A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (29 page)

That a novelist would find a magical creature susceptible to the power of words interesting is not surprising. In Meyrink's novel, however, the Golem as such makes no appearance. Rather Meyrink uses the name to refer to something much more like a mobile state of consciousness, a kind of psychic fog, that is somehow linked to the book's protagonist. Like Meyrink, Athanasius Pernath comes from an ambiguous background, and throughout the book the reader is unsure if the Golem is an actual entity, or a figment of Pernath's imagination. To complicate matters further, Pernath himself is unsure as well. And by the end of the novel, just exactly who, or what, Pernath is, becomes a disturbing question .. .

In Old Testament Hebrew Golem means an unformed embryo, and in medieval Jewish philosophy it was linked to the word hyle, which means matter without form - a microcosmic version of the chaos and dark night before creation. Until he finds himself Pernath, too, is a kind of Golem, and the dark corners and doorless rooms he traverses may be seen as the crooked path of his 'individuation'. Yet the same may be said for the work of the artist, whose idea remains in mere potentia until given shape through the creative act. Like many others in the early modern period, Meyrink was fascinated by the act of writing, and against his weird, melodramatic backdrop he has in many ways fashioned a tale of how a 'dark, dim intuition finds a vivid, effective expression.

When Meyrink began writing The Golem, the idea of a World War was, if not unthinkable, at least not often thought. By 1915 when the novel appeared on the bookstalls, Europe was suffering a murderous collapse that would continue for another three years. Meyrink was not the only artist to have glimpsed the shadow that the coming First World War threw before it; like many others, he believed that European bourgeois civilization was so rotten that only an apocalypse could redeem it, could raze its hypocrisy-ridden landscape and make way for a new world. The same theme appears in his second novel, The Green Face, as well as Walpurgisnacht, his third. In The Golem it is the Jewish Ghetto that is destroyed, but Meyrink knew that was only the beginning. Through his occult explorations, he had seen an ideal world, a realm of the spirit of which this physical shell was but a shadow. Now it was time for that shell to crack. The Golem, Meyrink believed, was one of the means to perform this deed, and it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that by 1918 it had once again got out of hand.

Andrei Bely

Of all the esoteric transplants to take root in fin de siecle Russia, none was as successful as anthroposophy, the unwieldy name Rudolf Steiner gave to his Christianized revision of Madame Blavatsky's theosophy.41' Along with steering away from Blavatsky's Tibetan masters and toward a more western form of esotericism, Steiner introduced a strong element of German philosophical rigour into Blavatsky's occult speculations. Born in 1861 in Kraljevec - then part of the Austro- Hungarian empire - Steiner first made his name as a Goethe scholar: as a young man he edited the great poet's scientific writings. He was later briefly involved in the Nietzsche archive started by the philosopher's sister, Elizabeth ForsterNietzsche, in Weimar. Elizabeth, widow of a pan-Germanic anti-semite - and later an acquaintance of Adolf Hitler - hired Steiner to help organize her brother's notes, as well as to tutor her in the more abstruse elements of his philosophy: perhaps not surprisingly, Elizabeth was notoriously ignorant of her brother's, or anyone else's, ideas. During his brief tenure, Steiner had an opportunity to meet Nietzsche - if occupying the same room as the insane philosopher counts as meeting him - and had a paranormal vision of his astral form. Elizabeth at that time was dressing her defenceless brother in a toga, and positioning him by the window, where his blank immobile stare, massive moustache and unkempt hair provided the impression of a great prophet, peering into the beyond. He was riddled with syphilis and by 1900 was dead.

In 1897 Steiner moved to Berlin where he briefly edited a literary magazine. He then taught at the Berlin Worker's School, where he managed to transmit to his Marxist audience a fair amount of German Idealism. This erratic pattern took an even more eccentric turn when Steiner was asked by the Berlin Theosophical Society to lecture on Goethe's Mdrehen, "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily." The lecture was so successful that he was invited back, and it was Steiner's lecture on "Christianity as Mystical Fact" in the winter of 1900 that more or less set him on his future career: previously kept from view, he now displayed his esoteric interests openly. In the audience that evening was the woman who would become Steiner's second wife, Marie von Sivers, a Baltic Russian, frustrated actress, and devout theosophist.41 Forceful and ambitious, von Sivers had already made a place for herself by translating the playwright and Wagnerian Eduorad Schure's esoteric bestseller The Great Initiates (1889). In 1902 she accompanied Steiner (who was still married to his first wife) to the London Conference of the Theosophical Society. Reports have. it that during this trip she suggested that Europe was in need of a new religious movement and that he, Rudolf Steiner, should lead it. Steiner agreed and soon after became the Secretary General of the German Branch of the Theosophical Society, second only to Annie Besant in authority and thought by many to be the most brilliant esoteric thinker of the time.

