P.16: Cosmological Searches

Esoteric-occultism as the Da Vinci Code Movie and book is an outgrowth of laid great stress on an esoteric understanding of "the constitution of man," which emphasized interiority and was underwritten by a highly structured account of human consciousness. The self-realization of which occultism spoke was symptomatic of both the bourgeois self-consciousness and self-determination that have been so closely associated with post-Enlightenment subjectivity and the "transcendental" interiority of the nineteenth-century Romantic and allied movements.

This was an occult preoccupation with self that looked within for the means of transcending the phenomenal world and accessing the spiritualized manifestations of an occluded reality. The "powers of the interior man" were what the new occultism concerned itself with, and these "powers" were conceived in purely psychologized terms. The idea of an interiorized self was never far removed from theological considerations, and it is notable that when the term selfhood entered the English lexicon in the mid seventeenth century, it did so in the context of discussion of the ideas of Jacob Boehme.

The attempt to identify the self with the conscious thinking "I," and to distinguish it from anything approaching the notion of the soul, has been one of the enduring hallmarks of post-Enlightenment culture. It is a self conceived as mind and consciousness that became the locus of attention during the nineteenth century, and it is this newly imagined self that must be placed at the center of narratives of cultural modernity. At the very least, the psychologized self as it emerged at the turn of the century appears to be characterized by the exchange of a nonrational spiritual dimension (the soul) for a secularized irrational (the unconscious) as integral to the process of self-constitution.

And yet the shift to a psychologized self was implicated in all kinds of different ways in those fraught attempts to redefine a Christian worldview that we associate so strongly with the late-Victorian period. Certainly fin-de-siecle occultism was centrally concerned with a renegotiation of self that sought an accommodation with a unifying and transcendental spirituality even as it underscored the self's multiplicity and contingency. The concept of the occult self as it emerged at the turn of the century was conceived in the context of the timeless teachings of the "ancient wisdom" but was predicated on a modern elision of self and consciousness that underwrote the most recent formulations of subjectivity.

Therefore Emersonian Transcendentalism is an appropriate referent for the fin-de-siecle "mystical revival." As conceived in New England during the earlier half of the century, Transcendentalism was itself a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism that privileged intuitive spiritual experience and legitimated a mystical oneness with God and the natural world. Ralph Waldo Emerson had been exposed to German idealism and a particular Romantic tradition through his friendship with Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and he brought to his admiration for Plato and the Neoplatonists a deep interest in the sacred literatures of the East.

Reason and Science, those arbiters of modern moral and intellectual authority, were themselves being reevaluated in the light of new intellectual trends that emphasized the preeminence of subjective interpretation. Indeed, while traditional religious belief had been subjected to harsh examination in some quarters and been found wanting, it was also clear that the crude antireligious charges and ambitions of a militant scientific positivism were not shared unconditionally by the scientific community and even seemed somewhat old fashioned by the end of the century. The positivist reliance on an ethos of scientific objectivity now came under attack, while a questioning of cognitive absolutes in turn raised concerns about the contingency of "truth" and the role of subjective appraisal in determining the codes by which life is understood and lived. At the same time, a new appreciation of the complexity of the human mind, coupled with developments in sociology, psychology, and philosophy that stressed the interrelationship of subject and object, brought into question the concept of an irreducible reality existing independently of human perception and understanding.

It was in this intellectual and cultural climate that a "esoteric revival" that was preeminently concerned with "the interior man" occurred. Moreover, there was a significant overlap among the conceptual focus of those who steeped themselves in occult writings and participated directly in related occult practices, that of psychical researchers intent on the objective investigation of occult or paranormal phenomena, and medical psychologists who were interested in altered mental states and cases of dual or multiple personality. The close connection between the intellectual preoccupations of members of the late-Victorian Society for Psychical Research and those of European medical psychologists is clear; that several of the most renowned international psychologists, including Hippolyte Bernheim, Pierre Janet, Charles Richet, Cesare Lombroso, Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, William James, and subsequently, Sigmund Freud, were associated with the SPR speaks for itself. (see following Case Study)

Religious spiritualists in contrast to the upcoming trend of psycho analysis resisted the idea that spirit communications originated in the mind of the medium, they were suspicious of complex notions of the self and espoused the idea of a single temporal self, which passed in death from the earthly body to the spirit Summerland.

