Science, Religion, and Magic in James Blish's "After Such Knowledge" Sequence.
James Blish was a science fiction writer who possessed a remarkable range of scientific, historical, literary, and theological knowledge, which included some detailed research into the history of the Occult (he was at one time contracted to write "A History of Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic"). As Brian Aldiss puts it: "Knowledge was Blish's passion. He was an irreplaceable mixture of savant, plain hack, and visionary" (Trillion 240). Despite being the subject of a major critical monograph by David Ketterer in 1987, he has had relatively little critical attention paid to him in the last twenty-five years. (1) This may be partly because his work, like that of many sf writers, was often uneven, with most of his undisputed artistic successes being in the (critically neglected) form of short stories such as "Surface Tension" (1952), "Common Time" (1953), "Beep" (1954), "A Work of Art" (1956), and "How Beautiful with Banners" (1966). His "Cities in Flight" sequence of novels, which is informed by a Spenglerian interest in the cycles of civilization, also has many admirers but his "major contribution to modern literature" (Stableford 52) is a different sequence of novels, published between 1958 and 1970, which he retrospectively grouped together under the heading "After Such Knowledge." In this sequence, generic SF collides interestingly with other literary forms, and the scientific pursuit of knowledge is challenged by religious and Occult discourses.Four novels make up the "After Such Knowledge" sequence: A Case of Conscience (1958), a work of theologically inflected sf, set in 2049-50, about the dilemma of a Jesuit scientist when confronted with an apparently sinless alien civilization that has no concept of God; Doctor Mirabilis (1964), a historical novel about the medieval scientist Roger Bacon, who was often alleged to have Occult powers; and Black Easter or Faust Aleph-Null (1968) and The Day After Judgement (2) (1970), two linked Occult fantasies set in the present about an arms manufacturer who hires a black magician to release numerous devils into the world for one night, causing World War III and Armageddon, in which God is quickly defeated and Hell established on Earth.
After finishing Black Easter, Blish wrote:
I realized that I had now written three novels, widely separated in times of composition and even more in ostensible subject-matter, each one of which was a dramatization in its own terms of one of the oldest problems of philosophy: Is the desire for secular knowledge, let alone the acquisition and use of it, a misuse of the mind, and perhaps even actively evil? ("A Science-Fiction Coming of Age" 165)
Even after writing a continuation of Black Easter he continued to regard the sequence as a "trilogy," and this hesitation between three and four may itself have symbolic significance, since in some numerological schemes three represents the spiritual (the Trinity and the three kinds of Platonic soul) and four the material (the four elements), which taken together form a cosmic unity. C. G. Jung, for whom the quaternity was always the central symbol of psychological wholeness and balance, referred often in his works to "that strange dilemma which is posed by the problem of three and four" (Alchemical Studies 224) or "the dilemma of 3 + 1" (Aion 224), evident in many alchemical writings. Says Jung,
The number three is not a natural expression of wholeness, since four represents the minimum number of determinants in a whole judgement. It must nevertheless be stressed that side by side with the distinct leanings of alchemy (and of the unconscious) towards quaternity there is always a vacillation between three and four which comes out over and over again ... Thus the uncertainty as to three and four amounts to a wavering between the spiritual and the physical. (Psychology and Alchemy 26-7)
Jung's numerological dilemma finds some analogies in David Ketterer's argument about the significance of the numbers three and four in Blish's sequence, which he linked to the movement from a three-dimensional to a four-dimensional universe that sf has claimed to provide ever since H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Ketterer derived part of his argument (and the title of his book) from Blish's use in The Day After Judgment of the rare word "tesseract" (a four-dimensional analogue of a three-dimensional cube, which also happened to be the title of a sf fan magazine to which the young Blish had contributed): "Although constrained by a three-dimensional present, the implication is that science fiction may afford some kind of enhanced perception of our reality by evoking an awareness of the fourth dimension" (Ketterer 318). And, indeed, Ketterer thought that in the movement from Black Easter to The Day After Judgement "a threefold vision has been transformed into a fourfold vision" (313).
Blish's comments about his retrospectively constructed "sequence" of three (or four) novels and the epigraph that he attached to the last of them, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" (from T. S. Eliot's "Gerontion"), make it easy enough to read all the novels as parables of "dangerous knowledge," a favorite theme of sf writers since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and one that goes all the way back to the Forbidden Tree in the Book of Genesis. The whispering "Self" that instills Roger Bacon with a "lust to know" may be a demon rather than a daemon and eventually the black magician Theron Ware brings about World War III in order to satisfy his curiosity rather than for any material benefit.
