The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  ‘Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?’ Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

  ‘Juster. And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it,’ answered Svidrigailov, with a vague smile.

  This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov.

  Similarly in The Brothers Karamazov, when Ivan has a nightmare in which he is visited by the Devil, neither Ivan nor the reader believes that this is just a delusion. Dostoyevsky is telling his readers that devils may squeeze through into the material dimension. No other single writer so powerfully conveys the undercurrents of evil that welled up in the second half of the nineteenth century. His work is pervaded with a sense of vital contact with other mysterious worlds, some of them hellish. There is, too, the spiritual extremism, the sense that there is no middle way, that if you do not run to embrace the most spiritual, the demonic will fill the vacuum. Those who try to follow the middle way are nowhere.

  Like Swedenborg he looked forward to a new age, but in Dostoyevsky’s case this grew out of a very Russian sense of history.

  ‘EVERYDAY I GO INTO THE GROVE,’ wrote the poet Nikolai Kliuev in a letter to a friend ‘and sit there by a little chapel and the age-old pine tree. I think about you. I kiss your eyes and your heart… O mother wilderness, paradise of the spirit… How hateful and black seems all the so-called civilized world and what I would give, what Golgotha would I bear so that America should not encroach upon the blue feathered dawn, upon the fairy-tale hut… Western Christianity among whose heedless gifts to the world we must count rationalism, materialism, a technology that enslaves, an absence of spirit and in its place a vain, sentimental humanism.’ This is the Russian perspective.

  Orthodox Christianity had taken a different path from Roman Christianity. Orthodoxy preserved and nurtured the esoteric doctrines, some of them pre-Christian, that Rome had discarded or declared heretical. The mystical vision of Dionysius the Aeropagite continued to illumine Orthodox Christianity with its emphasis on direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds. In the seventh century the Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor wrote urging disciplined introspection, the monastic or wandering life. ‘Illumination must be sought,’ he wrote, ‘and in extreme cases the whole body will be illumined too.’ The same phenomenon was reported by the monks of Mount Athos. Monks deep in prayer would suddenly illuminate their entire cave or cell. This was a vision of God, the hesychast, which could be achieved by rhythmic breathing exercises, repetitive prayers and meditation on icons.

  In Russia the Church emphasized supernatural powers attainable after severe spiritual discipline. But then in the seventeenth century the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Nikon reformed and centralized the Church. It was left to the Old Believers (Raskolniki) to keep the beliefs and spiritual disciplines of the early Christians alive. Their outlawed communities were driven underground, where they survived as a living tradition. Dostoyevsky kept in touch with them throughout his life.

  Illustration to Wagner’s Lohengrin. No other esoteric artist so conveys that central esoteric doctrine — the sense of impending and overwhelming destiny. Wagner wrote of his ambition to bring a non-existent world into being, and Baudelaire described how watching Lohengrin induced in him an altered state of consciousness in which the ordinary world of the senses became dissolved. The occultist Theodor Reuss claimed he had known Wagner and that this gave him special insight into a secret doctrine concealed in Parsifal. Reuss saw the closing words of Parsifal at the end of act three, where he stands holding his lance erect, as a glorious deification of the sex drive.

  Out of the Old Believer tradition came the Stranniki, or Wanderers, solitary individuals who renounced money, marriage, passports and all official documents as they moved across the country, promising ecstatic visions, healing and prophecy. If caught, they were tortured, sometimes beheaded.

  Another later movement which came out of the Old Believer tradition was the Khlysty, the People of God, a persecuted underground society famous for its extreme asceticism and rejection of the world. They were reputed to meet at night, sometimes in a forest clearing lit by banks of candles. Naked under flowing white robes, they danced in two circles, the men in an inner circle in the direction of the sun and the women in an outer circle moving in the other direction, widdershins. The aim of this ceremony was liberation from the material world and ascent into the spirit worlds. They would collapse, speak in tongues, heal the sick and cast out demons.