The new occultists, on the other hand, while accepting the existence on other planes of spirit life, worked with a complex notion of self and accorded a central place to the role of what they called "self-consciousness" in the attainment of spiritual wisdom and perfect "consciousness of Being." This occult "self-consciousness" combined a secularized notion of self as consciousness with a carefully differentiated account of selves both temporal and divine. The crucial distinction, therefore, between the secular sciences of mind and occultism (with psychical research often roughly bridging the two positions) is that an occult understanding of personal consciousness was always articulated in metaphysical terms. Human consciousness was spiritualized by an esoteric philosophy that distinguished between a temporal and divine self. So that whereas Theosophists, for example, understood the self as consciousness, they insisted on a clear distinction between the earthly "personal Self," or "personal Ego" (the "I") and a timeless "permanent Self," or "Spiritual Ego," which is continuously incarnated in human form until finally perfected and released from the wheel of karma.

According to H. P. Blavatsky, the personal Self or Ego represents merely the temporary personality of a particular human incarnation. It is the Permanent Self, that which survives death to be continuously incarnated, which constitutes "the real individuality"-the "real" self" But Madame Blavatsky also spoke of an impersonal and ungendered Higher Self, a third self, and this was a concept which assumed great importance in fin-de-siecle occult circles. The Higher Self was represented in strict Theosophical terms as the universally diffused "divine principle" within every human being and akin to that spark of divinity which signifies "the God within us." The Theosophical Higher Self, then, is "one with the Universal Soul or Mind" and constitutes an inner manifestation of "the Universal Spirit." 18 Theosophists knew the importance of reaching an understanding of the Higher Self, and advanced occultists within the Theosophical Society recognized that their goal was experience of "the God within."

Many of the senior members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn similarly conceived of what the Order variously referred to as the Higher (sometimes Highest) Self, Angelic Self, or Genius as a God-like Self that must be nurtured and developed through advanced occult practice. The Golden Dawn taught its senior Adepts how to achieve what the Order called knowledge of or "conversation" with the Higher Self, and underlined the importance of a complete awareness of the implications of self as a prelude to approaching not only "the God within" but divinity itself. One Golden Dawn teaching document states that "Perfect knowledge of Self is required in order to attain Knowledge of Divinity, for when you can know the God of yourself it will be possible to obtain a dim vision of the God of All."

The Second Order's intense meditative technique of the Middle Pillar, in which the magician ascended the Tree of Life, was dedicated to accomplishing this union of the human and divine, and specific rituals like that of the Rose Cross were designed to induce a mode of consciousness conducive to such undertakings. The ultimate goal of communion with the Higher Self and the related transformative experience of union with the divine were what magicians meant when they spoke of the Great Work. Thus, in one of their rituals, Second Order Adepts would intone: "I desire the attainment of the knowledge and conversation of my higher and Divine Genius, the summum bonum, true wisdom and perfect happiness, the power of the great transformation."

Here, as often in Golden Dawn practice, the Higher Self is referred to as the "Genius," and in general the rich interrelatedness of occult personnel meant that the concept of a Higher Self (like that of God) underwent various changes.

Nevertheless, all serious students of the occult understood that occult study and practice were in part dedicated to the full knowledge and understanding of "Self" in each of its different manifestations. This was summed up in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by the Renaissance admonition to "Know Thyself."

Esoteric-occultists at the turn of the century were also exposed to an occult tradition in which the traditional preoccupation of the alchemist, the "chemical" transmutation of base metal into gold, is seen as synonymous with the "spiritual" raising of the individual to a divine state. The fact that there were those in the Golden Dawn who cautioned against a too "spiritual" interpretation reinforces the sense that senior Adepts were taught (either formally or informally) that alchemy represents an allegory for the cultivation of the highest Self'' These occultists subscribed to a "spiritual" reading of alchemy, which teaches that the alchemical narrative of the search for the philosopher's stone, the key to turning base metals into silver and gold, is actually a coded account of the development of a perfected Self similar to that of the Golden Dawn's highest Self and the Theosophical "God within us."