More precisely, the four novels stage a confrontation between science and religion played out over an 800-year timespan and corresponding, at some level, to an argument Blish was conducting with himself. As a teenager he had rejected his mother's belief in Christian Science, which he said "must be the silliest and least exciting religion the West has ever contrived" ("A Science-Fiction Coming of Age" 163) and become, at best, an agnostic. However, despite initially pursuing a scientific career by completing a degree in microbiology and beginning postgraduate work in zoology, he maintained a lifelong interest in theological issues and, towards the end of his life, became an admirer of C. S. Lewis, to whom Black Easter was dedicated. "Christian Science" might have seemed a ridiculous creed but the idea of a rapprochement between religion and science continued to haunt him. Brian Aldiss concluded: "My guess is that, while Blish liked turning our ideas upside down, he also longed for some sort of acceptance in which standard religion could take its place beside a rigorous science. He saw a contradiction between the two systems and wished to bridge it" ("James Blish" 47).
The conflict between religion and science and its possible resolution is a major theme of many sf stories, but by introducing Occult material Blish significantly complicated the argument. "By putting demonology up against science and reversing the normal SF balance between the scientific and the 'transcendental' in [Black Easter and The Day After Judgement], he found a way of avoiding, surmounting, and transforming the controlling cliches of SF" (Ketterer 319). The strange generic clashes within the whole sequence (sf, historical fiction, Occult fantasy) and the contradictions that are openly paraded within individual novels (for instance concerning the status of "white magic") become a way of ceaselessly shuffling and reshuffling the relations between science, religion, and magic in a restless search for valid forms of knowledge. The conclusion of that search depends to some extent on whether the novels are read in the order of their original composition or in the order of their fictional time frames. When the four novels were finally published together in one volume in 1991, they were placed in the latter sequence, which was the reading order Blish himself recommended. Read in that order, the novels invert the grand narrative that Sir James Frazer developed in the second and third editions of The Golden Bough wherein, as civilization evolves, magic gradually gives way to religion which is, in turn, gradually supplanted by science.
However, it might be truer to say that Frazer himself had already subverted his own grand narrative of progressive enlightenment ("the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to science" [711]) by pointing out some of the ways in which magic can resemble science more than it does religion (which for Frazer always involves the "propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man" [50]):
Whenever sympathetic magic occurs in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature ... Thus the analogy between the magical and scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world. Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. (48-9)
Passages like this have been very influential on sf writers seeking to give systematized and rationalized accounts of magic, as in Robert Heinlein's early story "Magic Inc." (first published as "The Devil Makes the Law" [1940]), in which the protagonist is actually called Fraser. Blish's interpretation of the close relationship between magic and science is rather different since in his case the magic involves the conjuration of demons and is therefore much more closely entwined with religion. For Frazer, however, even in cases of conjuration, the element of compulsion rather than propitiation in ritual magic still makes magic "the bastard sister of science":
It is true that magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as religion would do. (51)
In order to understand the particular way in which Blish exploits the Occult to complicate the conflict between religion and science, it is necessary to give some account of all four novels in the sequence.
A Case of Conscience is by some way the most artistically successful of the four, despite being a slightly awkward expansion of a previous version. It has attracted the most critical attention and been described by David Ketterer as one of "the few genuine classics of the genre" (1), (3) the genre in this case being specifically sf rather than fantasy more generally. When reviewing the first novella-length version of the book (published in 1953) under the pseudonym he adopted as a critic, "William Atheling, Jr.," (4) Blish declared it to be symptomatic of the increased interest in religion shown by sf since the successful development and use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II. It was one of a number of sf stories published at that time that were "instruments of a chiliastic crisis, of a magnitude we have not seen since the world-wide panic of 999 A.D., when everyone expected the Second Coming and the Last Judgment on the next New Year's Morning, and nobody in his heart of hearts could bring himself to believe in the forgiveness of Christ" (Blish, "Cathedrals in Space" 59). (5) This (self)-analysis makes it clear how genuinely close the first novel in the sequence is to the two Occult fantasies of World War III and Armageddon that conclude it. In Black Easter Blish puts into the mouth of the scientist Adolf Hess, who is struggling to accommodate his rationalist worldview to the apparent demonic conjuration he has witnessed, an expanded version of the same insight (now addressed to the arms manufacturer Baines):
I think the human mind goes through a sort of cycle of fear. It can only take so much accumulated knowledge, and then it panics, and starts inventing reasons to throw everything over and go back to a Dark Age ... every time with a new, invented mystical reason.... The last time was the chiliastic panics just before the year A.D. 1000, when everyone expected the Second Coming of Christ and realized that they didn't dare face up to Him. That was the heart, the centre, the whole reason of the Dark Ages. Well, we've got another millennium coming to a close now, and people are terrified of our secularization, our nuclear and biological weapons, our computers, our overprotective medicine, everything, and they're turning back to the worship of unreason ... Some people these days worship flying saucers because they don't dare face up to Christ. You've turned to black magic. Where's the difference? (Black Easter 119-20)
The flight from reason takes a morally and theologically paradoxical form in A Case of Conscience. A Jesuit biologist, Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, who is part of a small scientific expedition to the planet Lithia, encounters a race of twelve-foot reptiles who appear to lead rational, ordered, moral lives, though without poetry or other creative arts or even any recourse to metaphor, and without any religious belief.
