ADEPTS AND INITIATES
It would be a long and complicated task to trace the history of magic century by century and country by country. Fortunately there is a simpler method: to consider the lives of the principal figures in the history of Western magic. This is what I propose to do in the next two chapters.
I must begin by repeating my basic general proposition. It is man’s biological destiny to evolve Faculty X. All living creatures on the surface of this planet have been trying to do this throughout their history. Man is more than halfway there. A true adept would be a man in whom Faculty X is more developed than in the average.
By this definition, there have not been many true adepts. This does not mean that the great names of magic were charlatans or self-deceivers (although some were). Most of them possessed a high degree of ‘intuitive’ powers, akin to Corbett’s ‘jungle sensitivity’. These powers lie at the lower end of man’s consciousness – the red end of the spectrum. Faculty X lies at the violet end.
But that is an oversimplification, and I must try to clarify the matter further before proceeding.
Man could be compared to someone who lives in the Grand Canyon, but who is so short-sighted that he cannot see more than five yards. Or to someone who lives in a cathedral, but is surrounded by a kind of curtain, like a fortune-teller’s cubicle, that goes with him wherever he walks.
The curtain is ‘everydayness’. It is a state of mind rather than an objective reality. The human mind must be thought of as being akin to the radar of bats; we somehow reach out and ‘feel’ the reality around us. But in my ordinary, everyday existence, I do not need to ‘reach out’ very far. And I get into the habit of not doing so.
Whenever I am deeply moved by poetry or music or scenery, I realise I am living in a meaning universe that deserves better of me than the small-minded sloth in which I habitually live. And I suddenly realise the real deadliness of this lukewarm contentment that looks as harmless as ivy on a tree. It is systematically robbing me of life, embezzling my purpose and vitality. I must clearly focus on this immense meaning that surrounds me, and refuse to forget it; contemptuously reject all smaller meanings that try to persuade me to focus on them instead.
And this is why the mage or the adept is a fundamental human ‘archetype’: he symbolises man’s evolutionary destiny. Bulwer-Lytton’s description of the mage in The Haunted and the Haunters catches his essence: ‘If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea [of him]; the width and flatness of frontal, the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw – the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald – and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the consciousness of immense power.’ And when he later added a new ending to the story, Lytton extended this sketch into a full-length portrait of a man who seems to be a combination of the Wandering Jew and the Count de Saint-Germain.
But why the hint of menace? Serpents symbolise wisdom, also coldness and deadliness. It is an interesting thought that there are no portraits of ‘benevolent supermen’ in world literature. There are heroes, usually with fatal flaws, and unbelievable gods. But the nearest thing to a true superman, in the original sense of the word, is the character in the American comic strip. Lytton’s baleful magician – and his like in the writings of Hoffman, Tieck, Jean-Paul, even Tolkien – is the nearest the human imagination seems to be able to get to the idea of superhumanity. This is to be expected; our lack of sense of meaning means that we understand the negative better than the positive. Can one, for example, imagine a completely benevolent but equally powerful Hitler, who wants world domination in order to liberate the poor, to destroy anti-Semitism? No. Benevolent statesmen tend to be idealistic and ineffectual:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity …
Hitler’s powers were partially magical, because he was driven by long-range purposes and enormous optimism. The consequence was the automatic development of powers at the ‘invisible’ ends of the spectrum; the almost hypnotic power over crowds to which so many observers have testified. (Such observers – Lüdecke, Hanfstaengl, Gregor Strasser – were surprised to find that Hitler lacked charisma at close quarters. He ‘switched on’ his power when he needed it, like a conductor working the orchestra up to a climax.)
Good men tend to mistrust the will and stick to reason. But ‘magical’ powers cannot be developed without an optimistic effort of will. On the other hand, one does not need to accept the possibility of their development. One of the most amusing cases of the unintentional development of such powers is told of Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, the lifelong associate of Madame Blavatsky. In July 1882, the colonel was in Colombo, Ceylon, trying to encourage a Buddhist revival. (He had left Madame Blavatsky, who tended to dominate him, behind in India.) The local high priest, Sumangala, told him that the Catholics on the island were hoping to convert a place near Kelanie into another Lourdes, complete with a healing shrine. So far, the miracles had failed to occur; but the colonel realised that if mass suggestion got working, they might well begin, and the Buddhists would lose half their congregation. He told the high priest that he had better try working miracles on his own account. The high priest said there would be no point, since he knew he had no powers.
Shortly thereafter, the colonel met a man named Cornelius Appu, who was paralysed in one arm and partially paralysed in one leg. The colonel decided he might as well try out the effect of suggestion, so he made a few mystic passes over the man, and told him that might help.
Later in the day Mr. Appu returned to say he felt better already and ask for more treatment. The colonel made more passes. Cornelius Appu began to improve fast, and told everyone that the colonel was a miracle worker. He wrote out a statement describing his cure – with the hand that had been paralysed. It was published, presumably in a local newspaper. Mr. Appu brought a paralysed friend. The colonel repeated the suggestion treatment, and it worked.
But now, to his dismay, he found himself overwhelmed by hordes of people with every ailment. They came in crowds. And the colonel, although hard pressed, soon found that using his thaumaturgic powers was like riding a bicycle, a matter of confidence and practice. The colonel believed; the sufferers believed; and cures were effected by the dozen. They would interrupt his meals, and force their way in while he was dressing. He records that he had to go away periodically and bathe in the salt water of the harbour, behind his house, where he felt ‘currents of fresh vitality entering and re-enforcing my body’. His powers developed to such an extent that one morning, when he was feeling particularly fresh (‘it seemed as if I might almost mesmerise an elephant’) he cured a young Indian of facial paralysis from the other end of a room, raising his arm and saying in Bengali, ‘Be cured.’ ‘A tremor ran through his body, his eyes closed and reopened, his tongue, so long paralysed, was thrust out and withdrawn, and with a wild cry of joy he rushed forward and flung himself at my feet.’
The colonel developed his power under ideal circumstances. It would not have mattered in the least if he had failed with Cornelius Appu, for he firmly believed he was trying to cure the man by ‘selling him the confidence trick’. He continued to believe that it was merely a matter of suggestion, until the powers, allowed to develop naturally and at their own pace, became unmistakable.
