Magical Thinking Amongst the English
There is no book quite like Kenneth Grant's Magical Revival. But what exactly is it? In some ways it is a conventional
narrative of the 'new' Magical experiment that was introduced by the
'revelation' of Aiwass to Aleister Crowley in 1904. Grant takes us
through to the Zos Kia Cultus of Austin Osman Spare who died in 1956. But
this general narrative is overshadowed by the book's true purpose which
is to do for Magic as a religious narrative what the Early Church
Fathers did for Christianity - to express both its cogency and its
mystery and so its high and serious purpose as a spiritual tradition, if
not necessarily a religion in the formal sense.
Nor can the
corpus of work be wholly judged on this one work. Grant was dedicated to
his task. This is merely a part of a cycle of nine books which, in
themselves, must require equal dedication from the reader and so either
elicit a deep interest in what this 'religion' means or some
participation in it. Let me start with where I am coming from
personally because I have given it five stars as an imaginative tour de
force but this does not mean that I am wholly persuaded by it. And this
is not because it is a work of high irrationalism. I have no objection
to the irrational in its appropriate place and its appropriate place
includes the spiritual, the daemonic and the artistic.
My
interest and concern with Grant's 'Typhonian Tradition' is that it
confuses two great 'magical' processes - one retrogresive and one
progressive. The book is important in helping the reader understand what
he is dealing with before detaching the one from the other for his or
her own purposes. Let us deal with the retrogressive. Crowley's
Thelema and its Typhonian derivative represent not the first steps in a
new march towards human transformation but the last gasps of
post-Socratic attempts to 'ideologise' the human condition and place it
under essentialist laws and processes.
Nearly all religions do
this. Christianity, Judaism and Islam certainly do. The secular
religions of the Enlightenment, including Marxism-Leninism and
Constitutional Liberalism, do this. The Mormons, Theosophy, Thelema and
Wicca, amongst other new ways of challenging old ways, have been no
different. Even environmentalism is at it nowadays. All have their false
histories and absurd eschatologies. In the Typhonian case, what
we have is a myth of ancient diffusionism as untenable as that belief in
an ur-matriarchy and a surviving ancient nature religion that infected
the early thinking of Wicca and of Starhawk's followers on the American
West Coast. Fortunately, modern neo-pagans have courageously managed to
throw the bathwater of false history out, without losing the baby of a
very attractive 'nature religion' filled with personal and community
meaning.
The Typhonian mythology is thus a romantic and poetic tale in
which the chthonic worship of Set or Shaitan was displaced by
Judaeo-Christianity and the old gods transformed into demons and into
the evil figure of Satan. There is some truth in the myth perhaps but
the matter is myth nonetheless. It forces the believer into a faith that
requires priests in a way that is not only not liberatory but works
directly against the liberatory aspects of not only Thelema but of the
whole progressive revolt against established religions and rigid
ideologies.
Having said this, the chapters that recount this myth
are entrancing to anyone who has become depressed in their soul by the
dessicated rationalism of the West. They are in a tradition from
Blavatsky through to modern alternative histories where both the
frustrated educated and the half-educated are given the opportunity to
rewrite reality according to their own inner drives. The process is
liberatory at this negative level of NOT being what was dumped on the
believer by his history yet it does not deal with the most enslaving
matter of all - the absurd need to believe in any system at all, whether
rational or irrational.
However, beneath all this late nineteenth
century pseudo-science and late symbolist nonsense, a progressive force
is burning to get out. You can see this in the move from the
quasi-traditionalism and dressing up games of the pre-war period to an
interest in psychology and direct experience that emerges in the
interwar period. We go from a priestly class of magical obscurantists to
individualism in around half a century. Since Magick has no
problem with internal contradictions - indeed, it thrives on them - the
co-existence of Setian myth with individualist shamanic excess is not
something we should worry about too much except to note that one looks
backwards and one looks forward Janus-like. Two figures, in this
context, stand out.
The first figure might be dismissed as a
batty old dear but she was far from this, even if the woman has little
importance outside of her particular time and place - this is Dion
Fortune. Fortune had two insights - the psychotherapeutic role of Magic
as a true pathway to the exploration of the unconscious with all its
risks and dangers and the biochemical physicality of these pathways. Her
link of the chakras to the endocrine system (while not scienticically useful today) permits a renewed respect
for the possibility that the Tantrik tradition and (less often
acknowledged) those East Asian spiritual traditions that deal with the
person elliptically, as in Taoist spiritual alchemy or the philosophy of
Zen, might have some hidden scientific validity hidden within them even if Fortune did not have sufficient knowledge to know hat it was.
Others
have moved on from there to investigate the physicality of sexual
secretions and their magical, and so spiritual, meaning (of which more below)
but where the genius of this lies is in its filling a fascinating gap
between the description of matter (the biology that underpins mind) and
the actual experience of mind. Although it is reasonable to
state that we humans might be behaviourally predictable, all things
considered, most of the time and that our minds are moulded into shape by our culture and
relationships, a mystery remains that minds can consider matters to be
other than might be dictated by society or inheritance (that is, they have 'imagination'). On
top of this, minds contain with themselves a will to power and
self-development that can work against norms. They seek to transform a
person and their surroundings regardless of these norms. This thing that
cannot easily be explained is certainly not fully explained by God at
one extreme or by science at the other.
Between the two is a
state, best described philosophically by the pragmatists, the
phenomenologists and the existentialists in the areas, respectively, of
doing, experiencing and being, that is fluid and volatile. In this
state, the True Will (the really seriously important innovation of
Crowley even if Nietzsche understood it better) competes with the
necessities not so much of physics but of a constructed social reality
that can be oppressive and is a cause, often, of deep misery and
non-fulfilment. It is this territory in which magic works as an
alternative to other forms of spiritual engagement and to various
psychotherapies - indeed, it might best be understood as a form of
psychotherapy in which certain methods are used rather than others and over which the individual has more personal control. Of
course, believers really do believe in demons and maifestations and
tulpas. We retain an open mind but the rareness of 'accredited' examples
of these phenomena means that, given that life is short and we cannot
all live at the intense level of Spare, it might be better if we passed
over this and concentrated just on the techniques of self development.
The
second significant figure is Austin Osman Spare himself, the artist, who might
best be described as having discovered for himself the shamanic
instincts of non-civilised cultures in the post-civilised culture of a
strained and crumbling West. This book is valuable in itself for
explaining Spare's quite remarkable thought processes and giving us some
excellent illustrations that help us understand the link between
Spare's intense artistic engagement and the magical liberation of the
self that was intensely necessary for him. Throughout the book, Grant
makes clear that he knew those of whom he writes and this adds something
special to his accounts of his subjects. There was a flow of
endeavour that started with the OTO, in which dissatisfied middle class
nobodies (for that is what they were, regardless of the involvement of
luminaries like WB Yeats) performed strange rites to free the spirit
from the shackles of convention. Crowley's individualistic revelation of
personal transgression and Fortune's harnessing of magical thought for
psychotherapeutic transformation lead thence to Spare's final
abandonment of priests, gurus and therapists for a dangerous mix of
excess, transgression and deliberate self-exhaustion.
