…HOWEVER, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE eighteenth century the rise to supremacy of the United States was only a mystical vision. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries France became the most powerful and influential nation. Extremes of good and evil, rapier and sharp tongue, decided the fate of the world in the corridors of the Louvre, then Versailles.
It is perhaps significant that, though Descartes spent many years researching the Rosicrucians, even journeying to Germany to try to track them down, he never succeeded. A prey to visions, he was evidently not, like Newton, adept at alchemical techniques that might give repeated, perhaps even controlled, access to the spirit worlds.
In collaboration with the mathematician and theologian Marin Mersenne, whose patron was Richelieu, Descartes developed a rationalist philosophy, a closed system of reasoning without the necessity of reference to the realm of the senses.
The philosophy of Descartes and Mersenne helped evolve a new form of cynicism. It enabled a succession of French diplomats and politicians to run rings round their opposite numbers. They might wear similar, though rather more fashionable clothes than the ones worn by their contemporaries in Germany, Italy, Holland, Spain or England, but the difference in consciousness was as drastic as that between the Conquistadors and the Aztecs.
The French court was the most magnificent in human history, not only in material terms, but in the sophistication of its culture. Beautiful and heartless, it wittily interpreted all human actions as motivated by vanity, according to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. ‘When we dwell on the good qualities of others, we are expressing esteem for our own finer feelings’ is one of his sly, devastating critiques of human nature. ‘No matter how well we are spoken of,’ he said, ‘we learn nothing we do not already know.’ In the gap left by the departure of sincerity arose a tyranny of taste and style.
As spirituality was severed from sexuality, libertines like Choderlos de Laclos, author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, said to be a spider at the centre of a vast web of sexual and political intrigue, Crebillon fils, author of the best of the libertine novels, Les Egarements du Coeur et de l’Esprit, Casanova and de Sade became representative men, admired for the complexity and cleverness of their power plays.
In all sex there is an element of striving. Now this striving became an end itself. Even among the most sensitive and intelligent, sex could be reduced to an exercise of power.
Following Cardinal Richelieu’s unprincipled machinations to promote national interests in the reign of Louis XIII, Louis XIV aggregated to himself the title of Sun King — but of course there was a dark side. While haute cuisine was devised to keep nobles contented at court, peasants were taxed to the point of starvation and Richelieu massacred religious dissenters. Later Marie Antoinette would be shielded from sight of the sick, old or poor, and Louis XVI obsessively read and reread an account of the beheading of Charles I, drawing to himself the thing he feared most.
Rumours of powerful, esoteric secrets echoed round the court. Cardinal Richelieu carried a wand of gold and ivory and enemies feared its magic powers. His mentor Père Joseph, the original eminence grise, taught him spiritual exercises that developed psychic powers. He employed a cabalist called Gaffarel to teach him the secrets of the occult. A man called Du-boy, or Duboys, rumoured to be a descendant of Nicholas Flamel, went to see him carrying an obscurely phrased magical primer. But Du-boy was unable to interpret it for the Cardinal and get him results, and so Du-boy was hanged. It seems Richelieu became desperate to achieve the breakthrough to the other side that he craved, because he employed increasingly extreme methods. Urban Grandier, an alleged devil-worshipper, was being slowly tortured to death at Richelieu’s behest, when he is reported to have warned: ‘You are an able man, do not destroy yourself.’
Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, caused her young rival to die by means of a Black Mass.
One of Louis XIV’s doctors, called Lesebren, gave a strange account of what happened to a friend of his who had concocted what he believed to be the elixir of life. He had started to take a few drops every morning at sunrise with a glass of wine. After fourteen days his hair and nails began to fall out, and he lost his nerve. He started giving the potion to an elderly female servant, but she too became frightened and refused to continue. So finally he started an old hen on a course of this medicine, by soaking corn with it. After six days its feathers began to fall out until it became completely naked. Then two weeks later new feathers began to grow brighter and more beautifully coloured than the feathers she had had in her youth, and she began to lay eggs again.
