A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (30 page)

There is an hallucinatory flavour to the book, and reading it in long sittings certainly gives the impression of entering another reality. How much Bely himself experienced of similar states, and how much he assimilated from his enormous reading, is unclear. That he was an unstable character is suggested by reports about him. Berdyaev, who knew him well for a time, believed that Bely lived "by a passionate desire to lose his identity altogether," and spoke of his "monstrous disloyalty and treachery." Although undoubtedly brilliant, it was, he said "impossible to rely on Bely in any way whatsoever." He was also something of a "maniac", obsessed by fears, apprehensions, horrors and premonitions, and had a peculiar terror of meeting a Japanese or Chinese.49 Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the classic dystopian novel We (1924) remarked of Bely that "He always left one with the impression of impetuosity, flight, feverish excitement" and summed up his character as "Mathematics, poetry, anthroposophy, fox trot . . ." Bely's own relationship with Steiner went through radical fluctuations. In 1916 he left Dornach and returned to Russia, but Asya Turgenev refused to follow him, choosing to remain with the Doctor.50 A period of disillusionment followed, and Bely publicly repudiated Steiner's work. Then, after enduring severe hardship during the revolution, he returned to Dornach, but was rejected by both Aysa and Steiner. He then spent two depressing years in Berlin, returning to Russia in 1923, where he-married another anthroposophist, Klavdia Vasilyeva, and wrote a series of autobiographical works, one of which, Recollections of Steiner (not published until 1982), paints an idealized portrait of Steiner. Although at first enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks, Bely soon realized that any dreams of a spiritual revolution had been quickly jettisoned, and. unlike his one-time mentor Briusov, he never found a place within the new Soviet machine. He died, a somewhat forgotten figure, in 1934. Petersburg, however, remains a classic, a recognized masterpiece, and one of the great works of high modernism thoroughly drenched in esoteric thought.

Notes

1 Maugham's hero, Larry Darrel, is said to be based on Christopher Isherwood, who became a student of the yogi Prabha- vananda in California in the 1930s.

2 There's reason to suspect that the Ana, Bulwer Lytton's name for his subterranean super-race, influenced Bernard Shaw's late Lamarckian `metabiological Pentateuch', Back to Methuselah. Both works present a superior civilization of mental supermen, who have given up the delights of the flesh in favour of a life devoted solely to the mind. The fact that in his novels Bulwer Lytton often associates the `superior type' with the social out cast - a reflection of his own experience - also has resonances with Shaw, who thought of himself as the complete outsider and who agreed with Nietzsche that the higher evolutionary type would find him or herself beyond good and evil.

3 See Stapledon's First and Last Man and Starmaker, and the stories making up Lovecraft's `Cthulhu Mythos'.

4 W.B. Yeats, Preface to H.P.R Finberg's 1924 translation of Axel (London: Jarrods,1925).

5 H.G. Wells The Food of the Gods (New York: Airmont Publishing Company, 1965) pp. 189-190.

6 The superman theme would spawn hundreds, maybe thousands of offspring in the fields of sci-fi. Olaf Stapledon's Odd John, A.E. Van Vogt's Slan, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land are only some of the most well known efforts in this area.

7 The novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley, who read the memorial address following Wells' cremation at Golders Green on 16 August 1946, was another, more unequivocal advocate of Dunne's ideas, as he was of the ideas of P.D. Ouspensky.

8 To date there is only one full scale book on Blackwood, Mike Ashley's Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (London: Constable, 2001). S.T. Joshi's The Weird Tale (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press) has a long and exhaustive study of Blackwood's work. I have relied on both for the present section.

9 As late as 1962, Gerald Gough, librarian of the Society of Inner Light, a Golden Dawn offshoot started by the occult psychologist Dion Fortune (Violet Firth), tried to contact Blackwood in a seance. Among others present was the late poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine. Although Blackwood himself was a firm believer in reincarnation, he didn't think that the soul remained intact after death and was disparaging about spiritualism. His own belief was that the individual soul merged back into a kind of collective cosmic mind, from which new souls emerged. These may inherit qualities from the souls that have passed - i.e., reincarnation.

10 Strangely, Machen and Blackwood were linked by more than magic. Along with gaining mastery of the Golden Dawn, A.E. Waite spent his time as the London manager for Horlick's malted milk company. (Blackwood, we remember, tried his hand at a career in powdered milk.) In 1903, persuaded by Waite, the company issued a popular magazine, The Horlick's Magazine and Home Journal, which ran for eighteen issues. Along with Waite's own contributions were those of Evelyn Underhill (writer on mysticism and member of the Golden Dawn), Edgar Jepson, and Machen, most notably his story "The White People."

