Charlatans, Cults & the Dark Side of the New Age

How do we stay open to awe and magic without being tricked?

In the last post (Blue-Fire Falcon) I shared with you a strange encounter that happened in the local woods a few years back. I hadn’t really spoken about it, even to close friends, since verbalising things like that is risky. It can flatten the experience, or ‘collapse the electron’, as we mentioned last time, which basically means to trap an experience in a single explanation. If I was going to exaggerate a little, I might say that collapsing the electron is to rationalise away an experience of the numinous to the point where it’s stripped of magic.

The post brought out some interesting comments, among them this:

‘I began 'collapsing the electron' because the world is so very full of charlatans that I didn't want to add to their numbers.’

This came from a person called Jocelyn. Jocelyn, if you’re reading, thanks again for saying that. You’ve provoked this little essay. And you’re right. The world is full charlatans, and cult leaders, and cult leaders in the making (whether they realise it or not). Perhaps I’m one of them. All the more reason to dig into this.

Charlatan: a person who deceives others by pretending to have knowledge or skills that they don't actually have.

People like me, who aspire to live a magical life, are especially vulnerable to either becoming a charlatan or being tricked by one. We have a sense that the world is deeper, stranger, more beautiful, more painful, more vividly alive, and more filled with awe than modern society equips us to experience. Because of that, some of us go East, to the Buddha, to yoga, to traditions of mysticism outside the West’s. Others go into retreat, either jumping from one meditation centre to the next, or carving out an annual passage through various healing groups and ‘unlock-your-potential’ courses. We might live in a van, or a yurt, and attempt to make a life in one of the few scraps of old woodland that hasn’t been cut down. Probably we are drawn to altered states of conscious, to tarot, astrology, alchemy, or archetypes; to synchronicity, mushrooms, soul-making, or faeries. Or we might try, often in isolation, to seek out a lost spiritual tradition hidden in the soil of the West.

Wherever we go, whatever our interests, there’s sure to be a charismatic figure just around the corner, with more skills and knowledge about the very thing we’re most into. And if you don’t bump into a charlatan or aspiring cult-leader in real life then you’re sure to on the Internet. Social media echo-chambers spin us deeper into our fantasies about what is real, what is morally good and what is true, but our purchase the True and the Good continue to slip away, undermined by a post-modern cleverness that sees everything as subjective even if the enemy’s viewpoint is clearly fucking wrong.

This algorithm-fuelled tribalism, where hateful things get more clicks, pushes us deeper into our own little worlds where it’s even easier to become a charlatan or have your beliefs shaped by one, for a small monthly offering. With escapism on the rise, what better place to escape to than a magical, cosy world, where the cosmos cares about who you are.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

If we believe the mainstream myth that we’re adrift in a meaningless universe, then one of the ways we console ourselves is by saying: ‘Meaning does exist but we have to create ourselves.’

Charlatans are good at this. They use their special skills and knowledge to create a glamour about themselves, saying: ‘The meaning is here. This is the true nature of reality and this is how you access it.’

Mixed in with all the charlatans and cult-leaders are rare geniuses, like William Blake, who are actually in touch with a greater reality. There are also quite a lot of admirable people doing their best to make sense of these maddening times or to make a contribution knowledge or culture through whatever vocation they’re committed to. The problem is, it’s not always easy to tell the charlatan from the real thing, especially when they might actually have some authentic skill that sets them apart.

Blessing Deficit Disorder might be one reason why the world is crammed with charlatans. In the absence of love and praise, why not start your own little cult and get the praise and love through that? In the vacuum left by the death of God, cults proliferate. Humans need meaning. We’ll find it somehow, no matter how secular and dispassionate we pretend to be.

A question, then. Am I charlatan? Do I deceive others by pretending skills and knowledge I don’t have?

You can find out by becoming a paid subscriber, just £299 per month.

Joking. It’s free.

I’m a charlatan insofar as I use snooty phrases such as insofar, which I’d never say in real life. (Would I? I mean… I don’t think I do. If some of my friends are reading this, then they might be able to tell you whether I say ‘insofar’ in person).

One of the tricks I do is to read genuinely clever people like Iain McGilchrist and James Hillman, then leverage their genius for these little essays. But then I quote them both such much I must sound like an acolyte, which brings up another question: have I been duped by a more powerful charlatan? Has Dr Iain McGilchrist deceived me, and others, into believing he has more knowledge than he actually does? What’s he even a doctor of, anyway? And how do we know that what he’s saying is even true? To find out, I’ll need to read up on the nature of knowledge, of truth itself, and how we can come to know it. I’ll do that now.

…

So after a bit of digging it seems that, in recent years, one of the most significant books on the subject was actually written by Iain McGilchrist, a book called The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. The problem is, the two volumes are too heavy to even hold, let alone read. Oh well, I suppose I’ll just carry on quoting it without having read it all.

