by Colin Wilson
I must admit that by this time I was sceptical, but was taking care not to show it. It was beginning to sound like a confidence trick. Then Cunningham astounded me by seeming to read my thoughts. He got up and carefully closed the curtains, brought out a bottle of Chartreuse, produced black coffee, and then said: ‘Now, we can get down to discussing the real problems, and the real nature of our work together.’ (He has this habit of talking as if the two of us were conspirators.) ‘Now, Gerard, tell me what it is that you want most in the world.’ I said that I didn’t particularly want anything, since I had enough money to live and work. ‘Yes, I know you don’t want to be rich. I wasn’t referring to that kind of need, anyway. You know what I mean. What do you want out of life?’
Since I’d been brooding on this, I was able to reply immediately: ‘Some way of intensifying my consciousness tenfold; some way of living more completely.’ He nodded, and said that he knew I was going to make this reply (the funny thing was that I felt he was telling the truth, and that he knew in advance exactly how the conversation would go).
I want to try to record the next part of the conversation as accurately as I can, because I think it proves that, no matter how much of a charlatan he may be, he undeniably has some deep insight, some unusual knowledge of psychology, that he couldn’t have learned in England (I dismiss the possibility that he thought it out for himself; although he is intelligent, he doesn’t strike me as a creative thinker).
First of all, he pointed out to me that I am basically dissatisfied with myself. I have all the things that I once believed would make me ideally happy—I mean ‘a room of one’s own’ and five pounds a week, music and books, and a fairly interesting love-life. And yet I’m bored and unfulfilled. Why? ‘Human weakness,’ I said. ‘Quite. You are right. But what is the exact nature of this weakness?’ ‘Low intensity of consciousness.’ ‘Precisely. Your consciousness is trimmed low, like a tiny candle flame. It doesn’t embrace the things you ought to be grateful for. Consider what happens if you go into a bookshop and find a book you’ve always wanted to own. Your consciousness puts out a kind of arm, a pseudopodium, and envelopes the book. For a few hours—or perhaps days—you are intensely aware of the book. You keep saying to yourself: “I’ve got it at last.” Then your consciousness relaxes; the arm is withdrawn. You get used to the book and no longer feel grateful that you possess it. Am I not right?’ I admitted he was. All this, he said, is a result of the low pressure of our conscious minds. It is like a terribly low gas pressure that won’t boil a kettle. ‘You have many things that you would hate to lose, and yet you are in the strange position of not being at all glad you possess them. Have you never bought a book and forgotten about it; then someone borrows it from you, and your interest in it revives. As soon as it’s returned, you plunge on it and read it from cover to cover. The consciousness has to be constantly stimulated into gratitude by loss.’ I reminded him of Chesterton’s novel about a man who keeps leaving his wife and going off round the world, because it’s so nice when he comes back to her. He said: ‘Precisely. Can you imagine a more terrible indictment of human beings? They exalt love and romanticism as the greatest thing in the world. All their most moving poems and epics are about the tremendous importance of love. And yet when a man is married to a woman he is in love with, he is promptly bored by her. He is not actively and violently bored; he doesn’t want to poison her or push her out of a window; but he can’t help taking her for granted, and losing the first intensity of possessiveness.’ Cunningham then proceeded to the question of the intensification of consciousness, and the achievement of what he called ‘cosmic consciousness’. There are various methods, he said. Drinking, for example. This relaxes us, fills us with a certain spirit of acceptance, intensifies the power of affirmation. But it causes deterioration. The same is true of drugs.
At this point, he asked me if I’d ever tried drugs. I said I hadn’t. ‘Then you must start immediately. It will lend point to what I’m going to say.’ I protested that I didn’t want to try, but I must admit that I felt curious. Cunningham opened a cupboard, came back with a tiny packet, and poured a small amount of a greyish powder on the back of my hand. I sniffed it through my nose as he instructed me. He also took some—about three times as much as he gave me, I noticed. He wouldn’t tell me what it was—said that he only wanted to demonstrate it to me, and didn’t want to get me ‘hooked’ on it. He denied that it was cocaine, although he admitted that it contained cocaine. It made my nose very sore and made me want to cough. I drank some wine to clear my head. After five minutes, it began to take effect. Cunningham was right; it was like turning the control on a gas jet; my consciousness seemed to light up, to expand. The curious thing was that it had no other effect—didn’t give me a pleasant sensation, like alcohol, and didn’t have any effect at all on my mind, except to make my thinking rather clearer.
