Book Reviews

Living Buddha Zen by Lex Hixon; Larson Publications, Burdette, N.Y., 1995; paperback.

Alexander Paul Hixon, the "Greatheart," was born on Christmas Day and left this earth on All Saints Day, November I, 1995. His memorial was celebrated in New York on December 8, which was the Blessed Mother's feast day. Every important date regarding this extraordinary man seems to have poetic justice stamped on it, lie was 54 years of age when he died.

Those who knew Hixon understand the significance of what God in the aspect of the mother meant to him. He spent his life seeking the Divine in a myriad of spiritual traditions, but always connecting them to the Universal Mother-whether it was Mother Mary, Goddess Kali, Mother Earth, or Tara. In his book The Mother of the Universe (Quest Books), he writes: "The Great Mother is humanity's most primordial, pervasive, and fruitful image of reality. She expresses herself fluently through and within every sacred tradition." He goes on to comment on the phenomenon of recent sightings of the Mother: "The many authentic appearances of the Virgin Mary- in Mexico, Portugal, Gerabondal, Spain, Lourdes, France, and contemporary apparitions today in Egypt, Mejugorje, and America-are special revelations of her reality for the modern world."

Hixon’s latest book, Living Buddha Zen, was published by Larson shortly before his death following a long and futile bout with cancer. He was to receive transmission in December from his Zen teacher Bernard Tetsugen Glassman Sensei. Other books by Hixon include Mother of the Universe, Mother of the Buddhas, and Heart of the Koran (all published by Quest), and Coming Home (recently reissued by Larson).

Hixon made explorations in "researching the Truth" accessible to all. He was a blend of scholarly intellectual and mystic, able to stay current in four sacred traditions: Ramakrishna Vedanta, Orthodox Christianity, Vajrayana Buddhism, and the Sufi Dervish Order, in which he became successor to Sheikh Muzafer after visiting Mecca in 1980. His title was Sheikh Nur, and he guided Sufis in New York City, New Jersey, Mexico, and Boulder. The profound devotion and love his Sufi students expressed for him is something to see. At the wake, a large band of Sufis brought forest green fabric to cover his casket, threw fragrant flower petals, sang, and praised Allah that he was in Paradise at last.

Years ago under the guidance of Father Alexander Schmemann, Lex and his wife Sheila studied mystical Christianity at Saint Vladimir's Seminary. I attended a service once with them and felt enchanted by the depth of spirit in that church. Every Sunday they went to Saint Vladimir's, despite the fact the church did not agree on his involvement with other religions.

Hixon was exposed to many paths in part from his hosting of a radio broadcast in which he interview ed many of the world 's spiritual leaders, including the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Krishnamurti, Bawa Mahaddin, Pir Vilayat Khan, and others.

I have been blessed to have had the guidance, inspiration, and education Lex Hixon gave me so steadily since I was sixteen and searching. He introduced me to my favorite teacher, Swami Aseshananda, a Hindu monk who looked like Yoda wearing a bow tie. The swami always welcomed Lex to lecture when he was in the northwest.

Everyone in Lex's circle was somehow inducted as a "spiritual debutante," unveiled to "spirituality-society." so to speak. His own spiritual path began with Christianity, under the guidance of Father Deloria, a Lakota Sioux Episcopal priest. Later Hixon converted to Orthodox Christianity, then discovered Zen through Alan Watts. Then he encountered the Gospel of Ramakrishna which led to a meeting with his Indian guru Swami Nikhilananda, with whom he traveled and studied in the last seven years of his life. He also studied Tibetan Buddhism and knew the Dalai Lama. But no path engrossed him more, I think, than the Muslim tradition.

Robert Thurman, a professor of Buddhist studies and a friend, said Hixon "had a genius for revitalizing the classics and a reverence."

Toward the end of his life, Lex seemed exhausted by the huge responsibilities he had undertaken. Friends stayed at his house, some for months, some for years. One such friend, who had stayed at his house in 1987, told me she had a dream that Lex got colon cancer and that she told him about it. He ignored the message. What is strange is that this was a man who analyzed everyone's dreams and took them seriously. I feel he had made up his mind to depart this realm for reasons beyond our understanding. He ignored a chance to heal the illness in the early stages. Nevertheless, he has left behind a legacy of great deeds which would fill a book. He gave unbelievable amounts of money to good causes, spiritual organizations, and friends. He built a retreat in the Catskills, with a temple to honor all traditions and open to the public (for information, phone 518/966-5140).

Stephen Levine has said that "Lex has looked into the eyes of the Divine and has burst into flame." In a letter to Lex during his final illness, the Effendi in Istanbul wrote, “The only way to avoid death is not to be born in the first place. In death there is union with the Beloved. The real skill is to reach the secret of death before dying. May Allah make us all obtain that sec ret."
-CHRISTIANE A NICOLE

Spring 1996

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New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science: edited by Willis Harman with Jane Clark; Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1994; hardcover.

In a recent article in Shambhala Sun, Willis Harman declared that the key question of our time is one of meaning: What is the central purpose of technologically advanced societies when it no longer makes sense for it to be economic production?

"The seeds of worldwide conflict lie in the enormous and growing disparity between the world's rich and poor peoples." Harman wrote, adding that, "the industrial era paradigm contains no rationale or incentive for more equitable distribution of the earth's resources."

For more than twenty years, Harman has been among the foremost spokesmen for a new metaphysic for modern science. In his new book, New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Harman collects fourteen essays by various contributors offering perspectives for the nineties on issues previously raised by E. A. Burtt in his seminal book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science seventy years earlier.

In suggesting a need for new ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying modern science, Harman and his colleagues do not suggest any kind of closure on what the new assumptions should be. But they do identify principal categories, including a shift away from a fragmented and mechanical conception of the world toward a holistic and organic conception; a shift away from a concern with objectivity toward a concern with subjectivity, including the role of perception and cognition in the process of scientific inquiry; a deep sense of wholeness, of oneness, of everything being part of a universe; and a sense of the validity of deep intuition as one of the ways in which we contact the greater reality.

Harman says that a "respiritualization of society appears to be taking place, but one more experiential and non-institutionalized, less fundamentalist and sacerdotal, than most of the historically familiar forms of religion."

Contributors to this book include scientists , philosophers, and psychologists, among them aerospace engineer Robert Jahn, biologist George Wald, physicist Arthur Zajonc, anthropologist Charles Laughlin, philosopher Lynn Hankinson Nelson, psychobiologist Roger Sperry, and professor of Indian studies and law Vine Deloria, Jr.
– WILLIAM METZGER

Spring 1996

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Chaos, Gaia, Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Great Streams of History by Ralph Abraham; HarperSanFrancisco, 1994; paper.

In recent years, mathematicians, physicists, social scientists, and even movie makers have been interested in chaos theory. When reading about this concept, a layperson wonders about its applications to everyday life. How is it useful and why is everyone so excited about it?

Ralph Abraham, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, gives his response in this book. The word "chaos" generally evokes such synonyms as disorder, confusion, and disarray. Webster's Dictionary calls it the "state existing before the creation of distinct forms" or "complete disorder." Abraham, however, defines chaos as a cosmic principle and the source of all creation. When we resist change and cling to order, we are fighting this principle. It may be nature's way of transforming our lives through its ongoing evolution and growth.

Two other principles work hand in hand with chaos. These are "gaia,” the creative order of the living world that helps maintain its existence, and "eros," the creative impulse and spiritual medium that binds chaos and gaia together.

Abraham believes that science is in the throes of a major upheaval. Its traditional role has been to maintain the current paradigm through suppressing any experience that runs contrary to its dogma. It presumes we are each a separate consciousness looking out at a totally determinable mechanistic universe. Its dependence on accurate measurement of phenomena allows it to dismiss information that challenges this view in much the same way that medieval religion denied a sun-centered solar system as contrary to biblical canon.

Abraham argues that science cannot deny the existence of chaos in the rhythm of the planets, whose orbital variations defy prediction, the turbulence of climatic forces in the atmosphere and oceans, and even in the "metapatterns of history."

"Gaia," a term coined by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, points out the holistic interconnection between the earth, its climate, and all living things. The Gaia Hypothesis, which began in the biological sciences, affirms the intelligence of the whole life system of our planet in creating and regulating the physical conditions optimal for the emergence and maintenance of life. The history of the temperature and climate of the earth, with its regulation by the biosphere and its irregularities (ice ages) caused by chaos in the solar system, is used to illustrate Gaian theory. (page 5)

Eros, according to the Greeks, denoted a spirit that yearned for "that which is missing or demanding love." Abraham compares it to the holy spirit, or logos, that connects soul and body. It is a psychic energy pushing aside order. It prevents stagnation. It promotes growth, transformation, and new life.

Abraham applies chaos theory to the study of history and the myths of each historical period. He states historical evolution takes place through transformations called bifurcations. These bifurcations affect stationary time periods where little change occurs, periodic time periods where a pattern, such as a series of wars, is repeated, and chaotic periods where radical bifurcation occurs. The latter, while appearing the most unsettling, actually leads to the greatest evolution in the era. Examples include the discovery of (the wheel, use of time pieces, the invention of movable type, and the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal culture.

Abraham ties chaos, gaia, and eros together culturally in what he calls the orphic tradition. It encourages balance among matriarchal and patriarchal civilization, regarding all life as sac red, and giving high priority to peace and security. It avoids violence, encourages sexual freedom, promotes myths and rituals focused on love while holding music and mathematics in high regard.

He states that we are in the midst of a scientific and cultural revolution that will, with our enlightened encouragement, allow this orphic tradition to once again blossom and grow. This involves acceptance of chaos (inevitable psychically-inspired transformation) rather than clinging to outdated ego, inspired order, and stagnation.

While applying chaos theory to history, science, myth, religion, and philosophy. Abraham actually says very little about the dynamics of chaos theory itself. While not overburdening the reader with complex mathematics, it would have been useful to walk one through some of the details of this compelling theory. He incorrectly assumes that the reader will have some knowledge of chaos dynamics while reading a book obviously meant for the layperson. This survey of many diverse fields is, at times, only loosely tied together. It does, however, contain a glossary of technical terms as well as a thorough index. The extensive bibliography points the reader to greater exploration of the various fields and to further examination of his overall theme.
-GARY CRAWFORD

Spring 1996

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The Balance of Nature's Polarities In New-Paradigm Theory by Dirk Dunbar; Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, 1994; paper, 165 pages.

Since about 1945, the sense that Western civilization took a wrong turn somewhere has been generally expanding. The world wars were signals that something had gone drastically wrong, and the general belief that enough nuclear weapons existed to wipe out humanity, if not life on earth, was to many a desperate call for a new way of viewing and interacting with the world. Many new ways have been proposed in the past fifty years, from free market capitalism to moral interpretations of quantum physics, to feminism, to hippie enlightenment, to goddess worship.

Dirk Dunbar's book is an attempt to summarize the main threads of spiritual aspect s of these new ways. This "cultural transformation" involves science in the form of Jungian psychology and the new physics, and a broadened awareness of nature, especially in certain strands of feminism and popular music. Dunbar calls the general concatenation of ideas the "new-paradigm theory," and the overall thesis is simply stated in a sentence on his first page: "Western culture is reintegrating a feminine, ecological impulse into its dominantly masculine, rational value system."

The first sections of the book provide crisp explanations of how some of the new paradigm theory's most prominent developers- including Nietzsche, Emerson. Jung, Erich Neumann, Theodore Roszak , Fritjof Capra, Alan Watts, and Riane Eisler, as well as the Eranos meetings and Esalen Institute-have called attention to the problems of Western culture and helped shape the transformation. Collectively, says Dunbar, these scholars alert us to the fact that Western culture has been in a state of psychological and spiritual imbalance for about 2400 years, and at this point in history a general effort is being made to restore balance.

The central figure in this is Nietzsche's Apollonian opposition. Our culture has bee n so long dominated by Apollonian qualities (rationality, logic, and what we generally take to be masculine or yang traits) that Dionysian qualities (intuition, emotion, and general feminine or yin traits) have been subordinated and weakened, leading to an overemphasis on science and a lack of emphasis on our relation to nature, for example, not to mention ourselves. In his conclusion Dunbar says:

Recognizing the Mother Goddess, Dionysus, Shiva, and yin as representations of nature's dark, mysterious, female, receptive, synthesizing, and intuitive principles, and the Father-sky, Apollo, Vishnu, and yang as light, rational, male, aggressive, and discriminating principles, the scholars [of new-paradigm theory] contend that only through balancing the two can individuals and society at large actualize full human worth.

This sentence captures the gist of the book. The most important element of new paradigm theory is that the debilitating split between human beings and nature is being recognized and dealt with in postwar culture through the feminist and environmental movements and through an emphasis on personal psychology in the Jungian tradition. As important to Dunbar's argument as Nietzsche's figures is Erich Neumann's theory or prophecy that the collective Western psyche shifted from feminine to masculine emphasis about 2400 years ago and has only recently entered a stage of reintegration of the two.

Dunbar gives particular attention in the latter half of his book to the American countercultural movement of the sixties. He says that the counterculture was a manifestation of Dionysian aesthetics and more finely, that it was an effort to replace Apollonian, agape driven values with Dionysian, eros-driven values. Jack Kerouac (On the Road, The Dharma Bums) and Robert Pirsig (Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) represent different phases of the countercultural effort to make this replacement.

Further, Dunbar argues in some detail that the rock music of the sixties also embodied the change. A kind of unconscious rebellion was enacted in the music of the fifties, in which performers like Elvis Presley evoked distinctly Dionysian sensibilities. Dunbar points out that Presley in some sense came to be seen as a "god," reinforcing Dionysian sensibilities. The Dionysian evolved, in this view, into full-fledged, conscious rebellion by the late sixties, when the music of the Beatles, the "Rolling Stones, the Doors, and others deliberately invoked Dionysian, eros-driven feelings. He likens this to the popular transformation, in ancient Greece, of Dionysian rites into sophisticated drama. The whole thing signifies to Dunbar not merely a youth rebellion, but a shift of cultural paradigms.

This book is a concise summary of the philosophical and historical ideas about cultural change which have evolved in this century in the West. However, although Dunbar emphasizes the reintegration of feminine elements of the psyche into Western values, he mentions relatively few women. Still it is an excellent introduction to some major interpreters of modern culture.

Dunbar is a clear thinker and philosopher, a fine teacher and musician, and also an accomplished athlete, one of the outstanding players in the history of European professional basketball. His book is a helpful addition to the literature of this turbulent century and well worth the time and energy of anyone interested in the spiritual implication s and potentials of those changes.

-DANA WILDE

Spring 1996

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Structures of Consciousness by Georg Feuerstein; Integral Publishing, Lower Lake, Cal., 1995; paperback.

This scholarly work was out of print for several years, and it is good to have it available again, complete with a vivid new cover. Feuerstein's book is the first and only comprehensive introduction to the work of the Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1905-1973), who long before the new age movement, arrived at the conclusion that we are witnessing the birthing of a new type of consciousness. In his magnum opus The Ever Present Origin, he named it the aperspectivalarational-integral consciousness.

Feuerstein has been pursuing Gebserian research for the past quarter century. What makes Structures of Consciousness so valuable is that it not merely makes Gebser's generally difficult work accessible, but also critiques and expands it. Consciousness has recently entered scientific discourse so the ideas in the book, skillfully sketched by Feuerstein, will be of interest to many readers of The Quest. I recommend this book highly.
-SUBHASH KAK

Spring 1996

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The Tale of the Incomparable Prince by mDoc mkhar Tshe ring dbang rgyal, trans. by Beth Newman; HarperCollins, 1996; hardcover, 319 pages.

Beth Newman has undertaken the first English translation of the only known Tibetan novel, The Tale of the Incomparable Prince. Writing in the 1720s, the author attempted to combine social and political views with Buddhist teachings in an artistic fashion. He sought to provide a tale for his people without limiting it to the world of scholars who traditionally exchanged such stories among themselves.

The hero of the novel, Prince Kumaradvitiya, is an Eastern equivalent to King Arthur, a symbol of excellence in the arts of war, love, and leadership, who maintains the highest understanding and devotion to morality and universal love. The tale told here combines Eastern teachings such as the Bhagavad-Gita with a more typically Western-style tale such as those of Homer. It is an exciting story about princes and kings, heroes and villains, and, of course, love. It is also a deeply spiritual and philosophical piece that engages a reader's sense of morality.

Unlike its sermon-like predecessors in the Buddhist literary canon, the religious lessons in The Tale of the Incomparable Prince are relayed in a storytelling manner that makes the values and ideals of the tradition accessible to the modern reader.

The story tells of the birth and rebirth of Prince Kumaradvitiya. Prince Kumara is born as the first son and heir of King Suryamati (Wise Sun), the great king of the city Gem of the World. Kumara is born according to prophecy as a brilliant and powerful prince, who inherits wealth, knowledge, political and martial power, and the love of his people. His unimaginable abundance of earthly powers and privileges is displayed in his quest to obtain the magnificent Monahan as his queen. He is called upon to exercise political leadership and military prowess in leading his armies into battle against enemies.

