Free A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult by Gary Lachman Page A

Plotinus, Proclus and lamblichus. As in the work of the contemporary Neoplatonist John Michel, much of this wisdom is couched in mathematical and geometric forms, with which Blake had some difficulty. Taylor apparently once tried to teach maths to Blake, who was notoriously recalcitrant, and it is telling that Blake's style is all Old Testament and Gothic, and lacks the principle of geometric balance, order and restraint that we recognize as classical. Mention of John Michel brings us to Blake's fascination with ancient Britain, with the megaliths and "druid stones" that had recently come to popular attention through the work of William Stukeley. Like contemporary New Agers, Blake believed that the Ancients possessed a wisdom and a knowledge lost to us, a capacity for spiritual vision and life that was quickly fading in the triumphant rise of science. And like today, the London of his time was populated with a collection of societies interested in reviving the ancient practices and embodying the lost wisdom; Blake himself was at the centre of one, playing guru to a group of artists who called themselves `The Ancients', because of their fascination with the art of the golden past, a conduit to which they found in Blake's own work.

    Notes
    1 Robert Darnton Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) p. 34.
    2 For the material on Swedenborg, Cagliostro and Falk, I am indebted to Joscelyn Godwin's brilliant study, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) pp. 94-97, and to Marsha Keith Schuchard's seminal essay "Yeats and the `Unknown Superiors': Swedenborg, Falk and Cagliostro", in Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies (New York: AMS Press, 1995).
    3 Darnton pp. 70-71.
    4 Mozart's interest and involvement in Enlightenment occultism was profound; in 1789, he attended a fancy dress party in Vienna, dressed as a Hindu philosopher, and handed out esoteric riddles in the form of sayings of Zoraster. On a more serious note, his music is suffused with Masonic themes, most notably in his initiatory, Illuminati-inspired opera, The Magic Flute as well as his Masonic Funeral Music. See my article "Concerto for Magic and Mysticism" in The Quest Vol. 90, #4 July-August 2002.

    5 Quoted in Henri E Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (London: Fontana Press, 1994) p. 58.
    6 The Baroness D'Oberkirch has this to say about him: "While not actually handsome, his face was the most remarkable I've ever seen. His eyes, above all. They were indescribable, with supernatural depths - all fire and yet all ice. It seemed to me that if any two artists sketched him, the two portraits, while having some slight resemblance, might yet well be totally dissimilar. Ambivalent, he at once attracted and repelled you; he frightened you and at the same time inspired you with insurmountable curiosity." Cagliostro, she said, "was possessed of a demonic power; he enthralled the mind, paralyzed the will."
    Another aristocrat, the Baron de Gleichen, remarked that: "Cagliostro was small, but he had a very fine head which could have served as the model for the face of an inspired poet. It is true that his tone, his gestures and his manners were those of a charlatan, boastful, pretentious and arrogant, but ... his ordinary conversation was agreeable and instructive, his actions noble and charitable, and his healing treatments never unsuccessful and sometimes admirable: he never took a penny from his patients."
    7 In his introduction to the Dedalus edition of Judith Landry's translation.
    8 For a longer account of Weishaupt's illuminated predecessors, as well as a history of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, see my article "The Mystical Count" in Fortean Times #140 November 2000.

     

Romantic Occultism
    `Romantic' and `Romanticism' are both highly ambiguous terms providing a confusing array of definitions and usages. In his important study Classic, Romantic and Modern