Strange Powers Read Free Page A

illogical as the poet's, and that this is true of all creative thinking. But it came as a surprise to me to learn that there was suddenly a new wave of interest in eastern philosophy, in romanticism, in magic and occultism. When I wrote about the novels of Hermann Hesse in The Outsider , they were all out of print; and, as far as I know, I was the first person to write about them extensively in English. Now, suddenly, he was apparently a best seller. So was Tolkien; his Lord of the Rings had been a 'cult book' since its publication in the mid-fifties, read and re-read by a small circle of enthusiasts; now it literally sold by the million in paperback on American campuses. So did H. P. Lovecraft, a writer I had first read in the early sixties, and had written about in a book called The Strength to Dream in 1962. When I first wrote about him, his books could only be obtained through a tiny American publisher, Arkham House, run by Lovecraft's old friend, August Derleth; by the late sixties, they were all in paperback.
    As to the 'occult boom', it seems to have started with a curious work called The Morning of the Magicians , by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, published in Paris in 1960. This also became a best seller. And this in itself was a baffling phenomenon. There had always been offbeat best-sellers, like The Search for Bridey Murphy , Worlds in Collision , The Passover Plot (suggesting that the Resurrection was basically a put-up job); but they confined themselves to one particular theory. The Morning of the Magicians (translated in English as The Dawn of Magic ) had no central thesis. It moves from Gurdjieff to alchemy to the Great Pyramid to Atlantis to the question of whether Hitler was mixed up in black magic, and there are sections on Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Charles Fort. The English edition is a few pages longer than the American; the pages that have been cut out of the US edition describe an experiment in telepathy conducted between the atomic submarine Nautilus and the Westinghouse Special Research Center; presumably they were dropped because it was impossible to obtain the necessary confirmation from Westinghouse or the US Navy. Which raises the question of how many other items in the book might be equally difficult to confirm... A fascinating book, certainly, but one that would enrage any logical positivist because its authors seem to have an attitude of blissful indifference towards questions of proof and verification. Although the English and American editions have had nothing like the success of the French, they certainly played an important part in the 'occult revival' that now proceeded to snowball. Small presses that had specialized in occult books for a limited audience suddenly found they were making unprecedented sums of money. Copies of works like John Symonds' biography of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast— first published in 1951 by Rider, England's foremost 'occult press'—and Israel Regardie's four-volume work on the rituals of the Golden Dawn, changed hands at fantastic prices. Witch covens sprang up all over the place—until 1951 they had been illegal in England—encouraged by a book called Witchcraft Today by Gerald Gardner, in which it was claimed that witchcraft—the ancient pagan nature religion of 'Wicca'—still flourished more widely than anyone had supposed. Whether it really did, or whether it was Gardner's book that caused it to flourish, is perhaps beside the point. In the late sixties, a seven-volume encyclopaedia of occultism, Man, Myth and Magic , published in weekly parts, achieved the kind of success that had previously been achieved only by cookery books and works like Wells's Outline of History . The works of every neglected Kabbalist, from Paracelsus to Crowley, began to find their way back into print.
    Now Wells would have said that the 'occult boom' indicates nothing except that people are stupid and gullible, and there is obviously some truth in this view. But I