Gary Lachman - Revolutionaries of the Soul: Reflections on Magicians, Philosophers, and Occultists

Revolutionaries
of the Soul

Other Titles by Gary Lachman

Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World

The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World

Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality

The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas

Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jungs Life and Teachings

The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters

Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen

Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work

The Dedalus Book of the Occult: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams (editor)

A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

In Search of P. D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff

A Secret History of Consciousness

Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Writing as Gary Valentine:

New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie, Iggy Pop, and Others, 19741981

Revolutionaries
of the Soul

Reflections on Magicians,
Philosophers, and Occultists

GARYLACHMAN

This publication has been generously supported by
The Kern Foundation

Theosophical Publishing House
Wheaton, Illinois * Chennai, India

Learn more about Gary Lachman and his work at http://garylachman.co.uk/

Find more books like this at www.questbooks.net

Copyright 2014 by Gary Lachman

First Quest Edition 2014

Quest Books

Theosophical Publishing House

PO Box 270

Wheaton, IL 60187-0270

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover image: Serg64/Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Kirsten Hansen Pott

Typesetting by Wordstop

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lachman, Gary.

Revolutionaries of the soul: reflections on magicians, philosophers, and occultists / Gary Lachman.First Quest Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8356-0926-5

OccultistsBiography. I. Title.

BF1408.L33 2014

130.922dc23

[B] 2014012128

ISBN for electronic edition, e-pub format: 978-0-8356-2214-1

4 3 2 1 * 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

To revolutionaries of the soul everywhere

Table of Contents

Colin Wilson and Faculty X was first published in Quest, Summer 1995.

Discovering Swedenborg was first published in Fortean Times 220, March 2007.

Jan Potocki and the Saragossa Manuscript was first published in Fortean Times 140, November 2000.

liphas Lvi: The Professor of Transcendental Magic was first published in Fortean Times 120, March 1999.

The Alchemy of August Strindberg was first published in Fortean Times 180, February 2004.

The Inimitable Madame B. was first published in EnlightenNext 47, Fall/Winter 2011.

Rudolf Steiner: The Dweller on the Threshold was first published in Fortean Times 205, January 2006.

Manly Palmer Hall: The Secret Teacher was first published in Fortean Times 255, November 2009.

Dion Fortune: Psychic Warrior was first published in Fortean Times 287, May 2012.

Aleister Crowley: The Beast Himself was first published in Fortean Times 231, January 2008.

Julius Evola: Mussolinis Mystic was first published in Fortean Times 191, Special Issue 2004.

Jung and the Occult was first published in Fortean Times 264, July 2010.

Ouspensky in London was first published in Quest, Autumn 1998.

Jean Gebser: Leaping into the Unknown was first published in EnlightenNext, Spring/Summer 2010.

Owen Barfield and the Evolution of Consciousness was first published in Lapis 3, 1996.

The Strange Death of James Webb was first published in Fortean Times 150, September 2001.

Id like to thank the editors of Quest, Lapis, and EnlightenNext for their assistance in making this book possible. My special thanks goes to David Sutton, my editor at Fortean Times, for his generous and invaluable help and to Joscelyn Godwin for his needed suggestions. I am also indebted to Anja Flode Bjorlo for her inestimable contribution and to Richard Smoley for seeing the thing through. And once again Id like to thank my sons, Maximilian and Joshua, and their mother, Ruth Jones, for their unfailing support.

T he idea of becoming a writer first came to me in my teens. It was expressed then in some rather bad poetryluckily this has not survivedand it was not until many years later that I actually produced anything worth reading, or at least that an editor would accept for publication. Perseverance furthers, the I Ching tells us, and at least in this context it was right. Today, looking back to the time when I was first being publishedthe early 1990s, when I was about to enter my fortiesI am amazed to realize that I have been writing now for more than twenty years. I started out with book reviews and magazine articles and essays, taking any opportunities that presented themselves and, as most beginning writers do, eagerly building up a body of work in print, doing all I could to make up for lost time. Today, in my late fifties, I am just as busy as I was then, even more so, suffering the full-time writers complaint of chronic workaholism and insufficient earnings; even during the busiest days of my career as a musicianby the mid-70s I had turned the poetry into songwriting and was successful with it for a timeI was never as busy as I am now. But between first seeing print and today, I haveif I may so immodestly inform the readeradded a few notches to my belt. Between 2001, when my first book, Turn Off Your Mind, appeared and the time of this writing (2014), I have produced sixteen books, with another due to be published this year, and I am about to start the research for another, practically as soon as I finish writing this introduction. I have also produced scores of articles, essays, book reviews, interviews, and lectures, of which the pieces collected here are a small sample. It often feels that I do very little other than writea complaint friends often makeand that I have become, as a less-busy fellow writer once called me, a writing machine. If that is the case, it is the one example of a man-machine merger that I condone, and I trust that the gods of writingssuch as Hermes, about whom I have, ironically, written a bookwill keep me well oiled and in good working order for at least another twenty years.