A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (14 page)

Whatever the case, it is undoubted that Zanoni is one of, if not the most important occult work of the 19th century. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the rise of the Terror, it is a veritable encyclopedia of occult science. Lytton provides lengthy disquisitions on Platonism, Pythagoras and the Neoplatonists; Kabbalah, herbalism, and the notion of correspondences; the gnostic hierarchy of planes, the astral world, elementals, secret societies; occult physiognomy, Mesmer, Cagliostro, and Jacques Cazotte. Ostensibly a melodrama along the lines of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), with a complex plot and several characters, Zanoni is an initiation allegory, depicting the responses of its protagonists to the challenges of the spiritual path. Zanoni himself is a kind of cross between the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Comte de Saint Germain, a mysteriously ever-youthful figure, possessing strange powers, who appears when needed and disappears in the blink of an eye. With his mentor Mejnour, a dark, somewhat sinister character- an early prototype of the `coming race' - he is one of the last remaining members of an ancient occult brotherhood, a society of adepts that predates the historical Rosicrucians by millennia; Zanoni, we are told, is at least five thousand years old. Tired of his eternal life, Zanoni wishes to sacrifice his immortality for the love of a woman, the beautiful Viola. Mejnour, who has jettisoned love in favour of the chill satisfactions of occult power, warns him of his wish. Viola, though desirable, is still only a woman, a mere mortal ignorant of the austere realities of the spirit. Glyndon, a promising artist caught between the commands of his soul and the attractions of success, compells Zanoni to present him to Mejnour as a candidate for initiation. The occult action is still thrilling, and the philosophical subtext remains powerful. Zanoni recognizes that the true magician is the artist, and through the novel he remonstrates with Glyndon, urging him to forgo the occult path and to perfect his art. Yet Glyndon, eager and overconfident, rejects Viola, whom he also loves, and gives himself over to Mejnour's charge ... And in the background the repellent Nicot, an opportunistic painter who sells his services to the highest bidder, plots the downfall of all that is superior to him: Lytton's take on the bloodthirsty Jacobins. The book begins with the narrator meeting Glyndon, now an old man, in the occult bookshop of John Denley in Covent Garden, an actual place, well known in early 19th century occult circles. A conversation on Rosicrucianism starts up, and later, after Glyndon's death, the narrator receives a strange manuscript, written in an unknown cipher3S. It is the story of the remarkable Zanoni. Dickens was later to adapt Lytton's plot and its climactic scene for his own Revolutionary work, The Tale of Two Cities.

Lytton is one of the few artist-magicians who avoided the pessimism and defeat that plagued other devotees of the other world. Perhaps his early encounters with `The Dweller of the Threshold' helped stabilize his personality. Being brought up in an aristocratic household must have helped as well, although during his time of scandal, Lytton faced poverty and calumny, so his life was not always roses. Unlike Nerval or Hoffmann, there is something very down-to-earth about Lytton, and his fascination with the occult never becomes obsessive; hence his attempts to understand it scientifically. In some ways he reminds us of Swedenborg, able to fulfil his responsibilities in this world, as well as in the other. The kernel of Zanoni was with Lytton for many years. Originally based on a dream, it appeared first in a short story "The Tale of Kosem Kosamin the Magician" (1832) and saw magazine publication in an incomplete form as Zicci (1838). The question remains of Lytton's own association with the Rosicrucians, or any other occult society. Although it has been frequently reported that Lytton was a member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, a kind of precursor to the more well known Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, both Joscelyn Godwin and Golden Dawn scholar Robert Gilbert argue persuasively that this was not the case. That a modern Rosicrucian group would want Lytton is certain. But like his assessment of the spiritualists, Lytton's own evaluation of the organizations he was aware of is not encouraging. In a letter to Hargrave Jennings, author of The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Their Mysteries (1870) - a book that tells us more about Jennings' obsession with phallic imagery than about the Rosicrucians - Lytton wrote that he possessed the "cipher sign of `the Initiate'," but that the current pretenders to Rosicrucianism could not understand it. He also added darkly that the Rosicrucian Brotherhood still existed, but not under a name recognized by outsiders, which suggests that he did know it, and hence was not an outsider.