This is a
trajectory that mirrors the crumbling of English imperial confidence
into post-war individualistic rebellion against a dull bureaucratic
society. But these are very much marginal figures in society. The
individualistic rebellion only moved from the margins to the centre of
society in the 1960s (much as drug culture moved from the high born
experimentation of Aldous Huxley to the global tuning out of Timothy
Leary and Terence McKenna). By the last quarter of the twentieth
century, few actually needed rather than wanted transgressional Setian
rituals and increasingly fewer took psychotherapy seriously. A
combination of the ability to speak out about distress, a loss of faith
in all authority and the realisation (whether from NLP or CBT or
determined use of mental breakdown, drugs or divorce to effect change)
that things can change has since made these figures (Crowley, Fortune,
Spare and others) less useful but they are still pioneers of new
thinking. This thinking is only interpreted as spiritual because it deals
with things that can have no externally imposed meaning except through
faith. For some, they are truly magical figures because, as in the
placebo effect, magick is simply a way of describing techniques that
appear to WORK.
Which brings us to the most positive aspect of
the book. It appears to ramble through its narrative (the book is,
however, well written and a pleasure to read) but there are some key
themes and one of these themes is sexuality and another is
transgression. In 1904, Crowley was already well experienced not just in
sexual experimentation but in finding a meaning to it that extended
beyond hedonism. This had arisen originally from a rather doubtful
interpretation of the Tantrik Tradition by the OTO in Germany which had
important corresponding links with the UK. The personalities
types attracted to the OTO were often unstable, anarchistic, solipsistic
and unreliable but they were also aware that social mores did not
permit them to reach their full potential or express their true natures.
Instead of seeing that potential fulfilled in social obligation or duty
or repressing it into bourgeois respectability or conventional art or
into industry as an end in itself, they looked inward to their primal
urges in that interesting period between Nietzsche's critique of the
herd and Freud's identification of the sexual component in the
sub-conscious.
Nietzsche did not give primacy to sexuality while
Freudianism had its own powerful liberatory sexual heretic in Wilhelm
Reich (whom Grant mentions) but, at this crucial period, the normal
state for a sexually aware male or female in the West was to accept a
culture based on a repression of instincts in public discourse yet the worst sort of sexual exploitation in secret. This is a culture that still exists
(based on recent scandals) inside parts of the Catholic Church and it is
interesting to note that the abuse scandals within the Catholic Church
are one of the few issues that can cause a bitter anger to emerge in
magical circles, as if there remains a recognition that their real
origin as a religious sub-culture lies in an age of intolerable
hypocrisy and sexual repression. It is hard to realise just how
extensive this culture of sexual repression during the late nineteenth
and early part of the twentieth centuries was and how those who were
highly sexualised were forced into states of shame and guilt or
effective psychopathy or misery by the general refusal to consider
sexual energy as of value.
Eastern values, dismissed within the
prevailing ethic in very negative racial terms, arrived in certain
circles with explosive force. The progressive, liberatory and most
valuable part of Grant's book is his exposition of how this
understanding of Tantra and sexual alchemy combined with various
transgressive myths and currents to become something both new and very
old - Sex Magic or Sex Magick as Crowley preferred to call it, Unconnected to sexuality but equally important for personal liberation was the indirect reversal of Zen and related thinking into Europe through the Japanese connection with Martin Heidegger.
In
essence, and in its early stage, Sex Magic was, bluntly, exploitative
of women (as the Eastern versions often but not invariably were). Women
were used as vehicles for what amounts to a manipulation of the
'endocrine system' (thinking of the crudity of the science of the period) and other chemicals in the body to reach altered states
of consciousness that precisely mimicked, indeed were identical with,
states of consciousness experienced in high spiritual states of
mysticism. This was beyond good and evil - powerful transformations that
could change lives but with the proviso that a late nineteenth or early
twentieth century European was forced to conduct themselves in secret
or else face social obloquy or worse. Everything in Grant's book
presupposes secrecy and being outside society. This expresses a reality
of a world where homosexual acts were illegal (we remember the fate of
Oscar Wilde), where the sexual life of women was regarded as something
that must not be discussed or encouraged, where masturbation was not a
pleasure but a wrong and where free discussion of the link between
sexual ecstasy and spiritual transformation could not be openly debated.
Grant
wrote this book originally in 1972 and, though subsequently revised, it
is courageous in that context. He pulls no punches in his account of
transgression and some readers will be disgusted - at one or two points,
I was. Its deliberate transgressive tone made it an underground text.
There would be no Penguin edition or serialisation in the Sunday Times. This
was, of course, being written less than a decade after reform of laws
governing homosexuality in England. Women were still being treated as
second class citizens (an attitude that has created the baby boomer
reactive harridans of today). Sex education in schools was avoided except at the
functional level and there was no significant research into the positive
aspects of sexuality. Sadly we were are now going into reverse again after some fifty years of transparency.
Jenny Wade's highly influential
'Transcendent Sex' was only published in 2004 and the literature of
sex-positive feminism and polyamory, much of it to the consternation of
feminist reactionaries, turned from a trickle to a flood at the beginning of the twenty-first century. From this perspective, Grant's book expresses a
pivotal point in history where all the transgressional revolt of a
repressed element within humanity (not necessarily the majority of
humanity but a significant portion) had piled up into an
over-engineered, possibly defensive, demand for the recognition of
sexual transgression as a spiritual tool of equal value to (at that
time) drugs and psychotherapy. What this book does is not just
state what might now be said in a very different way with another thirty
years of liberatory struggle under the belt, it lays out the findings
of all those thwarted people in their explorations (in secret) of the
truths lying behind the link between sexuality and spirituality that
they had derived from the traditions of the East. This is also a book
that is in the tradition of seeing magic as a science - a concept alien
to any positivist who happens to pick it up and start reading.
The
point is that the scientists can still only tell part of the story. The
psychologists are demonstrating the health relationships involved in
sexual satisfaction. Wade has identified the convergence of spiritual
and sexual technologies and outcomes. Psychotherapists were increasingly
moving from being 'priests' seeking to make people 'normal' into
arbitrators between persons and a world in which changing the world in
conformity with will has become part of the equation for many people.
Again, sadly, psychotherapeutists have flipped again into being, alongside academics and human resources professionals, chief ideologists for control and repression. Cognitive scientists are still discovering the biochemical pathways that link
orgasmic experience and the sense of the numinous - and are even
postulating God genes and spirit molecules. Psychedelics are being tested as solutions to psychic problems.
But, in terms of the
actual experience of a person getting spiritually from A to B and
finding meaning in existence, science still has nothing to say. The only
religions that in any way prepared the ground for this brave new and
exciting world are the religions of the East and, in the West, the
neo-pagan alternatives to the religions of the book. In this
context, as the Western 'tradition' that best developed a working
'technology' of transcendence based on sexual energy, transgression,
shamanistic excess and exhaustion and adaptation of meditative technique
(where Spare had interesting things to say on the 'not wanting' that
permits success in desires that you no longer consciously have), the
Magical Revival documented by Kenneth Grant is of critical importance. For
this reason, this book is almost a must-read for anyone interested in
self development and in the link between spirituality and sexuality even
if, like me, you tend to reject its retrograde ethos, its
pre-scientific basis and its excesses as all counter-productive to a
sane and rounded life, ecstasy included.
