The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 4 of 4

The Fuhrer might be Himmler -- but he is referred to elsewhere in the same letter as the "Reichsfuhrer-SS" and it was always Hitler alone who was "the Fuhrer". Nor -- in view of Himmler's sending Cosmic Ice literature to prominent Nazis like Goring and Darre, which he did, in fact the month after the letter to Frau Gahr -- does it make sense for a Leiter of his personal staff to send anyone books in order to influence Himmler. If Hitler was in the habit of talking to Frau Gahr about Cosmic Ice, who was she?

Karoline Gahr at the period the letter was written kept a small workshop in Munich which occasionally turned out badges for the SS. [119] She was the widow of the goldsmith Otto Gahr, one of Hitler's early cronies in the Nazi party, who had designed the standards of the S. A. to Hitler's specification and had died in 1932. Both in Mein Kampf and in his 1942 conversations, Hitler talked fondly of Otto Gahr. It is not at all improbable for Hitler to have discussed a theory in which we know he believed with the widow of his old party comrade who was herself still helping the cause. Kurt Ludecke tells in his memoirs of a visit to Otto Gahr while the goldsmith was making the S.A. standards. The context in which he sets his visit is that of Hitler's custom in the early days of spending time talking to his humblest and most devoted followers. "They were men from the most modest homes, like his own, men who knew nothing of the great world beyond their own towns, but were sincere, enthusiastic, loyal, looking upon Hitler not only as a genius but as an inspired prophet. To understand these men was largely to understand Hitler and his power." [120]

If Adolf Hitler and Karoline Gahr had discussed the Theory of Cosmic Ice, where did they get it? There is no real way of telling, but one probable source is Edgar Dacque. Professor George Mosse has shown that a book "by a savant of Munich," which Hermann Rauschning mentions as attracting Hitler, was almost certainly Dacque's Urwelt, Sage und Menschheit. In this book Dacque uses the theory of Cosmic Ice to explain the flood. Moreover, Hitler admitted in January 1942 that he had once himself owned "a work on the origins of the human race. I used to think a lot about such matters." [121] Edgar Dacque (1878-1945) was a paleontologist who in 1915 became professor and custodian of the Bavarian State Paleontology Collection. By the publication of Urwelt, Sage und Menschheit in 1924 he began an attempt which was to occupy him for the rest of his life, "to forge together as best I can religion, science, and life." The influence of Schelling and Schopenhauer completed with that of Jakob Bohme and Meister Eckhart. An even stronger influence may well have been the Theosophical Society, for Dacque was one of those who signed an application for a charter from that organization to revive its dormant Munich section around the turn of the century.

Dacque's musings on the significance of revolution were undoubtedly influenced by Theosophical ideas. He prophesied the death of "the century of mechanistic tyranny" and the advent of the "magical viewpoint" (the source of "creative culture"). By 1938 Dacque's picture of "magical paganism" had been somewhat overlaid with a Christian gloss, but the mysticism that remains has analogies with that of Klages and Schuler. [122]

If Dacque was the source of first instance for Hitler's knowledge of Horbiger, the Nazi leader could not have come across the theory until the year of his imprisonment in the Landsberg jail. We do not know when he discussed Cosmic Ice with Frau Gahr, but there is a tortuous connection, which may show that Horbiger became known quite early in volkisch circles. An "old friend" of Hanns Horbiger was Ottokar Prohaszka, Prince-Bishop of Szekesfehervar in Hungary, who is said to have been heavily influenced by Horbiger. [123] Prohaszka (1858-1927) played a leading part in the counterrevolution after the Hungarian uprising of Bela Kun. He was a convinced anti-Semite who saw Jews and Freemasons at the bottom of all the disturbances of 1918-19. Prohaszka's principles eventually became the ideology of the right-wing Arrow Cross Party's "Group of National Reconstruction," and for a 'brief period the bishop was president of the Hungarian majority Party of Christian Union. When Kurt Ludecke was sent by Hitler to attend a congress of Hungarian Nationalists in Budapest at Christmas 1924, his address was scheduled between Prohaszka and the extreme racist Julius Gombos (who had been in touch with Hitler since the end of the previous year). Prohaszka appeared as the hero of an article in the Volkischer Beobachter as early as September 1920; and his essay "The Jewish Question in Hungary," first published in 1920, was printed in German in 1921 in the Hamburg journal Hammerschlage. [124] Because Horbiger is found almost invariably with a racist implication attached, because his supporters without exception praise him as a "really German" spirit, because he called one of his sons by the archaic name of Attila, there is a distinct chance that the Horbiger-Prohaszka connection and the popularity of Cosmic Ice among the Volkische coincide with the conjunction of Hungarian and Bavarian anti-Semitism in the early 1920s. But further than this it is impossible to go.

What, then, is the relationship between Nazism, the occult, and the concept of "illuminated politics"? The Occult Revival had expressed itself in peculiar forms in Germany and the volkisch movement drew much inspiration from the resurrection of mystical ideas. The trio of Eckart, Feder, and Rosenberg, which was so influential at the birth of the Nazi party, displays the illuminated characteristics that in a more extreme form were shown by the less significant Thule Society. Because the Nazi party was founded during a period of anxiety in an area which was exceptionally open both to inherited volkisch irrationalism and an influx of Slav-inspired conspiracy theories, it naturally bore upward with it idealistic, irrationalist, and occult ideas from the Underground in which the party had its origin. Because of the demands of operating effective government, the irrationalists were almost by definition excluded from power. But in the private beliefs of Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg there remained much of the irrationalism of their earlier days, which they were generally able to separate from their exercise of power. The possibility should by no means be ruled out that Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg did want to put into practice some of their more occult beliefs; that Hitler did see his New Order as the next step in evolution, that Rosenberg did believe that his Myth could persuade people to study Meister Eckhart and submerge themselves in the Volk. As for Himmler, his vision of reality was quite obviously far removed from that of the rationalist universe -- often, as his indiscriminate patronage of rejected knowledge makes clear, almost deliberately. These were men of the twilight who brought twilight subjects with them into the sun; and in this lies their significance.

Karl Kautsky's famous analysis of the rise of Christianity might be applied to certain sections of the early Nazi movement: "the organization ... attained victory by surrendering its original aims and defending their opposite." [125] The lesson for illuminated politicians may be the old one of "power corrupts." The illuminates who were swept into Nazism and who ended in the SS or preaching a "new reality" to the universities probably really believed that they were effecting an "idealistic" revolution. In many ways the Nazi reality does represent illuminated politics in power, and thus transformed. Add a prolonged period of isolation, culminating in a total war -- what other sort of war could an illuminated government contemplate? -- and the self-created pressure of real and illusory enemies forced the Reich into a policy of external aggression and internal massacre. The Nazi reality became the only interpretation of experience from which the ordinary German could derive social support. There is material for psychological (rather than historical) studies in the fact that the Nazi organizations most responsible for carrying out the "Final Solution" were often-like certain sections of the SS and the Einsatzstab Rosenberg -- under the direction of or associated with illuminated elements. The extermination of the Jews marks the point at which some Germans proved in the most indisputable way that they had made a transition from an ill-defined but existing Established reality to a world whose values -- and no doubt whose subjective appearances -- were totally other.

The psychology of power and conquest is not the field of this book; but even here the driving force may to some extent have been derived from an imagined transcendental sanction. On the night of 12-13 January 1942, Hitler said to Bormann: "Mark my words, Bormann, I'm going to become very religious." Bormann replied: "You've always been very religious." [126] Hitler at once proceeded to indulge in fantasies about becoming the great khan of the Tartars. But it is not these that are significant so much as Bormann's reply.

In Dietrich Eckart's last fragmentary publication, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, Hitler's friend gave his particular version of the anti-Semitic gospel in the form of a dialogue between Hitler and himself. The views attributed to Hitler (while of course not certainly his) are probably an approximation of an Eckart-Hitler consensus. They include the theory -- put in the mouth of Hitler, and claimed as original -- that the Jews left Egypt because of an impending pogrom. We have already seen this idea expressed in that unpublished document of illuminated anti-Semitism, The Secret of the Jews.

"We want Germanity, true Christianity, order and planned breeding," says Eckart. There is never an enemy (the Hitler character is made to say) so implacable that we cannot obey Christ's instructions to love him -- but Christ never intended us to love mere animals. And then the characters in the dialogue mutually decide that "we are both Catholics." [127] There is also probably some significance -- beyond the obvious one for Catholic Bavaria -- in the number of articles in the early Volkischer Beobachter on the theme "Can a Catholic be an anti-Semite?"

The idea that the transcendental impulse can carry politicians and their followers into "other realities" must not be taken too far. It is certain that if Hitler was borne into the realms of occult belief by his irrationalist ideas, he also determined to use the appeal of the transcendental sanction as a weapon in a very concrete struggle for power. We have seen how both Hitler and Himmler admitted their reliance on the power of ritual. At lunch on 14 October 1941, these two illuminates discussed the question of religion. "The notion of divinity gives most men the opportunity to make concrete the feeling they have of supernatural realities," Hitler said. "Why should we destroy this wonderful power they have of incarnating the feeling for the divine that is within them?" But he also expressed his horror at the possibility that the Nazi movement would acquire a religious character and institute a form of worship. [128] This is not the opinion of the convinced irrationalist of popular superstition. Both belief and manipulation were present in variable quantities.

To some extent the illuminated attitude and an affection for rejected knowledge are found in other Fascist movements. This is clear enough in Belgian, Hungarian, and Romanian Fascism, to say nothing of the more well-known brands in France, Italy, or Spain. The Marxist explanation that "reactionary" forces naturally allied with each other against the inevitable rise of the proletariat has influenced our writing of history much more than is explicitly admitted. There is obviously some truth in it; but on occasion the really important factor may well have been the need for a transcendental sanction felt by illuminated politicians. In Italy the interesting and mysterious figure of Giulio Alessandre Evola wrote on the Hermetic tradition, preached an "imperialism of the blood," and had some influence on the ideology of Italian Fascism. [129] In Norway, Vidkun Quisling emerged from the lunatic fringe of politics with his Nasjonal Sammlung's ideology of blood and soil. Quisling's philosophy seems to have been based on a "Universalism" not unlike Hackel's monism or the universalism of Othmar Spann. In 1929 he published a pamphlet on the significance of the existence of life on other worlds -- a preoccupation in at least one German volkisch sect -- and after his conviction for treason, he repeated the statement that the universe was controlled by "a divine power connected with the inhabited planets." Quisling seems to have been convinced that he was engaged in a struggle between the powers of light and darkness -- and some of his statements to this effect read very like those of Ungern-Sternberg! According to a former editor of the British Church Times, Quisling was one of Frank Buchman's converts to Moral Rearmament -- which secured some of its greatest successes in the Scandinavian areas. [130] Whether or not this was the case, the similarity of approach between the two opponents of "moral Bolshevism" -- the phrase was actually used by Buchman -- is significant from the point of view of the effect of the transcendental impulse. It is probably this common search for a divine sanction that led to Buchman's relatively insignificant contact with the Nazis and the rumor recorded by Fritz Thyssen that Himmler was a member of the Oxford Groups. [131]

And as always, the man on the street or the Strasse was interested in other things. Even in the SS there were complaints that the "educational" sessions were poorly attended. [132] But something of the transcendental attitude did surface briefly in Germany, and with it some illuminates. Those who became converts to the Nazi ethic, however, were usually of a very definite type: irrationalists in the most derogatory sense of the word, undiscriminating and ill-educated in the processes of rational thought. Yet such people were not the only products of the night from reason. Men and women of the greatest sophistication also reacted against the materialist-rationalist interpretation of life. From their deliberations have come some valuable -- and even dominating -- elements of modern culture.

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Notes:

1. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (London, 1966). Cf. his earlier essay "The Mystical Origins of National Socialism" in Journal of the History of Ideas (January-March 1961), pp. 81 ff. to see how he has modified an earlier thesis, which remains significant.

2. Mosse, Crisis, pp. 40 ff.

3. Mosse, Crisis, pp. 52-63.

4. Laqueur, Young Germany, pp. 32-37.

5. On Fidus, see Masse, Crisis, pp. 84-86.

6. Landmann, Monte Verita.

7. Mosse, Crisis, pp. 108 ff, for German Utopians.

8. Steiner, Story of My Life, p. 134.

9. See R. d'O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (London, 1941).

10. Ransom, Theosophical Society, p. 188.

11. See Johann Baltzli, Guido von List (Leipzig, 1917).

12. Guido von List, Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder (Berlin, 1891).

13. Von List, Der Unbesiegbare (Leipzig, 1898).

14. Baltzli, Von List, pp. 45-46.

15. Wannieck to von List, 12 December 1914, quoted in Baltzli, Von List, pp. 184-85.

16. Baltzli, Von List, pp. 47, 185.

17. See von List, Die Religion der Ario-Germanen in ihrer Esoterik und Exoterik, reissued in Deutsche Wiedergeburt, Band III, (Berlin, 1921); and Der Ubergang vom Wuotanismus zum Christentum, Band V (n.d.).

18. Baltzli, Von List, pp. 50, 55.

19. On Lanz see Wilfried Daim, Der Mann; Daim, Der Mann, p. 271.

20. Lanz von Liebenfels, Meister Amalrich, and Meister Archibald, Die ariosophiische Kabbalistik von Name und Ortlichkeit (Ariosophische Bibiliothek, Heft 15), p. I; Daim, Der Mann, pp. 180, 120-21.

21. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, Die Theosophie und die assyrischen Menschentiere (Bibeldokumente, Heft H), p. 5.

22. Von Liebenfels, Die Theosophie, p. 26. See passage quoted in The Occult Underground, p. 92.

23. Daim, Der Mann, pp. 159-60. For Issberner-Haldane see Howe, Urania's Children, pp. 111-12. For Gorsleben see this chapter below.

24. Fuchs, Sturm und Drang, p. 82.

25. Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, "Zwischen Rilke und Hitler-Alfred Schuler," in Zeitschrift fur Religions-und Geistes-geschichte, Band XIX (1967), p. 336. See Carl Albrecht Bernouilli, Johann Jakoh Bachofen und das Natursymbol (Basel, 1924), which is dedicated to Klages; Joseph Campbell, introduction to Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons (New York and London, 1965). E. K. Winter, "Bachofen-Renaissance" in Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Band 85 (1928), pp. 316 ff.; see Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons, "Sir Galahad," Die Kagelschnitte Gottes (Munich, 1921), and Bertha Eckstein-Diener, Idiotenfuhrer durch die Russische Literatur (Munich, 1925); Eckstein-Diener, Idiotenfuhrer, p. 116.

26. Alfred Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart, ein Vermachtnis (4th ed., Munich, 1937), pp. 13-14; Albert Reich, Dietrich Eckart (Munich, 1933), pp. 22-62.

27. Rosenberg, Eckart. p. 16; Wilhelm Grun, Dietrich Eckart als Publizist (Munich, 1941), p. 44.

28. Reich, Eckart, p. 52; Rosenberg, Eckart, p. 21.

29. Adolf Dresler, Dietrich Eckart (Munich, 1938), p. 36.

30. Rosenberg, Eckart, pp. 22-23, 32; Grun, Eckart. pp. 42-48, 69; Dresler, Eckart, pp. 15 ff.; Eckart, "Der Adler des Jupiters" in Auf gut Deutsch. 12 December 1919, p. 668.

31. Fuchs, Sturm und Drang, p. 100.

32. See Helen B5hlau, Das Recht der Mutter (Berlin, 1896), and Friedrich Ulrich Zillman, Helen Bohlau (Leipzig, n.d. but c. 1919); Helen von Racowitza, An Autobiography (tr. Cecil Marr, London, 1910), p. 415; Steiner, The Anthroposophic Movement. p. 143.

33. Volkischer Beobachter, 17 May 1919; Eckart joined the Thule some time in 1919; Eckart, "Ein eigentumlicher Theosoph," in Auf gut Deutsch (11 July 1919), p. 222.

34. Wachsmuth, Steiner, pp. 315-18; Saint-Yves d' Alveydre, Mission des ouvriers (3rd ed., Paris, 1884); Rudolf Steiner, The Threefold State (London, 1920), and Papus, Anarchie. indolence et synarchie (Paris, 1884).

35. E.g., Kully, Die Wahrheit, p. 206; Wachsmuth, Steiner. pp. 356 ff. Steiner, 29 August 1922, quoted Savitch, Marie von Sivers p. 133; Kully, Die Wahrheit, pp. 206-9.

36. For this hostility, see Rittelmeyer, Steiner, p. 117, and Wachsmuth, Steiner, pp. 397-98 for Steiner's lecturing to those involved in the Saar Plebiscite. Cf. Kully, Die Wahrheit, p. 209; see, e.g., Wachsmuth, Steiner. pp. 242-43; Eckart, "Der Adler des Jupiters," p. 327; Eckart, "Ein eigentumlicher Theosoph," p. 671; Howe, Urania's Children. pp. 81 ff.

37. The Guildsman, June 1920. "There are some good ideas in his book and we shall make haste to steal them."

38. See H. W. Schomerus, Die Anthroposophie Steiners und Indien (Leipzig, Erlangen, n.d.); Christian Gahr, Die Anthroposophie Steiners (Erlangen, 1929), pp. 38-39; Steiner, The Soul of the People (London, 1936). Originally lectures delivered in Berlin in November 1914. These were sent to Prince Max of Baden together with the theory of the Threefold Commonwealth. See Wachsmuth, Steiner, p. 357.

39. Richard Euringer, Dietrich Eckart (2nd ed., Hamburg, 1938), p. 15; Eckart, "Mittendurch," in Volkischer Beobachter (3 February 1923), p. 5; Eckart, Das ist der Jude (Munich, 1920); "Ein Volkischer Beobachter in England" (9 June 1920). See Grin, Eckart. bibliography for 1920; Eckart, "Jewry Uber Alles," in Auf gut Deutsch (26 November 1920); Hansjorg Maurer, "Versammlung im Zirkus Krone," Volkischer Beobachter (24 January 1923), pp. 2-3; Franz-Willing, Hitlerbewegung. p. 131; also short note in school text, Nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung (ed. Martin Iskraut, Leipzig, 1934), pp. vii-viii.

40. Gottfried Feder, Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz (2nd ed., Munich, 1933), p. 12; Feder, "Das Manifest zur Brechnung der Zinsknechtschaft des Geldes" in Kampf, p. 51; see Munchener Beobachter, 9 August 1919, p. 2 and Feder, Kampf, p. 111.

41. Feder, Kampf, p. 97; Reich, Eckart, pp. 69-71; Eckart and Feder, "An alle Werktatigen," in Feder, Kampf, pp. 96 ff.; see also Feder, Die Juden (Munich, 1933), and in Das neue Deutschland und die Judenfrage (Leipzig, 1933).

42. "Aus der Bewegung," Volkischer Beobachter (29 May 1920), p. 4; Feder on 4 December 1930, in Kampf, p. 282.

43. On the Baits see Laqueur, Russia and Germany. pp. 30 ff.

44. H. J. Schmierescott, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und der revolutionare Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republik (Gottingen, 1967), pp. 127-28.

45. Reinhold Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 21, 256 note 32.

46. Rosenberg (ed. Serge Lang and Ernst von Schrenck), Portrat eines Menschheitsverbrechers (St. Gallen, 1947), p. 33; Gunter Schubert, Anfange nationalsozialistischer Aussenpolitik (Cologne, 1963), pp. 11-12, 167-69. Cf. F. Th. Hart, Alfred Rosenberg (Munich, 1933), pp. 36-37; for this development see Cohn, Warrant, pp. 138 ff., Laqueur, Russia and Germany, pp. 50-125.

47. See A. Netchvolodov, L'Empereur Nicolas II et les Juifs (Paris, 1924), and Nikolaus Markov, Der Kampf der dunklen Machte (Erfurt, 1935).

48. See A. Tcherep-Spiridovitch, Vers la debacle (Paris, 1914) and The Secret World Government (New York, 1926).

49. Laqueur, Russia and Germany, pp. 122-25. See Bostunitch, "Der letzte Theologe," p. 67, where he quotes Heinrich Lhotsky on the Baits: "Vergiss nie, dass du Arier bist und Sonnenwege wandeln musst." Both Lhotsky and Johannes Muller may have absorbed anti-Semitic influences while with the Mission to the Jews in Russia.

50. Laqueur, Russia and Germany, pp. 58 ff. for Scheubner-Richter and cf. also Paul Leverkuhn, Posten auf ewiger Wache (Essen, 1938), pp. 184 ff. For Rosenberg in Munich, see Laqueur, Russia and Germany, pp. 68 ff. and Bollmus, Amt Rosenberg, pp. 18 ff.

51. Eckart, "Jewry uber alles," p. 42.

52. Howe, Urania's Children, p. 86. Mr. Howe's forthcoming Lunatic Fringe will enlighten us as to the elusive Freiherr and his associates. Meanwhile, see Reginald H. Phelps, "Before Hitler Came: Thule Society and Germanen Orden" in Journal of Modern History (March-December 1963), pp. 245 ff.; Phelps, Journal. pp. 250-51.

53. See "E.H.," "In eigener Sache" in Munchener Beobachter (1919, no. 4), p. 3, and Philip Stauff in Munchener Beobachter, 24 May 1919.

54. Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Geschichte der Astrologie Band I (Leipzig, 1923), p. 37; Sebottendorff, Die Praxis der alter Turkischen Freimaurerei (Leipzig, 1924).

55. Sebottendorff, Bevor Hitler kam (Munich, 1933), pp. 222-23, 260. N.B. the strictures of Howe, Urania's Children, p. 86 on this book: Volkischer Beobachter (23 August 1919), p. 1.

56. Franz-Willing, Hitler Bewegung, pp. 64-66. Cf. Sebottendorff, Bevor Hitler kam, p. 73.

57. For verdicts on Greiner's unreliability, see Franz Jetzinger, Hitler's Youth (London, 1958), p. 11, 136 note 1, 143; Werner Maser, Die Fruhgeschichte der NSDA P (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1965), pp. 8, 67 note 92; also Maser's Hitler's Mein Kampf (tr. R. H. Barry, London, 1970), pp. 61, 209. But cf. Maser passim, and Konrad Heiden, Der Fuhrer (tr. Ralph Manheim, London, 1944), p. 55. Cf. Alan Bullock, Hitler, a Study in Tyranny (rev. ed., London, 1962), p. 35.

58. Joseph Greiner, Das Ende der Hitler-Mythos (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna, 1947), pp. 86-94,

59. Daim, Der Mann, pp. 15-23.

60. Mosse, Crisis, p. 77, pp. 31 ff., 246-47.

61. Kaltenbrunner, "Zwischen Rilke und Hitler," p. 163; Boehringer, Stefan Georg, p. 109; Mosse, Crisis, p. 76, Salin, Stefan Georg, p. 194.

62. Greiner, Hitler-Mythos, pp. 84-86.

63. Franz-Willing, Hitler Bewegung, pp. 67-73, p. 78, p. 82; Maser, Fruhgeschichte, p. 149.

64. Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. James Murphy (London, 1939), pp. 302, 318.

65. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York, 1965), pp, 412-15.

66. Erich Ludendorff in Mathilde Ludendorff Ihr Werk und Wirken (Munich, 1937), pp. 40-41.

67. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Missing Years (London, 1957), pp. 84-85.

68. Feder, "Das Weibes Kulturtat" in V6lkischer Beobachter (9 December 1920), p. 3. Cf. Ludendorff, Mathilde Ludendorff, p. 110 ff.

69. For these sources see Johannes Hertel, Von neuen Trug zur Rellung des Alten (Berlin, 1932), and Louis Jacolliot, The Bible in India (London, 1870), For the biography of Mathilde von Kemnitz, see Erich Ludendorff, Mathilde Ludendorff, pp. 178 ff. and Hertel, Von neuen Trug. For Mathilde von Kemnitz and occultism, see her Moderne Mediumforschung (Munich, 1914), and her Der Trug des Astrologie (Munich, 1932).

70. Erich Ludendorff, Mathilde Ludendorff, pp. 43 ff.

71. See Erich and Mathilde Ludendorff, Die Judenmacht: ihr Wesen und Ende (Munich, 1930); Ilse Hess, Prisoner of Peace (London, 1954), p. 54; J. R. Rees (ed.), The Case of Rudolf Hess (London, 1947), p. 35.

72. James Douglas-Hamilton, Motive for a Mission (London, 1971), p. 125.

73. For Scheubner-Richter's role in coordinating the activities of Russians and Germans see Laqueur, Russia and Germany, pp. 62-68, 105 ff. Cf. also Volkmann, Emigration.

74. Adolf Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944 (London, 1953), p. 252.

75. Feder, Kampf, pp. 150-54.

76. Franz Neumann, Behemoth (London, 1942), pp. 187 ff. on Spann, see D. Vikor, Economic Romanticism in the 20th Century (London, 1932). Spann's complete works are published from Graz; see in particular the Fundament der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Gesamtausgabe, Band 3, 1967) and Der wahre Staat (4th ed., Vienna, 1938). Cf. Erkenne dich selbst (Gesamtausgabe Band 14) for the mystical premises on which Spann based his theories. Within the ambit of this sort of economic speculation the English Guildsmen found a hearing. A series of "Schriften der Englischen Gildenbewegung" was published at Tiibingen and at least two university theses were devoted to Guildsmen after the Nazis came to power. See Feder, Die neue Stadt (Berlin, 1939).

77. Albert Reich and O. R. Achenbach, Vom 9 November, 1918 zum 9 November, 1923 (Munich, 1933), p. 20; Fritz von Trutzschler, Armes Volkstum (Berlin, 1920); Howe, Urania's Children, p. 87 note 1; quoted in Phelps, "Before Hitler came," p. 261.

78. Artur Dinter, Die Sunde wider den Geist (Leipzig, 1921), pp. 235-44; Dinter, Die Sunde wider die Liebe (Leipzig, 1922), p. 329; Peter Huttenberger, Die Gauleiter (Stuttgart, 1969), pp. 13-14 and pp. 42-46. Cf. Dinter, Die Deutsche Volkskirche (Leipzig, 1934).

79. See documents printed in J. S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (London, 1968), pp. 370-74, listing sects banned up till December, 1938, pp. 370-74; 378-82; Howe, Urania's Children, pp. 192 ff.

80. Hitler, Table Talk, p. 251; Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 191; Hanfstaengl, Hitler, p. 41; Kurt Ludecke, I Knew Hitler (London, 1938), pp. 195-96, Hitler, Table Talk, pp. 231, 442-43, 572.

81. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 240-42.

82. Bollmus, A mt Rosenberg, pp. 54 ff., 113 ff., 25-26, 39, 255 note 27.

83. Rosenberg, Der My thus des 20 Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1934), pp. 25-27.

84. See Spengler, Fruhzeit der Weltgeschichte, ed. M. Schroter and A. M. Koktanek (Munich, 1966), pp. 210 ff.; A Bessinertiny, Das Atlantisratsel (Leipzig, 1932), p. 147; Bessinertiny with Ernst Uehli, Atlantis und das Ratsel der Eiszeitkunst (Stuttgart, 1930).

85. Albert Herrmann, Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis (Berlin, 1934); Karl Georg Zschaetzsch, Die Arier (Berlin, 1920).

86. Rosenberg, My thus, p. 88; Lang and Schrenck, Menschheitsverbrechers, pp. 111-12; Rosenberg, My thus, pp. 220 ff., 251, 259.

87. John Macready, Der Aufgang des Abendlandes (Leipzig, 1926), p. 632. See the analysis of Ernest Seilliere in Morales et religions nouvelles en Allemagne (Paris, 1927), pp. 126 ff.

88. Josef Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologue (Gottingen, Zurich, and Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 34 ff. This is invaluable in showing the possible extent of Nazi mysticism. Cf. Werner Angriss and B. F. Smith, "Diaries of Heinrich Himmler's Early Years" in Journal of Modern History (September 1959); C. A. Bernouilli, Bachofen, p. 456.

89. Josef Ackermann, Himmler, pp. 196-99; Mosse, Crisis, pp. 116-20; Heinz Hahne, The Order of the Death's Head (tr. Richard Barry, London), pp. 48-49.

90. Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs (London, 1956), pp. 38-39,151-52; Josef Ackermann, Himmler. pp. 63 note 132, 64, 68-69 and note 166. See Karl August Eckhardt, Irdische Unsterblichkeit. (Weimar, 1937). Eckhardt was associated with Ernst Krieck and Walter Wust -- see this chapter; speech printed in Josef Ackermann, Himmler, p. 245.

91. Speech quoted Ackermann, Himmler, p. 101. See Heinrich Himmler, Die Schutzstaffel als antibolschewitstische Kampforganisation (Munich, 1936).

92. Himmler, Die Schutzstaffel. p. 27. "Ich halte ihn fur uberheblich, grossenwahnsinnig und dumm; er ist nicht fur uns geeignet"; Himmler, Die Schutzstaffel. pp. 101-07; Kersten, Memoirs, p. 29; Rauschning, Hitler Speaks. p. 237.

93. Hahne, Death's Head, p. 152.

94. Document from Amt Schulung in Bundesarchiv Koblenz, file no. NS 15/51 neu; see Hubert Schrade, Das Deutsche Nationaldenkmal (Munich, 1934) and Bauten des Dritten Reiches (Leipzig, 1939); Richard von Kienle, Germanische Gemeinschaftsleben (Stuttgart 1939), which was published by the Ahnenerbe. See Wilhelm Grau, Die Judenfragen in das deutschen Geschichte (Leipzig, 1937); K. G. Kuhn also wrote on the "Jewish question." Julius Andree, Die Externsteine (Munster, 1936) is a typical example of Externsteine literature.

95. Alfred Baumler (ed.), Was bedeutst Hermann Wirth fur die Wissenschaft? (Leipzig, 1932), pp. 92-93; see Hermann Wirth, Der A ufgang der Menschheit (Jena, 1928), and Albert Hermann, Ahnen und Atlantis. pp. 23 ff.; Friedrich Hielscher, Funfzig Jahre unter Deutschen (Hamburg, 1954), p. 288.

96. Michael H. Kater, Das Ahnenerbe. die Forschungs-und Lehrgemeinschaft in der SS, thesis presented to Heidelberg University, 1966. A vital piece of research for those seeking to understand Nazi irrationalism.

97. Hielscher, Funfzig Jahre, passim, esp. p. v.

98. "Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft 'Das Ahnenerbe' Tagebuch 1944 gefuhrt von Reichsgeschaftsfuhrer SS Standartenfuhrer Sievers." Bundesarchiv Koblenz file NS/21/Vol II.

99. Correspondence in Koblenz file NS2l /409 /G /81/2, in particular letters of unidentified Scharfuhrer, 18 July 1937 and 29 August 1937; and Obersturmbannfuhrer to Reichsfuhrer SS. 14 August 1937.

100. Stromer von Reichenbach, Was ist Weltgeschichte? (Ludwigshafen, 1919), and Max Kemmerich, Das Kausalgesetz der Weltgeschichte (2 vols., Munich, 1913-14.

101. Stromer von Reichenbach, Was wird? (Ludwigshafen, 1919), and also Erfullte Voraussagen der Hislorionomie (n.d., n.p.).

102. Howe, Urania's Children, p. 192 note 2, quoting Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichinstitut fur Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (1966).

103. See letter of Reichsleitung Rosenberg to Wendorff of Amt Wissenschaft in Bundersarchiv file NS 15/219 neu. For Koresh, see Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (New York, 1957), pp. 22-27.

104. Georg Hinzpeter, Der Sieg der Welteislehre (Bres1au, 1936), pp. 180-88.

105. Chiefly from H. S. Bellamy, Moons Myths and Man (2nd ed., London, 1949). I do not recommend any of the German works, for reasons which should be clear; but those interested might try Philipp Fauth, Der Mond in Horbigers Welteislehre (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1938).

106. See William A. Jones, Blavatsky and Horbiger (London, 1950).

107. Friedell, Kulturgeschichte Agyptens. pp. 46-49; Cultural History of the Modern Age, vol. III, pp. 463-65.

108. Edmund Kiss, Die kosmische Ursachen der Volkerwanderung (Leipzig, 1934). Cf. A. G. Hogbom "Die Atlantislitteratur unserer Zeit" in Bulletin of the Geographical Institute of the University of Upsala (1941), pp. 46 ff.

109. Rudolf John Gorsleben "Hochzeit der Menschheit" in Illustrietre Beobachter (1937), Folge 3. Wilhelm Asendorpf, Die Edda als Welteislehre (Krefeld, 1933). On Gorsleben, see Dietrich Eckart, Das is der Jude, p. 54 note 2; Hans Wolfgang Behm, Horbigers Welteislehre (Leipzig, 1938), p. 219.

110. Kater, Ahnenerbe, pp. 63-64, 351-53. Josef Ackermann, Himmler, pp. 46-67.

111. The "Pyrmont Protocol" in Bundesarchiv Koblenz file NS 21/Vol 716.

112. See Hans Fischer, Rhythmus des kosmischen Lebens: Das Buch vom Pulsschlag der Welt (Leipzig, 1925).

113. Hans Fischer to Reichsfuhrer-SS, 21 August 1936 in Koblenz NS 21/Vol 716. The connection of the younger Horbiger with the Druid Order leads to the speculation that Lewis Spence -- thought to have belonged to a Druid Order and who wrote copiously on the related Atlantis problem -- may have belonged to this organization.

114. One of the two Viennese Horbiger societies was liquidated by the Nazis; another survived under the chairmanship of Manfred Rieffenstein. The only member of the committee of the Berlin Society to survive was Hinzpeter, still alive in 1949. See The Research Centre Group. fly sheet issued by Egerton Sykes (London, 1949).

115. Scultetus to Reichsfuhrer-SS 18 August 1936 (via Bruno Galke) 13 September 1937. In Koblenz files NS 21/Vol. 714 and 716.

116. Rudolf von Elmayer-Vestenbrugg, Ratsel des Weltgeschehens (Munich, 1937). This is almost identical to his Die Welteislehre (Leipzig, 1938). The author also used the name "Elimar Vinibert von Rudolf." Quite possibly both are fictitious.

117. Hitler, Table Talk, pp. 248-50, 324, 445.

118. Galke to Frau Gahr 3 February 1937 in Koblenz file NS 21/Vol. 715/G. Df. letter printed by Helmut Heiber, Reichsfuhrerl (Stuttgart, 1968), p.47.

119. Franz-Willing, Hitlerbewegung. p. 86 note 47.

120. Ludecke, I Knew Hitler (London, 1938), p. 93.

121. Mosse, Crisis, pp. 306, 356 note 32; Edgar Dacque, Urwelt Sagen und Menschheit (Munich and Berlin, 1928), pp. 158 ff. for Welteislehre. and Hitler, Table Talk, p. 248.

122. See The Vahan; Dacque, Urwelt. Sagen und Menschheit, Natur und Seele (Munich and Berlin, 1926), esp. pp. 21-22 and Das verlorene Paradies (Munich and Berlin, 1938).

123. Hinzpeter, Welteislehre. p. 189.

124. On Prohaszka, see William Juhasz, "The Development of Catholicism in Hungary in Modern Times" in Church and Society 1789-1950 (ed. Joseph N. Moody, New York, 1953) and C. A. Macartney, October Fifteenth (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1961), pp. 28-32, 498. See, also Prohaszka, The Jewish Question in Hungary (The Hague, 1920) and Friedrich Heer, God's First Love (tr. Geoffrey Shelton, London, 1970), p. 339. Ludecke, Hitler, p. 243 and Volkischer Beobachter. 23 September 1920, "Ein antisemitischer Bischoff," p. 4.

125. Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (London, 1925), p. 461.

126. Hitler, Table Talk, pp. 203-4.

127. Eckart, Bolschevismus von Moses bis Lenin (Munich, 1922), esp. pp. 22-23 and pp. 30 ff.

128. Hitler, Table Talk, p. 61.

129. Nolte, Three Faces, pp. 321, 630 note 17. Cf. chapter VIII.

130. See Hans-Dietrich Loock, Quisling, Rosenberg und Terboven (Stuttgart, 1970); Ralph Heims, Quisling (London, 1965); E.g., Quisling's article "A Nordic World Federation," in British Union Quarterly, vol. I, no. 1 (January-April 1937); Sidney Dark, Not Such a Bad Life (London, 1941), p. 230.

131. Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler (London, 1940), p. 189-90.

132. Hohne, Death's Head, pp. 154-55.
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 1 of 4

Chapter 6: The Hermetic Academy

The Discovery of the Unconscious-Freud and the Occultists-The Status of Hypnotism-The Eccentricities of Wilhelm Fliess-Psychoanalysis and Psychical Research-Freud as Secularizer of the Occult-The Occult Experiences of Jung-Basilides the Gnostic-The Analysis of Kristine Mann-The Eranos Conferences-J. W. Hauer and the Nordic Faith Movement- Spiritual Progress and Education-The Occult and the New Educational Fellowship

EINSTEIN'S General Theory of Relativity was not formulated until the First World War; and not until Relativity was accepted was the post-Newtonian universe of law finally overturned. This universe of law had found its culminating expression in the late-19th-century scientific Establishment which, as seen by its opponents, insisted on the primacy of a crude materialism and allowed no other arbiter of truth than the rigors of observed experiment. To a large extent, of course, this scientific Establishment and its criteria existed -- it existed more surely than the "Establishment of materialism and individualism, " which the idealistic politicians intended to overturn. But the scientific Establishment was elevated into a great bogeyman by those who saw their human dignity or religious preconceptions placed under the writ of "Victorian materialism." The Occult Revival of the late 19th century was one symptom of a reaction against the harsh supremacy of the universe of law. By the period between the two wars, the successors of the 19th-century occultists had eagerly adopted Relativity, and popular works like Sir James Jeans's Mysterious Universe convinced numberless adherents of the many occult groups that "the scientists were coming round." It was important to convert the scientists, because the irrationalists of the early Occult Revival had never been able to forget that they were opposing the great pundits of their day, and the next generation frequently combined both rationalist and irrationalist superstitions.

If the tyranny of the scientific Establishment was understandably exaggerated, its restrictions had been effective not only in prescribing a skeptical attitude and an experimental method but in limiting the territory investigated. The standards of controlled experiment and conclusion could only be applied to certain subjects -- the physical world in its broadest sense. What then was the status of man himself? The alternatives seemed clear: either to accept the implications of the idea that he was simply the highest animal, or to take refuge in orthodox religion, which for some two centuries had been suitably isolated from the inconvenient probing of Established science. Against this artificial dualism the occultists again reacted. Amid a welter of romanticism and hysteria could always be heard a number of voices calling plaintively for a philosophy that would unite religion and science and provide an explanation both convincing and comforting of man's place in the universe. Because of the fundamental content of such systems, Eastern religions or Western occultism of a neo-Platonic, Gnostic, or Hermetic character could be seen as fulfilling this need. As part of the same process there occurred a fundamental turning point in man's vision of man. The restricted area of investigation prescribed by the scientific method was expanded immeasurably. The direction of man's vision broadened from an exclusive concentration on things outside himself to include a concern with his perceptible nature and his interaction with his fellows.

From this swiveling of the attention have come modern psychology and sociology, as well as countless variations on areas of inquiry that were already accepted. Man himself was under the microscope -- but not with the beady eye of T. H. Huxley fixed sternly to the other end of the instrument. The new sort of investigator was convinced that there was more to humanity than met that beady eye, that there were motives and actions that could not be expressed merely in terms of surface pressures, that beneath the obvious demands of survival and procreation lurked undefined chains of cause and effect, which resulted in man's being far from the master in his own house. The term unconscious became of the highest importance. An inquirer might once more assume that man -- that is, the investigator himself -- was not capable of perceiving his entire nature. And he might do this, he thought, without abandoning the strict criteria of "scientific proof' which had stood him in such good stead in his forays through the physical universe. At the same time, and as part of the same process of altered vision, the irrationalist reaction produced two results that became inextricably bound up with man's inquiry into the submerged part of himself. In the shape of the occult and Oriental systems, which had come to be so much in vogue, there was available a mountain of literature dealing with precisely the problems which the investigator into the unconscious found confronting him and to which the Christian answers had long been forgotten or discredited. On a less profound level, public interest in Spiritualism and the supernatural had resulted in attempts to apply the criteria of 19th-century science to the appearance of "ghosts" or communications from the "Summerland." The plain result is that psychoanalysis, psychical research, and the more religious aspects of the Occult Revival can by no means be disentangled.

Indeed, it is doubtful whether they should be. The area of investigation -- the Unconscious, the unperceived part of a man -- might appear in essence the same, although the premises of inquirers might greatly differ. If a psychoanalyst of the type familiar in the West is faced with a patient whose relatives believe him to be "possessed by a devil, " the fact that he may diagnose a "split personality" does not alter the symptoms displayed. And if such a diagnosis is made it owes a great deal to the Cinderella of psychical research. It has been argued that the whole development just outlined -- a certain redirection of scientific attention -- has involved giving new names to old ghosts. That is, that what might in the 12th century have been called an evil spirit might after Freud be simply known by another term. Occultists -- and some psychoanalysts -- have naturally hailed this concentration on the immaterial as presaging a new age. Whereas Rom Landau decided that the "spiritual problems" of man between the wars required a resort to fashionable gurus like Keyserling, Ouspensky, or Krishnamurti, varieties of psychoanalysis could fulfil something of the same need. This is clear from a summary of the mood of the interwar period made by Carl Gustav Jung.

We cannot suppose that this aspect of the unconscious or of the hinterland of man's mind is something totally new. Probably it has always been there, in every culture. Each culture gave birth to its destructive opposite, but no culture or civilization before our own was ever forced to take these psychic undercurrents in deadly earnest. Psychic life always found expression in a metaphysical system of some sort. But the conscious, modern man, despite his strenuous and dogged efforts to do so, can no longer refrain from acknowledging the might of psychic forces. This distinguishes our time from all others. We can no longer deny that the dark stirrings of the unconscious are effective powers -- that psychic forces exist which cannot, for the present at least, be fitted in with our rational world-order. We have even enlarged our study of these forces to a science -- one more proof of the earnest attention we bring to them. Previous centuries could throw them aside unnoticed; for us they are a shirt of Nessus which we cannot strip off.

The revolution in our conscious outlook, brought about by the catastrophic results of the World War, shows itself in our inner life by the shattering of our faith in ourselves and our own work ... the old dream of the millennium, in which peace and harmony should rule, has grown pale. [1]


We have seen that some people still entertained that dream. But Jung's verdict and the importance ascribed to psychoanalysis are indisputable. Once more the crisis of the First World War is invoked to show the primacy of unreason; and Jung claims that a science has been invented to deal with the unrecognized forces, which in their darker aspects have caused the tragedy. This insistence that his own analytical psychology or the psychoanalysis of Freud form part of a new "science" must be kept in mind as we examine some neglected aspects of their emergence. For the pioneers of the Unconscious were as concerned as their occultist contemporaries with the supremacy of materialist science; and Freud in particular took the greatest care not to become publicly associated with the more "occult" or "mystical" aspects of that redirection of human attention in which he was a central figure.

