Quest Magazine

C.G. Jung’s Vision of the Aquarian Age

Printed in the  Summer 2018 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Greene, Liz, "C.G. Jung’s Vision of the Aquarian Age" Quest 106:2, pg 19-25

By Liz Greene

Theosophical Society - Liz Greene is a Jungian analyst and professional astrologer who received her diploma in analytical psychology from the Association of Jungian Analysts in London in 1980. She holds doctorates in both psychology and history, and is the author of a number of books on psychology and astrology, Tarot, Kabbalah, and myth, including The Astrological World of Jung’s Liber Novus.The idea of the New Age as an astrologically defined epoch—assumed, in modern times, to be the coming Aquarian Age—began to take shape in the late eighteenth century, crystallized in the nineteenth, and is still popular today. But it is difficult to find agreement among authors about just what constitutes the New Age. Many of the ideas that form the basis of New Age thought are very ancient and have not been significantly altered by modernity (another exceedingly ambiguous term). They might equally be viewed as “Old Age,” as they reflect cosmological and anthropological themes that have maintained a structural integrity for more than two millennia. C.G. Jung viewed such ideas as archetypal: they belong to the “spirit of the depths,” as he called it in his illuminated personal journal known as The Red Book, and not, as might be assumed, to the “spirit of this time.”

New Age ideas—particularly the conviction that self-awareness and God-awareness are indistinguishable, and that God can be found within—are assumed by some scholars to be unique to “modern” spiritualities, a category in which Jung’s own ideas are often included. But this assumption is not supported by textual evidence. The equation of “god-knowledge” with “self-knowledge” is clearly expressed in late antique Hermetic, Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Jewish esoteric literature. Nevertheless, Jung believed wholeheartedly that a new epoch reflecting the symbolism of the constellation of Aquarius was about to dawn and that his psychology might make a significant contribution to the conflicts arising from such a profound shift in the collective psyche.

The God in the Egg

In 1951, following two heart attacks, Jung wrote a work called Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. The Greek word aion has a number of different meanings and usages, all of which are relevant to Jung’s understanding of the imminent collective psychic change he envisioned. Homer and Herodotus used the word to describe the lifetime of an individual. Euripides, like some Hermetic treatises, personified Aion as a divine being, calling him the “child of time,” who “brings many things to pass.” Aeschylus and Demosthenes used the word to describe both an epoch and a generation. Sophocles understood it as one’s destiny or lot, akin to the idea of moira or Fate. Hesiod used it to define an age or era, such as the Age of Gold or the Age of Iron. Paul used it to refer to the present world, as well as to an era or epoch. In Plato’s Timaeus, aion constitutes eternity, while chronos (time) expresses aion temporally through the movements of the heavenly bodies.

Jung seems to have favored the idea of an aion as both an astrological epoch—lasting roughly 2,165 years, or one-twelfth of what he believed to be the great “Platonic year” of 26,000 years—and a god-image, emerging out of the human religious imagination and embodying the qualities of that epoch. These epochs are reflected in the astronomical phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes: the gradual backward movement of the point of the spring equinox (the moment each year when the sun enters the zodiacal sign of Aries) through the stars of the twelve zodiacal constellations.

The Gnostic text Pistis Sophia, with which Jung was familiar in G.R.S. Mead’s English translation, describes the aions both as celestial powers ruling over specific regions of the cosmos and as the regions themselves: zodiacal constellations with doorways or gates through which the redeemer god passes as he accomplishes his task of salvation. In contrast, the magical text known as the Mithras Liturgy presents Aion not as a zodiacal constellation, a planetary archon, or an epoch of time, but as a fiery primal divinity, also called Helios-Mithras: as Jung understood it, an image of the libido or life force. A vision of this eternal being is the goal of the ritual of the Mithraic religion, leading to the temporary “immortalization” of the initiate. Later in the ritual, prayers are offered to the “seven Fates of heaven,” the planetary divinities governing Heimarmene, or astral fate. An invocation is then addressed to Aion that names his primary attributes and functions. Aion, the “star-tamer,” emanates and controls the heavenly spheres, and the vision vouchsafed the initiate in the Mithras Liturgy allows an identification with divinity that, at least for a time, breaks the power of Heimarmene. Jung associated this freedom from the bonds of astral compulsion with the integrating potency of a direct experience of the Self; but like the liturgy, he stipulated no guarantee of the permanence of the state.

Jung’s description of Aion included the name Kronos (Saturn), but he elided it with chronos (time) and emphasized its leonine attributes. Paradoxically, Jung associated this “Deus Leontocephalus” (lion-headed god) not only with the sun, but also with the Gnostic archon Ialdabaoth and the archon’s planet, Saturn. Aion was many things for Jung: a fiery libido symbol embracing all opposites; a symbol of time expressed through the solar pathway of the zodiacal round; and a personification of the planetary deity Saturn-Kronos (Jung’s own horoscopic ruler, as he was born with the Saturn-ruled sign Aquarius rising in the east). Aion, for Jung, also embodied an astrological age—that of Aquarius— which, in its imagery and meaning, combines the human form of the Water Bearer with its opposite constellation of Leo, the lion. W.B. Yeats, preoccupied with the same zodiacal polarity, described his own vision of the approaching New Age in his poem, “The Second Coming,” written just after the Armageddon of the Great War, with a prophetic pessimism not unlike Jung’s own: a terrifying being with a lion’s body and the head of a man “slouching toward Bethlehem to be born” in the midst of chaos and social disintegration.

The major theme of Jung’s Aion is the shift in human consciousness and a simultaneous shift in the god-image, reflected in the ending of the Piscean age. In Jung’s view, Pisces is associated with the Christian symbols of Jesus and Satan as the two fish. The advent of the Aquarian aion is associated with a new symbol: humanity as the Water Bearer. Jung believed that each of the great shifts represented by a new astrological aion is reflected in the imagery of the presiding zodiacal constellation and its planetary ruler:

Apparently they are changes in the constellations of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. This transformation started in the historical era and left its traces first in the passing of the aeon of Taurus into that of Aries, and then of Aries into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the spring-point enters Aquarius.

There has been considerable speculation about where Jung acquired the idea of a New Age in relation to the movement of the vernal equinoctial point. Jung himself has been credited with being the first person in modern times to disseminate the idea that the long-anticipated New Age would be Aquarian.

Actually the idea of an Aquarian Age is rooted in the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when a number of scholarly works were produced that focused on the Christian figure of Jesus as one of a long line of solar deities. Although none of the authors of these works provided the kind of interpretations offered by astrologers contemporary with Jung, all of them emphasized the importance of the precessional cycle in the historical development of religious images and ideas.

In 1775, the French astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736–93) proposed an astral origin for all religious forms. Bailly was followed by a French professor of rhetoric, Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809), who, in his Origine de tous les cultes (“Origin of All Cults”), argued that all religions sprang from sun worship and that Christianity was simply another form of solar myth. Like Jung over a century later, Dupuis noted the parallels between the astrological constellation of Virgo and the mother of the solar messiah. Describing the engraving he commissioned for the frontispiece of his book, Dupuis noted “a woman holding a child, crowned with stars, standing on a serpent, called the celestial Virgin . . . She has been successively Isis, Themis, Ceres, Erigone, the mother of Christ.”

