bamford, editor. (West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1985) p. 440.

  37 Ibid. p. 449.

  38 Ibid. p. 50.

  39 Ibid. p. 339.

  40 Ibid. p. 438.

  41 Ibid. p. 439.

  42 See the English translation by Belle N. Burke (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1994).

  43 Although his interests included alchemy, number theory and other aspects of the western esoteric tradition, Rene Schwaller de Lubicz is most known today for his unorthodox theories about Egyptian civilization and the construction of the Temple of Luxor. In recent years Schwaller de Lubicz's ideas have received renewed interest through the work of Graham Hancock, who based his bestselling series of books about the precursors of Egyptian civilization on de Lubicz's remark that the Sphinx was much older than orthodox Egyptologists suggest.

  44 From "Epistle to Storge" in Ars Magna, translated by Czeslaw Milosz in The Noble Traveller pp. 244-245.

  45 In Hebrew, AL means God, LA, not. For Jones, this meant that the reflection of God is Not. Kabbalistically this maybe interesting, but the idea is not new. The Gnostics spoke of the Pleroma, a kind of negative world existing (or not-existing) outside the manifest world; the kabbalists themselves speak of the En Sof, a similarly non-manifest source of being. Later proponents of the notion included the alchemist and theosophist Jacob Boehme, and the philosopher Hegel, whose dialectic begins with the initial opposition of being and non-being. As mentioned earlier, Hegel was a reader of Boehme.

  46 In the 1930s, Frater Achad started a magical organization of his own, and one member, Wilfred T. Smith, carried his tea
ching to California, where he started a group called the Agape Lodge. This would later include John (Jack) Whitesides Parson, a scientist at Pasadena's famous jet Propulsion Laboratory. Agape Lodge was ultimately under Crowley's guidance, and after Smith abused his position (in a very Crowleyesque way, by seducing Parsons's wife) he was expelled and Parsons given control. Parson's Pasadena home became the site of magical rituals, including sex and drugs. L. Ron Hubbard claimed to have been sent to investigate the black magic ring by Naval Intelligence. He seduced Parsons' wife as well, and also absorbed enough about Crowley's ideas to use them as a foundation for his Church of Scientology. Hubbard was also a pulp science fiction writer at the time, and knew Heinlein, who visited Parsons' home on a few occasions. Many of Crowley's ideas inform his influential novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. For more on Parsons and Hubbard, see my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.

  47 Lowry would have another indirect link with Crowley. As mentioned earlier, his friend and drinking partner, Dylan Thomas, was discovered by the poet Victor Neuberg, with whom Crowley performed a series of homosexual magical acts in Paris and North Africa.