Crucially, however, the new occultists believed that a fully realized "consciousness of Being" implies both conscious mental process and an understanding of the limits of everyday self-awareness. For them, a fully elaborated consciousness involves far more than an awareness and interiorized experience of that mundane self which we call the "L" The new occultism understood consciousness as multifaceted, and emphasized a multiplicity of selves that are represented and manifested at different levels of consciousness. Annie Besant asserted that an understanding of the full implications of consciousness was one of the major lessons of occultism, and in her role as leader of the Theosophical Society promoted the view that occult study was the route to a full and complete knowledge of the mysteries of both self and the cosmic or universal "Mind." As Theosophical teaching evolved after Blavatsky's death it stressed the unity of consciousness while explicating its different manifestations. Besant taught that those unschooled in esotericism have only limited awareness of the full potential of human consciousness, and mistakenly assume that a univocal "waking-consciousness" is fully synonymous with self-consciousness in all its manifestations. She associated this limited waking state with the brain, the physical organ of "mind," assuming that full self-consciousness could never be so defined or confined. In "the average man," she wrote, "the brain is the only part in which consciousness has definitely become Self-consciousness, the only part in which he feels himself as `I,' and asserts himself as a separate individual unit."

Like all Theosophists and many other serious occultists, Besant was acutely aware that Eastern religions had long been familiar with the operation of different states of what she called "super-consciousness," or "the consciousness above the waking consciousness." The Theosophical Society was not alone in teaching the techniques of yoga and meditation as a means to an exalted state of "occult" awareness, but Annie Besant did not confine her interest to a "mystical" Eastern tradition. She was also interested in contemporary Western developments in medical psychology. Besant readily acknowledged the seemingly parallel preoccupations of psychology and occultism, but equally asserted the critical distinctions between the two.

Besant stressed that while all but a few "advanced psychologists" tended to view anything other than the consciousness of the waking state as "abnormal," "sub-conscious," "inconscient," and necessarily "disorderly," the East (and, by implication, Theosophy) regarded such states as "higher than the waking state" and sought to reproduce them at will. Similarly, she suggested that while the trance produced by "hypnotic or medicinal means," as "in the Salpetriere and elsewhere," effected changes in the physical body that were identical to those found in entranced Raja and Hatha Yogis, the differences "between the super-physical conditions of consciousness in the hypnotized subject and in the Yogi" are marked. Theosophy had its own means of attesting to these changes, but most significantly argued that "The Spiritual Man," who accesses the trance state at will via a range of meditative techniques, moves, in direct contrast with the "sleeping" hypnotized subject, who "loses consciousness," into a higher but fully self-conscious mode of being in which "he" can access planes beyond the earthly and temporal. She argued that the techniques of Raja Yoga in particular, "in which the consciousness is withdrawn from the brain by intense concentration, leads the student to continuity of consciousness on successive planes, and he remembers his super-physical experiences on his return to the waking state.”

Other occultists, while differing on the cosmological details, placed similar emphasis on gaining entry to nontemporal reality, and what this often amounted to in practice was the willed movement between different levels of consciousness that facilitated both the sense of a second "I" and an altered sense of the place inhabited by this different self. Fledgling magicians in the Golden Dawn, for example, were trained to move between two levels of consciousness, the magical and mundane, and experimented with a variety of self-hypnotic and ritualized techniques designed to produce this sense of a second initiated or magical self. Subsequently, Second Order Adepts (and later also members of the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society) were instructed in the occult clairvoyant practice known as Astral Travel, which relied on the sense of a second "I" that represented in graphic terms the kind of expansive "I" envisaged by Annie Besant when she spoke of consciousness being withdrawn from the brain.

It was this second self that would explore what magicians called the Astral Light. This referred to the great web of otherworldly planes or orders of existence that interpenetrate the world of earthly perceptions, and that can be accessed by those trained in the higher occult arts." An esoteric-occult elite were instructed in techniques that produced an intense sense of a personal double, a materialized replica of an embodied self, which left the temporal body of the occultist and journeyed at length in astral realms. Golden Dawn Adepts were taught how to formulate their own "Sphere of Astral Light," which would replicate their person and, to a certain degree, initiated consciousness. In other words, a complete second self, conceived as a subtle replica of the original, was created in the mind, and it was this second self that traveled in the Astral Light. The astral self was therefore conceptualized in physical terms and possessed a consciousness of its own, even though it was subject to ultimate control by the magician's will-the focused intent of the initiated or highest Self. In effect, what this type of magical practice taught was a highly refined system of dual or even triple consciousness. The mundane self, initiated magical self, and "Sphere of Astral Light" apparently operated at different levels of consciousness, and at the very least this exercise involved a double displacement of the "I" as a necessary preamble to travel in astral realms.

Astral Travel was based on the precept "Believe thyself to be in a place, and thou art there," and the projection of a "Sphere of Astral Light" worked in conjunction with an accepted code of occult symbolism to effect an intense extraterrestrial experience." Nevertheless, Victorian Adepts were well aware that at one level Astral Travel was an interior journey conducted within the mind. Florence Farr acknowledged this when she said, "I suppose that there are thousands of people in England and as many millions elsewhere, who are trying in one way or another to learn that ancient art, taught by the wise from the beginning of recorded time, the Art of Guiding the Mind."

