‘Magick,’ said Aleister Crowley, its most notorious modern exponent, ‘is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with the Will.’ He was echoing the thought of his nineteenth-century predecessor Eliphaz Levi (of whom he believed himself to be a reincarnation): ‘Would you learn to reign over yourself and others? Learn how to will. How can one learn to will? This is the first arcanum of magical initiation …’ He added that the force of will is ‘as real as steam or the galvanic current’. Yet Crowley’s biographer John Symonds once remarked: ‘The only trouble with magic is that it doesn’t work’—an attitude that reflects the view of the majority of people. It is common sense not to believe in magic.
But it is worth pausing to ask: why is it common sense? The answer is: because our everyday experience offers no support for the claims of people like Crowley. But then, everyday experience offers little support for the claims of will either. In order to call upon the uninhibited force of the will, you must want something intensely. And few of us experience really powerful desires—except, perhaps, in a state of sexual excitement.
Modern civilisation induces an attitude of passivity. When a Stone-Age hunter set out to trap wild animals, he was aware of his will as a living force. When the prehistoric farmer scored the surface of the earth with a crude plough, he knew that his family’s survival through the winter depended on his effort, and his will responded to the challenge. When a modern city dweller walks down a crowded thoroughfare, he feels no sense of challenge or involvement. This city was built by other people; all these shops and offices are owned by other people. He can get through an ordinary day’s work in a state approximating to sleep. Most of his routine tasks are carried out by the ‘robot’. There is neither the opportunity nor the need to use the will.
There is a simple experiment that anyone can carry out to demonstrate the role of the will; it was described once by Dr C. E. M. Joad on a BBC Brains Trust programme. In a Gloucester pub, Joad overheard someone asserting that any four people could lift a seated person with their index fingers alone. He then saw this demonstrated on the landlord—an enormous man, who was lifted easily by four fingers placed under his armpits and knees. (One of the lifters was the landlord’s small daughter.)
The procedure is for the chosen subject to sit in a chair, while the other four attempt to lift him by placing index fingers under his knees and arms. It is, of course, impossible. Then the four persons place their hands on top of his head in a ‘pile’, taking care that no person’s hands should be next to one another. They should concentrate hard for about a quarter of a minute, then, at a signal, remove their hands, place fingers under the subject’s knees and arms, and try again. This time, the seated person rises effortlessly into the air. Joad mentioned that he had tried it many times and watched fat men sailing towards the ceiling.
There is some controversy about why this works, as it undoubtedly does. In The Mysterious Unknown, Robert Charroux asserts darkly that ‘it cannot be explained by physicists any more than by metaphysicians’. He seems to believe that it is some accumulation of will-force during the period of concentration. Others assert that no concentration is necessary. Joad says that the experiment should begin with each of the four laying their hands separately on the subject’s head. The likeliest explanation is that the sudden concerted effort produces intense concentration, which supplies the necessary strength for the few split seconds during which it has to be exerted. We arouse ourselves momentarily from our ‘robotic’ state.
But it is worth keeping our minds open to alternative explanations. A dowser friend showed me a similar experiment, which he claimed depended on ‘earth forces’. He held out his right arm parallel to his body, and told me to try to pull it down, using both hands; I succeeded without too much difficulty. He then began to shake his arm to remove all its muscular tensions, beginning by shaking the hand until it moved loosely on the wrist, then the forearm, then the whole arm. Again he raised the arm, and told me to try to pull it down. This time, it was impossible; the arm seemed to be made of rock. He explained that as he stretched the arm, pointing at the horizon, he tried to imagine that earth forces were moving up through the soles of his feet, and out along the arm, like a ray of light. Whatever the explanation, it produced an extraordinary rigidity.
It is worth describing one more experiment to illustrate the power of willed concentration. Again, it requires the presence of four or five people. This time the subject stands with his eyes closed, with the others forming a circle round him. They place their fingers lightly on his shoulders, back and chest. The aim of the experiment is to cause him to sway in whatever direction they predetermine. The four simply concentrate, making sure not to push. It usually takes only a few seconds for the subject to sway in the desired direction.
The first time I tried this, I stood in the centre and allowed my mind to become a blank. Suddenly there was a strong sensation of being pulled forward, as if by a magnetic current, and I had to be caught as I swayed.
The friend who introduced me to the experiment said that it worked even if the subject resisted, but that if he resisted too hard, it would produce dizziness. A few days later, I described the experiment at a business meeting, and someone suggested that we try it. I was dubious—convinced that the atmosphere of a board room would be unpropitious. The man who stood at the centre warned us that he intended to resist. We tried hard for a minute; nothing happened. It was more or less what I had expected; nevertheless, I suggested we have one more try. This time, to my surprise, he suddenly swayed backwards—the direction we had decided on. He admitted that his efforts to resist had made him feel dizzy.
This experiment has not always proved successful; it seems to work best in the evening, when everyone is relaxed and receptive. The only occasion when it was a total failure was in front of television cameras, in a museum of witchcraft; we were using the continuity girl as a subject. But it was an icy cold midwinter day, and our discomfort—and the girl’s heavy fur coat—may have had something to do with it. On another occasion, when Uri Geller was one of the group, the subject swayed backwards instead of to the right—whereupon Geller admitted that he had been willing her to move in the opposite direction to the one we had decided.
My own original suspicion was that it worked by means of suggestion, transmitted by the scarcely perceptible pressure of the fingers. This was disproved when we tried it without the fingertips actually touching the person in the middle; it seemed to work just as well, although the reaction time may have been slightly longer. I found myself inclined to accept the explanation of the friend who first told me of the experiment: that the operative principle was telepathy, that it was simply a matter of ‘thought pressure’—four wills overruling the will of the subject in the centre.
The matter of ‘telepathic commands’ has been studied extensively in the laboratory. In the 1890s, Dr P. Joire conducted experiments at the University of Lille in which blindfolded subjects were telepathically ordered to perform certain simple actions—bend their arms and legs or walk in a certain direction. The results were positive. Joire discovered that the experimenter had to concentrate very hard throughout the tests. It usually took between ten and twenty seconds for the subject to start to obey the suggestion, then he did so very slowly—which suggests that the ‘force’ being applied was very weak. In 1926, the Russian scientist L. L. Vasiliev repeated these experiments in Leningrad with a woman suffering from hysterical paralysis of the left side. She was placed under hypnosis and mentally ‘ordered’ by Vasiliev and two colleagues—to make various movements, including moving her ‘paralysed’ arm. She not only made the movements but was usually able to identify the ‘sender’ of the order.1
It may be objected that this demonstrates only telepathy, not the power of the will. But Joire’s subjects declared that they experienced a feeling of tingling in the muscles, after which they ‘succumbed to this influence almost unconsciously’. Joire never tried to find out what would happen if they resisted. J. B. Priestley has a story of an occasion when he practised ‘telepathic suggestion’.2 At a dinner of a poetry society in New York, Priestley told his neighbour: ‘I propose to make one of these poets wink at me.’ He chose a sombre-looking woman, ‘obviously no winker’; after he had concentrated on her for a minute or two, she winked. Priestley’s companion was inclined to doubt whether it had really happened, but after the dinner, Priestley was approached by the poet, who apologised for winking and added: ‘It was just a silly sudden impulse.’ Priestley thought that the general feeling of boredom at the dinner, ‘when everybody’s mind is emptying’, aided his mental suggestion.
Can this force operate directly on matter? The effect is known as psychokinesis, and although it is still a matter of controversy, there seems to be little doubt that it has been frequently observed, both in the laboratory and under less rigorous conditions. In her book The Decline and Fall of Science, the psychical researcher Celia Green cites a case that sounds oddly like the experiment I have already described:
My only experience of levitation occurred during a lunch-time break at school when I was seventeen … Each girl took her turn lying on a long wooden table at the front of the classroom, with the others gathered tightly around her, so that were no gaps… As one lay there, the girls chanted a rhyme—the actual words of which I have forgotten, but which referred to the person on the table as looking white, ill and then dead. It was spoken quite slowly and in unison so that its drone-like tone had great depth and was very penetrating.
