Quest Magazine

Printed in the Summer 2014 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch. "The Aquarian

The nation's most fateful evangelizer of the positive in the latter half of the twentieth century was neither a mystic nor a minister. Like many of the shapers of positive thinking, he had a modest formal education, possessed a self-devised philosophy of life, and showed a willingness to experiment with a wide range of religious ideas. Friends and adversaries alike experienced a sense of wonder that he became the twentieth century's most influential president, next to Franklin Roosevelt. This was Ronald Reagan.

Every historical writer who has approached the life of Reagan experiences the same sense of perplexity over who the man really was. Pulitzer-winning biographer Edmund Morris was so confounded by his subject that in his epic biography, Dutch, the writer made himself a character, finding it more useful to chart Reagan's influence on those around him than to part the curtain on the man himself. Many biographers were left to plumb Reagan's movies, his penchant for homegrown wisdom, and his bevy of moralistic stories for keys to the man's outer actions—such as his stare-down of the Soviet Union (followed by his role reversal as a peacemaker); his chimerical (though to the Soviets alarming) pursuit of "Star Wars"; and his bread-and-butter conservatism (clung to even though his family was rescued by the New Deal). In every respect, Reagan was a pairing of opposites.

The skeleton key to Reagan's career is not found in his films, his flights of idealism, or the pivoting of his internal moral compass, though each of these things is important. To be finally understood, Reagan must be seen as a product of the positive-thinking movement. Indeed, it was Reagan's song of the positiv—as articulated in thousands of speeches as a conservative activist, California governor, and U.S. president—that, more than any other factor, made the principle of brighter tomorrows and limitless possibilities into the idealized creed of America.

The code in which Reagan spoke is the key to the inner man—a fact sensed by President Gerald Ford, who called Reagan "one of the few political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations." (Reagan, it should be noted, had produced his own political speeches starting in the 1950s, and, as president, crafted the basic boilerplate and stories for many of his talks.)

In a 2010 reassessment of Reagan, Newsweek erroneously called him a born-again Christian. For all the admiration that born-again Christians felt for Reagan, and he for them, he cannot be described in that way. Ronald and Nancy Reagan's proclivity for astrology is already well known, but it is just one branch from a larger tree. One of the most overlooked facets of Reagan's career, and an aspect of his life with which few admirers have come to terms, is the strain of avant-garde thought and mysticism that touched him as a young man, and Reagan's enduring taste for the New Age spirituality of his Hollywood years.

Reagan didn't experience Hollywood as an interlude in his life. He spent nearly three decades of his adulthood there; it was, in all its facets, an integral part of him. He complained to biographer Lou Cannon about "this New York Times kind of business of referring to me as a B-picture actor." In a late-night discussion, after speaking with Cannon about his string of substantial film roles, Reagan concluded somewhat sheepishly, "I'm proud of having been an actor." He was similarly proud of being part of that community's spiritual and social customs.

One of his closest friends in California was astrologer Carroll Righter, who in 1969 became the first and only astrologer to appear on the cover of Time magazine. In Reagan's best-known movie, Kings Row from 1942, he costarred and became friendly with actress Eden Gray, who went on to write some of the twentieth century's most popular guides to Tarot cards. (Gray recalled Reagan gamely reading aloud from his horoscope and those of other actors before shoots.) And when Reagan began his political rise in the 1950s, his early speeches, and those he later delivered as president, featured themes and phrases that can be traced to the writings of a Hollywood-based occult philosopher, Manly P. Hall.

None of this was a source of embarrassment to Reagan. Throughout his life he was at ease discussing premonitory dreams, astrology, number symbolism, out-of-body experiences, and his belief in UFOs, including personal sightings in the 1950s and '70s.

During his 1980 presidential campaign, he sat for a three-hour interview with journalist Angela Fox Dunn, the daughter of Malvina Fox Dunn, Reagan's drama coach at Warner Brothers in the 1930s. Reagan never opened up so much as when he was around people with ties to his movie days. With surprising frankness, the Republican nominee expounded on topics ranging from the astrological signs of past presidents, to his mother's religious beliefs, to the prophetic qualities of psychic Jeane Dixon, another old Hollywood friend. While Dixon was "always gung ho for me to be president," Reagan related, in the "foretelling part of her mind" the prophetess didn't see him in the Oval Office. (A prediction that, more or less, squared with Dixon's record.) He also boasted to Dunn of being an Aquarius, the most mystical of all the zodiac signs. "I believe you'll find that 80 percent of the people in New York's Hall of Fame are Aquarians," he said. (It is not clear what Hall of Fame Reagan was referring to—it may have been the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at New York's Bronx Community College. If so, he would have been disappointed to learn that Aquarians are not overrepresented among its inventors, statesmen, and scientists.)

At the back of his personality, Reagan was the man he proudly described to Dunn: an Aquarian. He was influenced by various mystical and mind-power cultures, whose mark he left permanently stamped on America.

"Child of Destiny"

Long before his life in Hollywood, Reagan was at home with various blends of American mysticism. A combination of the conventional and otherworldly characterized his childhood.

"The best part," he recalled, "was that I was allowed to dream. Many the day I spent deep in a huge rocker in the mystic atmosphere of Aunt Emma's living room with its horsehair-stuffed gargoyles of furniture, its shawls and antimacassars, globes of glass over birds and flowers, books and strange odors."

His mother, Nelle, was, by turns, religiously conservative, but she also infused her sons with a freethinking streak, telling Ron and his brother to address their parents by first names. In a progressive viewpoint that wouldn't gain currency until many years later, Nelle told the boys that their father's alcoholism was really a disease. Nelle was committed to seeing her sons well rounded, and she took them to plays, recitals, and lectures. One biographer called her a "determined improver." Another noted that she "encouraged positive thinking." Nelle wrote a poem for her Disciples of Christ church newsletter, "On the Sunnyside":

Think lovely thoughts, ennobling the soul
Keeping them from strife . . . 
The sunnyside's the only side
Full of graces divine
Sometimes too bright for us to scan
I'd seek to make them mine.

Nelle doted on Ron as her favorite. "Within the Reagan household," observed biographer Lou Cannon, "and perhaps in Ronald Reagan's heart, there was an early sense that he was a child of destiny." By the time Reagan arrived at Eureka College in central Illinois in 1928, he was comfortable with this perspective. He fondly recalled a French professor with a reputation as a psychic who forecast his greatness. "This is a class of destiny," she announced at the start of the term, and he felt she was speaking directly to him.

Reagan's break into radio came in 1932, when he was hired by the Palmer family, who were proprietors of an Iowa radio station. The Palmers were also a clan of spiritualists, mystics, high eccentrics, and visionaries. The family patriarch, D.D. Palmer, was the founder of chiropractic healing in the late nineteenth century. A mesmerist and spiritualist, D.D. Palmer said that the chiropractic method was transmitted to him from "an intelligence in the spiritual world" during an Iowa spiritualist convention.

