Colin Wilson’s ‘Occult Trilogy’

A Guide for Students

By Colin Stanley

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2012 Colin Stanley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84694-706-3

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………..1Notes…………………………………………………………….3Book 1: The Occult…………………………………………………5Book 2: Mysteries: an Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal, and
the Supernatural…………………………………………………..27Book 3: Beyond the Occult…………………………………………..47Colin Wilson on the occult: a checklist………………………………67Index…………………………………………………………….79About the Author…………………………………………………..89

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Occult

* * *

The Occult was Colin Wilson’s first commissioned book and hemade no secret of the fact that, at first, it was not a subject thatinterested him greatly. When he sought the advice of RobertGraves on whether he should write it, he was told very firmlythat he should not. However, with a young family to support,Wilson needed the money and fortunately went ahead with theproject. During the course of his research, he found his attitudeto the subject changing:

“Although I have always been curious about the ‘occult’ … ithas never been one of my major interests, like philosophy, orscience, or even music…. It was not until two years ago, whenI began the systematic research for this book, that I realisedthe remarkable consistency of the evidence for such mattersas life after death, out-of-body experiences (astral projection),reincarnation. In a basic sense my attitude remainsunchanged; I still regard philosophy—the pursuit of realitythrough intuition aided by intellect—as being more relevantmore important, than questions of the ‘occult’. But theweighing of the evidence … has convinced me that the basicclaims of ‘occultism’ are true.”

The completed book, dedicated to Graves, was published onOctober 4, 1971, by Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K. and RandomHouse in the U.S. In his new Introduction to a 2003 reprint,published by Watkins Publishing, he wrote, “The publication ofthis book had the effect of changing my life”. Cyril Connolly andPhilip Toynbee who, as critics, were instrumental in turning hisThe Outsider into a bestseller in 1956, but had subsequentlychanged their minds and then ignored his work for fifteen years,relaxed their embargo and came out in support of him again.

“But for me, The Occult did a great deal more than make me’respectable’, it also served as a kind of awakening. Before1970, I had been inclined to dismiss ‘the occult’ as superstitiousnonsense. Writing The Occult made me aware that theparanormal is as real as quantum physics (and, in fact, has agreat deal in common with it), and that anyone who refuses totake it into account is simply shutting his eyes to half theuniverse.” (Wilson (1), xxii)

A huge book (over 600 pages), it became the first in a trilogy ofequally bulky volumes on the subject. Mysteries followed in 1978(London: Hodder and Stoughton) and Beyond the Occult (London,New York: Bantam Press) in 1988. The book also spawnednumerous popular, illustrated books on the subject which havebeen issued under his name since the 1970s and, indeed, continueto appear today [see following checklist].

The Occult is divided into three parts, preceded by a shortIntroduction. The first part, ‘A Survey of the Subject’, statesWilson’s own preoccupations and convictions. The second, ‘AHistory of Magic’, concentrates on individual ‘mages’ andadepts. The third part, ‘Man’s Latent Powers’, looks at witchcraft,spiritualism and ghosts with a final chapter that discusses themetaphysical questions that arise out of occultism.

“The thesis of this book is revolutionary …” Wilson declares onthe first page of his Introduction. Primitive man believedthe world to be full of unseen forces whereas today our rationalminds tell us that these forces existed only in his imagination.The problem, says Wilson, is that we have become “thinkingpigmies” who have forgotten “the immense world of broadersignificance that stretches around [us]”. It is his belief thatcivilisation cannot evolve until the occult is taken for granted “onthe same level as atomic energy” and he recommends thatwe re-learn the technique of expanding inwardly and relax ourhard-headed approach to subjects such as premonition, life afterdeath etc.

“Man has reached a point in his evolution where hemust … turn increasingly inward. That is, he must turn to thehidden levels of his being, to the ‘occult’, to meanings andvibrations that have so far been too fine to grasp.”

He claims that the science of cybernetics has suggested that thereis a certain order and meaning behind the universe and that:

“All this means that for the first time in Western history abook on the occult can be something more than a collection ofmarvels and absurdities. Religion, mysticism and magic allspring from the same basic ‘feeling’ about the universe: asudden feeling of meaning….”

