REVIEW OF BOOKS

James Blish on the decline of the supernatural

When from early 1939 . to late 1943 the late John W. Campbell was editing an American magazine of supernatural fiction called Unknown, and later Unknown Worlds (whose ghost has been hovering over science fiction ever since), he was fond of asking editorially, "Is anything millions of people have believed for thousands of years likely to be untrue?" This is at bottom the chief rock of defence upon which apologists for modern occultism build their case; it is the main part of what they mean by the occult tradition '. The noun is justifiable, for the argument has been put forward over at least a thousand years by almost every major writer on the occult (and, in the Middle Ages and most of the Renaissance, on any other subject). It usually took the form of the citing of endless lists of authorities.

A second major claim which, though it quite contradicts the first, is put forward nearly as often, is that the ancients had a vast knowledge of the true nature of the universe which they wisely withheld from the unready and/or unworthy masses, but which it is now time to reveal and investigate. This is the Golden Age argument. The first half of it goes back as far as one cares to search for it and may antedate writing; the most famous Golden Age story is Plato's pernicious Atlantis. The second half, that now is the time to break secrecy, was a common excuse among Renaissance writers, and was given enormous additional impetus by the invention of printing.

Nevertheless; there are enormous differences between Renaissance occult theory and practice and the modern, sufficiently in our disfavour to tempt one to decree a Golden Age of occultism. Renaissance occultism had just as high a nonsense quota (approaching 100 per cent) as ours, and probably just as much charlatanism (ratio unknown in both ages). But in general, both intellectually and in intent, the Renaissance occultists seem almost a different race.

Nonsense first. The answer to Campbell's would-be rhetorical question is, of course, Yes. One has only to compare the main beliefs held by the Egyptians over 3,000 years with those prevailing in the West for at least 1,500 years to realise that one of these two sets of millions of people had to be wrong. The Egyptians spring instantly to mind in this context because it is their beliefs which Christian occultists have most persistently and un successfully tried to integrate with their own, as did the Greeks and Romans. A more general study of comparative religion might suggest that both sets were wrong, a frisson which probably visits every divinity student at least once.

Such a study, centred on the occult, was attempted by the late surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann,* and first published in the United States in 1948 as The History of Magic. A work of this kind, written for the layman but to scholarly standards of accuracy, has been needed for a long time (and it is only fair to warn the reader, in considering what follows, that by no coincidence at all I am trying to write one). It is a notable try, especially in view of the fact that it admittedly relies in large part on secondary and tertiary sources, and has been handsomely produced (there are 169 illustrations, most of which are from primary sources). Yet I do not think it will do. About its accuracy I have no important complaint except that some of its many quotations from the literature have been abridged without notice to the reader. A more serious weakness is that it is frequently vague. Some examples: (1) The majority of the illustrations are allegorical, but all are captioned with only one phrase or even only one word, and frequently go unexplained in the text as well; (2) It is usually impossible to tell how much weight Seligmann allows conflicting evidence, or how much credence he gives any particular scholium (in his account of witchcraft he seems to believe that there really were sabbats, as well as real witches, during the craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see pp. 181-2), but this uncharacteristic admission is brief and buried in a mass of unassessed anecdotes); surely impartiality is desirable, but equally surely the nineteenth century German ideal of the objective historian should be known to be self-contradictory, and especially in this field!

All these problems arise from the book's organisation, which is — I shall not resist the easy word — surrealistic. Seligmann tries to cover everything, from astrology to Zoroastrianism, not excluding such completely non-influential practices as molereading. Such an attempt would require an encyclopaedia; in this volume, despite its large size and small type, even the minor subjects wind up scamped. Overall, the treatment attempts to be historical beginning with the Akkadians somewhere around 2500 BC (the date is not given) and extending to the eighteenth century,but this breaks down almost at once into COntinual crass-references to the subsequent iates of specific superstitions and practices. This cutting back and forth between two major approaches, and over thousands of years, is confusing almost from the outset, and later on treatment by subject rather than chronologically takes over whole chapters. Granted that chaos rules in any over-view of the occult; still, there are some consistencies in this universe of discourse, and 1c obscure them by adoption of a choatic approach is not only foredoomed but positively wrong-headed.

Consistency is the major virtue of both the subject-matter and the text of Shumaker's studyt of five Renaissance ' sciences ' (astrology, natural and white magic, witchcraft, alchemy, and Herrnetism — the last a scholium about which Seligmann spreads confusion every time he opens his mouth about it, which is often). This, also handsomely produced and extensively illustrated, is by intention a book for scholars, and is grounded almost entirely upon primary sources in Latin, Greek and various vernaculars which it occasionally quotes without translation (although in every such instance there is an English paraphrase close by). Nevertheless, it is by a large margin more accessible to the lay reader than Seligmann's history, in inherent interest, control of the material, admission a biasses, overall organisation, and clarity and sufficiency of exposition of sometimes almost intractable, downright loony, but still unfortunately important ideas and systems. And even in the purely literary sense, it is much better written, with hardly a trace of the jargon we expect from academics, despite the fact that Professor Shumaker is an entrenched Authority in theoretical criticism (in English, not in history). His prose makes the artist Seligmann's look outright turgid.

