Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Blumenthal-McGannon, Sally, "Therapeutic Touch Camp Continues via Zoom" Quest 108:4, pg 8, 40

By Sally Blumenthal-McGannon

I recently had the privilege and honor of participating in a Therapeutic Touch (TT) camp on Zoom, the web conferencing site. I am not savvy about or comfortable with technology, so imagining this event was challenging for me. Fortunately I have been attending TT workshops at Indralaya from the beginning in the seventies, as well as a few more at Pumpkin Hollow, where I had the opportunity to learn and study with both Dora Kunz and Dolores Krieger, the cofounders of TT.

Over the years, a group of us have remained very close. Endowed with a variety of skills, we normally hold our healers’ camp yearly at Camp Indralaya on Washington state’s Orcas Island. This year, the virus made this gathering impossible, so we decided to hold the camp online with Zoom. Some of the group had prior experience providing TT with Zoom individually or in small groups.

I am a great believer in healing at a distance and sending healing to others in need. TT is all about energy. There is no need to physically touch the person you are treating. However, if you add technology, you lose me. I have lived in a virgin redwood forest for a long time and have never had good Internet reception. But the desire to participate in TT this summer was so great that other healers came together and figured it out.

While I was glued to the TV, watching the pain and suffering of protests after the murder of George Floyd, I was reading the applications of TT practitioners who wanted to be of service, knew they had something special to offer, and explained why they wanted to attend our virtual camp. I was so touched by their generosity and kindness that the healing from our future gathering had already begun for me. I was reminded of Dora, who urged us to send love and peace to the angels over the cities in distress. This enabled me to shift my focus from suffering to being centered, being of service, and reinforcing what we need in our world during these troubled times. The pandemic was another reason for me to appreciate the power of shifting my awareness and focus on healing.

In addition to all the emails I receive every day, I smile when I see contact from my TT family and know it is about love and healing. And I breathe. The benefit of my TT life and commitment continues to serve me, as I laugh at my original reason for learning Therapeutic Touch, which was to become a better nurse.

Our experiment is over. We held our Indralaya Zoom camp for three days, and it was beyond our greatest expectations (not that the outcome was ever in our hands). I could never have imagined the impact we would have on everyone involved.

We began our mornings with Helen Bee, an Indralaya elder who led morning meditation in the meadow during TT camp. She was actually at the camp, with a camera focused on the meadow, so we could see our safe space and begin our mornings together as we meditated in the meadow.

I was one of the facilitators for the Healing Partners (HP) group, something I have done for many years. As always, we met the evening before, where we had the opportunity to acknowledge what we would need to feel safe as we came together. Many participants knew one another from past summers, so our reunion began by seeing each other face-to-face on Zoom. Newcomers were greeted as well. We began with a welcoming meditation, thanking one another for showing up with a desire to connect with the healing spirit of Indralaya.

The next morning we all came together, over fifty of us, for meditation “in the meadow.” Then we were put in breakout rooms, where individuals received TT treatments from experienced practitioners. A few of us stayed in the main room, holding a safe healing space, available to pop in if someone needed support in a breakout room.

After resting, we met with our group, and HPs (healees) shared their experiences of receiving TT. It was amazing. People’s descriptions resembled those from the live camp. The treatments were just as effective, and sometimes more so. HPs loved the shared intimacy, closeness, and connection with their practitioners—amazingly, all on Zoom.

The first day was my opportunity to set the tone of being open, feeling safe to be vulnerable, and being held with respect and confidentiality. I addressed intimate topics such as grieving, dying, illness, and especially loss during this year of pandemic and social unrest. Naming the fear enables people to address it more easily.

By our afternoon session, HPs were open to sharing their journeys. I shared a page of quotes and had participants each write about one that resonated for them, which led to a deep discussion afterward. Here are some of the quotes they received.

Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed that is not faced. —James Baldwin

There’s nothing as whole as a broken heart. In these traditions, you cultivate a broken heart, which is very different from depression or sadness. It's the kind of vulnerability, openness, and acute sensitivity to your own suffering and the suffering of others that becomes an opportunity for connection. —Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

As long as I’m alive, I will continue to try to understand more, because the work of the heart is never done. —Muhammad Ali

Laughter is not only carbonated holiness: it is medicine. —Anne Lamott

Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end. —John Lennon

Sorrow is how we learn to love. —Rita Mae Brown

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. —Desmond Tutu

Willing to experience aloneness, I discover connection everywhere; turning to face my fear, I meet the warrior who lives within. —Jennifer Welwood

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. —Alice Walker

When there’s a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. —Pema Chödrön

Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start. —Nido Qubein

How did the rose ever open its heart and give this world all its beauty? It felt the encouragement of light against its being; Otherwise we all remain too frightened. —Hafiz

The universe is wider than our views of it. —Henry David Thoreau

What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems. —John W. Gardner

Receiving TT brings new energy, as the healee opens up and lets go of old pain, emotional and physical (if it is time for that). Sharing their chosen quote allowed participants to go deeper into their experience, feeling understood and supported.

The group experience was profound. I reminded people that we are all mirrors and that they might hear their own thoughts or feelings being expressed by another. There is a cumulative effect of TT, which grows over the days and continues after camp is over.

The connections and sharing, the risk taking and vulnerability, is profound. Each gathering builds on the past, and by the end of camp, we were an amazingly close group of people, who felt safe and held with respect and kindness, some on a level never perceived before.

We had a follow-up gathering a week later to check in and validate peoples’ experiences. Three of us led this group. I had wanted to remind the healees that when we parted last week, it was ending, but that every ending is also a beginning and how joyous it would be to share some of their new world.

What we heard was profound. Many recognized the timeliness of our gathering. Before it began, no one knew that our country was going to break open with such overt pain and vulnerability. The timing was impeccable and, again, out of our hands.

Below are some comments from participants.

“How timely for us to hold camp in the world right now. It was profound, and I got to experience BLM with a dose of Zoom and hope.”

“The bubble of safety, kindness, and support has stayed with me.”

“I learned how connected we are energetically.”

”My heart took a leap when I saw this group today.”

“I am transforming and figuring out how to protect myself (often from myself), having experienced such absence of judgment during TT.”

From someone who was deep in a grief state and sadness: “I now see my home as a sad bubble, outside of me when I finally went out (and my sadness), and I am ready to make changes since I have changed. I have found a way to stay connected with my husband with love, not pain.”

 “I’m grieving, everything is changing, energy started moving.”

This Zoom retreat has allowed us to connect with each other, ourselves, and the higher/inner power that connects us all and nature. I am left with greater awareness of our oneness and our innate healing power, which enable us to move forward during these challenging times. The healing will continue in each of us as we go out into the world. Knowing we have something to offer during these troubling transformative times is profound and humbling.

Sally Blumenthal-McGannon, MFT, RN, is a nurse, therapist, and Theosophist who has been studying Therapeutic Touch since 1976. She has started a hospice, been the Santa Cruz County AIDS Coordinator, and served as adjunct faculty at Santa Clara University, and has a private practice. She is presently writing a book called The Joy of Dying.

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 108:4, pg 2

Cherry Gilchrist’s image of a ruined city on a riverbank in this issue reminds me of some thoughts I put into my book How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible.

In his play Our Town, Thornton Wilder writes, “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

When I think about this “something eternal,” one image that comes to me is that of a water table. I would say that this something eternal is like a water table underlying everything that we call reality. It is a vibrant, moving presence, and it is there whether we know it or not. The world of the five senses is simply a crust that floats on this eternal presence. And it is this presence that gives life to this crust that we call reality, which would not exist without it.

What name shall we give this underlying presence? Some have called it the Ground of Being. Another common term is Spirit. Yet another is God.

Let us take the metaphor further. There are areas where it does not rain. If people live there, they have to rely on the water table for their water supply. Let’s say that our earthly reality is like a region of this kind. It has no life, no energy of its own. All the life it has is drawn from this Ground of Being, this Spirit.

To live, in any true sense, is to have a connection with this Spirit. We can imagine this process as involving wells, or springs, that connect the two levels of being. At certain points the water of the Spirit breaks through the crust, forming wells. These “wells,” shall we say, are moments of encounter with the sacred.