‘You see,’ Cunningham said, ‘there are quite simple means of intensifying consciousness. But I may as well be frank with you. Their disadvantages are exactly like those of alcohol, only more so. You noticed that I had to take three times as much as you. This is because I have been using it for several years. I’m not hooked on it. I could give it up within twenty-four hours. But then, I am the only person I have ever known who can use drugs without becoming their slave.’
He now became very mysterious. ‘There now remains only one great method that we haven’t mentioned—sex. This is in some ways the most important. To begin with, it has no harmful effect on the body. A man who has spent a lifetime having sexual intercourse is unaffected by it, unlike a drug-taker or alcoholic. Moreover, sex can sometimes produce an intensity of consciousness far greater than anything that can be attained through drugs. The main trouble with the sexual orgasm is that it is too brief. There is no way of prolonging it, and whether we like it or not, the intensity vanishes immediately afterwards.’
The effect of all this talk, with my mind abnormally brilliant from the drug, was indescribable. I had a feeling that I was on the edge of a revelation that would change my life. And Cunningham finished by saying: ‘I have discovered means of prolonging the sexual orgasm for a slightly longer period—about a minute. But this is not enough. And I need two things: leisure to experiment, and an intelligent helper. And I think you could be the helper.’
Up to now, I had been fascinated by him, and convinced that, even if he had no ‘supernatural insight’, he possessed a psychological knowledge that went beyond anything I’d ever met. And yet, just as abruptly, he began to speak in a way that made me think that he was either a fool or a charlatan. I naturally pressed him to tell me more of his method of prolonging the sexual orgasm. He appeared to hesitate for a while, then finally went out of the room, and finally came back with a book bound in leather. The title-page said: The Book of Ceremonial Magic of Abrahamelin the Mage, translated and edited by Caradoc Cunningham. ‘Take this away with you and read it—particularly my introduction. You won’t be able to gather much about the text itself without a certain amount of help.’ I glanced at it, but couldn’t see anything that seemed particularly profound. I noted a few sentences: ‘Among the smaller birds, the magpie is talkative and foretells guests.’ ‘Moreover, the elements themselves teach us fatal events.’ There were various tables giving details about the Tarot pack, the Kaballah, etc. I said: ‘I don’t want to jump to hasty conclusions, but some of this stuff looks like the mumbo-jumbo you can buy in fortune-tellers’ booths for a half-crown.’ He defended it by saying that much of it was symbolic, and required long study. I asked him if he had ever obtained any positive results by magic and he said gravely: ‘Many times.’ ‘But what kind of results?’ ‘I hesitate to tell you. I don’t want to hurry you into this thing too fast. You are naturally sceptical, and your scepticism has to be dissipated little by little. You see, it isn’t a question of some totally new revelation, but of getting you to place slightly different emphases on many things. This will
make everything appear to you in a completely different light.’
He refused to say anything more, but whenever I looked into the book, I couldn’t help feeling that anyone who could translate so much nonsense must be simple-minded. Cunningham plied me with a lot more drink. I took some of it, but soon realized that I’d regret it this morning, so refused to drink more, and said good night. There are no clocks in Cunningham’s room, and I’d left my watch behind. So I was startled as I came out into the street, and discovered it was already dawn. I came back here and slept for a few hours. Since eleven o’clock, I’ve been sitting in bed drinking tea and reading Abrahamelin the Mage. Cunningham’s introduction, and his notes on the various sections, seem to me more interesting than the text itself. But what really astounds me is that he claims in print that it is possible to raise demons, kill people by black magic, cause storms, etc. To do this Abrahamelin bloke justice, he seems to be more of a Jewish mystic than a magician; he includes long prayers to be repeated before the invocations, declares that a man will lose all spiritual power if he attempts to do evil with the magic, and includes a set of rules of ‘preparation’ that include fasting and praying for a week.
