The Works of Walter Leslie Wilmshurst
Brief Masonic Biography
The Meaning of Masonry
The Masonic Initiation
The Ceremony of Initiation
The Ceremony of Passing
Notes on Cosmic Consciousness
The Fundamental Philosophic Secrets Within Masonry
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal
The Mystical Basis of Freemasonry
Reason and Vision
The Working Tools of an Old York Master
Spurious Ecstasy and Ceremonial Magic
Wilmshurst's Tracing Board of the Centre
|
Published in the Occult Review July 1911
SPURIOUS ECSTASY AND CEREMONIAL MAGIC
By W. L. Wilmshurst
THE strongest evidence of man's dissatisfaction with his present
status and surroundings is furnished by his desire to transcend the
drab routine of life and to escape from himself. The yearning for
ec-stasis — the desire to stand out beyond his physical
limitations — manifests in many ways. Some of these —
conventional amusements, aesthetic or religious emotionalism —
are innocuous enough, but when they enter the region called occult,
many become wholly evil even when initiated with good intentions,
whilst one only is otherwise than entirely spurious, transient, and
imperilous. Of the evil methods it may be premised that they are the
shadows and perverted forms of the wholesome way; the homage of
imitation and imperfection that vice pays to virtue and its
attainment. The vulgar drunkard, for instance, enters after his own
manner a spurious temple of the Mysteries to seek the joys of the
pothouse, and his cup runneth over as surely, if in a grosser
fashion, as his who is inebriated by the mystic Grail in the
sanctuary of his own soul. The exhilaration of the aviator is a
low-grade replica of that of the religious aspirant who, sighing for
the wings of a dove, learns to soar — superasque evadere ad
auras — otherwise than in modern airships. But the mild
delights of the bottle and the thrills accruing from venturesome
sports pale to nothingness before the gorgeous illuminations of
consciousness inducible by certain drugs and anaesthetics. Few,
however, care to undertake the experiences of the opium and hashish
eater in view of the reaction and inexorable penalty exacted by
outraged Nature from those who wilfully or through moral infirmity
explore the caverns and abysses of the subliminal mind. Of recent
years experimental psychology has probed this matter, and Professor
James has described very graphically the effects upon himself of
intoxication by nitrous-oxide gas. There is produced, he says, an
intense and rapturous metaphysical illumination in which truth lies
open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence;
where subject and object, meum and tuum, the centre and
periphery of things, become one; and where one becomes consciously
blended with the Infinite.
Important philosophical deductions result from these experiments
and a treatise upon The Anaesthetic Revelation by an American citizen
is, in its way, of undoubted educational value.* [* See Prof. James's
The Will to Believe, pp. 294-8 ; and his article in the Hibbert
Journal, July, 1910.] But what is the effect of these practices upon
the personal organism of the experimenter? It will vary in
individuals proportionately to their native moral or immoral
condition, and it may be assumed that in the morally degenerate the
results would be much more appalling than those attending alcoholic
delirium. But even the average clean-minded man, actuated by the good
motive of scientific inquiry, testifies in the person of Professor
James himself that he is left with " the sense of a dreadful and
ineluctable fate; a pessimistic fatalism; depth within depth of
impotence and indifference ; . . . terminating either in a laugh at
the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a
meaningless infinity." So far, then, so bad; even at the best.
The immature Icarus flying to the sun, gets his wings scorched for
his pains and falls back into a sea of trouble.
Contraband illuminism is obtainable also by certain oriental
yoga-practices and by the frenzy of the dance as exemplified by the
whirling dervish who performs his gyrations with the object of
deadening the senses and awakening higher centres of consciousness
than those to which the senses are the portal. The dance has been
used in the rites of sanctity, and perhaps even in connexion with the
Christian Mass; but it has also served in the mysteries of iniquity
as a sensuous and illicit attempt to capture elements latent in the
depths of human nature to the legitimate possession of which that
nature has not yet attained. This latter was the classic sin of
Prometheus in stealing the Divine Fire and using it for carnal ends.
But it is perhaps little known that the excitation of psychic passion
and the promoting a spurious ecstasy by unlocking an imprisoned
essence which, by its proper user, may be suffered to act as the
purifier and baptizer of the lower nature, is illustrated, beneath a
thick veil of dramatic imagery, in the biblical reference to the
lascivious dancing-woman whose object was to reduce into possession
what is figuratively described as '' the head of John the Baptist in
a charger."