Speculations on a link between the precession of the vernal equinoctial point and changing religious forms continued throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. François-Henri-Stanislas de l’Aulnaye (1739–1830), who authored two books on Freemasonry, produced a text in 1791 called L’histoire générale et particulière des religions et du culte des tous les peoples du monde (“The General and Particular History of the Religions and Worship of All the People of the World”). His work was the first to consider the implications of the precession of the vernal equinoctial point into Aquarius, which he believed had taken place in 1726. In his Anacalypsis, published in 1836, Godfrey Higgins (1772–1833), a religious historian whose work exercised a major influence on H.P. Blavatsky, declared that the equinoctial shift from Taurus into Aries was the time when “the slain lamb” replaced “the slain bull.” In the late nineteenth century, Gerald Massey (1828–1907), an English poet and self-educated Egyptologist, offered a detailed scheme of the evolution of religious forms according to the precession of the equinoxes through the zodiacal constellations. One of Massey’s papers, “The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ,” privately published in 1887, contains the first reference to the Age of Aquarius appears in the English language:

The foundations of a new heaven were laid in the sign of the Ram, 2410 BC.; and again, when the Equinox entered the sign of the Fishes, 255 BC. Prophecy that will be again fulfilled when the Equinox enters the sign of the Water-man about the end of this [nineteenth] century.

All of these authors utilized mythic images to illustrate vast collective changes in religious forms and perceptions, and linked the myths to particular zodiacal constellations in the cycle of precession. Although Jung did not cite any of their writings in his own published work, the same ideas are central to both Aion and The Red Book. That no one seems to have agreed on the date for the start of the new Aquarian aion is not surprising. As Jung himself stated: “The delimitation of the constellations is known to be somewhat arbitrary.” 

Ancient Sources for the New Age

Texts explicitly relating the dawning of a New Age to the precession of the equinoxes may only have begun in the modern era. But Jung believed that earlier sources supported his belief that a new astrological aion was about to begin. For example, he attempted to find validation for the Aquarian Age in an alchemical text by the alchemist and physician Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605). Khunrath declared that an “age of Saturn” would begin at some unspecified point in the not-too- distant future and that it would usher in a time when alchemical secrets would become available to everyone: “The age of Saturn is not yet, in which everything that is private shall become public property: for one does not yet take and use that which is well meant and well done in the same spirit.”

Khunrath does not mention the precession of the equinoxes or Aquarius. Nor does the idea appear in any other alchemical literature of the early modern period, steeped in astrology though it was. But Jung believed that Khunrath was referring to the Age of Aquarius, because this constellation is traditionally ruled by Saturn. In a 1940 lecture, Jung commented:

Khunrath means that the age of Saturn has not yet dawned . . . Obviously the question is: what does Khunrath mean by the age of Saturn? The old alchemists were of course also astrologers, and thought in an astrological way. Saturn is the ruler of the sign of Aquarius, and it is quite possible that Khunrath meant the coming age, the age of Aquarius, the water carrier, which is almost due now. It is conceivable that he thought mankind would be changed by that time, and would be able to understand the alchemists’ mystery.

In this alchemist’s work, Jung found what he perceived as evidence that the Age of Aquarius would be concerned with revelations of an esoteric and psychological nature, “secrets” that had either been lost or had never been known, and whose emergence into collective consciousness would transform human self-awareness. Despite his pessimism about the capacity for global self-destruction inherent in the interiorization of the god archetype, Jung was guardedly optimistic about the psychological potential of the New Age.

In Gnostic literature, Jung may also have found similar evidence of a belief in precession as a herald of great religious changes—although here, as in Khunrath’s writings, there are no explicit references to the astrological aions in relation to the precession of the equinoctial point. The Apocryphon of John, as described by the second-century Christian heresiologist Irenaeus, speaks of the breaking of the chains of astral fate by the advent of the Redeemer: “He [Christ] descended through the seven heavens . . . and gradually emptied them of their power.” Pistis Sophia also provides descriptions of a great “disturbance” in the heavens. But like the Apocryphon of John, it does not explicitly refer to equinoctial precession.

Jung linked the Mithraic symbolism of the bull with the polarity of Taurus and its opposite constellation, Scorpio, describing them as “sexuality destroying itself” in the form of “active libido” and “resistant (incestuous) libido.” By the time he published Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912, he was well aware of the movement of the equinoctial point through the constellations:

Taurus and Scorpio are equinoctial signs, which clearly indicate that the sacrificial scene [the Tauroctony] refers primarily to the Sun cycle . . . Taurus and Scorpio are the equinoctial signs for the period from 4300 to 2150 B.C. These signs, long since superseded, were retained even in the Christian era.

By 1912, Jung had thus already begun to arrive at certain insights regarding the precession of the equinoxes in relation to the Mithraic iconography. He seems to have been convinced that Taurus and Scorpio, although “long since superseded” as equinoctial signs, were still relevant as potent symbols of generation and regeneration even in the Piscean era, when the Roman cult of Mithras first arose.

The Platonic year of 26,000 years (also known as the Great Year), during which the equinoctial point passes through all twelve signs, was never described by Plato, as precession had not been discovered in his time. But Plato defined the “perfect year” as the return of the celestial bodies and the diurnal rotation of the fixed stars to their original positions at the moment of creation. Echoing Plato, Julius Firmicus Maternus, a Roman astrologer of the fourth century CE, discussed a great cycle of 300,000 years, after which the heavenly bodies will return to the positions they held when the world was first created. Firmicus seems to have combined Plato’s perfect year with the Stoic belief that the world undergoes successive conflagrations of fire and water, after which it is regenerated. Although Jung was familiar with Firmicus’s work, it was in modern astrological, Theosophical, and occult literature that he found inspiration for his own highly individual interpretation of the Aquarian aion. 

New Sources for the New Age

Jung’s understanding of Aquarius as the constellation of the incoming aion is not traceable to any ancient or medieval source. His chief perception of this age rested on the idea of the union of the opposites, the interiorization of the god-image, and the struggle to recognize and reconcile good and evil as dimensions of the human psyche. “We now have a new symbol in place of the [Piscean] fish: a psychological concept of human wholeness.” In a 1929 letter, Jung prophesied a time of confusion preceding the new consciousness:

We live in the age of the decline of Christianity, when the metaphysical premises of morality are collapsing . . . That causes reactions in the unconscious, restlessness and longing for the fulfilment of the times . . . When the confusion is at its height a new revelation comes, i.e. at the beginning of the fourth month of world history. 

The “fourth month of world history” is the aion of Aquarius: “world history” in Jung’s context began with recorded history in the aion of Taurus between 4300 and 2150 B.C.E. The imminent collective transformation will, in Jung’s view, require a long and potentially dangerous process of integration, as it must occur in each individual. The Red Book might be understood as a highly personal narrative of that integrative process within Jung himself. Jung’s interest in Nietzsche is likely to have contributed to the idea that the celestial Water Bearer—one of only three zodiacal images bearing a human form—might be a symbol of the Übermensch, the “beyond-man,” who transcends the opposites. Nietzsche’s conviction that humanity was progressing toward a goal that lay “beyond good and evil” hints at the idea of the fully individuated human being, which Jung hoped would emerge in the new aion. But Nietzsche never associated his Übermensch with Aquarius.

An obvious modern source for Jung’s expectations of a transformation of consciousness based on the precession of the equinoxes might seem to be the Theosophists, who certainly promulgated the idea of an imminent New Age. Blavatsky was familiar with authors such as Higgins and Massey. But she did not equate her New Age with the entry of the vernal equinoctial point into the constellation of Aquarius, preferring to use what she referred to as “the Hindu idea of cosmogony” (the concept of the yugas) combined with certain fixed stars in relation to the equinoctial point. According to Blavatsky, twelve transformations of the world will occur, following a partial destruction by water or fire (a lift from the Stoics) and the generation of a new world with a new twelvefold cycle. She identified this idea as “the true Sabaean astrological doctrine,” which describes these twelve transformations as reflections of the twelve zodiacal constellations. But this approach does not involve precession, and the twelve transformations do not comprise a precessional cycle of 26,000 years; they comprise the entire history of the planet over many millions of years.

In an article on the history of the idea of the New Age, Shepherd Simpson points out that Jung, whom he credits with the first promulgation of the idea of an Aquarian Age in modern times, could not have gotten the idea from Blavatsky. The Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner, whose Anthroposophical Society rejected the Eastern inclinations of the Theosophists but retained many of their ideas, likewise subscribed to the idea of a New Age and referred to it as the “Age of Christ’s Second Coming.” But this New Age, which, in Steiner’s view, began in 1899, is not Aquarian:

There is much talk about periods of transition. We are indeed living just at the time when the Dark Age has run its course and a new epoch is just beginning, in which human beings will slowly and gradually develop new faculties. . . . What is beginning at this time will slowly prepare humanity for new soul faculties.

