The Flight from Reason: The age of the irrational
James Webb, 1971
Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, London, Great Britain
Hardbound, 305 pages
Call No Man Master: Fifty years of spiritual adventures in praise of teachers but wary of gurus
Introduction by Colin Wilson
Joyce Collin-Smith, 1988
Gateway Books: Bath, Great Britain
Paperback, 231 pages
review by Joe Szimhart, 2021 November
1980 was a significant year for me when I began my defection from a large, Theosophical sect after their Easter conference in April. That would be my third and last attendance over the course of a year with thousands of other devotees to hear Elizabeth Clare Prophet channel teachings from Ascended Masters in person. The goals of the cult was to enhance the possibility for ascension into heaven during or after this lifetime and to take over world government. The guidance came from ascended beings that included St. Germain, El Morya, Buddha, Jesus, Hercules, Mother Mary, K-17, and dozens of others in the heavenly state. Urgency ruled the moment as this opportunity may not appear again for us for many lifetimes. Powerful suggestions in the Teachings required one hundred percent dedication to achieve ascension. Despite the inexplicable spiritual experiences, I sensed a dark deception and control taking over my soul within a year of effort to comply with the Teachings. My formal break occurred six months later after excruciating psycho-spiritual battles and confusions in my mind and soul—my psyche. At times I felt psychotic. I awoke with panic attacks in the dead of night just as the cult teachings had suggested if I defected from the Path: Without spiritual protection from the Masters, I would be attacked by dark forces and Black Magicians.
One question we will explore here is whether there are extrasensory (occult) forces and entities acting. Language fails us when we dare to describe the inexplicable experience of our being or the animating principle of what we call a self, but I can tell you from personal experience that playing with spiritual fire is no joke. You can frame it within psychology and self-delusion or blame it on autonomous spiritual agents or do both. Warnings from famous mystics of all great religions about mystical pursuits is legend. Deception and self-deception accompany the unwary seeker. Without reasonable grounding, a sane core, and proper guidance mysticism with its apparent magical effects will make a fool out of the most ardent seeker by driving that seeker to submit to unscrupulous gurus or to go insane. The line between religious devotion and self-delusion is very fuzzy.
1980 was a significant year for James Webb, a brilliant Scotsman whose three books on the history of occultism and the behavior of occultists remain a skeptical standard in the genre. In May of 1980, James Webb put his shotgun to his temple and pulled the trigger. He died at age 34. He suffered for two years from existential anxiety, depression, and psychotic breakdowns. Whether or not he had a precondition is debatable—his father committed suicide when James was an infant—but by all accounts, he was not a depressive type prior to his breakdown. If anything, he was gregarious and deeply involved in his research. During one hospitalization, he was given an antipsychotic that brought him to his senses for a time. The lead up to his demise was an obsessive deep dive for over a decade into “rejected knowledge” (as he called it) that led to three impressive books, the first being the topic of this review, The Flight from Reason finished in 1970 when Webb was 24. That book was later released as The Occult Underground to be followed by The Occult Establishment, and finally his magnum opus, The Harmonious Circle about G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky and their influence on dozens of movements, celebrities, and persons in power. The Harmonious Circle was published in 1980, months before Webb took his life.
Webb was raised with two stepsisters by wealthy parents in Edinburgh, Scotland. His biological father committed suicide while stationed with the military in Germany weeks after James was born in 1946. James grew tall, well over six feet, and sported a thick shock of bright auburn hair. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied history. Early on, he was employed as a ghostwriter, television production assistant, and schoolmaster. He met scholars Kathleen Raine, Francis King, and Ellic Howe who guided Webb in the history of the occult. He became a full-time writer and contributed to the Encyclopedia of the Unexplained and to Man, Myth, and Magic. In 1974, Webb married a woman that his mother and stepfather disapproved of, noting that Jamie married under his level of breeding. In fact, though supportive and loving in her own way, Mary (Thomas) Webb viewed the esoteric topics of Webb’s studies with disdain and called it rubbish. She worked as an assistant journalist. The couple had no children.