  There were rumours of orgies at these midnight meetings, but more likely they — like the Cathars — were sexual ascetics, practising the sublimation of sexual energies for spiritual and mystical purposes.

  The young Rasputin stayed at the Orthodox monastery of Verkhoturye where he met members of the Khlysty. His own doctrine seems to have been a radical development, proposing spiritual ecstasy attained through sexual exhaustion. The flesh would be crucified, the little death of orgasm would become the mystic death of initiation.

  After a vision of Mary, in which she told him to take up the life of a wanderer, Rasputin walked two thousand miles to Mount Athos. He returned home two years later, exuding a powerful magnetism and displaying miraculous powers of healing.

  In 1903 he arrived in St Petersburg. There he was taken up by the personal confessor to the royal family who said, ‘It is the voice of the Russian soil which speaks through him.’ He introduced Rasputin to a court already fascinated by esoteric ideas and eager for experience.

  Martinism was already much discussed in Russia’s Freemasonic lodges. Maître de Philippe and Papus had visited the Russian court in 1901. Papus made Nicholas II the head of a Martinist lodge, and acted as the Tsar’s healer and spiritual adviser. He is said to have conjured up the spirit of the Tsar’s father, Alexander III, who prophesied the death of Nicholas II at the hands of revolutionaries. Papus also warned the Tsar against the evil influence of Rasputin.

  Rasputin would be slandered and murdered by Freemasons, but in 1916 his contemporary, the great initiate Rudolf Steiner, said of him, ‘the Russian Folk-Spirit can now work through him alone and through no-one else’.

  IF, AS WE MOVE TOWARDS THE FIN DE SIÈCLE, we look not at the very highest rung of art and literature but at the next rung down, we find a literature of explicit occult themes that would dominate popular culture in the twentieth century. Oscar Wilde was teeped in the lore of the Order of the Golden Dawn. His The Picture of Dorian Gray, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, brought the occult notion of the dopplegänger into the stream of public consciousness. M.R. James, the Cambridge don who has some claims to be the father of the ghost story, translated many of the Apocryphal gospels into English, gave a lecture on the occult sciences to the Eton Literary Society and wrote a story called Count Magnus in which the count, an alchemist, goes on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Anti-Christ, a city called Chorazin. The fact that Chorozon is the name of one of the demons who held lengthy conversations with Dee and Kelley suggests James knew what he was talking about.

  Earlier in the century Frankenstein’s monster had been a fictionalized account of Paracelsus’s homunculus. Attending the same house party as Mary Shelley when she conceived of the monster, Byron’s friend Polidori wrote an early vampire story. But of course the most famous version is Bram Stoker’s, in which the preserved body in the tomb is a sort of demonic version of Christian Rosenkreuz. Stoker himself was a member of the OTO — the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society practising ceremonial magic. The Czech theosophist Gustav Meyrink would explore a similar theme in his novel The Golem, which in its turn influenced German expressionist cinema. It was said that in the novel Là-Bas, Huysmans spoke of what had really happened at black magic rituals from personal experience, breaking his oath of secrecy. Aleister Crowley noted with evident approval that he died of cancer of the tongue as result.

  In art explicit occult themes can be seen in the symbolism of Gus
tave Moreau, Arnold Böcklin and Franz von Stuck, in Max Klinger’s waking dreams, in the weird erotic-occult art of Felicien Rops, whom a critic of the day dubbed ‘a sarcastic Satan’. Odilon Redon wrote of ‘surrendering himself to secret laws’.

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD THE SPIRIT of materialism was working for victory, devising materialistic versions of esoteric philosophy. We have already touched on the way that esoteric ideas of the evolution of the species appeared in materialistic form in Darwin’s theories. We have seen, too, how the ruthless and cynical manipulators of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, provided a methodology for revolutionaries in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now Marx’s dialectical materialism translated the spiritual ideals of St Germain on to a purely economic plane.