[A]ll of it derived from reason, none from precept, none from faith. The Lithians did not know God. They did things rightly, and thought righteously, because it was reasonable and efficient and natural to do and to think that way. They seemed to need nothing else.
Did they never have night thoughts? Was it possible that there could exist in the universe a reasoning being of a high order, which was never for an instant paralysed by the sudden question, the terror of seeing through to the meaninglessness of action, the blindness of knowledge, the barrenness of having been born at all? (41-2)
The other scientists vote to open the planet up for mining, since the lithium it possesses in abundance is crucial to the manufacture of fusion bombs, and the least sympathetic of them concedes that this will have to involve a form of slave labor since there is no financial or other inducement which would succeed with the Lithians. Father Ruiz-Sanchez's fierce opposition to this scheme allows religion to mount an effective moral critique of the scientific drive towards mastery and exploitation of the natural world and other living beings but he then becomes trapped in "some rarefied theological torture" of his own, concluding that this sinless, Godless civilization must be a creation of the devil.
The disastrous consequences that flow from bringing an individual Lithian back to Earth seem to confirm Ruiz-Sanchez in his analysis and he attempts an act of exorcism that happens to coincide with a dangerous, in fact foolhardy, scientific experiment being carried out on Lithia. From whatever cause, the planet vanishes in a thermonuclear blast, leaving us to ponder which kind of knowledge is the more dangerous: a religion still in the grip of magical thinking and with a tendency to demonize whatever it does not understand, or a science that is ruthlessly instrumental and at the same time oblivious to any possibility that it might have miscalculated? (6)
Doctor Mirabilis seems to me the least successful book in the sequence, though Brian Stableford by contrast sees it, along with the novella version of A Case of Conscience, as one of "the finest examples of Blish's work" (55). Blish was proud of his extensive research into the Middle Ages, but the story frequently gets bogged down in authentic but only marginally relevant historical detail. The novel shows science struggling to emerge against religious opposition and accusations of black magic and generates a good deal of sympathy for Bacon as a dedicated and driven seeker of the truth for its own sake: "Nor do I run after knowledge for greed or pomposity, but out of the lust to know, which I count holy" (Doctor Mirabilis 81). We are encouraged to share his dream of a universally valid form of knowledge that incorporates a moral perspective grounded in that knowledge:
First, the vision of a universal science which had begun to haunt him ever since he had first read the Secret of Secrets; next, the domain of experimental versus revealed knowledge; and finally, the domain of the moral law, which could be allowed supremacy over the other two, but only in so far as it could be shown to derive from them. (202)
This vision seems to offer a grand synthesis of science, morality and religion, whilst firmly excluding the sorcery and magic of which Bacon was often accused by his contemporaries. (7) The ambiguities of A Case of Conscience are not dispelled, however. They arise from the broad semantic field of the word "lust" and from doubts about the source of this "lust to know," which is "the voiceless, persuasive whisper of Roger Bacon's imprisoned demon Self' (Doctor Mirabilis 246).
