New Age Fi N De Siècle

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

NEW AGE FIN DE SIÈCLE

Gary Lachman

n this essay I’d like to address two points. First, that the fi n de siècle had an Ioptimistic, forward-looking, positive character, generally overshadowed by its more well-known “dark side”. And second, that the roots of much, if not all, of contemporary “alternative” thought and, for the sake of a better word, “New Age” philosophy can be found in this less well-known “positive” fi n de siècle. Establishing the second point will, I believe, do much to help establish the fi rst. That the fi n de siècle is generally characterized by “decadence” needs little arguing. Although the seeds of decline were planted earlier, 1884 can be seen as the offi cial starting date of the “decadent movement”. In that year, J.-K. Huysmans’ “breviary of decadence”, À Rebours, was published (Symons p. 76). Translated as “Against Nature” and “Against the Grain”, neither attempt quite captures the essence of the French, for which “up the asshole” would be a fair equivalent. This was the notorious “yellow-backed book” that sent Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, as well as many others, on their exquisite roads to perdition. If we need more proof that decadence was in the air, eight years later Max Nordau’s bestselling Degeneration (1892) achieved world-fame by arguing that the spirit of the age was rife with exhaustion, hysteria, and enervation, expressed in the work of obvious “degener- ates” like Nietzsche, Ibsen, Wagner, and Baudelaire; that Baudelaire and Nietzsche died of syphilis, and that Ibsen wrote a play, Ghosts, about it, may suggest that Nordau had a point. In “Dregs”, the ennui-ridden poet Ernest Dowson (d. 1900) wrote of “the end of every song man sings”, and Arthur Machen’s hideously enter- taining novella The Great God Pan (1890) depicted the rise of blasphemous atavis- tic forces, dragging modern man down into erotic madness and disintegration. That “decadence” tapped into a deep, ever-present well of Weltschmerz is evidenced by the popularity it maintained well beyond the fi n de siècle. For example, Machen’s grotesque story, as well as his many others, enjoyed a revival in the United States in the 1920s, and at the same time, decadent pastiches like Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922) were still shocking enough to attract the attention of the authorities. Yet a decade before Huysmans’ dangerous book appeared, not to mention its train of epigones, a different kind of fi n de siècle had started brewing in, of all

611 — Gary Lachman — places, New York’s East Side. In Irving Place on 13 September 1875, three people came together to found an occult movement that would exert a profound infl uence, not only on modern spirituality and esotericism, but on practically the whole of modern culture itself. Two of the three were men: William Quan Judge and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, both with distinguished careers behind them. But the third, female member of this triumvirate was the real centre of attraction. Before she put her considerable stamp on practically all aspects of modern spirituality, the eccentric Russian Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (born Helena von Hahn, 1831–91) had had an incredible roller-coaster ride of a life. There are varying reports of her activities prior to 1874, when it becomes possible to independently corroborate accounts of her exploits, and much controversy surrounds them, but as far as the story goes, H. P. B., as she was called, must rank as one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth or practically any other century. She claimed to have travelled widely across Europe, the Near East, North and South America, India, Tibet, North Africa, and other points, at a time when such travel, especially by a solitary woman, was exceptional or, in the case of Tibet, unheard of. She claimed to have met “Red Indians” and journeyed across the Midwest in a covered wagon in the 1850s. In 1867 she fought with Garibaldi on the barricades against the Papal army and the French at the battle of Mentana, and became friends with Mazzini. In 1871 she survived the wreck of the Eumonia, a sea disaster that in its day was as famous as the Titanic. She worked as a medium in Cairo, ran an artifi cial fl ower factory, taught piano, and in her spare time wrote articles, essays, and short stories for several newspapers and magazines. And these are just some of the stories. Again, much controversy surrounds these claims – especially the journeys to Tibet – but even if only half of what Blavatsky claimed was true, she still deserves respectful recognition (Washington pp. 32–33). It was in her capacity as a medium that Blavatsky met Colonel Olcott, at the farm of the Eddy brothers in Chittenden, Vermont in 1874. Olcott, who was interested in spiritualism, was covering a series of spiritualist phenomena occurring at the Eddys’ farm for the New York Daily Graphic, and H. P. B. went there with the intention of meeting him. Although today it seems, at best, a marginal pursuit on the fringes of the mainstream in the mid-nineteenth century, spiritualism was immensely popular, both in the United States and Europe. Its offi cial starting point was 1848. In March of that year, two girls, Margaretta and Kate Fox, of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. Soon others discovered they could do the same, and the age of spiritualism had begun. The belief in and practice of communicating with the dead became so widespread that one writer speaks of an “invasion of the spirit people” (Wilson pp. 73–108). In 1872, two years before Helena met Henry, spiritualism had even got into American politics, when the medium and psychic healer Victoria Woodhull ran for President – the fi rst woman to do so – as a candidate for the Equal Rights Party, on a spiritualist, free love, feminist, and socialist platform. Needless to say she didn’t win. Blavatsky and Olcott’s meeting led to a lasting, if often stormy, friendship and collaboration, the central result of which was the founding, mentioned above, with William Quan Judge, of the Theosophical Society in September 1875. Arising out of the spiritualist movement and responding to the sense of meaninglessness created by the increasing dominance of materialist science – especially in the form of Darwinian