D.D.'s son and successor, "Colonel" B.J. Palmer—the man who hired young Reagan as a broadcaster—developed his own variant of mind-power philosophy. Colorful and fearless, B.J. expanded the college of chiropractic and mental healing which his father had founded in Davenport, Iowa. This was where Reagan walked the halls and grounds as an employee at the radio station called WOC, for "World of Chiropractic." Its programming promoted the school but also featured standard broadcasts of sports, news, and music.

Part showman, B.J. Palmer created a strange otherworld on the campus, which had an adjacent mansion and gardens nicknamed "A Little Bit o' Heaven." B.J. festooned the Iowa property with curios from his world travels: statues of the Hindu gods Kali and Ganesha, massive Buddha heads and shrines, Chinese Foo Dogs, bronze and marble renderings of Venus, Japanese temple gates, and a truly eerie, enormous stone mosaic of a coiled, fanged serpent. ("The serpent was cast out of heaven," B.J. explained in a visitors' guide.)

Reagan spent his working hours at the college's rooftop station and joined the chiropractic students for meals in the basement cafeteria. Making his way from the roof to the basement, Reagan recalled seeing the hallways of the Palmer School of Chiropractic emblazoned with bits of B.J.'s philosophy, such as: "THINK! SPEAK! ACT, POSITIVE! I AM! I WILL! I CAN! I MUST!" Like many mental mystics, B.J. believed that man possessed an inner divine sense, a branch of the "Universal Intelligence," which he termed Innate. "INNATE," Palmer wrote, "is the ONE eternal, internal, stable, and permanent factor that is a fixed and reliable entity . . . the same capable INNER VOICE that is capable of getting any sick organ well."

To Reagan, B.J. Palmer's world was neither shocking nor surprising. It primed him for the spiritual culture he soon discovered in Hollywood. During his film career, Reagan encountered a mystical influence that left its mark on his political vision.

The President and the Occultist

Reagan often spoke of America's divine purpose and of a mysterious plan behind the nation's founding. "You can call it mysticism if you want to," he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, "but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage." These were remarks to which Reagan often returned. He repeated them almost verbatim as president before a television audience of millions for the Statue of Liberty centenary on July 4, 1986.

When touching on such themes, Reagan echoed the work, and sometimes the phrasing, of occult scholar Manly P. Hall.

From the dawn of Hall's career in the early 1920s until his death in 1990, the Los Angeles teacher wrote about America's "secret destiny." The United States, in Hall's view, was a society that had been planned and founded by secret esoteric orders to spread enlightenment and liberty to the world.

In 1928, Hall attained underground fame when, at the remarkably young age of twenty-seven, he published The Secret Teachings of All Ages, a massive guide to the mystical and esoteric philosophies of antiquity. Exploring subjects from Native American mythology to Pythagorean mathematics to the geometry of ancient Egypt, this encyclopedia of arcana remains the unparalleled guidebook to ancient symbols and esoteric thought. The Secret Teachings won the admiration of figures ranging from General John Pershing to Elvis Presley. Novelist Dan Brown cites it as a key source.

After publishing his "Great Book," Hall spent the rest of his life lecturing and writing within the walls of his Egypt art deco campus, the Philosophical Research Society, in L.A.'s Griffith Park neighborhood. Hall called the place a "mystery school" in the mold of Pythagoras's ancient academy.

It was there in 1944 that the occult thinker produced a short work, one little known beyond his immediate circle. This book, The Secret Destiny of America, evidently caught the eye of Reagan, then a middling movie actor gravitating toward politics.

Hall's concise volume described how America was the product of a "Great Plan" for religious liberty and self-governance, launched by a hidden order of ancient philosophers and secret societies. In one chapter, Hall described a rousing speech delivered by a mysterious "unknown speaker" before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The "strange man," wrote Hall, invisibly entered and exited the locked doors of the statehouse in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, delivering an oration that bolstered the wavering spirits of the delegates. "God has given America to be free!" commanded the mysterious speaker, urging the men to overcome their fears of being hanged or beheaded, and to seal destiny by signing the great document. Newly emboldened, the delegates rushed forward to add their names. They looked to thank the stranger only to discover that he had vanished from the locked room. Was this, Hall wondered, "one of the agents of the secret Order, guarding and directing the destiny of America?"

At a 1957 commencement address at his alma mater Eureka College, Reagan, then a corporate spokesman for General Electric, sought to inspire students with this leaf from occult history. "This is a land of destiny," Reagan said, "and our forefathers found their way here by some Divine system of selective service gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps." Reagan then retold (without naming a source) the tale of Hall's unknown speaker. "When they turned to thank the speaker for his timely words," Reagan concluded, "he couldn't be found and to this day no one knows who he was or how he entered or left the guarded room." Reagan revived the story in 1981, when Parade magazine asked the president for a personal essay on what July 4 meant to him. Presidential aide Michael Deaver delivered the piece with a note saying, "This Fourth of July message is the president's own words and written initially in the president's hand" on a yellow pad at Camp David. Reagan retold the legend of the unknown speaker—this time using language very close to Hall's own: "When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors."

Where did Hall uncover the tale that inspired a president? The episode originated as "The Speech of the Unknown" in a collection of folkloric stories about America's founding, published in 1847 under the title Washington and His Generals, or Legends of the Revolution by American social reformer and muckraker George Lippard. Lippard, a friend of Edgar Allan Poe, had a strong taste for the gothic—he cloaked his mystery man in a "dark robe." He also tacitly acknowledged inventing the story: "The name of the Orator . . . is not definitely known. In this speech, it is my wish to compress some portion of the fiery eloquence of the time."

For his part, Hall seemed to know almost nothing about the story's point of origin. He had been given a copy of "The Speech of the Unknown" by a since-deceased secretary of the Theosophical Society, but with no bibliographical information other than its being from a "rare old volume of early American political speeches." The speech appeared in 1938 in the Society's journal, The Theosophist, with the sole note that it was "published in a rare volume of addresses, and known probably to only one in a million, even of American citizens."

There are indications that Reagan and Hall may have personally met to discuss the story. In an element unique to Hall's version, the mystic-writer (dubiously) attributed the tale of the unknown speaker to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. When Reagan addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on January 25, 1974, he again told the story, but this time cited an attribution—of sorts. Reagan said the tale was told to him "some years ago" by "a writer, who happened to be an avid student of history . . . I was told by this man that the story could be found in the writings of Jefferson. I confess, I never researched or made an effort to verify it."

Whether the president and the occultist ever met, it is Hall's language that unmistakably marks the Reagan telling. Biographer Edmund Morris noted Reagan's fondness for apocryphal tales and his "Dalíesque ability to bend reality to his own purposes." Yet he added that the president's stories "should be taken seriously because they represent core philosophy." This influential (and sometimes inscrutable) president of the late twentieth century found an illustration of his core belief in America's purpose within the pages of an occult work little known beyond its genre.

"Anything Is Possible"

During the 1980 president campaign, many Americans were electrified by Reagan's depiction of America as a divinely ordained nation where anything could be willed into existence.

