Our Gods Wear Spandex Page 5

  MORMONISM

  The Church of Latter-Day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church, traces its origins to hidden scriptures known as The Golden Plates, allegedly revealed by an angel named Moroni to Joseph Smith. The Golden Plates claim that Jewish tribes emigrated to America following the fall of Jerusalem and that Jesus reappeared to them. Mormonism is considered a pseudo-Christian cult by most Christian denominations. It preaches a cosmology more akin to Gnosticism than mainstream Christianity, teaching that God was once a mortal and that men have the potential to become gods themselves.

  The Mormons were extremely unpopular in their early days and traveled west to flee persecution for, among other things, encouraging polygamy. The Mormons eventually settled on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Many believe that Mormon rituals are based in Freemasonry. Founder Joseph Smith was initiated a Master Mason in 1842, and some claim that he was schooled in the rites of ceremonial magic and alchemy by Dr. Lumna Walter.19 Indeed, Egyptian symbols are common in Salt Lake City, including a statue of the Great Sphinx bearing Joseph Smith's likeness. The Golden Plates were recently adapted into comic form by Mormon comic artist Mike Allred (Madman, X-Factor).

  TRANSCENDENTALISM

  Transcendentalism is a blend of Christianity and Eastern thought that had a strong influence on Theosophy. The movement began in September 1836, when poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson founded the Transcendental Club. In January 1842, the Club announced itself to the world with a lecture read by Emerson at the Masonic Temple in Boston. Emerson read texts like The Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist scripture, as well as the writings of Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. From these readings, Emerson developed a philosophy that taught the unity of creation and the virtues of mysticism over rationality and logic. Emerson's circle included novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. There was even a Transcendental commune, but it was short-lived (as communes filled with intellectuals usually are).

  11 Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy (Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1989), p. 49.

  12 Howard, Occult Conspiracy, p. 49.

  13 Bauval Hancock, Talisman, p. 318.

  14 Howard, Occult Conspiracy, pp 82–86.

  15 Louis B. Mayer was initiated at St. Cecile Lodge #568 in New York City and Jack Warner at Mount Olive Lodge #506 in Los Angeles. See “Famous Freemasons,” Ellensburg Masonic Lodge #30, F&AM. http://www.ellensburg.com/~masons39/index.html. See also Marlys J. Harris, The Zanucks of Hollywood : The Dark Legacy of an American Dynasty (New York: Crown, 1989), p. 233.

  16 Howard, Occult Conspiracy, pp. 15, 24.

  17 “Directors Order Diabolical Destruction of Grand Pyramid Marker at Bow,” Mary Baker Eddy Letter, No. 7, December 25, 1997.

  18 Adherents include Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Henry Fonda, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, and Doris Day. Monkee Michael Nesmith and former Batman Val Kilmer are both active and practicing Christian Scientists. See “Famous Christian Scientists (Members of the Church of Christ, Scientist),” adherents.com.

  19 See Lance S. Owens, “Joseph Smith: America's Hermetic Prophet,” Gnosis, Spring 1995.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE VICTORIAN OCCULT EXPLOSION

  The rise of secret societies in the 18th century and the proliferation of alternative religious movements in the 19th prepared the way for an explosion of new religious thinking at the turn of the 20th century. In many ways, it all starts with the English politician, novelist, and occultist Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873).

  THE COMING RACE: EDWARD

  BULWER-LYTTON AND VRIL

  A hereditary peer and a reformist member of Parliament, Bulwer was an ally of legendary Prime Minister Benjamin D'Israeli. He represented Hertfordshire, former British headquarters of the Knights Templar. A lifelong student of the occult, Bulwer was also an active Freemason and a high-ranking member of the Rosicrucian Order. He also formed a group with legendary French occultist Éliphas Lévi for the advanced study of magic. Bulwer channeled his interests into the writing of occult fiction, claiming that he created his novels to battle against what he called the “absorbing tyranny of every-day life.”

