His Strange Confession: Self- help, natural philosophy and what Napoleon Hill learned from the devil

7/28/2019 His Strange Confession: Self- help, natural philosophy and what Napoleon Hill learned from the devil

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His Strange Confession:

Self-help, natural philosophy, and what

Napoleon Hill learned from the devil

by David Metcalfe

(Originally Published at The Teeming Brain)

The good man went into his chapel then to fetch a book and a stole which he put

around his neck, and on his return he set about conjuring the Enemy. He had been

reading the invocation for some while, when he looked up and saw the Enemy beforehim in such a hideous guise that the stoutest of hearts would have quailed at the sight

of him.

Thou dost plague me cruelly, said the Enemy. Here I am now. What is thy

business?

from The Quest for the Holy Grail(13th Century Anonymous)

Anomalous phenomena require grounding in an everyday plot. The transitional matrix of

experience, from expected to unknown, from known to unexpected, acts as a conduit between

material truth and imaginal construct. From UFOs set against the lull of rural life to small

town stories of spirits and cryptids, anomaly outlines itself against a mundane background.

A potent confluence of the real and the imagined is found in some of the best examples of

classic ghost stories from the more masterful littrateurs of speculative fiction. Storytellers

such as Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, and Rudyard Kipling each mixed their personal

experiences, and also stories they heard told as truth while traveling abroad or mingling in

society, into select short fiction, thus creating works of fiction that, if they were retold as fact,

would cause some to question the sanity of the teller.

Then there are authors Charles Leland, William Seabrook, and John Keel: poetic


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entrepreneurs playing journalist in the nightside of nature, in whose works the boundary lines

are thrown out altogether. For these writers, the separation between autobiography and

imaginal exposition is absorbed into a holistic vision of high strangeness that is often as weird

and otherworldly as the best of Blackwood while being struck through with zigzag currents

and unconventionally mundane angles that open up an entirely different atmosphere. These

stories are told with a straight face, a wink, and a great deal of crafting, but all separation

between fact and fiction is made ignoble by the refusal of the storyteller to do anything but

recollect the story. Much of the skill in such a story lies in the authors seemingly affectless

manner of presenting what he heard and saw, with the author locating himself as a mere

transitional device that leaves a core of the event untouched.

Leland, Seabrook, and Keel all began as journalists, pursuing crooked career paths in which

their professional training was an enhancing element in their work rather than a prime focus.

Their jobs in journalism brought them in contact with a wide variety of people on odd

assignments, and their willingness to listen allowed them to assemble stories that would have

otherwise slipped into theanima mundiuncollected. In all cases the market played an eager

hand in shaping the nature of the story in its final form. Literate ghost stories are carefully

crafted pastorals, genteel corruptions of the vulgar imagination, whereas poetic journalists

hard at the hunt fall victim to the borderlands subtle snares, reporting back with will o the

wisp whispers and hints of possibility.

The creative act is a complex interplay of accident and intention. For those who experience

the aftermath, this is captured in obscure hints and hidden depths which emanate subtly from

the resulting creation. For the creator, this interplay consists in an acceptance of immersion

whose ultimate integrity exists in a willing acquiescence to the hungry mouth of the muse.


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Perhaps you will get the greatest values if you accept the Devil as being what he claims

himself to be, relying upon his message for whatever it may bring you that you can

use, and not worrying as to who the Devil is or whether he exists.

If you want my honest personal opinion, I believe the Devil is exactly who he claims to

be. Now let us analyze his strange confession.

- from Outwitting the Devil, Napoleon Hill (written 1938, first published 2011)

In 1938, after publishing Think and Grow Rich, the seminal self-help book that has

maintained a top position onBusinessweeks best seller list for nearly 80 years, Napoleon Hill

produced another book that proved too controversial to release. There are few things more

outwardly mundane than the everyday machinations of the American corporate world, and

yet at its mythical heart lies the same congruence of anomaly and unassuming facade that

informed the work of a Keel or a Seabrook. And Hills unpublishable story is in fact an

archetypal tale of a crossroads meeting with the devil himself.

