Raising Hell (18 page)

“I had enough sense to see,” Fortune wrote, “that I was at the dividing of the ways, and if I were not careful would take the first step on the Left-Hand path. . . .” Using all her powers of concentration, she called the wolf back to her room, where it appeared “in quite a mild and domesticated mood” on the hearth rug. “From it to me stretched a shadowy line of ectoplasm; one end was attached to my solar plexus, and the other disappeared in the shaggy fur of its belly. . . . I began by an effort of the will and imagination to draw the life out of it along this silver cord, as if sucking lemonade up a straw. The wolf-form began to fade, the cord thickened and grew more substantial.
A violent emotional upheaval started in myself; I felt the most furious impulses to go berserk and rend and tear anything and anybody that came to hand. . . .” Eventually, the wolf faded away, vanishing in a gray mist. “The tension relaxed, and I found myself bathed in perspiration.”

Throughout her career, which included writing
The Mystical Quabbalah,
one of the few significant additions to the occult canon made in the twentieth century, Fortune resisted that Left-Hand path—the path of evildoing—and used her research and beliefs simply to explore and explain the unseen world. She died in 1946.

MME BLAVATSKY

Her magical gifts came to her, she claimed, from sources both ancient and invisible, from the mahatmas of Tibet and the Egyptian goddess Isis. She had traveled long in the Himalayan regions, where she had learned the secrets of clairvoyance, prophecy, and materialization (at a picnic, she once made her cup and saucer appear in her hand out of thin air). She had broken through the wall between this world and the next and could offer her followers—of whom there came to be many thousands, spread across several continents—news from the great beyond. In the history of magic and spiritualism, there are few figures as provocative and, to this day, controversial as Madame Blavatsky.

Born on July 31, 1831, in Ekaterinoslav, Russia, she was the daughter of an army colonel, and she showed her rebellious streak early on in life: at seventeen, she married a much older man, a Russian government official named Nicephore Blavatsky, and before the marriage was ever even consummated (or so she always claimed) she took off for parts unknown. Unaccompanied, she traveled through India, Canada, Mexico, and Texas. Twice she tried to enter Tibet, disguised as a man (as a lone woman, she would never have been allowed in), and once she managed to penetrate the interior before becoming lost; she was
escorted back to the border by a troop of horsemen. Still, whenever she told the story of her life, she drew a veil over the ten years between 1848 and 1858, claiming to have spent them in an unspecified Himalayan retreat, where she learned much from the Eastern spiritual masters.

After returning to Russia, where she achieved a certain celebrity as a medium, she again felt the need to broaden her horizons, and she traveled to America, where the spiritualism craze—begun by the Fox sisters in Wayne County, New York, in 1848—was in full swing. When she arrived in New York City in 1873, she was without friends or resources, she was short and stout (weighing well over two hundred pounds), with a quick temper, unguarded tongue, and chain-smoking habit. But within six years, she had managed to become famous all over the country and had founded an organization, the Theosophical Society, which exists to this day. If this weren’t enough to prove her extraordinary powers, there are many firsthand accounts from her contemporaries, which describe her remarkable magnetism and charisma, her ability to bring people around to her own point of view, and her success at recruiting them into her burgeoning group.

The fundamental tenets of theosophy, as promulgated by Blavatsky, were drawn from many sources, ranging from the Cabbala to Buddha, from Hinduism to the Western occult traditions. In brief, the society was dedicated to three main objectives: (1) the formation of a universal brotherhood of man, (2) the study and furtherance of ancient religions, sciences, and philosophies, and (3) the investigation of the laws of nature along with the nurturing of the divine powers lying dormant in every man and woman.

Blavatsky believed, and wrote in her book
The Secret Doctrine,
that all the great religions of the world welled up from one supreme source and were merely different expressions of the same universal truth. This truth, she contended, had been held in trust, throughout the ages, by a mysterious group of Tibetan adepts, or mahatmas (great souls), with whom she was in regular psychical touch. Two of these adepts met and communicated
with her on the astral plane, sometimes going so far as to drop letters, with written instructions, down from the ether.

