A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (8 page)

In 1783, the Rev. Jacob Duche, ex-Chaplain to the Continental Congress, started the London Theosophical Society, a radical Swedenborgian group. Along with Blake its members include William Beckford's friend Philip de Loutherberg, the Swedish alchemist and Freemason Augustus Nordenskold, and Blake's fellow artists John Flaxman and William Sharp. Earlier I remarked on the similarity between Blake's ideas and those of Saint-Martin. It's possible the two met, as both SaintMartin and Cagliostro visited the group in 1787. Ironically, if Blake and Saint-Martin did meet, then of the two, Blake was truly the unknown philosopher, suffering neglect and obscurity throughout his life.

Blake would have known of De Loutherberg's `Eido- physikon' as well as his work at David Garrick's Theatre in Drury Lane; as his biographer Peter Ackroyd suggests, it is possible to see the influence of De Loutherberg's stage magic in Blake's dazzling illuminated books. Blake knew other `magical' artists as well. Richard Cosway was one of Blake's teachers at Par's Drawing School in the Strand. He was also a practising magician, blending mesmerism, Kabbalah, ceremonial magic, drugs and ritual nudity in his devotions. (Oddly, Cosway, unknown today, was very successful in his time, and famous as much for his extravagant dress and enormous self-regard, as for his nicknames the Macaroni Painter, `Dicky' and Billy Dimple.) Swedenborg we know spoke openly about sex, and Blake's work, both his poetry and art, is suffused with a robust mystical eroticism as well as a Michaelangeloesque glory in the human body. But it is possible that he, and his devoted wife Catherine, professed a more than symbolic belief in the power of the naked body. His patron Thomas Butts was fond of telling the story of coming upon William and Catherine in their summer house in Lambeth and finding them in the nude. Blake is supposed to have said "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve." They had been reciting passage from Paradise Lost in their own Garden of Eden. Blake was also known to busy himself with erotic drawings depicting a variety of combinations and practices.

With the painter Henry Fuseli, a close friend and supporter, Blake shared a love for the erotic, the Gothic and the sublime, as well as an openness and interest in the Semitic races, something he had in common with his contemporary esotericists. Another occult artist who met Blake late in his life was John Varley, a practising astrologer and `zodiacal physiognomist'. With Varley Blake conducted a series of seances during which he saw and drew the visionary heads of the famous dead: Socrates, Mahomet, Voltaire and Richard Coeur de Lion were among Blake's astral sitters. (It was also then that he saw his eerie "Ghost of a Flea.") This was not Blake's first encounter with astrology and heads: in 1791 he had executed a series of engravings of heads based on Lavater's philosophy of physiognomy, selections from which were published in issues of The Conjuror and The Astrologer's Magazine.

Blake's other occult influences were literary. There was Swedenborg of course. But, as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell suggests, Blake came to reject central elements in Swedenborg's teachings. These were replaced by his deep study of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme. (It will be remembered that Saint-Martin was also a profound reader of Boehme.) A wandering scholar and physician, like Blake, the 15th century alchemist Paracelsus rejected orthodox beliefs and accepted doctrines, disregarding the experts and trusting in his own instincts and natural insights. In many ways, Paracelsus is the patron saint of the Romantic`s; his central belief is that the truth of the universe lies in the human imagination, an insight that inspired Blake's life long "mental fight" against materialism and repression. From Boehme Blake absorbed the vision of the Universal Man - something Swedenborg professed as well - and the belief that the whole of existence is engaged in a perpetual creative conflict between will and desire or, as later philosophers would put it, being and nothingness. Blake declared that "Without Contraries there is no Progression" and his work is full of immense striving, a sense of cosmic struggle and labour.

