SIX

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY – MAGIC AND ROMANTICISM

In the first years of the nineteenth century there died a man whose name deserves to be better known to students of mysticism and the occult: Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, the ‘unknown philosopher’. His immense significance is that he was midway between the traditional mystics of the East or West and a new evolutionism. His philosophy is informed with an extraordinary air of optimism. Man is fundamentally a god, says Saint-Martin, not a worm. In this atmosphere of health and light, his work resembles Swedenborg’s. As the epigraph of my book The Stature of Man,* I quoted a passage that catches the essence of Martinism; speaking of the idea that the earth is a mere speck in the universe, he says:

It is perhaps this wrong connection of ideas which has led men to the still falser notion that they are not worthy of their creator’s regard. They have believed themselves to be obeying the dictates of humility when they have denied that the earth and all the universe contains exists only on man’s account, on the ground that the admission of such an idea would be only conceit. But they have not been afraid of the laziness and cowardice which are the inevitable result of this affected modesty. The present-day avoidance of the belief that we are the highest in the universe is the reason that we have not the courage to work to justify that title, that the duties springing from it seem too laborious, and that we would rather abdicate our position than realise them in all their consequences. Where is the pilot that will guide us between these hidden reefs of conceit and false humility?

After studying the bewilderingly eventful lives of Casanova, Cagliostro, Saint-Germain, John Dee and the rest, it is a relief to come across a man to whom almost nothing happened. He was born at Amboise, in Touraine, in the same year as Cagliostro – 1743. His family were aristocrats of reasonable wealth, and although his mother died soon after his birth, his stepmother proved an excellent substitute, and he adored her. His family were devout Catholics, and he was sent to the college of Pontlevoi while still very young. It was there that he discovered a book on self-knowledge by Abadie, and it seems to have exercised an enormous influence on his mind. He studied for the law, and in due course was called to the bar. But he felt nothing but distaste for the affairs of everyday life, and managed to persuade his father to allow him to abandon the bar for the army. It may seem an odd choice, but he no doubt reasoned that an army commission in times of peace is something of a sinecure and after the seven years’ war and the treaty of Paris, Europe was more or less at peace in 1766, the year Saint-Martin entered the army. In this he proved to be correct, for he was able to devote a great deal of time to study while his brother officers were out drinking.

At the age of twenty-four, when he was with his regiment in Bordeaux, Saint-Martin met the man who was to be the major influence in his life, Don Martines de Pasqualles de la Tour. Martines was a Rosicrucian of a peculiar kind. The Rosicrucians were a secret society bearing many resemblances to the freemasons, but their emphasis was on occultism; they were said to be followers of Paracelsus. Most of the legends about their origins seem to be fabrications (they can all be found in A. E. Waite’s Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross). But the notion of this mystical brotherhood, the thought of a worldwide society of magical adepts, seems to have satisfied some demand in the imagination of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were many small Rosicrucian societies all over the continent, many of them affiliated with the freemasons. Don Martines was a member, perhaps the founder, of a curious group of masonic Rosicrucians called the Elect Cohens. Martines had already established an order of so-called Illuminés in Paris; Illuminism was another form of Rosicrucianism, but associated with political aims. (It would be roughly correct to say that the Illuminists were to the Masons and Rosicrucians what the Jesuits were to the Catholic Church.)

Martines was something of a Cagliostro figure. He claimed to be a magical adept who had attained a very high level indeed. The ceremonies of his group included incantation in the manner of the Key of Solomon and a complex number mysticism, which differed in many basic respects from that mentioned in the last chapter. But all this magic was held to be only the means of attaining ultimate mystical illumination – which is no doubt why Don Martines liked to call his group Illuminés although they were non-political.

Saint-Martin was initiated into the Elect Cohens in the second half of 1768. The effect was as deep as Cagliostro’s induction in the freemasons. Saint-Martin became a dedicated man. Three years later, in 1771, he left the army and devoted the remainder of his life to mysticism. And although the master withdrew to Santo Domingo in the West Indies, dying in 1774, and although Saint-Martin became poverty-stricken as a consequence of the French Revolution, there was no deviation from this life-long endeavour to bring to the world this vital insight that man is somehow a god who has forgotten his heritage and come to accept that he is a beggar.

In Saint-Martin, this position does not involve the belief that there is no God; on the contrary, his philosophy is completely God-oriented. Being profoundly religious, he accepted the religion in which he had been brought up, but, like Swedenborg, interpreted Jesus and the Virgin in his own way. His mysticism was deeply influenced by Jacob Boehme, for whom his respect was so enormous that he placed him next to Jesus himself.

But the core of his philosophy is his belief in the importance of man. He comes very close to Sir Julian Huxley’s statement that man is now the managing director of evolution in the universe when he writes: ‘The function of man differs from that of other physical beings, for it is the repair of the disorders of the universe.’ This notion of ‘repairing’ is of central importance in his philosophy, and it explains the importance he attached to Jesus as the archetypal repairer. What fascinates Saint-Martin is that man keeps having quite clear flashes of godlike faculties. It is as if some dormant power wakened up in him. ‘Man possesses innumerable vestiges of the faculties resident in the Agent which produced him …’ This must not be taken as just another assertion that the kingdom of God is within us. It is far more exciting than that. If you believed that the engine of your car was completely dead, due to some fundamental fault, and you casually pushed the starter, expecting nothing, and the engine gave a cough and a roar, then stopped again, you would be excited because you would realise there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it, after all. Without realising it, man possesses immense powers. He is ‘engendered from the fount of wonder and the fount of desire and intelligence’. And his most vital faculty is his imagination – imagination in the sense that Paracelsus used the word, the faculty for reaching beyond himself, beyond his everyday life. Man wears blinkers; imagination is the power to see beyond them. Most men sit dully, like sheep in a field, imagining that ‘there’s nothing to be done’, that everyday reality is a kind of prison from which there is no escape except through drugs, drink or suicide. In fact, the doors are open. Man’s chief trouble is his curious passivity, which is like hypnosis. The beginning of his ‘salvation’ are the glimpses of freedom that come in times of crisis or in moments of sudden ecstasy.

Blake had spoken of the ‘five windows that light the caverned man’, the five senses, but added that there is one through which ‘he can pass out what time he will’. Saint-Martin wrote: ‘The soul leaves the body only at death, but during life, the faculties may extend beyond it, and communicate with their exterior correspondents without ceasing to be united to their centre.’ He is speaking about Faculty X. At every moment, man is freer than he realises.

Saint-Martin produced most of his books under the pseudonym ‘the unknown philosopher’. Living in a time of violence and of aggressive rationalism, he wanted to avoid drawing too much attention to himself; besides, he was convinced that his writings would appeal only to a small audience. In this he was wrong. By the time he died, at the age of sixty (his health was always frail), Martinism was a European movement like Swedenborgianism or freemasonry, and it continued to exercise considerable influence after his death. (The freemason who converts Peter in War and Peace – a real person called Bazdéev – was also a Martinist.) It is a pity that he has been forgotten in our own century, for his ideas are more relevant than ever.

Unlike Cagliostro, Saint-Martin had no political influence on his time; by no stretch of the imagination can he be called a harbinger of the Revolution. But he was a vital influence on a far greater revolution, the great movement called Romanticism. Romanticism, the new spirit created by Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Wordsworth, Shelley, Berlioz, was the artistic expression of the mysticism of Claude de Saint-Martin. Underlying it all are those ‘glimpses’, those moments when the engine starts up for a moment.

Romanticism is based on moments of ecstasy. And what is ecstasy? Perhaps the least controversial definition would be: a sudden bubbling up and overflow of pent-up emotion. And when a man experiences ecstasy, all commonness disappears; he is rocked in a cradle of delight, and life is almost unbearably sweet. It is in such moments that he realises what a poor thing his skinny, starved everyday consciousness is.

The Romantics were driven by the spirit of magic, which is the evolutionary spirit of the human race. And it was Fichte who noted the basic paradox of Romanticism: ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly’ (Frey seyn ist nichts; frey werden is der Himmel). When you have freedom, you yawn and take it for granted, because man’s will is mostly in neutral gear; when you suddenly become free after a long period of misery and bondage, everything is delightful and life seems infinitely rich. It is the same when you suddenly get something you want very badly; even the most mediocre male gets a glimpse of the immensity of freedom as a girl yields to him for the first time. This is why Casanova and Frank Harris and the author of My Secret Life spent their lives in pursuit of sex; they were after the flashes of lightning that reveal man’s freedom.

