A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (25 page)

There is good reason to believe that when Ouspensky met Gurdjieff, that "sly man's" dour doctrine - that man is a machine with only the slimmest possibility of gaining freedom - combined with Ouspensky's own Romantic worldrejection to push him into an attitude of Stoic resignation. At any rate, he wrote little after working with Gurdjieff, and the last book published in his lifetime, A New Model of the Universe (1931) (which includes "Experimental Mysticism"), is a collection of essays originally written in his pre-Gurdjieff days, re-worked and brought up to date. Many of the chapters deal with themes similar to Tertium Organum: the fourth dimension, the superman, eternal recurrence, and Ouspensky's own version of the new physics. But through it all runs the idea of esotericism, the notion that behind the everyday world, we can find traces of a hidden hand, the influence of esoteric schools, whose teaching offer the only hope of escaping the wheel of life. Ouspensky believed in this idea fiercely, and in his last days, seeing in Gurdjieff a tainted source, he made plans for journeys into Central Asia, the area of the world most likely, he believed, to harbour traces of the secret schools.

These would not be his first journeys to the east. Before meeting Gurdjieff, Ouspensky had acquired a reputation in pre-Revolutionary Moscow and St. Petersburg as a journalist, mostly for his accounts of his search for the miraculous in India, Egypt, Ceylon and Central Asia. Indeed, it is precisely because of his reputation that Gurdjieff had him ensnared. Returning to Moscow after his fruitless search for schools, Ouspensky was astounded to discover a source of the secret teaching right in his own backyard. Yet, while downing glasses of Montrachet in his last, lonely days, Ouspensky often thought nostalgically of his early years in Russia, before he met Gurdjieff, when his lectures on the superman or the fourth dimension would draw thousands of listeners. He would also remember his late night sessions at St. Petersburg's Stray Dog Cafe, a meeting place for Symbolist poets and other members of the avant garde, and the place where Ouspensky rubbed shoulders with the likes of Anna Akmahtova. It was the same milieu as that of Briusov and, another writer we will meet shortly, Andrei Bely. Had Ouspensky not cast in his lot with Gurdjieff, there is good reason to believe that he would be spoken of today in the same breath as Berdyaev, Merzhkovsky and Soloviev. As it is, the influence of Tertium Organum on the Russian avant garde has, in recent years, received more attention. Among other painters, Kasimir Malevich was influenced by Ouspensky's writing on higher space, and even Berdyaev, who was very critical of the occult influence of Rudolf Steiner on the Russian intelligentsia, spoke of Ouspensky as the only theosophical writer worth reading.

The youthful Ouspensky had a poetic soul, a romantic, vulnerable side that comes out in his early writings, like the collection of stories translated as Talks With The Devil (1916-1973). It also appears in one of his earliest books, The Symbolism of the Tarot originally published in Russia in 1911. Combining his ideas on time, consciousness and secret knowledge, this series of poetic prose sketches was later reworked and included as a chapter in A New Model of the Universe. Yet, as some commentators have remarked, it is in striking contrast to his more rigorous, stern dicta on recurrence, sex and the laws of Manu. Perhaps the strict taskmaster of "the work" could not let go of his earlier, more human self.

Like many drawn to the occult tradition, Ouspensky thought little of socialism and other egalitarian movements. Disagreeing with Bucke's democratic view of cosmic consciousness, he argued that the superman would be a product of high culture, not an inevitable advance of the race. Crossing Russia during the Revolution, Ouspensky had an opportunity to consider these ideas. Separated from Gurdjieff by the warring White and Red armies, stranded in the backwater of Ekaterinodar, Ouspensky wrote a series of Letters from Russia, published in A.R. Orage's journal The New Age. His account of looting, murder and other atrocities perpetrated by the Bolsheviks was sobering reading for many sympathetic to the Soviet experiment. Reaching Constantinople in 1920, Ouspensky never set foot in Russia again. Throughout his years as an exile he maintained a fierce, implacable hatred of bolshevism, seeing in it the most vile example of the "history of crime," a virulent barbarism intent on overthrowing what was left of western culture. Ouspensky however had no love for the czarist regime; in 1905 his beloved sister was arrested as a dissident and locked up in the Boutirsky Prison in Moscow, where she died. It was grim realities like these that drove him to reading works on occultism while working as a journalist on a Moscow newspaper, and led him, eventually, on his long search for the miraculous.

