by Colin Wilson
Strange Powers
Colin Wilson
Contents
Introduction
Robert Leftwich
Mrs Eunice Beattie
Dr Arthur Guirdham
Introduction
'The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that, within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.'
With these strange words, H. G. Wells began his final book Mind at the End of Its Tether, written in 1945, the year before his death. It sounded like one of the Jehovah's Witnesses' doomsday prophecies. 'The end of everything we call life is at hand,' said Wells, 'and cannot be evaded.' In the quarter of a century that has passed since his death, there has been no obvious sign of the 'fundamental change' that Wells foresaw. But no, that is not quite true. There has been a change, and a very important one: not in the conditions of life, but in the attitude of the civilized western mind to those conditions. It is a change that would have amazed Wells, and perhaps irritated him. For although Wells could not have known it, he died in the last decade before the end of scientific determinism. This determinism—the belief that the universe is basically a machine, and that life is just a highly complicated mechanical process—had reigned supreme for more than a century, and it seemed to have come to stay. Its basic attitude could be summarized like this: 'Man has always been infinitely capable of error and self-deception. Now he has found a method that can save him from them—the scientific method. He must clear his mind of all preconceptions, and then merely face the facts. Concentrate entirely on facts, and on drawing rational conclusions from those facts... ' It was a creed to which Wells subscribed without reservation, and he could not conceive that it might ever be changed or modified—unless the human mind should plunge again into the errors of the dark ages. It was the creed that finally led him to the despair of Mind at the End of Its Tether, with its feeling that man is a hopeless, incorrigible self-deceiver who is due for a brutal awakening... Victorian science said man had no right to false hope; Wells said man had no right to hope at all. He was saying that the human mind is so full of its own importance that it cannot get used to the idea that it is totally unimportant; worse than unimportant—negligible, almost non-existent. Wells had taken the 'scientific attitude' as far as it would go; the pendulum had to start swinging in the opposite direction...
It did—although the first signs of it would have struck Wells as absurd, a sign of decadence. I had come to London, at the age of twenty, in 1951, and I noticed, in bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, books with titles like A Buddhist Bible, The Myth of the Magus, Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa, The I Ching, In Search of the Miraculous, Worlds in Collision. Now my own training, insofar as I'd had any, had been scientific, and I was very much of Wells's way of thinking. I understood that the scientific attitude is not basically just a spoilsport skepticism. T. H. Huxley defined the scientific attitude as 'sitting down before the facts like a little child', and following wherever they lead. And I knew that this attitude can bring an almost mystical sensation of opening vistas, a universe full of extraordinary facts, all waiting to be absorbed into the realm of human knowledge. But there are all kinds of facts and truths: historical, philosophical, literary, legal, religious, and I saw no reason to limit my interest to the kind of facts that Wells regarded as the scientist's proper province. So I borrowed the I Ching and the Malleus Maleficarum and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and books by Montague Summers on witches and vampires from the library. And it soon struck me that there is a problem here that Wells had never taken the trouble to define. For example, Immanuel Velikovsky's best-seller Worlds in Collision is certainly a crank book; but not because he believes that a giant comet from Jupiter caused tidal upheavals and gave rise to such phenomena as the fall of the walls of Jericho and the parting of the Red Sea to let the Israelites through. From the scientific point of view, Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos are full of interesting facts about some strange catastrophe that tore mammoths and mastodons limb from limb and then buried them in black mud, about giant boulders in the Jura mountains apparently torn from the Alps. Frozen mammoths have been found that must have been frozen almost instantaneously, for there has been no decay of inner tissues (they are still edible when unfrozen). Any modern cold storage firm will tell you that this is almost impossible for a creature of that size. To begin with, unless it is frozen very rapidly, the crystals of ice that form are so large that they burst the cells of the tissues, and the meat loses flavor when unfrozen; the Beresovka mammoth was frozen so rapidly that only the tiniest crystals formed throughout.[1] Some catastrophe happened very suddenly indeed, and it is the business of science to try to explain it. On the other hand, there is no real evidence to link these prehistoric mysteries with the fall of the walls of Jericho when the Israelites blew their trumpets. Velikovsky is a crank because he reasons badly and wrongly from his facts—not because there is something wrong with the facts themselves. But a scientist who declined to read Velikovsky on the grounds that he is a crank would also be guilty of prejudiced thinking. Velikovsky's reasoning may be shaky; but the facts remain. And it is not his preoccupation with these strange facts that makes Velikovsky a crank. There is an emotional prejudice behind the choice of 'the facts' the scientist is willing to take seriously: a feeling that certain facts are 'good taste' and certain others are bad taste. Quite unconsciously, he has come to limit his interest to the kind of facts that fit into the kind of jigsaw puzzle he is good at solving.