Amid extremes of cynicism and gullibility, where quacks and frauds were common, genuine initiates developed ways of presenting themselves to the outside world. Esoteric teachers had always known their wisdom looked foolish to the uninitiated. They had always focused on the tricky paradoxical nature of the cosmos. Now initiates began to present themselves in the guise of tricksters and scoundrels.
A poor boy from the backstreets of Sicily reinvented himself as Count Cagliostro. By a mixture of mesmeric charm, his habit of using as bait Seraphita, his beautiful young wife, and above all his rumoured possession of the philosopher’s stone, he rose to the top of European society.
To those at the bottom of society he seemed some kind of saint. Healing miracles performed among the poor of Paris, unable to afford a doctor, made him a popular hero, and when, after a short imprisonment, he was released from the Bastille, some eight thousand people came to cheer. When Cagliostro was challenged to a debate in front of his intellectual peers, his opponent Court de Gébelin, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s and a renowned expert on esoteric philosophy, soon admitted he was up against a man whose erudition far surpassed his own.
Cagliostro also seems to have had remarkable powers of prophecy. In a famous letter of 20 June 1786 he prophesied that the Bastille would be completely destroyed, and it is said that he even predicted the exact date of this event — 14 July — in graffiti found inscribed on the wall of the prison cell in which he died.
Anyone with supernatural power is bound to suffer temptation. Perhaps the most charismatic and disconcerting initiate of the twentieth century was G.I. Gurdjieff. He deliberately presented his ideas in an absurd way. He wrote of an organ at the base of the spine that could enable everyone to see everything upside down and inside out, calling it the ‘Kunderbuffer’. In this way he deliberately gave the power of the kundalini serpent, the reserve of unredeemed energy that lies coiled at the base of the spine, and which is central to Tantric practice, a laughable name. Similarly he wrote of gods in giant spaceships and that the surface of the sun is cool. Anyone who dismissed it showed himself unworthy. Anyone who persisted and was able to tune in found that Gurdjieff’s spiritual disciplines worked.
Since his death it has emerged that he sometimes used his undoubted powers of mind control to prey on vulnerable young women.
A friend of mine journeyed to India, to visit the renowned teacher, adept and miracle-worker Sai Baba. My friend was travelling with his beautiful young girlfriend. After an exquisite dinner the servants withdrew and Sai Baba took his guests into the library. My friend was perusing a book while his girlfriend talked to Sai Baba. He noticed that he was standing unusually close to her and became anxious when Sai Baba turned the conversation to the subject of the sexual dimension in Hindu myths. Suddenly Sai Baba reached to ring a copper bell engraved with sigils and simultaneously seemed to grab something out of mid-air. He turned his hand palm up to reveal a golden chain with a crucifix on it. He told the girl that this was real magic and held his palm out to her, offering her the object, which seemed to my friend to glow with a dark aura.
He also noticed that the sigils on the bell were Tantric, and realized that the intention was probably to bewitch his girlfriend with a view to seducing her. He asked where the chain came from.
‘It appeared before your very eyes,’ said Sai Baba.
My friend took the chain from him, to prevent his girlfriend from touching it. Holding it over his palm, he used the art of psychometry to determine its origins. He had a disturbing vision of grave robbers, and realized that this crucifix and chain had been dug up from the grave of a Jesuit missionary.
He confronted Sai Baba with this and so, by demonstrating his own magical powers, he was able to make him back down.
Telling me about this many years later, my friend said that since Prospero had broken his wand at the end of The Tempest, initiates had been forbidden to exercise their magical powers, unless in exceptional circumstances like these. There is a law that if a white magician uses his occult power, an equal amount of power is made available to a black magician.
Is there any other evidence to suggest that magic is still practised today? In a secondhand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells I recently came across a small cache of letters in which an occultist gave out advice on how to use magic spells to achieve their goals. One included introducing menstrual blood secretly into food as a way of awakening a man’s sexual desires. This might seem outlandish, but in 2006 the British government announced its plans to give large grants for the development of ‘biodynamic’ farming. This method, devised by Rudolf Steiner, depends on the correspondences between plants and the spirits of the stars described by Paracelsus and Boehme. Steiner recommends that an infestation of field mice should be dealt with by burying in the field the ashes of a field mouse prepared when Venus is in the sign of Scorpio.