Steiner's break with theosophy was prompted by Besant's and C.W. Leadbeater's attempt to launch the twelve year old Krishnamurti as the new Jesus Christ. Before this, Marie von Sivers had arranged for Steiner to give a series of lectures in Russia, knowing that his highly Christianized theosophy would go down well with the growing number of "Godseekers" turning up among the intelligentsia. The 1905 Revolution, however, spoiled these plans, and sent many of the seekers into exile. It was then arranged for Steiner to give his lectures in the exile capital of Europe, Paris, in 1906. Among the audience were many of the most influential figures in the Russian cultural Renaissance: Dimitri Merzhkovsky, Zinaida Hippius, Konstantin Balmont (friend of Briusov) and Nicolai Minsky. By 1913, when Steiner gave a series of lectures at Helsingfors specifically for his Russian followers, there were already several anthroposophical discussion groups and workshops in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

In Steiner's esoteric system, the Slavic folk-soul has an important and timely role to play. Russia, he believed, was the country most suited to embody a new cultural epoch, something that many of the new mystically inclined intelligentsia believed as well. The Russian soul, Steiner told them, would transcend both the rational-materialist west and the mystical-spiritual east, inaugurating a new, holistic consciousness, that would synthesize these opposites. Oddly, many of Steiner's pronouncements on the Slavic soul echo Hermann Hesse's remarks on `Russian Man'. The Russian, Steiner said, was a "child." "In the Russian way of thinking, two opposing concepts can hold sway simultaneously." "The Russian does not have the slightest understanding of what Westerners call `reasonableness'." Madame Blavatsky, Steiner said, was a typical Russian: she went to extremes, did not think logically, and was childlike. Yet it was precisely these qualities that allowed her to intuit deep, spiritual truths ... sometimes.

Steiner's message hit home, although not all among the intelligentsia thought well of him. For the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, anthroposophy had a "distinctly corrupting and disintegrating effect." Berdyaev, who attended Steiner's Helsingfors lectures, was not impressed, and saw in Steiner a kind of black magician, casting a spell upon his audience. His followers seemed "maniacs possessed by some power beyond their control." "Whenever they uttered the magic words `the Doctor (i.e. Steiner) said', they seemed to be seized by some demon ..." Berdyaev was also very wary of a certain Anna Mintslova, whom he called Steiner's emissary, "an ugly, fat woman with protruding eyes" who bore a likeness to Madame Blavatsky. Mintslova "was skilled in her approach to human souls," and her influence was "absolutely negative and demonic." It is even possible that she performed some kind of magic spell or remote hypnosis on Berdyaev. He recounts how one night, half asleep, he saw her face hovering in a corner of his room, "its expression was quite horrifying - a face seemingly possessed of all the powers of darkness." Berdyaev also remarks on her strange disappearance, fading into thin air one afternoon on the Kuznetsky Bridge in Moscow. Rumours said she had gone into hiding in a Rosicrucian monastery, or, conversely, had committed suicide because the Doctor had condemned her for failing in her mission to convert the Slavs ..."

One writer to fall under Steiner's spell was the novelist, poet, and essayist Andrei Bely. Born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow in 1880 (Andrei Bely was a pseudonym, meaning `Andrew White'), Bely was the son of a worldfamous mathematician and a St. Petersburg society lady. Prompted by his father, Bely entered the mathematics faculty at Moscow University, and graduated in 1903. By that time, Bely's feeling for mathematics had changed; through music, which he called "audible mathematics," he became fascinated with art and aesthetic expression. Already at 17 Boris had been writing poems in the manner of Heine, Verlaine and Maeterlinck; now he became Andrei Bely, adopting the pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his renowned father.