Some posit that much of the fear about publishing Outwitting the Devilwas due to the
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fexec%2Fobidos%2FASIN%2F1402784538%2Fdemmus-20&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEMCERy1eE1Z1tSrbmRS-_cu4gLkQhttps://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThink_and_Grow_Rich&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGWVTJMWZh7A3V_R7Mviq0xTstCQA


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involvement of Hills wife in the Presbyterian church. Considering the direct manner in which

he approaches his subject, this is unsurprising. He said Think and Grow Rich was created

after he interviewed a host of successful entrepreneurs and business owners. Outwitting the

Devil, however, sourced itself from an interview of a different sort. While many have found

C.S. Lewiss explorations of the diabolical realm inThe Screwtape Letters a source of

inspiration, Lewiss well-known penchant for fiction allowed his book of infernal epistles to

dance around any speculations about a possible literal reality that might stand behind them.

By contrast, Hills encounter with the devil is not so easy to place or dismiss, nor does he even

try to.

Ah! Now Ive done Philosophy,

Ive finished Law and Medicine,

And sadly even Theology:

Taken fierce pains, from end to end.

Now here I am, a fool for sure!

No wiser than I was before:

Master, Doctors what they call me,

And Ive been ten years, already,

Crosswise, arcing, to and fro,

Leading my students by the nose,

And see that we can know nothing!
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Faust, Act 1, Scene 1 (Lines 355-364), Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, trans. A.S.

Kline

Hills story begins with his skipping town in Ohio, having become involved in a dispute

between a local newspaper editor and corrupt town officials that left the editor dead.

Eventually, he finds himself holed up in West Virginia with a pistol and a heavy case of

paranoia, at a loss for what to do or where to go next. This is Hills dark night of the soul, and,

in a strange Faustian twist, what he recounts next doesnt quite mesh with the

two-dimensional facade of positive thinking that has emerged around his name and memory

in recent years.

In hiding and on the run, Hill takes a deep look at what he has been propagating with his

success seminars, and he realizes that, if measured against his own teaching, he wouldnt

consider himself successful. Under pressure, this small crack in his persona starts to give way

to greater doubts, until there arrives a crowning moment of catharsis in which Hill, desperate

and unsure, summons the devil. Addressing him as Your Majesty, Hill proceeds to

investigate the roots of practical philosophy in a book length Q & A with Old Nick. If you

want to fix a problem, go straight to the source, and so theres no better way to understand

how to overcome adversity than by having a direct conversation with the Adversary itself.

For an author who has fostered such a socially conservative

legacy, Hills discoveries, and their manner of revelation, are a bit unorthodox. Think and


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Grow Rich hints at its esoteric background if one pays attention to the sections on

transmuting sexual energy and utilizing intuition or the sixth sense to assess potential

outcomes and contact discarnate mentors. However, ifThink and Grow Rich is an

introductory pamphlet, thenOutwitting the Devil is the full instructional manual. With the

devil as instructor, Hill doesnt dull the argument in hopes of courting polite discourse.

When Outwitting the Devil intially came to my notice, I had only recently realized that Hill

was tapping into deeper streams than I had previously assumed, so I sent out a request for

any professionals who were influenced by Hill to tell me how the more esoteric end of his

philosophies of success, the sexual alchemy and psychism, sat with their interpretation of his

work.

Nathan Vanderploeg Director of CapitalWise Educational Services, commented that Its an

astounding statement for Napoleon Hill to say that the chief, major reason most people dont

succeed before theyre forty, out of all the thousands of possible reasons, is over-indulgence in

physical expression (or pursuit of physical expression) of the emotion of sex. But in my own

life, I am 100% convinced that its the major reason I too have not yet achieved the level of

success I want! Major takeaways: We need to balance our chasing women with channeling

our sexual drives into business. As a 25-year-old professional, Vanderploeg found this lesson

hit home, and its insight helped him to realign his priorities.

Another youthful entrepreneur, Louis Lautman, founder of The Young Entrepreneur Society,

wrote to me and said he credits Hill with everything that he has done.