IF CAGLIOSTRO REMAINS AN ENIGMA, the man he looked up to is an even greater mystery.
Cagliostro’s own account of meeting the Comte de St Germain at a castle in Germany in 1785 records that he and his wife arrived at 2 a.m, the appointed time. The drawbridge lowered and they crossed to find themselves in a small, darkened room. Suddenly, as if by magic, great doors opened to reveal a vast temple made dazzling by the lights of thousands of candles. In the middle of the temple sat the Comte de St Germain. He was wearing many fabulous diamond rings and on his chest there rested a bejewelled device that seemed to reflect the light of all the candles and beam it on Cagliostro and Seraphita. Sitting either side of St Germain two acolytes held up bowls from which incense arose, and, as Cagliostro entered, a disembodied voice he took to be count’s — though his lips did not seem to move — resonated around the temple.
‘Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?’
Of course in at least one sense St Germain knew exactly who Cagliostro was — the visit had been pre-arranged, after all — but here he was asking about his previous incarnations, his daemon, his deeper motives.
Cagliostro threw himself on the ground in front of St Germain, and after a while said, ‘I come to invoke the God of the Faithful, the Son of Nature, the Father of Truth. I come to ask one of the fourteen thousand and seven secrets he bears in his bosom. I come to give myself up as his slave, his apostle, his martyr.’
Clearly Cagliostro thought he recognized St Germain, but who was he?
There was a clue in the fact that St Germain then initiated Cagliostro into Templar mysteries, taking him on an out of body journey, flying him above a molten sea of bronze to explore the heavenly hierarchies.
St Germain had appeared in European society quite suddenly in 1710, apparently from Hungary and seemingly about fifty years old. Small and dark skinned, he always wore black clothes and extraordinary diamonds. His most arresting features were his hypnotic eyes. By all accounts he quickly commanded attention in society because of his accomplishments, speaking many languages, playing the violin and painting. And he also seemed to have an extraordinary ability to read minds.
He was believed to practise secret breathing techniques taught by the Hindu fakirs and, in order to meditate better, he adopted yoga positions unknown in the West at that time. Though he attended banquets, he was never seen eating in front of others and drank only a strange herbal tea he concocted himself.
But the greatest mystery surrounding the Comte de St Germain was his longevity. Having appeared in public life in 1710, apparently in late middle age, when he met the composer Rameau in Venice, he remained in public life at least as late as 1782 without appearing to age at all. Sightings of him by the great and the good continued as late as 1822.
It would be tempting to dismiss all this as a romance in the style of Alexander Dumas were it not for the fact that witnesses who left accounts of meeting him over such a long period were of such high standing. As well as Rameau, they included Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Clive of India and Casanova. He was a prominent figure at the court of Louis XV, an intimate of both Madame de Pompadour and the king himself, for whom he took diplomatic missions in Moscow, Constantinople and London. There in 1761 he negotiated an agreement called the Family Compact, which paved the way for the Treaty of Paris, putting an end to the colonial wars between France and Britain. St Germain’s efforts always seemed to be in the cause of peace, and, though he is often lumped in with Cagliostro, he was never caught out in any act of dishonesty. Although nobody knew where his money came from — some said alchemy — he was evidently independently wealthy and by no means a desperate adventurer.
So who was the Comte de St Germain? A key to his secret identity lies in Freemasonic history. It is said that it was he who coined the Freemasonic mantra Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and whether or not this is accurate, he may be seen as the living spirit of esoteric Freemasonry.
More particularly, St Germain should be identified with another personality beset by rumour, counter-rumour and uncertainty about whether he really lived at all. In the secret history St Germain is Christian Rosenkreuz reincarnated in the age of enlightenment, of imperial expansion and international diplomacy.
To borrow a phrase from the eminent science fiction writer and esotericist Philip K. Dick, he had learned how to reconstitute his body after death.