After reading most of Cunningham’s own original work in this book, I am disappointed. He strikes me as a romantic who’d like to believe in all this trash. But as far as I can see, the main thing that’s needed is a capacity for self-delusion. It’s all very well talking about magical experiments, but the main trouble about all magic is that it doesn’t produce results. I suppose it was an early form of science. But how can anyone attach any seriousness to a formula for making gold with the dried blood of a newt, two hairs from a witch’s cat, and a number of incantations in Hebrew? The stupidity of the whole thing lies in the desire to make gold in the first place. If gold could be manufactured easily, it would be as worthless as iron. I’m forced to the conclusion that Cunningham has no spiritual perception.
I took the trouble to write out on a sheet of paper a summary of my own aims, which I shall give to Cunningham when I return this book. It will explain my rejection of magic more clearly than any number of criticisms. I copy it out here:
‘I am perpetually aware of the feebleness of my consciousness. I have only one aim: to learn to “pump up” consciousness in the way you can pump up the pressure in a Primus stove. I agree that the sexual orgasm, alcohol and drugs can momentarily raise the pressure of consciousness. But this is like pumping air into a tyre with a hole in it; within a few minutes it’s flat again. I am horrified by the instability and inconsistency of human beings. We seem to have practically no values that don’t change minute by minute. If time could be speeded up fifty times, we would be able to see this amazing lack of direction. This is how it would look: a man groans with hunger; he grabs food, but before it is half-way to his mouth, throws it away and complains of indigestion. He starts to kiss a beautiful girl, but suddenly lashes out and blacks her eye instead, then immediately bursts into tears and begs forgiveness; within a few seconds he is laughing hysterically and jumping up and down. . . . And so on. Scorpions stinging themselves couldn’t be more absurd and inconsistent than human beings. Even the greatest of them talk nonsense, and all philosophers contradict themselves before the end of the book. They preach universal love, then admit that there is often more vitality in conflict, or declare the need for freedom, and end by admitting that men are disgusting idiots who need to be bullied. Nothing we can say about life cannot be negated by another statement that appears equally true. Our moods and mental climates are more changeable than England’s weather.
‘I admit that we have a few negative values that are far more solid and consistent than our positive ones. Waste of life always strikes us as a stupidity, whether it is a man engraving the Lord’s Prayer on a pinpoint, or a man who commits murder for a few shillings and is hanged for it. Cruelty seems to excite a fairly uniform revulsion throughout mankind. But compared with the few things that we know to be bad or worthless, there seem to be millions of contradictory things that we think good.
‘All this feebleness is the outcome of our fluid consciousness, which is too passive. It merely photographs things, and loses the photographs almost as quickly as it takes them. The consciousness never seems strong enough to see meanings in things; all it can do is just observe blankly. It is like staring at a page of a book in a foreign language. We seem to be crippled; there is an awful paralysis in our feelings, our values. A man can return to a place he has longed to see after ten years, and experience absolutely no emotion; his feelings are paralysed. A soldier returns from the war; he has been dreaming of home for years and re-reading every letter fifty times; within a fortnight he is quarrelling with his wife and going out to get drunk to forget his boredom.
‘I am perpetually aware of this, and I realize that the only answer is an internal strength so enormous that certain values would be quite permanent. A man with such strength would love life with an unimaginable intensity, and his love of life would provide a stimulus for striving after still greater strength. Only this paralysis of consciousness stops us from marching down the road towards the superman.’
That, I think, is as clearly as I have ever expressed my central obsessions. At least Cunningham has stimulated me to that extent.
