Initiation and Illusion
Initiation is the basis of magic and the basis of initiation is self-knowledge.
It is the procedure of self-knowledge, which brings about crucial changes in perception of both Self and the World.
Pursued to its limit, the procedure of self-know1edge precipitates a psycho-spiritual crisis; The Nightmare of rejection; a critical ordeal. Initiated status depends solely upon how the neophyte copes with this crisis. It is the nature and significance of this ‘dark night of the soul’, which is the subject of this article, for an understanding of the psychological, cultural and ontological implications of the initiatory process throws light on, not only the function and nature of magic itself, but also on the enigmatic quality of recent cultural history.
Magic, like art, or politics, is a socio-cultural phenomenon. This must be recognized. Ignorance of the relationship between magical disciplines and the cultural forces that mold them renders accurate definition of the role of those disciplines impossible. In the following paragraphs aspects of initiatory experience will be described and discussed with references to facets of modern literature relevant to the overall theme of crisis.
The objective of initiation is transformation. Its practice rests upon the supposition that changes in the personality, and even physiology, can be brought about through processes designed to induce psychosomatic development. The following quote from Eliphas Levi’s The Key of the Mysteries (1897) is a clear statement of intent:
To create God, to create oneself, to make one’s self independent, immortal, and without suffering: there, certainly, is a program more daring than the dream of Prometheus. Its expression is bold to the point of impiety, its thought ambitious to the point of madness…
Modern interpretations of the early stages of initiation practices describe them in terms of ‘deconditioning’ or ‘dissociation’. From the start it is proposed that, in order to achieve a breakthrough in plane (Mircea Eliade’s phrase) or a ‘quantum jump’ in ‘neurological awareness’, self-knowledge requires the initiate to reject or disengage himself from those received ideas which he had hitherto accepted as his only definition of reality. Often the initiate will physically cut himself off from the outside world by entering a retreat, like the monks of religious orders, with whom he is not, nevertheless, to be confused.
The consequences of this de-conditioning are difficult to assimilate. After a certain point the initiate feels that the process has teken him over. He may be swept into a maelstrom of bizarre, ’neurotic’, conditions during which his behavior will run contrary to accepted standards of normality. He will realize that purification means, above all, disengagement from ‘the inferno of the normal’. To begin with he will dislodge his usual moral standards by deliberately cultivating ‘perverse’ tastes:
he will engage in rituals of ‘sense-reversion’, embracing with delirious pleasure, the ‘forbidden fruits’ of ‘immorality’. Like the tribal shamans he will employ all manner of extreme techniques including hallucinogenic drugs, sadomasochistic sexual rites (mortification of the flesh), melohypnosis and wild dancing.
Eventually the neophyte may lapse into a condition of pseudo-insanity, a self-induced delirium. The following is a quote from Eliade’s Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1957):
…the future shaman marks himself off progressively by some strange behavior: he seeks solitude, becomes a dreamer, loves to wander in the woods or desert places, has visions, sings in his sleep… becomes violent and easily loses consciousness, takes refuge in the forests, feeds upon the bark of trees, throws himself into the water or fire or wounds himself with knives… undergoes hysteric or hysteroid crises, may flee into the mountains… live upon animals ‘that he catches directly with his teeth’ and then, returning to the village, dirty, bloodstained, with his clothes torn and his hair disheveled ‘like a savage’. It is only after another ten days that the neophyte begins to stammer some incoherent words.
In the ultimate stages of the crisis the neophyte will experience a mental condition in which the borderlines between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ are erased. He will penetrate other, and indeterminate, Bardo-realms of existence during a simulated death ritual. His body will be overtaken by disease and he will be torn apart by the Demon Masters of Initiation in an archetypal experience of Hell.
