A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (35 page)

Milosz's ascent, however, did not last long. And when the movement stopped, he could see:

... a very dense cloud, which, despite its coppery tinge, I compared to the freshly discharged seed of man. Above the top of my skull, a little to the rear, a glow then appeared like that of a torch reflected by still water or an old mirror.

During these visions, Milosz was in complete command of his senses, and felt neither dread, nor curiosity nor amazement. Yet:

an instant later, from regions which I knew were far behind me, a sort of gigantic and reddish egg shot forth, hurled with extraordinary force into space, it reached the line of my forehead in an instant; and there, suddenly changing its movement and colour, it became round and small, turned into a golden lamp, lowered itself until it brushed my face, climbed again, grew in size, recovered its oval shape of an angelic sun, stopped not far above my forehead and looked deeply into my eyes.'

This was the "spiritual sun" he told Carlos Larronde he had seen.

It is impossible to do more than touch on Milosz's 20th century contribution to the hermetic tradition. Ars Magna and The Arcana are extremely difficult works; the "Exegetic Notes" to The Arcana alone run some hundred pages. He was in many ways a man out of time; his spiritual milieu was that of Saint-Martin, Cagliostro, Goethe, the Enlightenment Illuminati discussed in the first section of this book. Like Swedenborg, he combined a mystical sensibility with a practical capability rarely exhibited in poets.

In his last days, Milosz wrote an eccentric interpretation of the Book of Revelations, after having read the work some 50 times over a fortnight. He believed that the year 1944 would see a universal conflagration, and although World War II fell short of this, he had also predicted its arrival several years in advance. He spent his last years at Fontainebleau, where he loved to walk in the gardens and where he displayed an uncommon intimacy with the birds. On one occasion, after an absence of some months, upon his return he was greeted with a chorus of song, "paths, woods and bushes resounded with calls," presenting a "light-headed joy by all kinds of species." His love of his aerial friends was demanding, and on one occasion, after carrying a case of seeds, he collapsed in a faint, falling into the December snow, almost dying. He did die on 2 March 1939. One particular bird he let free in a room reserved for it, and it was only put into its cage at night. On that evening the bird refused to go into its cage, and, Milosz, desperate, attempted to catch it. Finally getting his hands on it after several attempts, but frantic and exhausted after the chase, Milosz collapsed. He was dead. The symbolism will not escape the attentive reader.

Malcolm Lowry

At the summer solstice of 1916, Frater Achad - otherwise known as Charles Stansfeld Jones, a London accountant and devoted student of the occult - stood before his altar in his temple in Vancouver, Canada, and acknowledged a remarkable fact. He had, he realized, undergone a significant transformation. From humble Neophyte in the order of the Argentinum Astrum, or Silver Star, he had metamorphosed into a Master of the Temple. Confirmation of this exalted change came in the form of visitation by the Secret Chiefs who, Achad realized, had called upon him to accept the obligations of his new status. Taking the solemn oath of his new office, Frater Achad swore to fulfil his duties and to work diligently to execute all the responsibilities that were attendant upon him now.

Soon after his experience, Jones telegrammed his mentor in London, with whom he had been carrying on a magical correspondence course, and announced what had happened. Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast and Jones' master, was delighted at the news, but more importantly, he was struck by the remarkable coincidence it seemed to portend. Just nine months previously, with two of his Scarlet Women, Crowley had performed a series of magical operations, the aim of which was to produce a "magical child," an heir to the mysteries inherent in his sacred text, The Book of the Law. Jones' telegram seemed to confirm that Crowley's efforts - which included for the most part having sex in a variety of ways - had been successful. Frater Achad, he felt certain, was the one predicted by the Book, who would come and elucidate its many secrets. Achad, encouraged by his master's delight, embarked on a long and complicated kabbalistic analysis of Crowley's inspired work, which eventually took shape in 1919 as the revelation that God combines within himself both being and non-being.45 This discovery heartened Crowley and, at least for him, cleared up some of the more obscure points in The Book of the Law. Yet, as happened with practically everyone who got involved with him, the Great Beast eventually turned on Frater Achad. The fact, however, that in 1926, Jones went mad could not have helped their relations. During a brief stay in England, Crowley's magical child joined the Roman Catholic Church with the intention of converting it to Crowley's religion of thelema. He then returned to Vancouver where, on a particularly auspicious day, wearing only a rain coat, he flung it open, revealed his nakedness, and announced that he had abandoned the Veil of Illusion.

