Strange Powers

  As to the 'occult boom', it seems to have started with a curious work called The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, published in Paris in 1960. This also became a best seller. And this in itself was a baffling phenomenon. There had always been offbeat best-sellers, like The Search for Bridey Murphy, Worlds in Collision, The Passover Plot (suggesting that the Resurrection was basically a put-up job); but they confined themselves to one particular theory. The Morning of the Magicians (translated in English as The Dawn of Magic) had no central thesis. It moves from Gurdjieff to alchemy to the Great Pyramid to Atlantis to the question of whether Hitler was mixed up in black magic, and there are sections on Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Charles Fort. The English edition is a few pages longer than the American; the pages that have been cut out of the US edition describe an experiment in telepathy conducted between the atomic submarine Nautilus and the Westinghouse Special Research Center; presumably they were dropped because it was impossible to obtain the necessary confirmation from Westinghouse or the US Navy. Which raises the question of how many other items in the book might be equally difficult to confirm... A fascinating book, certainly, but one that would enrage any logical positivist because its authors seem to have an attitude of blissful indifference towards questions of proof and verification. Although the English and American editions have had nothing like the success of the French, they certainly played an important part in the 'occult revival' that now proceeded to snowball. Small presses that had specialized in occult books for a limited audience suddenly found they were making unprecedented sums of money. Copies of works like John Symonds' biography of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast—first published in 1951 by Rider, England's foremost 'occult press'—and Israel Regardie's four-volume work on the rituals of the Golden Dawn, changed hands at fantastic prices. Witch covens sprang up all over the place—until 1951 they had been illegal in England—encouraged by a book called Witchcraft Today by Gerald Gardner, in which it was claimed that witchcraft—the ancient pagan nature religion of 'Wicca'—still flourished more widely than anyone had supposed. Whether it really did, or whether it was Gardner's book that caused it to flourish, is perhaps beside the point. In the late sixties, a seven-volume encyclopaedia of occultism, Man, Myth and Magic, published in weekly parts, achieved the kind of success that had previously been achieved only by cookery books and works like Wells's Outline of History. The works of every neglected Kabbalist, from Paracelsus to Crowley, began to find their way back into print.

  Now Wells would have said that the 'occult boom' indicates nothing except that people are stupid and gullible, and there is obviously some truth in this view. But I believe it is far more than that. It is all part of what might be called 'the new romanticism'. The 'old romanticism' dates back just about two centuries before the occult revival; it may be said to have started with Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise in 1760; and Rousseau's book is basically a plea for freedom: that a man and woman who are in love have a right to become lovers without the approval of society. And all romanticism has continued to be an obsession with freedom: the feeling that freedom can be found if you go and look for it. It runs from Byron's Childe Harold to Hesse's Siddhartha and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The interesting thing about this new incarnation of the spirit of romanticism is that it came so late. The old romanticism may be said to have died out in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the fin de siècle; its last avatars were Rimbaud, Verlaine, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and those other poets of what Yeats called 'the tragic generation'. After that, there was a reaction: back to realism, classicism, social responsibility. From the twilight sadness of Verlaine and Dowson, there was a plunge into a savage pessimism of the 1920s—Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Huxley, Joyce. The writers of the thirties rallied, pulling themselves back from the brink; they wrote about dole queues, the war in Spain, social responsibility. Then came the war; and after it, a sense of hiatus. Nobody seemed to know where to go next. The American sociologist David Riesman wrote an essay called 'The Found Generation' about the new generation of students; it seemed that they were no longer full of political idealism, like Riesman's generation of the thirties; all they wanted was a good job, a suburban house and a car.

  When I wrote The Outsider in 1955, it seemed to me that I was swimming in direct opposition to the current of the times. Nobody was interested in Nietzsche and Hesse and Nijinsky. Yet Kerouac's On the Road had, in fact, been written three years earlier and when it finally appeared, in 1957, it was clear that America also had its generation of dissatisfied romantics who thought that freedom lay just around the corner—in San Francisco, or New Mexico, or perhaps in Death Valley, where Charles Manson's 'family' were arrested in 1969. Within ten years, the new romanticism had transformed the face of society in Europe and America; the students were marching and protesting again, and the 'Beatniks' (the name was coined by a San Francisco columnist) outnumbered holiday makers in seaside resorts. Psychedelic drugs and marijuana also played their part in the revolution. In 1953, Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception had advocated the use of mescaline to produce 'expanded consciousness', but it was another ten years before mescaline and LSD became as common as marijuana. An Englishman who settled in America, Alan Watts, became the prophet of this new generation of 'mescaline eaters'; his doctrine asserts basically that western man has become too aggressive towards nature; he must learn to stop 'running', to become passive and receptive. Dr John Lilly's important book The Center of the Cyclone also advocates the controlled use of psychedelic drugs for 'inner exploration', and goes into considerable detail about the techniques for this 'journey to the interior'. Carlos Castaneda's three books about his 'magical apprenticeship' to the Yacqui Indian medicine man, don Juan, have all achieved the status of best sellers; but, on close examination, it is difficult to see why. Walter Goldschmidt, who introduces the first (The Teachings of Don Juan) begins by admitting that it is partly allegory, and Castaneda's accounts of his meeting with the peyotl god Mescalito, and of his flight through the air when he rubs himself with a special ointment, sound like exercises in imaginative fiction. Castaneda's books are best-sellers because they express the aspirations of the new romanticism so clearly: the desire to escape to 'other worlds', the suggestion that drugs are a valid means to this end, the serious tone of the discussions about expanded consciousness. But unlike the popular classics of old romanticism—Goethe's Werther, Schiller's Robbers, the don Juan books make a claim to be fact, not fiction; and this is most important of all. As 'imaginary conversations with don Juan', their appeal would have been much smaller. The desire to escape has become more serious, more urgent, than it was in the nineteenth century; it hungers for fact.

