Author: Gary Lachman

From New Dawn 184 (Jan-Feb 2021)

The twentieth-century esoteric philosopher Valentin Tomberg was born in 1900 in St. Petersburg to a Russian father and an Estonian mother. Little is known about his early life; indeed, Tomberg seems to have gone out of his way to draw as little attention to his life as possible. As his editor and translator Robert Powell remarked, Tomberg himself “attached no significance whatever to the biographical details concerning him.”¹ In fact, the main reason he is known today is that he is recognised as the author of a remarkable book, Meditations on the Tarot, that was and still is published anonymously. Ironically, the very steps Tomberg took to obscure his identity led to a great deal of interest in it.

What we do know about him is that by his late teens he had become deeply interested in Theosophy and the spiritual philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev, as well as in the more mystical aspects of the Russian Orthodox Church. 

Russia in the early twentieth century was a remarkable time for a young man with spiritual interests to come of age. Soloviev, Russia’s first philosopher, who has found a new reader in Vladimir Putin, was one of the major philosophical and religious figures of a period in Russian history known as the Silver Age. This stretched from around 1890 to 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution, a historical eruption that devastated Tomberg’s family, as it did many others. 

As I show in my book The Return of Holy Russia, the Silver Age was a time of deep interest in and almost obsession with religion, spirituality, mysticism and the occult, and it produced a powerful surge of creativity in literature, music, philosophy, and art. For a young man of Tomberg’s inclinations, having his spiritual awakening at this time no doubt made an impression on him that remained for the rest of his life.

A New Cultural Epoch

Although Madame Blavatsky, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, was Russian, her focus on Eastern sources of wisdom, continued by her successors, alienated many Russians, who were deeply Christian. Tomberg was one of them, and soon after joining the Theosophical Society he left, turning his allegiance to the work of Rudolf Steiner. 

Steiner was immensely popular in Russia in the years leading up to the revolution, his highly Christianised version of Theosophy – which he would soon rechristen Anthroposophy – appealing to the generation of “God Seekers” that characterised the Silver Age. As I show in my book, both Steiner and the God Seekers had great hopes for a new “cultural epoch” to emerge from Russia at this time. In the view of Steiner and others, including Soloviev, Russia was charged with the mission of uniting the scientific knowledge of the west with the mystic intuition of the east, their integration giving birth, it was hoped, to a new creative consciousness that would transcend the limits of its parents.

Sadly, this marriage between east and west was precluded by the revolution and, as we know, something radically different emerged from Russia. Lenin’s adamantly anti-spiritual ideology put paid to any notion of a new “cultural epoch,” and the chaos of the revolution cost Tomberg dearly. His family’s fortunes were lost, as were his father – who had a position in the czar’s government – mother, and brother. One story has it that during the chaos, Tomberg’s mother ventured into the streets. She never returned, and Tomberg later found her and their dog, both shot dead and tied to a tree. Like many who escaped the terror, Tomberg was unquestioningly anti-communist for the rest of his life.

Upstart Anthroposophist

In 1920, Tomberg made his way to Tallinn, Estonia. From there, he wrote several letters to Rudolf Steiner, asking if he could become his student. His letters went unanswered; it is unclear if Steiner ever read them or simply ignored them. Steiner’s silence evidently did not put Tomberg off Anthroposophy; in 1925, the year of Steiner’s death, Tomberg joined the Estonian branch of the Anthroposophical Society, eventually becoming its secretary-general. But friction soon appeared between Tomberg and the society; he was too individual a mind to remain merely a good anthroposophist. 

Throughout the 1930s he wrote many articles for Anthroposophical journals, on a variety of subjects; many had to do with what Steiner called “the return of Christ in the etheric,” and the “mission” of different nationalities. Tomberg claimed that these articles were informed by an experience he had in 1931 when he was put in contact with the “angelic world.” This, no doubt, set him further apart from his fellows, and eventually he was asked to leave the society. At around this time he had also tried to find a place for himself at the Goetheanum, the society’s headquarters in Switzerland, but was denied this by Steiner’s widow.

In 1938, Tomberg moved to Holland; after the Nazis invaded in 1940, he joined the resistance. His relations with the Anthroposophical Society in Holland ran into the same problems as before. It seems the essence of the trouble was that Tomberg’s esotericism was even more Christocentric than Steiner’s; if you know Steiner’s work, you’ll know this is no easy feat. After the war, Tomberg moved to Cologne where he earned a degree in jurisprudence and became deeply engaged with Catholicism. It is unclear if he actually converted, but he become alienated from the Russian Orthodox Church because its leadership had seemed sympathetic to Hitler.

In 1948, Tomberg moved again, this time to England, where friends found him work with the BBC as a translator; he was a polyglot and would later monitor Soviet broadcasts. In 1960 he retired, devoting himself to study and writing. He died in 1973, from a heart attack while on holiday with his wife and their son in Majorca. Aside from his early essays, practically all his work appeared only after his death, and one work in particular was designed by Tomberg himself to appear in precisely that way.

