#

Cap.

PP.

0

Introduction

11 to 14

1

Enlightenment Occultism

15 to 61

2

Romantic Occultism

62 to 124

3

S`at.anic Occultism

125 to 149

4

Fin de sie`cle Occultism

150 to 223

5

The Modernist Occultist

224 to 265

0

Introduction

11 to 14

"The grimoires of witchcraft have their roots in grammars."

{Thus, were the deities of grimoires originally intended as hypostases of grammatical categories (which would seem rather unbefitting)? What about an alternative derivation of the word /GRIMoire/ from the name of the Norse Eddaic god /GRI`Mnir/, leader of the gremlins?}

1

Enlightenment Occultism

15 to 61

"Newspapers ran accounts of ...

Leon le Juif, who possessed a magical mirror, and

M. Ruer, who had discovered the Philosopher's Stone.

Talking dogs, a child who could see underground, men who walked on water, and reports of strange creatures ... peppered the daily press.

Even eminent authorities like Restif de la Bretonne and Mirabeau accepted the idea that Frederick II had produced satyrs and centaurs via experiments".

p. 29

"Louis Claude de Saint-Martin was born in Amboise, in the province of Touraine on 18 January 1743. ... It was in 1767, ... at Bordeaux, that he met ... Don Martines de Pasqually de la Tour -- otherwise known as Martinez Pasquales -- ... a Rosicrucian, and the head of an order of Masonic illuminism known as the Elect Cohens --

p. 30

Cohen {kohen} being Hebrew for priest. ... Pasqually ..., in 1774, ... died in Port-au-Prince. ... Willermoz, Saint-Martin's close friend, ... received secret messages from God, through the medium of mesmeric sonambulists. Saint-Martin helped Willermoz decode these messages, and he was also helpful to Mesmer's important disciple, Puysegur. Saint-Martin joined the Parisian Society of Harmony in 1784, but felt that Mesmer's .... materialism ... could attract the attention of unwanted astral spirits. ...

p. 31

Saint-Martin ... published his works under the pseudonym of 'the Unknown Philosopher'. Saint-Martin ... of apoplexy ... died on 13 October 1803."

p. 32

"It was ... Eckharthausen's book The Cloud upon the Sanctuary that set Crowley off on his ... career. ... The Confessions of Aleister Crowley ... remarks that :

The Cloud upon the Sanctuary told ... of a secret community of saints in possession of every spiritual grace, of the keys to the treasure of nature, and ...

p. 33

such that there was no intolerance or unkindness ... their one passion was to bring mankind into the sphere of their own sublimity. ...

Crowley himself ... became the head of another occult organization, the O.T.O., or Ordo Templi Orientis, then started one of his own, Argentinum Astrum, or Silver Star. ...

p. 34

Karl Von Eckharthausen was born 28 June 1752 at the Castle of Haimbhausen in Bavaria. ... Eckharthausen ... speaks of a "theocratic republic," ...

p. 35

And their mutual correspondent, Baron Kirchberger, writing to Saint-Martin, spoke of Eckharthausen ... . ... . ... Eckharthausen married three times, had several children, and died ... on 13 May 1813."

p. 39

"In 1788, ... at a dinner party given in Paris by the Duchesse de Gramont ... Cazotte went on to say that the Revolution was soon approaching ... . ...

p. 41

As for the reign of reason that Cazotte assured Malesherbes he would live to see, as Christopher McIntosh makes clear in his Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival, by 1792, a number of 'cults of reason' had sprung up in revolutionary France, the aim of which was to take the place of the destested Church.

