American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius
Timothy Grieve-Carlson
New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 310 pp., hardcover, $120; paperback, $39.95.
Shortly before his death in 1993, social critic and editor Irving Howe told a group of contributors to his seasoned political quarterly Dissent: “We have two problems at this magazine. The first is that some of you don’t know how to write in English. The second is that some of you don’t want to write in English. The second of these is the far greater problem.”
Howe meant that the Upper West Side living room of writers, many of whom taught college, were increasingly using academic jargon as a mark of professionalism. Indeed, the very unreadability of much current scholarly writing in the humanities functions as a source of pride to many pedants, who see their respective specialties as rightly possessed of their own nomenclature, much like the study of the reproductive cycles of mollusks.
Ironically, perhaps, the rise of Western esotericism as a recognized field of study has introduced a bold, fresh, rigorous, and scholarly new wave of literature into the humanities. Because academia until recently neglected, or even rejected, study of occult, mystical, pietistic, and esoteric thought streams, much of the new bumper crop of scholarly literature in esoterica exudes the freshness of discovery.
A prime example appears in scholar of religion Timothy Grieve-Carlson’s impeccably timed and pristinely written (and reasoned) American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius. His book testifies not only to the overall quality of recent scholarly exegeses of esoterica but also the fruits of growing up in a household that maintained a set of Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series (as noted in his acknowledgments).
American Aurora is timely because Grieve-Carlson finds in Johannes Kelpius (1667‒1708)—the Hermetically influenced Christian monk who sojourned from Central Europe to establish a short-lived but influential colony outside Philadelphia in 1694—a subject who invariably appears in historical literature with little backstory and often a semilegendary telling. Grieve-Carlson notes:
“Our dim historical memory of Kelpius and the hesitation of scholars to cut back against the strata of folklore and legend have turned him into a kind of tabula rasa for an American occult tradition in search of an origin story from the earliest period in American history, a uniquely American spin on Wouter Hanegraaff’s suggestion that esotericism is always grounded in a discourse of ‘ancient wisdom.’”
This early passage frames the adventurousness and purpose Grieve-Carlson brings to his study. The author dirties his hands, not only traveling to the rocky, root-twisted banks of the Wissahickon Creek in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where Kelpius and his circle struggled to live (leading to the abbot’s death from tuberculosis at age forty-one) but also plumbing period literature to grasp how this Lutheran pietist and religious radical understood himself and his wilderness surroundings. “Can a historian of religion,” Grieve-Carlson wonders, “read a landscape as a primary source?” Not only can he, I offer, but to overlook it means neglecting vital material.
It doesn’t take much to further detect subtlety and nonconformity in Grieve-Carlson’s approach. Rather than repeat recent nostrums (such as the textual sins of historian Frances Yates) or older nostrums (such as lettered Europe’s immediate embrace of the Corpus Hermeticum’s redating in the seventeenth century), the author charts a path, in both text and notes, that leavens ready-made notions.
In so doing, Grieve-Carlson argues persuasively that the influence of Hermeticism—the late-ancient compact of Greek-Egyptian thought—on Christian figures such as Kelpius, Paracelsus (c.1493‒1531), and Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) produced a pre-Enlightenment Gaia philosophy in which humanity and nature function as one whole. “Early modern Protestants,” he writes, “turned to Hermetic and alchemical literature because it offered an environmental knowledge that was applicable to a changing climate.”
During a Central European era of “persistent drought, cold, and war”—as well as increased persecution of mystical pietists—there also arose, the author notes, better reportage of natural phenomena, sometimes from farmers or tradesmen witnessing a meteorite. Collegiate authorities in the Old and New Worlds typically dismissed such reports as fancies of superstitious villagers, much as today’s sclerotic professional-skeptic culture disregards replicable findings from parapsychology or creditable evidence for UFOs.
The brutality of life in Central Europe was enough to drive the forty or so members of “the Kelpius group” to attempt transatlantic voyage to the American colonies. Once arrived, Kelpius and his circle sought to read hidden meanings into the colonial wilderness—and read many books too. Kelpius was a bookbinder by trade and, as Grieve-Carlson notes, made a decent living at it. Their learned commune laid tracks for others, including the Ephrata and Shaker colonies. I believe the author could have done more to consider this aspect of the monk’s legacy.
Grieve-Carlson is admirably generous toward popular historian Julius Sachse (1842‒1919), who promulgated several myths around Kelpius, including his Rosicrucian lineage. Next to Sachse, occult scholar Manly P. Hall (1901‒1990) proved among the few writers who kept Kelpius’s name alive in the first half of the twentieth century. But Hall too overrelied on folklore. He got Kelpius right in impact but fuzzy in details; Grieve-Carlson gets the hermit right on both counts.
Grieve-Carlson (along with scholars possessing related interests, like April DeConick and Hugh B. Urban) is continuing a cultural refinement begun over a generation ago by Yates: documentation of how Renaissance Hermeticism subtly but foundationally informed Western culture. We finally have a formidable study of Kelpius, one of the vessels through which that influence passed.
Mitch Horowitz
The author, a member of the TSA, is a PEN Awardיwinning historian, former vice president at Penguin Random House, and host of Discovery/Max’s Alien Encounters. His latest books are Modern Occultism and Happy Warriors. His work is censored in China.