They also helped her to perform the “miracles” with which she attracted crowds and converts. Although Blavatsky herself claimed these “phenomena” were an insignificant part of her mission (and skeptics often proved them to be put-up jobs, involving hidden wall panels and secret confederates), they made an undeniable impression on the public. She could make the flame of a lamp rise and fall simply by pointing at it, she could make rose petals shower down on the heads of the assembled company. When two young gentlemen at a dinner party mockingly referred to the cup and saucer she’d magically produced at the picnic, insinuating that she’d somehow hidden the items beforehand, Madame Blavatsky flew into a rage. Turning to the hostess, she asked her to imagine something that she really wanted, and when the hostess mentioned a brooch that she’d lost years before, Blavatsky told her to envisage it as clearly as she could. Then Blavatsky told the guests to go outside to the flowerbed, where she declared her mahatmas had now deposited it. After a bit of digging, the brooch was found there.

In
Isis Unveiled,
the virtual bible of theosophy which Madame Blavatsky published in two volumes in 1877, she claimed that she had served as an amanuensis to her spirit guides, sitting for hour after hour, smoking her hand-rolled cigarettes (which often contained hashish), and recording what the Egyptian deity and the Tibetan masters dictated to her; sometimes, when she looked up, one of the spirits was holding open a sourcebook for her. According to John Symonds, who wrote a book about Blavatsky, she said of this process:

I am solely occupied, not with writing
Isis,
but with Isis herself. I live in a kind of permanent enchantment, a life of vision and sights, with open eyes, and no chance whatever to deceive my senses! I sit and watch the fair good goddess constantly. And as she displays before me the secret meaning of her long-lost secrets, and the veil, becoming with every hour
thinner and more transparent, gradually falls off before my eyes, I hold my breath and can hardly trust to my senses! . . . Night and day the images of the past are ever marshalled before my inner eyes. Slowly, and gliding silently like images in an enchanted panorama, centuries after centuries appear before me. . . . I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory. I tell you seriously I am helped.

What the guides helped her to understand was that the world we know is destined to be inhabited by seven “root races,” of which human beings are now the fifth. The first root race, invisible and made of fire mist, inhabited a region near the North Pole. The second, which was a bit more visible—and invented sexual intercourse—lived in northern Asia. The third race, who communicated with each other by telepathy, was made up of huge, apelike creatures who roamed a lost land in the Pacific called Lemuria. The fourth, and certainly most famous, was the denizens of Atlantis, destroyed, in Blavatsky’s outline, by powerful currents of black magic. We humans, the next in line, are already on our way out, and we’ll be replaced by a race that will live, once again, on Lemuria. When that race peters out in its own good time, the last root race of all will take up residence here, before life finally says good-bye to earth altogether and begins again on the planet Mercury. The time scheme for all this is, as would be expected, quite vast.

Blavatsky’s own time ran out at the age of sixty. After years of deteriorating health due to heart and kidney disease, she passed over to the astral plane on May 8, 1891, in the theosophical headquarters on Avenue Road in London.

THE SECRET

DOCTRINE

. . . the Sages have been taught of God that this natural world is only an image and material copy of a heavenly and spiritual pattern; that the very existence of this world is based upon the reality of its celestial archetype; and that God has created it in imitation of the spiritual and invisible universe, in order that men might be the better enabled to comprehend His heavenly teaching, and the wonders of His absolute and ineffable power and wisdom. Thus the sage sees heaven reflected in Nature as in a mirror; and he pursues this Art, not for the sake of gold or silver, but for the love of the knowledge which it reveals; he jealously conceals it from the sinner and the scornful, lest the mysteries of heaven should be laid bare to the vulgar gaze.