These “new soul faculties” do indeed belong to the Aquarian Age, but they are only in preparation. According to Steiner’s idiosyncratic reckoning, the Age of Aquarius will not begin until 3573; the present world is still living in the Piscean Age, which began in 1413. Steiner wrote extensively about the problem of evil; like Jung, he believed evil to be a reality rather than a mere deprivation of good, and, also like Jung, he was fascinated with but also repelled by Nietzsche’s ideas. Steiner also understood the necessity for humans taking responsibility for evil:

Until now, the gods have taken care of human beings. Now, though, in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, our destiny, our power for good and evil, will increasingly be handed over to us ourselves. It is therefore necessary to know what good and evil mean, and to recognize them in the world.

But Steiner was much closer to Gnostic perceptions than Jung was and understood evil to belong to the incarnate world and the dark spiritual potencies (Lucifer and Ahriman), who, like the Gnostic archons, work to inflame the innate selfishness and destructiveness of the human being. Nor did Steiner associate the integration of good and evil with an imminent Aquarian Age. Although Jung was well acquainted with Steiner’s work, Steiner was no more likely a source for Jung’s understanding of the new aion than Blavatsky was.

In 1906, G.R.S. Mead offered his own version of the New Age:

I too await the dawn of that New Age, but I doubt that the Gnosis of the New Age will be new. Certainly it will be set forth in new forms, for the forms can be infinite . . . Indeed, if I believe rightly, the very essence of the Gnosis is the faith that man can transcend the limits of the duality that makes him man, and become a consciously divine being. 

This idea of a resolution of the problem of duality is much closer to Jung’s formulation, and Mead may have contributed important ideas to Jung’s vision. In Aion, Jung elaborated on Mead’s description:

The approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as the mere privation of good; its real existence will have to be recognized. This problem can be solved neither by philosophy, nor by economics, nor by politics, but only by the individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit. 

But although Mead referred to the “cycles of the Aeon,” he did not link these cycles with the precession of the equinoxes. The New Age, whatever it might be, was apparently not, for Mead, an Aquarian Age. While Jung turned to Mead’s work for insights into many of the texts of late antiquity, it seems he looked elsewhere for ideas about the meaning of the Water Bearer.

Much likelier sources for Jung’s ideas about the Age of Aquarius were two Theosophically inclined astrologers who provided Jung with much of his knowledge of astrology: Alan Leo and Max Heindel. Leo embraced Blavatsky’s idea that humanity was at the midpoint of its millennia-old evolutionary cycle. But as an astrologer, he could not ignore the significance of the precession of the equinoxes, and he associated the New Age with the constellation of Aquarius. In Esoteric Astrology, first published in 1913, Leo declared: “I am actuated by the primary motive of expressing what I believe to be the true Astrology, for the New Era that is now dawning upon the world.” There is no mention of Aquarius in this statement. But two years earlier, Leo had declared explicitly that he believed the Age of Aquarius would begin on March 21, 1928. Leo did his best to reconcile Blavatsky’s idea of the Hindu yugas with precession, but his conclusions were, in the end, closer to Jung’s:

The constellation of Taurus was in the first sign of the zodiac [i.e., Aries] at the beginning of the Kali Yuga, and consequently the Equinoctial point fell therein. At this time, also, Leo was in the summer solstice, Scorpio in the autumnal equinox, and Aquarius in the winter solstice; and these facts form the astronomical key to half the religious mysteries of the world—the Christian scheme included.

In Leo’s view, the great cycle of precession is concerned with spiritual evolution, and the dawning Aquarian Age will mark the turning point of the cycle: the beginning of humanity’s slow ascent back to the realm of pure spirit. Although Jung used psychological models and wrote about wholeness and the integration of opposites rather than a return to a perfected world of pure spirit, it seems that, in principle, he agreed.

Leo described the Aquarian Age in general terms. Max Heindel was more specific, as we see in his 1911 statement about the purpose of his Rosicrucian Fellowship: “It is the herald of the Aquarian Age, when the Sun by its precessional passage through the constellation Aquarius, will bring out all the intellectual and spiritual potencies in man which are symbolized by that sign.”

But for Heindel, these burgeoning “intellectual and spiritual potencies” did not involve the psychological problem of the integration of good and evil. In The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, published in 1909, Heindel provided a detailed explanation of the precession of the equinoxes, calling the entire cycle a “World-year.” In accord with the general tendency to disagree about when the New Age would commence, Heindel declared that the Age of Aquarius would not begin for “a few hundred years.”

Heindel’s 1906 book The Message of the Stars may have been more useful to Jung, as it describes the astrological ages in relation to the polarity of each zodiacal constellation with its opposite. Heindel’s view that the Age of Aquarius contains the attributes of Leo, the opposing constellation, must have been of considerable interest to Jung, who was inclined to view the workings of astrology, as well as human psychology, as a dynamic tension between opposites. Heindel had presented this theme in The Message of the Stars:

There are two sets of three pairs of signs, the first [set] being Cancer and Capricorn, Gemini and Sagittarius, Taurus and Scorpio. In these pairs of signs we may read the history of human evolution and religion . . . This is also divisible into three distinct periods, namely: the Aryan Age [sic], from Moses to Christ, which comes under Aries-Libra; the Piscean Age, which takes in the last two thousand years under Pisces-Virgo Catholicism; and the two thousand years which are ahead of us, called the Aquarian Age, where the signs Aquarius and Leo will be illuminated and vivified by the solar precession. (emphasis Heindel’s)

Heindel also discussed the religious symbolism of the astrological ages:

In the New Testament we find another animal, the Fish, attaining great prominence, and the apostles were called to be “Fishers of Men,” for then the sun by precession was nearing the cusp of Pisces, the Fishes, and Christ spoke of the time when the Son of Man (Aquarius) shall come . . . A new ideal will be found in the Lion of Judah, Leo. Courage of conviction, strength of character and kindred virtues will then make man truly the King of Creation.

Heindel’s “Son of Man,” with his leonine “courage” and “strength,” abounds with echoes of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Like Heindel, Jung developed the idea that an astrological age reflects the symbolism of two opposing constellations. But he was not as optimistic as Heindel about the new aion. Jung did not assume that the union of the opposites would be a smooth passage into a higher and more loving stage of spiritual consciousness, as did the Theosophists and the New Age proponents of the late twentieth century. He foresaw “a new advance in human development,” but he viewed the transition into the Aquarian aion as a dangerous time, fraught with the potential for human self-destruction. In a letter to Father Victor White, written in April 1954, Jung stated that the shift into the aion of Aquarius “means that man will be essentially God and God man. The signs pointing in this direction consist in the fact that the cosmic power of self-destruction is given into the hands of man.”

With even more overt pessimism, he wrote a year later to Adolf Keller: “And now we are moving into Aquarius, of which the Sibylline books say: Luciferi vires accendit Aquarius acres (Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer). And we are only at the beginning of this apocalyptic development!” In light of the history of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first, it seems that Jung’s dark prophecy was uncomfortably relevant. 

The Timing of the New Aion

There has never been any accord among authors about the date for the commencement of the New Age. At the end of the eighteenth century, de l’Aulnaye believed that the Aquarian Age had begun in 1726. At the end of the nineteenth century, Gerald Massey insisted that the Age of Pisces began in 255 BCE, with the “actual” birth of Jesus, and that the equinoctial point would move into the constellation of Aquarius in 1901. Alan Leo offered the very specific date of March 21, 1928— the day of the vernal equinox of that year—while Dane Rudhyar, writing in 1969, suggested the Aquarian Age had begun in 1905. And Rudolf Steiner, in the early decades of the twentieth century, was convinced the Age of Aquarius would not start until 3573.