It remains my view that
true liberatory sexual spirituality is held back, not enhanced, by
belief systems like the ones in this book. They are now distractions
from developing a much more clinical and disciplined approach, perhaps
truly scientific in some respects and driven by philosophy more than belief, that takes the core of what the East and the Western
mystery traditions have developed into systems, strips away their
essentialist presuppositions and treats the whole thing as
existentialist technique - i.e. the management of a surge of energy
(which may or may not be sexual depending on personality) able to change
brain structure at will based on altered states of consciousness that
deliberately trigger the spirit molecules. There is no need for gods or
demons except as tools and metaphors.
Personally, I understand
the short cut of drugs but, having achieved a form of gnosis myself in
both of two states (which we might describe as tantric and zen), it is
my personal challenge to find gnosis on terms that integrate me with the
world and which are non-exploitative to a partner. This is definitely
not Osho's Neo-Tantra which (in my opinion) misses the point that the
aim is not integration and tranquillity but periodic disintegration and
struggle in order to rebuild and restructure the self for new
conditions. In that sense the transgressional aspects of Grant's
Typhonian system are worthwhile and should be respected even if there is
dangerous but life-enhancing meat in his book that should not be ignored
because it is surrounded by nineteenth century accretions and the
eccentricities of social outsiders. If you are interested in
Neo-Tantra, by all means take that option but I remain convinced that,
in the long run of life, the issues of transgression raised in the sex
magic tradition that developed out of the OTO and which were brought
into the 'relative' open by Crowley and Spare, need to be faced head-on -
just as death too needs to be faced head on and the Typhonian tradition does this as
well. There is no better guide to this path and to its history than
Kenneth Grant.
Brian Bates, too, is not a historian but a fairly senior academic psychologist who has specialised in 'deep imagination' and 'shamanic consciousness'. This makes his The Real Middle Earth an oddity of a book because his undoubted knowledge of the limited amount of material that survives about Middle Earth cultures and consciousness (largely Anglo-Saxon for Bates but also Viking and Celtic) is reviewed through the lens of a broader interest in the instinctive and (he believes) natural modes of consciousness for indigenous peoples. The publisher's sales pitch in the book is Tolkien but, though the references back to the great exponent of English 'radical nostalgia' are fairly sensible and relevant, this is just to get the average reader hooked on the unarguable thesis - that Tolkien was referring back to a real Middle Earth of magic and 'mystery' that existed around the North Sea and in the British Isles for a thousand years.
Bates has a deeper cultural purpose here. English cultural politics is still a war between a benign form of 'blood and soil' and the legions of Rome (represented by Christianity). Bates has a consciously neo-pagan sensibility and his attitude to Christianity is, like that of most neo-pagans today, broadly hostile, representing it as the imposition of unwarranted authority (both that of the burgeoning state and that of an educated priestly caste) on an indigenous folk culture that he characterises (with justification) as having a shamanic base. I think he overplays this - in reality, any original pagan folk culture long since disappeared under the weight of folk Christianity as Ronald Hutton and many folklorists have demonstrated but his should be seen as a thought experiment in potentiality rather than as an entirely true statement about the past.
English 'blood and soil' thinking is definitely not of the Radical Right as it is in the bulk of Europe and in North America. English exceptionalism is a cultural and political reality and it underpinned the deep instinctive suspicion of many English people about the European project as well as others ambiguous feelings about the imperial pretensions of the 'British' Crown. It is certainly no accident that Bates is based in the most neo-pagan and green city in Britain (Brighton) and it may equally be no accident that Thomas Paine's original English base, if briefly, was only a little to the north in South Saxon Lewes which still has a definite pagan feel around its famous bonfire festival. It burns 'Rome' with an enthusiasm that is more than Protestant. English libertarian thought fluctuates between a radical rationalism and a wistful neo-pagan nostalgia but both have their enemy in excessive executive authority and foreign tyranny. This 'blood and soil' thinking has, of course, long since lost the blood component (impossible to maintain in one of the most urbanised and cosmopolitan countries in the world) and replaced it with re-envisioning of the soil element to encompass both a green approach to the environment and a highly anarcho-libertarian approach to society and the 'soul'.
The neo-pagan revival itself which underpins this book and which has its radical nostalgic components is a phenomenon of only the last fifty or sixty years (although there are literary and artistic antecedents going back to the end of the eighteenth century in the 'country' cultural elite). What started out as a definitely eccentric English response to modernisation that looked backwards and was mocked by the mainstream culture has transformed into a spreading movement outside the establishment that has now claimed 'religious' status. Mockery has been replaced by a studious attempt by the London metropolitan elite to ignore neo-paganism as an embarrassment but the movement, which emphasises individual freedom and responsibility, communities of choice based on ritual rather than dogma and a strong resistance to imposed authority, has spread through the lower middle parts of society and internationally as a form of cultural resistance movement to elite failures and the callousness of the market. I suspect it has stalled in recent years as various crises have flowed through the nation and whether this process revives in 'religious' terms, there is no doubt that many 'ordinary' people feel increasingly vindicated in their criticism of established order. By the third decade of the third decade of the twenty first century, neo-paganism is now one of the lesser signs of widespread cultural revolt.
Professor Bates does not enter into the politics of all this. Indeed, the neo-pagan community tends to wear its a-politics on its sleeve with perhaps an instinctive orientation towards liberalism, environmentalism and anarchism. Only a very few hardened types adopt darker hued commitments to European and North American extremisms of the Right. Indeed, Bates makes it fairly clear that Odin (Odinism being the basis of a right-wing Heathen cult though most Heathens are not of the Radical Right by any means) is probably a late construction - a new supreme God designed to counter Roman and Christian ideology with a strong figure that could protect an older shamanic and Wyrd culture based on many tribal gods and nature spirits from direct assault by what would have been a technologically more developed and economically advanced rival.
The rise of Odin is probably not unconnected with the rise of the Vikings as opportunist and more advanced 'Middle Earth' bandits just as Christian Europe came under pressure in the Dark Ages. The sneaky approach of the Church was always to link its 'auctoritas' with that moment when warlords sought legitimacy to cement their power over not only over the population but their own rivals within their elites. On analogy with the later Medieval period's 'bastard feudalism', we might call this 'bastard tribalism'. But, in general, British neo-paganism (there are strong Celtic strands as well) is of the libertarian-left and is likely to remain so.