To take this analogy a step further, let’s say that there are places where the water arises more often. People are attracted to these places. They come repeatedly. Hotels and other accommodations are built for them. Someone notices that this water seems to surface more often at certain times, so the place attracts even more people then. These become regular occurrences, and, like all other forms of human activity, they become formalized.

This groundwater does not belong to anybody. It comes and goes as it will, sometimes in a predictable pattern, often unexpectedly. But the land around the spots where the water comes up can be owned; it is real estate just like anything else. The property is bought up by the devout and by the shrewd, and they start to limit people’s access to the water.

These owners set themselves on high. They say the water rises because of certain things that they themselves do. They will let others take part—if these others will do as they say and pay them a price for the privilege.

Say also that this groundwater of the Spirit erupts in an especially powerful way at a particular place and time. These are the revelations known to world history. Those who experience them have not only seen—and seen in a very powerful way—but often believe that they are inspired to guide humanity in the right path. Usually one individual encounters this eruption most directly and powerfully. He becomes the founder, the lawgiver. He gives commandments about how to pray and how to live with our fellow humans.

This eruption of the groundwater of the Spirit revives and nourishes the land around it for many years. Life becomes possible there. The water continues to bubble up in varying quantities—sometimes enough for a group, sometimes for an individual only. Over the centuries, it bubbles up less often. Soon the land is dry again; only the tiniest trickles appear from time to time. But people still live there, remembering when the water was abundant. Some even eat dirt and tell themselves they are drinking water.

We could also liken the Ancient Wisdom to this groundwater. It does not belong to anybody; no one can claim it, though plenty of people try. The impulse comes with great force, then over the centuries it weakens. Its truths are diluted, its ideas are subtly changed, until it has only the faintest resemblance to what it originally was.

It would be foolish to mistake one of the dry wells for the living water underneath, yet people do this regularly. The water itself becomes a matter of memory and legend. Scoffers deny that there was ever such a thing.

Those of us who devote ourselves to the Ancient Wisdom should, I believe, reflect on these ideas. Every form that embodies this wisdom can dry up. At the very least we ought to avoid mistaking the wells for the water. Perhaps their ultimate value is as reminders to dig our own wells for ourselves.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Clewell, Andre , "How Do We Teach about the Root Races?" Quest 108:4, pg 24-25, 30

By Andre Clewell

I earned a PhD in evolutionary biology at a major Midwestern university. Later I was introduced to Theosophy. I was distraught to learn that some evolutionary concepts as understood by Theosophy differed widely from contemporary scientific fact and theory. This contentious material was prominently featured in The Secret Doctrine. I was particularly concerned with the elaborate narratives concerning human evolution in earlier Root Races, which read like children’s stories. The chasm separating evolution as understood by biology and anthropology and that in The Secret Doctrine continues to widen, and the two versions seem irreconcilable.

I was chastened by the realization that Theosophy otherwise presented a cogent and compelling case for spirituality and that The Secret Doctrine was written under the unassailable tutelage of Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi. Perhaps, I reasoned, extenuating circumstances would eventually come to light and resolve some of the differences between these incompatible evolutionary accounts.

Uneasily, I shelved my concerns as I continued studying Theosophy. However, I was concerned that other novice spiritual seekers would summarily reject Theosophy on the basis of The Secret Doctrine’s fantastic and contentious evolutionary narrative. As I began to teach Theosophy, I tried to avoid going into any detail that would raise the concerns that my initial Theosophical instructors in Theosophy mentors had raised in me.

This article explores the short-circuited nexus between science and Theosophy and how we can approach this topic when giving Theosophical instruction to newcomers. My concerns begin with teachings in The Secret Doctrine insisting that human evolution represents an evolutionary lineage distinct from that of all other mammals. H.P. Blavatsky repeatedly expresses this opinion. Yet all scientific evidence, including that from DNA investigations, converges upon a different, and indeed incompatible, explanation of human evolution.

