Lawrence and the “homeless soul”

By the end of the twentieth century, it had been almost forgotten that the Freudian account of the unconscious was only one of many to have emerged from the intellectual ferment of the second half of the 19th century. The philosophical roots of the concept of the unconscious in Leibniz, Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer had also been occluded from view by the dominance of Freudianism. From his earliest work of the 1940s until his final writings of the 1990s, Gilles Deleuze stood at odds with this dominant current, rejecting Freud as sole source for ideas about the unconscious. This most ‘contemporary’ of French philosophers acted as custodian of all the ideas that had been rejected by the proponents of the psychoanalytic model, carefully preserving them and, when possible, injecting them with new life. In 1950s and 60s Deleuze turned to Henri Bergson's theories of memory and instinct and to Carl Jung's theory of archetypes. In Difference and Repetition (1968) he conceived of a ‘differential unconscious’ based on Leibnizian principles. He was also immersed from the beginning in esoteric and occult ideas about the nature of the mind. Deleuze and the Unconscious shows how these tendencies combine in Deleuze's work to engender a wholly new approach to the unconscious, for which active relations to the unconscious are just as important as the better known pathologies of neurosis and psychosis.

This chapter evaluates Temple of Set founder Michael Aquino’s The Book of Coming Forth by Night (1975). The text describes a manifestation of an “ageless Intelligence of the Universe” that rejected the “Moorish” moniker of Satan. It is a “sequence of realizations” from the ancient Egyptian god Set. Aquino does not consider himself the author as much as the instrument for Set’s revelations. Indeed, it is written in the first person as the voice of Set, who claims responsibility for Aleister Crowley and Anton Szandor LaVey’s occult ideas, in order to “prepare men for that which would follow.” The Book of Coming Forth by Night, despite being an important internal text, is perhaps not the most influential externally: its reach does not extend much beyond the Temple of Set.

The relationship between Charles Baudelaire and his contemporary, the occult writer Eliphas Lévi, has long interested scholars. This essay argues that instead of fruitlessly looking for evidence of direct literary influence between the two men, we should look on their writings as parallel texts exploring remarkably similar themes but to radically different ends. Both Lévi and Baudelaire wrote about the supposed mystical origins of language and were interested in the links between poetry and black magic—a means, in both cases, to conjure up past experiences or absent people. Baudelaire's poem “Un Fantôme” also explores the connection between memory and the occult concept of “lumière astrale,” the mystical, unifying force that supposedly penetrated and connected all Creation. Although Baudelaire's writing looked to such occult ideas as potential antidotes to the fragmentation and transience of existence, he saw that they were ultimately marked by a fatal and quintessentially modern irony: Although ideas akin to Levi's may have offered the semblance of plenitude and happiness in their transcendence of daily existence, they also, by definition, held such feelings out of reach in an eternally irretrievable past.

Reviewed by: Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion by Hugh B. Urban Dmitry Galtsin hugh b. urban. Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Hugh Urban's book Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion was published in 2021, the result of decades-long interest in secrecy and religion, as well as the continuation of the author's studies in Indian Tantra, Western sex magic, and modern esoteric movements.1 Urban's book is focused on "secrecy as [End Page 464] power," and especially "the unique sort of power that religious claims to transcendent authority can wield" (2). The author intends to "theorize secrecy as a broader, cross-cultural, and comparative phenomenon in the history of religion," being preoccupied with "the mysterious workings of power and … the more this-worldly, historical, and material aspects of claims to hidden knowledge" (3). In Urban's view, "secrecy is better understood as a crucial part of the construction of religious authority itself and a fundamental element in both the maintenance and the dismantling of religious power in relation to broader social, political, and historical interests" (4). He claims to be engaged with "critical history of religion" (4), which can't help but bring to mind the basic Marxist approach, having at its core the strategy of unmasking religious claims by deconstructing them into elements, which point to the "material" (whatever is meant by the term) interests and processes, allegedly reflected in human consciousness as religion. The author explicitly speaks of the political implications of the method employed in his study: "The task of the critical history of religion in the twenty-first century is … at least twofold. Not only is our challenge to critically examine religion itself … it is also to examine the state (and now also the corporate) entities that surveil, regulate, censor, and in some cases criminalize religious groups, particularly those that stray outside the margins of 'legitimate' religiosity (particularly, Muslims, people of color, new or alternative religious movements, and those who express dissident political views)" (205). Urban criticizes, on one hand, those historians of religion who, admitting that secrecy is central for their field of study, nevertheless leave the study of secrecy "disappointedly vague, general, and theoretically undeveloped" (3), and on the other those who speak of the "decline in secrecy" following the French Revolution, industrialization, and disenchantment of the world (5–8). Urban views mature and late modernity as the time of "a tremendous new interest in secrecy, in the proliferation of secret societies, esoteric brotherhoods, occult movements, and in the mysteries of the exotic Orient" (5). At the same time, the end of this period in the second half of the twentieth century has seen an unprecedented rise in secrecy related to politics, especially in the United States, as reflected in the quote from David Cole: "Today, it is the citizenry that is increasingly transparent while government operations are shrouded in secrecy" (8). In order to examine secrecy as power, Urban analyzes several phenomena related to the sphere of esotericism and fringe religion, such as Freemasonry and Theosophy of the late nineteenth century, [End Page 465] sex magic of the first third of the twentieth century, the Nation of Islam of the second half of the twentieth century, white supremacy terrorist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and Scientology of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Secrecy is understood throughout the book as "a kind of strategy … for acquiring, enhancing, preserving, and/or protecting power" (10). The "power" here is, of course, Pierre Bourdieu's symbolic power, "a power, which the person submitting to grants to the person who exercises it, a credit which he credits his, a fides, an auctoritas … It is a power which exists because the person who submits to it believes that it exists" (10). Secrecy is thus a means of obtaining, preserving, and making symbolic capital: any information guarded by secrecy becomes valuable insofar as it becomes secret and thus contributes to the economy of secrets, the market of exoteric and occult ideas being part of this economy. As a strategy of dealing with symbolic capital, secrecy is subject to a complex dialectics of adornment and vestment...