  Occultism also played a part in the development of Freud’s ideas. His mentor Charcot had in turn been taught by the prominent occultist and inventor of mesmerism Anton Mesmer. The young Freud studied the Cabala and wrote approvingly of telepathy, speculating that it might have been an archaic form of communication used by everyone before the invention of language.

  He introduced into mainstream thought an idea that is essentially cabalistic — the idea of consciousness having a structure. For example, the model of the mind that Freud popularized — of super ego, ego and id — can be seen as a materialized version of the tripartite cabalistic model.

  Indeed, at an even more basic level the very notion that there are impulses independent of our point of consciousness, but which may impinge upon it from outside, is a secularized, materialistic version of the esoteric account of consciousness. In Freud’s scheme of life these hidden forces should be interpreted as sexual rather than spiritual. Freud later reacted against the esoteric roots of his ideas and stigmatized as mad the ancient form of consciousness out of which they had grown.

  The esoteric influences on Freud’s pupil Jung are even clearer. We have touched on how he interpreted alchemical processes as descriptions of psychological healing, and how he identified what he saw as the seven great archetypes of the collective unconscious with the symbolism of seven planetary gods.

  Salome by Gustave Moreau.

  By interpreting the alchemical processes as purely psychological he was denying a level of meaning intended by the alchemical writers — that these mental exercises can influence matter in a supernatural manner. And though Jung saw the seven archetypes as acting independently of the conscious mind, he would have stopped short of seeing them as disembodied centres of consciousness acting completely independently of the human mind. Indeed, when Jung met Rudolf Steiner he dismissed him as a schizophrenic.

  But late in life, Jung’s work with the experimental physicist Wolfgang Pauli encouraged him to take a few steps beyond the pale. Jung and Pauli came to believe that in addition to the purely physical mechanism of atom knocking against atom there is another network of connections that binds together events not physically connected — non-physical, causal connections brought about by mind. Jung’s contemporary, the French anthropologist Henri Corbin, was researching the spiritual practices of the Sufis at this time. Corbin came to the conclusion that the Sufi adepts worked in concert and could communicate with one another in a realm of ‘objective imagination’. Jung coined the same phrase independently.

  Later in life the materialistic explanations that Freud had been trying to force on to spiritual experiences also sprang back at him, and he became plagued by a sense of what he called the uncanny. Freud wrote his essay on The Uncanny when he was sixty-two. By thinking about what he feared most he was trying to stop it happening. A few years earlier he had experienced the number sixty-two coming at him insistently — a hat check ticket, a hotel room number, a train seat number. It had seemed to him that the cosmos was trying to tell him something. Perhaps he would die at the age of sixty-two?

  In the same essay he described the experience of walking round a maze of streets in an old Italian town and finding himself in the red light district. He took what he thought would be the most direct route out of this district, but soon found himself back in the middle of it. This seemed to happen to him again and again, no matter which direction he took. The experience can only remind us of Francis Bacon. It was as if a maze were changing shape to keep the wanderer from finding the way. As a result of these experiences Freud began to suspect that there might be some complicity between his psyche and the cosmos. Or perhaps the cosmos was manufacturing meanings independently of any human agency and, as it were, beaming them at him?

  If Freud had been forced to admit that either of these had been the case, even if in only one instance, then his whole materialistic world-view would have been smashed into pieces. Freud was naturally anxious to block these promptings. They left him in a disturbed state of mind.

  THE EUROPEAN COLONIZATION OF OTHER parts of the world prompted a flow of esoteric ideas in the other direction, a reverse colonization of Europe. The British Empire in India led to the publication in English of esoteric Hindu texts, and as a result oriental esotericism is still better represented in bookshops in the West than its occidental counterpart. Similarly the French colonies in North Africa lent esotericism in French-speaking territories a strong Sufi colouring.