Doctor Mirabilis, like the first novel, also raises the question of whether there is a fundamental incommensurability between different forms of knowledge, which precludes any final grand synthesis. "It is not reasonable to suppose that Aristotle knew the number of the Elect," declares Albertus Magnus, one of Bacon's rivals (123). This then becomes the epigraph for Black Easter which, together with its sequel, poses the greatest challenge to the modern reader by taking it for granted that magic does work and that devils do exist, something that bends to a breaking point the generic conventions of sf (not to mention historical fiction) and requires a different orientation of the reader towards the text. Nevertheless, the short versions of both Black Easter and The Day After Judgement were initially published in sf magazines (the former in If [1967], the latter in Galaxy [1970]) and the Penguin paperback editions of both novels (though not the Faber hardbacks) were prominently labeled "Science Fiction."
Throughout the short history of sf as a distinct literary genre, writers, editors, and critics have often tried to establish and police the boundaries between sf and other forms of fantastic literature. For instance, according to Roger Luckhurst, "Rigorous conceptual distinction has helped fix a categorization whereby SF equals the acceptance of natural law, the exercise of reason and the frameworks of science and history, whilst fantasy equals supernaturalism, oneirism and the frameworks of magic and myth" (Science Fiction 124). The influential Marxist critic Darko Suvin has been one of the main upholders of this distinction, as has one of the authors he most admires, the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, who writes: "It is the premise of science fiction that anything shown shall in principle be interpretable empirically and rationally. In science fiction there can be no inexplicable marvels, no transcendences, no devils or demons--and the pattern of occurrences must be verisimilar" (35; my italics). James Blish himself appeared at times to subscribe to the same formal distinction between sf and fantasy: "In my opinion--in my profoundly religious opinion, I might add--it is the duty of the conscientious science fiction writer not to falsify what he believes to be known fact" ("The Science in Science Fiction" 44). However, as Blish's mischievous use of the word "religious" implies, the reality is that sf has been from its beginnings an impure genre, closely entwined with fantasies of the supernatural and the paranormal. For example, one of Blish's early stories, "There Shall Be No Darkness" (1950), offered a "scientific" explanation of werewolves. As Roger Luckhurst argues, the "niche habitat" of sf is not so much "within" normal science as in "the temporary intervals when knowledge is controversial or in flux, in the phase- space between anomaly and normalization" ("Pseudoscience" 404-5), a space occupied by phenomena such as telepathy, time travel, and faster-than-light speeds. However, there is no "scientific" explanation of black magic and the rituals of demonic conjuration offered in Blish's two novels. Rather, it is a flat "given" that demons exist and that they can be controlled in the ways set out in the various grimoires that have survived. (8) Not surprisingly, reactions from within the sf community were very mixed. Brian Aldiss thought that in Black Easter "Blish creates possibly his finest novel" (9) and the Times Literary Supplement reviewer called it "powerful and chilling" (Anon 287), but M. John Harrison wrote that, "His shoddily-constructed stew of alchemy and black magic succeeds only in being pretentious" (49).
Blish made strenuous efforts to authenticate his use of Occult material, giving it historical credibility by basing it all on "the writings and actual working manuals of practising magicians working in the Christian tradition from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries" (Black Easter "Author's Note"). He drew heavily on Arthur Edward Waite's The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1911), first published in 1898 as The Book of Magic and Pacts, but also consulted many of the original manuscripts and early printed books, including the Grand Grimoire, the Grimorium Verum, the Key of Solomon, and the Lemegeton (or Lesser Key). This scholarly research enabled him to give detailed step-by- step descriptions of the actual processes of conjuration and the names and precise physical appearance of the demons Theron Ware releases from Hell for one night. The magician's primary pact is with Lucifuge Rofocale, designated the "Prime Minister of Hell" in the Grand Grimoire, but this pact gives Ware power over a further eighty-nine devils, forty-eight of whom he chooses to let loose upon the world in accordance with Baines's instructions. This gives Blish the opportunity for a virtuoso display of arcane knowledge, which he delivers largely without irony, as if he were recounting the wonders of the physical universe in a more orthodox sf novel:
The demons flashed in a nightmare parade: RAYM, earl of the Order of the Thrones, a man with a crow's head; SEPAR, a mermaid wearing a ducal crown; SABURAC, a lion-headed soldier upon a pale horse; BIFRONS, a great earl in the shape of a gigantic flea; ZAGAN, a griffin-winged bull; ANDRAS, a raven-headed angel with a bright sword, astride a black wolf; ANDREALPHUS, a peacock appearing amid the noise of many unseen birds; AMDUSCIAS, a unicorn among many musicians; DANTALIAN, a mighty duke in the form of a man but showing many faces both of men and women, with a book in his right hand; and at long last, that mighty king created next after LUCIFER and the first to fall in battle before MICHAEL, formerly of the Order of the Virtues, BELIAL himself, beautiful and deadly in a chariot of fire as he had been worshipped in Babylon. (Black Easter 112)
