From Wikipedia:

The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a ‘cell’, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as ‘unmechanized’ and are threatened with “Homelessness”. Eventually, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, and the civilization of the Machine comes to an end.

Essentially it predicts: Google, Facebook, online university courses, video conferencing, collapse, the uniformity of our built environment and more.

You can read the entire story here. Or you can listen to the audio.

My favorite passage:

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body – it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend – glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

‘Where are you?’ she sobbed.

His voice in the darkness said, ‘Here.’

Is there any hope, Kuno?’

‘None for us.’

‘Where are you?’

She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands.

‘Quicker,’ he gasped, ‘I am dying – but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.’

He kissed her.

‘We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when Aelfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl.’

‘But Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the earth? Is this – tunnel, this poisoned darkness – really not the end?’

He replied:

‘I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the midst and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless – tomorrow—– ‘

‘Oh, tomorrow – some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow.’

‘Never,’ said Kuno, ‘never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.’

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Post tags: fiction, history, technology

Congressman Oscar Callaway’s report to the US Congress in 1917 on JP Morgan’s plan for the media:

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached. The policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month, an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”

Just more evidence why truly independent media is the most important thing we can have. However, it is something we haven’t had for a long time.

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Post tags: history, journalism, media, propaganda, united states

Sander’s talk started by covering the history of innovation. By adapting the environment and the brain to tackle new challenges, humans are one of the greatest success stories in nature’s history, all because we can adapt and innovate. Eventually, humans began focusing their innovation centers in cities. Cities are not more energy efficient but are better innovation engines.

This centralization comes with a requirement: as centralization increases, the rate of innovation that must occur to support the structure has to increase. Food and energy must be brought from further and futher away because the ecological footprint of the city grows. Once fossil resources became harnessed, innovation became fundamentally necessary to support the collapse of society. As more of our society depended on oil for growth, that growth continued because of innovation. Technology has allowed us to harvest more oil faster and from more remote places. This supported more population growth and further innovation. At this point in the talk Sander makes a shocking claim: perhaps innovation is the greatest ponzi scheme of all, the rate of innovation must increase at all times to prevent the collapse of civilization.

And the more I think about it, the more I think he is right. How could I prove him wrong? If we stopped innovating, would we destroy humanity with the state of our current technology? All signs point to yes, especially in the United States.

Sander continues by pointing out two views of humanity and its relation to nature.

1) In the cohesion of nature, strangeness and force are emphasized. That change is attributed to nature but people are passive and resistive to change. Nature and change are viewed as dangerous because they are outside the realm of human control.

The opposing view is that,

2) Humans are overly agressive, forcing change on our environment to support our war-like culture and nature is passive receiver of our exploitation.

These two views interplay to create a critical approach to human decision making: natural dangers are exaggerated, human dangers are underplayed.

This can be seen in the climate change debate. We fear the response of nature to our actions but ignore the many other problems humanity is creating through our technological program.

Sander continues by stating the inevitable result of technological innovation. We intervene more and more in our environment, thinking that we reducing our risks but all we do is change the spectrum of risks, not the overall quantity of risks. The end state is that we lose control because we lose the ability to understand the complex chain of events resulting from our interventions.

Human changes are rapid and shallow attempt to replace and begin to outweigh the natural changes which are slow yet all encompassing. Risk spectrums shift over time with respect to their environments. We tend to overemphasize the frequent risks, try to reduce them and substitue completely unknown risks at larger scale over a longer time period. This accumulation of long term, large scale risks build up and collapse the civilization.

At some point, Sander believes that every social system will go out of control. The system pushes itself into a trap, the cost of problem solving goes up, flexibility goes down, the outcome is included in the way it was started, our exploitation of our environment creates the weaknesses we must contend with at the end.

Oil has provided us a shockingly stable environment but this environment has reduced our ability to adapt. Now, we can only innovate within the structure we create for ourselves, aggravating the situation even further, reducing our ability to break with the overarching problems. Climate change isn’t bad for humanity, it is bad for the status quo, our social structure. The fall of the Roman Empire resulted primarily because they used up all their wood, their primary energy source, shipping it from further and further away. This collapse was not a “solution”, it was simply the inability to maintain innovation at the rate necessary to extract new energy sources. After the fall of Rome people migrated from urban areas to the rural environment. The city was the keeper of information, the archivist was the maintainer of civilization. Perhaps we are in a slightly better position now because the internet helps us maintain our global knowledge, yet is even more dependent on energy than the city.