  One of his most popular and influential novels, Zanoni, concerned a high-ranking Rosicrucian who takes a young woman's place at the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in France. The novel deals extensively with Rosicrucian philosophy, to the point that it could act as a primer for the Brotherhood. Bulwer would write that “the supernatural is only something in the laws of nature of which we have been hereto ignorant.”20

  The Stephen King of his era, Bulwer wrote best-sellers like Paul Clifford and The Last Days of Pompeii that were popular worldwide. The Last Days of Pompeii delved into ancient magic and the cult of Isis, as well as the mystical ferment of first-century Rome. Two mystic characters—a Witch of Vesuvius and an Egyptian magician who claims descent from the line of Rameses—are prominent. Bulwer's 1857 short story “The Haunted and the Haunters,” anticipates writers like H. P. Lovecraft, exploring metaphysics in the context of Gothic fiction. In addition to these stories, Bulwer wrote a number of historical novels like Harald, Last King of the Saxons. None of these, however, had nearly the influence of his 1871 work, Vril: The Power of the Coming Race.

  For all its influence, Vril is hardly a page-turner. The book has no plot to speak of and consists mainly of an unnamed American narrator's observations of the history and customs of the Vril-ya (meaning “the civilized nations”). The Vril-ya are a race of superhumans driven underground in the distant past, where they form a new society lit by an interior Sun. The Vril-ya are far more advanced than surface dwellers, having discovered an all-powerful liquid called vril that seems to be roughly analogous to some form of atomic energy and is extracted from the interior Sun.

  The Vril-ya are ruled by a benevolent dictator. They disdain conflict and debate, and equate philosophy with “wrangling.” Their social creed is: “No happiness without order, no order without authority, no authority without unity.” Women are larger (some seven feet high) and more formidable than the men, yet make “the most amiable, conciliatory, and submissive wives.” Robots seem to do most of the work. The Vril-ya are vegetarians; they disdain “carnivores”; they are convinced of their superiority over all other people. Bulwer describes them as beautiful and exotic, having “blue eyes, and hair of a deep golden auburn” and “complexions warmer or richer in tone than persons in the north of Europe.” Like New Agers, they:

  …dwell in an atmosphere of music and fragrance. Every room has its mechanical contrivances for melodious sounds, usually tuned down to soft-murmured notes, which seem like sweet whispers from invisible spirits…they have a notion that to breathe an air filled with continuous melody and perfume has necessarily an effect at once soothing and elevating upon the formation of character and the habits of thought.21

  The nameless narrator laments the Vril-ya's state of apparent perfection, however, claiming it has a stultifying effect on the arts and the creative spirit: “Without its ancient food of strong passions, vast crimes, heroic excellences, poetry therefore is, if not actually starved to death, reduced to a very meagre diet.” He laments their lack of passion and notes that, without crisis and strife, there is no opportunity for heroism: “Where there are no wars there can be no Hannibal, no Washington, no Jackson, no Sheridan.”22

  Beneath their placid exterior, however, the Vril-ya nurse a dark agenda. They describe themselves as exiles, “driven…to perfect [their] condition and…destined to return to the upper world, and supplant all the inferior races now existing therein.” Nor will the “supplanting” be a peaceful process. The Vril-ya openly predict that they will exterminate the inhabitants of the upper world upon their return. The Vril-ya's calm assumption of eventual return and conquest leads the narrator to hope that “ages may yet elapse before they emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers.”23

  To the Victorians, the combination of Utopianism, genetic superiority, and irresistible te
chnological force made for an intoxicating brew. The social displacement caused by the Industrial Revolution and demographic anxieties provoked by imperialism made Bulwer's vision of an all-powerful, highly evolved race a comforting vision of the future. This new type of Utopianism influenced untold legions of science-fiction writers and inspired the “World of Tomorrow” propaganda that helped many people weather the Great Depression.

  H. G. Wells presented a more sympathetic version of the Vril-ya in his Utopian novel The Shape of Things To Come. Conversely, Aldous Huxley held up the Vril-ya as a warning against excessive government control in his novel Brave New World. In fact, with Vril, Bulwer began an evolution in fiction writing that led ultimately to present-day tales of super-races like The X-Men and The 4400.

