Perhaps the most occult writer of the twentieth century and the one who best lived up to Rimbaud’s dictum about becoming a medium was Fernando Pessoa. He wrote of holding inside himself all the dreams of the world and wanting to experience the whole of the universe — its reality — inside himself. He awaited the return of the Hidden One, who has himself been waiting since the beginning of time. Meanwhile Pessoa emptied himself like a medium, allowing himself to be taken over by a series of personae, under whose names he wrote different series of poems with very different voices. ‘I am the cleverness in the dice’, says an ancient Taoist text. ‘I am the active in the deeds’, says the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl. Pessoa recognized these sentiments. To move things in space and time, to make the world better, it is not enough to push as hard as we can. We need the spirits to work through us. We need some of that spirit of cleverness.
In the literature of the late twentieth century Borges, Calvino, Salinger and Singer also deal openly with esoteric themes. It is as if they work in accord with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assertion that all genuine creation makes conscious something from the esoteric realm that has not been made conscious before. Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy has been extremely influential, not only on Kandinsky, Marc and Beuys, but also on William Golding and Doris Lessing, both of whom lived in Anthroposophical communities.
It is a mark of the strange way that esoteric influences spread that two such different writers as C.S. Lewis and Saul Bellow were both instructed in esoteric philosophy by the same spiritual master, the Anthroposophist Owen Barfield.
Will it always be true to say that the greatest writers of the day are interested in esoteric ideas? We can certainly see the influence of esotericism on both Bellow and John Updike, the two leading novelists writing in English at the turn of the century. Some of Bellow’s correspondence with Barfield has been published. Updike has written an overtly occult novel in The Witches of Eastwick, but perhaps more telling is this passage from his latest novel, Villages: ‘Sex is a programmed delirium that rolls back death with death’s own substance; it is the black space between the stars given sweet substance in our veins and crevice. The parts of ourselves conventional decency calls shameful are exalted. We are told that we shine, that we are exalted…’
This passage reaches right to the heart of the issue that lies between the exoteric world view and its opposite. According to esoteric thinkers, life in a mechanized, industrialized, digitalized environment has a deadening effect on our mental processes. The concrete, the plastic, the metal, the electrical impulses bouncing off the screen become internalized, resulting in a sterile wasteland that does not regenerate itself.
A conscious shift in consciousness is needed to open ourselves up again to the free-flowing, revivifying influence of the spirit worlds.
IN 1789 THE ARMIES OF ANGELS LED BY St Michael won a victory in heaven. In order for this victory to be decisive, though, it would have to be fought again on earth.
On 28 June 1914 Rasputin was overtaken by the plot to kill him. On the very same day Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated.
All hell let loose.
Much has been written about the evil occult influences on Germany in the early twentieth century. Less well known is the story of the occult influences in Russia at the time of the Revolution. We have already touched on St Martin, Papus and Rasputin. What is very little known is the occult influence behind their enemies, the revolutionary communists.
As I have already suggested, Marxism can be seen as a materialistic reframing of the fraternal ideals of Freemasonry. The revolutionary cell structure instigated by Lenin and Trotsky was closely modelled on the working methods of Weishaupt. Marx, Engels and Trotsky were Freemasons. Lenin was a Freemason of the 31st degree, a member of several lodges including the lodge of the Nine Sisters, the most important lodge to have been infiltrated by the followers and nihilistic philosophy of the Illuminati. Lenin and Trotsky waged war on God.
But there is a deeper mystery here. How was a man like Lenin able to bend millions of people to his will? This seems to go beyond the sinister strategies of a Weishaupt.
The US military research into occult ways of gaining advantage over the Soviet Union has been well documented. Key personnel have given testimony which seems authentic, though the results seem to have been pretty limited.
What is only now beginning to emerge is the much more extreme — and successful — use of the occult by government agencies of the old Soviet Union. Some reluctant initiates have survived to speak of ‘the red initiation’, of the training to become secret agents which took place in former monasteries. It seems that occult techniques were employed to strengthen the will to a supernatural degree by exploiting the psychic energies of torture victims and sacrificial victims, too. Only someone who had killed in the cause could become a red initiate.
Of course we have seen this form of black magic before — in the pyramid culture of South America. In the secret history Lenin is a reincarnation of a high priest, born again in order to oppose the second coming of the Sun god, and when Trotsky was on the run from his old comrades, hiding in Mexico City, he was returning home.
The image of Lenin, the mummified incarnation of an initiate of the pyramids is both resonant and a little absurd to modern sensibility. Ironically, perhaps, this image seems to encapsulate the very spirit of Modernism, mixing the iconic with the offbeat, of the cheap, banal even tackily up to date with ancient, occult wisdom.
THERE HAS BEEN SOME DEBATE IN occult circles as to how much esoteric wisdom should be made public. How much is useful in the war against materialism — and how much is dangerous?
We return to India, where post-Atlantean history began.
As we approach the end of this history, we are in a good position to see how far humanity has evolved from the communally minded creature of earlier times who had little awareness of the world around him and little sense of an interior life. In Gandhi we see individual free thought, free will and free love. Here is someone who has so expanded his sense of self that he is able to make turning points in his own personal story, his own interior narrative, into turning points in world history.
Gandhi stands as a great embodiment of the new form of consciousness that the secret societies have been working throughout history to help evolve.
It is perhaps a small irony, as well as being a mark of the global reach of the secret societies, that coming from the land of the Rishis, Gandhi first learned esoteric ideas from the Russian/English/Egyptian/American hybrid Theosophy, as taught by Madame Blavatsky.
As a young man Gandhi described himself as ‘in love’ with the British Empire. Being naturally good-hearted he saw the best in the upright and fair-playing Britons who administered his native country as a colony.