This also answers an important question – raised by Louis Singer, and again by A. L. Rowse – of whether powers of mediumship, clairvoyance and so on must develop involuntarily, by not willing, as Louis Singer says. What man calls his ‘will’ is usually self-divided. This is why, for example, someone can make me itch by merely suggesting that I itch. I don’t want to itch, and the fear of itching arouses some perverse negative will in me, my unconscious, unused will, which gets tired of sitting still. (I have a theory that it is this negative will that causes many ailments, from ulcers to cancer.) If Colonel Olcott had badly wanted to heal Cornelius Appu, his tension and nervousness would have prevented him calling on his true will – the union of conscious and unconscious will, which is the basis of ‘magical’ powers.
Some fortunate people are still relatively untouched by the civilised disease of self-division, and possess natural thaumaturgic powers. I speak of them in my book on Rasputin:
Most healers agree that the act of healing seems to involve a certain self-depletion, although the powers can be developed to a point where one can be ‘recharged’ in a very short period [like Colonel Olcott]. Mr. Harry Edwards describes the feeling of a power – a kind of fluid – flowing down his arm and through his fingertips when he touches an affected part of the patient’s body. Mrs. Elizabeth Arkle, of Bristol, who also possessed rudimentary healing powers ... has described the same sensation to me. She mentioned that she had to be in good health, psychologically as well as physically, to be able to ‘summon’ her powers; she experiences the thaumaturgic power as ‘a kind of fire’ in the areas of the breast or solar plexus. She mentioned that she had only used it with relatives – where the contact, presumably, is stronger – and that on one occasion, when tempted to use it [on her father], she had a strong intuition that it would be wrong, since he was dying. She could not explain why she felt it would be wrong.
Colonel Olcott’s description of his dramatic cure of the young Indian is explainable as hypnotic suggestion, like the deep-trance cure of warts, described on page 79. That is to say, hypnotic suggestion produces ‘confidence’ and awakens the ‘true will’. But this explanation cannot be accepted unreservedly. In Cornwall, where I live, the practice of wart-charming is widespread. Our local doctor, when approached by patients with warts, usually sends them to a wart-charmer before he applies his slower remedies. Wart-charmers work in a variety of ways. Some of them ‘buy the warts’, paying the sufferer a few pence for each wart. (Not vice versa; wart-charmers will not take money, and most of them make it a condition of their work that they should not be thanked.) Some insist that it is necessary to rub a piece of ‘rusty bacon’ on the wart, then bury the bacon. (Where possible, the bacon should be ‘stolen’, or at least taken without its owner’s spoken approval.) Others only need to know the full name of the person to be cured.
The sceptic may feel that we are now entering the realm of old wives’ tales and pure absurdity. He would be mistaken. The most startling thing is that cures are almost invariable. They certainly occur with a frequency too great to attribute to chance. For example, the painter and author Lionel Miskin took his whole family to a wartcharmer at Par; they were suffering from warts on the hands. All the warts disappeared in about two weeks. This wart-charmer ‘bought’ the warts for tuppence each.
But the notion of hypnotic suggestion must be abandoned in cases where it is animals that are cured. Mrs. Betty Bray-Smith of Pentewan had a pony with multiple warts, and was told to approach a wartcharmer on Bodmin Moor, a farmer. She accordingly telephoned Mr. Frank Martin (known as Fred), who was expecting her call. She asked, ‘What do I have to do?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Mr. Martin. ‘You’ve done all you have to. The warts will vanish of their own accord now.’ They did, during the next two weeks, all except the largest, which had to be removed with silver nitrate.
I was so intrigued by this story, and by other tales of Mr. Martin’s powers, that I drove over to his farm to interview him. What I wanted to know chiefly was this: Did he feel that he was projecting some mental power of his own, or did he feel he was using ‘other forces’ outside himself? The latter seemed most likely, since he did not see Mrs. Bray-Smith’s pony. However, what Mr. Martin had to tell me left me completely bewildered, for it did not seem to fit either theory. I had been told that wart-charming is an inherited faculty, which can only pass from father to daughter, or mother to son. Mr. Martin told me that he had been given his ‘charms’ (i.e. certain ‘spells’ to be repeated) by two old ladies, back in the mid-1930s. He has used them consistently since then, and with a high level of success. He was given several ‘charms’, including one to stop bleeding, and another to rid of ringworm. The charms are brief incantations, that must end ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and of the Holy Ghost’. Since a large number of his ‘patients’ are sheep and cows, he concludes that it is the charm itself that works, not his own ‘powers’. (Sheep and cows are subject to large warts, called in this part of the world ‘rigs’.) However it is important that the owner of the animal should also believe that the charm will work; Mr. Martin sees the cure as some kind of co-operation between himself and the owner.
He confirms that charms can only be passed on from man to woman, or vice versa; they cannot be ‘given’ to a member of the same sex. This seemed to imply that once a charm has been ‘given’, the original owner loses its powers. Mr. Martin verified that most charmers believe this, but said that he himself had given the charms to several people without, apparently, affecting his own powers.
When I asked him how he could explain these powers, he seemed to feel that they were fundamentally of the same nature as those used by Jesus (although far weaker). I pointed out that Jesus was a thaumaturgist: that is, he felt that something was ‘taken from him’ when he affected a cure. Mr. Martin agreed that his own cures seemed to take nothing from him. (But, he added, his uncle, a man of eighty-four, who was being buried that day, had possessed the power to cure the ‘king’s evil’, scrofula, and had been forced to give it up because it was ‘taking too much out of him’. It is interesting to recall that Dr. Johnson was ‘touched’ for the king’s evil by Queen Anne, but Boswell records that it had no effect; evidently the Queen lacked thaumaturgic gifts.) I asked Mr. Martin whether he would consider himself a religious man. After a moment’s consideration he shook his head and said he didn’t think so. But he emphasised that the impulse behind all such cures must be the impulse to do good. This explains why wart-charmers refuse to take money or even thanks. He explained that he himself often cured people without their knowing anything about it. The important thing was to use the power for good. He described to me an occasion when he had been present at the birth of a calf, and the carelessness of the vet’s assistant had caused serious bleeding. The vet remarked that if they didn’t get towels quickly the cow would bleed to death. Mr. Martin ‘charmed’ the cow without saying anything; the bleeding stopped. He did not bother to tell the vet what he had done.
He emphasised the importance of the desire to help. A sceptical friend had remarked: ‘If I cut myself now with a knife, you couldn’t stop the bleeding. And if you saw a butcher slaughtering a pig, you couldn’t stop the pig bleeding.’ Mr. Martin agreed, but pointed out that in neither case would it be doing any good. ‘But if the butcher cut himself accidentally, I could stop that bleeding,’ he added.
