A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  Daumal emerged from the skirmish intact, but both he and Le Grand Jeu were not in good shape. By 1929, his childhood friend Roger Gilbert-Lecomte had succumbed to the drug addiction that would eventually kill him. Daumal himself was barely scratching out an existence, living in poverty, losing his teeth, and feeling the ravages of his various experiments. If Daumal rejected Breton's solicitations, it was not from lack of need for a father figure. He was merely waiting to meet a more remarkable man.

  On 30 November at the Cafe Figon on the Boulevard St. Germain- a man whom Joseph Sima recognized from a previous collaboration sat at a table drinking calvados and beer, and drawing odd Arabic and Oriental designs. Sima approached his acquaintance and introduced the famous artist Alexandre de Salzmann to his young friend Rene. De Salzmann, a world-renowned authority of theatre lighting and set design, engaged Daumal and the others in conversation. Then, after a few minutes, he proposed a test: he asked the group to hold their arms straight out at the side for as long as they could. Several minutes later only Daumal's remained in the air. De Salzmann smiled and said, "You interest me." Daumal had met his remarkable man.

  Since 1918, Alexandre de Salzmann and his wife Jeanne had been students of the enigmatic Russian guru Gurdjieff. Born into an aristocratic family in Tiflis, Georgia, like Gurdjieff, de Salzmann had a colourful past, part of which included being kidnapped by brigands as a teenager. He claimed to have lost his teeth when falling from a mountain while in the service of a Russian Grand Duke. However, like Gurdjieff, de Salzmann enjoyed frequent leg-pulling and his many claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet he certainly shared one character trait with his master. de Salzmann was a remarkably versatile man, enthusiastic about everything. When Daumal first encountered him, he described de Salzmann as a "former dervish, former Benedictine, former professor of jiujitsu, healer and stage designer. ,2

  After studies in Moscow, de Salzmann headed for Munich, where he became involved in the Art Nouveau movement, becoming friends with Rilke and Kandinsky and contribut= ing illustrations to important journals like Jugend and Sim- plicissimus. It was here that he met the composer Thomas de Hartmann, who would later introduce him to Gurdjieff. In 1911 he went to Hellerau, where he developed a new system of stage lighting; among others, the poet Paul Claudel was captivated by his work. It was also there that he met his wife Jeanne, a teacher of eurhythmics; after Gurdjieff s death in 1949, she became the central living exponent of "the work."

  de Salzmann's relationship with Gurdjieff was ambiguous. At the time of de Salzmann's death from tuberculosis in 1933, Gurdjieff had apparently cut off his student of fifteen years, refusing to visit him as he lay dying in a hotel room. When the weak sickly man finally summoned the strength to confront Gurdjieff, his master all but ignored him. Whatever the esoteric meaning behind Gurdjiefl's behaviour, this incident must remain one of the darkest in the history of "the work."

  When the twenty-one-year-old Daumal met de Salzmann, he had no doubt his moment of destiny had arrived. Gurdjieff had been in France since 1922, directing the activities at his famous prieure in Fontainebleau, where, ironically, another young writer, Katharine Mansfield, also died of tuberculosis. But by 1924, Gurdjieff had suffered a mysterious car accident and had lost interest in his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Instead he laboured at the monumental Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, gaining inspiration from copious amounts of black coffee and armagnac.

  When Daumal met de Salzmann, the artist was making a living as an interior decorator and antique dealer. Still thirsting for the absolute, Daumal now drank greedily from one of its living wells. Rene and Vera spent endless nights talking with de Salzmann about Gurdjieff, and eventually de Salzmann appeared in fictional form in Daumal's two allegorical novels. La Grande Beuverie (1938), translated as A Night of Serious Drinking, was started during Daumal's brief stay in New York while working as a press agent for the Indian dan= cer Uday Shankar, and was a send up of the various artistic movements at large in Paris in the years between the wars. Although the novel, like Daumal's early experiments with carbon tetrachloride, is concerned with intoxicated states, Daumal's preface states his aesthetic and philosophical credo with admirable concision: "I refuse to accept," he writes, "that a clear thought can ever be inexpressible." Unlike most of the surrealist texts, Daumal's work is characterized by clarity and directness. While much of the automatic writing produced by Breton, Desnos and others is almost unreadable, Daumal's deceptively simple prose remains immediately accessible. This is especially true of his later, unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952), in which de Salzmann appears as Professor Pierre Sogol.

