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

(revised edition 1975), the cultural historian Jacques Barzun lists some ninety differing and contrasting uses of `romantic': most, since the collapse of Romanticism itself as an artistic and cultural movement, harbouring a pejorative meaning. To most people today notions of magic or the occult are highly `romantic', meaning they are unrealistic, mere fantasies, dreams and products of the imagination. The fact that for the popular mind the imagination is seen as the source of error and unreality shows how far our own modern consciousness is from the Romantic sensibility. With William Blake, Paracelsus and other hermetic thinkers, the Romantics saw the imagination as the central source of existence, the fundamental creative power, and the most god-like of human faculties. In many ways the Romantic Movement, begun by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Goethe in the last years of the 18th century, and carried on in different forms into the mid 19th century by European and American writers, poets and artists, was a defence of the imagination against the encroaching reductionism of science. In its battle against superstition, scientific thought, the great liberator of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, had unburdened the human mind of a number of chains. Yet in the process of `freeing' man from the falsehoods of religion and the constraints of political and social oppression, it had reduced his stature considerably. The rationalism and materialism that did away with religion left man little more than a mechanical toy, a puppet pushed and pulled by the impersonal forces of nature.
    Although it was clearly a reaction against the-Enlightenment, Romanticism did share many themes with its predecessor. The rights of the individual, fought for by the Enlightenment, became, under the banner of Romanticism, a belief in individuality itself. Individuality, personality, subjectivity were positive goals, because it is only as a true individual that man could experience freedom, and not be merely the atomistic recipient of an abstract `right'. In a society moving, even with the best intentions, towards total rationalisation, where the unique human being would be reduced to his function in an harmoniously operating system, the Romantic individual recognized a dangerous levelling, and opposed his own uniqueness to uniformity and mass production. For the Romantic, this individuality expressed itself most powerfully in the artist, the unique `creative genius', although it often settled for the unusual and idiosyncratic. This focus on the uncommon led, as one historian put it, to "an apotheosis of the strange and bizarre, the eccentric and weird, the demoniacal and reckless."' We have already seen an obsession with the eerie and exotic in the oriental and Gothic craze of the late 18th century. These remained, but the Romantic added to them an exploration of the workings of the mind. It is no surprise that in his massive history of the unconscious, Henri F. Ellenberger includes a lengthy examination of Romantic poetry and literature.

    If the Enlightenment occultists can be said to have worked, however unsuccessfully, toward a revolution in society, envisioning a world of religious tolerance and universal brotherhood, after the Terror and the rise of Napoleon, the Romantics shifted the scene of the battle. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake all shared in the glow of the Revolutionary dawn; yet when the bloodbath began they, and others, pulled away in disgust. It would be easy to see this as a retreat into quietism; but that in itself is a safe, reactionary response. The Romantic rejection of politics was not a retreat, but an advance into a more exciting, unknown and dangerous world: the mind. It was, as the critic Erich Heller calls it, "a journey into the interior." In one of his many aphorisms Novalis remarked "We dream of journeys through the universe - is not the universe in us? We do not know the depths of our mind. The mysterious path leads inwards.