The romantic with the most powerful obsession with magic was E. T. A. Hoffmann, known to most modern readers through Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. In him it is possible to see at once the weakness and the peculiar strength of the Romantics. Their chief weakness was that they did not think. But their strength was an ability to be carried along on a flood of emotion that took them a long way towards mystical insight. The Romantics used the imagination to release pent-up frustrations and to conjure up the kind of world they would like to live in. Agrippa, Paracelsus, Cagliostro were unhappy wanderers; the Romantics were wanderers in the world of imagination:

I travelled through a land of men,

A land of men and women too,

And heard and saw such dreadful things

As cold earth wanderers never knew.

wrote William Blake in The Mental Traveller.

In his masterpiece, The Golden Pot, Hoffmann creates a weird farrago of myth, magic and alchemy. Everything that happens to its hero, the student Anselmus, is the wish-fulfilment fantasy of a frustrated magician. A clumsy, preoccupied young man, he sits beneath a tree on the river bank and hears magic snakes whispering to him of love and another reality. The eccentric Archivist Lindhorst hires him to copy magical manuscripts for him, and he realises that Lindhorst is a salamander, exiled from Atlantis for falling in love with a green snake. The snakes in the tree are Lindhorst’s daughters, and the youngest, Serpentina, is in love with the student. However, so is the daughter of the dean of the university, Veronica, who expects Anselmus to rise one day to the rank of privy councillor.* There is the fundamental situation: the tug of war between the world of magic and the boring real world, which is disappointing, whether it is offering you success or drudgery. The world thinks Anselmus insane; what could be the objection to settling down with a beautiful girl, and accepting a comfortable job through the good offices of her father? And can he trust the strange visions conjured up by the half-mad Lindhorst, with his wild talk about how the youth Phosphorus embraced a white lily and fought with a black dragon? When the university registrar interrupts Lindhorst with a request that he tell them a true story instead, Lindhorst declares that this is the truest story he can possibly tell them. It corresponds to a deeper level of reality than this dreary, repetitive world. And in the end, Anselmus has the courage to choose Lindhorst and Serpentina rather than Veronica and the rank of privy councillor. And in most of Hoffmann’s stories, this decision would lead to tragedy; but in this, his most fantastic tale, he allows Anselmus and Serpentina to live happy ever after in Atlantis.

In this story occurs one of Hoffmann’s most striking symbols. At one point, Anselmus finds himself corked up in a glass bottle standing on a shelf. In other bottles there are Church scholars and law clerks, and they all look perfectly happy. When he asks them how they can be so cheerful, confined in a glass bottle, they reply that he must be joking; they are standing on the Elbe bridge looking down into the water, and later on they intend to go and have a drink in the tavern. The episode plays no real part in the story, and has obviously been inserted because Hoffmann thought it so important. Most people are unaware that they are imprisoned in a glass bottle; they are convinced they are free. It is the misfortune of the man of deeper perceptions to realise that he is imprisoned.

But this image also points to the central fault of all the Romantics: they are pessimists and defeatists. They see no way out of the glass bottle except into the unreal world of imagination, which weakens its devotees and makes them unfit for real life. With the exception of Goethe, the Romantics seem unaware of that other form that ecstasy takes: the violent, raging appetite for more life. There are moods in which the whole world seems so beautiful that man feels he can plough through life like a tank, smashing down every obstacle. Our usual state is one of poor appetite; we are like a man recovering from a long bout of retching, feeling that he never wants to eat another large meal. In moments of intensity he develops an enormous appetite, and feels as if he could keep on eating for a week. Everything in the world is fascinating, including an old tramp blowing his nose in the gutter and the smell of gasworks beside the canal.

This is ultimately the reason that we have to reject the Romantics. Wrapped in self-pity, they fail to stay the course. It seems to be almost a law that we have to accept one unsatisfactory extreme or another: the magician who gets too involved in the world, or the Romantic who is afraid to get involved.

But at least the Romantic revival brought a magical revival with it. The nineteenth century was a noisy, industrial century, a century of dirt, smoke, bad drains, sooty chimneys, but also of railways, canals, exploration, of good beef and good beer, of the Great Exhibitions of Paris and London, the Crystal Palace, the England of Dickens and Cobbett, the France of Flaubert and Maupassant. It was perhaps the most energetic century in mankind’s history. And in all the frantic money-making and empire-building, 95 per cent of mankind was pushed against the wall. Hence the revival of magic, which is fundamentally a revolt against coarse-grained reality.

The country in which this first occurred was France. Strangely enough, the man who gave it impetus was that arch-historian of money-makers and go-getters, Honoré de Balzac. Balzac had a strong mystical leaning, which emerges in such works as Louis Lambert, Seraphita and The Quest for the Absolute. But for Louis Lambert, as for Balthasar Claës, the hero of the last novel, the quest of the absolute ends in death, not in triumph.

In 1810, when Balzac was only eleven years old, there was born in Paris the man who was to become the source of the modern revival of magic, Alphonse Louis Constant, who wrote his books under the name of Eliphaz Levi. The parish priest was impressed by his intelligence and was instrumental in having him sent to St. Sulpice. In due course, Constant became a priest; but within a few years he was thrown out of the priesthood for preaching ‘doctrines contrary to the Church’ – exactly what these were has not come down to us. In his late twenties, a literary friend, Alphonse Esquiros, took him along to hear a strange prophet called Ganneau, an aged man who wore a woman’s cloak and babbled about the creation of the universe and the fall of man to a group of disciples. Constant describes him in the History of Magic: ‘a bearded man of majestic demeanour … He was surrounded by several men, bearded and ecstatic like himself, and in addition there was a woman with motionless features, who seemed like an entranced somnambulist. The prophet’s manner was abrupt and yet sympathetic; he had hallucinated eyes and an infectious quality of eloquence. He spoke with emphasis, warmed to his subject quickly, chafed and fumed till a white froth gathered on his lips.’ The entranced woman was Ganneau’s wife, whom he believed to be a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette (he believed that he was a reincarnation of Louis XVII). After Ganneau’s death, his wife continued to be convinced that she was Marie Antoinette, becoming indignant only if anyone questioned it. Constant and Esquiros, who had gone to Ganneau’s attic to laugh, were overcome by his eloquence and became his disciples.

I have quoted Levi’s description of Ganneau, not because it is of any historical importance, but because it gives something of the flavour of Paris in the mid-century, all the talk of ecstasy and occultism and revolt. Levi even has an extraordinary story of a disciple of Ganneau’s called Sobrier, who one day in 1848 began shouting on a street corner, advising the people to march to the Boulevard des Capucines and express their dissatisfaction directly to the ministers. Finally, half Paris was marching behind him, whereupon he slipped away. The mob stopped before the Hôtel des Capucines; someone fired a shot at them, and suddenly the revolution had started. Sobrier had played his part in history in an almost trancelike state.

At thirty Constant married a girl of sixteen, Noémie Cadiot, who bore him two children and subsequently left him. He was drawn increasingly to the study of magic, although he made some sort of a living on the edge of the literary world. In 1856 there appeared his Dogma and Ritual of High Magic, one of the books Ouspensky kept in his drawer when reporting the Hague conference. This was followed by a History of Magic and a number of other books on occult subjects. Disciples and pupils gathered round him, and he died at the age of sixty-five, in 1875, having started a magical revival virtually single-handed. He admits that his own inspiration was Louis Lambert, Balzac’s study of a brilliant, highly strung young mystic.

It must be admitted that Levi’s books do not inspire confidence. For what he is claiming is, unfortunately, a lie:

Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of old Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvellous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.

This passage reveals a highly romantic imagination, and little else. It is not true that there is a ‘secret doctrine’ known only to adepts. The Stone Age shamans did not possess a secret doctrine, only a curious oneness with nature and a contact with man’s subconscious powers. There is no secret doctrine apart from science, as we have clearly seen in the course of this book. Pythagoras, Agrippa, Paracelsus, thought of themselves as scientists, and they also happened to possess a certain degree of shamanistic power. This is not to deny that ‘magical ceremonies’ work; they do. Raynor C. Johnson mentions a description by George and Helen Sandwith of fire-walking in Fiji, an annual ceremony. ‘The essential feature appears to have been that those who participated had to be fully charged with some unknown type of energy (presumably generated on the aetheric level), and ten days of ritual preparation were devoted to this. Numerous tests were made before the culminating event: their flesh was pierced by skewers without the feeling of pain or loss of blood, and they were lashed without pain being felt or weals appearing. The same energy appears to have remarkable therapeutic powers, and the case is described of the almost instantaneous healing of a Hindu girl whose legs had been paralysed from birth.* For the fire-walking ceremony, forty tons of logs are burned, and the heat is so great that their faces had to be shielded from scorching at twelve feet. One of the fire-walkers remarked to the Sandwiths: ‘This is something that really works; it is not just talk and promises.’ The evidence for such feats is beyond dispute; but it does not prove that the ten days of ritual preparation involved some secret doctrine; whatever the ritual, its aim is to put the shaman in contact with the ‘aetheric energy’ that Johnson mentions. (He also mentions that tragedies have occurred due to insufficient preparation.)