Only occasionally, as in the description of ASMODAY, does a more sardonic note creep in and threaten the total suspension of disbelief on which the story normally depends:
This king also rode a dragon, and also had three heads--bull, man, and ram. All three heads breathed fire. The creature's feet were webbed, as were its hands, in which it carried a lance and pennon; and it had a serpent's tail. Fearsome enough; but Baines was beginning to note a certain narrowness of invention among these infernal artisans. (111)
The heavily researched and historically "authentic" details give the Occult elements some real rhetorical power and enable Blish to destabilize the simple opposition between religion and science by introducing a potent third force that closely resembles religion in its rituals and mythologies but has the instrumentality and amorality of modern science. (10) The magician Ware is "tonsured like a monk" and looks older than his real age, "like the scientists who worked for Consolidated Warfare Service" (25). We are told that "munitions and magic are circles that don't intersect very effectively" (31), a mismatch that is exploited for the purposes of black comedy in The Day After Judgement when the American Strategic Air Command attempts a massive, futile bombardment of the Dantesque Hell that has appeared in Death Valley. However, the equation between black magic and the scientific-military-industrial establishment is more commonly reinforced within the text (in the same way that Vietnam War demonstrators saw sinister significance in the shape of the Pentagon). The arms manufacturer Baines "practised what was literally an occult art" (Black Easter 41) and is precisely the same age as the magician Ware. He claims full responsibility for the nuclear catastrophe that has been unleashed and is not bothered about whether it was provoked by the conjuration of demons for which he paid Ware or by more secular means:
[I]t's our outcome. We contracted for it. Demons, saucers, fallout--what's the difference? Those are just signs in the equation, parameters we can fill any way that makes the most intermediate sense to us. Are you happier with electrons than with demons? Okay, good for you. But what I like, Adolph, what I like is the result. I don't give a damn about the means. I invented it, I called it into being, I'm paying for it--and no matter how else you describe it, I made it, and it's mine. Is that clear? It's mine. (120-1)
The moral equivalence between black magic and nuclear technology is here made fully explicit. Arthur C. Clarke famously proclaimed as the third of his three "Laws" that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Clarke 182), (11) a dictum that many sf writers have used to justify their exploitation of "supernatural" effects that ultimately prove to be capable of rationalization. The "Law" governing Blish's two Occult fantasies would be better expressed as: "Any technology sufficiently advanced to develop nuclear weapons is indistinguishable from the practice of black magic in its destructive pursuit of power and knowledge." Science itself has become satanic, as it had done in C. S. Lewis's "Cosmic Trilogy" (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) and the scientist Hess is the one character literally devoured by a demon at the end of Black Easter. Looking back on this incident, Father Domenico reminds the others that, "The thing which called itself Screwtape let slip to Lewis that demons do eat souls" (Blish, The Day After Judgement 19).
Despite Gothic moments such as this, the most striking thing about the black magician Theron Ware is his cool amorality rather than any more melodramatic form of evil. He does have scruples about whom he kills but these "scruples" seem closer to the dictionary meaning of "measurable units of weight" than to "stirrings of conscience," since the more "scruples" he has, the higher the fee he charges for his murders. For him, "black magic is a body of technique, like engineering" (Black Easter 23). He has a scientist's desire for knowledge and a scientist's real power over the material world but his practically effective operations are empty of any real meaning. When asked what the writings on his various magical implements mean, he replies:
Mean? They can hardly be said to mean anything any more. They're greatly degenerate Hebrew characters, originally comprising various Divine Names. I could tell you what the Names were once, but the characters have no content any more--they just have to be there. (59)
The connection with the operations of science is made manifest when Ware carries out Baines's commission to murder a leading theoretical physicist, Albert Stockhausen, whose blameless personal life (he is "sinless" like the Lithians) makes him a difficult target for demonic entrapment. Ware sends a demon to him who shows him "as it were to come from his own intellectual soul, a vision of the ultimate Nothingness which lurks behind those signs he calls matter and energy" (68), a vision that drives him to despair and suicide. The infernal City of Dis that appears in Death Valley in The Day After Judgement is revealed eventually to be "a clean, well-lighted city, like an illustration from some Utopian romance" of scientific and technological advancement (The Day After Judgement 150). The devils "had ingeniously embodied in their citadel nothing worse than a summary and epitomization of what pre-Apocalyptic, post-industrial man had been systematically creating for himself' (152).