Jung was initially equally precise, and equally independent, about the date on which the new aion would begin. In August 1940, he wrote to H.G. Baynes: “This is the fateful year for which I have waited more than 25 years . . . 1940 is the year when we approach the meridian of the first star in Aquarius. It is the premonitory earth-quake of the New Age.”

This date did not come from esoteric literature, but from a young Dutch Jewish astronomer named Rebekka Aleida Biegel (1886–1943), who had moved to Zurich in 1911 to take her doctorate in astronomy at the university. Betty Biegel became Jung’s patient and then trained with him, giving papers at the Association for Analytical Psychology in Zurich between 1916 and 1918.

In 1918, while Biegel was working at the Zurich Observatory, she sent Jung, at his request, an envelope of materials, which he marked “Astrologie” and kept in his desk at home. Biegel prepared a lengthy list of calculations indicating when the vernal equinoctial point—the moment when the sun enters the first degree of the zodiacal sign of Aries each year—aligned with each of the stars in the constellations of both Pisces and Aquarius. Along with these calculations, Biegel’s covering letter offered three possible dates for the beginning of the Aquarian aion: 1940 (when the equinoctial point aligned with the midpoint between the last star of Pisces and the first star of Aquarius); 2129; and 2245 (when the equinoctial point aligned with two different stars in the constellation of Aquarius, either of which might be considered the “beginning” of the constellation). What Jung called the “premonitory earthquake” of the Aquarian aion, according to Biegel’s first suggested date of 1940, coincided with some of the worst chapters of the Second World War.

Later Jung became less certain about the date of the commencement of the Aquarian aion. In an essay titled “The Sign of the Fishes,” written in 1958, he stated that the equinoctial point “will enter Aquarius in the course of the third millennium.” In a footnote, he explained that, according to the preferred starting point, the advent of the new aion “falls between AD 2000 and 2200,” but “this date is very indefinite” because “the delimitation of the constellations is known to be somewhat arbitrary.” But the “indefinite” and “arbitrary” nature of the date did not deter Jung from his lifelong conviction that the Aquarian aion was coming soon and that its initial impact within the collective psyche would not be pleasant. 

The Birth Chart of Jesus 

Jung was as preoccupied with discovering the birth date of Jesus, whom he believed to be the avatar and chief symbol of the Piscean aion, as he was with the date of the beginning of the aion itself. Jung compared a number of previous “ideal horoscopes for Christ” in Aion and concluded that the correct birth date for Jesus was in fact 7 BCE, as the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces in that year, with Mars in opposition from Virgo, was “exceptionally large and of an impressive brilliance.” He concluded that this configuration was the “star of Bethlehem” that had appeared as the augury of Jesus’ birth. Jung followed the calculations of the German astronomer Oswald Gerhardt and proposed May 29, the date on which the configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars had been exact, as the date of Jesus’s birth. This meant that his sun sign was Gemini: the “motif of the hostile brothers” that Jung believed to be one of the dominant archetypal themes of the Piscean aion.

Jung thus amalgamated the image of Christ as the “supreme meaning” of the incoming Piscean aion with the coniunctio maxima of Jupiter and Saturn in the zodiacal sign of Pisces. He viewed the approaching Aquarian aion as the epoch when individuals would interiorize the god-image; thus he did not anticipate a new avatar for the new aion who would manifest externally. He declined to adopt Steiner’s belief in a Second Coming of Jesus, or Annie Besant’s expectation of a new World Teacher, writing: “We now recognize that the anointed of this time is a God who does not appear in the flesh; he is no man and yet is a son of man, but in spirit and not in flesh; hence he can be born only through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb of the God.”

Jung did not believe that any single person would personify the spirit of the new dispensation; the Water Bearer “seems to represent the self.” This insistence on individual responsibility seems to have colored Jung’s expectations with profound misgivings about the human capacity to cope with the lack of an external divine object on which to project the god-image. He understood his own role as important, but as an individual, not an avatar, who could help to illuminate the difficult psychological process of interiorization through his published work. Jung’s understanding of the Aquarian aion ultimately mirrors that of Alan Leo, who insisted that “the inner nature and destiny of this sign is expressed in the one word HUMANITY.”

It seems that Jung understood himself to be an individual vessel for the polarity of the new aion, and the work he pursued for his own integration was also work on behalf of a collective that he feared was already beginning to struggle blindly and destructively with the same dilemmas: the rediscovery of the soul; the acknowledgment of good and evil as inner potencies; the terrible responsibility that comes with that acknowledgment; and the recognition of a central interior self, which alone can integrate the opposites.

Jung appears to have viewed not only himself, but all those individuals with whom he worked and all those who might be influenced by his ideas in the future, as potential vessels who could, through their individual efforts to achieve greater consciousness, facilitate the collective transition into an astrological aion in which humans would be faced with the terrifying challenge of interiorizing and integrating good and evil as dimensions of a previously projected duality of God and the Devil. Attempting to define the nature of his psychology to his associate Aniela Jaffé, Jung commented: “The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis, but rather with the approach to the numinous . . .The approach to the numinous is the real therapy.”

Jung was not encouraging about the global problems that this shift from the Piscean age to the Aquarian would entail. He placed his hopes, not in mass political or social movements, but in the capacity of the individual to recognize the enormity of the responsibility involved and to engage in the inner struggle to achieve greater consciousness. As he wrote: “If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me.”

 

Liz Greene is a Jungian analyst and professional astrologer who received her diploma in analytical psychology from the Association of Jungian Analysts in London in 1980. She holds doctorates in both psychology and history, and is the author of a number of books on psychology and astrology, Tarot, Kabbalah, and myth, including The Astrological World of Jung’s Liber Novus.

This article is adapted and abridged from the chapter entitled “‘The Way of What Is to Come’: Jung’s Vision of the Aquarian Age” in Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions, volume 1, edited by Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt: Chiron Publications, www.chironpublications.com. Reprinted with permission. Please see this edition for the full text as well as the references.

Magic and the Third Object

Printed in the  Spring 2018  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Hebert, Barbara, "Magic and the Third Object" Quest 106:2, pg 10-11

Barbara Hebert, National President

Theosophical Society - Barbara B. Hebert currently serves as president of the Theosophical Society in America. She has been a mental health practitioner and educator for many years.The topic of this issue of Quest is “Magic,” a somewhat avant-garde subject for many Theosophists. When we think of magic, we may think of Tinker Bell or Harry Potter. We may think of someone pulling a bunny out of a hat or an illusionist playing a card trick. We may think in terms of white magic versus dark magic, or good versus evil. However, it seems that magic, from a more occult or metaphysical perspective, involves all of these and much, much more. As we consider its various aspects, we will hopefully engage in open-minded inquiry that will facilitate discussion and an increased awareness of the powers latent in each of us.

The term magic stems from the word magus, which was originally a term applied to Persian dream interpreters and wizards. Many are familiar with the references to Magi, the three wise men who followed the star of Bethlehem to the cradle of Jesus. Dr. Jay Williams, in his 2005 article in Quest writes:

A magus, in the ancient sense, was someone who, through ritual and incantation and secret gnosis, could gain control over angels and daemons to hurt or heal, create or destroy. A true magus was thought to have tremendous power and was therefore both sought after and feared. The fact that many papyri containing the secrets of the ancient magicians have been discovered indicates that this was not a rarity in the Greco-Roman world.

Dr. Williams clarifies the term daemons by saying that “it originally meant simply god, particularly a god known as a power within.”

