After the war, he wound up in a rented villa in Cefalu, Sicily, where he founded what he hoped would be a magnet for occultists from all over the world. He painted DO WHAT THOU WILT on the front door, drew demons all over the walls of his studio, and even consecrated a temple to the new religion inside. But few came to worship there. Instead, Crowley spent his days addicted to heroin, abusing his several mistresses, and writing, on commission from a British publisher, The Diary of a Drug Fiend. The sensation caused by publication of the book led to his being thrown out of the villa altogether. Later in his life, somewhat recovered, he finally composed his veritable last testament, Magick in Theory and Practice. Crowley, the Great Beast of the Apocalypse, died of natural causes at the age of seventy-two, on December 5, 1947. His “Hymn to Pan,” a flagrantly sexual poem, was read aloud at the funeral service, and the Brighton Council was so scandalized by the incident that it immediately put measures in place to make sure no such thing ever happened again.
DION FORTUNE
Although she was to found her own order later in life—a group known as the Fraternity of the Inner Light—Dion Fortune first embraced the unseen world through the teachings of the Golden Dawn.
She joined because she believed herself to be the victim of a sustained psychic attack.
Born Violet Mary Firth in 1891, she was raised in a Christian Science family, where her marked propensity for daydreaming and deep thought was a subject of some concern; even then, she seemed to show less interest in the material world than the immaterial. So it was perhaps no great surprise that her life should take its most important turn when at the age of twenty she first perceived herself to be the target of a kind of mental curse.
At the time, she was working in an educational institution, where she unintentionally antagonized the principal, a cold and arrogant woman who was known for her highly developed skills in yoga. That woman, Fortune would later come to believe, had twisted the yogic energies into something malign and aimed their destructive force at her. The power of the assault left Fortune physically devastated and mentally drained, but it also pointed her toward her true vocation.
“It was this experience which led me to take up the study of analytical psychology, and subsequently of occultism,” she wrote. Trained as a psychologist, an area in which she wrote several other books, she soon decided there was more to the mind than the accepted theories of the time could account for, and she went looking for the rest of the equation in more controversial places—most notably, in the occult practices of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It was only after her initiation into the group that she felt that the damage done to her by that malevolent principal was finally repaired. And she was determined to help others who found themselves under the same kind of attack.
In a book she titled Psychic Self-Defense (1930), she laid out some of the best methods for fending off the evil influences. “Sunlight is exceedingly valuable,” she wrote, “because it strengthens the aura and makes it much more resistant.” But trips into the countryside, presumably to get far away from the malign forces, weren’t necessarily recommended because “elemental forces are much more potent away from towns, and if he [the target] is threatened by an uprush of atavistic forces, he had better cling to the haunts of men. The sea, too, is an elemental force that is best avoided for water is an element intimately associated with psychism.” Where did she recommend going? “The best place is an inland spa. Games, physical training, massage, anything that improves the bodily condition, are invaluable, but long solitary walks should be avoided. . . .”
She became not only a famed practitioner of many occult practices, including scrying, astral travel, and the Cabbala, but a kind of psychic physician to others who got into trouble on the etheric plane. In one case she recounted, a clumsy magician tried to employ a magic square, but did it wrong. Every night thereafter, he suffered nightmares and unexplained anxiety. Finally, one night, he actually caught sight of the creature now tormenting him: “Its eyes were closed and it was bearded,” Fortune relates, “with long flowing hair. It seemed a blind force slowly waking to activity.” On a subsequent night, he saw a long red snake slinking out from beneath his bed, and in terror he leapt out of the window. When the blind creature next appeared, the hair on its head had turned, Medusa-like, into a nest of writhing serpents.
Fortune contended that the actual forces of evil in the world had created evil intelligences, entities that had “probably originated through the workings of Black Magic, which took the essential evil essence and organized it for purposes of its own.” The presence of these creatures could be detected by sinister sounds, pungent odors, and flickering balls of lights; their effects on humans could range from hallucinations to physical decay.