In announcing his candidacy in 1979, Reagan declared: "To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible . . . If there is one thing we are sure of it is . . . that nothing is impossible, and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact." It was a vastly different kind of political oratory than the restrained, moralistic tones of his opponent, Jimmy Carter.

Through his reiteration of this theme of America's destiny, and his powers as a communicator, Reagan shaped how Americans wanted to see themselves: as a portentous people possessed of the indomitable spirit to scale any height. This American self-perception could bitterly clash with reality in the face of a declining industrial base and falling middle-class wages. Nonetheless, the image that Reagan gave Americans of themselves—as a people always ushering in new dawns—formed the political template to which every president who followed him had to publicly adhere.*

After Reagan, virtually every major campaign address included paeans to better tomorrows, from Bill Clinton's invocation of "a place called Hope" (and his use of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow") to Barack Obama's "Yes, we can." In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama echoed one of Reagan's signature lines when he declared: "This is a country where anything is possible." The one recent president who complained that he couldn't master "the vision thing," George H.W. Bush, was not returned to office.

Political Psychology

In Reagan's private life, positive thinking didn't always allow for deep relationships. Reagan's campaign aides and White House staffers were sometimes seriously hurt by the manner in which he would forget all about people and relationships that no longer suited a new phase or role in which he found himself. This was his habit in all areas of lif—and it layered him with a kind of emotional buffer. While recovering from an operation for colon cancer in 1985, Reagan pointed out to Time magazine that he did not "have cancer"—rather he was a man who "had cancer," past tense. "But it's gone," he explained, "along with the surrounding tissue . . . So I am someone who does not have cancer."

That is how Reagan dealt with almost every challenge: He found the terms to conceptualize himself in the strongest possible manner based on the demands of the moment. That talent could make him seem shallow and insincere, yet it allowed him to adapt in unexpected ways. Just as the young New Dealer of the 1930s transformed into the law-and-order conservative of the 1960s, so did the man who campaigned as a flinty Cold Warrior transform into a global peacemaker during his second term.

In the latter years of his presidency, Reagan was one of the few world figures who not only believed in the authenticity of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union (as most conservatives at the time did not) but who possessed a vision of what the post-Soviet era would look like (as most liberals then did not). In a mixture of dream making and idealism, Reagan firmly believed that his "Star Wars" initiative would rid the world of the nuclear threat and open the borders of all nations to peaceful commerce and exchange.

For those who looked carefully, his global outlook had been foreshadowed during his Hollywood career. Soon after World War II, Reagan joined a group called the United World Federalists. The organization advocated a worldwide government organized along a United Nations–style system of rulemaking and dispute resolution. It was precisely the kind of "big picture" idea that excited Hollywood politicos of the mid–twentieth century (and that evokes deep suspicion in Tea Party activists of the twenty-first century). Globalist peacemaking touched something in Reagan's earliest ideals. "I went through a period in college," he later recalled, "in the aftermath of World War I, where I became a pacifist and thought the whole thing [i.e., the war] was a frame-up."

Reagan's penchant for science fiction has been widely noted. The United World Federalists could seem like the kind of universal government that sometimes showed up in sci-fi entertainment, like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, or the Galactic Republic (replaced by the evil Galactic Empire) in the Star Wars movies. Perhaps not coincidentally, Reagan also spoke openly of his belief in UFOs for much of his life. According to family friend Lucille Ball, Reagan insisted in the 1950s that he and Nancy had a close brush with a flying saucer while they were driving down the coastal highway one night. The couple, Ball recalled, arrived almost an hour late for a Los Angeles dinner party at the home of actor William Holden. They came in "all out of breath and so excited" and proceeded to tell shocked friends about witnessing a UFO. As president, Reagan more than once assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that an interstellar threat would unite U.S. and Soviet societies. Gorbachev honestly seemed perplexed as to whether Reagan was kidding, but ultimately decided he was not.

Reagan's Irish ancestors might have called that side of him "barmy." But this aspect of Reagan should not be dismissed as shallowness or mental weakness. Reagan thought in epic, picturesque terms—about the Soviet Union as "evil," about himself as a man of destiny," about the mission of America as "mystical." Reagan's mother, Nelle, left him with a sense of enchantment about the power of big ideas. One of the ironies of twenty-first-century politics is how the nationalistic, anti-immigration activists of the Tea Party often extol Reagan as their hero. However passionately Reagan favored tax cutting or getting rid of "government waste," his outlook was fundamentally globalist and even a touch utopian.

Reagan also inherited his mother's passion for self-improvement. As a boy, he learned to read before starting school. He mastered scripts and later policy papers with rapidity. Critics thought Reagan was not a details man, but that wasn't exactly correct. Reagan could voraciously digest information that tapped his enthusiasm; he ran on enthusiasm, and without it he was adrift. In adulthood he maintained reading habits that extended to seven daily newspapers. Unlike his avowed admirer Sarah Palin, Reagan would never be caught dead on camera unable to cite a daily paper he read or to identify a favorite Founding Father. Part of Reagan's ire toward student activists while he was governor of California stemmed from how the small-town college boy in him felt an Ozlike wonder toward the University of California and the motto on its coat of arms: "Let There Be Light." He resented those who he believed desecrated its intellectual opportunities.

It must also be said, however, that Reagan's style was to read selectively and to question narrowly. As soon as he homed in on a position—such as his belief in massive welfare fraud—he would constantly happen upon fact after fact, usually in the form of stories or an offbeat statistic, to buttress his conviction. Campaign aides told of sometimes "misplacing" the chief's favorite magazines in order to avoid his glomming on to a factoid—such as trees causing air pollution—that would later prove an embarrassment. If there is an adjunct to Reagan's credo "Nothing is impossible," it might be: "If I believe it, that makes it so." That outlook may have helped a poor Depression-era boy adopt a powerful (and needed) faith in self. But it could reflect a dangerous self-indulgence in the realm of policy making.

Reagan, like Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and other positive thinkers, had so thoroughly, and subtly, convinced the public over the course of decades that what you think is what matters most that by 2010 few objected or even noticed when New York's Democratic senator Charles Schumer defended a scaled-down jobs creation bill by claiming that it was the very act of passage, rather than the policy particulars themselves, that made the difference: "The longer I am around, I think it's the market's psychology that matters dramatically." In substance, it was not much different from mental healer Phineas Quimby concluding a century and a half earlier: "Man's happiness is in his belief."

Mitch Horowitz, a TS member, is editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin books. An excerpt from his previous book, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, appeared in Quest, Fall 2009. This excerpt has been reprinted from his latest book: One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. Copyright ©2014 by Mitch Horowitz. Published by Crown, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.

Printed in the Summer 2014 issue of Quest magazine. 

Citation:  Pentland, John. "Religion and Money" Quest  102. 3 (Summer  2014): pg. 96-99 

To reflect on the relationship of religion to money, there is no better starting point than "to go beyond time." In returning to the origin of the question, we may find a grain of truth and thus turn towards the remedy for an otherwise intractable problem. Countless volumes have appeared about the church's attitude to war and sex, but very little has been written about money.

