Free Supernatural by Colin Wilson

in the tide of Nature.’
    Here we have a kind of verbal equivalent of Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night, with its flame-like trees and its sky that seethes like a whirlpool with sheer vitality.
    In fact, Jean Paul does not always write on this ecstatic level; many of his works are about humble schoolmasters who live quietly in some small country village, and marry a local girl, and spend their lives peacefully teaching children the three Rs, and writing poetry which they never try to publish.But whether he is writing of magnificent landscapes or idyllic little villages, we can see why thousands of young people read Jean Paul with tears in their eyes, and regarded him as the greatest writer since Shakespeare.It seems absurdly ironic that he is now totally forgotten.
    But what is so interesting here is how much things have changed in the sixty years since Pamela. Richardson was a realist; people read him because he wrote about the sort of people they knew.But if you are going to be carried away by a writer, rather like Sinbad the Sailor being carried up into the air by the roc, you may as well go for stories about young counts with mysterious fathers, which take place in the midst of magnificent scenery.If, like most of Jean Paul’s readers, you had never been outside your native town or village, then why not also have the benefits of a technicolour travelogue?
    But as you read Jean Paul’s splendid description of Isola Bella, you will notice that the mood it attempts to induce is one of abandonment. Like Albano, you are supposed to cry ‘Oh God!’, and feel as if you want to fling yourself off the terrace and swoop like a bird over the sea.Jean Paul is trying to persuade you to give yourself to this wonderful landscape, like a girl giving herself to a lover.And here we encounter the greatest problem of the romantics.They may have intuitions of hidden powers, of the ability to fly or to float into the air like a balloon.But it is all basically Christmas cake and pretty girls.You sit back passively and wait for it to be handed to you on a plate.Church, on the other hand, is excited by his insight to make a sudden effort:
    ‘I exerted that will, visualising my hands and pressing downwards upon the centre of the earth.It was no surprise to me that I left the ground ...’
    And the student Beard, we may recall, had been reading a book about the power of the will when he decided to try to ‘appear’ to his fiancée Miss Verity.
    These ‘hidden powers’ we are speaking about demand a certain effort, a non-passive attitude—something like Powys’s ‘thrill of malicious exultation’, the feeling that he is a ‘demiurgic force’, not a passive creature waiting to be swept off his feet.
    In the following chapter I want to look more closely at some of these ‘hidden powers’, and the methods by which we can contact them.But it is important, above all, to remember that the method for contacting these powers consists in ‘subjectivising’, withdrawing inside yourself. This is the basic secret of ‘magic’.
     
    1. Tertium Organum, Chapter 14 .
    1. Quoted in my Beyond the Occult, p. 187 , and in Phantasms of the Living, by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Volume 2, p. 461 .
    1. Yeats: Essays and Introductions, p. 37 .

2
    The Powers of the Hidden Self
    S IX YEARS BEFORE the publication of Pamela, the wife of a gamekeeper on the shores of Lake Constance, in Austria, gave birth to a male child whose influence would be as tremendous and far-reaching as that of Samuel Richardson.Unfortunately for Franz Anton Mesmer, he was not a novelist but a scientist and a philosopher—I say unfortunately because everybody loves a good story, but few people like being asked to think.Even clever people are inclined to react to original ideas with indifference or hostility.So Mesmer’s amazing contribution brought him little but trouble, and when he died in 1815, he was virtually forgotten.Yet his ideas, as we shall see, are virtually the