The Ark

Harry Potter is the latest version of the dark art of sorcery. Alan Baker tells the history of Wizardry.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

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Rachael Kohn: A tall, gaunt figure with a peaked hat is the archetypal wizard, and Merlin is his name.

Hello, on The Ark today we meet many wizards who have lived in history, not in legend.

I'm Rachael Kohn.

The ability to control evil spirits is the most important power of the wizard. Priests who exorcise demons vie with wizards in this art. But unlike priests, wizards are often thought to have made a pact with the devil, like Faust, who was probably a wandering wizard. Other powers of wizardry have attracted many different kinds of people, including the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard.

Alan Baker introduces us to one of history's most colourful professions.

Alan Baker: Wizards have been around for as long as humanity, human civilisation has been around.

The very first wizards I guess you could say were the Shamans, which is a very strange and fascinating religious system, which originated in Central Asia several thousand years ago. And the purpose of the Shaman in a way was similar to the function that wizards have performed ever since. It was really as a mediator between the world of the spirit and the world of humanity.

The Shaman for instance was always asked to interpret signs and omens, whether it was strange lights in the sky, comets, sudden thunderstorms, strange weather phenomena. Natural phenomena was seen as expressions of either the pleasure or the displeasure of the gods. So the wizard and the Shaman in a sense, they act as go-betweens between the world that human beings can't understand by themselves, and the human world.

Rachael Kohn: Well when you speak of signs, I immediately think of ancient Greece and Rome, where there were Oracles and people who read them. You write about Apollonius; now he seemed to disturb or anger the early church because he was so popular. Why was that?

Alan Baker: That's right. I think because Apollonius was a fascinating character.

In a way he was almost like the Buddha in a sense, that he came from a very privileged background, he was very wealthy, he was very attractive, everyone loved him and everyone flocked to him to hear what he had to say, and the early church of course, found that objectionable, because he was drawing followers away from Jesus Christ, and towards his system, which was, as you say, it was based more on a Pagan belief system obviously, than Christian. So that was the reason really that he wasn't very popular with the early church fathers.

Rachael Kohn: Well in fact your description of what Apollonius did sounded very similar to what Jesus himself did.

Alan Baker: In many ways they were similar people I think. They both came forward with messages of peace and love and understanding between the various peoples of Earth, so he is comparable in many ways, although of course he obviously was a pagan, and the belief system that gave rise to him was very different from Christianity.

Rachael Kohn: Well he was living around the time of Jesus, but he travelled around a lot, he seems to have gleaned some of his knowledge from Buddhists as well as Egyptians. Was it common for wizards to travel widely?

Alan Baker: Yes, very much so. We have the examples closer to the present time of John Dee, the very famous Magus, who was the court astrologer to Elizabeth I, and he, in company with most, if not all wizards, travelled very widely because the wizard, in a sense his reason for existing or his reason for practicing what he did, was to gather as much knowledge of the world and the universe as possible. And obviously you can't do that sitting at home. So wizards were great travellers.

Rachael Kohn: Well you've mentioned John Dee. Now he was what you call a necromancer, so he communicated with spirits of deceased people. Does that mean he was much like spiritualists today?

Alan Baker: I suppose you could say that necromancy was the forerunner of spiritualism, although necromancy was much more of a mechanistic system.

For instance, at a typical spiritualist séance, as I'm sure you know, you have a circle of sitters and you have the medium and the medium goes into a trance and calls out to whoever might be there, and etc. etc. The necromancer actually performed magical rites or operations in order to summon the spirits of the dead, and of course that's why they were considered by the church, probably quite rightly, to be rather dangerous people, because they were performing magical rites which are absolutely forbidden.

Rachael Kohn: Well of course they were also much sought after especially because they had a reputation for being able to turn certain base metals into gold, and that brings up alchemy. The person you write about who's really most interesting and probably very influential, is Paracelsus.

Alan Baker: That's right.

Rachael Kohn: What was his story, and was he successful ever in turning metal substance into gold?

Alan Baker: Paracelsus was actually a very, very talented chemist. He really invented the science of chemistry, at least as applied in medical operations. As to whether he succeeded, that's debatable, as with any alchemist.

The thing about alchemy is that it takes many, many, many years to learn the principles behind it, which are incredibly complicated. You'll find all sorts of strange phrases and words that to a modern reader are totally incomprehensible, so if anyone actually wanted to practice alchemy today, they would be very hard-pressed even to understand the instructions. Turning base metals into gold? I think you'd have to be a fervent believer in magic and alchemy to say that that ever actually happened.

Rachael Kohn: Well Paracelsus certainly gives the impression that alchemy being part of wizardry was very close to science, I think you call him a chemo-therapist.

Alan Baker: That's right. Alchemy is a forerunner of chemistry, and it's something that you have to take the history of human thought and human discoveries about the world and the universe as a continuum.

In the modern science of chemistry and physics as well, it arises or it developed out of these earlier, more primitive forms of it. I think any scientist would be the first to admit that his or her own science was or is the result of these early experiments.

Rachael Kohn: Was Paracelsus viewed as something like a doctor, or was he regarded as a wizard in his time?

Alan Baker: I think a little bit of both. I think it rather depended on one's attitude towards him personally.

