The idea of becoming a writer first came to me in my teens. It was expressed then in some rather bad poetry—luckily this has not survived—and it was not until many years later that I actually produced anything worth reading, or at least that an editor would accept for publication. “Perseverance furthers,” the I Ching tells us, and at least in this context it was right. Today, looking back to the time when I was first being published—the early 1990s, when I was about to enter my forties—I am amazed to realize that I have been writing now for more than twenty years. I started out with book reviews and magazine articles and essays, taking any opportunities that presented themselves and, as most beginning writers do, eagerly building up a body of work in print, doing all I could to make up for lost time. Today, in my late fifties, I am just as busy as I was then, even more so, suffering the full-time writer’s complaint of chronic workaholism and insufficient earnings; even during the busiest days of my career as a musician—by the mid-70s I had turned the poetry into songwriting and was successful with it for a time—I was never as busy as I am now. But between first seeing print and today, I have—if I may so immodestly inform the reader—added a few notches to my belt. Between 2001, when my first book, Turn Off Your Mind, appeared and the time of this writing (2014), I have produced sixteen books, with another due to be published this year, and I am about to start the research for another, practically as soon as I finish writing this introduction. I have also produced scores of articles, essays, book reviews, interviews, and lectures, of which the pieces collected here are a small sample. It often feels that I do very little other than write—a complaint friends often make—and that I have become, as a less-busy fellow writer once called me, a “writing machine.” If that is the case, it is the one example of a man-machine merger that I condone, and I trust that the gods of writings—such as Hermes, about whom I have, ironically, written a book—will keep me well oiled and in good working order for at least another twenty years.
What often prevents an aspiring writer from really getting started is the problem of finding his material, his theme—what, exactly, to write about. (Creative writing teachers tell us to “write about what you know,” but that only raises the question: what do you know?) The technical tricks of the trade, of course, have to be mastered and a readable style developed. But what leads to mastery is the key element of having something to say, of finding the things that you love and are obsessed with and that you want to introduce readers to, so as to stimulate an equal love and obsession in them. It is precisely that love and obsession that drives the writer to finding the best way to communicate his passion.
What the reader of this collection, and perhaps of my other books, will discover is that I am in love and obsessed with ideas. I like to think. It is, admittedly, an occupation not as popular as in some earlier times and one that requires the increasingly elusive necessities of peace and quiet, along with the more accessible ingredients of a book, notebook, table, and pen, or, more frequently today, laptop. You don’t need a Hadron collider or Hubble telescope or Human Genome Project—just time, dedication, and an insatiable need to clarify and focus your mind. I am no critic of intuition, feeling, or the more palpable delights of sensation, but I do think that human beings are essentially thinking beings. That is to say, it is in the world of the mind that our humanity truly resides; it is the element that, as far as we know, we do not share with other creatures and which, for better or worse, it has been given to us to explore. This is why it is not as popular an activity as some others. Thinkers are rather like those people at the head of a jungle expedition, hacking into a thick tangle of roots and vines in order to make a path. It is demanding, unpleasant work, but it needs to be done, and it must be admitted that the people further back on the trail have a relatively easier time of it. Is it any surprise that most of them leave the difficult work to those who have a taste for it?
So I like to think. But what do I think about? As the reader of these essays, taken from different publications over the last two decades, will find, there are a few themes that occur again and again. One is human consciousness and its evolution, both in the individual and in the culture at large. Another is that mysterious world that seems to strangely parallel our familiar, everyday one, the world of the occult, the magical, the esoteric. As you might suspect, these two themes overlap and are intimately related. There are aspects of what we call the occult that enter into states and forms of consciousness rather different from what we usually experience, just as certain unfamiliar modes of consciousness have a strangely magical character to them. One reason I became interested in the occult nearly forty years ago was precisely because it seemed to offer some way to approach the kind of intensity of consciousness I was instinctively seeking out—often in dangerous ways—just as it was through an interest in magic, the occult, and the esoteric that I found a way of mapping out the strange and unusual states I sometimes experienced, and which, it seems to me, suggest some latent possibilities waiting to be developed. Later, when I studied philosophy, I discovered that, while the kind of philosophy I encountered in university for the most part either ignored those aspects of reality in which I was most interested or dismissed them as nonsense, the “rejected” tradition of the occult, magic, and esotericism was more than open to them. Indeed, in many ways, it is precisely that tradition that has offered a home to these concerns, at least since the beginning of modern times. This is why, when I came to write, I wrote about ideas and people that generally fell into these areas—or, more broadly speaking, into the world of what we can call “alternative thought.” (The fact that there were magazines and journals open to publishing my work also helped.)