In his book Magic, Money, and Myth, William Desmonde shows that in some ancient cultures money was used as a symbol to replace food in sacrificial communion rituals. Participation in the meal implied a bond of loyalty with other members of the group and also signified entering into a covenant with the deity. Each communicant received a particular portion of the sacrificial flesh corresponding to his standing in the community. When money of different denominations began to be used in place of the portions of food, the establishment of a contractual relationship between two individuals at first retained traces of the original bond of religious loyalty among participants in the same communion, with impersonal bargaining replacing the patriarchal redistribution of foods among the brotherhood.

In any case, there is good reason to suppose that money was originally a sacred device created by religious authority to facilitate the exchange of necessities in an expanding society. It was intended to be a means of recognizing that human beings have individual property rights and at the same time that no human being or family is self-sufficient. In support of this theory, the French esotericist René Guénon states that coins of the ancient Celts are covered with symbols taken from Druid doctrine, implying direct intervention of the Druid priests in the monetary system (Gunon, 133-34).

With the huge increase in world population and international trading, this original purpose of money for the individual as so often the real significance of religion itself has been eroded until today it is completely forgotten. From the economic point of view which prevails in the modern world, money has value almost exclusively on a material level. Both the smallest transactions and the largest, which are now carried out by bookkeepers without anything of intrinsic value changing hands, are more often done in a mood of impatience, irritation, and negativity than as an expression of loyalty in individual human relationships. No longer a reminder of higher values, money has become such a social convenience that it is even a social necessity.

Originally made of gold, silver, or copper of something that didn't spoil with time all but the smallest denominations of the coinage are now printed on otherwise worthless paper. The modern American nickel retains only a vestige of the original notion in the words "In God We Trust" now relegated to the rim, as the image of a president in the center reflects control of the monetary system by the temporal government.

The worldwide inflationary trend, which is considered a principal problem for today's social systems, may be seen as a further step in the progressive "debasement" of the currency. Inflation is thus the last inevitable result of control of the money system by temporal authorities and a symbol of the deterioration in the quality of individual human relationships.

The trend towards high interest rates is another sign of this deterioration. Interest-bearing loans"lending money out to usury"are still forbidden by the strictest religious authorities in the Middle East and were until recently forbidden throughout Islamic countries. The original basis for the rejection of usury was generally the primitive custom of economic assistance to one's fellows, in accordance with which the taking of usury among brothers was regarded as a serious breach against the communal obligation to provide help. The Old Testament is quite specific on this point: Take thou no usury of [thy brother] or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase (Lev. 25:36-37). The fact that the prohibition against usury became increasingly severe in Christianity, under quite different conditions, was chiefly due to various other motives and factors. Only in the nineteenth century was the church obliged, under the pressure of certain unalterable facts, to remove the prohibition.

In the last millennium of Western history, religious hostility toward usury had little to do with individual human relationships but resulted instead from the attitude of Christian religious ethics toward the rational acquisitive enterprise as such. Every organization, and certainly every established religion, requires sources of material support. As money relationships became more and more depersonalized, the churches have tended to separate themselves from the commercial establishment, to suspect its motives, and to solve their material problems at arm's length from it. Even in religions which otherwise placed a high positive value on the possession of wealth, purely business enterprises became the objects of adverse judgment. Christian authorities down the centuries have repeatedly invoked the doctrine that Christ literally requires poverty of his followers, and a whole train of martyrs died for this principle, while the church itself became increasingly powerful in the material sense, due largely to the cheap and efficient labor of ascetic bachelors. Gradually the ethical standards demanded by the church hardened and kept the most devout groups far from a life of trade. A business career was adopted only by those who were lax.

This ever-widening gap between religion and the pursuit of money, the typical goal of the rational acquisitive enterprise, has become an accepted fact in most modern societies. The churches and the business class have come to confront each other as the two principal sources of scale and power (visibly obvious in so many towns and cities, where churches and banks are the most prominent architectural features). Each claims that the function of money is to fulfill the advancement of general human welfare but on different grounds. The churches claim that giving for the religious and the poor is a basic human need; the business people justify their acquisitiveness on grounds of its effectiveness in providing the masses with material support. Naturally, interdependence between the inner and outer aspects of life has led to many compromises and inconsistencies, since it is not possible to keep these two aspects altogether apart. But, generally speaking, attempts by churchmen, in a period of declining church power, to reconcile religious ethics with the growth of economic power have been directed towards reform of money flow and distribution on a politico-social level.

Given the sacred origin of money, solutions to the problem of religion and money on this level can never be found. A solution is achievable only through reinstating the individual's relationship to money within the whole scale of his spiritual studies and strivings, that is, through reeducating him to regard money transactions as a measure of his individual human relationships. For, like everything existing, money is a vital part of life on the planet and is worthy of respect, of course at its proper level. True religion views everything, including money, in relation to universal laws. In showing us our dependence on each other, money acts to remind us of these laws. The only thing wrong with money is our present view of it. This is what needs to be studied and understood.

Where to begin? It stands to reason that such a program of reeducation cannot begin with the masses, who, in the last analysis, are not concerned with human values except in terms of physical survival.

Nor can much be expected from the many studies of money that are being made on the psychological level, although these may serve as useful shocks to our customary unconscious attitudes towards accumulation and waste. For example, Freud noted that in the modern Western world, the language of people of different nationalities is a mirror of their typical attitude to money. Germans earn money, Italians find it, the French gain or win it, the English have it or possess it, Americans make it. Freud pointed out also a common tendency among the clergy of his time to look on money as dirty; you mustn't touch it. He detected here some similarity to their attitude to sexual relations and even hinted at a direct connection between the problems of money and sex.

A contemporary student of the psychology of money with experience as a banker, Michael Phillips, says: "The hardest thing to convince people of is a fact only the very rich know: the way to make money is to do exactly what you want to do and to do it exactly the way you want to do it.' In his book, The Seven Laws of Money, published on behalf of a money-giving community, Phillips throws fresh light on the useless greed and fears which often lie behind the accumulation of money and block its social function in the circulation of energy on the psychophysical level. He shows that freedom from the "money game' comes from being efficient at it. His seventh and last law states that "there are worlds without money which exist like a star to guide human beings, but the world we live in is a world in which everything is related to money and our lives would be different if we were willing to see this and not deny it. Phillips stops short of an inquiry into the universal or spiritual laws which can move individual human beings toward freedom in their inner lives, in harmony with the whole of the divine creation.

Such an inquiry, impossible at the democratic level  and inadequate at the psychological level, must obviously be the task of a spiritual elite men and women of insight to be found mainly in the churches and religious orders but also in academic circles, among philosophers, educators, scholars of anthropology, and perhaps some businessmen. Even modest studies begun at this level can be of practical help in dispelling, on the one hand, the popular theory that religion requires that serious aspirants to a spiritual life should not handle money at all and the myth, at the other extreme, that there is widespread inefficiency and corruption in the way the churches collect and distribute their funds. Superficially, there is justification for both of these statements, and each requires careful and continuing examination for coherent and practical thinking about religion and money to emerge.

