THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
In the autumn of 1969 I discussed questions of the occult with the poet Robert Graves at his home in Majorca. Graves immediately made a remark that startled me. ‘Occult powers are not so rare. One person in every twenty possesses them in some form.’
What interested me so much was the exact figure: 5 per cent. This is also the figure for the ‘dominant minority’ among human beings. In the early years of this century, Bernard Shaw asked the explorer Henry Stanley how many of his men could take over leadership of the party if he, Stanley, were ill. ‘One in twenty,’ said Stanley. ‘Is that figure exact or approximate?’ ‘Exact.’
The matter of the dominant 5 per cent was rediscovered during the Korean War by the Chinese. Wishing to economise on man-power, they decided to divide their American prisoners into two groups: the enterprising ones and the passive ones. They soon discovered that the enterprising soldiers were exactly one in twenty: 5 per cent. When this dominant 5 per cent was removed from the rest of the group, the others could be left with almost no guard at all.
Evidence from zoology indicates that the ‘dominant 5 per cent’ may apply to all animals.
The interesting question arises: How far is the biologically dominant 5 per cent the same thing as Graves’s ‘occult 5 per cent’? There are certainly many reasons for assuming that the two groups are identical. In primitive societies the leaders are also priests and magicians. The men who led hunting parties would again be those who possessed a high degree of ‘jungle sensitivity’. What is the power that distinguishes the leader? It is the power to focus, to concentrate the will in emergencies. That is to say, it is a form of Faculty X.
In short, it seems probable that all human beings possess the vestiges of ‘occult powers’, the powers that spring from their deeper levels of vitality, what the playwright Granville-Barker called ‘the secret life’. The dominant 5 per cent are more adept at canalising these powers than most people. The magicians, witch doctors, witches and mediums have been those members of the dominant 5 per cent who have developed their natural powers.
Another interesting sidelight on this matter is shed by recent researches into deep-trance hypnotism, some of which are described in Mind and Body by Dr. Stephen Black.* Dr. Black points out that most people can be hypnotised if they co-operate – an un-hypnotisable person would probably be mentally sick – but only a small number of people are ‘deep-trance subjects’. Strangely enough, the exact figure is 5 per cent. Deep-trance subjects can be cured of a surprising number of physical ailments by hypnotic suggestion – from asthma to warts. Even ‘medium-trance subjects’ can be hypnotised into not reacting to a skin test for tuberculosis that would normally cause a raised swelling. Patients who suffered from multiple warts were cured in two stages, one side at a time, to make sure that the warts had not disappeared of their own accord. Warts are believed to be due to a virus infection; yet they vanished without scarring in periods ranging from five weeks to three months.†
Dr. Black’s experiments were less concerned with curing specific ailments than with demonstrating that the body can be affected by the mind to an unusual degree; and in this they were remarkably successful. What is at issue, here again, is the hidden power of the subconscious mind, that can be reached and utilised by ‘deep hypnosis’ in 5 per cent of people. Five per cent of people are capable – potentially at least – of tapping the hidden powers of ‘the secret life’.
Graves’s concern is less with witches or mystics* than with poets, and his important book The White Goddess contains a theory of the nature of poetry that links it not only with the powers of the subconscious, but with traditional magical cults.
According to Graves, there are two forms of poetry: ‘muse poetry’ and ‘Apollonian poetry’. The first is created by ‘inspiration, checked by commonsense’; the second with the intellect. He associates ‘muse poetry’ with the White Goddess of primitive lunar cults. Science, like Apollonian poetry, is an attempt ‘to banish all lunar superstitions and bask in the light of pure solar reason’.
Graves’s account of the genesis of The White Goddess is a remarkable example of what he means by poetic intuition:
The enlightenment began one morning while I was re-reading Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of The Mabinogion, a book of ancient Welsh legends, and came across a hitherto despised minstrel poem called The Song of Taliesin. I suddenly knew (don’t ask me how) that the lines of the poem, which has always been dismissed as deliberate nonsense, formed a series of early medieval riddles, and that I knew the answer to them all – although I was neither a Welsh scholar, nor a medievalist, and although many of the lines had been deliberately transposed by the author (or his successors) for security reasons.
I knew also (don’t ask me how) that the answer must in some way be linked with an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of a ‘Battle of Trees’ – mentioned in Lady Charlotte Guest’s notes to The Mabinogion – which was occasioned by a lapwing, a dog and a white roebuck from the other world, and won by a certain god who guessed the name of his divine opponent to be Vron, or ‘Alder’. Nobody had ever tried to explain this nonsense. Further, that both these texts would make sense only in the light of ancient Irish religious and poetic tradition. I am not an Irish scholar either.
Since there has never been any lunatic streak in my family, I could not believe I was going crazy. More likely, I was being inspired. So I decided to check up on the subject with the help of a shelf-full of learned books on Celtic literature which I found in my father’s library (mainly inherited from my grandfather, an Irish antiquarian) but which I had never read.
To cut a long story short, my answer to the riddle, namely the letter-names of an ancient Druidic alphabet, fitted the not-so-nonsensical Song of Taliesin with almost frightening exactitude; and The Battle of the Trees proved to be a not-so-nonsensical way of describing a struggle between rival priesthoods in Celtic Britain for the control of the national learning. You see, I had found out that the word ‘trees’ means ‘learning’ in all the Celtic languages; and since the alphabet is the basis of all learning, and since (as I remembered from Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars) the Druidic alphabet was a jealously guarded secret in Gaul and Britain – indeed, its eighteen letter-names were not divulged for nearly a thousand years – well, the possession of the secret must have been something worth struggling about. I had also found out that the alphabet in Caesar’s day was called the Boibel-Loth because it began with the letters B.L.; and that as a result of the Battle of the Trees, the Boibel-Loth had displaced an earlier, very similar, and equally secret Celtic alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion, whose eighteen letters were explained as references to a sequence of wild trees – induding the Alder. This sequence, I found, served a dual purpose: as an alphabet and as a sacred calendar – the tree consonants standing for the months of which their trees were characteristic; the tree vowels standing for the stations of the Sun, its equinoxes and solstices. It is a calendar which can be proved, by study of the festal use of trees throughout Europe, to have been observed in the Bronze Age (and earlier) from Palestine to Ireland, and to have been associated everywhere with the worship of the pre-Aryan Triple Moon-goddess, sometimes called Leucothea, the White Goddess.*
What Graves came to discover, through research and a series of strange coincidences, was that the Triple Moon-goddess was a universal symbol in pre-Christian poetry and mythology: Greek, Phoenician, Celtic, Roman, Scandinavian, Hindu, even African.
‘The most important single fact in the early history of Western religion and sociology was undoubtedly the gradual suppression of the Lunar Mother-goddess’s inspiratory cult, and its supersession ... by the busy, rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favour of the commercial Phoenician alphabet – the familiar ABC – and initiated European literature and science.’
