If Crowley had met Lawrence and Lawrence had met Jung.....

As a writer and researcher I have discovered over the past 20 years some interesting connections, coincidences, cross-references (whatever you wish to call them) concerning the assortment of prominent - but in some instances flawed - European visitors to Ceylon during the 19th and 20th centuries. I came across some long-forgotten notes on the subject recently and now wish to share them with readers of The Sunday Times.

To begin with, let me divulge no less than three extraordinary connections regarding the timing of the coinage of the word serendipity. Consider first of all Aleister Crowley, the most famous and infamous magician of modern times, the self-styled “Great Beast 666”, who described the Ceylonese as “musicians in an orchestra, playing a nocturne by some oriental Chopin, unconscious of disquieting realities” and suggested that the Kandy Perahera communicates a “sort of magnificent madness to the mind”. Crowley, who provides some very perceptive comments about the island and its people in his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, left after his second visit exactly 150 years to the day that Horace Walpole, the progenitor of the Gothic novel, coined the word serendipity on January 28th, 1754.

Then there is Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who steamed into Colombo harbour for a visit that would turn out to be longer than he expected in “late January 1956”, as his biographer Neil McAleer states in Odyssey. The ship had left Tilbury in the “first week of January”, so it is conceivable – some would say inevitable - that it arrived in Colombo on the 28th, 202 years after Walpole’s brilliant creation.

Finally, in the realm of fiction, Jules Verne chose January 28th, 1868, as the day that Captain Nemo and his fellow submariners aboard the Nautilus first caught sight of the island in Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea. “The first thing I noticed was a range of mountains about 2,000 feet high, the shapes of which were most capricious. On taking the bearings, I knew that we were nearing the Island of Ceylon,” as the character Arranax remarks.

Now let’s move on to the curious, incongruent trio of the aforementioned Crowley, together with C.G. Jung and D.H. Lawrence. Jung, the 20th-century’s master physician of the soul, interpreter of symbols, and intrepid explorer of the human mind, visited Ceylon in 1938. Six years later he suffered a near-death experience in which, as he reported in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he found himself floating in earth orbit above the island. Crowley admits he was influenced by Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious in writing his voluminous autobiography, which, ironically, Jung described as being “beastly beyond words”.

When Jung went to Taos in New Mexico in 1925 he had the same Indian guide as D.H. and Frieda Lawrence the previous year. D.H. Lawrence has been described as “the perennial searcher after pre-industrial wisdom”, yet he was one visitor to Ceylon who failed to value the experience. “He found the little temples vulgar, the faces of the yellow-robed, shaven-headed monks nasty. As for the birds and beasts of which he was usually so fond, they ‘hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day’”, as his biographer Brenda Maddox reports in The Married Man.

It transpired that the paths of Jung and Lawrence were destined never to cross, which is perhaps just as well, for it is unlikely they would have got on, since Jung regarded Lawrence as a Freudian in all but name. “D.H. Lawrence exaggerated the importance of sex because he was excessively influenced by his mother,” Jung opined. “He over-emphasised women because he was still a child and was unable to integrate himself with the world.” This statement, incidentally, came from a psychoanalyst whose unconscionable professional ethics permitted him to seduce many of his female patients. Don’t be fooled by Jung’s avuncular appearance.

Crowley was not very flattering about Lawrence either, dismissing his eroticism as something that “appeals to the appetite of the unintelligent” and declaring that “love stories such as his are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty”. While Crowley realised that the modern school of fiction – exemplified for him by Bronte, Hardy and Lawrence – had a healthy attitude towards sexual relations, he also understood the flawed nature of its themes, in that “the exaggeration of the importance of such relations leads to disaster”.

Then there is the fact that Frieda Lawrence had a well-documented affair with the doomed psychoanalyst Otto Gross. During the early years of the 20th century, Gross and Jung were Freud’s favourite disciples. Knowing Jung’s and Frieda Lawrence’s sexual natures it is tempting to speculate on what may have happened if they had met.

The last of the trio, zoologist Ernst Haeckel, is important to 21st-century humankind as he was the originator of the concept of ecology. Yet despite his respectable background, Haeckel was habitually fraudulent in his scientific work. For instance, it is said he invented the theory of recapitulation - the notion that the development of the embryo follows the stages of evolutionary development - by doctoring the evidence.

Haeckel visited Ceylon in 1881-1882, spending time in marine research at Weligama and painting some magnificent pictures. His account, A Visit to Ceylon, was published in 1883, while his pictures appeared in Wanderbilder in 1905-06. Crowley was a great admirer of Haeckel’s theories. “I had considerable opinion of the intelligence of Germans, dating from the time in my boyhood when Helmholtz was the great name in physics, Haeckel in biology, Mommesen in history, Goethe in poetry” he confesses.

Before bidding adieu to Crowley, it should be mentioned that if he had gone hunting in the Hambantota district just six years after he actually did, he would have had to acquire a gun and gaming licence issued by Leonard Woolf. It is intriguing to imagine an encounter between these very different Englishmen – an encounter that would no doubt have featured in their autobiographies, thereby providing more connections and references for the obsessive researcher.

As a young man, Lawrence was, like Crowley, highly influenced by Haeckel. Lawrence read theology, history and philosophy with particular avidity, and is known to have walked around his home town with copies of the works of Darwin, Haeckel and Huxley. Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe produced in Lawrence what he later described as his “own temporary adherence to Monism”. It has been claimed that William James’ Pragmatism probably did more than anything else to steer Lawrence away from Haeckel’s philosophy.

While there is little trace of Darwin and Huxley in Lawrence’s work, Haeckel certainly left his mark. Several Haeckelian characters inhabit Lawrence’s early fiction, such as the tragic materialist, Annable, in The White Peacock and Dr Frankstone in The Rainbow. Lawrence’s brother bought the 22 volumes of the International Library of Famous Literature. Lawrence is supposed to have read this anthology thoroughly, which is of interest because included is an extract from Haeckel’s A Visit to Ceylon.

And with that I’d better start searching for similar long-forgotten notes on the subject . . .