  Vril had a huge impact on the nascent occultism of the late 19th century. Theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky quoted extensively from it and presented a more palatable form of the Vril-ya in her “Ascended Masters.” Blavatsky was so impressed by Vril that she argued that Bulwer must have gotten his ideas from an initiate of an Eastern tradition.24 Aleister Crowley was also a noted fan of Bulwer and recommended Bulwer's fiction to his acolytes.25 Masonic Grand Poobah Albert Pike may also have been influenced by Bulwer when he wrote, a year after Vril, in his landmark text Morals and Dogma of a potent force “by means whereof a single man, who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct it, could revolutionize and change the face of the world.” He described the force as “a ray detached from the glory of the Sun.”26

  On the other hand, Bulwer's novel is seen by many as a criticism of the corrosive effects of a scientific society and socialist Utopianism. The novel's narrator certainly doesn't seem overly fond of the Vril-ya, and Bulwer's opposition to Marxism and Darwinism, and to what he saw as science run amok, is clear throughout the book. In their landmark 1960 work, The Morning of the Magicians, Louis Pauwells and Jacques Bergier warn that Bulwer's fiction contains “the conviction that there are beings endowed with superhuman powers.” They note the potential danger of this belief, pointing to Bulwer's popularity in fin de siècle Germany. Some scholars trace the roots of the infamous Vril Society, which allegedly counted among its members Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Göering, back to a secret society originally called The All-German Society for Metaphysics that some say was grounded in Bulwer's work.27

  Regardless of whether you accept this argument, it is difficult to overstate Bulwer's influence on his time. Using the conceit of science fiction, he pioneered the concept of a super-race whose powers far exceed those of ordinary men. In the turmoil of the Victorian Age, when scientific and technological breakthroughs held out the promise of improving or even perfecting the human machine, this was heady stuff. Moreover, it's no accident that this concept came from a practicing occultist. The promise of a new race had a powerful impact—positive and negative—in the century to come. But first a strange band of eccentrics, led by a corpulent, pipe-smoking Russian emigré would expand Bulwer's fanciful ideas into a worldwide movement.

  MADAME BLAVATSKY AND THEOSOPHY

  Perhaps the most important alternative religious movement in the 19th century was the Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. A peculiar woman with a puzzling biography, Blavatsky revolutionized the counterculture of her time and founded a movement that became truly international in scope. She was one of the first to bring Eastern mysticism to the West. Among her core teachings are the fundamental unity of all existence, the regularity of universal law, and the progress of consciousness toward an ever-increasing realization of unity.

  Blavatsky was a stout and homely woman with a restless intellect. She was also charismatic, domineering, and strong-willed. Born Helena von Hahn in 1831, she married a bureaucrat named Nikifor Blavatsky at 18, but soon left him. After a curious odyssey that allegedly took her to Turkey, Greece, Egypt, France, New Orleans, Mexico, South America, the West Indies, England, and Canada in search of spiritual enlightenment, she arrived in Tibet in 1868, where she encountered a band of immortal spiritual masters—the Secret Chiefs, among whom she counted Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha—who tutored her in the spiritual arts and sciences. Her restless nature eventually led her to America, where she met Henry Steele Olcott, who played a decisive role in her life.

  Olcott, a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, first met Blavatsky while investigating the Eddy brothers, two Vermont yokels trying to cash in on the Spiritualism craze. Olcott was impressed by what he believed were Blavatsky's great psychic powers; Blavatsky was impressed by Olcott's bank account. Together, in 1875, the two founded the Theosophical Society in New York.

  In 1877, Blavatsky published her two-volume magnum opus, Isis Unveiled. She and Olcott then pulled up stakes and moved to India, where they launched The Theosophist magazine in 1879. The Society began to establish branches throughout America and Europe, as well as in the European colonies. They recruited other lieutenants, including Annie Besant (a socialist, feminist, and Irish nationalist from London), and the scandalous C. W. Leadbetter (a former Anglican priest). In 1887, the Society launched its official magazine, Lucifer, in London. In 1888, Blavatsky published another seminal work, The Secret Doctrine. After her death, Besant and Leadbetter took control of the Theosophical Society, which continued to grow, counting among its members baseball's founder Abner Doubleday and legendary inventor Thomas Edison.28 After a series of scandals, the movement fell on hard times and its influence diminished rapidly as the century progressed.29

  Ultimately, Theosophy would provide an umbrella under which a whole host of religious, spiritual, psychic, and paranormal trends could come together as a relatively coherent philosophy. It syncretized Eastern and Western teachings, setting the stage for many of the cult movements of the 20th century. The motto of the Theosophical Society is: “There is no religion higher than Truth.” As with the later New Age movement, Theosophy taught that there was an eternal truth—the Sanatana Dharma—at the core of all religious teachings. Among these core teachings are reincarnation, karma, nonphysical planes of existence, pantheism (the presence of God in all matter), humanity's conscious participation in evolution, mind over matter, and apotheosis (the process of achieving ultimate perfection).