I was clearly aware of this as I read the I Ching or Ouspensky's New Model of the Universe. The idea of throwing down coins to learn about the future is absurd and indefensible from the Wellsian point of view. On the other hand, like everybody else, I had observed the way that coincidences do sometimes form odd patterns. I can offer an example that occurred only a few days before writing these pages. Reading a review of a recording of Verdi's early opera Attila, I saw a reference to a ballet called The Lady and the Fool, put together from early Verdi operas. I found this record on my shelves—I didn't know I had it, and had certainly never played it—and discovered that the ballet had been arranged by John Cranko. The record notes mentioned that Cranko's other most popular ballet was Pineapple Poll, arranged from the music of Arthur Sullivan. I knew I had this, so I took it out, and played it after I had played The Lady and the Fool. At half past eight in the evening—immediately after playing the records—there was a program I wanted to listen to on the radio; I switched on at 8.25. The radio happened to be tuned to the wrong station, and a newsreader was announcing the death that day of John Cranko, whose best-known ballets were The Lady and the Fool and Pineapple Poll. Not a tremendously exciting coincidence, I agree. But odd. I had probably possessed the record of The Lady and the Fool for years but never played it; I hadn't played Pineapple Poll for years either, and didn't know it was by Cranko. These were the only two records I played during the evening before hearing the news of his death.
Wells would say: Very well, what conclusion do you draw from that? That some invisible intelligence wanted to direct your attention to Cranko? Perhaps Cranko's ghost? Or that there was some mysterious working of providence... ? No, I am not suggesting either of these. I merely observe that coincidences of this sort happen sufficiently often to suggest that they shouldn't be ignored. Science consists basically of observation of events that are repeated—whether it is the sun rising every morning, or a comet returning every hundred and fifty years. This is no place to discuss Jung's idea of synchronicity—I will do so later; at the moment, I would only say that if a 'chance' occurs often enough, the chance of it being pure cha
nce soon becomes unlikely. I also note, in passing, that these coincidences seem to occur more often when I am psychologically healthy than when I'm tired or depressed—perhaps suggesting that some unconscious radar-system is in operation.
As to Ouspensky—and his teacher Gurdjieff: they raise the question of crankery in a very clear form. Half Gurdjieff's 'system' consists of psychological observations of an acuteness that amounts to genius; he is on the same level as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and William James. The other half consists of strange assertions about planetary levels, the 'ray of creation' and tables of 'hydrogens' that are unknown to chemistry. This part of the system may have profound occult meanings, or it may be a homemade symbolism, like the mythical personalities of Blake's Prophetic Books. A highly intelligent friend of mine—and one of the most intelligent men I have ever known—dismissed Gurdjieff as a complete crank and charlatan; he was a humanistic philosopher rather than a scientist; but he was, it seems to me, slipping into the same 'fallacy of intolerance' as Wells. Gurdjieff did not suit his preconceived idea of the rational and logical; so he let his emotions guide his reason, and dismissed him.
