That old black magic
Colin Wilson
Magic and the Millennium, A Sociiological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-World Peoples, Bryan R. Wilson (Heinemann, £6.50)
Aldous Huxley has a curious story of an American religious sect. One day, the leader of the sect announced that God had appeared to him in a dream, and told him that he was to perform a miracle. In front of the whole congregation, he was to cut off his brother's head with a sword, and then replace it on his shoulders; whereupon, God would bring the brother to life again. Oddly enough, the brother raised no objection; he allowed himself to be decapitated. But he stayed dead. The leader was arrested and confined in a lunatic asylum.
The story kept running through my head as I read Magic and the Mil&valor?, -which is
not, as you might imagine, an addition to the literature of occultism, but an exhaustive and scholarly study c.4 primitive salvationist cults that have sprung up in opposition to the ' white man '. It is a big book, and the style doesn't exactly sparkle. But for anyone who doesn't mind the polysyllables — or is willing to skip them — it is a saddening and disturbing book. Imagine the Aldous Huxley anecdote repeated, with fascinating variations, a hundred or so times, and you have an idea of the overall effect.
The white man had three basic ways of imposing himself on primitive tribes: through religion, through whisky, and through guns. In Tahiti, the Christian missionaries objected to polygamy, idolatry, tattooing, the wearing of flowers in the hair, dancing, and boatraces. Not to mention the traditional sexual promiscuity. In Melanesia, there were often suicides when missionaries forcibly broke up polygamous family units. This kind of thing would gradually build up an intense pressure of misery and frustration which might express itself in many ways. In southern Papua, a native who was mourning the death of his father and brother went into a trance, and had visions of dead kinsman and ancestors; he heard prophecies of the coming of a steamer with cargo for the natives. The idea spread; other native fantasies were added. Finally, it turned into Vailala Madness ', when whole villages would suddenly experience giddiness (called 'head-he-go-round '), and sway and dance, uttering gibberish. This was simply one of the 'Cargo cults ' — i.e. cults where all the
native longing for the millennium becomes centred on the idea of boatloads of marvellous goods — such as tobacco and outboard motors — cast up on their coasts. We smile at the naivety; but it is the typical reaction of a peaceable people to religious disorientation. The frustration causes ' immortal longings ' to arise in them, and the desire for outboard motors gets mixed up with the longing for heaven.
Among tribes of a more warlike disposition, the reaction is more violent. The Ghost Dance of the American Indians is typical. A Paiute Indian called Wovoka was in a fever during an eclipse of the sun; he believed he went to heaven, saw God, and was told that if the Indians did the Ghost Dance, the white men would vanish, the buffalo would return, and everything :would be as it had been before the whites came.
Magic and thy Millennium is a remarkable hook, simply as an accumulation of facts. But
I could have wished for rather more exploration of the psychology of millennialism, and a
less rationalistic attitude about the whole thing. Is it really good enough to state flatly that magic doesn't work? Professor Mircea Eliade would not agree — at least, where some tribal shamans are concerned. Possibly this point is not really relevant to a book like this — but it indicates the rather narrow, fact-collecting approach that I found off-putting. There are very wide implications here — for everybody, not just for primitive tribes. When human emotions and aspirations are bottled up, the mind tries to project its own image of what it needs. It reaches out, it fantasises, it creates. The result may sometimes be mere nostalgia — like the Indian desire to have the buffaloes back again, or the Irish-American's sentimental ballads about Killarney. But very often, the result is more important than nostalgia. Implications go wider than poetry and religion. It is arguable that the socialist movements of the nineteenth century were ' millennialist '; certainly Marx's. Capital has always struck me as a cranky religious document rather than a work of sober economics. It' we see nineteenth-century socialism and anarchism as the western equivalent of cargo cults, it suggests the reason that socialist economies are always breaking down, failing to deliver the goods in a purely material sense. Bryan Wilson's book is about ' magic ' in Sartre's sense — a kind of pathetic wishful thinking that is determined to distort unpalatable facts, and he shows again and again how the incredible human capacity for self-deception, born of wishful thinking, leads to tragedy. The theme really needed someone like Aldous Huxley to do it justice, and to develop its implications. Dr Wilson writes as if he is sitting on the other side of a high wall, quite secure from delusions and wishful thinking. He could have written a classic to rank with William James's Varieties of Religious Experience; instead he has produced a kind of splendid rag-bag.
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