The Occult - A History by Colin Wilson (1971).pdf - Colin Wilson - morefaya2006

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

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

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

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