Blake was also attracted to the neoplatonic thought of Thomas Taylor. A bank clerk and mathematician, Taylor was obsessed with Plato, and taught himself Greek in order to read him and the other classical authors. Like Blake Taylor opposed Newton and materialist science, and it interesting to remark that neither Blake nor Taylor could have known of Newton's own obsessive pursuit of occult knowledge. Newton's volumes of Biblical exegesis and alchemical study did not come to light until the twentieth century. In lectures given at the house of Blake's fellow painter John Flaxman, Taylor introduced Blake to the notion of the prisca sapientia, the `primal wisdom' first brought to man through Orpheus, Hermes, Zoroaster, then later continued via Plato, Plotinus, Proclus and lamblichus. As in the work of the contemporary Neoplatonist John Michel, much of this wisdom is couched in mathematical and geometric forms, with which Blake had some difficulty. Taylor apparently once tried to teach maths to Blake, who was notoriously recalcitrant, and it is telling that Blake's style is all Old Testament and Gothic, and lacks the principle of geometric balance, order and restraint that we recognize as classical. Mention of John Michel brings us to Blake's fascination with ancient Britain, with the megaliths and "druid stones" that had recently come to popular attention through the work of William Stukeley. Like contemporary New Agers, Blake believed that the Ancients possessed a wisdom and a knowledge lost to us, a capacity for spiritual vision and life that was quickly fading in the triumphant rise of science. And like today, the London of his time was populated with a collection of societies interested in reviving the ancient practices and embodying the lost wisdom; Blake himself was at the centre of one, playing guru to a group of artists who called themselves `The Ancients', because of their fascination with the art of the golden past, a conduit to which they found in Blake's own work.

Notes

1 Robert Darnton Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) p. 34.

2 For the material on Swedenborg, Cagliostro and Falk, I am indebted to Joscelyn Godwin's brilliant study, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) pp. 94-97, and to Marsha Keith Schuchard's seminal essay "Yeats and the `Unknown Superiors': Swedenborg, Falk and Cagliostro", in Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies (New York: AMS Press, 1995).

3 Darnton pp. 70-71.

4 Mozart's interest and involvement in Enlightenment occultism was profound; in 1789, he attended a fancy dress party in Vienna, dressed as a Hindu philosopher, and handed out esoteric riddles in the form of sayings of Zoraster. On a more serious note, his music is suffused with Masonic themes, most notably in his initiatory, Illuminati-inspired opera, The Magic Flute as well as his Masonic Funeral Music. See my article "Concerto for Magic and Mysticism" in The Quest Vol. 90, #4 July-August 2002.

5 Quoted in Henri E Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (London: Fontana Press, 1994) p. 58.

6 The Baroness D'Oberkirch has this to say about him: "While not actually handsome, his face was the most remarkable I've ever seen. His eyes, above all. They were indescribable, with supernatural depths - all fire and yet all ice. It seemed to me that if any two artists sketched him, the two portraits, while having some slight resemblance, might yet well be totally dissimilar. Ambivalent, he at once attracted and repelled you; he frightened you and at the same time inspired you with insurmountable curiosity." Cagliostro, she said, "was possessed of a demonic power; he enthralled the mind, paralyzed the will."

Another aristocrat, the Baron de Gleichen, remarked that: "Cagliostro was small, but he had a very fine head which could have served as the model for the face of an inspired poet. It is true that his tone, his gestures and his manners were those of a charlatan, boastful, pretentious and arrogant, but ... his ordinary conversation was agreeable and instructive, his actions noble and charitable, and his healing treatments never unsuccessful and sometimes admirable: he never took a penny from his patients."

7 In his introduction to the Dedalus edition of Judith Landry's translation.

8 For a longer account of Weishaupt's illuminated predecessors, as well as a history of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, see my article "The Mystical Count" in Fortean Times #140 November 2000.

Romantic Occultism

`Romantic' and `Romanticism' are both highly ambiguous terms providing a confusing array of definitions and usages. In his important study Classic, Romantic and Modern (revised edition 1975), the cultural historian Jacques Barzun lists some ninety differing and contrasting uses of `romantic': most, since the collapse of Romanticism itself as an artistic and cultural movement, harbouring a pejorative meaning. To most people today notions of magic or the occult are highly `romantic', meaning they are unrealistic, mere fantasies, dreams and products of the imagination. The fact that for the popular mind the imagination is seen as the source of error and unreality shows how far our own modern consciousness is from the Romantic sensibility. With William Blake, Paracelsus and other hermetic thinkers, the Romantics saw the imagination as the central source of existence, the fundamental creative power, and the most god-like of human faculties. In many ways the Romantic Movement, begun by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Goethe in the last years of the 18th century, and carried on in different forms into the mid 19th century by European and American writers, poets and artists, was a defence of the imagination against the encroaching reductionism of science. In its battle against superstition, scientific thought, the great liberator of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, had unburdened the human mind of a number of chains. Yet in the process of `freeing' man from the falsehoods of religion and the constraints of political and social oppression, it had reduced his stature considerably. The rationalism and materialism that did away with religion left man little more than a mechanical toy, a puppet pushed and pulled by the impersonal forces of nature.