In addition, HPB said that atmospheric gases were stable over geologic time (Secret Doctrine 2:159). That notion has been thoroughly and universally discredited. In general, The Secret Doctrine displays a lack of a fundamental understanding of ecology and its formative roles in evolutionary processes. Genetic mechanisms were unknown when it was written, and Mme. Blavatsky’s writings exhibit a profound misunderstanding of the role of sexual reproduction in evolutionary processes.

More importantly, from a contemporary perspective the alleged emergence of protohumans in the Third, Lemurian, Root Race and the early Fourth, Atlantean, Root Race seems fantastic. Others before me have questioned this material. The late TSA president Joy Mills wrote, “The subject of lost continents, both Atlantis and Lemuria, remains a topic of speculation for many people” (Mills, 365). Discussions of the Stanzas of Dzyan 6 through 9 (Secret Doctrine 2:131–226) are especially disconcerting from a modern scientific perspective, particularly the descriptions of sweat-born beings, giants, androgynes, and narrow-brained beings. The gradual solidification of bodies in these beings from a transparent etheric state seems incongruous with modern knowledge about biochemistry, cell biology, and physiology. It would be much easier to accept the accounts of these fantastic beings if they had been presented as human prototypes that were developed by pitris or other demiurges entirely on nonphysical planes of existence.

Notions about these beings and the solidification of bodies appear in the Stanzas. Although Mme. Blavatsky discussed them at length in The Secret Doctrine, she only mentioned these earlier Root Races briefly without elaboration in her Collected Writings, and I have not seen them discussed in other nineteenth-century Theosophical literature, including the Mahatma Letters. At one point, though, HPB suggested that these teachings contain “more or less transparent allegories” and that the portrayal of the sweat-born race “concealed a psycho-physiological phenomenon, and one of the greatest mysteries of Nature” (Secret Doctrine 2:148). Unfortunately she did not elaborate on this assertion.

In his monograph on how The Secret Doctrine was written, Theosophical scholar Boris de Zirkoff explains that the Masters reviewed the manuscript each night as Blavatsky wrote it. Could the Masters have suggested that these topics were indeed allegorical, and could HPB have dutifully added a paragraph to that effect? Her only other recourse would have been to rewrite many completed pages of manuscript for The Secret Doctrine at a time when subscribers for her long-overdue magnum opus were clamoring for its publication.

The Stanzas of Dzyan reduced to writing knowledge that oral tradition had passed down for innumerable generations. Were these teachings garbled from countless oral retellings by elders of what actually happened in Lemuria and Atlantis? Is this why they may be allegorical? Did the Masters decide that HPB was too ill and too burdened by other responsibilities to demand an extensive rewrite, so they allowed her one suggestion of allegory to suffice? We don’t know. We don’t even know if the Masters reviewed all of the nearly 1500 pages of The Secret Doctrine with equal care. Their principal interest was that the spiritual paradigm that we call Theosophy be made publicly available. Mme. Blavatsky’s numerous detours into related Victorian science and scholarship were of less concern to them.

According to de Zirkoff, other Theosophists suggested edits and prepared texts that were incorporated into The Secret Doctrine. We don’t know which passages were contributed by others, although they are unlikely to have concerned the contentious material. Furthermore, other hands made major rearrangements of the text just before the manuscript was typeset. We don’t know for sure if these changes affected HPB’s narrative or if the Masters reviewed the results of this last-minute exercise.

The Masters only imparted information which humanity was ready to absorb and integrate from cultural, historical, and philosophical perspectives. They presented new information within the intellectual context of the times. For example, when The Secret Doctrine was written, the structure of the atom was unknown to science, and the Masters could not explain atomic behavior in terms of subatomic particles and quantum mechanics. Likewise, they were not at liberty to explain the evolution of species in terms of mutation and genetic isolation. They were addressing an audience preoccupied by considerations of biological classification rather than ecosystems, so they did not discuss ecological dynamics in evolutionary processes. They largely limited their instruction to answering questions that were put directly to them, and they did not venture into side issues.

Even so, why did the Masters feel that information in The Secret Doctrine could be effectively presented in the form of fables and fairy tales? Why did they allow HPB to promote an evolutionary lineage for humans that diverged from all other mammalian evolution?