Jacques Cazotte was born in Dijon in 1719 ... . ... Between 1747 and 1759, Cazotte moved back and forth between France and the island of Martinique in the Caribbean ... . Back in France, in 1760, Cazotte ... was saved from ruin by inheriting a large house near E'pernay, fromj his clergyman brother. There Cazotte married, had three children, and remained for the rest of life ... . ...

p. 42

Cazotte published The Devil in Love in 1772 ... . ... Cazotte ... by ... his last work, Arabian Tales, written as a kind of sequel to The Arabian Nights, is in the tradition of exotic occultism".

p. 42

"the eccentric Pole, Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815), ...

p. 43

[was] the author of The Manuscript Found at Saragossa, ... a weird farrago of stories within stories ... . Over a period of 66 days, Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer, recounts his adventures amidst gypsies ..., demons ..., astrologers, the Wandering Jew, secret societies and obliging oriental ladies. ...

p. 44

Potocki spoke fluent Arabic, and ... the Count often dressed in burnous and fez. ... Secret knowledge and scenes ... of initiation run through The Manuscript Found at Saragossa. ...

p. 45

Sentiments of tolerance, egalitarianism ..., and ... multiculturalism -- all part of the Illuminati platform -- are evident throughout the book. ... Potocki set his adventure in Spain. ... Potocki may have been aware of ... the Alumbrados, or 'Illuminated Ones', who began in Guadalajara in the early 1500s. ... He may also have been aware of another sect of 'Illuminated Ones', the Roshaniya, who flourished in Afghanistan also in the 1500s. ...

p. 46

One motif that Potocki shares with William Beckford ... is a stairway of 1,500 steps. In Beckford's ..., the steps lead upward, to the top of Caliph {H^alif} Vathek's ... tower. In Potocki, they lead downward, into a cave and the underworld."

p. 47

"Adam Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati" was "Founded on 1 May 1776, two months before the American Declaration of Independence".

{evidently inspired by the insurrection of the 13 Colonies, and aspiring to the same political principles}

p. 49

"Taking the code name Spartacus,

{as, much later, did Karl Liebknecht}

with his associates Baron von Knigge and the bookseller Johann Bode, Weishaupt's influence reached across Bavaria ... . ... Beyond Bavaria the order reached ... Austria ... . Mozart, Schiller and Goethe were absorbed ... . By 1782 it had about three hundred members, and in the next year, it reached Bohemia and Milan ... . ...

p. 50

The most influential proponent ... was the ... Abbe' Barruel ... . ...

p. 51

Peacock's friend Percy Shelley, however, was enthralled by Barruel, reading the Memoirs repeatedly, and ... developing a passionate belief in Weishaupt's ideals".

p. 55

"Barruel did receive the final initiation, and was made privy to the central Masonic secret. ... After an apprentice had taken his oath ..., "The Master said ... to him : '... the secret of Masonry consists in these words EQUALITY AND LIBERTY; all men are equal and free ... .'" This formula, he tell us, was ... expanded to mean "... war against Christ and his Altars, war against Kings and their Thrones!"

p. 56

"In books like Blake and Tradition (1968), Raine argues persuasively that Blake saw himself as a poet in the hermetic tradition, drawing on ... the "perennial philosophy.""

"Blake's natural affinity to mystical visions ... surfaced early; as a young boy ... he saw angels in a tree".

"Blake ... knew that the rise of scientism ... spelled disaster for the spiritual in man. ...

p. 57

Blake ... only came to prominence in 1898 through the efforts of Yeats and his fellow editor, E. J. Ellis."

"In 1783, the Rev. Jacob Duche, ex-Chaplain to the Continental Congress, started the London Theosophical Society, a radical Swedenborgian group. Along with Blake its members included ... Blake's fellow artists John Flaxman and William Sharp. ...

p. 58

Blake was also known to busy himself with erotic drawings ... . ... Another occult artist who met Blake late in his life was John Varley, a practising astrologer and 'zodiacal physiognomist'. With Varley Blake conducted a series of se'ances during which

p. 59

he saw and drew the visionary heads of the famous dead : Socrates, Mahomet, Voltaire and Richard Coeur de Lion ... . ...

