A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  Every intention which does not assert itself by deeds is a vain intention, and the speech which expresses it is idle speech. It is action which proves life and establishes will. Hence it is said in the sacred and symbolical books that men will be judged, not according to their thoughts and their ideas, but according to their works. We must do in order to be ...

  Magical operations are the exercise of a natural power, but one superior to the ordinary forces of Nature. They are the result of a science and a practice which exalt human will beyond its normal limits ... But in order to work miracles we must be outside the normal conditions of humanity; we must be either abstracted by wisdom or exalted by madness, either superior to all passions or outside them through ecstasy or frenzy. Such is the first and most indispensable preparation of the operator .. .

  Man can be modified by habit, which becomes, according to the proverb, his second nature. By means of persevering and graduated athletics, the powers and activity of the body can be developed to an astonishing extent. It is the same with the powers of the soul. Would you reign over yourselves and others? Learn how to will. How can one learn how to will? This is the first arcanum of magical initiation, and that it might be realised fundamentally the ancient custodians of sacerdotal art surrounded the approaches of the sanctuary with so many terrors and illusions. They recognised no will until it had produced its proofs, and they were right. Power is justified by attainment. Indolence and forgetfulness are the enemies of will, and for this reason all religions have multiplied their observances and made their worship minute and difficult. The more we deny ourselves for an idea, the greater is the strength we acquire within the scope of that idea ... What seek you therefore from the science of the Magi? Dare to formulate your desire, then set to work at once, and do not cease acting after the same manner and for the same end. That which you will shall come to pass, and for you and by you it has indeed already begun ... An idle man will never become a magician ...

  Initiation is a preservative against the false lights of mysticism; it equips human reason with its relative value and proportional infallibility, connecting it with supreme reason by way of analogies. Hence the initiate knows no doubtful hopes, no absurd fears, because he has no irrational beliefs; he is acquainted with the extent of his power, and he can be bold without danger. For him, therefore, to dare is to be able. Here, then, is a new interpretation of his attributes: his lamp represents learning; the mantle which enwraps him, his discretion; while his staff is the emblem of his strength and boldness. He knows, he dares and is silent. He knows the secrets of the future, he dares in the present, and he is silent on the past. He knows the failings of the human heart; he dares to make use of them to achieve his work; and he is silent as to his purposes. He knows the significance of all symbolisms and of all religions; he dares to practise or abstain from them without hypocrisy and without impiety; and he is silent upon the one dogma of supreme initiation. He knows the existence and nature of the Great Magical Agent; he dares perform the acts and gives utterances to the words which make it subject to human will, and he is silent upon the mysteries of the Great Arcanum.

  So you may find him often melancholy, but never dejected or despairing; often poor, never abject or miserable; persecuted often, never disheartened or conquered. He remembers the bereavement and murder of Orpheus, the exile and lonely death of Moses, the martyrdom of the prophets, the tortures of Apollonius, the Cross of the Saviour. He knows the desolation in which Agrippa died, whose memory is even now slandered; he knows what labours overcame the great Paracelsus, and all that Raymond Lull was condemned to undergo that he might finish by a violent death. He remembers Swedenborg simulating madness and even losing his reason in order to excuse his science; Saint-Martin and his hidden life; Cagliostro, who perished in the cells of the Inquisition; Cazotte, who ascended the scaffold. Inheritor of so many victims, he does not dare the less, but he understands better the necessity for silence. Let us follow his example; let us learn diligently; when we know, let us have courage, and let us be silent.

  From A Season in Hell

  ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  EXCERPTS

  A Season in Hell

  Formerly, if I remember rightly, my life was a banquet, at which all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

  One evening I took Beauty upon my knees. - And I found her bitter. And I insulted her.

  I have armed myself against justice.

  I have fled. Oh enchantress! Oh misery! Oh hatred! - it is to you that my treasure has been entrusted.

  I am succeeding in banishing all human hopes from my mind. In order to strangle all joys I have sprung upon them stealthily like a wild beast.