Sander stated that he thought the urban situation will explode, it is fragile and we invest more and more in our cities and less in a resilient rural environment.

He shared my sentiment: optimistic for humanity, pessimistic for society.

So what if we can accelerate our innovation to maintain the pace required to avoid collapse? Unfortunately that acceleration also rapidly adds up in unintended consequences. Technology must be implemented at faster and faster rates to avoid collapse but prevent the long term viewpoint. Many immediate problems add up and then you can’t focus on the long term problems.

Sander compared our situation to a tribe in the Southern hHghlands that saw deforestation and decided to counter with a ceremony of slaughtered pigs. The tribe raised continually more and pigs to slaughter, converting the entire valley to mud. Eventually the pigs piled up and died of disease. The land was ruined because of the mud and the tribe was left in the mess they’d created.

Hardly a mainstream view, it is much more attractive to spout the promises of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Assuming that rates of technological innovation will continue or exponentially increase as technological determinists like Ray Kurzweil do, is turning a blind eye to the role energy plays in civilization. By considering energy do we have to conclude our industrial civilization will unravel over the next few decades? Perhaps all our 20th century innovation is built on the high energy environment provided to us by cheap oil, if that’s the case it’s going to be an interesting ride down the back side of Hubbert’s peak.

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Post tags: history, technological program, technology

David Grann's account of the legendary explorer Fawcett

As my parents read aloud the story of Arctic explorer Ernest Shackelton on his disastrous journey to the Antarctic during my childhood, I was forever biased towards the world of adventure. A vivid imagination in my little head recreated the peril those men faced in the cold and hopeless situations and that peril became the definition by which I must judge any adventure story, especially one about a British guy charging off into the unknown. I carried all this imagery into The Lost City of Z, New Yorker Contributor David Grann’s first book. Grann’s resume of writing for the New Yorker has him uniquely prepared to retell the life of legendary explorer Percy Fawcett and his eventual disappearance in the Amazon Jungle. Writing on topics as far ranging as giant squid hunts and the political world can load any man with the ammo for storytelling. This diversity of interests and the ability to weave a story shows through in the pages of The Lost City of Z.

Bitten by the same bug that caused so many to follow in Fawcett’s doomed footsteps, Grann sets off to retrace the journey of a final expedition that riveted the world… the quest for the lost headquarters of an ancient civilization centered in an unexplored Amazon. Fortunately, Grann avoids inserting himself too often in the story, detracting from the excitement of Fawcett’s life. Percy Fawcett needs no embellishment, the details of his life are adapted and construed to make fictional adventurers entertaining.

From Percy Fawcett’s beginnings as an explorer to his early mind bending quests to map the border of Bolivia and Brazil, every quest is told in gritty detail. The terrors of the Amazon came in many forms, like the electric eels (puraque) that send 650 volts through their victims where, “one shock is sufficient to paralyze and drown a man-but the way of the puraque is to repeat the shocks to make sure of its victim.” or the piranhas that, “will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness.” Malaria, Fawcett’s breakneck pace, starvation, infection of wounds, mosquitoes, violent natives were  just a few of the ways the Amazon killed off expedition members. The inhumanity of the landscape led many to think that no civilization could survive on such harsh terrains, but Fawcett thought otherwise. Over his many expeditions from 1906 to his final expedition in 1925 he pieced together the clues that led him to believe an ancient civilization was based somewhere in the Amazon and that he was destined to find it. Fawcett was a rebel in many forms: he fought notions that “unsophisticated non-whites” could build a civilization in the Amazon and he worked with Madame Blavatsky as she formed the early Theosophical Society rebelling against the spiritual oppression of the time. Fawcett had a tremendous respect for the native Amazonians, they were masters of the local environment. When an expeditioner was struck with maggots, “The Echojas would make a curious whistling noise with their tongues, and at once the grub’s head would issue from the blowhole… the Indian would give the sore a quick squeeze and the invader was ejected.” Other fascinating accounts include how the Indians would make noises to draw monkeys out of the trees that were quickly subdued for a fast meal. I’m thinking this was like a native version of McDonalds.