What Bates attempts here is a re-construction ('reconstructionism' is standard and acceptable practice within neo-paganism) of the spiritual basis of Anglo-Saxon life, attempting, with some success, to re-establish this reconstructed 'religion' as a viable project, an analogue to other indigenous and even East Asian religions linked to the 'deep' psychology of Jung as a more 'natural' approach to the world and the environment than the imposed dogmatic approaches of the religions of the book. He does not go too far in attacking the 'other side'. He restricts himself to showing how organised religion systematically appropriated and then neutered folk and tribal practice through a series of well chosen examples scattered throughout the text. In his view (and he is persuasive), this was a conscious and aggressive attempt to shift the population from a direct engagement with the spirit of the wider environment to dependency on the priest as interpreter of that environment. Some might say that the Dark Ages did not end with the arrival of the missionaries but began with them and that we are only now coming out into the light again!
Of course, a word of caution is required. 'Reconstructionism' is flawed, certainly if you think that modern man can reproduce the actual thinking of the past through analogy. The amount of material available through texts and archaeology is limited and analogical thinking is generally a doubtful guide to the truth. Local conditions are local conditions and Australian shamanic ceremonies may be like Anglo-Saxon ceremonies and the Way of Wyrd (a central concept for Bates) may be like the Chinese concept of 'chi' but 'like' is not the same as 'same'.
There is a big 'may have been' about this book and, of course, that is generally a rather futile exercise but we have already suggested that it should be treated as a thought experiment. It should be read as a suggestive basis for further reading rather than as a precise account of the truth of the matter - a useful theory but not one to be accepted completely at face value. There is an excellent section of further Notes which show the degree to which Bates has researched his subject and which would be invaluable to anyone who really wanted to get into this subject in any depth and make up their own minds. But this caveat should not deter you from reading the book. On the contrary, if the history may be suspect, despite Bates' clear commitment to detailed research, and the attempted link to modern popular culture an edge forced, the psychological points being made are very well taken.
The reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon indigenous thought really does stand up to scrutiny as an alternative of more value in terms of self development and 'spiritual growth' for many people under certain conditions than the imposed authority of dogmatic ideology, whether of the Christ, Mohammed or Pure Reason. It cannot be said that all people would think like Anglo-Saxons are purported to have done (that is, in an essentially libertarian way) because a lot of people like being told what to think by others. They need the illusion that something external with a will, like God, or some universal abstract like Reason is or should guide their lives. There is enough psychological research to show that the default position of humanity is to crave authority and I am sure that the real Anglo-Saxons were no different. But, equally, many do not think in these terms and the last thousand years have truly been a dark age for these people until relatively recently.
Bates' reconstructed Anglo-Saxon spirituality (with nods to cognate Celtic and Nordic versions) is well argued through a succession of chapters that emphasise integration with the actual natural environment (where he is persuasive), the role of liminality (the boundaries between worlds and experiences), the imaginative construction of the world along shamanic lines, the techniques used to access the ecstatic and dream world sources of wisdom and the concept of Wyrd (which steers a fine and persuasive line between fatalism and claims of radical free will). Once outlined, much later magical practice can be seen as little more than a degeneration of shamanic practice but that is another book by another person at another time. What emerges from Bates' work is that there is something psychologically natural about indigenous concepts that have been pushed aside by externally imposed authoritarian models of human nature and destiny to the serious detriment of our mental health (if not our physical health).
One theme is the separation of the soul from the body - the basis of the English culture of 'fetches' and ghosts. Indigenous Anglo-Saxon culture in this sense is closer to Shinto with its idea of spirits being able to access other worlds through liminal gateways, able to be called back from the dead or unable to leave the earth and of spirits of place being propitiated or questioned. In both cultures, trees can have souls and animistic shamanism seems to be the ur-thought of humanity. The Japanese were lucky not to have Rome on their doorstep. The shamanic journey is central to Bates' thesis. Using Icelandic examples, he also rehabilitates the women shamans, the ancestors of the much degenerated village witches and folk magicians, some of whom were to pay the price for their plant magic and 'difference' with death in the early modern period.
Anglo-Saxon culture appeared to have spheres of magic that were appropriate for men and women and another deep sadness about the advent of Christianity is how, in taking magic away from the general population, it particularly dispossessed women even as it strengthened the position of some women in other ways through an imposed authoritarian sexual morality in place of a customary and community one. Both would have been conservative cultures but the former was based on how women as groups like to order their own affairs (perhaps in the usual creative struggle with men) whereas the latter was an imposition of standards drafted by some men at the expense of both free male and female choice, allegedly to protect women. The free negotiation was taken out of culture and law imposed not by custom but by Rome - perhaps another quietly seething resentment of some of today's indigenous English against the European project.Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is political after all - the integration of tribe with the landscape (something felt by many indigenous, especially rural, English today) which represents the blood and soil aspects of the case so much disliked by urban rationalists of the Left. The explanation of the dragon as symbol of the decline and fall of cultures that have had their time - a nice example of instinctive English dystopian pessimism - and the avoidance of the places and houses of the fallen ones, much as Anglo-Saxons avoided using abandoned Roman urban stock, may or may not be true but the Roman way (with the reintroduction of Christianity) does seem to have been a conscious attempt to declare war on Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. We see the deliberate despoiling and then occupation of pagan centres with their springs and their yew trees in order to turn them into Holy Wells and Church sites. Not much changes ... the Ukrainian Government appears to be doing much the same to Russian Orthodox communities within Ukraine, a process which the Western media seems to be disinclined to expose. We are all well aware of genocide but the story of Christianity's assault on paganism appears increasingly like deliberate soul-murder or animicide to be placed alongside other imperial and totalitarian attempts by other ideologies to crush the resistance of a population to new masters. At least pagan Rome merely gave priority to its gods and let others flourish.
Using Tolkien as his trigger, Bates also explores the role of the elven people as forces of nature, shapeshifting, dwarf magic and animal totems - raven, bear and wolf - and their relationship to society and community. The spider has a whole chapter to itself. The wolf, my own totem if you like, is a pack animal on the margins of society and symbol of chaos. The wolf is an enemy to traditional culture (there is undoubtedly something very conservative about Bates' spiritual perspective or, rather, an attempt to re-balance existence into some form of normality). Perhaps the wolf is needed today precisely because our traditional culture is that of an imposed desert mentality in a country once of forests and now an urban jungle.
It also has to be said that Bates' 'reconstructionism' is married with some very evocative writing which helps us to understand better than most academic texts can tell us what it must have been like to live in small, fairly sufficient settlements surrounded by forest and with only hard physical labour, folk remedies and magic available to deal with mental and physical health and ensure adequate nutrition. Much of Anglo-Saxon pagan thought is highly practical given the state of knowledge at the time and, given the placebo effect as well, probably of use in half the cases of ill health as well as providing salves against anxiety and depression.
It is not (and Bates is not fool enough to claim this) a substitute for improved scientific understanding of disease and mental health but the successor Christian culture was no better, merely Christianising pagan spells and incantations by, for example, sticking a saint or two on the front and placing a host where vervain might be. Indeed, it is probable that the genuine benefits of folk medecine and the commitment to the concerns of persons in their environment would have made Anglo-Saxon mental and physical healthcare more rather than less efficacious than much of the text-based nonsense coming from the monasteries.
