[Figure: The vampire of this 19th century Victorian engraving reveals the strong sexual element present in vampire lore, his foreboding presence disguised with a "kiss."]
TAT Journal Issue 8
TAT Journal is a meeting place...
We who are interested in philosophy, esotericism, depth psychology and other pioneer ventures of the mind and spirit find it hard to get together with people who will not only understand us, but who will work with us and exchange ideas. For this reason we invite all of our readers to feel a part of our quarterly forum and write in with their contributions.
PERSPECTIVE
Stories of vampires, demons and exorcisms are as popular in novels and movies -
the folk-tales of today - as they have ever been. And while the
twentieth-century view of reality relegates such accounts to the realm of
fiction or superstition, many people recognize in these fantastic creatures a
force that is truly present in the world, not necessarily "evil" but
"irrational," the source of compulsive behavior and the human urge for
self-destruction.
Everyone is supposed to know now that there are no such things as spirits, discarnate entities that afflict the living. Mental illness is no longer the province of the priest, but of the psychiatrist; and there are many recognized categories of psychosis for which there are no cures but a growing pharmacopoeia of palliatives. Inevitably, however, material science is left empty-handed in its wrestling match with the immaterial mind. And so the legends persist.
Why is it that we want to hear tales of demons and ghosts, of leprechauns and jinn? Is it simply because we prefer the miraculous to the mundane? Or do the accounts of these strange beings harmonize with the intuition that there are dimensions of reality that are not subject to everyday cognition? And if the human mind is not material, might it not act and be acted upon in a realm beyond the reach of our senses?
Carl Jung's great contribution to psychology was in revealing the myths and legends of our ancestors as being profoundly accurate representations of the functions of the unconscious mind; in that unconscious he found the source of our mythical creatures, given their life by the collective energy of humanity. Jung was not an occultist, but he realized that the ancient traditions about the beings that both tormented and succored men were not nonsense. Do we dare withdraw from the enlightened ignorance of our modern, concrete universe to learn, with Jung, that mankind has long possessed a wisdom about the dangers to which the psyche is exposed in its unseen world?
True mental health is revealed in people today more rarely than ever before, because it is the product of a disciplined and selfless life. The modern reaction to repressive moral codes has created the illusion that humanity can be liberated through self-indulgence; but instead of liberation we experience a dissipation of direction and life-force that leaves the mind lost and defenseless in the dark forest of thought. The old traditions recognized that we are always wandering in that wood, and so taught the people methods of safe passage and protection from attack. The modern view says that there are no creatures and no forest, in fact, no mind - only a body whose reactions can be observed and chemically moderated. Which is really more unbelievable: the mind existing in a world of spirits, or men living in a world without mind?
Cover: Frank Langella from the Broadway play Dracula.
Editor: Paul Cramer
Associate Editor: Mark Jaqua
Production Assistant: Cecy Rose
Printing: Doron Fried
Staff: David Diaman, Keith McWilliams
©1979 TAT Foundation. All rights reserved.
The TAT Foundation is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization established to provide a forum for philosophical and spiritual inquiry on all levels, modeled on the principle that cooperation and interaction with fellow inquirers can expedite one's own investigation. The TAT Foundation is organized to fund and encourage workshops, intensives, Chautauquas, study groups and related services. This journal is one of those services. The intent of the TAT Journal is to promote the goals of the TAT Foundation by providing a readers' forum and writers' exchange.
CONTENTS
Dracula and other fictional vampires grip the popular imagination because they represent the human fascination with sex and death. Martin Riccardo describes vampire legends and beliefs from around the world.
Thoughts from a rare Individual who has used his physical confinemment to seek mental freedom.
The practitioners of magick in ages past may not have been so superstitious and foolish as we now like to believe. Their complex rituals were concentrative methods for leading them into the subconscious mind.
What do you know for sure? Does our mastery of concepts contain any assurance of real knowledge? What Is knowledge? What Is reality?
Modern theories of mental Illness may explain abnormal human behavior less adequately than do traditional beliefs in spirit possession.
A classic account of a life-after-death experience by a man who made the trip and returned.
Richard Rose describes his early investigation Into the confusing varieties of yoga, and his good fortune in encountering the books of Paul Brunton as a guide.
Alkaline vegetables and cold water hygiene are combined in the Waerland's purifying regimen
READER'S FORUM
TAT Journal believes that by helping others you can help yourself. Our Reader's Forum is the best place to "meet" other inquirers and searchers like yourself. TAT wants to help put you in touch with friends you would otherwise not have access to. Contact other TAT Journal readers with your thoughts and ideas, and share your discoveries. Send your letters, comments or articles to TAT Journal, Reader's Forum, P.O. Box 236, Bellaire, Ohio 43906. If you wish to contact someone in the Reader's Forum personally, send your initial correspondence to us in a separate, stamped and unaddressed envelope and we will mail it to the party you choose.
More than One Room?
Apathy and inertia seem to go hand in hand for a great deal of the human race in regards to the nature of their own existence and their relationship to the world. But occasionally throughout the years one will find, as I have, certain individuals who are curious about themselves and seek some understanding of their own nature. Generally, there are two reasons which seem to propel these people into a search:
The first might come as a result of a drug experience or possibly some type of "spiritual" experience. The second may be intuited in one's own daily life dealings possibly symbolized to them through a dream showing them cramped into one room or trying to continuously fit themselves into an old pair of shoes that are no longer big enough for them. Sometimes in the dream there is a doorway leading out of the room or an indication where one might find the correct pair of shoes to put on, and sometimes not.
In regard to this I recently came across a reference in one of the writings of the English psychologist Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, in which he speaks to these experiences indicating some similarities:
"In ancient parables Man is often compared with a house. He lives in the house of his Being. In this house are many rooms on different floors. Each man has a house where he lives with certain typical attitudes, prejudices and habits, usually corresponding to the lowest rooms in himself. He can live in better rooms, yet when he hears something new, something strange, he will return to his old house, unless a very deep impression has been made on him, when he will be lifted into new rooms in the house of his Being, momentarily, only to fall back into his old rooms - that is, into the few rooms probably in the basement, which he usually occupies mentally and emotionally."
He goes on to give an analogy from the New Testament:
"Thus it is said that on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, after the multitude had heard the words of Christ: 'They went every man unto his own house.' (John vii. 53) They did not understand anything new."
In a sense this is pointing at a unique philosophy, an individual philosophy or psychology, different from a general sociology or mass-minded psychology. With the emphasis on the individual, I believe Nicoll speaks to both instances: the one of experiencing the different state of perception and the one of feeling caged in, symbolically intimated in a dream. He indicates that there is a way out but that an individual's own state of mind could keep him from doing so. In other writings, he suggests that peer pressure makes it hard to move on in a new direction.
Colin Wilson, the prolific author of psychology and the occult, has made a similar observation to that of Nicoll's. He has said that mankind's greatest enemy is not death but forgetfulness. "We lose direction too easily," he says. We get a glimpse of another state, another room, but our tendency is to fall back to familiar ways for no other reason than that they are familiar.
There are many writings which indicate a path to these upper rooms, if one begins to look for them, notably the works of Nicoll, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Rose, Jung and others as well as in the records of men and women who have experienced them such as found in Richard Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness and a book full of so-called laymen's experiences entitled Twice-Born Men, the author of which I don't remember.
As I believe there is a path out of the jungle of confusion indicated by the works of the men mentioned above, my own personal observations, and of older writings such as the Old and New Testaments or Patanjali's writings, I would be interested in corresponding with anyone of similar interests.
Impressions of Saint Teresa
There are three things helpful to remember when embarking on the somewhat tedious journey through the writings of Teresa of Avila:
Keeping all this in mind, Teresa is still a hard nut to crack. Her writing is at once turgidly emotional and dead arrow detached. She has a sense of humor that cuts through pretense and yet one feels that she is constantly aware of the dangerous path she is treading with the Catholic Church reading over her shoulder.
If you can persevere, however, there are some vividly common-sensible bits to be had here, especially for women. Although she is not writing about the ''Fourth Way'' life, but about the convent existence of unquestioning obedience and belief (or "faith") - she can be uncannily accurate about specific problems of women:
In her descriptions of the states of prayer, progressing from recollection or "the Prayer of Quiet" to "Union," she is marvelously eloquent. The reader must be careful to separate these brief (what can one say?) descriptions from all the "I am a poor woman and a sinner" protestations that usually follow.
She occasionally mentions entities, and there are descriptions of two incidents when she actually saw entities while speaking to persons of low spiritual level. There are numerous cautions about taking advice from people who don't know anything, but who have managed to gain a position of authority on "spiritual matters."
I found that I was never dead certain whether Teresa had actually reached a state of enlightenment or samadhi. But I have more than a sneaking suspicion that she did. She is sly enough to know that she mustn't lay claim to that, however - as she is only a poor, sinful woman, standing in constant need of Jesus Christ (and the entire Catholic hierarchy who speak for Him.) What she writes, she writes to preserve the path for those who would come after her. She went to the trouble to found a more remote and cloistered convent for the few who had the inclination to get on a severe and difficult road with her. There was no other way to do it at that time, for women. (Or men either, for that matter.) I get the distinct impression that she knew exactly what she was doing - her language and religious orientation are simply that of another country in perfectly ghastly times. Teresa of Avila is an enigma... and very adept, I think, at running between the drops of holy water.
WANT TO WRITE TO SOMEONE IN THE READER'S FORUM? Send your initial correspondence in a separate, stamped and unaddressed envelope to this magazine and we will mail it to the party you choose.
The Age of Mutation
The nineteen-eighties will be here in a matter of months. A mere calendar change, you say? Yes, but a pregnantly symbolic one.
There are signs that change is once again in the wind, that we are about to emerge from the long tunnel of collective introversion that was the seventies. We have been operating in private, many of us, each getting our individual head together, or trying to. And now history is about to raise the curtain on the act we've each been preparing for the past five to ten years, to call us back to center stage, ready or not. What might the new play be like? To know that, we first have to find out who the players are. Where is the creative minority, the new avant garde that can spark the fires of change in the years ahead? Is there really someone waiting in the wings? And why haven't we heard from them sooner?
Perhaps because, as intimated, they spent the seventies going through a collective identity crisis. In the sixties, strictly intuitive criteria were used by the vanguard minority to identify themselves. They weren't particular about labels, and used the old fifties term "hippie" until Tim Leary declared its death in 1967. After that, they ironically accepted society's designation of them as "freaks," and wore the weirdling epithet like a badge of honor. Needless to say, there was no one around with a rational definition of what a freak was, though sometimes it was said that a freak was a person who had "cosmic consciousness." As for what cosmic consciousness is, and what its implications might be... "Well, y'know, it's like, a certain state, a state of mind, and it makes you do freaky things, and it makes you so different from the straights."
If that was the case, then it must have been a very unstable state, judging by the vast numbers of freaks who went straight after the seventies rolled 'round. For those who did not - who perhaps tried but found they could not - it's therefore not surprising that the seventies were such a confusing time. If their freak-hood was a state of mind, then why couldn't they change it? Why couldn't they become hip capitalists or contented rural farmers or successful inner-peace promoters like so many of their former comrades? Could it be that for some, this freak thing goes much deeper? My God, maybe it's inscribed in our genes or something, or carved in our neurons.
