Quest Magazine

Return to Redemption Ridge

George Eugene Belcher
West Palm Beach, Florida: National Transcom, 2012.
187 pages, paper, $18.99; Kindle e-book, $3.99.

We Theosophists are interested in helping humanity awaken to the universal truths The Secret Doctrine espouses. In this regard we should not underestimate the influence of movies and books of fiction. It is rare to find a novel that is accurate in presenting these principles of the ageless wisdom, but George Belcher's new novel Return to Redemption Ridge fits this category well. The author gives us a good mystery and love story set on a two century-old farm. The main character is a skeptical journalist who comes to this (some say) haunted farm to interview an aging, reclusive but famous and wealthy businessman. There are apparitions, unusual happenings, and revelatory information on reincarnation, life after death, and the soul. This is an inspirational, intelligent novel in which one also learns about the import business, caring for horses, and how to visually identify the age of good wine. Belcher's book is an imaginative and lovely addition to the genre of Theosophical education.

Judith Snow-Clewell

The reviewer is president of the FloridaFederation of the Theosophical Society in America.

Ancient Wisdom for a New Age: A Practical Guide for Spiritual Growth

Terry Hunt & Pal Benedict
Las Vegas, Nevada: Twin Star Nexus, 2012. 414 pages, paper, $18.95.

Ancient Wisdom for a New Age is written in the form of a dialogue in which the questions of an inquirer are answered by the authors. The book offers some praiseworthy suggestions for ways to live the spiritual life. It also discusses humanity’s metaphysical nature and evolutionary journey. The chapter on reincarnation is especially well-done.

Hunt and Benedict have drawn on many resources for the theories they discuss. Their bibliography includes The Mahatma Letters, several works by H.P. Blavatsky, thirteen titles by Alice Bailey, seven by C.W. Leadbeater, and about forty-two others. To their credit, the authors recommend that readers accept only what is reasonable to them and that they keep an open mind so that they might get new insights. Nevertheless, the theories come across as facts rather than theories. Clearly the authors hope those theories, or facts, will be helpful to others in making spiritual progress.

On the practical side, the authors stress what every great spiritual teacher has stressed--the danger of identifying with the personal ego. In fact, they have emphasized it to a fault. Throughout the book, even the simplest pleasures are put down as a hindrance to spiritual growth. We are told that the soul has no interest in football games or movies. Perhaps that is true, but surely harmless entertainment and fun are not a hindrance to spiritual growth.

The authors’ treatment of our emotional nature comes close to suggesting that we eliminate all emotion and operate only from a higher spiritual state of consciousness, as they seem to believe adepts do. Yet in The Mahatma Letters, historical documents written by two adepts named Koot Hoomi and Morya, we find that the adepts have very strong feelings. In one letter, Koot Hoomi said Blavatsky “made [Morya] more than once start in anger, and break his pipe while swearing like a true—Christian.”

Each chapter has numerous subtopics that sometimes include extraneous material and occasionally omit material needed to cover the subtopic. In chapter 2, “The Human Experience,” there is a subsection entitled “The Nature of the Human Soul.” Commendably, the authors point out the need to be scrupulously honest with ourselves and with others. No doubt that is essential if we are to live a spiritual life; but except for saying that “the human soul exists on the very highest levels of the mental realm,” the authors do not tell us much about what the soul is. In the next subsection, “The Levels of Consciousness,” we are told that the most spiritual parts of a human being are atma and buddhi, which are “the very highest vibrational frequencies within us.” That may be true, but how do we discover what high vibrational frequencies are within ourselves?

The authors frequently say that “everything is exactly as it should be.” Perhaps it would be nearer the truth if they had said that everything is the result of action. Surely the sorry world situation is not as things should be. Were that the case, we should leave things as they are. Ignorance, selfishness, and greed have caused great misery to humanity and to nature, but isn’t it our job to do what we can to change ourselves and the world for the better? No doubt the authors would agree with that, but readers could get the wrong idea from the authors saying that things are as they should be.

Ancient Wisdom for a New Age provides some very important advice for those who want to live the spiritual life. In addition to warning about the dangers of identifying with the ego, the authors stress the need for a selfless life. They also point out that the adepts are not willing to become personal teachers for everyone who wants individual guidance, and they strongly discourage mediumship and channeling.

Hunt and Benedict are to be commended for making a noble effort to help spiritual pilgrims on their way. At the same time Ancient Wisdom for a New Age spends too much time on metaphysical theories without providing reasonable evidence for their veracity, and it often answers questions in simplistic and unsatisfying ways. By far the most practical chapter in the book is “Your Spiritual Practice.” To justify the book’s subtitle this chapter might have been expanded and some of the metaphysical theory omitted.