And so Eliphaz Levi’s books are based on a false premise. Even A. E. Waite (who translated them) – himself not the most reliable of historians of magic – feels impelled to warn the reader that Levi uses his imagination too much. His aim is to impress his readers with his own knowledge of the ‘secret doctrines’, of the Kabbalah, etc. In fact, he knew little or no Hebrew. In short, he is another in the long line of magical charlatans. This is not to say that he is no more than a confidence man. He studied magic and believed in it, and even E. M. Butler, who remarks that his so-called science ‘becomes more transparently bogus with every page one turns’,† is willing to accept his account of raising the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana, as described in Chapter 13 of Transcendental Magic. According to Levi, a mysterious lady, an adept, showed him her magical ‘cabinet’, and asked him to evoke the spirit of Apollonius to ask it a question. The ‘cabinet’ was a room in a turret, with concave mirrors, a marble altar, a copper tripod and a white lambskin rug. He observed a vegetarian diet for three weeks before the invocation and had to fast completely for the last seven days; during all this time he meditated on Apollonius and held imaginary conversations with him. At the end of twelve hours of magic incantations (all detailed in the appendix of Transcendental Magic), the shade of Apollonius appeared in a kind of grey shroud. It vanished several times, apparently objecting to the sword Levi was wearing, and at one point touched his arm, which remained numb for days. It answered his two questions telepathically, prophesying death for the subjects of both. Afterwards, Levi says, ‘something of another world had passed into me; I was no longer either sad or cheerful, but I felt a singular attraction towards death, unaccompanied, however, by any suicidal tendency’. He claims to have invoked the shade on two subsequent occasions and learned two important kabbalistic secrets. He adds, however, that he does not believe the shade was necessarily Apollonius, but that the whole manifestation was a kind of ‘drunkenness of the imagination’. Bearing in mind Paracelsus’s concept of the imagination, we need not take this to be a total disclaimer of a genuine occult experience; in fact, he adds that he ‘did see and … did touch, apart from dreaming, and this is sufficient to establish the real efficacy of magical ceremonies’. And at the beginning of the chapter on necromancy, he remarks sonorously: ‘Eliphaz Levi Zahed, who writes this book, has evoked, and he has seen.’

Levi exerted a considerable influence upon the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, who became something of a disciple, and the description of the magician in The Haunted and the Haunters is a fanciful portrait of Levi; there are also echoes of him in A Strange Story, Zanoni and The Coming Race, the first of which is a classic of occultism and suspense that has been oddly neglected in our own time. One of the focal points of Levi’s magical doctrine is the notion of the ‘astral light’, Levi’s name for the invisible magical ether that we have encountered in other occultists, and which he describes as ‘a force more powerful than steam’. In Lytton’s novel The Coming Race, this appears as vril, a magical form of energy. (It is an amusing thought that the manufacturers of Bovril beef extract borrowed Lytton’s word and united it with a cow to form the name of their product; Levi’s astral light lives on.)

It was Bulwer-Lytton who made the idea of occultism fashionable in England, and was chiefly responsible for the magical revival that involved Mathers, Yeats, Crowley, Waite, Dion Fortune et al. The revival might have started fifty years earlier if a certain Francis Barrett had been a better writer; in 1801, Barrett published a large study of ritual magic called The Magus, whose portraits of demons may still be found in most histories of magic and witchcraft, and in an advertisement at the end of the book, appealed for students and disciples to help him create a magic circle. But the book is dull, if informative, and cannot bear comparison with Levi. The Reverend Montague Summers, that credulous historian of witchcraft and vampirism, asserts that Barrett did succeed in founding a circle and that Cambridge subsequently became something of a magic centre as a consequence.

What should by now be quite clear is that the spirit of magic underwent a complete transformation in the nineteenth century. With Paracelsus it had been a science. With Cagliostro it became the instrument of his religion of the regeneration of mankind. But with Levi and Lytton it became a romantic literary property, surrounded by dense clouds of incense. Goethe’s Faust turns to magic because he is sick of his human limitations, and he wants to explore those moments of godlike intensity that Saint-Martin wrote about. Nineteenth-century man found himself high and dry in a materialistic and boring world. In the Middle Ages, devils were a reality that everybody accepted without question – hence the morbid fascination aroused by the legend of Theophilus. Now the shadows were gone; the common daylight made everything hard and clear. And the romantics looked back nostalgically to the age of demons and incubi, altogether more stimulating to the imagination than railways and paddle steamers. The universal complaint was boredom. In Obermann (1804), Etienne de Senancour created a Byronic hero who broods among the mountains of Switzerland upon man’s inadequacy and his own failure to establish contact with the magnificence of Nature. The real problem of life is not its misery but its meaninglessness. He remarks that cloudy weather makes him feel sad, but when the sun comes out it strikes him as ‘useless’. He feels tired and without desire; he is neither happy nor unhappy – even unhappiness would be a relief from the dullness. A hundred and fifty years before Samuel Beckett, Obermann sits waiting for Godot. This feeling of futility and boredom was the foundation of the occult revival.

But what about the feeling that man possesses godlike powers – the feeling that is obviously based on reality, if the claims of the Fiji fire-walkers are true? How is it that the most intelligent men – like Obermann, and like Matthew Arnold, who wrote a poem about him – are crippled by a feeling of helplessness, of contingency, of being a mere plaything of forces greater than themselves? There can be only one answer. Because they are mere rationalists, obsessed by the ‘scientific view of nature’. Men like Bulwer-Lytton and Eliphaz Levi recognised this instinctively and took steps to combat it. Hence the ‘magical revival’.

But the really explosive impetus for the revival came from America. A completely new epoch in the history of occultism opened on the evening of March 31, 1848, in the house of the Fox family in the town of Arcadia, Wayne County, New York. For some time the family had been disturbed by rapping noises, and on this evening, the two Fox girls, aged twelve and fifteen, asked the mysterious knocker to repeat noises made by snapping their fingers. The ‘spirit’ did so. Twelve days later, a roomful of neighbours heard a man called William Duesler ask the ‘spirit’ questions, which were answered by raps. The spirit said that it had been murdered for money, and buried in the cellar. Digging in the cellar later produced some decayed human remains, which were presumably those of the pedlar who had been murdered by a previous tenant of the house. It was then discovered that the Fox sisters seemed to incite rapping noises wherever they went. A relative of the Foxes later declared that it was all fraudulent – produced somehow by the girls cracking their double-joints – but by that time, ‘spirit rapping’ had caught on and spread all over America. Undoubtedly, much of it was fraudulent. Equally certainly, much was genuine.

These phenomena will be discussed more thoroughly in the third part of this book; they are mentioned here only to introduce one of the most flamboyant figures in the history of occultism: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

She was born Helena Hahn, the daughter of a Russian colonel, in 1831, and she was the cousin of Sergei Witte, later prime minister and friend of Rasputin. She seems to have been an explosive madcap. Married at sixteen to a man twenty-four years her senior, she deserted him after a while – the marriage still unconsummated – and began her wanderings around the world. Count Witte said she became a bareback rider in a circus, taught the piano in Paris and London, became assistant to the medium Daniel Dunglas Home for a while, managed an artificial flower factory in Tiflis and periodically turned up at her home in Ekaterinoslav looking plumper and stranger than ever. She had been beautiful as a young girl, with curly dark hair, a large, sensual mouth and great azure eyes. She soon put on weight, reaching sixteen and a half stone (232 pounds) in middle age; but no matter how much her bulk increased, she never lost a gentle, feminine, appealing quality – it comes out even in her last photograph. She also travelled, according to her own account, in Mexico, Texas, India, Canada and Tibet – the last was almost impossible for a woman to enter, and she was turned back twice. The circus job seems to have ruined her sex life; she fell off a horse and displaced her womb which, a doctor certified later, made abstention unavoidable; she later declared: ‘I am lacking something, and the place is filled up with some crooked cucumber.’ Returning to Italy from Greece in her fortieth year, the Eumonia blew up, and only seventeen of its four hundred passengers survived; she described limbs and heads falling around her as she swam.