Despite his wealth and success, his instinct is to lead his people according to dharma. Like the Buddha, Kumara understands that earthly riches and pleasures only trap people in samsara, misery. He must, however, first complete this journey towards enlightenment himself before he can return and lead his people and offer them salvation from samsara.

As a religious text, this novel is faithful to the Buddhist tradition, teaching that as karma repays us for drifting from dharma, we have the tendency to make more and more mistakes. This leads us into the never ending cycle of misery called samsara. Tshe ring dbang rgyal writes:

In that fiery place, the Death Lord draws lines
Upon our bodies according to our evil deeds.
Then sharp weapons saw us into that pattern.

The only escape from samsara is the quest to understand and come to terms with the transitory nature of life, which is a ceaseless system of births and rebirths. Our experiences are simply visions of this pool of life as it churns. Everything is impermanent except that everything is impermanent.

The novel mirrors the experiences of the Buddha, who also was born a rich prince, Siddhartha, who abandoned earthly riches for his quest of enlightenment.

Juan Mascaro, who translated the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada, wrote that "There are, however, two great branches of literature not found in Sanskrit. There is no history and there is no tragedy; there is no Herodotus or Thucydides; and there is no Aeschylus or Sophocles or Euripides" (in Juan Mascaro, trans., The Bhagavad Gita, Penguin, New York, 1962, 9-10). Tshe ring dbang rgyal's work proves Mascaro to be quite mistaken, for this is a magnificent piece of literature, filled with poetry, tragedy, and some history. We now have in English a single piece of literature that provides a compelling tale that includes a fictionalized history of ideas and events vital to Tibet and the Buddhist world.

-PATRICK JAMES COLONNA

Summer 1996

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A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber; Shambhala, Boston, 1996; paper.

Compared to Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, its 800-page, highly acclaimed predecessor, A Brief History of Everything is a stroll in the proverbial park. But not simply because of its shorter page count. The book has been written in an interview format, which makes it more personable, more reader-friendly, and far less intimidating than the earlier book. And Wilber's sprinkling of humor throughout is an unexpected delight. Ken Wilber has come out to play.

Yet make no mistake, this book, which centers on evolution, human development, consciousness, and spiritual realization, is no lightweight. As a distillation and synthesis of his previous works-more than a dozen since his classic, The Spectrum of Consciousness-there's plenty of substance here.

Nonetheless, the effect of this style of presentation makes Wilber's insights seem less "scholarly" and more immediately relevant to day-to-day life. Here's an example: Wilber suggests that, ultimately, Spirit reveals itself in three distinct ways in the physical world-through the sense of "I," the subjective or inner aspect of spirit or consciousness; through the "we" space, the community of spirit that pivots on ethics, morals, and culturally accepted worldviews; and through the "it" domain of objects and things, the measurable outer garment of God studied by science.

This obvious, yet not clearly recognized, distinction was useful. As a management consultant, I have known intuitively that most managerial methodologies are predominantly "it"-focused, using the scientific method to streamline systems. That's all very well and good. At some level I have known that to neglect consciousness and the inner development and growth of individuals within an organization is to become imbalanced and fall short of an organization's ultimate potential. To do so is to cut off the left hand of spirit in expression.

But unlike before, I now possess a potent and clear conceptual model, a more expansive framework that I can share with corporate executives. From my perspective, these individuals need to embrace both domains if they want their organizations to thrive.

In A Brief History of Everything, Wilber describes two streams of spiritual movement -the "ascending path" of evolution, which embodies the realization that in back of all forms, behind the Many, there is the One, and the "descending path," in which the One finds perfect expression as the Many. According to Wilber, it is the inability of "ascenders" and "descenders" to fully integrate these two movements of spirit that has led to fierce battles and bitter gridlock throughout history ascenders and descenders, "still crazy after all these years." This distinction proved immediately helpful to me in my desire to better understand some of the polarizing forces that arc playing themselves out on the world scene, right here, right now.

Warning: This book is not intended for the spiritually immature or dogmatically inclined. Whether you are a new ager, a systems thinker, an unflagging environmentalist, or a hardline fundamentalist-if you have fallen into a sense of complacency and righteousness regarding your own partial take on the good, the beautiful, and the true-Wilber is sure to rattle your cage.

But herein lies Wilber's greatest gift. He sniffs out and exposes limited, dysfunctional, and half-baked thinking like a champion bloodhound in hot pursuit of its quarry. Through an amazing capacity to synthesize and clarify Eastern and Western psychologies and spiritual traditions, he is able to paint a unique and broad panorama where all the puzzle pieces can fall into place.

One can only hope that this book will be a crossover title for Wilber, allowing the brilliance of his insights to shine among a much broader audience.

-Russ DICARLO

Summer 1996

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A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe:The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science by Michael S. Schneider; HarperCollins. New York, 1994; xxxii +352pages; hardcover.

Number symbolism and mysticism are pervasive in the world's cultural traditions. In the West, the Pythagoreans and the Kabbalists have provided two major approaches to the meaning of numbers; while the East has its own numerological traditions. The symbolism of numbers is also a major concern of Freemasonry and of modern Theosophy. From H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, with its preoccupation with number symbols in the Stanzas of Dzyan and explications of them, to the writings of later Theosophists like Claude Bragdon, who integrated art, architecture, and mathematics, Theosophical literature has treated numbers as emblems of the timeless wisdom.

A Beginner's Guide is an eclectic survey of the symbolism of numbers one through ten as (according to the blurb on the dust jacket) "a wisdom neither ancient nor New Age but timeless." Its author, Michael Schneider, is a mathematics teacher who "designed the geometry harmonizing the statues at the entrance to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City." He writes in the grand tradition of mathematicians who have perceived their calling as all art of order and a yoga of understanding.

In his introduction to the book, the author distinguishes between secular mathematics (which is what is taught in schools and used in ordinary applications), symbolic or philosophical mathematics (which is the main subject of this book-a view of numbers as an expression of the order of creation), and sacred mathematics (the use of numbers to raise consciousness from mayavic to the Real, from the phenomenal to the noumenal, from the typical to the archetypal). It is the possibility of the last that is the real fascination of the study of numbers.

The body of this well-illustrated and clearly written book is divided into ten chapters, one for each of the first ten numbers, 1 to 10. One misses a chapter on zero, mystically or sacredly speaking the most important of the numbers and one of considerable value even in secular mathematics (try multiplying or dividing LClX by XXXlI to see how important 0 is). However, the chapter on I includes the circle, which overlaps the symbolism of zero.

The book includes a wealth of topics related more or less closely to numbers: mandalas, the ouraboros, the geometer's tools, Mobius strips, checkerboards, the vesica piscis, the principle of the arch, primary colors of pigments and light, labyrinths, the Orphic Egg, the Platonic solids, the Golden Mean (also rectangle, triangle, and spiral), the Fibonacci Series, Escher illusions, the Zodiac, Stonehenge, the musical scale, the electromagnetic spectrum, chakras, the Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla, ziggurats, the caduceus, mitosis, the I Ching, the DNA molecule, lunar phases, the enneagram, the Otz Chiim, the tetraktys, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Here indeed is God the Geometer's plenty.

It is said that the gods created the universe by numbers. And if each of us is a creator in training, then the title of this attractive, entertaining, and informative volume suggests it is a handbook for future Dhyan Chohans, or universe-creators. Studying the book mayor may not prepare readers to construct a universe. It will, however, tell them much about the inner side of numbers and open their eyes to the rich symbolism of mathematics and geometry.

-JOHN ALGEO

Summer 1996

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God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita. Royal Science of God-Realization by Parahmahansa Yogananda; Self Realization Fellowship, Los Angeles, 1996; Two·volume slipcased hardcover, 1,224 pages.

This monumental translation and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, by one of India's illustrious saints, breaks new ground as a revelation of its deepest spiritual, psychological, and metaphysical truths.

One of the most beloved of India's sacred texts, the Gita is considered to embody the essence of the four Vedas, 108 Upanishads, and six systems of Hindu philosophy. A pivotal episode of the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, the Gita takes place on the eve of a cataclysmic war in ancient India. Allegorically depicting the moral and spiritual struggle that leads to God-realization, it presents a dialogue in which the Lord Krishna, symbolizing the omnipresent Spirit, imparts counsel to the warrior-prince Arjuna, the soul.

In an illuminating commentary, Yogananda explores the science of yoga encrypted in the Gita, its time-honored tradition of meditation, and the way this ancient discipline makes possible the direct experience of God. In simple but eloquent language, he sets forth a sweeping chronicle tracing the soul's journey to enlightenment. He considers issues of great interest today, including the origin, evolution, and nature of the cosmos; karma and reincarnation; the phenomenon of death and life after death; and the eternal laws of righteousness. Extensive footnotes show striking correlations between the Vedic view of reality and the discoveries of modern science, as well as parallels between the teachings of the Gita and those of the Bible.

Born in northern India, Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) lived and taught in the United States for more than thirty years, after coming here in 1920 as India's delegate to an international congress of religious leaders. His landmark Autobiography of a Yogi, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, is widely regarded as a spiritual classic.

A preliminary serialization of his translation and commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita first began appearing in 1932 in Self-Realization Fellowship's magazine. Toward the end of his life, Yogananda devoted considerable time to revising and expanding this work, and gave instructions to two close disciples regarding editing and annotation for eventual publication in book form. His complete translation and commentaries are now available for the first time in this elegantly designed and illustrated edition, which includes a 37-page index and twelve original color paintings by contemporary Indian artists.

-JUDITH CORNELL

Summer 1996

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The Ultimate Maze Book by David Anson Russo; Simon &Schuster, New York, 1991; paper.

Labyrinths are big things these days. A number of recent books have treated walking labyrinthine patterns as a spiritual exercise or have considered the patterns as symbols of our experience of and in the world.

Labyrinths, also called mazes, are of two basic sorts: unicursal, in which a single, undeviating path without options leads through the intricate windings of the pattern; and multicursal, in which a number of paths branch off from each other, offering sets of alternatives, not all of which may lead to the desired end. The term "labyrinth" is sometimes restricted to the unicursal variety, although that may also and less ambiguously be termed a "meander." Multicursal labyrinths are also called "mazes."

The Ultimate Maze Book is about multicursal labyrinths, which are often used as puzzles-frustrating or entertaining, depending on their complexity and the solver's ingenuity, Mazes are of several types, depending on how they are made: turf mazes, hedge mazes, toy mazes (games in which one rolls a little ball through the passages in a glass-topped box), and paper mazes, This book consists of 39 full-page colored maze diagrams on paper that the reader can try to solve. Even the simplest are fiendishly difficult for the tyro. Working mazes is like solving crossword puzzles: it takes talent, experience, and an obsession to finish the task.

The mazes in this book can also be regarded as works of art, for most could be hung on the wall as decorations. Or alternatively they could be used as objects of contemplation, like yantras. Spiritual exercises need not be very far from art and entertainment, for the world, as the Hindu sages tell us, is a game, a divine lila.

There are significant differences between the unicursal meander and the multicursal maze. One may be a gender link, with women preferring the meander, and men the maze. Or they may correspond with different psychological types: the meander with security-seeking introverts and the maze with chance-taking extraverts. Or perhaps they symbolize two spiritual experiences: the meander the certainty of our higher selves, and the maze the confusion of the personalities.

The two forms of the labyrinth certainly differ in their philosophical implications. For the meander proclaims that we will all reach the goal, not all at the same time, but all with the same assuredness. The maze offers no such guaranty. You enter it at your own risk and take your chances.

This book offers many hours of play and contemplation with chance-taking confusion, but no danger if you hit a dead end.
-JOHN ALGEO

Summer 1996

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A Mythic Life, by Jean Houston; HarperCollins, New York, 1996; hardcover, 340 pages.

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Peripheral Visions, by Mary Catherine Bateson; HarperCollins, New York, 1994; hardcover, 243pages.

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The Way of the Explorer: Art Apollo Astronaut's Journey through the Material and Mystical Worlds, by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, with Dwight Williams; G. P. Putnam: Sons, New York, 1996; hardcover, 230 pages.

All three of these books present what could surely be called mythic lives. All three authors have ranged in their lives across expanses of experience decidedly uncommon in one life.

Jean Houston's career has ranged over psychology, philosophy, anthropology, the new physics, and embodied all of these interests in explorations of human potential. But she is perhaps best known as an extraordinary storyteller in workshops and mystery schools aimed at transforming participants' lives.

Mary Catherine Bateson is a professor of anthropology and English and a prolific author, another profound storyteller who writes movingly of the effort to "construe continuity" in a life that may appear extraordinarily diffuse and scattered in its explorations.

Former astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell's life, beginning on a Texas ranch during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, included training at MIT, walking on the moon, and then exploring the outer dimensions of human consciousness.

Mythic lives, all.

Mitch ell begins his tale this way: "In January of 1971 I boarded a spacecraft and traveled to an airless world of brilliant clarity. The soil there is barren and gray, and the horizon always further than it appears. It is a static world that has only known silence. Upon its landscape human perspective is altered."

By the end of the first page he makes the key point of his book: "What I experienced during that three-day trip home [from the moon] was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness."

A visionary moonwalker, he went on to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which under the direct ion of Willis Harman has become the leading institution in the exploration of consciousness. Mitchell's book is an adventure across space and deep into inner space culminating in his declaration that the gods of the mystic and the theologian have been too small. "They fill the universe. And to the scientist, all I can say is that the gods do exist. They are the eternal, connected, and aware Self experienced by all intelligent beings."

Mary Catherine Bateson's stories draw on experiences living in many cultures Israel, the Philippines, Iran, America. She promotes the idea of lifelong learning and, in a delightful chapter called "Construing Continuity," speaks of how in looking back over a life of seeming discontinuity one can discern or at least "construe continuity."

She writes that:

Often those who have made multiple fresh starts or who have chosen lives with multiple discontinuities are forced by the standard ideas of the shape of a successful career to regard their own lives as unsuccessful. I have had to retool so often I estimate I have had five careers. This does not produce the kind of resume that we regard as reflecting a successful life, but it is true of more and more people, starting from the beginning again and again. Zigzag people. Learning to transfer experience from one cycle to the next, we only progress like a sailboat tacking into the wind. (p.82)

We can, she says, write the story of our lives as continuity or discontinuity. One version of the truth, she says, is that "Everything I have ever done has been heading me for where I am today," and the other version is "It is only after many surprises and choices, interruptions and disappointments, that I have arrived somewhere I could never have anticipated."

Those who have participated at one time or another in one of Jean Houston's workshops will already have heard some of the stories in her book. But all of them bear "rehearing" in this summation of her life to date. Perhaps we should say" lives to date," for Houston's life is characteristic of Bateson's description of the wide-ranging life. From the Hollywood of the forties, where Houston's father Jack was a writer for many of the great comedians, to travels to many countries, to the Parliament of Religions, to the United Nat ions, Jean Houston's life is rich with stories

. All three of these authors, by taking readers on their own mythic journeys, show how to draw out the mythic strands in our own lives.

-WILLIAM METZGER

Autumn 1996

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A Parliament of Souls: In Search of Global Spirituality edited by Michael Tobias, Jane Morrison, and Bettina Gray; KQED Books, 1995; paperback, 291 pages.

A Parliament of Souls proceeds on the presumption that with over 5,000 languages and dialects spoken in the world and nearly two hundred countries culturally intermingling in an unparalleled manner, the late twentieth century provides unprecedented opportunity for a human community that is strengthened with dialogue and tolerance. As a speculative hypothesis, this claim was tested in the historic forum provided three summers ago by the 1993 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago.

If the 1893 assembly held one hundred years earlier is recalled for initiating inter-religious dialogue and encouraging comparative studies of religion, the 1993 gathering is remembered for creating an international network connecting religious communities worldwide. Unlike the first parliament, the 1993 event was an assembly to which all the religions were invited and almost all participated.

Insightful and sometimes inspiring interviews with twenty-eight spiritual leaders are contained in this book, which was prepared as a companion volume to accompany the acclaimed public television series filmed during the 1993 Parliament. The book provides a spacious spectrum surveying contemporary religion, a virtual spiritual banquet with dishes served by Baha'i, Brahma Kumaris, Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Jain , Jewish , Muslim, Native American, Sikh, Sufi, Taoist, and Zoroastrian adherents.

This commemorative book contains thoughtful presentations from H. H. the Dalai Lama, Harvard Prof. Diana L. Eck, University of Chicago Prof. Martin E. Marty, Notre Dame's Theodore Hesburgh, theologian Hans Kung, former UN Assistant Secretary General Robert Muller, Brother Wayne Teasdale, and Swami Chidananda.

Those represented in the book possess powerful hearts and analytical minds, which they apply to confront the countless crises and problems challenging contemporary societies. Among the perplexing problems raised are the possibility for a universal ethics code, the response required when hatred emanates from religious sources, ways to combat racial prejudice and ethnic bigotry, and the role of personal spirituality in daily life.