The work in question is Tomberg’s magnum opus, Meditations on the Tarot, subtitled “A Journey into Christian Hermeticism.” This was first published in French – the language in which it was written – in 1980, seven years after Tomberg’s death and nearly twice that long after the work’s completion, which Tomberg noted as 21 May 1967, the “Festival of the Holy Trinity.” German and English translations soon followed, but it was not until 2002 that a full English edition appeared through a mainstream American publisher, bringing Tomberg’s work to a wider reading public, albeit still a marginal one with a taste for the arcane and esoteric. It was also at this point that it became known Tomberg was the author of this work. And although by now his authorship is well known, as mentioned the book is still published anonymously, as was Tomberg’s wish.

Letters From Beyond the Grave

Meditations on the Tarot consists of twenty-two “letters to the Unknown Friend,” sent “from beyond the grave,” dispatched, that is, well after Tomberg’s death. The reason for these tardy communiques is that Tomberg wanted to mute any personal element in them, to have the reader of these letters focus on their message, not on the messenger. Tomberg himself insists that he has “said more about himself” in these letters than he “would have been able to in any other way.”² The unknown friend to whom Tomberg is writing is the reader, and Tomberg’s letters are long, discursive, deeply pondered and occasionally meandering essays on the twenty-two trumps of the Tarot, filled with references to Steiner, Teilhard de Chardin, Bergson, Nietzsche, Gurdjieff, the Corpus Hermeticum, Catholic dogma, and many other writers, philosophers, mystics, and saints. (I should point out that the Meditations run to more than 600 pages.) Tomberg’s letters do not touch upon the divinatory character of the Tarot. Nor does he relate the trumps to the usual astrological or cabbalistic correspondences, as do most books on the Tarot, although both Cabbala and astrology make appearances.³ Instead, the Meditations are illuminating, insightful, and not infrequently baffling excursions into the meaning of the symbols presented in the trumps, which Tomberg tells his unknown friends are arcana. 

Arcana

Arcana, Tomberg tells us, are more than secrets, which are merely facts that are hidden from us, or allegories, which are figurative representations of abstract ideas. Arcana are “authentic symbols,” “magic, mental, psychic, and moral operations” that can awaken “new notions, ideas, sentiments and aspirations,” and which require more than an intellectual understanding for their power to be felt.⁴ 

One way of recognising authentic symbols, and of differentiating them from mere signs, Tomberg tells us, is that they have the power to “conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time according to the depth of meditation” one reaches in their contemplation.⁵ A sign is nothing more than an indicator of what it points to. An arrow pointing to a door shows you the way out, but it does not share in you taking it. A symbol participates in the reality it presents, and its meaning, when grasped, should have an almost visceral effect on us. That is, it should affect us in such a way that it effects a change in our consciousness, our awareness, adding not only an intellectual knowledge but offering an existential encounter with hitherto unknown dimensions of Being. It introduces us to a bit of reality of which we were unaware.

This “transformational” power of symbols lead Tomberg to speak of the trumps as “enzymes” that enable us to be “fruitful in a given spiritual domain.” The trumps “ferment” the knowledge necessary for spiritual experience. This is why Tomberg speaks of them as “spiritual exercises,” whose aim is “to awaken from sleep… deeper layers of consciousness.”⁶ They are definite encounters with esoteric realities, through which we, the unknown friends, are changed. 

In this way, the trumps are similar to great works of art. According to Tomberg, the symbols of the Tarot should have the same effect on us as the “archaic torso of Apollo” had on the poet Rilke when he saw it while living in Paris. In its presence, Rilke knew that he “must change his life.”⁷ A true encounter with the Tarot’s symbolism, Tomberg tells us, should make us feel the same. His aim is to get us to think Hermetically, to allow the rich symbolism of the trumps to reach into our imagination and trigger our faculty for seeing connections between things which we would otherwise ignore. For Tomberg, the essence of Hermeticism is the ability to perceive “the totality of things,” “the One, the All,” as the ancient alchemists called it, the deep, underlying unity at the heart of the multiplicity of Being.

The French Connection

I should point out that Tomberg is writing in the French tradition of the Tarot – he bases his letters on the Tarot de Marseilles – and that this connection brings in the central theme of the book: to show how Roman Catholicism is an indubitable repository of Hermetic wisdom. Hence the subtitle, “A Journey into Christian Hermeticism.” Understandably, this may be sufficient reason for some unknown friends to forgo that journey. Yet we need not accept Tomberg’s thesis in order to profit from his book. 

I can respect the high regard Tomberg has for Catholicism, without agreeing with him that “the more one advances on the way of free research… the more one approaches the Church.”⁸ After much spiritual searching, the author of these meditations found a home in the Catholic church, but that does not mean that for us to learn from him we must take up residency there too. What strikes me as most important about the Meditations is not the arguments Tomberg makes for, say, the Ten Commandments as instructions in Hermetic philosophy or his belief that the fundamental virtues of the Christian faith – obedience, poverty and chastity – are the sine qua non of any esoteric pursuit, ingenious and thought-provoking as they are. We can embrace these dicta, take them with as many grains of salt as needed, or simply reject them. What strikes me as important about Tomberg’s Meditations for the non-Christian reader is the way Tomberg approaches the Tarot, his understanding of what we can call a Hermetic “way of knowledge.”

