by Colin Wilson
After I had finished writing this passage, I broke off my day’s work to take my dogs for a walk. As I was leaving my work room, I noticed on the camp-bed a book that had obviously fallen off the shelf, and which I did not recognise. It was called You Are Sentenced to Life, by a Dr W. D. Chesney, and I had obviously bought it many years before in California and sent it for binding. But I had never actually read it. When I came back from my walk, I glanced through the book—and discovered, at the very end, a page headed ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEC. It was a letter to the author from the founder of the Order, Grace Hooper Pettipher.
I had cited Vallee’s story about Melchizedec as one of the most proposterous synchronicities I know. Finding yet another reference to the Order within an hour or so of writing about it—I have about 30,000 books in my house—obviously involved a coincidence that would be beyond numerical calculation. It was as if the ‘guardian angel’ had said: ‘You think that’s preposterous?—well how about this?’
It was shortly after this that, reading some text about Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of magic, and his famous formula ‘As above, so below’ (which is supposed to express the essence of magic), I felt for the first time that I understood the inner meaning of the saying. It is generally taken to refer to the magical system of ‘correspondences’, the idea that earthly things have a heavenly connection. (For example, the days of the weeks are named after gods, and a magician who wished to perform a ceremony to ensure wealth would choose Sunday as the best day, since the sun is associated with gold . . .) What suddenly struck me is that we are all accustomed to the fact that the environment can act upon the mind—so that a dull day can make us depressed, and so on. But the fundamental tenet of ‘occultism’ (and the basic assertion of this book) is that the mind possesses hidden powers that can influence the external world. This seems to happen by a process of ‘induction’, not unlike that involved in a simple electrical transformer. If, for example, I wish to use my British electric razor when I am in America, I have to buy a transformer which will ‘step-up’ American voltage (120) to British voltage (240.) If I want to use an American razor in England, I have to reverse the same transformer (which merely involves connecting it up back-to-front) to step-down 240 volts to 120.
Like most people, I have often observed that when I am in an optimistic and purposeful state, things tend to ‘go right’. When I am tired and depressed, they go wrong—as if I have wired up my ‘mind transformer’ the wrong way round, so it causes ‘lower’ vibrations in the external world. Optimism, on the other hand, seems to induce more powerful vibrations in the external world, and these in turn induce ‘serendipity’—a term coined by Horace Walpole, meaning ‘the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by chance’.
Religion has always taught that the gods have power over matter, but man is its slave: if this interpretation is correct, ‘As above, so below’ means that man has the same potential power to control matter as the gods.
This is obviously the essence of Richard Church’s insight when the sound of the hatchet and its impact on the tree became ‘desynchronised’ (see page 9): ‘I had found that time and space are not absolute. Their power was not law . . .’ This is obviously the beginning of a totally different attitude towards reality, an attitude that contradicts our ‘normal’ basic assumptions.
Let me attempt to express this more clearly. Life on earth has always had a difficult struggle to maintain itself. And man, one of the youngest of life forms, has had to fight against every kind of obstacle. What is so remarkable is that, unlike his fellow animals, he has learned to use his mind as his most important tool in the struggle for existence. This has carried him into an extraordinary realm of imagination and ideas. Our domestic animals live in the physical world; but our children already inhabit a strange electronic world of video-recorders and computers that would be beyond the grasp of any dog or cat. Man has become a creature of two worlds, with one foot on the solid earth and one foot in the world of the mind.
But because he is one of the youngest of all earth’s creatures (only a few viruses are younger), he is extremely unsure of himself. With very few exceptions, each individual feels himself to be surrounded by a vast, hostile world that makes him feel like a pygmy. Above all, this huge and complex world makes him feel passive, a ‘creature of circumstance’. Some primitive creature from another planet might well assume man sees himself as a god, but he would be mistaken. We feel that we have very little influence over our complicated lives. Moreover, as soon as we feel tired or worried, we feel even more ‘trapped’, and our estimate of ourselves sinks almost to zero.
