Suckled In A Creed Outworn  David Elliot Originally published in Issue XVI of Vulgata, May 2007.

Call it confession, call it autobiography, call it narcissism, but call it successful; the business of penning one’s spiritual “journey” in today’s religious market of opiate sentimentality, self-help odysseys, potted pantheisms, and ornate self-worship, is a lucrative and booming cottage industry perhaps inevitable in a society emancipated from the chains of traditional wisdom and the shackles of good taste. From self-hagiographies, such as Matthew Fox’s Confessions of a Postdenominational Priest, to phantasmagoric absurdities, like Neale Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God, to the real lodestars of edification, such as So I Married a Horse, one besieges Heaven daily that the faddle be brought to an end. Being critical of such maudlin affectations, I try myself to avoid autobiographical meanderings of the spiritual nudist variety and proclaim everywhere a stiff opposition to such exhibitionist slush. I therefore apologize in advance for the “violations of mine own creed,” but I believe that my present topic: that of paganism, witchcraft, and the occult, invites - nay constrains - moderate divulgings on the part of this scribe, since I think that the several years in which I vented my youth in that howling desert, combined with the total otherness of supernatural esoterica as a subject, would make a short confessio helpful. Cardinal Newman, asked at a dinner party how he became a Catholic, famously replied that it was not the kind of thing one could properly explain between the soup and the fish course. I agree, and therefore do not propose here a full recounting of my religious peregrinations, which are more numerous, and - in a very old sense of the word – “queer” than most, but will confine myself to a brief excursus so as to make the psychology of fascination with the occult clearer to those who have either never felt its itch or who have been wise enough not to scratch.

I certainly do not remember anything from early childhood that would make me a prize candidate for the society of dark gods. True that my response to the illustrated Parables of Jesus For Children will not likely be cited in any future beatification proceeding, since I throttled any child, sibling or stranger, that presumed to edify themselves with its pages. But then, most children are wicked hoarders. And when at the tender age of seven I surreptitiously stole into a full-length viewing of The Exorcist; the soul-destroying howls and macabre demonic faces that travestied my dreams thereafter cannot be said to have inspired much affection. I have been told that I was not a model of piety, though I do remember a few exceptions. There was, for example, my preternatural awe when my father told me that the Crucifix processed in during Mass was really a spear which the priest kept at hand in case the devil showed up and wanted skewering. Then there was the matter of my first anathema, occasioned in sixth grade when Bobby Wilson muttered during Mass “Church is boring”, which elicited from me the pious riposte “You’re going to Hell!” And when our French teacher Mr. Pilon assured us, with broad beatific grin, that Moses didn’t really part the Red Sea and that the Bible was about as historical as Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I could have said with Chesterton: “For one moment, I was in the mood in which men burn witches.” Like many of the boys, I remember loving the candles and incense and robes and sense of mystery and ritual in which my early Church-going years were happily awash. It was a God-haunted, if not a God-centred youth, in which throbs of unspeakable ecstasy would wrack my breast when we sang “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might” in imitation of the Seraphim, or when we were told that “There were giants in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:4). “Sweet and gentle Jesus” may indeed be a sublime comfort to the child who every night feels abandoned to a pitch black Universe of nebulous mysteries and nameless dreads. But when a boy becomes cognisant that the same deity who populated the world with mother’s lullaby and auntie’s flowerbed also thundered forth such monstrosities as the combusting volcano and the Tyrannysaurus Rex; then the Godhead comes to have a certain antimony. In Him the staggering extremes of sweet familiarity and frightening otherworldliness, adorable mercy and uncompromising demands, astonishingly kiss and meet. No one impressed this upon us as children better than C.S. Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia when he represented Christ under the form of the numinous Lion Aslan, Son-of-the-Emperor-over-the-Sea; who is spoken of as good, but not tame:

“Is he – quite safe (asked Susan)? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver…
“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