The term "cosmic consciousness" was coined by a Canadian physician who published a book by that title in 1900, the year before his death. His name was Richard M. Bucke, and what he had done was to take the supreme bright idea of nineteenth-century materialist scientism, namely evolution, and combine it with the deepest insights of the Western (and Eastern) spiritual tradition. What he came up with was the conception that the human species is evolving, not just physically and culturally, but psychically. A true son of the Victorian Age could no longer find sufficient meaning in regarding Jesus and Buddha and rest as "religious" fountainheads, for religion and its childish-seeming myths no longer stirred the blood in his veins nor inspired him to see visions. It was no longer satisfactory to label Saint Paul and John of the Cross as "mystics," for mysticism was too unscientific. And Dante and William Blake and Walt Whitman - to call them simply "inspired poets" seemed somehow to miss the point. No, the, great new energy-charged myth of the day was evolution. Could there not be a relevant parable, Bucke speculated, in the process by which the primal horde of ape-men spawned the first humans? Didn't this process involve the early appearance of a few scattered precursors, isolated individuals with a cerebral structure different from the rest, capable of nurturing the newly-dawned spark of sapience? Of course it did, and Bucke concluded that all the best of the avatars, saints, and sacred poets of historical times were likewise precursors, mutants if you will, of the next step in evolution beyond the stage of Homo Sapiens. The change, as previously noted, would be a psychic one, and the inner experience of the cosmically conscious homo superior would be as different from that of his sapient forebears as a man's mind is different from an ape's.
A collective change in consciousness on the part of a small but significant fraction of the prevailing social order - this is what cultural change gets down to. In the recent decades of the twentieth century, this change in consciousness has been explained in many ways: in political terms, in sociological terms, in psychiatric terms, in religious terms, in philosophical terms. Those who are the subjects of the change have variously regarded themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat, the uplifters of humanity, schizophrenics or schizoids, spiritual seekers, philosophic iconoclasts. And this, I believe, marks the heart of the endemic impotence of this particular grouping of people, if group it is: a chronic confusion about identity. Highly individualistic persons come to tentative conclusions in private about themselves and the world, then try to carry their often profound insights and realizations into the public arena in order to seek a harmonious voice, another soul or souls who have likewise recognized the Problem and want to do something about it... and what's the result? Babel. Utter confusion of tongues, and the resultant alienation, one from another, of individuals who obviously have so much in common, perhaps sense it, but cannot penetrate the barrier of labels and alien identities.
All of the old categories, as above, have proven futile, serving only to increase our isolation and promote further confusion. Perhaps it's time to float a new world-view upon the billowing wind, to try on for size an utterly new and historically unproven explanation of who we are and what we're doing here. Perhaps it's time to identify ourselves as psychic mutants.
The theory is that whereas the simian-to-humans transition required millions of years, the time-scale for the new psychic change measures in the thousands. And it has already been going on for anywhere from twenty-six hundred to three thousand years.
Part II of the theory is that for various bio-psychic and socio-economic reasons, the sporadic trickle of mutants who infiltrated the world in previous centuries has in our own time gushed to a veritable torrent, though the actual number is still a tiny minority of the global population.
All right then: who and what is a psychic mutant? How do we differ from the standard homo sapiens?
In order to get a reasonably clear understanding of the complex answer to this difficult question, it's first necessary to put the parent species itself, i.e. homo sapiens, in perspective. For one thing, it's not a finished product - obviously, or we mutants wouldn't be here. But further, it's not complete even in terms of its own constituency, as it were. As the human race is presently constituted, there yet exist massive vestiges of earlier stages of psychic evolution. Indeed, the majority of humanity hardly qualifies for the title "sapient," which implies a centering in the intellectual portion of the individual's being. By contrast, everyday experience reveals that most people are controlled by, and centered in, their emotions; they can properly be said, therefore, to be "sentient" (Latinizing it a bit, we might even speak of "homo sentiens"). Still further down the scale are those remnants of the primal horde who are moved by little else than gross physical sensation; they are centered neither in the head nor the heart, but in the body. There are still many of these nearly pure Cro-Magnons with us today, as witness those numerous individuals whose lives and interests revolve wholly around sports, and the swollen ranks of juvenile (and adult) gangs.
Where, then, is a psychic mutant centered? Every acid graduate knows the answer to that, though chances are he has no words for it save outdated ones, like "soul" or "spirit." More modern attempts to label the fourth quality in our quaternion (instinct-emotion-mind-?) are also unsatisfactory - words like "superconscious." Intuition is a technically correct label, but the word is unsuitable because of its vernacular usage, in which it is heavily associated with emotion and little esteemed. At this early stage, therefore, it seems correct to leave the question of nomenclature open. Somewhere along the line there'll be a winner in the name-the-new-species contest.
Many new, young mutants will come of age in the nineteen-eighties. What are the chances that a significant proportion of them will be able to so identify themselves, to relate enthusiastically to the idea that they are harbingers of a new species? They will arise from every class of the population, realize their inner difference from their fellows, and begin to seek... something. How can they be expected to experience the tingle of recognition on coming into contact with the concept of the psychic mutant, an idea whose place in popular culture has been mostly limited to the literary ghetto of genre science fiction?
The answer is that the gods of synchronicity have so arranged things that the most pregnant social phenomenon of the late seventies is the science-fictionization of the general culture. Star Trek conventions drew thousands, Stars Wars millions, and the most emotion-charged religious symbol of the day is no longer the cross, crescent, or Star of David, but the UFO. In the higher levels of the culture, bold speculators have been busily at work translating all the old spiritual and visionary ideas into a new, if fragmented, mythology of science fictional images. There is little doubt in my mind that the times are exceedingly ripe for the psychic mutant to publicly step forth and declare himself.
There are also signs that the ethic of hyper-egalitarianism, which has been gathering momentum for five hundred years, has crested in our own time. It has accomplished its proper work of heightening sensitivity to human needs and making people on all levels of society aware of everyone's common humanity (from Cro-Magnon to homo superior, all are Homo - all human). But the natural after-effects of this great leveling wave are the primary cause of the hellish decay of the quality of life here at the end of the twentieth century, the great gelatinous tide which, if not reversed, will send Western Civilization the way of Atlantis. We are drowning in a sea of equality, sameness, and lack of excellence. History at this turning-point cries out for an openly elitist movement, one which bases its criteria of human quality not on class or race or sex or nationality or education or refinement, but on the only yardstick which has ever been valid: the internal nature of the individual.
This article is intended to be the briefest of introductions to an enormous new subject. There is no space here to go into detailed explanations of any of the points raised. Hopefully what has been said is sufficiently heuristic to inspire others to turn their thoughts in this direction, and to add their ideas to what has been presented here. Responses can be made through the pages of TAT Forum, or anyone who so desires can write to me personally:
Paranormal Telephone Communications
A newly discovered and immensely important psychic phenomenon, paranormal telephone communications, has opened up to parapsychology an entirely new vista falling into the category of survival phenomena. Briefly, this general phenomenon can be divided into two main varieties: telephone calls representing the dead and calls representing the living. The most important of the two types, I believe, is the first - calls representing the dead - but I must admit that my personal interest in this fascinating field was sparked by the second type.
In 1974 I called my colleague, Mr. Scott Rogo, at about noon, but the telephone was answered by a renter whose voice I knew perfectly well. He said that Scott was not at home and finally answered that he would pass on my message. Time passed but I received no return call and finally at about 6:00 p.m. I called again, but this time Scott answered. He had not received any message and had only been away from his house for about twenty minutes at the time that I called. His renter had actually been in a city sixty miles distant, had given blood at a blood bank, had a receipt for this donation and was accompanied by a witness. Only two keys to the house were available, one kept by Scott and the other by the renter.
Quite a number of telephonic cases have been collected and studied, some in the form of a call to the living receiver and some providing answers by apparently living people; but in all cases it can be demonstrated that the "living voice" on the line, representing a person quite alive, did not in fact originate from that person. When possible fraud and sheer chance have been eliminated, these cases are perhaps even more puzzling than are those cases representing the dead, and to complicate the field even more there are still other extremely rare types of voices which fall into different categories.
Voices representing the dead are the most plentiful and can be divided into a number of sub-varieties. Some are restricted to a very few words; some offer speakers who do not seem to realize that there is someone on the line listening. Others give fairly long communications and some feature more than one speaker. A few illustrative examples will be given.
"My Aunt Ruth died in a Methodist hospital in Houston, Texas in January, 1975. A day or so after her funeral my father, Dr. C.M. Taylor, received a phone call at his home. It was 'Aunt Ruth' but her voice was so faint on the line that Dad couldn't understand what she was trying to say. He told her so and she replied, 'I can barely hear you too, Mack. (Mack was the name she always called him.) Hang up and I'll call you back.' He did but she never called back."
"(They) had lived in the same neighborhood for 35 years and Dad and Aunt Ruth knew each other about as well as two people can. To this day Dad is completely certain that it was Aunt Ruth's voice on the phone - l just confirmed this over the phone this morning."
"Dad is a conservative Texas rancher and dentist who has never had anything to do with spiritual matters..." Dr. C.M. Taylor confirmed the written account.
This case is representative of those cast in a simpler form: a few words said, recognition of the speaker's voice, etc. Some examples have been confirmed and others rest on the statements of the narrators. A more complex case highly condensed will follow.
A family who were friends of Mrs. X moved away from the building which both families had occupied; several years later, Mrs. X's son said that a call had been received from "Carol," who said that she would call back. The next day the boy again reported that "Carol" had once more called and on being asked for her new number said that it didn't matter. Mrs. X called a mutual friend, gained the phone number of her distant friend, called and was shocked to hear from her husband that "Carol" had died about four days before. Mrs. X's two sons, one of whom had received the calls, confirmed in writing that the incident as described had definitely taken place.
Telephone cases occasionally include more than one voice on the line, a most important point with a very pro-survival implication. In Tomorrow, Summer, 1954, a case was described by the heraldry authority, Julian Franklyn. His telephone had been misbehaving in a curious way and then he received a call from his brother-in-law who possessed a most distinctive voice. While the first voice was speaking, a second voice broke in remarking that Franklyn was speaking to his brother-in-law and that he would call back. This promise was not kept, but when Franklyn's wife returned home she said that the brother-in-law had died that morning.
Still another example describing sounds other than words spoken by the caller was described in Light, June 19, 1931: "Recently a lady, whose integrity I can vouch, rang up on the telephone from her flat another lady in the London area without previous arrangement.... They started a normal conversation but were quickly interrupted by a voice which broke in announcing its possessor as a defunct individual, and accompanied by noises which were both unpleasant and disturbing. My friend asked the lady at the other end of the phone if she also heard the voices and the interruption. She did and they agreed to ring off.
"Later on in the evening the call was renewed and the same interruption occurred. They abandoned the 'phone for the evening. There has been no recurrence of the phenomenon... " Another variety of abnormal telephone communication was given to the National Inquirer, March 21, 1978 by the noted attorney Melvin Belli. Mr. Belli stated that a good friend, Suey Ng was alive and following his profession teaching English. Belli received a telephone call from an Oakland undertaker saying that his friend was dead and would be buried the following Thursday at ten o'clock. The lawyer called at the undertaking establishment for the funeral and found that his friend was apparently living for there was to be no funeral. To confirm that his friend was actually living Belli telephoned him from San Francisco and to his relief, if puzzlement, found that he was indeed living.