During his final year while struggling with mental health, Mary convinced Jamie (as he was known to friends) to take a boring job as a copywriter to get his mind off the “rubbish,” but the job may have exacerbated his distress. His one contact in the occulture that he trusted implicitly was Joyce Collin-Smith whose memoir Call No Man Master we will review also. Joyce was tall at six feet and had blue eyes. Her memoir reveals more about Jamie, the man, than we can glean from his books. In his profusion of letters to Joyce at the end, many unsent, we have evidence that Webb was keenly exploring the mysteries of life. Commentators, including Joyce, recognized similarities to LSD trips and reports of shamanic flight or spiritual journeys and the attendant falling apart of the self that are called initiations in the ancient mystery schools and in modern secret societies. Mental and physical breakdowns are often catalysts that launch a spiritual career or great psychological insights. William James wrote of his years long depression that, once resolved, enhanced his insights to become a major figure in the history of psychology and pragmatism.[1] Milton Erickson famously survived a long paralysis from polio in his youth that led to his ability to revolutionize hypnotherapy.[2] Cult leaders have superimposed esoteric initiations or mass trainings onto seekers for this very purpose—to force self-realization or enlightenment.
Jamie met Joyce around 1971 in England at one of Joyce’s lectures about her deceased brother-in-law Rodney Collin and his esoteric teachings. Joyce cast Webb’s horoscope in 1972 and wrote about it for The Astrological Journal (AUTUMN 1980). Rodney Collin was one of P. D. Ouspensky’s most devoted followers and Webb was early into his research on the Fourth Way cults that formed around Ouspensky and G. I. Gurdjieff teachings. Joyce was old enough to be Jamie’s mother at the time, but they became great friends, meeting often and exchanging letters primarily about Joyce’s intimate knowledge of the Gurdjieff circle and whether there was any healthy reality to occult pursuits. Joyce was married to Drew Collin-Smith who did not share his brother’s or wife’s devotion to spirituality and the occult. After his master Ouspensky died in 1947, Rodney Collin established a small commune in Mexico dedicated to esoteric teachings that deviated from Ouspensky in combining Catholicism with astrology and mediumship.
Rodney Collin was a tall, lean, brilliant, kind man who forged his own spiritual path after his master, P. D. Ouspensky, died in 1947. Shortly thereafter, Joyce went to Mexico City to study with Rodney at his commune. After years of spiritual experimentation, Rodney Collin ended his life by intentionally falling from a tall cathedral bell tower in Cusco, Peru in 1956. He had been struggling mightily with existential truth and it got the best of him. Like his master Ouspensky before him, Collin apparently sought a conscious death. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, Ouspensky kept alert, eschewed medications, and was pacing among followers when he collapsed and died. As with James Webb later, Joyce regarded Rodney as a soul mate and not merely a brother-in-law. In her memoir, Joyce reported childhood visions of extraordinary men who later matched the descriptions of Rodney Collin and James Webb. She believed in reincarnation and the reunion of soul mates.
Webb wrote to Joyce Collin-Smith that he had his first insight that the world was not as it appeared in his mid-teens: “I accepted the world completely until I was about sixteen, then a series of pre-cognitive dreams and an isolated religious experience began waking me up. At Cambridge I wrote poems replete with esoteric symbolism. I knew nothing of esotericism and didn’t know what the poems meant until recently—they were just a nice noise. One’s unconscious is often a good guide.”[3] This experience helped launch him into studying a field largely neglected by academia but recognized by Webb as not only pervasive but also socially and politically influential. Scholars later coined occulture as a label for non-establishment religion, esoteric spirituality, and superstitions. Other labels apply, such as ancient wisdom, Hermeticism, Tradition, perennial wisdom, and shamanism. Webb called all this human activity a “flight from reason.” Webb’s thesis was to show evidence that religion and spirituality had not faded during the so-called Age of Reason after 1700, rather it was thriving underground in occultism that emerged as the occult establishment in new religious movements. History has proven Webb correct, as I see it.