Admittedly it looks like folly to try to cover a huge and terrifying complex phenomenon like the witch-craze in fortytwo pages, however large and well-filled (Seligmann gives it thirty-two), but coverage in the historical sense of any of his five chosen movements of thought is not what Professor Shumaker intends, let alone pretends, to provide. Instead, he is out to show that for all their inconsistencies and controversies and monumental emptinesses, these five Renaissance disciplines had an intellectual and moral pattern in common which could not have been exposed (in a completely non-perjorative sense) by intensive examination of only one of them.

What emerges is a group portrait characterised by, first, a concentration upon syncretism — a unified field which would cover all knowledge — which dominated almost all serious Western thought and still does, though the advent of scientific method drastically changed our approach to it; and second, a moral, sometimes mystical and always eschatological attempt to understand why the world is the way it is and why we are in it, an attempt for which neither modern science nor modern occultism offer any answers. Indeed, we have decreed that this second effort is probably hopeless, and may even be meaningless.

By modern standards Renaissance scholars in every field, like their predecessors the scholastics and right back to Aristotle and beyond, do not live up to their reputations as formal logicians. They had not yet discovered induction, for which they can hardly be blamed, but in deduction they committed virtually every sin in the book, and over and over again. They argued from analogy; they piled up authorities (including minor poets like Lucan, 'Whose only virtue was that he was ancient — no distinction was made between fiction and reportage); though they constantly appealed to what they called ' experience ', what they meant by this was common belief and folk-tales, which they never bothered to check; their faith in reason was completely vitiated by bad premisses rooted in faith and custom, and often by the desire to become authorities themselves; they not only readily credited forgeries, but manufactured them; they engaged in fierce polemic wars over matters none of them knew anything about, and constructed vast allegorical treatises (particularly about alchemy) which were designed to impress other scholars with how much they knew, but were concealing, about matters which many of them knew to be coffee-table or non-subjects. This list could be extended almost indefinitely, and Shumaker duly brings in almost all of the defensible indictments. One of the sorriest things about it is that it includes Roger Bacon's four major sources of error, Upon which (though in many respects Bacon was one of the most credulous of the scholastics) the scientific revolution could have begun in the mid-Thirteenth Century.

Nevertheless there is, as Shumaker shows, a nobility of intent and a concentration of syncretism, as well as a lot of honest technical criticism, among the Renaissance occultists which has now almost completely vanished, and along With this high seriousness, we have lost even the desire to 'make any sense of the metaphysics of the subject, let alone its ethical implications (which the Renaissance writers mostly ignored also, since they were by and large more interested in illumination than they were in popularisation; we are, to give us credit, not quite so selfish). Instead, the modern occultist, practitioner, theorist or analyst though he may be, has substituted a willingness to believe anything — regardless of consistency or degree of triviality — which willingness masquerades as that appeal to evidence which modern study of any field demands.

There was inherently nothing trivial about spiritualism, which medieval and Renaissance writers would have unhesitatingly denounced as necromancy. As Ronald Pearsall points out in his survey", the popularity since Victorian times of the idea that it might indeed be possible to communicate with the dead should have resulted in a religion, and perhaps even a church. Instead, as Mr Pearsall's very title admits, the idea left nothing behind but a welter of parlour and theatre tricks and a negligible number of tiny cults. Mr. Pearsall, however, accepts as genuine both hauntings and clairvoyance.

As an example of infinite credulity plus appeal to incredible evidence, we have available a book which tries to be a playful and sceptical report of the current occult scene in the States.t t Consider the following typical statement:

The trouble with astrology is that although the theory behind it doesn't fit in with current scientific concepts, it works — not 100 per cent but with amazing flashes of accuracy.

Seldom have two one-syllable words been so seriously misused outside the realm of swearing. Mr. Freedland does not know what he means by ' it ', nor, on his showing, do any of the practioners he mentions. Astrclogy, regardless of its validity, is a staggeringly complex discipline, and if there is one person alive today who understands it thoroughly, neither Mr. Freedland nor I have met him. What Mr. Freedland thinks he means by " works " is equally sloppy:

Then Linda looked up a few planetary tables on my wife's birth date and told her, "When you were five, you had a very dangerous mastoid operation." Now this is not exactly a vague tall-dark-man-in-your-future fortuneteller ploy. As it happens, Mary had to catch up on her first-grade home work in bed, and the only reason she survived the mastoiditis infection was that penicillin had recently come into use.

Mary's age is not given, but mastoiditis was a common and indeed very dangerous infection of children before the advent of antibiotics, and removal of the mastoid process the only known remedy; the guess needs no planetary tables, but only the birth date itself to make it a lucky one. The guesser would on the other hand be most unlikely to know when penicillin (which has a knotty history) came into general use. Was there in fact an operation in this case anyhow? Was Mary five at the time? Deponent sayeth not (and the style of this sample is, alas, also representative).

In an attempt to dismiss the prevalence of fraud in occultism, the otherwise eminently rational William James said that to disprove the proposition, "all crows are black," one did not have to examine all black crows, but only to show one white crow. In 1666, as both Seligmann and Shumaker note, the eminent chemist Helvetius reported a white crow — but in the field of alchemy, which today goes undefended even by our Freedlands. Modern occultists all have a favourite cageful of white crows in common to exhibit. And every specimen sheds flakes of whitewash at a touch.

James Wish, the nOvelist, is currently at work on a history of demonology and the occult.

“The Occult Explosion. Nat Freedland (Michael Joseph £2.50)