Both science and magic have real power within the world but prove to be ultimately empty, whereas religion (in the form of the monks who practice white magic) seems well meaning but powerless (constrained by a strange Covenant between God and Satan). At the end of Black Easter we are told, albeit by a demon, that "God is dead" and in The Day After Judgement Satan declines to fill the vacant position. In a lengthy and bravura pastiche of Miltonic blank verse he announces that he now knows that he never wanted to be God at all, "And so, by winning all, All have I lost" (The Day After Judgement 162) and begs Man to take the cup from him. Men must now look within themselves for the kind of truth and knowledge that could make an ethical difference.
It is tempting to associate Blish's use of Occult elements in two of his late novels with the resurgence of interest in the Occult which took place in the 1960s. Black Easter was published the same year (1968) the film Rosemary's Baby was released and two years after Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in California. It may not be coincidental that Blish chooses California as the place where Hell breaks through the surface of the Earth in The Day After Judgement, nor that he gives special prominence to PUT SATANACHIA (or Baphomet, the Sabbath Goat), whose sigil was the only occult symbol depicted in LaVey's Satanic Bible. (12) Certainly these convergences would have made it easier for Blish to find a publisher.
It is also tempting to credit him with an early awareness, anticipating a good deal of recent academic work, that modern occultism (beginning in the late nineteenth century) was much more than a simple reaction against the modern and against the disenchantment of the world brought about by scientific thinking, but was rather something which was "itself constitutive or symptomatic of key elements of modern culture" (Owen 8). (13) In fact, though, Blish's particular sense of the relationship between the Occult and the modern is very much his own and differs considerably from the arguments put forward by subsequent scholars. Rather than being a spiritually-motivated response to the death of God and a form of "transcendence for a post-transcendental age" (Laqueur 128), the Occult in "After Such Knowledge" becomes a way of confirming the death of God, whom we ourselves have killed in our insatiable thirst for knowledge. Blish makes, in the end, no distinction between "white" and "black" magic (and here he is following the line taken by A.E. Waite): "All magic--I repeat, all magic, with no exceptions whatsoever--depends upon the control of demons" (Blish, Black Easter 26). (14) For Blish, the absence of moral purpose at the heart of a magician's quest for knowledge and power is precisely equivalent to the scientific drive to know and master the natural world which has produced the means to destroy it. This insight had a specific historical context, the fears of nuclear catastrophe in the 1950s and 60s, but was also part of the author's personal quest for meaning.
The restless search for valid, ethically grounded knowledge dramatized within the sequence was expressive of a lifelong intellectual restlessness in Blish himself. He usually described himself as an atheist or agnostic (as in the Foreword to A Case of Conscience where he speaks of himself as "an agnostic with no position at all in these matters" [9]) but his partner in later life, Josephine Saxton, said of him: "If it were possible to be a Jesuit, a Calvinist and an Atheist all at once, then James Blish would have been all three" (Ketterer 321, n.8), which gives a more accurate picture of the tensions evident within his writing.
In a posthumously published essay, he returned to the Spenglerian ideas expressed by Hess in Black Easter about how civilizations experience cycles of secularization followed by resurgences of religious feeling, which, the second time round, are more eclectic and syncretistic. "This process ... leads inevitably to a revival of the occult, and here science and religion overlap, to the benefit of neither" (Blish, "Probapossible Prolegomena" 10). These words suggest little sympathy with the renewed interest in the Occult during the twentieth century (or with what David Morris has called the "Techno-Occultism" of writers like Erich von Daniken [Morris 7]) and no hint that Blish himself might take it seriously as a belief system, but they are followed by some interesting reflections on sf as the space where science, religion, and the Occult are brought into a close relationship with each other, making it the exemplary genre for this particular phase of history. "Science fiction," he says, is the "literary form taken by syncretism in the West. It adopts as its subject matter that occult area where a science in decay (elaborately decorated with technology) overlaps the second religiousness" ("Probapossible Prolegomena" 10).