Webb’s books read like a dispassionate critique and history of the occult. In fact, I often used his final chapter of The Harmonious Circle titled “Of Masters and Men” as a valuable reference for my clients who were harmed by devotion to esoteric groups and gurus. What makes Webb’s accounts so valuable was his ability to grasp why and how cult leaders like Gurdjieff could grip the minds of otherwise well-educated and worldly sophisticated followers. Gurdjieff was a master of exploring the mysteries of a spiritual life and the human mind, but he was also a master of ruthlessly manipulating human behavior. For Gurdjieff, telling lies was a means to ultimate truth. His memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men that first appeared in Russian in 1927 and was revised many times, is a mixing of fact with fiction to get to his idea of truth. In other words, Webb admired many of Gurdjieff’s insights while condemning his pathological teaching methods.
Webb retained his sense of humor throughout his psychological struggles. He wrote to Joyce on 31st January 1980 that he was “hoist with my own petard,” quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The petard, an explosive device, goes off unexpectedly and hoists the bomb maker off the ground. Webb knew of Joyce Collin-Smith’s struggles with gurus and cults and of her own nervous breakdown after years of devotion to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who founded Transcendental Meditation. Joyce was the Maharishi’s personal assistant for years early in his career in London when the guru incorporated his fledgling business as the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. Joyce broke with TM around the time Mick Jagger, Mia Farrow, and The Beatles discovered the holy man. Joyce saw the guru’s dark side up close, his craving for money and power, and that he had locked-door sessions with young white women in his quarters. Prior to her devotion to TM, Joyce was attracted to Buchmanism or the Oxford “Moral Rearm-ament” [sic] movement that was a form of charismatic Christianity founded by Frank Buchman. She later tried Subud that was founded by the Indonesian Sufi, Pak Subuh, who taught that sensuous movements called Latihan would arouse the spiritual forces. Indeed, devotees of Subud, Joyce writes, experienced ecstasies and sexual arousal when doing Latihan. Subud was formed around 1925 but emerged in England around 1957. Joyce wrote that it took her nearly ten years to regain her creative energies after practicing TM. Prior to that she had been a successful writer of fiction. The stress of that kind of meditation can rearrange the brain’s synapses to the detriment of some devotees, as she would later find out.
Joyce was the perfect contact for Webb when he met her. Although she retained her interest in the occult by practicing astrology, making friends with Theosophists, and forging her own path in mysticism, Joyce was wary of masters by then. The pair were like two sides of a mirror, she in the occult world and he the observer-skeptic in a romance of two worlds. They delighted in one another’s company for several years, visiting over wine and gourmet meals, until Webb met and married Mary Thomas in 1974. Their relationship would resume years later after Webb fell into depressive psychosis and reached out to her, seeing Joyce as the only person he knew who could understand his psycho-spiritual insights at the time. However, even Joyce could see that Webb’s obsessive preoccupation with religion and philosophy was unhealthy and she cautioned him to back off.