  The association between Hippie culture and occultism can be seen at Glastonbury, a town whose small population (just over four thousand) is almost outnumbered by the influx of Hippies during the summer months. The man largely responsible for this is a shy, rather aloof scholar named John Michell. Michell's book The View Over Atlantis appeared in 1969; in it, he discusses the theories of Alfred Watkins, a Hereford businessman, first expounded in The Old Straight Track (1925). Watkins had noticed many straight tracks associated with prehistoric mounds (or lumps), marked at intervals with large stones; he assumed that these were the roads of prehistoric man. John Michell's first book had dealt with 'flying saucers', and he observed that UFOs are often associated with spots where leys intersect—like Cradle Hill, at Warminster. In The View Over Atlantis, he suggests that these leys were 'lines of power' analogous to the Chinese 'dragon paths', lines associated with the power called fung-shui, the ancient energies of the earth. Certain leys link up St Michael's Mount in Cornwall with Glastonbury Tot and Stonehenge; all Britain is intersected with these paths, which were associated with some ancient civilization that was of a far higher order than anyone has so far guessed. (This is his 'Atlantis'.) In a subsequent book, City of Revelation, Michell expands this theory that the Golden Age is more than a legend; that it really exis
ted at some remote epoch, and that information about it is concealed in coded form, in many ancient buildings, including Stonehenge. Two central conclusions emerge from all this. One is that, during this remote epoch, man was in spiritual harmony with nature, in the way that native magicians and shamans (like don Juan) still are; the other, that man owed his knowledge, in this remote epoch, to extra-terrestrial beings. (This is an idea that seems to be in the air of our time; Arthur C. Clarke gave it popular currency in his film script for 2001, A Space Odyssey, in which beings from outer space land on earth, and leave behind a monolith whose vibrations have the effect of heightening the intelligence of man's remote ancestors.)

  In the fifties, Michell's books would have been classified with 'the lunatic fringe' (as Watkins' book was), and would have reached the tiny audience who study the measurements of the Great Pyramid and the mediaeval cathedrals. It is an interesting sign of our time that they should have inspired the Hippie invasion of Glastonbury. It seems unlikely that his basic ideas can have wide appeal; the form in which he presents them is too abstruse, often mathematical. But what certainly does appeal is this romantic idea of lines of power connecting spots like Stonehenge, Woodhenge, Salisbury Cathedral, Maiden Castle, and so on. The imaginative appeal of Michell's work is related to that of Lovecraft and Tolkien; but again, like Castaneda, he has the advantage of presenting his work as fact, or, at least, serious speculation.

  The occult boom shows no sign of letting up. If history runs true to form, it should continue until about the turn of the century. For there have been magical revivals in almost every century for the past five hundred years. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, there was John Dee and a host of other practising magicians and alchemists. It skipped a century—the intellectual atmosphere of the age of Newton, Leibniz and Descartes was not conducive to magic—but the late eighteenth century was the age of Mesmer, St Germain, Cagliostro, and the late nineteenth century was the age of Madame Blavatsky, Eliphas Lévi, the Golden Dawn. In terms of the number of people actually affected, the latest revival is the greatest of all. For example, it is a curious fact that the best-selling author in the whole world at the moment is Erich von Däniken, a German whose Chariots of the Gods?—Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, appeared in 1969 and became a bestseller; since then, Return to the Stars and Gold of the Gods have broken all records. I say it is a curious fact because von Däniken's books say nothing that has not already been said many times by various writers. His basic thesis is the one we have already mentioned: that in some remote age, 'gods' from flying saucers landed on the earth, and helped create a highly evolved civilization, whose ruins can still be seen in the jungles of South America, on Easter Island, etc. His theses are fascinating, if not new; but the manner in which he states them is, to put it mildly, highly unsatisfactory. He gives the impression of being unable to stick to a point, rambling wildly so that it is difficult to follow the argument. There is an element of boastfulness which unsympathetic critics have interpreted as paranoia. (Chariots of the Gods? begins, typically: 'It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it,' both statements being patently untrue.) The style is often infantile, full of jibes and jeers at his critics; speaking of a gold hemisphere with a circular brim: 'To anticipate fatuous objections, it is not a sculptural representation of a hat with a brim. Hats have hollow spaces for even the most stupid heads to fit into.' And in places, he displays a lack of logic that amounts almost to imbecility. Describing a skeleton carved out of stone which he located in an underground chamber, he says: 'I counted ten pairs of ribs, all anatomically accurate. Were there anatomists who dissected bodies for the prehistoric sculptor? As we know, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen did not discover the new kind of rays he called X-rays until 1895!' The mind boggles at the mad illogicality: the idea that a sculptor would need X-rays to see a skeleton, when every graveyard must have been full of them. It is equally puzzling how his publishers allowed him to put such an absurdity into print.