In discussing the historical origins of psychoanalysis, two traps must be avoided. The first is to attempt the sort of "psychoanalytical biography, " which analysts alone are qualified to attempt or judge; and the second is to become overwhelmed by the multiplicity of Freud's philosophical ancestors. It has been observed that "the general conception of unconscious mental processes was conceivable (in post-Cartesian Europe) around 1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable around 1870-1880, " [2] and that Freud's insistence on the sexual basis of neuroses was the main factor in arousing opposition to psychoanalysis. It is notorious that Freud's intense eagerness for originality led him not to carry out thorough reading on his crucial Interpretation of Dreams (1900) until after his conclusions were formed. Therefore it becomes all the more important to relate the origins of psychoanalysis to the "general intellectual climate" in which speculation about the Unconscious took place.

In 1868 Eduard von Hartmann published his Philosophy of the Unconscious, which raised the problem of unconscious mental processes. Rudolf Steiner's reaction to his first reading of von Hartmann has already been noted. Nothing, he felt, should remain unconscious. Steiner's deduction was that he should find some ·way of making conscious the unconscious processes -- which is what his "spiritual perception" amounts to. It is well worth while to examine the occult affiliations of psychoanalysis, a cure for neurosis which Freud thought to consist of bringing the conscious mind to a recognition of the suppressed causes of illness. Occultists, Spiritualists, and hawkers of proprietary brands of Theosophy were interested in precisely the same problems, although their final conclusions might and did take a very different form. Thus, the Spiritualist Carl du Prel's Philosophy of Mysticism, first published in 1885 (and Freud included it in the bibliography of The Interpretation of Dreams), defines its author's central problem as "the question whether our Ego is wholly embraced in self-consciousness." [3] It had better be made clear at the start that this relationship between the Occult Revival and psychoanalysis is no mere intellectual construction based on similarities of approach or of conclusion. It begins with the fact that Sigmund Freud was "an old friend" of Friedrich Eckstein.

This information is contained in a footnote in Ernest Jones's biography of Freud, and the source given is Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld. Dr. Bernfeld is dead, but it is possible to be certain that his Eckstein was indeed our old friend the devoted Wagnerian and follower of Madame Blavatsky. The footnote gives Eckstein's nickname of "Fritz, " and a paper by Dr. Bernfeld is almost explicit in referring to the varieties of rebellion practiced among Freud's friends at the University of Vienna. There were those, he writes, who "led queer existences in coffee houses and vegetarian restaurants." Eckstein was able to remember that when Freud left school in 1873 and heard the lecture that convinced him to become a doctor he wrote a newspaper review of the occasion that had so impressed him. This review remains untraced, but it indicates that Eckstein, although a few years older than Freud, was indeed "an old friend." Certainly both men knew Victor Adler, although Freud's contact with the latter nearly ended in a duel. The occasion of this was a heated attack mounted by Freud in a student debating society against Adler's idealism. The future psychoanalyst had recently been converted from his early attachment to the romantic doctrine of Naturphilosophie and had become a rabid materialist. Freud himself does not seem to have been a candidate for membership of the clique in Megalomania Cafe, although his friendship with Eckstein was long-lasting.

How else explain the appearance of Eckstein in the Almanack of Psychoanalysis published in the 1930s by the Freud group in Vienna? In 1930 Eckstein contributed an article entitled "The Unconscious, Heredity and Memory in the Light of Mathematical Science." He argued from progress in genetics that psychoanalysis might one day be capable of a mathematical formulation. His starting point was Leibniz, and he claimed that as early as 1918 he had written a popular article embodying "a mathematical formulation and analysis of the Unconscious, " which had, not surprisingly, been ignored both by biologists and psychoanalysts. [5] Six years later Eckstein surfaced again in the same yearbook, writing on "Older Theories of the Unconscious." This once more began with Leibniz but dwelled on the Neo-Platonists in a manner that might be expected of an associate of Jung rather than of Freud. Plotinus was seen as the founding father of all theories of the Unconscious. According to Plotinus, all "higher" knowledge is based on an intuitive-regressive emergence into consciousness of the unconscious, of contents that occur "somewhere in the soul" and that we are only able to recognize when they have permeated the entire being. And precisely in this lies its shattering, purifying effect and its significance for the spiritual renewal of mankind. "Up, let us fly to the beloved land of the Father!" [6]

In his memoirs (published the same year as the article), Eckstein mentions Freud only in connection with their mutual friend Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932). Von Ehrenfels, like Friedrich Eckstein, was a mathematician and a Wagnerian; Eckstein wrote his obituary in the Neue Freie Presse. But like Freud he was a sexual eugenist, and he christened the founder of psychoanalysis and himself "Sexual Protestants." In 1908 Freud published a paper in which he used von Ehrenfels's book on Sexual Ethics as his starting point. Both agreed in their views on the custom of monogamous marriage. [7] For the greater part of his career von Ehrenfels was professor of philosophy at Prague, producing his best known book on ethics in 1897. In the present context his important work is the Cosmogony (1916), in which he outlined nothing less than a new religious system. At least von Ehrenfels seemed to think it was new. It was in fact a redefinition of the idea of God in Neo-Platonic terms and an expression of von Ehrenfels's hope "for a new and even far lovelier variant of Christianity." Compare Eckstein's description of the emergence of unconscious contents according to Plotinus with von Ehrenfels's account of the evolution of Deity: "With the arising of human intellect (and probably of similar processes on other heavenly bodies) consciousness of self awoke in God, and there dawned a phase of immanence in his work." [8] The philosopher also believed in "over-souls," which represented personalities composed of many human souls.

It would be difficult to argue that Freud derived his ideas to any notable extent from his friendship with Eckstein or Ehrenfels. What the connection does show is that Freud's destruction of his papers may have covered up evidence of contact with others working on the periphery of his own field, although with different premises. Friedrich Eckstein's lack of reference to psychoanalysis in his memoirs seems to show that the contribution he made the same year to the Alrnanack of Psychoanalysis was not greatly influenced by Freud's discoveries except in point of terminology. It emphasizes the fact that the school of divine philosophy to which he belonged, when furnished with the concept of the unconscious mind -- which (as Lancelot Law Whyte has written) had already been considered in twenty-six aspects by Eduard von Hartmann when Freud was twelve [9] -- could lead to conclusions that anticipated some basic theories of psychoanalysis. Such philosophy, of course, had nothing to do with Freud's discovery of his complexes and only a tenuous connection with therapy. But there are a few other interesting coincidences. First, it has been argued that Freud was indebted to Empedocles for his concepts of the life and death instincts; and it is known that Friedrich Eckstein and his "Pythagorean" friends were devotees of Empedocles. [10] Then there is the question of Eckstein's attempt to work out a mathematical basis for the Unconscious. This will assume new significance in the context of Freud's debt to Wilhelm Fliess. Finally, the odd fact should be noted that the house in which Freud was staying in 1895, when he had the idea that underlay his theory of the interpretation of dreams, was Schloss Bellevue at Grinzing, the scene of the Viennese Theosophists' summer colony seven years before.

Freud's first steps away from Vienna and toward psychoanalysis were made when he went to Paris in August 1885 to study under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere. A measure of Freud's success in establishing his creation as an independent science is that it is so frequently forgotten that psychoanalysis emerged from the study of hypnosis. The investigation of the altered states of consciousness induced by the hypnotic trance led to other psychologies which have not fitted the materialist temperament so well as that of Freud.

Charcot (1825-93) represented the 19th-century scientific Establishment's coming to terms with hypnosis. The phenomena that are now defined as "hypnotic" emerged from the faith-healing activities of Mesmer at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the movement of which Charcot was the final product had been begun by James Braid in England in the 1840s. The object was to remove the "hypnotic" phenomena from the occult complexities in which the Paracelsian Mesmer had entangled them. Charcot exercised himself to produce an explanation of the symptoms he studied in terms of neurophysiology -- in other words, with a completely materialist theory, in which a subject easily hypnotized was seen as physically ill and successive stages of hypnotism rigorously classified.

Charcot had arrived at the Salpetriere in 1862; and it was not until 1884 that his theories were challenged by Hippolyte Bernheim (1840-1919), the president of the Nancy Medical Society. Bernheim attacked Charcot's system of classification. Together with Dr. Ambrose Liebault he proposed a theory that Liebault had proved amply in his medical practice -- that the hypnotic state was produced psychologically, by suggestion. and that Charcot's belief that hypnosis was connected with illness was a largely accidental result of the concentration on hysterics at the Salpetriere. A few months before his death Charcot wrote an article on faith healing in which he appeared to concede defeat. He admitted the principle that "hysterics" were easily suggestible. [11]

The reaction of Charcot against the irrational aspects of hypnosis was counterbalanced by the continued borrowing by occultists of the phenomena of hypnotism. The Spiritualist epidemic that had originated in America in 1848 very quickly appropriated the idea of the Mesmeric trance. To the revelations transmitted by "spirits from the next world" was added the whole parcel of dubious medical practice attached to the popular Mesmeric movement. By the last half of the 19th century this could include phrenology (there was also a half-breed specialty known as "phrenomagnetism"), hydrotherapy, and any number of questionable pursuits of a magical or fortune-telling nature. Most of these occupations flourished in America, where itinerant Mesmerists had little trouble in fascinating backwoods communities with slick talk and the title of "professor." An example is the "Electrical Psychology" of John Bovee Dods, who used the human aura in some peculiar fashion to make contact with his patient and believed that all the phrenological organs were duplicated on the spiritual plane. In Europe such systems were less well known, although Richard Harte, the Theosophist who published The Hebrew Talisman, can be found as late as 1902 to be of the opinion that "Adam must have been in a magnetic slumber when the Lord performed the very serious operation of the extraction of a rib." [12]

Despite the efforts of Charcot and the Salpetriere school, it proved impossible to deny the assertions from Bernheim and Liebault at Nancy that hypnotic phenomena were to be explained on psychological grounds. For a respectable doctor who wanted to use the beneficial effects of hypnosis in his practice, this presented grave problems. The capitulation of the Salpetriere meant the end of the program to incorporate hypnotism into the materialist world picture. Shortly after Charcot's death hypnotism declined altogether as a subject of medical interest in France, and this may be partly attributed to the fact that it was temporarily unsafe to venture further into debatable territory. However, occultists continued to be interested in hypnotism, and they were not all of the calibre of Dr. Dods or Richard Harte. On 7 June 1884, just over a year before Freud came to study with Charcot, Colonel Olcott of the Theosophical Society had called at the Salpetriere and seen Charcot himself. This meeting took place because one of Charcot's assistants, Dr. Raymond Combret, was a member of the Paris Theosophical Society of the East and the West, presided over by the Duchesse de Pomar. [13]

Thus, in venturing into the field of hypnotism -- even in the stronghold of Charcot's materialist interpretation -- Freud was knowingly putting himself at risk, and he should not have been surprised at the opposition he received. In October 1886, Freud presented a paper, "On Male Hysteria, " to the Vienna Medical Society, and criticism was vociferous. Among the critics was Theodore Meynert, who had a perpetual feud with a certain Dr. Leidesdorf, known as a hypnotizing doctor. Freud worked with Leidesdorf -- and Meynert began to refer to Freud as if he were "merely" a hypnotist, "working in this place as a trained practitioner in hypnosis." [14] To make matters worse, in 1889 Freud visited Bernheim at Nancy. He was converted from his allegiance to Charcot and translated Bernheim's book on Suggestion. The same year Freud defended hypnosis against the slanders of its opponents.

They have not tested the new therapeutic method and employed it impartially and carefully as one would, for instance a newly recommended drug; they have rejected hypnosis a priori and now no acquaintance with that procedure's invaluable therapeutic effects hinders them from giving the most biting and unjustified expression to their dislike of it, whatever that may be based on. They immensely exaggerate the dangers of hypnosis, they call it by one bad name after another. [15]


By changing his allegiance from the Salpetriere to Nancy, Freud had placed himself against the materialist interpretation of hypnosis. He had evidently branded himself in the eyes of his more prejudiced brethren as a man who dealt in quackery and intangibles. His defense of hypnotism is as hypnotism, and it is interesting to compare the Theosophist Richard Harte. Some years later Harte published a book called Hypnotism and the Doctors, and it was dedicated to demonstrating that "the history of the treatment which hypnotism has received at the hands of the doctors is a long story of ignorance, prejudice, cruelty, stupidity, and conceit on their part." [16] Two men may undoubtedly support the same cause for very different motives, but the sort of cause they support may indicate much. Hypnosis was rejected by a large proportion of the medical establishment -- it has never really achieved acceptance. It therefore attracted adepts of pure irrationalism like Richard Harte as well as those like Freud concerned with its therapeutic implications. Not only might Freud be tarred with the same brush as Dr. Dods and his Electrical Psychology, but in the indefiniteness of his own ideas at the time and of ideas about hypnosis generally there may well have been something in the accusations of his opponents. In making fun of Dods, there is the danger of giving such pioneer theorists much less than their historic due. Dr. Dods was invited to deliver nine lectures to the United States Senate; and in the speculations of some other products of the popular Mesmeric movement (like Laroy Sunderland and William Fahnstock), there is much good sense. In the "spiritual science" of P. P. Quimby (the progenitor of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science) may be found an anticipation of Freud's idea of the traumatic experience and also of the cathartic method of cure. [17]

Freud came to use the hypnotic state to avoid the "censor, " which prevents the analyst from discovering those repressed experiences which in his system are said to cause neuroses. But eventually he abandoned hypnotism because of the embarrassing discovery that one of the side effects of the hypnotic transference might be to provoke amorous advances from his patients. He substituted placing his hand on the patient's forehead -- which might, in fact, induce a light hypnosis -- and developed his method of dream interpretation as another means of penetrating the hidden areas of the unconscious. It has been argued that Freud gave up hypnosis because it was not a field in which he could satisfy his "desire for originality." [18] Whatever the truth of the matter, the idea of reaching hidden areas of the mind was implicit in many of the theories of hypnosis before Freud took over the concept and developed his own special means of analysis. The founder of psychoanalysis can also be seen to have searched for congenial theories in the borderland between medicine and occultism during his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess.

Freud met Fliess in 1887, while he was still very much occupied with hypnosis. Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928) was a nose-and-throat specialist with a large practice in Berlin. He was sent by Joseph Breuer-Freud's teacher and first collaborator -- to hear Freud's lectures on neurology. An intimate friendship developed, which lasted until the turn of the century -- and the correspondence between Freud and Fliess has provided rich material for the history of psychoanalysis. This includes the draft of a "Project for a Scientific Physiology, " which was the earliest attempt by Freud to formulate his ideas and the basis on which he was to build. [19] The Freud-Fliess letters also show that Freud was so completely under the spell of Fliess that he temporarily accepted some of his friend's more eccentric theories and tried to combine them with his own developing system.

Fliess discovered that he was able to cure certain illnesses by administering cocaine to the nasal mucous membrane. He then made a tenuous and unjustified connection between this part of the nose and the genital area, and jumped wildly to the conclusion that all life was governed by periods of 28 and 23 days, which were connected with the menstrual cycle. At the same time he developed the notion that all human beings were bisexual. To take first the magic numbers 28 and 23 and Freud's acceptance of them: in 1896 Fliess sent Freud a draft of his first paper on the theory of periodic cycles. At first Freud voiced some slight criticism. But he was responsible for sending Fliess's paper to the Viennese publishers who issued it the next year. By December 1896, Freud was attempting to use the 28-day period to explain the development of the neuroses he was studying (the wording of this passage has been suppressed by the editor of the correspondence). Gradually the relationship between the two men cooled and Freud saw less importance in the theory of his friend -- although in May 1900, he was still able to praise "the beauty of the conception, the originality of the ideas, the simple coherence of the whole." [20]

Wilhelm Fliess used his periodic laws in the most far-reaching way, and his methods of reducing almost any period of time to multiples of his two crucial numbers are, to say the least, suspect. For example, Fliess argued that creativity went in cycles. Thus, Gustav Fechner had discovered a certain formula when he was 18, 083 = 23 • 28[2] + 28 + 23 days old. As the theory developed it became clear that the chief conclusion was a comprehensive determinism, which particularly affected individuals of the same family.

Following the periodic cycles through generations of the same blood teaches us to interpret the substance of life as a coherent whole whose pulsations flow through all individuals who carry within themselves the inheritance of a generation. The birthday of a great-grandson is already settled with the day of his ancestress's death.


By 1918 Fliess was maintaining that the year -- the precise calendar year, for example, 1926 -- could be used as a significant period over which to compare births and deaths in different families. Three years before his death he waxed poetical over The Miracle of the Year.

Yes, miracle! Or is it not a miracle, if over many years we always see the first flowers on a rose-bush at the same date, or at the most with a discrepancy of one or two days, if we notice the remarkable regularity with which the swallows arrive on the first or second of May and leave on the first of August? [21]


It is no coincidence that after the publication of his first large work, The Course of Life, in 1906, Fliess changed publishers and issued his works under the imprint of the Theosophical and volkisch publisher Eugen Diederichs of Jena. The insistence of Fliess on the mystical link of the blood was obviously attractive to volkish thinkers. It is interesting that Gustav Wyneken, a prominent figure in the youth movements, possessed a copy of the book which first placed emphasis on this aspect of Dr. Fliess's theory -- Of Life and Death, published by Diederichs in 1909. [22] The ideas of Fliess also became the property of occultists, who were attracted both by the obvious connections of the Fliess periods with astrology and the current occult fascination with prophecy engendered by disturbed times. The historical studies of Stromer von Reichenbach are almost identical in method to the laborious calculations of births and deaths published by Fliess. Egon Friedell compared this "similar system of fatalism" to that of the Babylonian numerologists. The theories of Fliess began to appear tangled up in occult bibliographies with Berdyaev, Franz Hartmann, Eliphas Levi, Papus, Max Kemmerich, Hermann Wirth, Rudolf Steiner, Lanz von Liebenfels and Har s Horbiger. By the second edition of The Course of Life in 1923, its author had tacitly recognized the camp in which he stood:

Indian antiquity could have drawn up the theory which will be put forward in this work. The necessary assumptions were completely present. Its deduction needs no laboratory and no microscope. It is based on simple observation of nature and its instrument is the human intellect.


Such observation led to the conclusion that human life was completely regulated by the day and the year, the rotation and the orbit of the earth. As early as 1906 Fliess had recognized the inevitability of his being branded a mystic. By 1923 he was complaining bitterly that his theories had been neglected by the scientific Establishment. Perhaps, he wrote, his ideas would soon find a hearing among those who were ready.

Or else I must say with Kepler: It doesn't worry me whether my work is read now or only later. It's nothing to me to wait a century for my readers, when God himself waited six thousand years for his discoverer. I will conquer. I have stolen the hidden treasure of the Egyptians. I resign myself to my holy wrath. [23]


There is, of course, nothing inherently unrespectable about a fascination with periodicity or cycles in purely scientific terms. In fact, at the same time as Wilhelm Fliess was elaborating his theories, the Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius was investigating the effect of the moon on the menstrual cycle, having earlier established lunar influence over thunderstorms. [24] But the extension of the Fliess theory into an all-embracing determinism represents a capitulation to the fashion for cyclic theories so prevalent among the occultists and those in search of reassurance, among whom Fliess's theory fell. [25] A certain similarity of viewpoint was probably there from the start. Fliess's idea that all nature was linked together has been traced to the late Romantic school of Naturphilosophie (by which Freud also was greatly influenced). This implied an "organic" vision, a reliance on the idea of a world-body. [26] Goethe was the great traditional exponent of this attitude, and his sources were those of occult tradition. The lecture that persuaded the young Freud to become a doctor was, in fact, nothing less than a reading of Goethe's essay on Nature. That perpetual Goethean, Rudolf Steiner, was tutor to a Viennese family where Joseph Breuer (Freud's teacher and collaborator) was a regular visitor. [27] In 1886, Steiner delivered his first lecture in the Vienna Goethe Union -- where (as I have already noted) he met Friedrich Eckstein. There is neither evidence nor need to argue a direct connection. It is merely important to realize that the atmosphere in which Freud, Fliess, Eckstein, and Steiner .lived was influenced by similar considerations and that there is a certain connection and even coherence in their outlook.

Another point of contact between the approach of Fliess. and that of occult pursuits is his use of numbers. They are manipulated in a way which many of his opponents have denounced as "number mysticism." [28] We have already recorded that Friedrich Eckstein (another friend of Freud from the early days) published in 1918 what he claimed was a mathematical formulation of the unconscious; and we also know that Freud tried to adapt the numerology of Fliess to the progressive development of neurosis. This in itself is significant. But it becomes even more so when we remember the episode of Eckstein, his mathematician friend Oscar Simony, and their unsatisfactory seances with Henry Slade, the protege of Baron Hellenbach. Hellenbach himself was a friend of Simony, and in Spiritualist matters was a follower of Carl du Pre\. In 1882 Hellenbach had published in Vienna a treatise called The Magic of Numbers, in which he argued a periodicity in all human activities and demonstrated to his own satisfaction how the tetragram controlled both his own life and the career of Napoleon. Hellenbach also maintained that there was a periodic law governing human growth. He based his claims on the numerological theories of a Viennese surgeon and occultist, Franz Liharzik, who had published an elaborate exposition of his ideas in 1865. Liharzik's numerology was derived from Athanasius Kircher and Ramon Lull, to say nothing of Pythagoras. [29] Ideas of the significance of number itself and of periodicity in human life were very much part of the Occult Revival at the time when Freud was developing psychoanalysis, and they were expounded in Freud's hometown.

In this context the numerology of Fliess begins to take on a new appearance, as do the accusations of his critics. Wilhelm Fliess was a man whose theories were substantially akin to those of the Occult Revival, and in such circles he found his only public. Freud's association with him has always been a matter for amazement in psychoanalytic circles. But only a detailed acquaintance with the background of such theories reveals to what extent Freud's friend was an adept of the Underground of knowledge.

Like other rejected theories, the "Fliess periods" acquired followers and became a cult. One of his supporters wrote in 1918: "The importance of Fliess periodicity research stands nowadays beyond all contradiction. The circle of his disciples and collaborators grows undiminished." Significantly, criticism leveled at Fliess was also used to damage Freud. For example, in 1910 the two -- by then estranged -- friends were labeled "New Pythagoreans" by a writer in a scientific publication who made short work of Fliess's calculations and strongly criticized his use of the year as a "Great Mystery." This critic thought that just as Freud's psychology made everything depend on sex, so did Fliess's biology. That is, the starting point of the Fliess concept of cyclic determinism was the menstrual cycle, and his theory incorporated the secondary idea of bisexuality. Just as it is significant that the opposition to Freud was based on his stressing the sexual origins of neurosis, it is also important that the interest of both Fliess and Freud coincided in the field of sexual investigation. This may partly account for Freud's otherwise odd statement in a letter to Fliess (New Year's Day, 1896) that they were "both doing the same work," and it emphasizes the fact that the collaboration of the two men was seen by the -- admittedly blinkered -- Establishment as similar and subversive. [30]

In the interchange of ideas that occurred between Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess, Fliess's secondary theory of "bisexuality" was also discussed. After some initial doubts, Freud was completely won over. He announced to Fliess in August 1901, that he was about to write a book called Bisexuality in Man. Fliess had already become rather disturbed about Freud's jealousy, and it seems fairly certain that the psychoanalyst's known trait of forgetting inconvenient discoveries by other people was responsible for the fracas which followed. A pupil of Freud, Dr. Herrmann Swoboda, learned from his teacher of the "bisexual theory, " and he informed a friend named Otto Weininger. On the basis of this plundered idea, Weininger wrote his book Sex and Character, which Freud read in manuscript in 1901. The book was published in 1903; and in October of that year Otto Weininger shot himself. When Fliess discovered that his theories had been plagiarized and that the channel of communication had been Freud, a quarrel developed, which led to the breaking off of their friendship altogether in 1904. A polemical battle broke out between the supporters of Fliess and Swoboda during which Freud's name was not unexpectedly dragged in the mud. This did not prevent Swoboda from continuing to publish books based on the Fliess theory -- he even carried on a correspondence with Fliess -- and eventually this former pupil of Freud issued an immense work on the significance of the periodic recurrence of the number 7 which might have been elaborated straight from Baron Hellenbach. [31]

Otto Weininger (c. 1880-1903) is a tragic figure. He was a Jew who became a Christian on the day he obtained his doctorate in 1902. His religious conversion seems to have been genuine. But it carried a sad corollary, for Weininger was deeply convinced by German volkisch ideology, venerated Wagner, and despised his own race. His suicide in 1903 came as the climax to a period of intolerable mental pressure at the end of which he told his friend, Swoboda, that he saw three possibilities open to him: the scaffold, suicide, or the achievement of a mystical quest. His book Sex and Character had an enormous circulation particularly among illuminated groups: it combined his tortured anti-Semitism and distaste for women with the prophecy that there would emerge from this "Jewish century" a great founder of a new religion. Weininger went on to elaborate a symbolic theory of the universe, which acknowledged his debt to Plato, adopted the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm, and declared that character could be discovered from astrology. It is clear both from his posthumous works and from Sex and Character that Weininger was acquainted with occult and Theosophical groups. There are even indications that he saw himself as the great prophet whose advent he predicted. [32]
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 2 of 4

Lessons can be learned both from the fact that it was Weininger who adopted the Fliess theory and from its popularity under its new guise. The Naturphilosophie that influenced Fliess and the early Freud derived from the Romantic -- which is to say very much an occult-world-picture. One of the traditional elements in this world-picture is the idea of polarity. [33] An almost contemporary discussion of the problem is the book of the French magician, Josephin Peladan, Traite des Antinomies (1901). Whereas Fliess had confined the concept to the idea that each human being incorporated masculine and feminine elements, at least one of his disciples extended the idea of polarity throughout all creation. [34] Weininger attempted to express his version of the bipolar theory through some almost meaningless mathematical formulae. The real crux of the matter is not his algebraical window dressing but the significance that he himself attributed to the idea of bisexuality. As soon as he introduced the concept, he compared it to traditional thought: to the hermaphrodite and the suggestion of one of the Gnostics about a "man-woman." In his book Weininger saw "the germs of a world-scheme ... allied most closely with the conceptions of Plato, Kant, and Christianity." [35] So, once more, the theories of Fliess gravitate to the occultists and mystical philosophers. Yet again someone connected with Freud's progress toward psychoanalysis is seen to have belonged to their number. More correctly, two figures: Weininger, who showed Freud his manuscript; and, to a lesser extent, Swoboda, Freud's pupil.

The following conversation, recorded by Jung, took place in Vienna in 1910.

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakeable bulwark." He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, "And promise me this one thing, my dear son, that you will go to church every Sunday." In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark -- against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud" -- and here he hesitated for a moment, then added -- "of occultism." ... I knew that I would never be able to accept such an attitude. What Freud seemed to mean by "occultism" was virtually everything that philosophy and religion, including the rising contemporary science of parapsychology, had learned about the psyche. To me the sexual theory was just as occult, that is to say, just as unproven an hypothesis, as many other speculative views. [36]


The date has some importance in the development of Freud's attitude to the occult. Leaving aside for the moment Jung's analysis of Freud's motives, what might Freud be chiefly concerned about in his use of the term occult? We have defined the occult as "rejected knowledge, " and to a strict materialist both the Gnostic and Oriental doctrines of the recent revival and more accepted transcendental teachings might be seen as included in the term. But in this context there is no doubt that the chief fear of Sigmund Freud was directed against the area of inquiry known as "psychical research" and was defined in the terms of the London Society for Psychical Research established in 1882 "to investigate that large body of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic." This is what Jung later termed "the rising contemporary science of parapsychology." The fact that we have already in a single paragraph three terms for one subject shows the difficulty confronting anyone at all who takes an interest in the field. In Germany, the term Okkultismus was used up until the Second World War to describe both members of esoteric groups and para-psychologists (wissenschaftliche Okkultisten). The English word occultism could have something of the same ambiguity. The phrase psychical research, although its meaning is now certain, merely shows the necessary interpenetration of supposedly normal, abnormal, and paranormal aspects of the mind -- for what after all, is this psyche, which is being investigated? The confusion becomes acute when, for example, The Brighton Herald could print a report in 1913 of a talk by Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson on "Psychology" at the Brighton Pavilion -- and the reader discovers that the versatile prelate's view of "psychology" was as a term covering the phenomena of the seance room. [37] The word parapsychology, which Jung used in his memoirs, is unambiguous. It is derived from the French metapsychisme. a coining in which the psychical researcher Charles Richet had been anticipated by that most eclectic of all gurus, Wincenty Lutoslawski. [38]

Freud initially tried to circumscribe the area of his inquiries, and he was naturally cautious about the wagonload of mystics and those in search of faith dragged along the path marked "occultism." At the same time he was dismally conscious that he might at any point along his road have to deal with the supposedly "supernatural"; and on several occasions he did face up to this task. It was difficult to ignore subject matter that presented itself as part of his elected specialty. Frederic Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, had preceded Freud by some years in recognizing the importance of the unconscious mind. His theory of the "subliminal self" was first outlined in the Proceedings of the SPR in a paper of 1888. Myers discussed the "Daemon" which was said to have inspired Socrates. He referred to the "messages which are conveyed to the conscious mind from unconscious strata of the personality." [39] This was followed by a long series of papers during the period 1891-92 in which Myers argued that

that group of facts which the scientific world has now learnt to accept (as the hypnotic trance, automatic writing, alternations of personality and the like), and that group of facts, for which in these Proceedings we are still endeavouring to win general scientific acceptance (as telepathy and clairvoyance), ought to be considered in close alliance and correlation.


Referring to the fact that hypnotized subjects showed themselves dislocated from their normal personalities, he wrote: "I conceive it possible that ... I may assume these various personalities under one single consciousness." [40] The term "subliminal, " meaning "beneath the threshold, " Myers later defined as "all that takes place ... outside the ordinary margin of consciousness." [41]

From the point of view of the early Freud, the approach of Myers left much to be desired, particularly as the Englishman insisted on nailing to the masthead of his "subliminal self" a Neo-Platonic metapsychology. But it is important to notice that the two men were attempting in a similar fashion to map the unconscious regions of the mind -- and that, therefore, the phenomena which have been more exclusively associated with each were in fact objects of necessary mutual concern. Thus, after Breuer and Freud published the "Preliminary Communication" to the Studies in Hysteria in January 1893, Myers gave a full account of the paper at a meeting of the London SPR that April. Thus, Freud accepted membership of the SPR in 1911 and five years later of the American society. [42] The very nature of Freud's concerns and the matrix of psychoanalysis itself meant that the possibly supernatural could by no means be excluded.

There was all the more reason for exercising care to admit for consideration only the phenomena that might be classed as occult or "supernatural, " and to exclude the philosophy.

Myers is an extreme example of the early psychical researcher involved in finding a way to reestablish his lost religious faith. But many of his active colleagues in the SPR shared his approach. It is an attitude that has tended to dominate psychical research and to which the most publicized parapsychologist of the 20th century, Dr. J. B. Rhine, is no exception. Rhine's interest in psychical research grew out of his need "to find a satisfactory philosophy of life, one that could be regarded as scientifically sound and yet could answer some of the urgent questions regarding the nature of man and his place in the natural world." Rhine, at first, had aspirations to the ministry. When he became disillusioned with his Christian faith, he and his wife decided to become professional foresters as "the woods seemed to offer a free and natural life." The turning point came when they heard Conan Doyle lecture on "Spiritualism." Although they remained unconvinced, even the possibility of attaining Doyle's faith was exhilarating. After a period of experiment with mediums, the Rhines came into contact with the vitalist William McDougall, who had arrived in the United States in 1920 and initiated psychical research at Harvard. From this contact sprang the famous card-guessing tests for Extra Sensory Perception carried out by the Rhines at Duke University and over the results of which there is such disagreement. It is remarkable how Rhine's conclusions from his inconclusive experiments in telepathy are almost identical to the equally doubtful theories of Frederic Myers. [43]

This excursion is necessary to show that parapsychology as such has so consistently presented traps to the "scientific" investigator that Freud's mistrust of the supposedly "supernatural" aspects, which his chosen subject made it difficult to avoid, was a perfectly natural condition. If Freud had been forced to defend himself so heatedly over the relatively acceptable question of hypnosis, his circumspection over the ambiguous connotations of "the occult" is understandable. In the German-speaking countries academics and medical men were no more immune to the attractions of occultism than their Anglo-Saxon colleagues. Zollner had started the fashion with his experiments with Henry Slade. At one of his sittings he had persuaded Gustav Fechner to be present -- and as it is known that Freud freely admitted his debt to Fechner, he would undoubtedly have been aware of the Zollner experiments. Freud would have also known that the psychologist William Wundt had assisted at one of Zollner's seances, had twice pronounced unfavorably on the phenomena, and that his powerful opinion was shared by his pupils -- for example, Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1916), who lectured at Harvard and categorically denied the existence of psychic phenomena. Most influential of all in determining Freud's attitude to the occult was probably the succession of occult scandals with which Europe was as familiar as England and America. For example, in 1900 there occurred the first exposure of the celebrated "flower medium, " Anna Rothe, who had obtained a large following even among contributors to Psychische Studien. [44] The arguments that caused the greatest reverberation in the later days of psychoanalysis were those which centered around the work of the Munich psychical researcher Schrenck-Notzing.

Albert, Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing (1862-1929) qualified as a doctor with a thesis on hypnotism. According to one of his friends, he married "the richest heiress of Wurttemberg" and afterward (in the words of another) "ran a large house but a small practice. "45 He published several works on psychopathology but, after the founding of the Munich Psychological Society in 1892, became associated with Carl du Prel and determined to study Spiritualist phenomena by scientific means. As early as 1887 he had published a survey of telepathic experiments and issued two other books concerned with the phenomena of mediums. His main work of 1914, the Phenomena of Materialisation, contains records of sittings with several mediums said to produce "materialized" apparitions, notably one known by the pseudonym "Eva c." Six weeks after this publication Mathilde von Kemnitz published her Moderne Mediumforschung, containing records of a seance that she had attended the previous summer with another of Schrenck's mediums. This displayed the amazing credulity of the Freiherr and the complete lack of control exercised during the sitting. Mathilde von Kemnitz had been deputed to search the medium, who immediately claimed she did not understand what was required of her; and those present at the seance were chiefly friends of Schrenck-Notzing. To her pamphlet was attached a letter from Dr. Walter Gulat-Wellenberg, who revealed that "Eva C" (the heroine of Schrenck's book on the phenomena of materialization) was well-known under other names, that she was accompanied everywhere by an obvious confederate, that her vaunted materializations were retouched photographs from the Paris newspaper Le Miroir, and that Charles Richet had exposed her activities in Algeria some years before. Schrenck-Notzing issued a weak rejoinder. It took the line that a recently qualified physician could hardly be supposed capable of overturning the giants of modern science like Crookes, Lodge, and -- by implication -- himself.  [46]

From this moment on, Schrenck-Notzing was ranked with the occultists of the most credulous sort. His self-defense became ever more improbable. By 1920 he was still upholding the belief that "Eva C" had produced materialized spirits, and he argued that the two-dimensional appearance of Eva's cut-out photographs was explained by "a general law that a continuation of the materialization of organic parts, beyond the field of vision of the observers, is non-existent." Attacks on Schrenck's later experiments with the Schneider brothers grew more and more vocal, and in the year before his death the Freiherr was suing two of his opponents in the courts. In 1927 Count Carl von Klinckowstroem diagnosed, on the basis of Schrenck's example, what he called "the Occultists' Complex." This "manifests itself in the occultists' becoming used to the miracle of mediumship and getting entangled in its dogmas and absurd hypothesis so that they become completely unreliable for level-headed interpretation and report of the evidence." Around the time of Schrenck's death, there appeared a number of pamphlets protesting at the penetration of rationalist science by the criteria of "faith" and at the damage done to genuine parapsychology by credulous researchers. Schrenck-Notzing's friend and colleague, Albert Moll, a leading authority on hypnosis, deliberately restrained his criticism but characterized the Freiherr as "an example of being led astray through ambition and sensationalism." Klinckowstroem bemoaned the fate of parapsychology. Another doctor warned that the supremacy of the white race was founded on rationalism, and that surrender to the mystical was a portent of doom. [47]

None of this concern on the part of the scientific Establishment would have remained unknown to Freud, particularly as Schrenck-Notzing had contributed some useful studies on sexual pathology and because psychologists, medical men, and authorities on hypnosis were continually involved. As psychoanalysis gradually gained acceptance, the dangers of dealing with "occultism" of any description would have presented themselves ever more forcibly. It is, therefore, significant that Freud altered his attitude as the years advanced in favor of considering the supernatural: and even he could not escape the influence of the outburst of irrationalism which followed the First World War. Apart from Jung, at least two of Freud's close psychoanalytical associates were interested in the forbidden areas: Sandor Ferenczi and Wilhelm Stekel.

Six days after he had finished The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, Freud noted a case of a prophetic dream being apparently fulfilled. He explained it as an instance of a dream being manufactured after the event to which it really referred. In March 1908, he described three cases that might seem to have indicated thought transference at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, but he still excluded the possibility of telepathy. Then he met Jung, was profoundly shaken by some apparently paranormal events, which Jung himself provoked, and (perhaps in response to warnings from other friends) administered to his most brilliant disciple his warning against the "black tide of occultism" in 1910. Yet in the very same year the founder of psychoanalysis began some half-hearted inquiries himself, in the company of Sandor Ferenczi. They visited a Frau Seidler in Berlin, who claimed to be able to read letters blindfolded. She correctly guessed that a letter she was given came from Vienna; but Freud later realized that the place of origin was written on the envelope. Both he and Ferenczi were obviously ignorant of the correct procedure for protecting themselves against fraud. Freud told Ferenczi that Frau Seidler must possess a "physiological gift" for perceiving others' thoughts. "I am afraid you have begun to discover something big, but there will be great difficulties in the way of making use of it, " he wrote to Ferenczi. The attitude of caution was maintained the next year when he warned his friend against "undue eagerness" in his "occult studies." [48]

This warning was probably necessary. The first paper ever written by Ferenczi dealt with the occult (1899), and Ernest Jones records that much correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi -- who until 1932 was as close to Freud as anyone -- was on occult topics.49 After his visit with Freud to Frau Seidler, Ferenczi made further tests with her and also with a Hungarian Theosophical medium called Frau Jelinek. These unsatisfactory experiments were replaced by a collaboration between Ferenczi and a homosexual patient who, the analyst claimed, could approximately guess his thoughts. Prophesying a revolution in analytical technique, Ferenczi wrote to Freud that he himself was a mind reader, and about 1912 tried to convince Ernest Jones that they were in mental contact. His next enthusiasm was the talking horse of Elberfeld called "Clever Hans." But he was deterred from investigating the animal's supposed telepathic abilities by discovering the vast body of literature on psychical research. In November 1913, he introduced a "Professor" Alexander Roth into the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society but failed to persuade Freud to give this clairvoyant a testimonial. After the war Ferenczi's occult studies continued. In 1925 he took part in apparently convincing experiments in thought transference with Freud and his daughter Anna. Freud continued to allow the more cautious members of the psychoanalytical movement to influence him against letting Ferenczi publish his results. The resulting conflict was a major cause of the breach between the two men. The Hungarian ended by believing he was being successfully psychoanalyzed via telepathic messages sent from America by a former patient. [50]

Despite Freud's initial caution, there is no doubt that Ferenczi's influence was a leading factor in changing his attitude to the "occult." It would be to credit Freud with powers more than human to suppose that he could have resisted altogether the irrationalist influences which pressed so hard around him. Postwar Vienna was as full of anxiety as anywhere else in the defeated countries; indeed even confirmed mystics could be scathing at the expense of popular occultism. Franz Blei wrote in his autobiography in 1931: "In Vienna the 'occult phenomena' deserved well of a spectacular number of officers, which made the 147-year-old Dr. Eckstein call the whole complex 'sub-lieutenant's metaphysics.' As everyone in Vienna knows, Dr. Eckstein also knew the Count de St Germain. There are some who say that he himself was the Count." [51] Despite such warnings before his eyes Freud moved decidedly from a position of restraining Ferenczi to a position where he himself had to be restrained.

In the summer of 1921 Freud was invited to act as coeditor to no less than three different periodicals devoted to psychical research. To one of the invitations -- from Hereward Carrington of New York -- he replied that "If I had my life to live over again I should devote my life to psychical research rather than psycho-analysis." That September he delivered a paper on "Psycho-analysis and Telepathy" to a small circle of his closest associates in the Harz Mountains; and he evidently thought the paper important enough to be read again -- although he let himself be persuaded not to carry out this plan. [52] It is in fact a deliberate statement of his position on the burgeoning occult revival.

Freud told his audience of the invitations he had received from psychical researchers, recorded various instances in which prophecies had not come true, and discussed the "strong resistance" he felt to talking about occultism at all.

It no longer seems possible to keep away from the study of what are known as "occult" phenomena .... The impetus towards such an investigation seems irresistibly strong .... It is a part expression of the loss of value by which everything has been affected since the world catastrophe of the Great War, a part of the tentative approach to the great revolution towards which we are heading and of whose extent we can form no estimate; but no doubt it is also an attempt at compensation.


Freud saw very clearly the similarities between the occult approach and that of psychoanalysis.