In Part 1, Chapter 1, which has the seemingly paradoxical title’Magic—The Science of the Future’, Wilson explains thatalthough he had read books on magic and mysticism in hisyouth, he did so “because they confirmed my intuition ofanother order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form ofconsciousness …”. But if, at that time, he had been askedwhether he literally believed in magic, he would have answered:No. “Magic, I felt, was no more than a first crude attempt atscience, and it had now been superseded by science”. Hecontinues:

“If I still accepted that view, I would not be writing this book.It now seems to me that the exact reverse is true. Magic wasnot the ‘science’ of the past. It is the science of the future. Ibelieve that the human mind has reached a point in evolutionwhere it is about to develop new powers—powers that wouldonce have been considered magical.”

In the animal kingdom ‘magical’ powers (such as the hominginstinct) are commonplace:

“Civilised man has forgotten about them because they are nolonger necessary to his survival … In fact, his survival dependsupon ‘forgetting’ them. High development of the instinctivelevels is incompatible with the kind of concentration upondetail needed by civilised man.”

Wilson then recounts some incidents of premonition andtelepathy in his personal life before outlining recorded cases ofastral projection by John Cowper Powys and August Strindberg.This encourages Wilson to produce his own basic theory of thepower of the human mind, introducing the important concept of’Faculty X’: “that latent power that human beings possess to reachbeyond the present“:

“Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times,and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertainthough it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.”

He quotes examples of ‘Faculty X’ from Marcel Proust’s autobiographicalnovel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and ArnoldToynbee’s A Study of History. These examples are of centralimportance to Wilson and will be referred to on numerousoccasions in future works. ‘Faculty X’, Wilson insists, is anordinary potentiality of consciousness, “… it is the key not only toso-called occult experience, but to the whole future evolution ofthe human race”. [Wilson considered this chapter importantenough to include, in its entirety, in the self-edited collection TheEssential Colin Wilson (London: Harrap, 1985).]

Although he advised Wilson against writing such a book,Robert Graves seems to have contributed to it significantly. Part1, Chapter 2: ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, opens with adiscussion between the two in which Graves asserts that 5 percent of human beings have occult powers. This, of course, fascinatesWilson because “this is also the figure for the ‘dominantminority’ among human beings”. He feels that there are”many reasons for assuming that the two groups are identical”.But when he speaks of ‘occult powers’:

“Graves’s concern is less with witches or mystics than withpoets, and his important work The White Goddess contains atheory of the nature of poetry that links it not only with thepowers of the subconscious, but with traditional magicalcults.”

Graves’s idea is that there are two kinds of poetry: ‘muse poetry’which he associates with the White Goddess of primitive lunarcults and ‘Apollonian poetry’ which attempts to banish lunarsuperstitions with pure solar reason. A poet, according toWilson,

“… is a person who is naturally mentally healthy and resilient,and who frequently experiences moments in [which] he issuddenly amazed and delighted to realise how interestingeverything is…. He perceives that the world is rich withmeanings that he would ordinarily overlook.”

He concludes that “Graves’s ‘lunar knowledge’ is a reality—areality of which poets become aware in moments of stillness”.And:

“If we agree, then, that the ‘muse poet’ or the ‘magician’ is aperson whose mind is able to relax and grasp these deeperlevels of meaning, we must also recognise that this is a two-wayaffair. The meaning is already there, external to his ownmind, and his power to ‘tune in’ to it is only the beginning.”

We have now reached the essence of Wilson’s philosophy: “Thetrue ‘direction’ for consciousness lies in knowledge expansion, awider and wider grasp of the relations of the actual world, toilluminate and supplement the ‘lunar’ insights of the subconscious.”