Alexander Seton,
The New Light

of Alchemy
(c. 1640)

THE ALCHEMISTS’ ART

Whether the alchemist was most concerned with material or spiritual gain is still a subject of debate, but transformation, in one form or another, was always his goal. Plumbing the mysteries of nature—how matter came into being, why it took the shapes it did, how it could be transformed—these were the questions that occupied the mind of the alchemist, and these were the mysteries that comprised what was sometimes called the Secret Doctrine or the Great Work.

In the material sense, the chief aim of alchemy was to change baser metals—lead, tin, iron—into the most noble metals of all, silver and especially gold, using a mysterious substance known as the philosophers’ stone. Apart from its obvious value, gold was considered to have miraculous restorative powers and properties.

In the more philosophical sense, alchemy was a system of thought designed to improve and ultimately perfect the human nature of the alchemist himself. “Out of other things thou will never make the One,” wrote the sixteenth-century German alchemist Gerhard Dorn, “until thou hast first become One thy-self.”

But whatever the specific aims and practices of the alchemists’ art, they were always cloaked in great mystery and in language almost impossible to comprehend: “Take the serpent and place it on the chariot with four wheels and let it be turned about on the earth until it is immersed in the depths of the sea . . . and when the vapour is precipitated like rain . . . you should bring the chariot from water to dry land, and then you will have placed the four wheels on the chariot, and will obtain the result if you will advance further to the Red Sea, running without running, moving without motion” (
Tractatus Aristotelis ad Alexandrum Magnum
).

Try that in your home laboratory.

There were several reasons for the deliberate obfuscation of
the alchemists’ texts. For one thing, these magical arts always ran the risk of being declared heresy in the eyes of the church, and its practitioners could wind up tied to a stake. So the less that could be proved against them, the better.

For another, it was important, as far as the alchemists’ fraternity was concerned, to keep their secrets and discoveries to themselves. If the formulas for making gold or for the alchemists’ ancillary aims (such as the discovery of the elixir of life, “the universal solvent,” or the creation of homunculi) fell into the wrong hands, they might be used for nefarious or unholy purposes. As Thomas Norton of Bristol put it, in his fifteenth-century manual the
Ordinal of Alchemy
:

This art must ever secret be,

The cause whereof is this, as ye may see;

If one evil man had thereof all his will,

All Christian peace he might easily spill,

And with his pride he might pull down

Rightful kings and princes of renown.

Thirdly, skeptics might say the reason for all the obscurity was, quite simply, that there was nothing there. The alchemists were engaged in an elaborate con game, and making sure that no one understood them was the best way of making sure that no one could question the depth and profundity of their “science.”

When all is said and done, there’s probably some truth in all of these reasons.

As it is, there was a good deal of discrimination and discord among the members of the alchemical brotherhood itself; those who thought they were practicing the true science—the self-proclaimed adepts—looked down their noses at the rank amateurs, the dabblers and dilettantes whom they thought were debasing their calling. In fact, they had a nickname for them—puffers—after the bellows that these struggling alchemists spent so much time plying in their cluttered, makeshift laboratories.

Even so, the adepts, too, had more than their fair share of equipment—retorts, furnaces, flasks, alembics, grinders, copper pots, crosslets, etc. But it was repeatedly written that most of this elaborate paraphernalia was unnecessary to the true work: in the
Guide charitable,
now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, it was stated that “the whole expense of the Stone will not be very considerable; the first elements of the Great Work cost little; earthenware vessels, the furnace, charcoal, and various utensils suffice.” As for the rest, the serious alchemist was advised to look to the book of nature, which was open all around him, and to maintain the proper attitude. After Nicolas Valois completed what he claimed was a successful transmutation, he offered this recommendation: “thou wilt do as I did it,” he declared, “if thou wilt take pains to be what thou shouldest be—that is to say, pious, gentle, benign, charitable and fearing God.”

THE ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY

Although its earliest origins will never be known for certain, there’s no question that alchemy is one of the oldest and most practiced of the occult arts. According to one legend, of Arabic derivation, it was God himself who handed down the secrets of alchemy to Moses and Aaron.