The Church of Scientology remains one of the most controversial and poorly understood new religious movements to emerge in the last century. And among the most controversial questions in the early history of the Church is L. Ron Hubbard's involvement in the ritual magic of Aleister Crowley and the possible role of occultism in the development of Scientology. While some critics argue that Crowley's magic lies at the very heart of Scientology, most scholars have dismissed any connection between the Church and occultism. This article examines all of the available historical material, ranging from Hubbard's personal writings, to correspondence between Crowley and his American students, to the first Scientology lectures of the 1950s. Crowley's occult ideas, I argue, do in fact represent one—but only one—element in the rich, eclectic bricolage that became the early Church of Scientology; but these occult elements are also mixed together with themes drawn from Eastern religions, science fiction, pop psychology, and Hubbard's own fertile imagination.

Chapter 7 situates Frankism in the context of eighteenth-century Western esotericism, the movement which, like Frank, sought the secret knowledge (gnosis/da‘at) of hidden realms or aspects of existence and which scandalously taught that traditional religion is but the surface atop magical and mythic truths it only half-understands. Mid-eighteenth-century Europe witnessed an explosion in initiatic secret societies clustered around esoteric and occult ideas, of which the Frankist sect at the time of Words of the Lord was one. Socially, it was closely connected to Masonic networks, which it exploited for political gain, and Frank was in direct contact with other Western esotericist figures and charlatans. And ideologically, ZSP’s theology is closer to Western esotericism than Kabbalah, syncretizing materialism, libertinism, folklore, and quasi-Enlightenment rationalism. The Frankist court resembles a secret society, and the teachings of ZSP resemble a Western esoteric theology, with equal parts tradition and modernity, rationalist critique and magical occultism.

The work shows that the system of the scholastic principle of teaching was developed and introduced into the system of teaching at medieval universities by the state church in order to approve its dogmas and teachings. It has been proven that the system of scholasticism, based on the deductive method, proclaimed the need to prove the concepts and ideas already approved by the church, without thereby implying any scientific research in principle. It is shown that scholasticism introduced mystical and occult ideas into university teaching, which displaced the already very modest medieval scientific developments. The system of scholastic teaching led to a ban on anatomic-physiological research and clinical observations, the absence of practical and experimental classes, the destruction of the concept of clinical thinking and scientific-practical discussions, and the formation of a template approach to the treatment of patients in medieval medical faculties.

In this volume the author describes more than 3000 short stories, novels, and plays with science fiction elements, from earliest times to 1930. He includes imaginary voyages, utopias, Victorian boys' books, dime novels, pulp magazine stories, British scientific romances and mainstream work with science fiction elements. Many of these publications are extremely rare, surviving in only a handful of copies, and most of them have never been described before. Each of the entries is exhaustive, with bibliography, including previous periodical publications, and a full summary of the story, with historical and critical comments. Author biographical data, where available, accompanies each item. An appendix surveys ideas and systems that have proved important in early science fiction, such as Atlantis, Fourierism, the single tax, Theosophy, the hollow earth, the open polar seas and similar concepts. The text also includes title, author, date and magazine indexes as well as a 65-page motif and thematic index. The author's introduction aims to provide a fresh understanding of the nature of science fiction and its origins, and contains an exhaustive analytical table of science fiction motifs as they fit into the conceptual scheme of the sciences. In addition to its obvious value to the field of science fiction, the book covers many powerful issues in American cultural history - feminism, racial and ethnic prejudices, crank scientific theories, extreme social and economic systems, occult ideas, and descriptions of varying attitudes toward science and advanced technology.