She enters the history of occultism some two years later. It is true that she seems to have acquired some reputation as a medium in Russia, but details are lacking. In 1873, she went to America, and found the country in the grip of the spiritualist craze. It had progressed a long way since the Fox sisters had produced rappings twenty years earlier. Now the spirits turned tables, made articles of furniture fly around the room, played musical instruments and even materialised at séances. Two brothers named Eddy were the most prominent materialisation mediums, and it was at their farm near Chittenden, Vermont, that Madame Blavatsky met a bearded lawyer who possessed the honorary rank of colonel – Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott was a bearded, gentle, naïve American, with eyes that tended to look in opposite directions. He was much taken with Madame Blavatsky, whose character was certainly striking. She was enormously vital, direct of speech (as the remark about the ‘crooked cucumber’ demonstrates), a nervous chain-smoker who often soothed her nerves with marihuana (which was not illegal in those sensible times), and capable of colourful and imaginative profanity. The bumbling, serious-minded colonel found her a magnet. He wrote about her in the newspaper for which he was correspondent, and saw much of her when she returned to New York. Other newspapers interviewed her because she was good copy. There was no romantic involvement with the colonel; in fact, she married a young Georgian named Michael Bettanelly, seven years her junior, on his promise that he should not try to invade her bed. When he failed to keep it, they separated. She was breezily indifferent to the existence of her Russian husband, Vice-Governor Blavatsky. She is admittedly on record as saying that sexual love is ‘a beastly appetite that should be starved into submission’.

Madame Blavatsky had definite mediumistic powers. Throughout her life, acquaintances spoke of strange knocks and rappings that occurred in her presence. The colonel was glad to call upon her help when it was a question of investigating mediums suspected of fraud – for example, a couple named Holmes, who were accused of hiring a Mrs. Eliza White to impersonate a ‘materialised spirit’ called Katie King. The famous socialist Robert Owen was much taken with Katie King and gave her presents of jewellery, which Katie took back with her to the spirit world. With Madame Blavatsky’s help, Olcott was able to tell his readers – in a book called People from the Other World – that the Holmeses and Katie King were undoubtedly genuine.

It was clear to HPB, as she became known to her admirers, that her future was tied up with spiritualism. The trouble was that it was already becoming less fashionable; and a spiritualist newspaper she helped to launch soon failed. She and the colonel started a Miracle Club, which was basically simply another séance group, but this did not prosper. The colonel was a total believer in HPB’s powers, and he contributed greatly to her support in the year after he met her. Occasionally when he was with her, notes dropped out of the air detailing her needs, and she explained that they were from certain secret Mahatmas she had met in Tibet, spiritual adepts who would one day regenerate the world. The colonel always followed their instructions. There was also a Brotherhood of Luxor – in these early days, HPB tended to emphasise Egypt rather than Tibet – whose members sent messages to the readers of The Banner of Light, the spiritualist newspaper that publicised her doings in exchange for a certain amount of financial support.

It was one of the Luxor Brotherhood who suggested that the colonel should leave his wife and three children and move into the same building as Madame Blavatsky. The marriage was not entirely happy and he was glad to follow the suggestion.

It was on September 7, 1875, that Madame Blavatsky embarked on the career that was to make her world-famous. A certain Mr. Felt had lectured to a small study group about the hermetic secrets embodied in the measurements of the pyramids. He explained that those secret ‘laws of proportion’ could also invoke spirits, although, he added, the spirits he had seen showed no sign of intelligence. The colonel suggested that perhaps they ought to form a society to study this kind of thing. HPB nodded vigorously. And during the next week they thought of a name for it – the Theosophical Society.

The word was not invented by HPB. It had been in use, as a synonym for mysticism, for centuries; for example, Bishop Martensen refers to Jacob Boehme’s system as a ‘theosophy’ in his classic book on Boehme (1882). But after HPB, theosophy meant primarily a curious system of Eastern and Western mysticism, ‘secret doctrine’ and spiritualism. As soon as the society was formed, HPB set out to write its bible. She wrote endlessly, day after day, chain-smoking and occasionally glancing up to read some book held out for her by spirits. The result, Isis Unveiled, came out in two volumes in September 1877 and sold amazingly well. An incredibly erudite work, blending doctrines from the Kabbalah, Cornelius Agrippa, Pythagoras, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist scripture, Isis Unveiled can still be studied with enjoyment, if only for the extraordinary boldness of its conceptions. We have already touched upon her doctrine of ‘root races’ in discussing Atlantis. The first root race lived near the North Pole and they were invisible, being made of fire-mist; the second, living in northern Asia, were just visible – they invented sexual intercourse; the third root race were the ape-like giants of Lemuria, who communicated telepathically and could not reason in our sense; the fourth were the Atlanteans, who were destroyed through black magic; we are the fifth (and according to the occultist Lewis Spence, we are also heading the way of Atlantis); the sixth root race will evolve from the present human race and will live on Lemuria (in the Pacific) again; after the seventh root race, life will leave our earth and start up on Mercury. Buried in all these remarkable assertions there is the vitally important notion that man is in a privileged position. It is true that his spirit is trapped in an unprecedented weight of flesh; but he possesses the will and intellect to cope with it. He could, with confidence and courage, become godlike.

For three years, the Theosophical Society more or less flourished in America. Then HPB decided that interest was declining, and that they should go to India. An odd coincidence prompted this decision. In 1870 the colonel had met an Indian named Moolji Thackersey on shipboard; seven years later the colonel happened to be talking to a friend who had just returned from India, and he asked him if, by any chance, he had met Thackersey. His friend had indeed; he even had his address. Olcott wrote to him about the Theosophical Society; Thackersey wrote back about a new Indian religious movement called the Arya Samaj, started by a remarkable teacher called Swami Dayananda Sarasvati. Olcott also wrote to the Swami, and soon the Theosophical Society had accepted the idea of amalgamation with the Arya Samaj. And when, not long after, Daniel Dunglas Home made some slighting remarks about Madame Blavatsky and her society in one of his books, she decided to leave the treacherous and unspiritual West and seek light in India.

The trip began badly – seasickness, heat and a large bill for expenses from the president of the Bombay Arya Samaj, which made HPB erupt into a volcano of profanity. All the same, they had made the right choice.

India was getting tired of British domination. These cultured Westerners who thought that the wisdom of India was preferable to the technology of the white man were a great moral boost. Swami Dayananda found them naïve and too interested in occult phenomena, but the rest of Bombay accepted them with enthusiasm. Their magazine, The Theosophist, sold better than it had ever done in America. The tide was all in their favour, even though there were aspects of India they found jarring. One old gentleman of high rank brought a pretty ten-year-old girl into the room, and HPB smiled charmingly; but when he said: ‘Allow me to present you to my little wife,’ she roared, ‘You old beast, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

Her occult powers seemed to increase. She caused a shower of roses to fall on the heads of a company of scholars and pandits, made a lamp flame rise and fall merely by pointing at it and materialised a cup and saucer at a picnic. On this last occasion, two Englishmen suggested that Madame Blavatsky might have buried the cup and saucer in the place where they had been found, and HPB was so angry that ‘she seemed to take leave of her senses’. Nevertheless, she agreed to provide further proof of her powers – or rather, the Mahatmas’ – that evening. She asked their hostess if there was anything she particularly wanted, and the hostess mentioned a brooch lost some years ago. After asking her to envisage it clearly, HPB announced that the Masters had deposited it in a flower bed outside. The company went into the garden, dug among the flowers and unearthed the brooch.

A new disciple, A. P. Sinnett, asked if he might be allowed to correspond with the Mahatmas, and HPB said it might be possible. Sinnett gave her a letter to be transmitted, and a few days later he found a reply on his desk from a master who called himself Koot Hoomi Lal Singh. Another disciple, A. O. Hume, wrote to Koot Hoomi, and also received an answer. The letters from Koot Hoomi continued until there were enough of them to publish in a volume. (They are at present preserved in the British Museum in seven volumes.) Sinnett and Hume certainly had no doubt whatever that the letters came from a secret master in the Himalayas. On one occasion, they asked him whether it would not be possible to establish direct contact with him instead of having to use HPB as a mailbox. The result, after this letter had been handed, sealed, to HPB, was a violent scene in which her profanity reached a new level of colourful inventiveness.