Shorn from the academia that dominates comparative religious study, the contributors illumine thoughts and feelings that might seem abstruse or esoteric. Unfortunately, most mass media coverage of the Parliament almost completely missed the wellsprings that flowed profusely during the event. Without contrivance, this aesthetically appealing anthology is pervaded with an intimate and experiential approach, expressing what Tobias describes as "a profound unity in pluralism." It illustrates that while religion sometimes earns an unfavorable reputation, still religious sources provide significant claim that must be addressed by every individual. It confirms the conclusion that the 1993 Parliament evoked, in Tobias' words, "an exhilarating experience to encounter deep feelings conveyed so intimately and shared among friends."

-DANIEL ROSS CHANDLER

Autumn 1996

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The Shambhala Guide to Yoga, by Georg Feuerstein. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Pp. xi + 190.

This survey of yogic philosophy and practice is made with Georg Feuerstein’s customary lucidity, comprehensiveness, detail, and common sense. It is a book about what yoga is, not how CO do yoga, thus putting first things properly first. Too many people in the West set out to do yoga without knowing just what it is they are doing. Feuerstein corrects that misordering of priorities by giving an overview of the major aspects of the theory that every practitioner should command before beginning serious work.

This Guide makes it clear that yoga is not just an exotic form of calisthenics, but is rather a spiritual discipline based on certain assumptions about the nature of reality. It also makes clear that the full range of yogic practice includes some activities that are potentially dangerous ones for those who are unprepared for them and are unguided by knowledgeable experts in the field. Its thirteen chapters also give a commendably wide coverage of both Hindu and Buddhist yoga.

The book's first four chapters cover the following subjects: the history and purpose of yoga; the main kinds of yoga (jnana, karma, bhakti, mantra, raja, and hatha); the process of transmitting yoga (the teacher, the disciple, and initiation); and the nature of the bliss to which yoga leads and the moral basis for pursuing it (yama and niyama).

The next four chapters deal with specific techniques typical of yogic practice. These include methods of bodily purification (some of which seem bizarre to contemporary Westerners) and the postures that many Westerners exclusively associate with yoga; the rationale of diet; the theory of breath control; and the mental practices of withdrawing one's attention from the outer world (pratyahara), concentrating it (dharana ), making it continuous in meditation (dhyana), and finally getting it all together (samadhi). The use of imagination, practical techniques, and distractions along the way are also covered.

Chapters nine through eleven treat some more specific matters, including mantras, kundalini (with suitable warnings about the dangers of ignorant and premature experiments), and tantra. Treatment of the last subject includes left -hand and sexual tantras, but it also makes clear that they are not the whole of the "subject, which encompasses "a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices," embracing twelve characteristic features. The last two chapters are conclusions. Chapter twelve examines the nature of the samadhi experience, often translated as "ecstasy," that is, a standing outside one's egoic self, but which might more appropriately be translated as "enstasy," a standing within the conscious ness of the unitive Self. The final chapter, "Yoga in the Modern World," looks at the role yoga can usefully play to fill the gap between con temporary religious fundamentalism and secular fundamentalism (based on scientific materialism) and stresses the need for a qualified teacher to direct the performer in that role.

The final chapter both resonates and contrasts with modern Theosophy. H. P. Blavatsky viewed Theosophy as also filling the gap between the two fundamentalisms of religion and science. Furthermore she viewed Theosophy as a kind of yoga (specifically jnana yoga) leading to the ecstatic experience called samadhi in yogic literature. However, she also recognized that for most Westerners guidance by a guru in the Eastern pattern is not feasible, and so she advanced Theosophy as a form of yoga that can be followed without personal instruction- a form of yoga for the West or, more accurately, a yoga not limited to the cultural patterns of the East, though benefiting from its wisdom.

The Shambhala Guide to Yoga is a vademecum for students and intending practicers of Eastern yoga. It fills the need for a survey of the whole subject in a degree of detail that satisfies without satiating the enquirer. Anyone who wants to know both about yoga and how to do it can usefully begin with Annie Besant's Introduction to Yoga as a primer, follow it with this work surveying the whole field as a thorough introductory overview, and then go on to Wallace Slater's useful guides Raja Yoga and Hatha Yoga for safe, practical suggestions on doing yoga.

-JOHN ALGEO

Winter 1996

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Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle: The Evolution of a 'Transcultural' Approach to Wholeness, by Steven M. Rosen; State University of New York Press, Albany. N.Y, 1994; softcover, 317pages.

According to Stanislav Grof, the literature on creativity clearly demonstrates that significant breakthroughs in the fields of science, art, religion, and philosophy are characteristically the result of an inspiration mediated by nonordinary states of consciousness. Grof has distinguished at least two primary forms of inspiration.

Sometimes an individual is suddenly presented- in a dream, vision, fever, meditation, or other nonordinary state of consciousness- with the solution to a problem on which he or she has been unsuccessfully working, typically for a long time. An example would be the chemist August von Kekule, who arrived at the final solution to the formula of benzene with his dream of the ouroboros and its ingenious suggest ion of the structure of the ring.

In other cases, however, the relationship between intuitive and discursive thinking is reversed - and the individual is presented, out of the blue, with an unprecedented insight into the nature of reality far in advance of its time. It can take years- even decades or centuries - to unfold the implications of such a visionary seed idea. An example is the idea that organic life originated in the ocean, which was initially formulated by the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, but which had to await modem evolutionary biology for confirmation. Likewise the now familiar idea that reality is characterized by a mutual interpenetration of all things, which is found in ancient Chinese texts, has been developed more recently by the physicist David Bohm and others as an emerging paradigm in science.

Psychologist and philosopher Steven M. Rosen is a key contributor to the "new paradigm," having worked with Bohm himself. Rosen was initially trained in experimental psychology, but has been diligently laboring for twenty-three years in the fields of theoretical physics, mathematics, parapsychology, topology, cosmology, and phenomenology.

While working on his dissertation, he experienced a hypnogogic vision with a powerful and frightening ecstatic component. He subsequently conjectured this was a kundalini awakening. Four years later, in 1972, his Ph.D. in hand, the process suddenly recommenced. Over a two-week period, Rosen experienced what he has described as a series of visionary insights into the nature of consciousness and the cosmos. These insights utterly transformed his sense of self and reality.

Rosen's new book provides a record of the evolution of his ideas, which he describes as a twenty-plus-year process of "unpacking" that two-week transformative experience. In it he traces "the development of the Moebius principle, a new way of approaching the foundations of science and philosophy. The strategy has been to confront crisis and fragmentation in contemporary thought by offering a concrete intuition of thoroughgoing wholeness" (p.269).

Not all holisms are coherent, dynamic, and creative. Some, like Nazism and other totalitarian ideologies, aim for a closed and rigid totality while sacrificing values such as coherence, comprehensiveness, richness, complexity, and openness to change. Rosen is unwilling to make such sacrifices. Rosen is no conservative traditionalist; he sees such views as preserving dualism by exalting a static, orderly realm of supra historical Being over and above a merely chaotic process of historical Becoming.

It may seem perverse to mention totalitarianism, traditionalism, and the new paradigm in the same breath. But in his important 1989 book, Imaginary Landscape; Making Worlds of Myth and Science, philosopher William Irwin Thompson openly broke with the New Age precisely because of what he had come to regard as its unabashedly reactionary character. Thompson argued for a new, non-authoritarian, non-regressive conception of wholeness, for which we need a living, moving geometry, a new topology of the sacred, a "processual morphology."

If Thompson had been acquainted with Rosen's work, he doubtless would have recognized a kindred spirit. "In the Moebius principle," Rosen writes, "wholeness is sought in the embodiment of paradox…The wholeness in quest ion is utterly fluid and dynamic, an unobstructed boundless flow" (p. 269).

By "paradox," Rosen does not mean sheer contradiction-what he calls the negative sense of the word- for that would license every form of irrationality. The positive sense of paradox is to be "understood in the Zen-related sense of a wholeness so uncompromising that it confounds the dichotomies built into ordinary thinking" (p. 120). This refusal to compromise requires a greater, not lesser, degree of logical clarity. For example, the conflation of intellect and emotion represented in the Nazi motto "Think with the blood!" signals a reversion to pre-ration al modes of thought. As Sam Keen has pointed out, the first step of all totalitarian movement s is to encourage us to project our shadow onto the face of "the enemy."

Rosen invites us to bear in mind Ken Wilber's contribution in drawing attention to "the 'pre/ trans fallacy,' a widespread tendency among theorists to confuse pre-personal [i.e., undifferentiated] and transpersonal [i.e., integrated] dimensions'" of consciousness [p. 213). We must also distinguish what is pre-rat ional (merely irrational) from what is trans-rational. Paradox in this positive sense has a definite trajectory: a movement towards a fully coherent wholeness.

By refusing to yield either side of the paradox that we are at once fully alone and yet fully at one with the universe, we are forced to live what cannot easily be explained, that is, what we are. We must resolve to become a veritable mystery to ourselves.

For Rosen there is no easy guide-no guru-friendly formula-for such enlightenment. The question of personal identity is central. But this is not a symptom of a solipsistic or narcissistic self-preoccupation, for the question of identity cannot be addressed in isolation from questions of our collective human identity. And who, and what, is the "other"? Existential self-inquiry, social self-inquiry, and metaphysical inquiry are mutually irreducible, inseparably related aspects of the whole project.

Rosen is still- and necessarily ever shall be-in the process of working out the radical epistemological, existential, and metaphysical implications of this idea. In his perspicacious critiques of Bohm and Jung and their respective approaches to the problem of wholeness, he offers important hints on the direction in which his investigation must go.

In chapter 14, Rosen notes Bohm's distinction between the implicate order and the holomovement. Whereas the implicate (infinite) order is a stratum of energy, information, or meaning subtly enfolded within our explicate (finite} reality, yet knowable in principle, the holomovement is the "unknown" (and unthinkable) totality as it exists in itself, the unmanifest force behind even the implicate order. Rosen follows David Griffin in regarding the idea of the holomovement as symptomatic of Bohm's occasional "Vedantist mood "; he further asks whether this idea only serves to preserve the very fragmentation of consciousness and reality which Bohm originally set out to question.

At times in my personal exchanges with Bohm, I too have gotten the impression of an ultimate denial of form in favor of that which is formless. For example, he has distinguished symbolic knowing from what he believes to be beyond an, form of thought. Bohm has acknowledged that certain forms of symbolizing may usefully call attention to their own limitations and therefore serve as stepping stones, paving the way for transcendence. But in the end, through the acts of inward awareness and deeply reflective attention, which are distinct from mere forms of thought, form is entirely left behind; it dissolves in an" intelligent perception of the infinite totality." As I see it, the non-duality [of subject and object] thus achieved preserves the higher-order dualism of the finite and infinite, the differentiated and undifferentiable, for by granting formless totality such priority over form, form does not merely vanish hut remains to express itself negatively in the now unsolvable enigma of why there is format all. (p. 262)

Rosen's point , I take it , is this: If thought has no essential and internal relationship to intuition or meditation , and language is at best a dispensable means to an end which is entirely apart from language (to know that which is totally unsayable), then we are left with the same scenario rejected by William Irwin Thompson: the purely relative body/mind dropping off in favor of a purely absolute spirit; time, history, individuality, matter, etc. bespeaking a fall into the world; forms (include the forms of thought and imagination ) as symptoms of error or evil. The unbridgeable gulf between the symbol and the symbolized as expressed in the idea that language is thoroughly metaphorical and opaque and that nonlinguistic intuition, totally literal and transparent to reality, is undeniably dualistic; hence there must be continuity as well as discontinuity between thought and intuition, between prose and poetry, between symbolic language and the absolute reality to which it refers. The ultimate, in short, cannot be regarded as utterly ineffable (or the symbol as merely symbolic, or the body as a mere vehicle of absolute spirit) if we seek a truly uncompromising wholeness, a thoroughly coherent holism.

Rosen parts company both with those versions of mysticism which finally dismiss language and embodiment and the "merely phenomenal world ,"as well as with the postmodernist's insistence that language is all, and that objective reality is nothing more than the texts we happen to read (and we can choose to interpret them any way we like). Neither a relativist nor an absolutist, he calls for a transcendence of these polar opposites, and he takes his visionary cue from the Moebius strip and the Klein bottle. For Rosen, these paradoxical forms arc more than mere models; for a mere model, like a mere symbol, is apart from the thing modeled or symbolized. Yet how can this unity of symbol and referent be expressed in words?"

If I am seeking wholeness in the fullest meaning of the word," Rosen writes, "it is not enough for me merely to write about it; wholeness must be embodied in my own way of writing" (p. 269). How does one put one's whole self into the process of inquiry, and what is this "self" thus interjected? These are difficult questions for both Rosen and his readers to grapple with.

This is an exceptionally sophisticated work which requires complete and careful attention. Rosen is a profound thinker who has made an important contribution to contemporary debates.

-JOSEPH M. FELSER

Winter 1996

The Theosophical Enlightenment, by Joscelyn Godwin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. xiii +448. Paper.

Joscelyn Godwin is a professor at Colgate University who has distinguished himself as the author of a series of volumes on the history of the esoteric, particularly in its relationship to music.

The Theosophical Enlightenment is one of the most important books ever written on the history of the esoteric. The author with a charming and yet erudite style tells us all we essentially need to know about the English esoteric world from the time of the French Revolution to the early part of this century.

In this volume students of the writings of H. P. Blavatsky will find the essence of the teachings of many of the sages about whom she wrote. In addition these esotericists are linked to the social and political background of their time, and the reader will also be able to trace their links to one another.

The Theosophical Enlightenment is in three parts. The first deals with a revisionist approach to myth which developed into a universal view of history. The persons in this section include Richard Payne Knight, Sir William Jones, Henry O'Brien, Thomas Inman, and Godfrey Higgins, whose Anacalypsis was seen by one contemporary reviewer as a precursor to Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled. In this first part Professor Godwin does the reader a signal service in summarizing the 1500 pages of the Anacalypsis.

The second part of this book deals with the esoteric sciences in England up until 1850 and covers such diverse characters as Emanuel Swedenborg, Francis Barrett (author of The Magus) , the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, and Frederick Hockley. The third part views the rise of Spiritualism and deals in some derail with the mysterious Emma Hardinge Britten who was one of the founders of the Theosophical Society. It also outlines the origins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Christian disciples of Jacob Boehme, and the Rosicrucians associated with such figures as P. B. Randolph and Hargrave Jennings. It also investigates the mysterious Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, treated more fully in The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, by Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John Deveney (Weiser, 1995).

Godwin sees Blavatsky as a product of the skeptical enlightenment of the nineteenth century who brought together in the Theosophical Society the two threads of western and Oriental esotericism, a joining which did not survive the century. He devotes well over 50 pages to the early Theosophical Society and brings forth a number of little known details.

The research in this volume is encyclopedic and fascinating. Very few errors can be noted, although the "legal gentleman" mentioned on page 287 who conducted telepathic experiments with G. H. Felt was W. Q. Judge, and not H. S. Olcott: as supposed (see Path 7: 344).

This volume is dedicated to Leslie Price, who founded the journal Theosophical History and to James A. Santucci, the current editor.

I recommend The Theosophical Enlightenment as essential reading for those students interested in the history of esoteric ideas and in particular for students of H. P. Blavatsky.

-JOHN COOPER {reprintedfrom Theosophy in Australia 60.3, September 1996}

January 1997

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Realization, Enlightenment and the Life of Rapture, by A. E. I. Falconar. Dehra Dun, India: English Book Depot (15Rajpur Road, Dehra Dun 248001, India), for Non·Aristotelian Publishing, Isle of Man, 1994. Pp. (iv), vi, 208. ISBN 09510924 3 X. Hardback.

Ted Falconar is a longtime Theosophist who lives on the Isle of Man and travels frequently to India. His new book Realization, Enlightenment and the Life of Rapture is a delineation and interpretation of the spiritual path. It brings together the teachings of the Ancient Wisdom and other spiritual philosophies on the nature of the spiritual path, its difficulties, and ways to overcome them. Courageously, it attempts to describe the indescribable non-dual state of consciousness that has many names but is directly experienced by few.

Falconar says that achieving the non-dual state results in a life of rapture and the conquest of death. He suggests that the death of the desiring ego leads to a rebirth and the entering of the path to enlightenment and rapture.

Paradoxically, the author uses words to illustrate how verbalization gets in the way of achieving this state. He contends that linear, Aristotelian thinking is not only of little value in the quest but actually a hindrance. Western thought has gone down the wrong path in that it makes us more and more connected with the world instead of more detached, thus reifying the world of form and everything in it.

On the other hand, Eastern thought for millennia has taught the unreality of the conceptual world in which we exist and a method by which we can discover the real and thus gain Realization. This freedom, this liberation, is the ultimate aim of the seeker in the Eastern tradition. Realization can only be achieved by letting go and letting be.

Conceptualization and verbalization is not the path of letting go and letting be. Words and concepts are in fact a hindrance to nonverbal experience, which can only be achieved through opening the heart. The opening of the heart, in turn, is achieved through the devotional paths found in yoga, Sufism and other mystical traditions.

Falconer supports his thesis that our desiring egos and attachments are the cause of our suffering by quoting extensively from many of the great yogis, poets, Sufis, and spiritual philosophers, among them Sri Krishna Prem, Ramakrishna, Rumi, Kabir, Arabi and others who have written and spoken about this journey to rapture and the path to immortality:

Freedom can come only from Universal Consciousness for it is forever free, whereas lower selves are forever bound; only when we escape from our lower selves are we freed. [Sri Krishna Prem]

Falconar's discussion of how linear thinking and verbalization cause the main block to spiritual progress is enhanced by his use of nonverbal images, visualizations, and poetry to illustrate practically how we can go beyond the rational mind and so enter the state of rapture.