I found that his most enlightening comments were about his state of mind when he was effecting a cure. He explained that it was a gift, like any other gift – for example, like work. I was puzzled. ‘Like work?’ ‘There are some things you’re good at, and some things you’re not. For example, if I plough a field, I like the furrows all to run straight, and I really put my mind to it. The same when I thatch a roof – I don’t put a lot more effort into it than anybody else, but somehow it all comes right. Now, on the other hand, I can’t build walls.’ (Cornish ‘walls’ are part of a ‘hedge’ or bank of earth, and consist of irregular slabs of stone that use the bank as partial support.) ‘I can watch a man building a wall and tell him where he ought to put a certain stone. But I couldn’t lay it myself.’
In short, Mr. Martin is speaking of the use of Tao, as discussed in an earlier chapter of this volume (pp. 108–9), a kind of stilling of the mind that allows total concentration. It is the use of the ‘true will’, the instinctive will.
I cannot explain why Mr. Martin’s charms work, or why those of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other Cornish wart-charmers work, except by saying that the Cornish are Celts, and Celts seem to possess a higher degree of natural ‘powers’ than Anglo-Saxons. I suspect that the ‘charms’ are less to do with it than a natural thaumaturgic faculty, and that Mr. Martin may not feel that anything has been ‘taken out of him’ because the cure of warts takes too little for him to notice. As to how he can cure a pony he has never seen, I have no explanation to offer. (When I told him that the largest wart had not vanished, he said that Mrs. Bray-Smith should have phoned him again, and he would have repeated the charm. Some warts and ringworm are tougher than others.) As a type, Fred Martin struck me as kindly, honest, simple, with a high degree of natural benevolence: that is, the kind of person one might expect to possess natural thaumaturgic gifts. In that case, he may be mistaken when he explains that he cannot cure other ailments – ulcers, for example, and snakebite.
The mention of snakebite raises an interesting question. There are a number of Cornish ‘charmers’ who have the reputation of being able to cure snakebite and control snakes. The master of the local hunt described to me how he had seen one of these charmers immobilising an adder by drawing a chalk circle round it. Mr. Martin spoke of an old lady on Bodmin Moor with similar powers. A child belonging to two visitors was bitten by a viper; they called at the nearest farmhouse to ask if they could telephone a doctor. The old lady who lived there told them she could cure the bite, but that they must first go back and kill the snake. This seemed an absurd request, since they had seen the snake wriggling off into the bracken. The old lady assured them that they would find the snake where they last saw it, and they did. The child suffered no ill effects from the bite.
Anyone who has ever owned snakes knows that they are passive creatures, who soon allow themselves to be handled, and who are very likely to lie still in bracken – or a chalk circle, for that matter. And the late C. J. P. Ionides, the ‘snake man’, assured me that snakes cannot distinguish between one person and another, and that a tame snake will allow anyone to handle it, so that stories of the ‘powers’ of Eastern snake charmers are myths. He may well be right; but he was of a determinedly sceptical turn of mind, and would not admit the existence of any unusual ‘powers’, even in witch doctors or shamans. The stories told of Cornish snake charmers indicate a belief that certain human beings can establish a telepathic power over snakes, similar to the power of Grimble’s porpoise-caller. If this is true, then it is an amusing reversal of the notion that it is snakes who possess a hypnotic power. The contrary may be true: that they are good hypnotic subjects, at the mercy of the stronger psychic powers of man.
It would be a mistake, however, to imply that such powers are confined to simple, unsophisticated people, as the following passage demonstrates; it is from a letter written by Aldous Huxley (December 8, 1915):
I went on to dine with the Gilbert Murrays, where I was lucky enough to see one of Gilbert’s thought-reading performances. He is considered one of the best telepathists going – at any rate, he was astonishing on Sunday. He was best, of course, with his daughter, with whom he generally does it. With her he can describe scenes in books he has never read. He did two on Sunday – one out of Conrad’s new book [Victory], which he got almost word for word as his daughter described it and one out of Sinister Street. He feels the atmosphere of the thought: thus as soon as he came into the room the time his daughter had thought of Sinister St. – a scene of undergraduates talking together – he said ‘How I hate these people’ – the aesthetic young man being very hostile to him. He tried one with me, which came off extraordinarily well considering I was a stranger. I had thought of the following scene: the Master of Balliol listening to an essay on The Egoist, a book he has not read. Gilbert Murray stood holding my hand about half a minute, then began to laugh and said ‘Oh of course, it’s the old Master of Balliol being embarrassed. I’m not very clear about what, but I think it’s a conversation about a new poet’ – which is close enough for a first attempt with an unfamiliar mind. He can’t exactly describe the process – it seems to be a kind of smelling out of thought, of detecting it in the atmosphere.
But it might be more accurate to say that the process is closely allied to what happens when I try to remember some scene or event that partly eludes me; a half-picture forms in my mind, a few tantalising threads of association, but not the whole thing. Which raises again a point I made earlier: that our own mental processes are quite as ‘occult’ and mysterious as the powers of thaumaturgists or telepathists. One might say that Murray ‘remembered’ what was going on in Huxley’s mind – or used exactly the same mechanisms that we use in trying to recall something, but reached into Huxley’s mind instead of his own.
Another point worth noting. Murray’s response ‘How I hate these people’ might easily have been conveyed by the same telepathic process to the people he was talking about. And since we have already discussed the suggestibility of the average person, the self-division that makes us think about something we don’t want to think about, it is not difficult to see how a person with some telepathic ability could exercise ‘the evil eye’.
In short, we must recognise that the powers we have been discussing are commonplace. They exist far more widely and generally than we choose to acknowledge.
How can we summon these powers? It would be more to the point to ask: What prevents us from summoning them? The answer is: the blinkers, the narrowness, the fact that my consciousness is occupied with trivial issues such as why my car uses so much oil and whether a certain girl is being unfaithful to her husband. The only infallible way to develop these powers is for human beings to systematically turn away from triviality, to reject the near and concentrate on the far.
Man must develop positive consciousness. He has reached his present position on the evolutionary scale through his power to turn his mind into a microscope and concentrate on small things. But this has made him a victim of the small and the negative. Human history is the history of childishness, of silly quarrels for small reasons. Like the housewife in Under Milk Wood who says, ‘Before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes,’ we have become slaves of our amazing capacity for detail. Such a woman obviously does not really enjoy being alive. She is trapped in her own negativeness. So are we all.