The moon goddess was the goddess of magic, of the subconscious, of poetic inspiration. Human mythology has been ‘solarised’ and then, in the West, Christianised, and the masculine god of reason has usurped an increasingly important place, armed always with the irresistible argument that you can see a thing more clearly by sunlight than by moonlight. But this is untrue. On the contrary, certain things become invisible in a strong light. Highly conscious, rational modes of thought are like a wide net through which all the smaller fish escape.
Graves describes how the obsessions with the White Goddess and her sacred tree, the alder, came upon him in 1944, when he was writing a novel about Jason and the Argonauts. On his desk at the time was a small brass box with a curious design on the lid. On this box he kept a brass figure of a hump-backed man playing a flute. Ten years later he discovered that the design on the lid of the box represented the African Triple Moon-goddess, Ngame, and that the hump-backed man was the herald of a Queen-mother of an African state who claimed direct descent from Ngame. Back in Majorca in 1946, the coincidences continued to pile up. An antiquarian neighbour had died and bequeathed various small objects to Graves, including a mummy-like figure with a single eye. He later discovered that this mummy was an okrafo priest, a substitute-sacrifice to the White Goddess. A carnelian ring he was given by a friend – who knew nothing about the book – had a seal showing the three basic symbols of the cult: a stag, a moon and a thicket.
Even when the book was finished, odd things continued to happen. The first publisher who rejected it died of heart failure shortly afterwards. A second rejected it with a rude letter saying he could not make head or tail of it and he doubted whether anybody else could either; he dressed himself in women’s underwear and hanged himself on a tree in his garden.* On the other hand, says Graves, the publisher who accepted it – T. S. Eliot – not only got his money back, but also received the Order of Merit that year. (In the light of the comments on Powys in the previous chapter, one might be excused for wondering how far these events were the work of the goddess, and how far they may have been unconsciously willed by Graves himself.)
Graves remarks: ‘Chains of more than coincidence happen so often in my life that if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, I must call them a habit.’ ‘Very well: put it down to coincidence. Deny that there was any connection at all between the hump-backed herald on the box ... and myself, who suddenly became obsessed by the White Goddess of Europe, wrote of her clan totems in the Argonaut context, and now had thrust upon me ancient secrets belonging to her cult in Wales, Ireland and elsewhere. Please believe me; I was wholly unaware that the box celebrated the goddess Ngame. Or that the Helladic Greeks, including the early Athenians, were racially linked with Ngame’s people – Libyan Berbers, known as Garamantians, who moved south from the Sahara to the Niger in the eleventh century A.D., and there intermarried with Negroes. Or that Ngame herself was a Moon-goddess, and shared all her attributes with the White Goddess of Greece and Western Europe. I knew only that, according to Herodotus, the Greek Athene was the same goddess as the Libyan Neith [Lamia, another name of the goddess].’
The White Goddess is an extremely difficult book, complex and bewildering, but the reader who becomes fascinated by its strange, tangled threads soon discovers that Graves is not exaggerating when he speaks of having ancient secrets ‘thrust upon him’. He has stumbled upon a whole knowledge system as complex as modern physics whose assumptions are those of the ‘lunar’ rather than solar forces. He has done this by using his poet’s intuition to follow clues through apparently unrelated mythologies. The poet Randall Jarrell has asserted that the whole mythology is merely a rationalisation of Graves’s cult of the ewig weibliche, of his tendency to ‘overvalue women at the expense of men’ (to which he confesses in one of his poems). It is hard to see how this position can be maintained by anyone who knows the book well; its inner consistency vouches for its genuineness.
It is true that there should not be a conflict between ‘lunar’ and ‘solar’ knowledge systems, for all knowledge must be either true or false. One might say that the conflict arises from the narrow dogmatism of ‘scientific’ modes of thought. Ouspensky expresses it clearly in the passage that follows the long excerpt I have already quoted:
But here, in these books, there is a strange flavour of truth. I feel it particularly strongly now, because for so long I have held myself in, have kept myself within artificial ‘materialistic’ bounds, have denied myself all dreams about things that could not be held within these bounds. I had been living in a desiccated and sterilised world, with an infinite number of taboos imposed on my thought. And suddenly these strange books broke down all the walls round me, and made me think and dream about things of which for a long time I had feared to think and dream. Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interest and new expectations, I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition.*
We have obviously reached a crucial point in the argument. Most readers will be willing to accept the notion that man possesses subconscious powers that are hidden from the conscious intellect. But we are now positing the existence of external forces – white goddesses, magical alphabets and so on. Surely this is the point to state firmly that if the deaths of Graves’s two publishers were not simply coincidence, then it was the unconscious exercise of the ‘evil eye’ by Graves himself? And that the strange business of the brass objects on the poet’s desk may have been telepathy on the part of Graves, but was certainly not an attempt by the objects to draw attention to themselves? For is this not the dividing line between science and superstition? Ancient man thought the lightning was a god; Benjamin Franklin revealed that it was static electricity; and that is exactly what it is.
This is true; but there is more to it than that. And this is the point where another fundamental principle must be stated.
It is easy enough to see that man’s logical powers have cut him off from the forces of his subconscious mind. If you start to work out a mathematical problem in the middle of the night, you find it difficult to get back to sleep. Because mathematical calculation involves a peculiar concentration of the top levels of your mind, and when you start to calculate you summon up these top levels as Aladdin summoned the slave of the lamp. But sleep depends on the slave going back into his lamp, and allowing the lower levels of the mind to take over. Or, if you think of yourself – your total personality – as a kind of car, then in sleep you change drivers.
Human evolution over the past two million years has been the evolution of the conscious driver, the slave of the lamp. Civilisation is highly complex and man needs a highly complex mental organisation to deal with it. Compared to his ancestor of two million years ago, modern man is like a giant corporation compared to a small family business.
The trouble with a giant corporation is that its overheads are so enormous. The electricity bill for the huge office building is enough to run a hundred small businesses. And all its other overheads are in proportion.
The consequence is that civilised man tends to suffer from subconscious hypertension.
Consider what happens when a young man gets married and begins to raise a family. He has to think about his future, and a dozen other things besides, until he is like a juggler keeping several balls in the air at the same time. Now, if this thought struck him when he was on his honeymoon, he did not allow it to worry him. On the contrary: fed by powerful streams of subconscious energy aroused by sex, he feels more than equal to it all.
After a few years, there are times when he gets very tired of the juggling act, and wishes he could simply drop all the balls. But of course, since he loves his wife and children, this is out of the question. But there are times when he ceases to put his heart into the juggling, and allows it to become purely mechanical.
