Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE NEW AGE 65

profound analysis and synthesis of human psychology.” It became a forum for the discussion and exposition of the new developments that were taking place in psycho-analysis, and sometime during 1920 Orage formed a study group of practising psychologists to investigate psycho-analysis. It was during this period when the religious or spiritual dimensions of Orage’s mind and character were re-asserting themselves, perhaps as a counter-balance to the technicalities of Douglas’s social credit scheme, that he came under the influence of Mitrinovié.!!

Rowland Kenney, who was a member of the coterie of writers and artists associated with The New Age at the time of Mitrinovi¢’s arrival in London, was later to recall, “We were all immediately deeply impressed by Mitrinovic. Some of us were also deeply puzzled. We could never quite understand what he was, as they say, ‘getting at’’”’.!2 Paul Selver was similarly bemused, claiming that

Orage, to whom I introduced Mitrinovi¢, saw in him, I fancy, even more than I did, largely because he had far more in common with his ideas than I could possibly have. Orage’s interest in abstract thought and philosophical speculation was entirely beyond my range. The same remark applies to his familiarity with occult and transcendental matters, about which he was inclined to be reticent.!

This aspect of Orage’s persona was something of which a number of his associates were well aware. Outwardly he was a man of the world: urbane, witty, even ruthless at times, an avid follower of political trends and events, and a brilliant editor. Inwardly, according to Hugh MacDiarmid, quoting Beatrice Hastings, Orage “suffered from paranoic mystagoguery.”!4 Whilst to such people Orage’s spiritual strife appeared as an aberration, a deviation from the ‘essential Orage,’ others recognised it as a manifestation of a constant tension that had accompanied the man throughout his life. According to Edwin Muir, Orage, ever since his youth,

had taken up and followed creeds which seemed to provide a short-cut to intellectual and spiritual power. He had been a theosophist, a member of a magic circle which also included Yeats, a Nietzschean, and a student of Hindu religion and philosophy. He was convinced that there was a secret knowledge behind the knowledge given to the famous prophets and philosophers, and for the acquisition of that knowledge and the intellectual and spiritual power it would bring with it he was prepared to sacrifice everything and take upon him any labour, no matter how humble or wearisome or abstruse.!5