Tag: Hermes Trismegistus

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What’s On Its Way in 2022

Here are some talks on their way in the new year - one, I hope, that will be kind to us all.

January 11 I’ll be giving the first of three talks providing a Short History of Modern Occultism for the Last Tuesday Society. The opener is Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was one of the most remarkable and influential women of the nineteenth century, and the Theosophical Society, which she founded in NYC in 1875, profoundly shaped modern culture. And yes she was a deft hand at materialising all sorts of things, and studied occultism in a secret monastery in Tibet.

January 13 I’ll be on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking discussing my precognitive dreams with Matthew Sweet on a program devoted to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.

January 16 I’ll be speaking to the Theosophical Society about the mysterious figure, Hermes Trismegistus, fabled founder of magic and philosophy, whose teachings influenced ancient thought, Christianity, the Renaissance, and the modern occult world. The talk will be based on my book The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus.

January 18 my online course on The History of Western Esotericism begins for the California Institute of Integral Studies. The course will follow my books The Secret Teachers of the Western World and The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus. It isn’t open to the public; you need to be enrolled at CIIS to attend.

January 27 is the UK publication date for my new book Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence. In it I look at my experiences with “dreaming ahead of time,” - that is, of the future - over the past forty years, and how other “time haunted men,” such as J.W. Dunne, J.B. Priestley, Arthur Koestler, C.G. Jung, and others have tried to understand what must be the strangest paranormal phenomena of them all.

February 17 I’ll be giving an online talk for Watkins Bookshop about Dreaming Ahead of Time.

February 20 I’ll be discussing precognition and other odd things about dreams with Carl Abrahamson at Morbid Anatomy. It’s not up on their events page yet; when it is I will let you know.

March 8 I’ll be giving the second talk of my three part series A Brief History of Modern Occultism for the Last Tuesday Society. This time’s it’s everyone’s favourite bad boy, Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Magician in the World. Crowley did more in his rambunctious, super-sized life than most people do throughout all their incarnations. I’ll take the scenic route through his magical, sexual, drug and other excesses, providing a blow-by-blow account of how the Great Beast became the “man we’d like to hang!” If you want to prepare, you can read all about in my book Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World.

March 27 I’ll be winding up my Brief History of Modern Occultism with a look and the life and strange times of C. G. Jung, the Lord of the Underworld, who shared with Crowley a place among “those we like” on the cover of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s album. More than anyone else in the 20th century, Jung re-introduced magical and mystical ideas about the human soul, through his profound exploration of the human psyche, mostly his own. Jung’s descent in the unconscious following his breakup with Freud led to his discovery of the Collective Unconscious, with its mysterious compelling archetypes. And his notion of synchronicity - “meaningful coincidence” - put magic on the psychological map. All is told in my book Jung the Mystic.

April 25 I’ll be telling my dreams again, this time to the Science and Medical Network.

June 25 I’ll be speaking about the paranormal life of C.G. Jung to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, a talk based on my book Jung The Mystic.

June already. The year’s half gone. Funny thing, time.

Beyond the Robot Part 2, H. P. Lovecraft, Precognition, and Holy Russia.

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I’ll be giving the second part of my talk on Colin Wilson online on 30 August from 7:00 - 9:00 pm UK time. Here’s the link to register. The talk is based on my book Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. I gave the first part back in February, just before coronamania hit town. You can find that here. In the first talk, I focused on Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, and his roots in existentialism. Part 2 will follow on from that to Wilson’s ‘comeback’ book, The Occult which established him as one of the leading thinkers in the burgeoning consciousness and paranormal world of the 1970s. I will look at The Occult and the other books in Wilson’s “Occult trilogy,” Mysteries and Beyond the Occult.

In other news, my article “The Horror at Clinton Street: H. P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” is in the September 2020 issue of Fortean Times, #396, which should be available at a Temple to Dagon near you. I came to Lovecraft after cutting my Weird Tales teeth on Robert E. Howard’s testosterone injected tales of Conan the Barbarian, in the Lancer paperback editions of the mid 1960s, with their fantastic Frank Frazetta covers, full of swords, sorcery, rippling muscle and buxom wenches. Lovecraft was an eccentric, neurotic man of genius who transmuted his loathing of the modern world into tales of cosmic horror that at their best, produce a sense of awe. Sadly, his time in Brooklyn in the early 1920s, was not a picnic, and his dislike of people of colour or of less than colonial American descent, reached a paroxysm that, in a lesser individual, could have erupted into violence. In Lovecraft’s case, it produced one of his lesser tales, which nevertheless, put the Red Hook area of Brooklyn firmly on the Lovecraftian map…

 

