A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (2 page)

It may seem a paradox to speak of an `Occult Enlightenment'. After all, the Enlightenment saw the triumph of reason and science over superstition and religious prejudice. But there is rarely a sudden and absolute disappearance of a practice or belief that has been a central part of human culture. This is especially true for magic, which has been around for millennia, and is still with us today. For the scientific account of things, the magical view had indeed been eclipsed. But for the popular mind, it was clearly present.

In the Paris of 1784, for example, alchemists, kabbalists, astrologers and other wonder workers could be found practically everywhere. Street venders sold engravings of the mysterious Comte de Saint-Germain. Booksellers hawked hefty volumes on the secret occult arts. Faith-healers and alchemical physicians did a brisk trade among the poorer classes. Newspapers ran accounts of extraordinary characters like Leon le Juif, who possessed a magical mirror, and M. Ruer, who had discovered the Philosopher's Stone. Talking dogs, a child who could see underground, men who walked on water, and reports of strange creatures like the monster with a man's face, lion's mane, bull's horns, snake's scales and bat's wings, peppered the daily press. Even eminent authorities like Restif de la Bretonne and Mirabeau accepted the idea that Frederick II had produced satyrs and centaurs via experiments with sodomy ... Magic had so firm a grip on the French popular consciousness that, according to the historian Robert Darnton, the authorities found alchemists, sorcerers and fortune tellers much better placed as spies and police informants than their usual source, the priests.' This fascination with occultism was not limited to the French, and a similar, if less extroverted appeal was exhibited across the channel, in England, as well as in other cities on the continent.

The popular press of Enlightenment France may strike us as not too dissimilar to today's tabloids; but there remained other, less suspect areas in which a more serious interest in occultism prospered. One, the central one with which this book is concerned, was literature. The other was politics. The following selection on Enlightenment Occultism aims to give some idea of how these currents came together and helped shape the culture of the time.

Swedenborg

Perhaps the greatest occult figure of the 18th century was Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), whose sober and methodical approach to the hidden mysteries set a standard too often ignored by later devotees. For most of his adult life a brilliant and prolific scientist, Swedenborg wrote an immense number of scientific studies on everything from metallurgy to the anatomy of the brain. He was also a statesman and assessor of Swedish mines, as well as an inventor of considerable talent: when given the task of transporting several ships inland across mountains, Swedenborg managed it successfully, well ahead of schedule. Many of his scientific insights were also well ahead of their time, and if for nothing else, he would be remembered for these today in his native Sweden. But in 1745, at the age of 57, something happened. A profound spiritual crisis involving weird prophetic dreams and shattering hypnagogic visions - including a visitation from Christ - shook Swedenborg's strictly scientific consciousness and launched him on a new career as a cartographer of strange inner landscapes and occult worlds. He spoke with the dead, journeyed to other planets, and most strikingly, visited heaven and hell, returning to write an immense book about what he saw there. He wrote other immense books as well, most of them explaining in a dry, scholarly style the true meaning of the Bible. Swedenborg's influence on western culture has been great; his readers have included Goethe, William Blake, Coleridge, Balzac, Baudelaire, Yeats, Strindberg and Arnold Schoenberg. What appealed to them was the air of sanity and common sense with which Swedenborg made even the most incredible pronouncements: that people on the moon speak from their stomachs, for example, or that Martians have two-tone faces. But in the same book he could speak of hell as a psychological condition, an idea which at the time seemed radical, but which today we can appreciate readily.

The standard account of Swedenborg's career has his plunge into other worlds happening out of the blue, but Swedenborg's initiation into the occult was not quite as precipitous as that. Before his voyages to heaven and hell, Swedenborg had devoted a considerable time to various occult practices: breath control, meditation, automatic writing, as well as visionary methods based on a form of sexual mysticism. Swedenborg's links to London were many, and during an early visit in 1710, he may have joined a Jacobin Masonic Lodge. During a later visit, in 1744, there is reason to believe Swedenborg became a member of the Moravians, a secret society led by the eccentric Count Zinzendorf. Zinzendorf propagated a mystical political doctrine whose aim was to bring about the millennium by uniting Christians and Jews through kabbalism - a theme common to many Enlightenment mystics. Swedenborg was in London, staying in Wellclose Square, when his mystical experience occurred, and he may at that time have received some kabbalistic tutoring from Samuel Jacob Chayyim Falk, mentor perhaps to another Enlightenment occultist, Cagliostro. Falk, who was born into a Polish community of the followers of the `false Messiah', Sabbatai Zevi, came to England in 1742, and set up shop - literally - on the old London Bridge, which in those days was lined with houses. Here he ran an alchemical laboratory, while maintaining from his home in the East End a secret occult school. Although Swedenborg later claimed not to have studied Kabbalah, he is known to have visited Jewish districts in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Prague and Rome, and evidence from his own writings suggests a familiarity with kabbalistic thought. Loving erotic union is part of the ritual worship of the Jewish mystical community, reflecting the original creative act of the Godhead, as well as the reunification of male and female energies. In his own work, Swedenborg emphasized that in heaven, angels continue to make love, and in the Latin version of his book Conjugal Love, Swedenborg spelled out in detail methods of breath control and meditation enabling a practitioner to maintain an erection and remain within an orgasmic trance for considerable periods.2