What happens now is interesting. Various bills arrive at the end of the month. When he is in a healthy and optimistic condition, he pays them, works out what he has left in the bank, and then begins to think about taking his family out for a picnic on Sunday. But if he is feeling low and depressed, he avoids paying them as long as possible, because he likes the feeling of security produced by the knowledge that his pay cheque is still in the bank. The worries remain permanently as problems at the back of his mind, eating up vital energy as a light you have left switched on eats up electricity. As he feels himself getting more depressed, each additional problem seems to become bigger, and his energy sinks lower. He is now drifting towards what psychologists of fifty years ago called a ‘hyperesthetic condition’, in which life becomes a series of insurmountable obstacles: every molehill becomes a mountain. His whole psychological being is a series of rooms in which he has left lights switched on, and life becomes a burden. Some people become so accustomed to this state of permanent hypertension that they accept it as their normal condition, and take it for granted that they lose their hair at thirty-five and develop ulcers at forty.
Observe that the basic characteristic of this state is that you cease to notice things. Like a man running for a train, you no longer have time to turn your head to left and right. And even when you have caught the train, you don’t relax and look out of the window, as any normal child would. The inner tension continues; you try to read a newspaper, or perhaps simply stare blankly in front of you, your mind grinding away at its worries.
Now consider what happens if such a person goes away on a holiday, and suddenly everything seems to ‘go right’. It is a sunny morning; he can forget the office for a week or so and simply enjoy the scenery ... It is as if someone had pressed the ‘stop’ button of a dynamo; the roar of the engine dies, and the silence seems miraculous. It is as if a spring of vitality had suddenly bubbled into consciousness. He has ceased to be passive and depressed. He looks at the scenery with intense interest, or listens with pleasure to the local gossip in the bar of a pub. The inner strain has relaxed. He is no longer wasting his vital energy. And because he is noticing things again, his feedback mechanism begins to work. The pleasure he gets from the sight of a tree in the rain means that his senses begin to reach out, to expect things to be delightful and interesting, which in turn means that his springs of vital energy become more abundant. To look at things with interest is to refresh the mind. In Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse has the important sentence: ‘I ... was responsible for the provision of music for our group, and I then discovered how a long time devoted to small details exalts us and increases our strength’ (Chapter 1). Precisely. Because when you concentrate seriously upon small details, you release the general hypertension in the rest of your mind, and your vital springs are renewed.
William James also notes that ‘bullying treatment’ is often the best cure for the ‘hyperesthetic state’, when all molehills become mountains. The doctor forces the patient to make immense efforts; the first result is acute distress, followed almost immediately by a feeling of relief. Because the hypertension is unnecessary (it is no more than a bad habit), like a child’s fear of ghosts, it is a pointless waste of vital energy. Once the mind is snapped out of its state of miserable passivity by a shock, the vital forces begin to work again.
When a human being is healthy, he concentrates on one problem at a time, puts all his sense of purpose into it and maintains a high level of vital feedback from his environment. He does things slowly, with deep interest, and when he begins to get tired, he slows down, and lets his subconscious powers do the work of renewal. He recognises that over-tiredness and the depression and defeat that come with it constitute a vicious circle that must be avoided if he is to be efficient and healthy.
Now, although hypertension is accentuated by modern civilisation, it is not specifically a disease of civilisation. It is a disease of consciousness – that is, of being human. The farm labourer going to work is as likely to ignore his surroundings as the harassed car salesman. And if the inhabitants of some Amazon village are ‘closer to nature’ than New Yorkers, this is usually at the cost of dirt and ignorance and inconvenience. Hypertension is the price we pay for the symphonies of Beethoven, the novels of Balzac, the advances in medical knowledge that prevent children dying of smallpox.
However, it is not a necessary and inescapable price. It is the result of ignorance, of bad management of our vital economy.
The point to observe here is that although hypertension may not be necessary, it is as widespread as the common cold. It would not be inaccurate to say that all human beings live in a state of ‘vigilance’ and anxiety that is far above the level they actually need for vital efficiency. It is a general tendency of consciousness to ‘spread the attention too thinly’; and, like an overexcited child with too many toys on Christmas Day, the result is nervous exhaustion.
What is so interesting in this context are the moments when the tension relaxes, due to auto-suggestion or total absorption in some small task. Yeats describes such a moment, sitting in a crowded London teashop:
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness
That I was blessed and could bless.
This is probably a case of auto-suggestion; one can imagine the poet becoming increasingly tense and fatigued as he pushes among the crowds in central London, then sitting down to drink hot tea, as he looks out of the window of Swan and Edgars at the street. Suddenly his dynamos all grow silent, and he looks at the passing crowd with intense interest.
This, in fact, is what constitutes a poet. He is a person who is naturally mentally healthy and resilient, and who frequently experiences moments in which the usual hypertension vanishes, and he is suddenly amazed and delighted to realise how interesting everything is. What happens in such moments is that he begins to hear the ‘voices of silence’. He perceives that the world is rich with meanings that he would ordinarily overlook. I italicise ‘meanings’ because this is the heart of the matter. The meanings that we perceive when our normal hypertension vanishes are really there. They are not an illusion; they are not purely subjective.
It is true that the word ‘interesting’ has a subjective ring; I decide what is interesting and what isn’t. But it has an objective meaning nevertheless. As Sherlock Holmes studies the documents of a case and murmurs, ‘Most interesting, Watson,’ his meaning could be expressed as ‘More complex than appears on the surface’. The sense of meaning that arises in us when hypertension vanishes is a recognition of complexity, of ‘interestingness’.
If we think of human evolution as a process of increasing ‘complexification’ (to use Teilhard de Chardin’s expression), then it becomes clear that it also means increased ‘hypertension’, and that this in turn means an increasing tendency to overlook ‘meaning’.
It is important to grasp that the ‘meanings’ that Ouspensky began to see in woods, rivers and mountains were not a matter of imagination, or surrender to emotionalism. Graves’s ‘lunar knowledge’ is a reality – a reality of which poets become aware in the moments of stillness. In the Celtic legend of Gwion, cited by Graves, the boy Gwion is employed at stirring a cauldron which contains a magic ‘knowledge brew’; three drops fly out and burn his finger, and when he thrusts it into his mouth, he suddenly sees the meaning of all things, past, present and future. In the legend of Siegfried, as set to music by Wagner, drops of dragon blood fall on the hero’s hand, burning him; he thrusts it into his mouth, and is immediately able to understand the song of the birds and the ‘forest murmurs’. In both cases, the magic brew has the same effect: of inducing the deep inner silence that allows a new perception of meaning.
If we agree, then, that the ‘muse poet’ or the ‘magician’ is a person whose mind is able to relax and grasp these deeper levels of meaning, we must also recognise that this is a two-way affair. The meaning is really there, external to his own mind, and his power to ‘tune in’ to it is only the beginning.