Several girls took part before me without much success. Some … were quite disillusioned. Others however did admit to feeling a strange sensation … and it was this plus the declaration of a friend that she had experienced slight levitation that encouraged me to try it.
I have absolutely no explanation why I was able to rise approximately three feet from the table surface. I was perfectly conscious that I was rising and might even have uttered an exclamation of surprise… The rapidity of the rise and indeed the fact that I had risen at all caused me to jerk my body out of the lying position, and with much commotion the girls cushioned my fall.
Can this ‘psi’ power operate on inanimate matter? As a matter of fact, the modern scientific study of ‘psi’ began as an attempt to answer this question. One day in 1934, a gambler walked into the office of Dr J. B. Rhine, and told him that he was convinced he could influence the fall of the dice. ‘Show me’, said the sceptical Rhine. So the two crouched on the floor—the traditional gambler’s pose—and the visitor proceeded to demonstrate. As he did so, it occurred to Rhine that this might provide the solution to a problem that had been bothering him for years. The Parapsychological Laboratory had been set up in 1927, under the guidance of Dr William McDougall, one of the foremost psychologists of his time (and, like Driesch, a convinced vitalist). McDougall wanted to investigate telepathy and survival after death. The only obvious way to do this was to test mediums and clairvoyants; and the sceptics never lost an opportunity to point out that a skilful fraudulent medium could fool anybody. Moreover, Rhine had recently been in correspondence with Jung, who had told him the odd story about the exploding table and bread knife. Rhine agreed this was probably psychokinesis; but how could one test it in the laboratory? It was impossible to make bread knives explode at will. And now a gambler was providing the answer—how to test ‘mind over matter’ in the laboratory. Moreover, the tests did not have to be restricted to professional psychics; most students were expert at throwing dice.
Rhine tried it, and his results revolutionised parapsychology. For they showed beyond all possible doubt that when someone first made a determined effort to influence the dice, the results were significantly above expectation. What was equally interesting was that if students went straight on to perform a second test, the results dropped steeply. For a third test, they became lower still. In other words, students could exert PK powers when they were fresh and really put their minds to it. Then their attention began to waver, and the results fell off.
Since Rhine’s experiments, there has been a steady and impressive accumulation of evidence for psychokinesis. A Russian housewife, Nina Kulagina, discovered her powers accidentally when she was trying to find out whether she could ‘sense’ different colours with her fingertips alone. With her eyes blindfolded, she held her fingers above small bits of coloured paper. Someone noticed that one of the pieces was making slight movements. Kulagina practised hard and soon discovered that she was able to move matchsticks, fountain pens and compass needles. Tests in both Russian and American laboratories have detected no sign of fraud. A New York artist, Ingo Swann, was able to deflect the needle of a magnetometer when it was buried in concrete. Another New Yorker, Felicia Parise, was inspired to try psychokinesis after she had watched films of Madame Kulagina and was soon demonstrating her power to move small objects in the laboratories of the Maimonides Institute. Both Nina Kulagina and Felicia Parise have said that they find their efforts exhausting and often lose pounds in weight during the course of experiments.
In 1973, the feats of the Israeli Uri Geller suddenly made psychokinesis front-page news. Geller was able to bend spoons by rubbing them with his finger and alter the time on watches by clenching his fist above them. Sceptics labelled him a fraud, and professional conjurors offered to duplicate any of his ‘tricks’ on the stage. Even Geller’s admirers had to admit that his best performances were on television, not in the laboratory. Yet his laboratory performances were impressive enough; at Stanford, he demonstrated remarkable powers of telepathy, extrasensory perception, and the power to deflect a compass needle by concentrating on it. Many scientists who have tested him have concluded that his powers are genuine—or, to put this controversial topic at its lowest: no sceptical opponent has been able to prove that he is not genuine.
Geller’s feats raise a fundamental question. All laboratory tests so far have indicated that our PK powers are very slight. To test them, scientists have had to devise apparatus that will measure fractions of a milligram; even the highest estimate so far has been a mere ten per cent of the force of gravity exerted on a dice (i.e. one tenth of the weight of the dice). Kulagina and Felicia Parise perspire heavily as they move very light objects. Why should Geller’s powers be apparently so much greater than theirs?
The answer takes us to the heart of this strange problem. There is no obvious direct relation between these powers and ordinary willpower. When Felicia Parise first tried moving small objects, she failed, although she made overwhelming efforts of concentration. One day, she received a phone call saying that her grandmother was dying; it was a severe emotional shock. As she reached out for a small plastic bottle, it moved away from her hand. After the funeral, she tried moving the bottle again by ‘thought pressure’ and was this time successful. The emotional shock had somehow released her latent PK powers. When students were tested by Dr Helmut Schmidt at the Parapsychological Laboratory at Durham, North Carolina, they somehow achieved the opposite effects from the ones they were trying for. They were supposed to make a delicate light meter move clockwise; instead, it moved anti-clockwise. Their attempts to ‘will’ were apparently putting their powers in reverse.3
We know that the conscious will is connected to the narrow, conscious part of the personality. One of the paradoxes observed by Janet is that as the hysteric becomes increasingly obsessed with anxiety—and the need to exert his will—he also becomes increasingly ineffective. The narrower and more obsessive the consciousness, the weaker the will. Every one of us is familiar with the phenomenon. The more we become racked with anxiety to do something well, the more we are likely to botch it. It is Frankl’s ‘law of reversed effort’. If you want to do something really well, you have to get into the ‘right mood’. And the right mood involves a sense of relaxation, of feeling ‘wide open’ instead of narrow and enclosed. And in the case of Janet’s hysterics, we can see what goes wrong. The hysteric literally became two people, one of whom could answer questions while the other talked to someone else. That is to say, the hysteric divided himself in half. And, as you would expect, divided his powers in half too. Janet cured such patients by persuading them to relax into the ‘full self’, so to speak.
As William James remarked, we all have a lifelong habit of ‘inferiority to our full self’. We are all hysterics; it is the endemic disease of the human race, which clearly implies that, outside our ‘everyday personality’, there is a wider ‘self’ that possesses greater powers than the everyday self. And this is not the Freudian subconscious. Like the ‘wider self’ of Janet’s patients, it is as conscious as the ‘contracted self. We are, in fact, partially aware of this ‘other self’. When a man ‘unwinds’ by pouring himself a drink and kicking off his shoes, he is adopting an elementary method of relaxing into the other self. When an overworked housewife decides to buy herself a new hat, she is doing the same thing. But we seldom relax far enough; habit—and anxiety—are too strong. As Felicia Parise strained her will to move the plastic bottle, she was calling on the depleted powers of the ‘contracted self’. And the very intensity of her effort frustrated its own purpose, for it made her narrower still. This always happens when something goes wrong, and we become increasingly frantic and obsessive. The shock of the telephone call cut the knot, released her from the vicious circle. It made her aware that there were bigger and more important issues, and released her into the ‘wider self’, which lost no time in moving the bottle.
When the will is hindered by too much self-consciousness it often produces the opposite effect from the one intended. (Poe called it ‘the imp of the perverse.’) The ‘wider self’ would be happy to oblige, but the ‘contracted ego’ is somehow opposing itself, like someone trying to open a door by pushing it instead of pulling it. So it does the next best thing. In the case of Dr Schmidt’s students, it made the meter revolve the other way.
But both cases make the same point: when the ego contracts into a state of anxiety, it cuts itself off from its source of power. It is as if we had placed a tourniquet around an arm or leg, and caused it to go ‘dead’. The problem then is to relax, untie the tourniquet and get the blood flowing back into the nerveless area. The simile is inaccurate in only one particular. When your arm or leg has gone ‘dead’, it is incapable of movement. But when the ego applies a torniquet of anxiety to a part of itself, the excluded area remains very much alive and capable of independent functioning.
