The Secret History of the World

27. THE MYSTIC DEATH OF HUMANITY Swedenborg and Dostoyevsky • Wagner • Freud, Jung and the Materializing of Esoteric Thought • The Occult Roots of Modernism • Occult Bolshevism • Gandhi

EARLY ROMANTICISM’S JOY IN self-expression, in animal joy at being alive in the natural world, gave way to disquiet. The greatest of the German philosophers of idealism, Hegel, recognized this force in history: ‘The spirit cheats us, the spirit intrigues, the spirit lies, the spirit triumphs.’

Taken as an account of humanity’s interior life, the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century reveals a terrible darkening, a spiritual crisis. If materialist history explains this crisis as ‘alienation’, esoteric history sees a spiritual crisis. In other words it sees a crisis caused by spirits — or more particularly by demons.

The great exponent of this view was not someone revered in academia like Hegel or even the more frankly occultist Schopenhauer, but a man who rolled around the mud. Swedenborg saw demonic forces rising up from the depths. He prophesied that humanity would have to come to terms with the demonic in the world and inside himself.

Today the Swedenborg Church is the only esoteric movement admitted to Sweden’s National Council of Churches, and Swedenborg’s teachings remain influential on exponents of communal living, particularly on American groups such as the Shakers. In his own day, however, he was a rather more dangerous figure. Swedenborg’s exceptionally detailed and accurate clairvoyance made him world-famous. The spiritualists tried to claim him as one of their own. Swedenborg repudiated them, saying that his supernatural gifts were unique to him and heralded the dawn of a new age.

It was from his reading of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell that Goethe had derived his sense of the intrusion of evil, supernatural forces that afflicted Faust. It was from Swedenborg that Baudelaire derived his notion of correspondences, and that Balzac took his notions of the supernatural in Seraphita. But perhaps Swedenborg’s most important and far-reaching influence was on Dostoyevsky, an influence that would darken the mood of an entire era.

DOSTOYEVSKY’S HEROES ARE POISED over an abyss. There is always a heightened awareness of how much our choices matter — and also that our choices come to us in different disguises.

In Dostoyevsky we encounter the paradoxical notion that those who confront this evil, supernatural dimension, even if they are thieves, prostitute and murderers, are closer to heaven than those whose cosy world- view deliberately shuts evil out and denies it is there.

Eastern, Orthodox Christianity had been less dogmatic than its Western counterpart and it had valued individual spiritual experience more. Raised in this Church, Dostoyevsky felt free to explore the outer limits of spiritual experience, to describe battles between the forces of darkness and the forces of light that were taking place in realms of which most people were barely conscious. Dostoyevsky’s journey through Hell, like Dante’s, is partly a spiritual journey but it is also a journey through the Hell on Earth that humanity has created. There is in Dostoyevsky a new impulse which would come to characterize the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the desire to know the worst that can happen.

On Dostoyevsky’s death his library was discovered to be well stocked with Swedenborg, including his accounts of the many different hells that people with different capacities for evil fashion for themselves. Swedenborg’s accounts of the hells he visited are not fictional. They elude our conventional ontologies, our everyday working assumptions of what is real and what is not. Hell may at first appear no different from the world we live in, but then gradually anomalies show themselves. We might meet a group of genial and amusing men, libertines who love to deflower virgins, but they turn to greet us and we see they are ‘like apes with a fierce face… a horrible countenance’. Non-esoteric schools of literary criticism have missed the way that passages like the following, from Crime and Punishment, come straight from Swedenborg:

‘I don’t believe in a future life,’ said Raskolnikov.

Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.

‘And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort?’ he said suddenly.

He is a madman, thought Raskolnikov.

‘We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.’

‘Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?’ Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

‘Juster. And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it,’ answered Svidrigailov, with a vague smile.

This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov.

Similarly in The Brothers Karamazov, when Ivan has a nightmare in which he is visited by the Devil, neither Ivan nor the reader believes that this is just a delusion. Dostoyevsky is telling his readers that devils may squeeze through into the material dimension. No other single writer so powerfully conveys the undercurrents of evil that welled up in the second half of the nineteenth century. His work is pervaded with a sense of vital contact with other mysterious worlds, some of them hellish. There is, too, the spiritual extremism, the sense that there is no middle way, that if you do not run to embrace the most spiritual, the demonic will fill the vacuum. Those who try to follow the middle way are nowhere.

Like Swedenborg he looked forward to a new age, but in Dostoyevsky’s case this grew out of a very Russian sense of history.

‘EVERYDAY I GO INTO THE GROVE,’ wrote the poet Nikolai Kliuev in a letter to a friend ‘and sit there by a little chapel and the age-old pine tree. I think about you. I kiss your eyes and your heart… O mother wilderness, paradise of the spirit… How hateful and black seems all the so-called civilized world and what I would give, what Golgotha would I bear so that America should not encroach upon the blue feathered dawn, upon the fairy-tale hut… Western Christianity among whose heedless gifts to the world we must count rationalism, materialism, a technology that enslaves, an absence of spirit and in its place a vain, sentimental humanism.’ This is the Russian perspective.

Orthodox Christianity had taken a different path from Roman Christianity. Orthodoxy preserved and nurtured the esoteric doctrines, some of them pre-Christian, that Rome had discarded or declared heretical. The mystical vision of Dionysius the Aeropagite continued to illumine Orthodox Christianity with its emphasis on direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds. In the seventh century the Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor wrote urging disciplined introspection, the monastic or wandering life. ‘Illumination must be sought,’ he wrote, ‘and in extreme cases the whole body will be illumined too.’ The same phenomenon was reported by the monks of Mount Athos. Monks deep in prayer would suddenly illuminate their entire cave or cell. This was a vision of God, the hesychast, which could be achieved by rhythmic breathing exercises, repetitive prayers and meditation on icons.

In Russia the Church emphasized supernatural powers attainable after severe spiritual discipline. But then in the seventeenth century the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Nikon reformed and centralized the Church. It was left to the Old Believers (Raskolniki) to keep the beliefs and spiritual disciplines of the early Christians alive. Their outlawed communities were driven underground, where they survived as a living tradition. Dostoyevsky kept in touch with them throughout his life.

^{Illustration to Wagner’s Lohengrin. No other esoteric artist so conveys that central esoteric doctrine — the sense of impending and overwhelming destiny. Wagner wrote of his ambition to bring a non-existent world into being, and Baudelaire described how watching Lohengrin induced in him an altered state of consciousness in which the ordinary world of the senses became dissolved. The occultist Theodor Reuss claimed he had known Wagner and that this gave him special insight into a secret doctrine concealed in Parsifal. Reuss saw the closing words of Parsifal at the end of act three, where he stands holding his lance erect, as a glorious deification of the sex drive.}