In later works, he explores the Bi-Cameral (split) nature of the human brain as a possible source of Magical Thinking. Rock stars such as Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, the late musician, Graham Bond, and Hollywood nobility, including Kenneth Anger and Jane Mansfield have also been drawn to the belief in Magic.Ĭolin Wilson spent his entire writing career investigating Faculty X, writing over a hundred books in the process. Yeats, of the Golden Dawn, Robert Graves, author of the White Goddess, and the occultist Aleister Crowley were all noted poets. In this, he finds himself in good company: W.B. Writing in this work, Mr Wilson describes Magic as linked to the inspirations which send shivers down the spine, and embraces the poetic and artistic arenas as valid jumping-off points for the investigation of magic. Wilson describes what he loosely terms Faculty X, as an extra-normal sixth sense, which once formed a rich part of our psychology, and with which we have lost touch as a consequence of living in cities and technological society. This somewhat journalistic, but highly engaging account of Magic explores some historic avenues of human wisdom and folly in a study of magic practised through the ages. Perhaps the earliest mass market attempt to explain Magic in a social context is Colin Wilson’s ‘The Occult’. Therefore, an alternate magical creed bids us ‘to know, to will, to dare and to stay vital’. The symbol of the Egyptian god Harpocrates, to give his Greek title, was the child Horus, and the finger-placed-upon-the-lips motif is accepted by contemporary research as a classical symbol indicating youth. The adage to keep silent has sometimes been interpreted as to remain in a state of mental youth. The age-old description of Magic, ‘to know, to will, to dare and to keep silent’, acknowledges the art as a multivalent dynamic. These temples of establishment purity have given way to myriad forms of evolved practice and specialisation. Orders such as the Golden Dawn commenced their existence as very rigid disciplines focusing upon essential forms.
The recent history of Magic and Esotericism in the West seems to have some analogy with the history of Martial Arts schools. The Golden Dawn tradition attempted to reclaim the mystical lore of Hebrew mysticism through a return to the narrative of Isaac Luria’s mystical Tree of Life. It influenced a more formal hierarchical overview of the system, yet one more inclusive of cosmopolitan esoteric motifs. How successful these rituals were must remain a matter of conjecture, but this was a historically early attempt to employ the psychology of ancient ritual practices, preserved in ancient texts such as the Picatrix, towards the task of transforming the personal psychology of the individual focus. One instance of this was a quasi-masonic style ritual initiation in the form of organised ceremonies, employing robes and regalia intended to overwhelm the rational mind with colourful archetypes and seeking to awaken discrete qualities of consciousness through this experience. This approach utilised symbolic ritual towards a variety of purposes. Influenced by renaissance-era interpretation of Old Testament mystical lore and the Neo Platonic concepts believed to underlie the classical myths, the Golden Dawn evolved a combination of the mysteries of Pythagoras and the pre-Lurianic Kabbalah. Essentially Gnostic-Christian, the Golden Dawn system drew upon a wide variety of esoteric sources in an attempt to unify the symbols of the world’s ancient religions around the mechanism of the Tree of Life of the Hermetic Qabalah.
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