CHOOSE THE DEVIL YOU DON'T KNOW
The Devil and All His Works – Dennis Wheatley
The Devil is The Ultimate Hypnotist and so it’s high time He featured on the Cosmic Pancakes! blog. And who better to brief us on Satan’s top hypnotic tips and tricks than Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977), a British writer and expert on the occult who was one of the world’s best-selling authors from the 1930s through to the 1960s.
Sometimes I wonder whether people will read/browse the books I’ve ploughed through for this blog and confuse me/us, and my/our politics and worldviews, with writers who have proved useful. But let me start by saying that that’s never the case, and this book – by a member of the British establishment of yesteryear who was a conservative supporter of royalty and Empire – was particularly hard going. This book is racist, xenophobic, and classist, and warm views towards women and minorities seem led by Wheatley’s traditional patriarchal values and ‘white saviour complex’ perspective.
That said, Wheatley spent six decades studying some 4,000 tomes on the occult, using his privilege and contacts to meet with occultists including Harry Price, the Reverend Montague Summers, Rollo Ahmed, and Aleister Crowley. So the cabinets of curiosity Wheatley plundered are valuable if challenging to peruse.
The Devil and All His Works starts off fairly gently, with hypnosis and the usual backstory of Paracelsus and Mesmer, and the mayhem of all that mesmeric ‘universal fluid’ wafting about Europe and America in the 1700s-1800s. Of course, Gentleman Scientists such as Mesmer and Puységur asking women and poor people what they thought about their own physical and functional ailments, as well as about life, the universe and everything, was a dreadful idea. So the Catholic Church declared mesmerism/hypnotism The Work of The Devil, thus stamping it out cementing its allure and mystique for all eternity. Hurrah!
I came to rather enjoy Wheatley’s biases – if he believes it to be true or likely, then it is so. For instance, he praises SG Soal and his ‘experiments’ in telepathy; confidently calls Joan of Arc a witch; and assures us that Jesus was a fantastic hypnotist-magician who could perform Think-a-Drink while being a bit wary of women accolytes.
The book builds towards dark and disturbing stuff: necromancy; human, child, and animal ‘sacrifice’; black magick rituals; sex magick... It’s surprisingly detailed and instructive! But, ultimately, The Devil – as seen via a white Western lens – is a nebulous and disempowered (male) figure: old pagan gods and ‘witches’ disavowed by the Catholic and Christian churches; notorious hypnotists mixing ‘fascination’ with the power of suggestion; misguided occultists drawn to the ‘left hand’ path. Devils (and gods) of other cultures, religions, and races, past and then-present, are featured more for their novelty value, and are celebrated or derided according to the author’s tastes and views.
Wheatley believed Satanism was a viable threat to ‘the right’ way of life, lamenting the youths of his time giving faith to dark powers they don’t understand. It certainly is true that those youths – the Baby Boomer generation – may have done just that with their faith in right-wing ‘media’ propaganda, and rampant nationalism and nostalgia. It makes you wonder who’d even qualify as ‘The Devil’ these days, based on the number of backers, with that dumb, blind faith in power for power’s sake in mind..? American evangelicals believe Donald Trump to be the second coming; war and apocalypse are talked up; and Andrew Tate wants women to make him a ham sandwich… but Gen-X and Millennial women are too busy making everyone else ham sandwiches for WhatsApp group-chat reasons that they can barely think straight anymore! Not even the millions-strong Internet Chaos Magicians and #WitchesofInstagram have persuaded Satan to part with his earthly realm and gift it to us common and queer heathens instead. Any other contenders springing to mind?!
When this book was first published, in 1971, I’m sure Wheatley – a military man – envisaged some sensible (British) patriarchal elite taking the world in its steady, stern hand and sorting us riff-raff out. But the year is now 2024 and grown men are starting to wonder out loud if Taylor Swift might do a better job than them at running this place. But it is still a man’s world, so here’s hoping some collaborative, magical turnaround is still looming!