Like the founders of all the great religious traditions, Jesus was concerned chiefly with the individual's need to reopen his relationship with the Higher (God) and through him with all his fellow beings. His teaching in the Gospels does not provide much material about money. When he declared, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God (Matt. 22:21), he was speaking about the individual's relation to the state. In his mission, he conducted himself with a certain casualness toward money You received without payment, give without payment (Matt. 10:8)”moving from place to place, picking corn along the way, even on the Sabbath. There was no attempt to provide for material needs over an extended period of time: Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume, . . . but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven (Matt. 6:19-20). His disciples were advised to venture forth with more faith than money, with the implication that God will provide for the faithful.

Jesus became more specific in the story of the young man who asked him what to do to inherit eternal life. After reciting some familiar commandments, he told him to sell everything he had and give it to the poor. When this was more than the man could take, Jesus turned to his disciples with the well-known words, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God "(Matt. 19:24).

Evidently, riches of all kinds, including money, are a very serious barrier to spiritual growth. Almost all of his nearest disciples were drawn from the poor. But, from the mouth of Jesus himself, there is no prejudice against wealthy men. Rich men are mentioned among the close disciples of Jesus (and Buddha) and on occasion they played important roles; for example, Joseph of Arimathaea was needed to beg Jesus's body from Pilate for placing in the sepulcher. Judas Iscariot was the treasurer of Jesus's twelve apostles, and the spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff has indicated that in this role Jesus had profound trust in him (Gurdjieff, All and Everything, 739, 741). Whether this is so or not, from the very beginning of the Christian tradition, Judas and his treasurer's role have been awkward elements in the Gospel story, placed at an increasing distance from the inner teaching. A supremely high degree of understanding is called for if money is to serve its original purpose of reminding human beings that no one individual is self-sufficient.

Money does not seem to have been a major concern in the life of the early Christian church. It did not have much, and questions about how to understand Christ's teaching and how to behave towards each other were the most important issues. An austere lifestyle was generally adopted and for St. Paul, as for Jesus himself, money was a means of expressing individual generosity: "God loves a cheerful giver (2 Cor. 9:7). But even in this first generation after Jesus left this planet, before the Christian religion had became established, there are statements by Paul, such as "greedy of filthy lucre" (1 Tim. 3:8) and "the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Tim. 6:10), which indicate that funds were desperately needed to support believers who had come to Jerusalem to join the fellowship and that the transient value of money, as expressed by Jesus in his life and teaching, was being forgotten. Money had become a problem separated from the religious practice.

A study of the growth of the Christian church, from its first three centuries through the Middle Ages to the present day, is needed to show how this separation between the spiritual practice and the attitude towards money has increased and hardened. At first supported by voluntary gifts, demands for tithes and first fruits are added. Endowments and vacant benefices (of bishops) are sold, absolutions and dispensations are granted at a price, taxes are levied by the Vatican, church courts raise money by fines, fees, and the sale of icons, or by permits to view sacred relics. In other words, as money needs are faced, spiritual leaders are apt to lose sight of the primary purpose of their ministries. They exploit the religious conviction of their followers in order to support the institution. The institution, rather than being a means to a higher end, becomes an end in itself.

The Reformation was partly a culmination of protests against the church's abuses in financial matters. As a result, the sale of indulgences was abolished and the charges for adoration of relics were removed. But there is no doubt that the financial transactions of the Christian church were always one of its most vulnerable points and remain so today.

The same contrast between religious attitudes and the attitude of the commercial class can be observed in the history of other traditions. The God of Wealth in Chinese Taoism, who is universally respected by merchants, shows no ethical traits; he has become of a purely magical character. In India, the section of the commercial class which belongs to the Hindu religion, including all the banking groups, follows a form of erotically tinged worship of Krishna and Radha in which the sacred meal in honor of their savior has taken the form of a kind of elegant repast. Already in antiquity, Judaism was largely a religion of traders and financiers, and on the whole Jewish ethics support a more positive attitude to money than other traditions. But even if it is less marked, there is a definite separation between religion and money transactions in Judaism also.

At the same time, it is only fair to remark that the largest church organizations, at least in the Christian and Jewish traditions, have managed to preserve for two thousand years some basically human attitudes toward property and money which stand in marked contrast to the attitudes of their social counterpart ”national governments and charitable foundations. Many prominent laymen are uneasy about the privileged position and the wealth of the churches, particularly the Catholic Church, and have heard gossip about financial scandals, even touching the Vatican Bank. At the same time, these leaders of society, taking advantage of the tax laws, are responsible for the trend towards centralizing charitable giving, depersonalizing and dehumanizing it to the point that the giver often demands something material in return for his gift and the recipient takes it for granted.

They will be surprised to learn what an extraordinary degree of local autonomy still obtains in dispensing Roman Catholic funds for charitable purposes, in spite of the statistical benefits of central management. In fact, the Vatican takes no more than two or three percent of the offerings, and a major share of the responsibility for spending is passed down as far as the parishes. James Gollan, who brings this to light in Worldly Goods, a study of the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, is mildly critical of the strangely passive investment policy of the archdiocese of New York under Cardinal Spellman and his lay financial advisors in the 1960s. We may ask, what does it mean to be active in managing church money, given that an American Catholic bishop is absolute owner (under canon law) of negotiable investments worth in some cases more than $1 billion? Probably Gollan is right that a more active policy should be pursued, but the risks in the religious sense are one thing, and another simply in the material sense. More study of the way this question is faced by the largest religious organizations is needed. A conservative policy may be the best, but not merely because the church is an enduring institution which should not take short-term market considerations into account, or out of fear aroused by a few weak but charismatic preachers who have allowed their message to degenerate into profitable businesses.

No doubt what all these studies will show is that whatever are the faults of modern money systems, and they are many, it is not in money itself but in our attitude to money transactions that the principal confusion exists. To be quite practical, the difference between money and all the other attachments of temptations we lose ourselves in is that in present-day Western life, even for a child, money is a part of everything. The child who overhears mother complaining about lack of money or father boasting about his latest deal may well be asking: If money isn't a raison tre, what is?" Without some guidance about the place of money within the good life, a child's attitudes toward money are bound to be conditioned at a very early age by the unconscious reactions of his parents and teachers at times of financial shock. Not understanding anything about the relationship of money and religion, a child will grow up at the best to participate passively in accepted social values without striving to reach the spiritual maturity which is his or her birthright.

Gurdjieff has addressed this question fully and humorously in "The Material Question" (Gurdjieff, Meetings, 247-303). Although money is for him "despicable and maleficent" and "this aspect of human striving in itself had never been of interest to me," he succeeded as a young man in amassing a small fortune in order to be free "not to think about financial matters any more." Gurdjieff's account, however, shows that in fact he had to continue to the very end of his life to take the initiative in getting money to support his teaching activities, "of course without resorting to any means which could one day give rise to remorse of conscience, making use of capacities in me formed thanks to correct education in my childhood."