There is no record of Lytton joining any Masonic lodges, although it's possible that during a stay in Frankfurt he was initiated into the Asiatic Brethren, a Masonic offshoot whose origins go back to the 18th century heyday of secret societies, and who were believed to have dissolved after the disastrous end of the Illuminati. Yet, in Zanoni itself, and in Lytton's other occult works, there is nothing that could not be discovered in existing works by a diligent student, and Lytton, we know, was an omnivorous reader. But this shouldn't persuade us that he was not a true adept. The esoteric message of Zanoni, wrapped within the cloak of Enlightenment occultism, that the true magician is the inspired artist, is an arcane wisdom on a par with any other.

Eliphas Levi

1875 was a year of occult coincidence or synchronicity, depending on your outlook. It was the year of Edward Alexander - better known as Aleister - Crowley's birth. It was the year Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott formed the Theosophical Society in New York City. And it was also the year that saw the death of Alphonse Louis Constant, author of impassioned, if ill-argued, socialist tracts and who, in the last years of his life, became better known to students of the occult arts as Eliphas Levi, the Professor of Transcendental Magic.

Born in 1810 in Paris, Constant's life as a magician was relatively short, beginning with the publication of Dogme de la Haute Magie in 1854. Prior to that he had earned a living in a number of ways, maintaining a precarious existence on the periphery of the Parisian literary world. His first incarnation, however, was as a priest. The son of a shoemaker, Constant grew up in humble surroundings near the Boulevard Saint Germain, not far from the legendary Cafe Procope, a favourite of Enlightenment luminaries like Denis Diderot. Like many drawn to the mystic path, young Alphonse was dreamy and solitary, and his quick mind and native intelligence impressed the parish priest, who helped to get Alphonse sent to the `little seminary' of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet, and from there to Saint Sulpice. Here he studied for the priesthood until he was eventually relieved of the cloth for "preaching doctrines contrary to the Church."

Exactly what those doctrines were is unclear, but it is very likely they had to do with sex. Alphonse's doubts about the priesthood came in the form of a young girl he tutored for her first Holy Communion. The girl's mother begged Constant to instruct her, saying that a man of his kindness couldn't refuse. In the girl's beautiful blue eyes, he discovered a need for human love. Suddenly the thought of a life of cold renunciation repelled him, and he abandoned the priesthood just before taking his vows. The Church and its doctrines, however, remained a powerful influence, and in his later books he is at pains to argue that there is no essential difference between Christian dogma and magical truth.

Defrocked and jobless, for a time Constant joined a touring theatrical group. A talented artist, he provided illustrations for a magazine called Beautiful Women of Paris and the Provinces, as well as for an edition of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. Later, his hand would depict less fetching shapes, like the darkly popular image of the Baphomet devil, by now reproduced in hundreds of works on Satanism. But Constant's most public persona was as the writer of fiery, if unconvincing, socialist tracts, filled with revolutionary rhetoric. What Constant may have lacked in dialectics he made up for in conviction; one of his works, The Gospel of Liberty (1839), earned him an eight month prison sentence. In the strange history of occult politics, Constant is one of the few occultists with a left bias.

Constant's first experience of occult politics happened through his friendship with Alphonse Esquiros, who was for a time one of Gerard de Nerval's literary acquaintances. Esquiros is forgotten today, but his weird novel The Magician may be due for a rediscovery: the plot includes a harem of dead courtesans, a bronze automaton, and an hermaphrodite who is in love with the moon. Esquiros invited Constant to visit a strange visionary, an aged prophet named Ganneau, who called himself `The Mapah'. Involved in a bizarre messianic royalist intrigue, Ganneau wore a woman's cloak while preaching to his disciples of the creation of the universe and the fall of man. White froth gathered around Ganneau's lips, while his wife, who sat motionless, claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. Ganneau himself said he was Louis XVII. Originally inclined to scoff, Constant was impressed with the weird scene in the Mapah's squalid attic.

Another impressed spectator was a young student named Sobrier who, under the Mapah's influence, believed he was "predestined to save the world by provoking the supreme crisis of universal revolution." A decade later he got a chance to test this theory. Calling for revolution, Sobrier, accompanied by two street Arabs, marched through the streets of Paris, carrying torches, beating time, and gathering a huge crowd. The mob surged through the streets and stopped before the Hotel des Capucines. What happened next.is uncertain, but according to Levi's account, in the confusion a shot was fired, and a riot broke out. The revolution of 1848 had begun.