Finding inspiration in one of the more direct pieces of advice in Hills methodology,

Christopher H. Kilcullen, director of franchise sales and development for Wyndham

Worldwide, said, There are so many principles in this book that I have applied to my life but

none more important than auto-suggestion. When you intentionally think about, repeat and

affirm your ideals, you are planting the seeds that will grow to bear fruit. Kilcullen feels that

Hills practical advice is the key to his current entrepreneurial endeavors with a start-up hes

working on called AmericasGotProduct.com, which focuses on recommitting consumers to

buying domestically produced commodities and products.

Steve Mancina, a marketing and communications advisor, had a similar takeaway, reflecting

that he was 19 years old, when my employer at the time, Eleanore Carson, who still remains
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a dear friend, gave me her copy of this book. I am now 45. I have read and re-read the book.

In general, I find the greatest value to Hills philosophy to be the measured disciplined

approach to completing a task. Any task. Big or small.

Outwitting the Devilis a strange confession fromone of the founding fathers of Americas

philosophy of self-determination. Napoleon Hills

hidden masterpiece summons the devil into the

mundane world, and is all the more strange and

wonderful for its down-to earth-dealings with OldScratch.

My initial query, however, dealt with the more abstract intimations that float around Hills

work, and it seems that even with over 70 years as a best seller, the stranger aspects ofThink

and Grow Richremain obscure even to those who have found what they consider success by

putting its advice to work. It wasnt until I received a response from Matthew Joyce, a

counselor and business professional out of Boulder, Colorado, that I found someone who had

touched on the full potential of Hills work. His response is worth quoting at length:

I often use what Napoleon Hill calls the sixth sense or the creative imagination,

although I dont often tell my clients that I am doing so. You never know who might

be skeptical or challenged by such ideas. Fortunately no one seems to challenge the

positive results of the process.

My method is a slightly different from Hills since I developed it prior to reading hisideas about sexual sublimation/transmutation. To me the real gist of that chapter is

thatthe creative imagination functions best when the mind is vibrating (due to some

form of mind stimulation) at an exceedingly high rate. The actual sexual urges or

desires to channel the creative impulse into procreation are of relatively little account
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in my method, but I think Hill made some good points about them. To me the primary

focus is shifting the mind to the higher rate of functioning which gives me access to

information beyond that available from my physical senses or my conscious mind.

When I work I shift my awareness into a higher state of consciousness with an

activating thought. Ive been doing it so long now that it only takes a single breath to

make the switch in consciousness. Moreover, I now maintain a dual awareness of

normal consciousness while engaging my higher creative imagination. This means

that I switch back and forth while on the phone with the client or in meetings without

them noticing.

Where I go in consciousness and what I do after that shift depends upon the

circumstances. Sometimes I use it solve problems, posing the question and then

reaching out for the answer which appears from the ether. Other times I use it to

access new creative ideas for products or strategies or to glance into the future for

scenario planning. Its also helpful when I am not sure what to say next. In those cases

I open myself up and just allow the ideas to flow. The right thing to say always seems

to emerge, be they questions to ask the client, comments about the present situation, or

even impromptu speeches I need to give.

In the transmission of esoteric teachings its common to discuss the difference between oral

and written instruction. With alchemical practice, tantra, Kabbalah, and other forms of study

that involve an intermixing of cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy, and practice, it is often

the oral teaching that acts as a key to the textual base. Without this key all the reader is left

with is a disconnected symbolic puzzle that reflects biases rather than reveals truth. What

Joyce has that none of the other respondents have is the oral key, because Joyce, unlike the

others, was trained at The Monroe Institute. (For an in-depth interview that I conducted withJoyce regarding his practice, see Manifestation & the Mind, or the Practical Utility of Astral

Awareness.)

The Monroe Institute was founded by Robert Monroe, whose pioneering workJourneys Out

of the Bodypopularized the concept of out-of-body experiences when it was published in
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1971. Whats interesting is that, beyond his role as a seminal psychonaut, Monroe was a

successful businessman and millionaire who developed the first cable television service in the

state of Virginia. In a way he is a direct example of Hills theories in practice, and this goes

beyond the basic advice about self-affirmation and extends into the strange intermixing of

influences that flows through Hills oeuvre.