In order to prove that magical systems should not be relegatedmerely to the status of unsuccessful attempts at science, Wilsonthen devotes several pages to the I Ching, the Chinese Book ofChanges, and concludes that its profoundest level of meaning isrevealed when thinking about its symbols and ideas and not itspower to foretell events:

“… the primary meaning of Yin is ‘the cloudy, the overcast’,while that of Yang is ‘banners waving in the sun’. Could onedevise more basic symbols of the central problem of humanexistence? Dullness and boredom versus the ‘moments ofinsight’.”

In Chapter 3: ‘The Poet as Occultist’ Wilson states:

“The poet is a man in whom Faculty X is naturally moredeveloped than in most people. Whilst most of us areruthlessly ‘cutting out’ whole areas of perception, thus impoverishingour mental lives, the poet retains the faculty to besuddenly delighted by the sheer reality of the world ‘outthere’.”

This is made possible by their ability to concentrate and to stillthe mind—an ability most of us seem to have lost. He presentsexamples of telepathy, and the ability to project one’s bodyelsewhere, recorded by August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats , A.L.Rowse, Louis Singer and others.

“Art, music, philosophy, mysticism are all escape routes fromthe narrowness of everyday reality; but they all demand alarge initial outlay of conscious effort; you have to sow beforeyou can reap.”

In contrast, ‘magic’ or occultism is a simple direct method ofescaping the narrowness of everydayness. The student of theoccult looks within himself and “tries to reach down to hissubliminal depths”. This, says Wilson, explains the importanceof symbols, which have a power to appeal to the subconsciousmind, and suggests there may be, as W.B. Yeats and CarlJung asserted:

“… a racial memory, which works in terms of symbols. Thisracial memory can be reached by ‘hushing the unquiet mind’,by reaching a certain depth of inner stillness where it becomesaccessible to the limited individual memory.”

This brings Wilson back to the I Ching and initiates a discussionon the symbolism of the Tarot which contains “… shocks to jar themind out of ‘the triviality of everydayness’, to induce concentrationupon essentials”.

In Part Two, Chapter 1, ‘The Evolution of Man’, Wilson arguesthat life is a purposive process:

“… science insists that the universe can be explained entirelyin mechanical terms. If we can show this to be untrue, then wehave provided the case for magic with the most solid kind offoundation.”

When we make an effort, says Wilson, for example when learningto play a musical instrument, we slowly master the difficultprocess. If, however, we make no effort, then we barely achieve acoherent note:

“As soon as I have observed the enormous difference betweenpurposeful concentration and aimless drifting, I find it hard tobelieve that life has reached its present stage by drifting.”

Like Aldous Huxley, Wilson believes that if the mind has a ‘subconscious’why should it not also have a ‘super-conscious’:

“The powers of the ‘superconscious’ are within reach of thehuman will, provided it is fresh and alive. As soon as habittakes over—or what I have called elsewhere ‘the robot’—theydwindle…. All disciplines aimed at increased use of thesepowers depend on a high level of optimism and will-drive….A science—or knowledge system—which has no place for willor purpose is an obstruction to human evolution …”

In Chapter 2, ‘The Magic of Primitive Man’, Wilson attempts to”outline the development of man’s ‘hidden powers’ from thedawn of history to its ‘Tower of Babel’ period, the period ofdegeneration”. He presents evidence to suggest thatNeanderthal and Cro-Magnon man were monotheistic,employing shamans as intermediaries who used intense concentrationto achieve their aims. Then, as man’s activities expandedso did the need for more gods:

“All religion and occultism that spring from this intenseconcentration tend to be simple and mystical…. All the greatreligions … are simple in this sense. In the hands of thecommon people—the non-religious 99 per cent—they soonlose this simplicity, this clarity of vision, and develop hoardsof angels, gods and demons.”

In the next two chapters, Wilson considers the lives of some ofthe principal figures in the history of Western magic: “… the mageor adept is a fundamental human ‘archetype’: he symbolisesman’s evolutionary destiny”. The Magi, according toWilson, derived their magic powers from ‘positiveconsciousness’ which he defines as:

“… a happy, open state of mind…. It is a sense of themarvellous interestingness of the world. We still use the word’magic’ in this sense—talking about ‘the magic of summernights’, ‘magic moments’ and so on. This is not a misuse oflanguage; that is what real magic is about.”