  After de Salzmann's death, Rene and Vera threw themselves into "the work" with a dedication that troubled their friends. In a house in Seves, a suburb of Paris, Jeanne de Salzmann set up a kind of mini-prieure, a communal home dedicated to Gurdjiefl's teachings. There, with the orientalist Philippe Lavastine and a few others, Rene and Vera pursued the difficult task of `waking up'. They struggled through Gurdjiefl's "movements," incredibly difficult physical exercises designed to tap unused energies and overcome "sleep," and investigated the effect of music on the human organism. Yet during this time Daumal's health deteriorated; his rotting teeth were pulled and he became deaf in his left ear. He kept his failing body and growing soul together by contributing to L'Encyclopedie Franfaise and through translations of Hemingway and D.T. Suzuki's Essays on Zen Buddhism.

  In 1938 Daumal began to work with Gurdjieff directly, attending the famous dinners in Gurdjieffs tiny flat on the rue de Colonel Renards. This was a turning point in his life sadly parallelled by another: in the same year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Daumal rejected treatment and refused to enter a sanatorium.27

  In 1940 Germany invaded France. Vera was Jewish, and for his remaining years, Daumal eked out an increasingly precarious existence, constantly on the run from the Gestapo and the Vichy government. In 1941 tubercular arthritis developed in his left foot; two years later a synovial tumour erupted and the resulting infection caused him excruciating pain. Like his hero Rimbaud, for the last six months of his life Daumal was unable to walk. In the end malnourishment and a punishing habit of chain-smoking Gauloises killed him. In April 1944 Daumal died. An uncompleted sentence in the manuscript of Mount Analogue marks the point at which his quest for the absolute ended.

  Subtitled A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Mount Analogue resists final interpretation. A riveting marvel tale, it is also a modern day Pilgrim's Progress. Led by Professor Sogol, eight adventurers board the yacht Impossible to discover the invisible but "absolutely real" Mount Analogue, a symbol of spiritual pursuit. Though it is hidden from ordinary eyes, Sogol pinpoints its location through a series of supra-logical deductions involving the curvature of space.

  Convinced of the necessity of Mount Analogue's existence, the crew eventually arrive. And although "long expectation of the unknown lessens the final effect of surprise," the group's first encounter with their destination was nevertheless extraordinary:

  ... while we waited tense in the bows with the sun behind us, a wind rose without any warning, or rather a powerful suction suddenly pulled us forward, space opened ahead of us, a bottomless emptiness, a horizontal abyss of air and water impossibly entwined. The boat creaked in all its timbers and was hurled forward unerringly along a rising slope as far as the centre of the abyss and was suddenly set adrift in a wide calm bay, in sight of land.""

  A flotilla of boats manned by Europeans came out to meet them, and the leader led them to a white house where, in a bare room with a red tile floor, a man in mountain dress received them. He asked them some obvious questions which, unexpectedly, the group found very difficult to answer:

  Each one of his questions - all of them very simple: Who were we? Why had we come? - caught us completely off our guard and seemed to probe our very insides. Who are you? Who am I? We could not answer him as we would a police official or a cu
stoms inspector. Give one's name and profession? What does that mean? But who are you? And what are you? The words we uttered - we had none better - were worthless, repugnant and grotesque as dead things.Z"

  They soon discovered that all authority on Mount Analogue is in the hand of the mountain guides, and, by what seemed a miracle of coincidence, that they had landed on a spot, Port o' Monkeys, peopled by Frenchmen, like themselves. There were no natives on Mount Analogue; everyone there came from somewhere else. And although there wasn't "a single quadrumanous species in the region," their harbour nevertheless had its odd name. "I find it hard to describe my reaction," the narrator remarks, "but that name summoned up in my mind, rather disagreeably, all my heritage as a twentieth-century Occidental - something curious, imitative, shameless, agitated. Our port of arrival could not have been any other than Port o' Monkeys."s0

  But perhaps the strangest discovery was the material the inhabitants used for money. Before arriving, the crew had been troubled about what they might use to barter with the natives. They knew that for bartering with "primitive" people, travellers bring along a supply of trinkets: penknives, mirrors, combs, pipes, souvenirs, and other assorted junk. But in trying to trade with "the superior beings of Mount Analogue" such items would be useless. What did they possess of real value? With what could they pay for the new knowledge they would receive? For some time before arriving, each member of the crew made a "personal inventory" and as the days passed, each felt himself poorer, for "no one saw anything around him or in him which really belonged to him.""