This should alert us to an even deeper mystery. In an earlier incarnation Rosenkreuz/Germain had been Hiram Abiff, the Master Builder of Solomon’s Temple. The murder of Hiram Abiff had led to the Word’s being lost. On one level the lost Word was a power of supernatural procreation which humankind had wielded before the Fall into matter. Part of the mission of St Germain, through esoteric Freemasonry, was the reintroduction of knowledge of the Word into the stream of history.
The deepest mystery of this individuality, though, concerns an even earlier incarnation from the time when human bodies were on the borderline of becoming solid flesh. Enoch was the earliest prophet of the Sun god, a man whose face shone with a sun-like radiance.
When St Germain took Cagliostro on a tour of the heavens they were going on the tour described in the Book of Enoch. In the phrase Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, St Germain looked forward to a time when humanity would reach out to the Sun god with freedom of thought and will, as they had failed to do the first time He came.
The secret history of the world from the late sixteenth century to the nineteenth century is dominated by the work behind the scenes of the great ascended masters of Western tradition, Enoch and Elijah, and by preparations for the descent from the skies of the Archangel of the Sun — and, beyond this, for the descent of an even greater being.
These men were preparing the way for the Second Coming.
AS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PROGRESSED, sightings of the mysterious count become rarer, but a mood of optimism and expectation filled the lodges of the secret societies. In France ‘the Unknown Philosopher’, St Martin, was teaching that ‘every man is a king’. Chevalier Ramsay, the Scottish laird who had founded a Grand Lodge in Paris in 1730, made a speech to new initiates in Paris in 1737: ‘The whole world is nothing but a great republic. We strive for the reunion of all people of an enlightened mind… not only through the love of the fine arts, but even more through the elevated principles of virtue, science and religion, in which the interests of the brotherhood and that of the entire family of humankind can meet each other… and from which the subjects of all kingdoms can learn to love each other.’
Freemasonry provided a protected space for the tolerant discussion of ideas, for free scientific enquiry and for investigation into the spirit worlds.
Following the establishment of mother lodges in Scotland, London and Paris, the great event of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century took place in the 1760s. This was the founding of the Order of Elus Coens (or ‘chosen priests’) by the Portuguese magus Martines de Pasqually. The rituals of the Elus Coens, devised by de Pasqually, were sometimes up to six hours long and involved an incense that blended hallucinogens and fly agaric mushroom spores. In the later rituals of Stanislas de Guaita, much influenced by de Pasqually, a blindfold was removed and the candidate might find himself facing men wearing Egyptian masks and headdresses who silently pointed swords at his chest.
In the way that Dr Dee had worked to bring back real spiritual experience into the Church by the practice of ceremonial magic, men like de Pasqually and Cagliostro did the same in Freemasonry. In 1782 Cagliostro founded Egyptian Right Freemasonry, which would be highly influential in both France and America.
De Pasqually’s pupil and successor, St Martin, placed less emphasis on ceremony and more on internal, esoteric disciplines. Influenced in this by his reading of Boehme, his version of Martinist philosophy has remained highly influential in French Freemasonry to this day. Living in Paris at the time of the Terror, St Martin allowed men and women to come to his apartment, initiating them by a mystical laying on of hands. They were in such peril that they continued to wear their masks even during their meetings in order to hide their identities even from one another.
Famous for his genially excoriating attacks on religion, Voltaire is often thought of as a God-hater. In reality, it was organized religion he was against. When he was initiated by Benjamin Franklin, he was given the apron belonging to Helvetius to kiss. Helvetius was the famous Swiss scientist whose account of alchemical transmutation remains the second most highly authenticated account after that of Leibniz.
The historian of Freemasonry and mystical experience A.E. Waite wrote of Masonry’s ‘dreams of antique science, proclaiming that the reality behind dreams must be sought in the spirit of dreams’. He talked of Voltaire as the man ‘who held the keys — who had forged the key — which opened up the door to this reality and unfolded amazing vistas of possibility… Condemned practices, forbidden arts might lead through some clouds of mystery into the light of knowledge.’ We will see more clearly what this means in the next chapter, but for the moment it is enough to say that the initiates of the secret societies were amazed by these new vistas.
