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.

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. Maître 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 SIÈCLE, 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 dopplegänger 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 Là-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 Böcklin 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.

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 be some complicity between his psyche and the cosmos. Or perhaps the cosmos was manufacturing meanings independently of any human agency and, as it were, beaming them at him?

If Freud had been forced to admit that either of these had been the case, even if in only one instance, then his whole materialistic world-view would have been smashed into pieces. Freud was naturally anxious to block these promptings. They left him in a disturbed state of mind.

THE EUROPEAN COLONIZATION OF OTHER parts of the world prompted a flow of esoteric ideas in the other direction, a reverse colonization of Europe. The British Empire in India led to the publication in English of esoteric Hindu texts, and as a result oriental esotericism is still better represented in bookshops in the West than its occidental counterpart. Similarly the French colonies in North Africa lent esotericism in French-speaking territories a strong Sufi colouring.

The partition of Poland in the nineteenth century caused the spread of that country’s alchemical traditions over the rest of Europe. A genuine Rosicrucian impulse survived in middle Europe in the form of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. The Russian Revolution caused the occultists who had clustered at the court of the Tsars to flee, helping to introduce a stream of Orthodox esotericism in the West, and the Sufi- and Orthodox-influenced philosophy of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky became very influential in both Europe and America. In the 1950s China’s invasion of Tibet would cause the dispersal of Tibetan esotericism all over the world.

At a time when to many in the West the organized religion of the state risks being reduced to mere formalism, and seems to many to be sterile and exhausted, it would perhaps not be surprising if every intelligent person reaches a time in life when he or she wants to consider the great questions of life and death and whether or not life and the universe has meaning, and has to cast about for answers. Esoteric philosophy taken as a whole represents the richest, the deepest and the most fascinating body of thought on these questions.

THE VERY GREATEST ARTISTS AND WRITERS find ways of expressing what it means to be alive at a moment in history.

The great art at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century was on one level the cry of a hurt and puzzled humanity. Some artists and writers, including a few very great ones, looked squarely into the face of existence and decided that it was quite meaningless, that life on earth, human life, is an accident of chemical combinations and that, as Jean-Paul Sartre concluded at the end of La Nausée, the only way life can have meanings is if we choose to devise goals for ourselves.

It is true, too, that some artists have taken great pleasure in the material age and its shiny surfaces. Modernism was undoubtedly iconoclastic. However, by the end of the nineteenth century the tyranny of kings, clerical superstitions and stodgy bourgeois morality were pretty soft targets for iconoclasts.

For the majority of great artists of the modern era, the mechanical model of the universe has been the icon they really wanted to smash.

We like to think of Modernism as smart, hip, in tune with the machine age, impatient with the authority and dogma of earlier times. It is all these things, but it is not, as we also sometimes like to think, atheistic, at least not in the radical, modern sense of atheistic. In fact, if you like to see esotericism as the refuge of ancient superstition, then that is what Modernism really is. The great unifying spirit of Modernism — the spirit that unites Picasso, Joyce, Malevich, Gaudí, Beuys, Borges and Calvino is a desire to undermine and subvert the prevailing scientific materialism. It needs a little probing into the lives of these artists and writers to see that they were all deeply involved in the occult, and that esotericism provided them with their core philosophy of life and guiding aesthetic.

If we take Baudelaire and Rimbaud as representative starting points for Modernism, it is all too easy to interpret the derangement of the senses they recommend as ends in themselves. What they really believed was that when the material world is dissolved, the lineaments of the spirit worlds will present themselves. ‘The poet makes himself clairvoyant,’ said Rimbaud, ‘by turning all meaning upside down in a long and reasoned manner.’

Gauguin, Munch, Klee and Mondrian were theosophists. Mondrian’s theosophy taught him it was possible to discern a spiritual reality structuring the appearances of the material world. Gauguin saw himself as creating sculptures which — like Golems — could be enlivened by disembodied spirits. Kandinsky, like Franz Marc, was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner’s, but the great formative influences on Kandinsky’s paintings, leading the way into abstraction, were the ‘thought forms’ perceived in a trance state and recorded by theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbetter. Klee depicted himself meditating on the Third Eye. Malevich was in thrall to Ouspensky.

The esoteric roots of Matisse’s art may be better hidden, but he said that sometimes he looked at an object such as a plant he intended to paint for weeks, even months, until its spirit began to urge him to give it expression.