I know of only one religion that has made this recognition its foundation: Zoroastrianism, the religion of the ancient Persians. The Persian scriptures, the Gathas, state that the Supreme Being, Ahura Mazda, created two twins, who produce reality and unreality. Reality and unreality are seen as the essential elements from which the world is created. They are not positive and negative, but both are equally positive. It was only later that they degenerated into Good and Evil. (Later still, there was a further degeneration, when Ahura Mazda, the first cause, was identified with the Good, and his enemy Ahriman with the devil.) For reality is meaning – out there – and unreality is human subjectivity, our tendency to get enmeshed in our self-chosen values. We derive our power to act, to work, to concentrate, to evolve, from this same subjectivity, so it cannot be regarded as negative or evil. It becomes negative through human stupidity and defeat-proneness.
The Magi, from whom the word ‘magic’ is derived, were the priests of this ancient religion. I would suggest, then, as a hypothesis that can never be proved or disproved, that the original Magi derived their magic powers from ‘positive consciousness’ – from the recognition that subjectivity is only good so long as it keeps itself open to the reality of meaning outside itself.
Positive consciousness is a happy, open state of mind. A man in love has positive consciousness – especially if he has just discovered that the girl returns his feelings. It is a sense of the marvellous interestingness of the world. We still use the word ‘magic’ in this sense – talking about ‘the magic of summer nights’, ‘magic moments’ and so on. This is not a misuse of language; that is what real magic is about.
The little we know of the Magi is derived almost entirely from the History of Herodotus, much as our knowledge of Atlantis depends entirely on Plato. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., a few decades before Plato, was speaking about the later stages of the Magian religion. Even so, he is struck by the purity of their faith: ‘They have no images of gods, no temples, no altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly … Their wont, however, is to ascend to the summits of the loftiest mountains, and there to offer sacrifice to Zeus, which is the name they give to the whole circuit of the firmament. They likewise offer to the sun and moon, to the earth, to fire, to water, and to the winds …’ The Persians later developed the worship of the sun-god, Mithras, who is a saviour with much in common with Jesus (and whose religion in later centuries almost supplanted Christianity in Rome).
All the references in Herodotus are incidental, so we learn only that the Magi were skilled in the interpretation of dreams, and that they were a powerful caste who continued to dominate Persian life even after an attempt to seize power led to mass executions – presumably because daily life was unthinkable without them.
The Magi were the descendants of the shamans of the Neolithic, but with one important difference. The shaman derived his power from mana, the magical force that permeates nature. The Magi were also ‘adepts’ and scholars. They knew something of mathematics and astrology, both of which had originated not far away in Mesopotamia, and were skilled in divination. Their religious beliefs owe something to the Hindus; they certainly believed in the transmigration of souls. From the few references to them that are scattered in the classical writers, it seems fairly certain that the Magi began as an order of Wordsworthian nature mystics. Friedrich von Schlegel speaks of their ‘primitive veneration of nature’, and says that they were not a priestly caste but an ‘order’ divided into grades of apprentice, master and perfect masters.* Eliphaz Levi, perhaps not the most reliable of authorities, speaks of ‘secrets that gave them mastery over the occult powers of nature’ (that is to say, they were shamans), and citing Pliny and Lucius Pison as his authorities, declares that they could produce electricity. They existed long before the birth of their ‘avatar’ Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in the seventh century B.C., and from the evidence of the early Gathic hymns and later Zendavesta (supposedly written by Zoroaster), it is clear that the religion changed from nature worship to something closer to the religions of Mesopotamia, with their angels and demons. Later still, it degenerated into fire worship. By the time of Cyrus (who died in 529 B.C.), the great founder of the Persian empire, the Magi had also degenerated into a ruling cult, like the priests of Egypt.
But in their early days they were an order of worshippers and philosophers, like the Greeks who celebrated the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, or like the Jewish order the Essenes. Perhaps the most puzzling feature of the order is that they had no temples. If Herodotus is correct in saying that they performed their worship on mountaintops, then we must take these two facts in association to indicate that the Magi were nature mystics in the fullest sense of the word – the sense in which the seventeenth-century cobbler Jacob Boehme was a nature mystic. This description of Boehme’s second ‘illumination’ catches its essence:
Boehme’s glance was attracted by a polished pewter dish that reflected the sun. Suddenly a strange feeling overpowered him, for it seemed as if he were looking into the very heart of nature and beholding its innermost mystery. Startled and desiring to banish such presumptuous thoughts, he went out on the green. The vision persisted and became even more clear. The grass and flowers were stirred with strange living forces. Over nature the veil of matter grew thin and half-revealed the vast struggling life beneath.*
Boehme’s vision can be interpreted in a number of ways, but all come back to the same thing: the sense of overpowering meaning in nature. Boehme spoke of the ‘signature’ of things, meaning their inner symbolic essence, which makes it sound as if he caught a sudden intuitive glimpse of Dr. David Foster’s notion of a universe of coded information in which all living things are the expression of a vital intelligence.
There seems to be no doubt that the Magi were a mystical order of exceptional purity, the natural link between the shamans of the Stone Age and the confused magical cults of the urban civilisations. They were the expression of man’s need to escape his animal destiny, to ‘see beyond the veil’.
And this provokes the question: Why? Man is not naturally a mystical creature. He farms, he breeds children, he fights wars; if he worships nature, this is only out of the superstitious belief that the elements are gods.
I am inclined to believe that the answer lies in war. All the early poems are about battles. Homer was writing the Iliad at about the same time the Magi were composing the Gathic hymns in Bactrian, the language of eastern Persia. It was a violent and cruel world, and the Eastern temperament tends to lack humane fellow-feeling. Herodotus tells the story of King Astyages, the grandfather of Cyrus, who dreamed that his daughter’s child would overthrow him. He sent one of his servants, Harpagus, to kill the child; Harpagus handed him over to a herdsman instead. Later, when he discovered that Cyrus was still alive, Astyages took a horrible revenge on Harpagus; he invited him to a feast, asking him to send his thirteen-year-old son to help prepare it. At the feast, Harpagus ate his fill of meat; Astyages asked him if he had enjoyed it, and Harpagus said he had. A covered bowl was then placed in front of Harpagus; when he removed the cover, he discovered the head and limbs of his son; he had been eating him. Herodotus records: ‘The sight … did not rob him of his self-possession. Being asked by Astyages if he knew what beast’s flesh it was that he had been eating, he answered that he knew very well, and that whatever the king did was agreeable: Later, Harpagus engineered Cyrus’s victory over his grandfather.
