A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  Pessoa's poetry is aptly described as the central work of Portuguese modernism, and for this alone he deserves his belated recognition. But Pessoa wrote more than poems. His legendary trunk contained a wealth of miscellaneous writings on philosophy, sociology, history, literary criticism, as well as short stories, plays, treatises on astrology and a variety of auto biographical reflections. But in addition to the usual material produced by a writer, Pessoa is unique in that he also wrote as other writers and poets. These he called heteronyms, coining the term to distinguish it from the common pseudonym. Pessoa was not simply writing poems and prose under a different name: the various heteronyms he created were individuals with their own history, biography, personal characteristics and unmistakable literary style.

  For a solitary individual, living alone in small rooms, to occasionally talk to himself seems not unusual. In Pessoa's case, what began as a childhood game of having conversations with imaginary characters1' - "nonexistent acquaintances," he called them - became in later years an obsession with depersonalization and the fracturing of the self. Indeed, Pessoa's grip on his own self was so tenuous that at one point he took to writing his old teachers and schoolmates in Durban, posing as the psychiatrist Faustino Antunes, asking for their opinion on the mental state of his patient, Fernando Pessoa who, depending on the letter, had either committed suicide or was under restraint at an asylum. Having no idea who he was, Pessoa hoped to gain some insight from those who knew him.

  Pessoa lived with a constant fear of madness. At the age of twenty he wrote that, "One of my mental complications - horrible beyond words - is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity."' This fear was complicated by an equally distressing inability to act. "I suffer - on the very limit of madness, I swear it - as if I could do all and was unable to do it, by deficiency of Will.,, 12 Pessoa was one of the most costive of writers: his inexhaustible trunk, filled with the plans of hundreds of uncompleted projects, is testament to this. This "purely negative" characteristic, as he called it, was complemented by an interior world seemingly without ballast. In a "Personal Note" for 1910, Pessoa announced that, "I am now in possession of the fundamental laws of literary art." Neither Shakespeare nor Milton had anything left to teach him. In consequence of this, "My intellect has attained a pliancy and a reach that enable me to assume any emotion I desire and enter at will into any state of mind." Yet this easy command of interior states came at a price. "For that which it is ever an anguish and an effort to strive for, completeness, no book at all can be an aid.""

  Given this imbalance between an inability to do and a fluctuating sense of self, it's small wonder that Pessoa would compensate for this by inventing - if that's the correct word - an altogether straightforward, absolutely uncomplicated and unselfconscious alter ego. In a letter to the editor A. Casais Monteiro, Pessoa explained how his heteronyms came about. In 1912, after an unsuccessful attempt at writing "pagan poems" Pessoa was nevertheless left with a vague idea of their author. This was not himself, but Ricardo Reis, an Epicurean classicist who was the urbane, sophisticated disciple of yet another invented poet, Alberto Caeiro.14 Caeiro arrived after Pessoa tried, again unsuccessfully, to invent a kind of nature poet. As Pessoa writes:

  On the day when I finally desisted - it was the 8th of March, 1914 - I went over to a high desk and, taking a sheet of paper, began to write, standing, as I always write when I can. And I wrote thirty-odd poems straight off, in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I cannot define. It was the triumphal day of my life, and I shall never have another like it. I started with a title - `The Keeper of Sheep'. And what followed was the apparition of somebody in me, to whom I at once gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the absurdity of the phrase: my master had appeared in me. This was the immediate sensation I had.15