Gaudí’s Arab-influenced architecture, flamboyantly surging arabesques in which animal and human forms merge and morph into each other, invites the visitor to walk into an altered state of consciousness.

Spain is perhaps the country in Europe where the supernatural lies closest to the surface of the everyday. Picasso, the great artist-magus of Modernism, always had a strong feeling for the intrusions of the spirit worlds. As a boy he was believed by some of his friends to have supernatural abilities, like mind-reading and prophecy. When he travelled to France, Max Jacob, Eric Satie, Apollinaire, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau and others initiated him into a sophisticated occult tradition.

Picasso often used esoteric themes in his work. Sometimes he painted himself as the Harlequin. This figure is associated with Hermes and the Underworld, particularly in his native Barcelona, where Harlequin’s victory over death is re-enacted annually in street carnivals. His friend Apollinaire sometimes referred to him as ‘Harlequin Trismegistus’. At other times he portrayed himself in terms of an image from the Tarot, suspended between the material world and the spirit worlds.

In an analysis of a 1934 drawing of a Spanish bullfight, a long-overlooked work, Mark Harris highlights the theme of Parsifal. His essay is an inspiring example of the way that esoteric thought can illuminate dimensions closed to conventional criticism. In his youth Picasso had been a founder member of a group called Valhalla, formed to study the mystical aspects of Wagner. The drawing depicts the scene in Wagner’s opera when the black magician hurls the spear of Longinus at Parsifal, but, because Parsifal is now initiated, it only hovers over his head.

Georges Bataille researched Mithraism, and in 1901 Picasso made a series of paintings depicting women wearing a Mithraic cap, a traditional symbol of initiation. The 1934 drawing, Harris convincingly shows, is a portrayal of an underworld initiation. Like Dante and Dostoyevsky before him, he shows that the hell that the candidate must traverse begins with the hell of his own desires. Hell lies the other side of the grave but this life is hellish, too — and hellish according to the temper of the times.

This drawing is a depiction of one of Picasso’s grand themes. Our world is being shattered, fragmented by an eruption of evil, subterranean forces. The initiatic artist, Picasso, can remake the world, can be a fertility god reborn, but he will do it not in terms of the conventional canons of beauty. He will recombine the discarded, the shattered, the ugly, in beautiful new ways.

The abstract and conceptual painter Yves Klein discovered esoteric thought when he chanced upon a book by the modern proponent of Rosicrucian philosophy Max Heindel, who had been initiated by Rudolf Steiner but broke away to set up his own Rosicrucian movement. Looking forward to the transfiguration of matter, Klein intended his art to inaugurate a new Age of Space, depicted in canvasses of ultramarine unbroken by line or form. In his new age human spirit free of the restrictions of matter and form would levitate and float.

THE GREAT WRITERS OF THE TWENTIETH century were deeply immersed in esoteric thought, too. Inspired by rumours about William Blake and his sexual religion, W.B. Yeats and his young wife, Georgie, explored first the direct link between sexual and spiritual union to be found in The Zohar, then Tantric yoga. Yeats even had a vasectomy in the hope that stemming the flow of semen would help build up the energies needed for a visionary trance. Not only did their experiments produce more than four thousand pages of spirit-inspired automatic writing, but Yeats remained sexually rejuvenated into old age and wrote some of his most magnificent poetry then. He described ‘the love that moves the Sun’. Yeats was also a member of both the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical society, studied the Hermetica, wrote openly about magic and an introduction to a popular edition of the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali. Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake show his familiarity with Hindu and Hermetic doctrine, including direct quotes from Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky and Eliphas Levi. The poetry of T.S. Eliot also uses occult references in an eclectic way. Eliot attended Theosophist meetings and the breakaway Quest group attended by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Gershem Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. But perhaps the formative influence on his poetic sensibility was the Sufi-inspired philosophy of Ouspensky, whose lectures he also attended. In fact the famous first three lines of perhaps the most influential poem in English in the twentieth century, Four Quartets — on time past and time future contained in time present — are a paraphrase of the philosophy of Ouspensky.

