Colin Wilson & Jacques Bergier: that is, the conspiracy of history

Civilization as a conspiracy; history as a trap; an endemic psychic vampirism that has seized an entire civilization: these are the burning themes of two of the key texts of the Alternative Reality between the 60s and 70s: "The parasites of the mind" by Colin Wilson andΒ "The cursed books" byΒ Jacques Berger.


di Andrea Scarabelli
originally published on the Author's blog on The newspaper

"Our civilization, like any civilization, it is a conspiracy. A myriad of tiny divinities divert our gaze from the fantastic face of reality. "

So it opens up The eternal man by Pauwels e Bergier, the first (and, in fact, only) of five volumes dedicated to a reform of modern man. These theses are very similar to those of the novel Parasites of the mind di Colin Wilson, released in 1977 by Fanucci and now back in bookstores - indeed, on newsstands - in Β«Urania CollezioneΒ», in the masterful translation by Roberta Rambelli; a complicated and fascinating story with the center the "trap of history", the idea that the latter is determined by far more complex factors than those that our little rationalist minds can understand.

The book was released in its original language in 1976, exactly twenty years after the British writer's most famous work, The Outsider (also recently in bookstores thanks to the commitment of the Atlantide publishing house, by Simone Caltabellota). The Outsider is a gallery of eccentrics, a collection of characters always ahead of their time (or, better,Β contemporary in a world one or two centuries back), interpreters of their own time free from social or political anesthesia.

Here is what united a Nietzsche and a Dostoevsky, a Van Gogh and a Hemingway: theoutsider by Colin Wilson is as ill as the world around him, but unlike his contemporaries he knows he is. Which often gives him a lot of trouble. In an era that levels every discrepancy, reducing the genius impulse to the miasma of psychologism or the shackles of sociology, these characters did not give up, and paid dearly for their fidelity to their destiny. It is thus, Wilson writes, that one can understand the tragic outcomes of the biographies of these irregular, from Shelley and Keats, from Poe in Beddoes, from Holderlin a Hoffmann, up to Schiller, Kleist, LautrΓ©amont ...

The Mind Parasites, (Dec 1968, Colin Wilson, publ. Bantam Books, # F3905, $ 0.50, 196pp, pb) .JPG

And here we come to Parasites of the mind, novel written under the ascendant of HP Lovecraft (among other things, it was August Derleth himself, a friend of the Loner of Providence and founder of the historic Arkham House, who suggested to Colin Wilson to try his hand at fiction) and all concentrated on a rather bizarre year: the 1800s. century there is a singular change in the human race. Theromantic man, with its superhuman inspiration towards a higher existence. A guy who would have been looked upon with suspicion at other times in history: the Romantics:

«… They are like the Greek sailors who heard the sirens song, and preferred to throw themselves into the waves rather than return to the dull world of everyday existence. "

Having experienced fleeting glimpses of the absolute, they proved unable to return among men, to whom they left the tedious task of keeping their feet on the ground. "As for living, our servants will take care of it," he says Villiers de l'Isle-Adam to one of its characters. Much more than the well-known Albatros Baudelairian, it is he who embodies the spirit of an era that wanted to be superior to the present, to history.

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And the nineteenth century took its revenge, condemning the genius (which, according to Wilson, amounts to 0,5% of the population) to isolation. But why, all of a sudden, poetry, art and science cease to dialogue with civilization? Why can't one work for humanity except in the solitude of the laboratories, amidst the incomprehension of most? It is precisely here that theoutsider enters the domains of the parasites of the mind. Which, Wilson writes, have haunted Western psychology since the nineteenth century, opposing its development, spreading anxieties and depressions everywhere. An endemic vampirism psychic that has grasped an entire civilization.

Once, even if he was not always aware of it, man possessed the strength to drive them away. Not that before modernity things were going very well: except that, in the face of the tragedies of history, "man's optimism and his power of self-renewal were so enormous that chaos spurred him on to new enterprises." Subsequently, however, something seems to change:

β€œWe are in an age of darkness, where men of genius no longer create as gods. Instead, they seem to struggle in the grip of an invisible octopus. The century of suicides begins, the era of defeat and neurosis. "

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Cover of the first English edition of "The Mind Parasites"

For what reason has the faculty of self-renewal of the human race ceased? Precisely for these vampires of the mind, which Wilson calls tsathogguani (tribute to Clark Ashton Smithh, friend and correspondent of Lovecraft and inventor of the dark deity Tsathoggua, who became part of the pantheon of gods Myths of Cthulhu), which affect everyone, but especially men of genius, who could lead humanity to a sudden improvement. Under their yoke, history becomes an ongoing collective nightmare:

