CHAPTER 6

THIS CHARMING MAGIC

“The ultimate book for those who would walk with the Gods.” That was the sell line that made me pick up the big, thick, green book from a shelf in Watkins. I was in my late teens and I wanted… I wanted to mean something and to understand more, to escape myself and to be myself; I wanted renown and adventure and to tear the veil of the living and to see the secrets of the dead and I wanted love and respect and clear skin and a girl to fall in love with; I wanted to be set free of me. I wanted power. Power to make all this happen, power not to be a tongue-tied schoolboy riding the 29 bus down Green Lanes into town, with my birthday money tight-fisted in my pocket, to seek knowledge in the pages of my truest loves and in their sanctifying halls.

The bookshops of Tottenham Court Road and Cecil Court were my first solo destination; I’d catch the 29 bus early on Saturday morning after it turned out of Wood Green bus garage, climb to the top deck, and hide behind my book as the bus rolled slowly south, picking out my journey in chapters, safe from intrusion behind my walls of story.

Those were the days when Foyles was an outpost of Stalinist Russia, although with more stock. It seemed as if every book ever printed was there, somewhere, stacked ceiling-high under the fading names of each publisher. I still remember the battered desks where your books were wrapped with paper and you were given “the chit” to be presented to the enclosed, armoured cubicle where the treasurer sat clinking behind towers of change, to pay and then return, chit stamped, to claim the books as, now, your own.

But even Foyles did not have “The ultimate book for those who would walk with the Gods”. That was in Watkins, together with strange smells and stranger people, whose scrutinizing glances I ignored – if there was one lesson I had learned early as a child of the city, it was to make eye contact with no one.

It was about the thickest book I’d ever seen – 800 pages – and above the solid black of the sell line the title, just two words: The Occult.

London is a magical city. Oh, yes, the countryside is the haunt of wise women, the cunning folk of craft and herb and old lore, but the city is the place for sorcerers, for the seekers after arcane knowledge and the power it promises.

Contrary to popular belief, witch hunts were not features of medieval society. It was only in the sixteenth century that they became widespread, as people sought explanation and scapegoats for the ills of the century. The king himself, while reigning as James VI in Scotland, wrote a treatise against witchcraft:

The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaues of the Deuill, the Witches or enchaunters, hath moved me (beloued reader) to dispatch in post, this following treatise of mine, not in any wise (as I protest) to serue for a shew of my learning & ingine, but onely (mooued of conscience) to preasse thereby, so farre as I can, to resolue the doubting harts of many; both that such assaultes of Sathan are most certainly practized, & that the instrumentes thereof, merits most severly to be punished.⁵⁷

The witch persecutions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were mainly directed at the poor and the old, lonely women living on the edges of villages made suspicious and paranoid by the traumas of the time. As the old institutions, in particular monasteries, charged with caring for the poor and elderly were dissolved, the support of them came on to communities, themselves hard-pressed amid poor harvests and bouts of disease. If there was a pattern, it was this: an old woman seeks aid of a neighbour but is refused. When the old woman persists, she is insulted and teased and, in the only form of retaliation available to her, she curses the uncharity of her neighbour. But then, should misfortune strike in the days or weeks immediately afterwards, it was no hard leap from the evil of the day to the harsh words of the old beggar woman.

The records show that the witch craze was worst in Essex. This may be an artefact of the haphazard nature of record-keeping – it’s hard to see why this county should be worse than any other – but whether true or not, in the city there were others, much more highly connected, who sought knowledge and power through the occult arts.

The world had split in the sixteenth century. Religion was broken from its former unity. News of new worlds beneath the moon, lands unknown to the ancients, opened possibilities undreamed of and brought rumour of wealth unbounded. The heavens themselves shifted, and all that had been secure seemed unfixed and drifting.

