Revolutionaries of the Soul: Reflections on Magicians, Philosophers, and Occultists
Gary Lachman
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 083560926X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Explorers of occult mysteries and the edges of consciousness change the way we view not only the nature of reality, but also our deepest sense of self. Insightful author Gary Lachman presents punchy, enlightening, and intriguing biographies of some of the most influential esoteric luminaries in recent history. His 16 subjects include Swedish mystical scientist Emanuel Swedenborg; H. P. Blavatsky, Russian cofounder of the Theosophical Society; Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who inspired the Waldorf School of education; Swiss visionary C. G. Jung, founder of depth psychology; notorious English ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley; Russian esotericist P. D. Ouspensky, explicator of Gurdjieff's early works; and British psychic artist Dion Fortune, who was influential in the modern revival of magical arts.
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Life. In 1737 Swedenborg traveled to Paris and Italy to study anatomy and physiology. He also read widely in the anatomical literature of the time. This study produced his writings on the brain, posthumously published as The Cerebrum. Another product was The Economy of the Animal Kingdom. This work has nothing to do with animals in the wild: the “kingdom” is the human body and the “animal,” the animating energy, or soul. Here Swedenborg made his final assault on locating the elusive “seat of the.
Intense young man, named Sobrier, who “believed himself predestined to save the world by provoking the supreme crisis of universal revolution,” began shouting on the streets of Paris. Accompanied by two “street arabs”—one with a torch, the other beating time—he went through the streets with half of Paris behind him. The mob stopped before the Hôtel des Capucines; a shot was fired and the riot broke out. If this story is true, esotericism in the nineteenth century had more of an effect on the.
Themselves were the first of a series of “precipitated” (i.e., materialized) letters for which HPB would soon become famous. Later epistles would fall from thin air and apprise HPB’s colleagues and skeptics of her masters’ wishes. It is impossible to summarize Isis Unveiled here, except to say it was one of the first works of occultism to argue that magic was not some mindless superstition palmed off on the gullible, but a profound wisdom and science known to the ancients, yet lost to modern.
Twenty-five-year-old Jung joined the prestigious Burghölzli Mental Clinic in Zürich. Here he did solid work in word-association tests, developed his theory of “complexes,” and initiated a successful patient-friendly approach to working with psychotics and schizophrenics. It was during his tenure here that he also became involved with Freud. From 1906, when they started corresponding, to 1912, when the friendship ruptured, Jung was a staunch supporter of Freud’s work and promoted it unstintingly.
Days, Webb was convinced that the nervous breakdown that cast him into suicidal madness had also revealed dimensions of reality that could only be called supernatural. He found himself “catapulted into a larger universe” filled with altered states of consciousness and profound visions of “cyclical time.” The experience was not all revelation. Webb also showed the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia. His publisher, he claimed, was persecuting him. Worse still, he was convinced that a certain.