  I have summoned the executioners, in order, while perishing, to gnaw the buttends of their guns. I have summoned scourges so as to stifle myself with sand and blood. Misfortune has been my god. I have stretched out in the mud. I have become dessicated in the air of crime. And I have played fine tricks with madness.

  Spring has taught me the idiot's hideous laughter.

  Now, finding myself, quite recently, on the point of croaking, I thought of seeking for the key of the ancient feast, so that I might, perhaps, recover my appetite.

  Charity is that key. - This inspiration proves that I have been dreaming.

  "Thou shalt remain a hyena, etc ..." exclaimed the demon who crowned me with such pleasing poppies. "Attain death with all your appetites, with your egoism and every capital sin."

  Ali! I have endured too much: - But, dear Satan, a less irritated leer, I beg of you! - and awaiting one or two little belated villanies, I detach for you - you who love the absence of the descriptive or instructive faculties in a writer - these few hideous sheets from my notebook - the notebook of one of the damned.

  A Night in Hell

  I have swallowed a terrible draught of poison. - Thrice blessed be the advice which has been given me! - My vitals are burning. The violence of the venom twists my limbs, deforms, and strikes me down. I am dying of thirst. I am choking. Not a cry can I utter. This is hell, the eternal punishment, Behold how the fire flares up! I burn properly. So be it, demon!

  I had glimpsed conversion to goodness and happiness - salvation. May I be able to describe the vision, for the atmosphere of hell will not suffer hymns! There were millions of charming creatures, a sweet spiritual concert, strength and peace, noble ambitions - what more do I know?

  Noble ambitions!

  And this is still life! If damnation is eternal! A man who wishes to mutiliate himself is indeed damned, is he not? I believe I am in hell, therefore I am. That is the fulfilment of the catechism. I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have created my own and your own misfortune. Poor innocent one! Hell cannot attack the pagans. That is life once more! Later, the delights of damnation will be more profound. Quick - a crime, that I may fall into nothingness, in the name of the human law.

  Silence! - wilt though be silent? Shame and reproach are here: Satan says that fire is ignoble, that my anger is hideously stupid. Enough! ... Errors, enchantments, false perfumes, puerile music are suggested to me. And to think that I possess truth, that I behold justice. I possess a sane and fixed judgment; I am ripe for perfection ... Pride - My scalp is drying up! Pity on me! Lord, I am full of fear. I am thirsty, so thirsty! Ali! Childhood, with the grass and the rain, the lake amidst the stones and the moonlight when the steeple struck twelve ... the devil is in the bell-tower at that hour. Mary! Holy Virgin! ... My dreadful stupidity.

  Are they not honest souls over there who wish me well ... Come ... I have a pillow over my mouth and they hear me not: they are phantoms. Moreover, no one ever thinks of his neighbour. Let no one approach. Certainly I smell of burning.

  Hallucinations are innumerable. This is indeed what I have always had: no more faith in history, and forgetfulness of principles. I will be silent on that score, for poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am a thousand times richer, so let me be as avaricious as the sea.

  Ali! Come now -
a short time ago the clock of life stopped. I am no longer in the world. - Theology is serious, hell is certainly down below - and heaven on high. Ecstasy, nightmare, slumber is a nest of flames.

  When mentally alert in the country, what malice is displayed ... Ferdinand, Satan keeps pace with the wild seeds ... Jesus walks on the purplish brambles without bending them down ... Jesus walked on the troubled water. The lantern showed him to us, a white figure with brown tresses, upright by the side of an emerald wave ...

  I am going to unveil all the mysteries: religious or natural mysteries, death and birth, the future and the past, cosmogony and nothingness. I am a master in phantasmagoria.

  Listen!

  I possess all talents! There is no one here and there is someone: I would not distribute my treasures. Do you wish for native songs, houri dances? Would you like me to disappear and dive in search of the ring? Is that your wish? I will produce gold and remedies.