Aleister Crowley

The most notorious magician of the 20th century was born Edward Alexander Crowley on 12 October 1875 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire; he later transformed himself to Aleister to avoid sharing a name with his father,23 one of many transformations throughout a long and turbulent career. Between his coming of age and his death in 1947, Crowley adopted a whole series of other selves. There was, for example, Brother Perdurabo. There were also the Laird of Boleskine, Prince Chioa Khan, Count Svareff, Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, and Simon Iff. If we count his identity with his `higher self', there was also Aiwass, a supernatural being from another dimension, approachable through sex, drugs and magical ritual. Bringing in the many individuals Crowley claimed to have been in past lives - like Cagliostro and Eliphas Levi - swells the ranks even further. But it was the nickname given him by his puritanical Plymouth Brethren mother that set the course of Crowley's life. Rebelling against an arid fundamentalism, Edward so angered his mother that she called him the Great Beast 666 from the Book of Revelations. Crowley agreed and acted accordingly. This petulant spitefulness remained throughout his life. Along with an ability to justify all of his actions, it created an ego impervious to criticism. Crowley believed in himself and in his mission, which often enough were identical. His mother didn't know what she unleashed upon the world.

Crowley's history has been told several times24. Since his revival in the late 1960s (both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were impressed by him) and adoption by the devotees of heavy metal, he's achieved a posthumous notoriety that far exceeds the infamy of his day. Today, "Do what thou wilt," the catch phrase of Crowley's religion of thelema, is teenage lingo. As his own plunge into sex and sadism was prompted by his intolerable upbringing, Crowley's philosophy of indulgence appeals to the young, hemmed in by parental restrictions. Most people, however, get through this phase and adjust to life. Crowley made a religion of it, with himself, the Master Therion (the Great Beast in Greek), as high priest and deity.

Crowley absorbed an enormous amount of experience. He climbed the Himalayas, walked across China, learned several languages, squandered a fortune, and belonged to several occult orders. He took a startling amount of drugs, and had erotic relations with members of both sex in a variety of ways and places, was a chess champion, wrote German propaganda during WWI and enjoyed the rare distinction of having his own magical abbey shut down by Mussolini. He was also in and out of the tabloids during the 1920s and 30s, and earned the tag of "the wickedest man in the world." Though technically not a black magician, there was little of the light about him, and as most accounts of his life relate, he left a trail of madness and shattered lives. Few close to him emerged unharmed.

As mentioned earlier, Crowley became interested in magic (or `magick', as he would spell it) through a book of A.E. Waite's. Later, after reading Eckharthausen's The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, he became obsessed with the idea of a secret magical order. In 1898, while on a skiing trip in Switzerland, he met the chemist Julian L. Baker who introduced him to George Cecil Jones. It was through Jones that Crowley became a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, initiated into the society as Brother Perdurabo, "one who will endure to the finish."

For the rest of his life, Crowley devoted himself to rehabilitating the reputation of magick. First, through study and mastery of a variety of occult arts, mostly Kabbalah and cere monial magic; then through the propagation of his religion. Initially called Crowleyanity - an obvious dig at Christianity - then thelema, the teaching came to him in the revelation of The Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904. Leaving the Golden Dawn in 1900, Crowley avoided magic for some time and turned his mind to Buddhism and meditation. Inheriting a considerable fortune, he threw himself into his other loves, travel and mountaineering. Crowley was a good, if unorthodox mountaineer; his ascent of Chogo-Ri in the Himalayas, the world's second highest mountain, though a failure, is impressive. But his later attempt on Kanchenjunga ended in ignominy, when he refused to help members of his party who had met with an accident. Crowley left them to their fate and several men died. He then excused himself in a spate of self-justifying newspaper articles, after withdrawing all of the expedition's funds from the bank.