In medieval story there is, in one sense, plenty of “magic”. Merlin does this or that “by his subtilty”, Bercilak resumes his severed head. But all these passages have unmistakably the note of “faerie” about them…. But in Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare the subject is treated quite differently. “He to his studie goes”; books are opened, terrible words pronounced, souls imperiled. The medieval author seems to write for a public to whom magic, like knight-errantry, is part of the furniture of romance: the Elizabethan, for a public who feel that it might be going on in the next street…⁵⁸

The magic of London was not the hedge craft of country wise women but a high magic, an integral part of the Renaissance programme to reclaim the lost knowledge of the ancients. The sorcerers of the city were not the poor and the old and the female, but men of wealth who sought power – and they needed money in order to find and buy the grimoires and telescopes and alembics and athanors needed to practise the craft.

The astrologers who had so signally failed in their predictions that Anne Boleyn would bear a son had been banished from Henry’s court, but by the time Elizabeth came to power, the melding of philosophy, occult knowledge, and early scientific speculations was well advanced. No one typified this better than John Dee. Mathematician, astrologer, alchemist, and magician, Dee was born in London but, as is the way with most of us born in the city, his parents weren’t: they were Welsh. Adopted into the patronage system for his learning, he was asked to calculate the most propitious date and time for Elizabeth’s coronation. Now a royal favourite, Dee travelled through Europe collecting books and knowledge. On his return, Dee set up his first alchemical laboratory and began his angelic conversations with the aid of a medium, Edward Kelley. Dee and Kelley travelled through Europe with their families, eventually fetching up in Bohemia, where Kelley’s angel contact informed the men that they should hold all things in common, including their wives. “It was agreed by us to move the question, whether the sense were of Carnal use (contrary to the law of the Commandment) or of Spiritual love.”⁵⁹ As Dee was sixty and Kelley thirty-two at the time, this command probably held more interest for Kelley than for Dee. Whether or not they did share wives is unclear, but the circumstantial evidence is suggestive: shortly after the command, Dee broke off his partnership with Kelley and returned to England, where his wife gave birth to a baby boy some nine months after the breaking of their fellowship. Whatever Dee’s doubts, he raised the boy as his own.

Looking backwards from our twenty-first-century vantage point, we naturally elide sorcerers and astrologers, but from the perspective of the time, these were callings that presupposed very different views of the human place in the world. For the astrologer, man lived under the domination of the stars, his life and destiny laid out by the movement of the heavenly spheres. But the Renaissance sorcerer, the man of high magic, saw human beings as the measure of all things, and able to become anything, from angel to demon. The melding of neo-Platonism with various gnomic texts from antiquity, such as Pythagoras, Apuleius, and the Orphic and Sibylline books by the Florentines Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, had produced a universe teeming with spirits intermediate between the human and angelic levels: daemons (not demons), aerii homines, genii. These were beings of power, which the man of wisdom might summon and control, thus gaining mastery.

The sixteenth century was when key thinkers began to suspect that it might be possible for mankind to seize control of his destiny, to break the power of the stars and wrest control of the earth from the elements. But how to do it? Magic was one, but another method presented itself: science. Although now we see these as opposed, then there was little to choose between them: both presented themselves as manifestos of human emancipation.

Magic is power. Science is power. As the centre of political and mercantile power, London attracted and produced men committed to the new learning. One of the key players was born in York House on the Strand in 1561. Back then, the mansions of the elite lined the river that ran behind the Strand, as boats provided a much more reliable means of transport than anything on dry land. Although York House and the other mansions on the Strand were sold off to developers in the seventeenth century, in one of those strange survivals of previous ages that pop up in the city, the house’s water gate remains, stranded and gently eroding in Victoria Embankment Gardens at the end of Buckingham Gardens. As this was where ships used to moor, its present distance from the river is a signal reminder of just how narrow a channel the Thames now occupies compared to its previous tidal spread.

It was Francis Bacon, the father of scientific empiricism, who was born in York House. In 1620 he published the Novum Organum (New Method) of knowledge, advancing the idea that by inductive reasoning and the interrogation of nature man might advance to greater knowledge of, and power over, nature.

The key question for the men of the time was which method would prove more fruitful. Science proceeds by virtue of its method, which means that while it might take a genius such as Newton or Einstein to propose a new theory, once published it is possible for anyone of reasonable intelligence to follow the reasoning by which they came to their conclusions. Similarly, science is demonstrated by experimenters of genius, like Michelson and Morley, running tests to show if predictions match results. But, once the experiment has first been run, anyone following the same method should be able to replicate the results.

