The H.D. Book

by Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael

  To penetrate the depths of the psychic life, Freud resolved: “We shall have no hesitation in allowing ourselves to be guided by the common usages of language, or as one might say, the feeling of language, confident that we shall thus take into account inner attitudes which still resist expression in abstract terms.” And in the study of languages, the same sense of all times indwelling in our time or of the essential person of each man indwelling in every period of man’s history takes over. In the grand project of the Oxford English Dictionary, “on historical principles,” undertaken in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the first volume appearing in 1882, the English language was revealed in layers of usage laid bare, even as the city of Rome had been excavated by archeologists or the Earth by geologists. “The past” of our words, once it was acknowledged, entered into the present of their meaning.

  Like the detective hero of the murder mystery which was contemporary in its rise with psychoanalysis and the O.E.D., Freud reads in the dreams and life stories told by his patients searching for clues to a prehistory or metahistory leading to the disclosure of some past event that will make clear what really happened, parallel with the solution that satisfies the form of the popular mystery novel. So, in the Theosophic mystery, the traumas of Hyperborea or of Atlantis come as disclosures of shaping forces in our own lives—they are still with us. “Those very Monads which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris,” Blavatsky writes, “are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance.” Pound, writing in a period when he was most conversant with Yeats’s Kabbalistic lore, in Canto VII, hearing “Thin husks I had known as men, / Dry casques of departed locusts / speaking a shell of speech,” must have had the presence of such kelipot in mind, evil, that are quickened only by the sin of man: “Life to make mock of motion”—

  For the husks, before me, move,

  The words rattle: shells given out by shells.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  And the tall indifference moves,

  a more living shell,

  Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact.

  The bardic tradition may be recalled by Robert Graves in his “historical grammar of poetic myth,” The White Goddess, or the primal scene of Titanic infants playing with fire may haunt Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, as the Atlantean transgression of Nature’s laws occupies Blavatsky’s thought, because we live in a time into which all times are gathering. “The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assemblage,” Whitehead writes in his Aims of Education in 1929: “but it has only one possible hall of meeting, and that is, the present.” We find ourselves gathering what they were or drawn to the idea of them, for we have that wish for a great time or a great space—overpopulated as we are—to live in; and we call up the whole population of mankind and even, thinking of Darwin, of the living, to live in us.

  “Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read,” Yeats tells us in Per Amica Silentia Lunae:

  and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one’s knowledge. lf no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabbalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his never-published manuscripts, and who can have put together so ingeniously, working by some law of association and yet with clear intention and personal application, certain mythological images? They had shown themselves to several minds, a fragment at a time, and had only shown their meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together. The thought was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose.

  With Yeats, we are close to Blavatsky’s influence, for he had sought her out in 1887 when he was in his early twenties and he had gone on in other circles to devote his life to the esoteric wisdom cults. But it was the affinity that Poetry in the Romantic tradition has for the occult that moved him. For from the first Yeats had believed that Poetry had itself a secret tradition and doctrine. It was the study of Blake that had brought him to the threshold, leading beyond to Boehme and to the Zohar of Moses of Leon. It was Shelley who had set him on his way, for Yeats had read in that poet’s poem “Hellas” of a Jew, Ahasuerus, of whom Shelley says:

  Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream

  He was pre-Adamite, and has survived

  Cycles of generation and of ruin.

  “Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like,” Yeats tells us in The Trembling of the Veil. He demanded, like Blavatsky, that his images be verified. He had come in search of a Master in life who had appeared to him in Shelley’s play—the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus. “Mistake me not!” Ahasuerus had said in Shelley’s poem:

  All is contained in each. . . . Thought

  Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,

  Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

  They are, what that which they regard appears,

  The stuff whence mutability can weave

  All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms,

  Empires, and superstitions.

  It was to increase the dominion of the poetic mind that Yeats pursued his studies in the occult. The doctrine of correspondences that he found there enlarged the mission of metaphor and simile. The concept of the eidolon inherited from Iamblichus in which primal and eternal images are the movers or powers of the universe, agents of reality, charged the poet’s reveries and visions with a radical purpose, a directive towards the heart of the matter, taken in what the majority of men took to be a literary pastime—at best a function of cultured sensibility, at worst an idle and even childish indulgence in phantasy.

  Yeats is often called a symbolist, but the symbol, for him, was a magic intermediate, having its efficacy in the route it made between the soul and the image, the objective. But, it was also . . . , it had . . . , it moved into the mind with . . . , intention and choice. It was also the subject; it presented itself to him. For Yeats, as for Blavatsky, the great images were not imagined in the sense of being thought up, but came to the imagination. There was a way, he tells us, in which men kept their bodies still and their minds awake and clear so that they became a mirror of the Real.