Blake was also attracted to the neoplatonic thought of Thomas Taylor. ... In lectures given at the

p. 60

house of Blake's fellow painter John Flaxman, Taylor introduced Blake to ... prisca sapientia, the 'primal wisdom' first brought to man through Orpheus, Hermes, Zoroaster, then later continued via Plato, Plotinus, Proclus and Iamblichus."

2

Romantic Occultism

62 to 124

p. 65

"The historic Doctor Faust was born in Knittlingen, Wu[:]rttemberg, in 1480, and died at the hands of the Devil in Staufen, near Freiburg, in 1539 ... . Faust studied magic ... at the University of Cracow, in Poland ...; years later, while lecturing ... at the University of Erfurt, Faust ... invoked the spirits of Achilles, Ulysses and Hector ... . ... There are reports of ...

p. 66

the Devil accompanying him as his 'familiar' in the form of a dog.

{similarly as god Dharma, in the guise of a hound, accompanied the hero Yudhis.t.hira (according to the Maha-bharata)}

The first Faust book appeared in 1587 ... in German ... . By 1588, the story had crossed the English Channel; there it received ... eloquent treatment by Christopher Marlowe."

p. 65

"Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), ...

p. 67

birth in Frankfurt-on-Main".

"As Ronald Gray ... (1952) suggests, ... where Pietism was strong, ... the spiritual value of alchemy was also present. ... He was introduced to alchemical literature by ... the Pietist Fra:ulein von Klettenberg".

p. 70

"Goethe read the Chymical Wedding in 1786," which was the stimulus for "Goethe's Ma:rchen, The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and The Beautiful Lily. ... Novalis ... included a similar tale in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen ... . ...

p. 71

Ronald Gray devotes a chapter to the alchemical exegesis of the Ma:rchen, and in Goethe and the Philosopher's Stone (1965), Alice Raphael offers a Jungian reading of the tale."

p. 78

"Ernst Theodore Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in Ko[:]nigsberg in 1776; later he adopted the name Amadeus".

p. 79

"The Golden Flower Pot (1814) ... is generally considered his greatest work. ...

p. 81

The props of Hoffman's initiatory tale came for the most part from Le Comte de Gabalis (1670), ... depicting the elemental world of Paracelsus, by the Abbe' Montfaucon de Villars. The student Anselmus ... is troubled by a recurring vision of a glittering green snake. The snake ... is Serpentina, the daughter of the Archivist Lindhorst, who is in reality an elemental salamander,

exiled to earth for a transgression committed millennia ago.

{The motif of a deity's being exiled from heaven to an incarnation as a human on earth, is a regular theme of traditional Chinese occult novels; and is likely to have been learned from Chinese sources by European alchemists.}

Anselmus ... is hired by Lindhorst to copy out a magical manuscript, which indeed relates the story of ...

the evil apple woman ... .

{cf. the apple-goddess who took Thomas the Rhymer away into Fairyland}

... Anselmus having to choose between the two worlds ... is influenced by Hoffmann's reading of G. H. Schubert's Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views from the Nightside of Natural Science) (1808), ... which dealt with the ... paranormal side of existence. ... In the end ..., Anselmus ... plumps for Serpentina, and with her and the Magus Lindhorst, they retire to their

"freehold in Atlantis," Schubert's symbol for mankind's original state".

{Atlantis is described the original homeland by Silenos, in connection with the awarding to Midas of the alchemic "golden touch".}

p. 83

"In his Marginalia, Poe wrote of his experience of hypnagogia, that half-dream state ... "... where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. ...""

p. 84

"in his three 'mesmerism tales',

"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844),

{in RheGeD : the Cumbrian Mountains of RaGGeDy Anne}

"Mesmeric Revelations" (1844), and

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845),

{WALDEnses + MARitime Alps?}

his belief in ... piercing the veil between the 'two worlds' is presented ... . ...

p. 85

But if Poe's account of ... a state of suspend[ed] animation for seven months, at the end of which

his body dissolves into "a nearly liquid mass ..."