The colonel went to Ceylon and became converted to Buddhism, to Swami Dayananda’s disgust. The colonel could not see any important difference between these various Eastern religions. The Swami insisted on disaffiliating the Arya Samaj from the Theosophical Society, and even came to refer to HPB and Olcott as a couple of charlatans. I have already spoken of his sudden development of thaumaturgic powers in Ceylon (pp. 229–30). This, and the publication of a work called A Buddhist Catechism, which achieved remarkable popularity, gave the colonel a certain independent standing in the society. HPB was not entirely happy about this either.

But her downfall was the result of her generous and open nature. In Cairo in 1872 she had met a certain Emma Cutting, who subsequently married a one-eyed Frenchman named Coulomb. After various business ventures failed disastrously, Mme. Coulomb read in the Ceylon newspaper that HPB had founded a theosophical society in Bombay. She wrote to her; HPB replied warmly. The Coulombs went to Bombay, and were soon installed as HPB’s housekeepers. This was a mistake. Mme. Coulomb was a sour, trivial-minded woman who stored up grudges. She began by adoring HPB and ended by hating her. In 1884, five years after her arrival in India, it seemed that HPB was firmly established as the leader of one of the most influential movements in the country. (Olcott, an indefatigable traveller, had set up branches throughout India and Ceylon.) Her position seemed impregnable. She decided it was time for a visit to Europe. She stayed with Lady Caithness, another occult enthusiast, in Nice, and borrowed her flat in Paris. She went to London, and cheerfully agreed when the Society for Psychical Research asked if they might investigate her claims. Then, back in Bombay, Mme. Coulomb blabbed. She chose a Christian missionary, editor of the Christian College Magazine, as the recipient of her confidences. He was only too delighted to pass on her revelations to his readers; the Christian missionaries had been HPB’s bitterest opponents ever since she arrived. Mme. Coulomb showed him letters from HPB that made it clear that many of her effects had been achieved by fraud. She claimed that she had made a model of Koot Hoomi and walked around with it on her shoulders on moonlit nights, and that she had caused Mahatma letters to be ‘precipitated’ at the dinner table by the simple expedient of dropping them through cracks in the ceiling from the room above. The scandal was enormous; a report was immediately telegraphed to the London Times. An American spiritualist, Henry Kiddle, added fuel to the flames by pointing out that Koot Hoomi had stolen several paragraphs from one of his published lectures. Koot Hoomi replied, in due course, that he had somehow caught the words floating through the psychic ether, and written them down without thinking.

The Society for Psychical Research had intended to publish a more or less favourable report, but these events made them think again. They sent an investigator to India. But when he was finally admitted to the room which had contained the ‘shrine’ – a cedarwood cabinet in which Mahatma letters had often been precipitated – he found it empty, and the walls newly replastered. For some faithful disciple, wishing to demonstrate that fraud was impossible, had slapped the rear wall of the shrine, saying, ‘You see, it’s perfectly solid,’ when, to his dismay, a panel had shot open, revealing another panel in the wall of HPB’s boudoir. They were convinced that all this had been deliberately planted by the treacherous Coulombs – and indeed, it was true that M. Coulomb was a carpenter – and so removed the shrine to another room, and subsequently burnt it.

Inevitably, under the circumstances, the report of the Society for Psychical Research was distinctly sceptical. Madame Blavatsky, who was at the time suffering from a complication of diseases due to her great weight, retorted angrily that the phenomena would continue after her death – which would certainly not be long now.

But it was not the end yet. HPB recovered and rushed back to India, determined to sue the missionaries. Her legal advisers told her not to; a ‘magician’ is always at a disadvantage in a court of law when faced by sceptics, for the trial is bound to turn into a debate on the reality of the magician’s claims. The missionaries thereupon decided to force the issue by issuing a writ for libel against an old general who had called Mme. Coulomb a liar and a thief. This would also have had the effect of raising all the same issues in court. Madame Blavatsky was forced to flee back to Europe. She had fulfilled the magician’s destiny of triumphant rise and sudden downfall.

She travelled through Italy, Switzerland and Germany. She was dying of Bright’s disease. She decided to write another book that should clarify the obscurer points of Isis Unveiled and began The Secret Doctrine. Again, the manuscript pages piled up as her pen raced over the page. (The published version is over 1,500 pages long.) She told W. B. Yeats, who had met her on her second visit to England: ‘I write, write, write, as the Wandering Jew walks, walks, walks.’ Yeats noted a quality that is not apparent to readers of her works: her sense of humour. She told one serious disciple that the earth had another globe stuck on it at the North Pole so that it was shaped like a dumb-bell, and the disciple swallowed it without blinking. HPB reminded Yeats of an old Irish peasant woman. He records that her cuckoo clock hooted at him when he was alone with it, although it was not ticking and there were no weights on it. When HPB took a strong dislike to a priggish female guest, she described how her master had cured her of rheumatism in the knee by placing a live dog, which he had cut open, over the knee.

Perhaps Yeats’s funniest story about her concerns a ‘female penitent’ who became’ entangled with two of HPB’s more serious male followers. HPB spoke to her sternly: ‘We think that it is necessary to crush the animal nature; you should live in chastity in act and thought. Initiation is granted only to those who are entirely chaste.’ And after several more minutes of this, she concluded: ‘I cannot permit you more than one.’

But when another young lady, a Miss Leonard, successfully seduced a budding Mahatma called Mohini Chatterjee (of whom Yeats wrote a poem), HPB became so angry that she wrote her a thoroughly libellous letter and had to apologise.

The manuscript of The Secret Doctrine was a huge pile of jumbled papers. Various friends read it and said it was incomprehensible. She told them to get to work on it; so the book was typed, then rearranged. The book came out in 1888. Annie Besant, who had been a Fabian and Bernard Shaw’s mistress, reviewed it, and wanted to meet the author. Her first reaction was aversion: but when HPB said, ‘Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if only you would come among us,’ she melted. She subsequently became the leader of the Theosophical Society. It would not be inaccurate to say she became a Theosophist on the rebound from Shaw – the recent end of their affair had hurt her deeply. Years later, when her adopted son Krishnamurti met Shaw in Bombay, Shaw asked how she was. ‘Very well, but at her great age, she cannot think consecutively.’ ‘She never could,’ said Shaw.

HPB died on May 8, 1891, in her sixtieth year. She had been seriously ill for at least six years, and in spite of a complication of heart disease, kidney disease and rheumatic gout, her enormous vitality not only kept her alive but crackling with sparks. Her biographer, John Symonds, is not exaggerating when he calls her ‘one of the most remarkable women who ever lived’. She was larger than life-size.

Aleister Crowley believed he was a reincarnation of Eliphaz Levi; if so, Madame Blavatsky must have been a reincarnation of Cagliostro. She had the same charisma, the same adventurousness, the same mixture of humour, roguery and genuine psychic ability.

As to this last, there can hardly be any doubt. She could not have held so many disciples entirely by means of confidence trickery. She was a medium in the same sense that Home was, and in the sense that many adolescent children are. Phenomena happened when she was around. Her companion in later years tells of how she went into HPB’s room one night to turn out a lamp that was burning. She turned it out and got back into bed – the room was divided by a screen – when the lamp was lit again. She turned it out again, and this time watched until the last spark had vanished; suddenly, it lit again. The third time she did it, she saw a disembodied brown hand turning up the wick. When she finally succeeded in waking the sleeper, HPB explained she had been in her astral body, conversing with ‘master’, and that the sudden awakening was dangerous; it almost caused her heart to stop.

The first time she met Sinnett, he remarked that they had tried spiritualism but couldn’t even get a rap; she replied, ‘Raps are the easiest thing to get,’ and raps immediately began to sound all around the room.

Olcott and various other theosophists actually saw Koot Hoomi and other masters under circumstances that rule out HPB’s interference. And on several occasions, the masters left behind souvenirs of the visit – a silk handkerchief, for example. It is true that Olcott and the other disciples may have been lying. But on other occasions, the possibility of trickery seems much reduced. Major-General H. R. Morgan was being shown the ‘shrine’ when Mme. Coulomb knocked off a china tray and smashed it. While M. Coulomb was trying to repair it with clay, the general remarked that surely the masters ought to be able to restore it if they thought it important? The tray was placed in a cloth in the shrine; a few minutes later, it was found in its original unbroken state with a note saying cryptically that the Devil was not as black as he is painted.