My study of Ezra Pound's Cantos has led me to examine the occult movement in Europe and America during the late Victorian and early modern period.' It has long been evident that occult ideas have had an impact upon modernism at least through French symbolism, William Butler Yeats, and Wassily Kandinsky. Less well known is the probable influence of the man who was the founding editor of the Theosophical Society's journal, George Robert Stow Mead. We know that Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme attended lectures organized by Mead's Quest Society in the Kensington Town Hall; Pound's attendance was regular and began at least as early as 1912. He would often find his future wife, Dorothy, and her mother, Olivia Shakespeare, at the Quest lectures accompanied by Yeats.2 Mead's position within the occult movement was prominent and unambiguous. Born in 1863, he joined Blavatsky's Theosophical Society in 1884. After meeting Mme. Blavatsky in 1887, he became her private secretary, undertook revision of her major work, The Secret Doctrine, and became editor of the Theosophical Review. He was general secretary of the European section of the society until 1897, and was offered the presidency in 1907 on the death of Blavatsky's successor, Colonel Olcott. Instead of becoming president he led a schism and founded the rival Quest Society in 1909. Its center of operation was Kensington, the London borough in which Ezra Pound set up residence late in 1909. Pound read Psychology and Troubadours at the Quest Society meetings and the piece was published in the society's journal, The Quest, in 1912. Mead was also well known to Yeats.3

169). Sedulous readers will admonish me for failing to notice that “Malcolm Lowry” is killed in prose and resurrected only in textual forms. Moreover, the genius celebrated in these books is an imaginative projection; it is not just a talented self, but a heroic selfand even an indwelling spirit. My point is that the special demands of Lowry research force us to reverse our perspective, so that we seek the tissue of lived experience, not just the textual weave of that experience. We sense, not the subject-as-written, but the writer in his habit as he died. Or in Lowry’s terms, you can expel the author from his text, but he returns with a pitchfork. jo n KERTZER / University of Calgary Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992). xviii, 214. $29.95. The Celestial Tradition is a provocative work of scholarship that casts its celestial light upon one aspect of typically modernist obscurity. While Tryphonopoulos does not try to interpret every line of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, he offers a helpful framework that allows a reader to interpret for him/herself. Illumination is also provided by placing the poem in the spe­ cial context of “the rising psychic tide” (a phrase of G.R.S. Mead’s) of the early modern period. The context also provides important connections with other modernist writers closely related to Pound, such as T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats as well as D.H. Lawrence. The Celestial Tradition combines the strengths of scholarship with the task of critical interpretation in ways that can be accommodated to the demands of critical theory. The Celestial Tradition is provocative because it allows for a re-evaluation of the little understood and little regarded occult concepts in determining the character of modernism. Chapter 11 of the book summarizes the history of occult movements from ancient times to the modern period; the sub­ sequent chapter establishes the occult context of The Cantos and Pound’s relationship to the occult tradition. Chapter 11 draws heavily on established secondary sources; however, neither the average reader nor the academic spe­ cialist is necessarily familiar with such material. The author accomplishes two goals in this chapter: he defines clearly the parameters of the occult and clarifies the separate, though interwoven, strands that comprise the history of occult ideas. He also clearly separates a theurgic tradition of the occult, or “practical magic,” from the metaphysical, ideological, secret or “hidden” tradition of the occult. Tryphonopoulos, like Pound, concentrates upon the latter. I have only one critical question to raise about this chapter of the 494 book: the Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Kabbalistic, and alchemical strands of the tradition need to be presented more distinctly. I perceive a sharper distinc­ tion between a Neoplatonic tradition that opposes spirit and mind to the physical body and the alchemical tradition that perceives the body as an aspect of mind. Pound makes important use of the latter position. Chapter III places the occult tradition firmly within the context of mod­ ernism by introducing a picture of the London of the early decades of mod­ ernism as overtaken by Mead’s rising tide of occultism. Mead is presented as a central figure who bridges the gap between popular occultism and the in­ tellectual order in anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. This chapter presents the fruits of original research into Pound’s published and unpub­ lished correspondence and the writings ofoccultists such as Edward Upward and A.R. Orage. Particularly distinctive is the emphasis upon the role of Katherine Ruth Heyman. Tryphonopoulos shows that Pound had a contin­ uing relationship with this concert pianist, who was versed in the occult and wrote upon Scriabin. Pound’s close relationship with W.B. Yeats is obvi­ ously presented as ofmajor significance; Tryphonopoulos shows that Pound’s consistent opposition to theurgy or practical magic led him to oppose Yeats’s involvement in this branch of the occult. Yeats’s occult metaphysics, on the other hand, were a major influence and can be so acknowledged. Tryphonopoulos applies creatively his new scholarly material to the prob­ lems of interpretation. He suggests that Pound...

