A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  In 1897 Steiner moved to Berlin where he briefly edited a literary magazine. He then taught at the Berlin Worker's School, where he managed to transmit to his Marxist audience a fair amount of German Idealism. This erratic pattern took an even more eccentric turn when Steiner was asked by the Berlin Theosophical Society to lecture on Goethe's Mdrehen, "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily." The lecture was so successful that he was invited back, and it was Steiner's lecture on "Christianity as Mystical Fact" in the winter of 1900 that more or less set him on his future career: previously kept from view, he now displayed his esoteric interests openly. In the audience that evening was the woman who would become Steiner's second wife, Marie von Sivers, a Baltic Russian, frustrated actress, and devout theosophist.41 Forceful and ambitious, von Sivers had already made a place for herself by translating the playwright and Wagnerian Eduorad Schure's esoteric bestseller The Great Initiates (1889). In 1902 she accompanied Steiner (who was still married to his first wife) to the London Conference of the Theosophical Society. Reports have. it that during this trip she suggested that Europe was in need of a new religious movement and that he, Rudolf Steiner, should lead it. Steiner agreed and soon after became the Secretary General of the German Branch of the Theosophical Society, second only to Annie Besant in authority and thought by many to be the most brilliant esoteric thinker of the time.

  Steiner's break with theosophy was prompted by Besant's and C.W. Leadbeater's attempt to launch the twelve year old Krishnamurti as the new Jesus Christ. Before this, Marie von Sivers had arranged for Steiner to give a series of lectures in Russia, knowing that his highly Christianized theosophy would go down well with the growing number of "Godseekers" turning up among the intelligentsia. The 1905 Revolution, however, spoiled these plans, and sent many of the seekers into exile. It was then arranged for Steiner to give his lectures in the exile capital of Europe, Paris, in 1906. Among the audience were many of the most influential figures in the Russian cultural Renaissance: Dimitri Merzhkovsky, Zinaida Hippius, Konstantin Balmont (friend of Briusov) and Nicolai Minsky. By 1913, when Steiner gave a series of lectures at Helsingfors specifically for his Russian followers, there were already several anthroposophical discussion groups and workshops in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

  In Steiner's esoteric system, the Slavic folk-soul has an important and timely role to play. Russia, he believed, was the country most suited to embody a new cultural epoch, something that many of the new mystically inclined intelligentsia believed as well. The Russian soul, Steiner told them, would transcend both the rational-materialist west and the mystical-spiritual east, inaugurating a new, holistic consciousness, that would synthesize these opposites. Oddly, many of Steiner's pronouncements on the Slavic soul echo Hermann Hesse's remarks on `Russian Man'. The Russian, Steiner said, was a "child." "In the Russian way of thinking, two opposing concepts can hold sway simultaneously." "The Russian does not have the slightest understanding of what Westerners call `reasonableness'." Madame Blavatsky, Steiner said, was a typical Russian: she went to extremes, did not think logically, and was childlike. Yet it was precisely these qualities that allowed her to intuit deep, spiritual truths ... sometimes.

  Steiner's message hit home, although not all among the intelligentsia thought well of him. For the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, anthroposophy had a "distinctly corrupting and disintegrating effect." Berdyaev, who attended Steiner's Helsingfors lectures, was not impressed, and saw in Steiner a kind of black magician, casting a spell upon his audience. His followers seemed "maniacs possessed by some power beyond their control." "Whenever they uttered the magic words `the Doctor (i.e. Steiner) said', they seemed to be seized by some demon ..." Berdyaev was also very wary of a certain Anna Mintslova, whom he called Steiner's emissary, "an ugly, fat woman with protruding eyes" who bore a likeness to Madame Blavatsky. Mintslova "was skilled in her approach to human souls," and her influence was "absolutely negative and demonic." It is even possible that she performed some kind of magic spell or remote hypnosis on Berdyaev. He recounts how one night, half asleep, he saw her face hovering in a corner of his room, "its expression was quite horrifying - a face seemingly possessed of all the powers of darkness." Berdyaev also remarks on her strange disappearance, fading into thin air one afternoon on the Kuznetsky Bridge in Moscow. Rumours said she had gone into hiding in a Rosicrucian monastery, or, conversely, had committed suicide because the Doctor had condemned her for failing in her mission to convert the Slavs ..."