It does not follow as a matter of course that an intensified interest in occultism must involve a danger to psycho-analysis. We should, on the contrary, be prepared to find reciprocal sympathy between them. They have both experienced the same contemptuous and arrogant treatment by official science. To this day, psycho-analysis is regarded as savoring of mysticism, and its unconscious is looked on as one of those things between heaven and earth which philosophy refuses to dream of. The numerous suggestions made to us by occultists that we should cooperate with them show that they would like to treat us as half belonging to them and that they count on our support against the pressure of exact authority. N or, on the other hand, has psycho-analysis any interest in going out of its way to defend that authority, for it itself stands in opposition to everything that is conventionally restricted, well-established and generally accepted. Not for the first time would it be offering its help to the obscure but indestructible surmises of the common people against the obscurantism of educated opinion. Alliance and cooperation between analysts and occultists might thus appear both plausible and promising. [53]


But on closer inspection Freud saw pronounced difficulties in the way of an alliance. The occultist was a believer who was searching for reasons to support his faith, while the analyst was essentially a child of exact science. "Analysts are at bottom incorrigible mechanists and materialists, even though they seek to avoid robbing the mind and spirit of their still unrecognized characteristics." The analyst could not go about deliberately looking for occult phenomena, because this itself would impair his impartiality. However, "if occult phenomena force themselves upon him" he would not evade them. The analyst must discipline himself to attend to his proper subject. "Precisely because it relates to the mysterious unconscious" psychoanalysis itself could not hope to escape the catastrophic consequences of a collapse in intellectual values resulting from a triumph of irrationalism over rational science. Freud gave three reasons for concealing his remarks from a wider audience: a dislike of swimming with the tide, the fear of "distracting attention from psychoanalysis, " and the fact-telling in itself -- that he was being perfectly frank. [54]

The title of Freud's statement on occultism, "Psycho-analysis and Telepathy, " was to some extent a bow in the direction of his former colleague, Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel's The Telepathic Dream, first published in 1920, either then or in a later edition appeared in a series called "The Occult World, " which included discussions of the astral plane, the Odic force, Yoga, and the Cabala, besides works by Schrenck-Notzing and Arthur Grobe-Wuchitsky (this last an adept of occult numerology). Stekel had broken with Freud in 1912. But the coincidence of their mutual interest in telepathic dreams around 1920-21 indicates that there were strong pressures forcing analysts toward the paranormal. Stekel became interested in telepathic dreams after he himself had undergone a hallucination. He had been lying in bed very ill when a voice suddenly spoke to him: "In two weeks you will die! Use the time well!" [55] The prediction was not fulfilled, but the incident aroused Stekel's interest in psychical research. It turned him from a position of pure materialism to a wholehearted acceptance of telepathy. In his discussion of the cases he had collected, Stekel made great use of Myers, Gurney, and Podmore's Phantasms of the Living, and he contrived to explain the existence of telepathy in dreams through the agency of the "N-Rays, " which had recently been "discovered" by Professor Blondlot at Nancy.* He thought that every human being gave off rays, which transmitted emotions like love or hate, and he imagined that by this occult commonplace he could also explain hypnotism. He attacked his former master openly:

The telepathic dream contradicts Freud's theory. It is never a wish-fulfillment. So orthodox psychoanalysis does not want to recognize the telepathic dream.

Because of this, Freud and his immediate circle doubt the existence of the telepathic dream. I cannot understand this doubt and am forced to trace it back to a prejudice against all occult questions .... Anyone who today does not believe in the telepathic dream makes himself a laughing-stock. [56]


Freud struck back in 1922. He argued that even if Stekel's thesis had been adequately proved, it would not affect his theory that a dream was a wish fulfillment. Even supposedly telepathic dreams must be subject to analysis like any other. Analysis and occultism could not be mixed, and there were "powerful and mysterious instincts" fighting on the side of occultism. Yet his own attitude gave evidence of hesitation. Freud denied belief in "telepathy in the occult sense, " but he referred to "the incontestible fact that sleep creates favorable conditions for telepathy." [57] Three years after this reply to the renegade Stekel, Freud, Anna Freud, and Ferenczi carried out their own experiments in thought transference and, at the same time, Freud sent out a circular in which he declared how impressed he was with certain telepathic experiments published in the SPR Proceedings. On 15 March 1925, he wrote that "the matter is becoming urgent for us." This naturally alarmed these analysts who preserved the attitude of the earlier Freud and were concerned for the status of the new science. Ernest Jones dispatched a countermanifesto warning against the dangers in this change of approach. In correspondence with Jones, Freud admitted his complete "conversion" but advised him to say that this matter was Freud's own private affair. [58] The conversion of the founder of psychoanalysis was by no means sudden -- for as early as his 1921 pronouncement on matters occult, Freud had encouraged his listeners to collect instances of dreams that, when analyzed, seemed to show a possible telepathic content. [59]

Freud's final stance on the paranormal, as far as it is known, is contained in an essay of 1933. He maintained a belief in telepathy, while qualifying some of his earlier statements; and he came to see psychoanalysis as paving the way for an explanation of the phenomenon on purely physical grounds. He thought that telepathy might be the vestigial remnant of an earlier method of communication, which had been replaced by speech. [60] As regards his ideas on how his "conversion" affected his own system, he had, in the full flush of his enthusiasm in 1925, written a note on "The Occult Significance of Dreams" for inclusion in his Interpretation of Dreams. describing his own methods of experiment. Freud hinted at a complex means of attributing telepathy after first having analyzed the associations of the person to whom the thought was supposed to have been transmitted. [61] The possibilities of falsely attributing telepathic effects scarcely bear thinking about.

In 1926, the year after Freud issued his circular on the importance of telepathy, his journal Imago printed no less than four articles concerned with possibly occult phenomena. Obviously, the directions of the Master's interest greatly affected the disciples, although all were careful to achieve a correct position with regard to analytical dogma, and an editorial note stated that psychoanalysis pronounced neither for nor against the reality of such phenomena. [62] The most common Freudian attitude to the occult was to analyze it "according to the canons of the Master." But the nature of these canons and the man himself have so far been left out of this discussion. Without entering on a superfluous explanation of Freudian tenets, some attention must be paid to the means by which Freud sought to penetrate the depths of the Unconscious.

The essential elements of Freudianism include the assertion that there is an unconscious, that neuroses are sexually determined, that dreams are wish-fulfillments and can be symbolically interpreted, and that a cure for neurosis may be brought about by removing the mental block protecting a traumatic experience. We have seen that the possibly "occult" in the form of the revival of occult philosophy, the opting for rejected knowledge of a kindred nature, and a fascination with parapsychology had been present while Freud was developing psychoanalysis, and that a significant number of his associates shared such preoccupations. What of the system that emerged?

The unconscious has to be reached when the censor is asleep. Troublesome experiences and facts that the analyst could interpret were first obtained through light hypnosis, later merely by establishing a position in which the transference could be affected, and also by the interpretation of dreams. Freud's system does not use hypnosis to effect a cure, merely to obtain information. This is the characteristic that distinguishes psychoanalysis from all other systems of "mental healing" that derive from the use of hypnosis. Yet, in the premise that the healing must be done in the unconscious, Freudianism was not unique.

for example, in 1893, the year in which Freud and Breuer published their "Preliminary Communication" on hysteria, Thomson Jay Hudson issued his Law of Psychic Phenomena in London and Chicago. Hudson (1834-1903) had been a barrister and a journalist; at the time his book was published, he was chief examiner in the United States Patent Office. The Law of Psychic Phenomena sold over 100, 000 copies. Its author stated his object as being "to assist in bringing Psychology within the domain of the exact sciences" and was concerned above all with paranormal phenomena, dreams, and hypnotism. Much of the book, however, was devoted to elaborating Hudson's theory that man "has two minds": an "objective mind, " which is the directing force, and a "subjective mind, " which is "constantly amenable to control by suggestion" and "incapable of inductive reasoning." Hudson considered telepathy a proven fact, and he proposed a system of mental healing by telepathy -- "the communion of subjective minds" -- during sleep, when the directing mind was in abeyance. It is easy to see that Hudson's "subjective mind" is, in some aspects, equivalent to the Freudian unconscious, and also that the proposed method of healing corresponds to Freud's idea of evading the censor, even anticipating the idea that the barriers preventing access to the unconscious are lowered during sleep. But Hudson wrapped his theories up in the paraphernalia of the Occult Revival, and he incurred the hostility of scientists by the determination to make this -- otherwise remarkable -- theory serve as a bulwark for religion. Freud's contribution is, on the face of it, entirely secular, and his methods sometimes worked. But if, in relation to Freud, Hudson's idea of healing by telepathy seems fatuous, it should be remembered that, in 1912, Ferenczi was contemplating the same principle.

Freud's followers place great stress on his work on the interpretation of dreams. Dreams have been traditionally the preserve of priests and soothsayers, and to such associations is added the fact that, from the point of view of the patient, there is no reason to suppose a connection between the reported memories of a night's surrealism and the problems with which the patient consults an analyst. There are two questions to be distinguished here: the first about the method of dream interpretation, the second about the status of the analyst himself. As to the method, the inventor admitted "My presumption that dreams can be interpreted at once puts me in opposition to the ruling theory of dreams and in fact to every theory of dreams with [a] single exception .... " [63]

"One day, I discovered to my great astonishment that the view of dreams which came nearest to the truth was not the medical, but the popular one, half involved though it was in superstition." [64] As in his estimate of the relationship of psychoanalysis and the occult, Freud had no illusions as to where he stood -- against the conventional materialists and in danger of being branded a "witch doctor." His interpretation of dream symbols was as traditional as his insistence that dreams could be interpreted at all. Two French critics once observed:

Dreams of snakes, trees, flowers, gardens, teeth, eyelids, the navel, columns, caves, boxes, torches, and lamps had in the Renaissance the same meaning as the symbolism of Freud. Like him, the ancient authors had decided that the same dream was open to two different and opposing interpretations and possessed this idea of contradiction which is no discovery of modern psychology. Perhaps they came at it by examining the subjective content of a dream which is so different for the same depiction. [65]


To some extent, the analyst, as the interpreter of dreams, embodies the powers of the soothsayers who went before him. Again, Freud recognized this in his reflections on dreams and the occult. "Since dreams themselves have always been mysterious things, they have been brought into intimate connection with the other unknown mysteries." [66] The comparison between psychoanalysts and witch doctors has been made both by analysts themselves and by respected anthropologist (among others, Levi-Strauss). [67] Curiously enough, it is usually made the excuse for attacking Freud rather than for taking the witch doctor more seriously. In terms of function and in terms of cure, it is easy to discover parallels between the operation of analyst, priest, and magician. Freud himself wanted to establish psychoanalysis independently of both science and religion. In November 1928, he wrote to the Zurich pastor, Oskar Pfister, about his brainchild. "I should like to hand it over to a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of souls who need not be doctors and should not be priests." [68] Despite his concern to gain the acceptance of the scientific Establishment, Freud did not wish analysis to become part of that Establishment, and his own antireligious position did not apparently preclude him from an implicit acknowledgment of affinities between analyst and priest.

The idea of the psychoanalytic cure was based on the notion of removing repressions, a theory in which Freud found he had been anticipated by Schopenhauer. Freud writes that the psychoanalyst attempts" to restore an earlier state of things." To define this Freud adapts a Platonic myth. This refers to the search of all living beings for their natural complement. For Freud this became the sexual search, and the desired integrity was to be attained through the satisfaction of the libido. [69] This traditional theory -- without the sexual interpretation -- would have been very familiar to the contemporary mystics influenced by the Occult Revival, the Platonic tradition, and various ideas of polarity. It is easy to show that the idea was in fact applied to medicine by figures of the Occult Revival. In 1893 -- the year of Hudson's Law of Psychic Phenomena and of Breuer and Freud's "Preliminary Communication" -- the Theosophist Franz Hartmann (a friend of Eckstein, who had settled in Austria) published in London a work on Occult Science and Medicine, largely based on Paracelsian precepts. His definition of disease shows plainly the idea of restoring the lost equilibrium. "Disease is the disharmony which follows the disobedience to the law; the restoration consists in restoring the harmony by a return to obedience to the law of order which governs the whole." [70] That Freud was acquainted with what he called "obscure and ancient medical ideas" we know from a letter to Fliess, [71] and it is more than likely that he knew of Paracelsian medicine.

A pattern begins to emerge of psychoanalysis embodying ideas that the Occult Revival would have quite understood -- but with a considerable difference from the occult originals. In psychoanalytic theory and practice, ideas are encountered which are secularized versions of ideas that found their traditional expression in the language of contemporary occultism. This is not to say that such was Freud's intention. But enough has been said about his attitude to the occult to show that contact existed, and indeed that it could not be avoided. The theories were available, and either subconsciously or semiconsciously influenced Freud's interpretation of the Unconscious, a system which he had to take great care not to have condemned out of hand. (An analogy could be made with the process of chemistry developing from alchemy, but not an analogy which saw only virtue in the exact science, neglecting alchemical symbolism.) It is well known that Freud considered religions as examples of "delusional transformation of reality, " [72] and the hypothesis can therefore be advanced: that Freud's psychoanalysis incorporates elements of traditional thought, which reached him by way of the Occult Revival, but with the religious top-dressing shorn off and applied to the practical problem of curing neurosis -- although Freud could not altogether exclude the traditional associations of the "cure of souls."

In writing the history of occult and mystical groups in Western Europe it is always wise to see what the state of Jewish mysticism is at any given time. Jewish mystical tradition has provided a rich source of inspiration for non-Jewish mystics, and it has remained well insulated from the more obvious currents of nonrationalist thought. It has recently been argued at length that Freud's system represents the secularizing of certain trains of thought embodied in the Cabala: that Freud's reversed vision was to some extent influenced by the interior traditions of his Cabalistic inheritance. [73] This cannot be regarded as proven, but there may well be some truth in the theory. If so, the conclusion would be that "what was happening" in Jewish mysticism was to some extent its secularization -- in other words, Freud himself. It has been suggested that a mediator may well have been Eduard von Hartmann, whose Philosophy of the Unconscious owes a considerable debt to mystical ideas and who was himself an expert on Hasidism, [74] Another authority is concerned to demonstrate the affinities of Freud, the Cabala, and Leibniz -- the philosopher to whom Friedrich Eckstein attributed the idea of the importance of the unconscious during illness. [75] The indications are consistent, but final proof is lacking. If we are to accept the hypothesis of Freud's coherence with an occult revival on the one hand and his parallel native tradition on the other, it will largely depend on how we choose to regard both the man and his theories of sexuality.

It is obvious that, in the broadest sense, sexual upheaval was part of that crisis of consciousness which was the chief cause of the Occult Revival. Changing patterns of life and society also affected family life and sexual mores. Certainty in sexual relationships was as irreparably damaged as certainty in divine ordering; the uncertainties were twins and followed roughly the same development in time. A rough indication of changing sexual attitudes can be found in the progress of pornography. By 1660, writes one authority,

almost all the themes of later pornography are present; within a completely amoral attitude, in which all perversions are welcome if they gratify the senses ... these take place within a tightly knit family circle, with the shocking suggestion that all the conventional relationships of society are merely a facade for personal gratification. [76]


By the last half of the 19th century "matters came to a head." A pornography industry had grown up, in which the view taken of sexuality was the "mirror image" of that held by the Establishment. [77] This flourishing pornographic underworld has little connection with the Underground of Progressive opinion. But the alteration in sexual values reflected in one way by the pornographers was naturally echoed in another by those concerned to overthrow the Established order. Many of the Utopian colonies were based on free love, and it became an article of belief among the artists and camp followers of Bohemia. It was noticed by sexologists that "in times of upheaval, " like the French and Russian Revolutions, the abolition of sexual restraint was an inevitable consequence. [78]

Thus, at the time when Freud's studies of hysteria began to convince him that there was a sexual basis for the neuroses, the topic of sexual freedom was a common one in Progressive circles, the possibilities of a new sexual ordering were quite apparent -- and therefore the agonies over "the sexual question" increased. The topic was ready to hand as a stick with which to beat the Establishment. While in Russia Vasily Rozanov delighted to shock his hearers with his religion of cosmic semen, in Vienna Freud created opposition by insisting on his own theories of sex. Jung's analysis of why Freud demanded that he make a "dogma" of the sexual theory suggests that for Freud the idea of the "libido" was a "hidden god, " what Jung called a "numinosum" -- a holy or sacred power -- but that Freud could nonetheless "regard the new numinous principle as scientifically irreproachable and free from all religious taint." [79] What little is known about the apparent link between certain aspects of sex and religion seems not to rule out this possibility. Ivan Bloch has documented the correspondence throughout history of "secret arts, voluptuousness and unnatural vice" -- and there may well be a common denominator in the religious and the sexual dynamics. Francis King has shown that sexual theories of magic played a part in the 19th-century Occult Revival, [80] and interests in sexuality and the supernatural do frequently go hand in hand.

There exists at least one example of compatibility between Freudianism and the sexual side of the Occult Revival. In a review in Imago in 1913, the Freud group's expert on occult matters, Herbert Silberer, discussed Hargrave Jennings's The Rosicrucians, which had been published in German translation the year before. Jennings was obsessed with phallic symbolism. Steeples, pyramids, standing stones -- all represented the phallus, the "reason for religion." As might be expected, this interested Silberer, who recommended the book as a good read, although not as a work of scholarship or an account of the Rosicrucians -- indeed it is neither. But the theme was interesting "for psycho-analytic research, " and, although the book bore no relation to psychoanalysis at all, Silberer admitted that "a superficial observer "might think The Rosicrucians was a psychoanalytic treatment of the theme. [81] It would be naive to connect Jennings's lunacies directly with Freud. But the fact that an analyst himself could make the comparison shows that the "Phallic theory" -- which antedated Freud's sexual theory by ten years and was part of the lunatic fringe of occultism -- could be thought to have dangerous similarities.
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

Postby admin » Thu May 17, 2018 4:38 am

Part 3 of 4

Freud himself had once constructed a phallic religion of which he wrote to his friend Dr. Wilhelm Fliess:

I am toying with the idea that in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative, we may have the remains of a primitive sexual cult, which in the Semitic East may once have been a religion (Moloch, Astarte).

I am beginning to dream of an extremely primitive devil religion the rites of which continue to be performed secretly, and now I understand the stern therapy of the witches' judges. The links are abundant. [82]


Just as Hargrave Jennings went chasing round the countryside pursuing phallic symbols in the architecture and maintaining that the phallic theory was "the necessary mystic groundwork of all religion, " so Freud promenaded the mythical landscape and halted to examine the witches. He decided that the stories of the witches were similar to those told by his patients, as was the symbolism. Thus, the witches' broomstick is "the great Lord Penis." The "stern therapy, " presumably burning alive, of the witches' judges seems somewhat excessive for a mere neurosis. It is difficult to understand exactly what connection the "devil religion" bore in his mind to the sexual imagery of the witches -- it is certainly not called for by his interpretation of the witch confessions. Freud's dream of his "extremely primitive devil religion" is little better than Hargrave Jennings's vision of the Rosicrucians. His speculations on the witches preoccupied him to the extent that he ordered a copy of the Malleus Mallejicarum, and he troubled his mind with problems which have perplexed other "discoverers" of a witch religion like Margaret Murray -- "If I only knew why the devil's semen in witches' confessions is always described as 'cold.'" [83] In the event, Freud's interest in the Devil culminated in a perfect example of "Orthodox Freudianism" published in 1923, in which he analyzed a 17th-century Satanic pact as a case of "demonological neurosis." [84] This brilliant intellectual construction is a far cry from his earlier speculations. But the seemingly needless presence of the prototypically "occult" idea of a secret religion in Freud's early formulations is suggestive evidence of the sort of theories from which his ideas evolved. The 1923 paper represents the witch speculation in a secularized form.

Because of information deliberately destroyed or withheld, it is impossible to be certain of this argument; but within its context a number of Freud's personality traits assume significance. His cult of Rome, whatever the reasons in his own case, was shared by contemporaries like Alfred Schuler and Lanz von Liebenfels; his collection of Egyptian idols may signify more than antiquarianism; according to Ernest Jones his interest in mystical numbers predated his friendship with Fliess, and one leading source of occult numerology is the Cabalistic tradition of Gematria. In 1907 Freud was invited to contribute to a symposium on "ten good books." He included among the "most important" a work of Agrippa's pupil, Johann Wier, on witchcraft, and another on the list was Merezhkovsky's Forerunner. To his disciple Max Eitingon, he wrote in November 1922 that he was "perplexed to distraction by the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy and by occultism." [85] This association of the Baconian red herring with Freud's current fascination for telepathy is once more exactly the sort of combination of interests that is found in the Underground of rejected knowledge. The man who started the whole Bacon-Shakespeare quarrel, Ignatius Donnelly, was also the first popularizer of the Atlantis legend in the 19th century. Although Freud's own allegiance was given to the Earl of Oxford and to a somewhat saner argument, [86] the fact that he could be "perplexed to distraction" by the problem is extraordinarily revealing. The view of Freud as a secularizer of rejected but emergent traditions also finds some sanction in his organization of "the Committee" of his closest adherents who functioned as the watchdogs of orthodoxy. They formed a "secret society" of seven and wore gold rings in which they mounted Greek intaglios given them personally by Freud. [87]

The Committee was formed to protect psychoanalysis from the speculations of individuals who dared to transgress the party line. Its immediate cause was the heretical behavior of C. G. Jung. If Freud did secularize occult ideas, Jung's defection represents merely a reversion to the originals: he can be seen as the culminating point in the whole of the occult revival.

Carl Gustav Jung was the son of a Swiss country pastor, and the differences between himself and Freud cannot better be expressed than in their origins. The security of Jung's early religious upbringing collapsed; and he began to seek a substitute while studying medicine at the University of Basel. Like Freud he entered medicine as a compromise, as he had nourished both scientific and philosophical interests. At the end of 1895 -- his second term in the university -- he came across a book on Spiritualism in the library of a friend's father. Determined to discover the truth of such matters, Jung embarked on a comprehensive course of occult reading. "Names like Zollner and Crookes impressed themselves on me, and I read virtually the whole of the literature available to me at the time." Besides German idealists and mystics he devoured seven volumes of Swedenborg. Some three years later, his thoughts were turned once more to the paranormal when two apparently meaningless explosions took place in his home. One split a solid wooden tabletop and another shattered the blade of a carving knife. A few weeks later Jung heard of some relations who had formed a circle for table turning around a fifteen-year-old girl medium. For two years Jung attended the weekly seances, and the material he gathered became his doctoral thesis. [88]

Meanwhile, he discovered psychiatry by way of Krafft-Ebbing, and by 1905 he had progressed from the post of assistant at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich to senior physician at the Psychiatric Clinic. His superior at the Burgholzli was Eugen Bleuler, who was interested in hypnosis, and for a time Jung was in charge of the hypnotism clinic. Like Freud, Jung abandoned hypnotism, in his case because of the uncertain factors involved and his distaste for "magical" methods of cure. Soon after he had been appointed to head the Psychiatric Clinic, he became a determined supporter of Freud's (at that time) unpopular views, and from 1907 to 1913 both he and Bleuler formed part of the entourage of the eminence in Vienna.  [89] The breach between Freud and Jung has often been discussed. The chief cause was the conflict between Freud's insistence on the sexual theory and Jung's philosophical leanings in other directions. As early as 1908 Karl Abraham is supposed to have warned Freud about "the tendency to occultism, astrology and mysticism in "Zurich, " [90] and in retrospect one of the most interesting aspects of the relationship between Jung and Freud is why it occurred at all.

Jung, in fact, started his investigations into the human mind where Freud was to finish. The experiments with the girl medium "Miss S. W." not only provided Jung with his first insights into the formation of subsidiary personalities but encouraged his reading in the philosophical aspects of occultism. Jung was not interested in what he considered "the obvious autonomy" of the spirit rapping that surrounded the medium, but rather in the content of her communications. These were broadly divided up into two categories: (1) what Jung called the "Romances, " which involved tales of reincarnation in which the medium had once been the Seeress of Prevorst and also mistress of Goethe; and (2) the elaboration of a complex cosmology of a Gnostic type. The Romances are very like the "clairvoyant investigations" of the Theosophical Bishop Leadbeater and the similar productions of Helene Smith -- which Jung discovered only later. [91] The mystical system devised by Miss S. W. involved a Prime Force manifesting through matter and producing both good and evil agencies. Jung derived this structure from hearsay, Kant, and a fascination with the Seeress of Prevorst. "Naturally I worked through the occult literature so far as it pertained to this subject, and discovered a wealth of parallels with our gnostic system, dating from different centuries, but most of them scattered about in all kinds of works, most of them quite inaccessible to the patient." [92] By the time that Jung caught the medium cheating and broke off the seances, he had acquired not only an insight into the phenomena of different personalities in trance but a thorough grounding in the philosophical bases of contemporary occultism.

Throughout his life, Jung himself was to be subject to paranormal experiences; and these naturally played a great part in orienting his system. From the visions which punctuated his childhood, through the episode of the exploding table, to the dreams and mystical experiences of Jung's later life, the supernatural was never far away. [93] The most spectacular incident occurred in the presence of Freud himself. On a visit to Vienna in 1909, Jung asked Freud for his opinion on parapsychology, and the older man gave vent to a thorough condemnation of the whole approach "in terms of so shallow a positivism that I had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue." Jung began to feel as if his diaphragm "were made of iron and were becoming red-hot." And at that moment a loud explosion went off in the bookcase beside the two men. Jung told Freud that this was "an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon." In answer to Freud's angry denial, he predicted a second explosion, which duly occurred. "Freud only stared aghast at me." [94] Later Freud wrote to Jung explaining the incident away; but by the summer of 1911 he had so far been influenced by Ferenczi's occult enthusiasms as to tell Jung that when it came to "the perilous step of publication" he would like them to act jointly. [95] At exactly the same time Jung told Freud that he could not accept the exclusively sexual theory. He published a paper on "Symbols of the Libido, " which led to a complete break with the founder of psychoanalysis in 1913. Whatever the personal motives in this conflict, [96] there is no neglecting the ostensible cause. The facts were that the intellectual traditions to which Jung and Freud belonged were completely alien to each other -- it is neither denigratory nor generalizing to call Freud a "classical" and Jung a "romantic" figure [97] -- and to assert that what Jung took from Freud was in essence a method of interpreting the unconscious while the interpretations themselves came from his occult sources.

The break with Freud precipitated Jung into a period of what he himself called Sturm und Drang. during which he practiced as a psychiatrist without producing much in the way of theory. In 1917 came the Psychology of the Unconscious, which he described as "an intuitive leap in the dark" containing "no end of inadequate formulations and unfinished thoughts" [98]; and the crucial work of this period is not strictly psychological at all. Jung has described how he let himself down into his own unconscious and carried out an extraordinary journey of exploration among the contents. Finally, in 1916 there came a period when the Jung household seemed to be oppressed by "ghostly entities." Jung's son had an anxiety dream, and his daughters were haunted. Then occurred another of the paranormal experiences with which Jung's life was filled.

Around five o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front-door bell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the door bell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another. The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all aquiver with the questions: "For God's sake, what in the world is this?" Then they cried out in chorus, "We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought." [99]


"The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching." Jung's strange book VII Sermones ad Mortuos begins with the words of the spirits to him, and appears to indicate that he had accepted the role of occult teacher rather than analyst of a more conventional pattern. In three evenings Jung wrote the book in an apparently semiautomatic fashion. Its subtitle describes equally its contents and the rest of Jung's work: "The Seven Sermons to the dead, written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East touches the West." Basilides was a Gnostic writer; Alexandria, the city of Neo-Platonism and alchemy; and the synthesis of Oriental and Western traditions was to occupy much of Jung's time. Most of the elements of Jung's thought are contained in the Seven Sermons, couched in the language of a religious revelation. The book is based on neo-Gnostic premises and is almost impossible to summarize. Jung begins with the Pleroma, in which "there is nothing and everything" and about which "it is quite fruitless to think." We are distinguished from this "ground of being" -- the phrase is of course not Jung's -- and this distinctiveness is man's essential attribute. He must at all costs distinguish himself, following the "principle of individuation, " or run the risk of falling back into the Pleroma and losing all individual being. Man is the mediator between the world of gods and "the inner world." He must free himself from the bondage of "Abraxas, " the name -- originally the supreme principle of Basilides and other Gnostics -- used to designate the "illusory reality" of "force, duration, change." Even a slight acquaintance with Gnostic or Oriental thought is enough to see that such systems contributed much to Jung's own, although Jung introduced significant changes, notably the idea of individuation as the necessary way of "spiritual progress." Both in the context of Jung's break with Freud and in the wider sense of the contemporary emergence of occult thought, the words of Jung-Basilides betray an awareness of his positions: "For redemption's sake I teach you the rejected truth, for the sake of which I was rejected." [100]

The rings that Freud's Committee wore contained classical Greek intaglios given them by Freud. Jung wore an Egyptian "Gnostic" ring, whose symbols he had changed so as to Christianize them.1ol He certainly knew contemporary cults that were explicitly Gnostic, and he considered the Occult Revival to be comparable to "the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ." "There is even a Gnostic church in France today, and I know of two schools which openly confess themselves Gnostic." Jung's statement that he studied the Gnostics "between 1918 and 1926" is misleading in that we have already seen that he had made quite an extensive search through Gnostic literature while observing his spirit medium. By the time he wrote the Seven Sermons he had obviously already been strongly influenced by Gnostic theology. Reference to German Gnostic schools recalls that General Ludendorff was shocked to find that (c. 1930) "Abraxas" armlets were sold by a Frau von Platen in Berlin. Jung's mention of l'Eglise Gnostique de France is interesting in that Jules Doinel's Universal Gnostic Church became involved with the O.T.O., several of whose members became Gnostic prelates. The Gnostic Catholic Church which resulted has its present headquarters not far from Zurich where J ung himself lived. [102]

It is clear that Jung's affinities with the more religious elements of the Occult Revival were considerable and without doubt extended to direct contact. When, after the First World War, disciples came to Zurich for training or analysis, the attraction of Jung's psychology for the illuminated type of mind at once became apparent. For example, to take only the interest shown in Britain: William McDougall had become interested even before the war; Maurice Nicoll left Jung for Gurdjieff; and when Jung held seminars on dream symbolism in 1923 and 1925, they were reported by the Theosophist and writer on magic W. B. Crow. [103] Jung's psychology represents to many a restatement of the ideas at the core of occult tradition in terms accessible to those ill at ease with religious language. The point can be most strongly made by examining the way in which Jung was inspired to compare the stages in the "alchemical process" with those he observed during the course of his patients' "individuation."

Jung's account in his memoirs conflicts with his earlier statements. At the end of his life he was convinced that the impulse to investigate alchemy had come from one of his own dreams in which he was "trapped in the 17th century." Insight into the meaning of the alchemical process came after he read the Secret of the Golden Flower, supposedly a text of Chinese alchemy sent him by his friend Richard Wilhelm. But in the earlier essay, A Study in the Process of Individuation, Jung interpreted a series of paintings executed by one process, and he told another story. The third of a series of 24 paintings, wrote Jung, "brings in a motif that points unmistakably to alchemy and actually gave me the definite incentive to make a thorough study of the world of the old adepts. [104] The picture in question consists of a sphere, and in the corner a snake. The sphere is surrounded by a "vibrating" silver band with the figure twelve on it. It is important to follow Jung's exact words in conversation to his patient:

As if asking a question, I made the remark: "Then it is the vibrations of the band that keep the sphere floating?" "Naturally, " she said, "they are the wings of Mercury, the messenger of the gods. The silver is quicksilver!" She went on at once: "Mercury, that is Hermes, that is the Nous, the mind or reason, and that is the animus, who is here outside instead of inside. He is like a veil that hides the true personality." [105]


The question of the "animus" being inside or outside refers only to the technical details of that particular analysis. The real significance is that not Jung but his patient suggested the symbolism of Mercury and quicksilver. Jung, with his prior occult knowledge, at once associated Hermes with alchemy, the Hermetic science, and set about elaborating the comparison that suggested itself. Jung gives sufficient details in his account of this analysis for us to identify the patient, and as she has been dead for over twenty years there seems little harm in exploring her affiliations. "Miss X" was academic, educated in psychology, and in 1928 came to Europe to study under Jung. She was fifty-five at the time of the analysis, the "daughter of an exceptional father, " and some sixteen years after the analysis had been carried through she became fatally ill of cancer. [106] Thus, if we can find an unmarried American lady who fits the description and the dates of 1873-1944/5, we are on the way to discovering one source of Jung's interest in alchemy. The odds are that she formed part of the group of American analysts who came over to Zurich between the two World Wars for training analyses. [107] One of these fits the details so well that there is no possibility of doubt. This is Kristine Mann (1873-1945), the daughter of "a remarkable father, " Charles Holbrook Mann (1839-1918), in his day the chief intellectual of the Swedenborgian New Church in America.

Kristine Mann herself published little except various articles during the war years on the subject of public health and hygiene. She took a B.A. in 1895 and taught English at Vassar, where another pioneer of Jungian analysis in America, Eleanor Bertine, was one of her pupils. Together they studied medicine and received their M.D.'s in 1913 at Cornell University. In 1919 Eleanor Bertine organized analysts to speak at the International Conference of Medical Women, at which Kristine Mann was present. In due course they both found their way to Jung, and subsequently practiced as analysts in New York. [108] It is less Kristine Mann herself who is important, than her upbringing at the hands of the "remarkable father" who so impressed himself on Jung's consciousness during his daughter's analysis. The chain of associations that the identification of Kristine Mann as Jung's patient sets off is quite complicated. But it is, I believe, worth following it to the end.

Charles Holbrook Mann entered the ministry of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1865, and in 1877 he took up the editorship of the New Church Messenger, which he held for twenty-five years. In 1914 he left his ministry and announced the formation of a new sect, which was to abandon ritual and take for its slogan "religion in the workshop." Mann greatly influenced the elder Henry James and was the recognized leader of Swedenborgian thought on social and economic questions of the day. His significance with regard to analysis is that the New Church was particularly interested in sex education and mental healing, and .the theories of Mann in many ways form an anticipation of psychotherapeutic procedure. In fact, the Swedenborgians liked to think that Swedenborg himself "out-Freuds Freud." Mann wrote a book called What God Hath Cleansed defending "the correct use" of the sexual organs as "the highest, the purest and the most holy of all the external parts of the body." The New Church also adopted many of the trappings of the popular Mesmeric movement, including hydrotherapy, homeopathy, and the healing methods of P. P. Quimby. The Swedenborgian pastor Warren Evans set up a Mind Cure Sanitorium, and (with Quimby's disciple Julius Dresser) founded the Boston Metaphysical Club, which developed into the New Thought movement. The next New Church attempt at establishing a Swedenborgian system of healing was by Mann himself. [109] In his book Psychiasis (1900) Mann attempted to formulate a doctrine of the "healing of the body through the soul" as "the expression of the regenerating man's spiritual state." Even as early as 1887, he was proclaiming with remarkable lucidity the imperfect state of the socalled mind cure. "What the limitations of this system are, in what precise field it is properly to be applied, where it can come into orderly use and where it becomes an abuse, where it is the Lord and where it is the power of magic that produces the effect are questions as yet to be decided." [110]

There was every likelihood that the daughter of this forerunner of psychiatry would become an analyst herself. But what is the connection of alchemy with the Swedenborgian near miss at establishing a systematic mind cure? In 1858 in New York, Ethan Allen Hitchcock had published his Swedenborg: a Hermetic Philosopher, the year after his Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists. Hitchcock served as a major general in the Civil War; but according to his biographer, in the middle of councils of war and social occasions he would be concerned with "abstruse speculations concerning the mysteries of nature." In 1854 Hitchcock picked up an alchemical text in a New York bookshop, discovered the symbolic interpretation of alchemy, and accumulated an alchemical library of nearly 300 books. In 1866 he had visions of the Philosopher's Stone as "a kind of revelation .... Personally, I have much to fear from it before I can look forward to its benefits." Swedenborg: a Hermetic Philosopher is sympathetic to the New Church and deploys an extensive argument to show that Swedenborg derived a large part of his philosophy from alchemy, "although he misinterpreted a point in connection with it." [111] Almost certainly, therefore, the theory that aligned Swedenborg with the alchemists would be known in New Church circles, to say nothing of the probability that the New Church was perfectly aware of the resemblances in any case.

It is stretching coincidence too far to argue that when Jung recorded the suggestion of Hermetic symbolism in Kristine Mann's painting by Miss Mann herself, the New Church background is irrelevant. It is quite possible that Jung's account of the genesis of his alchemical ideas results from the sort of "forgetting" in which Freud also indulged. For Jung also admits, "Oddly enough, I had entirely forgotten what Herbert Silberer had written about alchemy." [112] We have met Silberer before, reviewing Hargrave Jennings's phallic musings. He specialized in applying the Freudian interpretation to folktales, occultism, and religion. In 1914 (the year after his review of The Rosicrucians) Silberer published Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism. in which he discloses that he had discovered for himself the religious significance of alchemy -- from the works of Ethan Allen Hitchcock. Hitchcock had suggested to Silberer comparisons with the Vedanta and several other points in an analysis which also depended on Eliphas Levi, Papus, Rama Prasad, a translation of The Red Book of Appin by Bertha Eckstein-Diener, and the Geheime Figuren. In his study of an alchemical parable, Silberer discovered three possible interpretations. These were the psychoanalytical (Freudian-sexual); the chemical; and what he called the "anagogic, " which was simply a recognition of the Hermetic intention in the first place. [113] Silberer himself then moved some distance away from Freud. It is distinctly odd that Jung -- who, as he freely admits, had valued Silberer highly -- had "forgotten" his predecessor's anticipatory work.

We are returning by a circular route to the treatment of Kristine Mann by Jung, during the course of which Miss Mann painted the alchemical picture. The nature of the treatment in this particular case is clarified by a knowledge of the New Church connections. Ethan Allen Hitchcock claimed that he had met Swedenborg many times "in the spiritual world." But it is doubtful whether this refers to a real vision as opposed to "conversations" with his works. "I was chiefly induced to make the acquaintance of Swedenborg by certain encomiums upon him by his friend Mr. Wilkinson whom I met in the spiritual world also, some 12/13 years ago, and who in fact introduced Swedenborg to me. The philosopher had a veil over his face." "Mr. Wilkinson" must have been James John Garth Wilkinson (b. 1812), a convinced Swedenborgian, a friend of Emerson, a homeopath who produced the first printed edition of Blake. He was one of the New Church members most interested in mental healing. In the same year as Hitchcock gave the world his interpretation of Swedenborg, Wilkinson wrote in a paper edited by his friend Thomas Lake Harris:

Let involuntary drawing be introduced then as a normal employment into asylums, and let the class of patients upon whom the spirit-cure is to be tried be those who are only functionally deranged, and especially those who are suffering from disappointed affections, and in general mental and affectional causes .... Let each drawing be kept, dated, and numbered, as marking a progress of state. [114]


Garth Wilkinson was suggesting that a form of "spirit drawing" or "automatic writing" be used as therapy, although "if you choose to say it is your own spirit I have no objections." Well over half a century later, Jung is discovered using precisely this method as an index to his patients' progress on the path of individuation. Remembering that he himself had read "seven volumes of Swedenborg, " it is permissible to wonder whether this Swedenborgian excursion had not taken him into the land of the New Church thinkers on his own initiative. In his memoirs Jung contrasts his own philosophical background with that of Freud, whose "intellectual history often seemed to begin with Du-Bois-Reymond and Darwin, " while he, Jung, possessed "some knowledge of the history of psychology" and was "especially familiar with the writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century." Possibly on his American trip in 1909, Jung's interests may have led him to pick up something of New England Transcendentalism in the bookshops. Or just possibly Kristine Mann suggested some details of her own treatment.

All these possibilities must be seen as unlikely if we accept Jung's claim that he had begun the process of painting in stages as an aid to his own inner development soon after he had written the Seven Sermons, and a Swedenborgian source is by no means ruled out. The coincidence of the New Church tradition emerging in Jung's professional life is continued not only in methods and men, but also in terms. Thus Garth Wilkinson uses the same Platonic terminology as Jung when describing Swedenborg's doctrine of the relations between Body and Soul: "There is an image-and-likeness psychology in man himself, for the soul is the archetype of the body as God is the archetype of the soul." [115] The fact that the Jungian archetype bears little relation to the word as used in Garth Wilkinson's conventional argument points the moral that Jung's system was an adaptation of tradition rather than a direct rendering of it into modern dress. It also suggests a solution to the problem of Jung's relationship with the Occult Revival and previous systems of mind cure.

The solution probably lies somewhere between the explanation of direct influence and that of independent discovery. The system of Freud had its roots in the scientific study of hypnotism and in the tradition that sought to take the phenomena of hypnosis away from the popular Mesmerists and more occult practitioners of mind cure. It was totally in keeping with this line of thought that when Freud found himself inevitably in confrontation with the "paranormal, " his interest took the direct form of psychical research. On the other hand, Jung began with psychical research. He accepted from the start the "paranormal." He confronted it in his own life, and paid attention to the content of earlier theorists of immaterial reality as well as those of the contemporary Occult Revival. Because of this difference in emphasis, Jung -- either through knowledge of writers like the American Swedenborgians, or through the wide reading we know he carried out in their sources -- developed a different concept of the meaning of unconscious mental processes. Freud followed Charcot, then Bernheim, but he always retained some of the Charcot in his attempts to map the unconscious. Jung can be seen as the heir to the still unsecularized attempts to established a mind cure, and thus he had natural ties with those whose less successful efforts in the same direction were based on similar premises.

There is no need to attack Jung's originality by insisting improbably that he took the idea of a succession of paintings from Garth Wilkinson. His own explanation that he spontaneously developed the method as a guide to his own unconscious is perfectly plausible. But it is certain that the tradition to which Jung belonged was obvious to fellow-adepts, who came to Jung as the preferred modern interpreter of traditional metaphysics. From such contact with like-minded spirits, Jung must have derived stimulus, inspiration, and ideas. The case of Kristine Mann with her New Church background is a perfect instance of this process. For her alchemical painting to suggest to Jung the connection between his "individuation process" and the alchemists, three elements were necessary. First, that Miss Mann should have had the background to incorporate Hermetic symbolism in her painting to start with (although this can no doubt be disputed); next, that she should herself have suggested the interpretation to Jung; and, not least, that Jung should have been sufficiently well read in occult literature to recognize the parallel presented to him.

By the time that Jung came to make his fuller pronouncements on alchemy in the 1940s and 1950s, there could be no doubt where he stood. Psychology and Alchemy is reinforced by wide reading on the alchemical side of the Occult Revival: Mrs. Atwood, A. E. Waite, Arthur Avalon, Manley Palmer Hall, G. R. S. Mead, and Lewis Spence crowd each other in his bibliography. In his idea that medieval alchemy was "rather like an undercurrent to the Christianity that ruled on the surface, " he is certainly indebted to A. E. Waite. And in the notion that "the central ideas of Christianity are rooted in Gnostic philosophy, " he is repeating the argument of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, who had been so influential with their "esoteric Christianity" in the days of the high Occult Revival. In 1936 Jung compared Edward Maitland's idea of God as a male-female duality to his own concept and to a vision in the Hermetic literature from which Maitland and Kingsford also derived much inspiration. [116] The contrast with Freud, who read Anna Kingsford's account of her dreams as a case history, is pointed. [117] But it should be noted that Jung was to some extent himself a secularizer. He knew full well that the religious symbolism of alchemy had been most thoroughly known to the writers of the Occult Revival, and he was careful to claim originality only in perceiving "the psychological meaning of alchemy." He used it as a model for the completed "individuation process" which, he maintained, did not display itself in any single case. [118] All that is necessary is to read instead of individuation process the phrase, so beloved of occultists, spiritual progress: to make certain other small changes of terms, and the reader is back with Mrs. Atwood and her Suggestive Enquiry of 1850. [119]

Because Jung shared some of his sources with the occultists and his psychology held attractions for them, the circles in which Jungian theory became popular in the German-speaking countries are predictable. Jung's first propagandist was the Munich psychotherapist Gustav Heyer, who had connections with the George circle and with Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing. [120] The extraordinarily close link between the supporters of Jung and German mysticism of the 1890s is exemplified in the Eranos Conferences.

