by Colin Wilson
The exact dating of the blocks remained a problem. According to Lovecraft, the ‘Great Old Ones’ existed a hundred and fifty million years ago, and his idea had gained popular credence. This, of course, was inconceivable. Reich’s neutron dater later suggested that the remains were less than two million years old, and even this may be an overestimate. The problems of dating are in this case unusually complex. The archaeologist usually relies on the various layers of earth above his find, for in these he possesses a kind of ready-made calendar. But in the three known cases of these giant cities, the clues seem contradictory. All that we can say with certainty is that each was destroyed by a deluge that buried them under many thousands of feet of mud. The word ‘deluge’ immediately suggests the Pleistocene to a geologist—a mere million years ago. But in the Queensland deposits have been found traces of a rodent that is known to have existed only in the Pliocene era, which could add another five million years to the dating.
All this is irrelevant to my main story. For long before the completion of the first tunnel, I had lost interest in the Karatepe excavations. I had come to recognize them for what they were—a red herring deliberately introduced by the mind parasites.
My discovery came about in this way.
By the end of July 1997, I was in a state of total exhaustion. Even with a five mile sun umbrella reducing the temperature to a mere sixty in the shade, Karatepe was intolerable. The rubbish dumped on us by Fuller’s disciples made the place stink like a swamp; the various disinfectant fluids that were used to cover it up only made it worse. The winds were dry and dusty. We spent half the day drinking iced sherbert with rose leaves and reclining in the air conditioned huts. In July, I began to get violent headaches. Two days spent in Scotland improved things, and I went back to work, but after another week, I went down with fever. I had had enough of constant interruptions from press men and Anti-Kadath cranks, so I went back to my flat in Diyarbakir. It was cool and quiet, being on the territory of the Anglo-Indian Uranium Company, whose guards had a short way with intruders. I found heaps of letters and several great parcels waiting for me, but for two days I ignored them, and stayed in bed and listened to the operas of Mozart on gramophone records. Gradually, the fever left me. On the third day, I had emerged from my accidie enough to open my letters.
Among them was a note from Standard Motors and Engineering, saying that, in accordance with my request, they were forwarding most of Karel Weissman’s papers to me at Diyarbakir. This, then, explained the enormous parcels. Another letter came from Northwestern University Press, and enquired whether I would be willing to entrust them with the publication of Karel’s psychological papers.
All this was tiresome. I forwarded the letter to Baumgart in London, and went back to my Mozart. The next day, conscience nagged me, and I opened the remainder of my post. And I found a letter from Carl Seidel, the man with whom Baumgart shared a flat (he was a homosexual) telling me that Baumgart had suffered a nervous breakdown, and was at present back with his family in Germany.
This obviously meant that the question of Karel’s papers was now in my hands. So, with immense unwillingness, I went about the task of opening the first of the parcels. It weighed about forty pounds, and consisted entirely of the results of a test made upon a hundred employees to determine their response to colour changes. I shuddered, and turned back to The Magic Flute.
That evening, a young Persian executive with whom I had become friendly dropped in to share a bottle of wine. I was feeling a little lonely, and was glad to talk. Even the subject of the excavations had ceased to be unbearable to me, and it gave me pleasure to tell him the ‘inside story’ of our work. As he was leaving, he noticed the parcels, and asked if they were connected with the excavations. I told him the story of Weissman’s suicide, and admitted that the idea of opening them produced a boredom that approached physical pain. In his cheerful and kindly way, he offered to return the next morning and open them for me. If they were all routine test papers, he would get his secretary to pack them straight off to Northwestern University. I knew he made the offer as a kind of repayment for my confidences of the evening, and I accepted cordially.
By the time I was out of my bath the next morning, he had finished. Five out of six parcels contained routine material. The sixth, he told me, seemed to be of a more ‘philosophical nature’ , and he thought I might like to look at it. With that, he withdrew, and his secretary came shortly afterwards to remove the enormous pile of yellow foolscap pages from the middle of my sitting-room.
The remaining material was in neat blue folders, and consisted of typewritten pages held together by metal rings. The cover of each bore a handwritten label: Historical Reflections. Every folder was sealed with a coloured sticky tape, and I surmised—rightly, as it later turned out—that they had not been opened since Weissman’s death. I never discovered what mistake had led Baumgart to send them to General Motors. I would guess that he put them by for my attention, and somehow packed them with the industrial material.
The folders were not numbered. I broke open the first, and quickly discovered that these ‘historical reflections’ covered only the history of the past two centuries—a period that had never held any great interest for me. I was tempted to send them off to Northwestern University without further examination, but conscience got the better of me. I retired to bed, and took the half-dozen blue folders with me.
This time, by accident, I started in the right place. The opening sentence of the first folder I opened read:
‘It has been my conviction for several months now that the human race is being attacked by a sort of mind-cancer.’
An arresting sentence. I thought: Ah, what an excellent opening for a volume of Karel’s papers… A mind cancer, another name for neurosis or anhedonia, the spiritual malaise of the twentieth century… Not for a moment did I take it literally. I read on. The strange problem of the rising suicide rate… The high incidence of child murder in the modern family… the perpetual danger of atomic war, the increase in drug addiction. It all seemed familiar enough. I yawned, and turned the page.