  One writer to fall under Steiner's spell was the novelist, poet, and essayist Andrei Bely. Born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow in 1880 (Andrei Bely was a pseudonym, meaning `Andrew White'), Bely was the son of a worldfamous mathematician and a St. Petersburg society lady. Prompted by his father, Bely entered the mathematics faculty at Moscow University, and graduated in 1903. By that time, Bely's feeling for mathematics had changed; through music, which he called "audible mathematics," he became fascinated with art and aesthetic expression. Already at 17 Boris had been writing poems in the manner of Heine, Verlaine and Maeterlinck; now he became Andrei Bely, adopting the pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his renowned father.

  Bely was a voracious reader and his favourite pastime seems to have been absorbing philosophical systems and turning them into writing. He was infatuated with Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, theosophy, eastern religions and was a follower of the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.43 From Soloviev, whose philosophy influenced the Russian Renaissance, Bely absorbed the idea, common to his generation, of a transcendental reality, intuited through symbols. He also absorbed the belief that the current age was at an end and that Russia was about to become the backdrop for a cataclysmic upheaval.44 Bely first came to literary notice with his eccentric prose work Second Symphony (1902), which applied the principles of musical composition to writing. Neither a novel, essay nor poem, Bely composed three further Symphonies, before embarking on his first novel, The Silver Dove (1909). Like Arthur Machen, Bely was obsessed with the clash between western European consciousness and primitive beliefs; in the novel the Moscow poet Daryalsky is tired of the intelligentsia and leaves the city for the countryside, where he joins a mystical sect, the White Doves. Here, under the dominance of their ruthless leader, who, Bely claims, anticipates the real life Rasputin, he is drawn into a disastrous union with the "Mother of God," in an attempt to produce a magical offspring. The novel was well received - in his review Berdyaev wrote that "Modern Russia has produced nothing greater" - and with Valery Briusov, Bely had established himself as a leader of the new Symbolist movement.

  In 1910-1911 Bely and his first wife, Asya Turgenev (niece of the writer) travelled in Italy, North Africa and the Holy Land. Then, in the spring of 1912, Bely met Steiner and became part of his entourage, eventually leaving Russia for Dornach, Switzerland, where he helped build Steiner's Goetheanum, a strangely beautiful work of Expressionist and Art Nouveau architecture.45 Although critical of some Stein- erites, Bely found striking parallels between his own ideas and those of anthroposophy. In a letter to the poet Aleksander Blok - with whose wife Bely had been infatuated - Bely remarked that "Since the autumn of 1911, Steiner has begun to speak of ... Russia, her future, the soul of her people and Soloviev ... He considers Soloviev to be the most remarkable man of the second half of the nineteenth century, knows the Mongol peril, asserts that since 1900 an enormous change has taken place in the world and that the sunsets have changed since that year ..

  Mention of the "Mongol peril" brings us to one of Bely's obsessions: the belief that Russia was threatened on two fronts, by an incursion of Asiatic hordes from the east and by the success of western rationalism and technology, which was absorbing the authentic Slav soul. This concern, often amounting to hysteria, saturates Bely's most well known work, the novel Petersburg (1916). Along with a later novel, the autobiographical Kotik Letayev (1922), begun during his time in Dornach, it is the most anthroposophical of Bely's creative writing.

  Taking place in the days
leading up to the 1905 Revolution, the plot centres around the radical student Nikolai Ableukhov and his father, a senator condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal. Nikolai is given the task of carrying out the sentence, and he does this by the means of a bomb hidden in a sardine tin. This almost comical situation takes place amidst a feverish landscape of secret agents, premonitions, strange dreams and astral journeys, made even more ambiguous through Bely's eccentric syntax. Through it all the initiated reader can find Bely's absorption of Steiner's teaching. Nikolai undergoes an astral voyage during sleep, in which he sees his father as the pagan god Saturn. In Steiner's system, Saturn was the first stage in the evolution of human and cosmic consciousness. The dreaded Mongol appears as well, along with the "old Turanian." Turanians were non-Semitic, non-Aryan nomads who supposedly came to Europe well before the Aryans. In Steiner's system, they are linked with the Mongols, and are responsible for inventing logical reasoning.