Christ and Hermes

Having said this, a look at history shows that Christ and Hermes are not such strange bedfellows as we may think. For a time during the Renaissance, Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of the tradition which bears his name, was seen as a figure of equal importance with Christ, and vigorous attempts were made to incorporate the Hermetic teachings, found in the Corpus Hermeticum, into Catholic dogma.⁹ In France there is a long tradition of a kind of “Catholic occultism,” reaching back to the nineteenth-century French mage Eliphas Levi, and leading on to characters like the eccentric Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and his disciple Gérard Encausse, who wrote under the pseudonym Papus; all three turn up in the Meditations. It is also true that there is a long tradition of literature on the Tarot in French. Indeed, it was Levi himself who first hit on the idea of linking the twenty-two trumps with the twenty-two “paths” on the Cabbalistic Tree of Life, a correspondence that is at the heart of practically all modern magic. 

Hermetic Syncretism

This linkage has subsequently been discredited, and most modern historians of the Tarot accept that there is no historical connection between the Tarot and the Cabbala.¹⁰ Nor, for that matter, does there seem to be one with Egypt, which many occultists regarded as the Tarot’s source, seeing it as the so-called “Book of Thoth,” the Egyptian god of magic with whom Hermes Trismegistus is associated. 

Yet for all his historical inaccuracy, Levi’s inspired howler has proved remarkably effective for the many occultists who have worked with his ideas. These include the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its most notorious associate, Aleister Crowley, as well as their many epigone. This seems to suggest that purists, who eschew such “romantic” notions as Levi’s and reject much that has accreted around the Tarot as nonsense, ignore the syncretic, synthesising character of Hermeticism. This was with it from the start, ages ago, when Thoth met the Greek god Hermes in ancient Alexandria, their fusion creating the “thrice great” one. This syncretic approach continued during the Renaissance when figures like Pico della Mirandola and others developed the notion of a “perennial philosophy,” which allowed for a Christian Cabbala – “culturally appropriating” a radically Jewish tradition – and, as mentioned, even a Christian Hermeticism. In this light, Levi seems merely to have done what Hermetic thinkers had been doing all along.

Analogy

Although Tomberg is aware of the historical appearance of the Tarot in the late Middle Ages – he does argue, though, for a kind of “archetypal” link to an Egyptian source; Jung makes many appearances throughout the book – a similar syncretic approach is taken in his Meditations. This makes perfect sense. For Tomberg, Hermeticism itself is a synthesis of magic, gnosis, mysticism, and philosophy, and its aim is not to supplant science or to uncover new facts, but to perceive the facts we already possess from a different perspective, and to infuse them with an additional depth, the kind of depth we discover through our encounter with the arcana of the Tarot. 

For Tomberg, analogy is the fundamental mode of acquiring knowledge in the Hermetic tradition, which proceeds through a process of synthesising the known and the unknown. The “open recognition of the relationship of all things and beings has engendered an exactly corresponding method of knowledge,” he writes.¹¹ That method is analogy, through which the “sympathy of all things” becomes apparent, not as a concept, or an idea or belief, but through a perception of it “in action” as it were, through the “fermenting” effect of the symbolic “enzymes” produced by our meditations on the trumps.¹²

This transformative effect is perhaps best seen in the Magician, the trump that Tomberg says is “the key to all the other Major Arcana.”¹³ By understanding and performing the “spiritual exercise” the Magician presents, Tomberg tells us that we will be able to work our way through to the knowledge and experience contained in the arcana that follow. As I do not have space to more than touch on some of the insights that the Magician presents, I trust the unknown friends that read this article will be encouraged to accept Tomberg’s invitation to journey with him and perform some of these spiritual exercises themselves. 

Concentration Without Effort

The spiritual exercise of the Magician, Tomberg tells us, is aimed at developing two essential abilities, necessary for any successful Hermetic work. They are “concentration without effort” and “turning work into play.”¹⁴ 

“Concentration without effort” – what he also calls “active relaxation” – is achieved, Tomberg tells us, when we can direct our attention to whatever occupies us, without the constant chatter of the care-ridden ego leading our minds elsewhere. When we can achieve an inner silence, free from the distractions of thought – the basic requirement of any inner work – the kind of concentration that would usually cost strenuous efforts can be reached “effortlessly.” 

As an example, Tomberg suggests a tightrope walker – an aptly symbolic choice. He is certainly concentrating on his actions; if he wasn’t, he would fall. But Tomberg asks: “Do you believe that his thought and his imagination are occupied with what he is doing?”¹⁵ The tightrope walker does not “calculate” or “plan” his next step because he has shifted his consciousness from his head – the worrying ego – to what Tomberg calls his “rhythmic system,” which possesses an intelligence of its own, the “intelligence of the heart” I have written about elsewhere.¹⁶

This shift from head to heart, Tomberg says, is symbolised by the lemniscate, or horizontal 8, that is formed by the Magician’s hat. This is the symbol of infinity, but, Tomberg tells us, it is also the symbol of “eternal rhythm,” the natural “flow” – as the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it – that our ever-worrying mind interferes with. When we have quieted our inner monologue, we can enter this flow. If we think of the “concentration without effort” we achieve when we are deeply “into” a book we are reading, we can get an idea of what Tomberg means. Our concentration is so focused we forget our surroundings. Yet it requires no effort at all; in fact, we enjoy it.