Although it was clearly a reaction against the-Enlightenment, Romanticism did share many themes with its predecessor. The rights of the individual, fought for by the Enlightenment, became, under the banner of Romanticism, a belief in individuality itself. Individuality, personality, subjectivity were positive goals, because it is only as a true individual that man could experience freedom, and not be merely the atomistic recipient of an abstract `right'. In a society moving, even with the best intentions, towards total rationalisation, where the unique human being would be reduced to his function in an harmoniously operating system, the Romantic individual recognized a dangerous levelling, and opposed his own uniqueness to uniformity and mass production. For the Romantic, this individuality expressed itself most powerfully in the artist, the unique `creative genius', although it often settled for the unusual and idiosyncratic. This focus on the uncommon led, as one historian put it, to "an apotheosis of the strange and bizarre, the eccentric and weird, the demoniacal and reckless."' We have already seen an obsession with the eerie and exotic in the oriental and Gothic craze of the late 18th century. These remained, but the Romantic added to them an exploration of the workings of the mind. It is no surprise that in his massive history of the unconscious, Henri F. Ellenberger includes a lengthy examination of Romantic poetry and literature.

If the Enlightenment occultists can be said to have worked, however unsuccessfully, toward a revolution in society, envisioning a world of religious tolerance and universal brotherhood, after the Terror and the rise of Napoleon, the Romantics shifted the scene of the battle. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake all shared in the glow of the Revolutionary dawn; yet when the bloodbath began they, and others, pulled away in disgust. It would be easy to see this as a retreat into quietism; but that in itself is a safe, reactionary response. The Romantic rejection of politics was not a retreat, but an advance into a more exciting, unknown and dangerous world: the mind. It was, as the critic Erich Heller calls it, "a journey into the interior." In one of his many aphorisms Novalis remarked "We dream of journeys through the universe - is not the universe in us? We do not know the depths of our mind. The mysterious path leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds, the past and future are in us or nowhere." More than a century later, the poet Rilke, a late Romantic and early modernist, would formulate the same theme more briefly: "Nowhere," he said, "will the world exist but within."

Many factors led to this development. The early roots were in the Protestant Reformation, which emphasized the individual's personal relationship to God. Another source was the rise of the modern novel. Samuel Richardson's Pamela, published in 1740, taught Europe how to daydream, thus preparing the way for the Romantics.' There had been earlier novels, like Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. But Richardson's prolonged account of an infinitely attenuated seduction prompted readers to plunge into an imaginative reconstruction of lives much like their own, only more interesting, and not tales of `long ago and far away.' One result of this opening of the inner worlds was an exploration of the odd quirks and characteristics of the unconscious and irrational, best exemplified in Coleridge and DeQuincey's fascination with dreams, somnambulism and other manifestations of the dark side of the mind. Another was a renewed interest in the occult tradition of the Counter-Enlightenment.

With the exception of Goethe, the Romantics can be seen as a great, though failed, experiment in the history of western consciousness. With them and their descendants, the union of artist and magician reaches its most clear expression. With them, however, also arises the dangers of a too total rejection of the mundane and everyday, in favour of magical realms and other worlds. It's not surprising that the poet and mage should be linked: both use words in order to produce a desired effect, and as magic moved more and more away from the medieval sense of controlling angels and demons, and closer to the kind of visionary powers we've seen in William Blake, the distinction between the two seemed one of mere terminology. By the time of Arthur Rimbaud and the early Symbolists, the distinction itself is pretty much lost, with the poet becoming the new high priest of the mystical religion of Art. Yet with the complete fusion of art and magic, the religion of Art begins its decline. The following section traces the Romantic notion of the poet as magician from its earliest inception in Germany, through perhaps the greatest occult fiction of 19th century English literature, to its late blossoming in the work of the French Romantics, who prepared the way for decadence and the fin de siecle.