612 — New Age fin de siècle — evolution, and the belief in the inevitable “heat death” of the universe predicted by the second law of thermodynamics – Theosophy (“the wisdom of the gods”) provided a kind of secular religion that in its heyday attracted some of the most infl uential people of the time. It was generally devoted to reviving the “lost” knowledge and wisdom of the ancients that, its members believed, exceeded both contemporary science and religion in insight and profundity, and exploring the hidden, occult character of human life and the cosmos. Some of its early converts included Thomas Edison and Abner Doubleday, the Civil War hero and purported inventor of baseball. Later Theosophists included the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian; the composer Scriabin; the poet W. B. Yeats; the novelist Jack London; the fi rst Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru; and the Zen Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki, to name a few. Although attracting much initial attention, bolstered by the publication in 1877 of Blavatsky’s enormous Isis Unveiled, which we can see as the fi rst major work in the “ancient wisdom” genre still popular today, by 1879, Blavatsky and Olcott had moved their base from New York to India. For its fi rst fi ve years on the sub- continent, Theosophy enjoyed unqualifi ed success, attracting many infl uential recruits and publishing its highly popular magazine, The Theosophist. This success was in no small part due to the founders’ very vocal embrace of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and culture – in 1880 both Blavatsky and Olcott formally became Buddhists by taking pansil in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) – and their equally vocal criticism of the British Raj and the Christian missionary effort. Then, in 1884 – that year again – a twofold disaster struck. Some disgruntled employees accused Blavatsky of faking the paranormal phenomena she produced in order to secure belief in the hidden adepts or “Mahatmas” whose agent she claimed to be; these phenomena consisted chiefl y of “letters” from the Mahatmas that materialized out of thin air. And on the heels of these revelations, made public through a Christian missionary magazine, a report for the Society of Psychical Research by their investigator Richard Hodgson corroborated the charges of fraud, and concluded that H. P. B. was pos- sibly a Russian spy – but was certainly “one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors of history” (Cranston p. xvii). Although both the initial charges of fraud and Hodgson’s report were highly contested – indeed, in 1986 the SPR itself withdrew Hodgson’s report as unreliable – Blavatsky’s reputation and health suffered as a result of the claims (Cranston p. xvii; Hastings). The Theosophical Society itself, however, minimized its connection with her and was relatively unshaken by the scandal. Leaving India in 1885, Blavatsky wandered in Europe until 1887, when she settled in London. Here she spent her last years completing another enormous work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), purporting to be a vast commentary on seven stanzas from the mysterious and, to most scholarship, unknown Book of Dzyan, a work depicting the hidden history of mankind and the cosmos, written in the forgotten language of Senzar. Blavatsky attracted a new group of followers, among them the Fabian and Socialist Annie Besant, who abandoned her political activities to become H. P. B.’s closest champion. With the death of Colonel Olcott in 1907, Besant would become the head of the Theosophical Society, a position she maintained until her own death in 1933. Blavatsky herself died of Bright’s disease and general exhaustion in 1891, leaving behind a vast body of work, an international

613 — Gary Lachman — organization, and enough controversy to keep her devotees and critics busy for more than a century.

*** Soon into its running the Theosophical Society established a “mission statement” that continues to inspire its members and fellow travellers today:

1 To form the nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour. 2 The study of ancient and modern religions, philosophies and sciences, and the demonstration of the importance of such study. 3 The investigation of the unexplained laws of nature and the psychical powers latent in man (Cranston p. xviii).