This is the arcanum of “transforming work into play,” which is a result of achieving this kind of concentration.¹⁷ When we enter the “zone of perpetual silence,” we can not only concentrate our consciousness “effortlessly;” any task we may be obliged to perform can become a source of delight.¹⁸ Because we can draw from a “secret and intimate respiration,” he “who finds silence in the solitude of concentration without effort, is never alone.”¹⁹ 

He or she is never alone, because the Magician who has achieved this has “attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious… and the deliberate action of the conscious,” the “I” or ego.²⁰ The Magician symbolises a state that is the “synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious,” or, as I have suggested, between our left and right brains.²¹ Tomberg says this is equivalent to what Jung speaks of as “individuation,” which can result in what Marie-Louise von Franz calls “conscious spontaneity,” a paradoxical state in which one is “consciously active and still spontaneous,” in which the conscious and unconscious minds have an equal say.²²

Tulpas and Egregores

This brief account of Tomberg’s interpretation of the Magician should give the reader an idea of what he may find if he dips into the Meditations. One other trump that I should at least mention is the Devil, the theme of Letter XV. This trump, Tomberg tells us, introduces us to the secrets and dangers of what he calls “counter-inspiration.” It presents a warning about the “intoxication” we experience when we become aware of our own power to “engender demons.”²³ The demon before whom the man and the woman stand enchained, Tomberg tells us, is one of their own making. It is a result of their misuse of the powers of will and imagination, the Magician’s tools in trade.

The specific demons Tomberg speaks of are tulpas and egregores. Tulpas are part of the esoteric psychology of Tibetan Buddhism. They are thought-forms created by a single individual, through prolonged efforts of visualisation. Eventually, after much mental work, the tulpa can take on a life of its own, much to the dismay of its creator. As I point out in my book, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, both the traveller Alexandra David-Neel and the occultist Dion Fortune had experiences creating tulpas, and both write of their difficulties in regaining control of and eventually dissolving them.²⁴ 

An egregore – which means “watcher” in ancient Greek – is a thought-form brought into existence by a group. As Tomberg tells us, there are no “good” egregores, only “evil” ones.²⁵ They can be “engendered by the collective will and imagination of nations,” Tomberg writes, but the aims of an egregore are always selfish, centred exclusively on gaining power and growing stronger at the expense of its creators. Once brought into existence, an egregore is harder to “dissolve” than a tulpa, given that it is the work of a group. This can be a cabal of occultists, or a political party – hence their inclusion in Dark Star Rising, which looks at the resurgence of a kind of “occult politics” in recent times. This seems to have raised its head during the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election and has remained on the scene since. It has also been at work in Russia. 

Should we take tulpas and egregores seriously? A good question. Tomberg certainly did, and as he tells us, the Devil is one trump we should clearly keep an eye on.

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Footnotes

1. Robert Powell, introduction to Valentin Tomberg, Lazarus Come Forth! (Great Barrington, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006) p. ix.

2. Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2002) p. ix.

3. The question of where and with whom Tomberg studied the Tarot is an interesting one. He speaks of a work, The Sacred Book of Thoth – The Major Arcana of the Tarot, by an “engineer” named Schmakov, published in 1916 which was “twice as large as Oswald Wirth’s” book on the Tarot (p. 590). He also says he read Ouspensky’s The Symbolism of the Tarot (1917). He tells his unknown friends that after the Bolshevik revolution, and presumably before going to Estonia, he became friends with members of a group of esoteric students that had been led by a mathematics professor, Gregory Ottonovitch Mebes. Mebes was the author of a book, The Course of Encyclopaedia of Occultism that is said to have influenced Tomberg. In 1926, Mebes was sent to a gulag, where he died. The group had been dispersed by the revolution, but the members he met “transmitted all they knew and recounted everything concerning the work of their group” to Tomberg. (Ibid.) The group seemed to have studied the Tarot in the traditional French way, relating it to Cabala, magic, astrology, etc. Tomberg says that through the “forty-five years” of his own study, he has “surpassed” what he learned from them and that throughout the Letters – aside for one exception – he does not draw on it. Another esoteric thinker who wrote about the Tarot, Mouni Sadhu, is said, like Tomberg, to have been in contact with members of this group, and influenced by Mebes’ book. Some have seen similarities between Sadhu’s The Tarot (1962) and the Meditations, which the link with Mebes may explain.

4. Ibid. p.4.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. p. 91

7. https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo 

8. Ibid. p. 283

9. See my book The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2011) pp. 154-56.

10. Robert M. Place, The Tarot (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005) p. 73.

11. Anonymous p. 12.

12. Ibid. p. 4.

13. Ibid. p. 3.

14. Ibid. p. 8.

15. Ibid. p. 9.

16. Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2017) pp. 52-53.

17. Anonymous p. 11. This is an arcana evidently known to Mark Twain, who makes good use of it in Tom Sawyer. There the wily Tom convinces his friends to paint a fence because he pretends to be enjoying it. Yet the trick is really on Tom because his friends actually do enjoy it; they have transformed work into play, by telling themselves it is play.