Sections are devoted to studies of the Magi, Orphism, theEssenes, the worship of the god Dionysius, alchemy, the MysticalKabbalah and Gnosticism. The life and work of Pythagoras:”… the first ‘great initiate’ of recorded history”, Apolloniusof Tyana, Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Nostradamus,Paracelsus and many others are considered.

At the beginning of Chapter 5, ‘Adepts and Impostors’,Wilson writes: “After the great sixteenth century there is a fallingoff in the quality of magic”. In it he considers the life andwork of Dr. John Dee, Giacomo Casanova, Count Alessandro diCagliostro, the Count of Saint-Germain and “the greatestoccultist of the eighteenth century” Emanuel Swedenborg.

In Chapter 6, ‘The Nineteenth Century—Magic andRomanticism’, we move into more familiar Wilson territory:”The romantics were driven by the spirit of magic, which is theevolutionary spirit of the human race” but “wrapped inself-pity, they fail to stay the course” ending in pessimismand despair: “with the exception of Goethe, the romantics seemunaware of that other form that ecstasy takes: the violent ragingappetite for more life”. However, the romantic revivalbrought with it a revival of interest in magic: Madame Blavatskyand theosophy, W.B. Yeats, MacGregor Mathers and the Order ofthe Golden Dawn.

‘The Beast Himself’, Aleister Crowley, is the subject ofChapter 7. Wilson had previously based a character—CaradocCunningham—in his novel Man Without A Shadow: the diary of anexistentialist (London: Arthur Barker, 1963) on Crowley andwould go on to write a short biography Aleister Crowley: the natureof the Beast (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1987). Chapter 8 isshared between Grigori Rasputin and the philosopher/mystic G.I.Gurdjieff. Wilson had already written a biography of Rasputin,Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (London: Arthur Barker,1964) and would write a novel based on his life, The MagicianFrom Siberia (London: Robert Hale, 1988). But it is Gurdjieffwhom he describes as “the most interesting of all magicians….There can be no doubt that he achieved a large degree of FacultyX” (502). Again, he had written about Gurdjieff before, mostnotably in his Outsider Cycle and would go on to write a shortbiography, The War Against Sleep: the philosophy of Gurdjieff(Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1980). Clearly Gurdjieff’smessage resonates with Wilson and, to a great extent, correlateswith his own ideas about the inadequacy of humanconsciousness:

“In the moments of ‘higher consciousness’ there is always afeeling of ‘But of course!’ Life is infinitely meaningful; its possibilitiesare suddenly endless, and ‘normal consciousness’ isseen as being no better than sleep. For, like sleep, it separatesman from reality.”

Following his assessment of Gurdjieff, Wilson moves The Occultforward to its third and final part: ‘Man’s Latent Powers’. InChapter 1 he presents a history of witchcraft includingvampirism and lycanthropy. Chapter 2, ‘The Realm of Spirits’,contains accounts of spiritualism, ghosts, reincarnation and clairvoyance.In Chapter 3, ‘Glimpses’, he attempts “to suggest ageneral theory that might impose some order on the bewilderingmass of occult phenomena already examined”. Wilson isconvinced that, if can we learn to raise our consciousness abovethe ‘everyday norm’ we could re-acquaint ourselves with”various powers and faculties that at present are ‘occult’ (latent,hidden) and would discover that they are perfectly natural afterall”. He recounts documented instances of telepathy, precognitionand mystical experiences seeing these as evidence thatwe can, albeit fleetingly, tune into higher levels of consciousness.But why only ‘fleetingly’?

“The answer is of fundamental importance. Because the’muscles’ that could hold it are flabby and undeveloped. Weonly make use of these muscles involuntarily, when suddenlystirred by beauty or a sense of crisis…. We possess the musclesfor compressing consciousness and producing states ofintensity, but we use them so seldom that we are hardly awareof their existence.”
(Continues…)Excerpted from Colin Wilson’s ‘Occult Trilogy’ by Colin Stanley. Copyright © 2012 by Colin Stanley. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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