Without making the “strong” argument that H. P. B. and Theosophy were the sole source of what I’m calling the “New Age fi n de siècle,” a look at what followed in her considerable wake – Blavatsky was a large woman and at one point tipped the scales at 232 pounds – makes clear that very little escaped her seminal infl uence. That infl uence continues today, and anyone who meditates, is interested in Eastern wisdom and religion, thinks about their past lives, contemplates their chakras or astral body, or considers themselves a member of the “counter culture” has, in a very real sense, Madame Blavatsky to thank for this. Blavatsky herself is an excellent meeting place for the various pursuits and interests that made up the New Age fi n de siècle; she had, as it were, several fi ngers in an assortment of “alternative” pies. The following is a brief account of some of the central themes of the more positive, optimistic fi n de siècle that, in one way or another, had their roots in Blavatsky and Theosophy and which continue in various forms today.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH AND ALTERED STATES When Blavatsky was investigated by the Society for Psychical Research, that organization itself was in its infancy. Founded in 1882 in England by the classical scholar F. W. H. Myers, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, and the psychologist Edmund Gurney, it arose out of the fascination with spiritualism and the decline of the Church that characterized the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on what we would call “paranormal” phenomena, the initial motive for forming the society was the belief that “objective and intelligent investigation” into these matters “could provide answers to the troubling metaphysical questions of the time” (Blum p. 41). Those “troubling metaphysical questions” were born out of the rise of rationalist thought and the inroads it was making into traditionally religious concerns. For men like Myers, Sidgwick, and Gurney, and many others, the increasingly polarized debates between science and religion – emblemized most emphatically by the famous battle between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in 1860 – left little middle ground between blind faith and aggressive agnosticism. While traditional religion seemed increasingly unable to provide a believable account of human existence, the ever-triumphant rationalist view was heading towards a “non-moral

614 — New Age fin de siècle — universe,” and declared that the existential questions of human existence – the mysteries of life and death and of good and evil – were either nonsense or unanswerable. With religion outgrown and science dismissive, Myers and his fellows wondered if the evidence for ghosts, spirits, precognition, telepathy (a term Myers coined), clair- voyance, and other “psychical” phenomena might help throw light on “the actual truth as to the destiny of man” (Blum p. 43). The central question regarding the “destiny of man” was that of life after death. As science secured more and more of the territory of “truth” from religion, the idea that there was some existence beyond the grave seemed increasingly doubtful, and this undermined the rest of religion’s edifi ce, including its moral and ethical com- mands. Myers and others believed that the alleged messages from the spirit world conveyed in séances, automatic writing, apparitions, dreams, and other ways might, if objectively studied, provide some evidence in support of, if not immortality, then at least some suggestion of a consciousness independent of the body. This could show that the strict materialist view was inadequate. Today most scientists and intellectuals shy away from any public admission to anything other than the strict materialist view, and many of them go out of their way to deny any spiritual or metaphysical character to reality. But in the fi n de siècle this was not the case. Soon after its inception, the SPR drew into its ranks many of the most infl uential minds of the time, such as Alfred Russel Wallace, co-“discoverer” of the theory of evolution; the physicists William Barrett and Lord Rayleigh; the philosopher and British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour; the physiologist Charles Richet; the philosopher Henri Bergson; and the psychologist and philosopher William James. James straddled the twin, related concerns of psychical research and investigations into the phenomenology of mysticism and “altered states of consciousness”, a pursuit that Myers himself followed in his posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). In this gargantuan, two-volume work, Myers developed his own theory of the “unconscious” or “subliminal” mind, in advance of Freud, and his ideas infl uenced fellow psychologists such as James, Pierre Janet, Théodore Flournoy, and C. G. Jung. James agreed with Myers that any account of human life must include evidence from “abnormal” psychological states, such as mediumship and mystical experience. In his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James argued that personal experience was a more valid “proof” of God or religion than any theology, dogma, or abstract system, and a good deal of the book is devoted to examining the evidence of various “mystical” experiences. James himself had more than one mystical experience. Perhaps his most famous one was that occasioned by his use of nitrous oxide that, among other things, helped him to understand the philosopher Hegel (Melechi pp. 20–24). Under the effect of the gas, James saw “depth beyond depth of truth” and recognized that “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the fi lmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different”. “No account of the universe in its totality can be fi nal”, James said, “which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” (James p. 305) James, like Myers and others at the time, argued that the increasingly dominant rationalist view, based on only one form of consciousness, was indeed disregarding these other forms wilfully. It isn’t surprising that, in the 1960s, when many of the

