by Gary Lachman
22 Although J.B. Priestley would have like to, he was never able to arrange a meeting with Ouspensky, for the basic reason that Ouspensky rejected the idea. Nevertheless, in his plays Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before, as well as in books like Man and Time and his last, Over the Long, High Wall, Priestley made use of and popularized Ouspensky's ideas - always, as Ouspensky had done with Gurdjieff, acknowledging their originator and source. It is unfortunate, in my view at least, that post-Gurdjieff Ouspensky seemed to have developed a powerful anti-social attitude, sometimes bordering on paranoia. Had he made the gesture and met with Priestley, his last days may not have been so tragic; indeed, they might not have been his last days at all.
23 He also believed that the name most suited to becoming famous with was one with a dactyl followed by a trochee, such as Benjamin Franklin.
24 Books about Crowley are numerous. The best remains John Symonds' The Great Beast (1951), most recently revised and reissued as The King of the Shadow Realms, Aleister Crowley his Life and Magic (1989). A more recent account is Martin Booth's A Magick Life (2000). For a life of Crowley from the point of view of a devotee, see Israel Regardie's The Eye in the Triangle (1970) .
25 Aleister Crowley The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (New York: Bantam Books, 1972) p. 7.
26 Martin Booth Introduction to Aleister Crowley Selected Poems (London: Crucible, 1986) p. 17.
27 For a full account of Neuberg's relationship with Crowley, see Jean Overton Fuller's The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg.
28 Doubts about how Machen is pronounced once prompted Cyril Connolly to remark that, "If I had been Arthur Machen, I would have added "rhymes with Bracken" to my signature by deed-poll, for nothing harms an author's sales like an ambiguity in the pronunciation of his name."
29 Machen lost his job with the Evening News in 1921 when he wrote a premature obituary of Lord Alfred Douglas. Reported dead, Machen's obituary used the word "degenerate;" Bosie, however, was very much alive and sued. The Evening News had to pay £1,000 in damages and Machen was fired.
30 Machen, however, did not think much of Wilde, referring to him as "an obese French washerwoman."
31 Maupassant was also generous to less successful writers, and for a time supported Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
32 Charcot was also apparently a great collector of what we might call demonic erotica, and spent his leisure time perusing the works of Felicien Rops and other less well known outre artists.
33 An English translation of "The Horla" appeared in a collection called Modern Ghosts in 1890, predating Wells' The Invisible Man by seven years. There had, of course, been fairy and folk tales involving invisibility for generations, but Maupassant's might be the first to offer a scientific account of the condition.
34 The name became so associated with Maupassant that he gave it to the balloon in which he travelled from Paris to Holland in July 1887, christening it `Le Horla'. An astute careerist, the stunt helped to publicize the collection of stories containing the tale.
35 Yet of the two Strindberg is clearly the more profound. For all his technical brilliance, Maupassant, like his contemporaries the Impressionists, lived on the surface, and his vision of life is shallow. Colin Wilson's remark that he is "the most brainless of all the great writers" is perhaps not an overstatement.
36 He was, of course, a considerable painter and water colourist.
37 It was around this time that Yeats met Strindberg and later remarked in his memoirs that when he met the playwright he was "searching for the Philosopher's Stone."
38 Characteristically, the story of how Meyrink pitched the novel to Kurt Wolff, its publisher, is, as we might expect, the stuff of legend. "I remember Meyrink's visit well," Wolff recalled, "a gentleman of aristocratic appearance and impeccable manners, with a slight limp. He had the honour, he said of proposing that the firm accept his first novel, although no typescript of it was available yet. He had recorded it on a dictating machine ... (but) he had brought along a handwritten copy of the first chapter. He wished to reach an agreement on the novel at once, before returning to Munich the following day. He would not demand the usual royalties, but instead desired immediate payment of ten thousand marks as a lump sum, in return for all rights and editions ... Would I be so kind, he asked, as to read the pages ... and to make a decision?
"Taken aback and embarrassed, I read the folio pages ... and was then expected ... to say yes or no I found the situation absurd, wanted to show I was equal to it - and said yes." (Kurt Wolff A Portrait in Essays and Letters ed. Michael Ermarth (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press) ), pp. 12-13.
