The Occult: A History by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: &NEW
Published: 2011-06-27T02:11:50+00:00

Chapter Six

The Nineteenth

Century – Magic and Romanticism

IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY there died a man whose name deserves to be better known to students of mysticism and the occult: Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, the 'unknown philosopher.' His immense significance is that he was midway between the traditional mystics of the East or West and a new evolutionism. His philosophy is informed with an extraordinary air of optimism.

Man is fundamentally a god, says Saint-Martin, not a worm. In this atmosphere of health and light, his work resembles Swedenborg's. As the epigraph of my book The Stature of Man (in England, The Age of Defeat – 1959), I quoted a passage that catches the essence of Martinism; speaking of the idea that the earth is a mere speck in the universe, he says: It is perhaps this wrong connection of ideas which has led men to the still falser notion that they are not worthy of their creator's regard. They have believed themselves to be obeying the dictates of humility when they have denied that the earth and all the universe contains exists only on man's account, on the ground that the admission of such an idea would be only conceit. But they have not been afraid of the laziness and cowardice which are the inevitable result of this affected modesty. The present day avoidance of the belief that we are the highest in the universe is the reason that we have not the courage to work to justify that title, that the duties springing from it seem too laborious, and that we would rather abdicate our position than realise them in all their consequences. Where is the pilot that will guide us between these hidden reefs of conceit and false humility?

After studying the bewilderingly eventful lives of Casanova, Cagliostro, Saint-Germain, John Dee and the rest, it is 362

a relief to come across a man to whom almost nothing happened. He was born at Amboise, in Touraine, in the same year as Cagliostro – 1743. His family were aristocrats of reasonable wealth, and although his mother died soon after his birth, his stepmother proved an excellent substitute, and he adored her. His family were devout Catholics, and he was sent to the college of Pontlevoi while still very young. It was there that he discovered a book on self-knowledge by Abadie, and it seems to have exercised an enormous influence on his mind. He studied for the law, and in due course was called to the bar. But he felt nothing but distaste for the affairs of everyday life, and managed to persuade his father to allow him to abandon the bar for the army. It may seem an odd choice, but he no doubt reasoned that an army commission in times of peace is something of a sinecure – and after the seven years' war and the treaty of Paris, Europe was more or less at peace in 1766, the year Saint-Martin entered the army. In this he proved

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