A few minutes later, I was reading with closer attention. Not because what I was reading struck me as true, but because I suddenly had a definite suspicion that Karel had gone insane. In my youth, I had read the books of Charles Fort, with their suggestions of giants, fairies and floating continents. But Fort’s extraordinary farragos of sense and nonsense have an air of humorous exaggeration. Karel Weissman’s ideas sounded as mad as Fort’s, but they were obviously advanced in all seriousness. Either, then, he had joined the ranks of famous scientific eccentrics, or he had gone completely mad. In view of his suicide, I was inclined to the latter view.
I read on with a kind of morbid absorption. After the opening pages, he ceased to mention the ‘mind cancer’ , and launched into an examination of the cultural history of the past two hundred years… It was carefully argued, and brilliantly written. It revived memories of our long talks at Uppsala. At midday, I was still reading. And by one o’clock, I knew I had stumbled on something that would make me remember this day for the rest of my life. Mad or not, it was horribly convincing. I wanted to believe it was madness. But as I read on, my certainty was eroded. It was all so unsettling that I broke the habit of years, and drank a bottle of champagne at lunch time. As to food, it was all I could do to nibble a turkey sandwich. And despite the champagne, I became steadily more depressed and sober. And by late afternoon, I had grasped the whole tremendous and nightmarish picture, and my brain felt as if it would burst. If Karel Weissman was not insane, the human race confronted the greatest danger in its history.
It is obviously impossible to explain in detail how Karel Weissman arrived at his ‘philosophy of history’.6 It was the result of a lifetime of work. But I can at least outline the conclusions he reached in his Historical Reflections.
The most remarkable faculty of mankind, says Weissman, is its power of self-renewal, or of creation. The simplest example is the kind
of renewal that occurs when a man sleeps. A tired man is a man already in the grip of death and insanity. One of Weissman’s most striking theories is his identification of insanity with sleep. A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.
Now Weissman argues that this faculty of creation or self-renewal is abundantly obvious in European man from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. In this period, human history is full of cruelty and horror, and yet man can throw it off as easily as a tired child can sleep off its fatigue. The English Elizabethan period is usually cited as a golden age because of its creativity; but anyone who studies it closely is horrified by its callousness and brutality. Men are tortured and burnt alive; Jews have their ears cut off; children are beaten to death or allowed to die in incredibly filthy slums. Yet so enormous is man’s optimism and power of self-renewal that the chaos only stimulates him to new efforts. Great age follows great age: the age of Leonardo, the age of Rabelais, the age of Chaucer, the age of Shakespeare, the age of Newton, the age of Johnson, the age of Mozart… Nothing is more obvious than that man is a god who will over-come every obstacle.
And then a strange change comes over the human race. It happens towards the end of the eighteenth century. The tremendous, bubbling creativity of Mozart is counterbalanced by the nightmare cruelty of De Sade. And suddenly, we are in an age of darkness, an age where men of genius no longer create like gods. Instead, they struggle as if in the grip of an invisible octopus. The century of suicide begins. In fact, modern history begins, the age of defeat and neurosis.
But why did it all happen so suddenly? The industrial revolution? But the industrial revolution did not happen overnight, and neither did it affect a large area of Europe. Europe remained a land of woods and farms. How, asked Weissman, can we explain the immense difference between the genius of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth, except by surmising that some invisible yet cataclysmic change came over the human race in about the year 1800? How can the industrial revolution explain the total dissimilarity between Mozart and Beethoven—the latter a mere fourteen years Mozart’s junior? Why do we enter a century in which half the men of genius committed suicide or died of tuberculosis? Spengler says that civilizations grow old like plants, but this is a sudden leap from youth to old age. An immense pessimism descends on the human race, which is reflected in its art, its music, its literature. It is not enough to say that man has suddenly grown up. What is far more important is that he seems to have lost his power of self-renewal. Can we think of a single great man of the eighteenth century who committed suicide? And yet their lives were just as hard as those of the nineteenth century. The new man has lost faith in life, he has lost faith in knowledge. Modern man agrees with Faust: that when all is said and done, we can know nothing.
Now Karel Weissman was a psychologist, not a historian. And the field in which he made a living was in industrial psychology. In the Historical Reflections, he writes:
It was in 1990 that I entered the field of industrial psychology as the assistant of Professor Ames at Trans-world Cosmetics. I immediately discovered a curious and nightmarish situation. I knew, of course, that ‘industrial neurosis’ had become a serious matter—so much so that special industrial courts had been set up to deal with offenders who sabotaged machinery or killed or injured workmates. But only a few people were aware of the sheer size of the problem. The murder rate in large factories and similar concerns had increased to twice that of the rest of the population. In one cigarette factory in America, eight foremen and two high executives were killed in the course of a single year; in seven of these cases, the murderer committed suicide immediately after the attack.
The industrial Plastics Corporation of Iceland had decided to try the experiment of an ‘open air’ factory, spread over many acres, so that the workers had no sense of overcrowding or confinement; energy fields were used instead of walls. At first, the experiment was highly successful; but within two years, the factory’s rate of industrial crime and neurosis had risen to equal the national average.