39 Meyrink was a friend of Friedrich Eckstein, the Viennese esotericist who, legend has it, first introduced Rudolf Steiner to the doctrines of theosophy, passing on to Steiner a copy of A. Sinnet's Esoteric Buddhism.
40 Anthroposophy means the "wisdom of man" as opposed to theosophy's "wisdom of the gods".
41 For an interesting perspective on Steiner's first marriage to the widow Anna Eunicke, see James Webb's The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1976), p. 64.
42 Nicolas Berdyaev Dream and Reality (London: Geoffrey Bles,1950) pp. 192-194. Berdyaev's autobiography is a key document on the Russian fin de siecle, and Steiner was not the only occultist or mystic to receive his animus. As an eccentric Marxist, Nietzschean, and Russian Orthodox existentialist, it isn't surprising he would find fault with much of what went on in the "highly charged and intense atmosphere of the early 20th century Russian cultural renascence." Berdyaev was highly critical, for example, of the sway Dirmtri Merzhkovsky and his wife, the poet Zinaida Hippius, had on the sensibility of the time. Merzhkovsky, who blended speculations on sex and a coming God-Man with Atlantis "lived in an atmosphere of unhealthy, self-assertive sectarian mysticism." His wife, with whom Berdyaev enjoyed a brief friendship, had "a profound understanding of others, blended with a capacity for inflicting pain on them. There was something snake-like about her. She was fragile, subtle, brilliant and entirely devoid of human warmth." Pp. 144-145.
43 Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), the son of an eminent historian who was also a priest, abandoned his early materialist philosophy after he underwent the first in a series of mystical experiences involving a vision of the Divine Sophia. In 1872 in the second-class carriage of the Moscow-Kharkov train Soloviev saw the young girl who sat across from him become a living embodiment of the divine Woman. Prompted by this, Soloviev abandoned his scientific studies at Moscow University and enrolled at the Ecclesiastical Academy. In 1874 he published a book entitled The Crisis of Western Philosophy which argued that western philosophy arrived through rational knowledge at the same truths affirmed by spiritual contemplation. He then embarked on a study of Swedenborg. In 1874, during a sabbatical year, he studied Hindu, Gnostic and medieval texts at the British Museum, where he had the second vision of Sophia. Inspired by his experience, Soloviev promptly set off on a journey to Egypt, where he attracted some attention by wearing his long black overcoat and top hat in the summer heat. During a visit to Bedouins in the Suez desert - he believed they possessed certain secret kabbalistic teachings - he was abandoned and spent the night alone. The smell of roses awoke him in the morning, and he had the third visitation of Sophia. Returning to Russia he preached a doctrine of `integral life' and received some support from Dostoyevsky. In the last years of his life he was obsessed with apocalyptic visions and wrote a book War, Progress and the End of History and a short story "The Antichrist."
44 "... he had had occasion to develop a paradoxical theory about the necessity of destroying culture, because the period of obsolete humanism was over and cultural history now stood before us like weathered marl; a period of healthy brutishness was beginning, pushing forth out of the depths of the people (the hooliganism, the violence of the Apaches ...) All the phenomena of contemporary reality were divided by him into two categories; the symptoms of an already obsolete culture and the signs of a healthy barbarism ... Chri
stianity is obsolete: in Satanism there is a crude fetish worship, that is, a healthy barbarism ..." Andrei Bely Petersburg (London: Penguin Books, 1995) translated by David McDuff, p. 399.
45 Work began on the Goetheanum in 1913 and was completed in 1920. On New Year's Eve 1922 the building, made entirely of wood and featuring immense twin cupolas, burnt to the ground; the cause of the blaze is still unknown, but there have been persistent rumors that it was begun by proto-Nazi groups in an act of occult warfare. In 1928, three years after Steiner's death, the second Goetheanum, made of reinforced concrete, was opened. Also designed by Steiner, it still stands today and remains the centre of the anthroposophical movement.
46 Quoted in David McDuff's introduction to his translation of Petersburg p. xix.
47 Petersburg p. xix.
48 Ibid. p.179.
49 Berdyaev pp. 195-196.
50 Asya Turgenev, a talented artist, remained devoted to Steiner, and her work on the glass engravings for the windows of the second Goetheanum can be seen in Dornach today.