Edward Abdill

Edward Abdill is vice-president of the Theosophical Society in America and author of The Secret Gateway: Modern Theosophy and the Ancient Wisdom Tradition.

Faith Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind

Margaret Placentra Johnston
Wheaton: Quest Books, 2012. x + 300 pages, paper, $17.95.

According to the author of Faith beyond Belief, much of traditional religion puts forth a message that is spiritually immature and lacking in nuance and sophistication. She supports this thesis by recounting her own struggle with traditional religious views, as well as by narrating the real life stories of ten people from diverse backgrounds who had similar struggles and ultimately decided to leave their places of worship.

The stories are both engaging and revealing. They include those of a young mother who was raised as a Mormon; a man who from Kenya who was raised Roman Catholic; a Midwestern woman who began questioning her Presbyterian church at the age of eight; an elderly man who began to question his Muslim faith after the events of 9/11; and a baby boomer who was brought up in the Russian Orthodox Church. Although they left their religions behind, all these individuals felt that they continued to have a deep spiritual life in which truth and ethics play a pivotal part.

In most of these cases, the decision to leave one's religion involved a prolonged and intense psychological battle–an inner tug of war between wanting the continued security of a community with shared beliefs and the ever-increasing doubts raised by the rational mind regarding rigid church doctrine. Those whose stories are told here found that their search for spiritual integrity was stifled and repressed by the narrow parameters of orthodox religious thinking. But it was not uncommon for these inner struggles to endure for years. One can appreciate the great courage and integrity that were required to make those decisions, especially in the face of impassioned pleas from family and members of the congregation to stay within the fold. In some cases, the price paid was complete rejection by family and former friends.

As compelling as these stories are, they serve to make the author's larger point, which is that spirituality evolves through four stages of growth. The first stage includes those who are spiritually undeveloped. These are people who live their lives without any guiding principles and are motivated primarily by selfish and egocentric concerns. Some of them may even attend church, but only for superficial and ulterior motives. The second stage consists of those who are looking for definite answers and tend to read scripture in a literal fashion. They view their religion as the only "correct" one and place great value on the security and comfort that such attitudes bring them. They are not comfortable with ambiguity and prefer cut-and-dried moral directives. Third is the rational stage, in which science and reason play a great role. Individuals at this stage value truth and integrity and therefore cannot accept religious ideas that fly in the face of science. They are often skeptical and ask lots of questions. "Critical reflection," the author notes, "is a necessary step in moving toward spiritual maturity" She observes that for individuals to arrive at the rational level, their sense of self has to be stronger than their identity with a certain group, although this does not necessarily mean they are selfish.

The author characterizes the fourth stage of spiritual growth as the mystical stage. Here scripture is interpreted as metaphor and allegory. There is a comfort with ambiguity and mystery and "an ability to live in the questions" Individuals at this level accept and value paradoxical statements as pointers to truth, while those at an earlier stage of spiritual development are made uneasy and insecure by such apparent contradictions. Mystics value unity over divisiveness, seeing not one group or another, but all as part of one.

While the author presents much evidence to support this theory of spiritual development, she takes pains to emphasize that we should not use this type of knowledge to judge people or categorize them. Also, the stages are not always cut-and-dried, and people often exhibit traits from more than one category. But the overall evidence is persuasive, and the theory is compatible with the Theosophical view of spiritual evolution. Research from a number of sources, as well as the author's own ideas, are presented in a clear and nondogmatic fashion.

Just as the message put out by traditional religion is often immature, according to the author, so are the relentless attacks on organized religion by the new crop of atheists–people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others. Although they make some valid criticisms against religion, often in brilliant fashion, they are guilty of making an idol out of the rational mind, failing to understand that there may be other ways of perceiving the ultimate Reality.

Finally, it should be noted that this is not a book about bashing religion. The author stresses, "As a society, we do not want to leave our churches behind. Nor should we; they provide us with a rich cultural heritage and a particular sense of community not available elsewhere. They also serve as an integrating force for good and remind us to focus on issues beyond the material world"

David Bruce

The reviewer is a longtime member of the Theosophical Society, for which he serves as national secretary.

Initiating Women in Freemasonry: The Adoption Rite

Jan A.M. Snoek
Leiden: Brill, 2012. xvii + 550 pages, hardcover, $237.

Freemasonry is often considered an exclusively male fraternity and, in most of its manifestations, so it is. In particular, the dominant stream of Masonry that has historically flowed out of the British Isles (including Masonry as it developed in North America) has forbidden the initiation of women. Why this is so is a knotty question, though probably one over which few people lose sleep.