Suey Ng did die, however, and his funeral was performed one week later at ten o'clock at the undertaking establishment which had been the apparent point of origin of the original mysterious telephone call. In this case a precognitive communication was made by an obviously paranormal voice representing itself as a living person.
To anticipate the obvious, I know of two examples of such communications which were received on "ansafones." One case was described to me by Richard Sheargold, the noted parapsychologist and foremost English investigator into the tape-recorded voice phenomenon. He had been involved in a case in 1975 in which a message representing a non-living woman was found on the ansafone after the office had been closed. Normal messages had been left but were followed by a series of comments claiming to originate from a recently dead but not yet orientated individual. The communication came in two sections - A B.B.C. program was announced between them and due to this fact Mr. Sheargold was able to verify the time when the ansafone was activated. The second example was given to me by a highly educated man of great reliability. He received two communications representing a dead relative, the second of which I have heard. It gives the correct name and is very clear and intelligible.
Obviously, any electronic communicating device can be utilized for the reception of paranormal voices. The tape recorder, the telephone, the ansafone, the television (I have personally experienced the last) and other devices have all been employed.
At the present, most of the available evidence testifying to the reality of the phenomenon is primarily anecdotal. But that fact does not detract from the scientific value of the evidence. First, at the beginning of any new field of study narrative evidence might well be the first material available. Second, the approach of establishing newly discovered content patterns which could not have been anticipated testify in favor of the authenticity of the accounts. Third, accounts exist with verifying material, witnesses, more than one person hearing the voices, etc., all of which fall into the same category of evidence usable in legal proceedings. And last, accounts now exist in great number assuring that even if the other considerations did not exist, still a certain percentage must by sheer chance be authentic.
Editor's Note: Raymond Bayless and D. Scott Rogo have co-authored the first book to be published on paranormal telephone communications, Phone Calls from the Dead (Prentice-Hall, 1979). They hope to generate interest among the public and parapsychologists, and to stimulate the development of experimental procedure in this area. Readers who have experienced this phenomenon are invited to send their accounts to Mark Jaqua, TAT Journal, P. O. Box 236, Bellaire, Ohio 43906; enclose a stamped envelope and your letters will be forwarded to Mr. Bayless.
Living Ghosts and the Apocalypse
The Random House Dictionary defines "hippie" as an alienated, middle-class youth who lives on a rural commune and experiments with psychedelic drugs. However, this word, which once was an emblem of praise among peers caught up in the 1960's whirlwind of Herman Hesse, LSD, Zen and anti-war protest, is now used by the same group of maybe-pot-smokers with the derogatory intonation that the inflamed hardhat employed to shape his orations for the American way of life.
The difference between the two groups is that, whereas the hardhat felt true condemnation, the ex-longhair of the 1970's uses the word "hippie" to explain a certain futile, psychological pose. A friend of mine said to me, when asked if he had seen my brother, "Yes, and he's still a hippie." He implied that my brother had not evolved out of this "uniform" and its attendant lifestyle.
In terms of the zeitgeist of the 1970's, its absorption of alienated youth into the mainstream nine-to-five itch and go-to-disco-blues, there lies in the psyches of these newly-made automata the hope, flickering in the primal regions of memory, that the explosion of the 'sixties may occur again in a way that would be truly transformational. Hence, idealism has gone underground. The group has become a sea of individuals as each individual chooses the raft that is most self-serving, be it med school or a journey to a Buddhist monastery in Thailand to study the creeds of the Hinayana.
While lunching with a friend at the local young people's restaurant, he ventured
the statement that after Christ's mission the Roman empire became a ghost
empire; in other words, Rome was not destroyed, it only resurfaced with new
symbols, those of the Christ. The metaphor impressed me and I thought that it
fit the psychological post-mortems of the 'sixties. The "punk" and "new wave"
movements in music consist largely of living ghosts. Its groups - Devo (meaning
devolution), the Sex Pistols, The Dead Boys and its manner of dress - the
bizarre safety-pin through the cheek and Raggedy Ann garb - intend to show the
complete
disenfranchisement with the idea of social change. These youths feel that they
and their technological societies are dead or dying. Consequently, they parade
as ghosts singing the funeral dirge. This movement is relatively small in
number, but the consciousness that it embodies touches many secret fans of the
Apocalypse that may or may not come.
If we assume that there is going to be some form of cataclysmic change with the disappearance of fossil fuels, or the coming of a messiah, or a rebellion against the technology-myth, then we become ghosts, beings that feel powerless over the environment which they haunt. This is the plight of many, regardless of their camp. It explains why the media were so thoroughly entranced by the Jim Jones death camp, and why a good airline crash or even a bizarre auto accident holds more fascination for the commoner of the metropolis than does a possible signing of a Camp David treaty on TV during the pre-plugged show "Battlestar Galactica," whose cast is looking for their legendary home, earth, while being chased by the robot-like Cylons, transformed reptiles with a political hierarchy resembling hell itself. In a deep sense, we are a humanity that is waiting for the end, and it may be that this very intuition in our unconscious will create destruction. While hitchhiking I was once picked up by a Vietnam veteran who was just waiting for the revolution by the young. His truck, with its shotguns and survival paraphernalia, bore the stamp of his conviction.
There is a more profound expression of this feeling of "things to come." Some of those who were conditioned to thoughtlessly accept a piece of consumer pie woke up to their conditioning. These rather rare individuals constitute a new underground in the sense that they fear being labeled and made into a group, for they see as nemesis any form of thought or ideology which might cause them to fall asleep in a new form of conditioning. They view their involvement in the 'sixties as the first step towards waking up. Their attitudes of rebellion have not degenerated into despair but have been transformed into hope, a hope that man might wake up.
A great exponent of this idea is Krishnamurti, the almost-messiah who disbanded the Order of the Eastern Star declaring that the way to truth is pathless, and that the reason, for man's enmity to man is a result of his being asleep under the intoxicating effects of various beliefs. Krishnamurti's style is to have a dialogue with his audience and his books often reproduce those dialogues verbatim. His psychological teachings are more valuable than those of others with psychological systems aimed at "waking up" which alienate the average Joe with a complex terminology. He says in the book, You Are The World: "What is the problem when we observe the actual world around us and in us? Is it an economic problem, a racial problem, black against white, the communists against the capitalists, one religion opposed to another religion... is that the problem? Or is the problem much deeper, more profound, a psychological problem? Surely it is not merely an outward, but much more an inward problem?"
Krishnamurti states that the nature of this psychological problem is that we are asleep, caught up in thought, identification with country, class and property, with sex, religion, and habit. This higher order of looking at the Apocalypse idea sees it as a vain hope, for even if it came how would it change man's nature? The way to Apocalypse is not to change externals but to raise man's consciousness. I read an article once that stated that one day the space-time continuum would change because of a change in man's perception, an idea that does not sound totally implausible. The article had a paragraph from a science fiction book describing how all at once the world woke up to the mystery of being; new dimensions appeared out of the noosphere, children flew in the air, animals spoke.
This approach may be scientific. Man is realizing that the nature of his thought-life, with its paradigms and myths, is largely responsible for the kind of environment he inhabits. The scientific revolution that started out of the urge to overcome the negative aspects of the environment such as cold, is now realizing that man is not a Darwinian overlord but an integral member of an ontological idea. Consequently, a science that was founded on discrete Newtonian events and bred a technology that ignored the interrelatedness of all phenomena, is now waking up to a disheveled environment.
Although a clock ticks out seconds in periods of hours and a certain number of hours constitute a year which is the revolution of the earth around the sun, isn't this quite an artificial way to view man's subjective experience of time? Why is that while one is engrossed in an activity or meditation, a minute can pass unnoticed, while if one is bored time passes interminably? Or why is it that certain events that occurred ten years ago leave a more lasting impression than those that happened yesterday? Perhaps there is some kind of relationship between thought and quality in experience. The assumption that man's mind is alien, an outsider of the physical world, a ghost in a body, may be fallacious. It may be that all phenomena have a mental origin and that what science calls physical laws are merely the consensus of those who perceive similarly, stating to themselves what the commonalities in their perceptions are.
We are living in an age when the old is dying and the new is waiting to arrive. It is the debate over that which is going to arrive and the manner of the arrival that has created such tension in the world, although it may be the case that tension is always uniform. Surely there have always been men who were ahead of their time like Galileo, and who sacrificed themselves in order to issue into man's very being different paradigms which would yet again be revised and destroyed with newer and more accurate agreements. What is unique to our epoch is the fact that man is becoming aware of the relationship between the paradigms of thought and the nature of his experience. The subject-object duality is becoming increasingly difficult to define. Objectivity is, perhaps, proportional to subjectivity.
The question that is intriguing to me, and difficult to answer, is, "Will man wake up?" On a certain level it seems that the structure of humanity is pyramidal. There will always be men who are asleep, who are doomed to live their lives under the tyranny of the prevalent myths of their society. And it may be the case that because of those who are asleep there are those who will wake up, who will become aware of the psychological assumptions their society and its world-view possess; they will attempt to transcend it and mentalize their natures. The pyramid itself would not necessarily undergo a complete qualitative change unless it were accomplished by individuals themselves.
Each man constructs the nature of his own prison. Every human life is an expression of the thoughts which occur inwardly. The angry person lives in a world in which others betray him. The paranoid sees others as threats. The intellectual wants to be a master of concepts and words, though his intent may concepts carnal in origin so he'll appear the brightest rooster.
At the top of the pyramid are those who seek to know their nature, who go within directly. All great teachers from Christ to Socrates to Buddha to Gurdjieff or Nietzsche have somehow preached the dictum, "Know Thyself." It maybe that the purpose of the earth ultimately is to carry beings who practice this. Recently, the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe was found to be most likely because two scientists found the original, lingering, backdrop radiation from the original event... at one point, man's mind and man's body, the sun and the planets, the galaxies and the void were one.
The Parade
There's a parade going on. Most people just march and march and never ask why, or wonder what lies at the end of the road. Others are contemptuous of the sheep and demand an alternative. Some "drop out" in an attempt to leave the parade behind, only to discover that they have merely switched sections in the same old parade. Others fight their way to the front, realizing too late that the drum major is as much a part of the parade as the musicians, except that he gets to the end of the road a bit sooner. But there are a few people who can escape; it must be only a few, because the loss of too many musicians will throw the entire band out of key. These individuals start with the realization that they were born into the parade and are inextricably a part of it, so that they cannot leave it merely by deciding that they are free. They are unique in that they detach themselves even as they march, constantly observing who they pretend to be in the parade in an attempt to discover who lies underneath the uniform. They are never comfortable. As soon as they start marching smoothly or begin to get carried away by the music, something happens internally or externally to remind them that it is only a parade. And just when they are sure that they are finally detached from the parade, the beauty of a soft face or the physical pain of their finite bodies brings them back into the fold. But it is this tension, the necessity of having to be both a marcher and observer, that keeps them awake and dynamic and looking for a way out. There is no alternative but to walk the two paths, so that when the music is over, they are not over too.
The Vampire as a Psychic Archetype
by Martin V Riccardo
The power of Thanatos... is so obvious in our culture that most of us normally don't notice it.
