A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  All of Novalis' work is saturated in the Pythagorean, hermetic themes of unity with the divine. Like Swedenborg, Blake and many others, Novalis saw the external, physical world as a symbol of a deeper, spiritual reality. With Sophie's death, Novalis saw in his chaste love for her a means of breaking through the outer shell and entering the radiant source. That transition, according to him, took place on 13 May 1797, when Novalis had a mystical experience, while contemplating Sophie's grave. There, as he recorded in his diary, "I was indescribably happy- moments of flashing enthusiasm - I blew the grave away like dust - her presence was palpable - I believed she would step forward at any minute."

  In the two months prior to his experience, Novalis practised a form of `active imagination', engaging in various spiritual disciplines the aim of which was to prepare him for his breakthrough. These were, in part at least, strenuous attempts to curb his sexual fantasies while maintaining a strict focus on his love for the deceased teenager with whom he hoped to soon be rejoined in death. A diary of the time records a struggle between "sensuous imaginings" and his determination to maintain his "engagement in a higher sense." Novalis, like other, later dark romantics - Wagner and Mahler come to mind - sought in death a release from life's illusions; yet it was only in a higher, spiritual union, that his sexual hunger could be allowed free expression. One product of this tension are the' mystico-erotic Hymns to the Night (1800), one of the few of the poet's works published in his life time. In the third hymn we find a poeticized account of Novalis' grave experience.

  In preparation for his mystical encounter, Novalis visited Sophie's grave frequently, poured over her letters and mementos, and read spiritual and mystical literature. How much his vision of Sophie was a product of his own powerful imagination is debatable, and the fact that sophia is Greek for wisdom, union with which is the central aim of mystical practice, cannot have escaped the attentive reader. That he practised conjuring her image up is clear from passages in his diary. A week before the vision, he recorded seeing her in profile, sitting beside him on his sofa, wearing a green scarf. One inspiration was a letter from his brother Carl, who spoke of a sudden yearning to die, brought on by a thunderstorm. He spoke of the "genuine sincerity" with which he contemplated being struck by lightning, the flash transporting one to "the eternal embrace of our beloved ones."

  Death, for Novalis, meant transfiguration, an ecstatic escape from time and space, a notion shared by many Romantics, and captured in the canvases of the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Whether this was so, or whether the grave meant sheer oblivion, Novalis did not have to wait long to find out. In 1798, Novalis met Julie von Charpentier, and his obsession with Sophie had apparently abated enough for him to become romantically involved with her. Their engagement, however, was doomed. Although his literary career was beginning to blossom (he had already met Goethe, and in Jena Novalis was the centre of a circle which included Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Schliermacher) the tuberculosis that destroyed his brother was ravaging his own delicate frame. He continued to write and to fulfill his duties as an inspector of the Saxon salt mines but in October of 1800 his lungs suffered a major collapse. His health declined and on 25 March 1801 - four years and six days after Sophie's death - he and his beloved met in what we must assume was a more lasting union. At the age of 28, Novalis died.

  E. T.A. Hoffmann

  Perhaps the most romantic of the Romantics was a strangely self-divided individual whose wild dual personality and bouts of alcoholic excess were complemented by a meticulous concern for social duty and a work schedule that would daunt even the most disciplined character. Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffmann was by day a respected juror and civil servant, holding at different times in his life positions with the civil administration in Poland and the Prussian Supreme Court in Berlin. By night, however, he was something very different. A considerable graphic artist, Hoffmann was also a composer. Although most of his music is lost today, he is known to have written ten operas (one of which, Undine, is arguably the first Romantic work in that form) two symphonies, two masses, several cantatas, much incidental music and dozens of chamber works. He was also a capable conductor, know for his productions of Mozart and Gluck, as well as a brilliant music critic. Hoffmann's essays on Beethoven, at a time when the public had yet to acquire a taste for him, as well as on the idea of music as an autonomous spiritual world helped, more than anything else, to create the image of the composer as the hierophant of a higher, ideal realm. With Coleridge and Baudelaire, Hoffmann is one of those rare writers who turn criticism into an art. His essays and reviews arguing for an appreciation of music as a self-sufficient non-representational art form - for the superiority of instrumental against vocal music, a preference practically unheard of in his day - would influence important musical theorists like Schumann, Wagner and Schopenhauer, and would later feed the aesthetic doctrine of Symbolism, which would dominate the late 19th century. This is not surprising: music, and the `superior world' that it depicted, was the central experience of Hoffmann's life. In "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," Hoffmann expressed the reason for this in a succinct formula. "Music," he wrote, "reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing."