Happy the moment when we are seated in the palace,
thou and I,
With two forms and two figures but with one
soul, thou and I.
At the time when we shall come into the
garden, thou and I,
The stars of heaven will come to gaze upon us;
We shall show them the moon herself, thou
and I.
Thou and I, individuals no more, shall be
mingled in ecstasy. [Rumi]

One of the book's strongest points is its inclusion of many diverse spiritual traditions. Another is the use of poetry related to the spiritual path, which gives a deeper appreciation of both the poetry and the path.

Do not go to the garden of flowers! O Friend! Go not there.
In your body is the garden of flowers,
Take your seat on the thousand petals of the
lotus,
And there gaze on the Infinite Beauty. [Kalur]

Falconer describes the spiritual path in a logical and understandable way. And yet, while his writing style is direct, readable, and often quite beautiful, it occasionally demonstrates antagonism toward a scientific point of view. In addition, some might find an overabundance of illustrative quotations.

With this single caveat, I can say that Falconar describes the indescribable as well as I have ever seen it described. This book is a truly marvelous work by a Western mystic who brings to life the familiar Sanskrit petition:

Lead me from the unreal to the real,
Lend me from darkness to light,
Lead me from death to immortality.

-ALEX PAPPAS

January 1997

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The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity, by Paul Heelas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. x + 266.

The author of this scholarly, serious, and not unfriendly study of the New Age movement: is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Values and a Reader (roughly equivalent to an American Associate Professor) in the Department of Religious Studies of Lancaster University. The book examines the origins, development, characteristics, and import of the New Age movement, especially in Britain and America.

The New Age movement: is viewed in relationship to "modernity," that: is roughly, contemporary mainstream views and practices. The New Age is said to be ambivalent about mainstream society, on the one hand offering a spiritual alternative to its religious values and on the other hand exemplifying and celebrating some of the characteristics of our time.

Theosophy is treated as part of the New Age movement, three key figures in its incipient development being identified as H. P. Blavatsky, Carl Gustav Jung, and George I. Gurdjieff. However, Theosophy does not figure largely in this study, for the author sees it: as historically seminal rather than contemporarily central to the movement: "Even the Theosophical headquarters in Madras is no longer New Age -and this despite the fact that: the Society (founded in New York) is generally accorded a significant: role in the development of what has happened in the west" (122).

That view is only half right. It is true that contemporary Theosophy is not distinctively New Age; indeed, many Theosophists would think of themselves and of the Society as Perennial Age rather than New Age. Yet there are clearly links between Theosophy and the New Age movement. In as far as the latter has a core Set of ideas, they arc largely compatible with and indeed derived from Theosophy. Most of the ideas set forth as characterizing the New Age in appendix 1 (225-6) are familiarly Theosophical.

The error in the author's view is in assuming that: modern Theosophy has ever been New Age, in the current sense of the term. Certain characteristics of the New Age are nor traditionally Theosophical ones. For example, the New Age is typically anti- or at least non-intellectual; Theosophy has always been in one sense an intellectual movement. Blavatsky spoke of it as a form of jñana yoga, union through knowledge, and the early appeal of Theosophy was to the intelligentsia of both West and East.

Also the New Age is generally countercultural, that is, opposed in lifestyle to the prevailing culture. Theosophists have often been superficially countercultural (for example, being vegetarians and eschewers of furs before such practices became fashionable). But in other ways, they have generally been conventional, educated, middle-class, professional, involved citizens. Relatively few were ever of the drop-out, turn-on persuasion that was much more typical of the early New Age movement.

The New Age tends, as the subtitle of this book indicates, to celebrate and focus upon the "self," that is, the sense of personal identity. Key expressions in this book are self-actualization, self-empowerment, self-enhancement, self-ethic, self-help, self-responsibility, self-spirituality, and self-work ethic. Theosophy too is centrally concerned with "self" bur distinguishes between the personal transitory self, the individual abiding Self, and the transcendent cosmic SELF. Its message is that: of Delphi and the Upanishads: know yourself and, knowing that, nothing else need be known. But the "self" which is to be known in Theosophy is something radically different from that of pop self-culture.

This book is a useful work for the information it contains. A casual reader may find it numbingly data-filled, and the interpretation of the data is sometimes superficial. But the book's virtue is that it contains facts and examines them without either credulity or incredulity and without either naivete or condescension.

-JOHN ALGEO

January 1997 and June 1997

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K. Paul Johnson's House of Cards? A critical examination of Johnson's thesis on the Theosophical Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi, by Daniel H. Caldwell. P. 0. Box 1844, Tucson, AZ85702: published by the author, November 1996. Pp, 43.

The purpose of this monograph, according to the author, is to

give a critique of K. Paul Johnson's thesis relating to H. P. Blavatsky's Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi. .. Johnson in his own introduction to The Masters Revealed [1994, 5-6] summarizes this hypothesis as follows:

Thakar Singh Sandhanwalia, founding president of the Amritsar Singh Sabha, corresponds in intriguing ways to clues about- Koot Hoomi's identity in the writings of Olcott and HPB, .. Maharaja Ranbir Singh of Kashmir has many correspondences to Morya as described by HPB.... Although much of HPB's portrayal of Morya and Koot Hoomi was designed to mislead in order to protect their privacy, enough accurate information was included to make a persuasive case for their identities as these historical figures.

Caldwell analyzes the techniques used in supporting the hypothesis of this identification and examines in detail the best primary evidence on the question, especially the accounts written by Henry Steel Olcott and others concerning their encounters with and knowledge of the persons in question. The monograph includes an appendix by David Reigle on Tibetan sources purportedly used by HPB.

Caldwell (41) concludes:

Johnson has devoted a great deal of time and effort in researching various portions of H. P. Blavatsky's life and the historical identities of her Masters. Johnson's books should he read by every Theosophist and occult student.

Unfortunately, Johnson's books are marred by numerous serious mistakes and inaccuracies.

All in all, Johnson's "identifications'' of the two Masters don't withstand a critical analysis of the sum total of evidence and testimony concerning the adepts involved. I believe that anyone who carefully studies the evidence and seriously thinks through the issues involved will reasonably conclude that Johnson's so-called "persuasive case" about the Masters M and K.H. is nothing but a "house of cards." Even as "suggestions," Johnson's conjectures on these two Masters are highly implausible and dubious when carefully scrutinized in light of all the known facts.

February 1997

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Technical Terms in Stanza II, by David Reigle. Book of Dzyan Research Report Cotopaxi, CO: Eastern School Press, 1997. Pp. 8.

This second in a series of discussions of the technical terms used in the Stanzas of Dzyan points out that of seven such terms in stanza 2, two occur also in stanza I (Ah-hi and Paranishpanna) and so need no further treatment (see American Theosophist, 84.3 [Late Spring 1996], 14), and four are relatively straight forward: manvantara, maya, devimatri and matripadma. That leaves only swabhavat, but it is a very great problem indeed.

Swabhavat is the essence or substance principle underlying both spirit and matter, also called mulaprakriti. In The Mahatma Letters the concept and term are attributed to "the Nepaulese Swabhavikas, the principal Buddhist philosophical school in India." But Reigle's efforts to document that attribution ran into a variety of difficulties, which he reports in this study. The problems are in the form of the term (svabhava is more usual), the existence of a Swabhavika school, and the meaning of the term, which Reigle says was rejected by both the Vedantins and existing Buddhist schools.

Reigle's last word is that a Svabhavika tradition may have existed in Nepal in the nineteenth century, as reported by early Buddhist scholars, but have died out. To document it, however, would require searching thousands of pages of Sanskrit texts. Reigle concludes: "Theosophists will have to find it, because no one else is likely to be interested." But the finder will also have to be one like Reigle himself, with background and interest in these philological and historical matters. We hope one day for a monograph on svabhava and the Svabhavikas from his pen.

February 1997

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Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. New York: Scribner, 1996. Hardcover, 608 pages.

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Mary's Vineyard: Meditations, Readings, and Revelations, by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut. Wheaton, II.: Theosophical Publishing House (Quest Books), 1996. Hardcover, 193 pages.

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Handbook for the Soul. Edited by Richard Carlson and Benjamin Shield. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Softcover, 215 pages.

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Handbook for the Heart. Edited by Richard Carlson and Benjamin Shield. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. Hardcover, 226 pages.

New books aimed at providing guidance on living the spiritual life are flooding into bookstores. Those listed above stand out for their fine selections of readings from many sources. The Brussats guide the reader, in prose, poetry, and prayers, to consideration of the many aspects of life experience. They have divided their choices of material under categories of things, places, nature, animals, leisure, creativity, service, body, relationships, and community.

In addition, they have created an "alphabet of spiritual literacy" on aspects of spiritual practice-such as attention, beauty, being present, compassion, and so on. Their contemplations on these are scattered throughout the book, surrounded by readings from many traditions. Along the way they also include activities and exercises to aid in the spiritual journey.

The authors issue an open invitation to all who wish to join them on the spiritual path, which is by no means an exclusive club:

Spiritual literacy is not concerned with sorting out religious dogmas and beliefs. To be spiritually literate does not require you to master certain texts or to climb to a high rung on the ladder of enlightenment. It is not an esoteric and mysterious practice for the initiated few; indeed, spiritual literacy is the very opposite of such elitism. Some of the most spiritually literate people are children and indigenous people who cannot even read letters on a page. For them and for us, literacy means being able to find sacred meaning in all aspects of life.

The reader can dip at random into the Brussats' book and sharpen the senses of sight, sound, smell, touch - as well as find much food for thought. The authors have devoted themselves for three decades to identifying and reviewing resources for people on spiritual journeys, and that devotion shows in this except ional book. Their projects have included the magazine Values and Visions, the Odyssey cable TV channel, and the Ecunet computer network.

The gifted poet and translator Andrew Harvey and his collaborator Eryk Hanut, photographer, writer, director, and set designer, have produced a beautiful book of meditations, readings, photographs, and spiritual insights on Mary as the Divine Mother. Mary's Vineyard is organized for use throughout the year with daily readings and contemplations. "Creating a sacred environment is not complicated," they write; "it just requires concentration and the constant reminder that the one important thing in your life is to keep your heart open to Divine Love."

Andrew Harvey's books have included The Return of the Mother, Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening, and A Journey in Ladakh, which won the Christmas Humphries Prize. He has also published books of his translations of Rumi, the Sufi poet, as well as a recent book about Rumi, The Way of the Heart.

Two exceptional anthologies of spiritual writing have been assembled by Richard Carlson and Benjamin Shield. Handbook for the Soul and Handbook for the Heart gather original writings by authors including Lynn Andrews, Deepak Chopra, Robert Fulghum, Harold Kushner, Thomas Moore, Hugh and Gayle Prather, Ram Dass, Bernie Siegel, Andrew Weil, and Marianne Williamson. The first of these books places its focus on helping the reader to achieve balance in life. T he second book concentrates on the theme of love. The editors are both therapists who have been frequent guests on radio and television programs in addition to maintaining private practices.

-WILLIAM METZGER

March 1997

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A Doctor's Guide to Therapeutic TOUCh, by Susan Wager. New York: Perigee Books/Berkeley Publishing Group, 1996. Pp. xix + 154. Paper.

Therapeutic Touch is a concept of which I have been aware since its inception. It is such an intriguing, practical and simple system for helping those with illness that I have followed its growth with great interest and am delighted to see this book come out. While it is titled "a doctor's guide," it is really very appropriate for anyone who is interested in the subject, lay or professional.

Therapeutic Touch has been likened to the laying on of hands, but is quite different both in its basic concept and its application, as you will see when reading this book. The fact that there is healing energy all around us which can be applied universally when understood is the theme of the system, This energy can be transmitted to an ill person through properly trained individuals who allow it to flow through them and our their hands to the energy fields surrounding the person in need.

This healing technique is done selflessly with total lack of feeling of any power on the part of the practitioners, who see themselves as only the instrument or conduit for the energy. In the last twenty years since the practice was formally started by Dora Kunz and Dolores Krieger, its spread has been quite phenomenal and scientific studies to validate its authenticity have been widespread.

Susan Wager has written a book which is dear, easy to understand, and thorough in its description of the system and its application. Its purpose appears to be to expand awareness and understanding of the concept, and it is written in a way which is simple yet profound. Her references are well documented and the personal experiences of various authorities whom she quotes make the reader feel an actual participant in some of the events.

Too often we are prone to pass over or skip entirely the opening section of a book in order to get to the "meat" of it. The introduction (written by Dora Kunz), the preface, and chapter 1 of this book are very important, and a careful reading of this scene-setting beginning will enhance what follows. The fact that the practice is becoming so widely accepted both in the United States and in other countries, and in so many situations, seems to validate its worth.

Briefly, the aspects covered in the book are the presence of energy fields in nature, .present-day ideas on healing, methods used in applying Therapeutic Touch, effects that have resulted, and special areas where results seem most helpful.

Throughout history, whenever a new method of approaching problems has been introduced, there has been conflict of opinion as to its worth among specialists in the field; Therapeutic Touch is no exception. I am sure that is why Susan Wager has waited this long to publish her experiences and understanding. She has allowed sufficient time for scientific studies to be conducted, so she can include their results in her presentation.

No claim is made that Therapeutic Touch provides a miracle cute in any situation. It is made very clear that the recommendation is for the practice to be combined with and supplementary to medical treatment. In this framework it is fast becoming an accepted method of contributing to the growing ability to assist individuals with their health problems.

The central idea of Therapeutic Touch is that human beings are whole entities comprised of physical bodies, thoughts, and feelings. For quite a while, the medical profession not only fragmented the three areas, treating them as mutually exclusive, but also separated organs and functions of the physical body, not considering their interrelatedness in treatment. Recently this has changed, and it is now widely accepted that all aspects of the person affect each other.

In keeping with the new medical view of wholeness, this book describes how Therapeutic Touch recognizes this wholeness and may help the patient on all levels. Even when cure is not possible, this treatment often assists in relieving stress and mental anguish to an extent that the physical pain is much more bearable. It also seems to strengthen the link between doctor and patient and to provide a greater feeling of personal worth in those involved.

The book ends with this statement: "These different approaches to healing need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, as we move into the future and medicine becomes even more high-tech, Therapeutic Touch becomes an important addition to our care of the sick, because it maintains the human connection between practitioner and patient. Health care practitioners can use both the best of medical care, together with Therapeutic Touch as an adjunct, to reduce suffering, relieve pain, and promote healing."

-Willamay Pym

April 1997

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Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, by William Irwin Thompson. New York:  St. Martins Press, 1996. Cloth, 264pages.

William Irwin Thompson has been writing books since 1967, and his newest book, Coming into Being, is the summa of all his writings. Throughout the course of his career, Thompson's objective has been twofold: first, to articulate his vision of what he terms the emerging planetary society, which he sees as rendering obsolete the industrial nation state; and secondarily, his hermeneutic of culture has stressed the continuity of thought between myth, science, and literature. Thompson bases his unitary vision upon the human imagination, and it is to a reimagination of the evolution of consciousness that his new book is directed. Coming into Being is a rich and dazzling tapestry of erudition and wit, which should serve to satisfy the appetites of those readers addicted to such chroniclers of the evolution of consciousness as Erich Neumann, Jean Gebser, or Teilhard de Chardin.

In a movement from West to East that recapitulates T. S. Eliot's quest in "The Waste Land" for the spiritual protein of human wisdom, the reader views in succession the great texts of literate civilization through the X-ray acumen of Thompson's mind. The book opens with a meditation on the origins of life in the evolution of the earliest cells, and here Thompson's style bristles with the kind of poetic lyricism that made famous the prose poems of Lewis Thomas in his book The Lives of a Cell. Thompson then moves forward to a discussion of scientific narratives about human origins, which he sees as the equivalent: of modern myths, and in this respect, Thompson is most characteristically himself in showing how the structures of supposedly objective scientific thought turn out to be isomorphic to mythical narratives. "Science is the conscious content," as he puts it, "but myth is the unconscious structure." The book then moves on through a discussion of neolithic goddess figurines, where the reader is treated to a detailed discussion of the complexities involved in their iconographical fusions of male and female anatomies.

Eventually, the sweeping river of Thompson's narrative arrives at the greater tributaries of such masterpieces of literate civilization as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Rig Veda, the Ramayana, the Upanishads, and the Tao te Ching. Along the way, the reader discovers through Thompson's eyes that the primary aim of Western culture has been the creation and dominance of the masculine ego, with its divorce of the spiritual from the material, as epitomized in Platonic thought. Thompson has a lot to say about themes of gender, and this is probably where his approach to the study of consciousness differs from others. His reading of texts such as the story of Samson and Delilah or Gilgamesh is concerned to point out where the feminine principle of cooperation and creativity is displaced at the hands of aggressive patriarchal heroes. Although this sociological dimension is but one among Thompson's multi-leveled readings-c-his primary intent being the creation of "an imaginary hyper-space in which multiple readings are seen together” it is a dimension of hermeneutic in which he excels, and readers interested in such issues will find them here.

