A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (26 page)

Crowley's Hymn to Pan was first published in his magical magazine The Equinox, original issues of which are now highly collectable and fetch considerable sums. To have included it in his message to the world attests to the importance it had for its author. It is a highly effective piece of incantatory writing. Best read aloud, its succeeds admirably in evoking a sense of an impending crisis: the appearance of the ancient god of madness. Today it is often used by Crowley's devotees in their rituals, and it was read, much to the consternation of the city council, by Crowley's friend Louis Wilkinson, in Brighton on 5 December 1947, when Crowley was cremated. Wilkinson, a friend of another magical writer, John Cowper Powys (and as Louis Marlow, author of the Ouspenskyean novel The Devil in Crystal (1944)), was originally supposed to read the whole of The Book of the Law over Crowley's coffin. At the last minute, he quite rightly chose instead this moving, memorable paean to his departed friend's favourite deity.

Crowley's relationship with other poets is curious. We've seen his reaction to Yeats. His most well known literary association was with the poet Victor Neuberg, with whom Crowley engaged in homosexual magic in North Africa and other places, evoking the demon Choronzon. Neuberg was understandably shaken by the affair and, like many involved with Crowley, came away from their association damaged.27 Outside of magical circles, Neuberg is practically unknown today, although he has a small niche in literary history as the man who discovered Dylan Thomas. Crowley seemed to have had a negative effect on Neuberg's protege as well, chasing Thomas out of a London pub with a feat of clairvoyance. Strangely, although no friend of modernism, Crowley's work had a powerful effect on the eccentric Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, today recognized as one of the central figures in European modernism, and who, like Crowley, had a penchant for other identities. The two corresponded on magical matters, but Pessoa is most known to Crowleyites as the man who helped the Great Beast fake a suicide in Lisbon. Pessoa himself was a highly hermetic writer, and his contribution to the occult will be looked at in the book's concluding essay.

Arthur Machen

The career of Arthur Machen is enough to make any wouldbe writer think twice about the prospects of making a living with his pen. With the exception of Henry Miller, I can think of no one who so self-consciously set himself the task of becoming a writer and who wrote so much about the process. Yet, unlike his brother in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Machen never achieved the kind of popularity enjoyed by Algernon Blackwood. The brief spurt of literary fame that did come his way in the 1920s, though appreciative of his genius, did not help him financially. Throughout his life Machen never quite escaped the poverty of his childhood. All accounts of him depict a robust, life-affirming character - Chestertonian in outlook and girth - full of contempt for the modern age, but thankful for life's small pleasures. Yet there is a grim, stoic atmosphere around Machen; with Blake he shares the poet's ability to maintain a much needed self-belief in the face of almost universal ignorance. Today he is known only to aficionados of the Golden Dawn and connoisseurs of gaslight and horror, though he is perhaps, more than any other, the writer for whom London was the most mystical arcana of all.

Arthur Machen21 was born Arthur Llewelyn Jones on 3 March 1863 in Caerleon-on-Usk, Gwent, and died in St. Joseph's Nursing Home, Beaconsfield, on 15 December 1947. He was eighty-four. Like many writers Arthur was a dreamy, solitary child, and he spent his early years reading and wandering in his beloved Welsh countryside. Literature, ancient ruins, the beauties of nature and the sense that behind them lay some vast secret - the basic occult sensibility - were the strongest influences on him. A good student, in 1880 at seventeen Arthur had to leave school because his impoverished clergyman father could not afford the fees. That same year he. made his first visit to London, where he failed the preliminary examination for the Royal College of Surgeons. It was also at this time that he adopted Machen, his mother's maiden name, and decided that he wanted to become a writer. One hundred copies of a first attempt, Eleusinia, a long poem about the ancient Greek mystery tradition, was published the next year, and on the strength of this Machen's parents believed his fortune lay in journalism. He was sent to London again to Iearn the trade.

He failed then too, and found work as a publisher's clerk and then a tutor, but oddly enough, for most of his life Machen did earn his living as a journalist, working on a number of London papers. It's difficult to see the Celtic mystic Machen in the cutthroat world of Fleet Street, but from 1909 until the '20s, Machen was a regular figure there, in his Inverness cape, felt hat and nearly shoulder-length white hair.29 Machen later said that having to write under a deadline eventually helped him to a mastery of style. A look at his later work shows less of a love for fine writing, the hurdle most modern readers hit in approaching him. However, it's the early decadent Machen that is the focus of a fiercely devoted cult.