Frater Achad soon recovered from his mania, and jettisoning Crowley's yolk, declared that Aiwass, the Great Beast's Holy Guardian Angel, was a malignant intelligence. He did not abandon his magical studies though, and hereafter announced that a New Aeon was indeed upon the world, but not the one that Crowley had in mind. Crowley, hearing of Jones's apostasy, realized his journey across the abyss - the necessary prerequisite to becoming a Master of the Temple - had been precipitous, and expelled him from his order. And to make sure that his ex-student learned his lesson, he evoked a handful of demons to destroy him.

Frater Achad's magical career, however, was not over, and his influence would inform two significant occult streams in the 20th century. One would originate in Pasadena, California, and include important figures like Jack Parsons, Robert Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard.46 The other would begin closer to home, in Vancouver, and would have a profound effect on Jones' fellow Englishman, Malcolm Lowry, and his important modernist novel, Under the Volcano. Lowry seems an apt inheritor ofJones' wisdom: if anyone had ever entered an abyss, Lowry, with his haunted, demonridden life, full of minor and major tragedies, surely had.47

Malcolm Lowry was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire in 1909 and died in Ripe, Sussex in 1957; much of his life, however, was spent in foreign lands. On the coroner's report the cause of death was given as "misadventure" - he had apparently choked on his own vomit - but the exact details are unknown. After a night of heavy drinking and a violent quarrel with his second wife, Margerie Bonner, Lowry was found dead the next morning, lying in a pool of gin and broken glass. He was not quite forty-eight, and the possibility of suicide cannot be ruled out: a bottle that had contained twenty sodium amytal sleeping pills was found empty. At the time of his death, aside from a few friends and aficionados of his work, Lowry was unknown. Under the Volcano, his major work, is now considered one of the most important novels of the 20th century. It is, by most accounts, a masterwork of modernist technique. It is also a book given over to Lowry's obsessions with occult ideas of initiation, trial, rebirth and the tragic fate of a black magician. The central framework of the book is the Kabbalah, the esoteric meaning of which he learned first hand from his teacher, Charles Stansfeld Jones.

Lowry's first meeting with Jones has all the romantic qualities we would expect from a magical encounter, although, as is clear from Gordon Bowker's exhaustive biography, Lowry, like many drawn to the occult, had a penchant for mythologizing his life." In a letter to his German translator, Clemens ten Holder, Lowry describes how he first came across Crowley's disinherited son. He and his wife Margerie had been living not far from Vancouver in a shack in Dollarton, British Columbia. Here Lowry worked obsessively on several revisions of his novel, which, by this time, had been rejected by twelve publishers. Walking in the forest, and contemplating the growing similarities between the intoxicated Geoffrey Firmin, the ex-British Consul, drinking himself to death in Mexico - Lowry's fictional alter ego - and Faust, Lowry reflected that his tragic hero was "in the position, as it were, of a black magician." If this were so, he thought, "had I not better learn something about what really haunted him? Fatal supposition! Indeed no sooner had I thought that than I actually encountered a strange personage in the forest here, who, ostensibly a canvasser for votes, was in reality just such a magician ... "49Lowry hastened to add that he -Jones - was a white magician and that Lowry himself did not practice the craft. Synchronicities of this sort - to use C.G.Jung's term for `meaningful coincidences' - seem to crowd Lowry's life, as well as his fiction: Under the Volcano can be read as an extended stream of consciousness exercise in the hermetic theme of correspondences.