11 Along with other thinkers, like William James and Nietzsche, Ouspensky's book owes a considerable debt to the mathematician Charles H. Hinton. At the turn of the nineteenth century, in a series of successful books and magazine articles, Hinton popularized the notion of a `fourth dimension,' running parallel to our usual three. His work also influenced H.G. Wells, who borrowed the idea for his first novel, The Time Machine. For more on Hinton and Ouspensky, see my A Secret History of Consciousness (Massachusetts: Lindisfarne 2003).

12 In The Glittering Gate (1914), Dunsany has two burglars breaking into Heaven. After picking the lock on the entrance, they discover nothing but an abyss. "Stars. Blooming great stars. There ain't no heaven ... " one declares.

13 Mark Amory Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972) p. 46.

14 Ibid p. 47.

15 Ibid. p.72.

16 Disquietingly, Bucke's psychiatric practice included procedures we would today find unacceptable. Early in his career, endorsing the Victorian belief that masturbation promotes mental disability, Bucke briefly instituted the precedent of `wiring' the penis to prevent his male patients from abusing themselves. The results were equivocal and the practice soon abandoned. Later, he practiced gynaecological surgery as a treatment for insanity in women, again with debatable results. His notions, savage to us, were in keeping with the interest in endocrinology popular at the time, and were prompted by a recognized need for more active methods of treating mental illness. Bucke later abandoned surgery and in his last years developed plans for a self-sufficient therapeutic community, an idea years ahead of its time. For Bucke's contribution to psychiatry see Peter A. Rechnitzer, R.M. Bucke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

17 R.M. Bucke Cosmic Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1966) pp. 9-10.

18 Sharon Begley, "Religion and the Brain," Newsweek, May 14, 2001.

19 For more on Gavin Arthur, see my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. (London: Macmillan, 2001) pp. 337-340.

20 Bucke p. 4.

21 Outside of occult circles, Ouspensky's name occasionally turns up in books on popular mathematical science, which often perpetuate the error that he was a mathematician himself. Although he had an interest in mathematics, as did his father, Ouspensky himself was not a professional mathematician; indeed he never held a university position of any kind, and was what we would call a drop out. His speculations on higher space, however, have earned him an infrequent mention, sometimes with unintentionally humorous results. Thus, in Hyperspace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 65-67) the physicist Michio Kaku remarks on Ouspensky's profound interest in multidimensional space, and the influence his ideas had on writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Given that Dostoyevsky died in 1881, when Ouspensky was six years old, his influence must have been great indeed. Yet, as Ouspensky himself had some unusual theories about time, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Dostoyevsky was influenced by Ouspensky. Part of Ouspensky's strange ideas about `eternal recurrence' included an unusual variant on reincarnation, in which upon death, a person incarnates again, but in the past, not the future. So, granting Ouspensky's peculiar views, he may, upon his death in 1947, have reincarnated into Dostoyevsky's time, and thus had upon the novelist the influence Michio Kaku so generously ascribes to him. Eternal recurrence was a central theme of Nietzsche, whose ideas influenced Ouspensky greatly.

22 Although J.B. Priestley would have like to, he was never able to arrange a meeting with Ouspensky, for the basic reason that Ouspensky rejected the idea. Nevertheless, in his plays Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before, as well as in books like Man and Time and his last, Over the Long, High Wall, Priestley made use of and popularized Ouspensky's ideas - always, as Ouspensky had done with Gurdjieff, acknowledging their originator and source. It is unfortunate, in my view at least, that post-Gurdjieff Ouspensky seemed to have developed a powerful anti-social attitude, sometimes bordering on paranoia. Had he made the gesture and met with Priestley, his last days may not have been so tragic; indeed, they might not have been his last days at all.

23 He also believed that the name most suited to becoming famous with was one with a dactyl followed by a trochee, such as Benjamin Franklin.

24 Books about Crowley are numerous. The best remains John Symonds' The Great Beast (1951), most recently revised and reissued as The King of the Shadow Realms, Aleister Crowley his Life and Magic (1989). A more recent account is Martin Booth's A Magick Life (2000). For a life of Crowley from the point of view of a devotee, see Israel Regardie's The Eye in the Triangle (1970) .

