Eclectic occultism
James Blish
The Occult Colin Wilson (Hodder and Stoughton £4.50) The number of new books, reprints, magazine articles and TV hours devoted to witchcraft, black magic and other aspects of occultism has been rising almost exponentially in Britain and the United States over the past quarter of a century, beginning (and perhaps it is no coincidence) at about the same time as the onset of the Cold War. Now Colin Wilson has essayed to survey the entire murky territory, including spiritualism, telepathy, Atlantis and flying saucers.
Any such book must almost necessarily consist mostly of unsubstantiated anecdotes and quotations from the copious earlier literature, and gain what little continuity it can from the few sub-fields which can be treated as historical phenomena (e.g., the European witch craze), and from the degree of credence the author is prepared to give the tall tales, taller claims and alleged witnesses.
The anecdotes are here all right, and in great plenty; but Mr Wilson has deliberately chosen to make relatively little use of the prop of history. By far the. largest part of his book (pp. 121-412) is taken up with what is called 'A History of Magic,' but which actually and admittedly is only a chain of biographies of individual magicians, from Pythagoras to Gurdjieff, with side glances at some of their disciples. This replacement of history with more anecdotes results in some curious omissions. Chief among these is the failure to note more than perfunctorily that ceremonial magic in the Christian tradition had a number of standard assumptions and practices which amounted to a body of doctrine, passed on from one magician to another, and recognised as effective by the Church. This only semi-secret tradition is attested to by the large number of grimoires or magician's handbooks still extant, dating back at least as far as the beginning of the fourteenth century. The word grimoire does not appear in Mr Wilson's index, although he does devote two paragraphs to the most important of them, The Key of Solomon, in a chapter on Kabbalists. Cornelius Agrippa is discussed, but the fact that the authorship of another important grimoire, The Fourth Boob, was attributed to him is not. Moreover, the fundamental fact that the whole purpose of ceremonial magic is the summoning and control of spirits (usually demons) is largely ignored; most of Mr Wilson's biographees, in fact, seem to have worked entirely outside this tradition as a whole.
This choice of approach and its consequent omissions seem to stem from the question of credibility. To put the matter briefly, Mr Wilson is a believer, whose thesis is that the physical universe has meaning, that evolution has a purpose, and that human beings possess a 'Faculty X' which can act directly at a distance upon the physical universe and detect aspects of the universe still unknown to the sciences. The thesis leads to the selection of mages who best fit it, and the rejection of those that do not. In the same way, it enables the author to survey the entire collection of lesser anecdotes with an appearance of judiciousness, allowing (though not invariably) for fraud where it had already been proven, and cheerfully rejecting as preposterous stories that most educated readers would deem so, on the grounds that they can be shown not to fit the hypothesis.
Mr Wilson's acceptances, however, far outnumber his rejections. His hypothetical umbrella is a broad one. In dealing with witchcraft, for example, he suggests that "witches and their powers are real enough; the Devil and his powers are not." Though acknowledging that almost all of the details of witchcraft were extracted by torture by Inquisitors who knew in advance (from the books of the demonologists) what they wanted to hear, and that the few voluntary confessions were the products of compulsive hysterics who also knew what their judges wanted to hear, he follows the long-discredited Margaret Murray in maintaining that the similarity of the confessions shows that witchcraft was a popular cult and that witches' sabbaths did take place and were widespread. (He adds that this is not doubted by "even the most sceptical historians," which is simply untrue.) In fact, he quotes with qualified approval the dictum of Montague Summers, "that dubious and romantic clergyman," that "most witches deserved what they got "because their intent was evil and their belief was that they were servants of the Devil, a Byzantine argument dating all the way back to the Malleus Male ficarum (1486).
More generally, 'Faculty X' expands its ground steadily in the course of the sur vey. Sometimes it appears to be no more than an extra sense or a group of them; then it becomes latent powers ' including but by no means confined to the power of suggestion either for healing or for scaring people to death; and by the end
it has become a pseudo-scientific neologism for the soul, allowing survival after death and. or reincarnation into the hypothesis. Thus all the appearance of selectivitY, all the weighing and balancing of evidence, the very sobriety of tone in which Mt Wilson relates even the most sensational incidents, come to nothing in the end, because the supposedly central hypothesis has become broad enough to cover almost anything, including the "entertaining speculation'! that inhabitants of other planets are "involved in the 'chain of reincarnation ' " (p. 533). All these speculations are indeed at least entertaining, and there are certainly plenty of them. Anyone wishing to begin reading in this field might well begin with this book (which also has a good bibliography), provided that he retains a good grip on his scepticism.
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