AND THEN, SUDDENLY, ROLLO APPEARED
The Black Art – Rollo Ahmed
Hypnotism, and magic/k, are distinctly stale, pale, and male sports. Hence I was thrilled to find that one of the occultists mentioned in the 1971 Dennis Wheatley book I recently read and blogged about, The Devil and All His Works, was a man of colour.
Rollo Ahmed was a Guyanan national, born Adbul Said Ahmed in around 1898 during the South American country’s British colonial rule. Ahmed emigrated to England between the First and Second World Wars, initially seeking work as a theatre performer. However, the ‘Mother Country’ neither welcomed him, nor offered him gainful employment. The few online sources I’ve found leave a lingering sense that Ahmed harnessed his ‘exotic’ heritage (per the abhorrent ‘fashions’ of the times) to position himself as an author, lecturer, occultist, Yogi, and herbalist for somewhat cynical reasons. Unfortunately, he was imprisoned three times for fraud later in life – this article* summarises his ‘crimes’... which could also be described as disputes over the “reasonable expenses” of an occultist procuring magic rings and mysterious powders. This stain upon his legacy seems to have trumped the racism and near-constant peril of destitution that he faced on arrival and throughout his life in Britain – and which he wrote about in his autobiography I Rise – that I’m sure more likely shaped his complex path towards ‘occultist’.
Ahmed had travelled South America and the Caribbean gathering occult knowledge before emigrating to Liverpool and then London, and he claimed his father was Egyptian and his mother Guyanese. This Egyptian link may have been fact, or it could have been an ‘exotic’ fiction to appeal to the London/English elite who pursued the occult and mystical. Whatever the case, the strands of Ahmed’s past – be they serendipitous or contrived – proved appealing. He soon counted Wheatley and Aleister Crowley as friends on the 1930s Bohemian literary scene, and Wheatley, already a popular author of occult fiction, recommended Ahmed to write this book, The Black Art, in 1939.
It’s a jam-packed overview of magick, witchcraft, and the occult, which the publisher initially wanted to be written by Wheatley (who declined as being insufficiently adept at the time). Ahmed fulfils the brief for a white European centric view of his subject matter in a detached style, with his personal opinions and practices tantalisingly rare and brief. Hypnotism is a recurring theme, though. Much of it is familiar, albeit more gratuitously detailed, territory for us: dark rituals involving hypnotically entranced innocents; voodoo priests and Indian fakirs who were masters of hypnotism; witches and martyrs using self-hypnosis to endure torture and burning at the stake; and the strange hypnotic and ecstatic states of mediums, mystics, and magicians traversing the astral planes of the dead, the living, and the beyond.
Ahmed, and Wheatley, have given me a taste for appreciating hypnotism via the ‘golden years’ of occultism. The Black Art particularly builds a picture of the Church’s hypocritical, parasitical relationship with the occult and, by extension, hypnotism: ecstasies, exorcisms, corrupt priests performing ‘The Black Mass’, and the PR war against paganism via the creation of myriad new ‘holy’ fears, frolics, and feasts, etc, make for a phantasmagorical belief-scape barely distinguishable from Satanism. The emergence of ‘animal magnetism’ and mesmerism in the 18th Century, meanwhile, are understood as part of the bubbling cauldron of magick propagated by occultists such as Count Cagliostro rather than simply as precursors to scientific hypnotism, as per the conventional narrative you’ll read in hypnosis books. Mesmeric and masonic lodges, and their rogue offshoots, as well as secret societies apparently committed to astrology and such, often drew people to their doors with the promise of gaining mesmeric/hypnotic powers acting as a gateway to darker arts... and acts.
Ahmed concludes this book by warning readers against dabbling in the occult, and I concur that peering into the cesspit of mankind’s ongoing quest for power and The Ultimate Rim-Job isn’t for the faint of heart. But both he, writing in 1939, and Wheatley, writing in 1971, bemoan the lack of serious contemporary occultists vs the proliferation of creepy, pointless sex cults. Perhaps it’s time for a new breed of occultist-hypnotists to bring Ahmed’s curiosity, creativity, class, and (multi)cultural insights to the field?
As wonderful as entertainment hypnosis and magic can be, and as worthy as hypnotherapy can seem, the loss of the phantasmagorical from hypnotism renders it, IMHO, a weak metaphor – and a weaker still human intervention.
* Part one is well worth reading, too.