In alchemical lore this crisis-phase corresponds to the distractio or ‘separation of the bodies’. The term Nigredo was also used to designate a general condition of horror and dissociation during which the artifex confronted the unregenerate chaos of the massa confusa. A number of images were used to express this condition of ‘universal blackening’: the black sun (Sol Niger) the raven’s head (caput corvi) the death’s head (Caput Mortuum); Coronis, the Crow-Maiden, and The Rabid Dog. According to the Rosarium Philosophorum the Nigredo is ‘a blackening of the brain’. In the Aurelia Occulta the condition is described in terms of weakness, senility, entombment, weakening of the flesh and torments inflicted by a fiery sword. At the height of the Nigredo the whole world turns black. The Earth is accursed. Everything is enveloped in dreadful night.
As Eliade says, the assumption behind these attempts to invert the prevailing order is that the norms governing everyday existence must be overcome. This reversal is accomplished by ‘going backwards’, by swimming against the tide, by working Contra Naturam; a rebours.
The risks of failure are great. The neophyte may never emerge from a hell of endless night. His organism may collapse, riddled with inexplicable psychosomatic diseases; he may destroy his identity. But the neophyte may learn to assimilate his condition. Occultist Nevill Drury has pointed to the dangers:
The shaman, confronted with the spectacle of a transcendental cosmic drama, could well be expected to lose complete control of his perceptive faculties, he may be overcome by awe. However it is precisely his ability to remain composed, even in his mythological confrontations, which distinguishes him from the schizophrenic.
The magus achieves initiated status by emerging from the psychic crisis not merely unscathed, but actually renewed, or ‘reborn’.
In The Romantic Roots of Modern Art (1979) August Weidmann pointed to the far-reaching art-historic consequences of a widespread attempt by writers and artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to ‘dislodge’ their ‘natural perceptions’ and ‘liberate the senses from the tyranny of the object and its unrelenting chain of associations’.
This ‘liberation’ required the destruction of ‘visual habits’ and the’breaking-up of perceptual as well as conceptual codes’.
Weidmann also noted that while any art which breaks new ground must deviate from established convention (Mannerism, for example), Modern Art is an extreme case: never before, he said, have art movements been dominated by such ‘resolute destructiveness and self-professed primitivism’.
Weidmann, like other critics, traced this dissociative pattern to the early Romantics, to the ‘cleansing of perception advocated by William Blake and the unleashing of the mysterious called for by Novalis. Like neophyte shamans the Romantics resorted to drugs (opium, hashish) in order to undermine orthodox perception and, like men in the grip of a psychic crisis) they were noted for their wild behaviour and a morbid fascination with death. Historically, it should be noted that early Romanticism emerged in European culture almost exactly contemporaneously with the first major modern occult revival: hermetic Masonry (1717), Sigmund Richter’s Rosicrucianism (1710), Von Hund’s Templarite Stricte Observance (1756), Pasqually’s Elus Cohens (1760), not to mention Pernety’s Illumines d’Avignon (1765), Weishaupt’s Illuminati (1776) and Mesmer’s Order of Universal Harmony (1778).
Space does not, unfortunately, permit a comprehensive survey of the ensuing interconnecti ns between literature, painting, music and occult revivalism. For the purposes of this article we shall concentrate on briefly outlining some intriguing parallels between more recent post- romantic literature, both poetry and prose, in the context of the typical initiatory crisis described above.
Erika Ostrovsky, in her book Celine and his Vision (1967) focussed attention on a ‘hidden current’ in modern European literature. She has been one of the first to remark upon the fact the the most important stylistic and thematic advances have been made by a small group of writers, mainly French, whose ‘central preoccupation has been with the sordid, absurd) desperate aspects of existence.’ The subject of her book, L-F. Celine is just one representative of a literary tradition which
includes some influential names: Sade, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Lautreamont, Dostoevsky, Mallarme, Laforgue, Jary, Strindberg, Kafka, Artaud, Genet and Beckett.
It is worth noting that this post-Romantic tradition of avant-garde literature coincided with a second occult revival partly inspired by the works of Eliphas Levi: during this period modern occultism emerged in the form we know it today: the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (1865); Anna Sprengel’s Licht, Liebe und Leben (1870), Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society (1875); Guaita’s Kabalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (1885); The Golden Dawn (1888); Peledan’s Catholic Rose-Croix (1890); Kellner’s OTO (1895); Crowley’s AA (1907); Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society (1909) and Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light (1922).