  Blavatsky was a prolific writer in her lifetime, although critics have noted that her books are rife with plagiarism, most taken from Masonic, Kabbalistic, Gnostic, Eastern, and other esoteric sources. One critic who exhaustively cataloged Blavatsky's writings concluded that “There is not a single dogma or tenet in Theosophy…the source of which cannot be pointed out in the world's literature.”30 At the time of her writing, however, most readers were completely unfamiliar with her source material. Despite her plagiaristic bent, or perhaps because of it, she was, therefore, responsible for bringing an important body of occult traditions to the public.

  Other critics have criticized Blavatsky for being overly influenced by Bulwer-Lytton.31 Although it may be true that her fascination with Isis originated in her reading of The Last Days of Pompeii, biographer Peter Washington claims that “it would not be unjust to say that her new religion was virtually manufactured from his pages.”32 And in Blavatsky's second major work, The Secret Doctrine, Bulwer-Lytton's fictional supermen begin to morph into objects of religion.

  The Secret Doctrine explored the deeper mysteries of science, religion, and psychic power, claiming that the ancient civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis fell because of their inferior state of spiritual evolution. Theosophy, of course, would lead humanity to its next stage of enlightenment. Blavatsky posited a seven-step progression of human evolution that led to apotheosis. She divided the ages of man according to a series of “root races,” describing the present race as fifth in line, following the self-destruction of Atlantis. The sixth race would be superior in every way to our own, and would usher in a New Age of peace and enlightenment.

  Theosophy's influence has been incalculable. It created ripples of esoteric thought that eventuall
y blossomed in Victorian occult movements, the work of Freud and Jung, the reemergence of the Freemasons and other secret societies, and finally the Age of Aquarius and the New Age movement. It provided a spiritual venue for the increasingly emancipated women of the West. It had a particularly strong following among artists, writers, and intellectuals, including Gauguin, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee, and Pollock. Composers Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius were also disciples.33

  Some of Blavatsky's disciples would form their own influential groups. Rudolph Steiner, a German Theosophist with a strong interest in Christian mysticism, founded the School of Spiritual Science, which soon branched into a number of so-called “Steiner Schools” in Europe and America. The Lucis Trust, founded by Alice Bailey, propounded a globalist philosophy of “World Goodwill.” Bailey's group is still affiliated with the United Nations and active in its causes.

  Despite Blavatsky's eccentric nature, her impact has been undeniable. Theosophy and its offshoots ultimately created an expectation of greater human potential. And because Blavatsky's teachings of super-humans and Secret Chiefs were far more optimistic than Bulwer-Lytton's prophesied Vril-ya, the ideas expounded in The Secret Doctrine gives us a significant precedent for a religious movement based on fictional super-powered beings. In many ways, the conjunction of popular occultism and popular art brought to prominence by Theosophy and related movements has rearranged the very foundation of Western Culture. The first flowering on this conjunction would emerge with a group whose very name has become synonymous with the occult.

  THE GOLDEN DAWN

  The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a legendary, but short-lived, occult group founded in 1886, at the height of the spiritual ferment of Victorian England, by a London coroner named William Wynn Westcott. Westcott allegedly obtained hidden writings called the Cipher Manuscripts that described rituals and teachings drawn from Kabbalah, astrology, Tarot, geomancy, and alchemy. Westcott “decoded” the manuscripts and showed them to an eccentric Freemason named S.L. McGregor Mathers. Soon after, he and Mathers established the “Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” to disseminate the teachings of the manuscripts to occult adepts. Lodges dedicated to Osiris, Horus, Amen-Ra, and Hathor quickly sprung up in England, Scotland, and France. In 1892, Mathers claimed to have come into personal contact with Blavatsky's Secret Chiefs themselves.