{cf. Bodish religious accounts of a a saint temporarily achieving a fluid state of the body (which appeareth as a puddle of water), before returning to the usual state}

carries more ... effect, "Mesmeric Revelation[s]" is closer to Poe's metaphysical target, ... the full blown apocalypse in his ... eerily prescient prose poem Eureka (1848) ... . ... . ... the

p. 86

remarkable prescience exhibited in Eureka ... predicts black holes, the expanding universe, curved space, galactic clusters ..., as well as ... the anthropic principle, unthought of at the time of writing."

p. 87

"Honore' Balzac ... was born in Tours in 1799. ...

p. 88

Balzac's mother ... was a reader of Swedenborg and Saint-Martin, and a follower of Mesmer, all of whom would become central influences on" Honore'.

p. 90

"Another influence was ... David Ferdinand Koreff, ... who had once held a chair in animal magnetism at the University of Berlin, and who had now moved to Paris. ... . ... Koreff knew Hoffmann".

p. 91

"Balzac's angel became the hermaphrodite creature, Se'raphita/Se'raphitus ... : to the woman he appears as a man, to the man, she is seen as a woman."

p. 92

"Nerval took the name Aurelia, the title of his most famous work, from a story in Hoffmann's The Serapion Brotherhood."

p. 93

"Ge'rard de Nerval was born Ge'rard Labrunie in Paris on 22 May 1808. ...

p. 94

In 1830 ... His cronies ... included Pe'trus Borel, the self-styled lycanthrope; ...

The'ophile Dondey, who wore glasses when he went to bed so he could see his dreams;

and Alphonse Esquiros, author of the occult novel The Magician".

p. 95

"A sense of his condition can be had from a letter he wrote ... :

[quoted from GNSW, p. xx]

You see spirits who talk to you in broad daylight,

at night you see perfectly shaped, perfectly distinct phantoms,

you think you remember having lived in other forms,

you imagine you are growing very tall and that your head is touching the stars {Tuphon's "head touched the stars" (GM 36.a)}, 0

the horizon of Saturn or Jupiter spreads before your eyes".

"Years later, another visionary poet, Rene' Daumal, wrote ... that he, too, had visited the exact same dreamscape that Nerval depicts in this poignant Aure'lia." ("Nerval the Nyctalope" ('Night-Fox'), in PW)

p. 97

"His often impenetrable series of poems, Les Chime'res, are rich in dark references to Pythagoras, Egyptian and Greek mythology, and Christian mysticism. But it is in Voyage in the Orient that Nerval gave ... his occult preoccupations ... . ... Voyage in the Orient is full of ... eroticism, strange dream states and astral doubles ...,

subterranean kingdoms,

{cf. Agartha}

elementals, Zoroastrianism,

the Druse, and the mythology of the 'pre-Adamite races'."

{Prae->adamite races of mankind are a feature of Druz mythology.}

p. 98

"Lytton was one of the first psychic investigators, predating the Society for Psychical Research by decades".

"A Strange Tale (1861) ... centres on reincarnation and the alchemical quest for the elixir of life."

p. 101

"Zanoni ... is a veritable encyclopedia of occult science. ...

{/Zanoni/ would mean 'Zenonian' : the adhaerents of Zenon of Kition were known as 'Zenonians' (according to Diogenes Lae:rtios 7:5).} {/ZEN-/ is evidently cognate with Skt. /YANa/, a term usually referring to Bauddha litterature.}

Zanoni himself is ... a mysteriously ever-youthful figure, who appears whenever needed and disappears in the blink of an eye. With his mentor Mejnour ... -- an early prototype of the 'coming race' -- he is one of the last remaining members of an ancient occult ... society of adepts ...; Zanoni, we are told, is at least five thousand years old. ...

p. 102

The book begins with the narraor meeting Glyndale, now an old men, in the occult bookshop ... . A conversation on Rosicrucianism starts up, and later, after Glyndale's death, the narrator receives a strange manuscript, written in an unknown cipher. {This may be a model for the mysterious cipher-book (allegedly found in an occult bookshop) said to have originated the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.} It is the story of the remarkable Zanoni."

p. 104

"Alphonse Louis Constant, author of impassioned ... socialist tracts ..., in the last years of his life, became better known to students of the occult arts as Eliphas Levi, the Professor of Transcendental Magic.