This is absurd. If we can make the imaginative effort of placing ourselves behind the eyes of one of our cave-man ancestors of the late Pleistocene era, we can imagine his amazement if he could catch a glimpse of the ziggurats of the Sumerians, the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Greece, the aqueducts of the Romans; and if he could see our modern skyscrapers and space probes, he would regard us as a race of supermen. And in a sense he would be right. It is we who fail to grasp the magnitude of our own achievement. We remain subject to a crippling kind of modesty, a neurosis of self-belittlement. Because of our inability to achieve a certain detachment from our own lives—to see them as it were, from a bird’s eye view rather than a worm’s eye view—we remain gloomily self-critical, convinced that all our technical and intellectual achievements are a kind of vanity or a prelude to catastrophe.
Yet in the past century or so, we have, in fact, begun to develop a kind of ‘bird’s eye view’, a certain capacity to soar above the trivia of our everyday lives into the realm of imagination and intellectual detachment. It is this capacity that promises that man will finally begin to grasp the magnitude of his own achievement, and to live on a far higher level of zest and vitality.
One thing seems clear: that the various ‘hidden powers’ we have spoken of in the course of this book are called into operation when we are in moods of optimism and relaxation. And, what is more, they induce a feeling of optimism and relaxation, as we can see in the case of Richard Church; in other words, there is a ‘feedback’ effect. All this suggests that there is a close connection between optimism, the ‘bird’s eye view’, and the development of these ‘hidden powers’. It also suggests that the most important step in this direction is the ability to grasp what is at issue in the puzzling phenomenon of synchronicity.
Alan Vaughan’s vision of the future reminds us that there have always been men and women who possessed this curious ability; they are known as ‘prophets’. One of the chief problems about the great prophets of the past—Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Mother Shipton, the Brahan Seer—is that their prophecies are so frequently ambiguous. The ‘magician’ Paracelsus published in 1530 (eleven years before his death) a number of obscure prophecies, including one of wars, riots, slaughters and conflagrations in the North countries, warning the inhabitants of Brabant, Flanders and Zealand to beware. At the time Paracelsus wrote, the Low Countries were peaceful and prosperous; fourteen years after his death, they passed from the Emperor Charles V to his son Philip of Spain, who attempted to impose Catholicism with the aid of the Inquisition, bringing about one of the most appalling reigns of terror in history. As a prophecy, then, it is impressive, but it could be no more than a fortunate guess—after all, in a world full of warlike princes, nothing is more likely than slaughters, riots and conflagrations.
Michel Nostradamus, who died a quarter of a century after Paracelsus, is the most controversial of all ‘prophets’. In 1555, he published the first edition of his ‘quatrains’, four-line stanzas arranged in centuries (lots of 100—a dozen in all, although several are incomplete.) Most of these are incredibly obscure, and, since they are all mixed up together, it is difficult to guess what period they are supposed to apply to. What, for example, can one make of this:
Milan, Ferrare, Turin et Aquilleye,
Capne, Brundis, vexez par gent Celtique,
Par le Lyon et phala
nge aquilee,
Quand Rome aura le chef vieux Britannique.
(5:99)
Literally translated, this seems to mean: ‘Milan, Ferrara, Turin and Aquila, Capua, Brindisi vexed by a Celtic (i.e. French) gentleman, by the lion and eagle phalanx, when Rome has the old British chief.’
It seems to be utter nonsense. But one of its interpreters, Stewart Robb, finds hidden meaning there. The French army used the eagle as an emblem for the first time under Napoleon, so presumably he is the ‘French gent’ referred to. Napoleon also taught his army to form into Macedonian ‘phalanxes’. Napoleon liked to think of himself as ‘the lion’, and even thought of adopting it as his emblem. So it would seem that the stanza refers to Napoleon’s Italian campaigns (1796–7). But who is the ‘old British chief’ whom Rome will have? Well, apparently the Brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie was living in Rome at the time, and the Jacobites liked to refer to him as Henry IX of Great Britain, since his brother was now dead . . .