I shared this sense, but when we moved and the new Parish proved to be inextricably mired in all the hackneyed commonplaces of liberal Catholicism’s prolonged death-rattle; with a Church like a barn, hymns better suited to a nursery, and homilies redolent of sitcoms; where the Mass was no longer an ineffable ritual before which all mortal flesh must keep silence, but merely a communal meal at which the Priest presided as waiter; well, then I was inclined to secretly agree with Bobby Wilson. Having encountered the kind of Catholicism that concluded the Apostle’s Creed with a question mark rather than an exclamation point, my “thanks” at the Mass’s concluding “Thanks be to God” were due less to the Mass-as-Gift as they were to the Mass-as-Done. When the children of Narnia played with the Lion Aslan they didn’t know whether it was more like “playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten”. Previously I had shared this sentiment, too; that God was good but not tame. But having been left cancerously jaded by a steady cataract of jejune hymnody, drivelling homiletics, and diluted doctrine; the conviction spread through me like a poison that all the old thunder was indeed gone out of Him: God was just a kitten. Tired of the mewing, this nonplussed twelve-year old quickly began to drift. No doubt there was some incipient wickedness mixed in with it, but still, it is little to be wondered at. When the message propounded from pulpits is reduced to a feeble parroting of secular shibboleths more readily gorged upon outside of Church precincts, then what apart from custom, habit, or prodding parents is to keep someone in the pews at all? If the Church demurs from being a “sign of contradiction” in the world because she is unwilling to bear the red wrath of secular ire, or because she is so tolerant as to embrace every evil with ravenous glee, then why even bother professing the Faith? I, at any rate, no longer could. Like a billion other people, I would have - if pressed - declared myself a Catholic. But like many in that billion, I was a non-catechized, formation-starved, liturgically-malnourished drifter; reared on a version of Catholicism that impacted like a wet mitten across the face, comatose about the faith for which the martyrs blood ran, and ready to burn a pinch of incense to whatever rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouched my way to be born.

I pass over the ne’er-do-well story of yet another puling adolescence and pause only to mention a single event that edged me on the path to perdition. During a nondescript afternoon in my fourteenth year I wandered into the local bookstore to relieve myself of some cash. I saw there an occult manual wrapped up in the meretricious tinsel of a boyhood story about knights and wizards and magic and bought it on the spot, devouring each page at home with breath-taken awe. A piece of rollicking good fiction scotch-taped onto thoroughly maleficent mysticism, The 21 Lessons of Merlyn, an international bestseller translated into seventeen languages, managed to communicate to me the thrill of life in a previously inconceivable manner, being a kind of pagan Chronicles of Narnia and Dark Night of the Soul dropped from Beelzebub’s pencil. It was to me what Dante’s first glance of Beatrice had been to him: “Here begins the new life.” Previously I had been alive too, but now boyhood’s dreary flickering of the mind over the plain prose clatter of baseball cards, comic books, video games, and homework, was to be replaced by a quixotic adventure into a spiritual realm teeming with vibrant realities and regnant powers. Around this corner one might meet a spirit; speaking these words one might glimpse another world. I felt that there was nothing in the pseudo-Christian slush I had been fed that could remotely compare with the imaginative sweep and infectious conviction of this mighty vintage. This attraction to the occult – which I didn’t even know that it was then - wasn’t an attraction to evil, but rather to the experience of being alive. That is why Goethe gets it so wrong when he has Faust say:

Instead of all that life can hold

Of Nature’s free, god-given breath,

I take me to the smoke and mould

Of skeletons and dust and death.

Smoke and mould, dust and death, have nothing to do with it. That is what one is trying to shuck. The world as it is seen is disenchanted, demythologized, antisupernatural: the gods have been rudely evicted, the angels wings clipped; no miracles catch fire like stars, mystery is debunked. It must be understood that the world of twentieth century malaise, which was little more than a no-man’s land of Death-of-God angst medicated by the expedient of a sexual vomitorium; is but a poor black-and-white sketch to which the occult alternative appears a full-colour portrait. But the question still remains: why, on the pagan and occult account of things, was there such a pandemic spiritual torpor? Why is the soul of modern man sinking feebly into the sands? The answer offered by these votaries of Baal was simple; Swinburne had said it a hundred years earlier: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the whole world has grown gray with thy breath.” This pagan jeremiad, which attributed man’s spiritual decline to what was seen as the insufferable Victorian pallour diffused by world Christian hegemony, was powerfully encored in The 21 Lessons. Tailor-made to seduce young men to occult practice, it told a story very different from the one I heard in religion class: a story of Roman butchers foisting their Christ-god upon man’s gentle pagan forebears and crushing their halcyon spirit with monomaniac zealotry, guilt-laden rules, and hellfire histrionics. But the old pagan animus, which began with the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who bathed in bull’s blood to renounce his baptism; and crested with Friedrich Nietzche, who signed his dying letters as the Anti-Christ, was suddenly given here its funeral valediction. The 21 Lessons and many of its best-selling bastards after it were not just the reactionary ravings of usurped malcontents - which, for all their genius, is all that Julian, Wagner, Swinburne, Nietzche and their ilk truly were. Instead, the neopagan progeny of Christianity’s cultured despisers were not defeatist but singularly optimistic; no more cries of Vicisti Galilaee, but rather a vaulting triumphalism; for they purported to do no less than to spiritually repristinate a dying world by tossing the Christian deadwood onto a pyre from whose flames the “olde religion” would re-arise in glory.

