A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (37 page)

46 In the 1930s, Frater Achad started a magical organization of his own, and one member, Wilfred T. Smith, carried his teaching to California, where he started a group called the Agape Lodge. This would later include John (Jack) Whitesides Parson, a scientist at Pasadena's famous jet Propulsion Laboratory. Agape Lodge was ultimately under Crowley's guidance, and after Smith abused his position (in a very Crowleyesque way, by seducing Parsons's wife) he was expelled and Parsons given control. Parson's Pasadena home became the site of magical rituals, including sex and drugs. L. Ron Hubbard claimed to have been sent to investigate the black magic ring by Naval Intelligence. He seduced Parsons' wife as well, and also absorbed enough about Crowley's ideas to use them as a foundation for his Church of Scientology. Hubbard was also a pulp science fiction writer at the time, and knew Heinlein, who visited Parsons' home on a few occasions. Many of Crowley's ideas inform his influential novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. For more on Parsons and Hubbard, see my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.

47 Lowry would have another indirect link with Crowley. As mentioned earlier, his friend and drinking partner, Dylan Thomas, was discovered by the poet Victor Neuberg, with whom Crowley performed a series of homosexual magical acts in Paris and North Africa.

48 Gordon Bowker Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry (London: Harper Collins, 1993).

49 Malcolm Lowry Sursum Corda! The Colleted Letters of Malcolm Lowry, Volume Two 1946-1957 edited by Sherrill E. Grace (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) p. 356.

50 Oddly Crowley himself was introduced to the work by another Jones, George Cecil Jones, the chemist and magician who brought him into the Golden Dawn.

51 Called Quauhnahuac in the novel, Cuernavaca, "the horn of the cow," has a curious occult history. Known traditionally as an area familiar to magicians and sorcerers, in the early 1960s it was the setting for Timothy Leary's initial psilocybin mushroom experiments, his first taste of the "food of the gods" being supplied by a local curandero, or medicine man. Later, it became the centre for John Star Cooke's `Psychedelic Rangers', a group of dedicated LSD enthusiasts who attempted to dose a variety of influential people with the drug. Cooke was known for his psychedelic seances, many of which were attended by prominent figures in the 60s counterculture. He had also become a kind of celebrity on the pop occultism circuit, through the popularity of a Tarot deck he designed. For more on him and Leary, who modelled his career on Aleister Crowley, see my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.

52 Malcolm Lowry Under The Volcano (London: Penguin Books, 1985) p. 218.

53 See Sursum Corda! pp. 293, 304.

54 And also of time, in the form of a clock. The opening chapter takes place a year after the events of the novel, with one of the supporting characters thinking back over the Consul's sad fate. He is, then, returning to the past. Lowry more than likely didn't know of Ouspensky's novel of recurrence Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, in which the central character is sent back in time to relive his life again, but his imagery here suits it perfectly.

55 Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (London; Penguin Books, 1985) pp. 139-140.

56 This letter can be found in the Penguin edition of the novel.

57 The novel also has a strong political element, which space has not allowed me to explore, and through the Consul's irrevocable descent, depicts the collapse of humanism and the rise of fascism. Firmin, a 20th century Faust, is modern man playing with dangerous forces he does not understand. Lowry believed that in Chapter Ten, with its long list of all the elements that were "against" Geoffrey, he had in some way anticipated the atomic bomb.

58 Under the Volcano p. 16.

59 Ibid. p. 23

60 Sursum Corda! pp. 356-357.

61 Under the Volcano p. 84.

62 Ibid. pp. 81-82.

Part 2

Selected Texts

From The Cloud upon the Sanctuary

KARL VON ECKARTHAUSEN

There is no age more remarkable to the quiet observer than our own. Everywhere there is a fermentation in the mind, as in the heart of man; everywhere there is a battle between light and darkness, between exploded thoughts and living ideas, between powerless wills and living active force; in fine, everywhere there is war between animal man and growing spiritual man.

