by Colin Wilson
The career of Ouspensky. Ouspensky and mystical consciousness. The discovery of laughing gas. The nitrous oxide trance. The ‘Connectedness’ of consciousness. A world of mathematical relations. Foreseeing the future. ‘Coming down to earth.’ Raskolnikov on his narrow ledge. ‘Upside-downness.’ The passivity of human consciousness. The Robot. The seven levels of consciousness. Why man is on the point of an evolutionary breakthrough. The problem of negative feedback. My experience in Tokyo. The billiard balls. Man’s hidden powers.
Appendix: Why I changed my view of poltergeists.
Preface
If someone had told me when I was 15 that I would one day be the author of a bestseller called The Occult, I would have repudiated the idea with contempt. For at that age I had no doubt whatever that the greatest future hope for humanity lay in the idea of science. But then, I was 15 in 1946, and H. G. Wells was still alive, and Wells had been the single greatest influence on my ideas and my life.
This was understandable. Wells, like me, came from a working-class background — his parents kept a not-very-successful shop in Kent, which soon went bankrupt. Thereafter, his mother, who was the driving force in the family, made an attempt to get him apprenticed to a draper’s shop, but he hated it as much as Charles Dickens had hated the blacking factory to which he had been condemned as a teenager. Wells ran away several times, until his mother got the much better idea of making him a schoolteacher.
For me at 15, born in the industrial town of Leicester, there seemed no chance of the blacking factory or its equivalent, for the Victorian age lay far behind us, and my academic record had been excellent: I won a scholarship to a secondary school as easily as a good racehorse takes a ditch. Had my income not been needed at home to help support the family, I would have gone to university, got a science degree and gone on from there.
But I can still remember my sadness when Wells died in August of that year at the age of 80. That month was also a turning point in my own life, for it was then that I left school at the age of 16, and the Labour Exchange sent me to a wool factory, where hanks of wool were wound on to bobbins before being used in hosiery factories (Leicester’s other main industry after the shoe trade). I worked from 8 am until 6 pm (plus Saturday mornings) with a half hour break for lunch, and it was the hardest work I had ever done. It was a man’s job, heaving around great crates of wool, and I hated it as furiously as Dickens had hated the blacking factory or Wells the drapery emporium.
Then rescue arrived. My old school offered me a job as a laboratory assistant, with the prospect of going on to take a science degree. It should have been the solution to all my problems. But there was a completely unforeseen obstacle: in those grim months of factory work, I had been so plunged into depression and desperation that I had lost interest in science. Fortunately, however, a new enthusiasm had replaced it. . .
A year or so earlier, I had come upon a little book called Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, an anthology of poetry from Spenser to the late Victorians, and I realised I enjoyed poetry. And now poetry became the answer to the boredom of the factory. Every evening when I got home I retired to my bedroom and plunged into poetry as into a warm bath. By now I had a shelf full of books, from Milton to Eliot. I planned my reading as I might have planned the itinerary of a holiday. I usually began with poetry that reflected my pessimism: Poe’s Raven or Ulalume, Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night, Eliot’s Hollow Men and Waste Land; then, as I began to feel better, Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, Shelley’s Adonais, Coleridge’s Dejection, Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat; and might well end with Milton’s L’Allegro or even Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and the Carpenter. And by that time I had returned to my usual buoyant optimism.
All this taught me something extremely interesting: that I could steer myself into different states of mind, and could choose how I felt. Or, as Edmund Husserl, a philosopher I later came to admire, would put it, feelings are intentional. So although my loss of interest in science was something of a disaster, I soon began to feel I had replaced it with a world just as fascinating: the vast universe of art and literature and philosophy.
In fact, the most widely discussed philosophy of that period (1947–50) was Existentialism, which was, quite simply, an attempt to bring philosophy down to earth. Oddly enough, it was summarised in the title of a book Wells had written in 1935: What Are We to do with Our Lives? This began with the recognition that the world is changing so fast that we have to try and grasp it, and take charge of it instead of merely enduring it. What had happened in the past, Wells said, was that man had been repressed and limited by institutions like the Church and the ruling classes. Now he could choose what he wanted to be.