An interesting interpretation which is by no means unconvincing. But is the Brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie really so important that he deserves a mention in the same breath as Napoleon’s Italian campaigns? If Napoleon had met him, or if he had played some part in the campaign, it would be very convincing; as it is, we must feel that the case for Napoleon is unproven.
Having said which, it must be admitted that there are some very convincing quatrains. There is one which runs:
Du nuit viendra par le foret de Reines
Deux pars, valtorte, Herne la pierre blanche,
Le moin noir en gris dedans Varenne,
Eleu Cap. cause tempeste, feu, sang, tranche.
By night will come through the forest of Reines
Two partners, by a tortuous valley, Herne the white stone,
The black monk in grey into Varenne:
Elected capet, cause tempest, fire, blood and slicing.
Varennes only appears once in French history, and this was when king Louis XVI fled there with Marie Antoinette from the French Revolution. They went via the forest of Reins, and lost their way, having chosen a bad route (’tortuous valley’). The king wore a grey suit, and he was, in fact, an elected king (capet), the first France had had. And his flight and subsequent arrest at Varennes led to the Terror, which ended with them losing their heads (the word ‘tranche’ almost sounds like the fall of the guillotine).
This is an impressive number of ‘hits’. But we have still failed to explain ‘Herne the white stone’, and the black monk. The king was of monkish temperament and had been impotent, so it could refer to this; one commentator says that Herne is an anagram of reine—queen, and that Marie Antoinette always dressed in white.
Other ‘hits’ concern Henry of France, the French Revolution, and the massacre at Nantes. But literally hundreds of other stanzas remain totally obscure, like the following:
Weak warships will be united together
False enemies, the strongest one on the ramparts,
The weak attacked, Bratislava trembles,
Lübeck and Misnen will hold the barbarous part.
The only word that leaps out of all this is Bratislava, the capital of Czechoslovakia, and since two German place-names are also mentioned, a modern interpretation will obviously start out from the assumption that this is about Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and possibly his invasion of North Africa in 1941 (’the barbarous part’). The German navy was not strong in 1939. Jean Charles de Fontbrune explains in his edition of Nostradamus that the ‘false enemies’ are the Hungarians whose threat led Czechoslovakia to proclaim independence; the ‘strongest one on the ramparts’ is presumably Hitler, but what he is doing on the ramparts is not clear (Fontbrune suggests keeping watch). Czechoslovakia has no sea coast, so it is hard to see why Bratislava is trembling at the German navy, or why Lübeck, which is 15 kilometres inland from the Baltic, should be mentioned. (Misnen is on the North Sea.) Altogether, it requires something of an act of faith to believe that Nostradamus was really prophesying the events of 1939 and 1941.
This should bring comfort to those who recall Nostradamus’s most famous prophecy:
L’an mille neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois
Du ciel viendra un grand Roi deffrayeur.
Rescusciter le grand Roi d’Angolmois
Avant que Mars regner par bonheur.
This declares that in July 1999, the ‘great king of terror’ will come from the sky. The great king of the Mongols, Genghis Khan, will be resuscitated (Angolmois is supposed to be an anagram of Mongolais), before which Mars (war?) will reign happily. But the Millennium was regarded with superstitious terror in the Middle Ages (and even today, the word is synonymous with breathtaking events, either agreeable or appalling). Mother Shipton, another remarkable prophet who lived in Yorkshire at the time of Nostradamus declared confidently that
The world to an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty one.
Mother Shipton also prophesied ‘carriages without horses’, thought that would fly around the world ‘in the twinkling of an eye’, iron ships that would float on water, and men flying in the air—a remarkable record of success. She even prophesied that Cardinal Wolsey would see York but fail to reach it, and was correct—he saw it from the top of a castle tower, but was then recalled to London, and died on the way. But it also seems clear that her powers of prophecy lost their accuracy as they reached into the distant future.