Their breasts were full of such faith and optimism that they would undoubtedly have agreed with Wordsworth that bliss was it that dawn to be alive.
Among the artists, writers and composers of the secret societies this great wealth of enthusiasm and these expectations of the dawn of a new age gave rise to the Romantic movement. Whenever there is a great flowering of imaginative art and literature, as, for example, in the Renaissance and Romanticism, we should suspect the presence somewhere in the shadows of sacred idealism as a philosophy of life and of the secret societies which cultivate that philosophy.
THIS HAS BEEN A HISTORY OF THE WORLD according to idealism — if we take idealism in its philosophical sense of proposing that ideas are more real than objects. Idealism in the more common, colloquial sense — meaning living according to high ideals — was, as George Steiner has pointed out, an invention of the nineteenth century.
In the previous century the lodges of England, America and France had worked to create societies that were less cruel, superstitious and ignorant, less repressive and prejudiced and more tolerant. The world had become all of these things — and also more insincere and frivolous.
Even before the Terror there was disquiet, an anxiety that, although society might be made to run along straight lines, this enterprise was adequate neither to human nature nor to other, darker forces operating outside the laws of nature. Romanticism was partly an attempt to come to terms with a galvanic feeling of intensity rising up from below and what today we would call the unconscious. It would give rise to intense music and poetry. It would be impatient of convention, encouraging spontaneity and self-abandon.
In the land of Eckhart various writers saw France in particular as a land of ‘soulless little dancing masters who did not understand the inner life of man’. In Lessing, Schlegel and Schiller philosophical idealism became a philosophy of life once more. Above all, this idealism would exalt the imagination, holding the mystical and esoteric belief that the imagination is a higher mode of perception than that offered by the senses. Imagination can be trained to grasp higher realities than the materialism being peddled by the apostles of common sense.
In conventional history Romanticism was a reaction to the polite, ordered eighteenth century. In the secret history it was demonic forces, rather than merely subconscious forces, that caused this reaction.
The roots of this reaction were sexual.
IN JULY 1744 JOHN PAUL BROCKMER, a London watchmaker, worried what on earth was wrong with his lodger. Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish engineer, had seemed a quiet, respectable character, attending the local Moravian chapel every Sunday.
Now his hair stood on end. He foamed at the mouth and chased Brockmer down the street, gibbering and apparently claiming to be the Messiah. Brockmer tried to persuade him to see a doctor but instead Swedenborg went to the Swedish embassy. When they wouldn’t let him in, he ran to a nearby drainage ditch, undressed himself and rolled around in the mud, throwing money at the crowd.
In a recent breakthrough book, the fruit of years of meticulous research, Marsha Keith Suchard reveals that Swedenborg had been experimenting with certain sexual techniques for achieving extreme altered states of consciousness that were taught at the outwardly respectable Moravian chapel. Marsha Keith Suchard also shows that William Blake was brought up in this church and that these sexual practices inspired his poetry.
We have touched on various techniques for inducing altered states, including breathing exercises, dancing and meditation. But these sexual techniques are the hard stuff, the most closely guarded secrets of the secret societies. It’s instructive, then, to follow with Marsha Keith Suchard the different stages of development of Swedenborg’s practice, as recorded in his journals and alluded to in his publications.
Even as a boy Swedenborg had experimented with breath control. He noticed that if he held his breath for long periods, he went into a sort of trance. He discovered, too, that by synchronizing his breath to his pulse he could deepen the trance. ‘Sometimes I was reduced into a state of insensibility as to the body senses, thus almost unto the state of dying persons, retaining however my interior life unimpaired, attended with the power of thinking and with sufficient breathing for life.’ Persistence in these techniques could bring practitioners great rewards… ‘there is a certain cheering light and joyful, confirmatory brightness that plays around the sphere of the mind, and a kind of mysterious radiation… that darts through some temple in the brain… the soul is called into a more inward communion, and has returned at that moment into the golden age of its intellectual perfections. The mind… in the kindling flame of its love despises all in comparison… all merely corporeal pleasures.’ Swedenborg seems to be describing different stages of altered states of the kind we have seen involved in the process of initiation. As Marsha Keith has pointed out, modern neurological research has confirmed that meditation increases the levels of DHEAS and melatonin, secretions produced by the pineal and pituitary glands which together are said by occultists to create the Third Eye.