18. See my article “Getting Beyond the Robot” in New Dawn 182 (Sept–Oct 2020).

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid. p. 20.

21. Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2015). In this book I argue that such a harmony is at the heart of the western esoteric tradition.

22. Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980) p. 238.

23. Anonymous p. 401.

24. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2018) pp. 90-92.

25. Ibid. pp. 419-20.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 188 (Sept-Oct 2021)

In 1959, while staying at the farmhouse of an old friend, the British existentialist Colin Wilson came across a book seemingly designed to attract his attention; the fact that it was the only one in the house practically ensured that it would. Its title was The Outsider and Others and its author was H. P. Lovecraft, the American pulp horror fiction writer from the pages of Weird Tales, who in recent time has been promoted to the rank of a Penguin Modern Classic. Wilson had never heard of Lovecraft but his own first book, the one that had made his name as an “angry young man” a few years back, was called The Outsider, so naturally he was interested. 

Wilson’s book was an account of modern alienation and the extreme mental states of creative individuals trying to overcome it. Lovecraft’s brand of “eldritch,” “grotesque,” “nameless” horror – these are only a few of his hyperbolic adjectives – seems far away from the angst and la nausée of existentialism, and yet appearances can be deceiving. Wilson took the mouldy volume off the shelf – it was published in 1939, two years after Lovecraft’s death – its yellowing pages almost crumbling at his touch, and settled down to read. Before turning in that night Wilson knew that he had come across an “outsider” indeed. If anyone fit the bill of the isolated, alienated man of genius, loathing the mediocrity of the modern age, Lovecraft did.

Wilson was so taken with Lovecraft that reading him inspired one of the books in his “Outsider Cycle,” in which he attempts to provide the foundation of what he called a “new existentialism,” to replace the dreary rive gauche version of Sartre and Camus, and the gloomy Schwarzwald meditations of Professor Heidegger.¹ Wilson believed that all three had taken a wrong turn at Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology, out of which existentialism emerged. The books in Wilson’s “Outsider Cycle” methodically spell out his objections to what had become a philosophy of meaninglessness and despair, in an attempt to regain existentialism’s original object: the vision of freedom. In outsider figures like Blake, Nietzsche, Gurdjieff, and others, Wilson had discovered experiences of a “Yea-saying,” affirmative consciousness that Sartre and the others had left out of their analyses. Central to his analysis of these moments of “affirmation” was Husserl’s dictum that consciousness is intentional. It is not the passive recipient of sense impressions impinging from without, but an active reaching out to reality, in order to grab it with the talons of the mind. It was this, Wilson believed, that the old existentialists had lost sight of.

Wilson’s book, The Strength to Dream (1962), a study in what he called “existential criticism,” focused on how different writers used the imagination to present their values, their vision of the world. He started with Lovecraft and were he alive to have read it – which is entirely possible; he would only have been in his early seventies – Lovecraft would no doubt had been gratified that he was taken seriously, and perhaps not a little bemused at the literary company he was keeping. Wilson put him in the context of W. B. Yeats, August Strindberg, and, perhaps surprisingly Oscar Wilde, as agents of what he called “The Assault on Rationality,” writers who reject the everyday world and create an alternative more to their liking. Yet Lovecraft might not have been amused at Wilson’s assessment of him as “that man of dubious genius” who “carried on a lifelong guerrilla warfare against civilisation and materialism,” and who was a “somewhat hysterical and neurotic combatant.”² 

Aside from his atrocious style, filled with phrases like “black clutching panic” and “stark utter horror” – Lovecraft always had a bad habit of overwriting – what repelled Wilson about Lovecraft was his “soured romanticism.” He was a man so revulsed by the triviality of modern life, it seemed, that he reminded Wilson more of the Düsseldorf mass murderer Peter Kürten, who dreamed of blowing up whole cities, in fantasies of revenge against the inequities of life, than of his tragic predecessor, Edgar Allan Poe.³ Lovecraft never engaged in any of the violent acts that filled Kürten’s horrific career, but his tales of ancient evil and exiled gods – Cthulhu and Co. – returning to their lost domain – planet Earth – were, Wilson believed, the literary and psychological equivalents of Kürten’s brutal assaults on “society.” Both, Wilson argued, were engaged in acts of ressentiment against a world that negated them.

Wilson’s estimation of Lovecraft, however, increased over time, helped by a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, where Lovecraft spent most of his short life. Wilson was a visiting lecturer at Brown University and took the opportunity to read Lovecraft’s letters and other works held in the library. His interest eventually led to a correspondence with August Derleth, the man more than anyone else responsible for Lovecraft being known at all today. After Lovecraft’s death Derleth became his literary executor and through his Arkham House Press kept Lovecraft in print. Derleth had read Wilson’s criticisms of Lovecraft and thought he had been unfair. Wilson was open enough to Derleth’s comments to revise some of his remarks about Lovecraft for the American edition of the book. Yet Derleth still felt Wilson had short changed Lovecraft. In a letter to Wilson he wrote, “If you’re so critical of Lovecraft, why don’t you write a fantasy novel, and see whether it’s any good…”⁴

Wilson Takes Up the Challenge

Not one to ignore a challenge, Wilson brooded on the idea. His interest was not in terrifying people as Lovecraft’s had been. It was, in fact, more along the lines of the sort of quasi-science fiction Lovecraft was writing towards the end of his life, in stories like The Shadow Out of Time. With its vision of ancient alien races sending their consciousness out into the depths of time and space, this produces more a sense of awe than a shudder – something we find in H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, two other writers with a “cosmic” point of view. Wilson’s own vision was that of a consciousness free from time, able to rise above the “triviality of everydayness” that revulsed Lovecraft (the phrase is Heidegger’s) and become aware of the “reality of other times and places,” and not only of the one in front of your nose. 