She and other involved senior occultists knew that practices like Astral Travel relied upon a series of intricate maneuvers of personal consciousness, just as they understood that the power of the structured imagination was crucial to the success of any magical undertaking whether conceived as exploration of astral realms or in terms of more temporal concerns. In fact, what magicians referred to as "the magical process" was entirely underwritten by the power of the mind and of the prepared imagination. As Florence Farr noted, "In truth, Imagination is the power of forming images in our minds.... So begins the magical process, the rest is not for me to divulge."

What Farr refused to elaborate, believing that revelation would betray her Golden Dawn oath of secrecy, was that the application of specific techniques produced a heightened consciousness, or changed sense of "l," and transformed the mundane into the magical self;

The way in which each member projected symbolism adapted from the Cabalistic Tree of Life onto a sphere that slowly increased in size until it encompassed the Order, the planet, and "the visible universe," the purpose being to draw down the divine "Light" upon the known world of human existence. As Annie Horniman was to add in denunciation of the "Sphere" group in 1902, "The twelve members had astral stations assigned to them around this sphere and a certain Egyptian astral form was supposed to occupy the centre." In other words, this was a form of Astral Travel in which Adepts moved around and took up positions within a vast cosmic globe with a view to concentrating "forces of growth, progress and purification" into the universe as we know it. Furthermore, this was a process that was controlled or overseen by an "Egyptian astral form," although the Egyptian symbolism was later to change to that of the Christian Holy Grail."

These relatively brief accounts obscure the complexity of the process described. It was in fact akin to a complex mapping procedure practiced within the Golden Dawn whereby the microcosm (or body) of the Adept was conceived as the Tree of Life and projected onto the inside of a great translucent sphere, which was envisioned as encompassing the universe. The Adept then moved up and through the vast projected Tree of Life, which simultaneously mapped both the inner (microcosmic) surface of the sphere and the outer (macrocosmic), thus allowing the Adept to experience the inner world of self and corresponding outer cosmic realities simultaneously." W B. Yeats's great fear, as expressed during the "Secret Groups" controversy, was that these intense visualization practices when carried out in small splinter groups created "centres of life, which are centres of death" to the "greater life" of the overall Order.

When esoteric-occulyists were taught, then, to "Believe thyself to be in a place, and thou art there," the meaning ascribed to the significant terms believe, thyself, and there was closely circumscribed. The "thyself" of the alchemist and Adept was not the self of common experience or parlance. And although the entire panoply of phenomena associated with otherworldly realms was at one level recognized to be a subjective emanation, it was equally conceived as part of a hidden reality existing beyond but also in relationship with the inner world of the initiated self. Indeed, some sophisticated Golden Dawn Adepts regarded Astral Travel as a kind of experiential metaphor. Rather than worrying about the precise location (inner/outer) or status (subjective /objective, real/unreal) of the Astral Light, however, Golden Dawn magicians assumed an "occult" correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm and concerned themselves with an array of procedural devices intended to test the authenticity of occult experience. But if Golden Dawn magicians tended to emphasize the importance of travel in the Astral Light, Theosophists considered occult reality ever present in temporal existence. They argued that the uninitiated invariably fail to recognize the otherworldly in our midst, and unwittingly write it off as a mere figment of the imagination.

According to Annie Besant, it is the lack of full self-consciousness-or of what she calls "self-realisation"-on and of planes other than the physical or earthly that inhibits recognition of particular occult phenomena. The "normal, average man" mistakenly assumes that such phenomena, experienced by initiated and uninitiated alike as occurring within individual consciousness, originate in "his" imagination and are therefore "unreal." For Besant, occultism's greatest gift is that it teaches "normal, average man" how to negotiate the many levels of conscious awareness and recognize the reality of an exteriorized occult world. What all occultists held in common, however, was the conviction that their experience of the "phenomena of consciousness occurring on super-physical planes" speaks to more than the power of mutually reinforcing fantasy or the exquisite inventiveness of the personal self.

Rather than worrying about the precise location (inner/outer) or status (subjective /objective, real/unreal) of the Astral Light, however, Golden Dawn magicians assumed an "occult" correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm and concerned themselves with an array of procedural devices intended to test the authenticity of occult experience. But if Golden Dawn magicians tended to emphasize the importance of travel in the Astral Light, Theosophists considered occult reality ever present in temporal existence. They argued that the uninitiated invariably fail to recognize the otherworldly in our midst, and unwittingly write it off as a mere figment of the imagination.