Both agreed on an important insight that elite seekers of enlightenment had no more claim to glory in heaven than common folks who pay no attention to that “rubbish,” as Mary Webb called it. Mary told Joyce, “He couldn’t talk to me about things like that.”[4] Webb wrote, “Perhaps there are various “modes of God.” Yet I agree with you that there is no reason to think that the pilgrims of the pit have knowledge which is in essence any different from the ecstasies and riders in the chariots of the spirit.”[5]
Others have taken up this story of James Webb and his value to the history of the occult. Besides Joyce, three of the more significant are Colin Wilson, John Robert Colombo, and Gary Lachman. Colombo’s self-published monograph titled The Occult Webb is a compilation of writings about Webb that features Colin Wilson, Gary Lachman, and Joyce Collin-Smith. The monograph was first issued in 1999, then reissued with Lachman’s opinion added in 2015. Lachman published a series of popular books on occultists and occult influence on modern music including biographies on Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, and a history of the Sixties consciousness revolution called Turn Off Your Mind (2001). I have reviewed several of Lachman’s books and read Colin Wilson (1931-2013), especially The Outsider (1956) that launched Wilson as an important social commentator and interpreter of occultism. Although Lachman’s research is mostly reliable like Wilson’s, I find their appreciation of occultists overly apologetic. In other words, occultists and radical gurus may have been onto something real that we need to acknowledge no matter how they behave. Martin Gardner, a well-known science writer, viewed Wilson as “an intelligent writer but duped by paranormal claims.”[6] Likewise, Benjamin Radford, a skeptic, accused Wilson of “mystery mongering” and described Wilson’s The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved as “riddled with errors and obfuscating omissions, betraying a bizarre disregard for accuracy.”[7]
As with Joyce Collin-Smith, there is a level of credulity with Wilson and Lachman that I find naive or overvalued. For example, Lachman mentions that Joyce had a vision after getting all those desperate letters from Webb and learning that he had died. “During her first wave of grief, Joyce found herself crying out loud, “Why didn’t you help him?”” She heard a voice that said, “I did” while noting an apparition of a face, “dark haired and dark-eyed” who she thought was the occultist, Rudolf Steiner.[8] Lachman notes that at the time of his death Webb had been commissioned to write a biography about Steiner. Subsequently, the job went to Colin Wilson who wrote that Webb’s account would have been skeptical. Lachman speculates that Webb, considering his state of mind before his suicide, may have not been so skeptical. Lachman went on to write his own book about Steiner (2007) that, as I mentioned above, tends toward appreciation about a man that Webb described as schizophrenic in his book, The Occult Establishment.[9] Steiner’s writings deeply impacted Joyce Collin Smith when she was sixteen, so her vision of the dark-eyed man after Webb died is not so mysterious. “Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds was the first esoteric book I ever saw,” she wrote.[10]
So, what is real? Is the occult world view a “flight from reason” as Webb called it or is it a necessary pursuit if the human being is ever to discover self-realization as a mirror of the source of being? Writers like Lachman and Wilson lean toward the latter view, while Joyce Collin-Smith settles into a comfortable niche, quoting J. Krishnamurti who said the “Truth is a pathless land,” that truth lies within the seeker, and “in truth, the Way is your own.”[11] Collin-Smith and Krishnamurti remain hopelessly myopic as both shared a reality with groups and masters despite their individualistic claims: In the end, Joyce depended on a long history of astrological arts while Krishnamurti famously continued to accept the support of Theosophical followers who viewed him as a master, a way shower, and a Pathless path to follow after he abdicated from his role as World Teacher among Theosophists.[12]
In his final letters to Joyce, Jamie Webb speculated that the Gnostics may have been right, that, as Deists believe, we are after all abandoned here on earth by a deity to fend for ourselves and that only a few will know the truth or find enlightenment to reunite with that deity that the Gnostics called the “alien God.”[13] Webb wrote, “But intellectually, the conviction of what Gurdjieff called “The Terror of the Situation” remains. And with it, a conviction that there is a way out.”[14] Gnosticism is all about the spiritual escape from this fallen material prison world. Webb’s personal myth or vision in those letters was that “the crew of a splendid spaceship crash-landed on an alien planet. Immediately, they were enslaved by local inhabitants, and now have forgotten who they were and whence they came. But occasionally something jogs their memories, and they remember the times when they flew through the galaxy on high adventures…”[15] One might recognize the similarity to the neo-Gnostic revelations of L. Ron Hubbard and his tales of Xenu that pass for truth in Scientology. Webb viewed his fable as metaphor; Hubbard sold his fantasy as concrete truth.
In his spiritual madness, Webb collapsed into a desperate reach for escape. If he could only find the keys to truth, he would be healed. He wrote, “Over the past four or five months I have been changing positions so rapidly that I haven’t known whether I was on my head or my heels.”[16] In one episode, he waded a river and scrambled twelve miles to Dunblane Cathedral, banging futilely on its locked door. Most of human cultic behavior in new and ancient religion stems from this same impulse to overcome the anxiety of not knowing, of the “terror of the situation,” as Gurdjieff expressed it. In one of his most desperate moments, Webb was found in treatment laying on a floor in a fetal position, “repeating the Lord’s Prayer again and again, muttering: “What is it all about?””[17] Indeed, the way to the answer to that question has proven to be potent bait used by the most unscrupulous gurus through the ages to hook anxious seekers.