These figures never reached the national press. Psychologists reasoned—correctly—that to publicize them would make things worse. They reasoned that it would be best to treat each case as one would an outbreak of fire that must be isolated.
The more I considered this problem, the more I felt that we had no real idea of its cause. My colleagues were frankly defeated by it, as Dr. Ames admitted to me during my first week at Trans-world Cosmetics. He said that it was difficult to get to the root of the problem, because it seemed to have so many roots—the population explosion, overcrowding in cities, the individual’s feeling of insignificance and increasing sense of living in a vacuum, the lack of adventure in modern life, collapse of religion… and so on. He said he wasn’t sure that industry wasn’t treating the problem in entirely the wrong way. It was spending more money on psychiatrists, on improving working conditions—in short, in making the workers feel like patients. But since our living depended on this mistake, it was hardly up to us to suggest a change.
And so I turned to history to find my answers. And the answers, when I found them, made me feel like suicide. For, according to history, all this was completely inevitable. Civilization was getting top heavy; it was bound to fall over. Yet the one thing this conclusion failed to take into account was the human power of self-renewal. By the same reasoning, Mozart was bound to commit suicide because his life was so miserable. But he didn’t.
What was destroying the human power of self-renewal?
I cannot explain quite how I came to believe that there might be a single cause. It was something dawned on me slowly, over many years. It was simply that I came to feel increasingly strongly that the figures for industrial crime were out of all proportion to the so-called ‘historical causes’. It was as if I were the head of a firm who begins to feel instinctively that his accountant is cooking the books, although he has no idea how it is being done.
And then, one day, I began to suspect the existence of the mind vampires. And from then on, everything confirmed my guess.
It happened first when I was considering the use of mescalin and lysergic acid for curing industrial neurosis. Fundamentally. of course, the effect of these drugs is no different from that of alcohol or tobacco: they have the effect of unwinding us. A man who is overworked has got himself into a habit of tension, and he cannot break the habit by merely willing. A glass of whisky or a cigarette will reach down into his motor levels and release the tension.
But man has far deeper habits than overwork. Through millions of years of evolution, he has developed all kinds of habits for survival. If any of these habits get out of control, the result is mental illness. For example, man has a habit of being prepared for enemies; but if he allows it to dominate his life, he becomes a paranoiac.
One of man’s deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren’t take his eyes off the world around him. Another one, with the same cause, is his refusal to notice beauty, because he prefers to concentrate on practical problems. These habits are so deeply ingrained that alcohol and tobacco cannot reach them. But mescalin can. It can reach down to man’s most atavistic levels, and release the automatic tensions that make him a slave to his own boredom and to the world around him.
Now I must confess that I was inclined to blame these atavistic habits for the problem of the world suicide rate and the industrial crime rate. Man has to learn to relax, or he becomes overwrought and dangerous. He must learn to contact his own deepest levels in order to re-energize his consciousness. So it seemed to me that drugs of the mescalin group might provide the answer.
So far, the use of these drugs had been avoided in industrial psychology, for an obvious reason: mescalin relaxes a man to a point where work becomes impossible. He wants to do nothing but contemplate the beauty of the world and t
he mysteries of his own mind.
I felt that there was no reason to reach this limit. A tiny quantity of mescalin, administered in the right way, might release a man’s creative forces without plunging him into a stupor. After all, man’s ancestors of two thousand years ago were almost colour-blind because they were in a subconscious habit of ignoring colour. Life was so difficult and dangerous that they couldn’t afford to notice it. Yet modern man has succeeded in losing this old habit of colour-blindness without losing any of his drive and vitality. It is all a matter of balance.
And so I inaugurated a series of experiments with drugs of the mescalin group. And my first results were so alarming that my engagement with Trans-world Cosmetics was terminated abruptly. Five out of my ten subjects committed suicide within days. Another two had a total mental collapse that drove them into a madhouse.
I was baffled. I had experimented with mescalin on myself in my university days, but I found the results uninteresting. A mescalin holiday is all very pleasant, but it all depends whether you enjoy holidays. I do not; I find work too interesting.
But my results made me decide to try it again. I took half a gram. The result was so horrifying that I still perspire when I think about it.
At first, there were the usual pleasant effects—areas of light swelling gently and revolving. Then an immense sense of peace and calm, a glimpse of the Buddhist nirvana, a beautiful and gentle contemplation of the universe that was at once detached and infinitely involved. After about an hour of this, I roused myself from it; I was obviously not discovering what had caused the suicides. Now I attempted to turn my attention inward, to observe the exact state of my perceptions and emotions. The result was baffling. It was as if I was trying to look through a telescope, and someone was deliberately placing his hand over the other end of it. Every attempt at self-observation failed. And then, with a kind of violent effort, I tried to batter through this wall of darkness. And suddenly, I had a distinct feeling of something living and alien hurrying out of my sight. I am not, of course, speaking of physical sight. This was entirely a ‘feeling’. But it had such an imprint of reality that for a moment I became almost insane with terror. One can run away from an obvious physical menace, but there was no running away from this, because it was inside me.