According to Annie Besant, it is the lack of full self-consciousness-or of what she calls "self-realisation"-on and of planes other than the physical or earthly that inhibits recognition of particular occult phenomena. The "normal, average man" mistakenly assumes that such phenomena, experienced by initiated and uninitiated alike as occurring within individual consciousness, originate in "his" imagination and are therefore "unreal." For Besant, occultism's greatest gift is that it teaches "normal, average man" how to negotiate the many levels of conscious awareness and recognize the reality of an exteriorized occult world. What all occultists held in common, however, was the conviction that their experience of the "phenomena of consciousness occurring on super-physical planes" speaks to more than the power of mutually reinforcing fantasy or the exquisite inventiveness of the personal self.

Both W B. Yeats and Florence Farr were deeply invested in the theory and practice of occult symbolism, and Farr herself taught that "thoughts which are above human consciousness clothe themselves with symbolism and present things to our imagination, which cannot be told in words. At some point Yeats commented to Ralph Shirley "that in his investigations into matters occult the two facts for which he met with the greatest weight of evidence were symbolism and astrology."

Pierre Janet (teacher of Freud), and Henri Bergson both noticed the Society for Psychical Research. Their simultaneous fascination with the occult and vigorous attempts to distance themself from it are matters of record. Freud feared that the occult, which he referred to in 1901 as "the black tide of mud," would compromise the respectability of psychoanalysis. But his early immersion in Naturphilosophie, friendship with men such as Wilhelm Fleiss, investigations of mediumistic phenomena with Sandor Ferenczi, legendary superstitious anxieties, mixed response to the occult interests of some of his followers, and a great rift with Carl jung over just such matters. (See the Case Study for details and bibliographical references)

After his break with Freud, Jung immersed himself in a study of Gnosticism and Hermeticism that owed a great deal to the work of the Theosophist G. R. S. Mead. "Jung was also familiar with the ideas of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, and his evolving theories of the unconscious as they developed after 1912 were indebted to key occult insights. His deep interest during the interwar years in Renaissance Hermetic literature led him to propose a psychologized reading of alchemy similar to that espoused by occultists at the fin de siecle. Indeed, Jung, who cited A. E. Waite's translation of the Musaeum Hermeticum in his own Psychology and Alchemy, thought of alchemy as "the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious." But if Jung's theorizing of unconscious processes has a distinct bearing on occult notions of self-realization and was taken up later in the century by occultists, there were also prewar occultists who recognized a certain kinship in Freudian ideas. And while Jung acknowledged his debt to Renaissance magic; some prewar occultists embraced psychoanalytic theory; and fin-de-siecle occultism itself remained deeply implicated in the contemporary innovative elaboration of subjectivity, there were significant differences between the occult and allied enterprises.

Occultism was conceived in quite different terms and dedicated to different ends. Late-Victorian magicians were undertaking what we might think of as remarkable and sustained explorations of the psyche, and extraordinary experimentation with the powers of the human mind, but they were absorbed in the magical enterprise and expressed the endeavor in these terms. Adepts were aware that at its most sophisticated, advanced magical practice exposed the limited nature of the personal "I" of conscious identity, but were concerned less with probing the limits of subjectivity than with exploring and establishing the reality of occult realms. The seeming parallels with the psychoanalytic project are startling. But although Magical Orders were teaching Adepts how to develop a magical self that could conduct lengthy forays into real but hidden worlds that interpenetrate our own, occultists spoke not of psyche but of planes; and in practical terms, of Astral Travel rather than investigations of the repressed components of the unconscious. Additionally, magical practice relied upon the development of multiple selves, which did not constitute a problematic splitting of the "I," or represent a crisis of personal identity. It taught willed access to the Astral Light, and emphasized mutuality of experience and the ability to take control and "change" certain facets of astral existence. This, then, represented a developed and controlled engagement with personal consciousness that was quite distinct from the kinds of mental states investigated and pathologized by late-Victorian medical psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis; distinct even from the hermeneutic processes of "individuation" favored by Jungian analytical psychology. Magical practice was an undertaking that operated on a different scale and in a different register.