The rather vague and capacious umbrella term “alternative thought” covers a wide range of subjects and individuals, connected by the fact that they do not find a place for themselves within the more narrow confines of modern, rationalist, scientistic thinking. This does not mean I am an enemy of science. Far from it; in fact for a time when I was first being published, I worked as a science writer for a major university in California. But I am a critic of the belief—for that is what it is—that the limited purview of materialistic science can explain everything in existence, and that what it can’t explain is either unreal or unimportant. While it is an undoubted achievement to have secured a grasp on the Higgs boson, I object to the idea that in doing so we have “solved the mystery of the universe,” as some of the news reports about the discovery announced. The universe is just as mysterious today as it was before the Higgs boson turned up. We may, indeed, have a firmer idea of how it hangs together, but we are no nearer to understanding why it is here in the first place and, more important, what we are supposed to do now that we find ourselves in it. Philosophy in the old school—going back to Plato and ending, perhaps, in the early twentieth century—used to address these questions, but in more recent years it has given them up. My sympathies are with the old school; the questions of why we exist and how we should live seem more important than what the next elementary particle in line to be discovered may be, certainly more important than the semantic nitpicking that much academic philosophy has descended into. Most of the people I write about in these essays thought so, too, and that, more than anything else, is why I am attracted to them. They were looking for the invisible, we could say, and so was I.
But what I found when I started to write about these ideas was that the lives of the people who held them were just as fascinating as the ideas themselves, and that a study of them provided a kind of counter-history to the one we are usually given. Almost half of my books are biographies. I’ve written studies of Emanuel Swedenborg, C. G. Jung, P. D. Ouspensky, Rudolf Steiner, H. P. Blavatsky, and Aleister Crowley. For all my interest in the occult, the magical, and the esoteric, I am at heart an existentialist. Existentialism, of course, has nothing to do with the occult or, for that matter, with spirituality of any kind. As presented in thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus, it is a grim affair, stoically affirming human freedom, limited as it is, in a contingent, accidental universe. But aside from the explicit beliefs—or lack of them—associated with existentialism, its essence is a concern with the meaning of human existence, a question that religion also used to address but which it seems to have mislaid some time ago. And this meaning, existentialism argues, cannot be discovered by sitting in an armchair and contemplating life. It can only be found by living—which, in any case, is unavoidable. What I found in writing about the lives of many of the people in this collection is that, as the writer Henry Miller once said, they “lived life to the hilt.” These “revolutionaries of the soul,” as my editor, Richard Smoley, calls them—hence the title of this book—not only thought about and questioned reality, they also threw themselves into it, often headfirst. They sought more out of life than what we usually settle for, and their revolutions embraced both the inner and outer worlds, broadening both in many ways. Madame Blavatsky hit the revolutionary barricades with Mazzini and Garibaldi. Ouspensky “remembered himself” during the chaos of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution. Jean Gebser nearly lost his life escaping from Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War. Jung descended into his unconscious while wrestling with psychosis, a struggle he shared with the playwright August Strindberg and the religious philosopher Swedenborg. Owen Barfield, with whom I had the good fortune to meet and speak with one afternoon some eighteen years ago, when I had first moved to London, saw more of the twentieth century than anyone else in this book, living through two world wars and ending his days contemplating the meaning of the information age. (He died not long after our meeting, at the age of ninety-nine, and I believe I conducted the last interview with him.) Rudolf Steiner avoided assassination by early proto-Nazis. Some, like the occult historian James Webb, did not survive their encounter with chaos. Others, like the dark magician Aleister Crowley, swallowed enough experience for a dozen lives; while still others, like the occult scholar Manly P. Hall, succumbed, for all their erudition, to spiritual con men. These were not bloodless rationalists, sizing up life from a comfortable distance, but men and women who found themselves in the thick of it, as well as in dimensions of reality most of us rarely encounter. That they lived life to the hilt and then some, Henry Miller, I think, would have agreed.
