A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (11 page)

In between these two incidents, which were simply the most prominent, Hoffmann carried on a dizzying career. His own life displays the same crowded backdrop and rapidity of change common to his stories, and throughout it Hoffmann showed a profound disregard for whatever physical effects this might entail. In a way it isn't surprising that he should die, paralyzed and in poverty, at the age of 46 - yet still dictating his last works - shattered by the accumulated buffetings of alcoholic excess, liver degeneration and a nervous disorder, locomotor ataxia.

Yet Hoffmann's life was an embodiment of his central themes: the uncertainty of identity and the conflict between the `two worlds'. Occult and paranormal ideas run throughout his stories. Mesmerism, hypnotism, somnambulism, multiple selves, the world of sylphs and salamanders, the perpetual battle between the dark and the light: these are the basic elements of his tales. But the recurring myth is the contrast and tension between the everyday world and that of magic. Nowhere did Hoffmann depict this with greater conviction that in The Golden Flower Pot (1814), which is generally considered his greatest work. Like Goethe and Novalis, Hoffmann used the Marchen, but with an important variation. Unlike Goethe and Novalis, Hoffmann sets his initiation story in the context of the everyday world, and brings magic down to earth. He is, as Jeremy Adler suggests, one of the first writers of the city, before Baudelaire and Poe."' Where Goethe's Fairy Tale has the odd, unfixed quality of a dream, Hoffmann's Dresden is immediately recognizable. His stories get their effect from the convincing depiction of the magical world invading the everyday. This is Hoffmann's `serapiontic principle', first proposed in his The Serapion Brotherhood (1819). The book is about a group of poets and artists who take their name from a mad nobleman who believes he is a monk martyred during the reign of Emperor Decius. When his followers point out that the towers they see are of those of Bamberg, Serapion denies this, and says they are indeed those of Alexandria in the Second Century AD. When they point out that this is madness, he reminds them that they forget that the world they see is within their minds. Reality is within, not out there: the central Romantic theme. Yet, Hoffmann recognizes that this can lead to a dead end, both in life and in art. Novalis' hermetic Mdrehen depicts another reality, but one too detached from this one to be convincing. The `serapiontic principle' argues that in order for magic to be effective, it has to be made convincing, which means that it has to be rooted somehow in this world. "There is an inner world," Hoffmann wrote, "and a spiritual faculty for discerning it with absolute clearness - yes, with the most minute and brilliant distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is the outer world, in which we are entrapped, that triggers this spiritual faculty ... it is the outer world that causes the spirit to use its powers of perception." Hoffmann's stories are still so readable today because he rarely loses sight of this' intuition. And the aesthetic principle at work in his stories is also the psychological one at work in Hoffmann's life. It's reminiscent of the fairy tale of Goldilocks. Too much reality and life becomes dull, pointless and insipid; too much imagination, and we become Brother Serapion, living in a solipsistic dream world. But when the combination is "just right," - as it is so often in Hoffmann's stories - then we get `magic."' Not ethereal fairy worlds, or flat, dreary realism, but a sparkling, intoxicating tale that stimulates our imaginative and creative spirits - a kind of literary champagne, again appropriately enough, for Hoffmann. The only other writer to portray this dual reality with such clarity and force is David Lindsay, author of the gnostic classic A Voyage to Arcturus (1920); but Lindsay's vision is grim, often pessimistic, and he lacks Hoffmann's inviting good humour; we might say he is Beethoven to Hoffmann's Mozart.