  Place your trust, then, in me, for faith relieves, guides and cures. Come, all of you - even little children - that I may console you and pour forth his heart - that marvellous heart - for your sake! Poor men and workers! I do not ask for prayers; with merely your confidence I shall be happy.

  And let us think of myself. This makes me regret the world but little. I am lucky not to suffer more. My life was wholly made up of sweet acts of folly, and that was regrettable.

  Bah! Let us make every imaginable grimace.

  We are decidedly outside the world. There is not a single sound. My sense of feeling has disappeared. Ali! My chateaux, my Saxony, my willow-wood. The evenings, mornings, nights, days ... How tired I am!

  I was bound to have my hell for anger, my hell for pride - and the hell consequent on caresses. A veritable concert of hells.

  I am dying of weariness. The tomb awaits me. I am travelling to that horror of horrors - the worms. Satan, old blade, you wish to dissolve me with your charms. I demand, I demand! - a prod with your pitchfork and a drop of fire.

  Ali! Once more to ascend to life! To look on our deformities. And this poison, this thousand-times-cursed kiss! My weakness and the world's cruelty! My God, pity! Hide me. I make too poor a resistance! I am hidden and yet I am not.

  The fire is flaring up with its damned one.

  Alchemy of the Word

  As regards myself. The story of one of my follies.

  For a long time I boasted of being in possession of every possible landscape, and found modern celebrities in painting and poetry derisive.

  I was fond of idiotic paintings, frieze-panels, decorative pieces, mountebank canvases, sign-boards, popular coloured prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, ill-spelt erotic works, the novels of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little juvenile books, old operas, foolish refrains, and silly rhythms.

  I dreamed of crusades, voyages of discovery of which there were no records, republics without a history, suppressed wars of religion, revolutions in morals, migrations of races and displacement of continents. I believed in all enchantments.

  I invented the colour of the vowels! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green - I regulated the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I prided myself on having fashioned a poetice diction accessible, one day or other, to all understandings. I reserved the translation.

  It was, at first, a study. I wrote on the subject of silences and nights. I noted the inexpressible. I fixed the frenzies.

  Far from birds and flocks and village girls, kneeling in the heather, surrounded by tender hazel-woods, amidst the warm green haze of the afternoon, what did I drink?

  What could I drink - voiceless young elms, flowerless greensward, overcast sky! - in that young Oise? Drink from those yellow gourds, far from my hut, Darling? Some golden liquour which caused one to perspire.

  I fashioned an incoherent tavern signboard. - A storm swept across the sky. At eve the waters of the woods lost themselves amidst virgin sands. The wind of God drove the icicles into the ponds.

  Weeping, I beheld gold - and I could not drink.

  The old lumber of poetics played a great part in my alchemy of the word.

  To hallucination pure and simple I became habituated. In the place of a factory I saw a mosque; I saw a school for drummers made by angels, coaches on the roads of heaven, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake. The very title of a vaudeville raised up terrors before me.

  Then I explained my magic sophisms by the hallucination of words.

  I ended up by finding the disorder of my mind sacred. I became idle, a prey to heavy fever: I envied the blissfulness of the animals - the caterpillars, who represent the innocence of limbo, and the moles, the repose of virginity!

  My character became embittered. In songs of sorts I said farewell to the world:

  The Song of the Highest Tower

  I adored the desert, sunburnt orchards, tarnished shops, lukewarm drinks. I loafed in stinking lanes, and with closed eyes offered myself to the god of fire - the Sun.

  "General, if an old cannon on thy ruined ramparts remains, bombard us with blocks of dry earth. The plate-glass windows of splendid shops! And the drawing rooms! Make the town eat dust. Oxidize the gargoyles. Fill the boudoirs with the power of burning rubies ..

  Oh! gnat intoxicated in the village urinal, enamoured with borage, and whose destruction comes with a ray!

  Hunger

  At last - 0 happiness, 0 reason - I dispelled the dark azure from the sky, and lived - a golden spark of light and nature. Joyfully, I assumed an expression as ludicrous and deluded as can be:

  I developed into an incredible opera: I came to see that all beings feel an invincible necessity for happiness; that action is not life, but a way of making a mess of some force, an enervation. Morality is cerebral weakness.