In a specially constructed auditorium at her "Casa Gabriella" on Lake Maggiore, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn (1881-1962) initiated annual meetings at which scholars, mythologists, and psychologists of Jungian sympathies have expounded their views of the spiritual problems faced by modern man. The presiding spirit is that of Jung, and an extraordinary harmony of outlook has seemed to prevail at the meetings. Olga Froebe commented in 1954:

Like all spiritual manifestations of an age, Eranos too is the response to an inward summons and necessity .... From its start, Eranos has been integrated by virtue of the force that C. G. Jung once termed "the sympathy of all things." ... Only this "sympathy" can explain the manner anyway in which our speakers have been brought to us. It has each time been something like a providential coming together of scholars who were intuitively moving in the same direction and open to the same ideas. [121]



This apparently miraculous harmony of voices can be explained simply by the fact that many of the scholars present have their intellectual roots, like Jung, in the Occult Revival. The Eranos Conferences take place in Ascona, and Olga Froebe-Kapteyn, "this mysterious nun-like muse, " was the friend and protectress of Ludwig Derleth.

When Ludwig Derleth contemplated establishing his Rosenburg in the dark days of the First World War, one of the places he naturally considered was Ascona, the center of the Progressive Underground and the home of Monte Verita. Olga Froebe-Kapteyn had visited Derleth in Munich, and in 1922 the Schwa bing Napoleon stayed at Ascona with his friend. Together they traveled to Rome that year, and it is quite clear that it was the stimulus of Derleth that inspired Olga Froebe's interest in symbols and the ancient world. In 1937 she was still writing to Derleth of her reverence for him. The ever-present tendency of the Eranos scholars to see themselves as an elite is perfectly prefigured in Derleth's vision of his order as the "golden society" elevated above all associations of the century. [122]

The troubled life of Monte Verita entered a new phase in 1926. Eduard Freiherr van der Heydt -- who had visited Frau Olga Froebe in her Casa Gabriella and been impressed with Monte Verita three years before -- bought the colony and turned it into a meeting place for artists. Van der Heydt was attracted by Krishnamurti, and his prospectus for Monte Verita recalled the old days. To Ascona came visitors like Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Jung himself. There was considerable contact between this new incarnation of Monte Verita and the Casa Gabrielle. And in 1930 Ascona saw Olga Froebe-Kapteyn send out invitations for a "Summer school for Spiritual Research, " which seems to have been her first conception of the role of the Eranos Conferences. This school was to offer free courses which would be "of very actual help to students, " and it defined its purpose as "a summer school for the study of Theosophy, Mysticism, the esoteric Sciences and Philosophies and all forms of spiritual research." [123]

In the years before Jung and his followers established themselves as the guiding lights of the Eranos Conferences, the meetings were directed by a much more "occult" hand. In late 1930, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn invited Alice Bailey and her husband to come from the United States and spend the summer lecturing at Ascona. Alice Bailey was the head of a schismatic Theosophical organization based in New York and known as "the Arcane School." She is best known for the series of lengthy tomes, which a Tibetan master is supposed to have dictated to her. From 1931 to 1933 she and her husband were the guests of Olga Froebe-Kapteyn. They succeeded in building up a large audience among the Bohemian population of Ascona, despite Alice Bailey's disgust with "the peculiarly decadent and objectionable people who lived on the shore of the lake." The prophetess warned her daughters against the many "groups from Germany and France whose ideas were anything but nice or clean." She retired to New York after the 1933 session when Jung and his friends arrived. In Alice Bailey's words: "The place was overrun by German professors and the whole tone and quality of the place altered. Some of them were most undesirable, and the teaching given shifted from a relatively high spiritual plane to that of academic philosophy and a spurious esotericism." [124]

At Eranos the occult did take on a more academic form, and the meetings became a series of lectures on topics of a "spiritual" nature. Over the mythological speculations of Eranos has hovered the spirit of Bachofen, most particularly in the symposium held in 1938 on "The Great Mother, " to which Jung, Louis Massignon, and Heinrich Zimmer contributed, as well as another consistent Eranos lecturer, Gustav Heyer, whose inspiration was taken directly from the philosophy of Ludwig Klages. Specialists in Eastern religion combined with authorities on Western occultism such as Professor Rudolf Bernouilli, who was (like Jung) a Fellow of the Zurich Technische Hochschule and who gave papers on alchemy and the number mysticism of the Tarot. After the death of Jung a dominating figure in the Eranos Conferences has been Mircea Eliade (born 1907) who has renounced his earlier vocation of writing novels "in order to inculcate a new comprehension of homo religiosus." Eliade had spent six months in an ashram at Rishikesh, and his Romanian novels of the 1930s were the center of a "transcendental movement." [125] His book on Yoga argues a connection with alchemy, and he is best known for his scholarly work on the Myth of the Eternal Return. In fact the theories of Jung have passed into the hands of the modern representatives of the 19th-century Occult Revival. Jung's psychology inspires the inheritors of those traditions which once inspired him. The Eranos Conferences are a compendium of all the elements of the Occult Revival, and an extension of all the elements of Jung's work.

Eranos may well owe much to Count Keyserling's Darmstadt conferences. Some of the lecturers at the School of Wisdom later found their way to Ascona. In the early 1920s there was close contact between the developing theories of Jung and the eclectic entourage of the Baltic philosopher. Jung met Richard Wilhelm in the early 1920s at Darmstadt, and in 1923 Wilhelm came to Zurich to give a talk on the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching. From this meeting sprang Jung's commentaries on Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower. Another contact between Jung and Darmstadt was Oskar Schmitz, who was responsible for introducing Jungian psychology to Keyserling and who possibly provided the stimulus for Jung's later investigation of astrology -- much in the same way as Kristine Mann plus Richard Wilhelm may have triggered the association with alchemy in Jung's already well-stocked mind. [126] It is not necessary to delve into every one of Jung's restatements of traditional or Oriental thought. His prefaces to Evans-Wentz, his introduction to Suzuki's study of Zen, his mythological interpretations, all fit the pattern already observed. However, one neglected influence on Jung must still be discussed, because it throws much light on the vexed question of his relationship with the Nazi regime. The connection can only be understood with the knowledge that Jung's psychology had come to represent a focal point for the scholarly mystics of the period between the wars.

Through the activities of Gustav Heyer, Jung met Jacob Wilhelm Hauer and was more influenced by him than it has been thought politic to admit. [127] In 1932 Hauer held a week-long seminar on Yoga in the Zurich Psychology Club, and in 1934 he spoke at the Eranos Conference on, "Symbols and Experience of the Self." Jung's own standpoint on Yoga is ambivalent. He thought it "one of the greatest things the human mind has ever created, " but it was not for the West. [128] His interest in Yogic psychology can be partly traced to Hauer; but the German's greater influence on Jung is shown in Jung's conception of the Self. Hauer's 1934 Eranos lecture concerned itself largely with the number symbolism, laying particular stress on the four-symbol, the quaternity or "tetrakys." In 1937 Jung referred to Hauer as one of the two sources of his own discussion of this problem. The psychologist then went on to talk of the "whole" of man: both conscious and unconscious aspects. He had chosen, he said, the term "self" to designate this "total man in accordance with Eastern philosophy, which for centuries has occupied itself with the problems that arise when even the gods cease to incarnate." [129] Again, Jung's source for this conception of" Eastern philosophy" is Hauer.

At the 1934 conference, Jung had first expanded on the topics of "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious." Hauer at once adopted both conceptions to argue that there existed a collective racial unconscious which manifested itself in racial symbolism.130 The year before this lecture, Hauer had founded the Nordic Faith Movement.

Jacob Wilhelm Hauer was born in Wurttemberg, attended a missionary college at Basel, and went to India, where he is said never to have converted a single Indian. He returned to Europe with great enthusiasm for Yogic philosophy and took a First in Greats at Oxford. In 1921 he left the Lutheran pastorate for a chair at Tubingen. On his arrival at the university, he founded a volkisch Bible-study group which, five years later, became part of the Youth movement proper. In 1928 Hauer took up the editorship of a magazine called the Kommende Gemeinde, which had as its symbols the Gothic arch and the Sun-Wheel. At the last meeting of the society which published Kommende Gemeinde. two of the speakers were Ernst Krieck and Martin Buber [131] -- on the one hand, a future Nazi philosopher and lecturer at Ordensburgen and, on the other, a friend of Eugen Diederichs and the reviver of Hasidic mysticism. In 1933 Hauer took it upon himself to unite all the non-Christian volkisch religious groups. He received widespread support for his proclaimed belief in the divine mission of Germany: in 1935 Hauer and Count Reventlow were the principal speakers at a rally of 10, 000 sympathizers in the Berlin Sportpalast. But even the vehement anti-Christian standpoint of the Nordic Faith Movement did not in the end save it from condemnation by the Nazis or its leader from an enforced resignation. [132]

Hauer was one of the earliest opponents of Anthroposophy, denouncing it as a "crime against the spirit." In his polemics he demonstrates not only his knowledge of Indian religion and a mastery of the doctrines he is attacking, but also a thorough grounding in Hermetic texts. He had even read Hargrave Jennings. Hauer collected his Nordic Faith Movement together under a pledge of having no Jewish or colored blood or Freemasonic affiliations. In the Sportpalast he was heard praising the virtues of Blood and Soil, and acclaiming the heroic SS-man. In 1935 he could see Adolf Hitler as "the genius of our people." [133] What had he to do with Jung?

Jung's uncritical supporters will answer: nothing, except a chance coincidence of views. This is not the case; for, as we have seen, the two used each other's ideas and derived inspiration from each other's psychologies. The manner in which Hauer adapted the idea of the "collective unconscious" to express his own opinion on the community of the race is exactly that in which Dietrich Eckart or Alfred Rosenberg took up the analagous concept of the unity of all souls in God. Indeed in 1934 -- the year after the publication of Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century and the year in which Hauer spoke at Ascona to the assembled Jungians-Hauer published a study of the Bhagavad Gita which defines God as the All, declares that the recognition of this leads to the grosse Heimkehr, and in other respects conforms to Rosenberg's interpretation of the same text. For Hauer, the "God-possessed German soul" was a mode of being that transcended political categories and resulted in the mystical unity of the Volk. [134]

Jung and Hauer were illuminates of similar traditions. This is the key to Jung's conduct while the Nazis were in power. And only against the background of Jung's relationship with Hauer can the psychologist's essay "Wotan" be understood. This piece, published in 1936, declared that the archetype of Wotan, the ancient Germanic god, creator of strife and worker of magic, was moving in the communal unconscious. Jung saw his Wotan impulse moving in the volkisch irrationalists, and in a note (added after the war) he revealed a knowledge of Klages, Schuler, and Stefan George. Germany was "possessed, " he announced, using the very metaphor with which Hauer had defined his position. Jung disapproved of the "German Christians" and advised them to join Hauer's Nordic Faith Movement, which was composed of "honest, well-meaning people" who admitted to being "God-possessed." Hauer himself was "possessed, " and Jung regarded his German creed as "the tragic and really heroic effort of a conscientious scholar" whose actions were directed by the disrupting force of Wotan. "There are people in the German Faith Movement who are intelligent enough not only to believe but to know that the God of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God." [135] Jung's essay is on the one hand, an explanation of world events in terms of his complicated psychology, and, on the other, a lament and apology for a kindred spirit in the grip of unconscious forces he could not control.

There is no need to accuse Jung of pro-Nazism on account of this essay, but the potentiality was there. Jung's theories drew strength from and in their turn inspired the illuminates of Central Europe. In Hauer can be seen a close associate and a member of the same illuminated circle who applied theories like Jung's to a racial doctrine. Jung's psychology could seem to lend itself to anti-Semitism and its founder made continual references to a difference between the psychology of races -- again a point of agreement with Hauer. This has not unnaturally led to accusations that Jung collaborated with the Nazis in assuming the presidency of the International Medical Society for Psychotherapy, the organization that supervised "coordinated" psychiatric activities under the Nazi regime. There is little doubt that Jung assumed the position because he was asked to and in order to keep psychiatric activities from being suppressed. [136] But the significance of the episode does not end with a decision as to whether or not Jung was anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi. The real importance of the accusations lies in the fact that Jung's accusers -- once the hysteria is penetrated -- had discerned a fundamental similarity between Jungian views and views associated with the Nazi regime. This once again shows the dangerous possibilities implicit in an illuminated viewpoint.

When he assumed the editorship of the Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapie in 1933, Jung wrote: "The differences which actually do exist between Germanic and Jewish psychology and which have long been known to every intelligent person, are no longer to be glossed over, and this can only be beneficial to science." [137] In so doing he did not unambiguously compromise himself -- as he was forced ever afterward to remind his attackers, he had for years been arguing the differences between the psychology of different races. Yet, it was an odd statement to make with no malice aforethought in that time and place. Jung, as a German-Swiss, naturally attracted favorable comment from Nazi psychologists in contrast with Freud. [138] Although his was not a "Nazi psychology, " it did incorporate the racial theory. The comparison that suggests itself is with the English illuminated politicians. Some did become anti-Semitic; some did not. Jacob Hauer became anti-Semitic; Jung probably did not. But the illuminated positions which they held in that time and place carried similar dangers, and if his critics have falsely accused Jung of holding "Nazi views, " this is at least partly because the Zurich psychologist talked in the language of contemporary illuminism -- in whose alarming accents certain criminally eccentric politicians in Germany had also been thoroughly schooled.

Because of Jung's intellectual standpoint, his vision of the analyst's role was more explicitly magical then Freud's. As early as 1913 he admitted that "indeed we must rate those doctors wise -- worldly-wise in every sense -- who know how to surround themselves with the aura of a medicine-man. They have not only the biggest practices, but also get the best results." The fundamental position may well be sound medical sense and has little to do with illuminism. But when Jung-Basilides took up his teaching it was very much in the manner of the medicine men he recommended. An Eastern commentator has described Jung:

In spite of being a deeply religious man, surcharged all over, and suffused with the richness of experience, he donned the robe of a psychologist and a doctor. He would not have done this had he been in the East.


This goes some way to explaining the "cultism" which even supporters of Jung have observed with displeasure. It is a condition not at all altered by explaining that "a gifted analyst is bound to be surrounded by people with strong transferences." [139] The statement is quite true, but it merely raises in a new form the question: what is an analyst?
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 4 of 4

In the case of Jung himself -- speaking entirely of his function -- there was a perpetual conflict between his role as an interpreter of essentially religious traditions and his early training as a scientist. He introduced Evans-Wentz's translation of the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation with the remark that "yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake." He complained that his critics "ignore the fact that as a doctor and scientist, I proceed from facts which everyone is at liberty to verify. Instead they cite me as if I were a philosopher, or a Gnostic with pretensions to supernatural knowledge." But such illumination is precisely what Jung did claim. "Religious experience is absolute, " he wrote.

It cannot be disputed. You can only say that you have never had such an experience, whereupon your opponent will reply, "Sorry, I have." And there your discussion will come to an end.


The student of the occult was always present, as when Jung decided that there were no Western equivalents to the Tibetan Book of the Dead "except for certain secret writings which are inaccessible to the wider public and to the ordinary scientist." By self-definition, therefore, Jung was not an ordinary scientist, although it is only possible to guess with which esoteric groups he was in contact. [140]

With Jung, elements present even in Freudian psychoanalysis are made explicit. It is no function of this book to discuss how far either the Freudian or the Jungian maps of the unconscious -- or the projections of any psychic cartographer -- correspond to close observation of the psychic processes. There is certainly no intention of detracting from the benefits derived from all good doctors and healers of souls. However, it is essential to realize that while the outer forms of irrationalism had penetrated political Establishments, the interior content of Underground systems of thought had begun to penetrate academies. The widest breach in the rationalist front was inevitably in the terrain of psychology and psychiatry, because of the nature of the subjects studied and the historical circumstances in which that study took place. Theories deriving from psychoanalysis, or developing parallel with it, have absorbed some of the same influences. Of these the most significant has been the New Education.

The builders of the brave new worlds of the Progressive Underground were most naturally concerned with the education of the children who would one day inhabit their Paradise. Doctrines of "spiritual revolution" found their natural outcome in attempts at reeducation; of "spiritual evolution," a good analogy in the educational progress of the child.

The pioneer of the altered attitude to education was Maria Montessori (1869-1952) whose vision of a race of Superchildren bordered on the apocalyptic. "The outcome ... is the New Child, a superior being, giving promise of a New Humanity, with powers of mind and spirit hitherto unsuspected." Many of the developments already discussed were part of the movement toward the New Child. In Germany, Langbehn's Rembrandt als Erzieher was followed by Carl Gotze's Child as Artist and Gotze's educational work based on the principle that the child was a natural creative artist who must have his powers liberated through education. The youth movements, and the groups with which Rolf Gardiner and the Springhead Ring were in contact, also formed parts of the movement for "liberated" education -- that is, designed to evoke the powers of the child rather than imposing adult standards upon him. In America the "Junior Republics" in which children governed themselves were set up. The idea was also tried in England with a "little Commonwealth" in Dorset. The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry and the Kibbo Kift were very much part of the educational movement and embodied a commitment to reestablishing "natural man." [141]

The theories of the psychologists provided added impetus.
Freud's conclusion that neuroses were produced by repressions fitted excellently with the ideas of those who wanted to recreate natural man; while Jung was a central figure in the minds of educational reformers after the First World War, as his psychology was particularly favorable to ideas of "spiritual evolution." Jung accepted the Biogenetic Law and may have been more influenced by his contact with G. Stanley Hall than he cared to admit. He lectured at conferences of the New Educators in 1923 and 1924, and his views on educational development very closely coincide, for example, with those of Ernest Westlake of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.

Occultists and religious reformers also concerned themselves with the children of the future -- for they, after all, were the custodians of the idea of "spiritual progress." Johannes Muller and Heinrich Lhotzky both put forward educational theories. The leading exponent of occult ideas of education has been Rudolf Steiner; and in 1962 there were almost seventy schools run on Anthroposophical principles in various parts of the world. Steiner himself also lectured to the New Educators, and (according to the Manchester Guardian) a conference attended by Steiner at Oxford in 1922 found in him "its central point." Steiner's principles were based on his occult theories, and it is easy to see how these could coincide with less esoteric ideas of evolution. "We must know on what part of the human being we have especially to work at a certain age, and how we can work upon it in the proper way," he wrote. "We can awaken what is in the child, but we cannot implant a content into him." [142] Such a coincidence of ideas makes it comprehensible that the organization that carried the flag of the New Education throughout Europe sprang from the Theosophical Society.

In 1914 a committee of Theosophists under Bishop George Arundale of the Liberal Catholic Church -- a former tutor of Krishnamurti -- decided to start a Theosophical School. The site chosen was -- where else? -- Letchworth Garden City. To the Theosophical tenets of karma and reincarnation were added the more generally "progressive" ideas of Arts and Crafts, Montessori theory, and Dalcroze Eurythmics. A general vegetarian diet was the rule and the pupils governed themselves through a "moot." The Theosophist Beatrice Ensor, an inspector of schools, was inspired by the Letchworth experiment and founded the Theosophical Fraternity of Education in 1915. She established a magazine to propagate enlightened ideas; and in 1921 she held a meeting of her fraternity in Letchworth, when it was decided that next year they should organize a general conference of educators at Calais which the Theosophists would run, although themselves keeping in the background. In 1921 the Calais conference was held, the name of the Theosophical paper changed to The New Era, and the New Educational Fellowship established. Its first object was "to prepare the child to seek and to realize in his own life the supremacy of the spirit." [143]


The New Era secured contributions from both occultists and educators. Beatrice Ensor shared the editorship with the celebrated A. S. Neill, and the entire spectrum of the Progressive Underground contributed to its pages. There was Isabelle Pagan of Racial Cleavage and Cloudesley Brereton, who wrote for G. R. S. Mead's Theosophical magazine Quest. There were articles by the Jungian therapist Esther Harding and the ubiquitous Patrick Geddes. The president of the Arts and Crafts Association joined the leader of a new French youth movement and Wilhelm Stekel -- a friend of Neill -- in a remarkable synthesis of "advanced opinion." Beatrice Ensor and the Theosophists were never quite submerged by the more practical educators. In April 1923, Mrs. Ensor contributed an editorial that noted approvingly the efforts of A. Conan Doyle and E. L. Gardner to capture the fairies.

We have recently come across other children who see fairies, and we are trying to obtain more photos. It is a very beautiful idea that Nature's laws are operated through the cooperation of beings who, while not belonging to our human order of evolution, are nevertheless working side by side with humanity in the building up of our world ... it would seem as though we were now beginning to reawaken at a higher level the sense organs which enabled the folk of yore to see clairvoyantly "the little people." [144]


Mrs. Ensor followed her beautiful thoughts by some tips for teachers on the education of the psychic child. Despite caustic comments from A. S. Neill on such vagaries, the New Educational Fellowship continued to interest people attracted to the occult and the transcendental. Adolphe Ferriere (1879-1960), who had been eminent in European New Education since just after the turn of the century, was a leading light in the Continental NEF. Ferriere was an advocate of an antirationalist approach to life, who considered that "realist politics are a mistake. They are an encroachment of reason on the healthy intuition." His educational interests led him to a concern with psychological types long before Jung published his book of that title in 1920. Ferriere agreed with Jung but thought the psychologist's theories incomplete. He devised a more extensive theory for himself, which he proposed to use in the service of the New Education. In its completed form this was based on what Ferriere considered "the essential element in religion." This was "the longing for union with creator." In such a union each person would find "the complete fulfilment of his own being."'45 This illuminated educator was responsible for introducing an expert on astrology to the adepts of the New Education.

The astrologer was Karl Ernst Krafft (1900-45), whose strange career has been exhaustively charted by Ellic Howe. [146] Ferriere had been interested in astrology since the days of the First World War, and by 1924 he had discovered a pamphlet written by Krafft, with whom he began a correspondence. Krafft's vast statistical researches into the relationship between the planets and humanity might, thought Ferriere, help his enquiries into the methods of determining character. This interest is exactly in line with the interest of illuminated intellectuals like those attending the Darmstadt School of Wisdom or the Eranos Conferences at Ascona. One of Krafft's specialties was called "Cosmobiology." When two issues of a Yearbook for Cosmobiological Research appeared in 1928 and 1929, Krafft's fellow-contributors included Richard Wilhelm, Edgar Dacque, and Sigrid Strauss-Kloebe, who lectured on astrology at Eranos. At the Conference of the New Educational Fellowship at Elsinore in August 1929, Krafft was introduced as a "psychologist of Zurich," and in the same program as talks by Montessori, Piaget, and Decroly, he gave two lectures on "The Relation between Astronomical, Meteorological and Biological Phenomena" and "The Possibility of Connecting Characterology with Cosmobiology." Krafft was followed by Ferriere, who suggested an explanation of "cosmobionomic phenomena" in terms of radiation and predicted the possibility of a neutral theory of types based on "the fundamental radio-active characteristics of the human being."

Krafft wrote to Ferriere that "many members" of the NEF were concerned with astrology and welcomed its renaissance. As an outcome of the conference, Ferriere tried to set up an international committee for research into typology with Krafft as its president. Some members of standing were secured, but a protracted campaign to attract the interest of Jung was unsuccessful. A single result of the committee was a joint publication by Krafft and Ferriere under the auspices of Ferriere's Swiss educational organization, which contains in embryo almost all Ferriere's formulations on the idea of types. [147]

The efforts of illuminated educationalists combined with successful attempts by psychologists to secularize certain occult concepts. Together they have produced remarkable effects. These results cannot be appreciated without the knowledge that those responsible have almost invariably been influenced by the Occult Revival. The illuminated attitude produces interesting variations on the theme common to all periods of history, that "the times are out of joint." While illuminated politicians attempted to alter the social structure of reality, illuminated psychologists and educators tried to restructure souls and minds. The identity of their aims was well expressed by Adolphe Ferriere in a letter to Romain Rolland.

The old religions, under the cover of their symbols, were right: man has lost this contact with the cosmic order -- mathematical or intuitive -- which the animals have managed to preserve well away from mankind -- and little children, too!


Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- he knew it well. [148]
_______________

Notes:

* Blondlot announced his discovery in all good faith, but it was soon proved that if his rays existed, they could be seen only by his own eyes.
1. C. G. Jung, "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, " in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London, 1933), pp. 234-35.

2. Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (London, 1962), pp. 168-69.

3. Carl du Prel, The Philosophy of Mysticism (tr. C. C. Massey, London, 1889), vol. I, p. xxiii.

4. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud, Life and Work (3 vols., London, 1953-57), vol. I, p. 31 note 1; Siegfried Bernfeld, "Sigmund Freud, M.D., " in International Journal of Psychoanalysis (July 1951), p. 208.

5. Friedrich Eckstein, "Das Unbewusste, die Vererbung und das Gedachtnis im Lichte der mathematische Naturwissenschaft, " in Almanach der Psychoanalyse (Vienna, 1930), pp. 44-60.

6. Eckstein, "Altere Theorien des Unbewussten, " in Almanach der Psychoanalyse (1936), pp. 241-44.

7. Eckstein, Alte Unnennbare Tage. p. 119; Neue Freie Presse (15 September 1933); Jones, Freud, vol. II, pp. 51, 328.

8. Christian von Ehrenfels, Cosmogony (tr. Mildred Focht, New York, 1948), p. 210.

9. Whyte, Unconscious, p. 164.

10. Garfield Tourney, "Empedocles and Freud, Heraclitus and Jung, " in Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1956), pp. 109 ff. Eckstein, Alte Unnennbare Tage, p. 105.

11. For the Nancy-Salpetriere controversy and the general position of hypnosis at the time, see particularly Konrad Wolff, "Magie und Rationalismus in der Hypnose" in Antaios, vol. II (1961), pp. 348 ff. Robert G. Hillman, "A Scientific Study of Mystery" in Bulletin of the History of Medicine (March-April 1965), pp. 163 ff. Jerome M. Schneck, "J-M. Charcot and the Theory of Experimental Hypnosis, " in Journal of the History of Medicine (July 1961), pp. 297 ff.

12. Richard Harte, Hypnotism and the Doctors, vol. II, pp. 224 ff., vol. I, p. 121.

13. Hillman, "Study of Mystery, " pp. 180-82; Blech, Societe Theosophique, p. 37.

14. Walter A. Stewart, Psycho-analysis: The First Ten Years (London, 1969), pp. 13-14; Standard Edition of Freud, vol. I, p. 95, note 2.

15. Sigmund Freud, review (1889) of August Forel's Der Hypnotismus, in Standard Edition, vol. I, pp. 91 ff.

16. Harte, Hypnotism and the Doctors, vol. I, p. vii.

17. On these systems see Harte, Hypnotism. For Quimby see my Occult Underground, pp. 121-23.

18. Schneck, "A Re-evaluation of Freud's 'Abandonment of Hypnosis, '" in Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences (April 1965), pp. 191 ff. Cf. Freud, "An Autobiographical Study" in The Problem of Lay Analysis (tr. James Strachey, London, 1928), pp. 189 ff.

19. Cf. opinion of Walter Stewart, Psycho-analysis, p. 3.

20. Freud, The Origins of Psycho-analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess (ed. Ernst Kris, London, 1954), pp. 179 and note 1, 318.

21. Wilhelm Fliess, Der Ablauf des Lebens (Leipzig and Vienna, (906), p. 251; Fliess, Vom Leben und vom Tod (2nd ed., Jena, 1914), p. 105; Fliess, Das Jahr in Lebendigen (lena, 1918); Fliess, "Das Wunder des Jahres, " in Zur Periodenlehre (Jena, 1925), p. 50.

22. Copy with Wyneken's signature in the Warburg Institute Library, London.

23. Fliess, Ablauf des Lebens, p. 529; Friedell, Kulturgeschichte Agyptens, p. 267; see Eugen Georg, Verschollene Kulturen (Leipzig, 1930), published by Voigtlander, the Welteislehre specialists; Fliess, Ablauf des Lebens (Leipzig, 1923), p. viii.

24. Michael Gauquelin, The Cosmic Clocks (London, 1969), pp. 97 ff.

25. E.g., Eugen Georg, Verschollene Kulturen; Hans Kunkel, Das grosse Jahr (Jena, 1922). Hanns Fischer, Rhythmus, uses Arrhenius but not Fliess. Also G. W. Surya (i.e., D. Giorgiewitz-Weitzer) Das Ubersinnliche in der Weltkreis (Freiburg in Breisgau, 1921).

26. See Iago Galdston, "Freud and Romantic Medicine" in Bulletin of the History of Medicine (December 1956), pp. 489 ff. and Bernfeld, "Freud's Earliest Theories and the School of Helmholtz, " in Psychoanalytical Quarterly (1944), pp. 431 ff.

27. Steiner, The Story of My Life, p. 138.

28. See Freud, The Origins, p. 9.

29. Lazar, Baron Hellenbach, Die Magie der Zahlens (Vienna, 1882) and Franz Liharzic, Das Quadrat (Vienna, 1865).

30. Richard Pfenning, Grundzuge der Fliessschen Periodenrechnung (Leipzig and Vienna, 1918), p. 1; Hans Henning, "Neupythagoraer" in Annalen der Naturphilosophie (1910), pp. 219 ff.; Freud, The Origins, p. 41.

31. A full account of the scandal is Vincent Brame, Freud's Early Circle (London, 1967), pp. 5-13. Cf. Richard Pfenning, Wilhelm Fliess und seine Nachentdecker (Berlin, 1906), and Hermann Swoboda, Das Siebenjahr, Band I (Vienna and Leipzig, 1917).

32. On Weininger, see David Abrahamsen, The Mind and Death of a Genius (New York, 1946) and Swoboda, Otto Weiningers Tod (Vienna and Leipzig, 1923), Otto Weininger, Ober die Letzten Dinge (Vienna and Leipzig, 1904), pp. 113 ff.; Taschenbuch und Briefe an einem Freund (ed. A. Gerber; Leipzig and Vienna, 1919), pp. 27-28, where he claims to be the founder of "the only true pathology of self-cure through God." Sex and Character (London, 1906), pp. 276-78, 330 for his occult experiences.

33. See Galdston, "Romantic Medicine, " pp. 500-501. Note his comment (p. 503) that the Romantics would have found Freud's metapsychology "familiar, " although "naive."

34. Hans Schlieper, Der Rhythmus des Lebendigen (Jena, 1909).

35. Weininger, Sex and Character, pp. xi, 10.

36. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (ed. Aniela Jaffe, London, 1967), pp. 173-74.

37. The Brighton Herald, 24 May 1913.

38. Lutoslawski first used the term in a book on Plato published in Polish in Cracow in 1902. See his Knowledge of Reality (London, 1930), p. 198 note.

39. F. W. H. Myers, "The Daemon of Socrates, " in Proceedings of the SPR, vol. V (1888-89), pp. 522 ff.

40. Myers, "The Subliminal Consciousness, " in Proceedings of the SPR, vol. VII (1891-92), pp. 299-301 ff. The other papers under this title are in Proceedings. vol. VIII, pp. 333 ff., and vol. IV, pp. 3 ff. There is a concluding paper on "The Subliminal Self' in vol. XI, pp. 334 ff.

41. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London, 1903), vol. I, p. 15.

42. Breuer and Freud, "Studies on Hysteria" in the Standard Edition, vol. II (London, 1955), pp. xiv-v; Jones, Freud, vol. III, p. 425.

43. J. B. Rhine, New Frontiers of the Mind (London, 1938), pp. 44-66; Rhine, The Reach of the Mind (London, 1948), p. 169.

44. Anton Muller, "Medizin und Okkultismus urn die Jahrhundertwende, " in Zurcher Medizingeschichtliche Abhandlungen (Neue Reihe Nr. 48), pp. 16-17. For the association of Fechner with occult tradition, see The Occult Underground, p. 229; also H. F. Ellenberger, "Fechner and Freud, " in Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic (July (956), pp. 201 ff.; Anton Mililer, "Medizin und Okkultismus, " p. 27; see Erich Bohn, Der Fall Rothe (Breslau, 1901), and Bohn with Hans H. Busse, Geisterschriften und Drohbriefe (Munich, (902). Busse was the cofounder with Klages of the Graphological Society -- see chapter II -- and used his talents to expose "Spirit messages."

45. Albert Moll, Psychologie und Charakterologie der Okkultisten (Stuttgart, 1929), pp. 18 ff. Franz Blei, Erzahlung eines Lebens (Leipzig, 1931), p. 403. For further personal reminiscences of Schrenck, see Gerda Walther, Zum anderen Ufer (Remagen, 1960).

46. Mathilde von Kemnitz, Moderne Mediumforschung (Munich, 1914). Gulat-Wellenberg's letter on pp. 71 ff. Protocol of sitting of 13 July 1913, pp. 50 ff.; Albert v. Schrenck-Notzing, Der Kampf urn die Materialisationsphanomene (Munich, 1914).

47. Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation (tr. E. E. Fournier d' Albe, London, 1920), p. 283; various articles, notably those printed in Schrenck-Notzing, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Parapsychologie (ed. Gabrielle von Schrenck-Notzing, Leipzig, 1929), pp. 133, 140 ff. and report of the settlement of one of Schrenk's law suits, "Vergleich in der Privatklagsache Schrenk-Notzing gegen Kiesewetter, " Zeitchrift fur parapsychologie (May 1928); Karl von Klinckowstroem, "Zur Psychologie des Okkultisten, " in Waldenburger Schriften, vol. VIII, (1927), pp. 68 ff.; Moll, Okkultisten, p. 18; Klinckowstroem, "Die Krise im Okkultismus" in Die Medizinische Welt, no. 50 (1928); Heinrich Schole, Okkultismus und Wissenschaft (Gottingen, (929).

48. Freud, "A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled, " Standard Edition, vol. VI, pp. 623-25; Jones, Freud, vol. III, pp. 410-12; vol. II, p. 188.

49. Jones, Freud. vol. II, p. 411. For the Freud-Ferenczi relationship, see Brome, Freud, pp. 195 ff.

50. Jones, Freud. vol. II, pp. 412-22, 436.

51. Blei, Erzahlung. pp. 404-5.

52. Jones, Freud, vol. III, pp. 419-20.

53. Freud, "Pyschoanalysis and Telepathy, " in the Standard Edition, vol. 18 (London, 1955), pp. 177, 178-81. The manuscript dates from August 1921, and was first published 1941.

54. Freud, "Psychoanalysis, " pp. 178-81.

55. Wilhelm Stekel, Der Telepathische Traum. The edition I saw was no. 2 of the series "Die Okkulte Welt, " but it was undated and may not have been the original publication. For his crucial experience, see p. 43.

56. Stekel, Der telepathische Traum, p. 17.

57. Freud, "Dreams and Telepathy, " in the Standard Edition, vol. 18, pp. 197 ff. See especially pp. 219-20.

58. Jones, Freud, vol. III, pp. 420-24.

59. Freud, "Psychoanalysis and Telepathy, " p. 190.

60. Freud, "Dreams and Occultism, " in the Standard Edition, vol. XXII (London, 1964), pp. 31 ff.

61. Freud, "The Occult Significance of Dreams, " in the Standard Edition, vol. XIX, pp. 135 ff.

62. Imago, vol. XII (1926), p. 434.

63. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, the Standard Edition, vol. V, p. 96.

64. Freud, "On Dreams" in The Interpretation of Dreams, the Standard Edition, vol. V, p. 635.

65. M. Laignel-Lavastine and Jean Vinchon, "Les Symboles traditionels et le Freudisme, " in I-er Congres de l'Histoire de l'art de guerir, Liber Memorialis (ed. Tricot Royer and Van Schevensteen, Antwerp, 1921), pp. 165-66.

66. Freud, "The Occult Significance of Dreams, " p. 135.

67. E.g., Claude Levi-Strauss, "Witch-doctors and Psychoanalysis" in UNESCO Courier, pp. 8, 10.

68. Freud to Pfister 25 November 1928 in Psychoanalysis and Faith (ed. H. Meng and Ernest Freud, London, 1963), p. 176.

69. The argument of Walter Riese in "The Pre-Freudian Origins of Psycho-analysis, " reprinted from Science and Psychoanalysis (1958).

70. Franz Hartmann, Occult Science and Medicine (London, 1893), p. 10. The italics are Hartmann's.

71. Freud, The Origins, p. 145.

72. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (tr. Jean Riviere, London, 1930), p. 36.

73. David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (Princeton, Toronto, London, 1958).

74. Donald Capps, "Hartmann's Relationship to Freud: a Reappraisal, " in Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences (April 1970), pp. 162 ff.

75. Robert Couzin, "Leibnitz, Freud and Kabbala" in the same journal (October 1970), pp. 335 ff.

76. D. F. Foxon, "Libertine Literature in England, " In The Book-Collector (1963), p. 304.

77. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (London, 1966), p. 283.

78. Clifford Howard, Sex and Religion (London, 1925), p. 28.

79. Jung, Memories, p. 175.

80. Ivan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time (tr. Eden Paul, London, 1908), pp. 113 ff.; King, Sexuality, Magic and Perversion.

81. Herbert Silberer in Imago, vol. II (1913), pp. 593-94. See Hargrave Jennings, The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (London, 1893), and cf. his Phallicism (London, 1894).

82. Freud, The Origins, p. 189.

83. Freud, The Origins. p. 188; Margaret Murray, The Witch-cult in Western Europe (London, 1962), pp. 178 ff.

84. Freud, "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis, " in the Standard Edition, vol. XIX, pp. 72 ff.

85. Jones, Freud, vol. III, pp. 410, 419, 453.

86. Freud's interest -- Jones, Freud, vol. III, p. 476 -- was ensnared by "Looney." This was J. Thomas Looney, author of Shakespeare Identified (London, 1920).

87. See Brome, Freud, pp. 154 ff.

88. Jung, Memories, pp. 119-20, 126-28.

89. On this period, see Jung, Memories, pp. 135 ff. and E. A. Bennett, C. G. Jung (London, 1961), pp. 22 ff.

90. Jones, Freud, vol. II, p. 156.

91. Jung, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena (1902) in Complete Works, vol. I, pp. 36-39; Memories, p. 186. "Miss Miller" seems to be "Helene Smith" of Flournoy's From India to the Planet Mars (tr. D. B. Vermilye, London and New York, 1900).

92. Jung, "On the Psychology and Pathology, " p. 88, and Memories. pp. 127-28.

93. Jung's own account in Memories should be supplemented by the criticisms of Sir Cyril Burt in the Journal of the SPR (December 1963), p. 163 ff.

94. Jung, Memories, pp. 178-79.

95. See letters from Freud to Jung printed in Memories. pp. 395-97.

96. Brome, Freud, pp. 118 ff. has analyzed these.

97. Freud's affection for Rome, his classical references, his insistence on clarity, and a (sometimes deceptively) precise presentation are almost directly opposed to Jung's knowledge of occult philosophy -- at the root of the "Romantic" world-view -- his Gnostic sources, denial of reason, and often diffuse style.

98. Jung in a letter quoted in H. R. Philip, Jung and the Problem of Evil (London, 1958), p. 322.

99. Jung, Memories. pp. 215-16.

100. Jung, VII Sermones ad Mortuos (tr. H. G. Baynes, 1925), p. xix.

101. Miguel Serano, C. G. Jung and Herman Hesse (tr. F. MacShane, London, 1966), p. 101.

102. Jung, "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, " p. 238; Jung, Memories, p. 226; Erich Ludendorff, foreword to Mathilde Ludendorff, Induziertes Irresinn (n.d., n.p.), p. 68; according to Francis King, Papus (who was a bishop in the Universal Gnostic Church) had Masonic honors conferred on him by Theodore Reuss. In return, Papus consecrated Reuss as a Gnostic potentate, and thus the line of succession passed into the O.T.O. See King, "Wandering Bishops, " in Man. Myth and Magic.

103. McDougall in A History of Psychology in Autobiography (ed. C. Murchison, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1930-36), p. 211; G. Stewart Prince, "Jung's Psychology in Britain" in Michael Fordham (ed.), Contact with Jung (London, 1963), p. 49 and W. B. Crow, The Science of Dreams (Adyar, 1935).

104. Jung, Memories. pp. 228 ff.; Jung, "A Study in the Process of Individuation" (developed from Eranos-Jahrbuch paper of 1930), in The Archetypes and the Col/ective Unconscious. Collected Works. IX (London, 1959), p. 305.

105. Jung, "Individuation, " p. 306.

106. Jung, "Individuation, " pp. 290, 344.

107. On the beginnings of Jungian analysis in the United States, see Alma A. Paulsen, "Origins of Analytical Psychology in the New York Area, " in Fordham, Contact. pp. 186 ff.

108. Paulsen, "Origins of Analytical Psychology, " and Paulsen, Obituary notice on Eleanor Bertine in Journal of Analytical Psychology (July 1968).

109. Marguerite Beck Block, The New Church in the New World (New York, 1932), pp. 160-68, 303-4, 340-41, 350-52.

110. Charles H. Mann, Three Sermons on the Healing of the Body through the Soul (New York, 1887), and Psychiasis (Boston, 1900). Anyone who imagines the current Honest to God interpretation of Christianity (Dr. John Robinson et al.) to be new would do well to read Mann's The Christ of God (New York, 1897).

111. See I. B. Cohen, "Ethan Allen Hitchcock of Vermont, " in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (April-October 1951), pp. 34 ff.; E. A. Hitchcock, Swedenborg: a Hermetic Philosopher (Boston, 1857).

112. Jung, Memories. p. 230.

113. Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (tr. S. E. Jelliffe, New York, 1917). This book, together with Rudolf Kassner's Die Mystik. die Kunstler und das Leben greatly influenced Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Apart from the commonly known fact that he committed suicide, I have been able to discover little about Silberer, who may well be a significant figure.

114. Hitchcock, Swedenborg. p. 119; C. J. Wilkinson, James John Garth Wilkinson (London, 1911); quotation in Block, New Church. p. 351.

115. Jung, Memories, pp. 184, 222-25; James John Garth Wilkinson, The Soul is Form and Doth the Body Make (London, 1890), pp. 16-17.

116. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy in Collected Works. vol. XII (London, 1953), pp. 23, 35; Jung, "Concerning the Archetypes with Special Reference to the Anima Concept" (1936), in The Archetypes, pp. 64-65 and note 24. Jung says that Maitland probably did not know the Poimandres; Maitland certainly did. See passage quoted in my Occult Underground, p. 278.

