Supernatural (67 page)

Rasputin had always possessed the gift of second sight.
One day during his childhood this gift had revealed to him the identity of a peasant who had stolen a horse and hidden it in a barn.
Now, on his second round of travels, he also began to develop extraordinary healing powers.
He would kneel by the beds of the sick and pray; then he would lay hands on them, and cure many of them.
When he came to what is now Leningrad, probably late in 1903, he already had a reputation as a wonder worker.
Soon he was accepted in aristocratic society in spite of his rough peasant manners.

It was in 1907 that he suddenly became the power behind the throne.
Three years before, Czarina Alexandra had given birth to a longed-for heir to the throne, Prince Alexei.
But it was soon apparent that Alexei had inherited haemophilia, a disease that prevents the blood from clotting, and from which a victim may bleed to death even with a small cut.
At the age of 3, the prince fell and bruised himself so severely that an internal hemorrhage developed.
He lay in a fever for days, and doctors despaired of his life.
Then the czarina recalled the man of God she had met two years earlier, and sent for Rasputin.
As soon as he came in he said calmly: ‘Do not worry the child.
He will be all right.’
He laid his hand on the boy’s forehead, sat down on the edge of the bed, and began to talk to him in a quiet voice.
Then he knelt and prayed.
In a few minutes the boy was in a deep and peaceful sleep, and the crisis was over.

Henceforward the czarina felt a powerful emotional dependence on Rasputin—a dependence nourished by the thinly veiled hostility with which Alexandra, a German, was treated at court.
Rasputin’s homely strength brought her a feeling of security.
The czar also began to confide in Rasputin, who became a man of influence at court.
Nicholas II was a poor ruler, not so much cruel as weak, and too indecisive to stem the rising tide of social discontent.
His opponents began to believe that Rasputin was responsible for some of the czar’s reactionary policies, and a host of powerful enemies began to gather.
On several occasions the czar had to give way to the pressure and order Rasputin to leave the city.
On one such occasion, the young prince fell and hurt himself again.
For several days he tossed in agony, until he seemed too weak to survive.
The czarina dispatched a telegram to Rasputin, and he telegraphed back: ‘The illness is not as dangerous as it seems.’
From the moment it was received, the prince began to recover.

World War I brought political revolution and military catastrophe to Russia.
Its outbreak was marked by a strange coincidence: Rasputin was stabbed by a madwoman at precisely the same moment as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo.
Rasputin hated war, and might have been able to dissuade the czar from leading Russia into the conflict.
But he was in bed recovering from his stab wound when the moment of decision came.

Rasputin’s end was planned by conspirators in the last days of 1916.
He was lured to a cellar by Prince Felix Yussupov, a man he trusted.
After feeding him poisoned cakes, Yussupov shot him in the back; then Rasputin was beaten with an iron bar.
Such was his immense vitality that he was still alive when the murderers dropped him through the hole in the ice into the Neva.
Among his papers was found a strange testament addressed to the czar.
It stated that he had a strong feeling he would die by violence before January 1, 1917, and that if he were killed by peasants, the czar would reign for many years to come; but, if he were killed by aristocrats—as he was—then ‘none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years’.
He was right.
The czar and his family were all murdered in July 1918—an amazing example, among many, of Rasputin’s gift of precognition.

Rasputin—in fact as well as in legend—was one of the most remarkable men in Russia.
Also remarkable was his compatriot and near contemporary Georgei Gurdjieff, who greatly influenced 20th-century occultism.
Gurdjieff differs from most other men of strange powers in one important respect: he was not primarily a mage or wonder worker, but a philosopher obsessed by the problems of human futility.
Why are human beings so weak?
Why is human consciousness so narrow?
Why do we spend our lives in a state of dullness resembling sleep?
Above all, by what practical methods can we break through to the great ‘source of power, meaning, and purpose’ buried deep within ourselves?
It was to questions like these that Gurdjieff addressed his life and work.