My favorite parts of the book are the excerpts from Fawcett’s journals and those of his expedition members like an accompanying naturalist that wrote, “my body mass of bumps from insect bits, wrist and hands swollen from bits of tiny gnats. 2 nights with almost no sleep-simply terrible… my shoes have been soaked since starting…worst ticks so far…my first experience with flesh and carrion-eating bees.”

Or when Fawcett wrote, “The animals staggered forward, out of breath, their noses bleeding from a lack of oxygen… ‘a mule’s load would often knock the animal screaming over the precipices,’ “

Ultimately though, it was all about the final expedition that captivated the world and ending with Fawcett’s disappearance along with his son. A mystery which was never solved. Grann recounts all the various theories and the available evidence adding his own experience with the Kalapalo tribe. After meeting with the Kalapalo tribes, Grann learns that they passed down an oral history about Fawcett. This oral tradition said that Fawcett and his party had stayed at their village and then left, heading towards “fierce Indians”  the Kalapalos warned them of. The Kalapalo people eventually saw Fawcett’s nightly campfire disappear. Fawcett often walked into arrow fire from vicious tribes to offer gifts of peace, but perhaps in this scenario he was finally conquered. Ironically, recent work from archeologists in the area have begun to reveal evidence for networks of roads and oral histories a city that could be the Lost City of Z Fawcett so desperately hoped to find.

David Grann’s account of Fawcett’s struggles and disappearance brought back all the childhood excitement of Shackelton’s adventures and that’s all I need in a great historical account of an expedition.

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Post tags: adventure, explorers, history

Politics and the Occult by Gary Lachman

“The larger the mass in movement, the stronger the effect of irrational impulses, the more powerfully the soul’s innermost currents begin to roar… the instinctive forces are reinforced under the influence of comrades striving for the the same good.” – Rudolf Bode

The occult and its societies have dropped away from accepted scientific method and society starting with the advent of Cartesian dualism and its influx throughout modern history signified by the Enlightenment, separating superstition and the spiritual from the material. Yet, while this occlusion of the spiritual grew there have been many behind the scenes of political movements that either secretly or openly engaged with the spirit world. Esoteric historian Gary Lachman has pieced together a comprehensive survey of the modern intertwining of the occult and the political  in his latest book, Politics and the Occult.

Lachman begins his recounting of occult political influence by recounting the mysteries of the Rosicrucians and the many with influence over kings, queens and monarchical society that identified with Rosicrucian ideas. When the pamphlets from the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross hit Germany in 1614, it began the modern concept of the secret society, a group that may be in or outside of the nation’s government aiming to have political influence and espousing illuminated politics. Illuminated politics being a political approach that has a religious complexion and obeys a transcendental scale of values.

Perhaps the most historically notorious connections between the occult and politics are through the legacy of the Masons. The primary vitriol against the Freemasons being inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in Russia in 1905 which has since been debunked but remains the fuel for many right wing hate groups to this day. Linking the Freemasons to the Jews and communism, the Protocols inspired people from Hitler to American Conspiracy Theorist James Shelby Downard. Perhaps the most obvious links between the Freemasons and political systems are through their symbolisms in the Great Seal of the United States and on the US currency. But more subtle links between the US and Freemasonry may have existed, Lachman discusses that  many European Freemasons saw the concepts of brotherhood, tolerance and the rights of man becoming real, Freemasonic generals chose to take special care that the US became independent from Britain.

The occult groups most feared and invoked by conspiracy theorists like William Cooper (who is responsible for much of the conspiracy theory mindset of the last 20 years), focus on a coming New World Order enacted through the political influence of a swath of secret societies but none more responsible than the Illuminati. The Illuminati were founded in Germany on May 1st, 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a law professor who aimed to accelerate the adoption of Enlightenment ideals like science and atheism. What made the society strange were the means to its end, the use of occultism, religious belief and hierarchy to reach these goals. Weishaupt networked this group through various Masonic lodges in Europe aiming to remove princes and nations from the face of the earth so that, “the human race should attain its highest perfection, the capacity to judge itself.” Eventually the society collapsed after Masonic lodges distanced themselves from Weishaupt’s aims after Bavaria made all secret societies illegal in 1784.