In each normal child there is a sense of adventure, a willingness to take risks to get what is wanted the most. In a world where money is part of everything, young people need much help in interiorizing this sense of risk in order to take hold of a truly religious understanding of what goes on within them and around them. Without this help, and without this inner understanding, passive obedience”out of fear"to the rule learnt in Sunday school—not to steal, not to take what is not given'”is unlikely to stand up to the stresses and emotional pressures of life, particularly in a big city. Sooner or later the rule will break down, unless that life"”with its omnipresent money demands"is being lived in the light of a religious tradition. More and more, all over the world, responsible questions about money, such as how much does one actually need, how much is enough for a given purpose, are disappearing from view. Simply to get more money is becoming a force, the action of which no one can easily deny, however ineffective he may be as a moneymaker.

A superficial understanding of the place of money in a religious life, and of its relationship with religion through occasional and impersonal giving, is no longer much help. Without a long work on oneself, it is impossible in contemporary conditions to be generous and free in regard to the force of money. Only those who are truly free understand how to use it as part of the demand they make on others for payment and sacrifice. General demands made by the elders of a religious organization on their followers tend to increase their fear of each other and in the long run to distort the teaching which the leaders are supposed to transmit. To use the force of money intelligently is to become aware of its original function in uniting individual human beings in service to the Highest; thus it may be necessary nowadays for a student to engage voluntarily in business for himself or herself for a certain period or to be faced with raising a large sum of money from nothing in a limited time for some inescapable reason. In other words, it may be necessary to have mastered the money game before one can see with certainty that the power of money over the human mind is limited and that there are things money cannot buy.

Sources

Desmonde, William. Magic, Myth, and Money: The Origin of Money in Religious Ritual. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962.
Guénon, René. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Translated by Lord Northbourne. London: Luzac, 1953.
Gollan, James. Worldly Goods. New York: Knopf, 1971.
Gurdjieff, G.I. All and Everything: Beelzebubâ's Tales to His Grandson. New York: Dutton, 1964.
---. Meetings with Remarkable Men. New York: Dutton, 1963.
Phillips, Michael. The Seven Laws of Money. New York: Random House, 1974.

Lord John Pentland (1907-84) was president of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York from its inception in 1953 until his death. He was instrumental in spreading the Gurdjieff Work in the U.S. During his lifetime, he was responsible for groups in New York City and many other parts of the country. If people are interested in reading more of his talks, there are others available for purchase on the Internet at lordjohnpentland.com. This article, which originally appeared in Gurdjieff International Review, is reprinted with the kind permission of Mary Rothenberg.

Printed in the Spring 2014 Citation: Lachman, Gary. "Colin  Wilson Reflections on an Outsider" Quest  102. 3 (Summer  2014): pg. 90-95.

I was in Holland when I heard the news that Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider, The Occult, Mysteries, and more than a hundred other books that I have read and reread obsessively, had died. It was the weekend of December 6—7, 2013, and I was in the Netherlands to give a lecture on Hermeticism. A text message came late at night informing me of his passing.

Colin had been ill for some time, enduring the aftermath of a debilitating stroke, and those of us who knew him also knew that it was probably only a matter of time before his body finally gave out. For two years he faced what is undoubtedly the greatest challenge an inveterate reader and workaholic writer like him could face: loss of the ability to read or to write. For more than half a century he had spent several hours every day—even Christmas, his wife, Joy, once told me—in his workroom in Cornwall, England, hammering away at his keyboard, totaling up in the process some 181 titles, on wide-ranging but related subjects (crime, philosophy, the paranormal, sex, consciousness), as his bibliographer, Colin Stanley, reports. But the writing machine had stopped and now the force behind it was gone. And although his death at eighty-two was not unexpected, the reality of it was still a shock. Someone whose ideas had changed my life and whose work forms the foundation for my own writing was no more. But it was more than this. Colin was a friend and a mentor, and when the reality of his death finally settled into my consciousness, I had a powerful and disturbing feeling that I was now on my own.

I first came across Colin Wilson's work in 1975. I was nineteen and living on New York's Bowery, maintaining a precarious existence by playing in a rock-and-roll band. I had borrowed a copy of The Occult from a friend, and suddenly everything was different. I had in fact seen a copy of The Occult a few years earlier, back in New Jersey, when a neighbor, knowing I was a fanatical reader of weird and horror fiction—H.P. Lovecraft especially—offered me her book club copy, thinking I might be interested in some real-life ghosts. But I wasn't ready for it, and I have to admit that I owe being open to Colin's work the second time around to the interest in magic and the occult I had developed after being introduced to the turbulent and tragic life of the dark magician, Aleister Crowley, the "Great Beast 666." I soon outgrew the Beast, but Colin's ideas stayed with me and informed practically everything I did from then on.

What was exciting about The Occult was that Wilson wrote about the paranormal, the mystical, and the magical from the point of view of existential philosophy, and he saw it in the context of literature and history. The book is full of references to and accounts of or by Goethe, Dostoyevsky, William Blake, H.G. Wells, Proust, Hesse, Bernard Shaw, as well as Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, and dozens of other important figures. As with practically all of his books, following up the leads Wilson offers in The Occult constitutes an education in itself. He took the occult seriously, not like a true believer, but like a philosopher, that is, someone who is open to discovering new insights into the mysteries of human existence. Wilson rejected the routine dismissal of the occult and paranormal common among the intelligentsia, but he was also rigorously critical of any wishful thinking or jettisoning of logic in favor of a fuzzy mysticism. He admitted that when he was first approached by an American publisher with the idea of the book, he was skeptical. He had always had a mild interest in the subject, but he thought most occultists were muddleheaded and credulous, and he accepted the commission because he needed the money. After he began researching the book, his attitude changed. He eventually concluded that there is as much evidence for the reality of telepathy, precognition, ESP, and other occult faculties as there is for particle physics. It was in fact his "scientific," that is, critical, approach to the subject that makes The Occult such a thrilling and, in the best sense, mind-expanding book.

Wilson's basic aim was to understand the occult in terms of phenomenology, the philosophical discipline developed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century, and which forms the basis for the better-known existentialism. Phenomenology is essentially the study of consciousness. I had read the existentialists by then, and up until that point the most powerful influence on my worldview was Nietzsche. I didn't know it at the time, but Wilson's early work was about existentialism, and the clarity and critical intelligence he brought to the lives and ideas of H.P. Blavatsky, Rasputin, Gurdjieff, Crowley, and others soon convinced me that there was much more to the occult than Tarot cards, candles, and spells. The fact that Wilson is unfailingly optimistic and that his highly readable style makes exploring ideas a challenging and exciting adventure didn't hurt.