The Flight from Reason in its original edition is out of print. I managed to secure a copy in 2021 from a bookseller in Germany to complement my Occult Underground version for around $50. The changes are not radical though same topics will appear in different sections. To sum up this wide-ranging territory covered by Webb and Joyce Collin-Smith, I can only wonder what drives anyone (including me) to not only ask the ultimate questions, but to also attempt to experience the answers through a kind of knowledge called gnosis. Seekers believe that Moses and Elijah had it, Krishna had it, Buddha had it, Pythagoras had it, Jesus had it, and St. Paul had it. Those ancient seers or realizers have spawned thousands of mimics with their cults and new religions, everyone trying to capture or trap the perennial Tradition, as Webb and Collin-Smith called it, within their own language and behavioral games. Whether that Tradition as God-wisdom, gnosis, or theosophy exists, we can only try to guess, but what we do know is that the language games and the behavior games (the traps) are observable and lend to social and scientific evaluation. Jamie Webb as a young scholar was all about the latter, about observing the language and behavior games of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Steiner and the like as a historian of ideas. His one distinction was that he was never a devotee as was Joyce, thus his attraction to her insights as an ex-member of many significant groups and gurus.
Joyce lived until age 91, passing away in 2010 relatively happy with her lot as a clairvoyant astrologer. She was a survivor after playing with spiritual fire as a believer for decades. Webb was not a survivor after playing with spiritual fire as a skeptic. My opinion may not matter, but skeptic or not, spiritual fire can burn you. Another way to put this is that religious or spiritual preoccupation often attends a psychotic break—I work in a psych hospital and have observed these many times. Joyce had a psychotic break after her stint with TM and serving the Maharishi. Whether anxiety over death and the meaning of life is the cause of the human propensity to pursue the occult and invent religions to reduce that anxiety, or that some ominous, divine force in nature (Tradition) drives or attracts us to gnosis is a question each person must answer for themselves, according to Joyce Collin-Smith. Sometimes any answer, whether religious, philosophical, or political, is better than none after you enter the labyrinth of hidden wisdom.
Other references:
Meetings with Remarkable Men by George I. Gurdjieff (1927)
The Outsider by Colin Wilson, 1956
The Occult Establishment by James Webb (1976)
The Harmonious Circle by James Webb (1980)
The Astrological Journal (Autumn, 1980)
Rudolf Steiner by Gary Lachman (2007)
The Gnostic Religion: The message of the Alien God and the beginnings of Christianity by Hans Jonas (1958, 2015)
The Occult Webb: An Appreciation of the Life and Work of James Webb complied by John Robert Colombo (Colombo & Company, 1999, 2015)
[1] https://www.verywellmind.com/william-james-biography-1842-1910-2795545. “I was, body and soul, in a more indescribably hopeless, homeless, and friendless state than I ever want to be in again," he later wrote.
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/suffer-the-children/201112/reflections-milton-erickson
[3] Collin-Smith, Joyce, The Astrological Journal (Autumn 1980) “An Appreciation of James Webb.” The quote is from a personal letter from Webb to Collin-Smith.
[4] The Occult Webb, 70
[5] IBID, 75
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson
[7] https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/colin_wilson_a_case_study_in_mystery_mongering/
[8] The Occult Webb, 101
[9] The Occult Establishment, 493
[10] Call No Man Master, 15
[11] IBID, 231
[12] The Flight from Reason, 60-64
[13] The Gnostic Religion: The message of the Alien God and the beginnings of Christianity by Hans Jonas (2015)
[14] The Occult Webb, 77
[15] IBID (also mentioned in Call No Man Master, 211)
[16] IBID, 78
[17] Call No Man Master, 214