It is said that we live in the age of light, but it would be truer to say that we are living in that of twilight; here and there a luminous ray pierces the mist of darkness, but does not light to full clearness either our reason or our heart. Men are not of one mind, scientists dispute, and where there is discord, truth is not yet apprehended.

The most important objects for humanity are still undetermined. No one is agreed either on the principle of reason, on the principle of morality, or on the cause of will. This proves that though we are dwelling in a reputed age of light, we do not well understand what emanates from our hearts and what from our heads. Probably we should reach this knowledge much sooner if we did not imagine that we have the torch of science already in our hands, or if we would cast a look on our weakness and recognise that we need a higher illumination. We live in the times of idolatry of the intellect; we place a common light upon the altar and we loudly proclaim that here and now is the aurora, that everywhere daylight is really about to appear, and that the world is emerging more and more from obscurity into the full day of perfection, through the arts, sciences, cultured tastes, and even by a purer understanding of religion.

Poor mankind! To what eminence have you raised the happiness of man? Has there ever been an age which has counted so many victims to humanity as the present? Has there ever been an age in which immorality and egotism have been greater or more dominant than in this one? The tree is known by its fruits. Insensate beings! With your imaginary natural reason, from whence have you the light by which you are so willing to enlighten others? Are not all your ideas borrowed from your senses, which do not give you the reality but merely its phenomena? Is it not true that in time and space all knowledge is but relative? Is it not true that all which we call reality is also relative, for absolute truth is not to be found in the phenomenal world. Thus your natural reason does not possess the true essence, but only an appearance of truth and light; and the more this semblance increases and spreads, the more the essence of light fades inwardly; the man is lost in the apparent and gropes vainly after dazzling phantasmal images devoid of actuality.

The philosophy of our age raises the natural intellect into independent objectivity, gives it judicial power, exempts it from any superior authority, makes it autonomous, converting it into divinity by closing all harmony and communication with God; and deified Reason, which has no other law but its own, is to govern Man and make him happy! Can darkness spread the light? ... Can poverty dispense wealth? Is death capable of giving life?

It is truth which leads man to happiness. Can you confer truth?

That which you call truth is a form of conception empty of real matter; its knowledge is acquired from without, through the senses, and the understanding co-ordinates these by observed synthetic relationship into science or opinion.

You abstract from the Scriptures and Tradition their moral, theoretical and practical truth; but as individuality is the principle of your intelligence, and as egotism is the incentive to your will, you do not see, by your light, the moral law which dominates, or you repel it with your will. It is to this length that the light of today has penetrated. Individuality under the cloak of false philosophy is a child of corruption.

Who can pretend that the sun is full zenith if no bright rays illuminate the earth, and no warmth vitalises vegetation? If the wisdom does not benefit man, if love does not make him happy, but very little has been done for him on the whole.

Oh! If only natural man, that is, sensuous man, would learn that the principle of his reason and the incentive of his will are only his individuality, and that on this account he is miserable, he would then seek within himself for a higher principle, and he would thereby approach that source which alone can communicate this principle to all, because it is wisdom in its essential substance ...

But the eye of the man of sensuous perception only is closed firmly to the fundamental basis of all that is true and all that is transcendental.

Even the reason which many would fain raise to the throne of legislative authority is only reason of the senses, whose light differs from that of transcendental reason, as does the phosphorescent glimmer of decayed wood from the glories of sunshine.

Absolute truth does not exist for sensuous man; it exists only for interior and spiritual man who possesses a suitable sensorium; or, to speak more correctly, who possesses an interior organ to receive the absolute truth of the transcendental world, a spiritual faculty which cognises spiritual objects as objectively and naturally as the exterior senses perceive external phenomena.

This interior faculty of the man spiritual, this sensorium for the metaphysical world, is unfortunately not yet known to those who cognise only on the external, for it is a mystery of the kingdom of God.

The current incredulity towards everything which is not cognised objectively by our senses explains the present misconception of truths which are, of all, most important to man.