W. B. Yeats tells of how he saw some kind of light floating around the portrait of Koot Hoomi (which HPB had painted ‘under guidance’); it vanished when he approached. HPB remarked, ‘I was afraid it was mediumship but it was only clairvoyance.’ The difference, she explained, was that if it had been mediumship, the light would not have gone away as Yeats approached.

Swami Dayananda was undoubtedly correct when he criticised the theosophists for being interested chiefly in ‘phenomena’. The Hindu ascetics insist that any advanced yogi can produce phenomena, and that they are a waste of time, a red herring across the path of spiritual advancement. The works of the theosophists which include such notable classics as Annie Besant’s The Ancient Wisdom and Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism – are full of references to the Upanishads and Buddhist scriptures, but anyone who turns from theosophic literature to the original scriptures soon realises that there is an abyss of difference; the purity of the religious impulse has been lost in transition. It is not that Hinduism lacks its preposterous tales of miracles. Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a recent work by a man who died in 1952, contains stories as extraordinary as anything in the lives of the medieval saints. There are not only stories of telepathy and ‘projection’ of the astral body to distant places, but of the creation of a magic palace in the Himalayas, and the overnight healing of a yogi’s arm when it has been almost severed from his body. Even so, Yogananda’s book breathes the true spirit of Hinduism, and can create the peculiar spiritual intoxication that can also be found in the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and the Bhagavad Gita. By comparison, The Secret Doctrine is on the level of children’s fairy tales, a muddy torrent carrying all kinds of strange objects on its surface. Again we feel strongly that interest in occultism often involves a certain immaturity.

This becomes even clearer when we consider the magical revival in France that followed the death of Eliphaz Levi. Levi’s chief disciple was the young Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, who wrote poems in the manner of Baudelaire and took morphine. Together with another young student of the Kabbalah, Oswald Wirth, Guaita formed an order of Rosicrucians in Paris. He wrote a curious work in several volumes called The Serpent of Genesis, with the subtitle The Temple of Satan, in which he violently attacked a ‘false prophet’, Eugène Vintras, and ‘a base idol of the mystical Sodom, a magician of the worst type, a wretched criminal’, called Joseph-Antoine Boullan.

The two objects of this attack occupy a prominent place in the history of French occultism in the nineteenth century. Pierre Michel Eugène Vintras was a Norman peasant and visionary who achieved something of the same celebrity as Swedenborg. He was born in 1807, and in 1839 he became manager of a cardboard-box factory at Tillysur-Seule. One evening he had a curious experience. A ragged old workman knocked on his door and addressed him by his Christian names, Pierre Michel. He got rid of the old man by giving him ten sous, but the old man apparently did not leave the building. Puzzled, Vintras asked a workman to help him search. He did not find the old man, but he found a letter and his ten sous. He now became convinced the old man was an angel. The letter was not addressed to Vintras, but he read it all the same. What he read impressed him very deeply. For the letter concerned the pretender to the French throne, Louis XVII, son of the king who had been executed.

Historical evidence seems to indicate that the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette died in captivity at the age of ten, in 1795. The unfortunate child had been kept locked in a dark room for six months, his food pushed through the grating in the door, and eventually died of scurvy. But no one seems to have seen the body and it was rumoured that he had escaped. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica admits that this is just possible. At all events, he was never heard of again. But in 1832 a German forger called Karl William Naundorf settled in France and announced that he was the missing heir to the throne. He was expelled in 1836, but by then he had many enthusiastic supporters. Naundorf’s followers, who called themselves the Saviours of Louis XVII, declared that France was about to enter a period of terrible calamities (which proved to be true enough), and that these could only be averted when Louis XVII returned to the throne. Then a golden age would begin, a period of unparalleled prosperity, spiritual and material.

The letter Vintras read was full of these prophecies about the exiled Naundorf. Convinced that the angel who delivered the letter had been St. Michael, Vintras instantly declared himself to be a convert to the pretender’s party.

He was a powerful ally, for he now began having apocalyptic visions, which he communicated so convincingly that he soon had hordes of followers, including a scholar called Charvoz, the curé of Mont Louis.

Vintras set up a chapel in the cardboard-box factory, and on the altar placed a number of hosts which, he said, had been sent to him by various disciples who had rescued them from desecration. (At this period, there was a certain amount of stealing of consecrated wafers from churches, presumably for use in black magic ceremonies.) And a miracle occurred; the hosts began to bleed. Medical tests verified that the blood was genuine and human (although it should be borne in mind that it was not until 1900 that Uhlenhuth discovered the method of testing a blood sample to establish its origin). Like the Abbé Vachère, of whom we have already spoken, Vintras seemed to have the odd ability to cause blood to materialise out of thin air. He was undoubtedly slightly insane, and his ‘visions’ have many parallels in the annals of medical psychology. For example, he describes a dream in which his ‘chapel’ was full of demons and monsters while the voice of the devil invited him to become one of his ‘elect’; the Virgin Mary, whose face hovered above an abyss, confirmed that he was damned. In spite of such nightmares, he continued to preach the ‘work of mercy’, and the followers of Naundorf, who had ‘probably engineered the first visit from the ‘angel’, had no reason to regret their decision to recruit him.

However, his publicist, the Abbé Charvoz, disregarded his advice to proceed with caution, and announced the miracle of the bleeding hosts in a widely distributed pamphlet. The authorities became nervous; a bishop denounced Vintras, and in 1842 Vintras and an agent of Naundorf’s called Ferdinand Geoffroi were arrested and charged with fraud. They should have been acquitted, since the old ladies whose money they were accused of embezzling stated publicly that they had given the money of their own free will and had no regrets. Nevertheless, Vintras was sentenced to five years in prison, and Geoffroi to two. An appeal was dismissed. It was while Vintras was serving his sentence that an ex-disciple named Cozzoli published a pamphlet called The Prophet Vintras denouncing the sect as a cover for sexual perversions, and alleging that Vintras performed black masses and masturbated on the host while he prayed. A police investigation of these charges exonerated Vintras. He came out of jail in 1845, the year that the pretender Naundorf died in Holland, and went to London, where his sect continued to flourish. He now declared himself to be an incarnation of the prophet Elijah, as Cagliostro had done before him, and even the Pope’s declaration that the sect was heretical did not diminish his widespread influence. He returned to France in 1863, consecrated a number of ‘priests’ in his Church of Carmel and died in December 1875.

One of these ‘priests’ was a dubious character called Boullan. Boullan, born in 1824, was a defrocked priest. The summary of his life that is given by Robert Baldick in his biography of Huysmans sounds too fantastic to accept without reservation. But Baldick, a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, asserts that ‘a study of the priest’s private papers, recently discovered in a remote French village by M. Pierre Lambert, and of a “confession” which he wrote in the prisons of the Holy Office, leaves no doubt that these reports of his depravity were well founded’. Boullan founded a religious community near Paris in 1859, and taught that sexual intercourse was a road to salvation. His disciples believed that they had copulated with Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, as well as with saints and archangels. In 1860, says Baldick, Boullan sacrificed a child borne him by a nun, the co-founder of the society, in some Satanic rite. As a result of these activities, he was imprisoned until 1870, when he returned to Paris, only outwardly repentant, and founded a dubious magazine called Annals of Sanctity in the 19th Century devoted to occult matters and accounts of Satanism. The basis of his teachings was still, apparently, sexual, and he taught his disciples how to dream they were having sexual intercourse with the saints of Jesus Christ by means of auto-suggestion. The Archbishop of Paris finally intervened, and Boullan was defrocked. Vintras, now in the last months of his life, was in Lyons. Boullan became his disciple. And when Vintras died later that year, Boullan, to the indignation of other members of the Church of Carmel, declared that Vintras had appointed him his successor. The result was a schism in the church. Boullan was finally accepted by a minority in Lyons, and settled there under the care of a housekeeper, Julie Thibault. She participated in a ceremony called the Union with Life, which seems to have been, to put it mildly, Dionysian in character. Boullan taught that since Adam and Eve fell through sex, man must learn to regenerate himself by the same means; sexual intercourse with people on a higher spiritual level than oneself raises one to their level – hence the importance of hallucinatory acts of intercourse with Jesus and the Virgin. Since Boullan was also on a higher spiritual plane than the female members of his congregation, it followed that he could give them a start on the upward path.