And what of Christ and His Church, at whose feet the old gods and occult powers had lied conquered and supine for nearly two thousand years? The Person of Christ Himself was not pilloried, indeed, He was scarcely ever mentioned; but there was no stick too feeble to beat the Church with. Not only was it to blame for everything bad that had ever happened, but it had also lost all of its old fight and so wasn’t seen as a serious threat. Previously Christians were toothier and would more likely become the supper of a Cameleopard in the Flavian Amphitheatre than contribute to the smoke of sacrifice rising from the Pantheon. Now they were bounding maniacally to embrace all the old worldliness against which they had formerly rebelled, like a rabblement of lemmings jumping onto the rocks below. And with a corresponding spiritual decline leading to an exodus from convents and seminaries and a precipitous plunge in Mass attendance; it was given to understand that the optimistic pagan would cock his head in the future to the Church with the expectation of hearing one sound only: dead wood falling. And you can guess who planned to do all the re-building.

This is not to say, I hasten to add, that pagans and occultists in general are people with breasts full of satanic musings who circle the Christian wagons for the chance of vengeful scalping. My sense is that the pagan or occultist tends to be of one of two varieties: fuddled lowbrows, and disaffected elites. The first is the psychologically pockmarked stray sheep trying to abate life’s tedium or flee existential despair with ritual titillation and spiritual fantasy. This is by far the more numerous variety. They burn candles to cast love spells, dance naked on the summer solstice, offer the Goddess libations of cheap wine, and regale hapless fairies with Celtic melodies. It is a sort of pathetically incoherent spiritual prepubescence, a hedonistic jamboree onto which odd bits of doctrinal flotsam have been strung. I cannot speak much to it, since I rarely encountered it, and was taught only to pour odium upon it. It is modernity’s equivalent of lowbrow Bacchanalian paganism; the sort that Pythagoras and Plato dismissed with a snort. But the second variety of paganism and the ken of occultism proper, while consisting of much smaller numbers, is by far the more serious and dangerous. It has produced ingenious systems of theological speculation upon angelology and demonology along with detailed methods for manipulating the spiritual and temporal order by the sheer fiat of a will honed by rigorous meditations. Good and evil understood simpliciter are rejected by the occultist as man-made distinctions foisted by moral idiots upon a universe too mysterious for them to bear with naked uncertainty. This is not to say that he embraces the tedious and prosaic fallacies of moral relativism, just to say that Thou Shalt Nots are spurned by the higher pagan as puerile goads to be replaced by more enlightened imperatives based on self-growth and spiritual mastery over the visible and invisible realms. Such a feat invariably does demand personal beneficence so as to attain the most auspicious reincarnations, and in the end, a catharsis amounting to something like godhood itself. The said regimen also demands ascetic renunciations, especially in the areas of food and sex; with a toothless vegetarian diet and a lifelong commitment to celibacy bringing home the laurels. It sees the religions of the world as picture truths fit for the unenlightened herd of spiritual incompetents capable only of the slenderest spiritual sallies and the most modest contemplation of truth; with the latter partially disguised, and partially revealed, through the imposture of myths and symbols. But for that rare man, one in a million indeed, deemed worthy to breathe the rarefied air of the esoteric heights, capable of contemplating truth itself like an eagle staring at the sun unblinking; for him a whole other world was open, the one at which Yeats hinted when he wrote “The world from which the stories came lies still within the astral mists.” One might say that while the vulgar were free to fill the earth and subdue it; these luminaries thought themselves free to subdue the very heavens. As should be obvious, a quite complacent elitism and contemptuous sneer at “the vulgar” is rife among occultists; of the sort shared by their spiritual great-great-grandfathers: the ancient Druids, Magi, Yogis, Pythagoreans, neo-Platonists, Orphics, Eleusinians etc. Humility, which in Christianity is that virtue without which you can have no other virtues, is simply a nonentity to the occultist; with the consequence that most of them, while cutting brilliant and charismatic figures, would make the most damnably proud Pharisee seem by comparison like a self-deprecating Confucian gentlemen who refers to himself as “This contemptible person.”