And even she herself could be tempted to employ them for nefarious purposes. Once, she recalls, as she was lying on her bed thinking about a woman who had done her an injury, and feeling increasingly angry and vengeful, “there came to my mind the thought of casting off all restraint and going berserk. The ancient Nordic myths rose before me, and I thought of Fenris, the Wolf-horror of the North. Immediately I felt a curious drawing-out sensation from my solar plexus, and there materialized beside me on the bed a large wolf. . . . I could distinctly feel its back pressing against me as it lay beside me. . . . I knew nothing of the art of making elementals at that time, but had accidentally stumbled upon the right method—the brooding highly charged with emotion, the invocation of the appropriate natural force, and the condition between sleeping and waking in which the etheric double readily extrudes.”
The question now was what to do with the unintended wolf. Summoning up all her courage, Fortune ordered it to get off the bed—which it did. Changing into more of a dog shape, it disappeared through the corner of the room. But Fortune knew the creature was still loose in the world, carrying that explosive psychic charge aimed at the woman who had angered her. She quickly asked her mentor—most probably Aleister Crowley—what she should do; after all, she didn’t really want to cause the woman serious harm. Her teacher’s advice was to reabsorb the creature, which she could do only by forgiving the woman and defusing, as it were, the ticking bomb.
“I had enough sense to see,” Fortune wrote, “that I was at the dividing of the ways, and if I were not careful would take the first step on the Left-Hand path. . . .” Using all her powers of concentration, she called the wolf back to her room, where it appeared “in quite a mild and domesticated mood” on the hearth rug. “From it to me stretched a shadowy line of ectoplasm; one end was attached to my solar plexus, and the other disappeared in the shaggy fur of its belly. . . . I began by an effort of the will and imagination to draw the life out of it along this silver cord, as if sucking lemonade up a straw. The wolf-form began to fade, the cord thickened and grew more substantial. A violent emotional upheaval started in myself; I felt the most furious impulses to go berserk and rend and tear anything and anybody that came to hand. . . .” Eventually, the wolf faded away, vanishing in a gray mist. “The tension relaxed, and I found myself bathed in perspiration.”
Throughout her career, which included writing The Mystical Quabbalah, one of the few significant additions to the occult canon made in the twentieth century, Fortune resisted that Left-Hand path—the path of evildoing—and used her research and beliefs simply to explore and explain the unseen world. She died in 1946.
MME BLAVATSKY
Her magical gifts came to her, she claimed, from sources both ancient and invisible, from the mahatmas of Tibet and the Egyptian goddess Isis. She had traveled long in the Himalayan regions, where she had learned the secrets of clairvoyance, prophecy, and materialization (at a picnic, she once made her cup and saucer appear in her hand out of thin air). She had broken through the wall between this world and the next and could offer her followers—of whom there came to be many thousands, spread across several continents—news from the great beyond. In the history of magic and spiritualism, there are few figures as provocative and, to this day, controversial
as Madame Blavatsky.
Born on July 31, 1831, in Ekaterinoslav, Russia, she was the daughter of an army colonel, and she showed her rebellious streak early on in life: at seventeen, she married a much older man, a Russian government official named Nicephore Blavatsky, and before the marriage was ever even consummated (or so she always claimed) she took off for parts unknown. Unaccompanied, she traveled through India, Canada, Mexico, and Texas. Twice she tried to enter Tibet, disguised as a man (as a lone woman, she would never have been allowed in), and once she managed to penetrate the interior before becoming lost; she was escorted back to the border by a troop of horsemen. Still, whenever she told the story of her life, she drew a veil over the ten years between 1848 and 1858, claiming to have spent them in an unspecified Himalayan retreat, where she learned much from the Eastern spiritual masters.
