The Secret History of the World

Out of the Old Believer tradition came the Stranniki, or Wanderers, solitary individuals who renounced money, marriage, passports and all official documents as they moved across the country, promising ecstatic visions, healing and prophecy. If caught, they were tortured, sometimes beheaded.

Another later movement which came out of the Old Believer tradition was the Khlysty, the People of God, a persecuted underground society famous for its extreme asceticism and rejection of the world. They were reputed to meet at night, sometimes in a forest clearing lit by banks of candles. Naked under flowing white robes, they danced in two circles, the men in an inner circle in the direction of the sun and the women in an outer circle moving in the other direction, widdershins. The aim of this ceremony was liberation from the material world and ascent into the spirit worlds. They would collapse, speak in tongues, heal the sick and cast out demons.

There were rumours of orgies at these midnight meetings, but more likely they — like the Cathars — were sexual ascetics, practising the sublimation of sexual energies for spiritual and mystical purposes.

The young Rasputin stayed at the Orthodox monastery of Verkhoturye where he met members of the Khlysty. His own doctrine seems to have been a radical development, proposing spiritual ecstasy attained through sexual exhaustion. The flesh would be crucified, the little death of orgasm would become the mystic death of initiation.

After a vision of Mary, in which she told him to take up the life of a wanderer, Rasputin walked two thousand miles to Mount Athos. He returned home two years later, exuding a powerful magnetism and displaying miraculous powers of healing.

In 1903 he arrived in St Petersburg. There he was taken up by the personal confessor to the royal family who said, ‘It is the voice of the Russian soil which speaks through him.’ He introduced Rasputin to a court already fascinated by esoteric ideas and eager for experience.

Martinism was already much discussed in Russia’s Freemasonic lodges. Maitre de Philippe and Papus had visited the Russian court in 1901. Papus made Nicholas II the head of a Martinist lodge, and acted as the Tsar’s healer and spiritual adviser. He is said to have conjured up the spirit of the Tsar’s father, Alexander III, who prophesied the death of Nicholas II at the hands of revolutionaries. Papus also warned the Tsar against the evil influence of Rasputin.

Rasputin would be slandered and murdered by Freemasons, but in 1916 his contemporary, the great initiate Rudolf Steiner, said of him, ‘the Russian Folk-Spirit can now work through him alone and through no-one else’.

IF, AS WE MOVE TOWARDS THE FIN DE SIECLE, we look not at the very highest rung of art and literature but at the next rung down, we find a literature of explicit occult themes that would dominate popular culture in the twentieth century. Oscar Wilde was teeped in the lore of the Order of the Golden Dawn. His The Picture of Dorian Gray, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, brought the occult notion of the doppleganger into the stream of public consciousness. M.R. James, the Cambridge don who has some claims to be the father of the ghost story, translated many of the Apocryphal gospels into English, gave a lecture on the occult sciences to the Eton Literary Society and wrote a story called Count Magnus in which the count, an alchemist, goes on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Anti-Christ, a city called Chorazin. The fact that Chorozon is the name of one of the demons who held lengthy conversations with Dee and Kelley suggests James knew what he was talking about.

Earlier in the century Frankenstein’s monster had been a fictionalized account of Paracelsus’s homunculus. Attending the same house party as Mary Shelley when she conceived of the monster, Byron’s friend Polidori wrote an early vampire story. But of course the most famous version is Bram Stoker’s, in which the preserved body in the tomb is a sort of demonic version of Christian Rosenkreuz. Stoker himself was a member of the OTO — the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society practising ceremonial magic. The Czech theosophist Gustav Meyrink would explore a similar theme in his novel The Golem, which in its turn influenced German expressionist cinema. It was said that in the novel La-Bas, Huysmans spoke of what had really happened at black magic rituals from personal experience, breaking his oath of secrecy. Aleister Crowley noted with evident approval that he died of cancer of the tongue as result.

In art explicit occult themes can be seen in the symbolism of Gustave Moreau, Arnold Bocklin and Franz von Stuck, in Max Klinger’s waking dreams, in the weird erotic-occult art of Felicien Rops, whom a critic of the day dubbed ‘a sarcastic Satan’. Odilon Redon wrote of ‘surrendering himself to secret laws’.

THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD THE SPIRIT of materialism was working for victory, devising materialistic versions of esoteric philosophy. We have already touched on the way that esoteric ideas of the evolution of the species appeared in materialistic form in Darwin’s theories. We have seen, too, how the ruthless and cynical manipulators of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, provided a methodology for revolutionaries in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now Marx’s dialectical materialism translated the spiritual ideals of St Germain on to a purely economic plane.

Occultism also played a part in the development of Freud’s ideas. His mentor Charcot had in turn been taught by the prominent occultist and inventor of mesmerism Anton Mesmer. The young Freud studied the Cabala and wrote approvingly of telepathy, speculating that it might have been an archaic form of communication used by everyone before the invention of language.

He introduced into mainstream thought an idea that is essentially cabalistic — the idea of consciousness having a structure. For example, the model of the mind that Freud popularized — of super ego, ego and id — can be seen as a materialized version of the tripartite cabalistic model.

Indeed, at an even more basic level the very notion that there are impulses independent of our point of consciousness, but which may impinge upon it from outside, is a secularized, materialistic version of the esoteric account of consciousness. In Freud’s scheme of life these hidden forces should be interpreted as sexual rather than spiritual. Freud later reacted against the esoteric roots of his ideas and stigmatized as mad the ancient form of consciousness out of which they had grown.

The esoteric influences on Freud’s pupil Jung are even clearer. We have touched on how he interpreted alchemical processes as descriptions of psychological healing, and how he identified what he saw as the seven great archetypes of the collective unconscious with the symbolism of seven planetary gods.

^{Salome by Gustave Moreau.}

By interpreting the alchemical processes as purely psychological he was denying a level of meaning intended by the alchemical writers — that these mental exercises can influence matter in a supernatural manner. And though Jung saw the seven archetypes as acting independently of the conscious mind, he would have stopped short of seeing them as disembodied centres of consciousness acting completely independently of the human mind. Indeed, when Jung met Rudolf Steiner he dismissed him as a schizophrenic.

But late in life, Jung’s work with the experimental physicist Wolfgang Pauli encouraged him to take a few steps beyond the pale. Jung and Pauli came to believe that in addition to the purely physical mechanism of atom knocking against atom there is another network of connections that binds together events not physically connected — non-physical, causal connections brought about by mind. Jung’s contemporary, the French anthropologist Henri Corbin, was researching the spiritual practices of the Sufis at this time. Corbin came to the conclusion that the Sufi adepts worked in concert and could communicate with one another in a realm of ‘objective imagination’. Jung coined the same phrase independently.

Later in life the materialistic explanations that Freud had been trying to force on to spiritual experiences also sprang back at him, and he became plagued by a sense of what he called the uncanny. Freud wrote his essay on The Uncanny when he was sixty-two. By thinking about what he feared most he was trying to stop it happening. A few years earlier he had experienced the number sixty-two coming at him insistently — a hat check ticket, a hotel room number, a train seat number. It had seemed to him that the cosmos was trying to tell him something. Perhaps he would die at the age of sixty-two?

In the same essay he described the experience of walking round a maze of streets in an old Italian town and finding himself in the red light district. He took what he thought would be the most direct route out of this district, but soon found himself back in the middle of it. This seemed to happen to him again and again, no matter which direction he took. The experience can only remind us of Francis Bacon. It was as if a maze were changing shape to keep the wanderer from finding the way. As a result of these experiences Freud began to suspect that there might