One of the key ideas Wilson develops in The Occult is what he calls "Faculty X," our strange and little-recognized ability to grasp "the reality of other times and places." There is nothing mysterious about this, and Wilson refers to it as "X" simply because we lack a name for it. It is essentially a development of what Husserl called "intentionality." "Intentionality" for Husserl means that consciousness, rather than merely reflecting reality, as in the model developed by René Descartes—and which has remained the dominant model of consciousness for most of the modern period—instead actually reaches out and grabs it. That is, consciousness is not a passive mirror but an active grasp. It involves a kind of effort, which means we can make more of it, or less. It is something we do rather than something we have. The kinds of experiences Wilson describes and gives as evidence for Faculty X are an example of consciousness "intending" more. Two of Wilson's key examples come from the novelist Marcel Proust and the historian Arnold Toynbee. Proust's mammoth novel Remembrance of Things Past begins when the protagonist tastes a bit of cake—a madeleine—dipped in tea. Suddenly he is flooded with memories of his childhood holidays in Combray, a town in northern France. But these are not memories in our usual sense; it is as if Proust—the novel is largely autobiographical—has been transported back to Combray itself, as if the madeleine dipped in tea were a kind of time machine. The experience made Proust feel that he was no longer "mediocre, accidental, mortal," no longer his usual self trapped in the present moment, but that he had somehow stepped out of time. In a section of his immense twelve-volume Study of History, Toynbee describes how once, while visiting the site of a famous massacre at the Greek fortress of Mistra, he suddenly felt as if, like Proust, he had been transported back in time, not to some earlier moment in his own life, but to some moment in history. It was as if the battle was actually going on around him. Toynbee also described an even more powerful experience that happened while walking past Victoria Station in London, in which it was as if he was suddenly aware of all of history as a passing parade. These and other examples of Faculty X—there are others described in Wilson's sequel to The Occult, Mysteries—led Wilson to conclude that our ordinary ideas about time are inadequate. This should not be surprising; as I've suggested above, our ordinary ideas about consciousness are also wrong.

I should make clear that Faculty X is not simply a nostalgia for the past—Wilson was not a romantic in that sense—but a recognition that reality is not limited to whatever happens to be in front of us at any particular time, which is how we usually think of it. Reality is not the four walls of your room or the dull glow of your computer screen or the depressing amount of your bank balance but is a factor of how powerful your consciousness is, how firmly it "intends." Wilson was the author of several very readable "phenomenological novels" in the sci-fi, mystery, even erotic genres, as readers of The Mind Parasites, The Philosopher's Stone, and Ritual in the Dark know. He writes in his book The Craft of the Novel: "Reality is not what happens to be most real to us at the moment. It is what we perceive in our moments of greatest intensity." In our moments of intensity we "intend" more and because of this we grasp reality more firmly; we get "more" from it, hence the characteristic feeling of some powerful objective meaning being revealed that accompanies these moments. Wilson believes that Faculty X is at the root of all occult or paranormal experiences, which is to say that at bottom these and other, similarly unusual experiences—such as mystical experiences—are a matter of consciousness. At the moment our "muscles of intention"—if I may speak in this way—flex involuntarily, usually under the stimulus of some threat or inconvenience, when we are forced to concentrate and focus our consciousness on the crisis. But Wilson was convinced it was possible to learn how to control them at will, and I believed him. I had by then experienced a few moments like those Wilson described, when my awareness of myself and the world seemed to rise up above its usual level and reached what he calls the "bird's-eye view," rather than our more common wormlike perspective. Life, Wilson tells us, is too close up for us to see its meaning. It's only when consciousness can achieve some distance from it that its meaning can become clear. Once or twice I had felt that distance and had somehow taken a step back from things. If this was Faculty X, then I wanted more of it.

It was two years later, in 1977, when I had left the soon-to-be-very-successful band Blondie and had moved to Los Angeles that my real obsession with Colin's work began. It started when I had spent a discouraging afternoon looking for work. I had yet to form my own group, The Know (the name came from my interest in Gnosticism), and royalties from my song "(I'm Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear" had yet to come in. It would become the only song about telepathy or with the word "theosophy" in its lyrics to make the Top Ten, when Blondie had a hit with it in 1978, but until then, like everyone else, I needed to find some way to make money. It was a depressing business, and after a few hours I decided to give up. I had a little money, and although this was supposed to go toward lunch and a bus ride home I decided instead to soothe my angst by buying a book. It meant hunger and a very long walk, but my soul needed it. The book was The Outsider.

As anyone familiar with his work knows, when The Outsider, Wilson's first book, appeared in 1956, when he was twenty-four, it made him famous overnight. Wilson was caught up in the "Angry Young Man" craze—the British equivalent of the American Beats— and not long after singing his praises the British press, notoriously fickle, turned on him. For most of his subsequent career, Wilson was persona non grata among the British literary establishment, a situation that in recent years has begun to change, with the praise Wilson has received from literary heavy hitters like Philip Pullman. (My own favorable reviews of Wilson's more recent work in some important British dailies has, I'd like to think, contributed to this effort.) The Outsider is a study in "extreme mental states," and at the time of its publication, Wilson was applauded as Britain's only homegrown existentialist. The Outsider charts the struggle of individuals who have a powerful hunger—a fundamental need—for a sense of purpose more meaningful than anything conventional society can offer. Their hunger is in essence religious; or, to put it more precisely, as Wilson argues, in earlier times religion could provide a powerful sense of purpose and an environment—monasteries—in which to pursue it. But in our materialistic, rationalistic civilization, geared solely to comfort and material gain, religion no longer suffices—we've outgrown it anyway—and the values and meanings of a purely secular, consumer society have nothing to offer. The Outsider takes life seriously; he feels there is something at risk, something at stake, that is ignored or actively denied by a society centered on comfort and security. The values informing our modern world are, for the most part, shallow, petty, and trivial. The Outsider wants something more, something deeper, more spiritual, more intense, something that, in essence, makes demands on him, rather than letting him "take it easy," as most things in our world are geared toward doing. Through looking at such Outsiders as Vincent Van Gogh, Nietzsche, T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), Sartre, Hesse, Gurdjieff, and many others, Wilson formulated a new archetype, that of the man or woman who "sees and feels too much and too deeply" and who can't be satisfied with the explanations that science provides or the adjustment that psychoanalysis and other "cures" can offer. The Outsider does not fit in. That is why he is an Outsider. 

Needless to say, I recognized myself as one of Wilson's Outsiders. The effect of the book was the same as I had experienced some years earlier when I first read Nietzsche: the sense that Wilson was talking to me. And he was, just as he was talking to all the other misfits who felt that here was someone who understood them. You could say I found myself by reading his book. Or at least that it put me squarely on the road to that destination.