  This problem was solved when the group was told of the peradam, strange, nearly invisible crystals that symbolize the rare and difficult truths found on the spiritual path, and which can also serve as an emblem of Daumal's equally lucid prose:

  There is found here, rarely on the lower slopes and more frequently as one ascends, a clear and extremely hard stone, spherical and of variable size. It is a true crystal and - an extraordinary instance entirely unknown elsewhere on the planet - a curved crystal ... this stone is called peradam. It may mean . . . `harder than diamond', as is very much the case or else `father of diamond'. And some say that diamond is in reality the product of the disintegration of peradam by a sort of squaring of the circle or ... cubing of the sphere. Or else the word may mean `Adam's stone' and have had some secret and profound complicity with the original nature of man.32

  One of the peradam's most remarkable characteristics is that its "index of refraction" is "so close to that of air." Only the trained eye can discover them, but "to any person who seeks it with sincerity and out of true need it reveals itself by a brilliant sparkle like that of a dewdrop."33 These nearly invisible stones - reminiscent of the lapis sought by the alchemists - are the only material things of any value on Mount Analogue.

  Although the novel's fragmentary character is in keeping with Gurdjieff's "work" - Ouspensky's own masterpiece In Search of the Miraculous was originally titled Fragments of an Unknown Teaching - the fact that Daumal didn't live to finish it is a tragedy. But before his death he left an outline of the remaining chapters. "At the end," he said, "I want to speak of one of the basic laws of Mount Analogue. To reach the summit, one must proceed from encampment to encampment. But before setting out for the next refuge, one must prepare those coming after to occupy the place one is leaving. Only after having prepared them, can one go on up.''34 The title of the last chapter was to be "And You, What Do You Seek?" Like Daumal's narrator faced with the questions of the mountain guide, his readers may have found this simple request difficult to fulfil.

  O. V. de L. Milosz

  The name Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, like that of Villiers d'Isle-Adam, is not one frequently heard these days, although the efforts of his nephew, the Nobel Prize winning Czeslaw Milosz, to remedy this fact have been considerable. Milosz, like Villiers, although Polish and Lithuanian by ancestry, wrote some of the most eloquent French prose, and he also shared with Villiers two other characteristics. His writing is suffused with an hermetic and mystical doctrine reaching back to previous ages; and his family line began with the Serbian aristocracy of medieval times. Milosz set much store by this noble ancestry, as his adoption of the heraldic title de Lubicz attests; yet, unlike Villiers, this aristocratic lineage did not prevent him from coming to grips with the world, as his long and honoured diplomatic service to the Lithuanian government makes clear.35 Yet, like Villiers, one could say of Milosz that he existed in the flesh only out of sheer politeness. "One," he wrote, "can get used to everything: the important thing is to live as little as possible in what is called the world of reality. ,36 Milosz took this suggestion to heart, and for much of his life he spent his time in the imaginative realms of Goethe, Plato, Swedenborg and Dante, his masters on the road to illumination. He learned his lessons well, and on a cold winter night on 14 December, 1914, Milosz had a mystical experience which transfigured himself and his work. His close friend, Carlos Larronde, the theatrical producer, recalled speaking to Milosz soon after his enlightenment. Emerging from a week's long seclusion, Milosz opened the door to his small apartment and, greeting Larronde in the hallway said, "I have seen the spiritual sun."37 For some, Milosz's mystical writings are simply obscure, but sympathetic readers of his arcane and difficult esoteric works are prone to agree with this brief account of his experience.

  O.V. de L. Milosz was born on 28 May 1877 on the vast family estate of Czereia, Lithuania. His father was a PolishLithuanian nobleman, his mother was Jewish, and his paternal grandmother Italian: along with his noble blood, Milosz had from the start the mix of races and ancestry that would lead his translator and editor Christopher Bamford to speak of him as "that almost impossible creature ... a fully realized Occidental, a true son and heir of the West ...s3s This crossroads of nationalities would emerge later in Milosz's fluency in several languages; by the age of twelve he spoke Polish, German and French perfectly, and to these was soon added English. (In later years he learned Hebrew and a Bible in that language was for a long time his bedside reading.) Along with fitting him for his future diplomatic service, this polyglot background prepared Milosz for the many translations he would make throughout his career, rendering Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Schiller, Mickiewicz, Pushkin, Lermontov and others into his adopted tongue. It also foreshadowed Milosz's fate as a national and spiritual wanderer, a destiny that, as the critic George Steiner remarked, is the defining characteristic of modern poets. Although at home in several tongues, finding a dwelling in a geographic place always proved a challenge to Milosz. This is one reason why, in later years, he adopted the calling of the Noble Traveller, an honorific given to Cagliostro, St.Germain, and other spiritual wanderers of the occult enlightenment whose "itineraries, though apparently haphazard, rigorously coincided with the adept's most secret aspirations and gifts ... 39