Whilst some major artistic personalities were overtly involved with these groups – Yeats was a member of the GD, Piet Mondrian and Kandinsky were influenced by Theosophical teachings – the great majority of the crucial figures remained isolated and apart, and even, like Mallarme and Artaud, condemned occultists for siding in with reactionary forces or just being plain out-of-touch with the most progressive aspects of their own cultural milieu. In an essay entitled ‘Rising Sign’, Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, commanded poets and artists to ‘uproot all the rearguard spiritualist thought’ which vitiates and paralyses analogical thinking. The reasons for this split between art and occultism will be touched upon in later paragraphs.
Let us now consider some specific instances of overlap between magical and aesthetic initiatory experience:
The Objectives
The clearest statement in respect of the initiatory intent of the poetic enterprise was made by Arthur Rimbaud in May 1871 in texts known as the Lettres du Voyant (nb ‘voyant’ is a French word meaning ‘visionary seer’) The poet should become, he wrote, ‘a seer or an angel exempt from all morality’. Other statements of a similar nature have been made by Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, Rene Daumal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George.
Psychic Crisis
In an epoch of cultural crisis, the specific tone of crisis is in large part due to the writings of the authors under discussion, particularly Artaud and Beckett. Many key works have been written as a result of personal crises. Beckett conceived a consolidated vision of his mission during a ‘turning point’ crisis in 1946, Artaud experienced a particularly catastrophic breakdown in 1937; Strindberg endured a protracted period of delirium in Paris between the years 1894-1896 (the ‘Inferno Crisis’). Paul Valery rejected the viability of conventional poetic language in a crisis in 1892. Rimbaud experienced a similar, if more violent crisis between the years 1871-1874 during which time he wrote his epoch-making works, including Les Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer. The poet Mallarme, perhaps the most significant French poet of the late nineteenth century, underwent a ‘crisis phase’ at an early stage in his career. This crisis, known as Les Nuits de Tournon, are recorded in his letters and many written texts, notably, ‘Herodiade’, ‘Igitur’, and the poem called the ‘Sonnet in X’. Other notable crises would be William Blake (in 1787), Thomas de Quincey (in 1813) and Heinrich von Kleist, who shot himself in bizarre circumstances in 1801. The following quote from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell may be compared with the quote from Eliade describing the initiatory crisis of the neophyte:
I succeeded in erasing from my mind all human hope. Upon every joy, in order to strangle it, I made the muffled leap of the wild beast.
I summoned the executioners in order to bite the buts of their guns as I was dying. I summoned the plagues, to suffocate myself with sand and blood. Misfortune was my God. I stretched myself out in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played some fine tricks on madness. And spring bought me the horrifying laughter of the idiot.
Withdrawal
During the late nineteenth century the withdrawal or dissociation of the artist from society was a dominant theme, especially among the post-romantic Decadents and Symbolists. In Mallarme’s ‘Igitur’, the hero (a distillation of Hamlet and Poe’s Usher) sits withdrawn from the world in a chamber surrounded with heavy drapes. Later he descends into the tomb, a representation of that withdrawal into the innermost recesses of the mind that is the essential prerequisite of poetic development. The classic expression of withdrawal was, however, Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884), which described, in great detail, the consequences of initiation in a specially prepared retreat, a house on the outskirts of Paris. Many other instances of this theme could be cited: the ‘dream-chambers’ of Edgar Allan Poe, the real-life retreats of Wi1liam Beckford, W.B.Yeats and the painter Fernand Khnopff. In all cases the chamber or house becomes what R.G. Cohn has termed ‘a cosmic site for meditation’, the sacred territory where rituals and ordeals of transformation are performed or endured.
In his essay on Marcel Proust (1931) Samuel Beckett wrote:
The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn into the core of the eddy.