Libertarian ignorance based on a community's shared knowledge of the resources of the environment around them strike this reader as superior to an authoritarian ignorance based on texts pulled out of time and place to maintain the economy of church and state. Better than either, of course, is a libertarian culture based on science and respect for the environment both. This book is a useful addition to the debate on where England goes next and it should be read by anyone who thinks wisdom comes out of a close reading of texts instead of the actual experience of life.
Grimoires is less of a social history than it might have been but one cannot complain if the title is crystal clear about what is being offered - a history of magic books. And, as such, it is excellent. At times, it seems not much more than a compilation of information about these books century by century but this serves one important purpose - it strips away any notion that the bulk of these books served any other purpose than personal aggrandisement in an age of poverty and lack of welfare provision. Men and women had every reason to clutch at straws.
One common theme from earliest times until quite recently has been the use of such texts to discover treasure by calling up demons and dark spirits and then binding and interrogating them to reveal it. John Dee's graveyard excursion was not novel. He was in a very long line of 'magical practitioners' who wanted a fast track to wealth - or to sexual pleasure or even just good health and a bit of happiness in a grim world. The spiritual content of these early modern books is minimal despite the attempts of later generations to read back their own spiritual searchings into the grubby grab for power and money of what probably amounted (no doubt with exceptions) to a succession of charlatans, fraudsters, small time criminals and half-educated cunning folk determined to prey for profit on the unhappiness of the masses.
Perhaps the only person in our era to have got this magical past right was that inveterate rascal Anton LaVey whose Church of Satan used the tropes of popular 'high' magic to sell his hedonistic mix of Californian individualism and cynicism. This was the same carnival gulling of country folk, in the tradition of medieval hucksterdom, that underpinned the eighteenth century French bibliotheque bleue. This is not to say that some of the original sources of the grimoires of early modern Europe were not of considerable spiritual importance or that the presence of grimoires did not prove vital to the creation of modern alternative spiritualities as ready-mades for interpretation.
The Hebrew cabbalistic tradition and pagan hermeticism as well as alchemy and possibly the tarot - alongside attempts to come to terms with the demonic lore of the religions of the book - were all sincere paths for the exploration of consciousness and alternative realities. Later, the equally sincere researches of Eliphas Levy, the creation of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the experimentation of Crowley and the 'invention' by Gerald Gardner of Wicca all made use of the conceits of the grimoire in order to explore consciousness and 'spirituality' in new and imaginative ways. Even between these time poles of sincerity, there are islands of genuine investigation into 'other forces' - Kelley may have been a fraud but Dee really does seem to have believed that he could talk with the angels. Many others took demons to be really existing creatures who could be bound safely for service without threat of eternal damnation.
The fears of the Church and the authorities were part fear of the heretical and part fear of new thinking but, on closer investigation, they were equally related to the potential for grimoires to be used to part peasants and small townpeople from their money or to promote unacceptable distance between community and church.The Catholic Church is not always the villain - sometimes it was highly protective of those under its care and even offered an early form of welfare 'socialism'. When Henry VIII plundered Catholic properties to buy the support of the country middle classes, he was also unravelling an admittedly ramshackle and inefficient national welfare system.
Immense efforts have gone into rooting out popular grimoires (including the terminal force used against sorcerers) over the centuries. The first relevant book burnings were of pagan writings by the newly assertive and totalitarian Christian communities of the late Roman Empire (although the Roman authorities were quite happy to burn books that defied state control of religion long before Constantine). It is little known that book burnings continued in Germany long after the Nazis lost power. Instead of Jewish and liberal books, religious campaigners were burning books of magic. Indeed, though they disapproved of magic (despite the fantasies of Western propagandists), the Nazis seem far less extreme in this matter than fanatical Christian Democrats and Protestants. More could perhaps have been written by Davies on the attitudes of the authorities in modernising America who seem, sensibly, to have seen grimoire production as a branch of fraud, precursors to much modern 'new age' nonsense, rather than as some threat of a more fundamental kind.
It might be argued that the detachment of these texts from educated high society and their survival out of that context also detached them from their pagan spiritual meaning and folk purpose. It degraded these texts into non-communal individualistic tools of power - personal weapons in life's struggle for oneself and against others. Grimoires are certainly ambiguous in pre-industrial and colonial society. Davies is excellent in tracing their path from Europe into the New World and other Western colonies and back and forward across Europe, linking their influence to practical factors such as the availability of the printing press and the willingness and determination of the authorities to suppress them. Levels of literacy are key in both permitting grimoires to flourish (they require someone to read them) and defining their acceptability and use.
Once a population got a taste for such books, these texts embedded themselves deep into some communities of migrants and former slaves - most often when literacy was combined with a low level of education and when canny entrepreneurs were able to provide sufficient cheap copies of 'classic works'. Magical sub-cultures emerged that were both proponents of sometimes unutterable nonsense and the basis of a culture of resistance to a non-inclusive high culture that had nothing to say to the poor and uneducated. This was very different from the highly cultured world of Toledo in the High Middle Ages where Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions and thought mingled to create the radical thinking of which the early modern grimoires were but a pale reflection. The folk memory of Toledo as centre of dark sorcery reflected this cultural debasement of a high intellectual tradition.
In successive totalitarian Christian reformations, magic became debased into a presumption of evil when all it really was was a challenge to intellectual authority. Manuscripts got mangled, attributed inappropriately, given antiquities that do not stand up to scrutiny. Whether manuscripts or printed books, these texts became systematically degraded from their origins in a tolerant High Mediterranean Culture. Perhaps some of the more genuine intellectual magicians were still being hunted to extinction as late as the early seventeenth century in Catholic Europe but it is fairly clear that the printed versions of their texts in the eighteenth century and their adaptations in America and across Europe and their colonies in the nineteenth were little more than gobbledy-gook for cunning folk. There are some wonderful tales of gullible treasure-seeking yokels being thoroughly done over by trickster 'sorcerers' in the chapter on the pre-revolutionary era in France and Switzerland.
Davies is usefully corrective on one widespread assumption, derived no doubt from the lurid stories of Montague Summers and Dennis Wheatley that witchcraft and demonic grimoires were closely associated. The witch trials were about ... well, witches. There may have been occasional links between sorcery and witchcraft but, outside Iceland, they were rare. This is, again, probably down to levels of literacy at the height of the witchcraft trials. You could scarcely blame a witch of sorcery by grimoire if she could not read or write. Iceland, on the other hand, had a high level of literacy for women at the time of its witch trials. There also seems to have been a greater chance of sorcery being invoked in a witch trial elsewhere if priests were being implicated in the alleged crime - their literacy permitted use of the grimoire.
There are other insights - into the controversial debate over Mormonism's debt to the grimoire tradition, into irrationalism in American settler society, into the adaptation of grimoires to creole needs and their use by various Caribbean cultures (often cleverly exploited by American pulp publishers) and, more generally, into capitalist exploitation of folk demand for grimoires (with much useful background on the American pulp publisher entry into the market). The influence of the specialist publisher Delaurence on the creation of new religious forms in the Caribbean and Africa whose antiquity has probably been much exaggerated would be worth an anthropological study in its own right. A thoroughly Western literary form appears to have assisted in constructing new forms of religion on a basis of inherited tribal magic and cultural dislocation. Some 'slave' religions may be surprisingly modern with the same link to the past as (say) Wicca or Asatru - more tenuous than some might like to believe. Even today, DeLaurence Scott books are explicitly banned by the Jamaican Customs Service as threats to local order.