It was this sexual doctrine that Stanislas de Guaita, Levi’s disciple, denounced in The Temple of Satan (1891). He said that it amounted to incubism and succubism – intercourse with male and female demons – and that Boullan’s doctrine that one should help ‘inferior beings’ by copulating with them could be used to justify bestiality. Guaita and Wirth decided that Boullan should be exposed the year after he succeeded Vintras – 1886 – and they wormed their way into his confidence, and that of his housekeeper, by pretending to be humble seekers after knowledge. Boullan was naturally cautious – he kept his sexual doctrines secret, to be communicated only to trusted adepts – but he finally expounded them to his new disciples. Guaita and Wirth then revealed that they were wolves in sheep’s clothing, held some kind of mock trial in Boullan’s absence and finally informed Boullan that he had been found guilty and condemned.

Boullan naturally assumed this meant that the two Rosicrucians meant to kill him by magic. He now recalled bitterly that he had taught them some particularly murderous spells. If these were now flying through the psychic ether between Paris and Lyons, he would obviously have to counteract them with spells of his own. Guaita and Wirth (who later wrote on the Tarot) were joined by two other Rosicrucian adepts – a poet, Edouard Dubus, and a highly eccentric novelist who called himself Sar Peladan. The battle went on for several years, with both sides experiencing inexplicable fits of oppression and nerves which they set down to the incantations of the other.

The novelist J. K. Huysmans had become well known for his remarkable novel À Rebours (Against the Grain), about a rich young man, Des Esseintes, who detests the banality of everyday life, and locks himself in his villa, surrounded by exquisite food, liqueurs, pictures and books to live a life of the imagination and senses. Des Esseintes is one of the greatest symbols of the romantic revolt against ‘the world’. (‘As for living, our servants can do that for us.’ said Axel, in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s play.) Huysmans had begun as a follower of Zola and the naturalist school, but his sympathies were closer to the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde. (À Rebours becomes the bible of Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel.) He became increasingly fascinated by Satanism and decided to write a novel about it. First, he had to collect his material, and it was necessary to meet a Satanist. He heard about Boullan, and wrote to him in Lyons, asking for information, and offering to represent him in his novel as ‘the Superman, the Satanist … far removed from the infantile spiritualism of the occultists’. (For some odd reason, believers in magic were violently opposed to spiritualism.) Boullan, glad of such an ally, welcomed Huysmans to Lyons. He told him the whole story of the battle against the ‘black’ Rosicrucians, explained that his own magic was strictly white and gave him all kinds of strange information. Huysmans kept faith; the novel Là Bas (Down There) appeared in the spring of 1891, with a flattering portrait of Boullan as the misunderstood white magician Dr. Johannés (a name Boullan had assumed), who performs miracle cures and un-bewitches people who have been bewitched by black magicians.

Là Bas is not a good novel; it is hardly a novel at all. But it is a very remarkable document that throws light not only on the psychology of French magicians of the nineteenth century, but upon the nature of ‘black magic’ in all ages.

There is very little plot. The writer Durtal, Huysmans himself, is engaged on a life of Marshal Gilles de Rais, the sexual pervert who derived pleasure from killing children, and excerpts from Gilles’s biography are interspersed throughout the book. One senses a curious immaturity in Huysmans’s interest in Gilles; when he describes him disembowelling children and masturbating on their intestines, he is not really aware of the horror of the subject; it strikes him as bizarre, freakish and therefore fascinating.

Durtal receives passionate letters from an unknown woman. The letters (which Huysmans had actually received from a female admirer) make it clear she is neurotic and hysterical, but Durtal, bored and weak-minded, is intrigued, and decides he is in love with the unknown. He eventually discovers that she is Hyacinthe Chantelouve, wife of a rather sneaky Catholic historian. There is a typical scene in which she finally agrees to give herself to him and undresses; Durtal has an immediate sense of anticlimax and finds the act of lovemaking sickening.

He discovers that she knows a priest who performs the black mass, the sinister Canon Docre (based on a Belgian abbé, Louis Van Haecke), and persuades her to take him to one. The black mass scene is obviously the high point of the novel. It has a remarkable feeling of authenticity. The altar boys are ageing poufs, covered with cosmetics. The chapel is dingy and damp, with cracked walls. The face of Christ on the cross is painted so that it laughs derisively. Canon Docre pours out Swinburnian invective on the Crucified: ‘Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach, thou hast seen the weak crushed … thou hast heard the death rattle of the timid …’ The women then begin to have convulsions in the manner of the Loudun nuns. One of the aged choir boys performs an act of fellatio on him. Docre ejaculates on the host and tosses it to the convulsed women; he also apparently defecates on the altar. Huysmans’s language is not explicit, but ordure obviously plays a central part in the mass. Durtal finally drags Mme. Chantelouve away; she takes him to a room in a cheap bar, where, in spite of his protests, she possesses him. As far as Durtal is concerned, that is the end of the affair.

What comes out so clearly in the description of the black mass is the desire of the participants to shock themselves out of their normal state of dullness. One of the most curious features of all such ceremonies – witch’s sabbaths and so on – is this emphasis on ordure and dirt. In Huysmans, it becomes clear that the whole thing, far from being horrifying and sinister, is merely an expression of bourgeois frustrations. Parents demand that children keep clean, therefore it gives a sense of wickedness to wallow in dirt. The ‘blasphemies’ sound completely harmless to anyone who is not a Catholic and who does not accept that disbelief in the divinity of Christ involves eternal damnation. The convulsions are intended to afford the same kind of relief as pornography. I have commented earlier on the element of deliberate nastiness that some pornographers throw in as a final touch of naughtiness; this is also present at Huysmans’s mass: ‘Another [woman], sprawling on her back, undid her skirts, revealing a huge and distended paunch; then her face twisted into a horrible grimace, and her tongue, which she could not control, stuck out, bitten at the edges, harrowed by red teeth, from a bloody mouth.’ The Devil’s realm is supposed to be ugliness. But the reader can sense an element of self-contradiction in Huysmans’s account. So much ugliness and unpleasantness can hardly make the mass sound wicked, for who would want to witness anything so nauseating? So he takes care to mention that there are attractive women present, ‘Junonian brunettes’, even a young girl. And in doing so, he reveals the paradoxical absurdity of Satanism. The element that makes the black mass attractive is perfectly normal, healthy, pagan sex. The driving force behind it is the sexual repression that is inevitable in all civilisation, where leisure gives everyone time to daydream about sex. The ugly crones with bitten tongues are an attempt to disguise this truth. A mere twenty years after Là Bas, D. H. Lawrence was undermining the whole foundation of this kind of infantile diabolism by emphasising that sex is a liberating activity; the penis is ‘the rod that connects man to the stars’. After sexual intercourse a healthy couple should experience something of the ‘oceanic feeling’ that characterises mysticism, and this oceanic feeling is an intuition of the godlike, not the demonic. If Huysmans’s diabolists had possessed any powers of self-observation, they would have noted that they experienced a sense of release, of ‘cosmic consciousness’, after their orgy, and that this is inconsistent with their professions of diabolism. Diabolism is an artificial antithesis, conjured into existence by bigotry and frustration – not a genuine expression of man’s revolt against the godlike.

This conclusion is underlined by the weakness and immaturity that Huysmans reveals in his self-portrait as Durtal. His troubles arise out of boredom, inactivity. It is boredom that makes him work himself into a state of romantic fervour when he receives the letters from the unknown. When he discovers that the unknown is a society hostess whom he has met, he feels a mixture of disappointment and pleasure: disappointment because Hyacinthe is less alluring than his imaginary ‘unknown’; pleased that she is, after all, quite sexually desirable. When she denies herself to him he begins to want her frantically. His moment of greatest pleasure occurs when she kisses him when her husband is in the next room. As soon as she surrenders he is revolted, and the morning after their depressing adultery, thinks longingly about chastity. As an excuse for not sleeping with her again, he tells her that he has a mistress and an ailing child, and is so touched by his own lie that he comes close to tears. Durtal is an addition to the long line of weak heroes in French literature: Obermann, Constant’s Adolphe, Stendhal’s Julien, Balzac’s Rubempré. The only objection is that Huysmans was not aware of this; he thinks that Durtal’s torments – which finally draw him back into the Church in La Cathidrale – are the agonies of sensitivity and intelligence, not of mere self-indulgence and lack of discipline.