Martin V. Riccardo is president of the Vampire Studies Society and is publisher of the Journal of Vampirism. For information write to P.O. Box 205, Oak Lawn, Illinois 60454.
In the Bible's book of Leviticus (Chapter 17, verse 14) it is stated: "You shall not eat the blood of any flesh at all, because the life of the flesh is in the blood, and whosoever eateth it shall be cut off." That is the pitiable state of the legendary vampire - to be cut off, severed from the living, yet set apart from the dead. He is forced to live in a hellish half-world, a lonely isolated existence of darkness and horror. He is driven solely by his fierce, uncontrollable lust for blood, a hideous cannibalism of human fluid. Like an amphibian that can live both in water and on land, the vampire can freely cross the border between the graveyard and the realm of living beings. Yet he is a prisoner agonizingly torn between the two worlds, a creature trapped in the depths of evil. He is the tragic rebel of the night who rages against the finality of death, but who willingly takes life to prolong his own semblance of it.
As grisly as this vampire image may be, there has been a new resurgence of interest in Dracula, the most popular villain of all time, outstripping even the Devil himself in the number of books, movies and other works devoted to him. What is it about the vampire that commands this fascination? Why is it that part of us should be so irresistibly attracted to Evil in its purest form - irredeemable, ruthless, and deadly?
The answer may lie in the darker recesses of our own inner minds, the hidden subconscious layers where so many secrets are stored. The Freudian school of psychology holds that this is the region of the id, the primal, baser nature within all of us, normally contained by the restraints of our conscious mind. It is said that the id supplies the raw power of our libido or sex drive, but also another force that occasionally gets out of hand - an attraction toward death.
These two primal forces of Eros and Thanatos (or sex and death) make themselves explicit in the symbol of the vampire. When a moviegoer sees the sinister cloaked figure on the screen, he may subconsciously recognize the darker aspects within himself, inwardly responding to the alluring sensuality of evil, the cold insatiable power of death. And when the vampire is staked or destroyed at the end of the film, the viewer can feel a visceral relief that the inner evil has been conquered. The only problem is that the resilient vampire will not stay down; the evil keeps resurrecting.
[Figure: The vampire of this 19th century Victorian engraving reveals the strong sexual element present in vampire lore, his foreboding presence disguised with a "kiss."]
The power of Thanatos (or what has been termed "the death instinct") is so obvious in our culture that most of us normally don't notice it. Television programs, plays, movies, and books (from Gothic romances to murder mysteries) usually play on themes of death. Usually someone must die or be threatened with death to keep an audience interested. Movie ads display actors carrying long threatening guns and knives - symbolic images of eroticism and death. Daredevils (those who literally "dare death" for its own sake) become national heroes.
There is always this possible danger of the subconscious mind being triggered into releasing something dangerous within us.
Rock music has drawn on these images, with some artists of this ilk utilizing and profiting from the symbols of death, such as the colors of chalk white and bloodred for make-up, and jet black for clothing. The effect created is not only reminiscent of the vampire, but of Death personified, such as the figure portrayed in Ingmar Bergman's film "The Seventh Seal." KISS is the most prominent rock group with black, death-worshiping regalia, even spelling the last two letters in the group's name with a runic SS like that of the Nazi death masters. Alice Cooper is the rock star who uses outrageous horror and death scenes in his musical performances. While "in character" he has been quoted as saying, "This whole generation is bent on self-destruction. Self-destruction is great! It's fun!" Cooper is also known to have a deep admiration for Bela Lugosi's movie portrayal of Dracula.
Sid Vicious was the "punk rock" star who carried death-mania rituals into his private life. Shortly after he was released on bail for the charge of fatally stabbing his girlfriend with a hunting knife, he was quoted as saying, "I want to die... I didn't keep my part of the bargain." Some months later he was found dead from a drug overdose in another girlfriend's apartment.
[Figure: The vampire theme was fashionable during the 19th century reaching new heights in prose fiction with the publication of the first vampire serial, Varney the Vampire (1847).]
The macabre images that such musicians unleash may touch sensitive chords of the inner mind, and can have more profound results than increased record sales. Parapsychologist Raymond Van Over interviewed one young woman who had been psychologically devastated by her encounter with one performer. She was waiting for a table in a Horn and Hardart restaurant in New York, and was at an emotionally vulnerable point in her life; she had lost custody of her infant son after separating from her husband. While in line she felt an irrational but immediate sense of terror toward some people waiting in line with her. She could gather from their conversation that one of them, a young man in a skintight costume of gold lame, was a rock singer, and that the woman with him was a witch. As she listened she felt a chill come over her. She turned to leave, but the singer then clutched her arm and said that not only was his girlfriend a witch, he was a vampire, and he especially loved to drink the blood of young women. She pulled away and left the restaurant, thinking at first it was a stupid joke, but still feeling unnaturally terrified. Afterwards she had several horrible experiences in which blood appeared spontaneously. On one occasion she entered her apartment to find that the picture of her son had fallen to the floor, while blood stained the wall where the picture had hung. On another occasion she entered her bathroom to find it completely splattered with blood. Some time later she started to hear voices cursing her and urging her toward self-destruction. She started to believe that a vampire was attacking her telepathically to get her blood; this eventually led to her being institutionalized. (1)
The power of the subconscious in altered dream-like states may even be responsible for some of the effects linked to vampirism.
[Figure: Tod Browning's film, released in 1931, was a box-office success. That Dracula's magnetic power was irresistible to women, was borne out by Bela Lugosi's vast fan mail, ninety-seven percent of it written by women. Gabriel Ronay, The Truth about Dracula.]
There is always this possible danger of the subconscious mind being triggered into releasing something dangerous within us. Normally it is in our sleep that the subconscious becomes most active and reveals what has lain dormant. It is the region of the dream, or nightmare (from mare, an oppressing demon - sometimes a sex demon). When a poll was taken in Great Britain to determine who was the most "dreamt of" person in the country, the name that reached first place was Denholm Elliot. Who is Denholm Elliot? He was the actor who prior to the poll had played the role of Dracula on British television.
The power of the subconscious in altered dream-like states may even be responsible for some of the effects linked to vampirism. One of these states is somnambulism (or sleepwalking). One twentieth century author noted that some Greeks and Romanians maintain a belief that there are somnambulists who wander about in the night and use their teeth to tear apart anyone they come in contact with. Sexologist and mind explorer R.E.L. Masters has defined the Slavic voukodlaks (or "vampires") as follows: "Somnambules (occasionally regarded as possessed by demons) who ravish young girls and drink their hot nourishing blood." (2)
Another altered state possibly linked to vampirism was first discussed by a nineteenth century physician, Dr. Herbert Mayo. He believed a condition he termed "death-trance" might lead people to believe in vampires. Once a person entered this condition of involuntary catalepsy or suspended animation, he would appear to be dead. When he revived, panic might result. Dr. Mayo wrote: "There is no reason why death-trance should not, in certain seasons and places, be epidemic. Then the persons most liable to it would be those of weak and irritable nervous systems. Again, a first effect of the epidemic might be further to shake the nerves of weaker subjects. These are exactly the persons who are likely to be infected with imaginary terrors, and to dream, or even to fancy, they have seen Mr. or Mrs. such a one, the last victim of the epidemic. The dream or impression upon the senses might again recur, and the sickening patient have already talked of it to his neighbors, before he himself was seized with death-trance. (3)
The early Assyrians had their lili, a female demon thought to be sexually insatiable who nightly sought out likely bed partners. This eventually evolved into the Hebrews' conception of Lilith, a night-flying wild-haired demoness hostile to all mankind.
[Figure: Considered Adam's first wife (before Eve), the Hebrew demoness Lilith, whose offspring were demons, was known to attack men who were sleeping alone, seducing them in their dreams and sucking their blood. She is the "night hag" who lives in the wasteland with the wild beasts and hyenas, in Isaiah (34.14), and she may be the "terror by night" of Psalm 91.]
The power of the subconscious elements in vampirism is revealed most strikingly in the sexuality involved. This brings to mind the old beliefs of succubi and incubi, female and male demons that seduced mortals in their sleep. Their history is closely tied with that of vampires.
The old mythologies were fertile ground for the seeds of subconscious dreams. The early Assyrians has their lili, a female demon thought to be sexually insatiable who nightly sought out likely bed partners. This eventually evolved into the Hebrews' conception of Lilith, a night-flying wild haired demoness hostile to all mankind. Tradition holds that she kills children and seduces men in their sleep while she drinks their blood. By the Middle Ages, Europeans considered her to be the queen of the succubi.
The Greeks had a similar creature, with the name changed to Lamia. At first she was thought of as being a vengeful monster that stalked the night to strangle children and drain their blood. Later the word "lamia" was used for a whole race of blood-sucking female demons who would sexually entice young men, and then devour them or drink their blood. It was said that the lamias would wait for the moment when their victims reached the peak of sexual climax; then they would tear into their flesh, feverishly gorging themselves on warm blood.
Variations on these themes (that combine the erotic, the supernatural, and blood lust) may be found in vampire beliefs around the world. The nosferat or "undead" of Transylvania (in Romania) was once considered a highly sexual vampire. It not only sucked blood, but it would appear in an alluring form to young men and women as they slept; it would then make physical love with them with such fervor and passion that the young people would die of exhaustion. The sburator is a vampire in the modern folk beliefs of Romania. Of him it is said: "He takes the form of a handsome man, enters the house through the window at night, and kisses women during their sleep - often without the latter realizing the intrusion - except that they are tired, terribly tormented, pain-ridden, and agitated on the following day " (4) In some Slavic areas there was a strong belief that the dead could still have amorous designs on the living. This belief was so prevalent in these areas that peasants were sometimes known to dress up in a shroud-like sheet or white cloak to make nocturnal visits to local widows.
Variations on... themes that combine the erotic, the supernatural, and blood lust may be found in vampire beliefs around the world.
In the legends of Portugal it was believed that sex-hungry, blood-sucking witches called bruxsas would fly through the night sky in the form of a gigantic bird, either to meet with demonic lovers, or to seduce unsuspecting travelers. A more recent example of sexual blood-fixation in a Portuguese woman (age 30) was reported by the German doctor who treated her. She would delight in imagining that everytime it rained, it rained blood. In place of normal sexual relations, she preferred to suck blood from the ear of her lover.
The French have a demoness called Alouqua that is a blood-sucking succubus. It is believed that she drives men to suicide after she devitalizes them. The Southern Slavs have a female vampire called the mora. She is said to fall in love with a man once she has tasted his blood, and out of love returns to him every night to drink his blood until she has killed him.
Among the more primitive natives of Brazil, a vampire called the lobishomen attacks women. Once they have been preyed on by this creature, the women are said to become uncontrollable nymphomaniacs. Even the more sophisticated citizens of modern Brazil have not been untouched by vampirism. A newspaper account of November 9, 1967 reported on how residents of Manaus (a Brazilian coastal city) were being terrorized by a vampire described as "a blond woman with sharp and pointed teeth, wearing a mini-skirt and black stockings." Small round marks were found on the neck of one victim, and several members of the local police became too unnerved to continue the investigation.