  Milosz's childhood was unhappy; his father, wilful, anarchistic and atheist, suffered from a serious nervous disorder, and his mother's "materialistic and uncomprehending solicitude" sent the boy wandering alone through the vast parks of the family estate. Milosz later remarked that the affection he would have naturally had for his parents was siphoned off to others around him. He was particularly fond of his paternal grandparents, as well as his nurse Marie and his tutor Stanislas Doboszynski, who introduced him to Polish literature.

  At the age of twelve, Milosz accompanied his parents to Paris, where his father was treated by the famous Dr. Charcot. A few months later, his parents returned to Warsaw, leaving Milosz behind as a student at the Lycee Janson de Sailly. Under the direction of Edouard Petit Milosz proved a brilliant student, but his education as a poet came from other hands. At thirteen Milosz was immersed in Lamartine, Baudelaire, Poe, as well as Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin, Byron, Shelley, Mickie- wicz and Slowacki. At eighteen Milosz was a regular at the Kalissaya, the first American bar in Paris, where he often shared a table with Oscar Wilde. On one occasion, Wilde is reported to have introduced Milosz to an acquaintance. Sitting at a table with
George Moore, Ernest Lajeunesse, and the poet Moreas, Wilde saw Milosz come in and, turning to his friend said, "This is Moreas, the poet. And that is Milosz - poetry- itself

  Milosz joined in the discussions about "pure poetry" at the Kalissaya and another literary haunt, the Napolitaine. But for all his neo-Romanticism, Milosz was dissatisfied with talk of art for art's sake. In a letter to his great friend Christian Gauss, Milosz spoke of being "horribly sad ... with a sadness that nothing can vanquish." "This life," he. wrote, "is horribly empty with its anxious loneliness surrounded by the idiots of the Napolitaine and the Kalissaya ..."41

  A few months later, on 1 January 1901, Milosz made a suicide attempt. "On the first of January ... towards eleven o'clock in the evening - with perfect calm, a cigarette at my lips - the human soul is, after all, a strange thing - I shot myself in the region of the heart with a revolver," he later wrote Gauss.41 He bungled the job, but his doctors didn't believe he'd recover. Miraculously he did. The next year he was recalled to Lithuania, to take up his responsibilities upon his father's death. By this time he had written and published his first collection of poetry, The Poem of Decadences, a timely title that does little justice to the poems themselves. It was also by then that articles recognizing Milosz's genius began to appear.

  Between 1904 and 1914 an independently wealthy Milosz wrote, published and travelled. In 1905, he witnessed the aborted Russian Revolution; that same year he sold off his family estate to a government company engaged in parcelling out land to the peasants. (He invested the profits in Tsarist bonds; although he would live on their interest for some years, with the Bolshevik revolution, the move would prove disastrous.) In 1906 The Seven Solitudes as well as the fantasy prose poem "The Very Simple Story of Mr. Trix-Trix, Clown," was published. Between that year and 1910, Milosz wandered through Germany, Russia, Poland, England (which, like Pessoa, he loved immensely), Italy, Spain and North Africa. Although this life of the Noble Traveller had its joys - spiritual as well as carnal - Milosz felt this time was sterile. A sense of this emerges in his erotic mystical novel Amorous Initiation, which depicts in lush, poetic prose the ascent of its narrator from a demeaning obsession with a Venetian cour-. tesan to the pure love of the absolute, a theme Milosz would return to over the years.42 Although Milosz is known to have had several affairs, some inspiration for the novel certainly came from the unrequited love he felt for Emmy Heine-Gelder, a distant relative of the poet Heinrich Heine. Thirteen years his junior, Emmy, "the only woman I loved," rejected Milosz and married instead a younger man. The experience affected Milosz profoundly, and for the rest of his life, the idea and nature of love, "the hard labour of the dream," would be his central poetic concern.