This is quite a dense book but perfectly readable. It comes alive, becoming more than a linking of antiquarian facts, when it gets to the eighteenth century. Here, the narrative starts to strengthen, especially with the narrative of migrant and former slave use of grimoires that really requires yet another historian to interpret, perhaps more theoretically. Davies certainly seems very loath to experiment with theory. What people did with grimoires is well covered. Why they used them, much less so. The book also adds a very large footnote to Hutton's and others' work on the rise of magic amongst the elite in the industrialising West. The key figure here is the autodidact Eliphas Levy, an eccentric who played an important role in re-presenting the grimoire and the high magical tradition as a possible source for attaining access to an alternative reality.
A community of 'clerks' rather than of high-born aesthetes (pace Wheatley's fantasies) then relieved the humdrum nature of their lives and created an alternative vision of society that found its early brief high point in the Order of the Golden Dawn from which all subsequent 'positive' use of grimoires probably derives. This was a moment of cultural sea-change that in France, Britain, America, Germany and Italy led to many different forms of creative irrationalism that are still transforming society as we write. The book ends with a review of the three 'fake' modern grimoires that have spawned their own intense followings - Lovecraft's wholly fictional 'Necronomicon' (as used in Chaos Magick), Gardner's 'Book of Shadows' (which is central to Wicca) and Lavey's cobbled together 'Satanic Bible' (which is central to Satanism but which, of course, has nothing to do with Satan at all).
All three made use of grimoire lore. Before we get hyper-critical about their provenance, we might ask just how reliable the claims of divine authorship of the books of the Bible or the Koran are if we really, really think about this instead of accepting claims on faith. From this perspective, the leap of faith made by Chaos Magicians (who are just playing with belief quite knowingly), Wiccans (who, in fact, are honest that each text is personal and to be recast by every practitioner in the light of their own needs) and Satanists (who have no illusions that LaVey wrote their text and know full well that Satan does not exist) seems less absurd than that of their rivals. Perhaps this may be one clue to the determination of the authorities to suppress the grimoire - in its cack-handed way, the grimoire says that no intermediation is required between the punter and his book. Any person with the power to interpret the book can decide their own destiny in terms of sex, power and spirit which is a standing challenge to all established priests, experts and intellectuals.
At its worst, the grimoire is not merely obscurantist but dangerous, not because it can conjure devils or perhaps give cause in extreme cases to murderous fantasy (of which there are cases) and has a proven history of fraud, but because, in truly ignorant hands, it can block the use of 'good' expert knowledge to deal with 'real' problems of sexuality, power relations, conditions of life, healthcare and spirituality. It is probably why socialists and progressives loathe it as much as any cardinal. But, at their best, their use represents a revolutionary act under conditions where there is no power for the people, where sexual repression is normal, where conditions are poor and life short and where religion represents social order rather than personal meaning. Their use under these circumstances says that 'we the people' will, in your lack of dialogue with us, choose our own experts and our own ways of intermediation with life amd matter. We will use magic because you have given us nothing or what you give us is conditional on our acceptance of your standards and 'morality' without asking us what we want. Irrationalism represents psychic resistance to the arrogance of the powerful.
Magic as resistance will never go away except where it is decisively crushed under the authoritarian boot of State and Church. Maybe that is the eventual solution of many liberal intellectuals as well (certainly many liberal intellectuals in the West have taken the neo-conservative turn in despair at the masses' inability to be 'rational') but it seems a price too high in terms of liberty for the majority. An alternative may be to permit a degree of healthy irrationalism within a culture based on communication and general welfare where grimoires (as symptom) have no cause to be used for fraud or criminality because their function has changed. Under new conditions, they can be used, as they increasingly are being used in the modern West, for fun and for spiritual growth rather than for the assertion of power by the powerless over circumstance and the even less powerful.
Davies makes one very profound point - perhaps his only attempt at deep analysis in a largely narrative history. It is quite simply that most of us in the West no longer need magic in our lives. Economic development, mass education and technology provide our magic because magic is nothing more nor less than a means of empowerment. If we see magic re-emerging today (albeit mostly in the spiritual and social sphere), it is because we need it again. The new religions are actively transforming persons and cultures where old systems have failed and this process is likely to accelerate under the influence of the internet. As Davies suggests, magic and grimoires are unlikely to disappear from our culture very soon.
Finally, let me add that the illustrations of various texts, scattered throughout the book, are extensive and well placed. Oxford have done a fine editorial job and there are copious and detailed footnotes and signs to further reading. The book is also very broad-based with information on all the main Western and Northern European markets and on North America and the European colonies. There will be gaps but a book that covers Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland and Norway as well as the different Caribbean Islands cannot be called parochial.
I cannot praise The Book of English Magic enough both for its content and its style. It
is a hefty tome at over 500 pages but beautifully bound and (once you
get over the odd use of a lighter typeface for 'practitioner'
contributions) designed. It may not be cheap but it is excellent
value. The structure is worth commenting on because, quite
simply, it works and it puts to shame a lot of the shoddy editing that
you currently get in the publishing industry. Carr-Gomm and
Heygate tell the story of English magic in twelve successive roughly
chronological chapters, each with contemporary resonance, taking us from
(in simplistic terms) earth magic, druidry, Anglo-Saxon magic, the
arthurian tradition, the folk magic of the pre-modern era, alchemy, the
world of John Dee, the cunning folk of rural industrial England,
freemasonry, the magical orders of the late ninetenth century, Crowley
(and his more benign contemporaries like Dion Fortune) and, finally, the
contemporary world right up to the emergence of chaos magic.
Each
chapter contains a narrative that introduces you to the contemporary
manifestations of the historic experience and then intersperses this
with practical magical insights (for example, how to hunt for ley lines
or the basics of magical numerology or the tarot) as well as extended
interviews with practitioners in each field. These 'insights' will give
you sufficient flavour of a practice for you to decide whether to
investigate further. On top of this, the authors provide
exceptional and up to date resource materials - fiction related to the
era, biographies of key figures, information on where to go and how to
get more information, including access points to current magical
schools, even those with a bit of a health warning attached. There are,
of course, useful further reading lists, advice on bookshops and
internet sites and even lists of publishers and academic and specialist
courses.
Finally, the overall tone is measured, balanced, fair
and thoughtful. There are even periodic health warnings against
misunderstanding or misusing magical techniques or expecting too much or
the wrong thing. This book exists well within the contemporary
culture of British (not just English) paganism - humane, tolerant,
eclectic. There is a certain national pride that England has Wicca as
its global contribution to the major growing religions (though Druidry
may claim some status here) and the argument that England is the most
magical country in the world certainly seems to hold water as each
chapter unfolds.