The first part of the story sounds apocryphal – too much like the story of Oedipus and other legendary heroes. But it is a historical fact that Cyrus overthrew his grandfather with the aid of Harpagus, who was sent out to repel Cyrus’s army, and joined it instead. So it seems likely that the story of Harpagus is true. It demonstrates the barbarous temper of these Eastern potentates. (Astyages also ordered the execution of all the Magi who had persuaded him to spare Cyrus.) Living in a world like this, surrounded by violence and ambition, watching the degeneration of urbanised humanity, it is not surprising that the descendants of the shamans turned away from it all and immersed themselves in the mystical peace of nature.
In this connection, we should also speak of the religious ‘mysteries’ of Greece, particularly those of Orpheus and Eleusis, and of the Hebrew sect of the Essenes, who arose some centuries later. For all these have important characteristics in common with the Magi of Persia. The Orphic religion was supposed to have been founded by the legendary singer Orpheus – roughly contemporary with Zoroaster – who also travelled with the Argonauts and soothed their quarrels with his songs. Various poems attributed to him describe the creation of the world from a cosmic egg, and speak in detail of life after death. Like the later Christians, his followers seem to have believed that all non-Orphics were doomed, for Plato quotes one of their myths to the effect that the uninitiated will be forced to spend eternity trying to fill a sieve with water by means of another sieve. (The Greeks had a strong feeling about the horrors of futility, as evidenced also in the legend of Sisyphus, who has to roll a rock uphill and watch it roll down again.) Nothing is known about the Orphic mysteries of initiation, but much can be inferred from what we know of those of Eleusis, since the two religions often intermingled, and Eleusis was used for the Orphic rites. Eleusis, a town fourteen miles west of Athens, was the place where Demeter, the corn goddess, was finally united again with her daughter Kore (or Persephone), who had been stolen by Hades. (Curiously enough, both goddesses were often identified with Diana, Graves’s White Goddess.) The Eleusinian mysteries began with a cleansing in the sea, then the imparting of occult knowledge, then an initiation that involved certain tests – probably wandering through underground passageways with carefully prepared ‘surprises’, rather like the ghost train on a modern fairground – and finally with the garlanding of the initiate. (Anyone who knows Mozart’s Magic Flute can form some idea of the ‘ordeal’ part of the mysteries.) All this guaranteed that the initiate would spend eternity comfortably in the Elysian Fields.
The Essenes, the Jewish sect of the third and second centuries B.C., also had solemn initiatory rites, and the aspirant had to remain a novice for a year. They were then tested for two more years. They were fundamentally a ‘purist’ religious group, who later moved into the wilderness near the Dead Sea, and were responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Like the Orphics, they preached a life of strict purity and the unlawfulness of killing anything. In Jews, God and History, Max Dimont states flatly that John the Baptist was an Essene, and that Christianity was fundamentally an offshoot of the Essene faith. This may well be true. The French mystical writer Edouard Schuré believes that Jesus was initiated into the Essene faith.
What all these sects have in common is the sense of solemnity and awe induced by their sacred mysteries. The Greeks and the Romans took their religion fairly lightly, and the Jews were less bigoted than the New Testament would have us believe (the Pharisees were, in fact, easygoing and tolerant, while the Sadducees were political realists who did not believe in immortality or resurrection). Anyone who has read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean will remember the delightful account of the religion of Numa in the first chapter, and its relaxed, pastoral atmosphere. (Numa was a legendary emperor of Rome who, according to Eliphaz Levi, could control lightning.)
The mysteries were a different matter. Their aim was to raise the mind beyond everyday triviality to steady contemplation of the miraculous character of nature. The method was to make the aspirant identify himself with the story of Demeter and Kore or Orpheus, in much the same way that a good preacher can make his congregation identify themselves with the passion of Jesus on Good Friday. The story of Demeter is dramatic enough for this treatment – her daughter being seized and raped by the god of the underworld as she gathered roses, crocuses, hyacinths and violets in the fields; Demeter’s long search, during which time she posed as a mortal and became a nurse in the house of the king of Attica, at his palace in Eleusis. (She decided to make the king’s newly born son immortal, but was caught by the queen as she was about to put him into the fire, and forced to reveal her identity.) Her grief makes the earth barren until Pluto agrees to allow Kore to return to earth every year. The myth explains the seasons, and the initiates took it literally. The mysteries began with a ritual fast, then with an all-night vigil, in which the candidates for initiation sat, veiled, on stools covered with sheepskins. During this time they would meditate on the rape of Kore and the sorrow of Demeter, the long search and so on. In this oral part of the initiation, all this was driven home by sacred drama and ‘sermons’. The ‘tests’ followed; they were probably terrifying and perhaps genuinely dangerous. After all this came the dramatic climax; Demeter’s sorrow in her temple at Eleusis, the fields barren of all vegetation, the restoration of her daughter, upon which she causes a field of ripe corn to shoot up. At this point in the celebrations, the worshippers are shown a ripe ear of corn. And, as with the rituals of the shamans, the dramatic effect must have been shattering. The worshippers look outside, at the fields of swaying corn and the ripe orchards, and it seems a revelation. From this time on, the name of Demeter or Kore makes a shiver run over the scalp.
The Orphic mysteries, which would also be celebrated at Eleusis, used the story of Orpheus in the same way, emphasising his sorrow at the loss of Eurydice, the descent to the underworld, his second loss of her when he looks over his shoulder, breaking his promise to Pluto (or Hades); his death, from being torn to pieces by Thracian Maenads.
What we do not know is the nature of the secrets imparted to the initiates, which were certainly of a magical nature. Even the Essenes, who were an ascetic religious order, had ‘magical’ secrets; the Jewish historian Josephus says, ‘They studied with great diligence certain medical writings dealing with the occult virtues of plants and minerals.’ And for the Greeks, as for the Magi, nature was a living thing, a veil concealing strange secrets. Each tree, each flower, each colour,* had occult significance. (Graves devotes two chapters of The White Goddess to an exposition of the occult significance of the various trees.) There was some significance in each of the flowers that Kore was picking before she was raped.