Machen's early years in London were an exercise in patience, endurance and want. Living alone in a tiny room on tea, bread and tobacco, Machen found himself in a sprawling, impersonal metropolis, his only escape his long, rambling walks through the city's interminable streets, recounted in books like Things Near and Far (1923) and The London Adventure (1924). Other would-be writers who launched themselves on the capital seemed to have their way made easy through friends, acquaintances, and family. Machen had none of this; what was worse, he felt a deadening inability to transfer the insights of his imagination onto the page. He was gripped by a "stuttering awkwardness" whenever he thought of "attempting the great speech of literature . . . " This excruciating pressure crushes most aspiring artists, as it does the hero of Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams (1907). To Machen's credit, he stuck to his dream and eventually made it come true.

From 1883 to 1890 Machen worked at becoming a man of letters, producing several books and translations, including the twelve volume Memoirs of]acques Casanova, now the standard edition. In 1884 he was hired to catalogue a collection of occult texts, and it was this, as well as his meeting with A.E. Waite a few years later, that turned his thoughts to magic. Then, in 1890, Machen had his breakthrough. The first chapter of his macabre tale The Great God Pan was published in a literary journal, The Whirlwind; two years later it appeared in book form, along with- another weird story, "The Inmost Light." It was more a success d'estime than a financial one, but even here Machen found himself running up against difficulties. Machen's story recounts a gruesome tale of a scientist's attempts to dissolve the veil of the external world, and reveal the secret of reality. In order to do this he performs a brain operation on a young girl. Predictably, the results are shattering: she has a vision of the great god Pan, goes mad and is put in an asylum, where she eventually dies. Not, however, before giving birth to a beautiful daughter, the product of her union with the object of her mind-blowing vision. In later years the girl becomes an evil femme fatale, triggering a rash of suicides in Victorian London.

The story made Machen's name, but his notoriety was not always welcome. While The Great God Pan found friends among the decadents it outraged more conservative critics and readers. Oscar Wilde, Machen's occasional dining companion and his only real link to the decadent movement, called it un grand succes.30 But not everyone agreed. The Westminster Gazette called it "an incoherent nightmare of sex." For the Manchester Guardian it was ". . . the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable (book) we have yet seen in English." Other mainstream papers offered a similar response. A literary agent Machen met at the time remarked that while having tea with "some ladies in Hampstead" he mentioned his story "and their opinion seemed to be that ... The Great God Pan should never have been written." They were not alone. Although its shocking effects seem dated today, in the Yellow Nineties, Machen's tale entered dangerous territory. He had `arrived', but the philistinism he would bash his head against for the rest of his life was undeterred.

Machen continued to write, and it's in this period - 1890-1900 - that his most characteristic work appears. Other strange stories, like "The White People" and "The Shining Pyramid," as well as his Stevensonian novel The Three Impostors (1895), earned Machen an enduring place in the history of weird fiction. It's now that his basic theme emerges: that beneath the veneer of modern civilization lie ancient, atavistic forces that man encounters at his peril. It was a theme that H.P. Lovecraft, a great fan of Machen, would later adopt in the stories in his `Cthulhu Mythos'. Although they were quite different characters - Machen a religious man and Lovecraft an atheist - Machen and Lovecraft shared a profound disgust with the modern world, and in their tales there is a feeling that they are, at least in part, getting back at a civilization they find revolting. (Blackwood, however, who Lovecraft also thought highly of, and who also believed in a lost, primal world, never gives quite the same impression; the strange forces his protagonists encounter, even when destructive, produce a sense of wonder, not horror.) Much of Machen's early writing seems prompted more by his rejection of the visible world than by his belief in a hidden mystical reality, a theme, we know, shared by many Romantics.