There are many views of what magic is and what
it means and the authors are fair to all of them - whether there are
really existent realities or whether the phenomena are psychological is
all the same to them. They take no sides. There is an amusing passage
where the authors compare the 'styles' of serious pagans, new agers,
wiccans, freemasons and the thelemites and chaos magicians at the harder
edge of the game so that 'choices' to dump Judaeo-Christian restriction
and plump for an alternative have very many options that will fit many
different types of personality. Personally, I am a
pagan-sympathetic observer with thoroughly chaotic and thelemite
tendencies who is just a little resistant to the professionalisation of
the latter. For me, this is a book of many possible techniques (and of
many more in decades to come) by which persons, individuals, find their
own ethical and 'spiritual' paths without benefit of authority.
Of
course, there are traditions that do have hierarchies and grades (with
freemasonry probably at the most extreme end of imposed order and
secrecy) and weak personalities can be overwhelmed by strong
personalities but the general trend of English magic is embedded in that
very English blend of individualism and pragmatism that makes us
strangely passive yet supremely stubborn if our Ancient Liberties are
threatened. My recommendation to the reader is to relax and let
the book flow through you, taking notes of those techniques and cultures
that most appeal to your nature. You can lay the book aside a bit
better informed about what is on offer if you ever need something to
give you meaning or explain the world better than scientific positivism
(though intelligent magic, as the authors frequently suggest, is not
incompatible with science by any means). Or you can take up one
of the traditions, follow through on a reference until it has served its
purpose - and then find another for a new purpose later. Basically,
make your search a pleasure not a chore - though the best results
clearly come from immensely hard and focused labour. This is the real
point of magical thinking - although the authors end the book with no
less than 16 uses of magic, in essence the primary use is self
development, finding your true nature and working it in the world.
Magic
represents a radical democratic and yet oddly conservative tradition of
resistance to being told who you are by authority of any type and yet
it is not anarchic even at its most chaotic. It constructs an ethic from
experience, an understanding of difference between persons (tolerance)
and of what makes us all so similar (nature). It is certainly not a
tradition for those who can think only in terms of either/or or in
all-encompassing universals that dictate what roles we must play in the
tide of history or before some fearsome patriarchal (or matriarchal)
judgemental deity. And one footnote about the English tradition.
In much of the world, the new paganisms have grown because they have to
say something to the unsure and disempowered (and this is clearly so
with the spread in the US of neo-pagan ideas) but, in the UK today, the
simple egalitarianism of the pagan revolution is expressed in the
breadth of intellect and achievement that leavens and assists the
paganism of the street.
As you read through the many testimonies
in this book, you will see people with serious academic accomplishments
rub alongside people whose status in society may be 'lowly' but who are
accomplished in their abilities to see things the rest of us do not or
in giving some sort of 'spiritual' service to others. The respect of
each for all and of all for each is in marked contrast to cultures that
'look up to' priests, rabbis or imams and leave their spiritual thinking
at the door of the church, mosque or synagogue. This is not to
denigrate the latter - they have their role as community religions which
contain many strands of deep intellectual engagement, mysticism and
consolation - but the structural difference (despite the High
Priestesses and Grades of some advanced magical and pagan traditions) is
that power comes from below instead from above. The wicked tantric
Crowley was seeking to liberate his followers, even from their
allegiance to him! Highly recommended and enjoyable - a book I shall keep close by my desk for reference.
We return to the world of Kenneth Grant, Magick and UFOs with another book from 2009 - Paul Weston's Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus. I would say, in general, that my attitude to
'wild cards' who write about UFOs and conspiracies is sceptical but
generous, compassionate and always ready to give such writers the
benefit of the doubt. I certainly do not trust official accounts of very
much unless backed by scientific method - and, even there, I have a
healthy distrust of scientists' determination to raise funds and pursue
careers through over-egging their findings.
My assessment of the
value of this book rose and fell as I read it. In the end, I gave
it a lower rating than I would have liked, with some frustration at the
fact that I could not quite express to the reader all that was
interesting about it. You might take it as an early twentieth century
appendix (one of many in the market but more interesting than most) to
Pauwel's and Bergier's Morning of the Magicians or as a less rational
and more 'thelemic' counterpart to Gary Lachman's Turn Off Your Mind
without his determination on coherence. It looks like a series of
set pieces at times so it is no surprise to find that the author has
been giving lectures and radio broadcasts on specific elements in the
story line - and yet there clearly is a co-ordinating vision buried in
the book. The inability to articulate this vision with full clarity is
one of the book's frustrations.
Let us deal with
the positive aspects. Weston does manage to convey that 'fantastic
realism' or (perhaps better) high irrationalism represents something
important in Western culture as an underground movement that has both
light and dark aspects. To his great credit, he refuses to pander to the
softer end of his readership with liberal prejudice - he describes the
dark side without approval but also without moral panic. He makes clear
that he is no sympathiser with Nazi occultism but lets everyone, in
general, speak for themselves. He is good at taking the world of Man, Myth and Magic and Pauwels and Bergier and updating it thirty or
forty years to embrace both the UFO phenomenon and the 'eight circuits'
theory of Timothy Leary. Weston is clearly an admirer of Crowley and of
Parsons and refuses to take the stock negative view of L. Ron Hubbard yet the hoped-for synthesis of an English occultism that is the last
gasp of Edwardian civilisation with the counter-culture that was
emerging in California while Parsons was doing his Babalon Working is
not forthcoming.
California (and initially the wider American
South West) was uniquely placed to encourage the fermentation of radical
ideas because of a curious combination of climate, wealth created by
the wartime culture of the burgeoning military-industrial complex and
the looser morality created by the entertainment industry, the nearness
of Mexico and the lack of a communitarian infrastructure built on older
evangelical values (from which many artists and literary types were
escaping). Huxley moved into this world as did Henry Miller.
Wilhelm Reich was an influence. A culture of sexual and political
dissent and of literary and artistic innovation (of sorts) emerged
around Berkeley in particular so that the late-1940s and beatnik culture
(cross-linking with Greenwich Village in New York and European centres)
developed a critical mass that was to take the English adaptation of
conservative Southern popular music, the medical experimentation with
consciousness 'back East', the discovery of occultism as self-liberation
and a wider libertarianism into a much wider critique of the given
social reality of the West. Leary, LaVey, Manson, Esalen, Hubbard, Anton
Wilson, McKenna - all aspects of what Weston terms 'fantastic realism'.
But,
too often, Weston seems to take some story at face value, tell a good
tale and then fail to link it to the next story so that there is no
theory or grand narrative - nor is there a sense of 'mood' that a
deliberate refusal to engage with intellectualism might require. For
example, the 'eight circuits' model is described very insightfully at
the very end but nothing is said or done to take it beyond the fifth
level despite everything that has gone before. The description of the
complex Montauk mythos is lengthy and entertaining but strains the
credibility of even the most trusting reader who has an IQ above
average. What is going wrong here? He badly needs a ruthless and
questioning editor. Almost certainly the book falls between stools - it
could have been just an entertainment (in which case a good editor
would have gone for the usual round of 'what ifs' and absurdities that
appeal to certain personality types) or it could have been a more
profound thesis about the changes that may taking be taking place in
human consciousness as we enter the twenty first century. It falls
between the two ... the 'tough editor' should have engaged with Weston's
enthusiastic scatter gun approach and driven the author into justifying
claims, creating a cogent theory for more off-the-wall claims and
making links clearer between assertions.
