A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult Read Online Free PDF Page A

then his own form of theosophical wisdom. For the next few years, Saint-Martin travelled across France, visiting Paris, Lyons and Bordeaux; during this time he communicated with other Martinists, including the novelist Jacques Cazotte.

    In 1772 Pasqually left France for St. Domingo, where, in 1774, he died in Port-au-Prince. The Martinists were left adrift, Pasqually failing to initiate them into the final reaches of their hierarchy. Rather than despair, Saint-Martin wrote the first of a number of books, Of Errors and of Truth, and in his social life he tried to pass on the truths of mysticism, while revealing the errors of the atheistic philosophy propagated by Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. These were the years of Cagliostro and Mesmer, of Jean Baptiste Willermoz and Lavater.
    Saint-Martin moved among the aristocracy, and became involved with mesmeric circles in Lyons and Paris. The Lyons mesmerists were especially rich in occult influences, having in their midst Rosicrucians, Swedenborgians, alchemists and kabbalists. Willermoz, Saint-Martin's close friend, a member of practically every secret society of the time, believed he received secret messages from God, through the medium of mesmeric somnambulists. Saint-Martin helped Willermoz decode these messages, and he was also helpful to Mesmer's important disciple, Puysegur. Saint-Martin joined the Parisian Society of Harmony in 1784, but felt that Mesmer's emphasis on the physical action of his fluids strayed dangerously close to materialism, and that this could attract the attention of unwanted astral spirits.

    Saint-Martin decided that the anxious climate of the time suggested caution. During his lifetime he published his works under the pseudonym of `the Unknown Philosopher.' His biographer and interpreter A.E. Waite remarks that his personal safety was a consideration: this was, after all, the time of the Great Terror. But Saint-Martin's membership of secret societies was also a reason. The ruse was pointless, and the identity of the Unknown Philosopher was soon common knowledge. Like other occult seekers, Saint-Martin travelled abroad, visiting Italy, Russia, Strasbourg and London, where he met William Law and the astronomer Herschel. August 10 1792 found him in Paris, where "the streets near the house I was in were a field of battle; the house itself a hospital where the wounded were brought." He had already been made penniless by the Revolution and, in 1794, when an edict exiled the nobility from Paris, he returned to - his birth place, Amboise. His time there was spent trying to wed his political concerns with his spiritual insights.
    Saint-Martin's last years were spent in the study of Jacob Boehme, the `Teutonic Theosopher' whose ideas influenced people like William Blake and Hegel. A 17th century cobbler, Boehme had a mystical experience staring at the sunlight reflected on a pewter dish. He then claimed to see the 'signature' of things and went on to write weighty tomes in an. obscure alchemical language. Dark and profound, SaintMartin worked at unifying Boehme's vision with his earlier Martinist doctrines. He seemed to have sensed that his last days were upon him, and writing to the end, after a brief fit of apoplexy, he died on 13 October 1803. Followers of his ideas came to be called Martinists as well, causing some confusion among occult historians.
    Saint-Martin's central theme is that mankind's mission is to `repair' the world. A similar doctrine appears in the Kabbalah, in which creation is the result of an overflowing of the sephiroth of the Tree of Life. Our job is to somehow clear up the mess. Walter Benjamin, an unorthodox kabbalist with Marxist leanings, saw history as an unending series of accidents, rather like an infinite pile-up on some eternal motorway. Saint-Martin would have agreed, but would not have shared Benjamin's confidence in Marxist ideology; rather he counted on our capacity to make contact with our pre-lapsarian source. Tolstoy,