Science is repeatable. That’s its point. It might take a genius to find the path through the overwhelming array of data, but once the path is found any Tom, Dick, or Harry should be able to follow it.

The point of magic is that any Tom, Dick, or Harry cannot do it. A magician, a wizard might take years to learn a spell, a craft, a potion, but even if I followed the same practices as diligently and for as long, there would be no guarantee that I could repeat the spell. Magic is personal and particular. In that it resembles elite sport or virtuoso musicians. I might practise batting for as long as Kevin Pietersen, working as diligently as he does, and yet at the end of it I would not be able to do what he does. Why not? The short answer: I don’t have his talent. The slightly longer answer: I do not have the combination of physical, mental, and emotional characteristics that make him a great batsman – my deficiencies ranging from poorer eyesight and being a good six inches shorter through to lacking a taste for physical confrontation as confirmation of my own abilities.

Similarly with music. Pace Malcolm Gladwell, but while 10,000 hours of practice might be necessary for mastery of an art, it is not necessarily sufficient for it. I could have set aside eight hours every day on the guitar – I did, for a number of years – and yet I never even came close to mastering the instrument, and this for a particular combination of physical and psychological reasons. To coin Albert’s law: practice is necessary for mastery of an art but it is not sufficient for it; you need talent too. And by talent I mean the particular combination of physical, psychological, and spiritual traits that are necessary for a particular person to master a particular skill – and note that these will differ according to both the person and the art.

Similarly with magic. A wizard is, by nature, singular. Magic is performance and few have the talent for it.

So, in the theatre of public results, science won hands down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: gravitation and the laws of motion, electricity and inoculation – all of these and more served to raise the prestige of science, as did the foundation of the Royal Society. The old ways and beliefs were passing, and the world had lost some of its enchantment, as evinced in Bishop Corbet’s “Farewell to the Fairies”:

Witness those rings and roundelays

Of theirs, which yet remain,

Were footed in Queen Mary’s days

On many a grassy plain;

But since of late, Elizabeth,

And later, James came in,

They never danced on any heath

As when the time hath been.

By which we note the Fairies

Were of the old Profession,

Their songs were “Ave Mary’s”,

Their dances were Procession.

But now, alas, they all are dead,

Or gone beyond the seas;

Or farther for Religion fled,

Or else they take their ease.⁶⁰

But unlike the fairies, magic did not go away.

London is a magical city. London is a mysterious city. And its magic and its mystery can come upon you at the most unexpected time. A small tree, seen by the path’s edge on your daily walk and barely noticed so that its absence is not registered, nor its presence, until one day, in physical memory, I look and see that sometimes it is there and sometimes not.

London is not like Venice, whose mystery is entwined in its labyrinth of streets and alleys, and in its beauty. For sure, London has its courtyards and dead ends, but a proper Londoner knows his patch. No, the mystery of London is in its familiar places, when the life drops away from them and the noise of the city dies down, and walking down a suburban street as twilight draws in I realize that all it would take is a slight twist of the real and I could keep walking down this street forever. But then, I live in the modern world, where the veil between worlds has been worn thin and we are kept from such sights only by a furious effort of will and a tumult of distraction. The walls were thicker two centuries ago, at the start of the Victorian age. Now, in retrospect, it takes on the antiquated air of its sepia-stained photographs, but it was the first, and perhaps only, truly modern age. It plucked the fruits of the Age of Enlightenment in the extraordinary range and power of its invention, which saw iron tracks grid the country and, in the city, the feats of tunnelling that produced the Underground and, even more importantly, the great sewerage system of Joseph Bazalgette, which made the megacity that London was becoming habitable.

The nineteenth century was the Age of Science undefiled. It was a time before the carnage of industrial war and the obscenity of research turned to death sullied the purity of the endeavour. This was the high point of reason and the lowest tide of superstition, when it seemed that everything would be illuminated and made clear. In comparison, our own age, with its proliferating cults and therapies, is a sink of superstition.

