A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (22 page)

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam II

On 26 February 1894, W B. Yeats attended a performance of Villiers de l'Isle Adam's philosophical drama Axel at the Theatre de la Gaite in Paris. Of the performance Yeats wrote that "Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam swept together ... words behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood ..." and created characters who exhibited "a pride like that of the Magi following their star ..." That Yeats should be so enthusiastic about a play performed in a language he was less than fluent in might raise an eyebrow, were it not for the fact that mystery and suggestion, not explicit meaning, were well in keeping with the essence of Villiers' Symbolist epic. Even before seeing the performance, Yeats had laboured over Villiers' play, scrutinizing it "as learned men read newlydiscovered Babylonian cylinders" and admitting that the work "seemed all the more profound, all the more beautiful, because I was never quite certain that I had read a page correctly." It was not, he admitted, a great masterpiece, but to the hermetically minded Yeats, Axel "seemed part of a religious rite, the ceremony perhaps of some secret Order ..."4

Yeats himself knew of such secret orders. In his teens in Dublin he had discovered theosophy, and in 1885 he met the Indian theosophist Mohini Chatterji, who introduced him to the Bhagavad Gita and Hindu philosophy and prompted his joining the society. In 1887, after moving to London, and visiting Madame Blavatsky, Yeats drifted from eastern wisdom to western esotericism, leaving the Theosophical Society in 1890 and joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most famous magical club of the fin de siecle. It's an understatement that a complete understanding of Yeats' poetry can be had only by grasping the importance of the occult in his life, a significance too often ignored by literary critics and academics. His host for his stay in Paris was MacGregor Mathers, the magician, kabbalist and head of the Golden Dawn during Yeats involvement. He too was impressed by Axel, as was Villiers' fellow writer Sar Peladan, the renegade Rosicrucian whose magical salon included figures like Erik Satie and Odilon Redon and who fought an occult duel with the dark magician, Stanislas de Guaita (see Huysmans and Ld Bas). "Villiers de l'Isle-Adam," wrote Remy de Gourmont," has opened the doors of the unknown with a crash, and a generation has gone through them to the Infinite." Sadly, Villiers himself was not around to appreciate his success, but it's almost appropriate that he would have already passed into the very Unknown that his doomed alter ego, Axel, anticipates with such ardour. A measure of the accuracy with which Villiers portrayed the spirit of the age can be seen in the fact that the literary' critic Edmund Wilson entitled his influential study of the "imaginative literature of 1870-1930", taking in such heavyweights as Proust, Joyce, Eliot and Yeats himself, Axel's Castle. The shadow of that mystic tower fell upon the consciousness of two generations.

The plot of Axel, insofar as it has one, centres around a buried treasure. As mentioned earlier, this is a symbol of alchemical gold and esoteric wisdom, but it is also an emblem of the lost wealth of Villiers' family. Count Axel of Auersburg, a young, handsome but world weary nobleman, has retired to his ancient family castle in the Black Forest. During the Napoleonic Wars, his father had hidden a fabulous horde of gold and jewels in the castle and was murdered by plotters planning to steal the treasure. Axel studies alchemy and hermetic philosophy, and is being prepared for initiation by a Rosicrucian adept, Master Janus. Axel's cousin, the vulgar Commander Kaspar, has got wind of the treasure and arrives at the castle. Axel's sedentary and contemplative existence disgusts him, and he tries to seduce Axel back into "life" with stories of battle and erotic conquest. Axel politely rejects these blandishments, but when Kaspar suggests that Axel finds the treasure, the young initiate challenges him to a duel and promptly kills him. While this is going on, Sara, a beautiful young noblewoman who has been put into a convent, finds a book that once belonged to Axel's dead mother. In it the secret of the treasure is revealed. Sara quickly escapes from the sisters and heads for the Black Forest. Arriving at the castle, Axel nobly offers her a chaste bed for the night. When everyone is asleep, Sara descends to the family crypt and finds the secret button hidden within an heraldic death's-head. Gold and jewels gush forth. Axel, however, has discovered her as well, and Sara, a determined young woman, turns on him with two pistols. She wounds Axel, and in the ensuing struggle, they discover they are in love. Sara, as it turns out, is a Rosicrucian as well.

