A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (21 page)

In Creative Evolution (1907) Bergson developed these ideas and argued against the by-then triumphant Darwinian picture of a mechanistic evolution, propelled by chance mutation and the blind will to survive, offering instead an eloquent and persuasive vision of an elan vital, a transcendent `life force' which penetrates matter and moulds it to its end. That end, Bergson argued, was a kind of evolutionary spirituality. As he wrote in his last book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) - written well after his celebrity had dimmed - the universe, it seemed, was "a machine for making gods." One writer who agreed with Bergson was the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who, in his philosophical comedy Man and Superman (1904) (which includes a satanic dream episode, the brilliant Don Juan in Hell), combined Bergson's elan vital with Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Later, Shaw drew on Bergson's ideas again for his futurist fantasy Back to Methuselah (1924), which introduces a race of supermen living in some unthinkable future, semi-divine human beings who have transcended the earthly lot and occupy themselves solely with the eternal. Critics like D.H. Lawrence thought Shaw's Ancients a dismal bore, having given up the flesh for a life of pure mind, an accusation often made against Shaw himself. Most people agreed. But Shaw's vision of a coming super race had it roots in more than his own supposed lack of interest in the delights of corporality.

Although Bergson became the most well-known opponent of strict Darwinian thought, he was not the first. That honour most go to the author of a book published in 1877, decades before Creative Evolution. The author of the book, Isis Unveiled, a 1,300 page compendium of occult thought, mysticism, and weird speculation was an unusual critic of biological theory in more ways than one. In the first place, she was a woman; in the second, she was Russian. In the third place Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had led an unconventional life, having, among other things, founded what would quickly become a worldwide religious cult, theosophy. The stamp of theosophy falls across practically every aspect of fin de siecle occultism. This is true whether or not the occultists in question were ever theosophists in a strict sense. Along with ideas of hidden masters, reincarnation and cosmic evolution, what theosophy brought to occultism was the belief that it and science were not enemies, but complementary approaches to uncovering the secrets of the universe. There had been earlier exponents of this idea: Mesmer, for one, and later both Poe and BulwerLytton argued that occult phenomena were really the result of forces not yet understood by science. Goethe believed that his own scientific work in botany, morphology and optics was as important as his poetry, an opinion not shared by many. One occultist who did agree with Goethe, however, was Rudolf Steiner, a Goethe scholar, philosopher and theosophist who broke away from theosophy and inaugurated his own form of "spiritual science", anthroposophy, arguably the most successful school of alternative thought to emerge from the 20th century. Needless to say, for the alchemists of an earlier time, occultism itself was a branch of science, perhaps the most important one.

Yet, while a sense of optimism and expectation greeted the new century, darker visions were also present. Along with intimations of a leap in human evolution, atavistic forces and primal ancient energies also rose to the surface. We have seen some evidence for this in the previous section, in the rise of Satanism and witchcraft. But the shadow took other forms as well. The chasm between the two worlds widened, and the Symbolist rejection of the "mundane shell" (Blake's phrase) reached its peaked. No longer content to ignore the modern world, the late-Romantic consciousness now heaped contempt upon it, and sought refuge in visions of some glittering golden past, or found itself alone in an abyss of cosmic isolation. A sense of apocalypse pervaded the psyche, appearing in some as the approach of madness, in others as the trumpet call of the last days. In a few cases, the two were synonymous. By the summer of 1914, darkness fell, and old Europe was no more.

Madame Blavatsky

As noted earlier, 1875 was an important year for occultism. It saw the death of Eliphas Levi and the birth of Aleister Crowley, two significant events by any standard. But even more significant, it was in that year that three eccentric individuals founded an organization that would profoundly influence not only modern occultism, but modern culture in general. In New York .City on 13 September 1875, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge came together to form a successor to their previous occult organization, `the Miracle Club', as one member had ironically referred to it. In its first stages the Theosophical Society was an outgrowth of the popular occultism of the time, and included among its founding members a spirit medium, a kabbalist, and other characters familiar with the traditions of European occultism. The last few decades had seen an obsession with spiritualism on both sides of the Atlantic. It began in upstate New York with the famous Fox sisters in 1848; by the early 1870s, Madame Blavatsky herself had acquired a considerable reputation as a medium. It was in this capacity that she met the earnest and soon-to-be devoted Colonel Olcott. A reporter with a deep interest in the supernatural, Olcott had heard of a pair of remarkable spirit mediums, the Eddys, who lived on a farm in Vermont. Arriving there he was immediately captivated by the appearance of an even more remarkable figure, Madame Blavatsky. Although it was her red Garibaldi shirt, forthright manner, ample proportions and powerful charisma that first caught his attention, Olcott soon discovered that Blavatsky was endowed with psychic abilities that easily outstripped those of the mediums he intended to investigate. A lifetime association began, and soon after the two became Platonic flat mates in Manhattan.

