This is the type of book I wish I had stumbled across many years ago. A guidebook to the history of the ideas of spirituality.

As a student of esoteric thought and spiritual development, I’m interested in the members of our species that have achieved a particular state of enlightened knowledge, a direct contact with wisdom. Many claim to have visitations from spiritual beings or to have received revelation through direct mystical experience. Yet, a true read of their work will reveal the presence of wisdom.

While Gary Lachman’s A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult tackles many of the important writers that have made these claims, it still falls a bit short of the book I wish it was. And my disappointments aside, this is still an amazing work. Divided into two halves, the first is a series of essays on the specific eras of western esoteric development and the key players that defined it, the second half containing excerpts from important writings by the authors introduced in the first half. This volume is keenly focused on authors and writers, and Lachman admits in the beginning that an equal number of pages should be devoted to musicians and other fields.

Within A Dark Muse the esoteric enlightenment is broken into five eras: Enlightenment, Romantic, Satanic, Fin de siécle and Modernist, each highlighting Lachman’s penchant to expose under-appreciated contributors to western thought. If you want to find a reading list for the next year and a half, this is the book to pick up. I’ve discovered quite a few writings that I will explore in depth over the next few months. While the public believes that ‘the occult’ and ‘satanism’ are synonymous, a simple survey of the ideas in this book will reveal quite the opposite. Occult studies are truly a deeper look at the hidden wisdom present in many of the holy books, cultures and humans on the planet. Most of the authors featured by Lachman deal with esoteric Christianity, the nature of God, metaphysics and spiritual practice (my areas of interest). The chapter on Satanic Occultism, while the most shocking, is also the shortest, simply because there aren’t many writers along those lines. This is a grab bag and a good one at that. Read and find the teasers you’ll need to dive further into many deeper ideas.

Where the book fell short is in the failure to acknowledge some major influences of the 20th century in their own right. Rudolph Steiner, G.I. Gurdjieff, Israel Regardie, Manly P. Hall, the first two being mentioned and the last two entirely left out. Other important thinkers, such as Krishnamurti, while not being explicitly occult, was still the center of Blavatsky’s Theosophical movement and would deserve more than the brief mention he receives. However, omissions make sense, jamming this much into 380 pages requires at least a few to be left aside.

The reason for the focus on occult writers becomes apparently early on in the piece on Romanticism as Lachman states,

“It’s not surprising that the mage and the poet should be linked. Both used words in order to produce a desired effect, and as magic moved more and more away from the medieval sense of controlling angels and demons, and closer to the visionary powers of William Blake, the distinction between the two became one of mere terminology.”

Learning more about Swedenborg, Cazotte, Mesmer, Saint-Martin, Eckharthausen, Blake, Goethe, Balzac, Poe, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky, Blackwood, Bucke, Ouspensky, Milosz and Lowry is an eye-opening experience. To think that most of the ideas being touted as new age or evolutionary have originated in these men is refreshing. A coming rapid evolution of the human race via 2012 or other catalyst? Bulwer-Lytton has already covered it. Ascending states of cosmic consciousness? Bucke has dissected it. Spiritual science? Goethe, Steiner, Ouspensky and many others have laid the framework. The excerpts section was filled with gems.

The essay included by Ouspensky included some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve seen to describe the human condition.

Some of the most cutting edge theories of modern physicists were hinted at (with a slightly more spiritual tone) by writers like Poe in the early 1800′s:

…there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser. The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while the electric principle permeates the atmosphere. These gradation of matter increase in rarity or fineness, until we arrive at a matter unparticled-without particles-indivisible-one; and here the all of impulsion and permeation is modified. The ultimate or imparticled matter not only permeates all things, but impels all things; and thus is all things within itself, this matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word “thought”, is this matter in motion.

Poe was also the first to state the reason why the sky is black and not saturated with the light of stars. An insightful man. And he also stated, “Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one point, we must have suffered in the same.”

Saint-Martin was filled with equally brilliant insights,

There is not a man in possession of his true self for whom the temporal universe is not a great allegory or fable with must manifest the truly divine pleasures… the overwhelming misfortune of man is not that his is ignorant of the existence of truth but that he misconstrues its nature…man is the visible expression of divinity…we have not the courage to work to justify [that we are the highest in the universe]… the learned describe nature, the wise explain it…as a proof that we are regenerated we must regenerate the world.

Wow. Powerful stuff.

The down side of A Dark Muse: I now have a reading list longer than I can ever hope to tackle.