It was this latter form of paganism that the 21 Lessons espoused and I wolfishly devoured. Indeed, I was soon in touch with the author himself and was extended the handsome privelege of becoming a member of his circle of intimates, itself a strange cluster of disaffected geniuses gathered from all points of the compass. Summers were spent at his retreat in western New York State, and winters were spent in waiting for the summers. My parents were by turns dismayed, tortured, and despairing at what appeared to them to be their once Catholic son’s trafficking in demons. Matters were not helped when my mother found a letter to the aforementioned author containing a jibe about “Christians following their Christ-god like a herd of sheep.” The memory of such menacingly stupid hubris, which reduced a poor mother to hysterics, and a quisling son to blasphemies, still has the power to burn and scald at ten years’ distance. Indeed, if my mother had had her way, she would have had me exorcised; while my father was simply agog at his son’s apparent belief in the little people. During this period I absented myself from the superfluous botheration of the classroom on a regular basis, and spent vast tracks of time during high school evading the attendance police, while biking almost daily to a forest retreat away from my hometown to bury myself in occult particularities. It would perhaps be wise to maintain reticence before a general readership regarding a series of misadventures over the years that included – amongst other cumbersome appurtenances – demons; but suffice it to say that I will never be tempted with disbelief in the supernatural or with the low and callow atheism of the schools. To such my attitude will always be that of Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet could say that because he had actually seen the ghost on the ramparts, not merely heard old wives’ tales in the pantry. But let wiser men profit by a fool’s experience in being told that when it comes to the existence of such evils as Our Lord attested to and cast into the swine, blessed are those who have believed and yet not seen!

The road up often goes down a long way first, as Dante has shown us, and I think my path first began to incline upward through the instrumentality of a teacher to whom my own happy debts are incalculable. He was (and is) a fierce eccentric and devout Catholic whose immense erudition, rhetorical pyrotechnics, melodramatic perorations, and manifest good will made for a magical personality that attracted students to him in numbers comparable only to the insects of a summer’s day. Throwing books across the room and hurling students to the floor, when the former was needed for emphasis, and the latter for chastisement, were both known disturbances in the classroom of this Mad Baggins. He was able to draw a map for students on how to find their own brain, a not contemptible feat given that most had lost it somewhere between the narcotic dungeon and the sexual penthouse of contemporary culture. More than that, he made many aware of their own soul for the first time, like men who only now saw their face in the mirror, and was unabashedly Catholic in his continual outpourings. His influence on me was like that of St. Ambrose to the young Augustine: I listened first to the eloquence of his message, and once transfixed, to the message of his eloquence. He was the first to make Christianity attractive to me; preparing the spindle so that the Lord could send the flax.

But the decisive grace came in a form as innocent-seeming but redoubtably potent as the Trojan Horse. It was a biography of St. Francis of Assisi: smooth, lively, fluent, but simple. Of course, as a “pagan suckled in a creed outworn” I was only too careful of my reading. Thus I would tearfully pour over Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita, meditate on the one-hand clappings of Buddhist sutras, dip leisurely into the golden volumes of Plato, nod sagely at the epigrams of Pythagoras, and laugh and cry with Lao-Tzu. But never was there to be found – never would it have even been thinkable – for me to leaf through a book with a Christian odour. But St. Francis was different. In my school we had been taught to think of him as a hopelessly romantic but lovable bird-man whose faith could be safely overlooked in favour of his love of nature. It was in the expectation of such anodyne fluff that he passed the usually rigid censors of my own pagan Index. Little did I know that he approached to being the Jesus Christ of medieval Europe, so that the God whom I had locked the front door against managed to unscrupulously crept in through the pantry window.

I include these autobiographical titbits not merely as gratuitous anecdotes, but solely to illustrate the fact that the only thing worse than no Christianity is some Christianity. The fullness of the Faith is always best, but after that the best thing is total ignorance, so that when the Gospel at last arrives, it is not only Good, but News. What a purely nominal Christian upbringing, such as Swinburne, Nietzche, or I had does, is to immunize the soul against the Faith by giving someone just enough to make them think they know everything without their being impressed by anything, just as a small dose of some virus causes the immune system to develop a resistance that leads to an inoculation against it. Hence the present generation’s landslide apostasy. In my particular case, I believe it was the languid state of the liturgy coupled with an embarrassed hushing up of the mystical elements of Catholicism that left my religious appetite for awe, wonder, dread, and mystery, chronically starved and foolishly misdirected. Had I been nourished with a full-blooded and life-giving belief in the supernatural sanitized from a Catholic perspective, I would not have sought it in another. Nobody who has a robust belief in the intercession of St. Michael goes whoring after the god Pan; and nobody who believes that the Eucharist is really the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ hankers for the cakes of fairies. That is the most important point to relay to Catholics with regard to paganism, witchcraft, and the occult: reduce the Faith to a pallid image of secular culture, and the human appetite for things sacred will remain, but will be first starved and then perverted; so that just as a man starving in the desert will eventually suck his own blood from his body, the soul starving for God will fasten itself to an idol: to sex, money, power, or – worse still – magic, with its siren’s song full of terror, pride, guilt, and tingling excitement.

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