And yet… This time of reason was when many of the most important occult societies and organizations were formed, a shadow drop to the bright light of the age, and London, the city of cities throughout the Victorian age, was where many of the most important and enduring started or flourished: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, spiritualism, the Theosophical Society, the Ancient Order of Druids. (The Ancient Order of Druids is the oldest, having been founded in 1781 in the King’s Arms pub, Poland Street, just off Oxford Street. There’s a plaque outside the pub commemorating the fact. The pub itself is now a favourite with London’s bears and otters. If you don’t know what that means, it would probably be better to pick somewhere else for a swift half.)

Spiritualism, the contacting of the dead through mediums, first began in New York in 1848 but spread rapidly through America and Britain. It was unusual among the new religious movements of the time in being largely led by women, most of whom were working class. The most famous proponent of spiritualism was a man whose literary creation incarnated objective rationality at its most cerebral: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a definitive London character, but the writer’s own time living in the city was relatively brief. The Doyle family moved to London in 1891 when Arthur set up a medical practice at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, but they only lived in the city for two years; the diagnosis of Conan Doyle’s wife, Louise, with tuberculosis demanded a move to somewhere with cleaner air. Conan Doyle, a doctor, lived with death; Louise died in 1906, and his eldest son, Kingsley, died in 1918 from complications of the wounds he suffered during the Battle of the Somme. Although raised a Catholic, Conan Doyle had lost his faith in his teens, but he acquired a keen interest in psychic research, joining the society dedicated to that in 1887. In 1916, Conan Doyle declared his belief in spiritualism, and as further family members died his faith strengthened. The believer did not influence the writer, however: Sherlock Holmes remained the sceptic through to his final written adventure, The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place.

Spiritualism itself reached a plateau in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then fell away to some extent under the assault of debunkers and the vapidity of conversations with the dead: truly, if death was like this, an eternal Sunday in an out-of-season English seaside resort might be better. But conversations with the dead continue today throughout London; spiritualists are condescended to by sceptics and religious believers alike, metropolitans seeing them as polyester-clad suburbanites who are terminally uncool, while the official churches look and recoil at what this mirror of belief reveals. Are they all, our creeds and temples and liturgies, simply a recoil from the face of death?

The Theosophical Society also had its origin in New York – perhaps indicating how the centre of modernity was moving westward. The two key figures in its early development were both women: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Annie Besant, whom we have already met. Blavatsky (1831–91) was a Russian/German who had travelled widely in her youth and was the very antithesis of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. Alfred Sinnett, editor of The Pioneer newspaper on which Rudyard Kipling put in his “seven years’ hard”, described her thus:

She was rugged and eccentric in appearance; she dressed anyhow – in loose wrappers – and smoked cigarettes incessantly. Worse than this, she was passionate and excitable, and often violent in her language. Namby-pamby conventionality shrank from her aghast – to her grim satisfaction, for she loathed it. She had a loud voice, that grew harsh in its tones when she felt irritated, and something or other would irritate her fifty times a day.⁶¹

When Blavatsky arrived in America, she became involved with the burgeoning spiritualist movement as a medium, but differed from its mainstream in maintaining that the communications she received were not from the dead but other spirits. Blavatsky also claimed that during her travels she had met and studied with many religious teachers, even entering Tibet – which was closed to Westerners in the nineteenth century – and receiving a commission from the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, a group of spiritual masters, to advance theosophy, the wisdom underlying all the world religions. To that end, Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. An indefatigable traveller, Blavatsky moved to India and also visited Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), before returning to Europe and settling in London, where she met and became friends with Annie Besant. In the capital, Blavatsky founded an eponymous lodge, of which she was most definitely queen bee. W. B. Yeats, whom we shall meet again, joined the lodge and gives, in one of his letters, a masterly little portrait of the atmosphere after Blavatsky had expelled three members:

Madame Blavatsky is in high spirits. The society is like the “happy family” that used to be exhibited round Charing Cross station – a cat in a cage full of canaries. The Russian cat is beginning to purr now and smoothen its furr again – The canary birds are less by three – The faithful will be more obedient than ever.⁶²