An even more interesting point arises. I have compared man to a car with two drivers: the conscious personality and the subliminal impulses. In civilised man, the role of the subliminal ‘driver’ is relatively automatic and repetitive compared with that of the conscious ‘driver’; he is little more than a maintenance engineer controlling sleep, memory and the functions of the stomach and the bowels. It is the conscious mind that writes symphonies, plans the conquest of space and builds civilisation. But in the ‘magical’ societies of the remote past, the subliminal ‘driver’ was just as important. When he took over, it was not merely for the purpose of inducing sleep, but of widening that other kind of knowledge, intuitive knowledge of the ‘meanings’ that surrounded him like forest murmurs. The magician or mystic aimed at getting somehow deeper into nature, of extending the grasp and power of the subliminal mind. Sleep was not a passive condition in which the body recovered from the day’s fatigues, but an instrument of investigation, sometimes even an essential preliminary of magic. In ancient Ireland, the choosing of a new king involved the sacrifice of a sacred bull, on which a Druid was gorged until he fell asleep. During sleep, incantations were recited over him, and he would receive ‘revelation’ of the rightful claimant to the throne.* To the modern mind, such a ceremony immediately suggests fraud practised upon gullible savages. But there are recorded instances of ‘sleep magic’ that are less easy to explain. In Pattern of Islands, Arthur Grimble, who was land commissioner in the Gilbert Islands of the South Pacific, describes the magical ceremony of the calling of the porpoise. Grimble was told that he should eat porpoise flesh to increase his girth. That led him ‘to inquire how [he] might come by a regular supply of the rare meat. The long and short of [an islander’s] reply was that his own kinsmen in Kuma village, seventeen miles up-lagoon, were the hereditary porpoise-callers of the High Chiefs of Butaritari and Makin-Meang. His first cousin was a leading expert at the game; he could put himself into the right kind of dream on demand. His spirit went out of his body in such a dream; it sought out the porpoise-folk in their home under the western horizon and invited them to a dance, with feasting, in Kuma village. If he spoke the words of invitation aright (and very few had the secret of them), the porpoise would follow him with cries of joy to the surface.’
In due course, Grimble was taken to Kuma. where all the dishes necessary for a feast had been laid out. The fat, friendly porpoise-caller retired to his hut, and for several hours all was silence. The porpoise-caller rushed out of his hut and fell on his face, then stood up ‘clawing at the air and whining on a queer high note like a puppy’s. Then words came gulping out of him: “Teirake! Teirake! (Arise! Arise!) … They come, they come …”’ The villagers all rushed into the water and stood, breast deep. Then the porpoises came in: ‘They were moving towards us in extended order with spaces of two or three yards between them, as far as my eye could reach. So slowly they came, they seemed to be hung in a trance. Their leader drifted in hard by the dreamer’s legs. He turned without a word to walk beside it as it idled towards the shallows ... The villagers were welcoming their guests ashore with crooning words ... As we approached the emerald shallows, the keels of the creatures began to take the sand; they flapped gently, as if asking for help. The men leaned down to throw their arms around the great barrels and ease them over the ridges. It was as if their single wish was to get to the beach.’ The ‘hypnotised’ porpoises were then slaughtered and eaten.
It might be mentioned, in passing, that animals are easily hypnotised. Black describes this in Mind and Body, and adds that the phenomenon was described in print as long ago as 1636, when Schewenter observed that if the head of a chicken is pressed to the ground, and a chalk line is drawn from its beak, the bird will remain ‘transfixed’ until aroused by a loud noise.
The hereditary porpoise-callers of the Gilbert Islands are an example of the development of ‘lunar knowledge’, and the whole story emphasises a vital point. We are accustomed to thinking of sleep as an uncontrolled and uncontrollable state, in which we lose whatever ‘powers’ of action and thought we normally possess. Most of our dreams are forgotten on waking. But J. W. Dunne pointed out in his celebrated book An Experiment with Time (1927) that we can, with a certain amount of effort, learn to recall dreams. He trained himself to do this by keeping a pencil and paper by the bedside and noting them down every time he woke up in the night. The result was his discovery that dreams often contain pre-cognitive glimpses of events that will happen later. (This will be discussed in Part Three, Chapter 3.) The ‘magic’ of the porpoise-callers is a further step in this direction – as was that of the Druids. This also explains the importance attached to dreams by primitive tribes, and why the moon-goddess is the patroness of magical cults.
It may also explain why the White Goddess was regarded as a destroyer as well as an inspirer. Psychedelic drugs, which have the effect of immobilising the ‘logical mind’, and putting the subliminal powers in the driving seat of personality, can produce revelations of beauty or of horror. The mind that opens itself to ‘subliminal meanings’ has shed its defences, thrown away its insulation, its ‘shock absorbers’. Daylight consciousness has the refuge of common sense, of ‘objective reality’. But in subliminal states, the dividing line between reality and one’s personal fantasies becomes blurred; and without a certain knowledge and discipline, the mind is at the mercy of its own tendency to morbidity. Graves comments correctly that the nightmare is one of the cruellest aspects of the White Goddess. This should be qualified although Graves may not agree – by saying that the danger arises from the ignorance of her ‘devotees’, not from any destructive tendency in the Goddess herself.
Another interesting question arises from Grimble’s account of porpoise-calling: the comment ‘If he spoke the words of invitation aright (and very few had the secret of them) the porpoise would follow …’ If it is the power of the dreamer’s subliminal self that somehow hypnotises the porpoises, why should the exact form of the words matter? This question obviously involves the whole field of magic rituals and incantations.
The answer is almost certainly: it matters only to the magician, who must believe in the objective validity of what he is doing. Our problem is that we contain two minds, and the conscious mind is so accustomed to its masculine role of dominance that it frequently interferes in the delicate workings of the feminine subconscious. E. H. Visiak, another poet with an abnormally active subconscious mind, described in his autobiography how he worked in a telegraph office and learned to send Morse signals with a key:
I was over-anxious, and fell into a vicious, cramped way of sending. To send properly was delightful. Instead of aching muscles, there was a sensation of free play in manipulating the key, an effortless, flexible cooperation with springing mechanism. One day, while I was practising, my wrist started moving with this delightful freedom. The Superintendent was looking at me in surprise and satisfaction from his desk. I had a glimpse of his benevolently gleaming spectacles, and the power, or knack – whatever it was – was gone, never to return ...*
Visiak’s ‘cramp’ is the hypertension we have been discussing, the conscious mind persistently interfering with the activity of the subconscious ‘robot’ that deals with these mechanical matters.
