A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (24 page)

Which is not, of course, to say his writing is without merit. The Gods of Pegana, Time and The Gods (1906), A Dreamer's Tales (1910), are beautiful, in a cloisonne sort of way. Yet like sweets or caviar, a small amount satisfies; more than this and one wants meatier stuff. What remains of Dunsany's enormous output are these early fantastic tales, whose atmosphere is inimitable, and whose influence on subsequent fantasists can hardly be exaggerated. Lovecraft, Tolkien, Eddison, and the other names making up the adult fantasy canon, would not have had a genre to work in, if Dunsany hadn't created it.

Like Wells, Dunsany wasn't an occultist, and his story, "The Hashish Man" (A Dreamer's Tales), seems to me a possible spoof on the practice of using hashish as a means of stimulating `astral travel', indulged in by his friend Yeats. Another magician who appreciate Dunsany's work was Aleister Crowley. On reading "The Hashish Man" the Great Beast wrote its author a fan letter, a rare occurrence indeed. Crowley's only criticism was that Dunsany had obviously not tried the drug himself. "I see you only know it (hashish) by hearsay, not by experience. You have not confused time and space as the true eater does.s15 With his letter Crowley enclosed some erotic magazines, perhaps hoping to open the young author's mind to other transgressive delights. Dunsany appreciated the praise, and replied that he never took anything stronger than tea. What he did with the magazines is unknown.

R.M. Bucke

In 1901 a book with the intriguing title Cosmic Consciousness appeared in Philadelphia in a limited edition of five hundred copies. Its author was Richard Maurice Bucke, a doctor and former medical superintendent of the asylum for the insane in London, Ontario. Although at first the book made little impression, interest in its remarkable claim - that humanity was slowly evolving into a higher level of consciousness - attracted attention, and soon its readers included the psychologist William James and the esoteric philosopher P.D. Ouspensky. More than half a century later it had acquired even greater popularity. By 1966 Cosmic Consciousness had gone through twenty-six printings and had become, along with Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings, part of the canon of works inspiring the burgeoning counterculture. Among others, Timothy Leary was one of its most fervent readers.

Bucke's background wasn't what you might expect for the head of an insane asylum, nor, for that matter, the author of a book arguing that the human race was moving into a higher state of consciousness. Born in 1837 to English parents who soon after emigrated to Canada, Bucke left home at seventeen after the death of his stepmother and spent the next four years involved in dozens of adventures. Crossing the border into the United States, he travelled across the country, working at a variety of jobs. He was a gardener in Ohio, a railway man in Cincinnati, and a deckhand on a Mississippi steamboat, before finally signing on as a driver on a wagon train heading across the Great Plains to the edge of the Mormon territory, today part of Nevada. The journey to Salt Lake took five months, and in the 1850s it was a dangerous business. For the last twelve hundred miles there were no white settlements and the Indians, resentful of the white man's incursion, were not particularly friendly. After this Bucke crossed the Rockies, was attacked by Shoshone Indians, and nearly starved, living for a time on flour and hot water. He then settled down as a gold miner. During an attempt to cross a mountain chain in winter, his companion died, and Bucke himself was about to follow when he was discovered by a mining party. Both of his feet were frozen, and all of one foot and part of the other had to be amputated. Bucke was twenty-one, and for the rest of his life, he would only occasionally be free from physical pain.

An inheritance paid for his medical training in Europe, and in 1864 he settled in Canada. By 1876 he had been appointed superintendent of an asylum for the insane in Hamilton, Ontario; the next year he moved to London. In 1888 he was elected president of the Psychological Section of the British Medical Association, and in 1890 was given a similar honour by the American Medico-Psychological Association. By the end of the century, Bucke was considered one of North America's foremost `alienists' (an early term for psychiatrist), and this standing among professionals helped his extraordinary ideas about human evolution gain a hearing they might otherwise have lacked.`