To me, growing up at the end of World War Two, it was not purely a social question. Dostoevsky, for example, said that if the human race was quite certain of the existence of life after death, this would be by far the most important knowledge we could have. Which is why, from a fairly early stage in my life, I had been preoccupied with such questions. Who was I? What was I doing here? And now that it seemed that science had failed to provide an answer, I knew I had to begin all over again.
After my earlier success as an author with The Outsider, it was pure chance that started me on my new beginning as a writer of the occult: the publication in the mid-1960s of a book called The Morning of the Magicians (The Dawn of Magic in the UK), which was willing to ask all the questions over again. It was immensely successful, and started an ‘occult boom’ all over the world. In 1968, my American agent asked me if I would be willing to write a book on the occult. It was not a subject that deeply interested me, but I knew the advance would be useful.
I began researching it on a trip to Majorca in 1969, where I met the poet Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess was the perfect preparation for such a work. The result was The Occult, whose success delighted and astonished me. This was followed by two sequels, Mysteries and Beyond the Occult, all three volumes amounting to over two million words. Finally, in 1991, my son Damon set out to compress the essence of the three volumes into the work you at present have before you.
1
The Rebirth of Magic
IN PARIS in the year 1960 there appeared on the bookstalls a volume with the euphonious title Le Matin des Magicians (The Morning of the Magicians). The authors were an oddly assorted pair—a flamboyant journalist named Louis Pauwels, and Jacques Bergier, an atomic physicist who was also a practising alchemist. It is a curious hodgepodge of a book, as the authors themselves recognised, for they wrote in the first chapter: ‘Skip chapters if you want to; begin where you like, and read in any direction; this book is a multiple-use tool, like the knives campers use . . .’ To everyone’s astonishment, it became a best-seller, running through edition after edition in France. Serious critics were irritated and baffled by its success; they pointed out that the book was merely a series of wild speculations on magic, alchemy, telepathy, prophecy, strange cults, the Great Pyramid, Hitler’s astrologers, the Cabala, flying saucers, and a thousand other topics. This mass of eccentricity was held together by one simple theme: that the world is a stranger and richer place than science is willing to recognise.
It was a message that apparently had a wide appeal in France, especially to the young. They were less interested in the book’s argument about the narrowness of science than in the imaginative appeal of its magical wonders. Other writers saw that there was money to be made out of the occult, and as books on astrology, reincarnation and visitors from outer space rolled off the presses there was no sign of any loss of interest. The craze spread to the United States, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, France and South America. In 1968, a German book called Memories of the Future made a fortune and a reputation for its author Erich von Daniken, and sold more copies than any other book except the Bible. Daniken’s thesis was that the earth was visited thousands of years ago by spacemen, who left behind signs of their presence such as the statues of Easter Island and the pyramids. Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, A Spa
ce Odyssey, was based on the same idea. It became a kind of cult, and its admirers went to see it again and again, just as they might attend a religious ceremony. The great occult boom had arrived.
I had bought The Morning of the Magicians when it appeared in England in 1963 (under the title The Dawn of Magic), but although I enjoyed it, had not taken it too seriously; it struck me as a little too wild and undisciplined. Besides, it was full of errors. It talked, for example, about the remarkable maps which, it declared, had been presented to the Library of Congress in the mid-19th century by a Turkish naval officer called Piri Reis, the oldest of which dates from the 1st century AD, yet which shows Antarctica, which was not discovered until 1818—and which, moreover, seems to show its shape as it was before it was covered with ice. Another map shows a land bridge across the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, which has not existed for at least 12,000 years. All this seems to argue that civilisation is far older than we realise—or possibly that the world was visited in the remote past by aliens from other planets.
