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

spiritual travels, came upon a variety of individuals bearing the marks of a dawning cosmic consciousness. Like Ouspensky, for Eckharthausen, this shift in consciousness from the mundane to the mystical is both the aim of his spiritual elect, acid the sign of membership within it.

    Karl Von Eckharthausen was born on 28 June 1752 at the Castle of Haimbhausen in Bavaria. Like Saint-Martin, he lost his mother at birth, but Eckharthausen's appearance in the world was a source of double sorrow. He was an illegitimate child, his mother the daughter of the overseer of the estate. His father, the count, was nevertheless very affectionate, treated him well, and gave him a fine upbringing and education. But his double loss of mother and legitimacy instilled in Karl a lingering melancholy, and, again like Saint-Martin, he early on developed a retiring attitude to the world, and a profound sense of detachment from it.
    Eckharthausen studied at Munich, then went to Ingoldstadt to pursue philosophy and law. As we will see, Ingoldstadt was the base for Adam Weishaupt's notorious Masonic splinter group, the Illuminati. Weishaupt was a professor of canonical law at the university, and one wonders if Eckharthausen came into contact with Weishaupt or was, indeed, one of his students. The Illuminati were a kind of secret society behind the secret societies, and it is not too far-fetched to see in Eckharthausen's hidden Church, a more spiritual version of Weishaupt's invisible brotherhood. Eckharthausen's concerns were more religious than political, and although he speaks of a "theocratic republic," which will one day be, "Regent Mother of the whole world," Weishaupt's Enlightenment rationalism would have repelled Eckharthausen's mystical temperament.
    Karl's father procured for him the title of Aulic Councillor, and in 1780 he became censor at the Library of Munich - a perhaps enviable position for a writer - then in 1784, Keeper of the Archives of the Electoral House. According to A.E. Waite, Eckharthausen produced sixty-nine works, turning his hand to drama, politics, religion, history, art criticism, as well as his mystical and occult books. Few of these, if any, are read today, and in his own lifetime, he was most famous for a handbook of Catholic prayers entitled God is Purest Love. This went into some sixty editions in Germany and was translated into several European languages, as well as Church Latin. His influence on the mystical currents of his time was considerable. Saint-Martin remarked that he was more interested in Eckharthausen than he could express; among other things, the two shared a profound interest in number mysticism, a practice that occupied Saint-Martin in his early days with Martines de Pasqually, and to which he returned in the last decade of his life. And their mutual correspondent, Baron Kirchberger, writing to Saint-Martin, spoke of Eckharthausen as "a man of immense reading and wonderful fertility ... an extraordinary personage." It was to Kirchberger's great regret that a proposed meeting at the Swiss frontier had to be called off on account of the Councillor's health. At their meeting Kirchberger hoped to receive a communication of the Lost Word from Eckharthausen, who, we assume, had found it. Any information on what may have passed between them is, like the word itself, lost. Amiable, charitable, highly cultured and devout, Eckharthausen married three times, had several children, and died, after a painful illness, on 13 May 1813.

    William Beckford
    Along with mystical politics and the regeneration of the world, occultism during the Enlightenment also took on a less idealistic character and appeared in ways more concerned with aesthetics and the search for exotic and sensational forms of entertainment than with revelation. One such form was the Gothic novel. Supernatural entities, haunted castles, secret societies and evil sorcerers were the stock in trade of pioneers like Walpole and of later contributors like