Supernatural (4 page)

All this taught me something extremely interesting: that I could
steer
myself into different states of mind, and could
choose
how I felt.
Or, as Edmund Husserl, a philosopher I later came to admire, would put it, feelings are
intentional.
So although my loss of interest in science was something of a disaster, I soon began to feel I had replaced it with a world just as fascinating: the vast universe of art and literature and philosophy.

In fact, the most widely discussed philosophy of that period (1947–50) was Existentialism, which was, quite simply, an attempt to bring philosophy down to earth.
Oddly enough, it was summarised in the title of a book Wells had written in 1935:
What Are We to do with Our Lives?
This began with the recognition that the world is changing so fast that we have to try and grasp it, and
take charge of it
instead of merely enduring it.
What had happened in the past, Wells said, was that man had been repressed and limited by institutions like the Church and the ruling classes.
Now he could choose what he wanted to be.

To me, growing up at the end of World War Two, it was not purely a social question.
Dostoevsky, for example, said that if the human race was quite certain of the existence of life after death, this would be by far the most important knowledge we could have.
Which is why, from a fairly early stage in my life, I had been preoccupied with such questions.
Who was I?
What was I doing here?
And now that it seemed that science had failed to provide an answer, I knew I had to begin all over again.

After my earlier success as an author with
The Outsider,
it was pure chance that started me on my new beginning as a writer of the occult: the publication in the mid-1960s of a book called
The Morning of the Magicians
(
The Dawn of Magic
in the UK), which was willing to ask all the questions over again.
It was immensely successful, and started an ‘occult boom’ all over the world.
In 1968, my American agent asked me if I would be willing to write a book on the occult.
It was not a subject that deeply interested me, but I knew the advance would be useful.

I began researching it on a trip to Majorca in 1969, where I met the poet Robert Graves, whose book
The White Goddess
was the perfect preparation for such a work.
The result was
The Occult,
whose success delighted and astonished me.
This was followed by two sequels,
Mysteries
and
Beyond the Occult,
all three volumes amounting to over two million words.
Finally, in 1991, my son Damon set out to compress the essence of the three volumes into the work you at present have before you.

1

The Rebirth of Magic

I
N PARIS
in the year 1960 there appeared on the bookstalls a volume with the euphonious title
Le Matin des Magicians
(
The Morning of the Magicians
).
The authors were an oddly assorted pair—a flamboyant journalist named Louis Pauwels, and Jacques Bergier, an atomic physicist who was also a practising alchemist.
It is a curious hodgepodge of a book, as the authors themselves recognised, for they wrote in the first chapter: ‘Skip chapters if you want to; begin where you like, and read in any direction; this book is a multiple-use tool, like the knives campers use .
.
.’
To everyone’s astonishment, it became a bestseller, running through edition after edition in France.
Serious critics were irritated and baffled by its success; they pointed out that the book was merely a series of wild speculations on magic, alchemy, telepathy, prophecy, strange cults, the Great Pyramid, Hitler’s astrologers, the Cabala, flying saucers, and a thousand other topics.
This mass of eccentricity was held together by one simple theme: that the world is a stranger and richer place than science is willing to recognise.

It was a message that apparently had a wide appeal in France, especially to the young.
They were less interested in the book’s argument about the narrowness of science than in the imaginative appeal of its magical wonders.
Other writers saw that there was money to be made out of the occult, and as books on astrology, reincarnation and visitors from outer space rolled off the presses there was no sign of any loss of interest.
The craze spread to the United States, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, France and South America.
In 1968, a German book called
Memories of the Future
made a fortune and a reputation for its author Erich von Daniken, and sold more copies than any other book except the Bible.
Daniken’s thesis was that the earth was visited thousands of years ago by spacemen, who left behind signs of their presence such as the statues of Easter Island and the pyramids.
Stanley Kubrick’s film
2001, A Space Odyssey,
was based on the same idea.
It became a kind of cult, and its admirers went to see it again and again, just as they might attend a religious ceremony.
The great occult boom had arrived.

I had bought
The Morning of the Magicians
when it appeared in England in 1963 (under the title
The Dawn of Magic
), but although I enjoyed it, had not taken it too seriously; it struck me as a little too wild and undisciplined.
Besides, it was full of errors.
It talked, for example, about the remarkable maps which, it declared, had been presented to the Library of Congress in the mid-19th century by a Turkish naval officer called Piri Reis, the oldest of which dates from the 1st century
AD,
yet
which shows Antarctica,
which was not discovered until 1818—and which, moreover, seems to show its shape as it was before it was covered with ice.
Another map shows a land bridge across the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, which has not existed for at least 12,000 years.
All this seems to argue that civilisation is far older than we realise—or possibly that the world was visited in the remote past by aliens from other planets.

The authors were right about the maps, but they had spoiled an interesting and exciting argument by being wrong about Piri Reis, who was actually a Greek pirate who was beheaded in 1554.
And although I was not aware of this particular error when I first read the book, I sensed a general atmosphere of carelessness that I found irritating.
This is why I felt no temptation to join in the ‘Occult Revival’ that seemed to be going on all around me.

Not that I was indifferent to the subject of the ‘supernatural’—otherwise I would not have bought the book in the first place.
When I was about 10 years old, I had been deeply impressed by a series of articles in a Sunday newspaper that purported to be the after-death experiences of an airman who had died in the Battle of Britain, as received through a ‘spirit medium’.
He described what it was like to die in considerable detail, and how the ‘next world’ was a marvellous place with emerald-green grass and perpetually flowering trees—I remember being particularly impressed by his account of going to swim in water that was like warm cotton wool, and didn’t get up your nose.
I hurried to the local library, and located various books on Spiritualism, including Harry Price’s
Most Haunted House in England,
an account of the haunting of Borley rectory (see pp.
233
ff).
This so impressed me that I read my way right through every book they had on ghosts, poltergeists and life after death.
For the next month or so I kept my schoolfriends in a state of astonishment with weird tales of the occult.