After returning to Russia, where she achieved a certain celebrity as a medium, she again felt the need to broaden her horizons, and she traveled to America, where the spiritualism craze—begun by the Fox sisters in Wayne County, New York, in 1848—was in full swing. When she arrived in New York City in 1873, she was without friends or resources, she was short and stout (weighing well over two hundred pounds), with a quick temper, unguarded tongue, and chain-smoking habit. But within six years, she had managed to become famous all over the country and had founded an organization, the Theosophical Society, which exists to this day. If this weren’t enough to prove her extraordinary powers, there are many firsthand accounts from her contemporaries, which describe her remarkable magnetism and charisma, her ability to bring people around to her own point of view, and her success at recruiting them into her burgeoning group.
The fundamental tenets of theosophy, as promulgated by Blavatsky, were drawn from many sources, ranging from the Cabbala to Buddha, from Hinduism to the Western occult traditions. In brief, the society was dedicated to three main objectives: (1) the formation of a universal brotherhood of man, (2) the study and furtherance of ancient religions, sciences, and philosophies, and (3) the investigation of the laws of nature along with the nurturing of the divine powers lying dormant in every man and woman.
Blavatsky believed, and wrote in her book The Secret Doctrine, that all the great religions of the world welled up from one supreme source and were merely different expressions of the same universal truth. This truth, she contended, had been held in trust, throughout the ages, by a mysterious group of Tibetan adepts, or mahatmas (great souls), with whom she was in regular psychical touch. Two of these adepts met and communicated with her on the astral plane, sometimes going so far as to drop letters, with written instructions, down from the ether.
They also helped her to perform the “miracles” with which she attracted crowds and converts. Although Blavatsky herself claimed these “phenomena” were an insignificant part of her mission (and skeptics often proved them to be put-up jobs, involving hidden wall panels and secret confederates), they made an undeniable impression on the public. She could make the flame of a lamp rise and fall simply by pointing at it, she could make rose petals shower down on the heads of the assembled company. When two young gentlemen at a dinner party mockingly referred to the cup and saucer she’d magically produced at the picnic, insinuating that she’d somehow hidden the items beforehand, Madame Blavatsky flew into a rage. Turning to the hostess, she asked her to imagine something that she really wanted, and when the hostess mentioned a brooch that she’d lost years before, Blavatsky told her to envisage it as clearly as she could. Then Blavatsky told the guests to go outside to the flowerbed, where she declared her mahatmas had now deposited it. After a bit of digging, the brooch was found there.
In Isis Unveiled, the virtual bible of theosophy which Madame Blavatsky published in two volumes in 1877, she claimed that she had served as an amanuensis to her spirit guides, sitting for hour after hour, smoking her hand-rolled cigarettes (which often contained hashish), and recording what the Egyptian deity and the Tibetan masters dictated to her; sometimes, when she looked up, one of the spirits was holding open a sourcebook for her. According to John Symonds, who wrote a book about Blavatsky, she said of this process:
I am solely occupied, not with writing Isis, but with Isis herself. I live in a kind of permanent enchantment, a life of vision and sights, with open eyes, and no chance whatever to deceive my senses! I sit and watch the fair good goddess constantly. And as she displays before me the secret meaning of her long-lost secrets, and the veil, becoming with every hour thinner and more transparent, gradually falls off before my eyes, I hold my breath and can hardly trust to my senses! . . . Night and day the images of the past are ever marshalled before my inner eyes. Slowly, and gliding silently like images in an enchanted panorama, centuries after centuries appear before me. . . . I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory. I tell you seriously I am helped.
What the guides helped her to understand was that the world we know is destined to be inhabited by seven “root races,” of which human beings are now the fifth. The first root race, invisible and made of fire mist, inhabited a region near the North Pole. The second, which was a bit more visible—and invented sexual intercourse—lived in northern Asia. The third race, who communicated with each other by telepathy, was made up of huge, apelike creatures who roamed a lost land in the Pacific called Lemuria. The fourth, and certainly most famous, was the denizens of Atlantis, destroyed, in Blavatsky’s outline, by powerful currents of black magic. We humans, the next in line, are already on our way out, and we’ll be replaced by a race that will live, once again, on Lemuria. When that race peters out in its own good time, the last root race of all will take up residence here, before life finally says good-bye to earth altogether and begins again on the planet Mercury. The time scheme for all this is, as would be expected, quite vast.