These observations bring us back to the definitions of magic quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Magic is the art and science of using the will. Not the ordinary will of the contracted ego but the ‘true will’ that seems to spring from some deeper area of the being.
This notion of the ‘true will’ plays an important part in the magical tradition. It also seems to be the key to many—if not all—paranormal phenomena, from poltergeists to psychokinesis. It enables us to explain why the antics of the poltergeist, or Geller’s ability to bend spoons, cannot be correctly described as ‘magic’. With a few rare exceptions, poltergeists seem to have been beyond the control of the people who caused them. Geller admits that he is never certain whether his powers will work, or whether some piece of metal that he handles casually—like the fork with which he eats his dinner—will bend in his fingers. But the aim of traditional magic has always been the control of the ‘hidden self’, sometimes called the ‘daemon’ or ‘guardian angel’, as well as of the forces of nature.
At this point, it is necessary to look more closely at the ideas of the Western magical tradition.
In their book Techniques of High Magic, Francis King and Stephen Skinner speak of four basic assumptions of magic:
1. That the [physical] universe is only a part of total reality.
2. That human will-power is a real force, capable of being trained and concentrated, and that the disciplined will is capable of changing its environment and producing paranormal effects.
3. That this will-power must be directed by the imagination.
4. That the universe is not a mixture of chance factors and influences but an ordered system of correspondences, and that the understanding of the pattern of correspondences enables the occultist to use them for his own purposes, good or evil.
These principles can be found, in various forms, in all the major magical texts, from the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistos and the medieval grimoires to the works of Levi, Crowley and Dion Fortune. The Jesuit scholar Martin Del Rio defined magic, in his famous Disquisitionum Magicarum (1599) as ‘an art or skill which, by means of a non-supernatural force, produces certain strange and unusual phenomena whose rationale eludes common sense’. Since Del Rio believed in angels and demons, his insistence that magic is a ‘non-supernatural force’ is of special interest here. Lewis Spence, the historian of occultism, defines magic as ‘a power, latent in human beings, of controlling cosmic matter by their will and faith’. Dion Fortune introduced an interesting variation: ‘Magic is the art of causing changes in consciousness at will.’ But all these definitions involve the underlying assumption that the ‘will’ is of a special kind.
The third principle is equally important: that the will must be directed by the imagination. MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn, stated in a lecture: ‘To practise magic, both the Imagination and the Will must be called into action, they are co-equal in the work… The Will unaided can send forth a current … yet its effect is vague and indefinite… The Imagination unaided can create an image … yet it can do nothing of importance, unless vitalised and directed by the Will.’4 And Mathers goes on to give several examples of his own magical practices, each involving clear visualisation. After conversations with a certain fidgety old gentleman, Mathers observed that he was listless and exhausted and concluded that the old gentleman was somehow ‘vampirising’ his energy. To counteract this, he imagined himself surrounded by a ‘force field’ that insulated him from the outside world. On another occasion, when he suspected that a man was using magical techniques to try to seduce a girl, he imagined himself holding a sword and severing a kind of psychic ‘web’ between them. In these and other cases, Mathers claimed, he was totally successful.
Mathers had recognised a basic principle of human perception: that it is ‘intentional’. When you look at something, it is as if your eyes reached out and grasped it. And the ‘grasp’ can be powerful or weak. This can easily be tested by means of a simple exercise. In looking at a drawing of a ‘transparent cube’, we can see it either as if looking at it from above or from below:
As the cube ‘changes’ from one to the other, we can become aware of the mental act of turning it over, exactly like flipping a coin from one side to the other. With a little effort, it is possible to ‘turn’ the cube as easily as flipping the coin. The effort that changes the cube from one side to the other is what the philosopher Husserl calls intentionality, and what Mathers means by imagination.
One of the most balanced and sensible of modern textbooks of magic by David Conway,5 devotes a whole chapter to the practice of ‘visualisation’. The student is advised to look at diagrams or pictures, then close his eyes and envisage them clearly. When he has accomplished this, he should try to visualise solid objects and to imagine them from various angles. The exercise can be extended to include the senses of smell and touch. Finally, it should be possible to visualise with the eyes open, so that the images are ‘projected’ into the real world. ‘This “projection”,’ says the author, ‘is a knack which, like learning to swim, will be acquired all of a sudden.’
But he goes on to point out that this faculty must be controlled; ‘involuntary hallucinations belong to the realm of mental illness, not magic’. He is making a point that is of fundamental importance in all such studies and disciplines. All highly developed faculties are a potential danger. Everyone knows how irritating it can be to have some silly tune or jingle running in one’s head. But this can happen to us only because we possess highly developed powers of memory; dogs and cats never experience such annoyances. Similarly, people with intense powers of concentration are prone to nervous breakdown because they subject themselves to greater strains than people with butterfly minds. Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice and other such cautionary tales have their foundation in common sense. It is easier to develop unusual powers than to control them.
Mathers sees the imagination as an essential adjunct of the will, analogous to the range-finder on a gun. Its purpose is to direct the will clearly and unambiguously towards its object. And this is obviously true of all our willed activities. The effect of wanting something strongly is not only to arouse one’s desires, but to arouse the energies that will enable one to pursue it. If we only half want something, or feel ambiguous about it, our energies will be sluggish, and we will probably fail to achieve it. So even where everyday purposes are concerned, the imagination is of central importance. But the magical tradition insists that the will has a power that is independent of the physical world. It can be transmitted directly, as it were, like radio waves. So forMathers, there would be nothing unusual in the idea of a man using ‘magic’ to seduce a girl. It would simply be a part of what is known as ‘natural magic’ (to distinguish it from spiritual magic, or a magic that uses the ‘higher forces’ of the universe). In The Occult, I quoted the poet Robert Graves, who told me that many young men use a form of unconscious sorcery to seduce girls. When a man wants a woman badly, he fixes his desire on her and broods on it until it permeates his being. He spends much of his time daydreaming about possessing her and enacting his desires in imagination. Mathers would say that the ‘true will’ is awakened by the intensity of the desire and proceeds to use its strength to dominate the will of the girl. Graves’s point was that many seducers use this method naturally without even being conscious that it is a simple form of sorcery. He would probably add that all self-confident people use the same kind of unconscious magic to achieve their ends.
This notion of the magical power of the imagination is not confined to the Western tradition; it can be found all over the world. In her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Alexandra David-Nell tells the classic story of the ‘hat that walked’. The hat was blown off the head of some traveller, and settled in a valley below the road. From a distance it looked like some strange creature, and the villagers who passed the spot were too frightened to investigate. Eventually, their fears and imaginings imbued the hat with a life of its own, and it began to move around like an animal. This story is typical of the type of magic practised in Tibet. She also explains how a knife can be ‘bewitched’ so that it can lead someone to commit suicide. The sorcerer has to spend months in intense concentration on the knife, envisaging the death of his enemy and performing magic rituals. When the knife is sufficiently charged with malevolent energy, it is placed in the house of the intended victim, and if he is incautious enough to pick it up, he will experience a sudden overpowering impulse to kill himself.
Max Freedom Long’s book The Huna Code in Religions deals with the magical and religious system of the Polynesians and relates this natural magic of the will to the complex operations of the superconscious or higher self. According to Long, the Kahuna priesthood recognise three levels in man, the subconscious, the ‘everyday’ self or middle self, and the superconscious self. Each level makes use of its own type of ‘mana’ or force. The ‘mana’ of the middle self is will or hypnotic force. But the ‘mana’ of the higher self actually creates the future of the individual, ‘this future gradually becoming materialised as actual events or conditions’. So the Kahuna go farther than most Western exponents of the magical tradition in believing that man actually dictates his own future through his deepest desires. It would seem to justify Goethe’s comment: ‘Beware of what you wish for in youth, for you will get it in middle age.’ Long relates the Huna code to the religion of the Gnostics, and to the beliefs of the Egyptian priesthood.
