EIGHTEENTH CENTURY OCCULTISM
I
Man, at once instinctively mistrusting his own power, and inspired by the love of the marvellous which is inherent in human nature, has from the beginning invoked, or invented, as you will, the invisible powers of an inaccessible sphere. History is filled with the phenomena arising from this innate tendency to believe in the supernatural, which while varying in form according to epochs, places, and customs are at bottom identical. Belief in the supernatural is, indeed, the basic principle of primitive man’s first conception of community of interest, the germ from which religion, social order, civilization have developed.
In the beginning religion and magic were one. All the priests of Egypt and the East were invested with supernatural and mysterious powers of which they long possessed the monopoly. These powers were precisely the same as those of the mediums of the present day; but the effects they produced no doubt appeared infinitely greater owing to the boundless credulity, simplicity, and ignorance of those who witnessed them.
By degrees, as civilization after civilization perished, knowledge became more diffused. Magic passed from the sanctuary to the street. The Pagan world was filled with astrologers, sorcerers, sibyls, sooth-sayers, wonder-workers of all descriptions. In the Middle Ages, when Christianity finally superseded Paganism, the supernatural once more took up its abode in religion. Demonology, which had survived all the revolutions of antiquity, and which still exists without much fundamental difference under other forms all over the world, assimilated itself to the dogmas of the Church. The Popes affirmed the popular belief in sorcery, magic and diabolic possession. But the supernatural phenomena associated with the belief in these things were regarded as the work of the devil, in whose existence the Christian world believed as implicitly as in the existence of God; so while the Church sanctioned this belief as one of the mysteries of religion it waged a merciless war against all persons suspected of having commerce with demons. From its terrible ban the mystical visionaries alone were exempt. These persons, ascetics all, the sanctity of whose reputations was unquestioned and whose hallucinations were due to hysteria, epilepsy, or neuroticism, were canonized.
Towards the close of the seventeenth century, with the revival of a tolerant and enlightened philosophy, the devil had grown old and accusations of sorcery were rare. But the belief in the supernatural still continued to thrive; and in the century of universal scepticism, the century of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, when faith in everything till then venerated was exploded, that in the marvellous alone survived. “The more civilization advances,” wrote Voltaire, “the more noise does superstition make.”
On the eve of the French Revolution, Mesmer electrified the world with his animal magnetism. With this discovery the belief in the supernatural entered a new and more wonderful phase. The marvellous had passed from a grossly material to a purely spiritual plane. The magnetism of Mesmer was followed by the hypnotism of the Marquis de Puységur, with its attendant train of table-turning and telepathy, clairvoyance and clairaudience, spiritualism, theosophy, and Christian science. To-day the whole system of the hermetic philosophy of the Egyptians and Hindus has been re-discovered, re-deciphered, and restored with the most astonishing results and the most conspicuous success to the amazement of the world.
Never has the belief in the supernatural been more flourishing and more invincible than at the present. Side by side with the positivism of modern science marches the mysticism of the occult, equally confident and undaunted, and equally victorious. Not a link in the chain that connects the phenomena of the mediums and adepts of to-day with those of the Chaldaeans has been broken. Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Eddy are the latest descendants of Hermes Trismegistus, who whether regarded as man, god, or the personification of all the knowledge of his remote times, is the parent of all the wonder-workers, scientific as well as unscientific, of the world. The prodigies of these priestesses of theosophy and Christian science, which are the last and most popular manifestations of the marvellous, are no less significant, and much more wonderful because more inexplicable, than those of a Ramsay or a Curie.
A.MESMER