These topics raise more questions than answers, and we have reached a quandary. A reconciliation of the ever-widening gap between The Secret Doctrine with modern biology and anthropology seems highly unlikely.

Yet we are loath to reject the content of The Secret Doctrine, which was overseen by Masters who also provided us with spiritual theory that unites the wisdom traditions of the ages. The Masters know more than we do. They have much better access to knowledge on the higher mental and intuitional planes than we do. Who are we to doubt them? Unfortunately, they are no longer precipitating letters with answers to our questions. Our only alternative is to have patience and trust that explanations will eventually be forthcoming.

In the meantime, how do we teach Theosophy to novices without affronting their intelligence and scaring them off with seemingly preposterous fairy tales? How do we give instruction about The Secret Doctrine? I recommend that we consider its contentious chapters on Root Race development as outdated scholarship. We should downplay the literal importance of these chapters and admit that we do not know how to interpret this material in light of our present state of knowledge. In so doing, we set these ideas aside for interpretation by future generations in light of new revelations. As an added benefit, we can avoid having to address several passages of Victorian snobbery that are tucked into these contentious chapters. This material would insult modern readers, who would rightfully consider it as racially biased.

We should not let ourselves be held hostage to the past by considering The Secret Doctrine as presenting a static dogma like the Christian Bible. The Masters intimated that more spiritual knowledge would be revealed as humanity advances and is ready for it. In that regard, the paradigm of Theosophy is and should be regarded as dynamic and open to new thought. Otherwise we will become stuck in the past like religious fundamentalists. From that perspective, outdated scholarship may well prove to be the only viable explanation for contentious science in The Secret Doctrine.

Sources

Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. 2 vols. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Mills, Joy. Reflections on an Ageless Wisdom: A Commentary on the Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett. Wheaton: Quest, 2010.

Zirkoff, Boris de. Rebirth of the Occult Tradition: How the Secret Doctrine of H.P. Blavatsky Was Written. Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977.

Andre Clewell investigates mechanisms of plant species evolution. He is a founder of the new discipline of ecological restoration, which recovers degraded ecosystems to their historic, natural condition. He is a Life Member of the TSA and past president of the MidSouth Federation.

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Johnson, Zane, "The Tragic Consciousness in Literature and Tradition" Quest 108:4, pg 26-30

By Zane Johnson

Many seekers today set out on their paths to find something that society is not giving them. In the face of ecological destruction, unflinching individualism, and a general sense of separation and desperation, people are looking for something not quite so tragic as what is currently on the table. Religion and its close cousin, literature, are the great resources in the human search for dignity and meaning. Myth, poetry, and drama can be powerful pathfinders out of this seemingly modern malaise, because they tell us that this search for something more is not ours alone but is woven into the fabric of human existence.

In his article “The Comic Mode,” literary critic Joseph W. Meeker defines the primary value of tragic drama as “avoiding or transcending the necessary in order to accomplish the impossible.” In distinction to comedy, which, like ecology, is a system “designed to accommodate necessity and encourage acceptance of it” (Meeker, 163), tragedy presents a version of reality based on power, struggle, pain, ambition, and commitment to an impossible ideal that leads the tragic hero to his (and it is usually his) ultimate end in death. One thinks of Shakespeare’s Brutus or Macbeth, feeling put upon by the cosmos or history to prove that “men at sometime were masters of their fates” (Julius Caesar, 1.2.139). Tragedies like Hamlet begin with the rupture of communal and familial bonds and proceed to the all-too-familiar end. Nature is cruel, as in King Lear, and serves only as an organic parallel to his court’s possession by dark psychological forces that seek to punish him. It is a staggered path into dissolution, from whence we only see a few hints of renewal at the end.

Comedies, on the other hand, usually follow a dialectical pattern, which sees a cast of characters move from an initial stage of uneasy stability to disorder as unruly passions are sorted out, and finally to renewal and restoration of order. In Shakespeare, this renewal often occurs in a “green world”—one thinks of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the chaos of human affections that is eventually tamed within an enchanted forest. Such a mode of literature extols the biological and communal over the ideal and individual and tends to highly value the bonds of human relationship and community. In As You Like It, this comfort in community extends, surely enough, to the natural world, where one “finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (2.1.16–17).