This could be taken as an indictment of sf for merely exemplifying and reproducing the intellectual confusions of its era but could also be interpreted more positively. Blish's adoption and adaptation of this particular literary form allowed him to conduct a thought experiment that interestingly triangulated magic with religion and science as a way of posing serious moral questions about the pursuit of knowledge in an age of atomic weapons. If the sequence is taken as a whole, and especially if A Case of Conscience (with its very equivocal ending) were to be regarded as the last novel rather than the first, it is hard to judge whether it reaches any conclusions. In the two Occult fantasies, we ourselves have apparently killed God and Hell has been established on Earth, but as SATAN MEKRATRIG, who is now forced reluctantly to fill the vacant throne, concludes in Miltonic blank verse:
Wee do not know the end. Perhaps indeed Jehovah is not dead, But mere retir'd, withdrawn or otherwise Contracted hath, as Zohar subtle saith, His Essence Infinite; and, Epicurean, waits The outcome vast with vast indifference. (The Day After Judgement 161)
The demonology that is paraded so elaborately in Black Easter and The Day After Judgement seems primarily a way of representing the ethical void at the heart of modern science rather than a way of putting forward a genuine alternative belief system (whether Christian or Occult). It is unlikely that Blish himself arrived at any firm religious position despite his lifelong theological interests, his deep reservations about where the pursuit of scientific knowledge might be taking us, and his restless search for other kinds of meaning. Nevertheless, despite his very negative picture of magic in the two Occult fantasies, he could understand its attractiveness to thinkers disillusioned with more conventional religious and scientific world-views and would have identified strongly with Theron Ware's declaration: "I myself have the utmost respect for scientific method, but I know that it doesn't offer me the kind of knowledge I'm looking for." (Blish, Black Easter 62).
Notes
(1.) The detailed biographical and bibliographical information that Ketterer provides makes his book an essential resource for anyone who wishes to study James Blish. It had been preceded by Stableford's short but useful book in the Milford series. Shackley has offered some interesting reflections on Ketterer's book and subsequent publications on Blish include the essays by Lobdell and Thiess.
(2.) I follow the English spelling of "Judgement" used by the Faber edition from which I quote. American editions of the novel spell it as "Judgment."
(3.) It now suffers a little from comparison with an even more impressive sf novel about a disastrous Jesuit encounter with an alien civilization, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996). For readings of A Case of Conscience see Bradham, Rickard, Reilly, Burgess, Parkin-Speer, Ketterer, and Thiess.
(4.) "William Atheling" had been the pen-name used by Ezra Pound for a fortnightly music column he wrote for the literary magazine New Age between 1917 and 1920.
(5.) Since the late nineteenth century most historians have been skeptical about the idea of a "world-wide panic" preceding 1000 AD. However, it was certainly one of a number of dates (1033 was another) to which millennial expectations (filled with hope as much as with fear) attached themselves. See Landes.
(6.) In Derek Thiess's reading of the novel, the studied ambiguity of the ending serves mainly to occlude the way religious rhetoric in conjunction with state power (and the assumptions of the novel itself) can generate "monsters" (in this case the Lithians) whose exclusion is deemed necessary to the maintenance of a coherent society.
(7.) For the relationship between Bacon's reputation and his actual beliefs and practices see Clegg and Power.
(8.) For a good recent account of these, see Davies.
(9.) Excerpt from his Oxford Mail review of Black Easter quoted on the dust jacket of the Faber edition of The Day After Judgement.
(10.) According to Nachman Ben-Yehuda: "Modern occultism offers something traditional religion does not have--an alternative scientific paradigm, coupled with a 'scientifically' controlled belief system" (Ben-Yehuda 14).
(11.) The "Law" made its first appearance in the revised edition of Profiles of the Future (1982).
(12.) Although the Satanic Bible was not published until January 1970, its constituent elements had been circulating for some years.
(13.) See also Surette, Treitel, and Laqueur.
(14.) A.E. Waite concluded: "let us establish that the distinction between White and Black Magic is the distinction between the Lemegeton and the Grimoire of Honorius,--in other words, between cipher and zero" (Waite 220).
Works Cited
Aldiss, Brian. "James Blish: The Mathematics of Behaviour." Foundation 13 (May 1978): 43-50. Print.
--, with David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz, 1986. Print.
Anon. "SF--Old and New." Times Literary Supplement (20 March 1969): 287. Print.
Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. "The Revival of the Occult and of Science Fiction." Journal of Popular Culture 20.2 (1986): 1-16. Print.
Blish, James. A Case of Conscience. 1958. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963. Print.
--. "A Science-Fiction Coming of Age." The Tale That Wags the God. Ed. Cy Chauvin. Chicago: Advent, 1987. 139-69. Print.