In his life Hoffmann never realized the "just right", the fruitful combination of the two worlds, that he achieved in his stories. Yet, for the Romantics, life and art are two sides of the same adventure, and what makes The Golden Flower Pot an inexhaustible source (a "pot of gold") is that by reading it, we are drawn into the very myth it presents. Hoffmann is the first writer with whom the equation Poetry=Magic is made clear; the reader, by association, is made accomplice to the alchemical transformation. The props of Hoffmann's initiatory tale come for the most part from Le Comte de Gabalais (1670), an occult novel in the Renaissance Rosicrucian manner, depicting the elemental world of Paracelsus, by the Abbe Mont- faucon de Villars. The student Anselmus, a clumsy, dreamy young man with a taste for poetry, is troubled by a recurring vision of a glittering green snake." The snake, it turns out, is Serpentina, the daughter of the Archivist Lindhorst, who is in reality an elemental salamander, exiled to earth for a transgression committed millennia ago. Anselmus, who is also attracted to the beautiful but worldly Veronica (who wants him to become Hofrath and lead a sensible, respectable life), is hired by Lindhorst to copy out a magical manuscript, which indeed relates the story of his primeval fall from grace, and of his perpetual battle against the forces of darkness, symbolized in the story by the evil apple woman ... The story's tension lies in Anselmus having to choose between the two worlds, and much of it is influenced by Hoffmann's reading of G.H. Schubert's Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views from the Nightside of Natural Science) (1808), at the time an immensely popular work of Naturphilosophie, which dealt with the irrational and what we might call paranormal side of existence. In the end, after a series of trials and fantastic adventures, Anselmus, like Hoffmann, plumps for Serpentina, and with her and the Magus Lindhorst, they retire to their "freehold in Atlantis," Schubert's symbol for mankind's original state of unity with nature. Yet the reader, who we must assume has at least the potential for poetry, or magic, is also a participant in the dialectic, and having read Hoffmann's account, must decide whether it is merely a diverting story, or a metaphor for his existence ... Relating an account of his magical past, the archivist is accused by the philistines of oriental bombast, and is requested to tell them something that is true. Lindhorst replies that he knows no story more true than the one he is telling them. 1, for one, agree: under the deceptive surface of an entertaining fable, Hoffmann has managed to articulate the central myth of human life.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), like Hoffmann, is another serious writer who has become, for the general reading public, merely a teller of gruesome horror stories. For myself as an adolescent in the 1960s, these were made into cinematic and highly enjoyable pulp by the filmmaker Roger Corman. "The Raven" is one of those poems you learn - or used to learn, at any rate - early on in English lessons in the US, and "The Tell-Tale Heart" has to be one of the most anthologized stories ever, turning up in scores of `Tales of Terror' type collections. But there is of course another side to Poe, a side that fellow poets like Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans and Stephan Mallarme knew and appreciated, unlike the Americans of Poe's own time, or the later serious critics, like Henry James and T.S. Eliot, who saw in his work nothing but an unfortunate influence on juvenile minds.

Poe's own life is a horror story more unsettling than any he wrote. Although it's accepted that accounts of his depravity and drug addiction are exaggerated, it is true that his life, beginning with a runaway father and the loss of his mother at the age of two, was a series of painful mistakes, defeats and frustrations. In true Romantic fashion, Poe died under mysterious circumstances, at the age of 40.13 Like Novalis' Sophie, Poe's own child-bride, Virginia, died of consumption, her demise being the ostensible cause of Poe's last decline and supposed final, destructive binge. For most of his life, Poe lived in abject poverty, and even with literary triumphs and fame - "The Raven" was the one clear success in his lifetime - he barely earned enough from his work as critic and editor to keep body and soul together. In Poe's case, this may not have been that problematic, as the separation of soul from the confines-of the body was his central metaphysical concern.

Like Hoffmann, Poe was a divided man, a self-professed rationalist (inventor of the tale of detection) who was obsessed with notions of the soul and the world beyond, an idealist poet who was chin deep in the cut-throat world of antebellum American journalism. Also like Hoffmann Poe was fascinated by the human mind and explored its lesser travelled environs, experimenting with hypnagogia, somnambulism, dreams and mesmerism. Poe's internal division even went so far as to form for him the blueprint of the psyche: he accepted the tenets of `Facultative Psychology', which argued that different mental faculties, like rationality, the `Moral Sense' and the `Aesthetic Sense', exist in isolation from each other. Again like Hoffmann, Poe tried to unify his many and disparate selves through the magic wand of Art. Any reader of Poe's critical works soon becomes acquainted with a dictum that runs through them like an idee fixe: unity of effect. That a man whose inner world harboured a mob of selves would be enamoured of unity is understandable. But Poe's vision of a unified world went beyond the printed page; or rather, although the paraphernalia of his poems and stories include reanimated corpses, premature burial, doppelganger, and fiendishly beating hearts, their subject is the knowledge of the true world, lying beyond the veil of the senses, that "wild, weird clime that lieth sublime/Out of SPACE, out of TIME." As one critic writes, "The direction of Poe's mind, the thrust of his imagination is ... away from the body toward the spirit, away from the `dull realities' of this world, toward the transcendent consciousness on a `far happier star'."14

That Poe is, like Novalis, essentially concerned with the 'journey into the interior' may come as a surprise to readers who remember him for conte cruels like "The Pit and the Pendulum," or for psychological thrillers like "The Black Cat." But Poe's stories and fables can be seen as inward voyages to a visionary consciousness. In his Marginalia, Poe wrote of his experiences of hypnagogia, that half-dream state that exists between waking and sleeping. These visions, he writes "arise in the soul ... only at its epochs of most intense tranquillity ... at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. I am aware of these `fancies' only when I am on the brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so ... (they) have in them a pleasurable ecstasy, as far beyond the most pleasurable of the world of wakefulness, or of dreams, as the Heaven of the Northman theology is beyond its Hell. I regard the visions, even as they arise, with an awe which, in some measure, moderates or tranquillizes the ecstasy - I so regard them, through a conviction (which seems a portion of the ecstasy itself) that this ecstasy, in itself, is of a character supernal to the Human Nature - is a glimpse of the spirit's outer world ..."15