  “I had no natural gift for this clear quiet,” he continues: “and I was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is not merely imagining.” It was to live in this as if it were more than imagined, as if it were a poetry that had its authors in eternity, as Blake said they were, and into which the poet entered in his art, projecting a like-poetry, a microcosmos of the Real in the medium of words, guided, like Freud later was to be guided, “by the feeling of language.” The Universe was a great Work or Language, life itself its voice, and all that the poet felt, heard, saw, and sensed, in the world about him or in himself, was a language he must come to read, just as each art had its particular language of images, sounds, or movements in which meanings were evoked.

  In an age when what we commonly call Science, the evocation of the use of the world, the presumption of mechanical imaginations in place of all other imaginations, defined its own realm as the sole Real and all other worlds as unreal, there were men in the arts too who attempted to define realistic claims, working purely in terms of semantic or cultural values, at war with unrealistic or animistic feelings of language. Turning to the pseudo-scientific or heretical concerns of the occultist, the evocation of a
world in terms of a living language, Yeats was turning too from any purely literary or aesthetic interpretation of the role of poetry, to affirm the truth he had found in Shelley or in Blake as most real. He sought not only theosophy, god-knowledge, but theurgy, god-work; and there was magic too, daemonic experiment. Words were at once agents of personal feeling and composition in a poem and also bearers of knowledge felt, evokers of the real and casters of a spell.

  •

  The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the ritual cult to which Yeats belonged, begun by Dr. Woodman, Dr. Wynn-Wescott and MacGregor Mathers, after the publication of Mathers’s The Kabbalah Unveiled in 1888, ten years after Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and the same year as The Secret Doctrine, gave rise not only to new formations in occultist circles but also to new formations in the literary world. There was a first splinter group—as such mutinies were called in Marxist movements of the 1930s—when between 1900 and 1901 Mathers and Aleister Crowley left the party or were ousted from the party in a furor of legal battles, theoretic arguments, and black magic wars. Crowley, obsessed with the terror of the void since the trauma of the Chogo Ri expedition of 1902, when he was the sole survivor of a group attempting to climb that mountain, devoted the rest of his life to finding a sufficient nightmare to fill the emptiness. “The Abramelin demons, that Crowley had invoked at Boleskine, would seem to have formed a secret alliance with their cousins of the Hamalayan heights,” C. R. Cammell observes in his study of Crowley. After the Second World War (where certainly the void and terror opened in the death chambers of the Nazis or the radioactive holocaust let loose over Japan by the United States would seem a sufficient blackness), in the rise of a poetry of emptiness and black humor and in another poetry of spiritual rebellion, as in the works of Philip Lamantia or in the film-poetry of Kenneth Anger, the influence of Crowley began to appear as a force in the art of the new underground culture.

  But we have here to do with a later division of the Order of the Golden Dawn into two distinct and even opposing groups among its members. Virginia Moore in her study of Yeats, The Unicorn, traces this history. The one, followed by Yeats and Algernon Blackwood, continued along the line of a pantheism in which all gods had reality in terms of the Anima Mundi below and the Great Mind or God above. The other, led by A. E. Waite, and including Arthur Machen, Charles Williams, and Evelyn Underhill, in 1903 broke with the parent body and formed a group which kept the Golden Dawn name but directed its study toward a Christian, even Catholic, mysticism. For this second group, the validity and verification of the esoteric tradition was determined by its devotion to the Christos—and outside the Christian reality, the esoteric was evil.

  Algernon Blackwood, with Yeats and the elder Watkins, formed, Virginia Moore tells us, a Society of the Three Kings. In Blackwood’s novels we find that he believes in or is drawn toward the idea of a mystical theurgy in the worship of the elements where the protagonist is united with the regions of the stars and a way is opened into the elemental realm of Nature that is also the restored childhood world and consciousness of The Education of Uncle Paul, The Centaur, or of A Prisoner in Fairyland. Yeats, as The Trembling of the Veil and Per Amica Silentia Lunae testify, sought a magic that might open his mind to invasions of sensation and image, uniting his imagination with the passionate and daemonic imagination of the Anima Mundi. They may have been—those three Kings devoted, we are told, “to the study of Mysticism not Occultism”—three Magi or Magicians too, studying the magic of the Child. Yeats in his Autobiography, like Blackwood in his novels, makes it clear that he seeks what he once knew in his childhood when he dwelt upon the thresholds of an enchantment or faerie in Nature, a closeness to the earth and to folk ways.

  There was another movement after the death of Madame Blavatsky. This time not in the temple of a ritual cult but in the lecture hall of a theosophic school. G. R. S. Mead, who had been Blavatsky’s secretary, followed the way not of magic rite nor of mystic ritual but of gnosis, the teaching in the divine mysteries. In 1896 he published his translation from a Latin version of the Coptic text the Pistis Sophia; in 1900 his study of surviving Gnostic texts and traditions, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten; in 1906 Thrice-Greatest Hermes, studies in Hellenistic theosophy and gnosis, with a translation of the Trismegistic literature; and then, the series of eleven texts: Echoes from the Gnosis. In the magazine The Quest edited by Mead, his purpose is clearly to establish all religions as one ground of man’s search for a life in the Divine World, to free the mind of man in his quest for the Divine from the inhibiting forces of dogma and church views, and at the same time, to revive the sense of the Divine World as the Real, the source of man’s vital life.

