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2 CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION PART ONE A Survey of the Subject 1. Magic – The Science of the Future 2. The Dark Side of the Moon 3. The Poet as Occultist PART TWO A History of Magic 1. The Evolution of Man 2. The Magic of Primitive Man 3. Adepts and Initiates 4. The World of the Kabbalists 5. Adepts and Impostors 6. The Nineteenth Century – Magic and Romanticism 7. The Beast Himself 8. Two Russian Mages PART THREE Man's Latent Powers 1. Witchcraft and Lycanthropy 2. The Realm of Spirits 3. Glimpses 3 PREFACE A SINGLE OBSESSIONAL IDEA RUNS THROUGH ALL my work: the paradoxical nature of freedom. When the German tanks rolled into Warsaw, or the Russians into Budapest, it seemed perfectly obvious what we meant by freedom; it was something solid and definite that was being stolen, as a burglar might steal the silver. But when a civil servant retires after forty years, and finds himself curiously bored and miserable, the idea of freedom becomes blurred and indefinite; it seems to shimmer like a mirage. When I am confronted by danger or crisis, I see it as a threat to freedom, and my freedom suddenly becomes positive and self-evident – as enormous and obvious as a sunset. Similarly, a man who is violently in love feels that if he could possess the girl, his freedom would be infinite; the delight of union would make him undefeatable. When he gets her, the whole thing seems an illusion; she is just a girl... I have always accepted the fundamental reality of freedom. The vision is not an illusion or a mirage. In that case, what goes wrong? The trouble is the narrowness of consciousness. It is as if you tried to see a panoramic scene through cracks in a high fence, but were never allowed to look over the fence and see it as a whole. And the narrowness lulls us into a state of permanent drowsiness, like being half anaesthetised, so that we never attempt to stretch our powers to their limits. With the consequence that we never discover their limits. William James stated, after he had breathed nitrous oxide, 'our normal waking consciousness...is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.' I formulated my theory of 'Faculty X' on a snowy day in Washington, D.C., in 1966; but the other day, someone pointed out to me that as long ago as 1957 I had told Kenneth Allsop: 'One day I believe man will have a sixth sense – a sense of the 4 purpose of life, quite direct and uninferred.' And in 1968 I wrote in a novel devoted entirely to the problem of Faculty X, The Philosopher's Stone: 'The will feeds on enormous vistas; deprived of them, it collapses.' And there again is the absurd problem of freedom. Man's consciousness is as powerful as a microscope; it can grasp and analyse experience in a way no animal can achieve. But microscopic vision is narrow vision. We need to de- velop another kind of consciousness that is the equivalent of the telescope. This is Faculty X. And the paradox is that we already possess it to a large degree, but are unconscious of possessing it. It lies at the heart of all so-called occult experience. It is with such experience that this book is concerned. – Colin Wilson INTRODUCTION THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK IS REVOLUTIONARY and I must state it clearly at the outset. Primitive man believed the world was full of unseen forces: the orenda (spirit force) of the American Indians, the huaca of the ancient Peruvians. The Age of Reason said that these forces had only ever existed in man's imagination; only reason could show man the truth about the universe. The trouble was that man became a thinking pygmy, and the world of the rationalists was a daylight place in which boredom, triviality and 'ordinariness' were ultimate truths. But the main trouble with human beings is their tendency to become trapped in the 'triviality of everydayness' (to borrow Heidegger's phrase), in the suffocating world of their personal preoccupations. And every time they do this, they forget the immense world of broader significance that stretches around them. And since man needs a sense of meaning to release his hidden energies, this forgetfulness pushes him deeper into depression and boredom, the sense that nothing is worth the effort. In a sense, the Indians and Peruvians were closer to the 5 truth than modem man, for their intuition of 'unseen forces' kept them wide open to the vistas of meaning that surround us. Goethe's Faust can be seen to be the greatest symbolic drama of the West, since it is the drama of the rationalist suffocating in the dusty room of his personal consciousness, caught in the vicious circle of boredom and futility, which in turn leads to still further boredom and futility. Faust's longing for the 'occult' is the instinctive desire to believe in the unseen forces, the wider significances, that can break the circuit. The interesting thing is that Western man developed science and philosophy because of this consuming passion for wider significances. It was not his reason that betrayed him, but his inability to reason clearly, to understand that a healthy mind must have an 'input' of meaning from the universe if it is to keep up an 'output' of vital effort. The fatal error was the failure of the scientists and rationalists to keep their minds open to the sense of huaca, the unseen forces. They tried to measure life with a six-inch ruler and weigh it with the kitchen scales. This was not science; it was crudity only one degree beyond that of savages; and Swift made game of it in the 'Voyage to Laputa.' Man lives and evolves by 'eating' significance, as a child eats food. The deeper his sense of wonder, the wider his curiosity, the stronger his vitality becomes, and the more powerful his grip on his own existence. There are two ways in which he can expand: inward and outward. If I am in a foreign country and I get a powerful desire to explore it thoroughly, to visit its remotest places, that is a typical example of outward expansion. And it would not be untrue to say that the love of books, of music, of art, is typical of the desire for inward expansion. But that is only a half of it. For what happens if I suddenly become fascinated by a foreign country is that I feel like the spider in the centre of a web; I am aware of all kinds of 'significances' vibrating along the web, and I want to reach out and grab them all. But in moods of deep inner serenity, the same thing happens. Suddenly I am aware of vast inner spaces, of strange significances inside me. I am no longer a puny twentieth-century human being trapped in his 6 life-world and personality. Once again, I am at the centre of a web, feeling vibrations of meaning. And suddenly I realise that in the deepest sense those Indians and Peruvians were right. I am like a tree that suddenly becomes aware that its roots go down deep, deep into the earth. And at this present point in evolution, my roots go far deeper into the earth than my branches stretch above it – a thousand times deeper. So-called magic powers are a part of this underground world: powers of second sight, pre-vision, telepathy, divination. These are not necessarily important to our evolution; most animals possess them, and we would not have allowed them to sink into disuse if they were essential. But the knowledge of his 'roots,' his inner world, is important to man at this point in evolution, for he had become trapped in his image of himself as a thinking pygmy. He must somehow return to the recognition that he is potentially a 'mage,' one of those magical figures who can hurl thunderbolts or command spirits. The great artists and poets have always been aware of this. The message of the symphonies of Bee- thoven could be summarised: 'Man is not small; he's just bloody lazy.' Civilisation cannot evolve further until 'the occult' is taken for granted on the same level as atomic energy. I do not mean that scientists ought to spend their evenings with an ouija board, or that every university should set up a 'department of psychic sciences' along the lines of the Rhine Institute at Duke. I mean that we have to learn to expand inward until we have somehow re-established the sense of huaca, until we have re- created the feeling of 'unseen forces' that was common to primitive man. It has somehow got to be done. There are aspects of the so-called supernatural that we have got to learn to take for granted, to live with them as easily as our ancestors did. 'Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception,' says Blake. 'He perceives more than sense (though ever so acute) can discover.' He 'knows' things that he has not learned through schooling or everyday experience, and sometimes it is 7 more comfortable not to know. Osbert Sitwell has a strange anecdote about a palmist: Nearly all my brother-officers of my own age had been, two or three months earlier in the year, to see a celebrated palmist of the period – whom, I remember it was said, Mr.

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