  Other heteronyms and poems followed soon after: the aforementioned Ricardo Reis; the futurist Alvaro de Campos (both, like Pessoa himself, disciples of Caeiro); Alexander Search, Thomas Crosse and Charles Robert Anon, all Englishmen; Jean Seul, a Frenchman; the astrologer Raphael Baldaya; the Baron of Teive (like Pessoa, unable to finish anything, except his own life when he committed suicide); the pagan Antonio Mora; Bernardo Soares, ostensible author of the interminable Book of Disquiet, and many more. Although new heteronyms continue to emerge, the central cast is made up of Caeiro, Reis, de Campos and Soares, with occasional appearances by Pessoa himself. Caeiro, who as a bucolic poet of sheer immediacy was the polar opposite of Pessoa, espoused a philosophy of complete unreflectiveness, a Portuguese variant of Zen satori.'6 "My mysticism is not to try to know/It is to live and not think about it," Pessoa's master wrote, something Pessoa himself found impossible to do. This Zen quality led the Catholic monk Thomas Merton to translate some of Caeiro/Pessoa's verse and show them to the Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki.

  Even without Pessoa's occult interests, which we will examine shortly, his account of the appearance of Alberto Caeiro is enough to suggest something paranormal. `Ecstasy', `apparition', `master': all three suggest something along the lines of possession, mediumship and Madame Blavatsky's spiritual guides, although Pessoa himself was critical of theosophy and was even advised during a session of automatic writing to, "Read no more theosophical books." (His heteronym Raphael Baldaya attacked Blavatsky savagely in a predictably unfinished essay.) Although in the next decade surrealists like Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Robert Desnos all practised automatic writing and Breton himself was a reader of Eliphas Levi and other occult writers - their interest in it was in a sense more political than occult, or even poetic, seeking, as it were, an open avenue to the `repressed' unconscious. Pessoa, however, for a time at least took the practice seriously, influenced in this by his Aunt Anica, a devoted student of the occult, with whom he lived between 1912 and 1914. Between 1916 and 1917, Pessoa engaged in a series of automatic writing sessions, making contact with several intelligences: Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, a character named Wardour and a dark figure called the Voodooist. While interesting biographically, Pessoa's automatic writings - accomplished sometimes with a planchette - lack the inspiration of his heteronymic efforts; most of them are encouragements to lose his virginity (sadly ineffective) and admonitions about his habit of masturbation. "Very soon you will know what you have courage for - namely, for mating with a girl," Henry More informed him. "You masturbator! You masochist! You man without manhood! ... You man without a man's prick!" another astral interlocutor opined." On other occasions these sessions produced a variety of occult signs and symbols, Masonic and kabbalistic insignia whose meaning troubled Pessoa.

  Along with automatic writing, Pessoa developed other occult skills. Writing to his Aunt Anica in June 1916, Pessoa informed her that, along with becoming a medium, he had developed other paranormal powers. One of these was a kind of telepathy. When his great friend Mario De Si-Carneiro was in Paris, going through the emotional crisis that led to his suicide at 26 - downing several vials of strychnine - Pessoa, he told his aunt, felt Si-Carneiro's anguish there, in Lisbon, being overwhelmed by a sudden depression. But his great achievement was the development of `etheric vision.' "There are moments," ... he told his aunt:

  when I have sudden flashes of `etheric vision' and can see certain people's `magnetic auras' and especially my own, reflected in the mirror, and radiating from my hands in the dark. In one of my best moments of etheric vision ... I saw someone's ribs through his coat and skin ... My `astral vision' is still very basic, but sometimes, at night, I close my eyes and see a swift succession of small and sharply defined pictures ... I see strange shapes, designs, symbolic signs, numbers ..."

  Like Gerard de Nerval, Pessoa had an interest in occult history and was fascinated by secret societies and organizations. One form this took was an attack on the Salazar government's proposed ban on freemasonry; in the Didrio de Lisboa for 4 February 1935, Pessoa published an article on "Secret Associations," defending freemasonry and, by association, other occult societies. In Pessoa's occult history of the world, f
reemasonry was the contemporary embodiment of a mystical dissension that began in ancient times with the Gnostics. A lifelong opponent of Christianity, Pessoa saw the "Gnostic heresy" surface at different periods in history, appearing as the kabbalists of 12th century Spain, the Knights of Malta, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the alchemists, and, in most recent times, freemasonry. Rosicrucianism, however, was perhaps his favourite branch of this esoteric tree. In "At the Tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz" Pessoa wrote that:

  Although there is no traceable connection between the Gnostics and the Rosicrucians - several centuries separate them in time - Pessoa associated the Gnostic idea of the fallen world and the den-ii-urge responsible for it, with the 17th century followers of Christian Rosenkreuz.