The authors were right about the maps, but they had spoiled an interesting and exciting argument by being wrong about Piri Reis, who was actually a Greek pirate who was beheaded in 1554. And although I was not aware of this particular error when I first read the book, I sensed a general atmosphere of carelessness that I found irritating. This is why I felt no temptation to join in the ‘Occult Revival’ that seemed to be going on all around me.
Not that I was indifferent to the subject of the ‘supernatural’—otherwise I would not have bought the book in the first place. When I was about 10 years old, I had been deeply impressed by a series of articles in a Sunday newspaper that purported to be the after-death experiences of an airman who had died in the Battle of Britain, as received through a ‘spirit medium’. He described what it was like to die in considerable detail, and how the ‘next world’ was a marvellous place with emerald-green grass and perpetually flowering trees—I remember being particularly impressed by his account of going to swim in water that was like warm cotton wool, and didn’t get up your nose. I hurried to the local library, and located various books on Spiritualism, including Harry Price’s Most Haunted House in England, an account of the haunting of Borley rectory (see pp. 233ff). This so impressed me that I read my way right through every book they had on ghosts, poltergeists and life after death. For the next month or so I kept my schoolfriends in a state of astonishment with weird tales of the occult.
My enthusiasm soon waned when an uncle presented me with a book called The Marvels and Mysteries of Science, and my mother bought me a chemistry set for Christmas. Science filled me with an ecstatic excitement that was as magical as any fairy tale, and the fascination with ‘the occult’ seemed to vanish like a dream at cockcrow. Yet it revived in flashes over the years: for example, when, at the age of 20, I was living in London, and came upon a strange work called the I Ching in the local library—newly translated by Jung’s friend Richard Wilhelm. Like everybody else who has ever acquired the I Ching, I immediately consulted the oracle on my own future, and was gratified when the result was the first hexagram in the book: Ch’ien, The Creative, with a judgement:
‘The creative works supreme success,
Furthering through perseverance.’
This led me on to a study of ritual magic and witchcraft, as well as to the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. I was particularly struck by a passage in the introduction to Ouspensky’s New Model of the Universe:
‘It is the year 1906 or 1907. The editorial office of the Moscow daily paper The Morning. I have just received the foreign papers and I have to write an article on the forthcoming Hague Conference. French, German, English, Italian papers. Phrases, phrases, sympathetic, critical, ironical, blatant, pompous, lying and, worst of all, utterly automatic phrases which have been used a thousand times and will be used again on entirely different, perhaps contradictory, occasions. I have to make a survey of all these words and opinions, pretending to take them seriously, and then, just as seriously, to write something on my own account. But what can I say? It is all so tedious. Diplomats and all kinds of statesmen will gather together and talk, papers will approve or disapprove, sympathise or not sympathise. Then everything will be as it was, or even worse.
‘It is still early, I say to myself; perhaps something will come into my head later.
‘Pushing aside the papers, I open a drawer in my desk. The whole desk is crammed with books with strange titles, The Occult World, Life After Death, Atlantis and Lemuria, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Le Temple de Satan, The Sincere Narrations of a Pilgrim, and the like. These books and I have been inseparable for a whole month, and the world of the Hague Conference and leading articles becomes more and more vague and unreal to me.
‘I open one of the books at random, feeling that my article will not be written today. Well, it can go to the devil. Humanity will lose nothing if there is one article less on the Hague Conference.’
All this was a faithful reflection of my own state of mind at the time. At the age of 20 I was already a father, and was living in South Wimbledon, in the home of an old invalid who had hired my wife as a nurse. Since my marriage I had made a living by working in a series of plastics factories. It was hard to find landladies who would put up with babies, and we had moved four times in the course of one year. Within a few months our present landlord would die, and my wife would take on a job as the nurse of a half-insane virago who lived in Earls Court; she would prove to be our worst trial so far, and she exhausted us both so much that when we separated—to try and find yet another home—we concluded that we were sick of marriage, and drifted apart.