The practices of Theurgy and Ceremonial Magic are cognate in
character to those already named. At their best (if the epithet be
not an abuse) they are attempts, undercover of pseudo-dedications of
sanctity, to stimulate and exercise occult faculties by constraining
to the ends of selfish gratification subhuman intelligences and
forces that mercifully remain unmanifested to our ordinary
perceptions; at their worst, and even at a stage far anterior to
that, they are unnameable abominations. As one of the great series of
studies upon the varied manifestations of the Secret Tradition in
Christian times upon which Mr. A. E. Waite has now for long been
engaged we have before us an elaborate volume, The Book of Ceremonial
Magic;* [* The Book of Ceremonial Magic, including the Rites
and Mysteries of Goetic Theurgy, Sorcery and Infernal Necromancy. By
A. E. Waite. 376 pp. with 180 engravings and plates. William Rider &
Son, Ltd.] a most comprehensive treatise in that it supplies the
texts of all the chief magical rituals extant, describes the methods
and operations, and supplies much historical and critical commentary.
But the author's avowed purpose being to show that Magic, Sorcery,
Necromancy and their cognates are perverse corruptions and fungoid
growths upon a body of doctrine that is high and holy, the book is
negative rather than positive in value; its motive is that of the
Spartan fathers when they paraded drunken helots in the presence of
their sons; namely, to show them something well worth avoiding.
That definite results accrue from magical practices is of course
indubitable, but if from following them one were to gain the whole
world, or even an inconsiderable portion of it, there is probably no
surer way by which to disintegrate eventually one's own soul. It is
significant that these operations demand from their devotees
preparations as arduous as, and certainly far more ingenious and
troublesome than, are required from those who aim at that genuine
occult wisdom of which art-magic is the complementary foolishness.
The doctrine of both prescribes rigorous discipline of body and mind,
but whilst in the one case the end proposed is that of assisting the
Divine in man to find its rest in the Divine in the Universe, in the
other it is to provoke auto-hypnosis and self-hallucination, to
indulge in vanity and self-glory, to truckle with obscene powers, to
steal nefarious marches upon and influence the freewill of one's
neighbour, and to obtain abnormal facilities for practising lewdness
unperceived. Corruptio optimi pessima; or as S. Francis of
Sales once said in taking the pure and sweet scented lily as the
symbol of the perfected soul, there is no scent so foully malodorous
as that of rotten lilies. Mr Waite has performed considerable
service, though doubtless a disagreeable task, in collating the
literature of Ceremonial Magic, in indicating its methods and aims,
and especially in demonstrating the invalidity of the distinction
popularly made between magic that is thought to be White and that
which is admittedly Black. It is perhaps too much to hope that
efforts towards attaining artificial illuminism or that the
prostituted use of occult powers will cease to be made as the result
of this volume, but, so far as literature can pronounce it, for all
but the ignorant, the imbecile, or the wantonly wicked, this book is
as the Last Judgement thereupon.
One turns with relief from contemplating the ways of vanity and
evil, to the one remaining path leading to the true ecstasy and
veritable Magia ; the path which I have said above is alone
legitimate and safe as it alone is to be computed genuine occultism
and the only one worth any one's while to pursue. Given the fact,
which lies at the basis of all occultism, that high and hidden
centres of consciousness and power exist sealed up within the human
organism, there exist also alternative ways of unlocking them. One is
by forced, illicit methods conducing inevitably to mental and moral
disintegration; the other is by a "graduated-fire" and
methods inducing legitimate and normal growth towards, and ultimate
absorption in, the focal source and holy centre of all consciousness
and power, where, voided of all vain desires and in utter immunity
from any peril, the soul
In
the ultimate Heart's occult abode
May
lie as in an oubliette of God.
As regards the former of these methods the best of all authorities
stigmatised as thieves and robbers those who sought to " climb
up into the sheepfold by some other way " than that of growth in
grace and sanctity and through the strait gate and narrow way
prescribed by the law and the order; whilst a lesser one who learned
the Secret Doctrine independently of the Christian fold has also
testified that those few who find the hidden door legitimately are
such as have been found specially worthy to be interiorly illumined
or have won their title to the heights by an inflaming passion for
holiness;
Pauci, quos aequus amavit
Jupiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus,
Dis geniti potuere.
[Virgil, A en. VI. 129—131.]
I will add but one word, lest Mr. Waite's new volume should by any
be thought negligible because it treats of a subject that is so. In a
succinct and powerful introduction he has himself provided the
antidote and counter-thesis to the main subject-matter of his book.
No terser summary, yet no more explicit and luminous exposition of
the one legitimate occult path, as often defined and often traversed
during the age of Christendom, has to my knowledge appeared in public
literature. And at a time when many minds are seeking for sound
counsel and feeling after the true way, and yet when, to meet this
demand, glittering temptations exist to divert them towards spurious
and dangerous processes, Mr Waite's introductory pages to the
collated records of Pseudo-occultism come as a warning to
inexperienced aspirants and as a trumpet-challenge that says, "Choose
ye this day whom you will serve !"
|