615 — Gary Lachman — concerns of Theosophy and the “New Age fi n de siècle” were being rediscovered, James was conscripted by the LSD advocate Timothy Leary as an early pioneer of what Leary and others at the time called the “psychedelic revolution”. And the current exploration of altered states through the use of a variety of substances, such as the powerful South American hallucinogen ayahuasca, owes much to James’ own self-experiments in the fi n de siècle. James acknowledged the diffi culty in retaining much of the “truth” he perceived in his mystical states, but one insight did remain. The essence of it, James said, was “reconciliation”. “It is as if the opposites of the world”, he wrote, “whose contra- dictoriness and confl ict make all of our diffi culties and troubles, were melted into unity.” (James p. 306) One philosopher of mysticism that James drew on in his refl ections was the Canadian R. M. Bucke, whose book Cosmic Consciousness (1901) is a kind of mystical riposte to the bleak concerns of Nordau’s Degeneration. Bucke argued that, rather than sinking into the slime of degeneracy as Nordau believed was imminent – in a kind of racial entropy – mankind was on the contrary giving birth to a new type of human being, one who possessed what Bucke called “cosmic consciousness”, a permanent awareness of the kind of “unity” James and others glimpsed only briefl y. Cosmic consciousness, for Bucke, is “a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man” (Bucke p. 1). It is a “consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe” (Bucke p. 3.). Among other insights brought to Bucke by his own experience of cosmic consciousness was the fact that “the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence” and “that the soul of man is immortal”, realizations that would have eased the anxieties of Myers and many others at the time (Bucke p.10). These revelations led Bucke to a wholly optimistic vision of the future. “The immediate future of our race”, Bucke believed, was “indescribably hopeful” (Bucke p. 4). Bucke based some of his optimism on the kind of technological vision that H. G. Wells was just beginning to make popular, but its main drive was evolutionary. Bucke believed that the growth of cosmic consciousness was a natural outcome of evolution, and his book is made up for the most part of accounts of earlier “sports”, individuals such as Buddha, Jesus, Plotinus, and more recent fi gures like William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Bucke’s contemporary Edward Carpenter, who embodied the new faculty. Yet while Bucke’s account of cosmic consciousness falls more or less within Darwinian lines, its implication of a “new race” fi t in with Theosophy’s speculation on a similar development, and with some of Blavatsky’s spawn it was wedded to Nietzsche’s idea of a coming Übermensch or “superman”. Blavatsky believed that a “new race” was coming into existence – an idea she borrowed from Edward Bulwer- Lytton’s early science fi ction novel The Coming Race (1871) – and that it would appear in America (Blavatsky p. 445).

OCCULTISM Two of the most inﬂ uential adherents to the idea of an “evolution of consciousness” came, not from the psychological or biological camps, but out of the Theosophical fold: the Russian writer and philosopher P. D. Ouspensky and the English editor and essayist A. R. Orage. Both united the idea to the tradition of occultism that Blavatsky herself, more than anyone else, reviviﬁ ed in the late nineteenth century.