His contemporaries, who perhaps disagreed with his theories or his pronouncements, because he was a very opinionated character, they would have condemned him as a charlatan, and as a wizard, and the more scientifically minded you were, the less inclined you would be to accept that. But he also helped a lot of people with his medical knowledge and his experiments.

Amongst the people he actually treated, he was a hero, obviously, the way today we would consider doctors and nurses. That was very much the attitude towards Paracelsus.

Rachael Kohn: Well he was around in the 16th century, and I guess, what, a couple of centuries later a most colourful personality, Cagliostro, was a celebrated wizard. He enjoyed quite a bit of success during his time.

Alan Baker: That's right. Another fascinating character, the subject is absolutely full of them. Like with Paracelsus, one's attitude towards him depends on which side of the fence one stands with regard to the reality of magic and so on.

A lot of people dismissed him as a charlatan, again, which I suppose you would have to say they had some justification in doing, because he started off in Sicily as a confidence trickster. But he was so clever and so inquisitive and so knowledgeable towards the end, that he developed a reputation amongst Europe's high society of being a great healer, a great magician, a great wizard. He ended very badly, as a lot of them did. He died in prison, but he certainly had a very eventful life.

Rachael Kohn: Well you almost give the impression that part of his magic was being able to separate the wealthy from their money. But he worked with his wife. Was it common for wizards to work with an assistant?

Alan Baker: Yes, well it's almost a cliché, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, isn't it.

Well of course in Cagliostro's case, his wife was his accomplice in his many confidence tricks. I hesitate to call them genuine wizards, but the genuine sorcerers, the genuine practitioners of ceremonial magic, often had assistants.

For instance, going back to John Dee, he had Edward Kelly, who he called his seer, or his scryer. What would happen was a wizard would frequently take a person who had a certain clairvoyant ability, in other words the ability to see into the world of the spirit, then to interpret what that person said. And to interpret his descriptions of his conversations with spirits or angels or even gods. So wizards frequently did have assistants.

Rachael Kohn: One of the most infamous of wizards, or practitioners of the ceremonial magical arts, is Aleister Crowley. One gets the impression overall, that these people often ended up badly. Can you tell the story of Aleister Crowley, who was around in the early 20th century.

Alan Baker: Crowley, I think it was in Cairo in the '20s I think it was, where he actually made contact, according to him, with an entity called Aiwass. You could describe it as perhaps his guardian angel, which imparted certain knowledge to him. And Crowley, his whole life was devoted to rewriting the history of magic to put his new theories about magic into practice, and to become as a god, which is the ultimate aim of sorcery. Whether he actually did that it's open to doubt, because he died in poverty in Hastings, on the south coast of England.

Rachael Kohn: Do wizards tend to fall victim to their own hubris? Do they end up becoming entrapped by their own grandiosity?

Alan Baker: Possibly. Because you see, one of the fundamental principles of magic, it's the phrase 'as above, so below'. In other words, man is made in the image of God, but what the wizard did was to turn that around and say that if man is God written small, then God is man writ large.

So there's this fundamental connection between God and man. I say 'man' in the old sense of 'woman' of course, also. But because of this connection between the godhood and humanity, practitioners of magic believed that it was possible to become so powerful that one could join with God and be as God. And according to the principles of magic, this isn't a bad thing, it's in a sense what God created us to do.

Rachael Kohn: Now you write about L. Ron Hubbard, as becoming very involved in the occult order OTO, with Jack Parsons, a scientist. Now that's an unusual conjunction.

Alan Baker: Yes. Parsons is the most interesting character in the book, and he's probably one of the most interesting characters in the whole history of magic.

Parsons was a self-taught chemist, he didn't graduate from college, he was really a scientific genius. He developed propulsion systems called JATOs, which stands for Jet Assisted Take Off. It was his ideas that ultimately led to the Apollo moon landings, there's even a crater on the far side of the moon that's named after him. So he was this towering figure in hard science, and yet he was also a practicing ceremonial magician who had a fervent belief in the potential of the human spirit to break free of the bonds of Earth, and almost like Crowley in a way, to ultimately release and free one's consciousness to join with the foundational powers of the universe.

Rachael Kohn: Alan, I was wondering where Harry Potter fits in to this history; is it an attempt to make what could be quite an unethical practice, quite a dangerous one, look sweet, and even heroic?

Alan Baker: That's a tough one. If one were a practising Christian, and had a fervent religious belief and so if one had subscribed to the idea that to perform magic is inherently dangerous and inherently evil, then I suppose you could possibly say that those books might not be suitable, but personally I think that the Harry Potter stories are wonderful stories.

I think everyone, especially children, have this need for the fantastic, for fantasy, for make-believe, for magic and mystery, and books like the Harry Potter books, and The Lord of the Rings, and fantasy in general, they meet that need.

Rachael Kohn: Alan Baker has written The Wizard: A Secret History which is now an open secret!

Next week the untold story of some surprising Aboriginal encounters with missionaries.

Join me, Rachael Kohn next week for The Ark.

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Guests

Alan Baker
is the author of a number of books, including Ghosts and Spirits, The Gladiator, The Knight and The Viking.

Publications

Title: The Wizard: Sorcery Through the Ages
Author : Alan Baker
Publisher: Ebury Press, 2003