At the age of fifteen Swedenborg was sent to live with his brother-in-law, who for the next seven years would be his mentor, and it was here at his new home that Swedenborg’s own researches turned markedly cabalistic.
We have seen how in the Cabala, as in all esoteric traditions, the creation is conceived of in terms of a series of emanations (sephiroth, or servants) from the cosmic mind. In the Cabala, as much as in the myths of the Greeks and Romans, these emanations are thought of as male and female. The En Sof, the unattainable cosmic mind, emanates male and female spirits, and these intertwine in a sexual way as the impulse of creation spirals downwards. In the same way that erotic images in the mind create sperm, the En Sof’s acts of loving imagination generate physical effects. The imagination — and particularly the sexually-fired imagination — is therefore seen to be the root principle of creativity.
On this cabalistic account, the Fall happened because of an imbalance which occurred between the male and female sephiroth. By imagining balanced and harmonious love-making between the sephiroth, the adept helps set right this primordial cosmic wrong.
In cabalistic lore the Cherubim arching their wings above the Ark of the Holy Covenant in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple were seen as an image of the harmonious love-making of the male and female sephiroth. Then when the second Temple was sacked by Antiochus in 168 BC, these erotic images were paraded through the streets to ridicule the Jews. When the Temple was destroyed in AD 70, a great need arose in the heart of the people to rebuild it. Sacred imagery of the love-making of the male and female sephira lay at the heart of a programme to right a historical wrong.
Swedenborg also wrote about rhythmic breathing methods relating to the pulse of the genitals. It is evident that, while living with his father’s brother-in-law, he began to practise such exercises in breath control in conjunction with the imagining of naked human bodies contorted erotically into the shapes of Hebrew letters already alluded to. These were believed to be powerful magical emblems or sigils. Similar techniques of taking sexual energies and using them as a force for spiritual good are used by some Hasidic groups today. Bob Dylan, who is in some way heir to the poetic tradition of Blake, has explored some of these practices.
The element of control is crucial to these practices and this was emphasized in another esoteric tradition of sexually charged spirituality. The expansion of European empires eastwards had caused rumours of Tantric practices to trickle back in the other direction. Swedenborg explored sexual tantra in detail. Psychological discipline was needed to achieve prolonged arousal. This in turn was needed to redirect sexual energies to the brain and thereby achieve a breakthrough into the spirit worlds, a visionary ecstasy rather than a narrowly sexual one. Swedenborg also mastered what is by all accounts an extremely difficult technique of muscle control known to Indian adepts, whereby at the moment of ejaculation the sperm is diverted to the bladder and therefore not expelled.
Clearly the techniques are dangerous — one of the reasons why they are kept so secret. They risk the sort of nervous breakdown witnessed by Swedenborg’s landlord, not to mention madness and death.
The peculiar admixture to his researches that Swedenborg discovered while attending the Moravian church in New Fetter Lane was a specifically Christian version of the arcana of love. At that time Moravians in London were under the sway of the charismatic Count Zizendorf. Members of the congregation were encouraged by him to visualize, smell and touch in imagination the side wound in the body of Christ. This wound was, in Zizendorf’s vision, a sweet, luscious vagina oozing a magical juice. The spear of Longinus was to be thrust repeatedly and ecstatically into it.
Zizendorf encouraged sex as a sacramental act and urged his followers to see the divine, spiritual emanations in each other at the moment of climax. A joint mental prayer at this moment has particular magical force. As Swedenborg put it, ‘partner sees partner in mind… each partner has the other in himself’ so they ‘cohabit in their innermost’. In a visionary trance partners were able to meet, communicate, even make love in their dismembered, spiritual forms.