Vampire researcher Wanda Bonewits has commented, "I think that the image of a vampire sinking his teeth into his victim's throat and engendering passionate surrender enroute has far more to do with sexual fantasy than with folklore." (5) Montague Summers, the authoritative scholar on vampires (who apparently believed in their supernatural existence) remarked in a similar vein, "The vampire is, as we have said, generally believed to embrace his victim who has been thrown into a trancelike sleep, and after greedily kissing the throat suddenly to bite deep into the jugular vein and absorb the warm crimson blood. It has long since been recognized by medico-psychologists that there exists a definite connection between the fascination of blood and sexual excitation." (6) It is obvious that sex plays a major role in vampirism, but it is not ordinary sexuality. It is a macabre sensuality, a variation on the kiss of death with supernatural undertones. Freudian psychoanalyst and author Ernest Jones wrote of the vampire, "It may be said at the outset that the latent content of the belief yields plain indications of most kinds of sexual perversions, and that the belief assumes various forms according as this or that perversion is more prominent." (7)
[Figure: The Consequences by Goya. In this plate from The Disasters of War, Goya depicted war as an unrelenting winged "vulture," sucking blood from the breast of man.]
The sexual perversions in vampirism may be so repressed they aren't even recognized. Even Bram Stoker, a sexually frustrated product of the Victorian Age, was not fully aware of the erotic content implicit in his novel Dracula. He would write long passages on boudoir visitations, vampiric kisses, and bloodlust in Dracula, yet he considered pornography "a class of literature so vile that it is actually corrupting the nation. "
Actors who played Dracula discovered the sexual power of the role. When Bela Lugosi first starred in the Broadway and movie version of Dracula, he was barraged with fan letters from female admirers. Christopher Lee, who portrayed the Count in numerous Dracula films, at one time received more fan mail than any other actor in Great Britain. A reporter, waiting among some fans for the Dracula actor Raul Julia after one of his Broadway performances, heard the fairly typical comment from a young woman: "I don't want his autograph. I want him to bite me on the neck."
One of the most recent sensations as Dracula, actor Frank Langella, has remarked, "Dracula seems to represent to women a certain kind of safe and sinful sexuality. A woman can fantasize submitting herself totally to the vampire... It's absolute abandonment without guilt."
The foremost literary scholar of Dracula, Leonard Wolf, has witnessed movie audiences leaning forward as the vampire leans toward his victim on screen. He has stated, "Movie audiences find it exciting to watch a man drink a girl's blood... What they recognize is a sexual embrace that is not threatening because all the physical responsibilities of lovemaking are evaded in that piercing kiss, and they can still be joined body and soul." (8)
Unfortunately, vampiric bloodlust is not solely relegated to fantasy. Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his classic work Psychopathia Sexualis provided a brief glimpse into its reality with his case no. 48: "A married man presented himself with numerous scars and cuts on his arms. He told their origin as follows: When he wished to approach his wife, who was young and somewhat 'nervous', he first had to make a cut in his arm. Then she would suck the wound and during the act become violently excited sexually." Montague Summers cited the case of a 14-year-old girl in France who "displayed on all occasions an extraordinary avidity for human blood and as sucking greedily recently inflicted wounds."
Such cases are not as rare as one might imagine. It was reported in January of 1979 that a 22-year-old student was arrested in Frankfurt, Germany for having enticed several teen-aged girls to his apartment where he drugged and sexually abused them. After his arrest, he admitted that he sometimes drank the blood of the girls. When police searched his apartment, they found four large knives along with large syringes and bottles that had traces of human blood.
While these cases show a psychological imbalance between conscious reality and subconscious compulsion, there are indications that the inner mind might be capable of unleashing what could be termed "paranormal" forces. Through the psychic powers of the subconscious, the old stories of the dead attacking the living might conceivably have some basis. According to one occult theory, the "undead" vampires were not really dead at all, but in a state of deliberate physical suspension in order to practice astral vampirism (leaving the body in astral or ghostly form to drain blood for nourishment).
There are many indications from folklore that malevolent forms of out-of-the-body travel were used by practitioners of black magic. One example is the belief in sections of Greece in the bruculaco, someone who falls into a cataleptic state; "the soul thus momentarily separated from the body goes into that of a wolf, making it thirsty for fresh blood." (9)
I have personally spoken to a woman in my office who believes she has seen a rather repugnant member of her family travel out of the body. She was not aware of my vampire research when she talked with me, but she described how over a period of a year she would wake up with what looked like bleeding teeth marks on her back and leg. She was attempting some magical procedures to prevent the attacks (placing some water in the four corners of her room), and she had not been attacked on the night before she talked with me. However, her daughter (who lived some distance from her, and was also in my office) had woke up that morning with deep scratch marks on her leg, with blood pouring down from her ankle.
The subliminal powers of the mind are truly awesome, whether for good or bad. As we dig into these subterranean layers, we need to be cautious of what may be unearthed. Lurking below, the gleaming red eyes of the vampire may be patiently laying in wait.
Selected References
Two Essays by George Ellis
PRISON: The Perfect Asylum
If the title of this article were a riddle (rather than a paradox), it would be difficult to unravel. Even as a paradox it will not easily yield to understanding, for so locked are we in our fixed notions that we see only what we want to see. We just do not have that open mind we think is ours, relying as we do on long-standing ideas that in time have become home-grown truths for us.
If we say that prison is a place of punishment rather than a perfect asylum, everyone will agree with the statement as leaving no question of doubt. For so it surely is, except insofar as we understand what a perfect asylum is, and how prison lends itself more fully to this end than any other setting, however ideal it may appear to be. A perfect asylum qualifies as such in that it allows the maximum opportunity for self-discovery. Try as you may, you cannot find or devise a community more suitable to self-discovery than prison. You learn quickly enough in this alien environment (if you learn at all) that you are not the person you thought yourself to be in the home community. The perfect asylum strips us of pretense, permitting us, if we are able, to understand our pretentiousness for what it was in a world that is pretentiousness itself, the world-at-large. The perfect asylum is one which always provides a separation from the psychological self-at-play in society. Prison admirably performs this service.
Indeed, that is what a perfect asylum is all about. It naturally sets before the mind's eye those poses and posturings we formerly assumed were truly serving us, revealing them as less than worthy roles. Prison quickly brings this to light, for there is no meaningful activity resembling those free-world doings which formerly occupied us so fully. We are hard put to find a place to hide from ourselves; and so we must face ourselves as we have never done before.
This is the way toward discovering what-I-am-not, for we are certainly much more than those ill-fitting social roles we have all along assumed as being ourselves. But until they are seen for what they are not, we can never see ourselves for what we truly are.
At least we have the chance of such a meeting - a chance we might not otherwise come by, no matter what exceptional setting or happy circumstance we might imagine. The perfect asylum is that place where personal identity is deliberately and methodically denied us. In the absence of those persons and things to which we were once so attached, which used to enliven our minds with their "living" experience, that personal identity "ghosts out," disappearing more and more every day. The perfect asylum is a place whose circumstances the mind utterly rejects as unworthy, as a foreign world that can never be its own. Prison life is always experienced as an existence to be endured but never accepted in the same way and with the same degree of attachment as our home community.
Memory is stronger than reality, for once we have committed ourselves to some core of identity the mind does not easily give it up. While identities are infinite in number, early in life we get locked into one or another, to our own tremendous deprivation, for we give ourselves over to this self-image and think of it as though it were really our self. In the separation that prison life imposes on us, we are forced to part reluctantly with this familiar self, but we still pretend, as all prisoners do, that we are just the same as we always were, hanging on to the bits and pieces of that former self. Nevertheless, in spite of all we do, this detachment is experienced as a kind of slow psychic death which we resist more strongly and fearfully than physical death, because it is more real and immediate. For, every day, the ghost of what we once were seems to lose more and more of its character and vividness, until it appears to mark the very end of life - of real living for us.
Most of us bitterly mourn this passing, drenched in self-pity as the phantom of our former self flashes before our mind's eye and disappears, finding no reflection of itself in the harsh reality that is now our lot. Some of us harden our hearts, so that the pain of our loss may not spill over into unbecoming tears. But this only serves to dam up the flow, building up a reservoir of bitterness which often overflows, causing fresh wounds. Still others manage a facade of well-being by losing themselves in work, busying themselves from morning to night until their minds find relief in exhaustion.
However we may react, the perfect asylum strips us bare to ourselves, until we are forced to acknowledge that we are still alive, even though living outside the scope of that experience which we have embraced as our own personal reality. This fact in itself constitutes an awakening, just as when the actor, engrossed in the role he has been playing, becomes aware that he is not that familiar character, however much he has identified himself with it. For us here in prison, this is a fearful awakening, to be sure, for the mind is filled, comforted, satisfied by the sense of identity which the security of the familiar bestows - and panics at its loss.
And so we try to fill the psychological void - in flight from the nothingness which we experience at the moment of self-loss by quickly creating some substitute image of ourselves out of the stuff at hand. We all live in our own picture-album world, and there is no reality for us except these momentary snapshots which bring our life-experience into focus, captured in memory's attention. In time we begin to see the world only in terms of these pictures, and when we lose our connection with these projections of a familiar world, we are compelled to build another image of ourselves - something we can believe in. But the ghosts of our former selves always hover in the background, reminding us that this latest version is just another presentiment which will also fade away in time and haunt us with its memories.
But the perfect asylum can teach the student something different, something lasting: That we are - before and beyond all the self-imagery the mind creates and captivates us with; that to take the conceptual world as a true representation of reality, lending it a reality not its own, is but the myopia of mankind; that life can be lived in full fellowship without the guidance of such thoughts as men deem necessary to establish or even describe brotherhood - for brotherhood brings its own understanding which is not limited by our thoughts about it; that Love, Truth, Understanding are ours in the experiencing, never truly known until the mind is freed of its preconceptions, of its fixations of meaning which we symbolize as ideas.
THE MISSING MEANING
"As a rule a man's a fool
When it's hot he wants it cool
When it's cool he wants it hot
Always wanting what is not."
These words were hand-printed on a piece of torn cardboard box that had aged before its time in the heat of the overhead pipes that lined the waiting room ceiling. It hung from a black shoestring looped over a too-large nail pounded into the wall just above the receiving window. You couldn't miss reading it as we new men queued-up for our issue of clothing. There wasn't anything else to do but look at each other and so those of us who could read, read.
That was a long time ago. Thirty-seven years. I was seventeen and facing the reality of prison life for the first time. The verse said more to me than I then could fully understand, having an elusive meaning alive but hidden as might some telling truth trying to surface but whose day had not yet come.
It seemed fitting that the verse had no title and was anonymous as life itself and, like life itself, came alive in a meaningful way only in the mind of the beholder. Perhaps it had been written by some long-forgotten convict who capsulized his life's experience into those four lines. And yet the truth of meaning there was not just his and spoke to every reader of himself, and in such a way as could only be understood at this very place, at this very time.
It was this setting even as much as what was said that gave deep meaning to the author's thoughts, as what is thought is only seen from where it is thought. Given another time and place the verse may well have brought to mind some quite different meaning of a superficial kind. As it was, the verse was appropriately placed reminding the reader that his own folly had brought him to this point of no return as disillusionment is always its own ending of such notions that were unworthy to be held.