Satan is the spirit of caution, prudence, and when perverted, negation. At his door are

laid the sins of omission. Few realize that man is responsible for the things he has not

done. That is part of the law. It is just as wrong not to do the right things as it is to do

the wrong thing. Satan inhibits, he draws back, he holds aloof.

Manly P Hall,Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics

The key is natural philosophy, a concept of rhythm, harmony, and balance that has been lost

in the contemporary world. Or at least thats what the devil has to say about it, and Hill pulls

no punches in directing his attention at all the social institutions that he sees fostering this

imbalance. Outwitting the Devil contains the usual tropes of right living, avoiding alcohol

and cigarettes, and all that, but Hills goes further than this by laying blame for modern-day

spiritual desolation on the school system, business owners, and mass media that provide the

developmental focus for society.


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A young Napoleon Hill

What I find most fascinating about this work is that instead of falling into some of the

Orientalist meanderings that were so popular at the time, and rather than creating some

allegorical extravaganza, Hill uses one of the most basic stories from Western culture, a pact

with the devil, to express his views. Moreover, he does it in such a way that it seems as natural

as pouring a cup of coffee in the morning. There is not hint of phantasmagoric flights,

barbaric names, sigils, circles, or any of the ritual accoutrements that have come to surround

such meetings in popular accounts. Instead, the story unfolds as succinctly and

straightforwardly as a farmer recounting a folksy anecdote, remaining practical throughout.

What keeps us away from success? The devil, as Hill relates it, marks fear and doubt as the

central cause of most of our problems. These tendencies keep us from staying on the straight

path, distract us from accomplishing our goals, cause us to look away from impending

problems, and hide our inner turmoils from the kind of clear view that could rectify them.

Rather than staying focused, our attention wanders because we doubt where we are going. In

this teaching we are presented with a practical ethics no different from what the adept Manly

P. Hall outlines in his treatise on esoteric ethics. Even the nature of the devil stays the same.

Outwitting the Devil is a strange confession from one of the founding fathers of Americas

philosophy of self-determination. Far removed from the fictions of someone like AlgernonBlackwood, assuming none of the esoteric or Fortean overtones of poetic journalists like John

Keel, Napoleon Hills hidden masterpiece summons the devil into the mundane world, and is

all the more strange and wonderful for its down-to earth-dealings with Old Scratch.

So the next time youre faced with a crisis, consider heading on down to the lonely crossroads.

Wait there for awhile, and see if you dont find yourself face-to-face with a solution from an

unlikely source. Maybe it will be a UFO. Maybe it will be spirit. Maybe it will be the devil

himself. Or maybe the very time alone will be enough to seed some solace.

-

-

David Metcalfe is an independent researcher, writer and multimedia artist focusing on the

interstices of art, culture, and consciousness. He is a contributing editor for Reality Sandwich,
https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FManly_Palmer_Hall&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGAvfscax9xgf9jM-7AIkev19Ifwghttps://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FManly_Palmer_Hall&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGAvfscax9xgf9jM-7AIkev19Ifwg


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The Revealer, the online journal of NYUs Center for Religion and Media, and The Daily

Grail. He writes regularly for Evolutionary Landscapes, Alarm Magazine, Modern Mythology,

Disinfo.com, The Teeming Brain and his own blog The Eyeless Owl. His writing has been

featured in The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized 2011), Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color

& Music (Alarm Press, 2011) and Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness (North

Atlantic/Evolver Editions 2012). Metcalfe is an Associate with Phoenix Rising Digital

Academy, and is currently co-hosting The Art of Transformations study group with support

from the International Alchemy Guild.

For more information on Santa Muerte, and the sanctification of death in the popular faith

traditions of the Americas, check outhttp://skeletonsaint.com, a collaborative project

hosted by Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut, David Metcalfe and Liminal Analytics.
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fskeletonsaint.com%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHuvzD2qoQPT172Rx19If26YLl9XQ

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His Strange Confession: Self- help, natural philosophy and what Napoleon Hill learned from the devil