We can clearly see that the derivation of the word magic is closely associated with knowledge and wisdom. This points us toward the Third Object of the Theosophical Society, which encourages us to investigate the laws of nature that we do not yet understand and the powers that are inherent in all beings. Henry Steel Olcott, first president of the TS, said in a lecture delivered in Columbo, Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) in June 1880 (and later published in the August 1880 issue of The Theosophist): “There is no impenetrable mystery in Nature to the student who knows how to interrogate her. If physical facts can be observed by the eye of the body, so can spiritual laws be discovered by that interior perception of ours which we call the eye of the spirit.”

Seemingly it is these spiritual laws of nature that are at the root of magic and are understood (and potentially used) by those who have delved into the occult sciences. On the Theosophy Wiki website, we find the following statement:

Occult science is a phrase used by H.P. Blavatsky to denominate the knowledge of the hidden forces of nature and their manipulation . . . though the adept knowledgeable in the occult sciences can perform phenomena which would seem miraculous to the uninitiated, every effect produced is based on laws of nature, whether known or unknown to modern science.

In support of this statement, HPB says in volume 8 of the Collected Writings:

To say that occult sciences claim to command nature arbitrarily, is equivalent to saying that the sun commands the day-star to shine. Occult sciences are nature itself; intimate knowledge of their secrets does not give to the Initiates the power to command them. The truth of it is that this knowledge teaches the Adepts the manner in which to furnish certain conditions for the production of phenomena, always due to natural causes, and to the combination of forces analogous to those used by the scientists.

Magic, therefore, is simply the knowledge and use of natural laws of which many of us are unaware at the present time. We may think of an airplane flying across the sky, upheld by a knowledge and use of the laws of aerodynamics. To us, watching an airplane in the sky seems very normal and understandable; yet two hundred years ago it would have seemed like magic.

To move further with this analogy, we recognize the airplane’s tremendous usefulness in transporting people over long distances in short periods of time. We also may consider its horrific use as a tool of terrorism on September 11, 2001. The laws of aerodynamics do not change, and the airplane (the tool to which the laws of aerodynamics are applied) does not change. They are neutral, objective, detached. It is when the user determines the course of action that the result is positive or destructive. Magic, or occult science, must be viewed in the same way. In volume 9 of the Collected Writings, HPB says:

Occultism is not magic. It is comparatively easy to learn the trick of spells and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature . . . it is the motive, and the motive alone, which makes any exercise of power become black, malignant, or white, beneficent Magic. It is impossible to employ spiritual forces if there is the slightest tinge of selfishness remaining in the operator. For, unless the intention is entirely unalloyed, the spiritual will transform itself into the psychic, act on the astral plane, and dire results may be produced by it. The powers and forces of animal nature can equally be used by the selfish and revengeful, as by the unselfish and the all-forgiving; the powers and forces of spirit lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart—and this is DIVINE MAGIC.

She goes on to say in volume 12 of the Collected Writings:

While theoretical Occultism is harmless, and may do good; practical Magic, or the fruits of the Tree of Life and Knowledge, or otherwise the “Science of Good and Evil,” is fraught with dangers and perils. Now, since the difference of primary importance between Black and White Magic is simply the object with which it is practised, and that of secondary importance, the nature of the agents and ingredients used for the production of phenomenal results, the line of demarcation between the two is very, very thin.

In her direct way, HPB is warning us that anyone whose motive is not completely and totally pure and unselfish will experience “dire” results from the use of these natural laws. She is also pointing out that the line between the beneficent and the detrimental use of these natural laws is slight.

What, therefore, do we do when it comes to magic, the investigation of unknown laws of nature, and the powers latent in each of us?

We are encouraged throughout the Theosophical literature to develop the inner person—the qualities and characteristics that will, with time, remove the more selfish aspects of our personality. We are encouraged to be self-observant so that eventually we may truly recognize the core of our motivations. We are encouraged to study, to meditate, and to serve humanity in all of its forms. In other words, we must work on ourselves! As understanding of our true nature grows, we will also discover those unknown laws of nature and our own inherent abilities. As we find in the article on the “Spiritual Path” in Theosophy Wiki, the early Theosophist T. Subba Row speaks of “the steady natural path of progress through moral effort, and practise of the virtues. A natural, coherent, and sure growth of the soul is the result, a position of firm equilibrium is reached and maintained, which cannot be overthrown or shaken by any unexpected assault. It is the normal method followed by the vast mass of humanity, and this is the course Sankarâchârya recommended to all his Sannyasis [renunciates] and successors.”

It is this path that will ultimately lead each and every one of us to an understanding of both the unknown laws of nature and the capabilities which we all possess. It is this path that provides us with the knowledge and the wisdom to use the laws of nature for the benefit of all humanity. It is this path that allows us to become magi.

Magic is not as avant-garde a topic as we may have thought. It has been discussed throughout the history of the TS and indeed throughout the ages. Magic is clearly linked to the Third Object of the TS. Open discussion regarding all aspects of this subject—including the development of the inner self, the inherent dangers of using natural laws in a selfish manner, and the value of investigating the unseen world—may provide us with an opportunity for increased understanding and growth.

 

 

 

 

 

Maurice Nicoll: Working Against Time

Printed in the  Spring 2018  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Lachman, Gary, "Maurice Nicoll: Working Against Time" Quest 106:2, pg 24-28

By Gary Lachman

Theosophical Society - Gary Lachman is the author of several books on the history of the Western esoteric tradition, including Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, and the forthcoming Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump.In August 1921, Maurice Nicoll, a successful London physician specializing in mental disorders, opened the diary he had been keeping for some time and recorded in it a kind of plea. “Prayer to Hermes,” the thirty-seven-year- old psychiatrist wrote. “Teach me—instruct me—show me the Path, so that I may know certainty—help my great ignorance, illumine my darkness? I have asked a question.”

By October that year, it seemed that Nicoll had received an answer. Urged by his friend A.R. Orage, editor of the iconoclastic magazine The New Age and scintillating “desperado of genius”—as the playwright Bernard Shaw called him—Nicoll attended a lecture given at the luxurious salon of Lady Rothermere, wife of a powerful newspaper magnate, in St. John’s Wood, London. Nicoll had by this time been conducting a kind of spiritual search, a quest for a knowledge that seemed unavailable through the usual channels, an inner journey that had led him through some strange territory. He had read deeply in the Hermetica, the works of mysticism and magic believed to have been written by the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, and had studied the great Swedish savant Emanuel Swedenborg. Plato was favorite reading, as was Plato’s follower Plotinus. At the time he attended the lecture, Nicoll was involved with Orage in what they called their “Psychosynthesis Group,” a handful of professional individuals who shared a dissatisfaction with the psychoanalysis which, courtesy of Sigmund Freud, had made its way from Vienna onto London’s intellectual scene. While they appreciated Freud’s genius, they believed that he sold human nature short, and that while the psyche could certainly be analyzed, it could also achieve a new synthesis, and through this enter a different, more complete, and harmonious state of consciousness, quite unlike our everyday one—something that Freud and his followers seemed to deny.

Dr Nicoll was at the time the leading English exponent of the ideas of Freud’s erstwhile crown prince but now sworn opponent, Carl Jung. Jung too spoke of a kind of psychosynthesis, as did his Italian colleague Roberto Assagioli. Nicoll was taken with Jung’s ideas and had even written a book, Dream Psychology, spelling out Jung’s theories about the psyche, the unconscious, and its strange nocturnal communications. But what Nicoll heard at the lecture that night was like nothing he had come across before.

The speaker was the Russian writer and philosopher Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, whom Orage had met some years earlier and whose sobering “Letters from Russia,” depicting the chaos attendant upon the Bolshevik Revolution Orage had recently published in The New Age. Ouspensky himself had only been saved from a White Russian refugee camp in Constantinople (soon to be renamed Istanbul) because of Lady Rothermere’s fascination with his book Tertium Organum, a work of exhilarating if sometimes abstruse metaphysics.

Ouspensky, a well-known journalist and author, had spent the past several years studying with the enigmatic Greco-Armenian esoteric teacher G.I. Gurdjieff. Around the time that Nicoll wrote his prayer to Hermes, Ouspensky, his fellow students, and their teacher had been swept from Moscow and St. Petersburg, first by the revolution and then by the civil war that had erupted across Russia, and been deposited on Europe’s doorstep.