The message of truth was there for those who were open to the message and I almost understood, but not quite. I stood there looking over the shaven heads of the men in front of me who, like myself, couldn't help reading what was surely meant for each of us to read and understand as it had been written. It is unlikely that any of us brought such understanding to the reading, so filled are we with ideas of our own making that obstruct truth, pretending then to be that very truth denied. Even as the trees are taken for the forest, ideas picture for us what has no reality beyond the mind's picturing. We see in thought what we would see, we read into thought what we would read, and I could not at that early age understand any more than that I was somehow missing the truth of what I read, that there was more to the matter being considered than what the mind's mirroring could reflect at this time. In short, I sensed my own unfaithfulness without understanding this, and if there were untrueness then there must be something more to me yet to come.
It was this faith that there was more to me than my thoughts were telling me that kept me, throughout life, from falling into some great despair. This was not hope, hope that takes its meaning in something as one's knowledge concludes a direction of mind, but a faith beyond knowledge, understanding only that knowledge of itself could never be enough. In some way I had already learned that it was in seeing through knowledge that one understood, that knowledge was only an appearance that could take on many appearances of usefulness or not. Strange. Though knowledge failed me often enough so also did I seem to gain strength out of this apparent loss. Still, I listened to my own words of knowledge, ignoring that inner voice that was always saying, "Fool! Faith in your knowledge must always end in failure as knowledge can never be true and the false can never stand." But the mind is stubborn and learning came hard.
The years came and went. The summers were always too hot, the winters too cold, and little of fair season in between. The mind took pride in its endurance, in a strength seemingly not its own. Yet we are strength and only knowledge weakens us to its own end as we serve out as best we can such ideas as claim us for their own.
George Ellis is imprisoned at Stateville, a state penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois.
Behind the symbols, rituals and rudiments of this mysterious and arcane practice lie the roots of a scientific and systematic method aimed at deeper levels of consciousness.
The Psychological Mechanics of Ceremonial Magick
by Harold Harnick
I was once staying on a farm, attempting to get in some reading and studying. I was in a calm, rather peaceful mood and was studying rather carefully a book I had just purchased, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. I was astounded by the book and was coming to the conclusion that, "If there was anything to Magick, this was the real thing!" I was sitting in my chair, engrossed in the book, when suddenly I was confronted with a PRESENCE. It hit me like a brick in the chest. I had been confronted with what I thought were spirits before, but nothing had been like this. It was not an inimical presence, but powerful and there - and it was asking me a question. The question was not verbal, but it welled up from within my being. "What is your intention with this Magick?" is what seemed to ring through the air. I felt I had to somehow answer correctly or I could be plagued with an obsession. I "answered" from the depths of my being that my intentions were only intellectual and that I was not going to use this Magick. I somehow had to summon with total sincerity all that was me to answer this question. Satisfied apparently, the presence was gone as abruptly as it had appeared. Needless to say, I was taken aback by the whole thing. It convinced me that there was more than merely a subjective reality to Magick. The thing that confronted me seemed nearly as real as this typewriter at which I'm sitting. Thus was launched my serious study of Magick.
Magick as a system to obtain enlightenment, or union with the Higher Self, is probably the most misunderstood system in the world. Its practices are arcane and difficult to understand. The author Israel Regardie regards Magick as the West's equivalent to Yoga. The practices of Yoga are directed inward in the attempt to reach the Self while, to appearances, the practices of Ceremonial Magick are directed outwards to gods, angels and celestial forces. This outward direction is only apparent though, because the deities which the magician invokes are only symbolic of the forces and powers within his own psyche, the same forces and powers which the yogi attempts to reach with his inward meditation. The paths of the yogi and the magician are the two extremes toward the realization of the same goal - the Higher Self or the Holy Guardian Angel.
[Figure: This fanciful image of man "stepping out" of the physical world to discover secrets beyond symbolizes the magician's goal.]
I will use two words in this essay, "Magick" and "magic." By "Magick" I mean the practice or the utilization of a system which is transcendental in nature, that is, aimed at the union of the lower self or ego with the Higher Self or Soul. In Magickal literature this is symbolically called "The Holy Guardian Angel." By "magic," I mean those practices which have some terrestrial or practical aim, such as making a love charm or talisman, or casting a spell that your neighbor's cow may dry up. In its basest sense this is black magic or sorcery, but it can be put to good purpose as in curing the sick or perhaps making it rain. Behind the use of practical magic is a knowledge of the occult laws of nature. The sixteenth century physician and magus, Paracelsus, was reputed to perform many amazing cures through his insight into the hidden laws of nature.
Western Magick is primarily based on the cosmology and psychological system found in the Jewish Kaballah. To understand Magick, at least a cursory understanding of the ideas behind the Kaballah is needed. According to the Kaballah, the Earth and all the subtle psychological and spiritual qualities which make up the human psyche are emanations of one primary or absolute principle - the Ain Soph. In the Hebrew language Ain means zero (0) or nothing. Since the ultimate principle, Ain Soph, is beyond all possible human comprehension, it is called "No-Thing" or "The Great Darkness." Merger with this ultimate principle is the final goal of the magician, superior to and following merger with the "Holy Guardian Angel." From this ultimate principal is emanated at the time of creation ten levels of being or existence. Each of these levels of being emanates or "creates" the level immediately below it. The first principle, Keser, emanates the second principle, Chokmah, which in turn emanates the third principle, Binah, etc. The last emanated principle is Malkus, which is our physical world and our physical body.
Each of these levels is not a place, but is indicative of a particular power or force in the human psyche. These levels are not like the layers in an onion, one on top of another, but permeate or are diffused through everything. In our physical level is contained, by a sort of osmosis, all the other levels, but each superior realm is of subtler substance and at a higher "vibration rate." In example, a person cannot see his emotions on this physical level because they occur on a subtler plane - the astral plane in Kaballistic terminology. Theoretically, to a being on this astral level, human emotions would be as tangible as the chair you are sitting on is to you.
The paths of the yogi and the magician are two extremes toward the realization of the same goal - the Higher Self or the Holy Guardian Angel.
Each of these levels in the Kaballistic cosmology or "Tree of Life" denotes a force, aspect, or capacity in the human being and as well in the general creation. The ten stations of the Tree of Life have names and numbers which are symbolic of the qualities of that station. The numbers and letters placed in different combinations are indicative of various reactions and correlations between these forces in nature. The attributes and number of sides of various figures such as the circle, pentagram, square, line and triangle cause them also to indicate different correlations among the powers on the Tree of Life. The various combinations of the figures, letters and numbers provide an endless symbology which can theoretically describe any process or quality in creation. Actually, it is a mathematical system used to describe and discover mystical matters. Eliphas Levi, the French magus, praises it thusly: "On penetrating into the sanctuary of the Kaballah, one is seized with admiration at the sight of a doctrine so simple and at the same time so absolute. The necessary union of ideas and signs, the consecration of the most fundamental realities by primitive characters, the trinity of words, letters and numbers, a philosophy simple as the alphabet, profound and infinite as the Logos; theorems more luminous and complete than counting on the fingers; an infinity which can be held in the hollow of an infant's hand; ten numerals and twenty-two letters, a triangle, a square, and a circle - such are the elements of the Kaballah, such are the primary principles of the written word, shadow of the Spoken Logos which created the world!"
While the magician invokes "gods" in his ceremonies, in the normal meaning of the word he is not pantheistic. Each of the gods he invokes is an aspect of the Tree of Life and is also representative of a power or quality in his own psyche. Thus the god "Mars" is representative of violence, war and strength, while the god "Saturn" is imbued with the qualities of sadness and melancholy. When the magician invokes these gods, it is not that he wants to become war-like or melancholy, but that he wants to experience these aspects of his inner self. Thus by repeated invocation and communion with these aspects of his inner self, he in time becomes a more integrated, harmonious, and powerful being. The "gods" are symbolic of the archetypal aspects of his own being. Whether or not these gods are separate beings is open to speculation as to what is actually meant by a "separate being."
Regarding these various sephiroth, or divine emanations, and combinations thereof as objective angels and deities is, in one sense, only to aid the conceptualizing forces of the mind, but in another sense they actually are gods. The pantheons of Greek, Roman, Chaldean and Egyptian gods all contained symbolic beings embodying principles and forces of the cosmos. In a magical ritual evoking the gods (powers within the magician himself) something must be given for the emotions to identify with and thus add emotional strength to the invocation. To the intellect, these universal principles are "forces," but to the emotions they are beings or gods. The emotions cannot easily identify with intellectual concepts, but they can identify with a personality. This is the primary reason why the universal principles contained in the Tree of Life are regarded as beings or gods.
The strange incantations, exotic incense and robes are the "tools" of the magician by which he pulls the levers and pushes the buttons of the psyche.
Reason Behind Ritual
Most people are aware of the general attributes of a Magickal ceremony - the robes worn, circles drawn on the floor, incenses, mysterious symbols and incantations of strange words and names. It would all seem to belong to a primitive time and out of place in our modern age. There is, however, a definite reason behind all the strange paraphernalia of a Magickal ceremony. Man's mind is fickle and there is great difficulty in focusing attention in one direction for more than a few moments. The senses are attracted here and there, and the mind follows. The purpose of the extravagant paraphernalia of Magickal ritual is to occupy all the senses.
The apprehension of celestial ideals is usually not possible because of the turbulence of the mind and the senses. The Magickal regalia give a source of concentration for the senses and thus remove the turbulence of the mind and cause all faculties to be focused on one purpose or apprehension. The Magickal "props" are roughly equivalent to the concepts we use to understand intellectual ideas, the nose "understands" through smell, the eyes "understand" through color, the ears through sound and cadence, and the touch through shapes. The Magickal apparatus mystically speaks to the being rather than just to the intellect as words and concepts do. The strange incantations, exotic incense and robes are the "tools" of the magician by which he pulls the levers and pushes the buttons of the psyche. Although these exotic tools can be used by charlatans to mystify the gullible, Israel Regardie defends their necessity: "Actually, it is just as erroneous and as unjustifiable to accuse a physicist of quackery because in his laboratory he has several microscopes of differing strength, fitted with wheels, tubes, and slides, and that his desk is littered with papers, bearing incomprehensible physical and mathematical formulae."
Each incense, symbol, incantation or colored robe in the ceremony has a particular meaning. For instance, if the god Mars is invoked, then there is a particular incense, color, symbol and incantation for this ceremony. The magician must perform his rite with his whole being or it will not be effective, and each "prop" used is to focus an aspect of his senses and mind. Eliphas Levi explains it: "Understanding must be formulated by signs and summarized by characters or pentacles. The Will must be determined by words and the words by acts. The magical idea must be translated into light for the eyes, harmony for the ears, perfumes for the sense of smell, savours for the mouth, and shapes for the touch."
A reason for the use of sound and incantations in a Magickal ceremony is the peculiar effect sound sometimes has on the psyche. In Indian occultism there is a whole science behind the use of word chants or mantrams. Words spoken with a particular intonation and rhyme have a strong psychological effect. This can be seen in our western culture in the use of advertising and political slogans. The phrase "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," is strongly imprinted on the American mind in a mystical sort of way. It calls forth a reaction in the psyche in a vague but powerful manner. Another phrase would be "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." How many people, smokers or not, have found this phrase running through their minds without consciously eliciting it? It is not the truth behind these phrases that attract people, but a mystical quality of rhyme and verse that somehow stimulates the mind.