  Bely was particularly impressed with a series of secret lectures that Steiner gave in 1912-1913, centred around the `activation of the etheric body'. The `etheric body' is a term Steiner took from theosophy; it refers to a kind of `life field' that animates our physical form; living things rot after death because their etheric body has disengaged from the merely physical form and no longer supports it. Steiner taught that when one begins to sense the etheric body, the feeling is like a sudden expansion into space. "He experiences terror; here no one is spared anxiety; it oppresses the soul; as though one had been hurled into space ..."47 In a chapter called "The Senator's Second Space" Bely describes the weird hypnagogic visions Nikolai's father has on the point of sleep. "This universe always appeared before he fell asleep; and appeared in such a way that Apollon Apollonovich, going to sleep, remembered all the earlier inarticulacies, rustlings, crystallographic figures, the golden, chrysanthemum-shaped stars racing through the darkness . . .s48 And in the section entitled "The Last Judgement," Nikolai also finds himself thrown out into strange cosmic depths.

  There is an hallucinatory flavour to the book, and reading it in long sittings certainly gives the impression of entering another reality. How much Bely himself experienced of similar states, and how much he assimilated from his enormous reading, is unclear. That he was an unstable character is suggested by reports about him. Berdyaev, who knew him well for a time, believed that Bely lived "by a passionate desire to lose his identity altogether," and spoke of his "monstrous disloyalty and treachery." Although undoubtedly brilliant, it was, he said "impossible to rely on Bely in any way whatsoever." He was also something of a "maniac", obsessed by fears, apprehensions, horrors and premonitions, and had a peculiar terror of meeting a Japanese or Chinese.49 Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the classic dystopian novel We (1924) remarked of Bely that "He always left one with the impression of impetuosity, flight, feverish excitement" and summed up his character as "Mathematics, poetry, anthroposophy, fox trot . . ." Bely's own relationship with Steiner went through radical fluctuations. In 1916 he left Dornach and returned to Russia, but Asya Turgenev refused to follow him, choosing to remain with the Doctor.50 A period of disillusionment followed, and Bely publicly repudiated Steiner's work. Then, after enduring severe hardship during the revolution, he returned to Dornach, but was rejected by both Aysa and Steiner. He then spent two depressing years in Berlin, returning to Russia in 1923, where he-married another anthroposophist, Klavdia Vasilyeva, and wrote a series of autobiographical works, one of which, Recollections of Steiner (not published until 1982), paints an idealized portrait of Steiner. Although at first enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks, Bely soon realized that any dreams of a spiritual revolution had been quickly jettisoned, and. unlike his one-time mentor Briusov, he never found a place within the new Soviet machine. He died, a somewhat forgotten figure, in 1934. Petersburg, however, remains a classic, a recognized masterpiece, and one of the great works of high modernism thoroughly drenched in esoteric thought.

  Notes

  1 Maugham's hero, Larry Darrel, is said to be based on Christopher Isherwood, who became a student of the yogi Prabha- vananda in California in the 1930s.

  2 There's reason to suspect that the Ana, Bulwer Lytton's name for his subterranean super-race, influenced Bernard Shaw's late Lamarckian `metabiological Pentateuch', Back to Methuselah. Both works present a superior civilization of mental supermen, who have given up the delights of the flesh in favour of a life devoted solely to the mind. The fact that in his novels Bulwer Lytton often associates the `superior type' with the social out cast - a reflection of his own experience - also has resonances with Shaw, who thought of himself as the complete outsider and who agreed with Nietzsche that the higher evolutionary type would find him or herself beyond good and evil.

  3 See Stapledon's First and Last Man and Starmaker, and the stories making up Lovecraft's `Cthulhu Mythos'.

  4 W.B. Yeats, Preface to H.P.R Finberg's 1924 translation of Axel (London: Jarrods,1925).

  5 H.G. Wells The Food of the Gods (New York: Airmont Publishing Company, 1965) pp. 189-190.

  6 The superman theme would spawn hundreds, maybe thousands of offspring in the fields of sci-fi. Olaf Stapledon's Odd John, A.E. Van Vogt's Slan, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land are only some of the most well known efforts in this area.

  7 The novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley, who read the memorial address following Wells' cremation at Golders Green on 16 August 1946, was another, more unequivocal advocate of Dunne's ideas, as he was of the ideas of P.D. Ouspensky.

