x 9 The Secret Lfe of Nature
has compiled a bibliography of almost a thousand books and papers
written by professional academics on various facets of shamanism
around the globe, dealing with such occult lore as out-of-body travel,
forests teeming with spirits, and the healing power of plants. Were
shamans not gifted with some supernaturally subtle clairvoyant view of
nature, especially of the curative properties of particular plants among
the scores of deadly poisonous ones, the forest would surely be strewn
with the corpses of the experimenters. Shamans must be seeing some-
thing in some other dimension.
But whereas the integrity of the shamanic tradition, once laughed
at as primitive fantasy, has been revalued in recent years and much of
what it has to say about the spiritual dimension underlying and up-
holding the physical dimension is being taken seriously by specialists in
fields from psychology to physics, the occult side of the primordial
wisdom tradition, though in many ways more comprehensive than the
shamanic and more understandable to a modern Western tempera-
ment, is deliberately ignored. Why?
It is ignored largely because of the false and unnecessary stigmas at-
tached by an ignorant or ossified establishment to occult authors such
as Leadbeater, Besant, Blavatsky, Steiner. These stignlas fester for the
most part because the writings of these authors are simply too "far
out." All were subjected to the standard vituperation of theVictorian
era, as often as not salaciously sexual. Besant, a suffragette and political
activist for women's rights, considered by Bernard Shaw the greatest
orator of her time, was pilloried, not for her political ideas, but for hav-
ing too explicitly explained to poor women the mechanics of contra-
ception. Imprisoned in the Old Bailey as a pornographer, she was the
first woman in Britain to defend herself in court and to obtain acquit-
tal. But her daughter was torn from her by the Lord Chancellor on the
grounds that as a freethinker she was unfit to be a mother. Leadbeater,
anticipating Wilhelm Reich's revolutionary insight into sexual frustra-
tion and the compulsive violence, sadism, and war that it engenders,
was ostracized, accused of "molesting" small boys when he suggested
masturbation as a healthier relief than violence. Blavatsky's reputation
was destroyed by a sting operation mounted by the British Society for