Readers of Wilson’s fiction, however, were definitely not taken by surprise and had no qualms about his serious foray into the subject; for occult instances and anecdotes abound in all of his novels from the first in the Gerard Sorme trilogy, Ritual in the Dark (1960), onwards. For example, in his 1963 novel The World of Violence (published in the US as The Violent World of Hugh Greene), the young protagonist Hugh, after listening to a piece of music by Beethoven that deeply moves him, sees a ghost (which he calls a ‘presence’) in the garden and speculates, ‘... it seems to me that I saw the “presence” in the garden because I was in a disturbed state after listening to the Beethoven, and some new faculty in me had been awakened.’ The important phrase here being, of course, ‘some new faculty in me had been awakened’. It seems that here we have the germ of an idea that became the focal point of The Occult, that is to say ‘Faculty X’ (‘that latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present’), formulated originally in 1966 and featured in his novel The Philosopher’s Stone in 1968. Wilson considered ‘Faculty X’ to be ‘... the key not only to so-called occult experience, but to the whole future evolution of the human race ... [and] ... it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.’