Now, the subconscious mind can be trained to respond to certain formulae or symbols. A lover of Wagner only has to hear a bar of the ‘Liebestod’ to feel his hair prickle. The Hindu saint Ramakrishna could be sent into a state of samadhi (ecstasy) by hearing the name of the Divine mother. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot deliberately uses quotations that have become highly charged with meaning in another context, including quotations from Wagner libretti. Graves states that only true Muse-poetry can produce this prickling of the hair that A. E. Housman declared to be the test of good poetry, and in a general sense, he is obviously right. But the floodgates can be made to respond to any ‘Open sesame’, if one takes the trouble. Teenagers of the fifties experienced the authentic ‘prickle’ when they saw photographs of the late James Dean. A tune reaches ‘top-of-the-pops’ status by being played over and over again until it arouses a ritual response. Hitler finally had his audiences trained to a point where a certain rise in the tone of his voice could start the emotional orgasm.
The symbol – or form of words – that causes the response is, to some extent, arbitrary. I have read a critic who asserted that Keats’s lines ‘The moving waters at their priest-like task/Of pure ablution round Earth’s human shores’ lost their ‘magic’ when the word ‘cold’ was substituted for ‘pure’ in the second sentence. I personally find the line equally effective either way, and conclude that the critic’s response – or lack of it – was a matter of habit response.
The inference is that the exact wording of the invitation was of more importance to the porpoise-caller than to the porpoises; it controlled the release mechanism of the power that invited the fishes to the ‘banquet’. The wrong wording might have warned the porpoises by releasing his sense of guilt at the deception, or otherwise arousing his conscious ‘censor’.
One might summarise this by saying that the conscious mind has the thick skin of a rhinoceros; it is powerful but insensitive. The subconscious mind has ‘one skin too few’; it is dangerously sensitive. It needs the masculine conscious mind as a woman needs a husband: for his strength and sense of purpose. And the conscious mind could not subsist without the feminine element, the ‘secret life’. But the ideal relation between the two is achieved only when the conscious mind is concentrated upon a single purpose with total commitment. Hence the masculine preference for dangerous sports – mountain climbing, driving racing cars – since the total concentration demanded brings about the union of conscious and subconscious mind, and a new accession of strength. Seduction is similarly motivated; in ‘sexual conquest’ the male consciousness becomes ‘one-pointed’, while the union with the female stirs depths of instinctive purpose. But the development of mere will-power is basically futile; it is only the spearhead of purpose. The true ‘direction’ for consciousness lies in knowledge expansion, a wider and wider grasp of the relations of the actual world, to illuminate and supplement the ‘lunar’ insights of the subconscious. This is why the development of ‘solar’ knowledge by Western man must be accepted as a true evolution, in spite of its one-sidedness; it need not remain one-sided.
All this is to say that ‘magical systems’ – the Hebrew Kabbalah, the Chinese Book of Changes, the Tarot pack, the Key of Solomon, the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead – should not be regarded as primitive and unsuccessful attempts at ‘science’, but as attempts to express these depths of ‘lunar’ knowledge in their own terms. The Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead – called in their own languages Pert Em Hru (Emerging by Day) and Bardo Thodol – are designed to be read aloud to the dying person in an attempt to give the ‘subconscious self’ a certain control over its strange experiences. To Western ears, this sounds absurd, until we recognise as rational the notion of controlling the ‘sleeping self’ and its impulses. Then we understand that what the ancient Egyptians and Tibetans were trying to do is not childish and illogical, but a step ahead of any knowledge we possess in the West. (Experiments in deep-trance hypnosis are perhaps the nearest we have come to it.) Anyone who wishes to test this can do so by making an effort to achieve a certain control over his dreams: for example, sleeping on his back to induce a nightmare, and then setting out to control the nightmare and prevent it from reaching its normal climax.
The Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching is one of the most interesting, and certainly one of the most accessible, of these ‘lunar’ knowledge systems. It is also unique in being free of harmful aspects; close study of it can do nothing but good. The I Ching began as a series of oracles, sixty-four of them, written (according to tradition) by King Wên, founder of the Chou dynasty, more than a thousand years before Christ. These sixty-four oracles were later expanded with ‘images’ and commentaries on individual lines. (The meaning of this will emerge in a moment.) Confucius and various other scholars wrote commentaries on all this, and the result is the bulky text published in a modern definitive translation in two volumes in 1951.*
On its simplest level, then, the I Ching can be regarded as a fortune-telling book like Old Moore’s Almanac, and no doubt this aspect of it explains the remarkable popularity it has achieved in recent years. But this fortune-telling aspect is based upon a system, and the study of the system is more rewarding and revealing than consulting the oracle.
This system is founded upon the simple opposition of light and darkness, or the positive and negative, called here Yang and Yin. From what has already been said in this chapter, we can immediately hazard the guess that this ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ are not supposed to be identified with primitive good and evil, but with the solar and lunar principles. In other words, Yin is not another name for negative qualities and principles, but for the dark ‘other side’ of the mind.
Yang is represented by an unbroken line, thus: ——————; Yin by a line with a break in the middle: ——— ———. Each of the sixty-four ‘oracles’ is made up of six of these lines, piled on top of one another like a sandwich:
——————
——— ———
——————
——————
——— ———
——— ———
This happens to represent hexagram 56, Lu, The Wanderer. Each of the sixty-four hexagrams has a title.
Anyone who is mathematically inclined will be able to see how sixty-four hexagrams sprang out of Yin and Yang. If you start off by drawing two lines side by side, one Yin, one Yang, and then see how many combinations you can get by piling new lines on them, sandwich-fashion, you will see that the six lines can be arranged in exactly sixty-four different patterns. I start with two lines:
—————— ——— ———
Now when I add a second line to each, four combinations become possible:
—————— ——— ——— —————— ——— ———
—————— —————— ——— ——— ——— ———
And when I add a third line, eight combinations are possible. In short, I double the number every time I add a new line to the sandwich.
But why sixty-four hexagrams in the first place?
The answer would seem to be that King Wên decided that there were eight fundamental symbols, as follows:
Ch’ien, The Creative, Heaven
K’un, The Receptive, Earth
K’en, Keeping Still, Mountain
K’an, The Abysmal, Water
Chên, The Arousing, Thunder
Sun, The Gentle, Wind
Tui, The Joyous, Lake
Li, The Clinging, Fire
On first acquaintance, the student is inclined to wonder why the set should contain both ‘water’ and ‘lake’, which seem to duplicate one another, until it is observed that the symbols go in pairs: heaven, earth; water, fire; mountain, lake; thunder, wind. These are also pairs of opposite qualities: the creative and the receptive; the violent (thunder) and the gentle (wind); the quiescent (mountain) and the joyous (lake); the clinging or constricting (fire) and its opposite, the abyss, emptiness (water). Each of these qualities is represented by a ‘trigram’ (three lines), and therefore each of the sixty-four ‘oracles’ is made up of two of the symbols.