Marsha Keith Suchard records that Blake’s parents were members of this congregation and that Blake absorbed these ideas from his wide reading of Swedenborg. She has shown how the prudish Victorians erased from Blake’s drawings much explicitly sexual imagery — including drawing pairs of underpants over genitals. Although there is a popular understanding that Blake was influenced by the esoteric philosophy of Swedenborg and others, we have until now overlooked these very specific techniques of sex magic that were at the root of his imaginative vision.
Blake experienced visions from an early age. At the age of four he saw God looking in through the window, and at four or five, while walking through the countryside, he had a vision of a tree filled with angels ‘bespangling every bough like stars’. But it seems that the secret techniques of Zizendorf and Swedenborg gave him a systematic, cabalistic approach to these phenomena.
In Los he would write, ‘In Beulah the Female lets down her beautiful Tabernacle Which the Male enters magnificent between her Cherubim And becomes One with her mingling… There’s a place where Contraries are equally true, This place is called Beulah.’
In Romanticism the individual interior life has finally expanded to become a vast cosmos of infinite variety. Love is the love of one cosmos for another. Deep calls unto deep. With Romanticism love moves into a new mode and becomes symphonic.
The historical significance of this is that the secret meditations and prayerful practices of a handful of initiates created a popular surge of feeling against materialism. A new way of making love, of re-enacting the creation of the cosmos, was a way of saying that right isn’t simply a matter of might, that there are higher ideals than expediency or enlightened egotism, that if you work yourself into the right frame of mind, you can experience the world as meaningful.
If the people make love so that they become illumined, the world will become a world of shadows. When they awake again, meaning will have settled on the world like dew.
THE ROOTS OF ROMANTICISM, therefore, were both sexual and esoteric. The German poet Novalis talked of ‘magical idealism’. This magic, this idealism, this volcanic spirit, conjured up the music of Beethoven and Schubert. Beethoven found himself hearing a new musical language, feeling and expressing things that had never been felt or expressed before. Like Alexander the Great he became obsessed with trying to identify this divine influx, the source of his unstoppable genius, reading and rereading Egyptian and Indian esoteric texts. For him his Sonata in D Minor and the Appassionata were his equivalents to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the most explicit expressions of his occult ideas.
In France the Martinist Charles Nodier had written of the conspiracies of secret societies in the armies of Napoleon to bring the great man down. Later Nodier introduced the young French Romantics, including Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Dumas fils, Delacroix and Gérard de Nerval, to esoteric philosophy.
Owen Barfield wrote that there is always a great current of Platonic ideas, a current of living meaning that from time to time fine intellects like Shakespeare and Keats can discern. Keats called the ability to do this ‘Negative Capability’, which he said was when a man is capable of being ‘in uncertainties, mysteries and doubtes without any irritable searching after fact and reason’. In other words he was applying to poetry the same deliberate holding off imposing a pattern and waiting for a richer pattern to emerge that Francis Bacon had advocated in the scientific sphere.
‘Weave a circle around him thrice… /For he on honey-dew hath fed, /And drunk the milk, of Paradise.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge carried an aura of the supernatural. He was deeply immersed in the thought of both Boehme and Swedenborg. But it was his friend William Wordsworth who wrote the purest, the most simple and direct expression of the feeling that lies at the heart of idealism as a philosophy of life. When Wordsworth wrote that he ‘felt /A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean, and the living air,/and the blue sky, and in the mind of man,/ A motion and a spirit, that impels,/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things…’ he is writing about what it feels like to be an idealist in a way which still feels quite modern.
Even people who on a conscious level would deny the existence of the higher reality Wordsworth is alluding to here, recognize something in this poem, Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey. Something, somewhere inside them, calls out in recognition, or it would be completely meaningless to them.
At the time that Wordsworth was writing, people did not have to struggle to discern such feelings. Goethe, Byron and Beethoven led a great popular movement.
So why did it all go wrong? Why did this impulse for freedom end up in the abuse of power?
To understand the roots of this catastrophe it is necessary to trace the infiltration of the secret societies by the proponents of materialism. Chevalier Ramsay had specifically forbidden the discussion of politics in the lodges he founded in 1730, but Freemasonry had a hold on the political leaders of Europe. To anyone who wanted to exert political influence, it must have been a temptation.