  It seemed to me that to every being several other lives were due. This man doesn't know what he is doing: he is an angel. That family is a litter of dogs. In the presence of several men I conversed aloud with a moment of their other lives. And thus I loved a pig.

  None of the sophisms of insanity - the insanity which is put under restraint - have been forgotten by me. I can repeat them all. I possess the system.

  My health was threatened. Terror set in. I fell into slumbers lasting several days, and continued the saddest dreams on rising. I was ripe for death, and along the road full of dangers, weakness led me to the boundaries of the world and the Cimmerian land of darkness and whirlwinds.

  To divert the enchantments which had settled on my brain, travel was obligatory. And on the sea, which I loved as though it might cleanse me of defilement, the consolatory cross arose before my eyes. I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my torment: my life would ever be too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty.

  Happiness! Its tooth, sweet at the point of death, warned me by the crowing of the cock - ad matutinum, to Christus venit - in the darkest cities:

  That is all over now. The power to greet beauty is now within my ken.

  From Petit poemes en prose

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  THE TEMPTATIONS, OR EROS AND PLUTO AND GLORY

  Two superb Satans and a She-Devil, not less extraordinary, mounted last night the mysterious staircase by which Hell assaults man's weakness when he sleeps, and communicates with him secretly. So they came and posed before me gloriously upright as if on a platform. A sulphurous splendour emanated from these three personages who detached themselves against the opaque darkness of the night. They looked so proud and so full of domination, that at first sight I took the three of them for real Gods.

  The face of the first Satan was of an ambiguous sex; he had also, in the lines of his body, the softness of the ancient Bacchus. His large languishing eyes, whose colour was tenebrous and uncertain, were like scented violets still wet with the rain of the storm, and his half-opened lips were like warm perfume boxes - from which exhaled strange odours; and whenever he sighed, musty insects took fire, as they flew from the
ardours of his breath.

  Around his purple tunic was corded, like a girdle, a caressing serpent who, with lifted head, turned languorously towards him his eyes that were like living embers. To this living girdle were suspended, alternating with phials with sinister liquours, shining knives and surgical instruments. In his right hand he held another phial which contained something luminously red, and which had for label these bizarre words: "Drink, this is my blood, a perfect cordial." In the left hand he held a violin which one supposes served him as an instrument on whose strings he could make vibrate his sorrows and his pleasures, and so spread abroad the contagion of his folly over midnight Sabbats. Around his delicate ankles trailed several rings of a broken chain of gold, and when the trouble which came from them made him lower his eyes, he gazed with intense vanity on the nails of his feet, brilliant and polished like precious stones. He gazed on me with his inconsolably broken-hearted eyes from which flowed an insidious intoxication, and he said to me in a singing voice: "If you desire, I can make you lord of souls, and you shall be the master of living matter, even more than the sculptor can be with his beings of clay: and you shall know the pleasure, forever reborn, of escaping yourself so as to forget yourself in others, and to attract other souls until they are conjoint with you."

  And I answered him: "Many thanks, but I don't know what I would do with this precious pack of beings who, no doubt, are of no more value than my own little self. In spite of the fact that I have some shame in remembering myself, I don't want to forget anything. And even if I couldn't recognize you, old monster, your mysterious cutlery, equivocal phials, and the chains around your feet, are symbols which explain clearly enough the inconveniences of your friendship. Please keep your presents."

  The second Satan had none of this tragic and smiling aspect, none of this fine insinuating manner, none of this delicate and precious beauty. He was large, with a fat, eyeless head, and his heavy stomach weighed down his thights. Every inch of his skin was gilded and illuminated, as if it were tattooed, with a crowd of moving figures representing the myriad forms of universal misery. There were little emaciated men who were writhing, suspended from a nail. Deformed gnomes with supplicating eyes asked for alms with outstretched hands. There were even little mothers, who wore round their waists the remnants of abortions. And these were not all.