616 — New Age fin de siècle —

By the end of the century, occult “undergrounds” were thriving in practically all the major cities of Europe, with London, Paris, and St Petersburg setting the fashion for the rest. When W. B. Yeats visited Blavatsky in her home in Holland Park, London in 1888–89, he had already helped to found the Dublin Hermetic Order and the Dublin Theosophical Lodge, and had attended more than one séance. Yeats’ pragmatic approach to occult studies soon led to his being asked to leave the Theosophical Society – which was heavy on theory but thin on practice – but he soon after joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, probably the most well- known magical group of the fi n de siècle, whose members included the notorious dark magician Aleister Crowley. Crowley’s explorations in consciousness can be seen as an expression of the positive side of the fi n de siècle, but his famously extrav- agant and excessive life style, rife with sex, drugs, and assorted perversions, not to mention his Swinburnesque poetry, put him also in the company of the decadents. Another fi n-de-siècle fi gure who spanned the decadent and optimist divide was the writer M. P. Shiel, whose lapidary style and fl amboyant ideas make him a peculiarly unique voice. His early work Prince Zaleski (1895) tapped the growing taste for eccentric detectives inaugurated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – and Conan Doyle himself was familiar with Theosophy and became a spiritualist. Shiel’s eponymous character, however, solves his cases through hashish intoxication and never leaves his “vast palace of the older world” fi lled with “barbaric gorgeous- ness”. He is a kind of Des Esseintes, the anti-hero of Huysmans’ À Rebours. Yet Shiel’s work is fi lled with speculations about the “superman”, and in his last novel, The Young Men Are Coming (1937), in which extraterrestrials trigger a “youth movement” dedicated to eradicating the “tired and irrational society of the Old Men”, Shiel’s evolutionary vision is expressed in a troubling, semi-fascist form. Paris seemed relatively immune to Theosophy’s call, but the French already had a long tradition of a Catholic occultism (Godwin). Eliphas Levi, whose colourful books on Kabbalah and magic were a major infl uence on Blavatsky, had been a defrocked priest, and a distinctly Parisian occult milieu developed along its own lines. One portal to these mysteries was Edmond Bailly’s bookshop in the rue de la Chausée d’Antin, which numbered among its clientele Huysmans, the playwright Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the poet and drug addict Stanislas de Guaita, the Freemason Gérard Encausse, the composer Erik Satie, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the artist Odilon Redon, and the occultist “Sar” Merodack Péladan. Péladan was the founder of the famous Salon de la Rose-Croix, and at its fi rst gathering in 1892, Satie’s Trois Sonneries de la Rose + Croix were fi rst performed. Another composer associated with the salon was Claude Debussy. Alchemy formed a large part of the Parisian occult fi n de siècle, and a remarkable document of “alchemical Paris” at the time is August Strindberg’s fascinating Inferno (1898), based on the posthumously published From An Occult Diary (1963). The alchemical milieu Strindberg occupied carried on well past the fi n de siècle, and was centred again on another bookshop, this time the Librairie du Merveilleux run by Pierre Dujols and Alexandre Thomas (Dubois). Much of what was de rigueur in Paris made its way, as was usual, to Russia, and of all the occult capitals of the fi n de siècle, St Petersburg was perhaps the most frenetic. In Russia’s “Silver Age” (1890–1914), occultism was the height of fashion, and a variety of outré activities turned St Petersburg and also Moscow into hotbeds

617 — Gary Lachman — of mysticism, magic, and erotic extravagance, in which the dark concerns of the decadent fi n de siècle mixed with the forward looking optimism of the early “New Age” movement. This, we remember, was the age that produced Rasputin. On the dark side, an effl orescence of satanic imagery and themes fl ooded the cultural streams, and practically everyone engaged in creative work of some kind at the time was touched by the Devil’s hooked claw, a development most clearly seen in the career of the novelist and poet Valery Briusov. The more positive occult presence was felt in the infl uence of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian Goethe scholar turned spiritual teacher. Before founding his own esoteric movement, Anthroposophy, in 1912, Steiner was the most impressive Theosophical lecturer in Europe. Steiner, who is best known today as the founder of Waldorf Education, made a profound impact on the “God Seekers”, Russia’s religiously driven intelligentsia, including fi gures like the writer Dimitri Merzhkovksy and the poet Zinaida Hippius. So great was Steiner’s appeal that, when the 1905 revolution forced him to cancel a series of lectures in Russia, they were rescheduled for the next year in Paris, the exile capital of Europe. One Russian thinker bitten by the Theosophical bug, yet critical of his compatri- ots’ devilish pursuits, was the journalist and novelist P. D. Ouspensky. Although an important thinker in his own right, Ouspensky is today best known as the chief inter- preter of another spiritual teacher to emerge from the Russian fi n de siècle, G. I. Gurdjieff. Ouspensky cut his esoteric teeth in the Theosophical Society, and in 1912 he published a work that remains an exhilarating, inspiring, and optimistic tour de force of metaphysics. In Tertium Organum, Ouspensky brought together a dazzling array of anti-materialist, anti-reductionist thought that still packs an impressive phil- osophical punch. Ranging from refl ections on Theosophical themes like the astral body to the “fourth dimension” of Charles Hinton – whose “hypercubes”, a visual- ization aid meant to trigger perception of “higher dimensions”, were highly popular in the fi n de siècle – Ouspensky’s central insight is the need to develop a more intense form of consciousness, precisely the kind of cosmic consciousness that R. M. Bucke had envisioned. But where Bucke believed that cosmic consciousness was a natural development of evolution, and would eventually become the norm for the entire race, Ouspensky’s Nietzschean sensibilities rejected this democratic notion (Ouspensky 1981 pp. 274–78). Instead, Ouspensky believed that the new form of consciousness would appear only in individuals who subjected themselves to the culture and disci- pline necessary to produce it. Cosmic consciousness for him wasn’t something that would appear automatically, but had to be achieved through effort. Another Theosophist who saw a new form of consciousness on the rise was A. R. Orage. Like Ouspensky, Orage would become a spokesman for Gurdjieff. (Although it is unclear if Gurdjieff ever offi cially joined the society – as both Ouspensky and Orage did – it is safe to say that his own “Fourth Way” school grew out of Theosophical soil.) In 1904, before he came into contact with either Ouspensky (whom he met in 1914) or Gurdjieff (whom he met in 1921), Orage gave a series of lectures to the Leeds and Manchester branches of the Theosophical Society on “Consciousness: Animal, Human, Superman”, later published as a book. For Orage, our everyday human consciousness is “inferior to superman consciousness, just as an embryo in an egg is inferior to the bird fl ying in the air”. Orage agreed with Ouspensky that the superman is a product of effort, an imaginative one: “evolution