Despite her professed universalism, Blavatsky saw the religions of the East – in particular Hinduism and Buddhism – as the greater vehicles for the spiritual advance of humanity. In her book Isis Unveiled, which lays out the doctrine of the great souled ones – the mahatmas – whom she claimed to be in contact with, Blavatsky attacks, with all the considerable vigour she could summon, what might be called the materialist trinity she held most responsible for the spiritual desiccation of Western civilization: David Hume, T. H. Huxley, and Charles Darwin. Indeed, such was her dislike of Darwin that she kept a stuffed baboon in her room, complete with spectacles, wing collar, morning coat, and tie, and with The Origin of Species under its arm.

It was, perhaps, no surprise that the mercantile and then imperial adventure that had taken Englishmen and women to the ends of the earth might, in the end, return and, returning, claim that what it had found was greater than what it had brought. The Theosophical Society is a key marker in the transformation of Western ideas relating to the East, although whether the change from material condescension to spiritual fascination was actually an advance, I am not at all sure.

Blavatsky’s two-volume magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, subtitled “The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy”, which pretty well sums up its ambition, was published in 1888. Among the reviewers was the radical freethinker Annie Besant. For Besant, “Ever more and more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had was needed for the cure of social ills…. since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind were other than, more than, I had dreamed.”⁶³ Then she was asked to review The Secret Doctrine. The book came as revelation. “I was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems, seemed to disappear…. in that flash of illumination I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.”⁶⁴

Besant asked to meet Blavatsky and, after only the shortest of hesitations, joined the Theosophical Society, even though this meant a break with all that she had already done and achieved in her life:

Was I to plunge into a new vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule – worse than hatred – and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?⁶⁵

But Besant had never lacked courage. She turned her back on her old life, and invited Blavatsky to live at her house at 19 Avenue Road, St John’s Wood (walking past this house today, it would appear that Besant’s fight for socialism had not adversely affected her own financial status). For her part, Blavatsky saw in Besant a woman after her own mind and heart, and appointed her “in the name of the Master […] Chief Secretary of the Inner Group of the Esoteric Section & Recorder of the Teachings”⁶⁶ so that, when Blavatsky died on 8 May 1891, Besant took over as the leader of the Theosophical Society.

Among the many visitors to Blavatsky in London was a young Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi. So she really did meet a mahatma. And Besant moved to India in 1893, remaining there for the rest of her life, joining the Indian National Congress in 1913 and becoming one of the fiercest opponents of the British Raj – while Mahatma Gandhi was content to call a truce with the Raj during World War I, Besant did no such thing, leading to her internment. Such a fiery woman found Gandhi’s method of non-violent resistance unpalatable and she lost influence in Congress, but remained president of the Theosophical Society until her retirement. Besant died on 20 September 1933 in Adyar, now a suburb of Chennai, and was cremated on the shore.

And all I can say is that there’s no one more intrepid than an intrepid Victorian woman.

As for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, this short-lived occult group was possibly the most influential of all the magical orders of Victorian England. It was founded in 1888 by William Woodman, William Westcott, and Samuel MacGregor Mathers, its doctrines and practices a melange of Hermeticism, kabbalah, mysticism, theosophy, and ritual magic. Its first temple was in London, at 19 Fitzroy Street (now a rather undistinguished office block fittingly unmarked by any blue plaque), and it soon attracted many celebrity Victorian adherents – this all being done by word of mouth and introduction, as the order remained secret at this time. Among its adepts were W. B. Yeats (of course – there scarcely seemed to be an esoteric order which he did not join), Irish revolutionary (and Yeats’s muse) Maud Gonne, writer Arthur Machen, theatre producer and heiress Annie Horniman, and the actress and feminist Florence Farr. I have a particular soft spot for Farr as, in later life, she sold up all her possessions and moved to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to become principal at a newly established school for girls in Jaffna. There she learned to speak and read Tamil, sending Yeats her translations of Tamil poetry. Farr died in 1917; her body was burned according to Hindu custom and her ashes scattered in the Kelani River.