Everybody gets what they want in the end, and some primordial inkling that life is in fact good is fulfilled.         

What does the foregoing have to do with those inner traditions, those ancient springs of wisdom to which people are turning for an alternative to tragic reality? My suspicion is, sadly, that the language of some these traditions, particularly the Western mystery traditions (with which I am the most familiar), often reproduce a tragic vision of reality, or what I call “tragic consciousness.” Wisdom is not immune from accreting elements from the surrounding culture.

	The ghost of Caesar taunts Brutus about his imminent defeat. (Engraving by Edward Scriven, from a painting by Richard Westall based on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, act 4, scene 3, London, 1802. Wikipedia.)

Part of the dilemma could be the enduring legacy of the nineteenth-century occult revival, which came upon the heels of the Romantic movement. In his article in The Church Times, which details the astonishing involvement of Anglo-Catholic clergy in Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Richard Yoder argues that both at the exoteric and esoteric levels, religious life was engaged in “a defense of the supernatural in the face of modern materialism.” This was, of course, an extension of Romantic values: a defense of the imagination against reason, nature against the despoliations of industrial capitalism, the individual against oblivion. Romantic closet dramas reveled in tragic consciousness, and it comes as no surprise that writers such as P.B. Shelley and Lord Byron constituted a “satanic school” of literature of their own to their contemporary critics. Prometheus Unbound and Cain characteristically reevaluate traditional satanic antiheroes as misunderstood revolutionaries, contained by powers of social and religious tyranny.

Of course, some of these values are fraught with a volatile self-against-the-world dualism. It is now a commonplace to suggest the direct influence of Romantic values—left unchecked and unbalanced—on twentieth-century fascist ideology. Many an occult personality of this same period also had fascist leanings. One need not scour too long the works of Aleister Crowley before coming up against repulsive statements about women, Jews, and the wretched of the earth, coupled with visions of a genetically engineered superrace that manipulates the ignorant masses towards the achievement of their True Wills. In a comment on chapter 3 of his channeled text Liber AL vel Legis, for example, he asks, “Should we not rather breed humanity for quality by killing off any tainted stock, as we do with other cattle?”

 Statements in Crowley’s Liber AL, particularly in the third chapter, are also remarkably similar to sentiments expressed in Shakespearean tragedy (Crowley is notorious for literary appropriation in his inspired works). Compare Liber AL’s “Lurk! Withdraw! Upon them!” (Crowley, 314) to Julius Caesar’s “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!” (3.2.200).

Occult fascism may be the outer extreme of the tragic mode, and we may affirm with Traditionalist esotericists like René Guénon that such occult currents represent a counterinitiation. But even within the Traditionalist framework, tragic consciousness predominates. In Defending Ancient Springs, Kathleen Raine, poet and founder of London’s Temenos Academy, states plainly that “genius is not democratic” (46).

Tragic consciousness affects those of us engaged in plumbing the depths of the traditions we’ve inherited in a more routine way. The hangover from the nineteenth-century occult revival and its historical and philosophical baggage affects how we conceive the spiritual life at a fundamental level.

Our language often seems to present the initiate as special in some way and can foster a sense that we have raised ourselves up from the ranks of the unenlightened masses. I believe this is mostly an error in language, but it can become potent as our unenlightened ego seeks a foothold. (The contemporary British Kabbalist Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi indicates that the initial zealotry and self-aggrandizement that can develop when one begins on a spiritual path can be corrected through a rule of silence: Halevi, 274.)

The esoteric is not for everyone, nor is everyone seeking it. And that’s fine. In her classic Esoteric Christianity, Annie Besant describes secret Christian teaching as just that—something secret, not intended for everyone. She further suggests that it is only for those that can rise above the general intellectual torpor of their contemporaries and be admitted into the temple. One might be forgiven for feeling unnecessarily excluded. Even worse, it could inflame the pride of the curious and encourage a sense of superiority.