  Like Novalis, Hoffmann too knew Sehnsucht. Yet it was not only in his writings on music that Hoffmann spoke of another world. If it already seems that he was gifted enough for several people - and to some extent Hoffmann was several people - he was also the author of some of the most bizarre and beloved stories and novels of the 19th century. In many ways Hoffmann is like a cross between Edgar Allan Poe and Hans Christian Andersen, both of whom read his tales with profit. His stories have the glitter and dazzle of fairy tales, yet are often shot through with a disturbing, macabre sensibility. Yet, like Goethe, he is one of those German authors that have never really got across to an English readership. Most people know Hoffmann today, if at all, in a form that would have pleased him: as the inspiration for Offenbach's light opera The Tales of Hoffmann, and for Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Nutcracker. Yet Hoffmann's weird tales of magical initiation, alchemy, strange states of consciousness and other occult themes display a psychological insight comparable to Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.

  Ernst Theodore Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in Konigs- berg in 1776; later he adopted the name Amadeus in honour of his beloved Mozart. He had an unhappy childhood, and the neglect he suffered at the hands of his parents was exacerbated by their early separation and divorce. Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by strict relatives in a household made up of a grandmother, three aunts and a puritanical uncle. Perhaps the sudden loss of his parents and the absence of a personal golden age led to his love of music and its promise of an `ideal' realm. At any rate, his fascination with it began early, and an encounter with Mozart's Magic Flute set the stage for his later creations. Mozart's musical Masonic fairy tale of initiation and the eternal war between good and evil, symbolized by the magus Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, became the blueprint for Hoffmann's own tales. All of Hoffmann's stories engage this archetypal theme, which is the romantic conundrum par excellence: the clash between the dull world of routine necessity, and the pressing claims of the imagination. Hoffmann, who had a foot in both worlds, felt the stress and friction between them throughout his life, and it took its toll; he was known for his sudden shifts in temperament, plunging from childlike gaiety into dark introversion, from warm conviviality into silent isolation. He was a man of masks, of fragments and unsettling inconsistencies. It would be trendy to speak of him as postmodern, but it's obvious that the kind of all-embracing unity that a Goethe managed to effect was denied him.

  Whether it was fate, his unconscious, immaturity, or Poe's `imp of the perverse', throughout his life, Hoffmann seemed to create a crisis whenever things ran too smoothly for him, and the claims of routine and
normality threatened to submerge too deeply the longings for the other world. As Government Assessor in Posen, he jeopardized a comfortable position by drawing caricatures of local dignitaries; his excellent graphic work had him exiled to Plock, an unspeakably dull provincial town, where he had little to do but regret his rashness. Years later, in Berlin, the pattern was repeated when he satirized the Director of the Police Commission in his last novel, Master Flea. Hoffmann spoke of his intentions, and word of his acid wit got around; proceedings were begun against him. The book was eventually published with the offending parts excised.

  In between these two incidents, which were simply the most prominent, Hoffmann carried on a dizzying career. His own life displays the same crowded backdrop and rapidity of change common to his stories, and throughout it Hoffmann showed a profound disregard for whatever physical effects this might entail. In a way it isn't surprising that he should die, paralyzed and in poverty, at the age of 46 - yet still dictating his last works - shattered by the accumulated buffetings of alcoholic excess, liver degeneration and a nervous disorder, locomotor ataxia.