It was while working on his Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966)that Wilson came upon an idea that would give the old Lovecraftian theme a new twist. Lovecraft’s fellow Weird Tales writers all added to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, inventing gods, ancient races, lost cities, and, most effectively, fictional texts such as Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, that give the tales a flavour of authenticity. But Wilson’s contribution wouldn’t be another god, like Clark Ashton Smith’s Tsathoggua, although he will draw on this, nor a forbidden text like Robert E. Howard’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, nor will his protagonists meet their doom in a ruined temple on some unknown South Pacific island. Wilson’s monsters would come from somewhere else. They would come from the mind.⁵

Wilson’s first foray into what we can call “phenomenological science fiction,” The Mind Parasites (1967), came on the back of a series of novels in which Wilson used the constraints of genre fiction for philosophical purposes.⁶ His first novel, Ritual in the Dark (1960), is an existential thriller about a sexual killer, and could best be described as Jack the Ripper meets the Brothers Karamazov in duffle-coated early 1950s London. It works out in fictional form some of the themes of The Outsider. This was a practice Wilson continued with detective novels (Necessary Doubt (1964)), psychological crime thrillers (The Glass Cage (1966)), erotica (The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme (1961)), and later with espionage, police procedural, soft porn, and, as we will see, science fiction.

Wilson’s engagement with Lovecraft led to several works, some serious attempts at using Lovecraft’s themes for philosophical purposes, some, like his contributions to the Lovecraft sendups The Necronomicon (1978) and The R’lyeh Text (1995) more tongue in cheek pastiche than anything else.⁷ The two novels I look at here, The Mind Parasites and its follow-up The Philosopher’s Stone (1969), are Wilson’s masterpieces in the genre. In them Wilson managed to put into gripping fictional form the essence of his “new existentialism,” and the insight that would inform his decades long investigation into the occult and paranormal, his search for “Faculty X,” the ability of the human mind to free itself of the constraints of time and space and occupy “other times and places.” 

Wilson wrote another science fiction novel, The Space Vampires (1976), that uses some Lovecraftian ideas – sadly it was made into the dreadful film Lifeforce (1984) – and his later epic Spider World series(1987-2002)is his attempt at a Tolkienesque fantasy. Yet it is in The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone that Wilson managed to find, to my mind at least, the perfect balance between the ideas and a narrative to convey them. The books are, borrowing a title from Alfred North Whitehead, “adventures of ideas.” Like the late novels of H.G. Wells, that Wilson, against critical opinion, rated highly, they are compelling because of Wilson’s ability to make the ideas come alive. The reviewer who said of his work that he had a “narrative style that can make the pursuit of any idea seem exciting detective work” knew what he was talking about.

The Mind Parasites

The Mind Parasites begins in 1994 – the future for its first readers, the past for us – when the archaeologist Gilbert Austin learns that his friend, the psychologist Karel Weissman, has committed suicide. The death, of course, was enough to shock him. But suicide? “It was impossible.” Weissman “had not an atom of self-destruction in his composition.” What could have driven him to take his own life? It was true that the suicide rate had increased considerably over the years. But Weissman was a follower of the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow (who shares billing with Husserl in the new existentialism). It was unthinkable. What made him do it? 

The answer to that, Austin suspects, could be found in the collection of papers Weissman left behind. Yet before Austin can attend to them, his own work takes him to Turkey where he and his colleagues make an incredible discovery. Strange figurines of an unknown origin lead them to tunnel below the surface only to discover a huge block seventy feet long two miles underground. It is the remains of a cyclopean city, a metropolis built by giants eons ago… 

Yet these allusions to the Great Old Ones and Elder Gods of Lovecraft’s mythos are really a red herring, for the truly evil creatures – who, borrowing from Clark Ashton Smith, Wilson calls the Tsathogguans – are not, like Cthulhu, resting in sunken R’lyeh, waiting to be awakened, but inhabit a much more intimate space: that of the mind. Austin discovers why his friend had killed himself: he had become aware of psychic vampires that have been bleeding human consciousness dry for the past two centuries, and they had got rid of him… Just as they had got rid of the generation of creative geniuses, the Romantics, who Wilson sees as the first sign of a new stage in the evolution of human consciousness.