618 — New Age fin de siècle — is altogether an imaginative process. You become what you have been led to imagine yourselves to be” (Orage p. 68). Like Ouspensky, Orage’s Nietzschean sensibility soon distanced him from rank and fi le Theosophists. His Nietzsche and the Dionysian Spirit of the Age (1906) was the fi rst systematic introduction to Nietzsche in English and was praised by H. G. Wells (Mairet p. 33). Orage’s periodical New Age, which he edited from 1907 to 1924, was the premier clearing house and sounding board for a dizzying array of “progressive” ideas: vegetarianism, arts and craft, back-to-nature, anti-vivisection, Rational Dress, socialism, Fabianism, feminism, Eastern religion, and a motley assortment of other “new” notions, including Theosophy; before editing the New Age, Orage’s main literary outlet was the Theosophical Review. Orage had an enviable ability to synthesize the medley of ideas that populated his eclectic mind into a point of view that not only sidestepped the contradiction between, say, Blavatsky and Bernard Shaw, or H. G. Wells and Plato, but made their unlikely union eminently reasonable. Orage published Shaw, Wells, and G. K. Chesterton, among others, and is most remembered today – outside of Gurdjieffean circles – as the discoverer of the New Zealander short story writer Katharine Mansfi eld. It was the New Age under his editorship that most clearly typifi ed the immensely stimulating blend of progressive ideas, evolutionary vision, mystical doctrines, and radical lifestyles that, not surprisingly, characterized the fi n-de-siècle New Age.

COUNTER CULTURE One progressive fi gure who spanned the spheres of consciousness and the “new life” was Edward Carpenter, earlier referred to as one of Bucke’s examples of a contemporary carrier of cosmic consciousness. Carpenter was a poet, social philosopher, and what we would call an early gay activist, as well as a member of the Fellowship of the New Life (founded in 1883), whose other members included the sexologist Havelock Ellis, the feminist Edith Lees, and the animal-rights activist Henry Stephens Salt. Dedicated to the cultivation of a “perfect character”, the fellowship aimed to transform society by setting an example of “the simple life” as expressed in the social ideas of Leo Tolstoy. With their aim of working towards the common good, they shared in Theosophy’s goal of achieving “a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour”. The Fabian Society was a later offshoot of the fellowship. Carpenter was one of the most important and infl uential fi gures of the turn of the century, and he shared in at least three central themes of the New Age fi n de siècle: the idea of an “evolution of consciousness”; progressive social reform; and “the journey to the East”, which we will look at in the next section. In From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta (1892), about his journey to Ceylon and India, Carpenter has a chapter entitled “Consciousness Without Thought”, in which he describes his experience of a “new” form of consciousness which he believed humankind was evolving into; hence his inclusion in Bucke’s book. Carpenter’s biggest impact at the time, however, was through his work Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889), which updated Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” and expressed an early form of the 1960s philosophy of “dropping out”. For Carpenter – as for the hippies – civilization was a “disease” that human society passed through; its “cure” was “getting back to