I found the most fascinating part of the book to be the discussion of 19th-century occultist Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. After claiming to partake in astral travel to learn the secrets of Agartha, a secret city at the center of the earth, Saint Yves developed the concept of synarchy, the opposite of anarchy, the establishment of complete and total government, a government that functioned like the human body that divided its people to function like the human body. Saint-Yves’ visions were detailed in his published work but were immediately retracted after their publication. He kept one copy and the printer secretly held another. Why he destroyed them we may never know. Speculation may lead you to think that he revealed a secret world before the inhabitants wanted him to.

Growing from the concept of synarchy came Rudolph Steiner’s Threefoldness, the idea that since human bodies are composed of feeling, thinking and willing. Feeling being the breathing, circulation and heartbeat; Willing consisting of the metabolism and the limbs; Thinking being the head and nerve communications. The goal being the production of free individuals that were in a society supporting spiritual growth.

When most think occult politics, they think the overblown claims of Nazi Occultism and the Thule Society. To name a few, stories of Nazi mystic and dark rituals inspired the video game series Castle Wolfenstein and the comic book hero Hellboy. Some claims go so far to say that the entire Hitler led atrocities were undertaken to produce mass blood sacrifices that would open portals to other dark dimensions, dimensions which UFOs and the grey aliens emerged from. Lachman debunks these fantastical claims by laying down the actual (and much less colorful) history of the Thule society. The most surprising dark revelation for me had nothing to do with Nazi’s, it was that shamanistic scholar Eliade was connected with political violence in his home country of Romania.

Lachman closes the book with some of his own thoughts on “illuminated politics” in the current years. His concerns about American Fascism are not overblown or misplaced. When the majority of a country is expecting a rapture or deliverance from above, its desires could be easily manipulated by overzealous demagogues. With an economic downturn in the US looking more prolonged by the day, most signs of recovery ignore the masses of unemployed. When a society is desperate it may look to any alternative that combines religion with political solutions. The far-right is continually laughable but has gained eerie power as exemplified by the recent resignation of Obama’s Green Jobs Adviser Van Jones and the backlash against Obama’s school address. Combine these concerns with Jacques Vallée’s warnings of a UFO cult becoming a major religion and the next 20 years could be very interesting.

So now, I’m excited to read more about the occult influences on society and specifically on the United States… which is timely because after reading Mitch Horowitz’s essay on Ouija I discovered he just wrote a book on the Occult in America! Hooray!

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Post tags: history, occult, politics

Click here to view the embedded video.

[via Boing Boing]

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Post tags: american empire, history, video

When I found my first set of petroglyphs (my photograph above) at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, the music from the 1960s Planet of the Apes movie filled my head as I envisioned my predecessors carving out these images on these rugged hills. I could see with cinematic production quality the frantic artist, these images did not strike me as the work of a reserved and slow artisan but of someone that struggled to express either something that was important or something that he/she could not describe to the others.

What surprised me about the petroglyphs were their relation to the content of Paul Devereux’s The Long Trip . Deveraux describes in The Long Trip the evidence of the relationship between humanity and visionary plants.   The details provided in The Long Trip of the visions induced by these ancient rituals matched my observations of these petroglyphs exactly. On p. 164 of the 2nd edition (published 2008 by Daily Grail Publishing) a useful chart shows the three stages of entoptic and visual phenomena from the cultures of three separate continents. Fig 11.31 below isn’t as neatly laid out as the one in The Long Trip but demonstrates a similar concept, relating entoptic phenomena to cave art, making the case that ancient art is often depictions of visions of these trance states.

The rock art at Dinosaur National Park corresponded all the stages of trance that Devereux summarized, including spirals (basic entoptic phenomena) and transformation into animals (one of the final stages of trance states). The picture below appears to depict a shaman’s transformation from lizard into human form,

Petroglyphs aside, one major aim Paul Devereaux had for writing The Long Tail was to demonstrate that modern civilization is a grand exception to the history of humanity because we do not have a ritualized context for accessing visionary states. Even more recent civilizations in Greece had the socially accepted Mysteries of Eleusis. Since Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond coined the modern term for these visionary substances as psychedelics, the associated plants and visionary tools have become stereotyped and abused before being outlawed by the United States with many other nations following suit. Devereux looks to make a case for their integration into our society.