Wilson’s The Outsider sought to answer the question why so many creative individuals of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries either died young, went mad, committed suicide, or in some way came to a bad end. Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Ibsen, Keats, Shelley, Kleist, Novalis, Poe; this list, chosen at random, could go on. These men and others, lesser known, experienced eruptions of the imagination unlike anything that had been seen before. The poets of the previous age said that the “proper study of man is man.” The Romantics disagreed and sought to embrace the entire universe. The ecstasies they experienced convinced them that men were really sleeping gods. Yet when they returned to earth from their ecstatic excursions, they were struck by the banality of the world they were forced to inhabit, and their inability to revive the vision of inner freedom and space, the “bird’s eye view” over space and time. Self-pity, depression, weariness set in. Baudelaire compared the poet to the albatross: when aloft, the bird’s great wings enable him to soar gracefully, yet on land they are encumbrance, tripping him up. This brutal world was not meant for such noble creatures, and so many of them succumbed.

Wilson’s mind parasites are an allegory of how the mind can collapse on itself, of how easy it is for it to slip into existential despair and a self-produced insanity. In The Outsider Wilson relates several experiences of what Swedenborg called “vastation,” a total emptying out of any sense of meaning, of any reality propping up your existence. One night on the desert, meditating on the reality of history, and on the knowledge of that reality housed within his mind, Gilbert Austin becomes aware that within his own consciousness, there is a universe as strange and unknown as the one he gazes out on at the stars… the essence of the Romantic vision. It was then that something odd happens. Austin catches a glimpse of “some alien creature” in his own mind. He then discovers that his friend Weissman had had the same experience. Weissman’s research into the growing suicide rate uncovered a disturbing fact: the human race was losing its power of self-renewal. “For more than two centuries now,” Weissman reports, “the human mind has been constantly a prey to energy vampires.” 

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, a kind of change came over the western mind: the powerful optimism of the early Romantics – Beethoven, Goethe, Blake – is followed by a gloomy pessimism, a despair the mind parasites feed on. “The artists who refused to preach a gospel of pessimism and life-devaluation were destroyed.” Some individuals, like the Marquis de Sade, were completely in the vampires’ control. Pessimists, like Schopenhauer, lived to a ripe old age. Nietzsche, the life-affirmer, goes mad. Men may really be gods, but it is in the parasites’ interest that they never find this out. Those who suggest as much are quickly done away with…

Having become aware of the parasites, Weissman is a threat to them, so they attack him with waves of depression and despair until he can stand it no longer and kills himself. When the parasites discover that Austin is aware of them, they try the same tactic. But in the meantime he has learned of Husserl’s work in phenomenology and of the central insight that consciousness is intentional. In one of the most remarkable battle scenes in all literature, a campaign that takes place entirely within the mind, Austin fends off the waves of suicidal emptiness and cosmic despair until his increased powers of intentionality rout the parasites.⁸ Now that their cover is blown, it is all out war.

The rest of the novel relates Austin’s gathering together a team of other intellectuals – psychologists, historians, scientists – who become the human race’s vanguard against the parasites. Through mastering Husserl’s phenomenological techniques, they learn how to direct their intentionality as if it were a laser beam of consciousness. One by-product of this is that they all become psychokinetic, their consciousness able to reach out and “grab” the world in a very literal way. Their psychokinetic powers are enormous. In an attempt to unite the world against the parasites, they use their combined mental energies to disintegrate the “Kadath block” on live television, claiming it was destroyed by the parasites. When they discover that the parasites have a base on the moon, they decide the only way to rid humanity of these deadly pests is to move the moon out of its orbit. Wilson’s use of the moon as the source of mankind’s afflictions is a nod to Gurdjieff, who saw “sleeping humanity” as “food for the moon.” He also makes use of the theories of Hanns Hörbiger, enamoured by Hitler, about the different moons the earth has had in the past. 

By the end of the novel, not only have Austin and his colleagues got rid of the moon, they have fended off a race war, prompted by the parasites, who glut themselves on the negative energies given off. The discovery of the ancient cyclopean city that started the book is of relatively minor importance compared to the revelatory insights into consciousness the team has achieved. At one point in the story, Austin becomes aware of other intelligences, benevolent ones, out in space, beyond the orbit of Pluto. He and his colleagues ride off, not into the sunset, but in the direction of that distant planet, their spaceship propelled by the powers of their minds… They are eager to join the other “policemen of the universe,” and to learn exactly how powerful a consciousness free of the parasites really is. Their mysterious voyage becomes a myth for future exploration into the vastness of existence, inner and outer.

The Philosopher’s Stone & Relationality

In The Mind Parasites Wilson explores the possibilities inherent in Husserl’s intentionality. In The Philosopher’s Stone it is another power of consciousness, relationality, Wilson’s own coinage, that takes centre stage. Readers of Wilson’s little book Poetry and Mysticism (1968), written at the behest of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for his City Lights imprint, will recall that in it Wilson’s speaks of “duo-consciousness” and of what he calls the “web-like” character of consciousness, when thoughts and recollections spread out and link together, forming a kind of “net” of awareness. In The Philosopher’s Stone the relationality of consciousness leads to what Wilson calls “time-vision,” the ability to look into the past as if through a telescope. If in The Mind Parasites the heroes discover their psychokinetic powers, in The Philosopher’s Stone it is psychometry, the ability to know the past of an object simply through touch, that Wilson’s heroes discover they possess. It is through this that the protagonists become aware of the Great Old Ones, brooding in some dimension outside our own, waiting for their chance to return…