117. See bibliography to The Interpretation of Dreams.

118. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 23 and Mysterium Conjunctionis in Collected Works, (London, 1963), pp. 555-56.

119. See The Occult Underground, p. 275.

120. Kathe Bugler, "Die Entwicklung der analytischen Psychologie in Deutschland" in Fordham, Contact, pp. 23 ff. For Heyer, see references in Gerda Walther, Zum anderen Ufer.

121. Quoted from Joseph Campbell, foreword to Man and Transformation (London, 1964), pp. 5-6.

122. Jost, Derleth, pp. 99-101, 136. Lothar Helbig, "Ludwig und Anna Maria Derleth, " in Derleth Gedenkbuch, p. 70; Derleth, Das Such vom Orden, p. 101.

123. Robert Landmann, Monte Verita, pp. 206 ff.

124. Manifesto printed in Landmann, p. 226.

125. See Eranos-Jahrbuch (1938) and cf. G. R. Heyer, The Organism of the Mind (tr. E. and C. Paul, London, 1933); Bernouilli, "Die Zahlen-mystik des Tarotsystems, " in Eranos-Jahrbuch (1934); Eliade's diary, quoted by George Uscatescu, "Time and Destiny in the Novels of Mircea Eliade, " in J. M. Kitagawa and C. H. Long (eds.), Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade (Chicago, 1969), p. 398; on Eliade, see E. M. Cioran in Kitagawa and Long, Myths and Symbols, pp. 407 ff. and Basil Munteanu, Geschichte der neueren Rumiinische Uteratur (Vienna, 1943), pp. 165 ff.

126. Jung, Memories, p. 405; Howe, Urania's Children, pp. 94-95 and notes p. 95, suggests that Schmitz was probably responsible for Jung's real "conversion" to astrology in the early 1920s. For an approach to astrology approved of by Keyserling, see Olga von Ungern-Sternberg, "Die Korrespondenz von Makro und Mikrokosmos, " in Der Leuchter, vol. VI (1925).

127. Bugler, "Die Entwicklung der analytischen Psychologie in Deutschland, " brackets Hauer with Richard Wilhelm and Heinrich Zimmer as three of the great influences on Jung.

128. Jung, "Yoga and the West, " in Psychology and Religion, Complete Works, vol. II (London, 1950), pp. 529 ff.

129. Jung, "Psychology and Religion, " in Complete Works. vol. XI, p. 52 and note 20, p. 82 and note 31. Cf. Hauer, "Symbole und Erfahrung des Selbsts, " in Eranos-Jahrbuch (1934).

130. Hauer, Eranos-Jahrbuch, p. 60 and his Deutsche Gottschau (Stuttgart, 1937), pp. 44 Fr.

131. Hans Buchheim, Glaubenskrise im dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1953), pp. 157-61. Cf. T. S. K. Scott-Craig and R. E. Davis, Germany's New Religion (London, 1937), pp. 22-23.

132. Conway, Persecution, pp. 106 Fr.; Buchheim, Glaubenskrise, pp. 162 Fr.

133. See J. W. Hauer, Werden und Wesen der Anthroposophie (Stuttgart, 1922); Conway, Persecution, pp. 106-8.

134. Hauer, Eine indo-arische Metaphysik des Kampfes und der Tat (Stuttgart, 1934).

135. Jung, "Wotan" in Civilisation in Transition, Complete Works, vol. X (London, 1964), p. 191.

136. Brome, Freud, pp. 142-53, discusses the controversy. The opposing points of view are put by Ernest Glover, Freud or Jung (London, 1950), pp. 142 Fr. and Ernest Harms, "Carl Gustav Jung -- Defender of Freud and the Jews, " in Psychiatric Quarterly (April 1946).

137. Printed in Civilisation in Transition, p. 533.

138. E.g., Kurt Ganger, quoted in George Mosse, Nazi Culture (London, 1966), pp. 199, 223-24. But cf. the Ordensburgen lecturer, Hans Alfred Grunsky, Seele und Staat (Berlin, 1935), pp. 97 Fr.

139. Jung, Freud and Psycho-analysis, Complete Works, vol. IV (1961), p. 255; A. U. Vasuvada, "Analytical Psychology of C. G. Jung and Indian Wisdom, " p. 141; Jane Wheelwright, "A Personal Experience, " in Fordham, Contact, p. 227.

140. Jung, "A Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, " in Psychology and Religion, p. 500; Jung, foreword to Victor White, God and the Unconscious, p. 307. Jung, "Psychology and Religion, " pp. 104-5; Jung, "Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, " p. 524.

141. Montessori, quoted in William Boyd and Wyatt Rawson, The Story of the New Education (London, 1965), pp. 23, 27-29. For one school conducted on OWC and K.K. lines, see Dorothy Revel, Cheiron's Cave (London, 1928), and Ernest Westlake, The Forest School.

142. E. A. Hinckelman and M. Ademan, "Apparent Theoretical Parallels between G. Stanley Hall and Carl Jung, " in Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences (July 1968), pp. 254-57; see Jung, "Child Development and Education" and "Analytical Psychology and Education, " in The Development of the Personality, Collected Works, vol. 17 (London, 1954); Lhotzky, The Soul of Your Child (London, 1902). For Muller's theories, see Willy Scheel, nnerliche Schulreform (Munich, 1920); Hemleben, Steiner, p. 125; Steiner, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy (London, 1965; orig. 1909), p. 25; Steiner, Study of Man (London, 1947; orig. 1919), p. 34.

143. An account of the school is in Armstrong Smith, Some Ideals in Co-Education (London, 1919); Boyd and Rawson, New Education, pp. 70 ff., 78.

144. The New Era (4-14 April 1923), p. 156.

145. Adolphe Ferriere, La Loi de progres (Paris, 1915), p. 660; see Ferriere, Psychological Types and the Stages of Man's Development (London, 1958), and his Activity School (London, 1939).

146. See Howe, Urania's Children, part 2, passim.

147. H. A. Strauss (ed.), Jahrbuch fur kosmobiologische Forschung (Augsburg, 1928), p. 29; reports in William Boyd and Muriel MacKenzie, Towards a New Education (London and New York, 1930), pp. 387-90 and cf. New Era (October 1929), p. 215; Krafft to Ferriere from Elsinore, 28 October 1929; Howe, Urania's Children, pp. 145-46. Of Ferriere's numerous publications, his Symboles graphiques de la Typocosmie is worth noting. It was published in 1940 at La Sallaz sur Lausanne by the Editions de la Forge. This argues a possible connection with followers of Lutos1awski, who moved his Forge to Lausanne in 1912.

148. Romain Rolland (Neuchatel, 1969), published by University of Geneva.
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 1 of 4

Chapter 7: The Great Liberation

Liberation and Society-Modern Art and the Occult Revival -America imports Bohemia-Drugs and the Occult- Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey-Underground Occultism-Haight-Ashbury and the Hippies-New Forms of Illuminated Politics-Reich, Marcuse, and Metaphysical Liberation-R. D. Laing and the Dialectics of Liberation

THE idea of "freedom" often has most tangible associations -- let me out of here, give me enough to eat, create the opportunities for me to use my abilities to benefit myself or others. Always beside these easily understood demands has run another. It is an apocalyptic definition of freedom, which has its roots in various pre-Christian religious conceptions. And in this century it owes direct allegiance to the irrationalist reaction and the occult revival of the 1890s. It is notorious that no two men will ever agree on what "freedom" is: for the anarchist of the turn of the century it signified the dissolution of all legal and social bonds, but for the believer in Hitler's Germany, it meant a liberation from the vagaries of fate augmented by the anarchic and profiteering systems of Western liberalism. Each definition represents "freedom"; and each embodies definitions of what "unfreedom" is. It is the purpose of this chapter to imply that in many such definitions of free and unfree, the tangible meaning of the word "freedom" has its inevitable corollary in a conception of personal "liberation" from the condition of being human -- a rejection of the helplessness, mutual isolation, and mortality of man.

This liberation is liberation of a mystical or occult nature. In its Western form it is to be found in the Gnostic systems. The cardinal tenet is that man contains God, a spark of the divine somehow entrapped in matter -- and that he can only effect his salvation by realizing and rejoining the Godhead from which he sprang. This is also the position at the root of the most serious occult systems. It may be that there is an innate Gnosticism in humanity, which throws up the idea of man's divine origins from time to time in different forms to provide a consoling myth for an intolerable predicament. The idea is even found in orthodox Christianity -- all myths of the Fall from grace embody some idea of a possible return to Heaven. In this century, with the presentation of traditional religious positions in secular form, there has emerged a secular Gnosticism beside the other great secular religions -- the mystical union of Fascism, the apocalypse of Marxist dialectic, the Earthly City of social democracy. The secular Gnosticism is almost never recognized for what it is, and it can exist alongside other convictions almost unperceived. Thus, the Fascist or the Communist or the anarchist may cherish unknown to himself a vision of personal liberation, which in imagination fuses with the communal definition of "freedom" to which he nominally subscribes. It was the characteristic of the Sixties, however, to produce a form of secular Gnosticism, which took on a relatively independent existence and which defined "liberation" in terms that without doubt derived directly from the occult revival or its influence.

This "pure" form of secular Gnosticism is found among the "Counterculture, " the "Youth movement, " and parts of the "New Left."

So far we have discussed the coincidence of occultism and politics in terms of "illuminated politics, " implying a politics that has a religious complexion and obeys a transcendental scale of values. The counterculture was packed full to bursting with the occult and mystical elements which indicate the illuminated attitude, and certain of its most cherished and supposedly "relevant" theories -- the term of the self-proclaimed pragmatic wing of the movement in opposition to the out-and-out mystics -- derived directly from the secularized Gnosticism of the occult revival. These concepts had been floating around for at least a century. But not until the 1960s did the Gnosticism become sufficiently secularized to provide the motor force for a widespread theory of everyday living. The Underground of the Sixties was often concerned with illuminated politics of a particular -- Gnostic -- form, whereas the illuminated politicians of the first half of this century more often put their idealism at the service of a political cause that made more concessions toward the aspirations of society at large.

Present-day illuminates are the obvious heirs of earlier illuminated politicians. We have already examined a/most every tenet cultivated among the contemporary Underground. Insistence on a "natural" way of living, anti-industrialism, vegetarianism, protection of the environment, "organic" community, and spiritual evolution -- all combine with occult enthusiasms and the political cause of the movement. The specific political objectives of any given time account for most of the differences between the later Underground and that of the 1890s -- and in what follows some obvious differences are taken for granted. My concern is to point the similarities and to argue that the Gnostic-occult idea of "liberation" is one common denominator of Underground groups. The Progressive Underground of the 1890s -- equally concerned with spiritual evolution and spiritual revolution -- was also the habitat of occultists and practitioners of strange religions like those from which the Underground of the 1960s derived its fundamental illuminism and much of its ideology. Because the Underground of the 1960s was a development from earlier Bohemias, those earlier Bohemias are important as a source of inspiration for contemporary idealists. Both the myth of Bohemia and the real configurations of that landscape have played a part in the growth of the modern Underground, and the occult has formed part both of the legend and the reality. The societies on which the Underground of the last decade were based had their own ideas of "liberation, " and the occult preoccupations of Eckstein's Vienna, Symbolist Paris, or the Munich of the Cosmic Circle have had an inevitable effect on their spiritual descendants. "Modern" culture as a whole is so indebted to artists and writers who found their inspiration in the turn-of-the-century Occult Revival that the avant-garde of today necessarily makes use of "esoteric" ideas without realizing their nature. In order to understand how the social criticism of the modern Underground is of a predominantly Gnostic nature, it would be useful to outline -- very briefly -- how the occult has affected some influential theories of modern art.

The eccentric American critic T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings published in 1948 a book called Mona Lisa's Mustache. This was the first work to call attention to the occult connections of modern art. Robsjohn-Gibbings was largely concerned with a polemic against the recently opened New York Museum of Modern Art, and his idiosyncratic fulminations contributed to bury his book. He also labored under the ideological effects of the recent war and made an equation which must have seemed preposterous to some: "modern art" = occultism = Fascism. The equation is preposterous as it stands, but the truth it conceals is great. Robsjohn-Gibbings had fallen into the trap d overstating his case; and, at the same time, he made the same mistake that is made by those who call, for example, Jung's psychology, -- or, for that matter, the Social Credit Party -- "Fascist." What both Jung and Social Credit have in common with some sorts of Fascism is the illuminated attitude. And exactly the same is true of modern art. Considerable occult influence has sometimes been behind modern theories of art, but these are not identical with Fascism.

Robsjohn-Gibbings placed considerable stress on the Futurist doctrines of Marinetti and their associations with the Italian Fascists. But he had only to examine the attitude of distaste shown by the typically "illuminated" group around Orage in their encounter with Futurism to see that those with a penchant for the occult need not be tarred with the brush of "modern art."

To be fair, if we alter his equation to read "occultism = much original modern art = occasionally illuminated politics, " we can see how the error arose. There is considerable excuse for the mistake when the career of someone like Guilio Evola -- whom Robsjohn- Gibbings did not cite as an example -- is considered. Evola turns up everywhere. He preached an "imperialism of the blood, " influenced Italian Fascism, and had his works translated into German under the Nazis. He wrote on alchemy and the Hermetic tradition. He is quoted by lung in this connection. He played a part in the revival of Bachofen. Anada Coomaraswamy sent a pamphlet by him to Eric Gill. Of course he appears in the history of modern art, although there is disagreement as to his status: Hans Richter thinks him a "second-generation Futurist, " while Tristan Tzara incorporated him in the legions of Dada -- whatever they were. [1]

Illuminated art derives from occultism, and much modern art is indirectly illuminated or directly occult. There is no place here for aesthetics, and my intention is only to show the connection of much influential modern art with the occult. This alliance began in Paris of the 1890s when -- as I have shown in my book on the subject [2] -- the occult revival coincided exactly with the Symbolist movement, and the Symbolists drew a great part of their inspiration from the occultists. Occult theories resulted in the conception of the artist as a saint and a magician, while his art became less and less representative of ordinary reality and hinted at things beyond. From this departure of the Symbolists from the universe of agreed discourse for private or superior worlds has sprung the tampering with "everyday" reality which has become so central a feature of modern art. Naturally, similar developments were going on elsewhere, just as the reaction against the tyranny of Reason occurred in other places. But Paris remained the hub from which the magic influences radiated, the center of artistic and occult experiment.

After the initial breakthrough, the development of modern art followed the epidemic of unreason, and it was often linked directly to the proliferating cults. Germany and Russia saw important developments, in which a central figure was Vasili Kandinsky. Kandinsky arrived in Germany in 1896 from a humdrum life as a lawyer, and, after a series of false starts, he settled in 1908 near Munich. In 1910 he painted the famous watercolor that, despite all counterclaims, has still the best title to be called "the first abstract picture." Sixten Ringbom has recently explored in detail some of Robsjohn-Gibbings's speculations. He has shown beyond all doubt that Kandinsky was influenced in his complicated theories of the significance of color by the ideas that Rudolf Steiner derived from Goethe, and in his moves toward abstraction by the Theosophical book Thought Forms, in which emotions are given pictorial substance. [3] Kandinsky attended lectures by Steiner in Murnau and Berlin. The library he left behind him includes the works of Steiner as well as several on Spiritualism -- Aksakov, Du Prel, Kiesewetter, Zollner -- and miscellaneous trapping of the idealistic revolution in the form of books by Baron Hellenbach, Hubbe-Schleiden's periodical Sphynx, and a tract entitled What everyone should know about vegetarianism. [4]

In 1911 Kandinsky and Franz Marc organized the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Berlin, the year before Kandinsky published his Theosophically inclined book, On the Spiritual in Art. Marc himself was greatly influenced by Kandinsky's occult color theories. He saw art as religion and abstract art as "second sight." He himself hoped for "liberation from the sense-illusions of our ephemeral life." [5]

The coincidence of art and occultism was, of course, not universal. But it was a definite part of the idealistic Underground, which drew its sustenance from the same revolt against reason as had inspired the Symbolists. In Germany, as in France, critics proclaimed the "death of naturalism." As early as 1891 Hermann Bahr had announced his belief that naturalism would go down before "a neurotic romanticism: I would rather say, through a mysticism of the nerves." In the Bohemian circles that had taken to their hearts Wagner's views on art and religion the more specific ideas of Rudolf Steiner found their natural home. Kandinsky and Marc had been anticipated in their mysticism by the Expressionist group Die Brueke founded in Dresden in 1904. Its leading spirit, Edvard Munch, was in close touch with Strindberg in the mid-1890s when the playwright was in contact with Lanz von Liebenfels. It is possible to endorse Robsjohn-Gibbings: "From the Rhine to the Baltic, the religious symbolists, religious socialists, idealistic art-lovers, occultists and Buddhists found their way." We have already seen this true in terms of general irrationalism, and it remains true in terms of irrationalism in art. By the end of the First World War, even an apologist for the religious mission of art who was fascinated by Steiner and Soloviev could deplore the way in which spiritual aspirations had been "distorted" into "pure spookiness and occultism." [6]

Such tendencies came together in the early days of the Bauhaus, which Walter Gropius established in Weimar in 1919. Although Gropius and the style with which he is associated later became severely attached to functionalist principles, at the time that he founded the Bauhaus he was considerably influenced by ideas of the religious mission of art, which at that time were common currency. "Art is sacred, " he wrote in 1919, "it is rare, without purpose; it wanders the loveliest ways far in advance, is born and understood in the highest ecstasy." The early programs of the Bauhaus included "joint planning of extensive utopian building projects -- cultural and spiritual centres -- with far-reaching objectives." [7] In the concept of a new sort of cooperation and artistic training for which the early Bauhaus stood, there are many parallels with the English Arts and Crafts movement, including a romanticized attachment to handicrafts and the nobility of labor. Within this atmosphere it was natural that the specifically occult would play a part.

The designer and supervisor of the Bauhaus "Preliminary Course" was Johannes Itten (1888-1967), who taught at the Bauhaus till 1923. In the 1930s he was listed as the leading Mazdaznan lecturer in Germany.  [8] His vision of the world in crisis led to a strange introductory course, in which breathing exercises and meditation were prominent features. He was obsessed with the vision of doom purveyed by Spengler's Decline of the West:

I was conscious that technical-scientific civilisation had come to a critical point. The slogan, "unity of art and technology" did not seem to me to be able to solve the problem.

I studied Eastern philosophy, occupied myself with Persian Mazdaism and primitive Christianity. Thus I came to the opinion that an internally-directed thought and spiritual strength must provide the counterweight to our outwardly-directed scientific research and technologising.

George Muche came to a similar conclusion through his war experience and we worked amicably together. We were looking for the basis of a new way of life for ourselves and our work. At that time I was laughed at because I did breathing and concentration exercises. Today it has become perfectly accepted for many people to occupy themselves with Eastern philosophy. [9]


Itten began his courses only when all were thoroughly prepared by breathing exercises. To his camp of idealists belonged, to some extent, also Klee, Kandinsky, Muche, and Oscar Schlemmer (who delivered compulsory courses in "Anthropology" -- which consisted of astrology, phrenology, physiognomy, and graphology). Itten designed a "uniform, " or monastic habit, for the Bauhaus; it was rather like the outfit worn by Eric Gill. The Bauhaus even possessed a special dance called "Itten-Muche-Mazdaznan." Alfred Arndt recalls: "Serious and dignified, the 'mazdaznaners' -- their chief was Master Itten -- ate much garlic and gargled often." When Arndt took over a studio from a "mazdaznaner, " he found a straw pallet and a blue circle on the wall five feet in diameter. The circle served as an aid in concentration exercises, which were a part of the creed of the "mazdaznaners." Not only the practitioners of Mazdaznan were influenced by the sense of the sacred: at Christmas 1919 Gropius himself served dinner to his pupils, and Arndt commented: "Just like the washing of feet." [10]

Although the greater part of such mysticism left the Bauhaus with Itten, the organization continued to be associated with adepts of the irrational. During the 1920s, the influential Dutch group De Stijl (of which the leading figures were Theo van Doesburg and 'Piet Mondrian) formed an alliance with the Bauhaus. The influence that originally bound the founders of De Stijl together was a mystical mathematician, Dr. M. H. J. Schoenmaekers, who believed himself able to partition the world into its component elements. His theories gave the Stijl artists the incentive toward their use of mathematical form and primary colors. Holland had always possessed a strong body of Theosophists, and the Dutch section was the first section of the Theosophical Society to receive an independent charter from the parent group. Mondrian himself joined the Theosophical Society in 1909, and he kept a portrait of Madame Blavatsky in his studio. Holland was also the European headquarters of Krishnamurti's Order of the Star in the East; and among the books that Mondrian kept until his death was Krishnamurti's At the Feet of the Master, together with some lectures of Steiner. [11]

The presence of Kandinsky in the later Bauhaus is a reminder that the traditions of Slav irrationalism have contributed to the irrational currents in modern art. It would be surprising if the circles around Diaghilev's World of Art had not been influenced to some extent by mysticism. In this group is found, for example, the Lithuanian M. K. Ciurlionis, who was much impressed by contemporary esotericism, and who around 1907 was beginning to try to "paint music." [12] When the confusion of the Bolshevik Revolution had been sorted out, the same fate awaited the idealist artists as awaited the writers of the "spiritual" traditions. When Kandinsky's plans for art education in Russia were again and again turned down by official cultural organizations, he left for the Bauhaus; and other protagonists of a spiritual art either emigrated or relapsed into silence. The channels through which their influences ran were those of Western irrationalism. For example, the "Suprematist" Kasimir Malevich published a book in the Bauhaus series as late as 1927, after having retired increasingly into teaching activities. There was little else to do other than maintain silence or publish abroad, for one who in 1920 had been proclaiming that man's perfection lay in God, that "God was not cast down." [13]

The occult revival was, thus, linked with the quest for a "spiritual" art; and, to a certain extent, such ideas of art followed the flag of esotericism. However, as the 1930s approached, political necessity and utilitarianism became the watchwords of the day. There remained one tradition -- apart from the works of those individual artists who owed allegiance to the earlier idealism -- that continued to question the premises on which ideas of political expediency or material satisfaction were based. It is probably incorrect to refer to a "tradition, " because this compendium of unreason began with the intentionally indefinable -- Dada. Dada, writes Hans Richter, was "the creation of a state of affairs which made new products possible." In this deliberate break with the accepted methods of doing, being, and creating, sense and non-sense were irremediably mixed. Dada was no less a revolt against reason for being wrapped in a language that reason itself denied. When Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Richard Hulsenbeck began to give their anarchic displays in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the confusion was directed against an order which the performers despised. Whereas Itten and others of his opinion might look with horror at the mechanized civilization that engulfed them and take refuge in the spiritual highlands, the Dadaists proceeded from a similar horror to attempt to destroy the constricting system of meaning which upheld the detested and Established order of things. But, precisely because of their revolt against accepted reality, the Dadaists -- and more often their Surrealist successors -- could not avoid the perennial solutions to the perennial problem: "What is real?" Thus Hugo Ball declared, "What we call Dada is foolery, foolery extracted from the emptiness in which all higher problems are wrapped." [14]

The aims of the Dadaists were to shock the bourgeoisie and to induce a sense of self-outlawry through their rejection of conventional standards. This did not absolve them from the natural human wish to find meaning in the world, even if it was not the meaning of accepted society. Just as the Symbolists of the 1890s had shocked the bourgeosie with nonsense poems and foregathered with occultists -- those more purposeful irrationalists of Bohemia -- the Dadaists were unable to escape the same pattern. In late 1916, in sympathy with a waiters' strike in their usual cafe, the Dadaists of Zurich moved to the Cafe Odeon, where they met Erich Unger, a student of the Cabala. Unger introduced them to Dr. Oscar Goldberg, who was a numerologist attempting to complete an esoteric interpretation of the Pentateuch. Hans Richter put Goldberg in contact with a wealthy friend who subsidized his researches. This was not an "important" or "influential" contact of the Dadaists, but it illustrates that those seeking anti-Establishment interpretations of existence inevitably meet -- both literally, and along the line of their inquiries. Hugo Ball (1886-1927) the "originator" of Dada, if anyone is to have the title, was well read in the literature of mysticism and Eastern philosophy, and he particularly admired Boehme. After the first appearance of Dada in Zurich, Ball and Emmy Hennings settled down with the rest of the German emigration in Ticino -- the canton of Ascona -- and studied the literature of the Russian idealists. From Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, and Soloviev, Ball moved on to the church from which they sprang. In 1923 he published a study of Byzantine Christianity, which contained lives of St. John Climacus, Dionysius the Areopagyte, and Simon Stylites. [15]

Not only did Dada have a necessary external connection with nonrational ways of thought, but it possessed an interior identity. This is clearly discernible in Hans Richter's discussion of the Dada obsession with chance and the magical power of art. Richter sees the "true" Dadaists as attempting to achieve a balance between conscious and unconscious forces. In 1918 Tristan Tzara introduced him to the Norwegian painter Viking Eggeling, who was experimenting with similar conceptions and who based his work on a philosophy embodying the old occult idea of polarity. They decided that they must "resolve the polarities" and create the bridge between consciousness and unconsciousness. Richter's description of this "new" truth reveals completely why occultism and Dada have a fundamental affinity.

At the time we were convinced that we had set foot in completely unknown territory, with musical counterpoint as its only possible analogy.

In fact, however, this idea of the "unity of opposites" has been known under the name of "contingence, " for a very long time. But what we had found still constituted a "discovery." Our scientific and technological age had forgotten that this contingence constituted an essential principle of life and of experience and that reason with all its consequences was inseparable from unreason with all its consequences. The myth that everything in the world can be rationally explained had been gaining ground since the time of Descartes. An inversion was necessary to restore the balance.

The realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole -- this was the central message of Dada. [16]


Out of the Dada revolt and the Symbolist inheritance, Andre Breton and his associates constructed Surrealism. Like Dada, Surrealism was not "art, " but a philosophy concerned with liberating man from a false consciousness. Breton's studies had begun with the occultists: Ramon Lull, Nicholas Flamel, Fabre d'Olivet, Fulcanelli, and Eliphas Levi. These became entangled with the work of more modern explorers of the irrational. Around 1919 Breton's occult interests merged with Freudianism and a particular fascination with the phenomena of trance writing -- possibly based on a reading of Pierre Janet's Psychological Automatism (which relied partly on Frederic Myers). In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault produced in Les Champs Magnetiques the first example of automatic surrealist writing. In so doing they were producing something which, while perhaps new in the realms of literature -- although briefer attempts had been made by the Dadaists in Zurich -- was not so in the world of art. Several painters -- among them Picasso -- have claimed to paint in a semitrance. Particularly in Germany there was, even before the First War, substantial interest in the artistic productions of mediums. For example, Hans Freimark's Mediumistische Kunst (1914) came to the typically Surrealist conclusion that the genius and the medium shared the same sources of inspiration. By the end of 1922 "an epidemic of trances" had broken out among the future Surrealists. [17]

The occult connections of Surrealism are frequently denied by latter-day "Surrealists" who have not bothered to study the substance of their inheritance. At the end of the Second World War, Breton returned to his early occult preoccupations. Another leading ornament of Surrealist iconography, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), lapsed increasingly into a private world of magical symbols that continually changed significance; for Artaud it was always difficult to decide whether or not he believed in his numerology and his magical universe. [18]

The union of occultism, psychoanalysis, and personal experiment with trance was symptomatic of Surrealism rather than constituting its essence; and indeed so was art itself of any description. I shall return at the end of this chapter to the manner in which Surrealism has transmitted its conception of "liberation." For the moment the important factor is that the movement embodied occult elements and was in every sense the direct heir of Dada and (to a lesser degree) of the earlier attempts to arrive at a "spiritual" standpoint through art.

Occult tradition was as much part of Bohemia -- both the inherited myths and the present reality -- as it had been in the 1890s, and its philosophies still formed the core of attempts to free the mind from the vision induced by circumstances. By the 1930s the occult had been joined by psychoanalysis and theories deriving from it -- fresh proof of the kinship of such apparently different systems and more ammunition for those who wished to destroy the fabric of bourgeois reality. These were further reinforced by a reverence for the experience of madness and a cult of the primitive. Among the ever-increasing number of Americans who began during the 1920s and 1930s to frequent European artists' quarters, elements both of the myth and the reality of Bohemia were naturally absorbed. After the Second World War (and the G.I. Bill), a culture, its dreams and artifacts were engorged entire. Dada and Surrealism as "movements" or "influences" or "trends" crossed the Atlantic and were absorbed into the consciousness of American artists, and the Bauhaus emigrated en bloc. Theories of occult liberation arrived with the artists in the New World.

American esotericism does not appear to have had much connection with illuminated politics until the past decade, and the most obvious reason is that the funds, organization, and drive needed to initiate any orthodox "political" movement in the United States have proved prohibitive for illuminated politicians. But the same rules of like-calling-to-like apply to the American situation; and one very good reason for the lack of occult groups in Progressive circles was the lack of such Bohemian political circles altogether. There was no lack of occultists. America had given birth to many of the movements that played a part in the 19th-century occult revival -- Spiritualism, Christian Science, innumerable cults of Christian derivation had arrived in Europe from America. The Theosophical Society in America broke off from the Annie Besant -- dominated European and Asian group and established itself in California. Initiates from various magical orders had returned across the Atlantic ever since S. L. Macgregor Mathers of the Golden Dawn had started to initiate Americans for fees in Paris. During the 1930s and 1940s followers of Aleister Crowley began to build up support of Crowley's brand of magic. When Progressive circles did begin to develop in the 1920s and 1930s, the esotericists found their natural place. Thus the doctrines of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky penetrated the avant-garde. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of the Little Review left for France and the master himself, while others gathered around Orage in New York. The potential for illuminated politics was there. For example, there was Alfred William Lawson (born 1869), who was a typical exponent of rejected knowledge -- in this case of an individualistic "physics, " which Lawson claimed governed the universe according to laws of suction and pressure -- and he sprang into the public eye in the 1930s with an economic doctrine known as "Direct Credit, " which resembled the theories of Major Douglas. [19] Lawson did manage to whip up a remarkable amount of support -- 16, 000 people attended a parade he held in 1933 in Detroit. This points the moral that another essential factor for the fusion of pure irrationalism with political or social thinking is a sufficient anxiety level. Lawson found his hour -- as Hargrave did in England -- with the Depression.

For America to display the patterns of behavior that we have observed in Europe, three factors were necessary. There must be a high level of anxiety to induce the crisis of consciousness which in Europe had been kept at an extreme of tension since the end of the last century. There must be a broadening of Bohemian culture to provide the natural launching pad for the exploration of other realities. And for irrationalist views of politics or society to obtain a wide hearing some way must be found to overcome the obstacles to political organization in the United States. With the momentary fusion of all anti-establishment forces in the late 1960s, all these conditions were fulfilled. Anxiety had been mounting since the immediate postwar era.* Bohemia had become the myth it had been so long in Europe and was at last based on a sufficient material reality. And the solution to the political problem was found by a new sort of political grouping -- around the myth itself Through the publicity of the mass media and particularly of television, the infinite desirability of Bohemia was projected as it had never been in Europe. And the rebellion against the Established, materialist, rationalist order of things in America took the form of an extension of the Bohemian life-style and an application of the Bohemian critique of society to the political situation as a whole. This critique has always been powerful and has been adopted by Realpolitik revolutionaries for their own ends since the middle of the last century. In essence it is the creed of spiritual revolution, a unio mystica of humanity and a liberation from the flesh.

So -- into the American consciousness came the artistic occult, as a natural corollary of the importation of Bohemia. In the magazine View, which began publication in New York in September 1940 and prominently featured the views of the Surrealists surrounding Peggy Guggenheim, the irrational was a key element. In the first number the front page carried a photograph of Pavel Tchelitchev, an artist perpetually involved with the occult. Tchelitchev had brought his esoteric tastes -- he actually imitated the style of 17th-century alchemical texts -- out of his native Russia. [20] View printed a telegram from Julien Levy to Tchelitchev describing the evil omens his Tarot pack had shown for the future of a friend. [21] In the autumn of the next year an interview with Andre Breton appeared; he mused on the supernatural powers attributed to Hitler and the prevalence of Nostradamus prophecies in his own prewar circle. Surrealism continued, he said, as "alienation of sensation in full accord with the precept of Rimbaud to become a 'seer.'" The same issue published a letter from Pierre Mabille in Guadeloupe calling for "a new orientation of the being and a 'hermetic' knowledge of metaphysics." Side by side with this stood a heart-rending appeal from Artaud in the lunatic asylum -- he could not get heroin and his communications were cut by the police, who "bar the roads in the occult, no less than in the real." [22] As the war progressed, the magical elements noticeably increased in the pages of View. Kurt Seligman began to serialize the material that he was to publish in 1948 in his The Mirror of Magic, and the editorial of View proclaimed explicitly: "Seers, we are for the magic view of life." [23] In the autumn of 1946, Seligman published a symposium on "Magic and the Arts, " which included every sort of definition of the magical approach, ranging from the concision of Marcel Duchamp ("Anti-reality!") through the labored profundities of Parker Tyler, to the enigmatic opinion of Edgar Varese (who cited Hoene-Wronski and thought magic to be "corporealisation of the intelligence that is in sound"). [24]

One writer who ended up on the West Coast contributed as much as any of the East Coast refugees from Hitler's Europe toward introducing a sense of the magical into American Bohemia. This was Henry Miller. Miller became interested in the occult in the mid-1930s, and his later interest extended to announcing that he would hang framed photographs of Gurdjieff and Hermann Hesse beside each other on the wall. Around 1935 Miller was reading Steiner, Eliphas Levi, Madame Blavatsky, and the Tibetan series of Evans-Wentz. He met Keyserling, Dane Rudhyar, and the extraordinary astrologer Conrad Moricand (who became a good friend). In a number of View in early 1942, Miller told how after an evening with Moricand he had fallen through a glass door and gone to the hospital. The next day Moricand had appeared with Miller's horoscope, announcing that the indications had been for death, not injury. After the war, Miller had Moricand as a guest in his home in California, a disastrous episode, which he has fully described. [25]

Neither the occultism of the View group nor that of Henry Miller can be seen as having a direct effect on the hospitality of American artists to the miraculous. Yet artists of the postwar generation necessarily absorbed the occult preoccupations of their predecessors as part of their education. The accumulated traditions of European Bohemia meant not only that the occult was a subject which fascinated some of the more influential artists but that the philosophies which informed their work were based on esoteric ideas. We have seen how occult ideas of liberation and spiritual revolution permeated the artistic movements to which the postwar generation looked. Both in the myth of the vie de Boheme and the reality, the topics had a recognized place. But the place they had was a place in an imported European fashion. And when America began to originate its own distinctive forms of Bohemianism instead of being content to play host to the foreign avant-garde, the fashion was transformed. Despite this transformation, the Bohemia of the "beatniks" could not escape the influence of earlier Bohemias.

Two factors about the Beat Underground are important from the point of view of this inquiry. First, unlike that of American Bohemians of the 1920s and 1930s, the political stance of the more intellectual Beat could be expressed simply by a rejection of "square society" and an identification with the socially rejected -- an attitude made famous by Norman Mailer in his essay, "The White Negro." Any political commitment by the Bohemians of the 1930s was liable to have been to the Communist party. [26] Secondly, although a mutual dissatisfaction with Established society had sometimes sent the denizens of the traditional Bohemias of Europe into the company of semi-criminal elements, European Bohemia was permissive and accepting but intellectually fastidious. Partly because of the attitude exemplified by Mailer's "White Negro, " but mostly because of the central position occupied by marijuana in the beatnik culture (and the consequent interest of semi-criminal drug dealers), the Beat Bohemia may have incorporated -- although there is no means of being statistically certain -- a larger proportion of unmotivated hangers-on than Bohemias of the traditional pattern. This resulted in a fairly large Beat "proletariat, " who might conform to the expected patterns of behavior, make all the right noises, but fail to understand the language. Thus, in the summer of 1960, one estimate of the Beats in Greenwich Village made only one sixth "habituated to reading (none seem addicted)" and guessed that at least as many in this particular Bohemia were writing as in earlier artists' colonies. [27] It would be unwise to make too much of this, for lack of solid evidence. But it is quite certain that with the development of the Beatnik culture into that of the Hippies, the huge publicity given to this colorful Bohemia drew in many more existential window shoppers than did the traditional European Bohemias or Greenwich Village of the 1930s. The process seems to have begun with the Beats. From the point of view of the developing Bohemian critique of society, it had one important result: the use of language, inherited from earlier Bohemias, that dealt with highly sophisticated and esoteric concepts of "liberation, " but with the meaning of the language forgotten, conventionalized, or misapplied, by a considerable number of camp followers or hangers-on.
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

Postby admin » Thu May 17, 2018 4:40 am

Part 2 of 4

At the same time as the American Beat culture developed an inchoate Bohemian critique of society -- untied to Party lines -- a particular Beatnik form of illuminism emerged in the adoption of Zen. [28] The romanticized use of Zen in the novels of Jack Kerouac created what was for America a new figure: the wand~ring scholar with religious leanings, more vagabond than academic. He had long been known in the literature of Europe, where he appeared in novels like Hesse's Narziss und Goldmund. and had found particular favor with the Wandervogel. Kerouac converted the character into a "Dharma Bum, " who rode freight trains across the continent seeking enlightenment. The moving spirit of American Zen seems to have been the West Coast poet Gary Snyder, who passed his interest on to Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco in the 1950s. Kerouac describes Snyder as embodying both the inherited traditions of 1930s protest and the new vision of Zen. He was

a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods with his father and mother and sister, from the beginning a woods boy, an axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he finally got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth and in the actual texts of Indian mythology. Finally he learned Chinese and Japanese and became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. At the same time, being a Northwest boy with idealistic tendencies, he got interested in oldfashioned I.W.W. anarchism and learned to play the guitar and sing old-worker songs to go with his Indian songs and general folksong interests. [29]


In this portrait, Kerouac identifies a type who was to become more and more familiar to Americans: the rebel who combined a detestation of social ills with a religious search. Sometime after this description, Snyder himself left for Japan to study Zen with the leading practitioners of the discipline. But it is more the Zen-and-rosewater marketed by Kerouac that influenced Bohemia than serious religious study. The other chief figure in arousing interest in Zen in the United States was Alan Watts, who has deplored the shallowness of the Zen commitment of many camp followers in an essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen, " which has become as celebrated as Mailer's "White Negro." Watts is a product of the European occult revival, and it is worth noticing that even in the creation of the "typically American" version of Bohemia by the Beatniks, neither the occult revival nor the inherited traditions of Bohemia could be excluded. Even Kerouac, the "creator" of the Beat legend, felt keenly his French-Canadian roots, and his novels -- particularly the later ones -- are studded with references to the archetypal Bohemians of Paris. In Watts -- who appears, incongruously besuited, at a Beat party in The Dharma Bums -- the emerging counterculture of California discovered a popularizer of Zen who had emerged indirectly from the Theosophical Society.

In 1903 an International Buddhist Society had been founded, following the period spent in the East by Allan Bennett, alias the "Bikkhu Ananda Metteya," who had passed into Buddhism from the magical activities of the Golden Dawn. An English Buddhist Society was formed in 1907, but by 1924 the chief association for the dissemination of Buddhist doctrine in England was the Buddhist Lodge of the Theosophical Society, founded by the eminent lawyer and judge Christmas Humphreys. In 1936 Alan Watts took over the editorship of the Buddhist Lodge's magazine, Buddhism in England, at the age of sixteen, and the same year, he published his Spirit of Zen. The father of this prodigy, L. W. [Laurence Wilson] Watts, was the treasurer and vice-president of the Buddhist Lodge; [30] and Alan Watts also sat at the feet of Dmitrije Mitrinovic. In 1938 the younger Watts left for the United States and became a doctor of theology and an Anglican counselor at Northwestern University. Then he moved to San Francisco from where his influence spread first throughout the Beatnik, then throughout the hippie world. As has been rightly pointed out, [31] it is more the influence of Watts than the more learned message of the leading Zen authority for the West, D. T. Suzuki -- whose second wife was American -- that has been responsible for spreading Zen ideas. Watts by no means confined himself to Zen and was himself the modern representative of those "mediators between East and West" who first became prominent in Europe and America in the middle of the last century. [32]

If this were in any sense a thorough survey of Bohemian characteristics or even of the development of Bohemian ideas, much more attention would have to be paid to the political causes adopted by Bohemia at any given time, statistical evidence produced for the composition of the disaffiliated community, very many writers and artists more than mentioned. Here it is only necessary to note that by the time of the hippie explosion, American Bohemia had developed into an independent culture superficially unlike its European predecessors, yet inevitably owing allegiance to their achievements. Occult and religious elements occupied the place they have held in every Bohemia; and the specific political causes of previous generations of intellectuals were replaced by the general opposition of way-of-life to way-of-life that had also been traditional in Bohemian Europe.

By the end of the 1950s the Beats were moving out of their headquarters in North Beach, San Francisco, into New York's Greenwich Village and out again into the Lower East Side. In San Francisco itself they made for the area around Haight-Ashbury, traditional low-rent area favored by San Francisco State students and conveniently located next to the "pan-handle" of Golden Gate Park. With a further increase in the burden of anxiety, increased publicity for an "alternative" way of life, and the emergence of a vast semi-educated group of school leavers and dropouts whose opportunities for romanticism had been nourished as never before -- a generation was produced that was devoted to the image through television, cinema, and large and uncritical reading while shielded from the strong winds of reality. The stage was set for the deposition of the kings of Bohemia and the proclamation of the republic of Woodstock Nation.

With a suitable change of key, the Progressive Underground of the 1890s might have been quite at home in Beatnik California: exchanging the vegetarian restaurants and cafes of Paris, Munich, and Vienna for the Chinese cooking of San Francisco and the cellars of North Beach; listening to records of Charlie Parker rather than concert performances of Wagner. But, if the inhabitants of Monte Verita could have fitted with ease into the pads of Venice West, they would have been even more familiar with the society of Haight-Ashbury, where a resurrected form of Christian Socialism combined with every form of mysticism under the sun. Familiar, that is, except for one aspect, certainly the most distinctive: the economy based on the new drug LSD.