With the sacred texts of the Far East, Thompson shows us in such writings as the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita that the traditional Western divorce of consciousness from matter is surpassed by the supramental wisdom that recognizes the animal, vegetable, and mineral domains as analogues of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping, respectively. With Lao-tzu's mystical philosophy of opposites in the Tao te Ching, we arrive at a recognition of the necessity for a balance of both worlds, the heavenly as well as the earthly.

Readers who are expecting a scholarly analysis in the mode of Eliade or Coomaraswamy should be forewarned that this book "is addressed more to the imagination of culture than to the academic management of scholarly research." The discussions, accordingly, are informal, interdisciplinary, and evocative; they are as richly textured as any page out of the Book of Kells, and should serve to stimulate the imagination of those readers who will have the pleasure of Mr. Thompson's thoughtful company.

-JOHN DAVID EBERT

June 1997

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The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus, by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. London: Century, 1996. Hardcover, xiii + 384pages.

Folklorists tell us that many human societies invent an ancestor myth to explain their origins and to define their values. From Australian aborigines to contemporary philosophers, the invention of ancestral lines connecting the present with days of yore is both a pastime and an act of filial piety. In such myths the paternity of the modern offspring is often imaginary rather than historical, but that is irrelevant to the value of the myth.

No human group seems to have been more fruitful in the creation of ancestor myths than Freemasons. The Hiram Key brings together several older myths, adds some new ones, and seasons the mixture with the authors' prejudices for democracy and against the Roman Catholic Church. The ancestry of Freemasonry proposed in this volume is briefly as follows.

In ancient Egypt, a new king's right to rule was established by a secret ceremony based on the myth of the death of Osiris and the birth of Horus, with whom the old and new kings were identified respectively. During the period when Egypt was occupied by foreign invaders called Hyksos (who included the Hebrews), one of the Hyksos leaders unsuccessfully tried to extract the secrets of the king-making ceremony from a king of Thebes, Seqenenre Tao II, who in the process was killed by three blows to the head. The secret ceremony having been lost with the death of Seqenenre (on whom the figure of Hiram Abif was later to be based), his successor adopted a new secret ceremony based on Seqenenre's death (which became the basis of the later third-degree ritual).

Moses was a member of the Egyptian royal family who, knowing the new ceremony, made himself leader of the Hebrews in their exodus out of Egypt to establish a new state. The leaders of the new nation continued to use the Egyptian secrets, which came to mark the line of King David. During the Babylonian Captivity, however, the Prophet Ezekiel sought to purge Jewish ceremonies of foreign elements, so at that time the Egyptian myth of death and resurrection was rewritten with a Solomonic setting but continued as a secret ritual.

By the time of Jesus, the Qumran Essene community of Jews, who expected the imminent appearance of the Messiah to reestablish Jewish rule in Jerusalem, continued the practice of the resurrection ritual among their inner group. Their political and religious heads respectively were Jesus and John the Baptist. After the death of the latter, Jesus assumed both roles and scandalized some of his own followers by his radically democratic views and actions. After the execution of Jesus, leadership of the community passed to his brother James, later challenged by Paul, who Hellenized the teachings of the community and thereby invented Christianity. Anticipating the destruction of their community, the Qumran leaders hid their most precious scrolls in a vault under the foundations of the Temple at Jerusalem.

A millennium later, the Knights Templar, while searching under the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple for buried treasure, found the scrolls, which contained the resurrection ceremony and a true account of the events around Jesus. The Templars then began to use the resurrection ceremony for entrance into their highest group and developed other ceremonies to commemorate their finding of the scrolls (which were the basis of the later Holy Royal Arch ritual).

When in 1307 the Templars were put down by the Pope and the King of France, their head, Jacques de Molay, was tortured by the Inquisition, using a reenactment of Christ's crucifixion. Removed from the cross, he was wrapped in a winding sheet that the Templars had used in their rituals, on which his form and features were impressed, so that it became the Turin Shroud.

A large number of Templars escaped from the persecutions in two ships, one of which sailed to America, where the Templars arrived nearly two centuries before Columbus. The other ship sailed to Scotland, which was a Templar stronghold. There they took refuge especially around Rosslyn Castle, the estate of the St Clair (or Sinclair) family, who were Grand of the Scottish Templars.

During the following century, Rosslyn Chapel was built as a model of the Temple at Jerusalem, and the precious scrolls discovered by the Templars were deposited in an underground vault beneath the Chapel, where they still await discovery. To safeguard the secrets of the Chapel, William St. Clair invented the first degree ceremony and the Mark Mason degree (of which the second degree was a later development).

That's the skeleton of the tale told in The Hiram Key. Ancestor myths should not be judged as though they were history, even when, as in this case, they masquerade as history. This remarkable story ties together Egyptian, Judaic, Templar, and other links that have been proposed for Masonic history, with the addition of such lagniappes as the Turin Shroud. It is an interesting account, which the authors present as a sort of detective Story with one clue leading on to another and foreshadowings of revelations to come.

As historical fiction, it is a good read. As history, however, it is something else. The "evidence" offered for the baroquely complex thesis is a series of analogs, coincidences, and vague similarities connected by a thread of ah-hah's and exclamation points. By the rules of evidence here used, one improbability is a strong suggestion and two are proof positive.

The authors' learning is wide but correspondingly thin. For example, they say that Sumerian is "one of the few tongues completely unconnected with this root language" Proto-Indo-European (83). Indo-European is one of a large number of language families, all unrelated, as far as evidence goes. Most of humanity's tongues therefore share with Sumerian the distinction of being "completely unconnected" with Proto-Indo-European. This is a small matter, unrelated to the book's argument, but then the authors' whole exposition of Indo-European is unrelated to the thesis of the book. One of the rhetorical techniques of the volume is to toss in a bit of gratuitous information now and again, apparently to impress readers with the work's erudition.

An objection that is more serious, because it relates to the book's value as an ancestor myth, is that the authors do seem to believe they arc dealing with ordinary history. Under that belief, their history of Freemasonry becomes a succession of political acts of violence. If that were the actual case, one would of course accept the fact, but there is not the slightest real evidence for such a view.

The Hiram Key proposes an interpretation of Freemasonry that traces its chief symbols (however improbably) to historical personages and events. This sort of rationalizing of mythology (euhemerism) was rejected scornfully by H. P. Blavatsky, one of the most original and best informed of late nineteenth-century analysts of myths. It is seldom right and is always irrelevant. Myth is not history; it: is cosmology, psychology, poetry, and philosophy. What is important about Hiram Abif? Is it that he was King Solomon's chief builder, or that he was an Egyptian king slain by a rival, or that he was the literary invention of some Freemason in modern times? None of those questions are important Masonically.

What is important Masonically is that Hiram Abif embodies fidelity, beauty, and craftsmanship. He is the third member of a trinity representing Conscious Intention, Material Substance, and Intelligent Energy. The Hiram Key is a good read. But it is bad history, bad mythology, and bad Masonry.

-JOHN ALGEO

June 1997

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The Philosophy of Classical Yoga, by Georg Feuerstein. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions. 1996. Paperback, 140 pages.

I wish that I had known of Georg Feuerstein's Philosophy of Classical Yoga when I was first learning yoga and reading the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. In my passion to understand I would layout fourteen translations of the yoga sutras on the floor and compare the various interpretations, sutra by sutra. In addition, I would examine passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the various Upanishads, and other relevant texts for assistance in gleaning the "hidden" meanings behind such terms as purusha, prakriti, ishvara, citra, abhyasa, vairagya, samprajnata, and asamprajnata samadhi. I labored over the differences and similarities between Patanjali's approach and that of the Samkhya Karika. I now find, in Feuerstein's book, a companion guide that echoes my earlier exploits. But, and here is the grace, he saves us the effort by laying the groundwork through his own prodigious labors.

In this scholarly and in-depth treatise, as in his previous books, Feuerstein once again shows us his passion and insight for interpreting ancient textual meanings. In hi s quest for understanding, he examines the different philosophical, psychological, and practical concepts that form the foundation of yoga. As he takes us through this journey, he carves out a clear trail of references for the reader to follow. What emerges is a picture at once both clear and comprehensible of the entire sphere of classical yoga.

Feuerstein remains faithful to his view of yoga as both a philosophical and practical tool for the transformation of consciousness rather than as a mere compendium of techniques. He also reaffirms that the trail carved out by the Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, and other Indian texts are, in essence, maps for meditative introspection that are, in the end, best utilized and integrated into daily living, rather than kept on the shelf collecting dust.

-RICHARD C. MILLER

June 1997

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Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order, by Graham White and John Maze. Chapel Hill, NC.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Hardcover, 347page.

Few modern American political figures are more intriguing than Henry A. Wallace, farm journalist, agrarian scientist, New Deal Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President of the United States (1941- 45), and finally quixotic candidate for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. While Wallace stood in the superheated political pressure-cooker of Washington during the Franklin Roosevelt years of depression and World War II, and remained a prominent name in the Truman years of emerging cold war, in some ways he never seemed totally to belong under the capitol dome. Something in him always seemed to be elsewhere. The man from Iowa was also on a deeply personal and often unconventional spiritual quest. From it flowed both the inner alienation and the profound commitment to world order, and to "progress" as he understood it, that kept him in the messy world of politics. His simple, unpretentious way of life seemed to be part of that character. Needless to say, Wallace was loved for his genuine humanity and hopeful visions, and damned by those who saw him as hopelessly naive, with his "head in the clouds" above such things as communism and the real nature of world politics.

The full contours of Wallace's spiritual journey were not widely known during his life. He was in fact a member of the Theosophical Society in America from 1925 to 1935 and was active in the Liberal Catholic Church in Des Moines between 1925 and 1929. He corresponded with the Irish theosophical mystic, poet, and agrarian reformer George Russell (''AE'') and in 1931- 32 successfully took a Theosophical correspondence course from the Temple of the People in Halcyon, California.

In the early New Deal years the Iowan established a complex and controversial relationship with the Russian mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich. Letters Wallace wrote to Roerich often couched in effusive occult language, the so-called "guru letters," were later obtained by political enemies and used against him. Partly because of the political quicksand likely to engulf a public esotericist, about the same time he came to Washington in 1933 Wallace commenced attending a "high" Episcopal church, combining Anglo-Catholic worship with a liberal vision of Christianity and its social mission. All these diverse spiritual resources went into Wallace's role as custodian of the New Deal spirit in its most idealistic form, and his dream that the twentieth century could, in the title of his popular 1943 book, become the "century of the common man."

Henry A. Wallace, the work of two Australian scholars, attempts to interpret this vision and its spiritual sources. Unfortunately the product is a bit uneven. White and Maze appear not especially well informed about the actual culture of American Theosophy. The recent archival work of Mark Kleinman on Wallace's spirituality, published in articles in Peace and Change and The Annals of Iowa, seems not to have been available to them; this material from Wallace's papers would have fleshed out considerably the youthful idealist's relation to Theosophical correspondents and institutions. More surprisingly, White and Maze were also apparently unfamiliar with the subject's later participation in the Episcopal church and his liberal Christian writings like Statesmanship and Religion (1934).

On the other hand, these authors present a full and useful account of the Roerich affair, although here too one suspects there is still more to be known. Whatever the limitations of their information on Theosophy and other forms of unconventional spirituality with which Wallace was involved, they are generally sympathetic in their handling of it.

A complete account of the spiritual life and vision of this extraordinary statesman remains to be written, if indeed the task is possible. For as prominent and recent a figure as he, the subject of several more political than spiritual biographies, extant information and interpretations remain remarkably varied, full of puzzling inconsistencies, and leave a sense of something, perhaps a master key, still missing. If only as a reminder of how much remains to be done by biographers, this book, attempting to balance the picture with serious attention to his spiritual life, is a serviceable starting-point for those seeking fresh perspectives on the man's life and ideas. For those involved in Theosophy and other forms of alternative spirituality, the book is also a salutary reminder that such ideas and ideals can and sometimes do have consequences at the highest levels.

-ROBERT S. ELLWOOD

June 1997

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How to Use Your Nous, by A. E. I. Falconar. Maughold, Isle of Man: Non-Aristolelian Publishing, 1987, 1997. Pp. ii+30.

Nous is a word borrowed from Greek, rare in American L1SC, but more common in British, where it is usually pronounced to rime with mouse, rather than with moose, as in American use. It means "intelligence" (though the British often use it to mean "gumption, common sense"), and H. P. Blavatsky used it specifically in the sense of "buddhi."

This booklet proposes and correlates several approaches to being "nousful," that is, having an intuitive, nonrational, but very practical insight into the nature of things. One of those is Krishnamurti's teachings on self-realization. Another is Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, which offers a number of practical suggestions for coping with the world, such as remembering that the name of a thing is not the thing itself, so the word rose is not after all a rose. That may seem obvious, but every day we for, get that principle and respond to the labels we put on things rather than to the things themselves, a process called stereotyping. So we think that all Chinese are inscrutable, or all Italians are great singers, or all Indians are spiritual, or all Americans are materialistic. (Or, as H. L. Mencken remarked, an idealist is one who believes that because a rose smells better than a cabbage, it also makes better soup.)

Korzybski's techniques, called non-Aristotelian thinking, are properly supplemental rather than alternative ways of dealing with the world. Aristotle's logic (which holds that nothing is both A and nor-A, everything is either A or not-A, etc.) is not absolutely wrong; it is just not absolutely right. It: is right part of the time, for particular purposes, but it is not right all of the time for all purposes, as the Buddhist logicians knew, as well as Korzybski. Indeed, Falconar also cites Zen koans and Tibetan visual meditations as alternative ways o dealing with non-Aristotelian reality, along with poetry and mysticism.

This booklet usefully correlates a number of seemingly unrelated techniques to cope with the world, especially Korzybski's, whose approach is sometimes thought to be anti-mystical, but only when mysticism is misunderstood as opposed to empiricism or phenomenology. In fact, the mystic is radically empirical and phenomenological.

-].A.

July 1997

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A Treatise on the Pâramîs, from the Commentary to the Cariyâpitaka, by Acariya Dhammapala. Trans. Bhikkhu Bodi. Kandy, SriLanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1996. Pp. 76.

The third section of H. P. Blavatsky's spiritual guidebook, The Voice of the Silence, called "The Seven Portals," is devoted primarily to a consideration of the Buddhist paramitas, or transcendent qualities to be developed on the Path. The paramitas are generally associated with Northern Buddhism as the qualifications to be developed by a Bodhisattva, but they appear in the Southern canon as well, as does also the concept of the Bodhisattva. The Southern exposition of these qualities is the subject of this book.

The early suttas of Southern Buddhism, written in the sacred language Pali and corresponding to the Sanskrit sutras, mention three types of persons who have attained Nirvana by following three distinct "vanes" or vehicles (that is, spiritual paths):
1. sammasambuddha, a perfectly enlightened Buddha, who achieves Buddhahood without the aid of a teacher, and teaches the dharma to others, founding a dispensation;
2. paccekabuddha, a solitary enlightened person, who achieves Buddhahood without the aid of a teacher, and does not reach others or found a dispensation;
3. arahat, a disciple who achieves Buddhahood through the instruction of a perfectly enlightened Buddha and then teaches others within the bounds of the dispensation of a sammasambuddha.

Later Buddhist writings include stories about the backgrounds of these three types of enlightened persons, including the Bodhisattva, a candidate for Buddhahood, a "germinal Buddha" of the first type. The Bodhisattva became the great ideal of the Northern School, which then tended to treat the other two types (in Sanskrit pratyekabuddha and arhat) as merely provisional or lesser ways. Although the Bodhisattva concept was present also in the Southern School, it lacked the privileged status it had in Northern Buddhism.

One of the jataka (or previous birth) tales of the Southern canon tells that eons ago, the Buddha, then a Bodhisattva born as the ascetic Sumedha, vowed before the Buddha Dipankara (the twenty-fourth Buddha of antiquity) that he would renounce his right to enter nirvana so that he might become a teaching Buddha in the future and thus save multitudes of beings. Having made that vow, he reflected on the qualities needed to achieve it; they were the ten "paramis" (Sanskrit "paramitas''}, which became the "requisites of enlightenment."

The Sanskrit term "paramira'' is from the root "param'' meaning "supreme, beyond." The word is sometimes analyzed as ending in "ita" meaning "gone" and thus is interpreted as "gone beyond" or "gone to the supreme," the notion being that these qualities are those needed by the one who has so gone. The ten paramitas were described by the sixth century Pali commentator Acariya Dhammapala in his "Treatise on the Paramis" as qualities necessary for deliverance. That treatise is put into English in this short book.

The Sanskrit and Pali canons give the following lists of Paramiras:

Sanskrit                                                Pali
giving (dåna)                                         giving
virtue (shîla)                                          virtue                            renunciation
patience (kshânti)                                  patience                        determination
energy (vîrya)                                       energy                          equanimity
meditation (dhyâna)                              [meditation]                  loving-kindness
wisdom (prajñā)                                   wisdom                        truthfulness

The Sanskrit canon has six basic paramitas (those in the first column above, for which Sanskrit terms are given). The Pali canon typically has ten paramis (listed in the second and third columns above). Meditation is not one of those ten, but is added when the ten qualities are reduced to six; then the five qualities in the third column are included in the six of the second column, which are identical with the traditional six paramitas of the Sanskrit tradition.