β€œIn the history of art and literature, starting in 1780, we see the results of the battle against the vampires of the mind. Artists who refused to preach the gospel of pessimism and the devaluation of life were annihilated. "

Genuine brain cancer has blocked man's spiritual development, pushing progress in an exclusively material direction. And in the "best of all possible worlds" man is devoured by anxieties, by the "discomfort of civilization" of Freudian memory. Also because the range of action of these beings (despite what is propagated by certain conspiracy theorists) is not of a socio-political nature but inner: they besiege the stronghold of our ego, which is not closed in on itself but open upwards and downwards, Wilson tells us, repeating a common wisdom a very heterogeneous traditions. Nothing strange, in short, were it not for the fact that starting from the nineteenth century "the lower self of man seems to receive artificial support from the outside". And this support is not eliminated by material means, but by an interior renewal.

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The romantics of the nineteenth century rightly argued that men are like gods and have forces that they normally ignore. And to be like the gods means to dominate circumstances, without being a slave to them. Well, if man gets rid of it for just a moment, "He would suddenly realize that he has inner powers compared to which the hydrogen bomb looks like a candle". He would become "an inhabitant of the world of the mind, just as he is now an inhabitant of the Earth", he would navigate his own inner domains as the ancient explorers threw themselves headlong into unknown territories, 'He would find he has many "i" and he would understand that his superior "I's" are what his ancestors would have called divinity ".

A grandiose perspective, although not devoid of chiaroscuro features. As these pages seem to overshadow, are we really certain that humanity is ready to take this leap forward? If not, the action of the parasites could even be salvific, keeping the fiction of civilization in place. "Civilization is a conspiracy", "history is a trap": okay, but how many would know metabolize such knowledge?

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Alex Gray, "Despair"

When, in 2000, he wrote The great book of unsolved mysteries, an imposing atlas of the Imaginary, Colin Wilson openly referred to the ideas of Jacques Bergier relating to the birth and decline of ancient civilizations. They would have died out having developed a very high technology, which would have then backfired against them. An idea with a limp epistemological value but with an extraordinary ethical significance that Bergier had deepened in another study,Β The cursed books.

The protagonists of the essay are the leftists Men in Black, which from the beginning of history - and not from modernity, like i tsathogguani by Wilson - they intervene as soon as humanity is about to take an evolutionary leap. They too, like Wilsonian psychological vampires, are averse to geniuses and visionaries. Their sect, just to give a few examples, is behind the sacking of the library of Alexandria and the Inquisition, the iconoclasts of all times and the burning of the "magician" Giordano Bruno (in which some jokers continue to see a martyr of the "progress of science"), the Nazi bonfires of books and Soviet censorship, the fate that over the centuries seized the owners of the famous "Book of Thot" and the destruction of the legendary Steganography Abbot Tritemio (it seems that the historian of religions Ioan Petru Culianu he was working on it, in the days before his heinous murder, by hand still unknown, in the toilets of the University of Chicago ...).

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There are things that should not be known and the task of the Men in Black would be to stop humanity from rushing towards its own destruction. It is interesting to note how this idea has crossed literatures of every latitude and longitude, sinceΒ Great Inquisitor told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alexei ai Nine Unknowns of the novel of the same name by Talbot Mundy (published in installments in the magazine "Adventure" in 1923), members of a sect created in the first century BC by Emperor Ashoka, guardians of a knowledge collected in nine books that would be harmful to humanity if it fell in the wrong hands. Up to the literature - more specific - dedicated to King of the World and similar (Guenon, ossendowski, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Bulwer-Lytton and so on).

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Colin Wilson (1931 - 2013)

A hymn to the most uncompromising obscurantism? Not at all. Also because the Men in Black visited Bergier himself repeatedly, during several conferences organized by the «Planète» magazine where we discussed past and future, materialism and magic, technique and spirituality, quantum physics and meta-history. And, although not necessarily dressed in black, the writer also happened to notice its presence in conferences animated by the desire to overcome the fences usually placed between knowledge ...

That of Men in black and parasites of the mind it is a vision of the world based on the reduction of man to his only material dimension, to the baseness of everyday life and to the prosaic nature of a horizontal life, among our fellow men: "The biggest human problem is that we are all tied to the present" Wilson warns. Hinting at a way out: regaining one's self, bringing those sporadic glimpses of freedom and immortality known by romantics, outsider, under normal condition. Sheltered from the vampires of the mind, she:

"When man loses contact with his inner being, his instinctive depth, he finds himself a prisoner in the world of consciousness, that is in the world of others.Β Β»

Remember the famous Aristotelian ruling that man is a political animal? β€œOne of the biggest lies in human history. Indeed, every man has more in common with the mountains and even with the stars than with other men". A wisdom to be treasured, to return to being present to oneself, decolonizing one's imagination once and for all.


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