But the most significant new member of the order, at least as far as the Golden Dawn itself was concerned, was Aleister Crowley, the most notorious occultist of the twentieth century. Crowley was introduced into the order by Allan Bennett (not to be confused with Alan Bennett, bespectacled playwright). Bennett went on to become a Buddhist in Ceylon and then an ordained monk, before returning to London and introducing Buddhism to the West. Crowley soon became dissatisfied with the level of knowledge to which he had access – patience does not seem to have been his most notable characteristic – and, going over the heads of the other Golden Dawn members in London, appealed to Mathers, who was then living in Paris. Mathers imposed Crowley upon the London group, leading to a full schism: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn became, in short order – deep breath – Alpha and Omega (led by Mathers); Stella Matutina (which Yeats joined); the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn (of which more anon); and Astrum Argentum (Crowley’s version of the order which, coming nicely up to date, is now on Facebook). Not so surprising when you think of the collection of talents and egos that went into creating the Golden Dawn in the first place.

As these successor orders each went their own way, they attracted new adherents. Few were of the calibre of the original members, with one exception: in 1917, Charles Williams was initiated into the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn.

Who was Charles Williams? If you haven’t heard of him, you will know two of the men with whom he was, later, to be most closely associated: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Williams was born in 1886 and lived as a child – I’m delighted to say – in Holloway, walking the same streets I walked as a boy. His family was poor and, though he won an Intermediate Scholarship to University College, London, he only attended for two years before poverty forced him to leave without completing his degree. After working as a clerk for four years, he found a job as a proofreader at the London offices of the Oxford University Press. He remained with the OUP until he died. It transformed him, but he profoundly affected it too, writing a play, performed by his co-workers at the Press, that turned the daily round of publishing – editing, proofreading, and the apparently petty relationships of office life – into poetry and ritual. The Masque of the Manuscript delighted his colleagues, as did the man himself. “He found the gold in all of us and made it shine…. By sheer force of love and enthusiasm he created about him an atmosphere that must be unique in the history of business houses.”⁶⁷

Such was Williams’ public face. By all accounts he was a man of whom opinions were transformed through personal intercourse:

he was tall, slim, and straight as a boy, though grey-haired. His face we thought ugly: I am not sure that the word “monkey” has not been murmured in this context. But the moment he spoke it became, as was also said, like the face of an angel – not a feminine angel in the debased tradition of some religious art, but a masculine angel, a spirit burning with intelligence and charity.⁶⁸

The peculiar transformation he had effected on the atmosphere at Oxford University Press was, in part, a result of his particular manners – manners that “implied a complete offer of intimacy without the slightest imposition of intimacy”.⁶⁹ But if that seems like a man too good to be true, there was another side of Williams – one apparent to anyone who has read the “supernatural shockers”, the seven novels for which he is best known. For those who have not read them – and I suggest you do, but not until you’ve finished reading this book – a taste of their unique atmosphere is conveyed by the opening of War in Heaven: “The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse”,⁷⁰ or All Hallows’ Eve, where a woman waiting on Westminster Bridge for her husband realizes that she is, in fact, dead. Present through all of the books is a taste for and an abiding interest in the occult. Of course – for Williams was a magician.

Now the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, as reconstituted after the great schism, was more interested in mysticism than magic, and more Christian than pagan, but Williams, judging by his novels, certainly had a greater than working knowledge of “Goetia” – black magic. He once confided to a friend that “[a]t bottom a darkness has always haunted me”⁷¹ and this darkness found expression, in words, through the mages and demons of his novels and, in his life, through an unusual capacity to understand evil. Williams’ father had taught him how to assume, for argument’s sake, views opposed to his own and that, coupled with his own dabblings, allowed him imaginative entry into a world where Platonic archetypes stalk English country lanes and sorcerers raise the dead that they might live forever.

For Williams, a lifelong Londoner, the city was the City – where temporal and eternal met and mixed, where the spirits of the dead mingled with the living, and the paving stones on which he trod were the paths of the City of God – and of the damned. There could be no clearer vision of the inhering of the supernatural in the natural, of the magical in the everyday. This vision that Williams offers, with free and open hand to anyone who reads his work, is his particular gift to those who now walk through the West End and in the dark shadow of the towers of the City.