Besant describes the qualities that the candidate for the mysteries must develop to be admitted: first discrimination, then disgust, then on to other, less threatening-sounding virtues, such as control of thoughts and endurance. Disgust is the one I want to focus on now. To be fair, she describes it not as disgust with creation or with human beings per se, but rather with “the unreal and the fleeting” (Besant, 174). Yet this can be a major stumbling block to anyone seeking the way and, in my opinion, should eventually be transcended.

When I first began a meditation practice early on in my spiritual inquiry, I was working at a kitchen. I remember discovering at the end of the night shift a maggot that had made a home for itself underneath the soda fountain, feeding on the syrup that fell beneath the grate. And I remember thinking: that’s it. That’s what we are, always too content to suck our sugar cubes in blissful ignorance. I felt disgust.

 Of course, I was all too eager to point my finger at those around me and not at myself. But I did experience a sudden, profound aversion to reckless, aimless pleasure-seeking at the expense of the planet and other human beings. Admittedly, it did have an unwelcome effect on my relationships. As Jesus reminds us, “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). This idea had outlived its usefulness to me as an impetus to deeper inquiry into Reality, and I struggled to let go of it.

When describing the higher meanings of atonement and sacrifice in the Christian mysteries, Besant affirms the basic truth that walking the spiritual path is fundamentally not for ourselves, but for the world (a “comic” as much as a cosmic truth). For the real, suffering, flesh-and-blood people and other sentient beings in our lives. This is “the life of love,” which is always other-oriented, and which is summed up beautifully as the Fruit of the Holy Spirit of St. Paul (Besant, 187).

There is an allure to taking too seriously the thought that we have some knowledge that the world does not and which makes us important. It is bewitching in a way, a thought that enchants us when the weird sisters of our imagination talk us into accepting a kind of spiritual viciousness towards others through which our imagined kingship should be gained. And the usual results follow.

Oftentimes the impulse to “conversion,” to begin our own spiritual inquiries, comes at the behest of a voice within us that tells us that things are not as they seem. There is more to this life of grasping after recognition and ephemeral pleasures, this life of sorrow and loss, than we have been led to believe. And this should be a cause for joy! Yet often it only seems to reaffirm the attitudes that we sought to escape in the beginning: that this world and creation are fallen, that pleasure is bad, that there is something wrong with our lives because they never seem to measure up to the impossible tragic ideals that we have somehow absorbed along the way. People and nature become merely instrumental to us as we retreat into our own spiritual ambition.

This is not to say that we should start from scratch and invent other lateral paths of spiritual seeking (though this too has its place). Nor does it mean that we can’t benefit from looking to other paths whose teleology is more horizontal and inclusive. There are a number of means to experience more comic consciousness in our spiritual lives.

 The wisdom of the Kabbalah tells us that the Pillar of Severity is just as important to the divine plan for creation as is the Pillar of Mercy. There is a place for the tragic mode in our seeking too, and it can often be a great impetus to us early in our paths. In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths certainly express tragic consciousness but are mediated by other compassionate teachings like those of the Brahmaviharas.

In my academic work, which helped inspire this reflection, I have lately focused on the intersections between literature, ecology, and religion in the English Renaissance. I have been delighted to encounter Renaissance Hermetic texts anew and read reflections on them from literary writers of the time that seem to affirm the intuitions found in comic literature.

 “Sure! there’s a tie of bodies,” as poet Henry Vaughan put it: a pulsing vitality that binds all sentient and nonsentient beings and valorizes life, matter, and embodiment (Di Cesare, 152). The world is infused with the anima mundi, and as the great martyr for wisdom Giordano Bruno put it, “that one and same thing . . . fills everything, illuminates the universe, and directs Nature to produce her various species suitably” (in Borlik, 57). This is surely esotericism in the comic mode.

The esoteric tradition of Renaissance Hermeticism and alchemy appears to express a comic rather than tragic consciousness, intuiting in nature and human life a vital force that sanctifies embodiment and materiality. Emphasis is on unity rather than division. Reaching its peak in the early days of the Reformation, when communal, sacramental rites were discontinued overnight, Renaissance esotericism also helped ameliorate the rift between humans and between humanity and nature.