By comparison with these non-European traditions, the ‘will-magic’ of the West often seems two-dimensional and crude. A typical example can be found in Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), concerning the famous Scholar Gypsy—familiar to every schoolboy from Matthew Arnold’s poem. The ‘gypsy’ was an Oxford student who left university because of poverty and joined a band of gypsies. Some time later he met two of his former fellow students and told them that the gypsies could ‘do wonders by the power of imagination’. To demonstrate the art, he left the room and went to another part of the inn. When he returned, he was able to give them a detailed account of their conversation after he left the room. Astounded at his accuracy, they asked him how he did it. ‘In which he gave them satisfaction, by telling them that what he did was by the power of imagination, his phantasy leading theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the discourse they had held together while he was from them…’ The Scholar Gypsy added that ‘there were warrantable ways of heightening the imagination to that pitch [so as to be able to] bend another’s’.
Clearly, the sense in which we are now speaking of imagination differs fundamentally from its normal usage. If I try to imagine Notting Hill Gate as it used to be in my early days in London, the image that comes into my mind is like a blurred photograph. It is ‘like’ the original in outline, but that is all—rather, say, like whistling the opening bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; no amount of brooding can ‘orchestrate’ my image. Yet Glanvill is speaking of the imagination not as a poor imitation of the original, but as an independent force. Mathers even makes the assertion: ‘When a man imagines, he actually creates a form on the Astral or even on some higher plane; and this form is as real and objective to intelligent beings on that plane, as our earthly surroundings are to us.’ If, for ‘Astral plane’, we substitute Lethbridge’s ‘next whorl of the spiral’, or perhaps some higher level of human consciousness, then Mathers is asserting that the imagination can act as a messenger between different levels of existence.
It is civilisation that has debased—or at least enfeebled—our idea of imagination. When Stone-Age hunters relaxed around the fire in the evenings and listened to stories of the chase or of battles with neighbouring tribes, they re-lived the events, yet in a completely different form from the original experience. (Children still have this capacity to become ‘totally lost’ in a story.) When the modern city dweller relaxes in front of his television, he cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to ‘re-live’ the events he watches. He consumes them as casually as he smokes his hundredth cigarette. So he comes to think of imagination as a counterfeit reality. When he accuses someone of being ‘imaginative’, he simply means that he is a liar. He has blurred the distinction between imagination and reality.
Our remote ancestors never made that mistake. Life was hard, and their mental powers were part of their survival kit. Some thirty-five thousand years ago, our Cro-magnon ancestors embarked on a career of genocide. The victim was their ape-like half-brother, Neanderthal man. And, in a surprisingly short time, there were no more Neanderthals. It was not that Cro-magnon man was stronger or more numerous than Neanderthal man; only that he had more brain power and imagination. And during the next twenty-five thousand years, he laid the foundations of civilisation by inventing art, religion and technology. Yet he had no way of storing knowledge except inside his own head. When a man died, his knowledge died with him, except for the little that was stored in the memory of other members of the tribe. The power of his mind was his only ally against the encroaching darkness.
We now know that Cro-magnon man came surprisingly close to inventing writing. In the early sixties, Alexander Marshack became fascinated by the complex markings on hundreds of pieces of bone and other Stone-Age artifacts. By microscopic examination, he established that they were not simply decoration—they were made with too many different tools—but some form of notation, probably of the phases of the moon. Our Stone-Age ancestors had stumbled on the basic principle of writing as long ago as thirty-four thousand years, but had failed to develop it. That failure was probably one of the best pieces of luck that ever befell the human race. It meant that Cromagnon man had to rely on brain power to preserve his essential knowledge—on memory aided by a few simple devices (the equivalent of tying knots in a handkerchief). He had to learn the difficult art of using the brain as a storehouse, and enlarging its capacity for storage. His descendants benefited from that long training when they came to live together in cities around 5000 BC. Däniken and his followers cite that sudden flowering of civilisation as evidence that space men must have had a hand in it. They forget that, space men or no space men, Cro-magnon man had been preparing to take the leap for thirty thousand years.
Finally, around 3500 BC, the Sumerians invented pictorial writing, and the principle was developed in Egypt, China and the land of the Hittites; at last, certain forms of knowledge—mostly religious rituals—could be preserved. More than two thousand years later, the Phoenicians and the Greeks developed the phonetic alphabet, and it became possible to capture the actual flavour and texture of everyday speech. It should have revolutionised civilisation as completely as the invention of the motor car or radio. In fact, the effects were at first almost imperceptible. Man had been relying on his memory too long to change his ways overnight. Plato expresses this curious distrust in the Phaedrus, when he tells how the Egyptian god Thoth invented the art of writing. Thoth boasts to King Thamus that he has invented the ‘elixir of wisdom and memory’; the king replies that he has done nothing of the sort—he has only discouraged the people from relying on their own mental efforts. Plato, like most ancient philosophers, felt that man’s chief distinction lay in his powers of memory and imagination, and that he ought to develop these in the way that an athlete develops his muscles.
In fact, the ancients developed an incredibly complex ‘art of memory’, which survived down to the age of Shakespeare. The astonishing story of this now-forgotten art has been told by the historian Francis Yates.6 But perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that the art of memory was regarded as magical and was developed by such celebrated cabbalists as Raymond Lull, Marsilio Ficino (who translated Thrice Great Hermes) and Giordano Bruno. Why magical? What was magical about an ‘art’ that merely trained you to commit whole books to memory?
The answer was self-evident to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle states it in his treatise On the Soul: ‘Memory belongs to the same part of the soul as imagination.’ Think of a scholar surrounded by a library of books. He may be merely a dull pedant who knows how to find information. But if he had the contents of all the books inside his head, that would be a different matter. He would know the books, be able to compare Plato’s views on the soul with those of St Augustine, or Alexander the Great’s military strategy with Julius Caesar’s. Such a man would possess wisdom rather than knowledge; he would be a genius, a kind of god.
The argument will strike some readers as a sophistry. Surely a man is none the wiser for having his head crammed with information? But that, again, is a typical modern misconception. The basic problem of human consciousness is its narrowness. From the moment I get up in the morning, my chief occupation is observing what goes on at the end of my nose. That is not really consciousness. A dog could say the same. My real glimpses of consciousness—of the potentialities of consciousness—occur in these moments of sudden intensity, or deep relaxation, when these limitations are suddenly transcended.
It is difficult to describe what happens in such moments, except to say that the world seems to become a deeper and a richer place. If you read poetry in such a mood, it is a sensual pleasure, as if it caused vibrations in the senses of smell and touch. If you listen to music, it seems to reach into every corner of your being. If you read a travel book, the places described seem to become real.
Clearly, what we are talking about is ‘Faculty X’, the strange ability suddenly to grasp the reality of other times and places. But here I must make a point of central importance. There is no good reason why a baby should not experience flashes of Faculty X. But they would mean far less to a baby than to an adult. All children experience Faculty X, particularly at holiday times and at Christmas; there is a sense of excitement and multiplicity, of endless horizons. But the child’s actual horizons are limited by inexperience; so the insight is also limited. On the other hand, a scientist who experienced Faculty X might glimpse the immense complexity of the universe. A historian who experienced Faculty X might grasp the reality of remote epochs of time. You could compare Faculty X to the power of distant vision. Obviously, it will mean more to a person standing on a hilltop than to someone in the valley.
It should be obvious, then, that the meaning-content of such an experience depends on the amount we know. For an ignoramus, Faculty X would be merely a pleasant sense that ‘all is well’, that the world is a marvellous and complex place. For a philosopher, it could be an insight into the meaning of human existence.