Born in 1810 in Paris, Constant ... grew up ... near the Boulevard Saint Germain ... . ...

p. 105

Constant ... was ... the writer of fiery ... socialist tracts, filled with revolutionary rhetoric. ... . ... one of his works, The Gospel of Liberty (1839), earned him an eight month prison sentence. ... Alphonse Esquiros ... invited Constant to visit a strange visionary, an aged prophet called Ganneau, who called himself 'The Mapah' ... preaching to his disciples of the creation of the universe ... . ...

p. 106

In 1852 ..., Constant became involved with the eccentric Polish e'migre' Hoene Wronski. ... Wronski ... developed a fantastically complex theory of the origin and structure of the universe ..., and it was this ... that ignited the flame of occultism in Constant. ... Wronski devoted himself to ... a 'predicting machine' he called the 'prognometre'. Wronski called his synthesis of philosophy, politics and religion messianisme, and it was this vision of a unified knowledge that plunged Constant into ... [writing] Dogme de la Haut Magie, translated into English as Transcendental Magic ... . ...

p. 108

After this success, Levi's reputation flourished and other volumes followed, like Le Clef de Grands Myste`res (1861)."

p. 110

"Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. ...

p. 112

Baudelaire had first come across the notion of synesthesia in Hoffmann's Kreisleriana. There Hoffmann remarked that when listening to music he invariably associated the different tones with colours and scents. Likewise, certain perfumes had a strange effect on him : the scent of brown and red marigold sent him into a deep reverie, in which he heard a low oboe sound in the distance. He suggested that all these different things -- colours, sounds, scents -- are aspects of

a single reality, a ray of pure light,

{cf. Gurdjieff-&-Ouspensky's "ray of creation"}

diffracted by the senses. ...

p. 114

Taking Hoffmann's ... synesthesia and Swedenborg's ... spiritual world, Baudelaire puts the poet/artist in the position of a kind of decoder, an expert at deciphering secret messages. Given Poe's penchant for ciphers and hidden clues, ... the poet/artist for Baudelaire is like Poe's eccentric detective, C. Auguste Dupin". ["During his lifetime Baudelaire was best known as a translator of Poe" (p. 113).] ...

p. 115

[Baudelaire wrote in his poem "A Carcass" about the corpse of a dead woman :] "Her legs ... were spread like a lecherous whore ... / Who opened in slick invitational style / her ... womb."

{This is reminiscent of the episode in the Tripit.ika of the Buddha's offering the corpse of the dead prostitute "Sirima" to his male disciples.}

p. 115

"Mathias Philippe Auguste Villers de l'Isle-Adam ...

p. 117

sank into ... pathetic destitution ... such ... that, were he an orthodox member of the Catholic Church ..., he would by now possibly have been canonized.

Villers de l'Isle-Adam was born in 1838 into a family whose noble ancestry" ["could look back on at least eight centuries of unbroken nobility" (p. 116)].

p. 118

"In 1862 he published the first volume of his philosophical romance Isis, also known as Wilhelm de Strally and Prolegomenes. ... this was never completed".

p. 120

"he wrote his occult fiction novel Tomorrow's Eve (which features Thomas Edison as a kind of Rosicrucian inventor of an artificial woman)" [(p. 123, n. 39 :) translated by Robert Martin Adams, University of Illinois Press, 1982].