As to Orphism, it soon blended with the worship of the god Dionysus, who originated in Thrace, and who was worshipped there in the form of a bull. Dionysus was quickly accepted in seventh-century B.C. Greece, because he was exactly what the Greeks needed to complete their pantheon of gods; under the name Bacchus he became the god of wine, and his symbol was sometimes an enormous phallus. Frazer speaks of Thracian rites involving wild dances, thrilling music and tipsy excess, and notes that such goings-on were foreign to the clear rational nature of the Greeks. But the religion still spread like wildfire throughout Greece, especially among women indicating, perhaps, a revolt against civilisation. It became a religion of orgies; women worked themselves into a frenzy and rushed about the hills, tearing to pieces any living creature they found. Euripides’ play The Bacchae tells how King Pentheus, who opposed the religion of Bacchus, was torn to pieces by a crowd of women, which included his mother and sisters, all in ‘Bacchic frenzy’. In their ecstasy the worshippers of Bacchus became animals, and behaved like animals, killing living creatures and eating them raw.
The profound significance of all this was recognised by the philosopher Nietzsche, who declared himself a disciple of the god Dionysus. He spoke of the ‘blissful ecstasy that rises from the innermost depths of man’, dissolving his sense of personality: in short, the sexual or magical ecstasy. He saw Dionysus as a fundamental principle of human existence; man’s need to throw off his personality, to burst the dream-bubble that surrounds him and to experience total, ecstatic affirmation of everything. In this sense, Dionysus is fundamentally the god, or patron saint, of magic. The spirit of Dionysus pervades all magic, especially the black magic of the later witch cults, with their orgiastic witch’s sabbaths so like the orgies of Dionysus’s female worshippers, even to the use of goats, the animal sacred to Dionysus. (Is it not also significant that Dionysus is a horned god, like the Christian devil?)
The ‘scent of truth’ that made Ouspensky prefer books on magic to the ‘hard facts’ of daily journalism is the scent of Dionysian freedom, man’s sudden absurd glimpse of his godlike potentialities. It is also true that the spirit of Dionysus, pushed to new extremes through frustration and egomania, permeates the work of De Sade. As Philip Vellacot remarks of Dionysus in his introduction to The Bacchae: ‘But, though in the first half of the play there is some room for sympathy with Dionysus, this sympathy steadily diminishes until at the end of the play, his inhuman cruelty inspires nothing but horror: But this misses the point about Dionysus – that sympathy is hardly an emotion he would appreciate. He descends like a storm wind, scattering all human emotion.
All this is the background of the first ‘great initiate’ of recorded history, Pythagoras. It is true that the legendary Egyptian founder of magic, Hermes Trismegistus (‘Thrice Greatest Hermes’), is supposed to have preceded him; but it is doubtful whether Hermes actually existed (the Egyptians identified him with the god Thoth, who gave men the art of writing) and the documents relating to him belong to the post-Christian era. Pythagoras was born about 570 B.C. – a remarkable era, for it was at about this time that the Buddha was born in India, and Confucius and Lao Tse in China.
Nowadays we tend to associate Pythagoras with early science and mathematics; but this is a mistake. He was primarily a religious mystic who was interested in everything. He wanted to understand the world because he believed that its principles were basically mystical or occult, and that mathematics demonstrated this. According to the common conception, a number is just a number – an abstraction; but Pythagoras knew that numbers have as much individuality as mountains or human beings. He defined a friend as ‘My other “I” – like 220 and 284.’ What he meant by this was that 220 can be divided by 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 44, 55, 110, and these add up to 284. The divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, 142, and these add up to 220. So 220 and 284 are ‘amicable numbers’.
This was how Pythagoras’s mind worked – by analogy. (This is true of magicians in general, with their motto ‘As above, so below’.) His interest in numbers and in science was not a desire to construct a chain of logic or inference, but the feeling that each separate fact might be a symbol of something much bigger – that facts might reflect bits of heaven, like broken shards of a mirror.
Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, the son of a merchant. The tyrant of the island, Polycrates, seems to have taken a liking to Pythagoras, and sent him with a recommendation to his friend the pharaoh Amasis of Egypt, asking that Pythagoras be initiated into the Egyptian mysteries.
There is a story of the pharaoh Amasis and Polycrates that affords an insight into the curious fatalism of that era. Polycrates was known as a singularly lucky man. Amasis felt that this kind of thing could not last, since the gods do not allow men to be happy for too long. He advised Polycrates to inflict some minor form of suffering or inconvenience on himself, as a man in danger of apoplexy might drain off a small quantity of blood from his veins (the simile is Grote’s). So Polycrates took a particularly valuable ring and threw it into the sea. A few days later a fisherman brought him a present of a fish – and the ring was found in its stomach. Amasis became convinced that nothing could now avert ill-fortune. In fact, it was greed that brought about Polycrates’s downfall: an envious Persian lord on a neighbouring island lured him there with promises of gold, and then tortured him to death in a manner that Herodotus says was too disgusting to mention. Significantly, the daughter of Polycrates dreamed of the catastrophe beforehand and did her best to persuade her father not to go. Here again we note these characteristic elements of that period in human evolution: cruelty, envy, prophetic dreams and a superstitious and pessimistic fatalism that turns out to be disquietingly accurate.
After some ordeals, including circumcision, Pythagoras was initiated at Thebes; he learned Egyptian, says Diogenes Laertius, and associated with Chaldeans and with Persian Magi. From them he learned about astronomy – the Chaldeans invented the signs of the zodiac in this era – and about numbers. (The famous ‘theorem of Pythagoras’ about the square of the hypotenuse was probably learned from Egyptian priests.) However, the Persian king Cambyses invaded Egypt, and Pythagoras was sent by him to Babylon, where he spent another ten years or so, studying the Mesopotamian mysteries. In all, he was away from his homeland for thirty-four years, and during that time he must have encountered sages from India or China, for there is a strong element of oriental mysticism in his later philosophy, as well as a belief in reincarnation that he elaborated into metempsychosis, the belief that the soul may pass into the body of other creatures, including animals.