So what of The Occult, “the ultimate book for those who would walk with the Gods”? Its author, Colin Wilson, exemplified the trajectory of post-war thought as well as anyone – as well as being an object lesson in the growing dangers of fame. Born in 1931, Wilson came from a working-class family and was self-taught. Originally from Leicester, he moved to London and, famously, dossed in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath at night while researching and writing his first book, The Outsider, in the Reading Room of the British Library. The Outsider, a study and invention of the outsider figure through the literature and arts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a tremendously exciting book, made more so by the fact that its author, who seemed to me to have read absolutely everything, was only twenty-four when it came out. The book was a huge hit and Wilson suddenly found himself catapulted from a park bench in Hampstead to the height of literary – and tabloid – celebrity; a fame he took to with all the self-assurance of a man who had confided to his diary that he was “the major literary genius of our century”. Unfortunately, the diary was published, in the Daily Mail, along with news of the enraged father of his girlfriend, armed with a horsewhip, breaking into a dinner party and accusing him of being “a homosexual with six mistresses” before setting about him with the whip.⁷² Wilson took refuge in Cornwall, married the girlfriend, and set about writing books on the occult and crime while the literary establishment, without even the grace of a blush of embarrassment, set about trashing the reputation of a man they had, a few months earlier, hailed at his own estimation.

So the city, within its strict circles of power, excludes and exiles, that the powerful remain in power. However, Wilson was as much saved by his vanity as condemned by it. Ignored and ridiculed by the literary establishment, he wrote continuously, finding new readers among the young and the curious – myself not least among them. At least in my generation, it seems as if almost everyone, growing up, had a Colin Wilson moment, when one or another of his books opened our eyes to some new facet of experience or reality that the wider world ignored, and for me it was the paranormal, the strange, The Occult. Reading the book and its litany of wonders and oddities, Wilson woke me from my dogmatic slumber, the belief, nurtured by my holy books – The Dragons of Eden, The Ascent of Man among others – that science, the study of the material world, might explain everything about the world. Turned out the world was strange: I had a book to prove it and, now, a reason to embrace the worlds of my childhood reading: worlds of wonder.

So I started exploring the occult: numerology, meditation, chiromancy, tarot, astrology, magic. I tried them all in the flush and fire of enthusiasm that can only be summoned by a mind fresh and unburdened with any great weight of knowledge, and with all the untrammelled egotism of a teenager: here was actual reason to think about… me! In numerology, the version of my name I preferred – Eddie Albert – made me, unfortunately, a 4: “the number of failure, poverty and general gloom”,⁷³ whereas my birth name, Edoardo Albert, was a 3: “an extremely fortunate number, implying creative energy, brilliance, liveliness, versatility, glamour and a natural attraction for both money and the opposite sex”.⁷⁴ I started calling myself Edoardo; sadly, neither money nor girls were attracted in consequence. Not daunted – and it was not a sequence in any case – I dealt out the major and minor arcana, twisted and let fall the divining sticks to consult the I Ching (not having access to the preferred yarrow stalks, I found the sticks from a Pik-a-Styk made a good alternative), and learned how to cast horoscopes (a major operation in the days before computers, involving planetary tables and a great number of pencil-and-paper calculations). Even in my teens I was too stiff to adopt the lotus position – just sitting cross-legged had been an ankle strainer at school – but I forced myself down into as close an approximation of the pose as I could manage and listened to my breath and attempted to shut down the run of my thoughts. I had little success, until one afternoon, when I picked up a new book, sat down on the floor in my room, and opened it to its epigraph:

My Beloved is the mountains, the

solitary wooded valleys, strange

islands…silent music

and went into the dark.

Of the next quarter-hour, I have no memory.

I, slowly, came to myself, still sitting upon the swirly 1970s carpet in my bedroom. I did not know where I had been, nor where I had gone – I do not know now. But my life was changed; now, and forever, I sought those strange islands and that silent music.