Later: After writing the above—it was about two in the afternoon—Cunningham arrived. I immediately showed it to him while I went to make tea. When I came out again, he was excited, said that I had proved myself to be one of the ‘new men’, and asked me if he could use it in his new book on magic. Naturally, I said I’d be delighted. He then insisted on taking me out for a meal (I hadn’t eaten since getting back this morning). We took a taxi to Fleet Street, and went to Cunningham’s club for a drink. Here, a great many people seemed to know him, and I got the impression that he’s popular. Only one thing struck me as odd. We went downstairs for a meal, and Cunningham went out to the lavatory. Immediately, a small, dark man who was dining with a platinum blonde came over to my table and bent over me in a conspiratorial manner. He asked me if I knew Cunningham well. I was surprised, and said that I’d known him for a week. At this point, he thought he heard Cunningham coming back down the stairs, and thrust a card into my hand, asking me to telephone him later. He then rushed back to his own table. However, it turned out that it was only the waiter coming downstairs. He sat there for another five minutes; still there was no sign of Cunningham. So he plucked up courage again, darted over, and asked me if I’d give him my phone number. I told him I didn’t have one, but managed to tell him my address as Cunningham reappeared in the stairs. He went back to his table and I saw him writing it down immediately. I don’t know whether Cunningham saw him, but if he did, he didn’t mention it to me, and I didn’t speak of it either. Ten minutes later, as the little man got up and left, Cunningham noticed him and stared after him rather hard; however, he said nothing. He seemed to be in a talkative mood, and very gay. He drank lager instead of his usual wine, and explained that he’d been drinking too much wine recently and that it was impairing his clairvoyant powers. I asked him about these, and he talked with a quite new candour. I set it down here because I’ve never encountered any similar case.
Cunningham explained that when he was about ten, he was at a private school. His mother came to visit him one day, and said: ‘Guess what I’ve brought for you?’ Cunningham said that he replied: ‘Wait, don’t tell me. Let me tell you. You’ve brought me an antique ring, and you bought it in that shop in the Old Brompton Road where we both stopped last time I was in London.’ Cunningham said that he hadn’t consciously ‘read her mind’; it was simply that he had a sudden strong impression that he knew what she was going to give him, and could see where she bought it. His mother was astounded; she had, in fact, bought him a curious ring in the shape of two snakes twisted together, since she knew he was fascinated by snakes (‘symbol of forbidden wisdom’, he explained). After this, Cunningham
said, he found in the school library a book by Rudolph Steiner about the development of ‘occult powers’, which explained how the soul should be sent into ‘outer space’ every night on the point of falling asleep; it also explained that the drinking of wine was ruinous to these powers. Now it happened that at this time, Cunningham was anaemic, and was always made to drink a glass of some ‘tonic wine’ before he went to bed. He knew it was no use explaining his reasons for refusing wine to the housekeeper; but he contrived things so that he could manage to pour the wine away without her seeing. He also practised the method explained by Steiner. Within a few days, he was aware that his powers were developing. When the boys set out to go to play cricket with another school, he suddenly knew for certain that one of them would not return that night; he told this to one of the boys. The boy laughed, but nevertheless told various others, who began to tease Cunningham about ‘ghosts’. However, they were all greatly impressed when, in fact, the boy did not return to school that night; he had been hit on the head by the cricket ball and was taken into hospital with a slight concussion. Cunningham, however, was clever enough to realize that he would only awaken a lot of tiresome curiosity if he paraded his powers too openly. He was therefore the first to declare that the whole thing had been coincidence, and took care not to say anything more about his second sight. But from then on, it functioned fairly regularly for several years. Only one evening, he inadvertently gave himself away to a friend. They had a gramophone in his room and were playing a Beethoven symphony. The friend started to look through a pile of records, when Cunningham said unthinkingly: ‘No, it’s not there. I lent it to Smith minor.’ He realized when he’d said it that his friend had not actually said he was looking for the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. His friend looked startled and said: ‘What?’ and Cunningham tried to retrieve his mistake by saying: ‘I thought you said you wanted to hear Beethoven’s Fifth, so I assumed you were looking for it.’ His friend was satisfied—until suddenly, Smith minor walked into the room with an album and said: ‘Here’s your Mendelssohn Violin Concerto back.’ The friend said later: ‘You did know what I was looking for, didn’t you?’ but Cunningham insisted that he had only made a lucky guess. All the same, he developed something of a reputation at school for spooky powers, and found this a nuisance when boys kept approaching him about the results of the next football match.