The ancient ‘art of memory’ was not simply an attempt to turn the human brain into a library. It was a deliberate attempt to create Faculty X, a wider and deeper form of consciousness. Hence the magical significance of memory. We can see the connection if we think of Proust’s description of his feeling as he tastes the cake dipped in tea and is transported back to his childhood. Or the description in Hesse’s Steppenwolf of the hero’s mystical intensity: ‘For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations.’ In both cases, memory ceases to be a ‘carbon copy’ and becomes a reality. This is the true significance of the art of memory. And it is no linguistic accident that we use the word ‘magic’ to describe these enriched states of consciousness: ‘the magic of childhood’, ‘the magic of the distance’, ‘the magic of the senses’. The powers that the ancients called magic—and that we prefer to speak of as paranormal—spring from those hidden realms of consciousness that lie beyond our usual limited horizons.
That this was, in fact, the fundamental aim of the ‘art of memory’ becomes clear from the words of some of its chief practitioners. The Venetian Giulio Camillo (1480–1544) actually built a ‘memory theatre’, which scholars of his own time classed with the seven wonders of the world. The spectator stood on a stage at the centre of the ‘auditorium’, and looked out on the whole sum of human knowledge arranged in seven blocks of ‘seats’, each in seven tiers with seven aisles in between—the number refers to the seven planets and Solomon’s seven pillars of wisdom. We would probably prefer to call it an ‘Exhibition’, but the word was unknown in Camillo’s time. The individual ‘exhibits’ consisted of ‘images’—probably paintings, statues, painted symbols—and underneath these, drawers containing speeches based on Cicero, the most celebrated of Roman orators. The whole intention was to awaken the mind to a wider sense of reality. Camillo said that it would enable the spectator to ‘perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind’. (In Latin, ‘hidden’ is occultus.) It would give him a kind of bird’s-eye view of the universe. Camillo further explained his intention by using the illustration of a man standing in a forest who can see only the trees that surround him. But if there is a hill nearby, and he climbs to the top, he can see the whole forest. In short, man is trapped in the present, unable to see the wood for the trees. But once he has learned the shape of the wood (in a simplified form), he can hope to ascend to a state of consciousness in which the whole thing becomes comprehensible.
This was why Camillo was one of the most famous men of his time—even though the ‘memory theatre’ was never finished and disappeared after his death. He had touched on one of the deepest aspirations of his age. To modern ears the theatre sounds absurd; but that is only if we fail to grasp its basic aim. Even today, a good exhibition can be a kind of revelation. Anyone who saw Richard Buckle’s Diaghilev Exhibition in London in 1954 will recall its almost magical effect; the use of décor and lighting—and even scent—was so cunning that it was like stepping backward in time to the St Petersburg of 1910 or the Paris of 1920. A decade later, Buckle created the same effect in his Shakespeare Exhibition, so there was a sense of double-exposure as you stepped out of the age of the first Queen Elizabeth into the traffic of modern Stratford.
This was the effect Camillo intended—and apparently partly succeeded in creating. His contemporaries immediately recognised the grandeur of the conception. They were living in an age of intellectual revolution. Columbus’s voyage to America had demonstrated conclusively that the earth was a sphere. Cortes and Pizarro brought back from the New World incredible tales of alien civilisations and savage customs. In Cracow, Nicholas Copernicus had reached the astonishing conclusion that the earth was a satellite of the sun. In Basel, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, one of the greatest doctors—and magicians—of the age, never tired of telling his students that the imagination constitutes the stars or firmament in man, and that this ‘inner firmament’ is the foundation of all magical powers. And now Camillo was suggesting that man could become master of both the inner and the outer firmament by entering a kind of magic theatre. It was more than an exciting idea; it was a new vision of the power and dignity of man.
Yet Camillo himself was a modest man who stuttered badly; perhaps that was the secret of his survival. Fifty years later, Giordano Bruno had the courage—and intemperance—to state in plain terms the idea that was only hinted at in Camillo and implied in Paracelsus: that if man is the ‘great miracle’ mentioned by Hermes Trismegistos, then the discovery of his own inner powers will turn him into a god. This is the vision at the heart of his major work, The Art of Memory.7 The mind of man is divine, and contains within itself the starry heavens. If man can grasp this universal plan—by means of a magical art of memory—then he will be able to tap the power of the cosmos. The magic power emanates from the ‘seals’, the images of the stars. He who understands the ‘seals’ will become a magus and possess the power to open the ‘black diamond doors’ in the psyche. Bruno also hints that such a man will burn with a kind of ‘heroic frenzy’ (eroici furori) and will bring salvation to the human race.
Such ideas were highly dangerous—to Bruno himself as well as to orthodox Christians who might be led astray by them. The flat truth is that Bruno was basically hostile to Christianity. His attitude was not unlike that of Swinburne three centuries later. But while Swinburne rejected the ‘pale Galilean’ in favour of Greek paganism, Bruno’s ideal was Egyptian hermeticism, with its worship of the sun. In fact, Bruno seems to have harboured Messianic delusions in which he was the sun. He makes an English admirer say of him: ‘Although I cannot see your soul, from the ray that it diffuses I perceive that within you is the sun or perhaps some even greater luminary.’ Bruno begins The Art of Memory by claiming that the work is divinely inspired, like the Holy Scriptures. He told Mocigeno—who betrayed him to the Inquisition—that he hoped to found his own religious sect in Germany. In Padua, shortly before his arrest, he prepared himself for his clash with the Church by performing magical operations to give himself charismatic powers, ‘working at hermetic seals and links with demons’. This was the man who would ‘stop at nothing, who would use every magical procedure, however forbidden and dangerous’.
Bruno was going through the typical martyrdom of the Right Man, obsessed by his divine mission, subject to ‘pathological accesses of rage in which he said terrible things which frightened people’. All the signs are that he was headed for the kind of nervous breakdown that often overtakes Right Men. But before he could take that final step towards the ‘black diamond doors’, the Inquisition pounced and consigned him to a dungeon. Two centuries later, Bonaparte’s police would do the same thing to the Marquis de Sade, and for precisely the same reason??? they found his ideas blasphemous and terrifying. The human race has never cared for moralists who tell man that he ought to be a god.
Paranoid or not, Giordano Bruno was the last great magician of the Renaissance to understand the magical significance of imagination. His learned contemporary John Dee—Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer—was more concerned with ‘natural magic’, telepathy, crystal-gazing, and what would now be called trance-mediumship. Robert Fludd, one of the greatest cabbalists of his age, was a doctor by profession (like Paracelsus), and even his magical works are basically scientific in spirit. Besides, the old magical art of memory, which depended heavily on images and symbols, was being swept aside by a new logical variety, invented by the Frenchman Pierre de la Ramée. Peter Ramus (to use the name by which he was better known) was a Protestant who died in the massacre of St Bartholomew; his martyrdom increased the popularity of his system in Protestant countries. ‘Ramism’ was basically a kind of learning by rote, and it appealed to the seventeenth century more than the classical system with its ‘occult’ overtones.
Not that magical ideas were unpopular in the ‘age of reason’. Even Sir Isaac Newton was an enthusiastic alchemist who devoted much of his life to the quest for the philosopher’s stone. But the new ‘magicians’ thought of themselves as scientists and rationalists; they felt they were simply trying to uncover the laws of nature. Such laws were independent of the human mind; so there was no more talk of imagination of the inner firmament. Franz Mesmer thought that he had discovered that the ‘hidden forces’ inside human beings are a form of energy called ‘animal magnetism’, which can be moved around the body by means of magnets. In a treatise on the divining rod entitled Occult Physics (1693), the Abbé Lorrain de Vallemont explained that dowsing works through perspiration from the hands; he also offered an interesting formula for causing the spectre of a rose to appear in a bottle when it is exposed to sunlight. (His theory that all living things leave behind an ‘occult image’ is surprisingly close to Lethbridge’s idea that ghosts are a kind of ‘tape recording’.) The only ‘magician’ whose fame was comparable to that of Paracelsus or Bruno was the Count de Cagliostro, half imposter, half genuine psychic. He possessed a remarkable imagination, but of the wrong kind; his ‘Egyptian freemasonry’ was largely of his own invention, designed to coax money out of the pockets of gullible admirers. Dr Johnson summarised the eighteenth-century mistrust of imagination when he declared: ‘All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity.’8
At this point one of the most remarkable events in human cultural history occurred. It was nothing less than a universal revolt on behalf of the imagination. The surprising thing was that it was not confined to a few occultists or philosophers, but occurred simultaneously from one end of Europe to the other. The man who was the innocent cause of this tidal wave of romantic feeling was a middle-aged printer named Samuel Richardson. Richardson had been commissioned to write a Teach-Yourself book on the art of correspondence; he got carried away and turned it into a detailed account of the attempted seduction of a servant girl by her master. When it appeared in 1740, Pamela instantly became the first best-selling novel. In fact, it was the first novel of any kind in the sense that we understand the word today.