After that meeting, which more than likely took place in June 1941 - although in the extant correspondence, the first mention of Jones is in a postcard to Lowry's friend Gerald Noxon nearly two years later - Jones returned to Lowry's shack, bringing with him copies of two books he had written: Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception and The Anatomy of the Body of God. Both dealt with Kabbalah, although Frater Achad's other main interest was the Parsifal legend, his studies in which produced The Chalice of Ecstasy, being the Inmost Secret of PAR- ZIVAL by a Companion of the Holy Grail, a Magical and Qabalistic Interpretation of the Drama of Parzival, published in 1923 by the same small Chicago firm that produced his other works. Jones also brought along a diagram of the Tree of Life, the graphic representation of the ten sephiroth or levels of existence emanating from the unmanifest godhead. Lowry was so taken with this that he asked Jones to teach him everything he knew about Kabbalah. Stan, as Lowry came to call him, agreed, and lent him a book about the "sacred magic" of Abra-Melin the mage. This was more than likely The Book of the Sacred Magic ofAbra-Melin the Mage, a translation of a manuscript that Samuel Liddell Mathers (later MacGregor), the head of the Golden Dawn when Crowley first joined, had discovered in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris. The text was written by Abraham the Jew in 1458, and recounts Abraham's years as a student of a seer known as Abramelin. Years later, he committed the knowledge he had gained to writing, and this was translated into French sometime in 1700; it was this French translation that Mathers came across. Mathers was not the only one to have known of the book: both Eliphas Levi and Bulwer-Lytton were conversant with it.

The aim of the rituals included in the text is to bring the practitioner to the "knowledge and conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel." To achieve this, the magician must learn how to master the lower demonic forces; legend has it that when Crowley himself attempted the operation - in his magical lodge in Boleskine, near Loch Ness - he failed to do this: hence the shadows that surrounded his later career. In Lowry's case, the demonic voices the mescal inspired Consul hears come straight out ofMathers' text.'°

Lowry and Margerie visited Jones often. Stan lived with his wife Rubina in Deep Cove, a hamlet not far from Dollarton, where they were more or less the resident eccentrics. Aside from his magical pursuits, Jones had a degree in philosophy, was a painter as well as the head of the College Ad Spiritum Sanctum, whose base was located in Chicago. Rubina shared Charles' interest in the occult, and was also a great reader, although she had less enthusiasm for Lowry than her husband had. The two couples became good friends nevertheless, and soon the Lowrys were spending a few evenings a week at Jones's house. There he introduced them to a variety of mystical practices: yoga, the I Ching, astral travel and meditation. Jones believed that the myth of the Holy Grail was the archetype of the quest for hidden knowledge, and more and more Lowry came to agree. Since his childhood he had believed that he was in some way different from others, had been set apart for some special fate, and that, like his predecessors Poe and Baudelaire, he was destined for a life of suffering, through which he would acquire deep spiritual understanding. It was another of those odd coincidences that among the writers Jones introduced to Lowry was Eliphas Levi who, as we've seen, also believed that the true magus must pass through the fires of suffering.

Jones made his impressive occult library available to Lowry, and we get an idea of the kind of world Malcolm was entering by the checklist of occult titles that appears in Under the Volcano. When Hugh, Geoffrey's brother, arrives in Cuernavaca," Mexico, where the novel takes place, and inspects his brother's library, he finds an odd collection:

... on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous kabbalistic and alchemical books, though, some looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King ...52

There were other books as well: the Mahabharata, William Blake, the Upanishads, the Rig Veda, but also Peter Rabbit. " `Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,' the Consul liked to say," Hugh recalls: a touch of humour added for leavening, perhaps; but perhaps also a nod to the kabbalistic notion that deep, profound secrets can be found in the simplest text.

By the time Lowry met Jones, he was ready for the initiation. Occult, or at least metaphysical literature was not foreign to him. He was a great reader of Ouspensky and in a letter to his mother-in-law, who shared his esoteric interests, he suggested she read A New Model of the Universe and Tertium Organum; in the same letter he praised J.W. Dunne's An Experiment With Time and spoke highly of Charles Fort's books. He even plagiarized Ouspensky, saying that he has "always believed that, that which impedes the motion of thought is false," a slight paraphrase of Ouspensky's coda to Tertium Organum itself. (In later years he would also repeat Ouspensky's dictum that "If we could put questions rightly, we should know the answers," an insight that finds an odd echo in some of Wittgenstein's aphorisms.53) Ouspensky's speculations on time and eternal recurrence find their way into Lowry's magnum opus, most clearly in the symbolism of the wheel that turns up in several places, most powerfully in the Ferris wheel, which, significantly, at the close of the opening chapter, revolves backwards over the setting for the Consul's trials, a subtle yet striking image of return.54 Lowry also identified strongly with Ouspensky's description of the Hanged Man from the Tarot, another image of suffering.