The problem is that the humanistic rationalist blinds himself in complete good faith. To keep a genuinely open mind is a matter of tremendous difficulty. We can slip into a 'point of view' that imposes rigid patterns on everything we see, and which makes certain things inconceivable. You only recognize it as a mental straitjacket when you have got rid of it. For example, although I read Montague Summer's History of Witchcraft with pleasure, it seemed self-evident to me that he was a crank or a liar. No sensible person, writing in the age of Einstein and Planck, could believe that 'black witches' were really wicked, and that they possessed real powers. Summers undoubtedly was a bit of a crank and a bit of a poseur; so it seemed fairly clear that he was pretending to believe in witchcraft to give his book a 'new angle'.[1] Nearly twenty years later, when writing The Occult, I took basically the same view. So, for example, when writing of the curious case of the North Berwick Witches, executed in 1591 for raising a storm in which they tried to drown the king, I took it for granted that it was basically a case of hysteria, superstition and credulity. Yet elsewhere in the same book, I accept evidence that African witch doctors can summon rain. (To begin with, it had been described to me by two friends who had actually seen it: Negley Farson and Martin Delaney.) It only struck me some time afterwards that I was being illogical in taking it for granted that the North Berwick Witches were innocent. Some aspects of the case are very odd. At one point in the examination, King James I declared the whole thing was a tissue of nonsense. Whereupon, one of the chief accused, Agnes Sampson, drew him aside and whispered in his ear certain words that he had spoken to his bride, Anne of Denmark, on their wedding night when they were alone; no one but the king and his bride knew them. The king was immediately convinced that he was dealing with real witches. Why should Agnes Sampson have done this, when James was in a mood to dismiss the whole thing as imagination? The account of the case given by Rossell Hope Robbins in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959) takes it for granted that all were innocent, and praises the courage of the schoolmaster, John Fian, who confessed after torture, but later withdrew his confession and died asserting his innocence. But Robbins fails to mention the important fact that Fian was the secretary of the Earl of Bothwell—who, in later life, had the reputation of being a dabbler in black magic, and who had every reason to intrigue against his cousin the king. When the king was sailing back from Denmark with his newly married bride, a tremendous storm arose and almost sank the ship; the witches confessed to raising this storm, with Fian's help. Neither does he mention that, on the morning after his confession, Fian told his jailers, without prompting, that he had been visited by the devil during the night. Robbins explains the confession by emphasizing how horribly Fian was tortured, his leg crushed by 'the boot'; yet Fian escaped twenty-four hours later, and managed to get back home. (So Robbins is forced to the conclusion that the escape was mythical, inserted by the chronicler to heighten the effect of the story.)
Robbins could be right. But there is another interpretation. There is evidence that Bothwell was plotting to kill the king, whom he hoped to supplant on the throne of England. Fian was his secretary. Suppose Fian was responsible for ceremonies to try to raise a storm to wreck the king's ship? Suppose the witches were not just self-deluding old hags, but possessed the same power as African witch doctors? Suppose Agnes Sampson had some genuine extra-sensory knowledge of what passed between the king and his bride on their wedding night and, having once committed herself to confession and repentance, decided to use this knowledge to convince the king when he became skeptical... ? This version fits the facts as well as Robbins' 'martyrdom of the innocent' theory. In fact, rather better.
Having reached this conclusion, it struck me that I was now appreciably closer to the position of Montague Summers, and that he might not be as dishonest as I had assumed. Summers does not deny that many innocent women have been executed as witches; he only argues that there is a tradition of 'black witchcraft' in Europe. I cannot go along with him in believing that witches really summoned the devil—although I would accept that they might have summoned 'powers of evil', whatever that means. The truth probably lies somewhere midway between Summers' total acceptance of black witchcraft and Robbins' total skepticism.
As far as magic and occultism went, I remained basically a skeptic. But in The Outsider which I started to write over Christmas 1954, I expressed my revulsion from the determinism and reductionism of modern science. (For example, I had always disliked Freud's attempt to explain Moses, Leonardo and Dostoevsky in terms of Oedipus complexes, castration fears, etc.) In The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel, I was more concerned with the problem from a philosophical angle: that two of the most influential modern philosophical movements, logical positivism and linguistic analysis, should regard questions of human freedom as more or less meaningless. With Heidegger and Sartre, I accepted that man is capable of expressing free will—and therefore of some non-religious version of 'damnation' and 'salvation'. Having worked in factories, offices, restaurants, I had a highly developed sense of the futility of certain modes of activity, and also of the strong feeling of meaning and freedom in others—for example, in self-expression (in my case, through writing), in travel, in romantic or sexual involvements. As far as I was concerned, a life spent in menial jobs was a form of damnation; while Rupert Brooke's lines about a smell
' ... that fibs
The soul with longing for dim hills
And far horizons'
brought a taste of freedom, of meaning, of 'salvation'. It was no good telling me that these words express linguistic misunderstandings.