--. Black Easter or Faust Aleph-Null. 1968. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972. Print.
-- [as "William Atheling, Jr."]. "Cathedrals in Space." The Issue at Hand. 2nd ed. Ed. Blish. Chicago: Advent, 1973. Print.
--. Doctor Mirabilis. 1964. St. Albans, UK: Panther Books, 1976. Print.
-- [as "William Atheling, Jr."]. "Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History." Foundation 13 (May 1978): 6-12. Print.
--. The Day After Judgement. 1970. London: Faber, 1972. Print.
--. "The Science in Science Fiction." The Tale That Wags the God. Ed. Cy Chauvin. Chicago: Advent, 1987. 35-45. Print.
Bradham, Jo Allen. "The Case in James Blish's A Case of Conscience." Extrapolation 16 (December 1974): 67-80. Print.
Burgess, Andrew J. "The Concept of Eden." The Transcendent Adventure: Studies of Religion in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Ed. Robert Reilly. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 73-81. Print.
Clarke, Arthur C. Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography. 1989. London: Gollancz, 1990. Print.
Clegg, Brian. The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon. London: Constable, 2003. Print.
Clute, John. "Scholia, Seasoned with Crabs, Blish Is." 1973. New Worlds: An Anthology. Ed. Michael Moorcock. London: Flamingo, 1983. 331-40. Print.
Davies, Owen. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Frazer, Sir James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abr. ed. London: Macmillan, 1922 (Rpt. 1941). Print.
Harrison, M. John. "A Devil of a Job." 1968. Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison. Ed. Mark Bould and Michelle Reid. London: Science Fiction Foundation, 2005. 49-51. Print.
Jung, C. G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. 2nd ed. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1968. Print.
--. Alchemical Studies. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. Print.
--. Psychology and Alchemy. 2nd ed. Trans. R. F .C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1968. Print.
Ketterer, David. Imprisoned in a Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1987. Print.
Landes, Richard. "The Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000: Augustinian Historiography, Medieval and Modern." Speculum 75:1 (Jan. 2000): 97-145. Print.
Laqueur, Thomas. "Why the Margins Matter: Occultism and the Making of Modernity." Modern Intellectual History 3:1 (2006): 111-35. Print.
Lem, Stanislaw. "On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction." Microworlds. Ed. Franz Rottensteiner. London: Mandarin, 1991. 31-44. Print.
Lobdell, Jared. "The Spenglerian City in James Blish's After Such Knowledge." Extrapolation 32:4 (Winter 1991): 309-18. Print.
Luckhurst, Roger. "Pseudoscience." The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. 403-12. Print.
--. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Print.
--. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Print.
Morris, David. The Masks of Lucifer: Technology and the Occult in Twentieth- Century Popular Literature. London: Batsford, 1992. Print.
Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 2004. Print.
Parkin-Speer, Diane. "Alien Ethics and Religion versus Fallen Mankind." The Transcendent Adventure: Studies of Religion in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Ed. Robert Reilly. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. 93-104. Print.
Reilly, Robert. "The Discerning Conscience." Extrapolation 18 (May 1977): 176- 80. Print.
Power, Amanda. "A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon." English Historical Review 121 (2006): 657-92. Print.
Rickard, Bob. "After Such Knowledge: James Blish's Tetralogy." A Multitude of Visions. Ed. Cy Chauvin. Baltimore: T-K Graphics, 1975. 24-34. Print.
Shackley, Paul. "James Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy: Reactions after Reading David Ketterer." New York Review of Science Fiction 21.10 (June 2009): 13-17. Print.
Stableford, Brian M. A Clash of Symbols: The Triumph of James Blish. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1979. Print.
Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 1993. Print.
Thiess, Derek J. "Religion, Monstrosity and the Sovereign Decision in Blish's A Case of Conscience." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 19.3 (2008): 331-48. Print.
Treitel, Corinna. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004. Print.
Waite, A. E. The Book of Ceremonial Magic: Including the Rites and Mysteries of Goetic Theurgy, Sorcery and Infernal Necromancy. 1911. London: Rider, 1987. Print.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Wymer, Rowland |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2013 |
| Words: | 7202 |
| Previous Article: | Fantasy Music: Epic Soundtracks, Magical Instruments, Musical Metaphysics. |
| Next Article: | Taking the Bite out of the Vagina Dentata: Latin American Women Authors' Fantastic Transformation of the Feline Fatale. |
| Topics: | |