A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (31 page)

43 Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), the son of an eminent historian who was also a priest, abandoned his early materialist philosophy after he underwent the first in a series of mystical experiences involving a vision of the Divine Sophia. In 1872 in the second-class carriage of the Moscow-Kharkov train Soloviev saw the young girl who sat across from him become a living embodiment of the divine Woman. Prompted by this, Soloviev abandoned his scientific studies at Moscow University and enrolled at the Ecclesiastical Academy. In 1874 he published a book entitled The Crisis of Western Philosophy which argued that western philosophy arrived through rational knowledge at the same truths affirmed by spiritual contemplation. He then embarked on a study of Swedenborg. In 1874, during a sabbatical year, he studied Hindu, Gnostic and medieval texts at the British Museum, where he had the second vision of Sophia. Inspired by his experience, Soloviev promptly set off on a journey to Egypt, where he attracted some attention by wearing his long black overcoat and top hat in the summer heat. During a visit to Bedouins in the Suez desert - he believed they possessed certain secret kabbalistic teachings - he was abandoned and spent the night alone. The smell of roses awoke him in the morning, and he had the third visitation of Sophia. Returning to Russia he preached a doctrine of `integral life' and received some support from Dostoyevsky. In the last years of his life he was obsessed with apocalyptic visions and wrote a book War, Progress and the End of History and a short story "The Antichrist."

44 "... he had had occasion to develop a paradoxical theory about the necessity of destroying culture, because the period of obsolete humanism was over and cultural history now stood before us like weathered marl; a period of healthy brutishness was beginning, pushing forth out of the depths of the people (the hooliganism, the violence of the Apaches ...) All the phenomena of contemporary reality were divided by him into two categories; the symptoms of an already obsolete culture and the signs of a healthy barbarism ... Christianity is obsolete: in Satanism there is a crude fetish worship, that is, a healthy barbarism ..." Andrei Bely Petersburg (London: Penguin Books, 1995) translated by David McDuff, p. 399.

45 Work began on the Goetheanum in 1913 and was completed in 1920. On New Year's Eve 1922 the building, made entirely of wood and featuring immense twin cupolas, burnt to the ground; the cause of the blaze is still unknown, but there have been persistent rumors that it was begun by proto-Nazi groups in an act of occult warfare. In 1928, three years after Steiner's death, the second Goetheanum, made of reinforced concrete, was opened. Also designed by Steiner, it still stands today and remains the centre of the anthroposophical movement.

46 Quoted in David McDuff's introduction to his translation of Petersburg p. xix.

47 Petersburg p. xix.

48 Ibid. p.179.

49 Berdyaev pp. 195-196.

50 Asya Turgenev, a talented artist, remained devoted to Steiner, and her work on the glass engravings for the windows of the second Goetheanum can be seen in Dornach today.

The Modernist Occultist

"In all the poets of the modern tradition, poetry is a system of symbols and analogies parallel to that of the hermetic sciences."' Without doubt true of poetry, this remark by Octavio Paz could easily be said of many other art forms in the modern tradition as well. Among novelists, painters and musicians, in a variety of ways, art in the modern period took on an arcane and esoteric character leading to a profound chasm between an increasingly difficult avant garde and an increasingly baffled general public.' The reasons for this are diverse. For literature, the growth in literacy and the audience for popular entertainment it created certainly played a part. With fiction and other literary forms falling prey to commercial interests and the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator, serious writers sought out new and unavoidably difficult means of communicating their insights. With the inflation of their currency - language - this led to a search for a means of expression not yet appropriated by the burgeoning print medium. Newspapers, popular fiction and magazines churned out words by the million, and the worn coins of everyday speech were less and less able to communicate anything more than the most commonplace meanings. The reaction to this among writers and poets ranged from the protracted syntax of Proust or Hermann Broch, to the brusque onomatopoeia of Marinetti or Hugo Ball, to zaum, the meaningless "language of the future" spoken by Velimir Khlebnikov and other members of the Russian avant garde. The parallels in painting and music are likewise clear. To give two examples, Wassily Kandinsky's abstract canvases moved away from an art that represented an external world no longer able to reflect a spiritual reality, and toward the immediate communication of an inner one; while at the same time his friend Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music dismantled the structure of a played out western harmony and, like Kandinsky's paintings, presented a new and startling avenue to the artist's own troubled psyche.