The Modernist Occultist
"In all the poets of the modern tradition, poetry is a system of symbols and analogies parallel to that of the hermetic sciences."' Without doubt true of poetry, this remark by Octavio Paz could easily be said of many other art forms in the modern tradition as well. Among novelists, painters and musicians, in a variety of ways, art in the modern period took on an arcane and esoteric character leading to a profound chasm between an increasingly difficult avant garde and an increasingly baffled general public.' The reasons for this are diverse. For literature, the growth in literacy and the audience for popular entertainment it created certainly played a part. With fiction and other literary forms falling prey to commercial interests and the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator, serious writers sought out new and unavoidably difficult means of communicating their insights. With the inflation of their currency - language - this led to a search for a means of expression not yet appropriated by the burgeoning print medium. Newspapers, popular fiction and magazines churned out words by the million, and the worn coins of everyday speech were less and less able to communicate anything more than the most commonplace meanings. The reaction to this among writers and poets ranged from the protracted syntax of Proust or Hermann Broch, to the brusque onomatopoeia of Marinetti or Hugo Ball, to zaum, the meaningless "language of the future" spoken by Velimir Khlebnikov and other members of the Russian avant garde. The parallels in painting and music are likewise clear. To give two examples, Wassily Kandinsky's abstract canvases moved away from an art that represented an external world no longer able to reflect a spiritual reality, and toward the immediate communication of an inner one; while at the same time his friend Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music dismantled the structure of a played out western harmony and, like Kandinsky's paintings, presented a new and startling avenue to the artist's own troubled psyche.
This dichotomy between an increasingly difficult art and a growing middle-brow demand for product is an outcome of the cul-de-sac reached via the route of Symbolism. As the external world became little more than a symbol of a higher, spiritual plane, and the artist the interpreter and high priest of this hidden reality, the means of communication required a greater and greater purity, a medium uncluttered with the gross manifestations of the physical world. This eventually led, as mentioned earlier, to Mallarme's blank page and Malevich's white canvases. It also led to artists seeking out new mythologies to house the meaning and significance no longer contained by the overused emblems of the past. In his Lectures on Aesthetics the philosopher Hegel argued that art would eventually dwindle to something like decoration and entertainment. Hegel argued that as Geist, the world-spirit, continued to evolve, the brief but glorious marriage between the inner and outer worlds exemplified by the art works of classical Greece would necessarily split asunder. Gothic art, with the soaring cathedral spire as its most paradigmatic symbol, led in Hegel's own time to Romanticism and the aesthetics of the strange and bizarre. By the 20th century, Romanticism had been played out and when artists did not retreat into silence, they adopted other methods of holding together the chaos of the modern era.'
Novelists like James Joyce took the framework of classical mythology and superimposed it on the banal experiences of a modern day everyman. The ironic double-exposure of Ulysses, however, proved a dead end and in Finnegan's Wake Joyce produced an extended full-stop to the experimental novel. Starting with an attempt to perceive four-dimensionally, cubism later turned, in the work of Kurt Schwitters, to no longer painting cigarette packs, but fixing them directly to the canvas. This eventually led to Andy Warhol and the notorious Brillo box by way of Duchamp's urinal. Yet other mythologies were also available, and one in particular found many adherents: the occult. As a case in point, two of the artists mentioned above, Kandinsky and Schoenberg, were both deep readers in different schools of occultism. Kandinsky's theories on colour and form presented in his essay On the Spiritual in Art were profoundly influenced by the ideas of theosophy and Rudolf Steiner. And in his unfinished oratorio Jacob's Ladder, Schoenberg, a reader of Swedenborg by way of Balzac's Seraphita, depicts Heaven as seen by Swedenborgian angels who, no matter which way they turn, always face God.' "Whether right, left, forward or backward, up or down - one has to go on without asking what lies before or behind us," Schoenberg's angel Gabriel remarks.