Another prophet who predicted horseless carriages—but this time drawn by chariots of fire (i.e railway engines)—was known as the Brahan Seer, and he lived a century after Nostradamus. Coinneach Odhar (or Kenneth Mackenzie) was born in Uig, on the Island of Lewis (in the Hebrides) around 1600. News of his powers of ‘second sight’ reached his feudal overlord, Kenneth Cabarfeidh Mackenzie—Lord Mackenzie of Kintail—who lived in Brahan Castle—and he released the seer from his job as a farm labourer and allowed him to live rent-free in a sod-roofed cottage. The seer attributed his powers to a ‘divining stone’ with a hole in it, through which he used to look to see the future. It was his powers of short-term prophecy that impressed Lord Mackenzie, as when he predicted that a Lochalsh woman would weep over the grave of a Frenchman in Lochalsh graveyard. It seemed unlikely, since there were few Frenchmen in Scotland; but, within a few months, Mackenzie heard of a Lochalsh woman who spent much of her time weeping beside the grave of her French husband, a footman, who had died after the seer’s prediction. When an elderly man, Duncan Macrae, asked the seer how he would end his days, there was general incredulity when Odhar said he would die by the sword, since there had been peace for some time. In 1654, General Monck led Cromwellian troops to Kintail, and when he met Macrae, asked him some question which Macrae failed to understand. Macrae put his hand on his sword, and was promptly cut down.
In 1630, the seer was passing over a patch of moorland when he predicted that it would be ‘stained with the best blood of the Highlands: 116 years later, it was the site of the battle of Culloden. Perhaps his ‘longest shot’ was a prophecy that a woman called Annabella Mackenzie would live in the village of Baile Mhuilinn, and that she would die of measles. This prophecy took more than two centuries to be fulfilled; then an old lady of that name did die of measles in Baile Mhuilinn—at the age of 95.
There are two stories about the end of the seer. One states that his lord’s wife asked him what her husband was doing—Mackenzie was at that time in Paris—and Odhar was injudicious enough to tell her that he saw him kneeling at the feet of a fair lady. The Countess then ordered him to be burned in a tar barrel. The more likely story states that when the local gentry were gathered at Brahan Castle, the seer remarked (in Gaelic) that he saw more in the children of footmen and grooms than in the children of gentlemen. Apparently this remark was interpreted as meaning that the aristocratic guests had actually been fathered by footmen and grooms. The Countess sentenced him to be burned; Lord Mackenzie arrived home too late to save him, although he rode like the
wind to try to prevent the execution. Before his death, the seer made predictions about the Mackenzie (Seaforth) family, including the statement that the last of the line would be deaf and dumb, that four sons would precede him to the tomb (one of them dying by water), and that his ‘white hooded’ daughter would kill her sister. In fact, the last Lord Mackenzie was born in 1754, and scarlet fever impaired his hearing at the age of 12; in later life his speech also became affected. His four sons all predeceased him (one being drowned). His daughter Mary married Admiral Samuel Hood, and when her husband died, her widows weeds included a white hood; she was driving a carriage with ponies when the animals bolted and the carriage overturned, killing her sister.
Perhaps the best-authenticated stories of accurate prediction of the future concerns the French essayist and occultist Jacques Cazotte, best known for his novel Le Diable Amoureux, in which the Devil takes the form of an attractive girl who wins the love of a Spaniard who made the mistake of invoking him. Early in 1788, Cazotte (who was then 69) attended a dinner given by the Duchesse de Grammont, at which Jean de la Harpe, a well-known atheist, was present, and he wrote down at some length an account of a prophecy made by Cazotte. After dinner, the talk turned to the possibility of revolution, which was obviously in the air, and which most of them (being liberals) welcomed. Cazotte suddenly declared that he could tell them that they would see the revolution very soon. The philosopher Condorcet asked for more information, and was told that he would die, lying on the floor of a prison cell, of poison that he had taken to cheat the executioner. The dramatist Chamfort, he said, would cut his own veins, but would die some months later. The astronomer Bailly would die at the hands of the mob. The duchess herself would be taken to the scaffold with her hands tied behind her, as would ‘even greater ladies’. The atheist de la Harpe was told he would become a Christian. An M. Vicq-d’Azir would die on the scaffold, as would M. de Nicolai.