I have dwelt on Là Bas because it makes it possible to see the great ‘magical battle’ between Boullan and Guaita for the futile and rather silly business it really was. The Abbé Boullan died on January 3, 1893, at the age of sixty-nine, the day after writing an ominous letter to Huysmans. ‘At 3 o’clock I awoke suffocating … From 3 to 3.30 I was between life and death.’ The numbers 8, 9, 3, in the year boded evil, he said. Mme. Thibault, who later became Huysmans’s housekeeper, wrote to him the same day telling him that after dinner, Boullan had struggled with congestion of the lungs, and then died suddenly. It was fairly obviously angina pectoris and a heart attack; it was not the first. But Huysmans immediately decided that the Rosicrucians had killed Boullan with their spells, and accused them of it in letters to newspapers. Guaita and Wirth declared flatly that there had been no spells at any time – no doubt telling the truth. Guaita fought a duel with Huysmans’s friend Bois, who had also accused him, but neither was hurt. The horse taking Bois to the duel came to a halt, trembling – no doubt telepathically sensing its rider’s fear – and his pistol failed to fire; naturally, he attributed both these occurrences to Guaita’s magic. Dubus, the Rosicrucian poet, boasted that it was his magic that had killed Boullan; but he himself died shortly afterwards, after telling Huysmans that he was pursued by voices. Guaita died in 1898 from an overdose of drugs.

It may be doubted whether anyone tried actively to cast death-spells. If Guaita was, as Baldick asserts, only twenty-seven when he died in 1898, then he was only fifteen when he and Wirth inveigled the secrets of the Union with Life out of Boullan in 1886; it sounds more like an adolescent prank than a calculated act of hatred. Huysmans may have added fuel to the flames with his novel, but since it does not directly attack the Rosicrucian group, it cannot have made all that much difference. If the ‘magical battle’ hastened Boullan’s death, it was because he worked himself into a state of nerves about it. It is doubtful, in any case, whether Guaita or any other member of the Rosicrucian group possessed the kind of nervous vitality necessary to project malice telepathically, in the way that John Cowper Powys believed he could.*

Huysmans records Durtal’s future course, and his own, in three subsequent novels, En Route, La Cathédrale and L’Oblat. These volumes, like Là Bas, can hardly be called novels; they detail Durtal’s path into the bosom of the Church – he ends as a Benedictine oblate – with lengthy discussions of medieval theology and the lives of the saints. The reader does not get a sense of a solution of Durtal’s problems, because Catholicism is not the solution. Durtal is self-divided, unhappy, thoroughly dissatisfied with his life and with himself. It is an evolutionary craving that drives him, the desire to achieve the ‘violet end’ of the spectrum of consciousness, and he fails.

At the British Museum Reading Room I often saw a man of thirty-six or thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and an athletic body, who seemed, before I heard his name, or knew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently I was introduced … He was called Liddell Mathers, but would soon, under the touch of ‘The Celtic Movement’, become MacGregor Mathers, and then plain MacGregor. He was the author of The Kabbalah Unveiled, and his studies were only two – magic and the theory of war, for he believed himself a born commander, and all but equal in wisdom and in power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magical ceremonial and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face and body – though in later years it became unhinged, as Don Quixote’s was unhinged – for he kept a proud head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that for many years he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved.

I have quoted Yeats at length because the portrait of Mathers contains all the essential elements of the magician. There is the poverty, the driving will-power, the obscure sense of destiny, the romanticism that makes him change his name from Liddell to MacGregor. It is tempting to say that he is a man born in the wrong age, an adventurer who finds the nineteenth century too tame; but since, as we have seen, Agrippa and Paracelsus were no better off, this cannot be maintained. The ‘old Jew’ Yeats refers to is Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Yeats was fascinated by the passage in Shelley’s Hellas describing the old Jew living ‘in a sea cavern ‘mid the Demonesi’, and he became a Theosophist – joining the Dublin circle that gathered around George Russell (A.E.) – ‘because they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew’. This idea of a lonely superman, possessing more-than-human power and wisdom, is an immense attraction to people who, like Yeats, detest their own age.

Mathers introduced Yeats to a small group of Christian Kabbalists called The Hermetic Students, and soon after, they decided to call themselves ‘the Order of the Golden Dawn’. Mathers talked mysteriously of an unknown master who had instructed him to found the Hermetic Students – perhaps Saint-Germain himself. The truth seems to be that Mathers had been a Rosicrucian and had been asked by a fellow Rosicrucian, Dr. William Woodman, to interpret a manuscript he had bought in the Farringdon Road. It turned out to be a ritual of ceremonial magic, and it mentioned a magical society in Germany. Mathers, Woodman and a Dr. Wyn Westcott, the London coroner, wrote to the German society and were given a charter to found their own group. Mathers, being of a dictatorial nature, ended as its sole leader. According to John Symonds the German order seems to have been influenced by Madame Blavatsky, for it believed in secret masters in Tibet.*

The Golden Dawn had lodges in Edinburgh, Paris, London and Weston-super-Mare. Mathers claimed to have established contact with the ‘secret chiefs’ in Paris, and his authority was increased by his discovery in the Bibliotheque de L’Arsenal of a grimoire called The Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, printed in 1458.

Mathers became the curator of a private museum owned by Frederick J. Horniman in 1890, but in 1891 he quarrelled with his employer and was dismissed. Horniman’s daughter, Miss Annie Horniman, made him an allowance of £443 a year, and he moved to Paris. His wife, the daughter of the philosopher Bergson, was also a ‘seer’. He left the actress Florence Farr in charge of the Order, and began performing ‘Egyptian Rites’ in Paris – he even hired the Bodinière Theatre and charged admission to see them. (It is not clear whether these had any connection with Cagliostro’s Egyptian rite but it seems likely.) Probably he left Florence Farr in charge because he felt that a woman was less likely to take advantage of his absence to increase her own authority. If so, the idea was unsound; there were others in the order who were finding his autocratic manner a strain: for example, Dr. Westcott, one of the original founders. Rumbles of revolt were heard, and they increased when Mathers showed a tendency to want to introduce his new Egyptian rites to the London society. And at this point, says Joseph Hone, in his biography of Yeats, Mathers precipitated a break by ‘seeking the support of a dreadful young man, who broke into the rooms of the Order and took possession of a book containing much secret matter’. When Hone’s book came out in 1942, the ‘dreadful young man’ was still alive and so could not be mentioned by name. It was Aleister Crowley, the reincarnated spirit of Eliphaz Levi. His intervention was the beginning of the end for the Order of the Golden Dawn, which now disintegrated gently. A new order, the Stella Matutina, declared that it would not tolerate mystagogues; but without mystagogues, it failed to maintain the interest of its members. Mathers died in 1918, overcome, according to the first edition of Yeats’s autobiography, by powerful magical currents emanating from Crowley.

In his excellent book Ritual Magic in England (1970), Francis King describes the subsequent history of the Golden Dawn. Mrs. Mathers became head of one of the branches of the Order, but failed to hold it together. That remarkable occultist Dion Fortune broke away and formed her own Temple; she later alleged that Mrs. Mathers launched murderous ‘psychic attacks’ on her, and actually succeeded in killing one errant member. In 1934, a Crowley disciple named Frances Israel Regardie joined the Stella Matutina and then proceeded to publish its secret rituals in a four-volume edition; this betrayal apparently pushed the society into the final stages of collapse. The magical banners and instruments of the A.O. (another branch) were buried in a clifftop garden on the south coast; in 1966, the crumbling of the cliff deposited them on the beach, and several magical groups instantly laid claim to them. This event seems to conclude the history of the Golden Dawn.

* In England, The Age of Defeat (1959).

* Highest rank in the Civil Service.

* Nurslings of Immortality, 1957, p. 117.

† E. M. Butler, Ritual Magic, 1949, pp. 283 et seq.

* The Daily Express for July 22, 1970, reports the suicide of a thirty-five-year-old gardener, who became convinced that an ex-girlfriend had bewitched him. His landlady told the inquest: ‘“About eighteen months ago he was introduced to a girl who was involved in black magic. He went out with her for a week, and she told him she belonged to a cult and that she had killed three men. She said she could put a curse on him. I told him to give her up, and he did.” … Mr. Harrington began to brood, and spent six weeks in hospital receiving treatment for nerves. Last Friday she returned from shopping and found him hanging from the banisters … “He told me about a nightmare he had that shattered his nerves. He said he dreamed of a man upside down on a crucifix in a field.”’ The parallel with Boullan needs no underlining.

* Although in Crowley’s Confessions, it is more likely that the ‘secret chiefs’ were German magicians, and one was certainly a Frenchman of Scottish descent.