Bucke's tenacity and application give the impression of a highly practical, down-to-earth man, suggesting that the picture of him as a philosopher of a radical shift in human consciousness is somewhat incongruous, although the portrait of him in Cosmic Consciousness, with his flowing white beard and longish hair, does suggest the air of a prophet. Yet there was another side to Bucke. Growing up on a backwoods Canadian farm, he developed a sensitivity to nature and experienced a powerful curiosity about the basic mysteries of life. At about the age of ten he felt a strange ecstasy and longing about the notion of death. A voracious reader of poetry, in later life Bucke was known to have memorized whole volumes of it. Bucke's father, a Cambridge graduate, had himself mastered seven languages, and when he moved his young family from England to the wilds of Ontario he brought with him a library of some thousand volumes. Bucke grew up in an atmosphere of rugged hands-on experience softened by literary discussion; more than likely it was this that prepared him for his later work as a visionary and prophet.

The first sign of that vocation appeared in 1867 when a visitor to Bucke's home quoted some of the poetry of Walt Whitman. The effect was immediate; Bucke was bowled over and from that moment considered himself the poet's disciple. Ten years later Bucke met Whitman and became a central figure in his circle, even treating Whitman in his medical capacity, successfully, as the poet later claimed the doctor saved his life. One of the volumes of poetry Bucke was reported to know by heart was Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Five years after his introduction to Whitman's poetry, Bucke had the experience that set him on his life's work and contributed to the language a phrase most people use without the slightest idea of its origin. At thirty-five, during a visit to England, Bucke had his illumination. After an evening spent reading Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats, Browning, and, of course, Whitman, Bucke left his friends and settled into his hansom cab for the drive to his hotel. The night of poetry had left him calm, his mind full of the ideas and feelings stimulated by the evening's discussion. He felt himself in a state of "quiet, almost passive, enjoyment."

And then it happened:

All at once, without warning of any kind, he [Bucke wrote his account in the third person] found himself wrapped around, as it were, by a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant he thought of fire - some sudden conflagration in the great city. The next instant he knew that the light was within himself.

Directly after there came upon him a sense of exaltation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendour which ever since lightened his life. Upon his heart fell one drop of the Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of Heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain.

"The supreme occurrence of that night," Bucke said, was his "initiation in the new and higher order of ideas." Within a few seconds Bucke learned more than "in previous months or years of study," as well as "much that no study could ever have taught.""

Nowadays Bucke's experience would be chalked up to the brain's reported "God spot" or, less generously, to temporal lobe epilepsy.'H For Bucke it was the first glimpse of the future of humanity.

Having experienced the reality of this new consciousness, Bucke looked for other examples of it. There were, he believed, at least fourteen cases of it, ranging from ancient times to the present. Buddha, Jesus, St. Paul, Plotinus, Jacob Boehme, William Blake, and, of course, Walt Whitman are all clear examples of full and complete cosmic consciousness. Others on this list include Balzac, while Emanuel Swedenborg is classed with the "Lesser, Imperfect and Doubtful Instances", which may strike some of us as odd. Some of Bucke's other choices also seem questionable, as do some of his remarks about primitive and backward races, and his assumption that the Aryans form a recognized higher type. One example of cosmic consciousness that Bucke was certain of was the Edwardian writer, traveller and vegetarian, Edward Carpenter. Influential in his own time but little read today, Carpenter is a perfect example of the blend of progressive ideas, evolutionary vision, mystical doctrines, and radical lifestyle that characterized the pre-World War I New Age. The author of Whitmanesque verse - Bucke points to his long poem Towards Democracy as a work in which "the Cosmic Sense speaks" - Carpenter was homosexual and an outspoken advocate of what we would call gay rights (Carpenter's own term was "homogenic love"). It's unclear how much Bucke knew or understood of this side of Carpenter's life. Carpenter himself is alleged to have had sexual relations with Whitman and, toward the end of his life, with the astrologer Gavin Arthur, later well known in the 1960s as the popularizer of the Age of Aquarius.'9 In From Adam's Peak to Elephanta, an account of his travels in India, Carpenter gives an extended description of "consciousness without thought," and relates it to several themes that will be picked up later by Ouspensky, such as the fourth dimension. Unusual states of consciousness weren't the only things Carpenter was known for: he also has the distinction of being the first man in England to popularize sandals.