The rest of the drama is a long, poetic and densely purple dialogue in which the world-rejecting Axel convinces Sara that the only true union for them is in death. Sara, more robust than Axel, suggests at least one night of passion. But the initiate is not swayed, and although young, rich, beautiful and well positioned socially - not to mentioned possessed of powerful magical support - they end it all by drinking a goblet of poison.

Although Yeats and his mystic brethren were entranced by the play, the general public and the critics would have nothing of it. Yeats remarks that as Master Janus denounced the life of pleasure and advocated the pursuit of the virtuous and chaste, one "fat old critic ... turned around with his back to the stage and looked at the pretty girls through his opera glass." With all this talk of spirit and the soul, the younger generation, it seemed, were becoming morbid. Understandably, Axel did not have a long run.

Axel's renunciation of life is the logical fulfilment of the Romantic belief in the supremacy of the imagination, the final severing of Hoffmann's `serapiontic principle'. It is the end of the other path that Huysmans, Baudelaire and the rest might have taken, the one leading to the barrel of a pistol. In his own life Villiers, an ardent Catholic, found his way to the foot of the cross, and later tried to change the play's ending, to deflect Axel's nihilism into a Christian channel. Sadly, he did not have time: the stomach cancer diagnosed in 1889 prevented him and the thought that he would die before perfecting his life work ironically reinforced his original pessimism. It is said that on his death bed he was arranging a law suit against God. The spiritual purity that Axel sought would eventually lead to a kind of aesthetic paralysis, bringing the Symbolist project to Mallarme's blank page and, later, to the white canvases of Kasimir Malevich. It would also lead to its opposite, the decadent plunge into debilitating excess, and a helpless disgust with a world oblivious to Villiers' and others' attempts to transform it.

H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells was not an occultist. The high-priest of science, Wells once took his fellow Fabian Bernard Shaw to task for believing in Bergson's elan vital or `life force', calling it a juju' and relegating it to the heap of superstitions that modern man must jettison on his way to creating a rational world order. Yet Wells himself had his own version of a higher man, and throughout his career he frequently wedded Nietzsche's vision of a sudden evolutionary leap to the Victorian belief in progress through science. In his novel The Food of the Gods (1904), two biologists discover a food that promotes steady and unlimited growth. The people who eat it become giants, not only in size but in vision, leaving behind the "littleness, bestiality and infirmity of men." Inevitably, the giants cause fear in the little people, who try to destroy them. "We fight not for ourselves," the leader of the giants declares, "but for growth, growth that goes on forever ... To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God . Till the earth is no more than a footstool ... i5

To point out the fascist and capitalist overtones of this declamation is only too easy for us who have gone through the century that Wells was only entering, but to give Wells his due, neither of these ideologies was on his mind. This notion of an evolutionary elite - not too distant from Blavatsky's vision of an inner circle of spiritual masters - never left Wells, and it's perhaps understandable that a person of his talent and energy would grow impatient with muddling humanity. In perhaps the last of his great science fiction novels, In The Days of the Comet (1908), a gas from a passing comet transforms the inhabitants of England into nobler, finer beings; and as late as 1937, in his little known novella Star Begotten, Wells has Martians firing cosmic rays at Earth in order to produce a super race. Yet this evolutionary optimism was countered by a dark pessimism, rooted in 19th century science, with its vision of a mindless evolutionary process and coming "heat death" of the universe. The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) all project a dark future for mankind. And if we are to judge by his last works, the darkness finally won. In Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), his last book, Wells declared gloomily that "this world is at the end of its tether ... the end of everything we call life is close at hand ..." Entropy - in the form of the atom bomb - was hurling mankind toward extinction; the very science that had promised humanity a glorious future was making certain its unavoidable end.