25 Aleister Crowley The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (New York: Bantam Books, 1972) p. 7.

26 Martin Booth Introduction to Aleister Crowley Selected Poems (London: Crucible, 1986) p. 17.

27 For a full account of Neuberg's relationship with Crowley, see Jean Overton Fuller's The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg.

28 Doubts about how Machen is pronounced once prompted Cyril Connolly to remark that, "If I had been Arthur Machen, I would have added "rhymes with Bracken" to my signature by deed-poll, for nothing harms an author's sales like an ambiguity in the pronunciation of his name."

29 Machen lost his job with the Evening News in 1921 when he wrote a premature obituary of Lord Alfred Douglas. Reported dead, Machen's obituary used the word "degenerate;" Bosie, however, was very much alive and sued. The Evening News had to pay £1,000 in damages and Machen was fired.

30 Machen, however, did not think much of Wilde, referring to him as "an obese French washerwoman."

31 Maupassant was also generous to less successful writers, and for a time supported Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

32 Charcot was also apparently a great collector of what we might call demonic erotica, and spent his leisure time perusing the works of Felicien Rops and other less well known outre artists.

33 An English translation of "The Horla" appeared in a collection called Modern Ghosts in 1890, predating Wells' The Invisible Man by seven years. There had, of course, been fairy and folk tales involving invisibility for generations, but Maupassant's might be the first to offer a scientific account of the condition.

34 The name became so associated with Maupassant that he gave it to the balloon in which he travelled from Paris to Holland in July 1887, christening it `Le Horla'. An astute careerist, the stunt helped to publicize the collection of stories containing the tale.

35 Yet of the two Strindberg is clearly the more profound. For all his technical brilliance, Maupassant, like his contemporaries the Impressionists, lived on the surface, and his vision of life is shallow. Colin Wilson's remark that he is "the most brainless of all the great writers" is perhaps not an overstatement.

36 He was, of course, a considerable painter and water colourist.

37 It was around this time that Yeats met Strindberg and later remarked in his memoirs that when he met the playwright he was "searching for the Philosopher's Stone."

38 Characteristically, the story of how Meyrink pitched the novel to Kurt Wolff, its publisher, is, as we might expect, the stuff of legend. "I remember Meyrink's visit well," Wolff recalled, "a gentleman of aristocratic appearance and impeccable manners, with a slight limp. He had the honour, he said of proposing that the firm accept his first novel, although no typescript of it was available yet. He had recorded it on a dictating machine ... (but) he had brought along a handwritten copy of the first chapter. He wished to reach an agreement on the novel at once, before returning to Munich the following day. He would not demand the usual royalties, but instead desired immediate payment of ten thousand marks as a lump sum, in return for all rights and editions ... Would I be so kind, he asked, as to read the pages ... and to make a decision?

"Taken aback and embarrassed, I read the folio pages ... and was then expected ... to say yes or no I found the situation absurd, wanted to show I was equal to it - and said yes." (Kurt Wolff A Portrait in Essays and Letters ed. Michael Ermarth (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press) ), pp. 12-13.

39 Meyrink was a friend of Friedrich Eckstein, the Viennese esotericist who, legend has it, first introduced Rudolf Steiner to the doctrines of theosophy, passing on to Steiner a copy of A. Sinnet's Esoteric Buddhism.

40 Anthroposophy means the "wisdom of man" as opposed to theosophy's "wisdom of the gods".

41 For an interesting perspective on Steiner's first marriage to the widow Anna Eunicke, see James Webb's The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1976), p. 64.

42 Nicolas Berdyaev Dream and Reality (London: Geoffrey Bles,1950) pp. 192-194. Berdyaev's autobiography is a key document on the Russian fin de siecle, and Steiner was not the only occultist or mystic to receive his animus. As an eccentric Marxist, Nietzschean, and Russian Orthodox existentialist, it isn't surprising he would find fault with much of what went on in the "highly charged and intense atmosphere of the early 20th century Russian cultural renascence." Berdyaev was highly critical, for example, of the sway Dirmtri Merzhkovsky and his wife, the poet Zinaida Hippius, had on the sensibility of the time. Merzhkovsky, who blended speculations on sex and a coming God-Man with Atlantis "lived in an atmosphere of unhealthy, self-assertive sectarian mysticism." His wife, with whom Berdyaev enjoyed a brief friendship, had "a profound understanding of others, blended with a capacity for inflicting pain on them. There was something snake-like about her. She was fragile, subtle, brilliant and entirely devoid of human warmth." Pp. 144-145.