Gurdjieff was born in America in 1873.
His parents were Greek, but he was Russian by nationality.
From an early age he was intrigued by magic.
One of the young men in his village could predict the future with astonishing accuracy after sitting between two lighted candles and going into a trance.
At about this time Gurdjieff also witnessed a demonstration of the power of suggestion.
He saw a boy who belonged to one of the many obscure local religious sects trapped in the middle of a magic circle drawn on the ground by some children of the village.
He was psychologically incapable of stepping beyond the perimeter of the circle.

While still in his teens, Gurdjieff set out on what became twenty years of travel in Asia, Africa, and Europe in search of the secret wisdom that, he was convinced, was somewhere to be found.
He learned the techniques of yoga and other forms of meditation in Tibetan monasteries and in Arab mosques; he studied hypnosis; he spent months with dervishes and with fakirs.
In 1912, he returned to Russia, ready to teach some of the mysteries he had learned.
Among the close circle of people who joined his group in Moscow was Peter Ouspensky, a young occultist and philosopher who was to become his most distinguished student.

On the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Gurdjieff left Moscow for his family home, then in the Caucasus.
There he founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, and was soon joined by Ouspensky and others of his disciples.
However, political conditions became too harsh in the Caucasus and, after attempting to settle in Istanbul and in Germany, Gurdjieff re-established the Institute at the Prieuré near Paris in 1922.

Gurdjieff’s system of teaching was based on the idea that, under normal circumstances, man is asleep, and that he is enslaved by a robot that controls not only his automatic functions but also much of his intellectual and emotional life.
Gurfjieff’s aim was to teach man how to outflank the robot by taking control of the vital reserves that exist in all of us, but that most people can tap only in times of crisis.
We can all remember occasions in our lives when, faced with exceptionally difficult and perhaps dangerous situations, we have been-forced—if only briefly—to excel ourselves physically or mentally.
At the moment of success we feel marvellously alive.
We are aware of a feeling of freedom—and rightly so, for the greatest freedom consists in our capacity to control and direct our own most deep-seated powers.
We say, with quite literal truth, ‘I didn’t know I had it in me!’

Gurdjieff’s method was to force his pupils constantly to extend their mental and physical limits.
They lived almost monastic lives at the Prieuré, working from dawn to dusk and performing exercises designed to bring the mind, emotions, and body into harmony and under control.
The aim was to achieve a state that Gurdjieff called ‘self-remembering’—a state in which a person is not only intensely aware of his surroundings but also aware of himself observing and participating in them: a marriage of total inner and outer awareness.
If you want to test how difficult this is, try a simple exercise.
Close your eyes and direct your attention inward until you are aware only of your inner self.
Now open your eyes and and direct your attention toward the outside world.
Now try to direct your attention to both at once—your inner self and the outside world.
You will find that you can only do it for a few seconds at a time; then you ‘forget’, and become aware only of either your inner self or the outside world.
In certain moments of great excitement or intensity, however, you realise that you can maintain a state of self-remembering for much longer.

Undoubtedly, Gurdjieff’s mastery of these disciplines gave him remarkable Psi powers—the way he could revitalise an exhausted follower by some inexplicable transmission of energy is only one example.
He was also able to establish telepathic links with his followers.
Ouspensky has recalled how, when they were in Finland, he began to hear Gurdjieff’s voice inside his chest, and was able to carry on conversations with Gurdjieff who was in another part of the house.
At the Prieuré Gurdjieffs pupils would give displays of telepathy for visitors, transmitting the names or shapes of various hidden objects from the audience to the stage.
Gurdjieff obviously had profound psychic gifts.
One day he told his pupils that a newcomer, who was out of the room, was susceptible to a certain chord of music.
When the person came in he struck the chord on the piano, and she immediately underwent a kind of hysterical fit.

There are many stories of Gurdjieff’s fund-raising skills that demonstrate not only his special psychological insight but also his sense of humour.
Before one of his parties to raise money in New York, Gurdjieff asked Fritz Peters to teach him all the most obscene four-letter words he knew.
When a large number of respectable and rich New Yorkers arrived, Gurdjieff began to talk to them about his ideas, gradually introducing more and more talk of sex.
Finally his conversation consisted almost entirely of four-letter words.
His guests relaxed, and then began to flirt with one another.
Eventually, all inhibitions gone, they proceeded to behave with total abandon.
Suddenly Gurdjieff stood up in the centre of the room, thunderously demanded their attention, and then pointed out that he had revealed to them something about themselves that they had never suspected.
Surely, he asked, that was worth a large contribution to his institute?
At the end of the evening, he was some thousands of dollars richer.