Soon after its inception, the vague interest in latent powers and occult phenomena that characterized the early Theosophical Society was complicated by a host of eastern metaphysical ideas brought in by Olcott and Blavatsky. The term "theosophy" itself had been around for centuries, Jacob Boehme makes much use of it, and literally means `God wisdom'. But since the founding of the Theosophical Society, the term has been synonymous with the kind of generic eastern spirituality and occultism associated with the group. Yet if all the Theosophical Society had going for it was the hodgepodge of mystical ideas loosely knitted together into its philosophy, it would never have had the kind of influence on 20th century thought it undoubtedly did. At the centre of the mass of doctrines about reincarnation, past lives, astral planes, higher consciousness and spiritual evolution was the formidable, electric and roguish figure of Madame Blavatsky. It is true that the world was waiting for something like theosophy to arrive. Bereft of God through the rise of science, and flooded with a triumphant materialist doctrine, thousands of individuals who sought spiritual guidance found themselves adrift in an indifferent universe. With its broad message of universal brotherhood, spiritual truth and cosmic mysteries, theosophy appealed to both the devout ascetic and the late-Romantic. Yet it's difficult to see how its message would have got across without the captivating personality of its spokeswoman.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (or HPB, as her followers called her), was born Helena von Hahn in 1831 in Ekaterinoslav in the Ukraine. Like her fellow Russian G.I. Gurdjieff, Blavatsky's early life is shrouded in mystery. She was married at eighteen to Nikifor Blavatsky, the Vice-Governor of the province of Erivan, but the marriage was never consummated. Indeed, it is doubtful whether HPB ever had sex, or if she had, that the experience was at all pleasant. All of her remarks on it are disparaging, and she constantly advised her followers to abstain from the beastly business, considering carnal activity a major impediment to the spiritual path. Leaving her husband, Blavatsky went to Constantinople, where she worked as a bareback rider in a circus; here she is supposed to have sustained an injury that made sex in any case impossible, prompting the thought that her abstemious virtue was founded on necessity. For a time she worked as the assistant of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home; later she directed the Serbian Royal Choir. She owned an artificial flower factory, worked as a journalist, short story writer and piano teacher, and was one of the few survivors of the wreck of the Eumonia. Finding herself stranded in Cairo, she conducted bogus seances, aided by large helpings of hashish, a taste for which she maintained throughout her life.

Before turning up in New York, HPB is alleged to have travelled extensively in Tibet, a remarkable claim at the time, and doubly so for a woman, one matched only by the equally redoubtable Alexandra David Neel, author of the occult classic Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Tibet and its remote fastness became in Blavatsky's mind a central symbol and source of spiritual truth and wisdom. Earlier in her career this position was occupied by Egypt. Perhaps Egypt was too close, or maybe there was little left of it that had not been explored; possibly the hidden masters - with whom she claimed to be in constant communication - wanted a change of scenery. Whatever the reason, by the time the theosophical ball really got rolling, all roads, paths and ways led to the remote Himalayan peaks. This journey to the east reached the popular mind in hundreds of ways, among others novels like James Hilton's Lost Horizon, made into a 1937 film starring Ronald Coleman, and W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which was also made into a film, in 1946, starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney.'

