The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary: Magical Antiquarian, A Weiser Books Collection

By Councillor D'Eckartshausen

Master of modern occultism, Lon Milo DuQuette, (author of Enochian Vision Magick and The Magick of Aleister Crowley) introduces the newest Weiser Books Collection – The Magical Antiquarian Curiosity Shoppe. Culled from material long unavailable to the general public, DuQuette curates this essential new digital library with the eye of a scholar and the insight of an initiate.

Translated by Isabel de Steige, Introduction by A.E. Waite

What if all the great religious, philosophical, social, and economic movements were part of a master plan facilitated by secret chiefs for the benefit of evolution toward godhead?

The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen is the document that introduced this concept to the 19th century occult communities. It is the work that inspired Aleister Crowley to pursue the Golden Dawn and magick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781619400726

Councillor D'Eckartshausen

Karl von Eckartshausen (28 June 1752 – 12 May 1803) was a German Catholic mystic, author, and philosopher. Born in Haimhausen, Bavaria, Eckartshausen studied philosophy and Bavarian civil law in Munich and Ingolstadt. He was the author of The Cloud upon the Sanctuary (de: Die Wolke über dem Heiligtum), a work of Christian mysticism which was later taken up by occultists. The book was given a high status in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, particularly by Arthur Edward Waite. It is known to have attracted English author and the founder of Thelema, Aleister Crowley, to the Order. Later he joined the order of the Illuminati founded by Adam Weishaupt, but "withdrew his membership soon after discovering that this order only recognized enlightenment through human reason." Karl von Eckartshausen was acquainted with Johann Georg Schröpfer, an early pioneer of phantasmagoria, and himself experimented with the use of magic lanterns to create "ghost projections" in front of an audience of four or five people.

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Introduction to the Weiser Book Collection Edition

The Cloud upon the Sanctuary has, I believe, always remained in the memory of a few, and is destined still to survive, for it carries with it a message of very deep significance to all those who look beneath the body of religious doctrine for the one principle of life which energizes the whole organism.

—ARTHUR E. WAITE

Even the most Pollyanna-ish among us will not deny that there is much unpleasantness in the world around us: wars and disease, hatred and discord. There seems to be no limit to the crimes and atrocities our kind is capable of and willing to inflict on each other.It's easy for us to disparage as evil the fundamental character of human nature, and ultimately resign ourselves to lives of quiet desperation, surviving daytoday by means of our moment-to-moment success in choosing the lesser evils.

It is easy to grow cynical and discouraged when pondering the state of affairs on planet Earth. The nightly newscasts lay out a dinnertime smorgasbord of military conflicts, famines, civil unrest, and economic ruin. It is cold comfort to observe that there has never been a season in all of recorded history that has been free of such suffering, injustice, and shameful displays of man's inhumanity to man. One can argue quite convincingly that civilization, indeed all human enterprise, has always been and forever shall be driven by the cruel and ignoble motives of the greed and avarice of the human heart.

It is also not too much of a jump in logic to assume that all this unpleasantness (which we are helpless to resist or vanquish) is the result of a master plan hatched by villains whose embrace of absolute evil has reached perverted spiritual dimensions.

Everywhere we turn—on the Internet, in the newspapers, on television and radio—conspiracy theories and theorists assail us with plots and intrigues hatched by governments and industries—and the secret societies that run the governments and industries—who allegedly use information as disinformation to confuse and befuddle us, making us pawns in some monstrous plan for world domination, space alien cuisine, or something transcendently naughty.

Ironically, many of these conspiracy theories and theorists seem to have fallen victim to their own distrust of the obvious and, with the wagging finger of accusatory paranoia, have singled out the very organizations and movements most vocally opposed to the evils they fear and despise. Such is the danger of trying to out dis-inform the dis-informed.

Thus the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and the Illuminati, societies and movements that were founded upon the most admirable ideals of freedom of thought and the Brotherhood of Man are now the agents of Satan, or the monolithic Church, or the world bankers, or the Jews, or reptilian space aliens.

At the same time, unless we have allowed ourselves to be completely overwhelmed by the depressing conditions wrought by the world's evils, we are forced to acknowledge what appears to be evidence of evolving consciousness—in particular the breathtaking advances in human thought, arts, and sciences—quantum leaps that in a few short decades have elevated the conversation from arguments over how many days it took for God to create heaven and earth to whether or not a particle traveling faster than the speed of light moves backward in time.

The theosophicand magical movements of the late nineteenth century optimistically latched on to the same idea as the conspiracy theorists that such a master plan does indeed exist—but that it is good rather than evil—that it is facilitated by enlightened beings who have transcendently good motives, and that humanity advances and evolves spiritually at least partially because of their secret efforts on our behalf. Such is the premise (and the promise) of The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary.

The inimitable occultist and writer Arthur Edward Waite (who suggested the text to a young and impressionable Aleister Crowley) offers us a most thorough and erudite introduction to this edition of the classic work. And it is with particular pleasure that I present it now to you.

LON MILO DUQUETTE

COSTA MESA, CALIFORNIA, 2012

INTRODUCTION

APART from The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, Eckartshausen is a name only to the Christian Transcendentalists of England. He wrote much, and at his period and in his place, he exercised some considerable influence; but his other works are practically unknown among us, while in Germany the majority at least seem forgotten, even among the special class to which some of them might be assumed to appeal. The Cloud upon the Sanctuary has, I believe, always remained in the memory of a few, and is destined still to survive, for it carries with it a message of very deep significance to all those who look beneath the body of religious doctrine for the one principle of life which energizes the whole organism. This translation has offered it for the first time to English readers, and it enters here upon the third phase of its existence. It appeared originally in the pages of The Unknown World, a magazine devoted to the deeper understanding of philosophical and mystical religion, and it was afterwards republished in volume form, of which edition this is a new issue. It has attracted very considerable attention and deserved it; it has even been translated into French, under the auspices of the late Countess of Caithness, for the pages of L'Aurore. These few words of bibliography are not unnecessary because they establish the fact that there has been some little sentiment of interest working within a restricted circle, as one may hope, towards a more general diffusion and knowledge of a document which is at once suggestive from the literary standpoint and profoundly moving from other and higher considerations. It encourages me to think that many persons who know and appreciate it now, or may come under its influence in the future, will learn with pleasure the little that I can tell them of its author, the CouncillorEckartshausen, and of certain other books not of his writing, which, as I think, connect therewith, and the study of which may help us to understand its message.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that I can say at the beginning concerning Eckartshausen is that he connects with that group of Theosophists of which Lavater was so important a figure, the Baron Kirchberger an accomplished and interesting recorder, and Louis Claude de Saint-Martin a correspondent in France and a certain source of leading. In his letters to Saint-Martin, Kirchberger says that Eckartshausen, with whom he was in frequent communication, was a man of immense reading and wonderful fertility; he regarded him in other respects as an extraordinary personage, whatever way providence may have led him. It would appear that at this period, namely, in 1795, Eckartshausen was looking for and obtaining his chief light from the mystical study of numbers, but was also, to use the veiled and cautious language of the correspondence, in enjoyment of more direct favours. Saint-Martin confesses on his own part that he was more interested in Eckartshausen than he could express. Kirchberger must have held him in even higher estimation, and undertook