A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (4 page)

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin was born in Amboise, in the province of Touraine on 18 January 1743. His parents were pious Catholics, and although his mother died a few days after his birth, his stepmother seems to have taken her place admirably, and Saint-Martin remained devoted to her throughout his life. A frail, delicate child - he once remarked that a deficiency in his astral parts accounted for his ill-health - a book on self-knowledge that he read in his youth set him on the mystic path. Reading it he embarked on a life-long detachment from the world, and took his first steps on a voyage into the interior. He studied at the College of Pontlevoi, his father having in mind for him a career in law. Although SaintMartin completed his studies, he felt no attraction to the bar, and convinced his father to allow him to enter military life. An influential relative secured a lieutenant's commission in the regiment of Foix. Army life may seem an unusual choice for a mystic, particularly a fragile one, but in 1766, after the Seven Years War and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe was at peace, and would remain so for some time, and Saint-Martin found ample time to pursue his studies in philosophy and religion.

It was in 1767, while stationed at Bordeaux, that he met the man who would change his life. Don Martines de Pasqually de la Tour - otherwise known as Martinez Pasquales - was a follower of Swedenborg, a Rosicrucian, and the head of an order of Masonic illuminism known as the Elect Cohens - Cohen being Hebrew for priest. Pasqually's background is vague: Spanish or Portuguese, it is uncertain if he was a Christian or a Jew He was, however, a serious occultist, and his Order of the Elect Cohens practised a variant of ceremonial magic that involved number mysticism, kabbalism and a form of theurgy, the calling down or invoking of god forms. His meeting with Pasqually had the effect on Saint-Martin that freemasonry had on Cagliostro: he had found his life's calling. In 1771 he left the military and devoted the rest of his life to preaching first Pasqually's occult doctrine, and then his own form of theosophical wisdom. For the next few years, Saint-Martin travelled across France, visiting Paris, Lyons and Bordeaux; during this time he communicated with other Martinists, including the novelist Jacques Cazotte.

In 1772 Pasqually left France for St. Domingo, where, in 1774, he died in Port-au-Prince. The Martinists were left adrift, Pasqually failing to initiate them into the final reaches of their hierarchy. Rather than despair, Saint-Martin wrote the first of a number of books, Of Errors and of Truth, and in his social life he tried to pass on the truths of mysticism, while revealing the errors of the atheistic philosophy propagated by Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. These were the years of Cagliostro and Mesmer, of Jean Baptiste Willermoz and Lavater.

Saint-Martin moved among the aristocracy, and became involved with mesmeric circles in Lyons and Paris. The Lyons mesmerists were especially rich in occult influences, having in their midst Rosicrucians, Swedenborgians, alchemists and kabbalists. Willermoz, Saint-Martin's close friend, a member of practically every secret society of the time, believed he received secret messages from God, through the medium of mesmeric somnambulists. Saint-Martin helped Willermoz decode these messages, and he was also helpful to Mesmer's important disciple, Puysegur. Saint-Martin joined the Parisian Society of Harmony in 1784, but felt that Mesmer's emphasis on the physical action of his fluids strayed dangerously close to materialism, and that this could attract the attention of unwanted astral spirits.

Saint-Martin decided that the anxious climate of the time suggested caution. During his lifetime he published his works under the pseudonym of `the Unknown Philosopher.' His biographer and interpreter A.E. Waite remarks that his personal safety was a consideration: this was, after all, the time of the Great Terror. But Saint-Martin's membership of secret societies was also a reason. The ruse was pointless, and the identity of the Unknown Philosopher was soon common knowledge. Like other occult seekers, Saint-Martin travelled abroad, visiting Italy, Russia, Strasbourg and London, where he met William Law and the astronomer Herschel. August 10 1792 found him in Paris, where "the streets near the house I was in were a field of battle; the house itself a hospital where the wounded were brought." He had already been made penniless by the Revolution and, in 1794, when an edict exiled the nobility from Paris, he returned to - his birth place, Amboise. His time there was spent trying to wed his political concerns with his spiritual insights.