For the literary minded, one theme stands out from Swedenborg's massive edifice: the idea of `correspondences'. This will turn up in a host of different ways in the centuries after his death, both as a central axiom of magical thinking as well as a core theme of symbolist poetry. Swedenborg argued that the physical world is rooted in a higher, spiritual world, and that correspondences exist between the two. In grasping the links between the physical and the spiritual worlds, we come closer to understanding the divine design. Swedenborg's correspondences are perhaps the most thorough expression of the alchemical axiom `as above, so below'; they are also a powerful embodiment - literally - of the idea that man is a microcosm, containing within himself the entire cosmos. In an age moving inexorably toward the `trousered ape' of Darwinian thought, Swedenborg argued conversely that man is truly made in the image of the divine, and spoke of the ultimate reality as Universal Man, the Anthropos, a theme central to kabbalistic and hermetic teachings.

In the 19th century, Baudelaire took the idea of correspondences and infused it with elements of synesthesia and the notion of the unity of the arts. But for his own time and immediately after, Swedenborg was known mostly as a prophet of a new age. The Church of the New Jerusalem, of which William Blake was a member, was founded after Swedenborg's death and preached an apocalyptic doctrine that went well with the social and political ferment brewing across Europe.

Other central figures of the Occult Enlightenment, like Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), Giuseppe Balsamo (1743-1795) - better known as Cagliostro - and the Comte de Saint-Germain (1710-1784?) weren't writers. Most balanced accounts admit there was something of the charlatan in all three. Yet it is difficult to accept this as a complete assessment of their careers, and some idea of their life and times is essential in any survey of magic in the 18th century.

Mesmer

Mesmer, who considered himself a strict scientist, began life in Iznang, a village on the German shore of Lake Constance. He studied at a Jesuit Theological School, and later registered as a law student in Vienna. He then turned his attention to medicine and in 1766 earned his medical degree with a dissertation on the influence of the planets on human diseases - evidence' that ancient hermetic ideas were still respectable in the mid18th century. Little is known of Mesmer's youth, and there is some question as to how he supported himself during his university days. In his monumental Discovery of the Unconscious, Henri E•Ellenberger speculates that Mesmer may have been helped by secret societies. If so, this would not be unusual; the late 18th century was a time rife with secret societies and occult organizations. As the Baroness d' Oberkirch, an aristocratic socialite and intimate of mesmeric circles in Paris and Strasbourg, remarked: "Never, certainly, were Rosicrucians, alchemists, prophets, and everything related to them so numerous and so influential. Conversation turns almost entirely upon these matters; they fill everyone's thoughts, they strike everyone's imagination ... Looking around us, we see only sorcerers, initiates, necromancers and prophets.s'

Mesmer's financial problems were solved when he married a wealthy widow and set himself up in Vienna. He became a patron of the arts and his friends include Gluck, Haydn (both masons) and the Mozart family. Wolfgang Mozart - who as a Freemason and quite possibly a member of the Illuminati would be no stranger to secret societies - performed his first opera, Bastien and Bastienne, in Mesmer's private theatre.' Of Mesmer's estate, Leopold, Wolfgang's father, had this to say: "The garden is incomparable, with its avenues and statues, a theatre, a birdhouse, a dovecote and a belvedere on the summit. i5

Mesmer first hit upon his discovery while treating a Fraulein Oesterlin in 1773-1774. Fraulein Osterlin suffered from several severe.symptoms, and Mesmer noted the cycle of their appearance and withdrawal. Mesmer was aware that doctors in England had experimented with treating patients with magnets, and decided to do the same. He attached magnets to Fraulein Oesterlin's stomach and legs. She improved considerably. Mesmer came to believe that it was not the magnets alone that cured her, but his own animal magnetism. The age of mesmerism was born.