Back on Samos, Pythagoras discovered that his patron Polycrates had changed for the worse; in fact, the regime had taken on a repressive character. He moved to Crotona in southern Italy. His personal magnetism was so great that he collected many disciples, but he also aroused envy and enmity; even his brother-philosopher Heraclitus had sarcastic things to say about him. An enemy raised the populace against him in Crotona and some of his followers were slaughtered. This seems to indicate that they had become a powerful influence in the city. (Edouard Schuré says that Cyton, the man who caused the uprising against Pythagoras, was a rejected pupil.) Diogenes Laertius says that Pythagoras was killed in Crotona. burned in a house to which the mob had set fire. Porphyry says he escaped and went to Metapontum, where he died at the age of eighty.
During the thirty years he spent in Crotona, Pythagoras became one of the great intellectual influences on the Mediterranean world. He brought Eastern mysticism to the West. His school was a school for mystics, and the initiatory rites were long and challenging. Pythagoras was a philosopher rather than a magician; in fact, he invented the word ‘philosopher’. But his highly mystical philosophy was one of the great influences in the history of magic.
Having said this, it must be admitted that his philosophy was striking and original rather than profound. He was apparently amazed to discover that there is a relation between the four principal notes of the Greek musical scale and the distance between them, as measured on the string of the lyre. One delightful legend records that he was passing by a blacksmith’s shop, in which four smiths were striking anvils of different sizes and producing four different notes. Pythagoras had the anvils weighed, and found that their weights were in the proportion 6, 8, 9, 12. He then stretched four strings from the ceiling, and hung the four anvils from them – or four weights of the same proportion. The strings, when plucked, produced these same notes.
Pythagoras built up a whole mystical philosophy of numbers upon this discovery, or so the story goes. On the lyre string the distance between the notes was 3, 4 and 6, and the notes themselves could be worked out in the proportions 1 : 2 (octave), 3 : 2 (fifth) and 4 : 3 (fourth). The four numbers involved (1, 2, 3, 4) add up to ten, a sacred number. This discovery sounds absurdly simple to our sophisticated ears; but it must be remembered that few people in those days could count beyond ten, and that the art of multiplication was still unknown, even to the Egyptians. It struck Pythagoras as a revelation that these four notes – which, when played together, sounded so harmonious – should be explainable in terms of whole numbers. His mind leapt to the startling idea that perhaps all the harmony of creation is due to numerical secrets of the same sort. Creation starts with the ‘divine, pure unity’, number one, then develops to the ‘holy four’, and the first four digits beget ten, the sacred number, from which everything else springs.
In the same way, you can make up a triangle of dots by putting four dots for the bottom row, three dots for the next, two dots for the next and one dot for the apex. (The Greeks seem to have recorded numbers by the primitive method of dots.) This proved to the Pythagoreans that the triangle is also a mystical symbol. If you make up several of these triangles, each one with an extra row of dots, you notice that any of these triangles, added to the one before, makes a ‘square’. That is to say, a triangle made up of three dots, added to a triangle made up of six dots, makes nine dots, which is three times three.
All this sounds like a harmless arithmetical game. But we are using the hindsight of centuries of science. In order to understand the full impact of Pythagoras on the Mediterranean world of his time, we must put off sophistication and travel back 2,500 years. There were various ‘mysteries’ – of Orpheus, Eleusis, Egypt, Babylonia – and some interesting views on life, death and the gods. But no one had ever made an attempt to unite all this into one magnificent structure of knowledge. Pythagoras knew about numbers; he knew about music; he knew about magic; he knew about astrology; he knew about the gods of Egypt and Chaldea and Persia and India. The Pythagorean ‘mysteries’ were based on those of Orpheus, who, by this time, was somehow identified with Dionysus. Dionysus is the life-force itself, formless and overpowering. Apollo is the god of art, of order, of harmony. He is not really the opposite of Dionysus – only death is the opposite of life. He represents a more complex and ordered form of Dionysus, an attempt of the formless energy to express itself as visible beauty, in opposition to ugliness and chaos. Apollo is a universal god – the Horus of the Egyptians, Mithras of the Persians, Marduk of the Babylonians. How does Dionysus become Apollo? Through ordering matter harmoniously, in accordance with secret laws of proportion, like the one Pythagoras stumbled on in music.
This was the essence of Pythagoras’s vision, and in spite of its inaccuracies, it is fundamentally a true vision – truer, perhaps, than we shall encounter anywhere else in the realm of magic. Instinctively Pythagoras understood the upward evolutionary movement of life, away from animal instinct and ‘jungle sensitiveness’ towards distance vision, the ability to grasp far horizons of reality. Unlike his contemporaries Thales, Heraclitus and Parmenides, and unlike Aristotle later, he never lost his secure grasp on the mystical, the ‘one’ – what Hindus would call Brahman – but he tried to understand the ‘one’ by the use of his intellect.
The result was sometimes sense, sometimes nonsense. He believed, says Diogenes, that the air close to the earth is stagnant, and that therefore every living creature on the earth is subject to disease and death; but the upper airs are always in motion, and ought therefore to be able to confer immortality. An interesting guess, but wide of the mark. His view of sex was jaundiced, although he had a wife and at least one daughter; he advises sexual intercourse in the summer, not winter, but adds ‘that the practice is pernicious in every season, and is never good for the health’. The pleasures of love, he said, make a man ‘weaker than himself’.
This may indicate that Pythagoras was a shaman, whose powers were diminished by sexual intercourse. His contemporaries believed all kinds of interesting legends about his magical powers. The story is told that he tamed a wild bear by whispering in its ear, and called down an eagle from the air to perch on his wrist. When he and a disciple were watching a ship entering harbour, and the friend speculated what treasure was on board, Pythagoras foretold correctly that its cargo was two dead bodies being sent home for burial. His life is so surrounded by magical legend that there is no way of knowing whether he was really a medium, or simply a mystical philosopher. His contemporaries seem to have had a habit of ridiculing him in epigrams, and one chronicler asserted that Pythagoras’s legendary descent to the Underworld to converse with the dead was a fraud; he had actually hidden in a cave for several weeks, getting his mother to write him news of what was happening in the world so he could pretend to have learned by supernatural means. He may well have had a touch of the charlatan – most ‘great initiatees’ did, as we shall see. The charlatanism of Pythagoras – his claims to remember previous incarnations, and so on – may have been, like Gurdjieff’s, an attempt to create the right atmosphere for the reception of his ideas. He lived to a considerable age – Diogenes Laertius says ninety – and seems to have been a remarkably strong and healthy man, who once startled everybody by winning the boxing championship at the Olympic games.
