Sorcery and Sanctity

“Sorcery and sanctity,” said Ambrose, “these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.”

What separates a saint from a sorcerer? Both leave the common life behind; both touch something that is not ordinary. Arthur Machen puts the question in the mouth of a girl in Victorian England, raised in a Christian household and initiated by her nurse into a world far older than it: the same current that once fed the cults of Dionysus and Pan. “The White People” is famous for its imagery, but what has persisted instead is its theory of evil.

Machen’s evil is not what we normally meran by the word. Murder, theft, adultery: these, his character Ambrose insists, are not the real thing. A murderer is “simply a wild beast that we have to get rid of to save our own necks from his knife.” Genuine evil lives on another plane entirely. To see what he means, you need the vocabulary the story takes for granted.

Émile Durkheim gave us the first two terms. The profane is the ordinary: Monday morning, the commute, the unremarkable substance of a life. The sacred is whatever a society sets apart and guards against contamination by the ordinary: the space you bathe before entering, the object you may not touch with unwashed hands. Rudolf Otto gave us the third. The numinous is the encounter with what he called the “wholly other,” and it arrives in two keys at once. There is the mysterium tremendum: dread, awe, the sudden sense of your own smallness before something vast. And there is the mysterium fascinans: beauty, allure, the pull toward. We have all stood in it: the ocean at midnight, a cathedral’s soaring nave, the face of someone we love. The mixture of terror and longing that makes you want to kneel or run.

Now Machen’s message comes into focus. Good deeds and evil deeds, charity and murder alike, are both profane: both transactions in the ordinary world. What sets the saint apart is not virtue but a relationship to the numinous. “Evil,” Ambrose says, “is wholly positive—only it is on the wrong side.” Holiness is the effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall; sin is the effort to seize an ecstasy that belongs to angels, and in the seizing a person becomes a demon. Evil, on this account, is not the absence of the sacred. It is the sacred, grasped.

The girl’s account of her initiation comes in a breathless catalog of forbidden things (the Aklo letters, the Chian language, the Mao games, what she calls the secrets of the secrets of the secrets), but Machen is precise about the system underneath the rapture. She tells a story of a poor girl given emeralds that are only grass, a ruby that is only a red stone, a crown that is only yellow flowers; the girl marries a prince, and on the wedding night a tall black figure claims her, “this is my own wedded wife,” and by morning there is nothing in the room but smoke and faded grass. Read the colors. Red, white, yellow, black are the four stages of alchemy: the nigredo, the blackening, where the matter decomposes; the albedo, the whitening, where it is purified; then the yellow; then the rubedo, the reddening, the completed stone. The girl runs the sequence backward. Decomposition, which should come first and be transformed, comes last, and the thing that decomposes is her. She does not purify herself: there is no white. She manipulates the world, and the working unmakes the worker.

This is the corruption of the three Hermetic arts. Alchemy, astrology, and theurgy were paths to gnosis: knowledge as union with the divine. The girl turns them into instruments for bending the world to her will. The clay dolls her nurse teaches her to shape are the plainest form of it: sympathetic magic, love or murder worked at a distance. She tells, too, of a Lady Avelin, who refused marriage for the secret things, made wax images of her suitors, and killed them one by one (drowned, hanged, stabbed, fevered) until she was caught and burned in the marketplace with her wax image strung around her neck. Each story escalates the same gesture. The world as raw material; the world as something to be worked.

The clay doll is not as far from us as the Victorian setting makes it look. The manifestation journal, the vision board, the prayer pitched like a shopping list: at what point does spiritual practice quietly become spiritual manipulation? The question is not rhetorical, and it does not spare the people who would never call what they do magic.

There is a moment when the girl is spared, and refuses the sparing. At the height of her initiation she imagines herself as Lady Avelin, the flames eating her body, and she is afraid. Machen lets us see that the fear is the mysterium tremendum doing exactly its work: the holy dread that was meant to turn her back. She feels it, and goes on anyway, and is found dead in the secret wood before a hidden image, the thorns grown thick around it.

Machen barely sketches the good, so let me. Picture the same girl, the same initiation, the same forgotten names, and instead of reaching for the clay, she sits down in the wood and listens. Instead of whispering the words to summon, she offers them as a question: what do you ask of me? The one who works the clay and the one who prays make the same gesture across the same impossible distance. Both believe souls are connected; both send intention out into the dark. The whole difference is in the hands. One pair grasps. The other opens. Simone Weil wrote that attention (to look at a thing without seizing it, without already turning it to a use) is what prayer is, and what love is. The saint and the sorcerer both withdraw from the common life, and both meet the numinous. One tries to command what it finds. The other consents to be changed by it. Theurgy, at its origin, was the alignment of the soul to the order of the cosmos; the girl’s tragedy is the exact reversal, the attempt to make the cosmos align to her.

The sacred good Machen leaves blank is only this: the courage to meet what is larger than you without trying to tame it, to receive a knowledge without assuming the right to wield it. The girl had everything she needed to become a saint, and she reached for the clay. We reach for it too, every time we dictate our compulsions to the sacred. The whole of it is in our hands: whether, at the threshold, they close, or open.