Blavatsky’s own time ran out at the age of sixty. After years of deteriorating health due to heart and kidney disease, she passed over to the astral plane on May 8, 1891, in the theosophical headquarters on Avenue Road in London.
THE SECRET
DOCTRINE
. . . the Sages have been taught of God that this natural world is only an image and material copy of a heavenly and spiritual pattern; that the very existence of this world is based upon the reality of its celestial archetype; and that God has created it in imitation of the spiritual and invisible universe, in order that men might be the better enabled to comprehend His heavenly teaching, and the wonders of His absolute and ineffable power and wisdom. Thus the sage sees heaven reflected in Nature as in a mirror; and he pursues this Art, not for the sake of gold or silver, but for the love of the knowledge which it reveals; he jealously conceals it from the sinner and the scornful, lest the mysteries of heaven should be laid bare to the vulgar gaze.
Alexander Seton, The New Light
of Alchemy (c. 1640)
THE ALCHEMISTS’ ART
Whether the alchemist was most concerned with material or spiritual gain is still a subject of debate, but transformation, in one form or another, was always his goal. Plumbing the mysteries of nature—how matter came into being, why it took the shapes it did, how it could be transformed—these were the questions that occupied the mind of the alchemist, and these were the mysteries that comprised what was sometimes called the Secret Doctrine or the Great Work.
In the material sense, the chief aim of alchemy was to change baser metals—lead, tin, iron—into the most noble metals of all, silver and especially gold, using a mysterious substance known as the philosophers’ stone. Apart from its obvious value, gold was considered to have miraculous restorative powers and properties.
In the more philosophical sense, alchemy was a system of thought designed to improve and ultimately perfect the human nature of the alchemist himself. “Out of other things thou will never make the One,” wrote the sixteenth-century German alchemist Gerhard Dorn, “until thou hast first become One thy-self.”
But whatever the specific aims and practices
of the alchemists’ art, they were always cloaked in great mystery and in language almost impossible to comprehend: “Take the serpent and place it on the chariot with four wheels and let it be turned about on the earth until it is immersed in the depths of the sea . . . and when the vapour is precipitated like rain . . . you should bring the chariot from water to dry land, and then you will have placed the four wheels on the chariot, and will obtain the result if you will advance further to the Red Sea, running without running, moving without motion” (Tractatus Aristotelis ad Alexandrum Magnum).
Try that in your home laboratory.
There were several reasons for the deliberate obfuscation of the alchemists’ texts. For one thing, these magical arts always ran the risk of being declared heresy in the eyes of the church, and its practitioners could wind up tied to a stake. So the less that could be proved against them, the better.
For another, it was important, as far as the alchemists’ fraternity was concerned, to keep their secrets and discoveries to themselves. If the formulas for making gold or for the alchemists’ ancillary aims (such as the discovery of the elixir of life, “the universal solvent,” or the creation of homunculi) fell into the wrong hands, they might be used for nefarious or unholy purposes. As Thomas Norton of Bristol put it, in his fifteenth-century manual the Ordinal of Alchemy:
This art must ever secret be,
The cause whereof is this, as ye may see;
If one evil man had thereof all his will,
All Christian peace he might easily spill,
And with his pride he might pull down
Rightful kings and princes of renown.
Thirdly, skeptics might say the reason for all the obscurity was, quite simply, that there was nothing there. The alchemists were engaged in an elaborate con game, and making sure that no one understood them was the best way of making sure that no one could question the depth and profundity of their “science.”
Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them Page 13