  Yet Hoffmann's life was an embodiment of his central themes: the uncertainty of identity and the conflict between the `two worlds'. Occult and paranormal ideas run throughout his stories. Mesmerism, hypnotism, somnambulism, multiple selves, the world of sylphs and salamanders, the perpetual battle between the dark and the light: these are the basic elements of his tales. But the recurring myth is the contrast and tension between the everyday world and that of magic. Nowhere did Hoffmann depict this with greater conviction that in The Golden Flower Pot (1814), which is generally considered his greatest work. Like Goethe and Novalis, Hoffmann used the Marchen, but with an important variation. Unlike Goethe and Novalis, Hoffmann sets his initiation story in the context of the everyday world, and brings magic down to earth. He is, as Jeremy Adler suggests, one of the first writers of the city, before Baudelaire and Poe."' Where Goethe's Fairy Tale has the odd, unfixed quality of a dream, Hoffmann's Dresden is immediately recognizable. His stories get their effect from the convincing depiction of the magical world invading the everyday. This is Hoffmann's `serapiontic principle', first proposed in his The Serapion Brotherhood (1819). The book is about a group of poets and artists who take their name from a mad nobleman who believes he is a monk martyred during the reign of Emperor Decius. When his followers point out that the towers they see are of those of Bamberg, Serapion denies this, and says they are indeed those of Alexandria in the Second Century AD. When they point out that this is madness, he reminds them that they forget that the world they see is within their minds. Reality is within, not out there: the central Romantic theme. Yet, Hoffmann recognizes that this can lead to a dead end, both in life and in art. Novalis' hermetic Mdrehen depicts another reality, but one too detached from this one to be convincing. The `serapiontic principle' argues that in order for magic to be effective, it has to be made convincing, which means that it has to be rooted somehow in this world. "There is an inner world," Hoffmann wrote, "and a spiritual faculty for discerning it with absolute clearness - yes, with the most minute and brilliant distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is the outer world, in which we are entrapped, that triggers this spiritual faculty ... it is the outer world that causes the spirit to use its powers of perception." Hoffmann's stories are still so readable today because he rarely loses sight of this' intuition. And the aesthetic principle at work in his stories is also the psychological one at work in Hoffmann's life. It's reminiscent of the fairy tale of Goldilocks. Too much reality and life becomes dull, pointless and insipid; too much imagination, and we become Brother Serapion, living in a solipsistic dream world. But when the combination is "just right," - as it is so often in Hoffmann's stories - then we get `magic."' Not ethereal fairy worlds, or flat, dreary realism, but a sparkling, intoxicating tale that stimulates our imaginative and creative spirits - a kind of literary champagne, again appropriately enough, for Hoffmann. The only other writer to portray this dual reality with such clarity and force is David Lindsay, author of the gnostic classic A Voyage to Arcturus (1920); but Lindsay's vision is grim, often pessimistic, and he lacks Hoffmann's inviting good humour; we might say he is Beethoven to Hoffmann's Mozart.