Norman Cohn has suggested that certain medieval movements that combined revolutionary millennarianism with mystical anarchism are, in a secularized form, "with us still." [33] In the last five years of the 1960s, a form of illuminated politics developed among the young, which gives more insight into the state of mind of a mystical revolutionary than has been possible at any earlier date, because its viewpoints were expressed in direct and unambiguous language. Detailed examination of Hippies, Yippies, and variations on the theme of rebellious youth proves Professor Cohn extraordinarily accurate in his assessment. Reading the underground newspapers of 1966 and 1967, in which the story of the movement is buried, nothing is so striking as the overwhelming impression of joy and hopefulness, the real sense of "liberation" achieved or about to be achieved. Whatever the political activists have subsequently written, the main factor in inducing this unparalleled euphoria was without doubt LSD. Although the gurus of the "consciousness-expanding" drug were not by any means the sole instigators of the hippie revolt -- as simplified accounts once made them seem -- they were certainly very influential.

Drugs have been used in most cultures to dislocate man's sense of ordinary reality, or at least to give relief from the humdrum world. Frequently the strange effects of such substances have been associated with the divine. Visions, dreams, and prophecies can be ascribed to the effects of drug-induced consciousness. The occult revival knew all about drugs, and marijuana was a recognized weapon in the "sorcerer's armory" of Stanislas de Guaita or Baudelaire. [34] The chief aspect of drug action examined during the occult revival was the effect of ether or nitrous oxide, which was widely thought to induce mystical experiences and earned the name of the "anesthetic revelation." John Addington Symonds experimented with chloroform, and the prophet of esoteric Christianity, Anna Kingsford, experienced her visions under the influence of the same drug. In 1880 Professor William Ramsay (a Fellow of the Royal Society who was subsequently knighted) carried out experiments in which he anesthetized himself at least fifty times. They induced in him a condition of rather disappointing mystical insight -- that is, Ramsay did not find his Berkeleyan revelation to his liking. In June 1893 he read a paper on his experiences to the Society for Psychical Research and was followed by Edward Maitland, who recounted the visions of Anna Kingsford. Those stimulated to try the effects of either for themselves were sufficiently numerous to hold a symposium on the topic in 1904. [35]

The most prominent supporters of the "anesthetic revelation, " however, were to be found in America. These were William James of Harvard and the inventor of the term "anesthetic revelation, " Benjamin Paul Blood. Blood was born in the 1820s and spent most of his life in New York State, where he died at the age of 86. In 1860 he had a revelation under anesthetics, which he describes as "an initiation historically realized as such, into the oldest and most intimate and ultimate truth. Whoever attains and remembers it, or remembers of it, is graduated beyond instruction in spiritual things." After repeating the experience at intervals, Blood produced a pamphlet on The Anaesthetic Revelation in 1874, which attracted many correspondents with corroborative evidence (including the poet Tennyson). Blood was emphatic that his insight had nothing·to do with philosophy. The basis was simply that one's self existed, nothing more. He wrote in 1910: "Sinai and Calvary were but sacred stepping-stones to this secular revelation." On the appearance of Blood's pamphlet, William James reviewed it very favorably, and began a correspondence with the author. By 1896 James was writing to Blood that he had distributed copies of one of his pamphlets after a seminar in "speculative psychology." The last article James was to publish during his lifetime dealt with Blood, and the psychologist admitted that The Anaesthetic Revelation "fascinated me so 'weirdly' that I am conscious of its having been one of the stepping-stones of my thinking ever since." [36] Apart from their influence on James's thought, the visions of Blood stimulated the Harvard professor to try for himself the effects of nitrous oxide. His own mystical insight was embodied in his influential Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and James's conclusion has served ever since as a text for those in search of "other realities."

It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. [37]


Aleister Crowley, as the chief inheritor of the traditions of Symbolist Magery, was rather more indiscriminately concerned with drugs. Opium, cocaine, heroin, ether -- he indulged and overindulged. Crowley's interest in drugs went further than simple dissipation, and his magical experiments were paralleled by those he undertook with drugs, notably what was then called Anhalonium Lewinii. This name for peyote, or mescaline, commemorates Ludwig Lewin, the first investigator of the Mexican cactus from which the drug is derived. After Lewin published his first study of this strange agent of visions in 1886, others (most notably Havelock Ellis) experimented with its effects, and Crowley followed suit. When in the U.S.A. during the First World War, Crowley visited the Parke-Davis factory in Detroit. He noted in his Confessions: "They were kind enough to interest themselves in my researches in Anhalonium Lewinii and made me some special preparations an the lines indicated by my experience which proved greatly superior to previous preparations." [38] There is firsthand evidence that Crowley introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline in pre-1933 Berlin. [39] This is interesting and significant; for it indicates that Huxley's wide reading in mystical matters was supplemented by practical experience before he arrived in the United States in 1937 -- that yet another link with the occult revival can be made. (The more accepted story -- that Huxley started experimenting with mescaline in 1953 under the supervision of Dr. Humphrey Osmond -- may of course be true, without affecting the present argument.) It is certain that Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. which resulted from his later experience, had more effect than almost any other element in stimulating interest in what Osmond later called "pyschedelics." [40]

In the spring of 1943, Dr. Albert Hofmann, working in his laboratories at the Sandoz Corporation in Basel, accidentally absorbed a small quantity o.f lysergic acid diethylamide, a substance that he had synthesized while researching into. the chemical constituents of the fungus ergot. Hofmann experienced hallucinatory effects and experimented an himself with a larger dose of LSD. Through Hofmann and Sandoz yet further hallucinogens were located. An American couple penetrated a Mexican Indian ceremony in which a hallucinogenic mushroom was used. On a second expedition the pair took an expert on fungi, who. identified and afterward grew a culture of the mushrooms in his Paris laboratory. Same of these mushrooms he sent to. Hofmann, who again experimented on himself and eventually synthesized the active constituent of psylocibin. He also discovered the hallucinatory properties of the morning glary seed. It was LSD, however, as manufactured primarily by Sandoz, which was responsible for the epidemic of mysticism which broke out on the American West Coast. According to. John Wilcock's column, Other Scenes, most of the LSD reaching California in the spring of 1966 was made at the Sandoz plant in Switzerland, sold to. buyers in Czechoslovakia, and delivered to. the United States through Mexico. At this time there was no law against the use of LSD, and the drug naturally gravitated into the hands of the religiously inclined and the innumerable cults that have made California their headquarters since the end of the last century. It was also natural that the apparently mystical experiences produced by the drug should themselves generate religious aspirations in official researchers. Thus, in December 1966, in the issue which announced the celebratory dedication of Haight-Ashbury by Diggers and hippies, the Berkeley Barb carried an article by Thaddeus and Rita Ashby, who had been responsible for research carried out by Sandoz in Mexico into problems of LSD and creativity, Their article, entitled "Did Jesus Turn On?", argued that Christ did turn on, that much Biblical poetry was produced by psychedelics, and announced that "Paradise must always be recreated." "The young people we meet in the LSD 'underground' seem to be groping towards such a renewal of religion." The Ashbys' own version of religious renewal ideally involved living in a house with a "tree-room" open to light and air, and a "womb-room" packed with psychedelic equipment for visionary experiences. [41]

From one relatively early survey of LSD use, a good idea can be gained of how the drug originally became diffused. LSD was at first thought to produce a "model psychosis": that is, to duplicate the effects of schizophrenia. Accordingly, it was to psychiatrists and medical men that the drug was of greatest interest. In the particular survey in question, three groups of LSD users were examined: an "informal professional" sample, over one-third of whom were initiated by a single psychiatrist member of the group; a group around a "religious-medical center" of a sort similar to Leary's; and a black market sample, all of whom had been introduced to the drug by a single person, himself in touch with people who fitted into one of the other two categories examined. Although research workers had the opportunity to try LSD as early as 1950, in this particular survey the first LSD use occurred in 1956. The next year the drug began to be used in clinical study on patients, and the group which obtained its LSD on the black market first used it in 1959. The religious-medical center had LSD available in 1960. A single survey of course proves nothing about the general pattern, but there is little to show that this sample cannot be taken as typical for the beginnings of the cult of LSD. One interesting aspect is that despite the relatively early opportunity to take LSD, the first use even among the "professional" group did not take place until 1956. It is possible that this may have been linked with the publication in 1956 of Huxley's sequel to The Doors of Perception entitled Heaven and Hell. This is reinforced by the survey's conclusion that even a sample of private patients introduced to LSD by their psychiatrists developed the characteristics of an "ingroup" after having read Huxley, Alan Watts, or other theorists of mystical experience. [42]

Timothy Leary was the moving force behind the popular LSD movement. Leary (born 1920) has dated the beginnings of his religious quest to January 1959. He was living in Spain, having resigned from his university job and in a state of disillusionment. He contracted a venereal disease, and during the ensuing illness, decided that he had undergone a process of mystical rebirth. In August 1960 he ate several hallucinogenic mushrooms in Cuernavaca in Mexico and returned to his offices in the Center for Personality Research at Harvard -- the university of William James -- with a new conception of what his work should be. Leary knew all about the anaesthetic revelation of William James, "who had mystic experiences using nitrous oxide and saw God and scandalized people by running drug parties in Boston's scruffy Back Bay." [43] At this point, Leary had not yet read Huxley's accounts of his visions under mescaline, although two of his graduate students had been running tests with the chemical. One of these introduced him to The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. During October and November 1960, Leary planned a series of experiments in conjunction with Huxley himself, who, by a strange coincidence, was staying in Boston. It is quite obvious that two factors conditioned the subsequent experiments: Leary's already-formed idea of "the possibilities of mind-free consciousness" and the influence of Huxley during the planning stage.

We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia; we were not to diagnose Buddha as a detached schizoid; nor Christ as an exhibitionist masochist nor the mystic experience as a symptom; nor the visionary state as a model psychosis. Aldous Huxley chuckling away with compassionate humor at human folly.

And with such erudition! Moving back and forth in history, quoting the mystics, Wordsworth, Plotinus, The Areopagite, William James. Ranging from the esoteric past, back into the biochemical present. [44]


In other words, Leary absorbed Huxley's own view of the significance of drug-induced experiences and took good note of his sources, those of Romanticism, Neo-Platonism, and the occult revival. His program expanded to include treatment of prisoners with a view to rehabilitation. But alongside the research arose a determination to turn people on.

The beginnings of the Bohemian use of hallucinogens probably date from Leary's initiation of Allen Ginsberg in December 1960. This produced in Ginsberg a determination to proselytize. Shortly afterward, Leary gave his magic mushrooms to another hero of the Beatnik era, the poet Charles Olson. Marijuana had been the drug of the Beatnik culture, and even then it had acquired religious connotations from its association with the Buddhism of Kerouac, Snyder, and Ginsberg. But the real eminence of the Beatnik drug world was William Burroughs, the son of the calculating-machine dynasty whose powerful book Junky had described his adventures with drugs much more potent than marijuana. Burroughs had taken up residence in Tangier, which became a place of pilgrimage for Beats like Kerouac on their way to Europe. It was logical that Leary and his new convert Ginsberg would approach the Grand Panjandrum of Junk, who was already experimenting with flickering and flashing lights to achieve "druglike" effects, which were to become familiar. In the summer of 1961, Leary, his colleague Richard Alpert, Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso held a mushroom session in Tangier. This was followed by an unsuccessful trip made by Burroughs to America and his rejection of the Harvard group's psychedelics. But contact with the leaders of the Beat Bohemia had been made, and it symbolized the directions that the drug religion was to follow. Ginsberg left for I ndia and the ashrams of the Ganges.

In November 1961 Leary was given LSD by an academic dropout called Michael Holingshead, who had taken the drug while working with a New York doctor. Soon afterward, the Harvard experimenters tried another chemical that produced visions, DMT. Both of these drugs resulted in experiences which were far more vivid and ecstatic than those caused by the magic mushroom. At Easter 1962, Leary and a Harvard Ph.D. student called Walter Pahnke gave a group of experimenters psylocibin in the chapel of Boston University and precipitated mystical experiences. Gerald Heard and Alan Watts arrived at Harvard, told Leary of the Traditions of European occultism, of Madame Blavatsky, of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. They all warned Leary that the classic technique of the occultist was the only one to ensure survival. Those who know, don't speak. Leary, on the other hand, felt the mantle of the guru clasped around his shoulders. "I found myself getting poetic and dogmatic. I know it is a real reality! I know it is the Divine message." He took to frequenting a Hindu ashram in Boston. Then he was asked to give LSD to Hindu devotees, and during the course of the session, Leary became convinced that "we are all Hindus in our essence." A process of mutual conversion began between him and the inmates of the ashram. Leary's growing respect for Hindu mythology was accompanied by the growing respect of the Vedantists for Leary. When their guru was away they would visit him for advice, and gradually he accumulated a following of those searching for a spiritual leader.

The slow, invisible process of becoming a guru, a holy man, had begun. It would be four years before I could openly admit to it. Accept my divinity, my divine election .... How ironic and ludicrous that an American Irishman should be forced into sainthood!


In the summer of 1962 he left once more for Mexico, and next year he was sacked from Harvard, whose authorities found it dangerous to have a valuable mystic on the staff. In succession he established the "Castalia Foundation" -- named after the Order imagined by his hero Hermann Hesse, the "International Foundation for Internal Freedom, " and the "League for Spiritual Discovery, " with its headquarters at Millbrook, New York, where Leary and his followers were living at the time of the great drug explosion. There was time after the disruption of his Castalia Foundation for a trip to India, where he went to study under Sri Krishna Premo "Relax, " he told his colleague Richard Alpert, "sit back, have a ball ... It's done now: watch it happen." [45]

What was "done" was the broadcasting of LSD to the four winds. Leary claims that Albert Hofmann, the synthesizer of the chemical, had at once realized the spiritual implications of his discovery. Concealing himself under the guise of a scientific researcher he had "initiated a high-level, ethical, gentleman's conspiracy of philosophically-minded scientists to disseminate LSD for the benefit of the human race." Leary himself and Alan Watts -- whose Joyous Cosmology (1962) proved to be the LSD equivalent to Huxley's propaganda for mescaline -- joined with other semi-academics to provide the publicity. The chemical itself was the chief problem. Whether or not Hofmann himself was ever involved, some scientists fairly certainly did cooperate. The most influential evangelist of LSD was one AI Hubbard, who had made a fortune from uranium and planned to set up a network of medically approved LSD clinics around the country. He was responsible for converting Humphrey Osmond to the religious interpretation of the LSD experience. Hubbard's pilot project at Menlo Park, California, which (according to Leary) "turned on several hundred of the most influential people in the San Francisco Bay Area" was closed; and Leary himself failed to persuade Sandoz to put an "ecstasy pill" on the market. By 1962 he had, nevertheless, contrived to set up "a loose but effective" distribution system for free LSD. Then he met a distinguished scientist, whom he calls "Dr. Spaulding" and describes as "one of the ten leading chemists in the country, " who claimed to be part of a well-established conspiracy that had been stockpiling LSD. "Spaulding" then sent Leary enough of the chemical to last four years. [46]

Partly through the efforts of Hubbard, partly through the natural receptivity of California, partly through the Beatnik preparation, LSD took its greatest toll in San Francisco. With the question of LSD- supply so paramount, the activities of private "chemists" came to be of increasing importance, and San Francisco possessed the most important private manufacturer of LSD in America. This legendary figure, known as Owsley and rumored to possess the full name of "Augustus Owsley Stanley III, " produced a fair proportion of the LSD used in the Haight-Ashbury culture. Leary has recorded a monologue by Owsley in which the Underground supplier expressed his belief that the Van Allen Belt was "the higher intelligence protecting earth from lethal solar radiation" and that LSD had been activated by this supreme intelligence as the counterforce to nuclear fission. [47] Owsley was also responsible for some of the public success of the Acid Tests conducted in San Francisco in 1965 and 1966 by Ken Kesey, the most remarkable of all LSD gurus.

Kesey (born 1936) attracted public notice in 1962 with his first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Before that, he had been a schoolboy hero and a college athlete. He arrived at Stanford University, California, on a creative writing fellowship in 1958. [48] At Stanford, Kesey met a young psychologist with whom he volunteered to take part in experiments with the newly discovered psychedelics -- then called psychomimetics because of the theory that they mimicked schizophrenic states. Kesey was among the first to be turned on, and soon the Bohemian community in Stanford was ordering peyote from Mexico and trying out the strange chemicals Kesey smuggled out of the hospital. Bohemia became Cockaigne. Richard Alpert arrived after he had begun to work with Leary; and equally important, Neal Cassady joined the circle. Cassady was the original Beat, the hero, "Dean Moriarty, " of Kerouac's On the Road: the model for the Bohemia that was ending and a main protagonist of that which was to begin. In 1963 Kesey moved to La Honda near Palo Alto, California, and early the next year the legendary adventure began.

From the bare description of what Kesey and his Merry Pranksters did, it is difficult to make the point that what developed was far more than in the case of Leary with his explicit reliance on the traditions of the Orient and European occultism -- a 1960s, Americanized version of the perennial occultist dream of a forcing house for souls. In the spring of 1964, Kesey and his friends crammed themselves, a jungle of electronic equipment and film cameras, and a quantity of LSD, marijuana and whatever else they could lay their hands on, into a pre-war schoolbus painted with Day-Glo and bearing a sign on the front reading "Furthur." They set off across the continent for New York. During the trip, if we are to believe Tom Wolfe -- and if we disbelieve him there is much if) the whole hippie episode which makes no sense at all -- the Merry Pranksters subtly changed in their conception of themselves. They became a band of truth seekers bent on extending their own consciousness with the help of drugs and a perpetual surrealism, and bent on turning others on. Back in California after their strange expedition, Kesey formed a curious alliance with the Hell's Angels -- and, even more significantly, a radical faction of Unitarians tried to form one with him. Owsley turned up, with his vast resources of LSD and a passion for electronics that was as great as the Pranksters' own. [49] Ginsberg had already become part of the group with a newly acquired Hinduism, which included chanting the Hare Krishna mantram. All the elements that go into the popular conception of the "hippie" had coalesced around Kesey.

In December, 1965, Kesey began his series of "acid tests." They used his particular notion of "expanding consciousness" -- LSD, provided by Owsley, music by an Owsley -- sponsored rock group called the Grateful Dead, and Kesey's electronic gadgetry and stroboscopes -- in an attempt to put the message of consciousness expansion over to the greatest number of people. The greatest result of these experiments was to start a new fashion in a decoration for discotheques and dances, and it becomes increasingly difficult to analyze who did and who did not believe in the grand metaphysics of the enterprise. The climax of the attempt at proselytizing, turning on, (and partly just having a ball) came at the end of January 1966. Kesey, the Grateful Dead, and Rock's number-one impresario, named Bill Graham, staged a three-day "Trips Festival" -- LSD was still not illegal -- which attracted large numbers of people and sparked off the high period of "hippie" culture in Haight-Ashbury. [50]

The widespread use of LSD was inextricably associated with occult and mystical groups through a two-way process. Because the leading gurus of LSD identified the drug-induced experience with the mystical experience of saints and ecstatics, those who used the drug did so in an atmosphere that was likely to put them in contact with theories of the occult or the unorthodoxly religious. And because the traditional irrationalist Underground has naturally been concerned with mystical experience, some of its members jumped at what appeared to be the chance to induce the vision of truth that years of unassisted meditation had not brought them. The result was that the components of the late 19th-century occult revival -- which provided the most accessible range of mystical goods on offer -- pervaded certain sections of the hippie Underground. It was by no means universal, but it formed a substantial element present from the beginning. Thus Timothy Leary wrote a tongue-in-cheek article on the responsibility of Englishmen for the psychedelic revolution, which embodies a high proportion of truth: but this is because most of the Englishmen he mentions who are not contemporary gurus were leading figures of the occult revival. It is quite possible to agree with Leary's judgment when he writes that "the English in India got turned on" or thanks "William Blake and A. R. Orage for Alan Watts." [51] If "turning on" is made equivalent to a state of mystical consciousness and occult interpreters are invoked to the adept's aid, Leary's position is perfectly clear.

The occult factor became prominent throughout the underground press and particularly in papers in any way concerned with events in the Haight-Ashbury. Messiahs of every description combined with earnest seekers of liberation and syncretisms more bizarre than any yet devised. As John Wilcock noted in April 1966, California "is a renowned haven for faddists, individualists and nuts of every kind .... There's always some screwball out here who's got some new cult or ism working and a band of happily unrealistic acolytes around him who are now convinced that they've discovered the True Path to everlasting health, wealth and satisfactory orgasm." [52] The traditional hospitality of Bohemia to occultism was extended as the vision of Haight-Ashbury spread over America from the West Coast and eventually to Europe.

The spectrum of hippie irrationalism stretched from revamped fundamentalist Christianity to detailed knowledge of the works of Jung. The Los Angeles Free Press printed in March 1965, at the very beginning of the restive stirrings in Bohemia, a letter from Sam Shapira, "The Living World Messiah, " who declared the existing American order to be "corrupt, criminal, diabolical from late John F. Kennedy and present Lyndon Johnson down." The Living World Messiah denied any identity with Jesus but claimed "to be heaven's called and anointed world Messiah or Christ by direct descending speech from the canopy of heaven witnessed" and demanded that in his honor all other religions cease to function. Sporadic items of metaphysical interest on the West Coast included the Church of the Awakening founded by Doctors John and Luisa Aiken in 1963, which was based in New Mexico and used psychedelics; and "Charlie Brown, " otherwise known as Charles Artman, and "Little Eagle, " who claimed to be a member of the Native American Church and kept its (legal) sacrament of peyote in a locket around his neck. Charlie Brown Artman was a figure of note in the first issue of the Berkeley Barb of August 1965 -- when the Barb was almost exclusively concerned with the student revolution in progress on the university campus. He was the son of an Iowa miner, and he believed in the advent of the new age and the dawning of a state of "Christ-awareness." His arrests range from that of February 1966 for living in a tepee on Berkeley Heights displaying a sign reading "Impeach Lyndon Johnson" to that of two years later for a traffic offense in Salt Lake City. During the latter proceedings Charlie Brown demanded solitary confinement in order to meditate, and his supporters expected "another out-of-sight, turned-on trial." Heroes from the worlds of pop, protest, and the church testified to the occult significance of the New Age. In September 1967 Bishop James Pike agreed that mystical experience and psychedelic initiation were identical. In November of the same year the folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie -- who has a degree in the history of religions -- proclaimed in Jungian terms: "I'm dedicated to Satan and Jehovah -- my God is Abraxas, the god of evil and of good." [53]

With the burgeoning of the underground press in 1967, occult and mystical attitudes found further outlets of expression. For example, in August 1967 the paper Indian Head of Santa Ana, California, published articles on Bhakti Yoga, Alan Watts, and Velikovsky's cosmology. The next issue was chiefly concerned with the economic-political analyses of Dr. Marcuse and Professor J. K. Galbraith, but by three numbers further on, the accent had shifted again to occultism and psychedelia, with discussions of Atlantis and the problems of taking LSD on a surfboard. The same year saw the beginning of the gloriously zany Buddhist Oracle -- full title: the Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle -- of Cleveland, Ohio, which carried advertising for all manner of esoteric literature, such as Crowley's Book of the Law. The sanest magazines of reform could be invaded by weird and dubious cults. Thus, the usually practical Modern Utopian could consider the antics of the "Church of the Virgin Mother, " which involved widespread transvestitism and claimed to explore the possibilities of parthenogenesis. In the late summer of 1967, the London International Times published an eccentric letter in which the writer claimed that Arnold Bennett -- he meant Allan Bennett -- had "invented methedrine." [54] The classical aims of the occultists' quest were bent into the oddest forms and overlaid with a heavy aroma of whatever drug might suit the fancy. The Montreal paper Logos printed an article describing its author's journey to the East which culminated in three weeks in a South Indian ashram where he was physically mauled by his guru. The next issue included a "Letter from Katmandu, " which concentrated exclusively on the "heavy drug scene." "Hash, grass are sold in government shops. Meth and other things can be had at the pharmacy and the 'Doc' is always willing to shoot you up with morphine or heroin. In addition there is opium, bhang, acid, mescaline, psylocybine, STP and some other way out things. There are many worlds just here." Although drugs may have been the principal route by which the occult entered Bohemia, once the mystical had become an accepted part of the scene, it was not necessarily connected with drugs or improbable extravagance. Thus, the clear-headed occult column begun in 1969 by Elfrida Rivers in the New York East Village Other was adept at knocking dangerous lunacies on the head. How necessary this approach was is shown by the columnist's weary resignation in the face of letters asking for the name and address of "an experienced witch": some version of this petition arrived almost every week. [55]

Whether in traditional or modernized form, with or without drugs, the occult has remained a consistent part of the modern Underground. Both the Leary and the Kesey experiments produced yet further esoteric organizations. At Leary's base at Millbrook, the headquarters of the "League for Spiritual Discovery" was set cheek by jowl with the Sri Ram Ashram and the Neo-American Church of Art Kleps, whose surrealistic figure had lurched into Millbrook in 1963.

Kleps (born 1928) had been an educational psychologist and, according to the various reports of his activities to appear in the underground press, seems to have spent most of his time at Millbrook in an inebriated state. Leary described him as "a clumsy manipulator, a blatant flatterer, a bully to the willingly weak, the world's most incompetent con-man. He is in short a sodden disgrace to the movement." The object of the Neo-American Church was to have LSD accepted as a sacrament. Its members would thus be given comparable legal status with the Native American Church, whose Indian peyote religion was sanctioned by law. Kleps named his "priests" Boo-Hoos and issued a paper called Divine Toad Sweat -- the sweat of a toad was supposed to contain some psychedelic chemical. On one level he declared that "the discovery of LSDmay be taken as the intervention of God in human history"; and, on another, he offered to seal for $1, 000 a certificate stating that "the chief Boo-Hoo never heard of you and regards you with indifference." The antics of Kleps introduced a welcome note of hilarity into psychedelic evangelizing. Once when he was in jail he contrived to make a Boo-Hoo of the son of a judge then occupied in trying to chase the Learyites out of the country. To Kleps also belongs the reputed distinction of having the Kleenex on which he had just blown his nose scooped up by narcotics agents for analysis. [56]

After the Trips Festival of January 1966, Ken Kesey had himself smuggled over the Mexican border, while his group continued the explosive Acid Tests which he had devised. One of the acquisitions to the Pranksters in this period was Hugh Romney, a former actor and inhabitant of the Beatnik world who had dropped out of the New York scene and met Kesey during the first Acid Tests. From this point, Romney says, he "went to work for the pudding" -- the pudding being the Intergalactic World Brain (or any other new term for God that happens to appeal). Romney ended up in the hills with a commune called the Hog Farm. He developed an elaborated version of Kesey's techniques. His "original Tarot on wheels" first set out at the end of 1968. Romney described it as "a group mind-bank" designed to produce children with universal capacities. What appeared to be a combination of group therapy, communal living, spiritual forcing house, and experiment in cooperative education had an eclectic selection of sources among which the occult revival is prominent. In 1967 Romney marveled at the books which "keep appearing, like the I Ching and the Bible, the Wind in the Willows, the Book of the Hopi, the Secret of the Golden Flower, Stranger in a Strange Land and Siddartha and the rest of Hesse and the last of Jung and all of Evans-Wentz and Mount Analogue, the Urantia Song, consummate All and Everything and still they keep coming."  [57] Even more than Kesey's Pranksters, the Hog Farm represented an updated version of the occult quest, and their debts to Jung and Gurdjieff are especially obvious. In method the Hog Farm may have been following Gurdjieff; in theory, Jung.

Other groups coalesced round figures who had little to do with the LSD-inspired cults but still became pivotal points of the Underground. An example is the group that published the Boston Avatar from June 1967. The Avatar ran a regular astrology column and another called "The Aquarian Age." It attracted contributions like that from one reader who decided that "An area designated for para-psychological and occult study coupled with programs designed to bring together factions now split over psychedelics, socioeconomic trend interpretation, theological re-assessment of spiritual experience in a natural setting such as Colorado or Montana would be a groovy thing, I think." The center of this enterprise was Me! Lyman, the author of the Autobiography of a World Savior and producer of apocalyptic utterances on current problems. Lyman's pronouncements were completely unlike anything published on the West Coast; this World Savior had pronounced himself all in favor of "hard work" against occult trends. Nevertheless, his ideas of mission were intriguing: "sometimes I'm the AVATAR. sometimes I'm asleep, " he announced; and in March 1968 the Avatar circle declared, "Today we simply incorporate ourselves as Mel Lyman." In answer to a correspondent who challenged him to explain his mission he replied: "I know God's plan, and I will reveal it to mankind, step by step, as God reveals it to me. That makes me a world savior." It is unsurprising that when the savior left AVATAR there was wailing among his devoted readership. A tragic letter from "Kathy" began, "Me!! I love you! I need you so bad! In 3 days I'll be 17 (yes, only a mere child). Maybe I don't matter to you, but I've always felt that you loved us all, no matter what. I may not have made it this far if not for you." Lyman's reply is explicit enough: "You have to lose me to find me in YOU." [58]
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 3 of 4

The center in which all such apocalyptic aspirations fused and from which they radiated, combined with politics and rearranged as a potent myth, was Haight-Ashbury. From the turn of the year 1965-66, when Kesey's Acid Tests became the Trips Festival, this San Francisco Bohemia gradually developed the characteristics that marked the image of "hippie" in the eyes of the public and of countless imitators. The term hippie was coined by Herb Caen, the columnist on the San Francisco Chronicle from "hippy-dippy, " otherwise "bebopping jerk." It is strange that Caen, who also named the Beatniks -- from "beatitude" -- should have pounced on the hippie style of dancing as the distinguishing characteristic and ignored the related search for enlightenment. [59] Apart from the use of drugs and exotic clothing, the characteristics of hippie culture with which people are most familiar -- through the musical Hair if in no other way -- seem to involve much chanting of Hare Krishna and mutterings about being in the Aquarian age. It is worth recording how these catchphrases passed into Bohemia.

When Alan Ginsberg was given psylocibin by Timothy Leary in 1960, it marked a turning point in his life. One of the results was that he stopped writing for publication. In 1966, as he confessed: "I took a lot of LSD and psylocibin previous to leaving for India and, well, I was in a slightly disordered state of mind. I thought it was absolutely necessary for me to drop dead in order to obtain complete enlightenment -- for my ego to vanish entirely and for my person to vanish entirely and everything about me to vanish entirely in order to be perfect." He left with his companion Peter Orlovsky and Gary Snyder on his own journey to the East and wandered around India meeting gurus and smoking marijuana. He visited the Dalai Lama and the Swami Shivananda of Rishikesh. It was Shivananda who recommended the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra as an exercise, and Ginsberg was later impressed by hearing the same phrase on the lips of a woman saint on the banks of the Ganges. [60]

The real importer of the chant into the United States was Swami Bhaktivedanta (born 1897), who arrived·in America in 1965 on a missionary expedition and started to give lectures on "Krishna Consciousness" in the Lower East Side of New York. He met Howard Wheeler, a teacher of English at Indiana State University, who introduced Ginsberg to the circle. Bhaktivedanta gradually acquired popularity among the New York Bohemians, and Ginsberg suggested that the fifteen "initiated disciples" of the Swami begin chanting in Tompkins Square, which the New York hippies had selected as their open-air meeting place. Wheeler distributed leaflets:

STAY HIGH FOR EVER
No More Coming Down
Practice KRISHNA CONSCIOUSNESS
Expand your consciousness by chanting
the
TRANSCENDENTAL SOUND VIBRATION


During the Peace Parade of 5 November 1966, Ginsberg and Wheeler led the chanting of the mantra, and distributed leaflets to thousands. Krishna Consciousness had arrived; and in January 1967 its missionaries came to Haight-Ashbury, which had been expectantly waiting for them. [61] Wheeler wrote:

During the spring and early summer of '67, Haight culture was at its peak. We were flying high with mantra, and thousands opened up to us. We splashed in the Haight pond with a mammoth mantra-rock dance at the Avalon. Swamiji and Ginsberg danced on the stage with upraised hands. Multicolored lights swirled across huge wall slides of Krishna and Rama. The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape and Big Brother blared away. Even Tim Leary garlanded one of us and salaamed, "A beautiful night, a beautiful night." Five thousand hippies, teenie-boppers and Hell's Angels stood reverently when Swamiji entered and listened attentively while he talked.

Every Sunday we chanted in Golden Gate Park and hundreds joined, holding hands and dancing in a ring. At any time of day I could walk down Haight Street playing cymbals and chanting and pick up at least a dozen enthusiasts. People were also attracted by our free prasadam [food] program and we would feed dozens daily. The Rhada Krishna Temple quickly became a dynamic influence in Haight-Ashbury life. [62]


From this success, the Krishna Consciousness movement expanded until it had centers in eight cities on the North American continent and four in Europe; and this rapid diffusion of the doctrine was an indication of how swiftly other related ideas might spread. To American Bohemia, such as it was, Hinduism seemed new; and in the precise form of "Krishna Consciousness" indeed was new. But it was the recurrence of a phenomenon that had been in progress ever since the end of the 19th century. [63]

The idea of the age of Aquarius is simply a statement of astrological fact. That is, a subscriber to astrology believes not only in the links between the heavenly bodies and life on earth but also in an elaborate superstructure of periods, including that of a "master period" of the Great Year, which is generally thought to last for about 36, 000 ordinary years. The earth is at present at the end of the Great Year governed by the astrological sign Pisces, and due to begin the next Great Year, dominated by the characteristics of Aquarius. The precise dating of the change -- over varies considerably with the individual astrologer and the system of calculation he employs. But the fact that the earth is due to enter a new astrological eon is not at all the invention of the hippies and could well have been calculated in the 16th century -- or in ancient Chaldea well before the birth of Christ. To say that the change is due in "about the year two thousand" means little; for variations of a few hundred years count for nothing in the calculation of a Great Year. In the more esoteric sections of the 19th-century Progressive Underground, the calculations were naturally biased toward an earlier advent of the new age; in pre-Nazi Germany the age of Aquarius was sometimes timed to coincide with the arrival of the Thousand Year Reich. In all cases the Aquarian characteristics were thought to be diametrically opposed to those of the preceding age -- for confusion, harmony; for the pursuit of material profit, the brotherhood of man.

The occultism of Haight-Ashbury might well merely have produced a consensus of opinion among the astrologically inclined indicating the arrival of the Aquarian Age. In fact, one particular astrologer who lived in the Haight seems to have been chiefly responsible for popularizing the idea. His name was Gavin Arthur, otherwise Chester Alan Arthur III. He was the great-grandson of a United States president and a direct link with the European astrological revival. Arthur (born 1902) had passed through a varied career, which included gold mining in Alaska, the world of American high society, and Paris in the 1920s before he came to live in Haight-Ashbury. He had been given Edouard Schure's Great Initiates at the age of 19 and had dabbled in astrology for thirty years before a Jungian psychiatrist in San Francisco persuaded him to cast her patients' horoscopes as an aid to analysis. Gavin Arthur was at this time a counselor at San Quentin prison, and he began to use astrology in his prison work. His astrological book, The Circle of Sex, was less his claim to fame than the fact that he had predicted the death of President John F. Kennedy before the elections sent him to Washington and Dallas. [64]

Arthur saw himself as a Jungian astrologer and foretold the arrival of the Aquarian age for the year 2260. The earth had, nevertheless, entered a "new age of culture" in 1940. To this quite orthodox astrological tenet, Arthur added the equally orthodox belief in spiritual evolution, a doctrine that he supported by a conflation of R. D. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness -- a well-known text of the 19th-century occult revival, which owed much to the New England Transcendentalists and Walt Whitman -- and the theories of Korzybsky's General Semantics. These theories he adapted to term minerals as one-dimensional, plants as two-dimensional, animals as three-dimensional and humans as four-dimensional modes of being. By implication, a new five-dimensional form of life for the new age was evolving. Arthur vaunted his intellectual ancestry: he had "sat at the feet of Edward Carpenter, who sat at the feet of Whitman." [65]

It was to the theories of Gavin Arthur that the enthusiast in the San Francisco Oracle was indebted when he watched the "Be-in" of 14 January 1967. "Not since the vast empire-armies of old Persia has there been such an exotic massing for a common purpose" he wrote. "Not since the last day of the Christ has the purpose been so gentle and so strong. Not in the 26, 000 years have the aborigines of a new mankind gathered in recognition of their heritage and their gig." [66] The mood of apocalypse -- as well as the success of the idea of Haight-Ashbury -- also derived from the Diggers, but the occult and religious factors that came together at one place and time were at least as responsible; and apocalyptic feelings generated by other causes reactivated interest in the occult. Before considering the Diggers and the social-political aspects of the Hippie Myth, some further results of the combination of LSD-cults, occultism, and Oriental religion should be noticed.

Gavin Arthur was by no means the only guru to pronounce for the idea of spiritual evolution. It was a cardinal tenet of those who followed Timothy Leary. How far anyone followed Leary completely is an open question, but his ideas could not help but be influential. Some six months after Kesey began his Acid Tests, LSD was declared illegal in the State of California -- on 6 June 1966 -- and soon afterward, Leary and Alpert delivered a "manifesto for an inner revolution" to an enthusiastic crowd. In October a writer in the Berkeley Barb wrote that "Timothy Leary comes to us as apostle and martyr of the new religion. Let us respect him, but let us take Spartacus, not Christ, as our model." The split between the political activists and the mystical drop-outs was obviously present from the start; but the important thing about Haight-Ashbury was the temporary fusion of ideas. A moving spirit behind the Haight's vision of itself was Ron Thelin, the owner of the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street, a center of the new culture. Thelin was behind the most distinctively "hippie" paper to emerge from the Underground, the San Francisco Oracle, and he was far from an opponent of Leary. [67] In the pages of the Oracle the rationale of a new "mutant consciousness, " which might be produced by LSD, was elaborated together with the idea that Haight-Ashbury was the center of the new developments. Was LSD producing a new subspecies? To some it seemed like it:

Mutants! Know now that you exist!
They have hid you in cities
And clothed you in fools' clothes
Know now that you are free! [68]


Richard Alpert called the Haight-Ashbury a "very high energy center, " and "the purest reflection of what is happening in consciousness, at the leading edge in the society." The Oracle's column, "Gossiping Guru, " thought it apparent that "a real and viable synthesis of Eastern and Western modes of consciousness is taking place and the result is sure to be the most powerful cognitive tool ever to fall into the hands of men of good will." Astrology not only predicted the new age, but possibly an avatar. In early 1967 the Oracle carried a request for further information about "Him who was born on February 5th, 1962, when 7 planets were in Aquarius." According to some sections of opinion there had been a great convocation of adepts on the inner planes to prepare for this Messiah! [69] The triumph of the new consciousness was seen in the "gathering of the tribes" (14 January 1967) for the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. By this point, the hippie culture had become defined and could do nothing but expand or decline. In fact it did both.

From the point of view of the individual's role in society, this new Bohemia produced a new version of the dream of the 19th-century occult revival: "liberation, " "spiritual evolution, " "expanded consciousness." It did this partly by using something of its Bohemian inheritance, partly by absorbing the occult tradition, mostly by adapting such ideas into a new form. It was nonetheless the Progressive Underground-spattered with Day-Glo paint, stoned out of its mind, dancing with a frenzy that some have compared to the outbreaks of dancing mania in the Middle Ages -- but recognizably the same creature. Its critique of society was derived from sources similar to those of earlier undergrounds of opposition to materialist Establishments. Because of this, the junction between the representatives of the new consciousness and the radicals who demanded a less materialist, less individualist society was made on the basis which our story has identified again and again: a common idealism, a common pursuit of cities not of this world, a common unity of the implicitly "spiritual" against the legions of Mammon. The union of all such elements took place in San Francisco, and Haight-Ashbury possessed a particular kind of illuminated politics in the shape of the Diggers.

The Diggers were responsible for the "love" part of Haight-Ashbury, just as the occult and drugs were responsible for ideas of an emergent new consciousness. The hippie culture based on drugs and a new Bohemianism flourished during 1966. But it was only recognized in December of that year when the Diggers staged a ceremony to mark the "Death of the old Haight and the Birth of the New Haight." A step further was the Be-In of 14 January, and the idea that the whole ethos would flower in. the "Summer of Love." The mass media moved in, and the myth of the hippie was born. The anticipated influx of teenagers and summer hippies exceeded all expectations. Tourists began to frequent Haight-Ashbury, where gentleness quickly evaporated under the pressure of too many people and a shortage of marijuana, which gave criminal groups. and pushers of horror-drugs like methedrine the chance to infiltrate. In October 1967, Thelin closed his Psychedelic Shop, and the Diggers held another ceremony designed to mark the death of "Hippie, son of Mass Media" and the birth of the "Free Man." This was also the month of the antiwar demonstration against the Pentagon.

The Haight was never to be resurrected, but what there was of value had by this time been grafted on to a zany version of Realpolitik and developed into a new idealistic critique of society. By the time most of the world had heard of hippies the species was transmogrified, but the myth was spread abroad. It should be emphasized that the vision of Haight-Ashbury has been much more influential than the reality, which by the summer of 1967 had degenerated into a state which, by all reports, was more like the rotting of the old society than the incubation of the new. [70]

A policeman shot a young Negro at Hunter's Point in San Francisco on 27 September 1966 and sparked off a three-day race riot, which resulted in curfews and a dislocation of normal living. The situation inspired some members of the San Francisco Mime Troup, a radical organization that specialized in trying to involve people going about their normal business in political action. The night after the shooting the first of the Digger manifestoes appeared. This emanated from a group within the Mime Troup; and it gradually became known that the Diggers would provide free food for those stranded by the curfew. [71] The tradition begun that night continued into 1967, until the influx of people and an acquired habit of looking to the Diggers for help temporarily submerged these exceedingly practical Utopians. In Haight-Ashbury a free store was opened under Digger direction, and it was the Diggers who organized the ceremony in December to inaugurate the new Haight and provided quantities of food for those attending the Be-In.