At that point I became a dedicated Colin Wilson reader. I spent the next few years rummaging through bookshops on the East and West coasts—my band was popular in L.A. and New York and we traveled coast-to-coast regularly—looking for his work and immersing myself in his ideas. I was never more excited than when I found a book of his I hadn't read. Although soon after The Outsider Wilson's cachet among the critics dropped abysmally, he hunkered down in Cornwall and carried on, filled with an enormous self-belief and resilience, and convinced—rightly—of the importance of his work. During the next ten years, along with writing several novels, he produced what he called "the Outsider cycle," a series of books aimed at articulating and solving the Outsider's problem of how to achieve a sense of meaning and purpose in a world informed by material values and by what Heidegger called "the triviality of everydayness." Wilson's aim was to create what he called a "new existentialism," based on the work of Husserl and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, a more optimistic approach , which rejected the stoical and pessimistic conclusions of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat, called The Stature of Man in the U.S., The Strength to Dream, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Beyond the Outsider, and Introduction to the New Existentialism addressed the Outsider's dilemma through focusing on religion, literature, sex, criminality, philosophy, science and sociology. Sadly, of the entire "Outsider cycle," only The Outsider remains in print—it has, in fact, never gone out of print. I am happy that I secured copies of the other books in the "Outsider cycle" decades ago; it would be difficult and costly to do so now. Readers familiar with Wilson's later work, his many books on the occult and criminology—Wilson was writing volumes of "true crime" from an existential point of view years before the genre's current popularity—will have to scour their public libraries or pay high prices if they want to familiarize themselves with the ideas that form the foundation for Wilson's later writings. This is a shame, as Wilson's new existentialism is a bold, creative, and brilliant approach to solving the Outsiders' problem. It deserves to be better known, and one of my projects for the immediate future is to write a book about it.

For the next few years, along with my other reading—mostly following up the leads Wilson provided—I read as much of Wilson as I could find, and in January 1981, I finally, if briefly, met him. It was at a talk he gave on his book Frankenstein's Castle, about the left and right brain, at the Village Bookshop on Regent Street in London. I was on holiday and was about to return to the States when I saw that he would be speaking. I changed my ticket and stayed an extra week just to hear him. Like so many others, the bookshop no longer exists, but somewhere among my files is a cassette recording of Colin's talk. A video recording of the talk also exists, and at the end of this, you can see me walk up to the speaker and, as any fan would, ask him to autograph some copies of his books. We only exchanged a few words; there were others who wanted to speak to him too. But two years later I made a more determined attempt to make contact with him.

In 1983 with a friend I went on a kind of mini—"search for the miraculous" that had us in France visiting Chartres Cathedral and the site of Gurdjieff's Prieuré in Fontainebleau, as well as Glastonbury Abbey, Stonehenge, and Avebury in England, and other European sacred sites. At one point my friend and I separated to have our individual adventures. Mine took me to Cornwall. By that time I had left music entirely and was looking for a new path in life. I forget how I got Wilson's telephone number, but at some point I had hitchhiked down to Penzance and from there called him. Even apart from Blondie, I had already met and worked with people like Iggy Pop, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, and other rock stars, but none of them had made me nervous; calling Colin did. (As I write in New York Rocker, I was even once asked to leave David Bowie's loft in New York because of a disagreement we had about Wilson's work.)

Wilson was friendly and immediately invited me to visit. Two things stand out clearly from that meeting. One was Wilson's house, set back from the Cornish cliffs, in which he had lived since the late 1950s. It was filled floor to ceiling with more books than I had ever seen before outside of a public library; the last total I heard was some 30,000 volumes, not to mention thousands of CDs, DVDs, and LPs. The other lasting memory is of a long, wine-fueled evening in which Colin did his best to explain Husserl's ideas about consciousness to me. We continued the conversation the next morning, over hangovers and breakfast, before I headed back to London. There I spent the last week of my "search" in the old Reading Room at the British Museum, reading books of Colin's I couldn't find in the States. This, of course, was partially romanticism: he himself famously wrote his first novel by day in the Reading Room while sleeping outdoors on Hamstead Heath in order to save money. When I returned to L.A., I started a correspondence with Colin that lasted until his stroke, when he could no longer reply, and in years to come I would visit Tetherdown—the name of his house—several more times and get to know Colin, his wife, Joy, and their children very well.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Colin came to L.A. several times to give talks, and each time he came we met. On one occasion I was housesitting for a friend, and I invited Colin and Joy to stay with me. It was a very modern three-story house set in the Hollywood Hills, with a large terrace garden and hot tub. I called it the "Zen Castle" and it was the site of some entertaining evenings; one was so entertaining that I missed a chance to meet the writer Robert Anton Wilson, with whom Colin was having an early lunch the next day, because I had overdid it the night before—a lost opportunity I regret. On a trip to England in 1993 I made the journey down to Tetherdown, and when, two years later, I went through a painful personal crisis, Colin invited me to visit and he gave me advice that helped me through the worst of it.

I had by then begun to write and had published a few articles and book reviews. I decided that, if I was ever going to become a writer for real as I had wanted to since my teens, now was probably my last chance. I was forty and found myself free. With little more than a wing and a prayer and propelled by a midlife crisis, I decided to leave L.A. and relocate, at least for a time, to England. Again, my romanticism shows through: although I had been an Anglophile since my childhood, brought up on the Beatles, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond, surely reading Colin's books had something to do with this? Whatever the reason, what began as a temporary change of scenery ended up as a permanent expatriation. I came to London at the beginning of 1996 and have been here ever since. The funny thing is that by now I have spent more time in the British Library or on Hampstead Heath than Colin ever did.

Over the years I visited Colin in Cornwall or met with him on his trips to London, and on more than one occasion I interviewed him. In recent years our meetings stopped, both because of the necessities of my own life and because of Colin's health. We kept up our correspondence—I always sent him copies of my books—but when I heard of his stroke, something told me that I wouldn't see him again. Our last meeting was at a conference in London in 2006 or so, where he introduced me to the author Graham Hancock. Afterward, with Joy, his son Damon and his wife and child—Colin enjoyed being a grandfather—he treated us to dinner at an Italian restaurant; Colin liked food and the wine was plentiful. There was a chance of seeing him in 2009 at the opening of the Colin Wilson Archive at Nottingham University, but his health prevented that. I continued to e-mail, not expecting an answer, but from time to time I would get an update on his condition. At the end of the obituary I wrote for the Fortean Times I quote Colin as saying that "I would like my life to be a lesson in how to stand alone and to thrive on it," a typical Outsider statement. It's a lesson many have learned, and those who have will miss him.

Gary Lachman is the author of several books about the meeting ground between consciousness, culture, and the Western inner tradition, most recently Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World and The Caretakers of the Cosmos. Revolutionaries of the Soul, a collection of his shorter writing, is forthcoming from Quest Books in October. He writes for several journals in the U.S. and U.K. and lectures on his work in the U.S., U.K., and Europe. His books have been translated into several languages. Born in New Jersey, since 1996 he has lived in London. Visit him at www.garylachman.co.uk.

VOLUME 102  NUMBER 3

Contents

Colin Wilson: Reflections on an Outsider
Gary Lachman

Religion and Money
John Pentland

The Aquarian: Ronald Reagan and the Positive Thinking Movement
Mitch Horowitz

The Money Magicians
Anne Sermons Gillis

Explaining Money to a Fairy
F.K.

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

From the International President
Tim Boyd

Viewpoint: The Question of Seeing
Tim Boyd

President's Diary