619 — Gary Lachman — nature”, “the simple life”, a closer connection to the land, and a closer acquaintance with our own inner world. Carpenter presaged much contemporary progressive thought, writing at length on environmental concerns, animal rights, gay rights, organic farming, vegetarianism, feminism, anti-capitalism, and dress reform, and advocating what he called “mystical socialism”. Anyone who enjoys wearing sandals in the summertime has Carpenter to thank for it, as he was the ﬁ rst to popularize their use in Europe. Another dress reform advocate, the Theosophist Anna Kingsford, was also a vehement anti-vivisectionist. Her antipathy to the practice was so great that Kingsford claimed to have killed several vivisectionists by sheer will power. How she squared this with the Christian mystical beliefs that led to her leaving Theosophy to form her own Hermetic Society is unclear (Washington p. 73). A more straightforward Theosophical expression of progressive social ideas began around the same time in Switzerland. In 1889, Alfred Pioda, a member of the Swiss Parliament and a devoted Theosophist, planned a “Theosophical cloister” in the sleepy village of Ascona, on the shores of the beautiful Lake Maggiore. Ascona by this time already had a radical background: in 1873 one of its residents was the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (ironic, as today it is an upmarket holiday resort). The cloister was to be set on a hill named Monescia, overlooking the lake, and Pioda’s collaborators in the plan were the Swedish countess Constance Wachmeister, Madame Blavatsky’s companion; Franz Hartmann, a Theosophist, German occultist, and translator of the Bhagavad Gita; and the Dutch novelist, psychiatrist, spiritualist, and dream researcher Frederik van Eeden, who, in 1913, coined the term “lucid dream”. Although Pioda’s plan did not materialize, another “alternative community” did soon take root on Monescia. In 1900 Ida Hoffman, a Montenegran piano teacher, and Henri Oedenkoven, the son of a wealthy Belgian industrialist, rechristened the hill Monte Verità, the “Mountain of Truth”, and on it founded a “co-operative vegetarian colony”. The site soon attracted scores of esoteric and cultural notables, eager to escape the stress-ridden life of the big city and relax in the beautiful near- Mediterranean micro-climate of Italian Switzerland’s Ticino. Well in advance of the “love generation”, anarchists, vegetarians, nature enthusiasts, free-love advocates, Theosophists, psychoanalysts, poets, painters, occultists, and philosophers who rejected an increasingly materialist mainstream society were drawn to the curiously spiritual atmosphere surrounding Ascona. The novelist Hermann Hesse, the dancer Isadora Duncan, the choreographer Rudolf Laban, the radical Freudian Otto Gross, the philosopher Ludwig Klages, the occultist and spy Theodor Reuss, the “spiritual scientist” Rudolf Steiner, the sociologist Max Weber, the novelist D. H. Lawrence, and the anarchist Erich Mühsam (later murdered by the Nazis) were among the many who came to participate in the “new life”, forming an at times chaotic attempt at actualizing Theosophy’s call for “a universal brotherhood of humanity”. Perhaps the most characteristic ﬁ gure associated with Monte Verità was the Naturmensch Gustav Gräser, known simply as “Gusto”. A poet and painter deter- mined to cure himself of “civilization”, Gusto made his own clothes and plucked food from the trees, lived in a cave with his wife and several children, made his own furni- ture from tree limbs and branches, and did his best to, as we would say, “stay off the grid”. During a visit to Monte Verità to take the cure for his nerves, Hermann Hesse was so impressed by Gusto that he submitted to his regimen. This meant exposing his

620 — New Age fin de siècle — naked body to the elements, and Hesse later wrote of being burned by the sun, drenched by rain, and having his skin torn by thorns (Freedman pp. 136–37). The original Monte Verità experiment ended in 1920, when Hoffman and Oekendoven moved to South America, but in the 1930s it received a new lease on esoteric life when the English-Dutch socialite Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn opened her nearby Casa Gabriella as the location for the famous Eranos Conferences, presided over by the psychologist C. G. Jung. Fröbe-Kapteyn had originally planned for the audito- rium she built to be used by the Theosophist Alice Bailey. Bailey, however, declined, saying that the area was associated with black magic and witchcraft (Green).

