The Occultism of the Text

Abstract

Literature, and sometimes other art, lays claim to a form of knowledge which is other than and transcends the given of the non-art world, but has affinities with religious and magical systems; the perennial philosophy.' We might substitute art for in the following quotation from Paracelsus's De Occulta Philosophia without exaggerating the claims made on behalf of literary work: Magic has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly. (quoted in Candish 1967:135). In the execution of literature, precision and secret knowledge become vital, its mystique is frequently impenetrable to non-initiates, the numinous is often evoked, or terror inspired as a means of defamiliarization. Just as in magic and religion, the emotional poles of love and dread are elicited: the invocatory text moves between them by a process analogous to sympathetic magic, while the incantatory text hypnotizes and renders the reader spellbound, lost in a labyrinth with unwinding print for clue. The form of knowledge to which literature has particularly laid claim reached its zenith in the occultism of the symbol, described in detail by John Senior in The Way Down and Out: Occultism in Symbolist Literature (1959), and briefly in William York Tindall's The Literary Symbol (1967). The occult symbolists like Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Yeats, learned their magic from such sources as Eliphas Levi's Dogme de la Haut Magie (1861), and claimed, with Villiers de l'Isle Adam, that there is a secret connection between poetry and the ancient methods of magic [...] both evoke the hidden object by allusive words, never direct. (Adam, quoted in Tindall 1967:55). The overt occultism of the symbolists is however, merely an extension of the formulations by romantic writers such as we see in Whitman's See, steamers steaming through my poetry.'2 Here language approaches the platonic ideal without passing through the middle phase of embodiment as the phenomenal. Apprehending the world as symbol, the poet recreates the act of perception through language alone.