POLITICS AND THE OCCULT; SCIENCE AND ESP

Gary Lachman. The Politics of the Occult: the Left, the Right and the Radically Unseen. Quest Books, 2008.

Following in the footsteps of James Webb, author of The Flight from Reason and The Occult Establishment, Gary Lachman traces the connections between occultism and politics from the days of the Rosicrusians onwards.

For much of this period, "occult" movements embraced radical or progressive causes, dreaming of various utopias, and laying, usually half baked, plans for their achievement. Some of the topics discussed here will be reasonably well known, others are much more obscure. For example to today the Moravians are a fairly standard nonconformist denomination, my old father's boss in the 1950s and 1960s was a member. Once they practised communal living, there was a Moravian settlement at Fairfield near Manchester. Lachman reveals they once had some very strange spiritual practices indeed, which I won't go into as some of you might just have eaten before reading this. Lachman also examines the sexual politics of Swedenborg, a topic airbrushed out of history by his followers.

Mixtures of "left" and "right" radical traditions persisted in these esoteric milieus, for example there are the connections between Nickels Roerich, the mystical explorer who went in search of Shambhala and dreamed at one point of creating a joint Soviet-Shambhalan power block, and Henry Wallace, who was FDR Vice President in his third term, and who later stood as a Progressive candidate for the US presidency in 1948. Roerich's dream was rather impractical for two reasons, one was that the Soviets weren't interested, the second was that Shambhala alias Agarthi (under numerous different spellings) didn't exist.

Right up until the first world war, occultist movements had been as much 'progressive' as 'reactionary', but in the following years, the revolt against modernity led many into reactionary directions. Here Lachman pinpoints the role of groups such as the Synergists and the Traditionalists who rejected democracy, liberty and equality pretty much lock, stock and barrel and ended up in bed with Hitler. Lachman particularly concentrates here on the roles of Carl Jung, Mirciea Eliade and Julius Evola. Jung gets a cautious acquittal but the other two are clearly guilty of deep involvement with fascism. Eliade hid his radical-right past in his later years as an American academic and 'historian of religions', but his private views do not seem to have changed, while Evola remained an unashamed Nazi.

Today there are all sorts of radical 'restorationist' movements in the world, and in many ways jihadist 'Islam' is the true successor to the European radical right, and I put 'Islam' in scare quotes, because as much, if not more, of this movement's ideology and philosophy come from European as from traditional Islamic sources. This, like synarchism or those who dreamed of Shambhala, looks towards the creation of a hyper-totalitarian state which will abolish the contradictions of modernity.

This is a fascinating and important book, though not a perfect one, one gets the feeling that too much is being squashed into too few pages, and it lacks the research in primary sources one might wish for, and there are some source notes to less than reliable sources. It is perhaps best seen as a map for future explorers to take. Nevertheless it is a book, which had he lived, our colleague Roger Sandell would have much appreciated.

Diane Hennacy Powell. The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena. Walker and Company, 2009.

Powell is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, with a training in neuroscience, and is therefore better able than many to be aware of the various problems integrating 'ESP' into modern neuroscience-based views of consciousness. We would expect someone with her background to examine the problem in a scientific fashion.

Well she does treat her own subject of neuroscience in a scientific fashion, with discussions of some recent research, the results of damage to specific areas of the brain, the possible role of dreamlike states in the production of out-of-the-body and near-death experiences etc. There is much of interest in these portions.

When it comes to the evidence for ESP and PK, the tone seems very different, for while her boggle factor is clearly more sharply set than many in this field, clearly excluding macro PK and seance room phenomena, much of her discussion in this area is anecdotal and shows little appreciation of the complex psychological, social and cultural background of much of this testimony. Worse still is her rapid descent into the kind of promiscuous paranormalism, in which the likes of Edgar Cayce, Peter Hurkos, Carlos Casteneda, Fritjof Capra, David Bohm , Rupert Sheldrake and Harold Burr all rub shoulders with one another, and with discussions of relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, chaos theory, interconnectedness, eastern world views, reflexology and iridology. All that is left out is Uncle Tom Cobleigh and his old grey mare. The assumption seems to be that if enough enough ingredients are thrown into the pot something tasty will emerge.

Part of Powell's problem is that she is, like many in this field, essentially looking for anomalies to use as ammunition against the dreaded materialism, because she cannot see how anything as special as consciousness can arise from a material brain. I rather suspect that this is more of a cultural or aesthetic problem than a scientific one, and one that ultimately comes from the class structure of classical Greek civilisation, where the pure, sacred world of the mind, the province of gentleman philosophers such as Plato, was contrasted with the grubby, profane, polluted world of matter, the realm of subaltern groups such as women, artisans and slaves.

This Hellenistic world view was incorporated into early Christianity and some of its offshoots, and has greatly influenced Western thought ever since. This tendency to try and separate consciousness from brain activity leads her into more problems such as "we do not know how the desire to drink creates the brain cell activity" which sets up the chain of nervous action which leads to the lifting of a glass. From the monist point of view there is no problem, because the decision to the pick up the glass is the product of the brain activity, and the "desire" is the experiential part of that activity.

Of course it is hard to imagine how patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the human brain can give rise to conscious experience, but if you really think about it, it is not any easier to really understand how activity in fields, energies, astral bodies, unextended mind-stuff or whatever can give rise to conscious experience. All that makes it appear so, are the cultural prejudices described above.

as with many such writers, Powell really does not do justice to the many complexities and disputes within this field, and barely touches upon the sceptical critiques of many of the topics and personalities covered. The approach to parapsychology is not really scientific, and I doubt that this book will convince many agnostics let alone sceptics, though it may impress some arts graduates with little background knowledge of science or the history and intricacies of parapsychology and psychical research. -- Peter Rogerson