In 1899 Machen's first wife died of cancer. Understandably he was crushed. The depression led to a creative block, and Machen gave up writing. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, took an extreme dislike to Aleister Crowley, and soon left to take up a new career as an actor. For the next eight years Machen played minor Shakespearian roles in Frank Benson's stage company. Then, in 1909, he turned to journalism and later, in the 1920s, autobiography. In the 1930s, prompted by financial need, he turned his hand to fiction again, producing a few minor works, but the earlier spark had fled. Ironically, while he felt creatively drained, his early stories were enjoying a vogue in the US. In 1918 Vincent Starret published Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin. Decadence had reached the States and a Machen craze ensued. New editions of his works appeared and he was celebrated by writers like Carl Van Vechten and James Branch Cabell. Machen was dubbed "the flower-tunicked priest of nightmare" and seen as the equal of his beloved Poe and De Quincey. One work in particular was singled out for praise as the "most decadent book in all of English literature." It was Machen's early novel The Hill of Dreams.

Although written in 1897, during Machen's most creative decade, The Hill of Dreams would not find a publisher until 1907. The reason is simple: if not the most decadent book in all of English literature, it's certainly a good candidate; the scenes of self-flagellation alone suggest that. Its ironic that it took a decade to find a publisher: in writing the book, Machen was consciously attempting to fashion a new style. The Three Impostors, a fascinating, if erratic occult adventure, met with even more criticism than The Great God Pan. The book was a commercial failure, and Machen, seen as merely a second-rate. Stevenson, was determined to recreate himself as a writer. Drawing on his own harrowing early days in London, Machen set out to write a "Robinson Crusoe of the soul," a book that would embody the aesthetic philosophy that he would later spell out in his work of literary criticism, Hieroglyphics (1906): the belief that ecstasy, not fidelity to life, was the touchstone of real literature.

Though a slim novel the work took Machen two years to finish, and it's possible that in depicting his own descent into hell through the figure of Lucian Taylor, Machen worked off some of his hatred of modernity. At any rate, the frisson of horror and decadence is less apparent in his later writings, the mystical light less tinted by the demonic. He had, I think, got through some of his world rejection, and in his imagination worked out the fate of an individual who adopts Axel's attitude toward life, yet lacks the spiritual stamina to put something in its place. Like Brother Serapion, Lucian lifts anchor on reality, and embarks on a dream voyage. Unlike Brother Serapion, he found no safe harbour in a monastery and slowly goes under. Increasingly, the qualities that set Lucian apart from other people, his genius and sensitivity, draw him into an underworld of his own dreams, visions and fantasies, until eventually his link with the world is severed. The Hill of Dreams has its roots in The Golden Flower Pot, and depicts a third choice along with the foot of the cross and the barrel of a gun: madness.

Guy De Maupassant

Although known for the most part as a laconic and cynical chronicler of late-19th century French manners, Guy De Maupassant had a lifelong obsession with madness and death. This later emerged in a series of gruesome and disturbing supernatural tales, whose mood is quite unlike that of his more famous stories, like "La Parure" and "Soule-de-suif." Some commentators suggest Maupassant's morbidity started with the mummified hand of a parricide given to him at fourteen by the poet Swinburne. If Swinburne thought it an appropriate gift, however, he must have known Maupassant already had a taste for such items. Maupassant grew up in a household familiar with mental abnormality. His mother suffered from a variety of neurotic and hysterical complaints, and his younger brother Herve had an unstable personality and would eventually die insane. That Maupassant himself would succumb to the same fate suggests that in some way his fascination with madness and premature death was an intuition of what lay ahead.

Guy De Maupassant was born in Chateau de Miromesnil, near Dieppe in Normandy on 5 August 1850. His father, the son of a successful business man, was a handsome amateur painter who had a reputation as a dandy. His mother, a brilliant and strong willed neurotic, was equally well off but more cultivated than her husband. She had an interest in philosophy and literature and was a friend of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, later the young writer's mentor. At Guy's birth the doctor gave his head a vigorous massage, rounding it off like a pot with a twirl of his thumb. This, he said, would ensure an active brain and a first rate-intelligence. Whether it was the doctor's handiwork or not, Guy grew up a very bright little boy. His parent's relationship, however, was crumbling, and at the age of six, Guy's father left him and his younger brother to be brought up by his mother. Extremely territorial, she would prove to be the strongest influence on his life. In later life Maupassant saw women as things to be enjoyed - he was an obsessive seducer - and his stories have a strong misogynist streak, and often depict the weakness of a negligent father.