Ouspensky might have remained there with his fellow refugees had it not been for the fact that an English edition of Tertium Organum had surfaced first in America and then Britain and had become a surprise best seller. Lady Rothermere, quick to embrace the latest intellectual fad, became a passionate devotee. Through Orage, Claude Bragdon, Ouspensky’s American publisher (and a Theosophist), managed to get a much-welcomed royalty check to the impecunious author, who was struggling to feed his family by teaching English—rather badly, as it happened. But even more welcome was a telegraph from Lady Rothermere, saying that she wanted to meet Ouspensky and would be happy to do so wherever he preferred. New York? London? Money was no object. Ouspensky could not believe his luck. He decided on London because of his contact with Orage and because he believed that there he could still earn a crust with his pen.

Nicoll found himself in some esteemed company that evening at Lady Rothermere’s soiree. The guests included the poet T S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and his friend the philosopher Gerald Heard, the writer of weird tales Algernon Blackwood, and the occult scholar A.E. Waite, among other notables. Ouspensky could not have asked for a better audience or a more romantic, mysterious buildup: lectures on higher consciousness by the author of a celebrated book on esoteric philosophy, who had arrived in London after making a perilous trek across a war-torn, exploding country—what more could one want?

Yet, if not disappointed, many were certainly surprised at what Ouspensky had to say. Hs lecture was not on the ideas about time, space, higher dimensions, and mystical states of consciousness that fill the pages of Tertium Organum and still make for thrilling reading today. Rather, he spoke of the strange system of self-development that he had spent the past several years learning from Gurdjieff and then expounding on his own. The metaphysics of Tertium Organum were behind him now, at least for the time being. He was there to talk about something different, and those who were there to listen found it nothing if not startling.

Ouspensky’s basic message, spelled out many years later in his account of his years with Gurdjieff in In Search of the Miraculous, and records of his talks like The Fourth Way, was simple, strange, and stark: Man is asleep. He believes he is conscious and has free will, but he is really a machine, a mechanism driven by forces outside him. Man can do nothing. He is trapped by his own unconsciousness, unable to escape the compulsive repetition of his life. The world war that had recently ended, the civil war raging across Russia, the revolution that had destroyed his country: this and everything else, Ouspensky told his stunned audience, was the result, not of human decision, choices, and beliefs, but of planetary forces acting on mankind, and driving it to perform meaningless mechanical actions, over and over, with no change possible. Unless one studied the system that he had brought with him from out of the madness. The way was difficult, the challenges many, and time was not on their side. But if one performed the Work, as the practical side of the system came to be called, there was a way out.

Not everyone was taken with this austere message. A.E. Waite was said to have stood up at one lecture, announced that there was “no love” in Ouspensky’s system, and walked out. But not Nicoll. He was so gripped by what he heard that he rushed home after the meeting to tell his wife. She was still recovering from having their first child, but Nicoll burst into the bedroom, ignored the baby, shook his wife’s bed, and told her that she had to hear Ouspensky. “He is the only man who has ever answered my questions,” he informed the startled young mother. Ouspensky, he said, was like a prophet. Nicoll’s conversion must have been infectious. His wife followed his advice and soon became as convinced as her husband that Ouspensky was the genuine article.

The couple attended more lectures. Slowly they began to grasp what Ouspensky would later call “the psychology of man’s possible evolution.” This psychology was based on ideas that even Nicoll the Jungian found strange, yet oddly convincing. One was the notion that, for most of the time, we do not remember our own existence, and only experience flashes of this at certain rare moments. Another was the fact that we do not possess a single “I,” as we usually assume, but are host to many different ones, each claiming pride of place. Still another was that, as mentioned, although we believe we are awake, we are really in a kind of sleep. True awakening was possible. It entailed refusing to “identify” with everything around us and freeing ourselves from this sleep through “self-observation.” Another step was to stop expressing negative emotions.

Nicoll, Orage, and many others sat at the stern Russian’s feet and absorbed his daunting teaching, convinced of its value through their own observations and by the logic and consistency of the system he unfolded. And soon into their journey they received what for many of them was the shock of their lives. A few months after Ouspensky’s arrival—in February 1922, in fact—Gurdjieff himself came to town.

Where Ouspensky impressed with his intellect and seriousness, Gurdjieff was like a mage of old. He was a man of power, and he intimidated those who attended his London meeting with the sheer solidity of his being—so much so that they could barely ask a question. As had been said of Jung, Gurdjieff had mana, a kind of spiritual force. And when it was announced that Gurdjieff had established his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, just outside of Paris, Nicoll, his wife, and their infant child were among the first to sign up for a stay. This was no light decision. It meant that Nicoll had to give up his practice in Harley Street, London’s most prestigious medical address, something he had worked hard to secure. It also meant in effect breaking off his professional relations with Jung, who had hoped Nicoll would be his representative in England. They remained friends and kept in touch; Jung was godfather to his first child. But Nicoll had a new teacher now.

By the time he and his family arrived at Fontainebleau, Nicoll had not led a particularly sheltered life. After graduating from Cambridge and getting his medical degree, he had signed on as ship’s surgeon on a steamer heading to Buenos Aries. He then studied psychology in Vienna, tutored by some of Freud’s followers, and in Zurich by Jung himself, with other lessons in Paris and Berlin. During World War I he was stationed in Mesopotamia. Here, in temperatures routinely above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Nicoll tended the wounded and sick, and gave what comfort he could to the dying, in conditions that at best could be called appalling. He came out of this hell an authority on shell shock. Even before meeting Ouspensky, Nicoll was a keen observer of himself and his surroundings. He kept a record of his experiences and at the end of the war produced a book, In Mesopotamia, which he illustrated with his own watercolors.

Nicoll had a talent for writing. Years earlier a story he had started with his sister as a joke, Lord Richard in the Pantry, grew into a successful book, play, and even film. As “Martin Swayne,” Nicoll penned several stories and novels, many published in the famous Strand magazine. Art and creativity came to him in several ways. He was also a fine musician with a good singing voice, and he had a talent for mechanics.

But without doubt, Gurdjieff was something else. Ouspensky’s lectures were demanding, the ideas startling, their urgency palpable. But the master was like a high-voltage electric current that no one could avoid. Those who crossed the English Channel to be with him found they had truly dived headfirst into the deep end. At the Prieuré (Gurdjieff’s institute was located in an old priory that he had bought), physical effort and more effort—what Gurdjieff called “superefforts”—designed to shake them out of their sleep, was the order of the day. Orage, a portly man and a heavy smoker, was given a shovel and told to dig. He did until he ached with pain and broke out sobbing. Nicoll was given the job of kitchen boy. This meant that for several months he had to wake at 5:00 a.m. each day, light the boilers to get the place ready, and be head cook and chief bottle washer to about sixty people. By 11:00 p.m. he had washed hundreds of filthy, greasy dishes, cups, pots, and pans with no soap, little hot water, and hardly a break. Gurdjieff taught by example, and his cries of “More!” and “Quicker!” aimed at Nicoll showed him that what we usually take to be our limits are really habits, part of the mechanical behavior Gurdjieff was out to destroy.

The sacred dances Gurdjieff taught them—the “movements,” as they were called—helped in this destruction too, as did his talks on the different “centers” of the human being—mental, emotional, moving, instinctive—and their harmonious development (hence the name of his institute). These centers were a complete mess and needed a total overhaul. Each and every one of them were broken machines, Gurdjieff told his students, but he could get them into shape. Readers familiar with accounts of life at Gurdjieff’s Prieuré—I give one in my book In Search of P.D. Ouspensky—have an idea of what it was like to have a tune-up from the master.