In a time when forces of disintegration and isolation in the social and natural spheres are rapidly gaining speed, the older tradition can again come to our aid. As pointed out in their manifesto Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, Peter Lamborn Wilson and his colleagues claim that there is an opportunity in these sacred sciences for ecological renewal, to help us “explore the riches contained in the magical confluence of our present time and consciousness with the divine gifts now available to all through Nature” (Wilson, Kindle position 134).

The other way that I have been able to integrate the comic mode in my own spiritual life has been to reembrace exoteric religion as a supplement to esoteric study. This will certainly not be a popular position, and indeed it took a lot of time for me to come to it, but I must admit, along with the Traditionalists, that the exoteric is inseparable from the esoteric. They inform and balance one another. Certain esoteric concepts or symbols within the Western traditions are incomprehensible without a thorough familiarity with Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition.

This is also a lesson we can take from the Renaissance esoteric stream of tradition, from whose fonts the conventionally religious—even the Puritanical—freely drew. Think of Anglican priests John Donne or George Herbert. In his poem “Man” Herbert presents a worldview grounded in relationship, analogy, and entanglement, in which

            Man is all symmetrie,
            Full of proportions, one limbe to another,
            And all to all the world besides.

This vision of humanity in the cosmos is a supremely beneficent one, one of belonging, in which “all things unto our flesh are kinde” (Hutchinson, 90).

I think this general optimism about life is common to more conventional forms of religion but is harder to come by in esoteric circles. Anglo-Catholic spirituality has been very important for me lately in living the values of community, companionship, and service that isolated study and practice could not. And yet the meat of the tradition is still to be discovered in private contemplation. It is not either/or—a choice made by all tragic heroes—but both/and. Believe the good news!

In this time in history, when we are becoming increasingly aware of our need for new structures, new ways of expressing communal bonds, and new ways of thinking about inherited tradition, it can be helpful to look back to the vast stretch of human history in which people relied on one another and on their natural environment for spiritual and physical nourishment.

To return to Meeker’s piece quoted at the beginning of this article, he makes the interesting observation that “whole cultures have lived and died without producing tragedy or the philosophical views that tragedy depends on” (Meeker, 157). Perhaps it is time to reevaluate why tragic consciousness has taken such preponderance in Western initiatory streams and whether the time might be ripe to smooth down our edges as seekers and, along with Prospero at The Tempest’s end, commit our all-powerful wands to the sea and walk free from our self-imposed isolation from deeper springs of tradition, history, and community.

Sources

Besant, Annie. Esoteric Christianity. New York: Bodley Head, 1902.

Borlik, Todd Andrew, ed. Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Crowley, Aleister. Liber AL vel Legis, 1904. OTO Library (website), accessed June 29, 2020: https://lib.oto-usa.org/libri/liber0220.html.

Crowley, Aleister. The New and Old Commentaries to Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law, 1920. Hermetic Library (website), accessed June 30, 2020: https://hermetic.com/legis/new-comment/index.

Di Cesare, Mario A., ed. George Herbert and the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets: Authoritative Texts and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

Halevi, Z’ev ben Shimon. Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1974.

Hutchinson, F.E., ed. The Works of George Herbert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

Meeker, Joseph A. “The Comic Mode.” In The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996: 155–69.

Raine, Kathleen. Defending Ancient Springs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Wilson, Peter Lamborn, et al. Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology. Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2007.

Wells, Stanley et al., ed. The Complete Oxford Shakespeare: Comedies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Citations from Shakespeare refer to this volume and the one below.

———. The Complete Oxford Shakespeare: Tragedies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 

Yoder, Richard. “On the Wings of the Dawn: The Lure of the Occult.” Church Times, Dec. 14, 2018: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/14-december/features/features/on-the-wings-of-the-dawn-the-lure-of-the-occult.

Zane Johnson is a poet, translator, and student of the mysteries. Recent work has appeared in Asymptote, No Man’s Land, Anatolios Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. He currently studies literature, translation, and the environmental humanities at the University of Munich.