  Along another path, at Oxford and especially Cambridge, following The Golden Bough of Frazer in 1890, both classicists and folklorists found themselves students of the mystery cults. The way led from Bergson’s L’Evolution créatrice, Jane Harrison tells us in her Preface to Themis in 1912: “I saw that Dionysus was an instinctive attempt to express what Professor Bergson calls durée, that life which is one, indivisible and yet ceaselessly changing.” From a second source, Durkheim’s Représentations Individuelles et Représentations Collectives, she had gathered that not only was the mystery-god an agency of “those instincts, emotions, desires which attend and express life” but that “these emotions, desires, instincts, in so far as they are religious, are at the outset rather of a group than of individual consciousness.”

  The texts of the classicist or the folklorist began to take on contemporary meaning in the light of ideas of life forces and collective mind. “I was no longer engaged merely in enquiring into the sources of a fascinating legend,” Jessie Weston writes of her conversion from the folklorist view in the Preface to From Ritual to Romance: “but on the identification of another field of activity for forces whose potency as agents of evolution we were only now beginning rightly to appreciate.” Tracing the roots of the Grail legend to “the mysterious border-land between Christianity and Paganism,” she tells us the path led from the Cumont to Mead where she found “not only the final link that completed the chain of evolution from Pagan Mystery to Christian Ceremonial, but also proof of that wider significance I was beginning to apprehend. The problem involved was not one of Folk-lore, not even one of Literature, but of Comparative Religion in its widest sense.”

  In the Quest Society, as in the person of its leader, G. R. S. Mead, the current of The Golden Bough and the current of The Secret Doctrine meet. In the pages of Mead’s journal, The Quest, we find the new philosophy of Bergson along with Jessie Weston’s Grail essays, Eisler’s studies in Orphic cult and the Fisher King, Pound’s “Psychology and Troubadours,” along with essays on the Progressive Buddhism of Daisetz T. Suzuki. And there was not only the study of the mythos, the lore, but there was, so the testimony goes, back of these essays a revival of the dromena, of the actual rites. “I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter,” Pound says, “and another who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them real.” The mysterious border-land between Christianity and Paganism that Jessie Weston sought knowledge of lay not only in the past but in the present London of 1909: “No inconsiderable part of the information at my disposal,” she writes, “depended upon personal testimony, the testimony of those who knew of the continued existence of such a ritual, and had actually been initiated into its mysteries.”

  •

  My grandmother was an elder in a provincial expression of this Hermetic movement, far from its center in London. Close to the woodlore of her origins in frontier life, she had some natural witchcraft perhaps. But then it may be too that all Grandmothers, as in fairytales, are Wise Women or Priestesses of Mother Nature. I was but a boy when she died, and with her death, my family’s tie with the old wisdom-way was broken. There was no cult life for them after her death.

  There is only what I remember out of childhood: the colored lithographs of Egyptian temples and the images upon the table, the voices talking of
“Logos” and “Nous,” the old women looking wisely into the Astral Light and telling what they saw there.

  My father and mother had been initiates, but in their own lives the tenor of the initiation was lost. From the region of San Francisco, they moved to Bakersfield in 1929, obedient to the directions of the stars in the Zodiac, as now Zen converts are obedient to the I Ching—Fate and Chance. They were isolated from their Brotherhood, their studies changed to studies that were respected by the community into which they had moved. By the time I was adolescent, my father was involved in the study of botany and local historical sites. After his death, Mother was relieved, I think, that this way of studying things might be dismissed. New friends did not share her belief—that was part of it—but then, though her belief may have lasted, her interest did not last.

  In my mind it has lasted. The lure is the lure of those voices weaving as I began to understand words a net of themes in which knots of meaning that refused any easy use appeared, glimpses from the adult world of words beyond them, as words were just beyond me, such a tapestry as Penelope is said to have woven that was never done but begun again each day, or as Helen wove, in which were all the scenes of the Trojan War. What was the hidden meaning of such a “Troy,” of “War”? they would ask. It was not a dogma nor was it a magic that I understood for myself in the Theosophic world about me, but I understood that the meanings of life would always be, as they were in childhood, hidden away, in a mystery, exciting question after question, a lasting fascination.

  The quest for meanings was a vital need in life that one recognized in romance where the hero must learn the language of birds, overhear the conversation of trees, call up even shadows to populate his consciousness. By associations, by metaphor, by likeness of the part, by fitting as part of a larger figure, by interlinking of members, by share, by equation, by correspondence, by reason, by contrast, by opposition, by pun or rhyme, by melodic coherence—what might otherwise have seemed disparate things of the world as Chaos were brought into a moving, changing, eternal, interweaving fabric of the world as Creation. It was the multiplicity of meanings at play that I loved in the talk of my parents in the 1920s. Two phases of the psyche’s development in childhood—the endless questioning and the timeless play—found their reflection or continuation in the adult world above and beyond.