Customer comments on this Youngstown Ohio Book
 Liminal Lives At The Doors Of Perception
Gary Lachman's generally excellent A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (2003) isn't an actual "history of the occult," as its title claims. Rather, the book is a collection of short essays on both famous and relatively obscure individuals, beginning in 1688 with Emanuel Swedenborg, whose lives were dominated by the metaphysical and the paranormal in some significant manner. Lachman, who excels at contextualizing the broad traditions of Occidental occultism, clearly has a both a great enthusiasm and a sober respect for his subject. The author's insights are often fascinatingly original, such as his belief that [...] is a modern example of "sehnsucht," which Lachman partially translates as "something infinitely desirable just beyond our grasp...horn calls far off in the dark forest, the poignant glow of sunset, which we will never reach, no matter how quickly we race to the horizon, the snow-capped peaks of a distant mountain range."
After the initial chapter on Enlightenment Occultism, which includes Mesmer, Cagliostro, Le Comte de Saint Germain, and Jan Potocki in addition to Swedenborg and others, Lachman hits his stride with penetrating essays on E. T. A. Hoffman, Edger Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and August Strindberg that shed telling light on areas of these writer's lives usually overlooked or ignored by academia.
A Dark Muse, which cautiously explores the questionable relationship between 'genius and madness,' also underscores the additional tragedy and suffering that comes to many of those who immerse themselves in the occult, or whose lives are immersed by it.
Depression, nervous collapse, extreme self-consciousness and sensitivity, hallucinations, temporary or permanent insanity, incarceration in mental institutions, syphilis, cancer, and other diseases, poverty, starvation, alcoholism, drug addiction, alienation from friends and family, social ostracism, and suicide or suicide attempts were common elements in the lives of many of those included here, all of whom, with the exception of Madame Blavatsky, are male.
In addition to severe forms of human suffering, early death was also a factor: Novalis died at 28, Rene Daumal at 36, Arthur Rimbaud at 37, Poe at 40, Guy De Maupassant at 42, Gerard de Nerval and Baudelaire at 46, Fernando Pessoa at 47, Malcolm Lowry at 48, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam at 51. Very few lived long, happy, or successful lives, though Goethe, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Dunsany, H. G. Wells, and Algernon Blackwood, each of whom had problems of their own, were exceptions to the general rule.
Lachman's writing is often persuasive and certainly penetrating. Having quoted De Maupassant's "...I have a softening of the brain...the result of washing out my nasal passages with salt water. A saline fermentation has taken place in my brain, and every night my brain runs out through my nose and mouth in a sticky paste. This is imminent death and I am mad...", Lachman adds, "Remembering the fate of his insane brother, Maupassant tried to kill himself, but botched the job and was saved by his servant. He was driven to s sanatorium in Paris in a straightjacket, and nineteen months later he died, raving, a month short of his forty-third birthday."
Lachman explains why he has chosen those figures who populate "The Modernist Occultist," though it's unfortunate he did not include Hilda Doolittle (1866-1961), since Doolittle not only experienced, wrote about, and avidly studied the occult, but also had a background in Count von Zinzendorf's Moravian Brotherhood, and, in keeping with the potential consequences of occult interaction, suffered several bouts of severe mental instability during her lifetime. It's also difficult to excuse the absence of C. G. Jung, though Lachman presumably left Jung out due to the sheer abundance of material available about him elsewhere. However, Jung fits Lachman's criteria exactly, and of course has had a profound influence on metaphysical thinking and theory.
A Dark Muse, which sadly lacks an index, concludes with a brief selection of excepts from the work of Swedenborg, Karl Von Eckarthausen, Madame Blavatsky, Strindberg, P.D. Ouspensky, Poe, Eliphas Levi, and others.
Worthwhile, but...
Lachman gets off on the wrong foot, at least in my books, by regurgitating sensationalist headlines over a recent supposed 'Satanic' killing in Germany in his introduction as a suitably dramatic opener. I know a little about the case, and it was no more authentically 'Satanic' than the Manson murders (another Lachman hobbyhorse in another of his books). The 'dark stuff' is almost inevitably more interesting - as he tacitly accepts by the space afforded it in 'A Dark Muse' - so that kind of wilful tabloid approach to 'black magic' bodes ill in my books.
He also fails to really get to grips with the relationship between occultism and the arts - part of his central thesis and perhaps the key to understanding this amorphous area (at least in my opinion). The dates he begins with and finishes on also feel a little abritrary (we seldom revisit recent history after the 'shock, horror!' intro), and much of the material here will be pretty familiar to most with an interest in occultism and its avant-garde exponents in the arts.
Yet, it rattles on at a fair pace, and there are some unfamiliar faces in here - Portugal's Fernando Pessoa (who helped Crowley fake his suicide) and a whole coven of devilish Russians (indeed Russia's one of the countries with a rich occult-art axis that remains virgin territory to most of us Western occult aficionados) spring to mind. Overall, 'A Dark Muse' is a valid addition to any occult bookshelves. It doesn't break too much new ground ('Surrealism and the Occult' is perhaps a more satisfying survey in that department) but reads well and should inspire all but the most jaded old magus to explore a new literary avenue or two.
 Intriguing and insightful, though not what I expected
Contrary to this book's subtitle, this is not quite a history of the occult. When picking up this book, I was looking forward to reading about the history of the occult as it lies in ancient Greece and hermetic texts, the subsequent secret societies formed based on those texts, the differences between them, and where their varying beliefs stemmed from. Instead, Lachman chooses to focus this text on central literary figures and their occult backgrounds, in other words, their "Dark Muses." Though this book wasn't quite what I had expected, it was still a rather intriguing read that presented a plethora of insightful information.
As Lachman states, "[i]t's not surprising that the poet and the mage should be linked: both use words in order to produce a desired effect" (66), and it seems that this statement serves as his thesis for the remainder of the book. Lachman speaks of Goethe, Blake, Poe, and Baudelaire, among many, many others, and dictates small (2-10 page) vignettes about their lives and their ties to the occult, as well as their contributions to occult-themed literature. Therefore, this book can be read as one unified piece, or one vignette at a time in random order as one's interest piques. Each person covered herein is grouped into the over-arching sub-sections of enlightenment occultism, romantic occultism, satanic occultism, fin de sięcle occultism, or the modernist occultist. Furthermore, at the end of the text important selected texts and excerpts are included, which is a nice addition.
I wish Lachman had gone a little bit more in-depth with each literary figure, as a couple of pages hardly does each one justice (whole volumes could be written on each central figure alone), and it would have been nice to find out more about occult history aside from each central literary figures' viewpoint, but nonetheless Lachman does cover quite a bit of interesting ground. I also found the text to be convoluted at times, as many of the lives of these important writers were inter-twined, and many names were mentioned before being properly introduced. Some of the facts presented seemed irrelevant at times as well, and the writing style of Lachman can be extremely dry. Regardless of my minor quibbles, I have found this book to be a decent starting point that has piqued my interest, making me want to read further on this intriguing subject matter. I think this will be a book I turn back to on various occasions, after I have read more of the important literary works mentioned herein.
I would recommend having some knowledge of occult interests, orders, and perhaps even some of the important texts before picking this book up, however, as some of the details might seem lost or otherwise incomprehensible to the casual reader, as I know I felt somewhat lost during a few of the sections.
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