Colin Wilson

I am a citizen, or at least a denizen, of Modern America, one who remembers when the malls came to New Jersey, to the intersection of Routes 4 and 17. At one or the other of these (there were two, or maybe three) there was a Sterns, which had on the fourth floor, between the coffee shop and the bathrooms, some books for sale. One title stuck in my mind: Ritual in the Dark. Alas, my allowance, such as it was, didn't run to hardbacks other than the Modern Library, and, besides, it seemed the sort of thing it might be a tad awkward to bring home. So it was Bretall's anthology of Kierkegaard that evening, or Campbell's of Jung. Yes, I was, even then, an Outsider, as I would be as a Roman Catholic at a little Quaker college in Indiana, a Gentile at Columbia, a humanist at Teachers College, a conservative in the antiwar movement.

Fast forward to my second year of graduate school, when I encountered Colin Wilson again in the second of a two volume anthology called, I think, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, a book I later sold for groceries waiting for the Board of Education to grant me a December advance on my October paycheck. For I was a Goth before my time, even from birth if not before, and I discovered my affinity for the Arkham country when WBAI broadcast the voice of Roddy McDowell reading "The Hound," a particularly appealing tale inspired, I am pleased to note, by the atmosphere of certain parts of Brooklyn. I acquired the record, and played it until the grooves pretty much wore out. There is no CD; I am waiting for an audio file to appear on the 'net.

One January day around my birthday, before the semester had properly begun, I had a few dollars in my pocket, and took the M5 bus down to the Brentano's, now a Barnes and Nobles, opposite Scribner's, now Sepphora. And since then The Occult: A History has stood on my shelf, several shelves, for thirty five years and more. Taking it down I once more admire the chaste design of the dust jacket, and the quotation which no doubt induced me to part with the then princely sum of ten dollars: "One day I believe man will have s sixth sense -- a sense of the purpose of life, quite direct and in-inferred. This is Faculty X. And the paradox is that we already posess it to a large degree, but are unconscious of posessing it. It lies at the heart of all so-called 'occult experience. It is with such experience that this book is concerned."

As an historian of ideas I was well aware of the esoteric side of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, having drunk from the deep wells of Dame Frances Yates. I had invited Ivan Illich to speak at Columbia over the bleatings of such "sheep in wolves' clothing" as Maxine Greene, and listened with rapt attention as the Croatian priest showed how Commenius created the modern theory of education of the materials of early modern alchemy as the grand attempt to raise the base metals of human childhood to a higher state of existence. I was even present when Putoff (or was it Targ?) presented the rusults of their work on remote viewing and psychokinesis at Stanford Research Institute to the Columbia physics seminar.

I had no clue that oddballs like Blavatsky, Steiner, Crowley, and Gurjieff might have anything to say to me about raising my own level of consciousness and human potential. Indeed, even now I find each of these figures I have named deeply disturbing, to say the least -- as does Wilson himself, though less so in the case of Gurjieff. It is fair to say that without The Occult I would not have discovered Robert Graves (even or especially with I, Claudius on the boob tube Sunday nights), or John Cowper Powys, or even Sir Alister Hardy, the evolutionary theorist, when I needed them. I might have found them later when my mind was perhaps duller, and certainly less impressionable.

Wilson contends that the next step in evolution will be the general cultivation of what he calls Faculty X, a suite of abilities called paranormal only because they are and have been up until now fairly unusual. Wilson's theme had been that we humans are pretty much asleep pretty much all the time, until awakened, briefly, by poetry or music, or until a training like that of Zen brings about a heightened awareness. That was his position in Mysticism and Poetry, and in his Lovecraftian science fiction The Philosophers' Stone, now, alas, a fairly rare book. And my father seemed to believe something similar, not from anything he said, but from some books he left around the living room, which I devoured some time around the age of ten.

Indeed, walking alone for hours in the woods behind my uncle's motel in Forked River that summer I experimented enough to realize that these powers are real. I can't recall anyting spectacular, but there was enough to convince me. But I realized simultaneously that I had anguish, hurt and resentment in me so powerful that I could not trust myself to develop unusual abilities without at some point harming someone, and ultimately myself. Surely my good angel was with me when I made that decision. And perhaps even when I discovered that a pass to the library could release me from the hell of study hall into the wonderland of a library provided with (among many other things, to be sure) the newly published Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Many passages in The Occult would recall that island of refreshing quiet amid the crawling, shrieking, black and brutal chaos of junior high school.

By the end of that last wretched century the leaders of the crowd had brought the whole world, at least that part of it I know, into the condition of a vast junior high school cafeteria. A few outsiders remained to keep the scholar's lamp lit, though they have had to fetch oil from the tombs and flame from deeper places yet and endure the scorn of the guardians of official learning. Colin Wilson is one of these outsiders, and so may we all aspire to be.

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