Quest Magazine

Oz - A Notable Theosophist: L. Frank Baum

By John Algeo

Reprint from American Theosophist 74 (1986): 270-3.

Lyman Frank Baum (1851-1919) is best known as the author of the popular children's book The Wizard of Oz, on which the1939 movie starring Judy Garland was based. Mainly through that movie, Baum's story has become one of the most widely known and best loved of all modern fairy tales.

Although Frank Baum is famous primarily for that one book, he wrote a good many other children's stories, including 13 additional Oz books; a variety of other fairy tales, short stories, and verses; and several series of girls' and boys' books (published under various pseudonyms). Also,because of the popularity of The Wizard upon its publication in 1900,Baum converted it to the stage, and it became a highly successful musical play on Broadway, inspiring a number of similar works (such as Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland).

As a young man living in New York State, Baum authored, produced, and acted in a play, The Maid of Arran, with which he toured from Canada to Kansas. He gave up that theatrical career, however, when he married Maud Gage, because her mother took a dim view of acting as a livelihood for a son-in-law. Thereafter, for brief intervals, he ran his family's axle-grease company; moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he operated a store called Baum's Bazaar; edited a weekly newspaper, the SaturdayPioneer; worked as a reporter for a Chicago newspaper; became a traveling salesman; was instrumental in founding the National Association of WindowTrimmers; and edited a magazine for the trade, The Show Window.Subsequently, he made motion pictures and pioneered the use of special effects for films based on his children's stories. Baum's genius, however, was as a teller of stories for children--initially for his own four sons. He was a devoted husband and a doting father.

Such facts about Baum's life are widely known. What is not so well known, however, is Baum's interest in theosophy. Michael PatrickHearn, one of the best of Baum's biographers, has made the most extensive, and virtually the only, acknowledgment of that interest:

His son Frank admitted the author's interest in Theosophy, but also reported that the elder Baum could not accept all its teachings. He firmly believed in reincarnation; he had faith in the immortality of the soul and believed that he and his wife had been together in many past states and would be together in future reincarnations, but he did notaccept the possibility of the transmigration of souls from human beings to animals or vice versa, as in Hinduism. He was in agreement with theTheosophical belief that man on Earth was only one step on a great ladder that passed through many states of consciousness, through many universes, to a final state of Enlightenment. He did believe in Karma, that whatever good or evil one does in his lifetime returns to him as reward or punishment in future reincarnations.... He believed that all the great religious teachers of history had found their inspiration from the same source, a common Creator. [72-73]

Although he did not join the Theosophical Society for some years, Baum seems to have believed in the central Theosophical concepts.It is not clear which Theosophical teachings Baum "could not accept"; possibly that reservation means only that Baum did not consider every idea that had been advanced by individual Theosophists to be Theosophical--a reservation that most of us would still want to make. Baum's belief in the basic ideas of Theosophy has thus been recognized, even though it has not been widely publicized. What has not hitherto been known, however, is that Baum became a member of theTheosophical Society, as did his wife, Maud, and his mother-in-law, MatildaGage.

Theosophical Society - L. Frank Baum, Theosophist. Scarecrow In the early membership rolls of the Society, there are entries recording the application for membership of Lyman F. Baum and Mrs.Maud G. Baum, of Chicago, Illinois, on September 4, 1892. They were admitted on the same day to the Ramayana Theosophical Society upon the recommendation ofDr. W. P. Phelon and M. M. Phelon. William P. Phelon was a prominent early member and one of the organizers of the American Section in 1886. The Baums'permanent diplomas (or membership certificates) were issued by the parent organization on December 5, 1892. Baum's mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage,had joined the Society seven years earlier, when she was living inFayetteville, New York. Her application and admission to the RochesterTheosophical Society are dated March 26, 1885; she was recommended by JosephineW. Cables and E. M. Sasseville.¹

It is likely that Baum learned about theosophy from his mother-in-law, a remarkable woman who was an active figure in the woman's rights movement and other social causes throughout her life. She was coauthor,with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, of the three-volume History of Woman Suffrage, and was one of the prominent early members of the NationalWoman Suffrage Association (Wagner, Declaration 2, 20).

In view of her concern for human equality and rights, it is not surprising that Matilda Gage was attracted to Theosophy. She valued it not only because it provided a philosophical basis for equality and social action, but also for some of its other teachings, such as reincarnation,which she explained to one of her grandchildren living in Edgeley, NorthDakota:

There is one thing I want you to remember first of all: This is that what is called "death" by people is not death. You are more alive than ever you were after what is called death. Death is only a journey, like going to another country. You are alive when you travel toAberdeen just as much as when you stay in Edgeley, and it is the same with what is called death. After people have been gone for awhile, they come back and live in another body, in another family and have another name. [Cited byWagner, "Dorothy," 6.]