To these six qualities, Blavatsky added another, which she put in the fourth position, namely virâga, translated as "nonattachment'' or "indifference to pleasure and to pain." They are the seven keys to the seven portals on the path of The Voice of the Silence.

The transcendent qualities are the Buddhist equivalent of the Christian seven cardinal and theological virtues (fortitude, temperance, prudence, justice, faith, hope, and charity). They are part of a universal tradition of ideals of conduct on the Path. The value of this short Treatise is that it sets forth clearly and helpfully the Southern Buddhist version of that tradition.

-M.D.

July 1997

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Medical Intuition: How to Combine Inner Resources with Modern Medicine, by Ruth Berger, Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1995. Pp. 143. Paper.

The author of Medical Intuition, Ruth Berger, is a psychic and a consultant: in the field of intuition who is known to television and radio audiences. Medical Intuition is her second publication, the first being The Secret Is in the Rainbow: Aura Interrelationships, which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

Although the praises of two medical physicians preface the text, the author draws attention to an unorthodox approach to health care when she refers in her opening paragraph to persons with supposedly incurable ailments who feel that they are guinea pigs hoping for some "magical treatment" to be discovered in time to save their lives. Berger's response is that their reaction should be to stop waiting and to "listen" to their own bodies.

The direct approach of the book, written in the second person to address the reader directly, is an attractive feature. The format is sometimes a catalog of symptoms and a list of seemingly futile events in an individual's search for recovery.

The author employs lay terms throughout. The general advice is to trust one's instincts as guidance to the right doctor and the right staff (or health care. Yet, states Berger, doctors are not gods.

Medical intuition is described as not about diagnosing illness but about locating energy blockages. The author also considers past-life recall in the healing process as a means of releasing the pain of the past and also of escaping the traumas of childhood. All of this, states Berger, is part of understanding and identifying one's fears and problems. The author never states that any of this is easy; yet she stresses that tapping into the universal consciousness is possible for all through meditation and faith in one's inherent abilities.

Creating order in one's life is one of the keys, says Berger. Medical Intuition may contain information and advice that anyone with pain or other health difficulties is seeking.

-Mary Jane Newcomb

July 1997

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Les histoires de Gopal, by Louis Moliné. Trans. Edith Deri. Paris: Editions Adyar, 1995. Pp. [vii] + [146] (71 double pages + [4]). Paper.

Les histoires de Gopal (The Stories of Gopal) center upon a disciple whose dialogues and parables illustrate a philosophical system embodying the concept of God, who exists universally and thus in the consciousness of human beings and in all animate and all inanimate objects; the basis for morality, the means of awakening consciousness in a world of illusion; and the realization of the self.

The format is a series of brief dialogues between Gopal, the disciple, and his Master. Often the Master's questions are subtle, returning Gopal to the concept that the world and all human experiences are illusion. Occasionally, familiar dialogues occur, such as the sequence in which the Master carries a young girl across the water.

Space and time seem nonexistent in some of the dialogues. If the Master asks Gopal to go for water to quench his thirst, Gopal does not question where he will find water in the desert but may become lost in time as well as space during his search. Eventually he finds his way back to the Master with the jug miraculously filled with fresh water. The margin between dream and reality is very thin here as elsewhere in the stories.

Occasionally rather than answers there are only rhetorical questions--the disciple must intuit the appropriate procedure. Unity of existence is never forgotten and serves as guide; it is stressed throughout the collection.

Although death is conceived as the real joy, the Master clarifies that the disciple needs to experience all of life—human love not excluded. Each is a part of the whole, including sinfulness, and must be confronted or even experienced. Even so, all is illusion, and unanswered questions may be the greatest source of learning for the reader.

-Mary Jane Newcomb

July 1997

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The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1710, by David Stevenson (Cambridge: University Press, 1988, reprinted 1993), xvii + 246 pp.

The history of Freemasonry is a mixture of myth, legend, inference, documentation, and imagination. It is usual, especially in those histories of the Craft written in England or under English influence, to begin Masonic history proper with the formation of the United Grand Lodge in 1717, which brought together four existing London lodges. Obviously, Freemasonry and Freemasonic lodges must have existed earlier; otherwise there would have been nothing to unite into the Grand Lodge. But of the earlier forms of those lodges and their practice, little heretofore has been documented.

David Stevenson, the author of The Origins of Freemasonry, is Professor of Scottish History at the University of St. Andrews. As a good Scotsman, he finds the origins of modern Freemasonry, not in England, but in Scotland more than a century before the formation of the English Grand Lodge. Even more interesting, he also finds those origins partly in the esoteric currents that swept Europe at the time of the Renaissance, thus linking modern Freemasonry with the Wisdom Tradition of the Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, Hermeticists, and others.

In the Middle Ages, skilled workers were organized into trade guilds, which served a number of purposes. They helped to regulate the trades by maintaining standards of competence among the workers and preserving the secrets of their crafts from interlopers. They provided religious, moral, and charitable reinforcement for their craftsmen. They served as social clubs. They developed ceremonies of initiation for newcomers. They developed mythical histories about the origins of their crafts.

Among the various trades, that of the stonemason was unusually suitable for an elaborate craft organization. Whereas most craftsmen were settled in a particular locality, stonemasons were traveling men, moving to sites where their skill was in special demand. Thus they had more need than most for the support of their fellows.

In addition to conventional guilds, which were bodies incorporated by a particular township, stonemasons developed a lodge system, not under municipal control. The early lodge structure was a building on a construction site probably for the use of stonemasons as a workshop, temporary living quarters, and social club. Because they could expect to have strangers turning up and c

Cumulative Index to Lucifer, Volumes I-XX, Comp, Ted G, Davy, Edmonton, Alberta, T6E 5G4 Canada: Edmonton Theosophical Society, P O, Box 4587, 1997, Pp iv+224, Cloth.

Theosophy is both progressive and traditional. As modern Theosophy, its expression must be adapted to each generation so that its timeless truths can be communicated in current idiom; yet the writings of the first generation of modern Theosophists have a special claim on our attention as foundational.

The Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) Theosophical Society has long had a program of making available important early works. Their latest publication is a Cumulative Index to volumes 1-20 (September 1887 to August 1897) of Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine, founded and edited during her lifetime by I--l. P. Blavatsky and afterwards by Annie Besant with the assistance during the last years of the magazine of CJ. R. S. Mead.

This index has been prepared by Ted G. Davy with the care and skill of all his work. Its publication in 1997 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of the magazine, or at least the end of its publication under the tide Lucifer; the magazine continued under the title The Theosophical Review. This index is a splendid contribution to Theosophical scholarship and an invaluable aid for students of the early writings. The main index (pages 1-164) presents the contents of the ten years of Lucifer by authors' names, subjects, and keywords. There are helpful cross-references for both subjects (Phenomena: see Natural Phenomena, Psychic Phenomena, Occult Phenomena, Unexplained Phenomena) and authors' names, both pseudonyms ("Philanthropos" see Blavatsky, H. Po) and initialisms (A. see Glass, A. M.) when the authors can. be identified.

As some indication of what can be found in this index, the entry for "Olcott, Henry .S. (1832-1907)" includes 145 references to him, followed by 21 entries for items written by him and several that he and HPB cosigned That is the pattern for persons: first references to them are indexed, then contributions authored by them.

The volume ends with several appendixes. One indexes book reviews first by the authors of the books and second by the book titles. The reviewers arc included in the main index. Another index lists the titles of journals and of pamphlets and book mentioned in the pages of Lucifer as having been received. A third appendix indexes by geographical locations and organizations Theosophical activities around the world, as reported in Lucifer.

This index is an invaluable guide to information about the history of the Society and the intellectual currents of early Theosophy. It also serves for fascinating browsing as, for example, one comes upon an article by the Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats and a notice of his lecturing at the Dublin Lodge. All Theosophical students are deeply indebted to Ted Davy for preparing this index and to the Edmonton Theosophical Society for publishing it.
-John Algeo

January 1998

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African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity, by Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie, New York: Henry Holt, 1996, Hardback, xxii+282 pages.

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Eco Homo: How the Human Being Emerged from the Cataclysmic History of the Earth, by Noel T. Boaz. New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins, 1997, Hardback, x +278 pages.

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The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, by Terrence W. Deacon New York: Norton, 1997, Hardback, 527 pages.

"Mommy, where did I come from?" Though later asked in mere sophisticated forms, that question of childhood is also a perennial question of our adulthood. We want to know where we, as individuals, as a social group, and as a species came from. Three recent books address the question of our origin as a species from three viewpoints: biological, ecological, and mental.

The biological origin of modern human beings has been accounted for by two theories. One holds that our earlier hominid ancestors spread over much of the world's surface and in various locations independently evolved into present-day humanity but that because of interbreeding, we have been becoming increasingly more alike. It is called the "multiregionalist" theory. The other holds that an earlier variety of the human genus evolved into our kind (Homo sapiens) in Africa and thence spread all over the globe, replacing other hominid species and that present-day differences among us are the result of evolutionary differentiation. It is called the "replacement" or more specifically the "Out of Africa" theory.

Recent analysis of the DNA or genetic code in human beings has shown that, although there are relatively great variations in DNA among groups of Africans, human beings outside of Africa are remarkably uniform, having only very slight variations among themselves and sharing their DNA pattern with some Africans. Since variation in the DNA is the result of mutations overtime, the most probable explanation of this surprising fact is that the human genus began in Africa, where it had a long evolutionary history and about 200,000 years ago developed into Homo sapiens, which later spread from Africa to the rest of the world. Such is the thesis of African Exodus, which dates the exodus from Africa about 100,000 years ago, allowing some 100,000 years in Africa for DNA diversification before the exodus began.

The book argues its thesis passionately and with revolutionary self-consciousness as a refutation of the multi-regionalist view, thereby refuting the romantic notion that science is a gradual, accumulative approach to ultimate truth. The book is also self-consciously a political statement, arguing against the thesis of The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, that intelligence is determined by race, with some races being genetically more intelligent than others. Science, far from being politically neutral, is often done in the service of some social agenda.

One of the interesting features of African Exodus is its emphasis on the unity of our contemporary human species. The differences among us are trivial; we are one people. African Exodus makes that point strongly with respect to our genetic inheritance.

Eco Homo basically supports the "Out of Africa" theory, although it presumes a slightly earlier beginning for the exodus of Homo sapiens "Africa is our ancestral homeland, and even today it still contains a stunning three-fifths to four-fifths of all human genetic diversity" (14). While agreeing with the date for the origin of Homo sapiens of 200,000 years ago, Eco Homo places the exodus earlier, between 130,000 and 175,000 years ago.

The characteristic feature of Eco Homo, however, is its attempt to connect the major stages of our biological evolution with changes in the eco logy: land formation, climate, weather patterns, flora and fauna distribution, and so on. It depicts human evolution, not as something independent of the rest of the planet, but as intimately connected with- influenced by and in more recent times increasingly influencing-the environment. Not only are we a unified species, but also we are unified and interdependent with the whole ecology of the planet.

Both books comment on, without explaining, a curious fact. About 20,000 years ago was one of those axial periods of human history when striking changes occur: "There is nothing in the paleontological record of the evolving human body that rivals the rapidity with which Homo sapiens began to evince advanced 'out-of-body' culture- cave art, music, burial of the dead, clothing, personal ornamentation, diverse tools, and so on....If one is drawn to dramatic 'hiccups' in the history of life on this planet, this certainly ranks near the top" (Eco Homo 217). In brief, human culture -our language, marriage and kinship systems, myths, magic, art, social mores and folkways, indeed everything from ethics to etiquette that obviously differentiates our behavior from that of nonhuman animals - began to appear at that time.

Eco Homo also stresses the remarkable fact of human behavior that we call "altruism" and relates it to that budding of culture 20,000 years ago. Altruistic behavior is evoked from the members of a cultural group "when two social conditions are met: There must be a vital need or threat to the group and there must be a strong sense of solidarity with in the group" (227). Altruism is thus a product of the evolution of cultural behavior and has survival value for the community. It has also, to be sure, its dark side: ethnic chauvinism and racism.

One of the great teachers of another axial period in human history, the Master Kung (or Confucius, as we usually call him), had a prescription for that undesirable side effect. He said that we begin with group solidarity within the family, but extend it progressively to the community, the state, the nation, and ultimately all humanity. The building of a world culture that synthesizes and transmutes local distinctions into a universal brotherhood of humanity is the cure for our social ills.

The Symbolic Species looks at the nature and evolution of language and the human brain and finds in their co-development the key to our modern humanity: "The doorway into this virtual world [of uniquely human abstractions, impossibilities, and paradoxes] was opened to us alone by the evolution of language, because language is not merely a mode of communication, it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought -symbolic representation....Biologically, we are just another ape. Mentally, we are a new phylum of organisms"(22-3).

"Symbolic" is being used here in a sense given to the term by Charles Sanders Peirce, who classified "signs" (things that stand for other things) into three types: "icons," which are pictures of what they stand for, such as portraits; "indexes," which are causally connected with the things they stand for, as the position of a weathervane stands for a direction of the wind; and "symbols," which stand for something by social convent ion, as a wedding ring stands for the marital agreement or the letter "c" stands for a particular sound in words (70-1). In fact, the Peircean symbol is really of two kinds. In one, a symbol is connected with what it stands for quite arbitrarily, as the letter "c'' is connected with the sound "cc." In the other, a symbol is connected with what it stands for metaphorically or analogically, as a wedding ring is connected with the marital agreement by its shape (being an endless circle), its material (being of precious metal), and so on. The analogical symbol is far richer than the arbitrary one, and is the basis of much distinctively human life.

The Symbolic Species also points out that ritual is intimately connected with language and other symbolic systems and thus with our essential humanity:

Early hominids were forced to learn a set of associations between signs and objects, repeat them over and over, and eventually unlearn the concrete association in favor of a more abstract one. This process had to be kept up until the complete system of combinatorial relationships between the symbols was discovered. What could have possibly provided comparable support for these needs in the first symbol-learning societies?

In a word, the answer is ritual. Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic "education" in modern human societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. [402]

In brief that remarkable budding of culture and altruism 20,000 years ago was the effect of the efflorescence of language and ritual. Voluntary social cooperation and culture are not possible with out symbolic language, and neither is the kind of thinking that lets us create mental worlds, virtual realities of "might-have- been" and "let's-pretend." "The evolution of symbolic communication has not just changed the range of possible objects of consciousness, it has also changed the nature of consciousness itself." To be human is to think symbolically, to see a wedding ring, not just as a metal circle, but as a pledge of fidelity, commitment, and mutual support.

These three books, the work of established academic anthropologists, point each in their various ways to certain principles of the Wisdom Tradition. Those principles include human solidarity, the interdependence of humanity with our environment, the naturalness of altruistic behavior, the uniqueness of the human mind, and the centrality of symbol, metaphor, and analogy to our perception of the world. One of the great teachers of that Wisdom Tradition wrote, "Modern science is our best ally" (Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett 65/11). Although there is much in all three books that followers of the Tradition might take issue with, the affirmation of those principles justifies that statement.
-MORTON DILKES

Spring 1998

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Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology, by David R. Oldroyd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. xxx + 410. Hardback.

Thinking about the Earth traces the history of ideas about the planet we live on from ancient times to the present. The volume reviews concepts concerning the origin of the Earth, its physical and chemical composition, its surface and tectonic evolution, its history of climate change, and interactions with its biosphere.

The book is largely nontechnical and, hence, should be easily accessible to the educated nonspecialist. The author, David Oldroyd, is a professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia, specializing in the history of geology, and the book is very much what might be expected from a science historian. The volume is very well researched, and even relatively minor players in some of the major debates in the Earth sciences during the last two centuries arc accorded their fifteen lines in the limelight.

The book will be of value to anyone in, retested in the development of ideas concerning Earth history, but its coverage of most topics trails off with work from the 1950s to 1960s and it does not attempt to track more recent developments. However, Oldroyd's goal is clearly not to provide an up-to-date review of scientific research but rather to illustrate the historical development of ideas concerning the Earth, and in this regard he succeeds admirably.

A weakness of the volume is that Oldroyd is not willing to admit that certain older ideas about the Earth are demonstrably incorrect and have been conclusively rejected by the Earth sciences community. Indeed, science docs progress with time, consigning some ideas to the trash heap of history.

To give an example, the Earth was once generally held to be the center of the cosmos, about which all other heavenly bodies revolved. This anthropocentric view was subsequently demolished by Newtonian mechanics, which explained the motion of the Earth about the Sun, that of the solar system about the Milky Way galaxy, and that of galaxies through the vastness of intergalactic space as a function of gravitational dynamics. Because Newtonian mechanics is solidly grounded in the laws of physics, a return to a Ptolemaic cosmos is a virtual impossibility.