This dichotomy between an increasingly difficult art and a growing middle-brow demand for product is an outcome of the cul-de-sac reached via the route of Symbolism. As the external world became little more than a symbol of a higher, spiritual plane, and the artist the interpreter and high priest of this hidden reality, the means of communication required a greater and greater purity, a medium uncluttered with the gross manifestations of the physical world. This eventually led, as mentioned earlier, to Mallarme's blank page and Malevich's white canvases. It also led to artists seeking out new mythologies to house the meaning and significance no longer contained by the overused emblems of the past. In his Lectures on Aesthetics the philosopher Hegel argued that art would eventually dwindle to something like decoration and entertainment. Hegel argued that as Geist, the world-spirit, continued to evolve, the brief but glorious marriage between the inner and outer worlds exemplified by the art works of classical Greece would necessarily split asunder. Gothic art, with the soaring cathedral spire as its most paradigmatic symbol, led in Hegel's own time to Romanticism and the aesthetics of the strange and bizarre. By the 20th century, Romanticism had been played out and when artists did not retreat into silence, they adopted other methods of holding together the chaos of the modern era.'

Novelists like James Joyce took the framework of classical mythology and superimposed it on the banal experiences of a modern day everyman. The ironic double-exposure of Ulysses, however, proved a dead end and in Finnegan's Wake Joyce produced an extended full-stop to the experimental novel. Starting with an attempt to perceive four-dimensionally, cubism later turned, in the work of Kurt Schwitters, to no longer painting cigarette packs, but fixing them directly to the canvas. This eventually led to Andy Warhol and the notorious Brillo box by way of Duchamp's urinal. Yet other mythologies were also available, and one in particular found many adherents: the occult. As a case in point, two of the artists mentioned above, Kandinsky and Schoenberg, were both deep readers in different schools of occultism. Kandinsky's theories on colour and form presented in his essay On the Spiritual in Art were profoundly influenced by the ideas of theosophy and Rudolf Steiner. And in his unfinished oratorio Jacob's Ladder, Schoenberg, a reader of Swedenborg by way of Balzac's Seraphita, depicts Heaven as seen by Swedenborgian angels who, no matter which way they turn, always face God.' "Whether right, left, forward or backward, up or down - one has to go on without asking what lies before or behind us," Schoenberg's angel Gabriel remarks.

To do justice to all the artists and writers in the 20th century who adopted various forms of occultism as either a framework for their creativity or, in many cases, an actual world-view, would require a separate book. In painting a very brief run through would give us, along with Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian,Joseph Beuys, and Nicholas Roerich; and in music, along with Schoenberg, Alexandre Scriabin, Gustav Holst, Olivier Messiaen, John Cage 5 and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In literature, with which we are principally concerned, the list would include Yeats, Thomas Mann, Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Ezra Pound, John Cowper Powys, William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Hart Crane, Lawrence Durrell, Jorge Louis Borges, David Lindsay ", Stefan George, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jiinger, Andre Breton, J.B. Priestley, Walter Benjamin, Christian Morgenstern, John Fowles, Saul Bellow, lain Sinclair, Robert Irwin, Colin Wilson and several others!

What I propose to do in the remaining section is present a selection of modern authors who either practised a form of occult or esoteric discipline, possessed to some degree what we would call occult powers, or developed an occult or mystical philosophy or world-view to offset the increasingly reductive scientific orthodoxy of the modern era. Personal preference and space has, of course, had a hand in my selection, but I've also tried to choose writers who are not as well known as some others associated with the occult: Yeats, for example, or, in more recent times, Eliot and Pound.' That The Waste Land includes references to Madame Blavatsky ("Madame Sosostris"), the Tarot, the Grail legend, Hesse's essay on "Russian Man" and elements of Hinduism is well known. What is not as well known is that Eliot attended P.D. Ouspensky's early London talks and that later poems, like the Four Quartets, contain references to time that could well have served as basic themes in Ouspensky's lectures. "In my end is my beginning," captures Ouspensky's ideas on eternal recurrence in a single sentence. Although Eliot later spurned his early fascination with the occult, finding a haven in tradition and the Church of England, his example shows that, far from an outmoded form of superstition, the occult was very modern indeed.