  8 To date there is only one full scale book on Blackwood, Mike Ashley's Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (London: Constable, 2001). S.T. Joshi's The Weird Tale (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press) has a long and exhaustive study of Blackwood's work. I have relied on both for the present section.

  9 As late as 1962, Gerald Gough, librarian of the Society of Inner Light, a Golden Dawn offshoot started by the occult psychologist Dion Fortune (Violet Firth), tried to contact Blackwood in a seance. Among others present was the late poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine. Although Blackwood himself was a firm believer in reincarnation, he didn't think that the soul remained intact after death and was disparaging about spiritualism. His own belief was that the individual soul merged back into a kind of collective cosmic mind, from which new souls emerged. These may inherit qualities from the souls that have passed - i.e., reincarnation.

  10 Strangely, Machen and Blackwood were linked by more than magic. Along with gaining mastery of the Golden Dawn, A.E. Waite spent his time as the London manager for Horlick's malted milk company. (Blackwood, we remember, tried his hand at a career in powdered milk.) In 1903, persuaded by Waite, the company issued a popular magazine, The Horlick's Magazine and Home Journal, which ran for eighteen issues. Along with Waite's own contributions were those of Evelyn Underhill (writer on mysticism and member of the Golden Dawn), Edgar Jepson, and Machen, most notably his story "The White People."

  11 Along with other thinkers, like William James and Nietzsche, Ouspensky's book owes a considerable debt to the mathematician Charles H. Hinton. At the turn of the nineteenth century, in a series of successful books and magazine articles, Hinton popularized the notion of a `fourth dimension,' running parallel to our usual three. His work also influenced H.G. Wells, who borrowed the idea for his first novel, The Time Machine. For more on Hinton and Ouspensky, see my A Secret History of Consciousness (Massachusetts: Lindisfarne 2003).

  12 In The Glittering Gate (1914), Dunsany has two burglars breaking into Heaven. After picking the lock on the entrance, they discover nothing but an abyss. "Stars. Blooming great stars. There ain't no heaven ... " one declares.

  13 Mark Amory Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972) p. 46.

  14 Ibid p. 47.

  15 Ibid. p.72.

  16 Disquietingly, Bucke's psychiatric practice included procedures we would today find unacceptable. Early in his
career, endorsing the Victorian belief that masturbation promotes mental disability, Bucke briefly instituted the precedent of `wiring' the penis to prevent his male patients from abusing themselves. The results were equivocal and the practice soon abandoned. Later, he practiced gynaecological surgery as a treatment for insanity in women, again with debatable results. His notions, savage to us, were in keeping with the interest in endocrinology popular at the time, and were prompted by a recognized need for more active methods of treating mental illness. Bucke later abandoned surgery and in his last years developed plans for a self-sufficient therapeutic community, an idea years ahead of its time. For Bucke's contribution to psychiatry see Peter A. Rechnitzer, R.M. Bucke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  17 R.M. Bucke Cosmic Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1966) pp. 9-10.

  18 Sharon Begley, "Religion and the Brain," Newsweek, May 14, 2001.

  19 For more on Gavin Arthur, see my Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. (London: Macmillan, 2001) pp. 337-340.

  20 Bucke p. 4.

  21 Outside of occult circles, Ouspensky's name occasionally turns up in books on popular mathematical science, which often perpetuate the error that he was a mathematician himself. Although he had an interest in mathematics, as did his father, Ouspensky himself was not a professional mathematician; indeed he never held a university position of any kind, and was what we would call a drop out. His speculations on higher space, however, have earned him an infrequent mention, sometimes with unintentionally humorous results. Thus, in Hyperspace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 65-67) the physicist Michio Kaku remarks on Ouspensky's profound interest in multidimensional space, and the influence his ideas had on writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Given that Dostoyevsky died in 1881, when Ouspensky was six years old, his influence must have been great indeed. Yet, as Ouspensky himself had some unusual theories about time, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Dostoyevsky was influenced by Ouspensky. Part of Ouspensky's strange ideas about `eternal recurrence' included an unusual variant on reincarnation, in which upon death, a person incarnates again, but in the past, not the future. So, granting Ouspensky's peculiar views, he may, upon his death in 1947, have reincarnated into Dostoyevsky's time, and thus had upon the novelist the influence Michio Kaku so generously ascribes to him. Eternal recurrence was a central theme of Nietzsche, whose ideas influenced Ouspensky greatly.