But at the time The Outsider came out, in 1956, what I was writing struck critics as the most old-fashioned rubbish—a sort of throw-back to the romanticism of Yeats—or even earlier, of Shelley and Blake. The success of The Outsider was followed by an almost immediate back swing. The father figure of English logical positivism, A. J. Ayer, led the attack; in a review of The Outsider, while Arthur Koestler dismissed the book as 'bubble of the year' (and has since reprinted this opinion in a volume of essays, by way of reaffirming it). The word 'woolly' turned up increasingly in reviews, particularly of Religion and the Rebel, the sequel to The Outsider. Then there was another group of objectors on political grounds. Most of my contemporaries in literature were left-wing—Osborne, Amis, Braine, Doris Lessing, Christopher Logue, Kenneth Tynan, Wesker et al., and they advocated the importance of 'commitment', marching to Aldermaston, signing petitions against repressive regimes, and so on. I had no positive objections; I would have been entirely in favor of banning the H-bomb or allowing Russia's Jews to go to Israel. It was just a question of priorities. I was interested in my own inner needs, and in the inner needs of men in general. That was my concept of an Outsider: a man driven by a powerful inner compulsion to freedom, which might lead him to act in opposition to the de
mands of society, to his own desire for comfort and acceptance by his fellows. In the nineteenth century, it had driven many of the major artists to an early grave; and most of the romantics accepted this as part of their basic philosophy: if you experience this strange urge for 'dim hills and far horizons', expect an early death; this busy human world has no place for you. I wrote The Outsider because I couldn't accept this notion. I could see no a priori reason why Shelley and Keats had to die young, why Hölderlin and Nietzsche had to go insane, why Beddoes and Van Gogh had to commit suicide. Or, for that matter, why Wordsworth and Swinburne had to drift into a mediocre old age. To me, it seemed, quite simply, that most of them were too passive. Even Nietzsche, that advocate of war and ruthlessness, spent his life quietly drifting from pension to pension. I believed that if 'the Outsider' could learn to know himself, and make a determined effort to control his life instead of drifting, he might end as a leader of civilization instead of one of its rejects. But the answer was not to join the peace corps or march in protest rallies. And because I held this indifferent attitude to current politics, I found myself, to my astonishment, labeled a fascist. I didn't see the logic of this, and still don't. I assume they thought that individualism always leads to fascism—unaware that fascism is a form of socialism that exalts the state above the individual. At all events, I had to get used to a feeling of working alone that was rather like being sent to Coventry. I continued to write books. The success of The Outsider meant that I was able to find publishers. But reviews were dismissive, and in a few cases (such as Introduction to the New Existentialism) there were no reviews at all.
Lack of money made life difficult; but otherwise, I didn't mind too much. After all, I was arguing that the romantic Outsiders had been destroyed because they lacked the strength to stand alone. To allow myself to be depressed by the neglect would have been illogical. Anyway, I was too busy just keeping alive. So I completely failed to notice that something strange was happening. The tide of a century and a half was turning. I knew, of course, that there was increasingly strong movement towards anti-reductionism in science. Since 1959 I had been in correspondence with the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who believed that Freud had 'sold human nature short', and that the idealistic and creative part of man's nature is as fundamental as his sexual or aggressive drives. I knew Michael Polanyi's important book Personal Knowledge (1958), arguing that the scientist's creative processes are as inspirational and illogical as the poet's, and that this is true of all creative thinking. But it came as a surprise to me to learn that there was suddenly a new wave of interest in eastern philosophy, in romanticism, in magic and occultism. When I wrote about the novels of Hermann Hesse in The Outsider, they were all out of print; and, as far as I know, I was the first person to write about them extensively in English. Now, suddenly, he was apparently a best seller. So was Tolkien; his Lord of the Rings had been a 'cult book' since its publication in the mid-fifties, read and re-read by a small circle of enthusiasts; now it literally sold by the million in paperback on American campuses. So did H. P. Lovecraft, a writer I had first read in the early sixties, and had written about in a book called The Strength to Dream in 1962. When I first wrote about him, his books could only be obtained through a tiny American publisher, Arkham House, run by Lovecraft's old friend, August Derleth; by the late sixties, they were all in paperback.