  Although Pessoa did know a few people who shared his occult interests, most of his contact with other occultists was via correspondence. Of these, the most celebrated was Aleister Crowley. In recent times, the extent to which Pessoa read Crowley and actually modelled his own ideas about secret societies on accounts of Crowley's own groups, has become the subject of historical research.20 Pessoa first made contact with Crowley when he wrote to the Great Beast, pointing out an error in the natal horoscope published in Crowley's notorious Confessions (Pessoa was a keen astrologer and at one point considered pursuing the craft professionally). Crowley replied and the two poets exchanged letters and writings; Pessoa even translated Crowley's "Hymn to Pan" into Portuguese. In September 1930, Crowley arrived in Lisbon, with his current Scarlet Woman. The couple quarrelled and Crowley's girlfriend left the country, leaving a deflated Great Beast behind. Crowley then enlisted Pessoa's aid in faking a suicide. Leaving a forlorn lover's note at the Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell) - a treacherous rock formation on the coast west of Lisbon - Crowley implied that he had taken his own life by leaping into the sea. Pessoa explained to the Lisbon papers the meaning of the various magical signs and symbols that adorned Crowley's suicide note, and added the fact that he had actually seen Crowley's ghost the following day. Crowley had in fact left Portugal via Spain, and enjoyed the reports of his death in the newspapers; he finally appeared weeks later at an exhibition of his paintings in Berlin. Given Pessoa's frail ego, it was more than likely a blessing that his association with the Great Beast was brief.

  What Pessoa actually believed is a difficult question. In the letter describing the birth of his heteronyms, he also enlarged on his occult ideas. "I believe in the existence of worlds higher than our own and in the existence of beings that inhabit these worlds," he wrote, and went on to say that he believed that, "we can, according to the degree of our spiritual attunement, communicate with ever high beings. i21 But for Bernardo Soares, things are not so clear. "I spent frightful nights hunched over tomes by mystics and kabbalists which I never had the patience to read except intermittently ... The rites and mysteries of the Rosicrucians, the symbolism of the Kabbalah and the Templars ... all of this oppressed me for a long time." This led to an "almost physical loathing for secret things ... secret societies, occult sciences ... the pretension certain men have that, through their understandings with Gods or Masters or Demiurges, they and they alone know the great secrets on which the world is founded." But what really troubled the author of The Book of Disquiet is that all these mystic masters were such atrocious stylists. "When they write to communicate ... their mysteries," he said, "[they] all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language." Yet Satanists alone are not at fault. "To have touched the feet of Christ," Soares tells us, "is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation. ,12

  Rene Daumal

  Sometime in the year 1924 the precocious French poet Rene Daumal soaked a handkerchief in carbon tetrachloride - a powerful anaesthetic he used for his beetle collection - and held it to his nostrils. Instantly the sixteen-year-old felt himself "thrown brutally into another world," a strange dimension of geometric forms and incomprehensible sounds, in which his mind "travelled too fast to drag words along with it."zs

  It was his first encounter with what he would later call "absurd evidence": proof that another existence lies beyond the conscious mind. Obsessed with the mystery of death, Rene was determined to peek at "the great beyond." When the anaesthetizing effects of the fumes proved too great, Rene's hand would drop from his face and he would regain consciousness, his mind reeling - and his head aching - from his recent plunge into somewhere else.

  Daumal took these trips hundreds of times, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, always with the same result: the conviction that he had briefly entered "another world." It is almost certain that the repeated use of carbon tetrachloride started the weakening of his lungs with led to his death from tuberculosis in 1944 at the age of 36.