The popularity of Pamela was undoubtedly due to its sexual theme. But that fails to explain the magical, almost mystical effect it had on so many readers—particularly of the female sex. The seduction theme provided Pamela with its thread of interest; but what was important was that the reader could lose herself in it, plunge into it as into deep water, leave her own life behind and become wholly identified with the life of the heroine. Pamela penetrated to remote country areas where the only exciting event of the week was the Sunday sermon. (And in those days before the advent of the novel, volumes of sermons were read avidly—not out of piety, but because they were a re-creation of the only imaginative experience of the week.) For thousands of bored housewives—and even more unmarried women—Pamela provided a more intense emotional experience than anything in their own lives.
Novel-writing became the fastest-growing industry in Europe. Richardson had taught the middle classes the use of the imagination, and the appetite grew with feeding. Rousseau’s New Heloise—another novel about seduction—was so popular that libraries found they could lend it out by the hour. Goethe’s Werther, in which the hero kills himself for love, caused an epidemic of suicides. Within half a century of the publication of Pamela, the free use of imagination had transformed the European mind. It was largely responsible for the French Revolution, many of whose leaders were rebels who had learned their dissatisfaction from Rousseau and Schiller. And it was responsible for that extraordinary revolution of the human spirit that we call romanticism: the revolt of the dreamers against the boredom of the material world.
The irony of romanticism is that it was rendered impotent by its own premises. Giordano Bruno had taught that the magus can become a kind of god if he dares to pursue the magical art to its ultimate limits. The romantics felt that man is already a kind of god—but a god in exile. Trapped in the dreariness of everyday life, he is like a fish out of water. And it cannot be long before he suffocates.
Imagination is man’s salvation and his downfall. The hero of Balzac’s mystical novel Louis Lambert possesses an imagination so intense that when he reads a book, he is transported to the scenes it portrays: ‘When I read the story of the battle of Austerlitz, I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the fighting men rang in my ears and made my inmost being quiver…’ But this intensity of imagination leads to brain-fever and he dies more-or-less insane.
One of the most remarkable figures of that remarkable movement was the novelist E. T. A. Hoffman. And since there is no space here for a longer account of romanticism, he can serve as the representative of the whole movement.9
Hoffmann was a musician and an alcoholic, whose world of strange characters influenced almost every major writer of the nineteenth century. It was in his novel The Serapion Brothers that Hoffmann created the supreme symbol of the romantic imagination. The Serapion Brotherhood is a group of poets and musicians who take their name from an insane nobleman who believes that he was martyred in the reign of the Emperor Decius. It is useless to argue with ‘the monk Serapion’, for nothing will convince him that he is living in nineteenth-century Germany. When the narrator tells him he is mad, he replies calmly that it is the narrator who is suffering from delusions. The world ‘out there’ is actually inside our own brains. So how can anyone prove that what is inside his own brain is ‘truer’ than what is inside someone else’s?
Now the ‘monk Serapion’ had once been a very good poet, noted for the power of his imagination. All that has happened is that his imagination has triumphed over ‘real’ life. It was a triumph that the romantics dreamed about. Yet Hoffmann himself was unwilling to state frankly that this was what he had in mind. Instead, the Brotherhood admires the sheer intensity of Serapion’s imagination, which can defy the whole world.
It is useless for a poet to try to make us believe in a thing that he does not believe in himself—cannot believe in because he has never really seen it. If a poet is not a genuine seer, what can his characters be except deceptive puppets, glued together from bits and pieces? But your hermit Serapion was a true poet. He had actually seen what he described, and that was why he affected people’s hearts and souls.
This ‘secret’ of poetic greatness that Hoffmann speaks about is the ‘magical’ imagination of the hermeticists. And Hoffmann, like Bruno, has a strong intuition that it is the key to greatness of another kind: that it is in short, the basic secret of human evolution. Yet he finds it difficult to reconcile this conclusion with the facts of the material world in which we are forced to live.
Poor Serapion! What did your madness consist in, except that some hostile star had taken away your faculty for grasping the duality which is the essential condition of our earthly existence? There is an inner world, and a spiritual faculty for discerning it with absolute clearness—yes, with the most minute and brilliant distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is the outer world, in which we are entrapped, that triggers this spiritual faculty… But you, happy hermit, lost sight of the outward world, and did not notice this trigger that set your inward faculty in motion; and when, with that gruesome acumen of yours, you declared that it is only the mind that sees and hears and notices events, … you forget that it is the outer world that causes the spirit to use its powers of perception.10
‘There is an inner world, and a spiritual faculty for discerning it with absolute clearness.’ This is the essence of the vision of Paracelsus and Bruno, and the name of the faculty is imagination. The poet Blake echoed Paracelsus when he wrote: ‘All animals and vegetations, the earth and heaven [are] contained in the all-glorious Imagination.’ But unlike Hoffmann, Blake was writing in a spirit of optimism and defiance; he was not afraid to assert that ‘imagination is the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable universe is but a shadow, in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies are no more’. Blake actually believed that imagination is a genuine principle of immortality. Hoffmann was convinced that imagination is a magical power, but not that it can somehow outlast the reality of the physical world.
The fact remains that Blake, Hoffmann and their colleagues were instrumental in bringing about one of the greatest advances in the history of the human race. To say they re-discovered imagination is misleading; they rediscovered something even deeper. Richardson had invented a magic carpet, and it differed as much from earlier forms of imagination—as practised by Homer and Malory and Chaucer—as an aeroplane differs from a motor car. Imagination ceased to be a way of escaping reality, and became a way of creating reality. The romantics had re-discovered one of the basic principles of magic.
The claim sounds excessive. But was it coincidence that the nineteenth century produced a greater advance in Western civilisation than the past three thousand years? We may object that these advances were brought about by science, not magic or imagination; but Newton’s Principia, the foundation of modern science, was published as long ago as 1687. It was not science or technology that transformed nineteenth-century Europe, but a new spirit; and it was the spirit that had made the Inquisition burn Bruno at the stake. The old spirit had been based on authority; the common people bowed their knees to the lord of the manor; the lord of the manor to his lord; and his lord, eventually, to God. Changes happened with infinitesimal slowness because no one believed in change. Above all, no one thought he was capable of causing change. Everyone was part of a system, which was greater than any of its individuals.
But at the beginning of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade declared that God was abolished. Byron’s Manfred shook his fist at God. Men executed the king in the name of freedom. It was the age of heroes and the age of imagination, in which men threw steel bridges across estuaries and railways across continents. The artistic schemes were grandiose: Beethoven’s symphonies, Balzac’s novels, Wagner’s Ring cycle; so were the engineering schemes: Brunel, the builder of the world’s largest steamship, posed for a photograph against a chain whose links were larger than a man’s head. Some historians have blamed romanticism on the Industrial, Revolution and the need to escape from the ‘dark satanic mills’. This is to put the cart before the horse; it was romanticism that caused the Industrial Revolution. It was romanticism that created the great colonial empires of the European powers. And it could be argued that it was romanticism that caused the great wars of the twentieth century.
But what concerns us here is not the historical consequences of the ‘magical revival’, but its effect on the spirit of certain individuals.
Shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, a Polish nobleman named Joseph Maria Hoene-Wronski came to the Observatory of Marseilles to pursue his studies in science. And in 1810, when he was thirty-four, Wronski announced that he had made a tremendous discovery: a method of achieving nothing less than ‘the Absolute’, the knowledge of ultimate truth. Wronski claimed that he had stumbled upon the basic Law of Creation by which a man could use the sense-impressions of a lifetime to create the ultimate reality inside his own head. Wronski actually claimed to have done so. His system is obscure, since he claims to derive it from the philosophy of Kant by means of mathematics. But it seems fairly clear that he had actually rediscovered the ‘magical memory’ of the hermeticists, possibly through study of the Cabbala.
Perhaps because the man himself was as bombastic and intolerable as any of his magical predecessors, Wronski’s ideas achieved little influence, though he succeeded in persuading a businessman named Arson to finance publication of his Messianic works. He died in poverty in Paris in 1853; his wife continued to believe she had been married to a god.
Wronski’s cousin, the Marquis de Montferrier, was the proprietor of various radical journals, and one of his contributors was a young left-wing journalist named Alphonse-Louis Constant. Constant had abandoned the priesthood when he realised that he could not renounce sex. He seduced both the assistant mistress of a girls’ school at Evcrcux and one of her sixteen-year-old pupils, a girl named Noémi. Threatened by Noémi’s father, Constant made her his wife.
Montferrier met the wife of his radical contributor and was fascinated by her youth and beauty. Possibly as a means of getting to know her better, he invited her to become a contributor to one of his newspapers. Soon Noémi became his mistress, and deserted the shattered Constant, who had not even noticed that his wife was having an affair.
But Constant derived one minor bonus from his meeting with the Marquis; in 1852, he was introduced to Wronski and fell under the spell of his Messianism. Wronski confided to Constant that he was secretly a student of the Jewish Cabbala, the mystical system of ‘levels of creation’, derived from the Gnostics. Constant had read a few magical works—Cornelius Agrippa and Jacob Boehme—without being convinced. Now Wronski initiated him into his own secret system for achieving the Absolute, and Constant was delighted to discover that it was possible to be a scientist and a magician. When Wronski died in the following year, Constant helped his widow to catalogue his manuscripts, plunged into the study of hermetic magic, and changed his name to Eliphaz Levi. Under that name he wrote several influential books on magic, which exerted a powerful influence on MacGregor Mathers, W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and other founder members of the Order of the Golden Dawn.
And so the ‘magical memory’ system somehow filtered down to the poets and occultists of the nineteenth century via Wronski and Eliphaz Levi, and the magical concept of the imagination as a living force mingled with the romantic concept of the imagination as the creator of visionary worlds. And in the case of Yeats, it may be said to have accomplished a certain amount of good. Yeats was a typical romantic, convinced that poets are not of ‘this world’, and that the ‘land of heart’s desire’ can be reached by mortal men only through death. Yet unlike most of his contemporaries of the ‘tragic generation’—Verlaine, Dowson, Wilde, Beardsley—Yeats succeeded in living into old age and producing a poetry of human affirmation.
The ‘magical’ heirs of Levi’s legacy were altogether less successful, at least from the historical point of view; it would not be unfair to say that the Golden Dawn and its various offshoots simply ‘fizzled out’. Mathers died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, having been deposed by his fellow members many years previously. Crowley became a drug addict and spent the last decades of his life borrowing from friends. Dion Fortune, who founded another breakaway movement, died of leukemia at the age of fifty-four; someone who knew her in her last year described her as ‘a burnt-out shell’.
Yet what is clear from the bulky volumes of rituals and ceremonies that have been published is that the members of the Golden Dawn were not dilettantes; they took the art of magic as seriously as Paracelsus or Bruno. They believed in the will and the imagination and in the ‘magical correspondences’ (which will be discussed in the following chapter). So what went wrong?
Looking through the four volumes of Golden Dawn rituals, published by Israel Regardie, it is difficult not to feel that they may have the made the same mistake as Bruno, and perhaps Wronski—that of complicating something that is essentially simple. After all, ‘magic’ is basically the art of tapping man’s ‘hidden powers’, whether we mean the power to influence dice by psychokinesis, or to achieve a vision of the ‘Absolute’ by mystical disciplines.
This notion of a ‘direct’ solution has persisted throughout the history of magic and mysticism, and it explains the emphasis that has always been placed on memory and imagination. Marcel Proust achieved his own mystical vision of ‘temps perdu’ in the simplest manner—by eating a cake dipped in herb tea. He spent the remainder of his life pursuing this vision with the same directness—by locking himself in a soundproof room, and attempting to re-create his own past in minute detail. He was pursuing the same ideal as Wronski, utilising the sense impressions of a lifetime to create the ultimate reality inside his own head. If he failed to discover Wronski’s ‘Law of Creation’, he discovered his own inner laws of creation and produced a masterpiece. His ‘direct method’ failed, since he never learned the art of re-creating the past inside his own head at will. Yet as we read him, we have a sense of excitement, a feeling that he was on the right track, and that a complicated magical ritual would not have brought him any closer to his goal, any more than it brought Mathers or Crowley or Dion Fortune to theirs.
The annals of crime produce another curious example of a man who tried to use ‘the direct method’ to achieve ‘magical memory.’ In October 1932, the psychiatrist Dr Frederick Wertham was called to a New York hospital to see a twenty-four-year-old youth named Robert Irwin, who had attempted to cut off his penis after winding a tight rubber band around the base. The wound was sewed up—it took seven stitches—and Irwin eventually left the hospital. He explained that he had tried to persuade doctors to amputate his penis on three occasions, and that he finally decided to do it himself ‘But why?’ asked Wertham. ‘You should ask me first where I got the visualising idea,’ said Irwin. And he proceeded to explain the notion that had obsessed him since his teens: the development of imagination until anything that had been seen or heard could be reconstructed in the head.
To develop this mental sight, you must simply exercise it, just as you would exercise a muscle to develop it. In other words, you just sit down every day and practice visualizing, and the more you practice, the sooner you’ll get there. But this practice is extremely difficult, as anyone who tries it will find out. It is easy at least for me to visualize an object in my mind. But to keep at this visualizing consistently, and especially to hold one particular image in my mind for any time, that is another matter.
I hope some day not only to be able to visualize and hold an object in my mind’s eye as long as I want to … but to be able to project such an object into space, to fix such an object in physical visibility: a projected living reality …
Irwin described in detail the ‘magical’ exercises described by David Conway earlier in this chapter. Irwin went on:
We have all read Shakespeare, the Bible, the dictionary. How much do we remember? Very little. Yet it is all there, right in our very heads. Every word, every line, every syllable. The time will come, given enough development in this direction, when a man could lie in his bed at night and be able to actually open up the book of Shakespeare there in the dark. In his mind. And read it—yes, read it, with his eyes closed… And what’s more, you’ll be able to see those plays enacted in your mind. Those characters will step forth in living, projected reality…11
This, said Irwin, was why he had tried to amputate his penis; he felt that his sexual desires were robbing him of the energy that he needed to achieve ‘visualisation’.
He had not arrived at these ideas by reading magical texts but through his natural talent as an artist. The desire to re-capture living forms was so strong that at the age of fourteen he was modelling figures in butter and soap. He collected pictures and reproductions of Greek statues and spent hours staring at them. And one day, as he was working as an errand boy, it suddenly struck him—like a revelation—that before a sculptor can make a statue, he has to visualise it, to make a mental statue in his brain. He began to train himself to visualise pictures in his collection, staring at them for minutes, then staring at the wall and trying to re-create them in detail. He made a metronome to see how long he could concentrate. He was also struck by the fact that masturbation involves ‘visualising’, and that it is one of the few departments in which man has developed visualisation with a high degree of success.