  In his life Hoffmann never realized the "just right", the fruitful combination of the two worlds, that he achieved in his stories. Yet, for the Romantics, life and art are two sides of the same adventure, and what makes The Golden Flower Pot an inexhaustible source (a "pot of gold") is that by reading it, we are drawn into the very myth it presents. Hoffmann is the first writer with whom the equation Poetry=Magic is made clear; the reader, by association, is made accomplice to the alchemical transformation. The props of Hoffmann's initiatory tale come for the most part from Le Comte de Gabalais (1670), an occult novel in the Renaissance Rosicrucian manner, depicting the elemental world of Paracelsus, by the Abbe Mont- faucon de Villars. The student Anselmus, a clumsy, dreamy young man with a taste for poetry, is troubled by a recurring vision of a glittering green snake." The snake, it turns out, is Serpentina, the daughter of the Archivist Lindhorst, who is in reality an elemental salamander, exiled to earth for a transgression committed millennia ago. Anselmus, who is also attracted to the beautiful but worldly Veronica (who wants him to become Hofrath and lead a sensible, respectable life), is hired by Lindhorst to copy out a magical manuscript, which indeed relates the story of his primeval fall from grace, and of his perpetual battle against the forces of darkness, symbolized in the story by the evil apple woman ... The story's tension lies in Anselmus having to choose between the two worlds, and much of it is influenced by Hoffmann's reading of G.H. Schubert's Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views from the Nightside of Natural Science) (1808), at the time an immensely popular work of Naturphilosophie, which dealt with the irrational and what we might call paranormal side of existence. In the end, after a series of trials and fantastic adventures, Anselmus, like Hoffmann, plumps for Serpentina, and with her and the Magus Lindhorst, they retire to their "freehold in Atlantis," Schubert's symbol for mankind's original state of unity with nature. Yet the reader, who we must assume has at least the potential for poetry, or magic, is also a participant in the dialectic, and having read Hoffmann's account, must decide whether it is merely a diverting story, or a metaphor for his existence ... Relating an account of his magical past, the archivist is accused by the philistines of oriental bombast, and is requested to tell them something that is true. Lindhorst replies that he knows no story more true than the one he is telling them. 1, for one, agree: under the deceptive surface of an entertaining fable, Hoffmann has managed to articulate the central myth of human life.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), like Hoffmann, is another serious writer who has become, for the general reading public, merely a teller of gruesome horror stories. For myself as an adolescent in the 1960s, these were made into cinematic and highly enjoyable pulp by the filmmaker Roger Corman. "The Raven" is one of those poems you learn - or used to learn, at any rate - early on in English lessons in the US, and "The Tell-Tale Heart" has to be one of the most anthologized stories ever, turning up in scores of `Tales of Terror' type collections. But there is of course another side to Poe, a side that fellow poets like Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans and Stephan Mallarme knew and appreciated, unlike the Americans of Poe's own time, or the later serious critics, like Henry James and T.S. Eliot, who saw in his work nothing but an unfortunate influence on juvenile minds.

  Poe's own life is a horror story more unsettling than any he wrote. Although it's accepted that accounts of his depravity and drug addiction are exaggerated, it is true that his life, beginning with a runaway father and the loss of his mother at the age of two, was a series of painful mistakes, defeats and frustrations. In true Romantic fashion, Poe died under mysterious circumstances, at the age of 40.13 Like Novalis' Sophie, Poe's own child-bride, Virginia, died of consumption, her demise being the ostensible cause
of Poe's last decline and supposed final, destructive binge. For most of his life, Poe lived in abject poverty, and even with literary triumphs and fame - "The Raven" was the one clear success in his lifetime - he barely earned enough from his work as critic and editor to keep body and soul together. In Poe's case, this may not have been that problematic, as the separation of soul from the confines-of the body was his central metaphysical concern.

  Like Hoffmann, Poe was a divided man, a self-professed rationalist (inventor of the tale of detection) who was obsessed with notions of the soul and the world beyond, an idealist poet who was chin deep in the cut-throat world of antebellum American journalism. Also like Hoffmann Poe was fascinated by the human mind and explored its lesser travelled environs, experimenting with hypnagogia, somnambulism, dreams and mesmerism. Poe's internal division even went so far as to form for him the blueprint of the psyche: he accepted the tenets of `Facultative Psychology', which argued that different mental faculties, like rationality, the `Moral Sense' and the `Aesthetic Sense', exist in isolation from each other. Again like Hoffmann, Poe tried to unify his many and disparate selves through the magic wand of Art. Any reader of Poe's critical works soon becomes acquainted with a dictum that runs through them like an idee fixe: unity of effect. That a man whose inner world harboured a mob of selves would be enamoured of unity is understandable. But Poe's vision of a unified world went beyond the printed page; or rather, although the paraphernalia of his poems and stories include reanimated corpses, premature burial, doppelganger, and fiendishly beating hearts, their subject is the knowledge of the true world, lying beyond the veil of the senses, that "wild, weird clime that lieth sublime/Out of SPACE, out of TIME." As one critic writes, "The direction of Poe's mind, the thrust of his imagination is ... away from the body toward the spirit, away from the `dull realities' of this world, toward the transcendent consciousness on a `far happier star'."14