This chapter examines the regime's policies toward occultists in the early to middle years of the Third Reich, including ‘Hitler's Magicians' Controversy’ — a debate over whether to allow professional anti-occultists to debunk ‘magic’ and occultism. When the regime worked to repress or ‘coordinate’ esoteric groups, it had more to do with controlling than eliminating occult ideas. Indeed, like border scientists generally, many Nazis worked carefully to distinguish between commercial and popular occultism on the one hand and ‘scientific’ occultism on the other. While the Nazis indicated considerable hostility toward commercial occultism, practitioners of the scientific variety enjoyed remarkable latitude, even sponsorship, by the Third Reich. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the ‘Hess Action’ against the occult and its longer term consequences.

Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738): Calvinist chemist and physician, History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands, vol. 3Amsterdam, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2002, pp. xvi, 237, €35.00 (hardback 90-6984-343-0). - Volume 48 Issue 3

the third sentence should read as follows.Before their embrace of spiritualism in the early 1850s both John Edmonds, the President of the Prison Association of New York, and Eliza Farnham, an advocate of phrenology, modified Sing Sing's evangelical approach to penology.

The occult has been a source of fascination for writers and scholars over the centuries. It is often associated with magic, the macabre, spectacle, the diabolical, and the unknown, but it also encompasses aspects of science and new understandings of the world. The occult shadows the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, belief, and practice. The word “occult” comes from the Latin occultus meaning secret or hidden, though it became associated with esoteric knowledge and magic during the early modern period. Those who sought out new knowledge needed to frame their work within legitimate boundaries, and curiosity needed to be curtailed to avoid excessive intellectual inquiry. Printing enhanced the circulation of occult ideas, and contemporary writers such as Agrippa became representative of the early modern occult tradition as well as the more ancient sources such as the hermetic texts. Indeed, the critical history of the occult also bears out its varied role in the early modern period in terms of its extremes and indeterminate nature. Fascination with the secret and hidden provides perfect material for writers and scholars. Writers of the early modern period exploited the gap between legitimate knowledge and the perceived nefarious, illegitimate practices of individuals. The trope of the overreaching figure, encapsulated in Doctor Faustus, provided spectacle as well as a moral lesson, while the hidden qualities of words and signs added an extra dimension to any performance: would those hidden qualities be accidently unleashed by the actors? The theater played upon the occult as spectacle but was also prepared to parody it as figures such as John Dee are recognizably caricatured and referred to in plays of the period. Magi and powerful figures with knowledge of the occult also occupy prominent positions in prose and poetry. Like its theatrical counterpart, writers of printed works were also wary of the power of signs and written words to be harnessed by their readers. The debates around the occult are wide-ranging and encompassing of different beliefs and practices, from what 21st-century readers might recognize as scientific to the magical, beliefs and practices that were contemporaneously coded as legitimate and illegitimate.

The aim of this article is to introduce the Czech reader to the issue of the relationship between National Socialism and occultism. In Western Europe, these relationships have been explored since the 1970s, when historians James Webb and Nicholas Goodric Clarke began to explore them. In the Czech environment, however, serious research on this topic is still relatively unknown and a minimum of scientists are devoted to it. Conversely, Popular culture and lovers of mysteries produce countless fantastic stories about Nazi wizards, secret societies controlling the NSDAP, or Nazi quests for the Holy Grail. This ensures a tabloid impression. But if we overcome this impression, we will find that the issue of the relationship between Nazism and occultism is a story about the rapid intellectual, religious and especially political development of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when at other times marginal occult ideas and fantasies could influence the development of entire states. This text is therefore a basic summary of the information known so far about the relationship between National Socialism and occultism. It is processed in the form of a sampling method into the conclusions of research carried out so far and the resulting literature. In it, we observe the intermingling of German nationalism and occultism at the end of the 19th century, which leads to the emergence of a chauvinist and racist occult teaching, the so-called Ariosophy. Ariosophy spread through Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, becoming the political program of various occult and political organizations. In Bavaria, the main representative of Ariosophy is the Thule Society, and the Thule agitation among the workers gave rise to the DAP in 1919, and from 1920 to the NSDAP. The end of the text is devoted to the NSDAP's ambivalent relationship to the occult. Since 1941, the party faction opposing occultism was victorious and the great persecution of occultists begins. The text introduces the reader to Reinhard Heydrich’s order of June 4, 1941, which begins the persecution.