A reason for the use of sound and incantations in a Magickal ceremony is the peculiar effect sound sometimes has on the psyche. This can be seen in our western culture in the use of advertising and political slogans.
Sound has the peculiar effect of calling forth moods and feelings. This can be seen by simply observing your reactions to different songs on the radio. One song may cause nostalgia and sadness, perhaps raising the thought of a lost love, while the very next song may make you feel powerful and like "raising hell" in some manner. I know that in myself, a certain type of music almost always has the effect of elevating me above my mundane cares and hangups. This type of music has a definite purging effect on my mind and I feel momentarily cleansed of all my care and oppression. (Not that I'm constantly oppressed!) Apparently there is a lost science to the use of sound and music. Manly Hall writes, "... we know that the modes of Grecian and Hindu music were regarded not merely as ordinary compositions for the pleasure of the people, but that these modes were exact formulas by means of which certain moods could be caused to arise in conscious beings. Therefore the mode set the mood, and all modal music had within it the power to affect man in various ways."* It seems that the magician intuitively uses this science of sound to pull the levers of his psyche and to help himself to get in touch with the deeper powers of his being.
The Psychology of Magick
It has long been known by mystics that man cannot apprehend God or the gods by his reason alone. There is something about isolated reason that prevents it from being aware of the deeper level of the psyche. Iamblichus in The Mysteries writes, "For a conception of the mind does not conjoin Theurgists with the Gods; since if this were the case, what would hinder those who philosophize theoretically from having a theurgic union with the Gods?" What is in contact with the "gods" is a capacity which lives beyond the reason. The magician tries to stimulate this capacity by his uncommon rites. The exotic rituals serve to focus all aspects of his being toward union with a god, or aspect of his inner self.
Throughout magical philosophy is contained the conception of the "astral light." In Ceremonial Magick there is a necessity to understand the workings of the astral realm, because in this realm are, supposedly, entities and forces which are detrimental to the psyche. In a ceremony the magician "opens up" the doors of his psyche to be sensitive to higher influences and inspirations. When he attempts to open himself up to higher influences, he also will be open to the negative influences on the astral plane unless he takes precautions or is strong enough to ignore them.
The astral light covers a rather broad range of man's psyche and the cosmos, but basically can be divided into the "lower astral" and the "higher astral." The lower astral is the container of all man's baser desires, emotions and instincts. In psychological terminology, it is the subconscious. It is also said to contain demons, elementals and spirits of lower intelligence or organization. The higher astral is the source of all man's higher ideals, emotions and archetypes. It is the "collective unconscious" of Jung. It is the higher astral which the magician is normally trying to reach when he attempts union with a god or the higher, more divine aspects of his psyche. It is the lower astral which is utilized in sorcery and conjuring to bind evil spirits, make charms, talismans and the like.
The astral light is a very interesting subject since to it is attributed the source of almost all psychic phenomena. In it are proposed to be existing all the entities that cause poltergeist phenomena, house hauntings, possession and the occurrences of Spiritualism. The lower astral is the closest "level" and next higher vibration to our physical world and thus greatly affects the material plane and vice versa. We live in the astral light as a fish lives in water.
Since the astral is a more subtle plane than our own, our intangible realities, such as words, symbols and emotions, have a material or tangible existence on the astral. According to Kaballists, correctly or emotionally spoken words can have the effect of a sledge hammer in the astral realm. Subtle things on our plane have a living reality on the astral plane, and around this principle is based much of the theory of practical magic and occultism. For example, it is held by some exorcists of haunted houses that elemental spirits of the astral realm can be trapped by a certain angle of roofs and clutter. Houses of many gables and cornices are more frequently haunted than other types. Regarding for a moment the phenomenon of possession, it has often been puzzling that people have been psychologically cured by the mere uttering of verbal threats at the supposed entity by the exorcists. Since the supposed entity could not be manhandled physically, it seemed to be frightened or ordered by powerfully spoken words. If words have a tangible reality in the astral realm, this would be explained. The words would be more or less powerful according to the sincerity and force behind them. The emotional force behind the words is important since emotion is held to be a material reality in the astral sphere. Mere intellectual recitation of words will have little impact in an exorcism or in a Magickal ritual.
Abra-Melin, The Mage
The system of Magick which is generally regarded as the most powerful is that contained in The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. The English edition of this work was first published in 1898 by MacGregor Mathers, the founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Before this time, the manuscript was apparently unknown, since reference of it is found in no other work. It has been speculated that Eliphas Levi knew of it but perhaps thought it too dangerous and powerful a system to be divulged. The copy from which Mathers made his translation was discovered among manuscripts in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in France.
In Abra-Melin is prescribed a rigorous six-month ritual which is to be carried out in solitude. The purpose of the prescribed ceremony and isolation is to gain conversation with the "Holy Guardian Angel" or union with the inner self. After this has been achieved, and it is assured that it will if the system is followed correctly, a means of binding and controlling demons and elementals to do the magician's bidding is recommended. Controlling and ordering astral spirits may seem rather morbid and melodramatic after "conversing with the Holy Guardian Angel" but Aleister Crowley among others, has explained it from a practical point of view. Once the magician is "back on the material plane" after his experience, he must use the tools at his disposal to accomplish what good that he is able to. Because of his rare skills, demons and imps are the most powerful tools at his disposal. You may not agree with this opinion, nor am I sure I do - but it does make a certain amount of sense.
The Abra-Melin magician uses magical squares to order the "Four Princes of the Evil of the World" to do his bidding. These squares consist of numbers and letters which are arranged in certain ways for specific purposes. Each arrangement has a particular Kaballistic meaning, and combined with the will and power of the magician, has a certain effect on particular spirits in the astral realms.
The peculiar personal anecdote I related at the beginning of this article does not seem to be too uncommon among those who come in contact with the Abra-Melin system. Ithell Colquhoun in her book on the Golden Dawn, The Sword of Wisdom, relates a few cases in point. In one incident the composer Phillip Hesestine attempted to bring back his straying wife by inscribing one of the Abra-Melin squares on his arm. His wife did return almost at once, but immediately afterwards, Mr. Hesestine unexpectedly committed suicide. Friends of Ithell Colquhoun thereafter rented Hesestine's flat and experienced many horrible phenomena. Another story that she relates concerned a young child. It seems that the child began acting very strangely, laughing continuously while several unexplained telekinetic and poltergeist phenomena occurred in his vicinity. The child was put to bed, and while being undressed two slips of paper fell out of his pocket. The slips of paper were notes and magical squares of two Abra-Melin demons that the father had been researching earlier that day. The two demons names were "Turbulent" and "Laughter"! The Abra-Melin system should not be impudently tampered with and Ithell Colquhoun offers this warning to the foolish: "I hazard the guess that certain entities have been caused to indwell these diagrams; and while they can be made to do the bidding of an experienced operator, they may exercise an obsessive influence over those who employ them carelessly."
Ceremonial Magick is the most arcane of Western spiritual methods. It is very difficult to understand and thus has been misused and misunderstood. Its purposes are transcendental in nature and the methods are so direct and prove such powerful stimulators that they should be used only by the mentally and physically healthy. It can be a very effective means of attaining a spiritual realization but, for the careless, it can also be a very effective way to put yourself in the local insane asylum. Ceremonial Magick is the most intriguing and esoteric of subjects for the intellectually inclined. For those, however, who wish to practice Magick, only sincerity of intention and balance of mind will lead to good results.
Annotated Bibliography
An easy to read and common-sense account of everyday magical philosophy. It contains many old illustrations and interesting anecdotes that makes it very enjoyable. Carroll and Saxe claim that the very nature of the world has changed in the last several centuries, which makes supernatural attainments more difficult today.
Eliphas Levi is responsible to a great extent for the revival of interest in magic of the last century. His writing is very flowery poetic, and so full of enthusiasm that he often overstates and generalizes. A.E. Waite and Levi are nearly opposite in character and Waite's translation and footnoting of History of Magic and Transcendental Magic do much to balance Levi's over-enthusiasm. Levi's style, however, makes him very readable, and has made him the most popular of the magical authors. In Transcendental Magic there is a treatment of the "Magical Equilibrium" which is not found in any other work.
A.E. Waite was an outstanding scholar of the Kabbalah and magic, and his writings are some of the most valuable in the field for their straight-forwardness and wealth of accurate information.
A most valuable book on the astral realm and occult psychology.
A dry presentation by Regardie, but also the best book available explaining the purpose and psychological mechanics of magic.
This book contains methods and practices for a system of magic that is probably the most powerful of any in the western world. It was popularly unknown until MacGregor Mathers discovered and translated it near the end of the 19th century. As a powerful system of magic, it should not be toyed with. There are several accounts of undesirable and sometimes disastrous experiences for those who have.
This is the textbook of magical ritual. While a member of the Golden Dawn magical order, founded by MacGregor Mathers, Regardie was under oath not to reveal these "secret" documents, but decided to issue them years later because of their value. This book probably will be of little interest to other than the serious scholar or practicing magician.
An account of MacGregor Mathers and others associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn existed around the turn of the century and most of the magical orders of today are its direct or indirect offshoots. Interesting accounts are given of such notables as MacGregor and Moina Mathers, Aleister Crowley, W.B. Yeats, Dion Fortune and A.E. Waite. Colquhoun did excellent research and her book is enjoyable reading.
This is a concise and important treatment of occult psychology, including the use of sexual energy.
A unique, step-by-step treatment of the magical "path" by a modern practicing magician.
Approach to Validity
by Richard Rose
Does a man own a house or does the house own him?
Does a man have power or is he overpowered?
Does a man enjoy or is he consumed?
Does a man really reason... or is it all a complex rationalization?
Does a man rationalize... or is he so programmed?
Can a man learn... that which he really wishes to... by himself alone?
Can a man become?
How shall he know what he should become?
Why build ant hills before knowing what an ant is?
Why do we build conceptual towers of Babel about human thinking... before we know that which thought is?
How can you dare to define thought before knowing the source-cause of all thought? Or the essence of thought?
When you describe bouncing... do you describe the striking object or that which is struck?
Can you start thinking? Can you stop thinking?
Is thought something received or something projected?
Is thought a sort of somatic effluvium, synaptic or chemical? Do we think, or are we caused to think?
Do we observe or do "they" observe? Are we the view or the viewer?
Do we create the idea of creation? Or are we the created idea? Do we experience, or are we experienced?
Is negative thinking (as commonly discussed), negative to man or negative to nature?
Does the brain generate thought like a radio generates the message coming from its speaker?
Is thought limited to the brain?
When a tree bends over does it create wind by waving its branches?
Can theological facts be established by voting?
Is Mary the mother of God or is humanity the mother of God?
Is God determined by victorious armies?
Is virtue established by Psychological edict?... by ecclesiastical vote... or by the requisites of our ultimate essence?
What is sin?... an offense against yourself... an offense against your fellow-man... an offense against God?
Is an offense against God recognized by divine outcry... earthquake or cosmic catastrophe?
Is it a sin to eat meat?
Are the animals our brothers?
Are they possessed of intelligence and soul?
Do animals sin when they eat other animals? Or are such sinning animals pardoned for keeping ecology in balance?
Is it wrong to kill except for food?
Do we do wrong by not eating the people we kill?
Who is knowledgeable about Good?