  The partition of Poland in the nineteenth century caused the spread of that country’s alchemical traditions over the rest of Europe. A genuine Rosicrucian impulse survived in middle Europe in the form of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. The Russian Revolution caused the occultists who had clustered at the court of the Tsars to flee, helping to introduce a stream of Orthodox esotericism in the West, and the Sufi- and Orthodox-influenced philosophy of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky became very influential in both Europe and America. In the 1950s China’s invasion of Tibet would cause the dispersal of Tibetan esotericism all over the world.

  At a time when to many in the West the organized religion of the state risks being reduced to mere formalism, and seems to many to be sterile and exhausted, it would perhaps not be surprising if every intelligent person reaches a time in life when he or she wants to consider the great questions of life and death and whether or not life and the universe has meaning, and has to cast about for answers. Esoteric philosophy taken as a whole represents the richest, the deepest and the most fascinating body of thought on these questions.

  THE VERY GREATEST ARTISTS AND WRITERS find ways of expressing what it means to be alive at a moment in history.

  The great art at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century was on one level the cry of a hurt and puzzled humanity. Some artists and writers, including a few very great ones, looked squarely into the face of existence and decided that it was quite meaningless, that life on earth, human life, is an accident of chemical combinations and that, as Jean-Paul Sartre concluded at the end of La Nausée, the only way life can have meanings is if we choose to devise goals for ourselves.

  It is true, too, that some artists have taken great pleasure in the material age and its shiny surfaces. Modernism was undoubtedly iconoclastic. However, by the end of the nineteenth century the tyranny of kings, clerical superstitions and stodgy bourgeois morality were pretty soft targets for iconoclasts.

  For the majority of great artists of the modern era, the mechanical model of the universe has been the icon they really wanted to smash.

  We like to think of Modernism as smart, hip, in tune with the machine age, impatient with the authority and dogma of earlier times. It is all these things, but it is not, as we also sometimes like to think, atheistic, at least not in the radical, modern sense of atheistic. In fact, if you like to see esotericism as the refuge of ancient superstition, then that is what Modernism really is. The great unifying spirit of Modernism — the spirit that unites Picasso, Joyce, Malevich, Gaudí, Beuys, Borges and Calvino is a desire to undermine and subvert the prevailing scientific materialism. It needs a little probing into the lives of these artists and writers to see that they were all deeply involved in the occult, and that esotericism prov
ided them with their core philosophy of life and guiding aesthetic.

  If we take Baudelaire and Rimbaud as representative starting points for Modernism, it is all too easy to interpret the derangement of the senses they recommend as ends in themselves. What they really believed was that when the material world is dissolved, the lineaments of the spirit worlds will present themselves. ‘The poet makes himself clairvoyant,’ said Rimbaud, ‘by turning all meaning upside down in a long and reasoned manner.’

  Gauguin, Munch, Klee and Mondrian were theosophists. Mondrian’s theosophy taught him it was possible to discern a spiritual reality structuring the appearances of the material world. Gauguin saw himself as creating sculptures which — like Golems — could be enlivened by disembodied spirits. Kandinsky, like Franz Marc, was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner’s, but the great formative influences on Kandinsky’s paintings, leading the way into abstraction, were the ‘thought forms’ perceived in a trance state and recorded by theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbetter. Klee depicted himself meditating on the Third Eye. Malevich was in thrall to Ouspensky.

  The esoteric roots of Matisse’s art may be better hidden, but he said that sometimes he looked at an object such as a plant he intended to paint for weeks, even months, until its spirit began to urge him to give it expression.

  Gaudí’s Arab-influenced architecture, flamboyantly surging arabesques in which animal and human forms merge and morph into each other, invites the visitor to walk into an altered state of consciousness.

  Spain is perhaps the country in Europe where the supernatural lies closest to the surface of the everyday. Picasso, the great artist-magus of Modernism, always had a strong feeling for the intrusions of the spirit worlds. As a boy he was believed by some of his friends to have supernatural abilities, like mind-reading and prophecy. When he travelled to France, Max Jacob, Eric Satie, Apollinaire, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau and others initiated him into a sophisticated occult tradition.