Constant's personal life was unsatisfying and disappointing, and it was the breakup of his marriage that prompted the transformation into Eliphas Levi. The assistant headmistress of a school became his lover and bore him an illegitimate child. But Constant had become infatuated with one of her students; in 1846, Constant abandoned the headmistress and married seventeen year old Noemie Cadiot. The union was ill-starred; a daughter died at the age six, and soon after her death, Noemie deserted the grief-stricken Alphonse. That a split was imminent may have been obvious. In 1852, a year before Noemie left him, Constant became involved with the eccentric Polish emigre Hoene Wronski. A soldier in the Polish and Russian armies, Wronski studied at the Observatory at Marseilles between 1803 and 1810, where he developed a fantastically complex theory of the origin and structure of the universe. Wronksi was a colleague of the major astronomers and physicists of the day, but his reputation was shredded when he published the results of his findings. These were so outlandish that the Institute of Marseilles forced him to leave; for the rest of his life intellectual persecution and calumny dogged him. Nevertheless, Wronksi was committed to his vision of a universal and fundamental knowledge, and it was this self-belief that ignited the flame of occultism in Constant. Wronski's vision was essentially Pythagorean: that number was the key to the mysteries of the universe. Among other pursuits Wronski devoted himself to a perpetual motion machine, squaring the circle (a solution to which Levi himself would propose), and a `predicting machine' he called the `prognometre'.

Wronski called his synthesis of philosophy, science, politics and religion messianisme, and it was this vision of a unified knowledge that plunged Constant into the deep waters of the Kabbalah. The result was Dogme de la Haute Magie, translated into English as Transcendental Magic (1896) by A.E. Waite. It was while writing this that Constant's wife left him. Constant contributed to a leftist journal, the Revue Progressive, owned by the Marquis Montferrier. The Marquis became acquainted with the young Noemie and invited her to contribute as well. Sunk into his kabbalistic studies, Constant was unaware that Noemie had become Montferrier's mistress. By the time he did it was too late. Devastated, Constant endured a terrible initiation. He emerged from his trial a changed man. When the Dogme appeared on the Parisian bookstalls Alphonse Louis Constant was no more. In his place stood Eliphas Levi, master of the mystic arts.

Although Levi's writings are full of portentous references to the secret mysteries of the Talmud, the Zohar and other Hebrew texts, he is by most accounts an unreliable guide to the secrets of the Kabbalah, with scant, if any, knowledge of the original tongue. It would be churlish to fault him for adopting the Hebrew equivalent of his name, but readers drawn to his works are often disappointed with what they find. This is a mistake. One doesn't go to Levi for a scholarly interpretation of notoriously difficult texts. One reads him for the sheer fun and romance of his books. In 1801 Francis Barrett, a student of occultism, put together a book on ritual magic called The Magus. Barrett was a friend of the bookseller John Denley, whose Covent Garden bookshop appears in Lytton's Zanoni, and according to most accounts, The Magus is made up of transcriptions of several magical texts Barrett borrowed from Denley. There is no doubt that at least three quarters of The Magus is plagiarized. The information is accurate, if stolen, but Barrett's book did not start an occult revival because, for all its scholarly apparatus, it is a dull read. Levi is never dull. His pages may be riddled with howlers, but you want to turn them, and the reader invariably gets value for money. It was Levi's vision of a magical "doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed," which led Madame Blavatsky, among others, to speak of the existence of Asiatic supermen, presiding over the fate of mankind from their remote Himalayan temples: that, and Lytton's notion of a "coming race." Whatever the anthropological and psychological truth about magic, Levi nailed down what the romantic in his readers want magic to be: a mysterious teaching about the other world, shared through the centuries by people like themselves, who have had glimpses of that world and believe in it. Scholars like Gershom Scholem may produce books infinitely more reliable for the academic student of the Jewish mystical traditions. But Levi's The History of Magic will keep you up at night, something, at least for me, Scholem has never done.