Hidden knowledge, strange journeys, and weird, uncommon landscapes often form the content of hypnagogic hallucinations, and also of Poe's stories. "The Purloined Letter," "The Balloon Hoax," and "The Domain of Arnheim"; those unusual interior spaces, like the House of Usher or Auguste Dupin's study: all symbolize, perhaps, the dark recesses of the mind, or idealized retreats in which to dream and meditate. And while clinical psychologists and neuroscientists may see hypnagogic visions as the flotsam and jetsam of an idling brain, for poets like Poe and visionary occultists like Swedenborg they are the signposts pointing to an undiscovered country of the soul. No doubt, the voyage outward may be risky. Poe knew this, as do the narrators of "MS. Found in a Bottle," "A Descent into the Maelstrom" and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. But he also knew it was the only trip worth taking.

Poe was a student of occult literature, and hermetic and alchemical themes appear throughout his work, in symbolic fashion in tales like "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Assignation" and "Ligiea," as well as in more straightforward satires like "Von Kempelen and his Discovery."'6 But in his three `mesmerism tales', "A Tale of The Ragged Mountains" (1844), "Mesmeric Revelations" (1844), and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845), his belief in the possibility of piercing the veil between the `two worlds' is presented in almost straightforward reportage. Poe was a perpetrator of literary hoaxes; and as one critic points out, at the time, a fad for pseudo-science had hit the States." "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" caused a stir in England as well as America, prompting practising mesmerists and poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write to Poe, asking if the account was true. But if Poe's account of a mesmerist keeping his deceased subject in a state of suspend animation for seven months, at the end of which his body dissolves into "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome - of detestable putridity" carries more macabre effect, "Mesmeric Revelation," is closer to Poe's metaphysical target, and is a sort of dry run for the full blown apocalypse in his magnificently bombastic and eerily prescient prose poem Eureka (1848), written shortly before his death.

Poe got most of his information about mesmerism from the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend's Facts in Mesmerism (1840). It is clear why Townshend's book impressed him. The rationalist Poe had little interest in spiritual interpretations of Mesmer's ideas; he was looking for facts, as both the opening sentence of this story, and the title of the Valdemar account attest. Writing to the poet James Russell Lowell, Poe remarked "I have no belief in spirituality. I think the word a mere word. No one has a conception of spirit. We cannot imagine what is not." What we can imagine, or at least what Poe could and does in "Mesmeric Revelation", is an infinitely refined matter that is `unparticled', not distinguishable by minute parts (atoms) but unified. This unparticled matter permeates the universe and is, for Poe, and for the mesmerized hero of his tale, God.18 This unparticled matter is hidden to our usual senses, but can be glimpsed in half-dream states and in mesmeric trance. Strangely, the notion of a kind of matter unperceivable by our normal senses, and within which other kinds of beings exist, will resurface in the work of Lord Lytton, Eliphas Levi and Guy de Maupassant. Poe's report from beyond was so convincing that a Swedenborgian group wrote to him, informing him that they could corroborate his findings. Poe somewhat peevishly informed them that, "The story is pure fiction from beginning to end." Yet he was at pains to argue that the vision of his longer work Eureka, basically an elaboration of what we find here, was true. Poe's selfdivision ran deep, yet even if we are left unimpressed by his account of an unparticled omnipresent divine substance, the remarkable prescience exhibited in Eureka is enough to suggest that hypnagogic states and mesmeric trances can afford insight into some unusual aspects of reality. Poe expected much of Eureka, believing it would establish him as an important metaphysical thinker. The book was a flop, yet within its florid pages, Poe predicts black holes, the expanding universe, curved space, galactic clusters, the discovery of a new asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, as well as other cosmological notions like the anthropic principle, unthought of at the time of writing. Critics had no idea what to make of it, and given Poe's reputation as a drunkard and drug-taker, it isn't surprising that they relegated his metaphysical flights to the same category as pink elephants. Their ignorance shattered Poe. To his publisher George Putnam Poe announced "I have solved the secret of the universe!", and demanded a first edition of 50,000 copies. Putnam squeezed out an advance of $14, and the 500 copies he printed didn't sell.