King Wên apparently meditated upon these sixty-four combinations of symbols, and interpreted each one as an archetypal situation or condition in human life. For example, if the hexagram represents earth above (at the top of the hexagram) and heaven below, the two can be seen as pressing against one another with equal force, heaven trying to move upward, earth trying to move downward, and perfectly counter-balancing one another; King Wên therefore called this hexagram Peace (or harmony). On the other hand, if heaven is above and earth is beneath, the two move away in opposite directions, without creative contact, and this situation is seen as representing Stagnation or Standstill. This interpretation reveals that we are dealing with the creative drive of the conscious mind and the receptive quality of the subconscious; for when these draw apart, there is, in fact, a condition of vital stagnation.
This may sound fanciful, or simply glib. I can only say that a close acquaintance with the I Ching and its symbols soon begins to reveal a remarkable inner consistency, and that such meanings become obvious. At first the landscape is strange and disconcerting; soon it becomes familiar, and everything is seen to be logical. One of the first great minds of the West to recognise this was Leibnitz, who himself cherished a strange dream of creating a ‘universal calculus’ in which all the truths of philosophy and mathematics should be expressible. He noticed that the way in which the hexagrams are built up constitutes a ‘binary’ mathematical system; that is, a system that, instead of using the numbers one to ten, and then repeating them, uses only one and two. The binary system is the basis of modern calculating machines and electronic computers. Leibnitz was no doubt mistaken in assuming that King Wên, or the later commentator Shao Yung, knew about binary mathematical systems; but his instinct was correct in seeing the I Ching as a distant cousin of his universal calculus. It was Leibnitz who was unscientific; his notion of a mathematical symbolism that could express all ‘truth’ is absurd; even ordinary language – which is far more flexible – breaks down over quite simple concepts that involve feelings. The I Ching is a net woven of altogether finer mesh.
The ‘oracle’ can be consulted either by means of yarrow stalks, or by throwing down three coins. The yarrow stalk oracle takes a long time; it involves dividing up fifty stalks in various ways, beginning by dividing the heap arbitrarily into two, and then reducing each heap by substracting groups of four sticks from it. The process is too long to describe here, and it would serve no purpose. The coin oracle is simpler. Three coins are thrown down. If there is a preponderance of heads (either three or two) a Yang line is formed. If a preponderance of tails, a Yin line is formed. This is done six times, forming a hexagram, which is then looked up in the I Ching. The question to which an answer is required is supposed to be held firmly in the mind throughout this procedure.
The psychologist C. G. Jung justifies all this by a principle that he calls synchronicity, that is, the assumption that ‘accidents’ and ‘coincidences’ are, in some way, linked with the unconscious mind – an assumption we have already considered in this book. The answer to the question is known to the subconscious mind – this is the assumption used to explain all prophecy and clairvoyance – and the ‘chance’ fall of the coins or division of the yarrow stalks can somehow record this knowledge.
It is significant that one of the founders of the psychoanalytic movement, whose professional life had been a continual preoccupation with the subconscious and its symbols, should come to accept such a notion in his seventies. It is said that Confucius also came to the study of the I Ching late in life, and once expressed regret that he did not have another fifty years to devote to it. For the real question about the I Ching is not whether it is successful as a crude oracle or fortune-teller, but whether, like the myths of the White Goddess, it embodies real lunar knowledge.
But before discussing this aspect of the I Ching – as a book of wisdom – I should state that its oracles often possess a weird accuracy that is profoundly disturbing. The story is told of the ruler Li, of the seventh century B.C., who had usurped power, and who consulted the oracle to know whether his son, Ching-Chung, would succeed him as king. The result was the twentieth hexagram, Contemplation, or Seeing into the Distance. The judgement sounds at first baffling:
Contemplation. The ablution has been made,
But not yet the offering.
Full of trust they look up to him.
But both this, and the ‘image’ that follows, emphasise the ‘way of law and ritual’. The judgement speaks of the moment in the religious ceremony when the libation has been poured, but the sacrifice has not yet been made, in which everyone is lost in contemplation and filled with reverence. The ‘image’ speaks of the king of old who visited the people and gave them instruction – again, this profoundly Chinese notion of the ‘right relation’ between ruler and ruled. The usurper Li might already have begun to feel twinges of conscience as he read these lines.
There was more to come. If a Yin or Yang line is obtained by throwing three tails or three heads (rather than only two), it is called a ‘changing line’; it tends to change into its opposite. In this case, the Yin line in the fourth place was the changing line, and this transformed the hexagram into Stagnation, or Standstill, whose judgement reads:
Evil people do not further
The perseverance of the superior man.
The great departs; the small approaches.
The totality of the judgement here is clearly unfavourable.
The priest who interpreted this oracle for King Li went on to point out that the title of the hexagram also means ‘seeing into the distance’ – the hexagram is associated with a watch-tower placed on hills – and that this meant that if the prince continued to rule, it would not be in this country, Ch’ien, but elsewhere – the story says that the priest specified the state of Ch’i because its rulers were descendants of the priests of the holy mountain, also implied in the hexagram Seeing into the Distance.
The annals conclude the story by stating that, in fact, Li was himself deposed by his neighbours in the next state, but that the descendants of his son eventually became rulers in Ch’i, as foretold.*
It is worth studying the two hexagrams – twelve and twenty – in the light of this story; they are too long to discuss in detail here, but many other indications of the fate of Li and Ching-Chung can be read into them. Whether one accepts the story or not, it provides insight into the way the oracle is used.
In Man and His Symbols, edited by Jung, there is a lengthy account by Jolande Jacobi of the analysis of a repressed, over-intellectual introvert named Henry; Henry was eventually persuaded – much against his will – to try throwing the three coins and consulting the oracle. ‘What he found in the book had tremendous impact on him. Briefly, the oracle to which he referred bore several startling references to his dream, and to his psychological condition generally.’ The hexagram was number four, Youthful Folly, and contained a warning against entangling oneself in unreal fantasies and empty imaginings. The judgement also forbade consulting it a second time. But two nights later, after a dream in which he saw a sword and helmet floating in empty space, he opened the book casually, and came upon the thirtieth hexagram, Li, which has weapons – particularly helmets and swords – for its symbol.
This is the kind of coincidence for which many students of the I Ching will vouch, and the effect is usually psychologically shattering. In Henry’s case, it was the gradual coming to terms with his subconscious forces, of which the I Ching became the symbol, that completed the cure. In the light of what has been said already in this chapter, this is not difficult to understand. His basic psychological problem was a kind of solipsism, a feeling of being trapped in ‘consciousness’, with a consequent feeling of dissociation from the rest of the world, a constant sense of unreality. For the subconscious mind is the point at which man is truly connected to nature. The historian of occultism A. E. Waite has described how his years of study led him finally to the understanding that there is no true separation between man and the rest of the universe; and how a serious illness that kept him in a semi-conscious state for nearly a month turned this intellectual understanding into deeply felt insight. This, to a lesser degree, is the effect the I Ching had on Henry. It also defines the real purpose of all studies of magic and the occult. We know, theoretically, that we possess a ‘subconscious’ mind, yet as I sit here, in this room on a sunny morning, I am not in any way aware of it; I can’t see it or feel it. It is like an arm upon which I have been lying in my sleep, and which has become completely dead and feelingless. The real purpose of works such as the I Ching, the Kabbalah, the Key of Solomon is to restore circulation to these regions of the mind.