An analogous case in Oldroyd's volume concerns the face-off between the expanding Earth and plate tectonic hypotheses. Both hypotheses were initially constructed to account for the distribution of continents and oceans on the Earth's surface. According to the expanding Earth hypothesis, the terrestrial sphere once had a solid sialic crust which subsequently split into fragments (i.e., the modern continents) that became separated by ocean basins as the Earth expanded.

The primary problem with this hypothesis is that there is simply no physical mechanism by which the Earth could have expanded by the requisite amount, i.e., roughly a three-fold increase in surface area and more than a five-fold increase in volume. Plate tectonic theory, which I will refrain from discussing here, now has a wealth of geophysical and geochemical evidence in support of it, and the expanding Earth hypothesis has about as much chance of resurrection as a Ptolemaic cosmos.

Philosophically, the point overlooked in Oldroyd's position that current views of the Earth have no greater intrinsic merit than earlier views is that scientific concepts have not merely changed through time but have deepened. By this, I mean that the level of debate has progressed from problems of a broad, fundamental nature to problems that are much more narrowly focused as more information has been generated and analyzed.

As an example, as recently as thirty years ago a major debate within the scientific community concerned the tempo of the evolution of life, i.e., whether it occurred gradually and continuously (as envisioned by Darwin) or whether it occurred episodically following long periods of stasis (the more recent "punctualist" view). Detailed compilations of taxonomic data have led to a widespread consensus among Earth scientists in favor of punctualism, and current research focuses on the factors permitting long-term evolutionary stasis (e.g., "homeostasis," or self-regulating equilibria within biotic communities) as well as those responsible for precipitating rapid evolutionary change (most of which appears to be associated with mass extinction events).

Hence, ideas on a given issue may fluctuate for some period of time, but in most cases enough darn is eventually generated to resolve the issue and scientific debate progresses to a deeper, more detailed level.

In the final section of the book, Oldroyd considers the Gaia hypothesis, one of the most interesting and controversial ideas to tweak established scientific paradigms in recent years. Since its inception, the Gaia hypothesis has fissioned into several versions, reflecting varying emphasis on the holistic, oneness-with-Mother-Earth theme. In the original version published by James Lovelock, the essence of the Gaia hypothesis is that the biosphere has a stabilizing influence on Earth-surface conditions, and that such stability, in turn, promotes a healthy, well-integrated biosphere.

The negative reaction of the scientific community to the Gaia hypothesis resulted, I think, largely from its avid acceptance by New Ager's, who have favored more holistic versions in which the Earth itself is viewed as a living organism. However, the Earth was sterile at some point in the past and will be so again at some point in the future, and it is nothing more nor less than a solid physical substrate on which life has developed (or been introduced) and to which life constantly adapts itself. To his credit, Oldroyd gives a very balanced account of the original Gaia hypothesis and of its potential implications with regard to long-term interactions between the Earth and its biosphere.
-THOMAS J. ALGEO

Spring 1998

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Spiritualism in Antebellum America, by Bret E. Carroll. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Hardback, xiv + 227 pages.

Historians of American religion have recently displayed a new level of serious interest in alternative spiritualities, past and present, realizing that they have influenced the course of America's radically pluralistic culture and have told American s who they are , virtually as much as "mainstream" religion has done. Bret Carroll's Spiritualism in Antebellum America is a good ex ample of this trend, and fascinating reading it will be for those with a taste {or good scholarly writing and a love of the American past and the manifold varieties of the spiritual quest.

The book is not so much a chronological tracing of the new religion from its beginning in 1848, with the mysterious "rappings" the young Fox sisters heard in their upstate New York farmhouse, up to the Civil War, as it is a thematic study of the new religion in this period, which was something of its golden age. Sensational accounts of mediumship, table-tilting, and spirit trumpets and bells filled the newspapers, and in some places conventional churches were reportedly nearly emptied as seekers swarmed instead to "home circles" and to auditorium programs featuring Spiritualist speakers and "demonstrations."

The chapters of Spiritualism in Antebellum America deal with such topics as "Spiritualist Republicanism," "The Structure of the Spirit World," "The Ministry of Spirits," "The Structure of Spiritualist Practice," and "The Structure of Spiritualist Society." "Republicanism" refers not to the present political party, but to what historians call the "republican" reaction in Jacksonian America against lingering elements of aristocracy, and privilege, in favor of democracy and equality. For many this mood took quite radical forms in the 1830s and 1840s, leading to a rejection of hierarchy and mere traditionalism in religion no less than in the political sphere.

Spiritualism was clearly a beneficiary and expression of this "republican" wave. Anyone could be a medium or form a Spiritualist circle. As Ann Braude has shown in another excellent book on the subject, Radical Spirits, Spiritualism was a movement that offered women opportunities for spiritual leadership and se lf-expression on important issues at a time when they were denied them in virtually all other churches, as well as in affairs of state. Spiritualism was closely connected with most of the progressive guises of the time: abolition of slavery, feminism, socialism, temperance, prison reform, and the decent treatment of Native Americans.

Historians have also come to see how much America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was, in the title of a recent book by Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith. The conventional religions, and even the famous frontier revivals, were only parts of this mix: there were also Deism, magic, Unitarianism, Mormonism, Transcendentalism, occultism, communalism, and then Spiritualism, But against this melange the emergent scientific and industrial revolutions presented yet another challenge, that of sheer materialism. One response to it was what Carroll calls "technical religion," of which he presents Spiritualism as a prime example.

Spiritualists offered their faith" as the most "scientific" of religious as well as the most "democratic." Not only could it he practiced by anyone, but its claims could also be tested by anyone. One could, in principle, check the veracity of what mediums reported about the lives of departed loved ones, or inspect the seance room for hidden props as much as one wished; this was one sect that did not depend on "blind faith" in the infallibility of ancient texts or of a privileged priesthood,

Spiritualism was actually a religion for the technological age in a double sense. Not only was it allegedly the first to be fully subject to scientific verification , it was also the first to be spread by means that the new technologies made available: through the mass print media at a time when literacy was finally approaching universality in a few advanced countries, including the US; through apostles no longer limited to foot , horseback, or sail, but able to carry the message throughout the nation and the world in the relative comfort and speed of hurtling steam trains and ocean liners and even to send messages instantaneously by the telegraph , invented only a few years before the Fox sisters' rappings. No wonder Spiritualist publications had such progressive, up-to-date names as the Spiritual Telegraph and Spiritual Age!

Present -day Theosophists will undoubtedly see in all of this, as did the founders of the Theosophical Society, H. P. Blavatsky and H. S. Olcott-both one- time students of Spiritualism-a foreshadowing of their movement, founded in 1875 in the wake of the first great Spiritualist age described by Carroll. Here too was a democratic form of spirituality accessible in principle to persons of both sexes and all classes equally, progressive in spirit and embracing many people seriously interested in world improvement. It too made much use of modern media for its dissemination-one thinks of all the Theosophical magazines, of Blavatsky and Olcott sailing by steamship through the newly-opened Suez Canal en route to India, and on a deeper level of the way in which modern Theosophy sought to resolve the burgeoning Victorian science- versus-religion crisis of faith. Theosophy did this, however, in a way that went beyond what Spiritualism ordinarily had to offer. It did not so much submit its claims and "phenomena" to scientific verification, though there was some of this, as appeal to a deeper and older stratum of wisdom, the "Ancient Wisdom," which was postulated as secreted within all real religion and science and which when unpacked could provide common ground for understanding them both.

The partial truth and sometime excesses of early Spiritualism produced scathing rhetoric from the Theosophical side in the nineteenth century. Today, however, with the polemical passion of early Spiritualism largely spent, one can appreciate antebellum Spiritualism, imperfect though it may have been, for the fascinating and courageous movement it often was. Bret Carroll's book will be an aid to that appreciation.
-ROBERT ELLWOOD

Summer 1998

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Tarot and the Tree of Life: Finding Everyday Wisdom
In the Minor Arcana, by Isabel Radow Kliegman. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, Theosophical Publishing House, 1997. Paperback, xxv + 220 pages.

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Choice Centered Tarot, by Gail Fairfield, foreword by Ralph Metzner. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1997. Paperback, vi+ 154pages.

What is the tarot? It is a deck of cards consisting of four suits equivalent to present-day playing cards, except that each suit contains an extra face or court card, called the "knight." To these fifty-six cards, called the "minor arcana," are added twenty-two additional trump cards, known as the "major arcana," ranging from a trump card numbered zero (the Fool) to the trump card numbered twenty-one (the World).

The origin of the tarot is a matter for speculation. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tarot enthusiasts were wont to follow the lead of Court de Gel-elm (1728- 1784) and other French esotericists, who saw in these cards a remnant of mysterious Egyptian sources, especially a legendary book called the Book of Thoth. Others, notably the brilliant writer and esoteric teacher Papus (Dr. Gerard Encausse), drawing on Gypsy legend , discerned Indian symbolism in the cards and attributed the four suits of the minor arcana to the four principal castes of the Hindu social order.

While there is little certainty concerning its origin, the re has never been any doubt about the uses of the tarot. They are threefold: (1) symbolic study of the cosmic and psychic patterns that move our lives, (2) expansion of our consciousness by visual meditations focused on the cards of the major arcana , and (3) divination or securing guidance upon practical matters of a perplexing nature.

I

The first of the two books reviewed here, Isabel Kliegman's Tarot and the Tree of Life, has a just claim to a unique status because it addresses itself to the minor arcana of the tarot. Although most books about the tarot contain a great deal of information about and insight into the archetypal images and mysterious implications of the twenty-two cards of the major arcana, the fifty-six cards of the minor arcana are almost routinely neglected. Most informed sources assure us that the minor arcana represent the human personality and the manifold structures of creation, while the major arcana symbolize spiritual potencies linked to the cosmos and personhood. To contemplate the spiritual side of universal existence and at the same time to remain uninformed regarding the personal dimension shows an attitude lacking in balance. This imbalance has been remedied by Tarot and the Tree of Life.

According to Isabel Kliegman, the tarot is above all a system of self-knowledge, self-integration, and self-transformation. Vital to this integration is the creative interact ion of the opposites leading to an ultimate and balanced union. A symbol system such as the tarot is eminently suited to facilitate this process, which, as C. G. Jung pointed out, takes place on a level of consciousness other than the rational, one where development expresses itself in symbols. In order to undergo successfully this process, we need to avail ourselves of all our psychological resources. Kliegman tells us in simple but impressive language that the neglected cards of the four suits of the minor arcana are indispensable to our psychological development and ultimate wholeness. These cards are "overlooked looking glasses" into the reality of our souls.

One of the most impressive chapters of this book is the second, entitled "Kabbalah: The Ultimate Gift." In a mere twenty' four pages, the author accomplishes what many have failed to achieve in tomes of many hundreds of pages. She presents a clear and practical exposition of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and its relevance to the basic concerns of everyday life, including the relevance of the Tree of Life to the tarot deck. Since the time of Eliphas Levi in the mid nineteenth century, the Kabbalah has been frequently employed to elucidate the meaning of the tarot cards, especially the twenty-two major arcana, which were attributed to the twenty-two interconnecting "channels" of the Tree of Life. The author expertly elucidates the attributions of the ten numbered cards of the four suits to the ten sephiroth (73-176) and presents a refreshingly original treatment of the court cards of the suits in their relationship to the four olams (regions or worlds) of the Tree (177- 215).

The book is replete with examples of people's experiences with the cards and has a friendly, direct tone that cannot help but set the reader at case when undertaking tarot study. A minor area of difficulty the reader may encounter is the author's use of the modernized phonetic spelling of Hebrew names, which is different from the older spelling to which man y readers are accustomed. The religious context of the book is Jewish, which is the author's faith, but which obviously may not be the religious background of many readers. Fortunately, many of the explications of Jewish religious concepts are given in a commendably universal tone, so that they are readily applicable to all traditions. A remarkable and brilliant instance is the author's commentary on the "Shema Yisrael" (17-1 8).

II

Gail Fairfield's Choice Centered Tarot possesses a thrust that is rather different from that of the previous book. Its emphasis is primarily on the tarot as a "psychic tool" and thus on divination. There is very little information presented that might create a context (or the symbolism of the cards; one misses the mythological frame, work expounded by Joseph Campbell or by Sally Nicholls. Even more one misses the Kabbalistic context presented by numerous other authors. (The word Kabbalah does not appear in the text.)

It is of course all too true that one of the most popular uses to which the tarot has always been put is that of divination. Yet divination without a larger philosophical and even transcendental context becomes a dreary business. The late Manly P. Hall expressed this well when he wrote: "To those versed in ancient philosophies it appears unfortunate that these cards should be collected and examined mainly in the interest of fortune telling. Man's place in the universe is far more important than the outcome of h is daily concerns" (The Tarot: An Essay, 21).

It is not that the Choice Centered Tarot is without some practical merit. As the noted figure of consciousness studies, Ralph Metzner, points out in his foreword, the author "emphasizes the psychological meanings of the Tarot, showing ... how the card symbols, which at first seem so perplexing, can yield powerful insights and help people come to greater self-understanding and the ability to make creative and responsible choices in all kinds of situations" (iv). Whether this emphasis appears as clearly and consistently as one might wish is an other quest ion.

Certainly the most annoying feature of this book is its frequent and for the most part quite unjustified introduction of "politically correct" motifs into the discussion of the tarot. What is one to make of remarks such as this: "Most Tarot decks are blatantly racist in that they confine themselves to the use of Caucasian images. The exclusion of people of other races ... reinforces the misconception that the Tarot is only relevant to the white race" (8)? The present reviewer has lectured on the tarot to many audiences of a racially mixed composition and has never heard anyone titter this kind of objection. Where race-oriented "PC" is present, the gender-oriented variety of the same thing cannot be far away: "Many decks and books still reflect the more traditional, rigidly defined sex roles... we need to be aware of the sexist and heterosexist attitudes that they reflect and reinforce" (8). Poppycock! Does the Queen of Swords not hold the most masculine of magical symbols, the sword? And can one imagine a feminine figure of more awesome power than the High Priestess, or a more dynamic and energetic one than the woman on the card of Strength?

Both of these books are useful additions to the ever-expanding body of literature on the tarot , but Tarot and the Tree of Life is more complete and more useful than Choice Centered Tarot. The former shows us how we are instructed by the numinous symbols of the cards, while the latter tells us how we may use these same symbols to serve largely personalistic ends. The difference between the two approaches is significant.
-STEPHAN A. HOELLER

Summer 1998

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Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die, edited by Sushila Blackman. New York: Weatherhill, 1997. Paperback, 160 pages.

In Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die, Sushila Blackman has collected death stories of Hindu, Tibetan, and Zen masters.

Hindus believe that the last thoughts before death affect one's next incarnation. Hence, it is best to think of God on dying so that one will be forever liberated. A famous example is Mahatma Gandhi's last exclamation, "Sri Ram, Sri Ram, Sri Ram!" as he died from an assassin's bullets.

Tibetan monks practice meditations to Be performed immediately before and after death to effect final liberation or at least reincarnation in desirable circumstances. They study the texts we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead so they can properly navigate the various bardos, or stages between death and rebirth. As the dying person’s life-force leaves the body, a great clear light appears-the light reported in so many near-death experiences. Tibetan masters teach that if one can recognize and merge into that light, one is liberated from all separate existence.

Many of the stories in this book have to do with foreknowledge of death without fear or anxiety. In the Japanese tradition, Zen masters on the verge of death givetheir last words in the form of a death poem, or jisei. The beautiful death poem of Basho, the greatest of Japan's haiku poets, was "Sick, on a journey, yet over withered fields dreams wander on." Several death stories of Zen masters involve humorous behavior or nonsensical statements very much like Zen koans.

The afterword presents an unexpected poignancy. Shortly before completing this book, Sushila Blackman learned that cancer had metastasized to her bones. She had unknowingly been collecting these stories to prepare for her own death, which came a little more than a month after she wrote the afterword.

These stories make the point that death is just another passage in life, which we need not fear. We, like the great beings, can make a graceful exit.
-MIKE WILSON

Summer 1998

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The Psychic Revolution of the 20th Century and Our Psychic Senses. By Claire G. Walker. Seal Beach, CA: Psychic Sense Publishers, 1997. Pp. xii + 166.

Once in a while, a book comes along that serves as a "bellringer'' to the century rather than to the moment; such a book is that authored by Claire Walker. From the thoughtfully written Author's Note to the concluding Endnotes, she has presented the term psychic in a new light, one that has evolved in the past hundred years. Her fresh approach to the greatly misunderstood psychic faculty restores to it a dignity that is ancient: in concept: and not to be misinterpreted as merely a psychic phenomenon.

Just as the Renaissance was a major turning point in the world's history, the-author believes that now another major direction has been taken, one in which individualism is a thing of the past. Claire Walker envisions the next step in the world's evolution as one of knowledge, wholeness, and spiritual vision.

The author credits the appeal of twentieth-century psychism to an outgrowth of the late nineteenth century as she traces the history of this often misunderstood term. She sets the stage by the founding of the Theosophical Society by H. P. Blavatsky and others in 1875. The author writes appreciatively concerning the struggles and accomplishments of Blavatsky, who brought an organized, rational view of the inner side of reality to the Western world. The author also surveys Theosophy's basic tenets and history, observing that the popular appeal of psychism began about the time of the Society's foundation.