Devereux begins by laying a groundwork for the modern context of these visionary experiences. The modern era of visionary substances began when Dr. Albert Hoffman synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD). These experiences connected with the past when explorer Gordon Wasson sent morning glory seeds to Hoffman in 1959. These morning glory seeds (of the R. corymbosa and I. violacea) were used in ancient rituals throughout Mexico. Hoffman discovered that the seeds contained the indole compounds related to LSD, lysergic acid amine… the same as LSD but about 10-20x less potent.

Anthropologist Andrew Sherrat’s model of ancient intoxication is that the, “inhalation of fumes preceded the ‘drinking complex’ and was the most ancient method of taking in aromatic and psychoactive substances. ” And throughout ancient life smoked opium and cannabis sativa were prevalent. Moderns can know this through analysis of through Herodotus’ descriptions of Scythian Kapnobatai (shamans) “howling with pleasure” during their rituals with cannabis. Old World Europeans encountered smoking only when they reach the New World and witnessed natives smoking tobacco. However in the ancient world liquid psychoactives were also available, Cypriot pots shaped like opium buds (where opium was prepared in an olive oil mixture) have been found as far back as 1550-1337BC in Egypt. Consequently, prehistoric opium and hemp seeds and pollens have been found around the globe. A Neanderthal man was even found in northern Iraq with Horsetail pollen, Ephedra the source of the nerve-stimulant ephedrine.

The accounts of ancient drug use that most greatly differ from our modern culture are the descriptions of the Amanita muscaria. This mushroom, known as the fly agaric, is the stereotypical toadstool. A red cap with white dots all over it, the  eating of which is noted to produce euphoria and later hallucinations after inducing extreme physical strength and endurance. From p. 82 of the book, “A Russian anthropologist Valdimir Bogoras observed a Chukchi tribesman take off his snowshoes after eating some of the mushroom, and deliberately walk for hours through the deep snow just for the sheet pleasure of conducting exercise which caused no sense of fatigue.” Event the reindeer craved this mushroom, passing these effects on to those that at their meat. Since the active constituents of the A. Muscaria remain intact when passed through a person’s bladder the reindeer will swarm down men that urinate in the open. Fellow tribesmen would collect this urine and use it to attract the reindeer or to drink at a later time to obtain the desired effects.

One mystery surrounding these visionary substances is in their geographic location. In late 1970, anthropologist Richard Evans Shultes wrote, “…only about 150 [of the world's flora] are known to be employed for their hallucinatory properties… nearly 130 species are known to be used in the Western Hemisphere, whereas in the Eastern Hemisphere, the number hardly reaches 20.” South America is filled with various snuffs, brews and plants that produce hallucinogenic effects like ayahausca, the world’s most ancient example of a designer drug combining an MAO inhibitor in B. cappi and many various admixtures, many of which contain the potent naturally ubiquitous dimethlytryptamine.

I found the details that Devereux presented on the psychedelic’s influence on myth to be the most interesting portion of the book. One example is of Richard Rudgley’s suggestion that the middle eastern psychedelic syrian rue contributed the designs to the carpets before propelling its users into flights of ecstacy… the flying carpet myth incarnate. The myth of Santa Claus may have derived from use of the Amanita Muscaria, the red and white colors of the mushroom, the idea of Santa clambering down the chimney like the entry of smoke into the Siberan yurts during the winter, the reindeer pulling the sleigh reminiscent of the animal’s connection with the substance and the flight through the sky the description of the basic shamanic experience of leaving the body, traveling through the air. My primary interest in psychedelics lies around their relations to ancient religious experience such as in Zoroastrianism and early Christianity, an example being in the taking of the Eucharist. This book didn’t deal heavily in these issues, with only with a few mentions of Zoroastrianism. So in that sense it left me a little disappointed but that’s why I’ll need to read Jan Irvin’s Holy Mushroom, a good follow up to this book.

An excellent history of humanity’s tendency to intoxicate with pharmacological plants and to seek visionary experience, The Long Trip was deep with rich information, a strong section of notes and references. This book is filled with interesting tidbits that may have escaped those deeply interested in the field but provides an incredible gateway for those with cursory experience. In a non-threatening way, Paul Devereux succeeds in providing the general public an introduction  to our ancestors and their use of ritual hallucinogens.

‘

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Post tags: ancient knowledge, history, prehistoric man, psyche

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.

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Post tags: esoteric, history, occult, philosophy, spirituality