Perhaps the most occult writer of the twentieth century and the one who best lived up to Rimbaud’s dictum about becoming a medium was Fernando Pessoa. He wrote of holding inside himself all the dreams of the world and wanting to experience the whole of the universe — its reality — inside himself. He awaited the return of the Hidden One, who has himself been waiting since the beginning of time. Meanwhile Pessoa emptied himself like a medium, allowing himself to be taken over by a series of personae, under whose names he wrote different series of poems with very different voices. ‘I am the cleverness in the dice’, says an ancient Taoist text. ‘I am the active in the deeds’, says the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl. Pessoa recognized these sentiments. To move things in space and time, to make the world better, it is not enough to push as hard as we can. We need the spirits to work through us. We need some of that spirit of cleverness.

In the literature of the late twentieth century Borges, Calvino, Salinger and Singer also deal openly with esoteric themes. It is as if they work in accord with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assertion that all genuine creation makes conscious something from the esoteric realm that has not been made conscious before. Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy has been extremely influential, not only on Kandinsky, Marc and Beuys, but also on William Golding and Doris Lessing, both of whom lived in Anthroposophical communities.

It is a mark of the strange way that esoteric influences spread that two such different writers as C.S. Lewis and Saul Bellow were both instructed in esoteric philosophy by the same spiritual master, the Anthroposophist Owen Barfield.

Will it always be true to say that the greatest writers of the day are interested in esoteric ideas? We can certainly see the influence of esotericism on both Bellow and John Updike, the two leading novelists writing in English at the turn of the century. Some of Bellow’s correspondence with Barfield has been published. Updike has written an overtly occult novel in The Witches of Eastwick, but perhaps more telling is this passage from his latest novel, Villages: ‘Sex is a programmed delirium that rolls back death with death’s own substance; it is the black space between the stars given sweet substance in our veins and crevice. The parts of ourselves conventional decency calls shameful are exalted. We are told that we shine, that we are exalted…’

This passage reaches right to the heart of the issue that lies between the exoteric world view and its opposite. According to esoteric thinkers, life in a mechanized, industrialized, digitalized environment has a deadening effect on our mental processes. The concrete, the plastic, the metal, the electrical impulses bouncing off the screen become internalized, resulting in a sterile wasteland that does not regenerate itself.

A conscious shift in consciousness is needed to open ourselves up again to the free-flowing, revivifying influence of the spirit worlds.

IN 1789 THE ARMIES OF ANGELS LED BY St Michael won a victory in heaven. In order for this victory to be decisive, though, it would have to be fought again on earth.

On 28 June 1914 Rasputin was overtaken by the plot to kill him. On the very same day Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated.

All hell let loose.

Much has been written about the evil occult influences on Germany in the early twentieth century. Less well known is the story of the occult influences in Russia at the time of the Revolution. We have already touched on St Martin, Papus and Rasputin. What is very little known is the occult influence behind their enemies, the revolutionary communists.

As I have already suggested, Marxism can be seen as a materialistic reframing of the fraternal ideals of Freemasonry. The revolutionary cell structure instigated by Lenin and Trotsky was closely modelled on the working methods of Weishaupt. Marx, Engels and Trotsky were Freemasons. Lenin was a Freemason of the 31st degree, a member of several lodges including the lodge of the Nine Sisters, the most important lodge to have been infiltrated by the followers and nihilistic philosophy of the Illuminati. Lenin and Trotsky waged war on God.

But there is a deeper mystery here. How was a man like Lenin able to bend millions of people to his will? This seems to go beyond the sinister strategies of a Weishaupt.

The US military research into occult ways of gaining advantage over the Soviet Union has been well documented. Key personnel have given testimony which seems authentic, though the results seem to have been pretty limited.

What is only now beginning to emerge is the much more extreme — and successful — use of the occult by government agencies of the old Soviet Union. Some reluctant initiates have survived to speak of ‘the red initiation’, of the training to become secret agents which took place in former monasteries. It seems that occult techniques were employed to strengthen the will to a supernatural degree by exploiting the psychic energies of torture victims and sacrificial victims, too. Only someone who had killed in the cause could become a red initiate.

Of course we have seen this form of black magic before — in the pyramid culture of South America. In the secret history Lenin is a reincarnation of a high priest, born again in order to oppose the second coming of the Sun god, and when Trotsky was on the run from his old comrades, hiding in Mexico City, he was returning home.