This is a shame because
there are the seeds of something important in the text - an approach to
the convergence of Crowleian culture with the counter-culture that
emerged in the American South West to dominate the second half of the
last century. Nor need he have sacrificed one likable aspect of the book
- a determination to engage with the irrationalism by being sceptical
about the claims of rationalists: I approve! But coherence is different -
more coherence would have been useful. The remarkable rise of
radical libertarianism in the West within the last fifty years - not
forgetting Ayn Rand and the Reaganite aspects as much as the New Left
ones - is a story that has still not been told with authority and
intelligence by official historians. This should have been Weston's
opportunity. The weirdness of contemporary American politics fifteen years after this book's publication should also be considered in this light - we have a populism backed by libertarian billionaires and appealing to irrational Christian fundamentalisms faving off the legalistic technocratic politics of the heirs of '68.
Despite the determined attempts of rationalists to
poo-poo synchronicities and coincidences, the flow of events does
indicate the formation of a coherent counter-cultural narrative, albeit
possibly created retrospectively, that has been tok on a life of its
own through the internet and popular culture as the twentieth became the twenty-first century. This narrative becomes of immense significance for
good or ill in the coming troubled years, both in politics and society
at large. Would it create the basis for a new cultural settlement or
trigger a reaction of horrendous proportions or hybridise into new and weirder forms? Mass irrationalism, or
'fantastic realism' if you prefer, is now a political issue that has to
be seen in terms of mass hysteria, conspiracy theory, refusal to respect
any authority, suspicion and 'ressentiment' as much as personal and
collective liberation.
The counter-cultural narrative raises
issues about the possible, if unproven, creation of a dynamic collective
consciousness in at least part of the population that speaks to values
and reasoning that have little to do with the creation of a working but
deeply flawed conventional society and everything to do with the inner
workings of many, possibly most, people who live within it. Who
'owns' this narrative when half the population are (logically) below
average IQ and there are no signs that alpha manipulators of the masses
are going to go away is an issue that frightens the life out of the
declining liberal elite. Whether they resort to increased security,
buying off the authoritarian half of the population in a vain attempt to
hold on to their control of the liberal core is the great question of
our time. This book could have contributed more to that debate which has become more pressing since its publication
The
importance of Crowley is, of course, mostly retrospective - he was far
less important than some might like to think in his day - but his post
facto iconic role has become profound. Crowley took the lid off the
pretensions to moral order of Edwardian England in a way that only came
to fruition as part of this wider movement that originated from within
the US between the 1940s and 1960s (whose basic lineaments have been
outlined by Adam Curtis in his BBC Documentary The Century of the
Self). This is where Weston is on to something - that there is a
link between English Edwardian and later Californian revolt that has
helped to create the culture in which we live now, one wholly alien in
its attitude to self and sexuality compared to anything that had existed
in the West since the replacement of pagan elites by
Judaeo-Christianity.
Of course, this revolution was preceded by
the twin sledgehammers of German philosophy (primarily Nietzsche) and
psychology (not so much Freud but the anti-psychiatry and Reichian
strands) as well as the jack hammer of technology and Popperian
scientism - but 'do what thou wilt' (with a nod to 'an harm no one') had
become the prevailing culture of our time until a more recent flight to security after COVID and war turned frightened liberals into defensive authoritarians. It might be argued that the
Nazi dark side of the occult was a reaction to cultural changes that
were far from dark in the preceding decades and that this might bode ill
for the West if it follows a similar trajectory of economic breakdown
and resentment. Weston is always on the verge of enlightening us about
this connection between light and dark but his horse keeps failing at the fence. There
is no turning back now. We may be moving into conditions of relative scarcity
and austerity, though probably not as extreme as those of the 1930s, without the collective models of Marxism and
belief in race and nation that mobilised rage and ressentiment against a
system that was clearly broken then and may be broken again. This is
why the book is both worth reading and disappointing. It adds a lot of
useful and entertaining meat to the dish of analysis and it raises
important questions - but at the end of the day, it has no analysis in itself.
The
flow from Crowley through Parsons to Grant and the link across to
scientological thinking, Ufology and conspiracy theory is all here and
quite persuasive but the argument does not always convince. There are
too many logical and intellectual shortcuts. The key figures in this
are perhaps not the human beings involved but Aiwass and Lam, the
discoveries/creations of Crowley and Grant respectively. The
intellectual relationship between these two 'intelligences' is the
bridge between understanding the link between the 'high irrationalism'
of the late Edwardians and the 'high weirdness' of the last third of the
twentieth century. What we really need here is either a
rational-psychological review of this trend or a full and cogent mythos
for the twenty-first century to accept or reject. We get anecdote and
hint but no suggestion of why this is all very important other than the
offer of a form of implied religious faith on the part of the author.
There are times when it appears that he has given up on the rest of us
who are not 'believers' and is simply speaking, perhaps persuasively, as
thelemite to thelemites. At these times (few admittedly), the book may
as well be a Christian or Buddhist apologia for all its insights to we
who might recognise the importance of the phenomenon but who will not
recognise its necessary truth without a lot more persuasion.
However,
this is not the bulk of the book. On the contrary, there are, amidst
the occasional lapses into credulity, sound and intelligent assessments
of many counter-cultural figures such as Gardner, Graves, Grant and
Anton Wilson. I am increasingly persuaded, partly by Weston, that Leary
does represent a natural and often deliberate continuation of the work
of Crowley. But somewhere, near the end, when description is replaced by
enthusiasm, the plot really does gets lost. Crowley and Grant were
enthusiasts for numerology ('gematria') and so is Weston. Oh
dear! I am sorry but, whilst I recognise the contribution of mathematics
to science, I just cannot get how, with the best will in the world,
some of the absurd numerological connections made in the book by others
and by the author are anything but 'high nonsense' - or, more likely,
'high autism'. I am sure that Crowley could have meant something very
profound by his line drawn across a page - equally, it could be a joke.
Either way, I am not sure most of us need to care.
Perhaps
gematria appeals to certain wiring in the brains of certain persons.
Perhaps minds like that of Ramanujan can, indeed, make connections in
their head that operate at levels far beyond the capability of the rest
of us. But the idea that words and numbers can coincide meaningfully in
the way presented in this book is just ridiculous - far beyond illogic
into something much worse, an utter waste of some of the valuable 28,000
days the average Western male has on this planet. So, if you
enjoy 'high irrationalism' or are curious and already a little informed
on occult history, I do recommend this book on the grounds of sheer
entertainment and occasional insights of real value. If, however, you
are looking for a serious synthesis of Western counter-culture or
reasons to take up Thelema, then I cannot.