Nicoll et la famille had been at the Institute for a year when Gurdjieff suddenly announced that he was clearing house. Of the many students he had gathered, only a select few would remain; the rest must go. Nicoll was not part of this group, and what was an even greater surprise was that Gurdjieff also announced that he was breaking off all relations with Ouspensky, who had remained in London, declining all of Gurdjieff’s invitations to join the Institute. Gurdjieff was planning a trip to the United States in order to raise funds, and Orage was going ahead to get things ready. Gurdjieff suggested to Nicoll that he might accompany Orage and help—he always had his eye out for good lieutenants. It was a tempting offer, but after giving it some thought, Nicoll declined; after all, he had a wife and young child to look after. But there was another reason. He had decided to return to London to carry on working with Ouspensky, whom Gurdjieff had just declared persona non grata.

Exactly why Gurdjieff and his main expositor fell out is a central theme in the history of the Work; in my book I look at it in some detail. But while Orage quickly moved his allegiance to Gurdjieff—and kept it there pretty much until his death in 1934—Nicoll felt a strong connection with Ouspensky. And although later in his own teaching Nicoll incorporated many of the techniques he had learned from Gurdjieff, including the movements, his own natural approach was much more like that of the man who had first taught the Work to him, that is, through the power of ideas. This resonance led to a friendship between them.

At this time Ouspensky wasn’t the easiest man to be friends with. His years with Gurdjieff had turned the earlier, poetic, convivial habitué of the bohemian Stray Dog Café in pre-Bolshevik St. Petersburg into a stern taskmaster, a man of iron control. But for some reason, Ouspensky softened around Nicoll. Ouspensky kept a low profile throughout the 1920s, working on what would become A New Model of the Universe and In Search of the Miraculous, lecturing to a small group, and living alone in a small flat donated by Lady Rothermere, who had by then moved on to other fads. But he warmed to Nicoll and would often spend weekends in a cottage by the sea that Nicoll had purchased. Ouspensky said he slept better there than in London and could, at times, “feel the world turning.” He liked to walk along the shore, carrying a battery of binoculars and cameras, and talk to Nicoll about his cat, who, he claimed, had an astral body.

Nicoll took Ouspensky to the local pub, where Ouspensky liked to drink and tell stories of the Russia he had lost forever. Even then, the nostalgia for a bygone world that would overcome Ouspensky in his last years—he died in 1947—was gently settling in, but then he was Russian. Yet this focus on the past was something more than sentimentality. It was a central theme in Ouspensky’s ideas about time and his favorite theme, eternal recurrence, the idea that our lives repeat over and over in endless succession, something he spelled out in his novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. Only by awakening now can we hope to escape this endless repetition. Ouspensky was obsessed with recurrence well before he met Gurdjieff, and in the version of the Work that he taught Nicoll, it played an important part.

It would play the same part in Nicoll’s own teaching. In 1931, the year that A New Model of the Universe, which contains a long chapter on recurrence, was published, after ten years of being his student, Ouspensky told Nicoll to “go away.” Nicoll remained startled until Ouspensky finished his sentence: “. . . and teach the system.” Nicoll did.

Aside from reports by some of his students—such as Beryl Pogson, his biographer—what we know of how Nicoll taught the Work comes from the series of weekly talks he wrote and delivered to his groups from 1941 until his death in 1953. The first volume of these talks—they eventually ran to five—was published in a limited edition for Work use just before Nicoll’s death. Today the Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky make some of the most insightful and intriguing material available about the system and can be read with profit by anyone with a basic knowledge of its ideas, whether “in the Work” or not. As his friend, fellow doctor and Ouspenskian Kenneth Walker—himself the author of good introductions to the system—said, “they will remain the standard work on the subject for as long as these ideas are of interest to mankind.”

Recently I had occasion to reacquaint myself with Nicoll’s Commentaries and see the truth of Walker’s assessment. I had read the Commentaries many years before—along with Nicoll’s other books—during my own tenure with the Work in the 1980s, but what struck me this time around was Nicoll’s knack of blending non-Work insights and ideas into his weekly sermons. (His father had been a minister.) This is not to say, as some purists might, that Nicoll watered down the teaching. Not at all. I agree with others that on basic Work subjects such as negative emotions and, perhaps most significantly, his insights into the difference between “personality” and “essence”—a kind of speciality—Nicoll is a clear, forceful, and inspiring expositor. He also has a warmth and bedside manner that humanizes what can often be presented rather solemnly and sanctimoniously. By all reports he was good-natured and upbeat and brought a lightness to what is frequently a heavy business; Pogson’s Maurice Nicoll: A Portrait suggest that a lot of singing and dancing went on in the groups. And he could write. All of which says that, as is always the case with the best students, they take what they learn and do something with it, not merely parrot their teacher.

Readers familiar with Swedenborg, Neoplatonism, and Jung who find their way to the Commentaries can enjoy, as I did, discovering Nicoll’s veiled references to these influences—which, as the years went on, became less and less veiled. For instance Nicoll’s advice that whatever we dislike in another we must look for in ourselves seems a close cousin to Jung’s admonitions about embracing our shadow. As Nicoll said, “an increase in consciousness . . . would result from bringing the dark into the light.” When he points out that our “inner psychological invisible country” possesses its own “heaven, hell and an intermediate place,” his description of our interior world strikes a Swedenborgian note, as readers of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell will know. I was surprised to see that his insight into the esoteric significance of left and right was up-to-date with the most recent findings on the differences between our cerebral hemispheres, something I have written about in The Secret Teachers of the Western World. “The right hand is ordinarily the more conscious,” he tells us. “The more conscious side of man is the external man . . . The less conscious side is the inner, deeper man,” Nicoll writes, and “the left eye and left hand . . . belong to the inner man.”

The right hand, we know, is controlled by the dominant left brain, which is associated with the ego, the personality, that is, the conditioned self, something the Work aims to make relatively passive. The left hand is controlled by the right brain, which, according to Nicoll’s view, is associated with what Gurdjieff called essence, the real self, the “inner man,” not the one we show the outer world. The aim of the Work is to have essence grow at the expense of personality.

Part of the Work Nicoll inherited from Ouspensky involved a deep study of the Gospels. He believed that much esoteric wisdom was conveyed in the parables, but only to those who knew how to grasp it. In this sense he saw the Work as a kind of esoteric Christianity—as Gurdjieff said it was—and the Commentaries are filled with references to what Christ really meant and taught with these strange stories that often make no obvious sense. One central theme is metánoia, the Greek word usually translated as “repentance” but which Nicoll says really means “change of mind.” Failing to make such a change results not in “sin” but in “missing the mark,” falling short of the target which, for Nicoll and Ouspensky is the same in the Gospels as in the Work, that is, waking up.

Nicoll’s late works The New Man and The Mark, published posthumously, continue these insights, but in Living Time he focuses on another mystery he shared with his teacher. He started the book in the 1920s, but it wasn’t published until 1952, a year before his death. Like Ouspensky, Nicoll was what the writer J.B. Priestley called a “time-haunted man.” Priestley should know; he was one himself. Nicoll and Ouspensky feature in Priestley’s brilliant study Man and Time, and Ouspensky was the inspiration for Priestley’s play about recurrence, I Have Been Here Before. Priestley was impressed with A New Model of the Universe, and his novel The Magicians has a character based on Gurdjieff—an Eastern European eccentric who has the strange ability to switch from “tick-tock” time to “time alive” at will—that is, from everyday time to something rather different. Priestley tried to meet Ouspensky but was snubbed. But he read Nicoll, and in one of his last books, Over the Long High Wall, he returns to the mystery that haunted him, Nicoll, and Ouspensky.

Nicoll’s introduction to the mystery of time may have come through Jung, before he met Ouspensky. He was fascinated by what Jung called synchronicities, those meaningful coincidences that seem to suggest some strange correlation between our inner and outer worlds and which often involve odd bends and twists in time. They often include, as they have with me, some precognitive experience, usually involving dreams. Nicoll had a habit of collecting synchronicities and what we might call “serial events,” occurrences of similar but unrelated things—for example, Nicoll records losing three different things in the same fashion one after the other.