As to my own personal experience of the I Ching, it has certainly disposed me to treat it as perhaps the foremost of all such works. I first came across it in the period I have already spoken of, when I was living in Wimbledon. Obviously, the first thing that any would-be writer consults an ‘oracle’ about is his future as a writer; he wants a ‘long-range forecast’. I took three pennies, and threw them down six times. Each time, there was a preponderance of heads, giving a hexagram made up of six Yang lines, the first one in the book, with a judgement that reads:
The creative works supreme success
Furthering through perseverance.
In the hundreds of times I have consulted it since then, the coins have never given six unbroken lines. Obviously, I was disposed to be convinced. The only other time when I have seen the coins fall in this way was when the oracle was consulted for the first time by the writer Bill Hopkins. He said flippantly: ‘If it gives good judgement, I’ll believe in it. If it doesn’t, I won’t.’ The oracle fulfilled expectations and produced the first hexagram again.
I clearly recall only one other instance of the book’s accuracy from that time. In Wimbledon I consulted it about the old man we were living with, who was charming and extremely difficult by turns. The hexagram obtained was Sung, Conflict, with a judgement that reads:
Conflict. You are sincere
And are being obstructed.
A cautious halt halfway brings good fortune.
Going through to the end brings misfortune.
It does not further one to cross the great water.
This told me exactly what I wanted to know: whether to get out of the place as soon as possible. ‘A cautious halt halfway brings good fortune. Going through to the end brings misfortune.’ I couldn’t think what was meant by the reference to the ‘great man’ but the text explains that the great man refers only to ‘an impartial man whose authority is great enough to terminate the conflict’. The only such man we knew was the brother of my wife’s patient; accordingly, we consulted him and explained the problem. He certainly succeeded in smoothing matters over for a short time. As to crossing the great water, we had considered moving across the Thames, back to North London, where I was working. The oracle proved to be right there too. Our move to Earl’s Court, after the old man’s death, brought a worsening of the situation.
What most impressed me about this particular occasion was the last line; I had obtained three heads; therefore, the commentary applied – nine at the top means:
Even if by chance a leather belt is bestowed on one,
By the end of the morning
It will have been snatched away three times.
One of the old man’s most infuriating habits was to give my wife presents when he was in a good mood, and then take them back again, or even give them to someone else. The lines in the I Ching apparently refer to being decorated by the king – a leather belt was the equivalent of a medal – but it certainly fitted our situation.
In his preface to the I Ching, Jung describes how he consulted it about the question of the new edition which he proposed to introduce to the Western mind. The answer was Ting, the Cauldron, which the commentary describes as a ritual vessel containing spiritual nourishment; i.e. the I Ching describes itself as such a vessel. The last ‘line’, which was a strong one, even prophesied the incredible success that the book has met with in America in the past decade (where it continues to sell almost like the Bible):
The ting has rings of jade.
Great good fortune.
Nothing that would not act to further.
(Carrying handles of jade signify that the ‘vessel’ becomes something that is greatly honoured.)
But for our present purposes, the most important of the ‘lines’ obtained by Jung was this:
Furthers removal of stagnating stuff.
One takes a concubine for the sake of her son.
No blame.
Jung interprets this to mean that the I Ching refers to itself as a cauldron that has long been out of use (i.e. kept upside down). But the important lines here are the ones referring to the concubine. ‘A man takes a concubine when his wife has no son,’ Jung comments, ‘so the I Ching is called upon when one sees no other way out. Despite the quasi-legal status of the concubine in China, she is in reality only a somewhat awkward makeshift; so likewise the magic procedure of the oracle is an expedient that may be utilised for a higher purpose. There is no blame, although it is an exceptional recourse.’
And although Jung does not dot the i’s and cross the t’s, this is clearly a deprecation of the I Ching’s role as a fortune-telling device. It should be an exceptional recourse, not a party game. For the real and permanent significance of the book is not as an oracle but as a book of wisdom.
The first thing noticed by anyone consulting the I Ching is its frequent references to ‘the superior man’. And its counsels, whether favourable or unfavourable, always include advice for the ‘superior man’ on how to deal with the situation. And anyone who has ever consulted the I Ching in a time of crisis will vouch for the mentally refreshing effect of this approach. ‘Life is many days,’ says Eliot. But human beings are usually trapped in the present, and respond to problems with a tension and anxiety that treats every problem as a matter of life and death. Johnson once said to Boswell, who was complaining about some trivial anxiety, ‘Come, sir, think how little you will think of this in ten years’ time.’
And this indicates the significance of the title of the Book of Changes. As I live through the present, all the phenomena of life seem ‘real’, solid, of permanent importance. In reality, they flow like the surface of a river. The ‘I’ that looks out through my eyes will be unchanged in ten years’ time, but many of these ‘permanent’ things around me will have disappeared.
The Book of Changes was a great influence on both Taoism and Confucianism. And one might say that the bedrock of the I Ching consists of two fundamental concepts, one Taoist, the other Confucian. The Confucian concept is to be found in a saying of Mencius: ‘Those who follow the part of themselves that is great will become great men; those who follow the part of themselves that is small will become small men.’ The Taoist concept has already been touched upon in speaking of hypertension. Chuang Tzu remarks that a baby can keep its fist clenched all day without getting tired, whereas an adult cannot keep it clenched for more than a few minutes. A drunken man can fall out of a cart without hurting himself. A carpenter whose workmanship was so perfect that it seemed supernatural explained that when he was about to undertake a difficult task, The reduced his mind to absolute quiescence, and guarded against any diminution of his vital powers. After a few days of such quiescence, he no longer cares about the importance of his task (making a musical instrument for the king); he goes into the forest, and his instinct selects the right tree. And in the making of the instrument, he makes no conscious effort but only ‘brings his natural capacity into relation with that of the wood’. All Taoist parables have this same content. A butcher who cuts up bullocks with perfect grace and accuracy explains that he does it in the same way – with total quiescence and total concentration – with the consequence that after nineteen years his cleaver is still as sharp as ever.
In Japan this is the fundamental principle of Zen, as readers of Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery will know.