We may note, in passing, that the Greeks seem to have lived to a greater age than most races. The Bible sets three score and ten as the average of human life. Pythagoras divides life into four stages: youth to the age of twenty, manhood to the age of forty, middle age to sixty, old age to eighty. In the Middle Ages, average life expectancy was about forty. I have elsewhere* advanced the theory that ‘intellectuals’, especially mathematicians, live longer than any other type of man.
If we can never be certain whether Pythagoras possessed occult powers, there can be no doubt whatever in the case of his most famous disciple, Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the first century A.D., and whose life was written a century later by an accomplished Greek named Philostratus. This ‘life’ is full of absurdities and wonders, but it is possible to discern through them all a natural medium with powers of prevision. Like Pythagoras, much of his life was spent in travel, and his philosophy, expounded in a series of long speeches in Philostratus, is a compound of Pythagoras and of Hindu, Babylonian and Egyptian magical lore. Philostratus wrote the book to please Empress Julia, wife of Severus, and seems to have based it on the memoirs of Damis of Nineveh, a disciple and friend of Apollonius. (It was this same Empress Julia who commissioned Diogenes Laertius to write his Lives of the Philosophers, from which I have quoted.) The result is the usual curious mixture of realism and myth. It is not too difficult to draw the line. We are told that Apollonius was a god, the son of Proteus, and that one of his calumniators, Tigellinus, withdrew the charges (of impiety against Nero) when he recognised Apollonius as a god. On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that Apollonius spent a great deal of his life defending himself against charges of being a black magician, and that he was, in fact, a travelling philosopher and medium who was certainly not widely regarded as a god, or even a real mage. (In those superstitious times, people would have been very chary of offending a real ‘magician’.) And there is one human touch that sounds too genuine to have been invention. When Apollonius consulted the Delphic oracle to ask if his name would be remembered in the future, she answered that it would be, but only because he would be so reviled. On leaving the temple, Apollonius tore up the paper – hardly the reaction of a philosopher. (But the oracle proved to be correct. Because various enemies of Christianity later tried to set Apollonius up as a rival to Jesus, he became known mainly as an antichrist.)
The stories told of his magical powers sound as if they might have come out of The Golden Ass. In Rome he raised from the dead a young lady of aristocratic connections whose death had caused the whole city to mourn. (The ancients were naturally unaware that severe brain damage occurs within hours of death, so that a person who had been miraculously revived would be an imbecile; the same objection, of course, applies to the raising of Lazarus.) When his friend and disciple Menippus of Corinth introduced him to his (Menippus’s) future bride, Apollonius instantly recognised her as a vampire (or Lamia – Keats wrote a poem of that title about the episode). Menippus refused to believe his warnings, but Apollonius came to the wedding, and with a few magical passes caused the guests and the feast to vanish – all were illusions conjured up by Lamia – and made the bride admit that she intended to eat Menippus. (Keats, the sentimentalist, makes Lamia a lovelorn snake who becomes a woman to win her lover; Apollonius, the cold-hearted philosopher, exposes her, destroying their happiness.)
A slightly less fantastic story describes how Apollonius warned the people of Ephesus of a forthcoming plague; fortunately he recognised an old beggar as the plague carrier and persuaded the populace to stone him to death, upon which the old beggar turned into a black dog. The truth of the story may well be that Apollonius recognised, in some instinctive way, that the beggar carried the plague, and had him stoned to death as the lesser of two evils.
The kind of calumny with which Apollonius had to contend all his life is illustrated in the account of his trial before the emperor Domitian. An enemy named Euphrates accused him of plotting against Domitian and killing a shepherd in order to discover from his entrails the date of Domitian’s downfall. (It must be remembered that the Romans believed in divination by entrails – but they were usually those of an animal.) Apollonius voluntarily presented himself at Rome to answer the charge, confident, apparently, that it was not his destiny to die at the hands of the emperor. His defence was that he had never, at any time, practised sacrifice, and that he had spent the night in question sitting beside a dying disciple, Philiscus of Melos. He explains that he is a philosopher, and seems to deny that he has magical powers. He also says that he would happily descend to Hades to rescue the spirit of Philiscus. Since one of the legends told of him is that he did descend to Hades (like Pythagoras), it seems likely that this part of the story, at any rate, is genuine. We gain a glimpse of Apollonius as he really was: a philosopher, a natural medium and something of a seer. His prophetic powers were probably undeveloped. Otherwise. it would hardly have been necessary for him to consult the Delphic oracle on his future reputation; the fact that he thought of consulting her at all on such a subject proves that he possessed his share of ordinary vanity. On the other hand, he was basically a man of good will, who used his powers to benefit other people. Philostratus tells a story of a father who had four unmarried daughters, all needing dowries. Apollonius persuaded him to spend what money he had to buy an olive orchard; it brought forth an excellent crop of olives when everyone else’s olives failed. This suggests that Apollonius possessed some of the old power of shamans to make the land fruitful. He later told the father of buried treasure on his land. Presumably he did not know of the treasure originally, otherwise he would have told him of it sooner; he probably ‘divined’ it in the course of working his fertility charms in the olive grove.
The divining of buried treasure is less fantastic than it sounds; in fact, it is an ordinary branch of dowsing, In his book Witches, the antiquarian T. C. Lethbridge describes how he was investigating Viking graves on the island of Lundy – they turned out not to be Viking after all – when his companion suggested that he should try dowsing for volcanic dykes, which are normally detected by a magnetometer. Lethbridge was led blindfolded over the clifftops. holding a twig. ‘Every now and then the twig would turn violently in my hands for a few paces and then stop.’ His companion then took off the blindfold and told him that he had located every one of the dykes. There are probably thousands of people who, like Lethbridge, are natural dowsers without knowing it. Apollonius was a dowser. We shall never know the exact nature of his other mediumistic powers because the truth about him is overlaid with tall stories about his magical abilities. It is easy enough to recognise the absurdities, but less easy to get at the truth behind them.
* Philosophy of History, Bonn, p. 224.
* Howard Brinton, The Mystic Will, London, 1931, p. 47. Brinton is paraphrasing Boehme’s biographer, Von Frankenberg.
* I have already mentioned the hypothesis that the Greeks could see a smaller range of colours than we can, and this seems to be confirmed by colour-lore. Apart from black and white, the only colours with special significance are red (danger, war), blue (aristocracy and the virtues connected with it), yellow (wealth or power), green (fertility). Black and white signify mourning and innocence, of course. Yellow may also signify vindictiveness.
* The Philosopher’s Stone.