Saint-Martin's last years were spent in the study of Jacob Boehme, the `Teutonic Theosopher' whose ideas influenced people like William Blake and Hegel. A 17th century cobbler, Boehme had a mystical experience staring at the sunlight reflected on a pewter dish. He then claimed to see the 'signature' of things and went on to write weighty tomes in an. obscure alchemical language. Dark and profound, SaintMartin worked at unifying Boehme's vision with his earlier Martinist doctrines. He seemed to have sensed that his last days were upon him, and writing to the end, after a brief fit of apoplexy, he died on 13 October 1803. Followers of his ideas came to be called Martinists as well, causing some confusion among occult historians.

Saint-Martin's central theme is that mankind's mission is to `repair' the world. A similar doctrine appears in the Kabbalah, in which creation is the result of an overflowing of the sephiroth of the Tree of Life. Our job is to somehow clear up the mess. Walter Benjamin, an unorthodox kabbalist with Marxist leanings, saw history as an unending series of accidents, rather like an infinite pile-up on some eternal motorway. Saint-Martin would have agreed, but would not have shared Benjamin's confidence in Marxist ideology; rather he counted on our capacity to make contact with our pre-lapsarian source. Tolstoy, August Strindberg and O.V. Milosz were among his readers. Perhaps A.E. Waite provides the best description of the Unknown Philosopher:

The Unknown Philosopher ... was a man of many friends, of strong attachments ... Saint-Martin is almost the only mystic who was also in his way a politician, with a scheme for the reconstruction of society; an amateur in music; an apprentice in poetry; a connoisseur in belles lettres; a critic of his contemporaries; an observer of his times; a physician of souls truly, but in that capacity with his finger always on the pulse of the world.

Karl Von Eckharthausen

Karl Von Eckharthausen, who, with Saint-Martin and Kirchberger, Baron de Liebistorf, carried on one of the most detailed and enlightening occult correspondences of the time, is little known or read today. Aside from students of European mysticism and Christian theosophy, the group among whom Eckharthausen receives passing interest are the readers of the notorious Aleister Crowley, the most celebrated - if that is the correct word - magician of the 20th century. It was in fact Eckharthausen's book The Cloud upon the Sanctuary that set Crowley off on his colourful, if morally ambiguous career. Crowley first came across the notion of a hidden community of spiritual adepts from reading A.E. Waite's Book of Black Magic and Pacts; in it, Waite refers obscurely to such a secret society. Crowley wrote to Waite, asking for more information. Waite suggested reading Eckharthausen. Crowley did. In his `autohagiography', The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast remarks that:

The Cloud upon the Sanctuary told me of a secret community of saints in possession of every spiritual grace, of the keys to the treasure of nature, and of moral emancipation such that there was no intolerance or unkindness ... their one passion was to bring mankind into the sphere of their own sublimity ... I was absorbed in The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, reading it again and again, without being put off by the pharisaical, priggish and pithe- cantropoid notes of its translator ...

What Eckharthausen himself might have thought of this endorsement is unknown, but one assumes he wouldn't have cherished the idea that as `satanic' a figure as Crowley was inspired by his devotional tract. What attracted Crowley was the idea of a secret, hidden Church, a congregation of the elect, an inner circle of adepts, devoted to the noble cause of truth. The idea appealed to Crowley's taste for mysteries, as well as his own penchant for elitism, a sensibility shared by many occultists. Crowley himself would soon join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; kicked out of that, he became head of another occult organization, the O.T.O., or Order Templi Orientis, then started one of his own, the Argentinum Astrum, or Silver Star. Crowley was not the only occult thinker moved by such a notion. Madame Blavatsky spoke of the Hidden Masters, secure in their Himalayan stronghold, steering man in his spiritual evolution. Ever since the Rosicrucians in the 17th century, the notion of some hidden brotherhood, devoted to mankind's spiritual growth, has been a key theme of occultist thought. In the secret society ridden 18th century, Eckharthausen's tract hit a very responsive nerve. And like the Rosicrucian myth, whether such a hidden brotherhood really existed or not was unimportant: people interested in its existence acted as if it did.

Eckharthausen's brotherhood, however, differed from the Rosicrucians in one respect. Where the authors of the Fama Fraternitas and other Rosicrucian tracts spoke of their brotherhood as an actual body, made up of definite members, as any other kind of society would be, Eckharthausen makes clear that his hidden Church is not some inner circle of, say, the exterior Catholic Church, or some society like the Freemasons. It is much more a community of like-minded souls, an idea found in Swedenborg and in 20th century occultists like RD. Ouspensky, who, in his spiritual travels, came upon a variety of individuals bearing the marks of a dawning cosmic consciousness. Like Ouspensky, for Eckharthausen, this shift in consciousness from the mundane to the mystical is both the aim of his spiritual elect, acid the sign of membership within it.