As we stand on the threshold of a new age, till: author states that it will be anything but business as usual. Her extensive research heralds a "New Globalism." If we fail to speak and think in the new language of that Globalism, we will be one with the dinosaurs, for goodwill and genuine brotherhood have not as yet: been realized. The author believes that the well-being of the twenty-first century will not depend on the knowledge of a privileged few but should be available to all inhabitants of the Earth.

Walker states that: the development of the psychic sense is so basic to human nature that it is the one natural resource not threatened by modern civilization and that it: is the next step in the evolution of the planet. She writes that a new image of the World Self will emerge as hundreds of thousands of people learn to balance inner being with outer personality, which is the work of the Universal Soul.

Parents and educators can breathe life into the educational system by recognizing the psi factor as a learning tool, a cherished natural ability that can unlock the inner potential of each child. In this manner the child's creativity can be actualized, allowing knowledge to be intuitive rather than inductive. Many psychically gifted children are now coming into incarnation, and early training and recognition of their abilities will allow their energies to grow into "new channels of doing and thinking."

A new society will emerge when the recognition of the psychic sense as pan of the human constitution provides interaction between the peoples of the earth. A new physics, a new geography, a new language (a new understanding of old terms), a new approach to health and alternative healing, and a new understanding of the development of the five senses that will aid in the awareness of the sixth or intuitional sense will in concert give rise to a new religion, one of world harmony and good will.

The author compares the new science with H. P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine (1:274), which holds that "Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is CONSCIOUS: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception." The book describes psychic "wholeness" as a fulfillment and a drive that creates a now of energy more important: than pleasure. Living then becomes an art that transcends personality to a spiritual level. The word psychic has meant many things in the past century. On the road to an increased understanding of reality, the psi factor has metamorphosed from parlor tricks and séances to scientific study and growing respect for the ancient spiritual teachings. Psychic, as the author uses the term, docs not refer to sensational phenomena, but to the development of an influence on our every daily thought, choice, and reaction.

We arc indebted to Claire Walker for her clarification of the meaning of the term psychic and for sharing her wisdom and research, her hope and insight: into the future.
-LEATRICE KREEGER-BONNELL

June 1998

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ACCESSING THE SECRET DOCTRINE
H. P. Blavatsky's major work, The Secret Doctrine, is both the most basic of all Theosophical books and the most difficult to use. Its wealth of detail and breadth of scope are breathtaking, if not intimidating, for many readers. Any assistance in providing easier and more effective access to this Theosophical monument is good karma. Two works of excellent good karma have recently become available: a new index to the book by John Van Mater and an Electronic edition with a search program from Vic Hao Chin.

A New Index

The Secret Doctrine: Index. By John P. Van Mater. Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1997. Softcover, viii+433 pages.

Indexes are valuable tools. Shortly after the publication of The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky was praising two students who had "indexed it for themselves, classifying the contents in two portions-the exoteric and the esoteric" (Lucifer 6 [1890]: 333--5). The two indexes hitherto most widely available have been that published by the Theosophy Company in 1939 and that, in the de Zirkoff edition, published by the Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, in 1979, which superseded earlier Adyar indexes.

The new index by John Van Mater has some distinctive and noteworthy features. A pervasive difference is its ordering of subentries under a main entry. For example, the main entry for the term "Race(s)" spreads over four columns and includes more than a hundred subentries. Subentries must be ordered somehow-but how?

The two earlier indexes listed subentries in the order of their volume and page numbers. That order gives the index user an overview of the sequence in which the topics are covered in the book. Also if the user wants to look up all the subentries for a given topic, the page numbers are in the most convenient order for doing so.

The Van Mater index orders subentries alphabetically by a keyword in the subentry. This has the advantages of bringing together subentries dealing with the same aspect of a topic and of letting the user quickly scan long entries for the particular aspect of a subject that is of interest. Each system of ordering has its own virtues and uses; it is good to have both available.

Other noteworthy features of the Van Mater index are its identification of the language source of foreign terms (mainly Sanskrit, of course) and its very helpful cross-references. For example, the entry for mulaprakriti (omitting the diacritics) begins:

Mulaprakriti (Skt.) See olso Pradhana, Prakriti,
Primonal [sic for "Primordial"] Matter, Svabhavat

If one consults the four cross-references under mulaprakriti, other cross-references appear under them and their further cross-references, namely aether, akasa, anima mundi, astral light, daiviprakriti, elements, ether, Father-Mother, hyle, ilus, protyle, world soul. By tracing the web of such cross-references, one can get a fair coverage of a given subject.

Van Mater ends his index with an appendix listing and translating foreign phrases used in The Secret Doctrine. This is especially helpful for us monolingual Americans. The phrases range from the preface's De minimis non curat lex (l:viii "The law does not concern itself with trifles") to a complaint of Euripedes about aoidon hoide dustenoi logoi (2:764 "those miserable stories of the poets"). The last foreign phrase in the book, Satyan nasti paro dharmah (2:798 "There is no religion higher than truth," the motto of the Theosophical Society) is entered in the main index, so is omitted from the appendix.

This volume, both in form and content, has the high quality typical of Pasadena publications. It is a significant and very welcome addition to the array of tools for the study of Theosophy. Students of The Secret Doctrine are in debt to John Van Mater and the Theosophical University Press for this excellent: work.

 

An Electronic Edition

The Secret Doctrine: Electronic Book Edition. Ed. Vincente Hao Chin, Jr. Quezon City, Philippines; Theosophical Publishing House, 1998. 5 floppy disks, 7.5 megabytes harddisk space.

The Philippines Section of the Theosophical Society, under the presidency of Vic Hao Chin, has brought turn-of-the-century technology to the study of The Secret Doctrine by producing an electronic version of Blavatsky's work.

Currently available on 5 high-density floppies, the text uses the pagination of the 1888 edition (as all modern studies do). It installs on a hard disk, runs under Windows 3.101' Windows 95, and requires 7.5 megabytes of hard disk space for its storage. It includes a search program that allows the reader to look for any word or phrase used in the text (other than special characters or words in diagrams or illustrations).

A search produces a list of sections in which the specified word or phrase is to be found, identified by volume, part, section or chapter numbers, and the title of the section. The sections are ordered in the list according to the frequency with which they contain the word or phrase, with the most abundant use first. For example, mulaprakriti is used in 22 sections of the book, most often in volume 1, pan: 2, section 12 entitled "The Theogony of the Creative Gods," where there are 12 uses, and next most often in the Proem of volume 1, where there are 11 uses, and so on.

Clicking on any given line of the list takes one to the corresponding section of The Secret Doctrine, in which every occurrence of the word or phrase is highlighted for ease of location. The click of a button takes the user from one highlighted use to the next. The text, in whatever amplitude the user desires, can be blocked and copied to a document in the word processor of the user's choice.

If a student wants to know what The Secret Doctrine says about any term or how it uses any expression, this electronic edition is the fastest, most thorough, and most accurate way to find the answer. Through it, one can produce an exhaustive list of every occurrence in The Secret Doctrine of whatever word or phrase one wants to investigate. And because its text can be copied and pasted to another document, it is the easiest way to get quotations, long or short, from the book.

Plans are currently underway to put the program eventually onto a CD with various supplementary materials. However, the electronic edition now available is excellent and highly useful. No serious student of The Secret Doctrine should be without it. Vicente Hao Chin, Jr., and his co-workers are owed a very great vote of thanks for their work in producing this electronic version.

 

The Future

Electronic, globally searchable texts will not put primed indexes out of business-at least, not yet. But they will transform how such indexes are designed and what they are used for.

The availability of computer searches through an electronic text largely obviates the traditional use of printed indexes, which has been to find places in a text where a given word is used and a given subject is discussed. It is pointless to look up a word manually in one printed book, note down the references given for that word, look up each reference in another book, and then copy (either by hand or xerography) the quotations one wants.

That is an obsolete research technique. Instead, one types the word or expression of interest into the electronic program, which then produces in the blink of an eye all occurrences of the word or expression, and one can electronically copy any passages one wants. Such electronic research reduces dramatically the time and effort spent in looking for information.

The existence of electronic texts will significantly alter the design and use of printed indexes, and the electronic texts will themselves evolve as new technology becomes available and as the needs of users call for evolving forms of presentation. Vic Hao Chin's electronic Secret Doctrine is the first, not the last, step in the new technology, just as John Van Mater's index is a transitional step to the new format such indexes will assume. Eventually, the two technologies-electronic text and printed index- will blend.

The key to the future of indexing is in John Van Mater's liberal use of cross-references. Vic Hao Chin's electronic text can be searched only for specific words or phrases used in the text. Thus, if one is interested in what The Secret Doctrine has to say about mulaprakriti, one can direct the program to produce all uses of that word. And it will do so, quickly and reliably. But the electronic program will not, at present, lead one on to synonyms or related terms. That's where the cross-references come

in. In a world of electronic searches, the most valuable part of the \/an Mater index are its cross-references. Future indexes need to amplify and elaborate such cross-referencing; they need to become not so much indexes to the text as thesauruses of related terms, which can be searched for by the computer program.

For example, the Van Mater index includes the complex of cross-references indicated above:

aether, akasa, anima mundi, astral light, daiviprakriti,
elements, ether, Father-Mother, hyle,
ilus, mulaprakriti, pradhana, prakriti, primordial
matter, protyle, svabhavat, world soul

To these might be added other related terms, such as the following (all of which appear in subentries under one or another of the cross-referenced terms):

aditi, aethereal, akasic, alaya, archaeus, asat,
celestial virgin, chaos, cosmic ideation, cosmic
matter, cosmic soul, cosmic substance, devamatri.
devil, dragon, eternal root, fobat, Holy
Ghost, honey-dew, hydrogen, illusion, isvara,
kshetrajna, Kwan-yin, life principle, light of
the logos, limbus, lipikas, logos, magic head,
magnes, maha-buddhi, mahat, matter, Mother,
Mother-Father, nahbkoon, Nebelheim, noumenon,
Oeaohoo, oversoul, parabrahman, picture
gallery, plastic essence, plenum, precosmic
root substance, prima materia, primordial substance,
Ptah, purusha-prakriti, root principle,
serpent, shekinah, sidereal light, Sophia, space,
svayambhu, undifferentiated matter, universal
mind, universal principle, universal soul, unmanifested
logos, unmodified matter, vacuum,
veil, waters of space, web, yliaster, Ymir

To be useful, such related terms would need to be organized into a branching tree of interlocking relationships. The best way to store and access such a tree structure is electronic. Eventually, the thesaurus-index toward which the Van Mater book has made a first step should be incorporated into the search program for the electronic text of The Secret Doctrine so that a user can search automatically not only for specific terms but also for related terms that the user may not even be aware of.

In sum, the two works under review here, the printed index and the electronic text of The Secret Doctrine, are splendid productions that will serve very well the needs of their users for the proximate future. They also point enticingly toward a more, though perhaps not very, distant future in which their technologies will be combined to afford students an unparalleled and previously unimaginable opportunity to study this foundational text of Theosophy.
-JOHN ALGEO

June 1998

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H. P. Blavatsky and the SPR: An Examination of the Hodgson Report of 1885, by Vernon Harrison. Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1997. Hardback, xiv + 78 pages.

A turning point in H. P. Blavatsky's life, which at the time must have seemed to her as well as to those around her to be a calamity, was the 1885 report of the committee of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) "appointed to investigate phenomena connected with the Theosophical Society" That report, written primarily by a young investigator named Richard Hodgson and therefore usually called "the Hodgson Report," reached a devastating conclusion:

For our own part, we regard her neither as the
mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar
adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title
to permanent remembrance as one of the
most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting
impostors in history. [4]

Theosophists have always held that the Hodgson Report, the initial effort of a fledgling and ambitious new investigator for the SPR, was biased, distorted, unfair, and unreliable. It would, however, not be unexpected that they should so respond to the report's highly critical judgment of the founder of Theosophy. Others tended to take the report as a soundly based, conclusive expose revealing Blavatsky as a fraud.

In 1986, shortly after the hundredth anniversary of the Hodgson Report, an impartial, critical examination of that report, covering both its methodology and conclusions, was made by a disinterested researcher, Vernon Harrison. Not connected with any Theosophical Society, Harrison had been a member of the Society for Psychical Research for fifty years; he was a professional expert in forgery and a frequent expert witness in legal cases involving forgery and counterfeiting.

The Hodgson Report dealt with a number of issues: (1) various paranormal phenomena performed by or connected with Blavatsky; (2) the putative Blavatsky-Coulomb correspondence; and (3) the authorship of the Mahatma Letters, Harrison confined himself to the last of those issues because forgery was his specialty and because primary evidence relating to that issue still exists, the Letters being available in the manuscript collection of the British Library. Eyewitnesses of the phenomena are now all dead, and the Coulomb letters mysteriously disappeared after having come into the possession of one of Blavatsky's opponents whom she sued for libel and who apparently found that the letters did not support his case.

Harrison's devastatingly critical examination of the Hodgson Report was published by the Society for Psychical Research, as the SPR editor said, "in the interest of truth and fair play, and to make amends for whatever offense we may have given" by the 1885 report. Harrison did not, however, end his investigation of the subject with that publication, but went on to examine critically all of the Mahatma Letters for evidence of forgery or fraud by Blavatsky.

Harrison's 1986 SPR article is reprinted in this volume together with a report of the new evidence from his subsequent investigation. The details of his research must be read in his own words to appreciate the thoroughness, skill, and knowledgeability with which it was conducted, There is also a keen and incisive sense of humor running through his comments. For example, Harrison demonstrates that by the same criteria Hodgson used to "prove" that HPB wrote the Mahatma Letters, he can "prove" that she also wrote Huckleberry Finn and that Dwight Eisenhower wrote Isis Unveiled, for Mark Twain and Ike's handwritings share critical features that Hodgson used to link HPB with the Mahatma Letters.

A1though it is not possible here to do justice to Harrison's full analysis, his concluding expert opinion on the subject can be summarized:

The Hodgson Report is not a scientific study…

Richard Hodgson was either ignorant or contemptuous of the basic principles of English justice…

In cases where it has been possible to check Hodgson's statements against the direct testimony of original documents, his statements are found to be either false or to have no significance in the context...

Having read the Mahatma Letters in the holographs, I am left with the strong impression that the writers KH and M were real and distinct human beings...

Who KH was I do not know, but I am of the opinion that all letters in the British Library initialed KH originated from him…

It is almost certain that the incriminating Blavatsky-Coulomb letters have been lost or destroyed, but there is strong circumstantial evidence that these letters were forgeries made by Alexis and Emma Coulomb...

I have found no evidence that the Mahatma Letters were written by Helena Blavatsky consciously and deliberately in a disguised form of her own handwriting…

I am unable to express an opinion about the "phenomena" described in the first part of the Hodgson Report ... but having studied Hodgson's methods, I have come to distrust his account and explanation of the said "phenomena."

Vernon Harrison concludes that there is much we do not know about Helena Blavatsky and many questions about her life remain unanswered. He believes, however, that "the Hodgson Report is a highly partisan document forfeiting all claim to scientific impartiality" (4), "riddled with slanted statements, conjecture advanced as fact or probable fact, uncorroborated testimony of unnamed witnesses, selection of evidence and downright falsity" (32), and therefore "should be used with great caution, if not disregarded. It is badly flawed" (69).

This book should be in the library of every Theosophist and should be studied by anyone who writes or reads about Blavatsky. It is an extraordinarily important work in HPB's biography and in the history of the Society and of Theosophy.
-JOHN ALGEO

July 1998

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SŌd: The Son of the Man, by S. F Dunlap. Photographic reproduction of the 1861 edition with added notes and bibliography Secret Doctrine Reference Series. San Diego: Wizards Bookshelf, 1998. Paperback, [ii], xxii, [ii] + 162 pages.

Sōd is defined in The Theosophical Glossary as a Hebrew word meaning an arcanum, a religious mystery. The term was well chosen by S. F. Dunlap as the main title of his Sōd: The Son of the Man. He also wrote a sister volume, Sōd: The Mysteries of Adoni. Numerous quotations from both are to be found in H. P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine.

Dunlap appears to have been an unorthodox scholar, which is not to be taken as a criticism. He was ahead of mid nine-(tenth century theology-s-even that of the present time- in recognizing that 2,000 years ago "mystery" traditions were an important element in any number of contemporary religions and that some of these significantly influenced the development of early Christianity.

In Sōd: The Son of the Man, the author compiled an extraordinary collection of references to what he called "infant Gnosticism." Among these are eclectic quotations from the books of the Old and New Testament, the Hermetica, Greek and Latin historians and philosophers, the early Church Fathers, and many others, including later scholars. One of the most interesting of this wide range of sources is the Codex Nazaraeus, an eleventh century document with obviously earlier origins.

Dunlap commences the final chapter of this book with the statement "It is unnecessary to sum up." However, most readers would have welcomed a summary by one who was astute enough to recognize a common thread in the religious philosophies of the Mediterranean area at the commencement of the common era.

Sōd: The Son of the Man is a useful source for a