During his lifetime Gurdjieff did not publish any books on the techniques of his teaching, and his pupils were bound to secrecy on the subject.
Since his death in Paris in 1949, however, many of his works have been published, and there has been a flood of memoirs by disciples and admirers.
Gurdjieff was in almost every respect the antithesis of Aleister Crowley.
Whereas Crowley craved publicity, Gurdjieff shunned it.
Crowley was forgotten for two decades after his death; Gurdjieff, on the contrary, has become steadily better known, and his influence continues to grow.
One of the main reasons for this is that there was so little of the charlatan about him.
He is no cult figure with hordes of gullible disciples.
What he has to teach makes an appeal to the intelligence, and can be fully understood only by those who are prepared to make a serious effort.

Nevertheless, Gurdjieff undoubtedly understood all the tricks of thought pressure.
One of the most typical stories of him is told by the writer and traveler Rom Landau.
One day, Landau was sitting in a restaurant with an attractive lady novelist.
She was facing away from Gurdjieff, who was sitting on the other side of the restaurant.
Suddenly she turned as if she had been struck, and her eyes met Gurdjieff’s.
Then, blushing, she turned away.
Later she admitted to Landau that Gurdjieff had somehow ‘struck her through her sexual center’, including a powerful sexual response as if with an intimate caress.

Like Rasputin, Gurdjieff was no saint in his personal relations with women.
Unlike Rasputin, however, he knew how to direct and control his extraordinary powers.
His disciples regard him as one of the greatest men of the 20th century, and it is not necessary to be a disciple of Gurdjieff’s to think that they may be right.

Among the most remarkable—and at present underestimated—magicians of the 20th century is the brilliantly talented writer who called herself Dion Fortune.

Little is known of her childhood, as her biographer, Alan Richardson, admits.
¹
Born in Llandudno on December 6, 1890, the only child of a lawyer, and of a mother who became an ardent Christian Scientist, Violet Mary Firth seems to have been an introverted child who began to have ‘visions’ at the age of 4.
(She later came to believe they were of past lives.) She was also sensitive to psychic phenomena from early childhood.
Another well-known psychic, Phoebe Payne, has described how as a child she always saw pretty ‘auras’ surrounding flowers, and was surprised to discover later that they were invisible to most people.
Violet Firth found that she was able to sense people’s hidden thoughts and feelings.
From the beginning, she ‘walked in two worlds’, and later developed into a good medium.

At the age of 20 in 1911 she became a teacher in a private school.
The principal was a highly domineering woman—a power-hungry bully who had studied the occult in India.
After several fierce arguments with the principal, Dion Fortune decided to quit her job.
A colleague advised her to leave without telling the principal, saying that if she did not, she would never get away.
Against this advice she told her superior.
The principal said she was welcome to leave if she first admitted that she was incompetent and had no self-confidence.
Dion Fortune indignantly denied the charges.
The principal then fixed her with her eyes and repeated the statement hundreds of times for four hours.

Eventually some deep instinct warned Dion Fortune to pretend to give way, and to beg her principal’s pardon.
The older woman then relented and let her go.
But the damage was done: Dion Fortune was a physical and mental wreck for the next three years.
After more than a year of the illness, she later wrote, ‘my body was like an electric battery that has been completely discharged’.
A psychologist’s diagnosis would probably be that the principal had used a kind of hypnotic power to deflate her self-esteem, to make her feel helpless and accident-prone.
The effect was to drain her vital reserves, as Gurdjieff would have put it, so that the slightest effort exhausted her.
She came to the conclusion that the woman had damaged her with a ‘psychic attack’, causing her astral body to leak vital energy.
She plunged deep into the study of occultism as an antidote.
Perhaps the most interesting part of her account of this experience is her statement that the principal had used not merely hypnotism but also telepathic suggestion—in other words, thought pressure.