But how can this be otherwise? In order to see one must have eyes, to hear one must have ears. Every apparent object requires its appropriate sensorium and it is this sensorium which is closed in most men. Hence they judge the metaphysical world through the intelligence of their senses, even as the blind imagine colours and the deaf judge tones without the suitable instruments ...

We must therefore have a sensorium fitted for such communication, an organised and spiritual sensorium, a spiritual and interior faculty able to receive this light; but it is close as I have said to most men by the incrustation of their senses.

Such an interior organ is the intuitive sense of the transcendental world, and until this intuitive sense is effective in us we can have no certainly of more lofty truths. This organism has been naturally inactive since the Fall, which relegated man to the world of physical sense. The gross matter which envelops the interior sensorium is a film which veils the internal eye, and prevents the exterior eye from seeing into spiritual realms. This same matter muffles our internal hearing, so that we are deaf to the sounds of the metaphysical world; it so paralyses our spiritual speech that we can scarcely stammer words of sacred import, words which we pronounced formerly, and by virtue of which we held authority over the elements and external nature.

The opening of this spiritual sensorium is the mystery of the New Man the mystery of Regeneration, and of the vital union between God and man it is the noblest object of religion on earth, of that religion whose sublime goal is none other than to unite men with God in Spirit and in Truth...

It is quite true that with new senses we can acquire the perception of further reality. This reality exists already, but it is not known to us, because we lack the organ by which to cognise it. One must not lay blame on the percept, but on the receptive organ.

With, however, the development of the new organ we have a new perception, a sense of new reality. In its absence the spiritual world cannot exist for us, because the organ rendering it objective to us is not developed. In its unfolding, the curtain is all at once raised, the impenetrable veil is torn away, the cloud before the Sanctuary lifts, a new world suddenly exists for us, scales fall from the eyes, and we are transported from the phenomenal world to the regions of truth .. .

A great many men have no more idea of the development of the inner sensorium than they have of the true and objective life of the spirit, which they neither perceive nor forecast in any manner. Hence it is impossible for them to know that one can comprehend the spiritual and transcendental, and can thus be raised to the supernatural, even to the vision thereof.

The great and true work of building the Temple consists solely in destroying the miserable Adamic hut and in erecting a divine temple; this means, in other words, to develop in us the interior sensorium, or the organ to receive God. After this process, the metaphysical and incorruptible principle rules over the terrestrial, and man begins to live, not any longer in the principle of self-love, but in the Spirit and in the Truth, of which he is the Temple ... Therein are those great mysteries of which our human philosophy does not dream, the key to which is not to be found in scholastic science.

Meanwhile, a more advanced school has always existed to which the deposition of all science has been confided ... the society of the Elect, which has continued from the first day of creation to the present time; its members, it is true, are scattered all over the world, but they have always been united by one spirit and one truth; they have had but one knowledge, a single source of truth, one lord, one doctor and one master, in whom resides substantially the whole plentitude of God, who also alone initiates them into the high mysteries of Nature and the Spiritual World.

This community of light has been called from all time the invisible and interior Church, or the most ancient of all communities, of which we will speak more fully in the next letter.

This community of light has existed since the first day of the world's creation, and its duration will be to the end of time. It is the society of those elect who know the Light in the Darkness and separate what is pure therein.

This community possesses a School, in which all who thirst for knowledge are instructed by the Spirit of Wisdom itself; and all the mysteries of God and of nature are preserved therein for the children of light. Perfect knowledge of God, of nature and of humanity are the objects of instruction in this school. It is thence that all truths penetrate into the world; herein is the School of Prophets and of all who search for wisdom; it is in this community alone that truth and the explanation of all mystery is to be found. It is the most hidden of communities, yet it possesses members gathered from many orders; of such is this school. From all time there has been an exterior school based on the interior one, of which it is but the outer expression. From all time, therefore, there has been a hidden assembly, a society of the Elect, of those who sought for and had the capacity for light, and this interior society was called the interior Sanctuary or Church. All that the external Church possesses in symbol, ceremony or rite is the letter which expresses externally the spirit and the truth residing in the interior Sanctuary..