The image of Lenin, the mummified incarnation of an initiate of the pyramids is both resonant and a little absurd to modern sensibility. Ironically, perhaps, this image seems to encapsulate the very spirit of Modernism, mixing the iconic with the offbeat, of the cheap, banal even tackily up to date with ancient, occult wisdom.

THERE HAS BEEN SOME DEBATE IN occult circles as to how much esoteric wisdom should be made public. How much is useful in the war against materialism — and how much is dangerous?

We return to India, where post-Atlantean history began.

As we approach the end of this history, we are in a good position to see how far humanity has evolved from the communally minded creature of earlier times who had little awareness of the world around him and little sense of an interior life. In Gandhi we see individual free thought, free will and free love. Here is someone who has so expanded his sense of self that he is able to make turning points in his own personal story, his own interior narrative, into turning points in world history.

Gandhi stands as a great embodiment of the new form of consciousness that the secret societies have been working throughout history to help evolve.

It is perhaps a small irony, as well as being a mark of the global reach of the secret societies, that coming from the land of the Rishis, Gandhi first learned esoteric ideas from the Russian/English/Egyptian/American hybrid Theosophy, as taught by Madame Blavatsky.

As a young man Gandhi described himself as ‘in love’ with the British Empire. Being naturally good-hearted he saw the best in the upright and fair-playing Britons who administered his native country as a colony.

But as he matured, he began to see a deeper reality. Beneath the much-vaunted fair play, he saw, for example, the unfairness of the tax burden from abroad and above all India’s lack of freedom to determine her own destiny.

Influenced in part by the philosophy of disobedience of the American Transcendentalist Henry Thoreau and by the art and social critic John Ruskin, Gandhi set about turning the world upside down and inside out.

In 1906, at the age of thirty-six, Gandhi renounced sex with his wife. His spiritual discipline involved daily work on a hand-spun spinning wheel, partly to encourage a method of weaving cloth that would provide employment for the poor, but also because he believed that as he worked on the cloth he was also working on his own vegetable body. If he could master his body in its different dimensions, he could develop what he called soul force.

He believed that the cosmos is governed by truth and by the laws of truth and that, by acting in accordance with these laws, an individual would gain Satyagraha, the force of truth and love.

For example, if you trust your opponent without fail, you will eventually influence him to act in a trustworthy way — both by means of a psychological influence, but also, crucially, by means of a supernatural one. Similarly, if attacked, you should try to be free from all thoughts of anger and hatred against your assailant. Follow this philosophy, Gandhi taught, and ‘you will be free of fear of kings, people, robbers, tigers, even death’.

In the upside down thinking typical of the secret societies, Gandhi blamed Indians not Britons for the occupation of India, pointing out that 100,000 Britons would not be able to control three hundred million Indians unless they went along with it. Indian cotton was being exported to Britain, to the textile mills of Lancashire, then sold back to India at a profit to Britain and a loss to India. Seated at his spinning wheel, he said, ‘It’s my certain conviction that with every thread I draw, I am spinning the destiny of India.’

On 26 January 1929 he asked people to observe Independence Day in towns and villages throughout India. He asked for the boycotting of law courts, elections and schools. He also chose to challenge the British government’s monopoly on salt manufacture, which meant that Indians had to pay the British for salt, even though it lay in open abundance around their own coast. In March 1930 the sixty-year-old Gandhi set off, staff in hand, on a twenty-four-day walk to the sea. Thousands joined him. Finally he waded into the sea for ritual purification, then leaned down and scooped up a small handful of salt. The crowd acclaimed him ‘Deliverer!’

Gandhi’s soul power was such that when he met armed soldiers, they would lower their weapons. Hindus and Muslims forgave each other in his presence.

The imprisonment of Gandhi and his hunger strikes sapped the moral will of the British government, leading to independence for India in 1947. The largest empire the world had ever seen melted away with an unprecedented lack of bloodshed.

In this history we have followed the lives of great leaders such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon. In a sense Gandhi was greater than any of them. Soul force, he believed, could deflect the greatest military power, because the intention behind an action could have greater and more widespread effects than the action itself.

Gandhi was a devout Hindu but he lived according to the deeper laws as laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. Talking to hostile Hindu and Muslim factions, he argued that someone whose spirit of self-sacrifice did not go beyond his own community eventually became selfish and made his community selfish. The spirit of self-sacrifice, he said, should embrace the whole world.

Like St Francis, he loved the whole world.