Blavatsky and Olcott drew followers from the occult demimonde of late 19th century New York, but it wasn't long before the popularity of spiritualism began to fade. The public mind had tired of it, and in any case Blavatsky herself was bored with the business. Her calling lay elsewhere. It wasn't the message of the spirits that she was destined to proclaim, but the hidden wisdom of the ages. Lost for centuries, obscured by the false doctrines of materialism and an incomplete science, it was revealed to her in copious detail by an incontrovertible source. These were the hidden masters, adepts who guide the evolution of humankind from secret monasteries in the Himalayas. They had chosen her as their spokeswoman to bring their teachings to the masses, in order to prevent the modern world from sinking deeper into the spiritless doctrines of matter. Proof of this came in the form of the famous Mahatma letters, which Blavatsky would materialize out of thin air, to the amazement of Colonel Olcott. Part of the message the masters delivered was that Olcott should abandon his wife and children and devote himself completely to the cause, which he promptly did.

The Colonel was impressed by HPB's abilities, but the public at large required something more. Blavatsky obliged with Isis Unveiled, a massive tome which covered everything from magic and psychic powers to ancient races, secret teachings, and Hindu philosophy. Its basic premise was that the occult is not hocus-pocus but a true science, based on profound knowledge of the secrets of nature, lost to modern humanity but known to the ancients and to a few highly evolved human beings, the adepts. It also presented an outline of cosmic and human evolution vastly different than that offered by modern science. A first printing of 1,000 copies sold out in ten days and a review in the New York Herald called it "one of the most remarkable productions of the century." A decade later, Blavatsky followed up with an even larger tome, The Secret Doctrine, more or less the Old Testament of modern occultism. Along with ransacking her library of occult works - and chain smoking hashish - Blavatsky's writing habits included perusing the Akashic Record to verify her many citations. Olcott describes how mid-paragraph HPB would stare into the middle distance for a few moments, then hurriedly put pen to paper. She was, he said, consulting the astral light for the correct page references.

Astral light was one of Eliphas Levi's contributions, arguing that it was the medium of the magician's will and imagination, thus uniting Mesmer's ideas with those of Romanticism. Another was the notion of an unbroken chain of occult inheritance, the handing down of dark secrets and forbidden knowledge from adept to apprentice. Both ideas would profoundly influence Blavatsky. Another influence was the Frenchman Louis Jacolliot. In books like Occult Science in India (1875) Jacolliot argued that a society of unknown men actually did exist in India whose influence on world events was paramount. In the 1920s the legend of the `Nine Unknown' turn up in the esoteric fiction of the novelist Talbolt Mundy, himself a member of Katharine Tingley's Point Loma Theosophical Society, and in the 1960s they formed part of Louis Pauwel's and Jacques Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians (1960). But the occult writer who had the most influence on Blavatsky was Bulwer-Lytton. From Zanoni, along with other occult notions, Blavatsky appropriated the idea of a group of ageless occult masters who stood apart from the mass of humanity. She also borrowed the idea of an ancient, secret language, which she called Senzar, the original tongue of the Book of Dzyan, whose teachings form the basis of The Secret Doctrine. And from Lytton's early science fiction work The Coming Race, she took the notion of a new race of super beings, which would eventually supplant humanity. The idea that man was evolving into a new kind of being would become popular in a variety of ways in the new century - Nietzsche, Bergson, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw 2 all produced versions of it. But Bulwer Lytton was first, and after him Blavatsky. Blavatsky's ideas of cosmic evolution involving unimaginably vast epochs would find their way into the weird fantasies of H.P. Lovecraft and the science fiction epics of Olaf Stapledon3, but unfortunately for many they formed the basis of a spiritually correct form of racism, most virulently in the hands of proto-Nazi Aryan supremacists.

After New York, Blavatsky and Olcott moved to India and based themselves in Adyar. From there they proceeded to conquer the occult world with their inviting blend of spiritual phenomena and eastern teaching. In 1884 Blavatsky travelled to England, where interest in theosophy had been piqued by the publication of A.P. Sinnett's books Esoteric Buddhism and The Occult World. Yet not long after disaster struck: an ex-employee published articles describing how HPB faked spiritual phenomena, most significantly the appearance of the masters Koot Hoomi and Morya. An investigation by the Society for Psychical Research concurred, and the integrity of theosophy was shaken. Yet both incidents had little longterm effect on the growth of the movement, which continued to attract followers in Europe and America, claiming, among others, Thomas Edison, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Abner Doubleday, the inventor of baseball. Blavatsky spent her last days in Europe, writing the monumental Secret Doctrine, surrounded by devoted followers. She died in 1891 of Bright's disease.