Bucke's optimism about the evolution of consciousness was parallelled by an equal assurance in our material perfection. The 20th century would, he believed, see human life transformed by the conquest of the air - just getting off the ground at Kitty Hawk - and the triumph of socialism. "The immediate future of our race," he wrote, "is indescribably hopeful. ,211 It may have been a blessing for Bucke that he was not around to see the Old World collapse less than two decades later. In February 1902, after an evening discussing the theory that Francis Bacon was the real author of the Shakespeare plays - Bucke firmly believed he was - he slipped on some ice while gazing at the night sky from his veranda. He fell, hitting his head violently against a pillar, and died almost immediately.

PD. Ouspensky

Although to most readers Peter Demian Ouspensky is known, if at all, as the most articulate disciple of the enigmatic G.I. Gurdjieff, he was in his own right a thinker of considerable merit, and it is possible that his meeting with that remarkable man was perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to him21. After breaking with Gurdjieff in 1924, Ouspensky set himself up in London as a teacher of Gurdjieff's ideas, disseminating them in a dry, professorial manner to the likes of Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, T.S. Eliot and Algernon Blackwood.22 The situation may seem strange; but as Ouspensky himself points out in his posthumously published In Search of the Miraculous (1949), an account of his early years with Gurdjieff, by 1917 - two years after their initial meeting in a seedy Moscow cafe - he had begun to separate the man Gurdjieff from his teaching, finding fault with the former, but maintaining the importance of the later. Yet, in 1947, just months before his death, brought on by heavy drinking, Ouspensky held a series of talks that have gone down as legendary in the history of "the work," the name given to Gurdjiefl's peculiar system of "harmonious development." Returning to a post-war London after sitting out the Blitz in the US, Ouspensky shocked his audience by repudiating the system he had devoted more than twenty-five years to propagating. All of the retinue of "work" ideas: "selfremembering," "sleep," our different "I's," the fact that we are all "machines," were denied by the aged and ailing master. Ouspensky rejected the teaching he had given his life to, and advised his listeners to think for themselves. The effect was electrifying. After his death, around which hovered strange circumstances and paranormal events, many of his students, rudderless, eventually found their way to Gurdjieff, the very man that Ouspensky had warned them against and over whom, no doubt, he had lost much sleep. To this day the relationship between the two is the stuff of myth and psychodrama, with Ouspensky cast as a treacherous Judas, stealing his guru's teaching, and Gurdjieff playing the black magician, power mad and insatiable, intent on dominating all around him.

That Ouspensky made such a profound volte face was not unusual for him. He is, if not unique, certainly one of the most self-critical and painfully honest, as well as readable, writers on esotericism. Having once adopted Gurdjiefl's austere and unromantic ideas, Ouspensky looked back on his earlier self with some disparagement, calling his Tertium Organum, the book that made his reputation, a weakness. Yet it is this book, more than any other, that communicates the best in Ouspensky: his vital, questing mind and fiery enthusiasm. All of his other works share a certain pessimism, perhaps most obvious in the theme of his single novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1915-1949), which is a working of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence, the idea that we live our lives over and over again. As a child in Moscow, where he was born in 1878, Ouspensky early on had powerful experiences of dejd vu, that strange feeling that "I have been here before." Today, most clinical psychologists root this in crossed wires in the brain, but Ouspensky would reject such an explanation. To him there was clearly something wrong with our ideas about time.

Like Nietzsche, Ouspensky's thought swung between the grim vision of an infinite series of himself, eternally making the same mistakes, and the profoundly optimistic counterweight of the superman which, in Ouspensky's case, meant a being endowed with a large helping of Bucke's cosmic consciousness. That Ouspensky had at least a taste of this is clear from his remarkable essay "Experimental Mysticism." Following William James, Ouspensky engaged in a series of experiments with nitrous oxide. In his little room in St. Petersburg, he inhaled the gas, and more than likely experimented with hashish as well, finding himself thrown into a strange world of living hieroglyphs and weird, inexplicable phenomena. It was his inability to bring back anything concrete from these experiences that led Ouspensky on his quest to find a teaching that could somehow show him the way.