Karl Von Eckharthausen was born on 28 June 1752 at the Castle of Haimbhausen in Bavaria. Like Saint-Martin, he lost his mother at birth, but Eckharthausen's appearance in the world was a source of double sorrow. He was an illegitimate child, his mother the daughter of the overseer of the estate. His father, the count, was nevertheless very affectionate, treated him well, and gave him a fine upbringing and education. But his double loss of mother and legitimacy instilled in Karl a lingering melancholy, and, again like Saint-Martin, he early on developed a retiring attitude to the world, and a profound sense of detachment from it.

Eckharthausen studied at Munich, then went to Ingoldstadt to pursue philosophy and law. As we will see, Ingoldstadt was the base for Adam Weishaupt's notorious Masonic splinter group, the Illuminati. Weishaupt was a professor of canonical law at the university, and one wonders if Eckharthausen came into contact with Weishaupt or was, indeed, one of his students. The Illuminati were a kind of secret society behind the secret societies, and it is not too far-fetched to see in Eckharthausen's hidden Church, a more spiritual version of Weishaupt's invisible brotherhood. Eckharthausen's concerns were more religious than political, and although he speaks of a "theocratic republic," which will one day be, "Regent Mother of the whole world," Weishaupt's Enlightenment rationalism would have repelled Eckharthausen's mystical temperament.

Karl's father procured for him the title of Aulic Councillor, and in 1780 he became censor at the Library of Munich - a perhaps enviable position for a writer - then in 1784, Keeper of the Archives of the Electoral House. According to A.E. Waite, Eckharthausen produced sixty-nine works, turning his hand to drama, politics, religion, history, art criticism, as well as his mystical and occult books. Few of these, if any, are read today, and in his own lifetime, he was most famous for a handbook of Catholic prayers entitled God is Purest Love. This went into some sixty editions in Germany and was translated into several European languages, as well as Church Latin. His influence on the mystical currents of his time was considerable. Saint-Martin remarked that he was more interested in Eckharthausen than he could express; among other things, the two shared a profound interest in number mysticism, a practice that occupied Saint-Martin in his early days with Martines de Pasqually, and to which he returned in the last decade of his life. And their mutual correspondent, Baron Kirchberger, writing to Saint-Martin, spoke of Eckharthausen as "a man of immense reading and wonderful fertility ... an extraordinary personage." It was to Kirchberger's great regret that a proposed meeting at the Swiss frontier had to be called off on account of the Councillor's health. At their meeting Kirchberger hoped to receive a communication of the Lost Word from Eckharthausen, who, we assume, had found it. Any information on what may have passed between them is, like the word itself, lost. Amiable, charitable, highly cultured and devout, Eckharthausen married three times, had several children, and died, after a painful illness, on 13 May 1813.

William Beckford

Along with mystical politics and the regeneration of the world, occultism during the Enlightenment also took on a less idealistic character and appeared in ways more concerned with aesthetics and the search for exotic and sensational forms of entertainment than with revelation. One such form was the Gothic novel. Supernatural entities, haunted castles, secret societies and evil sorcerers were the stock in trade of pioneers like Walpole and of later contributors like Radcliffe and Lewis. One early and singularly brilliant work in the genre that combined elements of occultism, the satanic and the taste for `the East' that had obsessed Europe after the publication of Antoine Galland's French translation of The Arabian Nights in 1717 was William Beckford's Vathek (1786). Written in French allegedly in a Kerouac-like burst of inspiration, Vathek brings together a variety of dark fascinations that would later become familiar to late 19th century decadents: diabolism, sadomasochism and other forms of perverse sex, orientalism, extravagant hedonism, ennui and an all-around interest in the forbidden. Where occultists like Cagliostro saw in `the East' a spiritual locale offering a greater tolerance than Catholicism, for Beckford, `the East' was the source of luxurious and inevitably debilitating pleasures. The erotic, the strange and the exquisite were the touchstones of Beckford's East, much more so than any transcendental wisdom. In the 19th century, this strain of exotic occultism would be taken up most vigorously, if there is such a thing as vigorous decadence, by the French Romantics.