The basic tenets of mesmerism are that a subtle, physical fluid fills the universe and forms a connecting link between man, the earth and the stars; disease is the result of blockages of this fluid in the body; and techniques exist to enable these fluids to move more freely. The famous `mesmeric passes' were attempts by practitioners to help the magnetism in its flow. It's clear that while he didn't consider himself an occultist, many occultists do in fact adhere to some form of Mesmer's basic idea. A form of it is evident in much holistic healing. It is also clear that a very similar notion appeared in the 20th century in the form of Wilhelm Reich's `orgone energy'. In Reich's case, the relationship between an uninhibited, healthy flow of orgone energy and sex was unambiguous. In Mesmer's case, the animal aspect of his magnetism raised a considerable number of eyebrows.

Strangely, Mesmer's first official recognition came when he was asked by Prince-Elector Max Joseph of Bavaria to testify in an inquiry into the alleged cures of a faith healer, J j. Gassner, who performed what could only be called exorcisms. Mesmer agreed that Gassners' cures were authentic, but claimed spirits had nothing to do with it. Gassner merely succeeded through using his animal magnetism.

Like many others, Mesmer was drawn to Paris. He arrived in 1778, proclaiming his discovery. In the shadow of the Revolution, it was a strangely restless place. An unstable government, a catastrophic financial situation, widespread corruption, a weak king and a spendthrift queen, combined with reckless market speculation, gambling and loose morals to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and unease. A disastrous war with England led to a hysterical enthusiasm for the American War of Independence. It was a climate in which some sudden, radical shift was expected. Haughty, prickly and egotistical, Mesmer's domineering personality and courtly manners - not to mention his animal magnetism - helped him gain access to Parisian society. He settled in a private mansion in Place Vendome, and accounts of Mesmer's success in curing a variety of ills percolated through society. `Mesmeric baths' and a collective treatment, the banquet, became popular pastimes among the rich, ill-disposed and, often, hypochondriacal aristocracy. A mesmeric Society of Harmony was set up in 1783, adding to the already numerous secret societies; branches appeared throughout France, their aim to spread Mesmer's teachings. By 1784, his success had peaked. There were many cures, and Mesmer had several champions, yet he eventually fell foul of the scientific establishment, as much for his alleged quackery as for his success. Yet, it has to be admitted that the frequent dishabille of Mesmer's attractive female clients, the orgy-like atmosphere of a mesmeric salon, and the orgasmic-like `magnetic crisis' that signalled the start of a cure, did not produce the appearance of a sober, scientific pursuit. After a damning examination by the Academy of Sciences, including, famously, Benjamin Franklin, and his embarrassing failure to cure the blind pianist Maria-Theresia Paradis, Mesmer's fortunes took a downward turn. He was ridiculed in cartoons and satirical plays. Although he was always able to find clients, his star had waned, and he died, embittered and alone, in his native Austria at the age of 78. Although his name has become part of the language - we speak of being mesmerized - the credit for discovering what mesmerism actually was went to his one-time disciple, the Marquis de Puysegur, who, while magnetizing a patient discovered he had put him to sleep. The term hypnotism was coined half a century later by the Englishman James Braid.

Whatever Mesmer's own fortunes, mesmerism took on a life of its own. In the hands of disciples like Nicolas Bergasse and Jacques-Pierre Brissot it took on a radical social character, propagating a variant of Rousseau's noble savage, championing primitive nature over decadent society. In various other forms it combined with spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, freemasonry, and strains of Rosicrucianism to add an esoteric and occult flavour to the edgy political climate. Freemasonry especially, which spoke of spiritual egalitarianism and universal brotherhood, seemed to embody many of the ideals which would later erupt catastrophically in the French Revolution - hence the antipathy shown it by both the aristocracy and the Church. Freemasonry had enjoyed a revival in the earlier part of the century, and in a few decades had burgeoned into a tangled nest of competing and confusing secret societies, offering ever higher and more obscure grades - with some, like the Illuminati, following a mystical/political agenda. Along with competing lodges in England, Scotland and the continent, in 1777, it received an additional mystical jolt from perhaps the most flamboyant occultist of the lot, Cagliostro.