In 1904, as mentioned, Crowley received a communication from the Secret Chiefs, his version of Blavatsky's hidden masters. Through the medium of his first wife Rose - who later died a dipsomaniac - Crowley received the sacred text of his religion, the aforementioned Book of the Law. On 8 April a voice spoke out of the air in his hotel room in Cairo, revealing the new Word of the Aeon. He wrote at a feverish pace, capturing the doctrine he spent the rest of his life advocating. It was a heady blend of Nietzsche and de Slide, served up in fin de siecle prose, and assorted Egyptian motifs. Crowley convinced himself, and later many others, that it prophesised the dawning of a new age, and that he was its reluctant avatar.

Crowley claimed that the Book of the Law was unlike any of his previous writings and clearly showed an alien hand. Any reader of Crowley's poetry will find this difficult to accept. By the time he received the Book of the Law, Crowley had already distinguished himself as a poet - at least to his own satisfaction - with several elegant, if self-published volumes. His first, Alcedema, A Place to Bury Strangers In, by "a gentleman of the University of Cambridge," was privately printed in 1898 in an edition of one hundred copies. The poem is a long exercise in blasphemy, degradation and masochism; the title refers to the field bought with Judas' thirty pieces of silver. With this first effort Crowley believed he had "attained, at a bound, the summit of Parnassus." The book, however, was not well received. A few other gentlemen of the University of Cambridge read it, and remarked that it should not be shown to the young. Undeterred (more likely encouraged) Crowley went on to produce poetry for the rest of his life. He wrote Swinburnian odes well into the heyday of modernism and seems not to have paid much attention to any poetry written after Wilde.

Crowley's choice of nom de plume for his first published work was an homage to Shelley's The Necessity of Atheism, whose author was "a gentleman of the University of Oxford." Crowley had a habit of associating himself with the greats of English literature; of his birthplace he famously said that it was "a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets - for one must not forget Shakespeare. "25 The humour is typical, as is the inordinate self-esteem, suggesting in fact a sense of inferiority, one so great that even becoming a god did not quite compensate for it. (Crowley believed he had become a god in 1921, when he reached the magical rank of Ipsissimus). Every writer is touchy about his work, but Crowley was positively paranoid. When he brought the proofs of his verse play Jephthah (1898) (another privately printed work) to show his magical brother Yeats, he was crestfallen at the poet's unenthusiastic response. "He forced himself to utter a few polite conventionalities," Crowley recalled, but Frater Perdurabo could see through the sham. It was obvious that "black, bilious rage shook him to the soul." The reason? Yeats had obviously recognized in Crowley's work the hand of a poet much greater than himself...

Jephthah, like much of Crowley's poetry, is fairly tough reading. It is not, as his biographer Martin Booth remarks, "true poetry, which, at its best, has that indefinable substance in it, that certain untouchable quality of the soul ... X26 Except for a few pieces, Crowley's poetry is mostly derivative and second rate, when it is not downright pornographic and nasty, as is his highly collectable collection White Stains (1898). Crowley, however, thought so well of his verse that in 1907 he published (privately again) his Collected Works. To stimulate notice, he offered a £100 prize for the best critical essay on his oeuvre. The announcement for the competition is typical:

The Chance of the Year!

The Chance of the Century!!

The Chance of the Geological Period!!!

Two years passed before anyone responded. Captain J.F.C. Fuller's effusive The Star of the West, which proclaimed that "Crowley is more than a new-born Dionysus, he is more than a Blake, a Rabelais, or a Heine ..." won hands down. Being the only entry, that was not difficult. Fuller became one of the early thelemites and Crowley, notorious for his meanness, neglected to pay him his prize. Later a noted military historian, Fuller had a thing for charismatic men, and was the only Englishman to attend Adolf Hitler's fiftieth birthday party.

Crowley, however, can be readable, especially when he is talking about himself, a good trait in a raconteur, but deadly in a poet. His massive Confessions (complete edition 1969) exhibits the same megalomania (Crowley called it an "autohagiography"), yet it is entertaining and in places displays insight. His two occult novels, Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), a fictionalized account of his Abbey of Thelema, and Moonchild (1929), a spiteful dig at the Golden Dawn, are enjoyable. Even some of the strictly magical texts, like the early Book Four (1911) and the later Eight Lectures on Yoga (1939) present no problems to the interested student, unlike his impenetrable magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), which fails in its attempt to bring his message to the average reader, who hasn't the slightest idea what he's talking about. It's in this work, however, that perhaps his best poem makes an importance appearance.