Bely was a voracious reader and his favourite pastime seems to have been absorbing philosophical systems and turning them into writing. He was infatuated with Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, theosophy, eastern religions and was a follower of the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.43 From Soloviev, whose philosophy influenced the Russian Renaissance, Bely absorbed the idea, common to his generation, of a transcendental reality, intuited through symbols. He also absorbed the belief that the current age was at an end and that Russia was about to become the backdrop for a cataclysmic upheaval.44 Bely first came to literary notice with his eccentric prose work Second Symphony (1902), which applied the principles of musical composition to writing. Neither a novel, essay nor poem, Bely composed three further Symphonies, before embarking on his first novel, The Silver Dove (1909). Like Arthur Machen, Bely was obsessed with the clash between western European consciousness and primitive beliefs; in the novel the Moscow poet Daryalsky is tired of the intelligentsia and leaves the city for the countryside, where he joins a mystical sect, the White Doves. Here, under the dominance of their ruthless leader, who, Bely claims, anticipates the real life Rasputin, he is drawn into a disastrous union with the "Mother of God," in an attempt to produce a magical offspring. The novel was well received - in his review Berdyaev wrote that "Modern Russia has produced nothing greater" - and with Valery Briusov, Bely had established himself as a leader of the new Symbolist movement.

In 1910-1911 Bely and his first wife, Asya Turgenev (niece of the writer) travelled in Italy, North Africa and the Holy Land. Then, in the spring of 1912, Bely met Steiner and became part of his entourage, eventually leaving Russia for Dornach, Switzerland, where he helped build Steiner's Goetheanum, a strangely beautiful work of Expressionist and Art Nouveau architecture.45 Although critical of some Stein- erites, Bely found striking parallels between his own ideas and those of anthroposophy. In a letter to the poet Aleksander Blok - with whose wife Bely had been infatuated - Bely remarked that "Since the autumn of 1911, Steiner has begun to speak of ... Russia, her future, the soul of her people and Soloviev ... He considers Soloviev to be the most remarkable man of the second half of the nineteenth century, knows the Mongol peril, asserts that since 1900 an enormous change has taken place in the world and that the sunsets have changed since that year ..

Mention of the "Mongol peril" brings us to one of Bely's obsessions: the belief that Russia was threatened on two fronts, by an incursion of Asiatic hordes from the east and by the success of western rationalism and technology, which was absorbing the authentic Slav soul. This concern, often amounting to hysteria, saturates Bely's most well known work, the novel Petersburg (1916). Along with a later novel, the autobiographical Kotik Letayev (1922), begun during his time in Dornach, it is the most anthroposophical of Bely's creative writing.

Taking place in the days leading up to the 1905 Revolution, the plot centres around the radical student Nikolai Ableukhov and his father, a senator condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal. Nikolai is given the task of carrying out the sentence, and he does this by the means of a bomb hidden in a sardine tin. This almost comical situation takes place amidst a feverish landscape of secret agents, premonitions, strange dreams and astral journeys, made even more ambiguous through Bely's eccentric syntax. Through it all the initiated reader can find Bely's absorption of Steiner's teaching. Nikolai undergoes an astral voyage during sleep, in which he sees his father as the pagan god Saturn. In Steiner's system, Saturn was the first stage in the evolution of human and cosmic consciousness. The dreaded Mongol appears as well, along with the "old Turanian." Turanians were non-Semitic, non-Aryan nomads who supposedly came to Europe well before the Aryans. In Steiner's system, they are linked with the Mongols, and are responsible for inventing logical reasoning.

Bely was particularly impressed with a series of secret lectures that Steiner gave in 1912-1913, centred around the `activation of the etheric body'. The `etheric body' is a term Steiner took from theosophy; it refers to a kind of `life field' that animates our physical form; living things rot after death because their etheric body has disengaged from the merely physical form and no longer supports it. Steiner taught that when one begins to sense the etheric body, the feeling is like a sudden expansion into space. "He experiences terror; here no one is spared anxiety; it oppresses the soul; as though one had been hurled into space ..."47 In a chapter called "The Senator's Second Space" Bely describes the weird hypnagogic visions Nikolai's father has on the point of sleep. "This universe always appeared before he fell asleep; and appeared in such a way that Apollon Apollonovich, going to sleep, remembered all the earlier inarticulacies, rustlings, crystallographic figures, the golden, chrysanthemum-shaped stars racing through the darkness . . .s48 And in the section entitled "The Last Judgement," Nikolai also finds himself thrown out into strange cosmic depths.