The usual explanation is that the mixing of men and women in “secret” meetings during the genesis of modern Masonry in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century British culture would have just been too scandalous. And Masonry, being an extremely traditional order, has continued that custom down to the present.

An alternate explanation, put forth by Robert G. Davis in Understanding Manhood in America: Freemasonry’s Enduring Path to the Mature Masculine (Lancaster, Va.: Anchor Communications, 2005), is that Masonic rituals (and their accompanying symbols and lectures) were consciously designed to initiate men into a mature and moral understanding of their responsibilities as men. In other words, Masonry may have evolved from an artisan trade initiation into a broader masculine adult “rite of passage” ritual. Women were not excluded out of some petty sexist spite. Rather, with Masonry understood as an embodiment of the male mysteries, the presence of women in Masonic lodges would have been as awkward as the presence of men in tribal women’s menstrual huts.

Nevertheless, during the upsurge of reform efforts in the mid- to late nineteenth century that encompassed abolitionism, suffragism, spiritualism, Prohibition, alternative healing methods, and a renewed interest in occultism, the exclusion of women from Freemasonry became an issue worthy of challenge. H.P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled, delighted in revealing the keys to several Masonic ciphers and presented her own analysis of Masonic symbolism and history. For good measure, in an exchange of honors with John Yarker, a British disseminator of fringe Masonic charters and degrees, she received a diploma declaring her the recipient of several degrees of the feminine Rite of Adoption. The next generation of Theosophical leaders, particularly Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, went even further by encouraging the growth and spread of Co-Masonry, a version of Freemasonry admitting both men and women.

Yet these efforts toward Masonic inclusiveness were preceded by the substantial development of a largely feminine Freemasonry, particularly in France, in the latter part of the eighteenth century: the so-called Adoptive Rites (into which Blavatsky would supposedly be initiated). This is the subject of Jan Snoek’s Initiating Women in Freemasonry, a breakthrough tackling of a subject hitherto lost in the shadows of obscurity.

Freemasonry’s spread from Britain to the European continent around the 1730s was accompanied by all sorts of paradoxes. If Masonry in Britain was distinguished by an egalitarian mixing of male bourgeoisie, gentry, and aristocracy, Masonry in France was largely an aristocratic pursuit. Yet the French aristocracy allowed a greater latitude for the activities of women, whether through salons or through aristocratic female participation in Freemasonry.

This was largely propelled through the phenomenon of Adoptive Rites, with traditional male lodges founding associated lodges for women, with their own unique degree rituals and mythos. This was often portrayed by unsympathetic Masons as giving a sop to “the ladies,” but Snoek convincingly demonstrates that the Adoptive degree rituals had sufficient sophistication and depth to rival those of mainstream male Masonry. In fact, Snoek offers evidence that the Adoptive ritual may have been adapted from a variety of “Harodim” Masonry that existed parallel to the better-known Grand Lodge Masonry of Britain in the 1700s.

Snoek traces the ebbs and flows of active Adoptive Masonry from the eighteenth through the twentieth century, although he largely concentrates on its continental manifestations and doesn’t bring Co-Masonry into the discussion. His book makes great use of the vast archives of the Grand Orient, the central lodge of France, which were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II and subsequently seized by the Soviet Union, where they were warehoused until their return to the Grand Orient in 2000.

Initiating Women in Freemasonry is a dense and scholarly work, perhaps of most interest to Masonic researchers and the growing number of academic scholars investigating esoteric traditions. It assumes the reader has a substantial familiarity with—or at least an interest in—both the intricacies of Masonic history and such arcane topics as the variations between ritual texts published in various “Masonic exposures” in the eighteenth century. This may drastically limit the potential readership for the book; hence the publisher’s astronomical list price for it.

But make no mistake: Snoek has produced a richly researched and wellargued book that brings a formerly obscure corner of Masonic history into the light of day. It offers evidence that over the past three centuries, more women received a form of Masonic initiation than has hitherto been commonly known or assumed.

This work represents a breakthrough in expanding the discussion of the multitude of “Masonries” that have coexisted since the 1700s. However, it may be a good long while before such specialized research trickles down into more mainstream discussions of what is “real” Masonry. In the meantime, for serious Masonic history buffs, Snoek’s book is a tough, dense, but rewarding read. He deserves the strongest thanks for undertaking it.

Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney was publisher and editor in chief of Gnosis magazine during its fifteen-year span. His book The Masonic Myth (Harper Collins) has been translated into five languages.