All of the writers I've chosen wrote poetry as well as fiction, though some were better known for one form rather than another.

Fernando Pessoa

Until relatively recently, the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was little known, but in the last few years he's been rediscovered by several critics, mostly on the strength of various translations of his Livro do Desassossego or Book of Disquiet, a collection of unfinished angst-ridden texts found in a trunk after Pessoa's death. The fragmentary nature of these writings - jotted on scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, the reverse side of other manuscripts and other odd places - makes Pessoa a prime postmodern figure, and the trunk, whose contents are still being catalogued (it contained some 25,000 items) has taken on the same mythical character as the valise Walter Benjamin carried on his fateful escape from Vichy France.`' Like Benjamin, in many ways Pessoa's posthumous celebrity is founded as much upon his life as upon his work. In Benjamin's case, his life embodies the myth of the Jewish intellectual on the run from the Nazis. In Pessoa's the story is less political; not only does he embody the disjointed, fractured postmodern ethos in his work, but in his very psyche.

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and aside from his childhood and adolescence spent in Durban, South Africa, upon his return to Lisbon in 1905, he never left the city again. After his father died from tuberculosis when Fernando was five his mother soon remarried, and her husband received a post at Durban as the Portuguese consul. Educated at an English high school, Pessoa proved a precocious child and brilliant student, and his early schooling instilled a lifelong love for England and English literature. In later years he took to behaving and dressing with "British restraint", and The Pickwick Papers was, he said, his constant companion. His command of English (also French) was impeccable, if eccentric, and his first published book was a collection of his English poems. As his translator John Griffin remarks, these are of little interest poetically and they received courteous but unenthusiastic reviews from The Times and Glasgow Herald. Although he published articles and poems in several literary magazines, aside from his English efforts, the only other book of Pessoa's to be published in his lifetime would appear in 1934, the year before he died. Mensagem (Message) is an extended esoteric poem arguing for the return of Dom Sebastiao, Portugal's King Arthur, and for Portugal's pre-eminence in a coming Fifth Empire of the spirit. Espousing Pessoa's peculiarly mystical patriotism, the book received a consolation prize in a national competition. This was a late and slightly backhanded recognition of Pessoa's genius, something that, as often happens, would only become common knowledge after the poet's death. Supporting himself as a freelance translator of English and French correspondence for several commercial firms, after a lonely, solitary life, spent in relatives' houses or in rented rooms, Pessoa, who more than likely remained a virgin, died in 1935 from acute hepatitis brought on by heavy drinking.

Pessoa's poetry is aptly described as the central work of Portuguese modernism, and for this alone he deserves his belated recognition. But Pessoa wrote more than poems. His legendary trunk contained a wealth of miscellaneous writings on philosophy, sociology, history, literary criticism, as well as short stories, plays, treatises on astrology and a variety of auto biographical reflections. But in addition to the usual material produced by a writer, Pessoa is unique in that he also wrote as other writers and poets. These he called heteronyms, coining the term to distinguish it from the common pseudonym. Pessoa was not simply writing poems and prose under a different name: the various heteronyms he created were individuals with their own history, biography, personal characteristics and unmistakable literary style.

For a solitary individual, living alone in small rooms, to occasionally talk to himself seems not unusual. In Pessoa's case, what began as a childhood game of having conversations with imaginary characters1' - "nonexistent acquaintances," he called them - became in later years an obsession with depersonalization and the fracturing of the self. Indeed, Pessoa's grip on his own self was so tenuous that at one point he took to writing his old teachers and schoolmates in Durban, posing as the psychiatrist Faustino Antunes, asking for their opinion on the mental state of his patient, Fernando Pessoa who, depending on the letter, had either committed suicide or was under restraint at an asylum. Having no idea who he was, Pessoa hoped to gain some insight from those who knew him.