Strange Powers (2 page)

Robbins could be right. But there is another interpretation. There is evidence that Bothwell was plotting to kill the king, whom he hoped to supplant on the throne of England. Fian was his secretary. Suppose Fian
was
responsible for ceremonies to try to raise a storm to wreck the king's ship? Suppose the witches were not just self-deluding old hags, but possessed the same power as African witch doctors? Suppose Agnes Sampson had some genuine extra-sensory knowledge of what passed between the king and his bride on their wedding night and, having once committed herself to confession and repentance, decided to use this knowledge to convince the king when he became skeptical... ? This version fits the facts as well as Robbins' 'martyrdom of the innocent' theory. In fact, rather better.

Having reached this conclusion, it struck me that I was now appreciably closer to the position of Montague Summers, and that he might not be as dishonest as I had assumed. Summers does not deny that many innocent women have been executed as witches; he only argues that there
is
a tradition of 'black witchcraft' in Europe. I cannot go along with him in believing that witches really summoned the devil—although I would accept that they might have summoned 'powers of evil', whatever that means. The truth probably lies somewhere midway between Summers' total acceptance of black witchcraft and Robbins' total skepticism.

As far as magic and occultism went, I remained basically a skeptic. But in
The Outsider
which I started to write over Christmas 1954, I expressed my revulsion from the determinism and reductionism of modern science. (For example, I had always disliked Freud's attempt to explain Moses, Leonardo and Dostoevsky in terms of Oedipus complexes, castration fears, etc.) In
The Outsider
and
Religion and the Rebel
, I was more concerned with the problem from a philosophical angle: that two of the most influential modern philosophical movements, logical positivism and linguistic analysis, should regard questions of human freedom as more or less meaningless. With Heidegger and Sartre, I accepted that man is capable of expressing free will—and therefore of some non-religious version of 'damnation' and 'salvation'. Having worked in factories, offices, restaurants, I had a highly developed sense of the futility of certain modes of activity, and also of the strong feeling of meaning and freedom in others—for example, in self-expression (in my case, through writing), in travel, in romantic or sexual involvements. As far as I was concerned, a life spent in menial jobs was a form of damnation; while Rupert Brooke's lines about a smell

' ... that fibs
The soul with longing for dim hills
And far horizons'

brought a taste of freedom, of meaning, of 'salvation'. It was no good telling me that these words express linguistic misunderstandings.

But at the time
The Outsider
came out, in 1956, what I was writing struck critics as the most old-fashioned rubbish—a sort of throw-back to the romanticism of Yeats—or even earlier, of Shelley and Blake. The success of
The Outsider
was followed by an almost immediate back swing. The father figure of English logical positivism, A. J. Ayer, led the attack; in a review of
The Outsider
, while Arthur Koestler dismissed the book as 'bubble of the year' (and has since reprinted this opinion in a volume of essays, by way of reaffirming it). The word 'woolly' turned up increasingly in reviews, particularly of
Religion and the Rebel
, the sequel to The
Outsider
. Then there was another group of objectors on political grounds. Most of my contemporaries in literature were left-wing—Osborne, Amis, Braine, Doris Lessing, Christopher Logue, Kenneth Tynan, Wesker
et al.
, and they advocated the importance of 'commitment', marching to Aldermaston, signing petitions against repressive regimes, and so on. I had no positive objections; I would have been entirely in favor of banning the H-bomb or allowing Russia's Jews to go to Israel. It was just a question of priorities. I was interested in my own inner needs, and in the inner needs of men in general. That was my concept of an Outsider: a man driven by a powerful inner compulsion to freedom, which might lead him to act in opposition to the demands of society, to his own desire for comfort and acceptance by his fellows. In the nineteenth century, it had driven many of the major artists to an early grave; and most of the romantics accepted this as part of their basic philosophy: if you experience this strange urge for 'dim hills and far horizons', expect an early death; this busy human world has no place for you. I wrote
The Outsider
because I couldn't accept this notion. I could see no
a priori
reason why Shelley and Keats had to die young, why Hölderlin and Nietzsche had to go insane, why Beddoes and Van Gogh had to commit suicide. Or, for that matter, why Wordsworth and Swinburne had to drift into a mediocre old age. To me, it seemed, quite simply, that most of them were too
passive
. Even Nietzsche, that advocate of war and ruthlessness, spent his life quietly drifting from
pension
to
pension
. I believed that if 'the Outsider' could learn to know himself, and make a determined effort to control his life instead of drifting, he might end as a leader of civilization instead of one of its rejects. But the answer was
not
to join the peace corps or march in protest rallies. And because I held this indifferent attitude to current politics, I found myself, to my astonishment, labeled a fascist. I didn't see the logic of this, and still don't. I assume they thought that individualism always leads to fascism—unaware that fascism is a form of socialism that exalts the state above the individual. At all events, I had to get used to a feeling of working alone that was rather like being sent to Coventry. I continued to write books. The success of
The Outsider
meant that I was able to find publishers. But reviews were dismissive, and in a few cases (such as
Introduction to the New Existentialism
) there were no reviews at all.

Lack of money made life difficult; but otherwise, I didn't mind too much. After all, I was arguing that the romantic Outsiders had been destroyed because they lacked the strength to stand alone. To allow myself to be depressed by the neglect would have been illogical. Anyway, I was too busy just keeping alive. So I completely failed to notice that something strange was happening. The tide of a century and a half was turning. I knew, of course, that there was increasingly strong movement towards anti-reductionism in science. Since 1959 I had been in correspondence with the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who believed that Freud had 'sold human nature short', and that the idealistic and creative part of man's nature is as fundamental as his sexual or aggressive drives. I knew Michael Polanyi's important book
Personal Knowledge
(1958), arguing that the scientist's creative processes are as inspirational and illogical as the poet's, and that this is true of all creative thinking. But it came as a surprise to me to learn that there was suddenly a new wave of interest in eastern philosophy, in romanticism, in magic and occultism. When I wrote about the novels of Hermann Hesse in
The Outsider
, they were all out of print; and, as far as I know, I was the first person to write about them extensively in English. Now, suddenly, he was apparently a best seller. So was Tolkien; his
Lord of the Rings
had been a 'cult book' since its publication in the mid-fifties, read and re-read by a small circle of enthusiasts; now it literally sold by the million in paperback on American campuses. So did H. P. Lovecraft, a writer I had first read in the early sixties, and had written about in a book called
The Strength to Dream
in 1962. When I first wrote about him, his books could only be obtained through a tiny American publisher, Arkham House, run by Lovecraft's old friend, August Derleth; by the late sixties, they were all in paperback.

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

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

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