Is Good that which we desire... or that which is in itself Good? What is the condition of "being Good" in itself?
Is evil the child of Good... or is it a twin?
If a man drives a horse through a plate glass window should the man be prosecuted... or is it the horse who should be prosecuted?
If a man robs to feed his children... should we prosecute the man, or that which drove him - the children?
If a man rapes a girl should we prosecute... a. the man, b. the girl who tempted him, c. his ancestors for his genetic inheritance of glandular inclination, d. the force that designed mankind?
What is equality?
Was Samson equal to Delilah?
Is a baby equal to a dying man?
Are you only half of a plan by virtue of not possessing both sexes?
Is peace of mind more important than global peace or herd-peace?
Who or what are you?
Are you only a body?
Are you rather a complex organism? A cell colony... a nature-oriented bundle of conditioned reflexes?
Is the brain a monitoring station designed for the organism's indefinite survival? Or is our body programmed for death (death gene) following procreation?
Is all religion and philosophy merely rationalization emanating from that computer?... to answer constant cellular awareness of death?
Or is the universal belief in life after death an intuitive reading from that computer, a reading not completely translatable into computer symbols which are limited?
Is there a soul?
Did it exist before the body or must it be developed, grown or evolved?
Prove the following: Mind (as other than somatic awareness), sub-conscious mind, ego, id, superego, chakra, kundalini, tisra til, astral, etheric, causal, desire, aura, halo, ectoplasm, spiritual ear (picks up shabd), conscience, spiritual nectar, philosopher's stone, guardian angel, hydrogen.
What is the correct definition of sanity?
Do our psychologists practice rationalization and make-believe when they substitute behaviorism for a deeper set of factors of human origins or factors of prenatal determination... meaning factors that would bring us to a knowledge of the true essence of man?
Do they not procrastinate the search for real causes?
Do they not manifest a possible paranoia in fear that subjective observations and pursuits may find more substantial things about the essence of man?
Which is the worse schizophrenic? The man who talks in tongues? The schizophrenic who is possessed and cannot help himself? Or... the professionals who create volumes of confusing, complex terminology describing nothing better than their own frustrating dichotomy?
Which is worse? The manic-depressives who brood or babble as a result of excessive voltage, chemical imbalance, some electrolytic deficiency or toxic condition?... or... the pompous alienist who babbles on the witness stand that this or that man should be subjected to ice pick, shock treatment... or electric chair?
What is real?
Is a mirage real?
Is a dream real? If not - why not?
Is wakefulness a dream?... is it an undefined state qualified by erratic or inferior senses?
Is the objective world real or only that which we believe it to be? Is an idea more real than a planet?
Is a planet merely a projected idea? Is an angel more real than a planet?
If the concept of a space-time continuum is valid... does space exist at all independently of time?
If time does not exist... do things move?
Is that which we see, actually there as it is seen, or is it projected? What is matter... atoms, force fields, - electricity?
Are force-fields projected energy?
Do we witness the material world through or with the senses.
Do we hear as well as the dog, see as well as the eagle, or smell as well as most animals?
Do we not have a limited color range?
If we have a limited color-view, how can we have a complete view of the world?
Is there a pure, or direct sense?
How can we have an accurate world-view if we are prone to the projection of a paradigm?
What about knowledge of yourself?
Are there two selves or just one, (dualism) physical self and soul?
Do desires and prejudices do your thinking for you?
Are you an actor whose act hides the real self?
Do you lie to yourself? If so, how can you know the truth?
Do you really think you know what is the truth?
Is truth decided by that which most people think? Or by that which is?
Is truth decided once and for all by experts or authorities?
Is truth learned... or is it only experienced? Do you act? Are you capable of acting?
Are you merely a bundle of conditioned reflexes? (Behaviorism) If we are such a robot-bundle... how can we be conditioned by another robot?
If we know that we are such a bundle, does not this knowledge give us knowledge of the robot's mechanicalness that might lead to the robot's emancipation?
Has such an answer or knowledge ever been found?
Is it found by faith or is it found by studying the self?
Do we identify the self with that which thinks?
Do we identify the self with that which thinks? Or is the self identified as that which is conscious... even conscious of thinking?
Do we know the nature of thought? What is a thought in itself?
What is the relation between a synapse (or a reaction) and awareness?
What is awareness?
Do you need to understand yourself?
Can you understand yourself by an objective study of behavior?
Can you understand yourself by the study of psychology, by either pure or manipulative psychology?
Is it possible to understand yourself without completely understanding your origin and destiny, and without satisfactorily defining the self?
Is not identification of the self, necessarily the isolation of the self from its environment?
If this is true where is the boundary-line?
Do motivating factors such as the appetites fall into the category of being separate from the self?
How can a "self" drink itself to death?
Is temptation alien to our real Self, or is it intrinsic?
Are we selves of many facets or are we a unique self, artfully invaded?
Do curiosity and desire belong in the category of separateness from the Self?
Is the body part of the Self or a garment of the spirit?
Is the mind part of the Self?
Is the mind in its presently understood potential, all that we can consider as the Self?
When a man loses his mind, where does his self go? Where did the mind go?
If a man lives for twenty years in a state of mental conviction, and then experiences a radical reversal of that conviction, what can be said about such a mind especially when we have regarded it as the ultimate self?
Is mind a faculty through which we observe God... as through a glass darkly?
Is it possible to know God before knowing the Self? Is it possible to know anything?
Do not hypnotic demonstrations with the senses indicate that reality is somehow irrevocably interlocked with belief?
Is the world only that which we believe it to be?
Why do we work so frenetically? Is it to get a better job, a better house and car, so that we can have a better mate, and better children?
Why do fantasies beget agonies?
Is our ulterior self in our heads or in our gonads?
Why do we still have innate spiritual hope, unless our intuition sees a solution?
Is spiritual hope and belief nothing more than a part of a robot's programmed stimulation?
Does a robot have any meaning or purpose beyond the intentions of the designer?
Can a robot program itself in any degree?
Can a robot be programmed by other robots for its own good?
Can a robot be reprogrammed in this manner to seek its definition and self-motivation?
Can logic be defined as well-coordinated robot-functioning, in which the robot reacts with seeming consciousness of its own programmed state of acceptance to every situation and suggestion?
Is sanity defined by logic?
Or do we attain it by being logical?
Is it sane to wish to know about our Real Essence?
Can the individual decide?
Can an individual decide on something outside the scope of that which is his limited perspective?
Is man doomed to predestiny?
Or is a man doomed to forever struggle in the uncertainty and inability of ever knowing whether he can act or decide, or not?
Does existence necessitate consciousness? Is man capable of self-consciousness?
Or is man merely aware of the idea of
self-consciousness?
Can a man watch himself?
Are there two people in such an act, or is one only the view?
What is thought?
Is thought synaptic or spiritual?
Is thought the reaction of cholinesterase upon acetylcholine?
Is thought the viewing of our own projections, and nothing more?
If thoughts travel in telepathy, what is the vehicle for this travel?
Do thoughts travel in another dimension, or is their action similar to that of electricity?
Protoplasm ends and thought begins where?
What psychological scientist has discovered this link between thought and matter?
Does the body manufacture subtle little essences called thoughts?
Or does the body develop receiving mechanisms or chemicals so that it will be aware of possible external essences?
Would such an external essence be called mind? If so would that mind be external to the body?
Are we then a body being influenced by an external mind?
Or are we the external mind?
Is thought transmitted in or with electrical energy?
Does a man's soul or essence make contact with the body of the man in energy generated by the gap of the synapses?
Is the inner man any more than conscious energy?
Does all energy come from food, or is it possible that we may draw energy from higher spiritual levels?
Do we transmute food-energy into other forms of energy such as mental energy, or is mental energy poured into us from a universal mind?
Are thoughts related to endocrine glands?
Is it possible that man can, with energy transmuted upward, produce thoughts with volition, rather than just submit to reacting?
Is memory an automatic recording?
What sees, what remembers, what reacts to perception and memory?
Does not the mind also have the unique ability which is forgetting, and is not all experience that has been gained, lost, when the mind forgets?
Do space and time both exist in space-time, or do neither exist?
Is real knowing, not knowing?
What is valid? Is a rock valid?
Unless we know that which a rock is to itself, how can we know its validity? If the rock is only our projection, does it have any validity?
Shall the finite mind ever perceive the infinite?
Is it true that the only question worth answering is whether or not we should commit suicide?
Explores states of being and mind. Meets weekly. Call for information ______
Spirits: Entity or Archetype?
by Mark Jaqua
[Figure: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters from Goya. Hobgoblins of the mental dimension control man when he is "asleep."]
Since man could first conceptualize, he has believed in other-dimensional creatures, whether he has called them demons, devils, incubi, succubi, elementals, imps, familiars or any other of the terms that are in every language, in every time. It has only been recently that a large number of men have declared that such beliefs are irrational, illogical and superstitious. Even today the majority of the world's peoples believe in spirits of some nature and all but the hardened materialist will at least admit that he is not sure.
Spirits are referred to and treated in the holy books and creeds of every religion, from Christianity and Buddhism to African or South Sea Island paganism. Religion must maintain belief in spirits, for what would man become in the after-life if not a spirit? Except for the school of Jung psychology has denigrated the idea of spirits, even though it has been unable to explain the powerful psychic phenomena surrounding the numerous documented cases of spirit-possession. Psychology should be honest enough to hold an open mind in regard to the possibility of other-dimensional entities, instead of becoming embarrassed at the mention of the subject.
In the age-old superstitions and priest-lore of the human race, spirits are usually treated in a vague, emotional and inexact manner. They are something to hold in awe and mystery, and not something to pry into, investigate or categorize. This is the generally held attitude of the common people. There have been some, however, who have studied the realm of spirits in an objective and scientific manner, even though their sources of information have been personal experience and the subjective report of others. Such subjective scientists have been Paracelsus, H.P. Blavatsky, Eliphas Levi, Dion Fortune and Franz Hartmann. Modern thinkers such as C.G. Jung and Colin Wilson have contributed new and creative descriptions to these existences traditionally called spirits or demons.
Whether or not there actually are spirits depends a great deal on who you are talking to and what type of description is given to a "spirit." If you ask a modern psychologist if there are such entities as the demons which our ancestors believed in, he will undoubtedly hold that there are not. He would not believe that a person could be possessed by an alien and inimical demon. He would, however, probably hold that a person can be "possessed" by an alienated portion of his own psyche, that a repressed sexuality, for instance, could surface with a seeming personality of its own and "take over" the person. The many case studies of multiple personality describe incidents of such a phenomenon. Are such alienated segments of the psyche entities and demons in their own right? If not, do they differ from the demon-possession treated by the Catholic priest, the shaman and the witchdoctor? Two hundred years ago, the diagnosis of a split personality would be demon-possession. Today the diagnosis is still demon-possession, but the demon has become much more sophisticated and respectable. It has become "animus possession," "autonomous complex" or another such label.
In Genesis it is claimed that man was made in God's image. An occultist would interpret this as meaning that man has, to a degree, the same creative power that God possesses. It can be seen that man can procreate his own kind and, surpassing the animals, he can create a technology and perform engineering feats with his hands and mind. The most subtle and primary type of human creation is that which we do with our mind. Every invention was first visualized in the mind, and this visualization is a