Although Wells can't be called an occultist, in the early days of his career, when, following Poe, Bulwer-Lytton and Jules Verne, he was creating modern science fiction, Wells wrote in a milieu swimming in occult ideas. One that struck him particularly was "the fourth dimension." Along with The Time Machine, Wells used the idea of some other space parallel to our own frequently. In "The Plattner Story" (1896), an inept chemistry teacher causes an explosion and is transported into another world which, in keeping with the times, turns out to be the fourth dimension. After a nine-day sojourn in the spirit world, complete with the souls of the dead, Plattner returns. That Wells had been reading his fourth dimensional literature is clear from the effect the journey has had on Plattner: his entire anatomical structure has been inverted, his heart beating on his right side, and the'rest of his organs and extremities following suit: he has become his own mirror-image. In "Under the Knife" (1896), an anaesthetic administered to the narrator during an operation produces an out-of-the-body experience, followed by a journey through the cosmic emptiness of space, culminating in a transfiguring vision of the Creator. In "The Door in the Wall" (1906) a politician recalls that as a child he entered through a magical door, which opened onto an enchanted garden; he is haunted by the memory and spends his life trying to find it again. In each of these tales, the narrator leaves behind the normal, everyday world and enters a version of Hoffmann's Atlantis, that other world of the imagination. Unlike some of the other writers we've looked at, in Wells' case, the desire to inhabit the other world permanently didn't express itself in addiction to alcohol or drugs or in a pathetic attempt to renounce this world. Wells evolved from imaginative dreamer into an utopian socialist, and from WWI until his final disillusionment, wrote and rewrote his manifesto for transforming this world into the other. His "open conspiracy" earned him world renown and the company of political leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Whether it did his writing much good is still a debatable question.

"The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes" (1895 is another fourth dimension tale, this time involving a few other occult or paranormal activities, like clairvoyance, bi-location and `remote viewing'. During a thunderstorm, the unfortunate Davidson is caught between the poles of an electromagnet and receives a terrific shock. When he awakes his consciousness has been transported to a remote South Sea Island, while his body remains in the London laboratory. When he tries to walk along the beach, he smashes into equipment, and when he's moved about in London, he finds himself flying over the island, or sinking through solid rock. The fourth dimension and a kink in space are offered as answers to the phenomenon, but Bellows, Wells' narrator, a mundane sort of chap, rejects this idea as nonsense, although he admits he is no mathematician. What Wells himself thought of the fourth dimension is also debatable. He was a good friend of the aviator turned time theorist J.W. Dunne, author of the once popular An Experiment with Time (1927), which recounted Dunne's experiences with precognitive dreams.' The aviators who appear in many of Wells' stories were modelled on Dunne and in The Shape of Things to Come (1933), Wells uses Dunne's ideas about dreams and precognition to enable his narrator to read a history textbook written a century and a half in the future. Yet, Wells at one point changed his mind about his friend's theories, more or less retracting a favourable review he had given of one of Dunne's books, wanting to avoid the impression that he was giving it an endorsement.

Like many creative artists, however, Wells was not adverse to indulging in an activity we have associated with many occult thinkers: hypnagogia. In the preface to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911) Wells described how he came to write his early stories.

I found that taking almost anything as a starting point and letting my thoughts play about with it, there would presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or vivid little nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares; violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity.

The door in the wall, sought after in different ways by many of Wells' narrators, may not have been as hidden as he thought.

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood had the kind of life most other writers only write about.` Today he is remembered chiefly by devotees of weird fiction, but in his own time Blackwood was an extremely popular writer, broadcaster and television personality, becoming a celebrity in the 1930s as radio's `Ghost Man', a sobriquet he accepted but never really liked. On 2 November 1936 he took part in the first television broadcast in Britain, filling a three minute slot in Alexandra Palace along with several other guests, including a Pearly King and the Queen of Blackfriars, in a show called Picture Page; he later became a regular guest on the BBC's Saturday Night Story, a position he shared with his fellow fantasist, Lord Dunsany. In 1949 Blackwood was awarded the Television Society Medal, a decoration he added to the CBE he received the same year. By the time of his death in 1951, Blackwood was a household name. He was famous until the early 1960s, and even reached a new audience via the weird fiction and fantasy revival of the late 60s and early 70s, a posthumous popularity enjoyed by Blackwood's fellow occultist and author, Arthur Machen.9 Machen's and Blackwood's names have often been linked, mostly because both were for a time members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and both were mystics of a sort. But the resemblance ends there. As we will see, Machen was an implacable enemy of the modern age; it's difficult picturing him as a television or radio celebrity of any kind. Blackwood too thought little of civilization, preaching throughout his many books a philosophy of cosmic unity and higher consciousness. But Blackwood had an adventurous, expansive spirit that Machen lacked, and this accounts for his fascinating life, and the curious power of his best writing.