Another aspect of this collection I’d like to point out is that many of the essays assume a broader, more literary-philosophical familiarity than what is usually the case in a book dealing with occultists and magicians. The article on Ouspensky, for example, places him in the literary world of 1930s London, and the one on the eccentric Polish explorer and ethnologist Jan Potocki centers on his single and singularly strange masterpiece, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Many readers, I suspect, are not that familiar with Jean Gebser, who combines a deep spirituality with the mandarin philosophical tradition of Central Europe. Much of Owen Barfield’s philosophy is based on his study of poetry—as is Gebser’s—and August Strindberg, of course, is one of the most important figures in literary modernism. Colin Wilson’s examples for a new faculty of human consciousness come from some of the great writers of the last century. One of the problems with much of today’s literature on spirituality is that it is too parochial, too limited in its context. It has become a genre, and it does not step over the borders of its niche too often. This is unfortunate. Market forces are probably to blame, with publishers and authors hesitant to confuse their readers (“Is this book about spirituality, or literature, or what?”), and the readers themselves more than likely want something simple and direct and not too challenging. This is a bad situation, and I for one make a point of appealing to readers’ intelligence—smartening them up rather than dumbing them down—and of making them stretch their imagination, even if only a little. The questions that obsessed the people in this book (and its author) are not limited to one neatly squared-off patch of reality; and in any case, reality, as we know, is never neatly squared off. The question of the meaning and purpose of human existence is not the property of a few “experts” working in their limited fields; it pervades every aspect of our lives, and as I argue in my book A Dark Muse (2005) about the links between literature and the occult, some of the deepest spiritual questions in the last two centuries have been addressed as often by writers and poets as by more ostensibly “spiritual” figures—sometimes more often and more successfully, in fact. We need to return these questions to the broader fields of human endeavor instead of keeping them neatly tucked away in “mind, body, spirit” and other genres. If that means challenging ourselves, then let’s be challenged. It’s the only way the spirit grows. In fact, the growing interest in “occulture”—the meeting ground between the occult and culture—recognizes this fact, and in the past few years I have participated in several conferences and seminars dedicated to this idea in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom.
The essays are arranged in a rough chronological order—rough is the operative word, as some pieces fall out of sequence—and although I have edited here and there, neatening and correcting, I have kept them as much as possible in their original form. I have done so because this is not a book in the sense of having one theme, worked out chapter by chapter, but a collection of writings done at different times. There is some overlap and some minimal repetition, but this seemed to lend itself to a natural and unplanned continuity; it was while going over these essays and articles that I felt they were, in a way, reaching out to each other to form a kind of lattice. The one anachronistic arrangement is with the first essay, “Colin Wilson and Faculty X,” one of the earliest pieces in the book, if not the earliest; it was first published twenty years ago. As readers of my work know, Wilson has been an enormous influence on me; it was through a reading of his book The Occult (1971)—still fascinating and important more than forty years later—that started me on my explorations into the occult and the hidden powers of consciousness. Sadly, Wilson, my mentor and friend whom I knew for thirty years, passed away in December 2013, while I was putting this collection together; he was eighty-two. Putting him at the start of this collection is a small tribute to the importance and significance that I, like many others, believe his work holds for the future of human evolution.
The last essay, “The Strange Death of James Webb,” comes at the end for a different reason. Webb’s tragic plight, his inability to completely accept or reject the occult, seems indicative of the situation our culture as a whole faces in regard to the occult. Our conscious, rational selves reject it as an outmoded superstition and see interest in it as evidence of a weak mind. Yet, as popular culture shows, the occult is still alive and well in our imaginations. We may reject it in the daylight, but in our dreams it comes to life.
So here are some revolutionaries of the soul. I hope they stir things up for you.
Gary Lachman
London, January 2014