Perhaps, more than any other, Beckett’s works illustrate the pains of withdrawal into the mind: they present, in agonized purity, the desolate ordeal the initiate must endure when he realizes that he must define himself without reference to externals. Beckett has traced this process through an extraordinary series of prose texts starting in 1934 with the short stories More Pricks than Kicks moving into the essential works of his crisis period (1946-1953): Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing and continuing with his later prose which depict anonymous, fragmentary personages inhabiting indeterminate post-mortem Bardo-realms: How it is (1960), Imagination Dead Imagine (1966) and The Lost Ones (1966/70).
Beckett progresses beyond narcissistic ultra-solipsism into a dialectic of exorcism and purification which results in prose texts of great purity and compactness and which have become the ultimate examples of the literature of negation. The trilogy of novels Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable represent the ultimate development of the withdrawal theme. Written in a stripped-down ironic style they have been described by A. Alvarez as a ‘stage by stage assassination of the novel… an undeviating withdrawal from both the exterior world and… the traditional novel… a terminal vision… a terminal style… a terminal aesthetic’. We will return to the crucial figure of Beckett later.
Blackening
‘Black’ is an adjective that has been applied to certain works which, like Goya’s ‘black’paintings’ in the Quinta del Sordo, embody the corrosive vision of nihilism and deprivation that characterizes the ‘dark night of the soul’. L-F Celine actually used the term ‘Blackening’ (Noircissement) to describe the process of relentless desecration embodied in his novels Voyage au bout de la Nuit (1932), Mort a Credit (1950), Guignol’s Band (1952) and Nord (1960).
In Celine and his Vision, Erika Ostrovsky writes:
One can follow Celine on every lap of this relentless journey which stretches across his four greatest novels and lasts for nearly three decades. If we consider these works as a unity, we find that the ‘blackening’ of man from womb to coffin proceeds with great clarity and almost absolute consistency.
Castigation of others is only one aspect of Ce1ine’s Noircissement, he also advocated the blackening on oneself which the author must achieve via a grotesque irony or ‘comic lyricism’.
Ostrovsky says:
Céline’s view of man is so black that any presentation of the latter, in all his nakedness, is more like presenting an open cadaver with his rotting entrails exposed than a display of inner grandeur… it is a defiant picture of the self… Celine is eager to condemn himself… the admission of sin and crime is made in the manner of a provocative challenge…
The writer becomes ‘an atheist in spiritual agony’ and his ‘arraignment is self-flagel1ation’.
This Blackening is a search for deeper self-knowledge, or even a procedure for the creation of a new personality. This self-knowledge explains the close connection between artistic processes and occult initiation. Rimbaud wrote:
The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it puts it to the test… he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence. This is unspeakable torture…
Illness and Death
The catastrophic consequences of the Nigredo stage of the initiatory procedure have been vividly portrayed by Huysmans in his seminal novel A Rebours, the ‘breviary of Decadence’. In it, the decadent aesthete hero, Des Essientes, shuts himself away in his retreat but is forced to return to the world outside because his health is ruined by the perverse regime he imposes upon himself, a reversal of normal life. In real life Huysmans was subject to endless illnesses and problems due to his own hypersensitivity. He used to say he was ‘as sensitive as a man who has been flayed alive’. In the nineteenth century the myth of the maudit the accursed poet or ‘damned’ artist possessed a real and ominous significance. Many poets and artists were indeed, ‘exemplary sufferers’, (to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase), and many works were conceived during bouts or lethal or near-lethal illness.
The culmination of the initiatory ordeal is the death ritual, the descent into the underworld or Katabasis. Two of the most important names in European literature, Mallarme and Beckett, are linked with works that explore the problematic exigencies of the death experience. In Mallarme’s ‘Herodiade’ the poet identifies with St John who experiences ritual decapitation and transfiguration
at the hands of the cold anima figure, the princess Salome (Herodiade). In his enigmatic ‘Sonnet in X’ he records the sensation of absence created by the descent into the underworld and the coterminous’death’ of all illusions, while, in his initiatory text ‘Igitur’ the hero descends an archetypal spiral staircase (escaliers de l’esprit humain) which, as R. G. Cohn points out, represent the spiral shape of the human psyche, in emulation of Dante’s descent into hell. At the climax of the drama, Igitur experiences ‘absurdist psychic death’ (Cohn) involving full acceptance of l’absurde (chance, hazard, the void) and the possibility of death-rebirth into this life.