To do justice to all the artists and writers in the 20th century who adopted various forms of occultism as either a framework for their creativity or, in many cases, an actual world-view, would require a separate book. In painting a very brief run through would give us, along with Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian,Joseph Beuys, and Nicholas Roerich; and in music, along with Schoenberg, Alexandre Scriabin, Gustav Holst, Olivier Messiaen, John Cage 5 and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In literature, with which we are principally concerned, the list would include Yeats, Thomas Mann, Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Ezra Pound, John Cowper Powys, William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Hart Crane, Lawrence Durrell, Jorge Louis Borges, David Lindsay ", Stefan George, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jiinger, Andre Breton, J.B. Priestley, Walter Benjamin, Christian Morgenstern, John Fowles, Saul Bellow, lain Sinclair, Robert Irwin, Colin Wilson and several others!
What I propose to do in the remaining section is present a selection of modern authors who either practised a form of occult or esoteric discipline, possessed to some degree what we would call occult powers, or developed an occult or mystical philosophy or world-view to offset the increasingly reductive scientific orthodoxy of the modern era. Personal preference and space has, of course, had a hand in my selection, but I've also tried to choose writers who are not as well known as some others associated with the occult: Yeats, for example, or, in more recent times, Eliot and Pound.' That The Waste Land includes references to Madame Blavatsky ("Madame Sosostris"), the Tarot, the Grail legend, Hesse's essay on "Russian Man" and elements of Hinduism is well known. What is not as well known is that Eliot attended P.D. Ouspensky's early London talks and that later poems, like the Four Quartets, contain references to time that could well have served as basic themes in Ouspensky's lectures. "In my end is my beginning," captures Ouspensky's ideas on eternal recurrence in a single sentence. Although Eliot later spurned his early fascination with the occult, finding a haven in tradition and the Church of England, his example shows that, far from an outmoded form of superstition, the occult was very modern indeed.
All of the writers I've chosen wrote poetry as well as fiction, though some were better known for one form rather than another.
Fernando Pessoa
Until relatively recently, the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was little known, but in the last few years he's been rediscovered by several critics, mostly on the strength of various translations of his Livro do Desassossego or Book of Disquiet, a collection of unfinished angst-ridden texts found in a trunk after Pessoa's death. The fragmentary nature of these writings - jotted on scraps of paper, the backs of enve
lopes, the reverse side of other manuscripts and other odd places - makes Pessoa a prime postmodern figure, and the trunk, whose contents are still being catalogued (it contained some 25,000 items) has taken on the same mythical character as the valise Walter Benjamin carried on his fateful escape from Vichy France.`' Like Benjamin, in many ways Pessoa's posthumous celebrity is founded as much upon his life as upon his work. In Benjamin's case, his life embodies the myth of the Jewish intellectual on the run from the Nazis. In Pessoa's the story is less political; not only does he embody the disjointed, fractured postmodern ethos in his work, but in his very psyche.
Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and aside from his childhood and adolescence spent in Durban, South Africa, upon his return to Lisbon in 1905, he never left the city again. After his father died from tuberculosis when Fernando was five his mother soon remarried, and her husband received a post at Durban as the Portuguese consul. Educated at an English high school, Pessoa proved a precocious child and brilliant student, and his early schooling instilled a lifelong love for England and English literature. In later years he took to behaving and dressing with "British restraint", and The Pickwick Papers was, he said, his constant companion. His command of English (also French) was impeccable, if eccentric, and his first published book was a collection of his English poems. As his translator John Griffin remarks, these are of little interest poetically and they received courteous but unenthusiastic reviews from The Times and Glasgow Herald. Although he published articles and poems in several literary magazines, aside from his English efforts, the only other book of Pessoa's to be published in his lifetime would appear in 1934, the year before he died. Mensagem (Message) is an extended esoteric poem arguing for the return of Dom Sebastiao, Portugal's King Arthur, and for Portugal's pre-eminence in a coming Fifth Empire of the spirit. Espousing Pessoa's peculiarly mystical patriotism, the book received a consolation prize in a national competition. This was a late and slightly backhanded recognition of Pessoa's genius, something that, as often happens, would only become common knowledge after the poet's death. Supporting himself as a freelance translator of English and French correspondence for several commercial firms, after a lonely, solitary life, spent in relatives' houses or in rented rooms, Pessoa, who more than likely remained a virgin, died in 1935 from acute hepatitis brought on by heavy drinking.