‘Thus there is such a thing as reasoned truth, just as there is such a thing as scientific truth; but both are inseparable from the humanity that gives rise to them, both are provisional and uncertain.’

- Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things

That’ll do. Seems relevant and makes me sound clever. Quoting people is great.

‘Mephisto’ by Eduard von Grützner

This painting of Mephisto by Eduard von Grützner isn’t just a mischievous echo of the mischievous tone pervading this essay, it’s also deeply relevant to the subject of charlatans.

As you may well know, the figure of Mephisto, or Mephistopheles, is from the famous play Faust (again, not read it). But as you may well not know, the character of Faust comes not first from German folklore. Faust, in fact, is actually an historical figure.

Johann Georg Faust was an itinerant alchemist, astrologer and magician who wandered the German countryside in the late 1400s, using his vast education and practical skill as a worker-in-fire to trick wealthy townsfolk out of their money. He was a confidence man. A charlatan and a magician.

In 1400s, before the separation of subject and object, before we killed God and the gods, before we sucked out of the soul of nature then crammed it into the human skull and claimed it wasn’t there, before all that the world still spoke, the firmament was still alive. Those knowledgeable in the hidden languages of the cosmos could act as intermediaries between the human world and the otherworld of demons, faeries, and divine entities of various kinds. This Doctor Johann Georg Faust was probably one such person, and people admired him for it. Like a rock star high on cocaine, he began to believe his own hype. Though the man came to a violent end when his alchemy lab exploded, his tricks on the German population carried on after his death, as scholars in centuries afterwards were baffled about the conflicting stories of who he actually was. Some even suggested he had never existed - a phantom of German folklore.¹

Why bring him up though? Why drown this otherwise jaunty essay in a boring history lesson? The answer is as compelling as anything you’re likely to experience in whatever years remain to you, and you can find out what it is by clicking the button below.

I’m joking, it’s free.

Goethe’s Faust tells the story of a scientist so devoid of joy, love and awe that he challenges the demon Mephistopheles to put him through an experience so overwhelmingly beautiful that he, Faust, would beg that moment not to leave. If Mephistopheles can do this then Faust will pledge to serve him for eternity in the demon’s own realm.

MEPHISTOPHELES

Settled!

FAUST

Sure and fast!
When to the moment I shall say,
"Linger awhile! so fair thou art!"
Then mayst thou fetter me straightway,
Then to the abyss will I depart!
Then may the solemn death-bell sound,
Then from thy service thou art free,
The index then may cease its round,
And time be never more for me!

Faust, convinced that his own soul is too dried up, thinks the demon won’t be able to pull it off. For him, the electron is so collapsed in on itself that he thinks he’s permanently cut off from the magic of existence. And here we come to the heart of it, because the bargain, in the end, leads Doctor Faust to incredible powers of manipulation and control over nature and the gods. The quality of consciousness inhabited by Faust at the end of the play is a mirror to the consciousness gripping the world at the time Goethe wrote it, where the divine is cast out, where the gods are killed, and we, with our blocked senses, numb hearts and enlightened intellects, are the ones left holding the blades.

‘Mephisto’, in full, by Eduard von Grützner (1985)

What sparked all this was an honest comment:

‘I began 'collapsing the electron' because the world is so very full of charlatans that I didn't want to add to their numbers.’

I don’t want to add to their numbers either. The danger of deception is so heightened now. So many people have had their confidence betrayed. And even if there was no danger of being taken in by some charlatan, there are still good reasons to stay on the safe ground of rational thought where the world makes sense and plays by the rules. To be open-minded and open-hearted to things outside the firm ground of commonly held beliefs is to risk isolation, suffering, and madness. Even the boldest poets fear this.²

I don’t want be a charlatan, and I don’t want to go mad, but I also don’t want to close the door on the soul of the world³. Mary Oliver says it best.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

- Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

What I mean by ‘the soul of the world’ is right there in that poem⁴. The life I want to live is one open to the strangeness, mystery, and beauty of the world, which also means being vulnerable to an awful lot of pain, violence, tragedy, decay, collapse, the deaths of our loved ones, the falling apart of the world. It’s too much, isn’t it? But don’t you think it’s better to be open to the too-much-ness of the world, its mystery, pain, and beauty, at least to some of it, sometimes, than to close the doors and lock the windows? If we do that then how are the visitors supposed to get in?

Charlatans might profess this kind of openness, but I don’t think it’s real. If it was then the pretender wouldn’t be inclined to pretend because an overwhelming experience of awe would have flooded in at some point, or brought in slowly from many different streams, carrying their love for themselves outward to the world. Wouldn’t they then be more humble and put themselves into genuine service of something greater? I think the charlatan’s gaze is turned in on himself, his offerings left at his own altar. The charlatan and the narcissist are blood-brothers.