- Alvarez defines Beckett’s work as the product of a man ‘born with the taste of death in his mouth’. In his crucial crisis-period Trilogy, Beckett evolved a stark, ironic form of prose-poetry that accurately represented his theme of ‘depression deepening to the point of death and annihilation’. In Malone Dies the text is the monologue of the dying Malone who lies, incapacitated in a bare room bathed in grey light. He is the writer of the black tradition, shorn of all but the meanest trappings of civilization: his bed, his stubby pencils, his stick. He whiles away the time as he decomposes telling cruel stories. Beckett’s biographer Deirdre Bair said the following about Malone Dies:
While he was writing it, everyone close to him feared that he might quite literally die when it was finished. As Malone’s efforts to write grew more painful and exhausting, so did Beckett’s… Beckett’s relentless pursuit of himself through Malone continued…
In the follow-up novel, The Unnamable Beckett presented his experience of the terminal phase of identity disintegration as the unknown character passes into oblivion. Beckett himself said:
… complete disintegration. No ‘I’, no ‘have’, no ‘being’, no nominative, no verb. There’s no way to go on.
Having explored the nature of the initiatory procedure in both occultism and literature a number of questions have emerged.
Firstly: is there a psychological basis for the idea of initiation?
Secondly: why should self-development (initiation) involve suffering?
Thirdly: is, (as Eliphas Levi suggested) self-development an impious or blasphemous exercise?
Fourthly: why should there be a division between artists and occultists, despite the fact that the process of initiation is common to both groups?
Fifthly: what is the general significance of the initiatory tradition in modern art and literature?
The first question is the most important because its answer provides keys for answering the other questions.
Carl Gustav Jung is possibly the psychologist who has had the greatest effect on modern occultism, particularly those aspects of his system which deal with the questions of the Collective Unconscious and Archetypal Symbols. Jung also proposed another set of ideas which have occult or magical implications: the theory of Individuation, which he formulated from both observation of his patients and from a close study of alchemical texts.
Jungian individuation is a ‘natural transformation process’ resulting in the emergence, or ‘rebirth’ of the ‘whole man’. Jung found that this experience of integration was often formulated in religious terms although the wholeness principle itself was regarded as a substitute for, rather than a reflection of, God.
Jung also noted that wholeness can only be achieved through suffering because it entails a reconciliation with, or assimilation of, the negative, inferior, repressed side of the personality. It is also emphasized that Individuation was not in any way a pathological or abnormal process.
Individuation differs from the initiatory schemes of shamans, magicians and poets like Arthur Rimbaud because it is a gradual process developing throughout a person’s life and, more noticeably, in later life, as the image of death becomes more potent.
For the magus, or the poet, however, this gradualist approach is not good enough: he wishes to induce self-development artificially by specially designed rituals of reversion or dissociation. He also, as Levi pointed out, wishes to pursue self-development well beyond the simple integration of the personality, into the realms of the supernatural: he wishes to usurp the powers of the gods.
In his influential Tavistock Lectures of 1935 Jung outlined a mental phenomenon which he termed Projection: it is this idea which provides an essential factor in the understanding of the problems we have raised. Psychic or unconscious projections are best described as primitive, instinctual, identifications with otherness (other people, the environment, external objects, systems of ideas, ideologies, etc.).
In the non-individuated on un-initiated state the undeveloped mind relates to the world almost exclusively via these identifications, just as the new-born infant, or the foetus in the womb, feels itself to be part of the mother, so the primitive, undeveloped mentality feels itself to be united with the world. This situation engenders pleasant feelings of security which, are, nevertheless, undermined as the growing entity learns to disengage itself from its surroundings and perceive itself as unique and different from others. As Jung explains, these unconscious projections falsify our worldview and become a blockage on the path of development because they impede self-knowledge which must be based upon an objective perception of oneself as a self-contained identifiable entity.