During the next three years I worked at a series of temporary jobs—in offices, factories, coffee bars—and tried to write a novel about an ‘outsider’ who feels as Ouspensky did about modern civilisation. I had always been fascinated by rebels and ‘outsiders’, social misfits who loathe what the philosopher Heidegger called ‘the triviality of everydayness’. And it was while working as a dishwasher in a London coffee bar in the mid-1950s that I decided to lay aside the novel and try to express my frustrations in a more straightforward manner by writing a book about ‘outsiders’.
It proved to be a good decision. The Outsider happened to be accepted by the first publisher to whom I sent a dozen or so pages, and, when it appeared in 1956, became an immediate bestseller. This was partly because it was a book that had something new to say—I am neither stupid nor modest enough to regard its success as a fluke. But it was also because the English literary scene had been singularly devoid of new talent since the end of the war. And the journalists who wrote about me made much of my publisher’s admission that I was only 24, and that I had written it in the Reading Room of the British Museum, while sleeping during the nights on Hampstead Heath to save rent.
The result, at all events, was an explosion of international notoriety and more money than I had ever dreamed of. But fame, I soon discovered, also had its negative side. The British are not—to put it mildly—a nation of intellectuals. Unlike the French, the Germans—even the Americans—they take no interest in the world of ideas. They were impressed by The Outsider because it had been written by a 24-year-old who had not been to a university. But they were not really in the least interested in romantic rebels with foreign names like Novalis, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Ouspensky. Moreover, it soon became clear that the popular press resented the publicity for which they themselves were responsible, and which had helped to make the book such a success. In the following year, 1957, they seized the first opportunity to announce their complete loss of interest in the whole Outsider phenomenon. This happened to be after the publication of my second book, Religion and the Rebel, which was hatcheted. The Americans, always delighted to see a success-bubble explode, followed suit. (Time ran a headline ‘Scrambled Egghead’.)
I found it a traumatic experience. But at least I was infinitely better off than when I was working for £5 a week in a plastic fa
ctory or coffee bar. Ever since I had been a small boy, I had dreamed of living in a tub, like Diogenes, or in some tiny room under the earth, rather like one of Tolkien’s Hobbit holes—a warm, comfortable retreat stocked with food and books. I didn’t really much care for being ‘famous’ and going to literary parties; mixing too much with people bewildered me and gave me a sensation I called ‘people-poisoning’. I wanted to be allowed to spend my days reading and thinking. So, together with my girlfriend Joy—whom I had met soon after my marriage broke up—I moved to a remote area of Cornwall, into an old cottage that was a fairly good imitation of a Hobbit hole, and went back with relief to reading, writing and thinking about the ideas that interested me so much.
What were these ideas? Well, to begin with, I had a deep conviction that man is on the point of an evolutionary breakthrough to a higher stage. These strange ecstasies that filled the romantics with an odd sense of power and certainty were not illusions: they were, in fact, glimpses of the unknown powers of the human mind. H.G. Wells once remarked that the world has changed more in the past sixty years than in the previous 60 centuries. He meant, of course, in technology. Yet it seemed to me that man himself has also changed more in the past 2 centuries than in the whole of his previous evolution, and that he is now close to the stage at which a new creature will emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
The Morning of the Magicians had also talked about a ‘new kind of man’, and the possibility that human beings may be about to achieve an ‘awakened state’. The authors had even made the important comment that what is now needed is an Einstein of psychology who can understand the hidden powers of the mind. Yet it was hard to see how these important ideas connected up with their talk about the Hollow Earth, vanished civilisations and aliens from outer space. Which is why I continued to feel that the ‘occult revival’ was something I could safely ignore. Yet on lecture tours of America—which I made at intervals in an effort to keep my bank-manager happy—I frequently bought paperbacks with titles like Famous American Hauntings or Exorcism—Fact not Fiction to read on the plane. And, like Ouspensky, I continued to find something oddly fascinating in this strange if occasionally lunatic world of speculation.