So far I’ve been calling on poetics, awe, and the sense of the sacred as reasons not to collapse the electron, not to the shut the door on strangeness and wonder, and also as one of the key elements that differentiates the charlatan from someone authentic. When the world offers itself to my imagination, will I accept or not? Will I allow myself to be brought back into the family of things, or not? But poetry, awe, and the sense of the sacred by themselves aren’t enough. They still leave us open to deception, and the possibility of becoming charlatans ourselves. Reading is required. Disciplined study. Precision of thought.⁵ Without these we’re lost in the fog of New Age dreaming, cast adrift in a sea of seductive ideas.

But we mustn’t allow that to push toward the narrow rationality of scientism. People who adopt this path, which on the surface seems clear, calm, reasonable and trustworthy, are actually enacting a different kind of charlatanism. It’s a style of consciousness we’ve been warned about in Goethe’s Faust, by Blake’s ‘Mind forg’d manacles’ and ‘Single vision and Newton’s sleep.’ It can’t see through itself, or laugh at itself, because the hyper rational perspective thinks it is being objective. It thinks it’s exempt from the influence of archetypal forces, but, as W.H. Auden said: ‘We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.’

There are things that can be studied by science, and there are things that can’t. Is love measurable? Some people might say it is, citing hormone studies, but the presence of endorphins doesn’t explain love any more than Newtonian physics explains gravity. If it did then there would be no need for Einstein (who, by the way, wrote love letters to Spinoza⁶).

This kind of removed, intellectual stance often dismisses intuition and imagination as wishy-washy, but the best scientists, like the best artists, rely on imagination and intuition all the time, and by doing so they go far beyond mere rationality. From Plotinus to Picaso, from William Blake to Björk, the great ones dare to be fully human, fully themselves, reaching beyond what’s commonly accepted, allowing strange visitors in, and through their vulnerability, human knowledge and human culture becomes enriched by their gifts.

The rationalists, meanwhile, in pretending more truth than they actually have access to (because they do not trust the dreaming world) end up being a different kind of charlatan - one that’s harder to see because western society had stamped rationality with a holy seal. Fortunately, the acolytes of scientism now have to contend with people like Iain McGilchrist, who writes book so rigorously argued and so embracing of awe - for the world, the cosmos, for human life - that they can’t be dismissed as poetic word-salads. McGilchrist draws on a deep reservoir of sources, including neuroscience, physics, philosophy, poetry, art, myth, psychology; a constellation of figures reaching back through time which could be imagined as a hidden tradition of alternative thought that alternative people ought to read. Two of the things that this community of (mostly dead) philosophers, scientists, and artists have in common is that; 1) none of them were charlatans, and 2) none of them ‘collapsed the electron’. Their eyes were open. They listened well.

‘Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’ We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.’

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

What I wish for myself - and for you, dear reader, if it makes sense - is to find a way, in the busyness of life, to be open and affected to the many gifts offered by the world, be they in wilds of the forest, the wilds of the city, the wilds of the house, or the wilds of the heart. I want my discernment to be strong, my studies to be vibrant, my courtship of the numinous to be disciplined and rigorous.

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

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How about you? Have any of you been taken a charlatan? Have you become one yourself? How do keep the electron from collapsing? Or if you prefer it to be collapsed, how do keep it that way? Can you still live an inspired life? Can you still be coming home? Let me know in the comments, or send a message if you prefer.

Thanks a lot for reading.

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Footnotes:

1. Sometimes it’s good to drop the odd footnote symbol into the text. It makes people think you’ve done some research. The footnote symbol I’ve chosen to use is a simple number, but you can choose different ones. Some of them look cool, like there’s one that looks a bit like a dagger. I would have chosen that but substack didn’t let me : (

2

Bolt and bar the shutter,
For the foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night,
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.

Horace there by Homer stands,
Plato stands below,
And here is Tully's open page.
How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and snow?

You ask what makes me sigh, old friend,
What makes me shudder so?
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.

- W.B. Yates

3. Dear Jocelyn, I’m not saying that you, personally, are closing the door on the soul of the world. Just that people who collapse the electron, as I have before, and as most of society does, risk flattening numinous experiences, and losing a potential gift.

4. Well, it’s not all right there in that poem, but it does a damn good job. For those suspicious about ‘the soul of the world’ or those wanting a more rigorous description of what it is, see Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman.

"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.

It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.

In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."

James Hillman (1975). Revisioning Psychology.

5. And a sense of humour, god damn it.

6. Baruch de Spinoza, crown prince of philosophers, who, in battling Descartes four hundred years ago, tried to keep soul and sentience alive in the world, in things, in nature. For an exceptional introduction to the man, see the chapter on mind in David Abram’s Becoming Animal, which, again, I haven’t read. Or have I?

Einstein’s love letter, or poem, to Spinoza can be read in full here.