But again, they are a red herring. The real subject of the novel is once again consciousness; this time, its potential to slow down and even to stop the aging process. In Back to Methuselah, Bernard Shaw argued that human life is too short to make any good use of it; humans needed to live to at least three hundred in order to mature. Wilson took up Shaw’s challenge as to how this could be done. His answer: the fountain of youth – or at least of immortality – lay in the prefrontal lobes of the brain.⁹

In search of a phenomenological elixir vitae, Wilson’s hero, Howard Lester, discovers that the “value experiences” of the psychologist Aaron Marks (Maslow’s “peak experiences”) seem able to slow down our biological clocks. He arrives at this insight after his research leads him to conclude that, statistically, philosophers, composers, scientists, mathematicians – anyone who makes a practice of trying to view life objectively, and not through the gauze of their emotions – live longer than other people. He discovers that the source of the “VE” are the brain’s prefrontal lobes, its most evolutionarily advanced part. Through a series of experiments introducing a minute quantity of “Neumann alloy” into their own prefrontal lobes, Lester and his colleague, like Gilbert Austin and his team, discover unknown powers of consciousness. Their “relationality,” the intuitive glue that spreads across reality like the ripples on the surface of a deep, still pond, increases enormously, until they are able to use their imagination to peer into time. 

Wilson has a long section in which Lester, sinking into a state of “contemplative objectivity,” finds himself in sixteenth century London, rather as Charlotte Ann Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, authors of An Adventure (1911), found themselves transported to the Versailles of Marie Antoinette. This is a time travel novel with a twist. Actual, physical time travel, the kind his hero H. G. Wells wrote about in The Time Machine, Wilson argues, is an absurdity. There is no “time” to travel through; “time” is a word we use to refer to process, and to think of “process travel” is nonsense. But the mind is not limited by the logic that constrains physical reality, as J.W. Dunne, author of An Experiment With Time (1927), discovered with his “precognitive dreams.” Just as Dunne was able to see into the future, Wilson’s phenomenological alchemists, in search of their own philosopher’s stone, can turn their vision to the past. The imagination, Wilson said, is “the ability to grasp realities not immediately present.” The past isn’t present, but it is a reality, and through their increased powers of relationality – awareness of the connectedness of everything – Wilson’s heroes can imaginatively grasp it.

One result of this new faculty is proof that Francis Bacon was really the author of Shakespeare’s plays. Another is that K’ tholo – Lovecraft’s Cthulhu – was one of the founders of human civilisation. Another is that the Great Old Ones are not dead, only sleeping, but their influence can be felt. They have erected barriers to the heroes’ time-vision which prevents them from reaching far enough back into the past to solve the mystery of… but that would be telling. En route the reader learns the truth about Stonehenge, the Maya, the Voynich Manuscript – a Wilsonian standby, that surfaces in more than a few places – poltergeists and much more. 

Wilson said that the aim of his writing was to get people to think. His novels are more fables or parables, than the kind of character analysis we associate with most modern fiction, which sticks obsessively to “everyday” consciousness and its trivial concerns. They share this character with the late novels of Wells, which use the barest structure of a novel for didactic purposes. Readers who find ideas exciting will find Wilson’s – and Wells’ – didactic fictions breath-taking. (“I apologise for sounding didactic,” Wilson’s hero says at one point. “It is impossible to say anything that is not commonplace without sounding didactic.”) I have read them a number of times yet each time I discover new things and come away exhilarated. If, as Wilson says, “close-upness deprives us of meaning,” his phenomenological fictions are cable cars to the heights, to the “bird’s eye view,” that enables us to enter that inner universe from which we can view the outer one with “contemplative objectivity.” “The will feeds on enormous vistas,” Wilson tells us. “Deprived of them, it collapses.” In The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone the reader will find vistas enormous enough to feed his will no end.

Footnotes

1. The Outsider (1956), Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat (The Stature of Man in the US) (1959), The Strength to Dream (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider (1965), and Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966).

2. Colin Wilson, The Strength To Dream (London: Abacus, 1979) p. 1.

3. Colin Wilson and Pat Pitman, Encyclopedia of Murder (London: Arthur Baker, 1961) pp. 326-335.

4. Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Press, 2005) p. xvii.

5. Wilson admits to being inspired by the science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956), in which Walter Pidgeon portrays Morbius, a scientist who has increased his mental powers through contact with the technology of an ancient, more highly evolved race. He was unaware that he was at the same time increasing the power of his unconscious mind. Because of this he releases “monsters from the Id.”

6. Recently the book has been the object of some renewed interest, seeing Wilson’s allegorical creatures as the possible agents of our contemporary malaise. See www.awakeninthedream.com/articles/mind-parasites-of-colin-wilson 

7. Wilson also contributed two shorter works, “The Return of the Lloigor,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, ed August Derleth (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1969) and “The Tomb of the Old Ones” in The Antarktos Cycle, ed Robert M. Price (Oakland, CA: Chaosium Publications, 1999).

8. I can only mention here that in another novel, The Black Room (1971), an espionage tale set around the effort to defeat a sensory deprivation chamber, Wilson works out the same ideas.

9. This was before Wilson became aware of the significance of “split brain” psychology surrounding the left and right cerebral hemispheres, which he will write about in Frankenstein’s Castle (1981) and Access to Inner Worlds (1983).

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