  Born in 1908 in the forests of the Ardennes, not far from the Belgian border, like his hero, the equally precocious Arthur Rimbaud (with whom he shared an early death, a fascination with drugs, and an interest in the occult), Daumal was educated at Charleville. Early on he displayed two lifelong characteristics: a brilliant intellect and an obsession with the "beyond'. This last manifested itself at a young age in a fascination with death. At the age of 6, Rene kept himself awake, caught in the stranglehold of `nothingness'. This early confrontation with the void led to exhausting experiments with entering dreams while still awake and strenuous attempts at `lucid dreaming'.24 They also led to his teenage attempts at suicide as well as the basic themes of his first collection of poetry, Counter Heaven, for which he won a literary prize in 1935.

  In his early years, Rene found scant opportunity to discuss these matters. Although his paternal grandfather was a Mason who started his own esoteric lodge, most adults gave Rene's existential concerns little thought. But during his teens, Rene was not alone. When his family moved to Reims and entered the boy in the lycee, Rene met three other young mental voyagers who shared his taste for metaphysical speculation. In 1922, with Roger Vailland, Robert Meyrat, and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Rene started a kind of secret society.

  The Simplists, as they called themselves, became inseparable, and along with reading decadent poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, they also studied works on occultism and theosophy and carried out experiments in parapsychology and magic, some of which included the use of hashish and opium. In one experiment, Daumal walked alone for hours with his eyes closed, strangely avoiding obstacles in his path. Other experiments included astral travelling, shared dreams, precognition, attempts to open the third eye, and a form of second sight called "paroptic vision."

  In these experiments, Daumal revealed an uncanny ability to determine the identity of objects with his eyes closed in a darkened room while wearing tight-fitting, blackened goggles. During these sessions Daumal would be hypnotized; he would then hold his hands near the objects, or place them on a specially covered box containing some item. Daumal could see the images on book covers and even sense colours by the temperature they gave off.

  In 1925 Daumal entered the prestigious Lycee Henri IV in Paris, to prepare for examinations to enter the Ecole Normale Superieure. One of his professors was the philosopher Emile Chartier, better known under his pen-name Alain. Along with his work in mathematics, philosophy, science and medicine, Daumal studied Sanskrit, mastering the language in three years, composing a grammar and beginning several translations. He also read the works of the traditionalist Rene Guenon and wrote a series of essays on Indian aesthetics, posthumously published as Rasa (1982).

  At the time of Daumal's studies in ancient traditions, however, Paris was a hotbed of modernism, and ho group was more vociferous than the surrealists, who shared with him a fascination with the occult and paranormal. In 1927, Daumal suffered a fall which led to a period of amnesia; this prevented him from taking his entrance examinations, so he began a course of free studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. There he met the Czech painter Joseph Sima and the Siberian-born, naturalized American Vera Milanova, who later became his wife. With the poet And
re Rolland de Reneville and the other Simplists, the nineteen-year-old Daumal embarked on the short-lived literary review for which he is most remembered in France today, Le Grand Jeu (The Big Game).

  The wild blend of Guenon, Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics, occultism and arcane scholarship in Le Grand Jeu posed a threat to surrealism. When the first issue appeared in 1928, surrealism had been around for a decade, but had lost momentum in endless squabbles over politics and egos. The Simplists, scarcely out of their teens, calling for a "Revolution of Reality returning to its source" and claiming to speak the same word as "uttered by the Vedic Rishis, the kabbalist Rabbis, the prophets, the mystics and the great heretics of all time and the true Poets," were bound to attract the older group's attention.25 Overtures were made to bring them into the fold, but Daumal firmly declined. Andre Breton, deep into Marxism, retaliated by openly criticizing Le Grand Jeu for its ideological failings. Daumal, unfazed, answered that Breton should beware of "eventually figuring in the study guides to literary history."