He fell in love with a girl called Alice, and asked her to marry him and help him in his development of ‘visualisation’. She agreed. Irwin began to read philosophy, for he was now convinced that if he could learn to journey into his own mind, he could eventually contact the ‘universal mind’, the ‘central radio station’. At this point, he discovered Will Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy, and read about Schopenhauer. This was the worst thing that could have happened to him. Schopenhauer’s central theme is that life is a continual violent striving of the will, which always leads to misery, since existence is meaningless. The most powerful urge of most human adults is reproduction, which prolongs the misery. Man’s only hope of salvation lies in liberating himself from desire and attempting to live a life of detached contemplation. And art is one of the most powerful means that man has yet discovered to achieve this state of contemplation…
Irwin was shattered; it verified his worst fears. He instantly broke his engagement with Alice. And he decided to defeat the blind urge to reproduction by amputating his penis. It was at this juncture that Dr Wertham met him for the first time, and listened to his plans to achieve total ‘visualisation’. Wertham’s view—which emerges clearly in his account of the case—was that Irwin was a nut.
The Depression years were a bad time for would-be artists. Irwin had to take a series of jobs that bored him. When jobs became impossible to find he slept in parks and begged food at the back doors of restaurants. After the attempt to amputate his penis, he was in and out of mental hospitals for several years. He took lodgings with a Hungarian family named Gedeon and fell in love with the eldest daughter, Ethel. For a while she helped him with his ‘visualisation’, then got bored. Ethel’s attractive younger sister Veronica also liked Irwin; she was an artist’s model and posed for him naked. In fact, she suggested that he should sleep with her; but Irwin was determined to conserve his sexual energy.
In 1937, Irwin succeeded in obtaining a place at a theological college; but after a fight with a fellow student, he was expelled. In deep despair he decided to commit suicide, and also to kill Ethel Gedeon. He called at the Gedeon home and found his ex-landlady in alone. Towards midnight, she became irritated at his determination to stay and tried to push him to the door. Irwin strangled her. When Veronica came home, he dragged her into the bedroom in the dark and forced her to lie still for hours; when he realised that she had recognised him, he strangled her, then went and killed the lodger, a bar-tender, with an ice pick. He gave himself up shortly afterwards. He was tried in November 1938 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Wertham’s insanity plea was rejected. Irwin’s last words before he was sentenced were: ‘Nobody understands me. Nobody wants to understand me.’
There seems to be little doubt that Irwin was mentally unbalanced in the last years of his freedom; the strains of a lifetime of hardship and frustration had undermined his sense of reality. There can also be little doubt that it was the arch-pessimist Schopenhauer—who was particularly fond of good living—who drove Irwin to the point of violence, first against himself, then against other people. What is curious and also rather disquieting, is that in none of the many accounts of the case has his ‘visualising’ ever been taken seriously. Wertham himself had no doubt that it was simply another symptom of his insanity. Irwin was an ‘Outsider’ in the fullest sense of the word. If he had achieved success as a sculptor, his idea of visualising might have been taken as seriously as Proust’s ‘recherche du temps perdu’. As it was, it led him to a lifetime in Dannemora Penitentiary.
We can take the Irwin case as a convenient symbol of the problem of the Outsider in the twentieth century, a problem defined by the hero of Henri Barbusse’s novel Hell, who explains his own unhappiness by saying: ‘I see too deep and too much.’ He is the creative individual whose instinct is to bring order out of chaos, to question the foundations of society. In all ages, such a man is likely to be misunderstood, since human beings have a powerful instinct of conservatism, and regard innovators with mistrust. But since the Outsider’s impulse is fundamentally religious—the desire to be more ‘serious’ than other people is the essence of religion—he tends to be less of a misfit in ages of faith than in ages of materialism and scepticism.
The Outsider is a ‘non-acceptor’. And his non-acceptance is based on a sense that human beings underestimate their own powers. The ‘unknown philosopher’, Saint-Martin, expressed it most clearly when he stated that man is always having flashes of god-like faculties: ‘Man possesses innumerable vestiges of the faculties resident in the Agent which produced him.’ This is why so many Outsiders of the past have been students of magic, and why the figure of the magician—Faust or Cornelius Agrippa—has always exercised such popular appeal.
Let us try to summarise the concept of imagination that has begun to emerge in the past few chapters:
Human beings seem to have an incorrigible tendency to constrict their everyday consciousness. They do this out of anxiety, out of the need to focus clearly on immediate problems. But the paradoxical effect is to strangle their vitality.
This ‘constriction’ or narrowing of consciousness is like looking at an object through a magnifying glass. Its basic features are enlarged, but at the same time you can see less of it. If you place it under a microscope, even greater magnification is obtained, but the visual field is made smaller than ever. As we constrict consciousness, we lose our over-all sense of meaning.
But this sense of meaning is our strength. When we can see meaning clearly, we know exactly what we are supposed to do, and our energies respond. When we cannot perceive meaning, we yawn with boredom, and our energies fail.
This explains one of the chief problems of everyday life. We can be perfectly comfortable, in an enviable situation, and yet thoroughly bored. We can be uncomfortable, in a highly dangerous situation, and yet feel intensely alive. Danger forces us to make a mental effort. We ‘stand back’ from life, like a painter standing back from his canvas, and see over-all meanings. The result is a flood of vitality.
It begins to look as if civilisation is man’s downfall, since it subjects him to increasing comfort. Healthy spirits usually dislike it and may actually go out and seek discomfort. This explains the apparently ‘paradoxical’ actions of so many ‘Outsiders’ like Gauguin, Van Gogh and T. E. Lawrence, who turned their backs on comfort. But man possesses an instrument for adjusting the balance. It is called imagination.
The romantics failed to plumb the powers of the imagination because they failed to recognise clearly that what is wrong with human beings is that we keep losing our sense of reality. We are the victims of ‘closeupness’. A man may still be deeply in love with his wife after twenty years of marriage and not ‘realise’ it until she has to go home to nurse her mother for a fortnight. He may love his home, yet take it for granted until he comes back to it from his holiday abroad. But if a friend asks him how he met his wife and urges him to tell the story of their courtship and marriage, this has precisely the same effect as losing her for two weeks. He takes the trouble to focus past events. Suddenly he is re-living them and realising how much he loves his wife.
The key word here is ‘focus’. Human beings are mentally lazy. We look at things with only half an eye, listen to music with only half an ear. We are always trying to economise on attention. It is rather like gulping food down too fast; it produces a kind of permanent mild indigestion. Sometimes, if life gets too hectic, and we lose the habit of paying careful attention to anything, this indigestion becomes acute, and the result is what Sartre calls ‘nausea’, a sense of total meaninglessness. By contrast, if we can somehow summon all our attention and focus it on a single object or idea, the result is a curious build-up of inner power, analogous to the way a laser beam builds up power by being reflected from one mirror to another. When this power has been generated, we focus on things that normally leave us indifferent and grasp their inner meaning. In such a state, a man would not need to talk about his wife for half an hour to realise that he loves her. He would think about her, and instantly grasp her total reality.
In short, imagination is the power to get back to reality, to re-focus our true values, to combat the curious erosion of our vitality that James calls ‘inferiority to our full selves.’
We might use another image, and say that ‘attention’ has a mechanism like a bow, or the spring of an air rifle. If we feel that something deserves our total attention, we pull back the bowstring—or spring—to its limit. On the other hand, if you shot an arrow by pulling back the string only a couple of inches, you would expect the arrow to fall on the ground a few feet away. And this sickly, half-hearted way of paying attention is typical of our everyday lives.
Now the bowstring—or air rifle—analogy is only another way of saying that consciousness is ‘intentional’. But Paracelsus and Bruno and Levi would draw a further conclusion. The purpose of the bow or rifle is to fire a projectile, and the projectile is intended to exert a certain ‘action at a distance’—let us say, to bring down a running stag. Paracelsus and Bruno would assert that the imagination, when correctly used, also has power of ‘action at a distance’. This power they called magic.
Yet it would be a total misrepresentation to say that imagination is the essence of magic. It is the driving force, but that is another matter. Petrol is the driving force of a car; yet there is a great deal more to a car than its petrol tank. According to the hermeticists, magic will not work unless it also utilises a certain law of nature. This is known as the Law of Correspondences.