THE JOURNEY TO THE EAST Perhaps the greatest debt that the New Age fi n de siècle and our own New Age owe to Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy is the dissemination and popularization of the “wisdom of the East”. Although interest in Indian religion and philosophy had been present since William Jones’ groundbreaking Sanskrit studies in the late eighteenth century, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott were the fi rst highly publicized Westerners to proclaim a deep appreciation of the Hindu and Buddhist cultural heritage and to argue its superiority over that of the West. By the time of their move from New York to fi rst Bombay (Mumbai) and then Adyar, many other Europeans and Americans were making their own “journeys to the East” – the title of a novel by Hermann Hesse, fi rst published in 1932, but popular in the 1960s and early 70s. Hesse himself went to Ceylon in 1911. We’ve seen that Edward Carpenter had made the trek. So did Ouspensky, in 1913, on his “search for the miraculous”. Gurdjieff, the esoteric teacher Ouspensky met at the end of his search – in a Moscow café, not in the mystic East – had made his own journey to Central Asia. Many others did as well, and the idea that lux ex orient soon became a part of mainstream culture. In the early twentieth century it informed pulp fi ction in, to give two examples, the Theosophist Talbot Mundy’s gripping tales of mystical adventure, such as King of the Khyber Rifl es (1916), and Walter B. Gibson’s character the Shadow, who learned his ability to “cloud men’s minds” in Tibet, where Madame Blavatsky herself perfected her occult powers. Less politically correct, by contemporary standards, were the ripping thrillers featuring the fi endish Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer that fi rst appeared in 1913, in which the East is seen as the source of the ominous “Yellow Peril” advancing on the West. More middlebrow mystical Eastern fare was later provided by James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), which introduced the world to Shangri-La, the hidden monastery in Tibet (fashioned after Blavatsky’s claims to living in one) and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944), whose title is taken from a verse in the Katha-Upanishad. Both books were made into highly successful fi lms. To chart the spread of Eastern ideas and practices in the West begun by Madame Blavatsky would require a book in itself. Suffi ce it to say that the many yoga centres, meditation classes, Oriental and Indian medicines, books on Tantra – not to mention the widespread adoption of Tibetan Buddhism in the West – popular today owe their existence to Madame Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott, and the other early Theosophists. One clear sign of the global impact of Eastern and Theosophical ideas occurred at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, an early multi-faith event that

621 — Gary Lachman — grew out of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, an early form of the World’s Fair. This was the ﬁ rst formal assembly of representatives of Eastern and Western religions, and among the participants numbered many Theosophists, including Anagarika Dharmapala, the representative of Theravada Buddhism, who had been Blavatsky’s student; W. Q. Judge, head of the American branch of the Theosophical Society and one of the society’s founders; and Annie Besant (Cranston pp. 425–29). The opening speech by Swami Vivekananda is seen by some to mark the beginning of the West’s, and certainly America’s, interest in Indian religion as a vital, living tradition, and not merely an exotic eccentricity. That Buddhists, Jains, Bahá’ís, Muslims, Hindus, and Theosophists could share the platform with Catholics, Protestants, and Jews was, for the time (and still today), a remarkable achievement, and it was precisely the kind of coming together of different faiths that Blavatsky saw as the essence of Theosophy. If she was still hovering around in her astral form and witnessed the gathering, she no doubt felt that her efforts had been worthwhile.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blavatsky, H. P., (1970), The Secret Doctrine, Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, CA. Blum, D., (2007), Ghosthunters, Century, London. Bucke, R. M., (1966), Cosmic Consciousness, E. P. Dutton & Co, New York. Cranston, S., (1993), The Extraordinary Life and Inﬂ uence of Helena Blavatsky, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. Dubois, G., (2006), Fulcanelli and the Alchemical Revival, Destiny Books, Rochester, VT. Freedman, R., (1978), Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis, Pantheon Books, New York. Godwin, J., (1989), The Beginnings of Theosophy in France, Theosophical History Centre, London. Green, M., (1986), Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins: Ascona, 1900–1920, University Press of New England, Hanover and London. Hastings, B., (1937), The Defence of Madame Blavatsky Vol. II, Hastings Press, Sussex. Hawkings, S., (2010), The Grand Design, Bantam Press, London. Hinton, C., (1980), Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles Hinton, Dover, New York. James, W., (1977), The Varieties of Religious Experience, Collier Books, New York. Leary, T., (1965), The Psychedelic Review Vol. 1 No. 5. Mairet, P., (1966), A. R. Orage, University Books, New York. Melechi, A., (1998), Mindscapes: An Anthology of Drug Writings, Mono, West Yorkshire. Orage, A. R., (1974), Consciousness: Animal, Human, Superman, Samuel Weiser, New York. Ouspensky, P. D., (1955), Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, Heritage House, New York. — (1981), Tertium Organum, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Symons, A., (1958), The Symbolist Movement in Literature, E. P. Dutton & Co, New York. Washington, P., (1993), Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, Secker & Warburg, London. Wilson, C., (1987), Afterlife, Doubleday, New York.

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