An essential phase of Individuation, therefore is the withdrawal) or transference, of these projections in such a way as to shift the centre of gravity of consciousness from the rudimentary everyday, primitive consciousness which Jung (following the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl) saw as an ‘enchantment’ called participation mystique, to a superior form of objective consciousness, ‘a rational, spiritual-psychic position over against the turbulence of the emotions’. In so doing the adept gains a deeper understanding of himself, a. prerequisite of the transmutation process.
In the Tavistock Lectures, Jung stressed the power and significance of these unconscious projections, describing them as ‘purposive and compensatory functions of the utmost importance’. He emphasized the danger that they may represent to the unwary analyst. Via a process of transference one may become ‘infected’ as the patient transfers his powerful need to identify from a represseu or painful psychic content to the analyst (or, shall we say, his guru?). Jung has suggested that the power of these projections derives from charges of repressed psychological energy which, when disturbed, may have devastating effects on the sympathetic systems of those involved in the transference process. One may become ‘psychically infected and poisoned by the projections to which he is exposed’. The disruptive power inherent in the projections may even effect the nervous system causing ‘illness which does not fit in with known medical symptomology.’ Jung remarked that the archetypal content of these projections ‘produces a ‘magic’…an overpowering effect’.
Rites of transition are methods for detaching man from his ‘natural’ state of secure identification and creating within him a more mature, regenerated, spiritual being. But there are complications. The unconscious projections distort the truth and induce seductive
feeling of belonging. Projections distort reality and cover up painful spots with a darkness we do not wish to illuminate:
This stripping off of the veils of illusion is felt as distressing and even painful…this phase demands much patience and tact, for the unmasking of reality is as a rule not only difficult but very often dangerous.
Individuation, the first stage of initiation, must require the rejection of infantile assumptions and attachments’ which do not in fact exist. These attachments, projections or identifications represent charges of energy invested in so-called ‘normality’, and, as Jung says, the progressive withdrawal of them; through rituals of dissociation, reversal and disengagement, through development of the Will in magical disciplines and the active exaltation of the imagination in the melohypnosis of poetic creation, brings us to a frontier of consciousness – an absolute horizon – an abyss – a void. The adept will begin to perceive that ‘normality’ is au arbitrary construct, that ‘meaning’ is a human creation, that, without the veil of unconscious projection to protect him from the truth, the world is a relativistic void of non-signification’.
‘Reality’, wrote William Burroughs, ‘is apparent because you live and believe it. What you call ‘reality’ is a complex network of necessity formulae… association lines of word and image presenting a prerecorded word and image track’
The horror of alienation that, results from this ‘stripping off of the veils of illusion’ is the initiatory ‘dark night of the soul’, the alchemical Nigredo. To experience Nigredo is to cross an absolute horizon; there is no turning back.
We have begun to answer some questions. The psychology of the procedure and the nature of the suffering are now understandable, to a degree. But IMPIETY? Yes. Absolutes are, like normality, arbitrary constructs. Worship, the basis of religion is a way of reinforcing projections transferred from an unacceptable realty to a substitute secure object (‘God’ or the ‘nature’ of the pantheists). The withdrawal of all projections must entail the cessation of the need to identify with anything. Belief and worship are therefore injurious to self-development and irrelevant to the processes of initiation. This is why Andre Breton dissociated Surrealism from mysticism and why there is no room for God in Samuel Beckett’s world of deracinated desolation.
If the archetypal projections that constitute the spirit of the age are destroyed there remains nothing – a gulf – a void – an abyss devoid of God and meaning. This spiritual vertigo turns our epoch into an age of crisis.
The poet Mallarme said that to compensate for his reduction to an ‘empty form of matter’ in the face of the void man must realize that he is great because he has created God and his own soul. He must accept that the universe is a chaotic spectacle of ‘ matter, conscious of being, yet rushing frantically into dreams which it knows do not exist….’ He must assert the powers of the creative imagination and ‘proclaim in the face of the nothingness that is truth… glorious fa1sehoods!’
The idea that ‘reality’ is a phantasmal cultural construct may be unacceptable but it is the source of the creative powers of both artists and magicians.
AC Evans
.