New Dawn magazine, which hails from down under - Melbourne, Australia, to be exact - has been reprinting some of my older articles, as well as some new ones. In recent months I contributed articles on H. G. Wells and the Open Conspiracy(May-June 2020 #180) and the little read - at least in the English speaking world - German writer Ernst Junger (Special Issue Vol. 14 #3). In their Special Issue Vol. 13 # 6, I contributed my essay “Mystical Experience and the Evolution of Consciousness, and in the July-August 2020 issue has an early article about precognitive dreams and synchronicity, “Destiny Calling.” This was originally published back in 1997 in Quest magazine and has not been available until now. I mention in a note that it can serve as an introduction to my next book, Time and the Dreaming Mind, which will be published by Floris Books sometime in 2021, and which deals at greater length with the kinds of experiences I write about in the article. In the current Special Issue. Vol 14 #4, you can find my article on the Hermetic Revolution of the Renaissance, which originally appeared in Gnosis magazine in 1996, and laid the groundwork for my book The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus.

I’ve been doing quite a few interviews for The Return Of Holy Russia. Here are links to some that have appeared since my last post.

Here I speak with Mark Jeftovic at Spokentome about A Secret History of Consciousnessand The Caretakers of the Cosmos, two of my books that he has released in spoken word editions. If I remember correctly, we cover a lot of ground…

Here I chat with Piers Kaniuka of Resistance Recoveryabout my work in general.

This time it’s about T.C. Lethbridge, pendulums and the counter culture at the Bureau of Lost Culture.

At Mind Matters it’s all things a la Russe.

Here I talk about the “Russian soul” with a real Russian

It’s The Caretakers of the Cosmos at Zeitgeist.

And at Legalize Freedom it’s Holy Russia again.

20% Discount on my titles at Floris Books

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The generous people at Floris Books are offering a 20% discount on my titles from now until the end of April. Along with Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, this includes The Caretakers of the Cosmos, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus, Rudolf Steiner, and A Secret History of Consciousness. Here’s what you need to know:
Code: LA0218
Offer: 20% off all books written by Gary Lachman when purchased via
www.florisbooks.co.uk
Valid until: 30/04/18
And as a starter, here’s a brief excerpt from Lost Knowledge of the Imagination.

 

There are of course many books on the imagination. Psychological studies, motivational works, instructions in visualization, research into creativity, guides to using imagination in business, relationships, and self-improvement – these are some of the results that come from a quick internet search on the subject. There are many more. Most definitions of imagination speak of its contrast with reality. My Oxford Dictionary tells me that imagination is the ‘mental faculty of forming images or concepts of objects or situations not existent or not directly experienced.’ Merriam-Webster tells me it is ‘the ability to imagine things that are not real’ – which seems something of a tautology – and ‘something that only exists or happens in your mind.’ The Cambridge Dictionary says that imagination is ‘the ability to form pictures in the mind’ and that it concerns ‘something that you think exists or is true, although in fact is not real or true’. Imagination is of course also creative. Roget’s Thesaurus calls it the ‘power to create in one’s mind,’ and samples of the synonyms it provides range from ‘artistry,’ ‘awareness,’ and ‘inspiration’, to ‘ingenuity,’ ‘insight’ and ‘creativity’.

I believe imagination is one of those things which we all know immediately but which, as I’ve said, we would find difficult to define. Indeed, an exact definition of it would only make it more obscure.[1] Nevertheless, here I will offer my own definition of imagination. It is not necessarily exclusive of others; I give it to emphasize what I take to be imagination’s central work, and also to make clear how it is a different way of understanding the imagination. I take it from the writer Colin Wilson. Imagination, he said, is ‘the ability to grasp realities that are not immediately present’. Not an escape from reality, or a substitute for it, but a deeper engagement with it. We could also say that imagination is simply our ability to grasp reality, or even, in some strange way, to create it, or at least to collaborate in its creation; with whom or what we will look at further on. For the moment let us limit ourselves to the first formulation.

It is because we need imagination to grasp reality – that part of it immediately before us, and its wider horizons that exceed the reach of our physical senses – that we can speak of a ‘knowledge’ of the imagination. Imagination has a noetic character; it is the source and medium of our other way of knowing. It shows us aspects and dimensions of reality that we would miss without it – and which much, if not most of official western culture has missed since the new way of knowing became dominant. While it can be used for fantasy, illusion, make-believe, and escapism, the real work of imagination is to make contact with the strange world in which we live and to serve as both guide and inspiration for our development within it. It is the way we evolve. Imagination presents us with possible, potential realities that it is our job to actualize. It also presents us with a world that would not be complete without our help.

Let us look then for this lost knowledge of the imagination, and see how much of it we can find.

 

[1] It is a phenomenon, in Sir William Grove’s words, ‘so obvious to simple apprehension that to define it would make it more obscure’. Quoted in Samuel Butler ‘Thought and Language’ in The Importance of Language ed. Max Black (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969) p. 13.