That is to say that the master of Tao or Zen places himself in the state that we have already discussed in relation to Powys; the conscious mind with its tensions is lulled; a man’s centre of gravity shifts towards the ‘secret life’. A celebrated chapter of the works of Chuang Tzu describes the process of sinking into quiescence as ‘listening to the music of heaven and earth’, listening to the wind or other sounds of nature, as if they were great music, totally absorbed in the thought of their deep significance. The mind begins to respond to the sound of the wind as if it were great music.
This principle of Tao has been recognised by modern psychology. For example, Viktor Frankl, the founder of ‘logotherapy’, tells the story of a school play for which an actor was needed to play the part of a stutterer. A boy was chosen who stuttered badly, but when he got on stage, he found he couldn’t stutter. Frankl calls this ‘the law of reversed effort’. Stuttering is the result of hypertension, a kind of stage fright – of attaching so much importance to an action that your conscious mind proceeds to interfere, like a stupid sergeant major, and spoils everything. Frankl’s principle is simply to persuade your sergeant major to achieve the opposite effect by a process of deception, like Br’er Rabbit persuading Br’er Fox to throw him into the prickly briar patch, or Tom Sawyer persuading his friends to whitewash a fence by pretending that he is enjoying it immensely. The stuttering pupil wants to stutter on stage; the sergeant major proceeds to interfere, and the opposite effect is achieved. Chuang Tzu’s carpenter would work badly if he allowed himself to worry about the Court; he spends several days soothing the sergeant major to sleep before he begins to think about the wood. Frankl cures cases of over-anxiety by telling the patient to deliberately try to do what he is so anxious not to do, thus releasing the pent-up emotions and allowing the ‘robot’ in the subconscious to get on with the job in his own quiet way.
Underlying all this is the recognition that man possesses enormous inner powers which he has allowed to become inaccessible through general hypertension and misuse of his mind.
Chuang Tzu’s carpenter has simply chosen to contact ‘the part of himself that is great’ in order to make the musical instrument; he could have chosen to ‘follow the part of himself that is small’, particularly if he is a good craftsman, and perhaps nobody would have known the difference. This is also what Graves means by the difference between Muse poetry and ‘classical’ poetry; the latter is fundamentally craftsmanship, created by the upper levels of the personality, well made but without inspiration.
Human beings are the only living creatures who have this choice – of following the part that is great, or the part that is trivial. The difference depends upon the unique human faculty of imagination. When an animal is in a dull situation, it becomes dull; the fiercest of all birds, the hawk, becomes quiescent when a black bag is placed over its head. Man’s superior consciousness means that he can see further; his sense of purpose stretches into the distance. But we are still 99 per cent animal; few of us bother to develop this unique capacity. We drift along from day to day, becoming bored when things are dull, depressed when immediate prospects look poor, using our powers of foresight and imagination only when confronted by an interesting challenge, and allowing them to lie fallow in between. And this situation, we must admit, applies most of the time to all of us, including the Beethovens and Einsteins. ‘Involvement’ is our common lot. But what makes us uniquely human are the strange moments of non-involvement. The pressure vanishes. Suddenly we are seeing life from a distance, as if we were gods; seeing it from above, from a bird’s-eye view rather than the usual worm’s-eye view. In these moments of optimism and affirmation, it seems absurd that we should ever have sunk into a condition of depression or defeat, for it is suddenly obvious that we are undefeatable and indestructible. Every compromise or retreat is seen to be the result of absurd miscalculation. I open casually a book on music and read an account of how the composer Gesualdo found his wife in bed with her lover, and killed her with his sword while his servants killed the lover; then went off to one of his castles and killed his second child, in case he was not the father. In a modern court room, his defence would be one of insanity. But was it insanity? If I try to place myself in his position, I immediately see that it was not insanity – only a blind involvement in the situation, like the involvement of a man wrestling with a boa constrictor. Caught in a whirlpool of emotions, he has to make an act of judgement. But most human beings would be incapable of making the correct judgement in such a situation; it is like asking a cabin boy to become captain of a ship in the middle of a storm and expecting him to make the right decisions. What Gesualdo did is not necessarily evil. It would be evil if he had decided in cold blood to kill his wife and child; but he was caught in a storm, his judgements were too immediate, too involved and, therefore, too violent. From the social and moral point of view, it might have been better if he had burst into tears and asked what he had done to deserve such a betrayal; but from Gesualdo’s point of view, it would have been equally a defeat.
Thinking about such a situation, one becomes aware of the human lack of detachment; our inexperience and immaturity in the complex problems of the human condition. But it should not be so. We have the ‘breathing spaces’ when we can take a detached point of view. If it was of life-or-death importance that we learned by these moments of insight, men would quickly become something closer to being godlike. But most of us can drift through life without making any great moral decisions. And so the human race has shown no advance in wisdom in three thousand years.
This is the insight that lies at the heart of the I Ching: that man can choose not to drift and follow the ‘small’ part of himself. The method of Tao – of contracting his subconscious powers by minute concentration upon particulars – opens the path to higher evolutionary levels.
Anyone who simply reads and studies the I Ching while thinking about its symbols and ideas, and ignoring its powers as an oracle, becomes aware that this is its profoundest level of meaning. Like great music, it produces a state of sudden intense delight, of inner detachment, of ‘breathing space’. The reader who becomes absorbed in the I Ching begins to see it as a whole, and will probably become more skilled in using it as an oracle; like water-divining, this power can be developed simply by making the effort. He will also become aware that the book’s power to foretell events is an unimportant byproduct of its real purpose.
One final point that must not be overlooked. Richard Wilhelm points out that the primary meaning of Yin is ‘the cloudy, the overcast’, while that of Yang is ‘banners waving in the sun’. Could one devise more basic symbols of the central problem of human existence? Dullness and boredom versus the ‘moments of vision’.
* London, William Kimber, 1969.
† See article by Sinclair and Gieben in The Lancet, October 1959, p· 481.
* ‘Now I am no mystic: I studiously avoid witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune telling, automatic writing, and so on’ (Five Pens in Hand, New York, Doubleday, 1958, p. 58).
* Lecture on The White Goddess, Five Pens in Hand, p. 54.
* Such deaths are commoner than one might suppose. I possess a German volume of legal medicine that contains several such photographs. The actual death from strangulation is usually accidental; the aim is masochistic sexual stimulation. Outsize baby clothes are sometimes used instead of female underwear.
* A New Model of the Universe, p. 4.
* See H. R. Hays. In the Beginning: Early Man and His Gods (New York, Putnam, 1963), p. 153.
* Life’s Morning Hour (London, John Baker, 1968).
* Translated into German by Richard Wilhelm, then into English by Cary F. Baynes, with a foreword by Jung. London, Routledge, 1951; New York. Pantheon, 1951.
* See Helmut Wilhelm, Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching (New York, Harper, 1960). pp. 95–97.