Fin-de-siecle occultism was like a shadow play of synchronicity. It mirrored broader cultural trends and preoccupations but in key respects magnified and outstripped them. The occult remained, though, a child of the historical moment. It drew upon the Renaissance admonition to "Know Thyself " and reconfigured that understanding of the knowing self in the most modern sense. The occult recognized not one self but a series of selves, which quite literally in themselves constituted incontrovertible evidence that

consciousness in all its dimensions can be known, and that the initiated self can penetrate the heart of the mysteries of "Being." In this, for all the acknowledgments of the multiplicities and occlusions of consciousness, and occultism's apparent attention to a decentralized subjectivity, the individual rational subject remained firmly rooted at the heart of the enterprise. At any given moment there was a lucid defining and controlling self. The optimism that characterized occultists' faith in the ability of such a self to plumb the great mysteries of the universe as represented by human consciousness only echoed the sureties of Freud and others at the turn of the century who similarly argued that the rational mind can come to know its own most precious and dreadful "irrational." Like the new practitioners of the sciences of mind, advanced occultists would have derided any suggestion that the theory or practice of occultism was predicated on an optimistic, overweening (even irrational) assumption. They were confident that they were pursuing a rational if unconventional experiential route to absolute clarity of mind. As Florence Farr commented in the preface to her 1912 novel, "To me the work of making the mind clear by first-hand experience is the holy alchemy of life."

This "work of making the mind clear" was pursued through careful preparation and development of what occultists took to be the limitless potential of personal consciousness as realized in the full elaboration of the self. Advanced occultism addressed in its own unique way the contemporary exploration of the limits of the rational self while predicating self-realization on the notion of a boundless but acutely self-aware "I" with ultimate referral to a stable and controlling consciousness. Occultism defined consciousness in a way that might not have been amenable to scientific criteria, or provable in any positivist sense, but was nevertheless conceived as infused with rationality even as it postulated a self that could traverse the dichotomized fault lines established by the rationalizing intellect. After all, the rationalizing intellect was not jettisoned during occult voyages of discovery; it was actively at work. Occult "strategies of inwardness" were still strategies, designed to shift the sense of self beyond the limits imposed by everyday "waking consciousness" and towards a full "consciousness of Being." This was a self that transcended in graphic terms those conceptual dualisms of subject/object and inner/outer that had recently come under attack from the secular disciplines, and at the same time epitomized that faith in rationality upon which those disciplines depended. Most crucially, however, an occult metaphysics of self represents an unorthodox but identifiably modern attempt to bring consciousness to a particular "understanding of itself."

In the name of the unraveling of the mystery of "Being," the occult generated a language of selfhood that implicitly countered the modern association of spirituality with irrationality while pursuing a spiritualized formulation of a modern secularized understanding of the complexity of human consciousness and the significance of the irrational domain. In so doing it sought to negotiate that seemingly oppositional relationship between the spiritual and secular and the "rational" and "irrational," proposing a language of self that sustained the alchemical ideal of holistic perfection in its constitution of an ultimate knowing "occult" subject. The expressive rationality of the modern occult self promised more than a Bergsonian momentary flash of spiritualized inspiration, but it equally represented that symbiosis of intellect and intuition characterizing the Bergsonian "deeper" self (le moi profond) and the appeal of the seemingly nondiscursive Symbolist event. And yet this interiorizecl language of self also articulated some of the tensions intrinsic to modern subjectivity. In particular, it was representative of a modern sensibility that remained immured in and fascinated by the performance of the irrational even as it sought to measure, understand, and to some extent control or manipulate it. Bergson and the occultists conceived of a finessed and ultimately unified self-consciousness that stood in stark contrast with the fragmented psyche postulated by Freud, but both positions assumed the power and importance of the occluded realms of personal consciousness for the rational self-referential "L" The heritage of a Bergsonian philosophy of life was played out through quite distinct political movements and European perspectives on modernity as the new century got under way, but the simultaneous necessity for and frailty of a modern rapprochement with the unconscious remained a preoccupation.

Freud's subsequent analysis of the cost of "civilization," the often devastating eruption of all that must be repressed in the name of rationality, order, and respectability, comes close, as Marshall Berman suggests, to "a definitive vision of the inner contradictions and ultimate fragility of modern life."

Ultimately, occultists sought in the infinite realms of human consciousness an alternative source and repository of self-understanding and spiritual purpose. In effect, and in a distinctively modern strategic move, the occult taught modern men and women how to create new spiritualized meanings "out of the resources of the self." As Florence Farr expressed it: "I stood naked in a bleak and dark eternity and filled it with my exultation."  

 

 

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April 18, 2004