My enthusiasm soon waned when an uncle presented me with a book called
The Marvels and Mysteries of Science,
and my mother bought me a chemistry set for Christmas.
Science filled me with an ecstatic excitement that was as magical as any fairy tale, and the fascination with ‘the occult’ seemed to vanish like a dream at cockcrow.
Yet it revived in flashes over the years: for example, when, at the age of 20, I was living in London, and came upon a strange work called the
I Ching
in the local library—newly translated by Jung’s friend Richard Wilhelm.
Like everybody else who has ever acquired the
I Ching,
I immediately consulted the oracle on my own future, and was gratified when the result was the first hexagram in the book: Ch’ien, The Creative, with a judgement:

‘The creative works supreme success,

Furthering through perseverance.’

This led me on to a study of ritual magic and witchcraft, as well as to the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
I was particularly struck by a passage in the introduction to Ouspensky’s
New Model of the Universe:

‘It is the year 1906 or 1907.
The editorial office of the Moscow daily paper
The Morning.
I have just received the foreign papers and I have to write an article on the forthcoming Hague Conference.
French, German, English, Italian papers.
Phrases, phrases, sympathetic, critical, ironical, blatant, pompous, lying and, worst of all, utterly automatic phrases which have been used a thousand times and will be used again on entirely different,
perhaps contradictory, occasions.
I have to make a survey of all these words and opinions, pretending to take them seriously, and then, just as seriously, to write something on my own account.
But what can I say?
It is all so tedious.
Diplomats and all kinds of statesmen will gather together and talk, papers will approve or disapprove, sympathise or not sympathise.
Then everything will be as it was, or even worse.

‘It is still early, I say to myself; perhaps something will come into my head later.

‘Pushing aside the papers, I open a drawer in my desk.
The whole desk is crammed with books with strange titles,
The Occult World, Life After Death, Atlantis and Lemuria, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Le Temple de Satan, The Sincere Narrations of a Pilgrim,
and the like.
These books and I have been inseparable for a whole month, and the world of the Hague Conference and leading articles becomes more and more vague and unreal to me.

‘I open one of the books at random, feeling that my article will not be written today.
Well, it can go to the devil.
Humanity will lose nothing if there is one article less on the Hague Conference.’

All this was a faithful reflection of my own state of mind at the time.
At the age of 20 I was already a father, and was living in South Wimbledon, in the home of an old invalid who had hired my wife as a nurse.
Since my marriage I had made a living by working in a series of plastics factories.
It was hard to find landladies who would put up with babies, and we had moved four times in the course of one year.
Within a few months our present landlord would die, and my wife would take on a job as the nurse of a half-insane virago who lived in Earls Court; she would prove to be our worst trial so far, and she exhausted us both so much that when we separated—to try and find yet another home—we concluded that we were sick of marriage, and drifted apart.

During the next three years I worked at a series of temporary jobs—in offices, factories, coffee bars—and tried to write a novel about an ‘outsider’ who feels as Ouspensky did about modern civilisation.
I had always been fascinated by rebels and ‘outsiders’, social misfits who loathe what the philosopher Heidegger called ‘the triviality of everydayness’.
And it was while working as a dishwasher in a London coffee bar in the mid-1950s that I decided to lay aside the novel and try to express my frustrations in a more straightforward manner by writing a book about ‘outsiders’.

It proved to be a good decision.
The Outsider
happened to be accepted by the first publisher to whom I sent a dozen or so pages, and, when it appeared in 1956, became an immediate bestseller.
This was partly because it was a book that had something new to say—I am neither stupid nor modest enough to regard its success as a fluke.
But it was also because the English literary scene had been singularly devoid of new talent since the end of the war.
And the journalists who wrote about me made much of my publisher’s admission that I was only 24, and that I had written it in the Reading Room of the British Museum, while sleeping during the nights on Hampstead Heath to save rent.

The result, at all events, was an explosion of international notoriety and more money than I had ever dreamed of.
But fame, I soon discovered, also had its negative side.
The British are not—to put it mildly—a nation of intellectuals.
Unlike the French, the Germans—even the Americans—they take no interest in the world of ideas.
They were impressed by
The Outsider
because it had been written by a 24-year-old who had not been to a university.
But they were not really in the least interested in romantic rebels with foreign names like Novalis, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Ouspensky.
Moreover, it soon became clear that the popular press resented the publicity for which they themselves were responsible, and which had helped to make the book such a success.
In the following year, 1957, they seized the first opportunity to announce their complete loss of interest in the whole Outsider phenomenon.
This happened to be after the publication of my second book,
Religion and the Rebel,
which was hatcheted.
The Americans, always delighted to see a success-bubble explode, followed suit.
(
Time
ran a headline ‘Scrambled Egghead’.)

I found it a traumatic experience.
But at least I was infinitely better off than when I was working for £5 a week in a plastic factory or coffee bar.
Ever since I had been a small boy, I had dreamed of living in a tub, like Diogenes, or in some tiny room under the earth, rather like one of Tolkien’s Hobbit holes—a warm, comfortable retreat stocked with food and books.
I didn’t really much care for being ‘famous’ and going to literary parties; mixing too much with people bewildered me and gave me a sensation I called ‘people-poisoning’.
I wanted to be allowed to spend my days reading and thinking.
So, together with my girlfriend Joy—whom I had met soon after my marriage broke up—I moved to a remote area of Cornwall, into an old cottage that was a fairly good imitation of a Hobbit hole, and went back with relief to reading, writing and thinking about the ideas that interested me so much.