  At the beginning of Gold of the Gods, he claims to have investigated a system of underground tunnels in South America, 'thousands of miles in length', containing the ruins of the ancient civilization for which the astronaut 'gods' were responsible. He even offers a map of the area in which the 'secret entrance' is located, but since the area covered by the map is a few thousand square miles, it cannot be regarded as conclusive evidence of his good faith. Obviously, if von Däniken leads investigators to his tunnel system, he will achieve a celebrity that will outshine that of his best-selling books, and will confound all his critics. But at the moment, it must be admitted that the chaotic nature of his books does support the view that he is a charlatan and a crank.

  But again I must emphasize: it is the presentation of the books that suggests this, not their subject matter. Ever since UFO sightings began, soon after the Second World War, many people have pointed out that ancient texts—including the Bible—refer to objects that sound like UFOs, that ancient drawings and carvings often show disc-like objects that could be flying saucers, and odd-looking men who could be astronauts in flying kit. It is an unproved hypothesis; but to give it serious consideration is not necessarily the sign of a crank.

  I was asked if I would care to write a book on the occult in 1968. It sounded an amusing idea. Ever since those early days in London, I had been interested in the subject, although I tended to treat it as light reading. When I was in America, on a lecture tour, in 1961, I bought paperbacks about flying saucers and allied topics at every airport bookstall, and I also purchased most of the books on occult topics issued by University Books in New York: Montague Summers on witches, werewolves and vampires, reprints of the books of A. E. Waite on the Rosicrucians, the Kabbalah, and so on. Moreover, since an experience with mescaline in 1963, I had developed my own theory of man's 'unused powers'. I had disliked the mescaline experience. There were none of the usual visual effects; everything looked much as usual; it was rather like being drunk, but with less control. For some odd reason, I had a strong intuition that the district in which I live—in south Cornwall—was once associated with witchcraft. I have never tried to verify this; my wife can find nothing about it in books of local history. What interested me was that my mind seemed more intuitive, more telepathic, as it were. I recalled that Jim Corbett, the famous tiger hunter, said that after years of hunting man eaters, he had developed a sort of sixth sense about danger, which he called 'jungle sensitivity'. I could understand this. The mind has sensitive areas, rather like the nerves in a fish's sides, that register delicate pressures. Most animals seem to possess this 'sixth sense'—in The Occult I cited many cases; of the homing instinct in birds and animals, of 'foreknowledge' in dogs—for example, how Hugh McDiarmid's dog knows when he is going to return home from a long journey, and sits at the end of the lane a couple of days before he is due back, waiting. Man must also have possessed this same 'psychic sensitivity' in the distant past. But he doesn't need it in modern civilized life; in fact, it would be a nuisance. My mescaline experience may have made me more sensitive, more intuitive; but it also ruined my normal powers of concentration. In order to tackle the complex business of civilized living, we must narrow our powers, concentrate on what has to be done. Intense will-drive and this telepathic intuition are incompatible. Neither would it be accurate to say that city life destroys the sixth sense; we destroy it in ourselves.

  However, that is not the end of the matter. These powers have only gone into cold storage; they can be brought out again if needed—for example, if, like Jim Corbett, we return to circumstances where they become necessary for survival. But there is another possibility. They may return as a kind of by-product of another kind of power, a power that man is only now slowly learning to develop. A dog may be able to sense ghosts in an empty house. But no animal could experience the kind of excitement Heinrich Schliemann felt as he uncovered the walls of ancient Troy, or Howard Carter as he entered the chamber containing the coffin of Tutankhamen. This excitement is based o
n what we might call 'a direct sense of otherness', of other times and other places. It could be objected that this sense of other-ness is 'nothing but imagination', but a moment's thought will show that this is careless thinking. It is true that Schliemann could not really look into the past, to the Troy of eleven centuries B.C. But the words 'Homer's Troy', which, for most of us, are merely words, suddenly became a reality for Schliemann. Troy was a reality, and for a moment, Schliemann was able to gasp it as such, as if he had been transported back three thousand years.