Who or what were the Diggers? They issued a series of flysheets of a surrealistic nature -- such as an orange sheet headed COOL CRANBERRY HORSE-HAIRED MOUTH CLUTTERED WITH APPLE CORES. They signed their correspondence with the name of George Metetsky, the "mad bomber" who had terrorized New York in 1957 and announced: "Regarding enquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts of the Diggers: We are happy to state that the DIGGERS are not that." [72] They took great pains to deny any member the status of "leader." Diggers proclaimed themselves against cars, the economics of excess, and the exploitation of the Haight-Ashbury culture by the "hip merchants" who were cashing in on the psychedelic fashion. Yet they were by no means opposed to the drug-induced idea of the "revolution in consciousness." They were indeed enthusiasts: "total drug-oriented mad ones, who are mad to live/mad to talk, mad to be saved ... people who have ridden the crest of Kerouac's bum's romance and slammed to earth wailing love!" Part of the hippie community, but determined on action rather than sitting around stoned and looking "spiritual, " the Diggers "in a sense became a new morality, the opposite of industrial capitalism." While the hippie entrepreneurs saw the Diggers as a community service, the Diggers themselves were out to make their new morality the basis of the community. The idealistic plan could not work, and by May 1967 the Diggers issued a leaflet denouncing the "weak-kneed series of cabals which expect someone to take care of their living ... some revolution!" [73]

The basic facts about the Diggers are that they combined practice with an approach that did not contradict the "new consciousness" theory; and that they derived their inspiration from the original Diggers led by Gerard Winstanley, who had settled on St. Georges Hill at Cobham in Surrey in 1649. The parallel is extraordinarily true both in terms of ideals and historical period. The Diggers, Ranters, and Levellers of the English Protectorate combined in varying degrees theories of social equality, simplicity of living, and religious illumination. In a transformed situation all these ideals could be discovered among the Haight-Ashbury Diggers. The original 17th-century Diggers embodied in the form of a social gospel various illuminist tendencies that had been present in the heretical millennarianism of the Middle Ages and that burst forth when the crises of Renaissance and Reformation shattered the solidarity of the medieval edifice. The traditions of direct illumination on which the millennarians of Cromwell's day drew had some affinities with heretical doctrines labeled "occult, " which emerged at the same period as Winstanley's Diggers. It is an interesting coincidence, if no more, that in response to a similar crisis, both the occult and political illuminism once more emerged from their underground habitations and explicitly acknowledged their ancestry.74 The parallel with the 17th century is still drawn by certain underground groups.

Under pressure in the summer of 1967, some of the Diggers began to advocate revolution, claiming to follow Winstanley's later practice.  [75] It is still not certain how "activist" the Diggers were. One of their leading members, Emmett Grogan, gives a confused impression of their ideology, based on Artaud, LSD, Winstanley, and sheer bloodymindedness. The Diggers' liberation was liberation from the Underground itself, but they naturally made use of its ready-made rhetoric. [76]

Nostradamus and the Cabala, Christianity and LSD, free food and the simple life -- all were natural bedfellows in this particular situation. The addition of Christian principles should surprise no one. The traditions of American Protestantism -- which have more recently produced the fundamentalist reaction of the "Jesus Freaks" -- are sufficient parentage. In Haight-Ashbury Christianity might clothe the apocalypse as well as Vedanta. "If Jesus were alive today he would live in the Hashbury -- the new Jerusalem." In April 1966, the Berkeley Barb carried a reproduction of a poster which made explicit the comparison which so many reporters-unable to abandon the adjective "Christ-like" -- had been romantically implying. "REWARD for information leading to the apprehension of Jesus Christ, " it read. "Wanted for sedition, criminal anarchy, vagrancy and conspiring to overthrow the Established Government. Dresses poorly. Said to be a carpenter by trade. Ill-nourished, has visionary ideas. Associates with common working people, the unemployed and bums." [77] The use of metaphor or analogy, is halfway to proclaiming identity. In such a situation the adoption of Digger principles was a perfectly logical step.

In many ways the Diggers were themselves a continuation of the turn-of-the-century Progressive Underground. In attempting to convert Haight-Ashbury to their ethical position, they were trying to extend the idea of the earlier Utopian communities over a larger urban area. The free food the Diggers supplied came partly from two farms operated by sympathetic communes outside San Francisco. Exactly as the illuminates of Munich took to the countryside during the First World War, those who had acquired a taste for communal living in Haight-Ashbury began during 1967 to head for the Utopian hills. The main exodus took place in the late summer, although the commune had been recognized much earlier as an alternative to the existence of urban Bohemia. The insistence on the simple life, the adoption of the rejected cause of the Indians, and a respect for ancient ceremony induced by the ingestion of peyote, resulted in the glorification of the Tribe as the ideal unit for living. The Be-In was advertised as a "gathering of the tribes, " and the Oracle's reporter added to his account of the festival an appeal for "growing space for the healthy, organic harmonious evolution of the Tribe." "Let's make Haight love together and then move to the country where love is hanging out waiting." Communes themselves might incorporate almost any variety of the various possible Underground syntheses: naturally the illuminated element has also become involved with communes, too. [78] But, whereas the transcendental impulse is constricted and passive within a commune, in the political movement that developed from the Haight of Diggers and hippies, the passive rejection of the Establishment practiced by communards was turned into an active revolt.

At the same time as the hippie culture was developing in Haight-Ashbury, the nearby University of California at Berkeley was undergoing a series of convulsions. These began in the autumn of 1964 and were partly the product of disillusionment and frustration felt by civil right workers after the failure of the CORE project in the South. The details of the student and so-called "Free Speech" Movement do not concern us here. Student revolt is nothing new, and recent European history shows many correspondences with what happened in America in 1965-68. [79] What is important is the junction that took place between some of the more orthodox student radicals, associated with the nationwide protest against the war in Vietnam, and the spiritual dropouts and Utopians of Haight-Ashbury.

Students have always been honorary citizens of Bohemia, and in a time of disaffection they naturally began to investigate Haight-Ashbury. Conversely, influences more associated with Bohemia started to affect student conceptions of political protest. In a debate in November 1965 over tactics for the large protest march in Oakland against the Vietnam War, Alan Ginsberg's pacifist proposals were barely defeated. These included the use of "masses of flowers, " Christian crosses, and Jewish stars; the chanting of mantras and carrying "Zen" signs. The chairman of the Vietnam Day Committee to whom this proposal was put was Jerry Rubin, who had been living at Berkeley and was heavily involved in the agitation connected with the Free Speech Movement. Rubin became the leading figure in the junction between the radicals of Berkeley and the hippies of Haight-Ashbury. When he and his fellow-activists were invited to a conference at a hippie Buddhist temple, they arrived at the idea of the "Be-In" to create "a union of love and activism." At a press conference just before the Be-In, Rubin told reporters that the radicals "share common identity with the community of Haight-Ashbury, " and his own account of the festival is clear in what it seemed to him to signify. Those taking part "believed that our energy would turn on the world." All the protest movements "led to deeper discoveries -- that revolution did not mean the end of war or the end of racism. Revolution meant the creation of new men and women."

At the Be-In people recognized "that they were not alone, " and this process seems to have resulted in a deep and lasting impression made by the hippie ethic -- which means both the advocates of the new consciousness and the Diggers -- on the student radicals. One observer compared the Be-In to the orthodox protest demonstrations he had attended and made the significant comment that although "the composition of the crowds was nearly the same, control of events had moved from politicos to the straight hippies." [80] Rubin's adoption of the idea of creating new men and women represents the transplanting of hippie ideas into the radical mind. We are back in the country of spiritual revolutions, and these are much-traveled roads.

Rubin moved from the West Coast to New York to become project director of the National Mobilization demonstration at the Pentagon in October 1967. At that demonstration -- for which the East Village Other called for the presence of "Mystics, saints, Artists, Holymen, Astrologers, witches, sorcerers, warlocks, Druids, hippies, priests, shamen, ministers, rabbis, troubadours, prophets, minstrels, bards, roadmen" [81] -- a pop group and assorted "shamen" ostensibly tried to levitate the Pentagon through a semimagical ceremony. This astute piece of image building stemmed from the group around Abbie Hoffman, a former civil rights worker at that time trying to practice the Digger eithic in New York. It fascinated reporters, entranced commentators like Norman Mailer, and marked the beginning of a brief period of surrealist political activity whose techniques were incarnated in the "Yippie!" -- Youth International Party -- movement, dreamed up by Hoffman, Rubin, and Paul Krassner the following New Year. Yippie!, which was designed as "a cross-fertilization of the hippie and New Left philosophies, " had the long-term aim of developing "a model for an alternative society" and the short-term object of massing as many elements of the underground as possible at the Democratic Convention in Chicago that August. Hoffman and Rubin both declared that they aimed to create a myth of the Yippie -- an all-purpose, hippie-surrealist revolutionary who would attract recruits at the same time as provoking the opposition. In Rubin's words:

A new man was born smoking pot while besieging the Pentagon, but there was no myth to describe him. There were no images to describe all the 14-year-old freaks in Kansas, dropping acid, growing their hair long and deserting their homes and their schools. There were no images to describe all the artists leaving the prison of middle-class America to live and create art on the streets.

The Marxist acidhead, the psychedelic Bolshevik. He didn't feel at home in SDS, and he wasn't a flower-power hippie or a campus intellectual. A stoned politico. A hybrid mixture of New Left and hippie coming out something different. [82]


The Yippie was a myth, like the hippie who went before him; but this time deliberately created. Both Rubin and Hoffman invoked Marshall McLuhan to support their choice of techniques: the "medium is the message" and thus the creator of myths. There is little difference between this McLuhanite idea of image building and the "myth" of Georges Sorel, which provided so many of the European Fascist leaders with a source of inspiration. The myth, the political image, the living symbol with all its indefinite and unconscious connotations is a powerful tool in the hands of politicians. But the myth must correspond to some degree of actuality: it must answer to needs which are in fact felt, and it must allow some possibility of success to those who try to live up to its legends. It is, therefore, significant in itself, in the support it attracts, and in what its manipulators set out to achieve.

The choice of technique -- the myth itself -- is suggestive because it had been previously used by politicians who appreciated the power of irrational forces to move men. The "hippie" and "New Left" elements of which the myth was composed both contributed to form the Yippie and his objectives. In case it is thought that most of the irrationalism came from the hippie element, it is worth quoting a report about Lawrence Lipton's film of the massive Oakland Vietnam Day march in Berkeley in February 1966.

One member of the audience asked Lenny [Lipton] why he used religious music in the first scene, when the demonstrators were beginning their march. He didn't like the equation of irrational religion with the Vietnam Day Committee. We were rooting for Lenny's answer and he came through very well. He explained that there was an element of emotional fervor to the demonstration and emotionality is not necessarily derogative.

We cheered because deep in our hearts we knew we had some irrational motivation, some emotional craving. And down went the self-righteous activist, and the audience cheers. The demonstrators do come off as supremely heroic despite Lipton's claims to the activist that "he would have put halos round the heads of all the marchers if it would have been possible." [83]


A similar collective irrationalism is displayed in the hippie-derived cult of mass gathering for rock dances and festivals. Even in Haight-Ashbury, this point was made. For those who were not concerned with the expansion of consciousness, rock dances provided a possible way of simply losing the self. In October 1966 the pop columnist Ed Denson compared the success of vast rock concerts with the Nuremberg rallies -- a comparison that is often made by opponents of the Underground and that holds only insofar as there is a common denominator of irrationalism. "Man seems to like to gather together in large groups and lose individual identity in the higher union of the whole." Denson also recognized the nature of this flight from the self. "The emergence of the Frisco rock scene has marked a partial return towards the religious or the blues type of experience."

We have seen sufficient examples of hippie irrationalism to expect the fundamental anxiety that almost always induces a widespread rejection of the rational. In its most basic form this could find expression in the fear -- which became widespread among West Coast hippies at the beginning of 1969 -- that California was destined to sink like Atlantis beneath the sea, as prophesized by the faith healer Edgar Cayce. In its more elaborate forms, such anxiety encouraged the pervasive mysticism in sections of the Underground. Far from Haight-Ashbury or any comprehension of what the consciousness-expanders meant, Underground mysticism developed into the worst possible nonsense. OZ summed up the situation in 1969: "Today's mystics seem muddled, yet reason shakes them hardly at all (and they don't believe in verbal communication). It is faith itself they want to believe in, the very act of believing they affirm." [84]

The creation of the Yippie was a strategy partly directed at the irrational impulses expressed both in New Left and hippies. The honeymoon period of happy surrealism, of throwing away money at the New York Stock Exchange, of "street theater, " lasted only till the battle for which the Yippies had been preparing in Chicago in August 1968. With the violence and the ensuing bitterness, the Underground once more polarized. On the one hand, there were the passive dropouts; on the other, there were the elements with tangible grievances and tangible goals, like the Black Panthers, together with militant revolutionaries like the Weathermen concerned with ideology and bombs. During 1969 Abbie Hoffman announced that killing a policeman was a sacramental act. Timothy Leary was interviewed as an expert on sacraments, and he voiced his doubts while admitting that it might be "some people's karma." [85] It was only for a short time that the attempted fusion of politics and transcendentalism succeeded; but the brief period of Yippie tactics left an enduring legacy. This legacy was the myth. Although the aims and methods of the Yippie organizers soon changed, their theories were to some extent borne out. Part of the Yippie myth was the idea of liberation. which pervaded every aspect of the Underground and provided a useful blanket concept under which any rebel could.cloak specific discontents. Beside all practical and tangible grievances, however, sat the occult idea of liberation -- of total freedom from all human restrictions, or equally from the restrictions of being human.

This idea passed into the underground from the Hippies, Diggers, and Yippies. All the LSD-Cults, the Oriental religions, the occult doctrines, if properly understood, contain the element of liberation from the prison of the personality, individual loneliness, and ultimately matter. Such philosophies had long been in the air as a result of the 19th-century occult revival. They had coalesced via Leary, Kesey, and innumerable other gurus in Haight-Ashbury, were projected accidentally by the media-created myth of the hippie and the deliberately-projected myth of the Yippie -- and their implications stuck. The original object of self-transcendence was often left implicit or distorted. Jerry Rubin wrote that "there is no such thing as an antiwar movement, " there were "movements for liberation, for freedom." Abbie Hoffman possessed "the knowledge that the institutions and values of imperialism, racism, capitalism and the protestant ethic do not allow young people to experience authentic liberation." [86] Such demands for the imponderable of total freedom had previously been met by specifically mystical or religious adaptations of the transcendental impulse. The contribution of the Yippies -- and, to a lesser extent, of the hippies -- had been the identifying of the "repressive" agency with a particular social system. In the original form of the theory it was not capitalism, "Amerika, " or the Protestant Ethic that was seen as the factor hampering man's self-liberation, but the human condition defined as matter, illusion, or a Gnostic Demiurge. With the spread from Haight-Ashbury of both hippies and of the hippie myth, such ideas became an integral part of the "alternative society, " and, with the impulsion given by Yippie! and other activist groups, the ethic of liberation was applied to reinforce a neo-Marxist criticism of society.

The progress of Hoffman and Rubin reveals how the political activists learned from the "spiritual" dropouts. Further impetus was given to the idea of liberation by some of the gurus of psychedelic Bohemia who themselves extended or adapted their spiritual disciplines to the exigencies of a social critique. One of these was Gary Snyder. He argued that Buddhist thought had been too much concerned with dispelling ignorance by psychological methods. If the sociological conditions are attended to as well, the result is "a Buddhist Anarchism." Ginsberg agrees. "Whereas one lone nut saying 'I am the Lamb' can be clapped in jail one cat coming up among 5 thousand people dressed in caps and bells saying 'I am the Lamb' and act on it because they're not afraid to be the Lamb because they know that everybody knows it already." The most influential of all such exponents of a social liberation was Alan Watts, whose Psychotherapy East and West (1961) is a remarkable exposition of the theory that Eastern "ways of liberation" are all, in fact, methods of reorientating human perception of a world whose constituents are governed by social institutions. Thus the Hindu doctrine of maya -- that man is trapped in a web of illusion -- "lies not in the physical world but in the concepts or thought forms by which it is described." Psychotherapy can perform the same function as Eastern methods of liberation. For Watts, "the aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it." For those who have taken over and misunderstood the concept, the reverse often appears to be true: yet it seems that in the original Yippie! idea of spiritual revolution there was much of the Watts approach. Thus Hoffman: "So what the hell are we doing, you ask? We are dynamiting brain cells. We are putting people through changes." [87]

The distinctively Yippie approach -- the zany disregard for society's values and the deliberate attempts to shock unthinking participants in accepted reality -- had been preceded in Europe by the Dadaists and Surrealists. With the development of an extensive American Bohemia, it was inevitable that imported versions of spiritual protest against material abuse would combine with a spontaneous rediscovery and reinterpretation of just such positions. We have seen how the occult was perpetually present both in Bohemian Europe between the two world wars and in the Europeanized Bohemias of America that preceded the hippie upsurge. In the Yippie critique of society, the occult was mobilized and became not merely an index of a generally illuminated approach, but the very source of the particular attitude itself. In Europe the occult sources of the idea of "liberation" are much easier to see, stemming, as they do, chiefly from Surrealism. It has therefore seemed more important to concentrate on the American movement of "liberation, " whose origins are not so clear.

It was natural that' Yippie! -- and the more passive hippie culture -- should independently develop Surrealist and Dada techniques of protest. It was natural, too, that as the American myth spread to the Progressive Underground of Europe the older established rationale of idealistic revolution would affect America and itself undergo a process of transformation into an active political creed. Abbie Hoffman makes his affinities clear when he shouts in triumph at the success of the Pentagon demonstration: "Artaud is alive at the walls of the Pentagon, bursting the seams of conventional protest, injecting new blood into the peace movement." [88] Artaud, apart from his theories of theater, which attracted Hoffman, is a natural hero of the irrationalist Underground; his magical preoccupations had even led him to take part in a peyote ceremony in South America. However, he was also -- de facto if not in name -- very much part of the Surrealist opposition to things-as-they-are. A brief analysis of the relationship of Surrealism and the modern Underground will indicate the direction of developments in Europe.

The Surrealists had issued a declaration on 27 January 1925 denying that they had anything to do with literature, although they were "quite capable, when necessary of making use of it like anyone else." If Surrealism was not a literary or artistic movement, what was it? To this question there were two main answers:

2. Surrealism is not a new means of expression, or an easier one, nor even a metaphysic of poetry. It is a means of liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it.

3. We are determined to make a Revolution. [89]


For Andre Breton there followed a long period of coquetting with the Communist Party, because the Marxist gospel seemed to him to provide a means of attaining social liberation. At the end of 1933, Breton, Crevel, and Eluard were expelled from the French Communist Party, and the odd alliance was at an end. Its progenitors remained convinced that Surrealism was a revolutionary force. The idea of liberation and the occult associations of Surrealism have a familiar consistency, and it is unsurprising to find that the successors of Surrealism have played a prominent part in European movements for "liberation."

In 1957 the first Situationist International was founded in Paris. Its members affirmed that surrealism had been for them "the beginning of revolutionary experience." To the question why one could not be a Surrealist today, they answered simply "in order not to be bored." They intended to take steps toward a movement more liberating than Surrealism itself, a standard to which Breton had declared he would rally if it could ever be unfurled. Both in East and West, culture appeared to the Situationists as "a series of faked up repetitions." Their position -- which demanded "complete freedom of information and creation" -- would under any form of government remain the same. The Situationists have attempted to maintain a strict party line, although a series of alignments and expulsions have encouraged variations on their ideas. Situationist echoes reverberated through the Underground. Thus in 1962 the Munich artists group Spur was expelled from the Situationist International. One of its members, Dieter Kunzelmann, was later to help found the Berlin Kommune I, a German commune that ranked high in the list of Underground beatitudes.

The Amsterdam Provos, who in 1965 began a campaign of political Dada, Surrealism, and anarchy, owed much to the activities of Constant (born 1920), an avant-garde painter and writer who had been involved with the Situationist-oriented Cobra group and for a time was himself a Situationist. [90] Constant proclaimed an era of play and adventure, an idea taken up by the Provos in their campaign against the Establishment. Yet another Situationist connection was with the British poet Alexander Trocchi's "sigma" group, which organized the poetry festival "Wholly Communion" in 1965 at the Albert Hall in London.

As for the Situationists themselves, they published a review which anticipated the techniques adopted by much of the Underground press: strip cartoons and naked beauties accompanied excursions into severe theory. In early 1966 they were approached by a group of students who had friends recently elected to the students union of Strasbourg University and were in search of an ideology. The Situationists drew up a brochure in an attempt to reconcile the warring factions in the would-be subversive group. The students then used student union funds to publish the brochure On the Poverty of Student Life and decorated the university walls with a subversive comic strip. The use of union funds was made the cause of a scandal by the authorities, and the theories of the Situationists became the model for university rebels. When the discontents at Nanterre erupted at the beginning of 1968, the hard core of revolutionaries turned to Situationist theory. Both in the Nanterre rebellion and the "student revolt" proper of May 1968 in Paris, Situationist slogans -- "Power to the Imagination, " "Take your Desires for Reality" -- which had previously been printed only in the Situationist bulletin found their way on to walls. The style of revolution in May 1968 owed a great deal to the Situationists; and, although in the internecine squabbling of various revolutionary groups the Situationists often tend to be despised, they have probably had more influence than is admitted on subsequent eruptions of the Underground. They themselves estimated that in May 1968 there were only about ten Situationists and their "enrage" supporters in Paris, yet they boasted of the creation of an illusory "vague and mysterious Situationist menace." [91]

Situationist theory provided the main Underground link with Surrealism. Situationists see society as a "spectacle." "Everything that used to be directly lived has moved away into a representation."  [92] They accept much of Marx -- especially the ideology of alienation -- but little of Marxism. There must be a liberation from the power of the spectacle, a redefinition of reality, a recovery of "the totality of everyday life." The Situationist analysis is at once amazingly detailed and inaccessible. One thing is clear: in a very complex form it reaffirms the necessity for "liberation" from an illusory state of consciousness. The "society of the spectacle" is seen as both cause and effect of the system of production, but it might quite simply be expressed as maya. the illusion which must be overcome. Throughout all transformations from Surrealism to Situationism, the idea of overcoming appearances has held constant; and traditional occultism and mysticism agree very well with this position. The new revolutionaries do not forget their masters. Andre Breton's last pronouncement on Surrealism cited the esotericist Rene Guenon -- who began his career as a disciple of Papus -- and the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem's Traite de Savoir Vivre (1967) actually includes a chapter with the same title as one of Guenon's books. [93]

No one who has spent time reading the varied, contradictory, and self-abusive publications of "the Underground" would care to maintain that the creature was anything but a Questing Beast with an infinity of heads, each one browful of theories. But if there was any unity at all among its members, this was provided by the concept of liberation. This concept has been associated with occult and "spiritual" movements, and it was capable of such universal application only because it originally applied to universals. Old-fashioned revolutionaries were caught up in the Underground; many thousands of concerned people marched against the Vietnam War without knowing anything of Kesey; there have been shoals of pseudohippies, with no knowledge of the theories of love and liberation, and malcontents or disaffiliates of every description who were merely fed up with something they called "the System." Yet beside every specific and perceived grievance lay the other, irrational desire for "liberation, " and among the Underground itself there were a few who realized what the term meant.

Until it took to guns, the Underground of Europe and America was, in every respect, the inheritor of the traditions of spiritual revolution which European progressives and Bohemians had earlier transmitted. The style of life -- rebellious, provoking, communal; the transcendental aspirations and ideas of spiritual evolution; the coincidence of rejected knowledge and rejected politics in the areas where all opposition fuses -- all conformed to the familiar pattern. The problem faced by the late Sixties was exactly that of earlier idealist revolutionaries -- the necessary synthesis with power. When the Dutch Kabouters (Gnomes), who succeeded the Provos, won five seats on the Amsterdam city council, they at once offered to give one back on the grounds that they now had too much influence. It was less likely that the Underground would be co-opted by the system it was trying to circumvent than that -- as happened to the idealists of the period between the world wars -- it would become the victim of an alternative system. The idea of liberation has become internalized, and it may vanish altogether. But there have been powerful forces supporting the Great Liberation, and the disappearance of the idea is unlikely. For owing allegiance in the last resort to the same esoteric sources -- the idea of liberation has become a commonplace in those circles that derive their inspiration from the illuminated psychologists and educationalists who were discussed in the last chapter.
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 4 of 4

It is difficult to believe that the experiments in "liberating" the powers of the child begun by the new educationalists have been completely without influence on the children thus educated. This is not to indulge in the strange brand of pseudoanalysis cultivated by those who derive the youth revolution from Dr. Spock's instructions on weaning. It is to restate the truism that what is avant-garde for one generation is taught to the next in the schools. By the third generation, it has become an accepted part of the unperceived assumptions on which everyday life is based. A common theory among post-1945 British Conservative opinion was to blame the success of Socialism on "the schoolmasters." This was an interesting and half-true appreciation of the principle of inheritance and transformation of ideas. The methods of liberationist education have passed into educational practice; and the idea is generally accepted that the abilities of the child must be "liberated, " rather than certain facilities instilled. This implies the assumption that there is something to liberate -- a suggestive metaphysical idea, which has undoubted associations with the occult connections of the New Education.

The chief theorists of such liberation are indebted to the psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists. Those who descend from Freud have rejected their master's conviction that repression was necessary for the advancement of civilization. Their grounds are that civilization as constituted is unsatisfactory. This has led to a number of attempted syntheses of Marx and Freud, and the most notable are those of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. In the context of this book, only a few important points should be noted.

There is an "official" Wilhelm Reich. This Reich attempted to characterize Fascism as the outcome of sexual repression, developed the concept of "character armor" inhibiting the natural relationship of persons, and advocated the cultivation of the orgasm. This Reich was the friend of A. S. Neill, the welcome ally of progressive education, and the hero of the Dionysian underground, which sometimes seemed to have adopted the orgasm as a political principle. The admirers of the official Reich prefer to draw a veil over the last years of Reich's life. When the Nazi seizure of power made it impossible to carry out his work of sex-reform in Germany, Reich fled to Scandinavia, where he made experiments that he claimed resulted in the discovery of "bions, " or "energy vesicles." In 1939 he arrived in the United States and continued his research into the nature of the life force: naturally, he found it. This was "orgone energy, " and it resembled nothing so much as Reichenbach's Odic force or Mesmer's animal magnetism. Orgone energy

charges organic substances, living tissues, especially blood corpuscles, and it kills bacilli and protozoa. It acts differently from the known forms of electromagnetic energy. It accounts for a number of astronomical phenomena: the Northern Lights, lightning, the atmospheric disturbances of shortwave transmission at times of increased sun spot activity. It accounts for the light phenomena of many flowers and of wood undergoing bionous disintegration, of the sexual organs of many insects, and for the blue coloration of many frogs in a state of sexual excitation. [94]


The discovery of orgone energy led Reich to believe he had discovered a cure for cancer in his "orgone accumulators." Later he believed that he could control cloud movements and hence the weather. At the very end of his life he was convinced he was in communication with beings from outer space. Supporters of the official Reich have denied that this later period has any relationship to the master's earlier work; opponents have been content to denounce Reich as "mad." In contradiction to both these points of view, the facts show that Reich's later ideas -- with the exception of the beings from outer space (and they will be discussed in the next chapter) -- were a natural development of his earlier theories. The experiments that discovered the "energy vesicles" resulted from Reich's attempts to put his psychology on a biological basis. It was no doubt an extravagant and unjustified leap to the discovery of the life force, but it was a logical progression -- or at least consistently illogical. Reich's view of the liberating role of the orgasm in society led him to search for the life-giving energy responsible. Like so many protagonists of liberation, he ended by discovering God.

On visits to his laboratories in Rugely, Maine, Reich became friendly with a seventy-year-old guide called Herman O. Templeton, who was one of the first to use Reich's "orgone accumulator." Reich was astounded to find that this backwoodsman had intuitively divined the appearance of his "bions." Templeton was "religious in the good sense of the word."

When I asked him one day whether he believed in God, he said: "Of course he is everywhere, in me and all around us. Just look there, " and he pointed across the lake to the blue against the distant mountains. * "I call it Life, but people would laugh at me, so I don't like to talk about it."

In other words this woodsman also knew of the existence of the biological energy in the atmosphere. [95]


Reich's identification of the orgone energy with God is again only a logical extension of his search for a life-force. The repeated persecution he had undergone undoubtedly helped to turn his mind to the preoccupations of his later years. But the concern of the sexual liberator with the divine was the result of no sudden jump. Reich's Murder of Christ (1953) is perhaps "paranoid, " and it virtually identifies the author with Christ; but it is also consistent with the pattern of Reich's mystical development. The bibliography includes Christian theology and works on Hindu and Buddhist thought, as well as a document issued by the "Rosicrucian" organization AMORC. Reich's description of the plight of the unliberated man uses the same metaphor as several neo-Gnostics. "It is possible to get out of a trap. However, in order to break out of prison, one must first confess to being in a prison. The trap is man's emotional structure, his character structure." [96]

A similar "Gnostic" idea of liberation is found in Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse (born 1898) obtained his Ph.D. in Berlin in 1922, and his theories betray the inheritance of his formative years. Again, there is something of a conflict between an "official" (if subversive) Marcuse and the unofficial philosopher. The official Marcuse is another mediator between Marx and Freud, a product of the Institut fur Sozialforschung, the pupil of profoundly Germanic Hegelians.

He is obviously a revolutionary, although not particularly original: many of his ideas can be found in the writings of his former colleagues, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. [97] Marcuse's concepts have strong connections with the Situationist idea of liberation and have probably influenced the French analysis. This is the well-known Marcuse of Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). There is another Marcuse, who is seen in his later publications.

This is the Marcuse who has described himself as "an absolutely incurable and sentimental romantic." [98] His concept of "liberation" involves the dissociation of the individual from the communal illusions of society, and Marcuse has compared the process to the LSD "trip":

The "trip" involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society -- an artificial and short-lived dissolution. But the artificial and private liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment. [99]


So there is to be a "revolution in perception" -- a "spiritual revolution" -- which is analogous on a social scale to the private and momentary liberation from self achieved by LSD. The proposition could hardly be more plainly put. The liberated universe cannot be described in terms of the ordinary universe. But the nearest Marcuse can come to its definition is "society as a work of art"; and art alone, he thinks, gives some idea of the transformative vision. It is telling that Marcuse sees as "the signal" for this alteration in perception "the great artistic rebellion in the period of the First World War, " and he chooses to quote Franz Marc of the Blaue Reiter as his text for the creation of the new aesthetic society. [100] Thus, the quest of the early Bohemians for a "spiritual" art and society returns to the revolutions of the new Bohemia in the form of a pronunciamento by one of their most revered prophets. It would be untrue to portray Marcuse as a mystic, but he has certainly transposed into rational-seeming language ideas that have previously found a semimystical expression. His view of the status of a philosopher is as a "liberator, " whose duty is to bring home to those he teaches the Platonic allegory of the Cave -- essentially that man is imprisoned and has no idea of his true potentialities -- and to assist in "abolishing the entire structure of established existence." [101]

What is this liberated viewpoint if not "another state of consciousness"? Reich might define it as attainable by the perfect orgasm. Marcuse, while allowing the erotic element its place, advocates life as a work of art. Another of Freud's adaptors, Norman O. Brown, performs astonishing contortions to produce a "mysticism of the body, " in which he conflates Ferenczi and Jacob Bohme. Because the thing itself is self-contradictory, it is only describing it to say paradoxically that Brown's theories represent a "secular Gnosticism." Almost every critic of Brown has noticed his mysticism -- it is hard not to do so -- and Marcuse himself has delivered a stinging rebuke, which reminds the reader of Freud's own admonitions to his followers. [102]

Another line of "liberationist" theories stems from C. G. Jung. Jungian analysts are prone to lamentation about the lack of acceptance of their school of thought as compared to the relative popularity of Freud. However, Jung has exercised a strong, though often unperceived, influence among the Underground. For example, in the phrase which was at one time so popular, "total experience" -- used among other applications to describe the "psychedelic" effect of rock dances with amplified music and stroboscopic lights -- there is a direct use of a Jungian term. [103] Jungian ideas passed through several mediators -- notably the British psychologist Eric Graham Howe, whose influence has been exercised on both Henry Miller and Alan Watts; and R. D. Laing (born 1927), the center of the modern group of "liberating" psychiatrists. [104] Although Laing and his chief collaborator, David Cooper, have derived inspiration from other sources, the basis of their early approach was the Jungian view that "neurosis tends towards something positive, " [105] and, in particular, that schizophrenia itself is a therapeutic process begun by the situation in which the apparently "afflicted" human finds himself. To this is added the idea that people are labeled as "mad" and attempts made to "cure" them for the purposes of maintaining a false consciousness in the sense of the Situationists or Marcuse. Society is, in fact, an unconscious conspiracy to suppress the nature of man.

In social terms this devolves into a conflict between Us -- the dissociated being, struggling to recover his true nature -- and Them -- the possibly well-wishing but ultimately destructive Establishment. Laing writes: "It is just possible that a further transformation is possible if men can come to experience themselves as 'One of Us.'" Or, in language that does not pay attention to some distinctions which no doubt would be drawn by Laing, the supposedly individual personality must be transcended and a contact made with something which could be seen as universal humanity or God. Some of the phenomena labeled "schizophrenic" are examples of "a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality." This position leads Laing to endorse much of Reich, the extent of whose neglect "cannot be explained rationally." [106]

Laing, Cooper, and their associates called a congress on the "Dialectics of Liberation, " which was held in London in July 1967. Besides the organizers, speakers included Stokeley Carmichael, Dr. Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg and other formulators of the idea of "liberation, " including Paul Goodman and Simon Vinkenoog. Laing and Cooper had become convinced that their position coincided with contemporary political struggles for "liberation" -- the "Us" were definitely defined as Cuba and North Vietnam and the "Them" as the American Imperialists. [107] This facile identification of a particular political system with the repressive forces alienating man from himself enabled the Laingians to align themselves with the international Underground. And it does not take an opponent of Laing's psychology, or a supporter of the Vietnam War, to see the absurdity of this assumption. Nevertheless, for a fortnight that July -- it was the summer of Haight-Ashbury's decline -- London witnessed a union of "liberated" elements that represented something of an "Intellectual Be-In." The congress was roundly criticized by those supporters of complete irrationalism who had abandoned thought altogether. Despite such criticism, the Dialectics of Liberation was a landmark in the history of the Underground.

The same ideas that led Laing and Cooper to ally themselves with theorists of political liberation resulted in the rapprochement with LSD cults and the theorists of spiritual liberation. In the early days of LSD it was thought that its "psychomimetic" properties would make it useful to psychiatrists. In fact, the Laing group did at one time use LSD in therapy. Laing first met Leary as early as 1964; and David Cooper was writing about the American drug movement in early 1966 before Britain had really become aware of what was going on across the Atlantic. Another factor that encouraged the adoption of Laingian views by an enthusiastic body of lay supporters was the very redefinition of "madness" upon which the approach rested. The Surrealists had long before attached value to the experiences of madness, and there were obvious points of similarity between the Underground cult of Artaud and Cooper's opinion that the tortured genius "had more to say relevant to madness than all the text-books of psychiatry." [108]

Religious and occult analogies are very important to the Laingian approach. Cooper compares the situation of acute bewilderment which precedes schizophrenia to the state of "no-mind" induced by the Zen koan. There are ways of being able to "liberate ourselves into a more real, less stereotyped future, " but these incur the risk of being thought mad; and in a present in which Christ would "end up largactilised and electro-convulsed on a 28-day detention order (Mental Health Act, 1959), " the implications do not need to be stressed. Laing is even more explicit. He states that the "normal" condition of perceiving oneself as a coherent permanent "I" is "a preliminary illusion, a veil, a film of maya." If the ego -- the "instrument for living in this world" -- is broken up, the person may be catapulted into states of other reality. States of reality that do not relate to the external world are classified as "mad"; and this includes the perception of the Divine. "The fountain has not played itself out, the flame still shines, the river still flows, the spring bubbles forth, the light has not faded. But between us and It there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded." [109]

Other realities -- they all talk of them or imply them. Leary and Laing are explicit in their use of the term; others prefer "expansion of consciousness" or "liberation." It is liberation from that which is, which presumes that there exists or can be created that which is other. The concept of liberation can almost always be associated with an esoteric source, either directly or through a mediating or secularizing agency. Specific forces of repression, of course, generate countermovements, which find fine slogans in the theology of total liberation; and there have undoubtedly been numbers of those who could be identified with "the Underground" who would disavow any of the theories discussed in this chapter. All that can be said is that much of the Underground was heading -- though it may not have realized it -- toward a "spiritual" and esoteric revolution. Urged by assumptions implicit in the idea of liberation and the explicit supernatural logic of some of its prophets, the counterculture also came to seek the Heavenly City.

But in seeking the liberation of the individual through the destruction of social maya, the advocates of the new apocalypse appear to have made one signal error. In the original form, the idea of liberation is Gnostic in nature. That is to say, it is world-rejecting. At the center is the divine spark trapped in heavy matter. The situation could be described as a point enclosed within a circle. In the original idea, the circle is broken and the spark escapes through a different way of looking at the circle. This is what is meant by "revolution in consciousness." The trapped human executes some spiritual acrobatics and sees that he is not trapped after all -- all the time the circle was broken, and indeed he may have created it himself. But this change in the relationship of the point (Man) and the circle (Matter) is achieved through operations taking place within the individual -- within the point. The circle is illusion, nothing more. The theorists of social liberation are trying to produce the necessary changes in the point by manipulating the surrounding circle, the existence of which has traditionally been seen as the product of wrong being, of a wrongly perceived relationship of man and universe.

The construction of a new social reality would seem to be, from the point of view of all systems of liberation, merely another artifact of illusion. On the other hand, the exponents of material reform proclaim that to concentrate on "spiritual" goals is to distract attention from goals that are realizable in the present. Both the spiritual aspirants and the social reformers seem to have admirable motives which it is not for this book to judge. But the application of the spiritual theory to material ends must finish in disaster. If it is the social system which prevents man from "experiencing liberation, " the construction of a new social system -- even the system which defines itself in opposition to that which has previously existed -- is merely to reforge the fetters which have been struck off. "Even a cowherd may by realization attain Liberation, " says the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. And even the wisest and the best intentioned may bury themselves yet further in the mire.

_______________

Notes:

* For a discussion of the symptoms of this crisis see the next chapter.

*Reich's "orgone energy" is supposed to be blue in color.

1. Hans Richter, Dada (London, 1970), pp. 199, 201.

2. See The Occult Underground. pp. 153 ff., 281-85, 362-63.

3. Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos in Acts Academia Aboiensis (Humaniora), vol. 38, no. 2 (Abo, 1970), and "Art in the Epoch of the Great Spiritual" in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1966), pp. 386 ff.

4. Ringbom, "Art in ... the Great Spiritual, " p. 394 and list printed on p.418.

5. Ringbom, "Art in ... , " pp. 409-10, and cf. Klaus Lankheit (ed.), Franz Marc (London, 1960).

6. Hermann Bahr, "Die Uberwindung des Naturalismus, " in Zur Uberwindung des Naturalismus, (Stuttgart, 1968), p. 87; for Steiner's pronouncements on art, see Art in the Light of the Mystery Wisdom (London, 1970), and Architectural Forms (London, 1936); see Otto Benesch, Edvard Munch (London, 1967), pp. 17 ff. At the time of their friendship in Berlin, Strindberg was writing a story called Tschandala -- the term is that of Lanz von Liebenfels (see chapter V); T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Mona Lisa's Mustache (New York, 1948), p. 76; G. F. Hartlaub, Kunst und Religion (Leipzig, 1919), p. 45.

7. Gropius quoted in Wolfgang Pehnt, "Gropius, the Romantic" in The Art Bulletin, September 1971, p. 301.

8. Scheurlen, Sekten.

9. Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus (Regensburg, 1963), pp. 11-12, 17.

10. Ringbom, "Art in ... the Great Spiritual, " p. 413; Alfred Arndt, "Life at the Bauhaus, " in 50 Years Bauhaus (London, 1968), p. 312.

11. Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl (London, 1970), pp. 17-18, 55; Ringbom, "Art in the ... Great Spiritual, " p. 414.

12. On Ciurlionis, see Nicolai Worobiow, M. K. Ciurlionis (Leipzig, 1938), and Camilla Gray, Russian Experiment, p. 118.

13. Kasimir Malevich, "God is not cast down, " in Essays on Art (London, 1970), pp. 188 ff. Gray, Russian Experiment, pp. 234-35 and 248 ff. for ideological squabbles among artists.

14. Richter, Dada, pp. 32, 67-68, 218.

15. Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Lucerne, 1956), pp. 18-19, Byzantinisches Christentum (Munich and Leipzig, 1923); Emmy Hennings-Ball, Hugo Balls Weg zu Goll, (Munich, 1931), especially p. 77.

16. Richter, Dada, p. 64.

17. See Ana Balakian, Andre Breton, Magus of Surrealism (New York, 1971), pp. 28-35, and Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (London, 1968), p. 83; Hans Freimark, Mediumislische Kunst (Leipzig, 1914).

18. On Artaud, see Bettina L. Knapp, Antonin Artaud, Man of Vision (New York, 1969), which gives an excellent picture of an alternative reality slipping out of control.

19. On Lawson, see Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies, p. 69 ff.

20. See Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew (London, 1970).

21. View (New York), vol. I, no. I (September 1940). It was to some extent against artists of the View brand that Robsjohn-Gibbings directed his attack.

22. View, vol. I, nos. 7-8 (October-November 1941).

23. View, vol. III, no. I, p. 5. For other such articles, see Pierre Mabille, "The Destruction of the World, " vol. I, nos. 9-10; Hilary Arn, "Nostradamus against the Gods"; Lionel Abe, "The Politics of Spirit, " vol. I, nos. 11-12, etc. Kurt Seligman, The Mirror of Magic (New York, 1948), reveals a complete knowledge of the basic 19th-century French occultists: Wronski, Fabre d'Olivet, Alina d'Eldir, Albert Poisson, Wirth, Papus, Saint-Yves d' Alveydre.

24. Seligman, "Magic and the Arts, " in View (Fall, 1946), pp. 13-16.

25. George Wickes (ed.), Lawrence Durrell-Henry Miller, a private correspondence (London, 1963), p. 347; Sidney Omar, Henry Miller: His World of Urania (London and California, 1968), p. 63; Alfred Perles, My Friend, Henry Miller (London, 1955), p. 132. Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (London, 1958), pp. 245 ff., 260; Henry Miller, "A Night with Jupiter, " in View (February-March 1942), p. 5.

26. For a comparison between the Beats and their predecessors, see Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (London, 1960), pp. 263 ff.

27. Ned Polsky, "The Village Beat Scene, " in Hustlers, Beats and others (London, paperback ed. 1971), pp. 173-74, 176 ff.

28. Polsky, Hustlers, Beats and others, p. 174; Lipton, Barbarians, pp. 244 ff.

29. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (orig. 1958, paperback ed. London, 1969), p. 11.

30. Christmas Humphreys, Sixty Years of Buddhism in England (London, 1968), pp. 20-40. Other heroes of Kerouac -- for example, Dwight Godard, compiler of A Buddhist Bible, published in the United States in 1928 -- are also the heroes of the European Buddhists.

31. Theodore Roszack, The Making of a Counter-Culture (London, 1970), p. 132.

32. An additional factor in spreading consciousness of Zen in America was undoubtedly the occupation of Japan. After 1945 there was a great increase in East Asian studies, and it is interesting that Zen properly entered England after the Second World War, when Christmas Humphreys -- who had been sent as a counsel to the War Crimes Trials in Tokyo -- visited Suzuki. It is symptomatic of the close links between the Occult Revival and the coming of Zen to the West that at the time of his trip Humphreys was preparing a new edition of the Mahatma Letters to H. P. Blavatsky, and that his journey included a visit to the headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar near Madras. See Humphreys, Via Tokyo (London, 1948).

33. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London paperback ed. 1970), p. 286.

34. See The Occult Underground.

35. For Symonds, see William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (paperback ed., London, 1968), pp. 376-77. For Anna Kingsford and others, see The Occult Underground: B. P. Blood, Pluriverse (London, n.d.), pp. 217-25. Cf. Journal of SPR June 1893, pp. 94-96.

36. Blood, Pluriverse, p. vii; for Tennyson's letter to Blood, see pp. 215-17, and Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Tennyson, a Memoir, vol. II, pp. 158-59; Blood, Pluriverse, p. xxiv; Letters of William James (London, 1926), vol. II, p. 39; William James, "A Pluralistic Mystic" reprinted in Memoirs and Studies (London, 1911), p. 373.

37. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 373-74.

38. See, e.g., Symonds, Beast, pp. 160 ff.; The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (ed. Symonds and Kenneth Grant, London, 1969), p. 768. The editors note (p. 934, note 4) that Crowley had been taking the drug "for some years."

39. The source is a former disciple of Crowley.

40. As his correspondence shows, Huxley kept in touch with almost every prominent member of the mystical underground. At first there were Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood, later Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. Huxley himself was prone to accepting every chance-blown scrap of rejected knowledge: for example, the Bates system of sight-training and Dianetics. See The Leiters of Aldous Huxley (ed. Grover Smith, London, 1969) and Laura Huxley, This Timeless Moment (London, 1969).

41. Sidney Cohen, Drugs of Hallucination (paperback ed., London, 1970), pp. 26-27, 32-35; John Wilcock, "Other Scenes, " in Berkeley Barb (22 April, 1966), p. 7; Thadeus and Rita Ashby, "Did Jesus Turn On?, " Berkeley Barb (23 December 1966); Thadeus and Rita Ashby, "Ecstatic Living" in The Alchemist (Manhattan, Kansas) vol. I, no. 3 (December 1968), reprinted from San Francisco Oracle.

42. Richard Blum, Eva Blum, and Mary Lou Funkhauser, "The Natural History of LSD Use" in Utopiates (ed. Blum, London, 1965), pp. 23-38, 55-56.

43. See Timothy Leary, High Priest (New York, 1968), pp. 2-60 (p. 60 quoted).

44. Leary, High Priest, p. 66.

45. For Ginsberg, see Leary, High Priest, pp. 110 ff.; for Olson, p. 143 ff.; for Burroughs, pp. 214 ff.; for the "Good Friday Experiment, " pp. 304 ff.; for Watts and Heard, p. 288; quote on p. 300; see Leary and Ralph Metzner, "Poet of the Interior Journey, " in Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (London, 1970), pp. 146 ff.; Norman Hartweg, interview with Richard Alpert in Berkeley Barb (3 September 1965), p. 9.

46. Leary, High Priest, pp. 110-12; "God's Secret Agent AOS 3" in Politics, pp. 225 ff.

47. Leary, "God's Secret Agent."

48. The main source for information on Kesey is Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (paperback ed., New York, 1969). This book needs no recommendation to its already large public, and only those who have had anything to do with Kesey-type experiments can judge whether the atmosphere it creates is authentic. However, from the point of view of a student of strange religions, Wolfe has conveyed better than any other writer the sense of living within another order of experience induced by a novel scale of values. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous has something of the same atmosphere, but is primarily concerned with exposition. There are one or two novels of the 19th-century Occult Revival which induce the claustrophobia and even the aspiration. But Wolfe's head-over-heels prose shows something which it is surely important for a 20th-century historian to understand -- how people still believe in miracles.

49. For Owsley and Kesey, see Wolfe, Acid Test, pp. 188-89.

50. Wolfe, Acid Test, pp. 222 ff., and Ralph J. Gleason, The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound (New York, 1969).

51. Leary, "The Magical Mystery Trip" in Politics of Ecstasy, pp. 88, 96.

52. Wilcock, in Barb, 22 April 1966, p. 7.

53. "The Messiah Speaks, " Los Angeles Free Press, vol. 2, no. 11; Berkeley Barb, vol. 3, no. 11, p. 6; on Charlie Brown Artman, see Barb, 1/1 (August 13, 1965) and 2/20 (20 May 1966); and Electric News (Salt Lake City) 1/3, p. 51; Helix (Seattle, Wash.), 2/2/ (29 September 1967); Distant Drummer (Philadelphia) vol. I, no. I (November 1967), p. 2.

54. See Indian Head (Santa Ana, Calif.) vol. I, nos. 4, 5, 8; Modern Utopian, vol. I, no. 3, pp. 29 ff.; International Times, no. 18 (13 August-13 September), p. 2.

55. David Ryan in Logos, vol. II, no. 2 (July 1969); reprinted from International Times; also "Letter from Katmandu" (August 1969), p. 2; Elfrida Rivers, "Emanations, " East Village Other, vol. IV, no. 39 (27 August 1969), p. 13.

56. Leary, Review of the Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook in East Village Other, vol. II, no. 19, (19 August - 1 September 1967), p. 9; Walter Bowart in Berkeley Barb (17 June 1967), p. 9 (reprinted from EVO), "The Way to God" in Modern Utopian vol. I, no. 1, and EVO vol. III, no. 4 (1-15 January 1968), p. 5.

57. Wolfe, Acid-Test, pp. 241 ff., and Richard Strauss, "A strroool trooomnmn down Memory Lane with Hugh Romney" in Oracle of Southern California (January 1968), pp. 6 ff.; Al Katzman, "Hog Farm in Open Celebration' in Logos (April 1969), p. 7A and 14A; Hugh Romney in EVO (week ending 17 August 1967), p. 10.

58. Avatar, vol. I, no. 3 (7 July 1967); see Avatar, nos. 18-24 (February-May 1968).

59. On Caen and his terms, see EVO, vol. II, no. 22 (1-15 October 1967), p. 3.

60. Ginsberg in Los Angeles Free Press, vol. III, no. 3 (21 January 1966); "Reflections on the Mantra, " in The Alchemist (November 1968), p. 19 (reprinted from Fifth Estate).

61. Howard Wheeler, "The Hare Krishna Explosion, " in The Alchemist (March 1968); Mukunduh Das Adhikary in San Francisco Oracle, p. 8.

62. Wheeler, "Hare Krishna, " p. 10.

63. See Wendell Thomas, Hinduism Invades America (New York, 1930).

64. L.A. Free Press, vol. IV, no. 33 (8-24 August 1967), p. 16 and San Francisco Oracle (January 1967), p. 4.

65. Oracle and Arthur, "Evolution and Cosmic Consciousness, " reprinted from Oracle in The Alchemist, vol. I, no. 2 (November 1968). On Alfred Korzybsky, see Gardner, Fads and Fallacies, pp. 281 ff. Gardner's arguments here should be watched as carefully as Korzybsky's own.

66. S.F. Oracle (January 1967), p. 7.

67. Berkeley Barb, vol. III, no. 14, and vol. II, no. 25, vol. III, no. II (16 September 1966), and Leary, Politics, p. 301.

68. Ted Berk, "Manifesto for Mutants" in S.F. Oracle (January 1967).

69. S.F. Oracle (5-15 November 1966) for Alpert, p. 3 and pp. 10-11; and "Gossiping Guru, " "The Stoned Age, " p. 6. See January numbers for the idea of Avatar.

70. For a description of what happened during the "summer of love" see Nicholas von Hoffman, We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against (paperback ed., New York, 1969), and Helen Perry, The Human Be-In (London, 1970). Hoffman, while not unsympathetic, concentrates on Haight-Ashbury as a culture based on a drug-economy. It is an excellent antidote to the naive enthusiasm of Helen Perry, who does show what was expected of the hippie ethic and makes the interesting point that Haight-Ashbury to some extent acted as a sort of "automatic psychotherapy" for people out of control. Perry also compares the hippies to the New England Transcendentalists. The much-praised account by Joan Didion, "Slouching towards Bethlehem" in the book of the same title (London, 1969), is quite useful, but lacks perspective. The best sources are, of course, the Underground Press-Barb, Oracle, East Village Other, Fifth Estate -- and they should be compared with more jaundiced accounts like Didion's or Hoffman's. There is an anthology of the early underground press, heavily edited by Jesse Kornbluth, Notes from the New Underground (New York, 1968) in which see pp. 284-300 for the decline of Haight-Ashbury.

71. On Digger origins, see Barb (21 October 1966), p. 3; Perry, Human Be-In, pp. 52 ff.

72. See Barb article, note 115. ( have not been able to find a copy of the Digger Papers in which these manifestos were printed, but see notes immediately following.

73. "Diggers Do, " in Kornbluth, New Underground, pp. 209-10; Alex Foreman and F. P. Salstrom, "Revolution, Diggers' Style, " in Distant Drummer (3-10 October 1969), p. 4. For two manifestoes from the Digger Papers, see. Peter Stansill and David Z. Mairowitz, BAMN (London, 1971).

74. See Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium, pp. 287 ff.; for the earlier crisis of Renaissance and Reformation, see my earlier The Occult Underground.

75. Foreman and Salstrom, "Diggers' Style."

76. Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio (London, 1972), pp. 232 ff.

77. Modern Utopian, vol. II, no. 4; Barb, 2-14 April 1966.

78. William James Collins and David Lee Carson, "A Speed-Freak Mythology, " in Avatar (15 October - 4 November 1969), p. 9; Thelin, "The Community of the Tribe, " in Oracle (January 1967), p. 15; William Hedgepeth, The Alternative (New York and London, 1970).

79. For the Berkeley troubles, see Hal Draper, Berkeley, the New Student Revolution, (New York, 1965). 1848 saw the first "student government" in Vienna and at the same time an outbreak of mysticism and millennarianism (e.g., the movement of Ganneau in Paris, for which see The Occult Underground, pp. 304 ff.) See also pp. 245 ff. and pp. 308-9 for corresponding roles of Poland and Vietnam in idealistic revolutionary movements.

80. Ginsberg, in Barb (19 November 1965), p. 4; Oracle (5-15 November 1968); Barb (13 June 1967), p. 3; Jerry Rubin, Do It! (London, 1970), p. 56; Ed Denson in Barb, vol. IV, no. 3, p. 4.

81. EVO (1-15 October 1967).

82. For Hoffman's contact with Diggers, see Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (paperback ed., New York, 1970), pp. 37 ff.; Rubin, Do It!" p. 106, quote on p. 82.

83. Barb (4 February 1966), pp. 1, 7.

84. Ed Denson, "The Holy Barbarians, " in Barb (21 October 1967), p. 6; see Elfrida Rivers in EVO (30 April 1969) who replied to a correspondent that those who believed were "looking as damn silly as the original Millerites, " and also underground press for early April that year; "Transcendentalism Is In, " in Oz, 17 (London, 1969), p. 20.

85. Leary in EVO, vol. IV, no. 27, p. 18.

86. Rubin, Do It!, pp. 246-47; Hoffman, Revolution. pp. 5-6.

87. Snyder, "Buddhist Anarchism, " in Buddhist Oracle (November - December 1967); Ginsberg, "Consciousness and Culture, " in Joseph Berke (ed.) Counter-Culture (London, 1969), p. 178; Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (London, 1971), pp. 9, 51. It is odd that this influential -- and in any case remarkable -- book should have taken ten years to reach England. Hoffman, Revolution, p. 31. Another parallel between yippie-style revolutionaries and occultists is the insistence that in order to understand their speciality one must take part in it.

88. Hoffman, Revolution, p. 46. His debt to Artaud is quite explicit. See p. 105 ff. for application of Theatre of Cruelty principles to the Chicago demonstration; Hoffman, Woodstock Nation (New York, 1969), p. 153.

89. Translated by Richard Howard in Maurice Nadeau, Surrealism, p. 240.

90. Internationale Situationiste (July 1958), pp. 5-6. Facsimile of entire review reprinted Amsterdam, 1970; Stansill and Mairowitz, BAMN, p. 131. On Kommune I, see Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel in Berke, Counter-Culture, pp. 104 ff.; Simon Vinkenoog, "A Rap on the Highroad to Happiness, " in Berke, Counter-Culture. p. 153.

91. Internationale Situationiste (December 1958), pp. 4 ff., 31-32; no. 11 (October 1967), pp. 23 ff., "Nos buts et nos methodes dans le scandale de Strasbourg"; and "Strasbourg 1966" in Berke, Counter-Culture, pp. 197 ff.; Internationale Situationiste, September 1969, p. 26. Cf. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, French Revolution 1968 (London, 1968), and Stansill and Mairowitz, BAMN, pp. 131 ff., 109.

92. The theory, which I will not attempt to summarize, and which is -- for at least one persistent reader -- very difficult to understand, has been translated into English in the form of Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, 1970), and Raoul Vaneigem, The Totality for Kids (London, n.d.).

93. Breton, "Du Surrealisme en ses oeuvres vives" (1953), in Manifestes du surrealisme (Paris, 1962), p. 187, note 1. Guenon took over L'Initiation from the disciples of Papus; Vaneigem, Traite de savoir vivre (Paris, 1967). See chapter, "Le regne du quantitif, " pp. 88 ff. and Rene Guenon, The Reign of Quantity. The Situationists have a fondness for the theories of Fourier, who has always had a strong following in the illuminated underground. See The Occult Underground, pp. 343-44. Breton himself, towards the end of his life, became very concerned with Fourier. See Jean Gaulmier's edition of Breton's Ode a Charles Fourier (Paris, 1961). Vaneigem opposes the "universal harmony" of Fourier to the "perverted harmony" of present conditions (in The Totality, section 25). Marcuse applauds the new Fourierism in "The End of Utopia" in Five Lectures, (London, 1970), and the idea of "creative play" which was broached by John Hargrave is common to Situationists, Provos, and to stray mavericks like Richard Neville of Oz -- see his Playpower (London, 1971).

94. Wilhelm Reich, "About the History and Activities of our Institute, " in Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (March 1942).

95. Reich, "Experimental Orgone Therapy of Cancer, " in International Journal of Sex-Economy, vol. II, no. I, p. 88.

96. Reich, The Murder of Christ (Rugeley, Maine, 1953).

97. See Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1947).

98. Marcuse in "The End of Utopia, " p. 82.

99. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London, 1969), p. 37.

100. Marcuse, Liberation, p. 41.

101. William Leiss and others, "Marcuse as Teacher, " in The Critical Spirit (ed. K. H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., Boston, 1967).

102. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (London, 1970). See especially last chapter. Almost every commentator on Brown notices his mysticism. Marcuse himself has criticized this trait in "Love Mystified, " in Negations (London, 1968).

103. Ed Denson, "The Holy Rockers, " p. 6. The expression "total experience" may come from a mistranslation. Might "experience of totality" come nearer Jung's intention?

104. E. Graham Howe, The Open Way (London, 1939), and Cure or Heal (London, 1965), which has an interesting preface by Laing.

105. On this, see Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung (6th ed., London, 1967), p. 101.

106. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (paperback ed., London, 1970), pp. 83, 137; Laing, review of Reich, The Function of the Orgasm in New Society (28 March 1968), p. 465.

107. David Cooper, introduction to his edition of The Dialectics of Liberation (London, 1969) and in the same book, Laing, "The Obvious, " pp. 13 ff.

108. Leary, Politics, pp. 94-96. Cooper, "The Drug Movement, " in New Statesman (4 March 1966); Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (London, 1967), p. 33.

109. Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, pp. 17, 23; Cooper, "Poetic Justice, " in TLS (28 July 1967), p. 687; Laing, Politics, pp. 117-18.
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Re: The Occult Establishment, by James Webb

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Part 1 of 2

Chapter 8: A Grammar of Unreason

Rationalists and Irrationalists-The Private Worlds of Occultists and Illuminated Politicians- Writers and Readers of Fantastic Literature-The Nature of Imaginary Worlds-Their Connection with the Occult-Flying Saucers-The Search for Otherness and the Creative Imagination-Conclusion

WHAT is the reasoning which governs irrationalism, and what are the laws that hold in a country where no laws run?

The "irrationalists" discussed in this book range from the supporters of the most puerile and simplistic ideas to adherents of elaborate and potent philosophies. All will resent being lumped collectively with the others; and the first step toward more fully defining the nature of "unreason" is to justify this arrangement. On their varying levels, then, the reactions we have called "irrational" probably represent the responses of specific types of men in certain historical situations. Perhaps the irrationalist response is a possibility for all men. Yet it is probably more likely for some than for others. It is also obvious that personal crises may trigger off irrationalist reactions. But we have largely been concerned with collective irrationalism, and irrationalism on a collective scale implies a collective, historical cause. This has been broadly defined as anxiety caused both by the fear of change and the perception of change that has, in fact, taken place. The general type of historical situation favorable to the spread of unreason is clear.

Such a situation may occur in restricted areas over a short period of time; but it seems that collectively the West has experienced three large outbreaks of unreason. The first may be described as the "crisis of Zero AD" and denotes the period both before and after the birth of Christ when a wave of magical speculation overwhelmed the achievements of Greek rationalism. The second may be called "the Renaissance/Reformation crisis" and refers to the upsurge of the irrational when the medieval synthesis collapsed. The third crisis is that of the 19th and 20th centuries, which has been the subject of discussion and can be thought of either as a "crisis" in its own right or as a development of the crisis of Renaissance and Reformation. [1] It is quite probable that, since the Reformation, the "crisis of consciousness" that I have defined historically may have become a problem to be faced by every thinking human being. But the three general crises represent times when the pressures on the individual have become strong enough to precipitate a flight from reason on a massive scale.

It is much easier to define the historical situation than to define the "specific type of man" who is most liable under pressure to become an irrationalist.

The word reason, or rationalism, has been used throughout as a purely descriptive term and implies by itself no value judgment. Thus an "irrationalist" means someone who does not subscribe to a "rational" system of thought. The very fact that one of the primary concerns of this book has been to show that irrational systems obey internal logics should be enough to disabuse any inquirer who is inclined to see in the term "irrationalism" an equivalent to the words "lunatic" or "absurd." The word "irrationalism" and not "arationalism" has been used because a cardinal characteristic of the systems we have been discussing is active opposition to the rational, and in no sense are they neutral. What is this Reason they oppose?

To attempt to give the term too wide-ranging a significance would be foolish. It is very easy to argue that no such thing as "the age of Reason" ever existed, although to a considerable extent the label retains its use. Reason was the creed of the age which supplanted the late Renaissance, saw the beginnings of scientific thought, Realpolitik and the ethic of profit. If one must attach class labels to ideas -- and they are only useful in the most obvious sort of history -- one might say that theocracy had in several variants been the strategy of feudal and aristocratic regimes, sweet reason the song of the emergent bourgeoisie, and irrationalism an accompaniment of the "revolt of the masses." There are a thousand holes in this interpretation, but also a residuum of truth. Reason was the "ideology" of Western Europe from the later 17th to the later 19th centuries. Of course during this period of time there were countless "irrationalists" -- there may even have been many more numerically than the protagonists of reason. Yet it was this system that became extended, codified, and eventually made a dogma: the dogma of late Victorian materialism, which we have seen as to some extent an illusory construction, but which again bears some relationship to the facts. Against what was perhaps a caricature of Reason, the irrationalists revolted.

Rationalism is a method of thought supremely adapted to the tangible, material problems of existence. Where all irrational systems cede primacy to rational codes is in the business of daily life and the mechanisms of survival. I doubt whether any of the irrational systems can equip a man to survive the world more fully than the commonly accepted usage of the mind. This would be hotly denied by occultists, mystics, and some orthodoxly religious, who might go on to claim that the so-called "rational" systems are imperfect and incomplete, as they take account of man only as a biological organism or finite animal. There seems to be truth in the argument that "man cannot live by bread alone, " that he needs some security beyond the assurance of coping with the problems of physical survival. But these basic problems must first be solved by any creature on earth regardless of his celestial origins or aptitude for metaphysics. It is not much good being proficient in Cabalistic exercises or Pyramidology if one's body is wasting away from plague, hunger, or cold. The irrationalist obviously does not entirely reject the logic of survival -- there is a case for regarding some instances of collective irrationalism as automatic self-preservation -- but he does frequently abandon the implications of that process of thought best adapted to ensure his physical well-being in favor of other ways of relating to what appear significant data.

The type of person who has become an irrationalist during the past hundred years has rejected the dominant mode of thought of over a century ago, and with it some potentialities for material success. It is exactly in the area of material problems in which the greatest possible measure of understanding is possible between men. It might be said that there is a "universe of agreed discourse" within which human beings communicate, and outside this the myriad private universes of each human being. At its most basic -- and most common-level, the agreed discourse is merely that which the human animal has evolved for the production of food, shelter, and the propagation of his species, together with the means of maintaining a limited cooperation without which none of these activities could develop. To this might be added the shared experience of operating a human organism. The various private universes belonging to individuals comprise the patterns of thought and modes of being of single creatures, and these universes can be communicated to other individuals only to the degree in which their own private worlds correspond to the first. By rejecting the most certain possibilities of shared experience the irrationalist departs from the universe of agreed discourse and lodges himself within a private world.

On the one hand, then, there is the communally accepted world obeying the ethics of survival, in which the rationalist approach is very effective. On the other, there are the private universes of each human being, for the ordering of which is necessary only a system of thought corresponding to the values on which its user places a premium. It often happens that a number of private universes are found to coincide sufficiently to enable an extended definition of reality -- supplementary to the limited universe of material needs -- to be adopted by a group of individuals. Thus, there arises a mutually accepted alternative reality or private universe, whose participants derive support from mutual affirmation of its standards. Occasionally such subsidiary realities attract so large a following that their enthusiasts begin to hold their interpretation of life as the only possible vision and seek to impose their version of "agreed discourse" on top of the basic language of human communication. The argument can be applied to the most orthodox communities of opinion, although if the "private universe" is that subscribed to by, say, the Union of Small Shopkeepers, the distinction is scarcely useful, as it merely states the obvious. But the idea of the development of private universes, secessionist realities, does show what irrationalists of different kinds have in common. The illuminated politician persuades his supporters to participate in a vision of reality that is not simply that of the lowest common denominator. The occultist or mystic opts out of the bothersome business of material reality and constructs his own. He may do this according to a system already in existence -- in which case he will share the "private universe" of others of his persuasion -- or he may be content to remain in his own personal version of reality. The rationalist may talk of "madness" or "eccentricity." When faced with a shared interpretation of life with which he cannot come to terms he refers to "shared delusions" or "mass psychosis."

This theory of "private realities" is not put forward as either original or universally applicable. It is merely an aid to description; and in its terms the illuminated politicians and the occultists can be seen to have something in common other than a specific concern with esoteric doctrine or rejected knowledge.

Dr. Wolfgang Treher has gone much further in his study, Hitler, Steiner, Schreber. He has made a detailed and convincing comparison of the private worlds of Rudolf Steiner and Adolf Hitler. Treher considers both Hitler and Steiner to have been schizophrenic, and in comparable ways. He has suggested dates for the beginning of the illness suffered by each and compared the private universes occupied by Hitler and Steiner with a personal account of a schizophrenic world written by the lawyer and politician Daniel Paul Schreber. [2] We also possess valuable information from the psychiatric examination of an illuminated politician who was also an occultist: Rudolf Hess. The first description of Hess after his flight to Britain mentioned "a paranoid attitude towards his present surroundings only partly accounted for by reality." His examiner noted "the general impression of having his mind fixed on some far-away inner topics which was apt to produce a sense of withdrawnness and lack of contact with reality, except in certain narrow segments of experience in which his inner world and his outer interests fused." [3] Both in a comparison of Hitler with Steiner and in a study of Hess, psychiatrists have thus come to the conclusion -- not very startling, after all -- that all three were divorced from ordinary reality: perhaps "schizophrenic." It is, therefore, significant that Aleister Crowley himself saw similarities between his own gospel of Thelema and Hitler's projected new order.

There are two versions of a story, which was believed by Crowley and some of his followers, about Hitler's reliance on Crowleyan principles. One is impossible, and the other extremely unlikely. They both center on Marthe KUnzel of Leipzig (head of the German branches of the O.T.O and Crowley's Astrum Argentinum), who was told by Crowley in 1925 that the country which first adopted Crowley's Book of the Law as its official text would become the leading nation of the world. The two versions of the story state either that Marthe Kunzel was a friend of Rudolf Hess, whom she interested in The Book of the Law when he and Hitler were imprisoned in Landsberg; or that "about 1926 or 1927" she became convinced that Hitler was "her magical child" and somehow managed to present him with a copy of Crowley's publication. [4] The idea that Hess was a friend of Marthe Kunzel is not in itself far-fetched, and it would have been perfectly possible for her to visit Hess in the Landsberg jail. However, the term of imprisonment served by the Nazi leaders ended in December 1924; and although an earlier date for her obsession is not ruled out, the legend does seem to associate the supposed attempt to pass The Book of the Law to Hitler with Crowley's pronouncement to his disciple in 1925. There is no real trace that Hitler had ever heard of Crowley's Law of Thelema. The whole story is rendered even more improbable by a letter from Marthe Kunzel to Crowley, in which she tells him of her political awakening: this was caused by observing how closely Hitler's thoughts followed Crowley's principles, and there is not a word about her responsibility for this coincidence. [5]

Some time between 1942 and 1944, Crowley annotated his copy of Rauschning's Hitler Speaks. noting correspondences between the ideas of Hitler as recorded by Rauschning and his own Book of the Law. Like all supposedly "prophetic" writings, The Book of the Law requires much interpretation, although Crowley himself was, at any rate, fairly clear as to what it meant. A cardinal point is his famous "Law of Thelema, " "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." [6] In much of Hitler's amorality the magician found resemblances to his own creed. From the fact that Crowley could -- evidently in all seriousness -- point to numerous connections between his own enigmatic proclamations and the ranting of Hitler, two main points can be deduced. First, the eldritch reality occupied by Hitler held attractions for Crowley, the occupant of an equally strange universe. Secondly, although it is in the highest degree unlikely that Marthe Kunzel came anywhere near influencing Hitler, there were, in fact, certain similarities between the two visions of reality.

Crowley marked for attention all the passages where Hitler is reported by Rauschning to have referred to a new world-order or the collapse of the old system of values. These are general apocalyptic expectations with which both might indeed well have agreed. But Crowley, of course, saw correspondences everywhere. When Rauschning recorded Hitler's confession of manipulating mass fanaticism, Crowley commented: "This policy was surely implied by Aiwas in the Book, with its slogans, its feasts and its freedoms. All we need is shouter No. 1." The "correspondences" he noted are naturally often quite impossible -- on one occasion, when Rauschning wrote of the Rohm purge that "Hitler bided his time, then struck like lightning, " Crowley juxtaposed verse nine of Book Three of the Book of the Law: "Work! withdraw! Upon them!" (Actually, the original reads, "Lurk, withdraw .... ") On page after page Crowley took Hitler's side against Rauschning, acclaiming the magnetism of the Leader's presence and the rumors that Hitler had a room decorated with "obscene nudes." To Hitler's declaration that it was time to "protect the strong against the weak, " Aleister Crowley added an enthusiastic "Yes!" [7] Although, by the end of his reading, Crowley had decided that Hitler had probably become a "Black Brother, " he persisted in fostering the legend that the similarities of which he was convinced had been inspired by Marthe Kunze] and his own sacred text.

We have seen enough examples of the attraction that occultism proper has for a certain sort of politician not to be surprised that Crowley thought that he and Hitler had much in common. The two men inhabited different realities; but these were equally opposed to that of the Rationalist Establishment and shared a small number of assumptions. Of course, Crowley's megalomania led him to exaggerate the similarities out of all proportion; and the differences are at least as significant. Whatever the opinion of the world about Crowley, he did have considerable personal gifts and some creative ability. This could hardly be said of Hitler. If we class them both as "irrationalists, " we must also remember that many geniuses who could never be described as anything but "men of good will" have also inhabited private universes divorced from the consensus of humanity. But almost all the irrationalists have been concerned with initiating change of some kind. A further examination of the areas from which they derive their inspiration shows interesting pointers to the motives of those who desert the reality of Reason for the more exotic pastures of their private worlds. The solution seems to lie in a question of the imagination. And if it seems odd to jump abruptly to a consideration of fantasy and science fiction, it should be remembered that this type of literature is, above all others, concerned with the imagination and the creation of other realities. It can also be shown to have substantial connections with the occult, and with illuminated politics.

There is a consistent link between people interested in the occult and readers of science fiction. Both the occult and fantastic literature can be said to provide an escape from the universe of reason and limited possibilities into realities which are bounded only by the imagination.

Historically, the coincidence of the literature of other worlds and the occult is as marked as it is in individuals. The 18th-century Romantics combined an interest in occultism with the cultivation of the Gothic novel, whose supernatural horrors were related to the Freemasonic "Rosicrucianism" of William Godwin and influenced Francis Barrett's compilation of magical lore, The Magus(1801). The occult revival of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is inseparable from the rapid increase in literature dealing with ghosts, the fantastic, and the supernatural; and it is easy to link the growth of this fashion -- extraordinarily influential in England and America -- with the mounting crisis of consciousness. Thus, one authority (writing in 1917) noticed the "marked" influence of Spiritualism and psychical research on literature and observed that this was connected with the growth of a literature of miracles dealing with the First World War. In the reaction against Reason during the first half of the 20th century, the literature of Europe sought to return to archetypes in the novels of Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka, while English writers leaned heavily on a taste for the miraculous. This latter development was brilliantly analyzed by Antal Szerb in a largely forgotten book, The Search for Wonder (1938), in which he related even such relatively "established" authors as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Eric Linklater, and the Powys brothers to the more explicitly fantastic writers, such as James Branch Cabell. He saw the development as the culmination of the process that had begun with the Symbolist revolt against naturalism and as part of the search of European man for an indefinable freedom or liberation -- "Whoever first names this freedom, whoever expresses what we all wish for and desire, will be the Messiah of the. century." [8] It is, therefore, possible to relate the wave of fantastic literature to the historical situation that produced the occult revival.

The subject matter of fantastic literature relies on the staples of ghosts, magic, diabolism, and the supernatural: such preoccupations might be said to define the category. The reason for this is simply that such literature has very largely been written by occultists, or at least by those attracted to the occult. Thus in the middle of the last century Eliphas Levi's friend Alphonse Esquiros concocted a fantastic novel called The Magician (1838), while in England Bulwer Lytton expressed a form of "Rosicrucianism, " particularly in his novel Zanoni (1842). The French magus Josephin Peladan wrote a long series of esoteric novels. Arthur Machen belonged very briefly to the Golden Dawn, was a friend of the mystic A. E. Waite, and himself underwent mystical experiences.9 Even where occult connections are least expected, they can be found in writers of fantasy at all periods. One of the reasons is undoubtedly the usefulness of the parable or fable form as a teaching story. Two examples among the heroes of the modern cult of the fantastic will be enough to show the ways in which esoteric symbolism is incorporated in fantasy: E. R. Eddison and Hope Mirrlees.

Eddison (1882-1945) was a distinguished British civil servant who wrote an early fantasy, The Worm Ourobouros (1921) before retiring in 1937 to devote himself to literature. He produced an unfinished trilogy set in the imaginary land of Zimiamvia and composed of Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The M ezentian Gate (1958). In Eddison there is no occultism as such, but much occult philosophy. Thus, The Worm Ourobouros celebrates the theory of "eternal recurrence" elaborated by Nietzsche and given further fictional expression by P. D. Ouspensky's novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1947). The Zimiamvian trilogy is a festival of metaphysics, not only in the philosophy of the learned Dr. Vandermast, but in the very construction of the work. All or most of the chief characters in the land of Zimiamvia are incarnations or aspects of Zeus and Aphrodite, evil or capricious as well as benevolent. Within this framework the hero Lessingham -- himself an aspect of Zeus -- experiences "Days and Nights of Zimiamvia" -- a concept taken from the Hindu "Days and Nights of Brahma" and signifying the illusory experiences of the god Brahma entrapped in maya. Eddison's philosophy is a form of Neo-Platonism. Its author is convinced that the world is illusion and a game. In fact, in A Fish Dinner in Memison the world in which we ordinarily live is shown as created by the Zimiamvian deities over the supper table for motives rather like those of Peter Pan when he thought that "to die would be an awfully big adventure." [10]

Hope Mirrlees is a minor author in the fantastic canon, and her only "pure" fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), was reissued in 1970. Lud-in-the-Mist deals with a crisis in the life of the sleepy, prosperous town of the title. Its inhabitants are concerned to deny the existence of Fairyland, which borders their country and has obscure connections with a previous regime of a magical nature. The crisis results from the eating of "fairy-fruit" by children of the town, and in the ensuing story the humdrum materialist inhabitants of Lud-in-the-Mist are brought to recognize the existence of the irrational. There are frequent suggestions of an esoteric symbolism, which is made explicit at the close of the book in a chapter called "The Initiate." Hope Mirrlees published two other novels and was associated with the Bloomsbury group. She was a close friend of Jane Harrison (1850-1928), a vitalist student of mythology influenced by the revival of Bachofen and whose book Themis had a wide circulation in illuminated circles like those of the Kibbo Kift. [11] Late in life Jane Harrison became associated with Prince Mirsky and the Russian emigration, as did Hope Mirrlees; acknowledgments made by the latter in a biography published in 1962 may indicate a conversion to Christianity. [12] This provides yet another example of the constant relationship of illuminate with illuminate.

While the novels of Crowley or Peladan might reasonably be expected to contain occult symbolism and while it is comparatively easy to detect esoteric symbols if the language is known, it is perhaps not so obvious that many occult texts are very similar to outright fantasies. The sort of pseudohistory that Madame Blavatsky took over from Fabre d'Olivet and incorporated in The Secret Doctrine has had both occult and fantastic descendents. On the one hand, Rudolf Steiner turned his clairvoyant perception on the lost continent of Atlantis and -- in a spiritual science fiction quite devoid of literary style -- somehow found it relevant to his occult history to describe Atlantean airships. On the other Robert E. Howard (1906-36), an early writer for the science fiction pulp magazines, produced an endless series of stories set in the period between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginnings of recorded history. He called it "the Hyborean age, " in an obvious reference to another of H. P. Blavatsky's lost continents, which had originally been called the "Hyperborean" land. The epidemic of Atlantis fiction in Germany was paralleled in the English-speaking world, although in England Atlantis had naturally no political importance. Sprague de Camp, an authoritative historian of science fiction, has observed that the Mars created by Edgar Rice Burroughs is very like the Atlantis described by H.P.B. and Walter Scott-Elliot, although he thinks it unlikely that Burroughs had read any Theosophical works. [13]

Whereas in fantastic literature the reader knows that he is dealing with fiction, in occult texts the disciple is given to understand that he is confronted by reality. The borderline between fiction and fact often becomes exceedingly blurred for the occultist; and it is no coincidence that just as occultism has inspired fantasy, works of fantasy have themselves inspired esoteric cults. It is possible that Madame Blavatsky -- who certainly became overwhelmed by reading Fenimore Cooper -- also derived some of her inspiration from the novels of Bulwer Lytton. In 1894 Frederick Spencer Oliver published a novel called A Dweller on Two Planets, which gave rise to a crop of legends that peopled Mount Shasta in California with a horde of Lemurian magicians. From this source came some of the inspiration for G. W. Ballard's 1 AM cult, which flourished during the 1930s and still has devotees. Most recently of all has appeared a book called The Necronomicon based on the forged Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy of pseudo -- Agrippa. It has apparently found some favor with occultists. [14] But, as every afficionado of science fiction and fantasy is aware, the Necronomicon was invented by the sepulchral imagination of the horror-story writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and it has its existence entirely in his pages. The occult world must await with anticipation the appearance of Lovecraft's other imaginary masterpiece, the prehuman Pnakotic Fragments.

The beginnings of the modern American science fiction movement once more confirm the impression that "dabblers in other realities" represent specific types in a specific historical situation. We observe a situation of anxiety, occult connections, and a blurring of distinction between different orders of reality. The crisis that really introduced science fiction to the American public has a specific time and date: 8:00 - 9:00 PM. on the 30th of October, 1938. During this hour Orson Welles made his famous broadcast of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. This caused panic in the Eastern states in America. Among those who actually believed that the earth had been invaded, . there was damage to property and limbs; in Harlem there was praying in the streets, and many guardian angels were seen. Some people refused to believe in Martians but reported sighting Zeppelins. Patrick Moore records two other examples of "science fictional" rumor started by broadcasts -- both post-Second World War -- in the U.S.A. One dealt with the end of the world, another with the moon falling on tht: earthlS (and it sounds as if it were Horbiger-inspired*). At the time of the Welles broadcast, four specialist science fiction magazines were established, and a fifth was starting. Within the next eight months, seven more were launched. The war caused an inevitable retrenchment, but the unstable conditions of the postwar period sent the number of magazines up once more to over twenty. [16]

The amazing effect of the Welles broadcast has been linked to fear of an approaching war, and it seems reasonable to connect the rise in the popularity of science fiction with similar cause. It was after 1945, in the tension of the Cold War and the period of the McCarthyite campaign, that science fiction established itself as a permanent feature of the literary landscape. Science fiction writers themselves often attribute this rise in popularity to consciousness of the atomic bomb. The results of opinion polls on the public attitude to the bomb suggest that they may have been right. For example, an article published in 1953 concluded that the Bomb had "strikingly little place in the conscious life of the American people" but admitted that there was much "illogical and unstable thinking" among those questioned. In one survey half the people who claimed not to be worried about the Bomb indicated that covertly they did in fact consider it a grave threat. [17] Such a reservoir of repressed fears was bound to result in unusual manifestations, and it is not unreasonable to assume that the science fiction boom was one of these. As to the readership, surveys have shown a definite bias toward scientists and technologists (opinions here vary). [18] Although, in the nature of things, there is no statistical evidence, it seems clear that science fiction has formed the natural stamping ground for those pseudoscientists who would earlier have been respected members of the occult underworld, and that certain perennial occult beliefs have taken shape -- sometimes posing as literature, sometimes not even supposed to be fictional -- in the world of science fiction. In other words, American anxiety during the 1950s resulted in the grouping of irrationalists around a literary movement devoted explicitly to other worlds. This is not to say that "science fiction is the occult transformed." It is to say that science fiction -- particularly in the 1950s -- contained substantial occultist elements.

First, consider the question of the content of modern science fiction and esoteric doctrines. The original term, "scientifiction" was coined by the inventor Hugo Gernsback for the scientific fantasies which he published in his technical journals from 1911 onward. The difference between science fiction and fantasy was once much debated, although the distinction is clear. If the hero travels from London to Bogota by magical means it is fantasy, but if he uses a matter -- transmitter it is science fiction. We have already seen how fantastic literature often contains esoteric references, and mechanized fantasy can be no less subtle. Thus, Daniel Galouye's Dark Universe (1962), takes place in a world after the Big Bang, where survivors who have taken refuge below the ground act out the different parts of Plato's myth of the Cave. Of the countless superman stories, most, like A. E. van Vogt's Slan (1953), appear to be pure entertainment with no ulterior motive. Yet van Vogt himself has been very much part of the underworld of rejected knowledge, and from certain authors any story of "men like gods" must be suspect. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), dramatizes the Teilhardian idea of humanity reaching "Point Omega" and evolving out of the human condition and into "the Overmind." Robert Heinlein's Gnostic book Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), has as its hero that familiar creature the barbarian appalled by "civilization" -- yet as the visiting Martian deploys his energies on raddled earth the message is not just "change the world, " but "thou art God." There are also an increasing number of symbolist, semioccult, neo-Jungian concoctions, whose meanings are based on the construction of mood and are essentially indescribable. What, for example, can be said of the extraordinary Fourth Mansions (1969) of R. A. Lafferty, except that it combines a title and texts from Saint Teresa of Avila with magic, telepathy, occultism, the hidden hand in history, and a secret plan of the Almighty?

These authors and their stories are -- with the exception of A. E. van Vogt -- separated by a considerable distance from the bedrock of early science fiction. The earlier builders of other realities were less metaphysical. Yet even van Vogt -- whose stories are "basic pulp magazine" science fiction, falling over themselves to provide a shock for every installment -- has attempted to incorporate unorthodox theories in his work. Van Vogt has written a series of novels about The World of Null-A-the book of that title was first published in 1948 -- in order to dramatize the ideas of Count Alfred Korzybsky's General Semantics. Null-A is the world of 2560, when the Institute of General Semantics has reorganized human thought processes on its "non-Aristotelian" principles. According to van Vogt, the book did much to publicize Korzybsky's school of thought. [19] As for General Semantics itself, it can, in one aspect, be seen as yet another quest for breaking through a wrong perception of the world and attaining perfect health and sanity. Korzybsky believed that correct practice of his system of psycho-philosophy would result in the improved bodily and mental health of the student. Van Vogt seems still to be interested in General Semantics, although for a time he switched his allegiance to Scientology.

Another science fiction figure who was at one time involved in Scientology is John W. Campbell, who became editor of Astounding Stories in 1937. At first, Campbell's interest in the unorthodox concentrated on the pseudosciences. In the period after the war these became particularly prevalent as -- according to one medical writer -- "on to the market had poured a vast quantity of surplus electrical equipment, easy to get and cheap for fashioning into awesome contrivances." Campbell's personal attempt at fashioning one of these miraculous contraptions was to construct a "Hieronymus machine" -- the celebrated "black box" of "psionics" -- which he demonstrated to the New York Science Fiction Convention in 1956. The machine is supposed to be based on a combination of electronics and extrasensory perception and is used for diagnostic and healing purposes.

Between 1960 and 1962 Campbell carried on a campaign on behalf of an invention for converting rotary motion into unidirectional motion, which was called "the Dean device." Of the inventor (Norman L. Dean, a successful businessman) Campbell wrote -- in a manner that smacks of the terminology of General Semantics -- that "being an amateur, he does not have any appreciable emotional investment in the validity of Newton's Laws; he had no block against challenging them." The National Aeronautics and Space Administration refused to test the device. But Campbell claimed that "some engineering companies" had taken up Dean on his recommendation and found that his invention worked. Eventually, a laboratory under official contract was persuaded to undertake the test. The Dean device refused to perform. Campbell was forced to make a grudging climb-down, claiming that the main point of his campaign was that, whether or not Dean was preposterous, he should have been given the chance to show what he could do. In fact, Campbell had originally had wistful ideas that Dean's invention might have been used as an all-American space drive. "It would have been nice if in response to Sputnik I, the United States had been able to release full photographic evidence of Mars Base I." [20]
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