The central message to get from these odd happenings, and the larger, more mystical exceptions to our usual experience of time, is that the everyday brand, with its endless one-thing-after-another, is not the only kind. Time is more flexible than we believe. We can have glimpses of the future, but, according to Ouspensky, we can also return to the past and actually change it—admittedly, one of his stranger ideas. But we can do this only if we work to wake up now. This entails snapping out of the dream that sees some wonderful new life awaiting us in the “future” in ticktock time. As Gurdjieff told Ouspensky, who repeated it to Nicoll, any such future will be exactly like the past, unless we can escape our mechanicalness and get hold of “time alive” today.

Nicoll tried to do exactly that, and he helped others to do it too. His Commentaries are a record of his hard work at avoiding the traps of ticktock time and resourcefulness at finding ways to enter time alive. As Gurdjieff and Ouspensky did, Nicoll used physical work as part of this effort. Beryl Pogson records how his talent for mechanics and engineering came in handy when the groups were transforming farmhouses into Work sites, while working on themselves as well. Yet Nicoll knew that, as Gurdjieff told him years ago, the Work did not build to last. Things change quickly and the Work must be mobile, something Nicoll learned while keeping the teaching going through the dark days of World War II.

A sense of urgency came to Nicoll during the war. With Kenneth Walker, he shared the idea that the Work must become a kind of ark, saving the teaching from the threatening flood of events. Like many others, Nicoll sensed that a dark age was coming. “The age of good men is over,” he wrote in his diary, “mankind is degenerating and passing into regimentation.” He felt that “all right understanding was dying,” and that “everything to do with truth and good was being lost sight of.” Barbarism had returned.

This feeling lingered into the postwar years, and in 1948 Nicoll told his groups that he did not have long to live. He had been diagnosed with cancer. This meant they had to hurry up, as there was still a lot to be done. One thing that did get done because of this announcement was that the weekly talks he had been giving for the last seven years were gathered together with thought of publication. This was the genesis of the Commentaries.

But Nicoll himself realized that he would have to leave some things undone. Gurdjieff had given him the task of linking the Work to developments in science. Nicoll’s interest in the brain reflects this aim, as did his reading of the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s book What Is Life?, which rejects the dominant materialistic answers to that question. Schrödinger’s idea of life as “anti-entropy,” as a force pushing against the dead weight of matter, excited Nicoll, and he devoted some of his late Commentaries to it.

One thing Nicoll left unfinished was his last commentary. He gave his last talk on August 16, 1953. Two weeks later he was dead. He had started writing a talk but had fallen into a coma before finishing it. It was published in the Commentaries as a fragment. One more reason, perhaps, to return?

Gary Lachman is the author of several books on the history of the Western esoteric tradition, including Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, and the forthcoming Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. He writes for several journals in the U.S. and U.K., and his work has been translated into several languages. View his website at garylachman.co.uk.

From the Editor’s Desk

Printed in the Spring 2018issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard,"From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 106:2, pg 2

Theosophical Society - Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America and a frequent lecturer for the Theosophical SocietyIt must have been twelve or fourteen years ago that I conducted an evening workshop in ritual magic at the New York Open Center in Manhattan.

It went off pretty well, although its goal was really nothing more than to illustrate certain basic principles. It did occur to me afterward that it may have been rather foolish to conduct a magical ceremony with a bunch of strangers who had walked off the streets of New York, but then perhaps the old saw should be modified to say that the good Lord looks out for little babies, drunken men, and, occasionally, ritual magicians.

In any case, the Theosophical literature is richly endowed with warnings about the dangers of occult magic, so I consider this readership sufficiently cautioned about this matter, and will go on to another subject: does magic work?

On the one hand, if occult magic doesn’t work, why is it found so universally? Superstition? Undoubtedly to a degree. The power of suggestion? Maybe, but maybe not. Max Freedom Long’s classic study of Huna or Hawaiian shamanism, The Secret Science behind Miracles, describes a case involving an Irish cabdriver in Honolulu, a young woman with whom he was up to no good, and her grandmother, who knew a thing or two about such matters. The cabdriver began to wither away from the feet up without knowing why. A doctor figured out what was going on: the young man had been subjected to the Huna death prayer. He intervened with the grandmother, and she let him know that she would put off the curse—on the condition that the cabdriver caught the next boat back to the mainland. “The situation had to be explained over and over again to the unbelieving Irishman,” Long writes, “but when the idea finally hit home, he became terrified and was willing to agree to any terms.” When he did, the symptoms went away. If the Irishman did not know about the curse and did not even understand the concept, it is hard to chalk up this case to suggestion.

On the other hand, if occult magic works, why has it fallen into disfavor, in Western societies at any rate?

Here is one suggestion: occult magic works, or it can work. But it is almost impossible to make it work without unexpected and undesired side-effects.

In his entertaining memoir My Life with the Spirits, magus Lon Milo duQuette describes his evocation of the spirit Orobas, described in the grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon the King as “a Great and Mighty Prince, appearing at first like a Horse; but after the command of the Exorcist he putteth on the Image of a Man.” His “Office” is, among other things, “to give Dignities, and Prelacies, and the Favour of Friends and Foes.”

DuQuette, down on his financial luck, needed Orobas’s help, and, after invoking him, got it. He gave the spirit a tough assignment: he wanted his fortune to reverse itself—and within an hour.

The ritual worked. Within one hour, a friend of DuQuette’s showed up in a beat-up but functional car and gave it to him unasked. DuQuette was able to use the car to find and keep a job, and things improved from there.

Of course there is always something in these affairs that doesn’t go quite right. According to the principles of Solomonic magic, the magus has to keep the spirit’s sigil, written on a small piece of parchment, in a secret place. No one should touch it or even look at it.

DuQuette hit upon what he thought of as the perfect hiding place: he taped the sigil inside his guitar, which he allowed no one else near. Unfortunately, Kurt, a student of DuQuette’s and a talented woodworker, offered to refurbish the guitar in exchange for lessons. DuQuette agreed, having forgotten about the sigil, which, along with the guitar, left his possession for five days.

Kurt brought back a beautifully refinished guitar, but he told DuQuette he couldn’t stay for his first lesson, because he was off to the racetrack. Kurt had never had any particular interest in horseracing until the previous day, when he and his father went to the track. “I just fell in love with the horses,” he told DuQuette. “They’re so beautiful. They look like gods! When they look at me I feel like a horse!”

Remember that Orobas appears “at first like a horse.” Conceivably the spirit had gotten out (Kurt had handled the sigil while refurbishing the guitar), and despite DuQuette’s best efforts, continued to obsess the ill-fated student for the next fifteen years: “Sadly, his addiction to horseracing and other forms of gambling escalated year by year into self-destructive behavior that eventually rendered him a social cripple. The last time I saw him he was living in a small industrial shop—the walls of his cell surrounded by hundreds of color photographs and posters of racehorses.”

Although DuQuette adds that the sigil could not be blamed entirely for Kurt’s fate—he was undoubtedly an addictive personality to begin with—DuQuette speculates that this predisposition, along with many other factors, may have given birth “to an evil spirit—a demon horse who escaped its wizard just long enough to gallop madly into the weak and vulnerable soul of a weak and tragic human being.” With a bit of help from a grimoire and a magician.

Magic, you see, is unpredictable. You can’t completely control it, and it usually gives you some results that you hadn’t wanted. In a way, I’ve proven it here. Without intending to give you a warning about magic, I seem to have done so after all.

Richard Smoley

  1. The Future of the Theosophical Society
  2. Efforts and Awakening: Insights from the Works of Maurice Nicoll
  3. The Alchemy of Adaptation
  4. Facing the Third Object: An Interview with Kurt Leland

Subcategories

Book Reviews

Menu