Frank Baum supported his mother-in-law in her work for woman's rights, and he learned many things from her, including Theosophical ideas. While he edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, he wrote a seriesof articles called "The Editor's Musings."² Before he joined theSociety, in the first issue of the paper under his editorship (January 25,1890), he wrote about the insecurity many Christians felt about the challenge of other religions and about a growing aspiration for knowledge outside the church. He wrote sympathetically of the Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, andChrist, and he introduced his readers to Theosophy:

Amongst the various sects so numerous in America today who find their fundamental basis in occultism, theTheosophist[s] stand pre-eminent both in intelligence and point of numbers.

The recent erection of their new temple in New York City has called forth the curiosity of the many,the uneasiness of the few. Theosophy is not a religion. Its followers are simply"searchers after Truth." Not for the ignorant are the tenets they hold, neither for the worldly in any sense. Enrolled within their ranks are some of the grandest intellects of the Eastern and Western worlds.

Purity in all things, evento asceticism is absolutely required to fit them to enter the avenues of knowledge, and the only inducement they offer to neophytes is the privilege of"searching for the Truth" in their company.

As interpreted by themselves they accept the teachings of Christ, Budda, and Mohammed,acknowledging them Masters or Mahatmas, true prophets each in his generation,and well versed in the secrets of nature. But the truth so earnestly sought isnot yet found in its entirety, or if it be, is known only to the privileged few.

The Theosophists, in fact,are the dissatisfied of the world, the dissenters from all creeds. They owe their origin to the wise men of India, and are numerous, not only in the far famed mystic East, but in England, France, Germany and Russia. They admit the existence of a God--not necessarily a personal God. To them God is Nature and Nature God.

We have mentioned their high morality: they are also quiet and unobtrusive, seeking no notoriety, yet daily growing so numerous that even in America they may be counted by thousands. But, despite this, if Christianity is Truth, as our education has taught us to believe, there can be no menace to it in Theosophy.

A month later in the Saturday Pioneer (February22, 1890), Baum turned to writing about fiction with occult and mystical themes. He dealt with Bulwer Lytton, one of H. P. Blavatsky's favorite writers,to whom she often referred; H. Rider Haggard, especially his novel She;and Mabel Collins, whose Idyll of the White Lotus and Light on thePath were already Theosophical classics.

Theosophical Society - L. Frank Baum, Theosophist, Cowardly Lion A few months later in the same periodical (April 5,1890), Baum wrote about mediumship and elementals. Mediumship was a subject of intense interest in the late nineteenth century (as witnessed by the fact thatOlcott and Blavatsky met at a séance). Baum's explanation of mediumistic phenomena, while perhaps partly his own interpretation, owes a great deal toBlavatsky. She attributed many of the apparent marvels of the séance room to the activities of elemental beings attracted to the medium. Baum's interpretation of mediumship is certainly derived, directly or indirectly, fromHPB.

The foregoing articles show that while he was editing the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer Baum had a considerable interest in Theosophy,occultism, and related subjects--an interest that he was not reluctant to write about. However, in spite of his keen interest, he did not join the TheosophicalSociety in 1890.

It was two years after writing these pieces in the SaturdayPioneer that he actually joined, and for a considerable time thereafter he sustained his Theosophical interests. His niece, Matilda Jewell Gage, who stilllives in Aberdeen, South Dakota, visited the Baums after they moved fromChicago to San Diego, California. She remembers that her famous uncle and grandmother both were interested in Theosophy and Theosophical literature.³

Further evidence for Baum's involvement withTheosophy is found in his children's books, especially The Wizard of Oz.Although readers have not looked at his fairy tales for their Theosophical content, it is significant that Baum became a famous writer of children's booksafter he had come into contact with Theosophy. Theosophical ideas permeate his work and provided the inspiration for it. Indeed, The Wizard can be regarded as Theosophical allegory, pervaded by Theosophical ideas from beginning to end.The story came to Baum as an inspiration, and he accepted it with a certain awe as a gift from outside, or perhaps from deep within, himself.

Frank Baum was one of the most notable yet unknown Theosophists of the turn of the century and was our first and perhaps greatest Theosophical writer for children.

Notes

This information was kindly supplied by Grace F. Knoche and Kirby Van Mater, of the Theosophical Society headquartered inPasadena, California. The Baums' membership is recorded on Register 1, page561, and Matilda Gage's on the same Register, page 49.
For access to Baum's newspaper, I am indebted to the kindness of Janus Olsen and Dolores Campton of the Alexander MitchellPublic Library, Aberdeen, SD, and of Barbara Rystrom of the University ofGeorgia Library.
This information is from a personal interview withMiss Gage conducted in January 1985 in Aberdeen.

References

Baum, Frank, ed. TheAberdeen Saturday Pioneer, Aberdeen, SD, Jan. 25, 1890--Mar. 21, 1891.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Wizard of Oz.New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973.
Wagner, Sally Roesch. The Declaration of Rights ofWomen: 1876. Aberdeen, SD: Aberdeen Area Chapter of NOW, 1975.
———. "Dorothy Gage and Dorothy Gale." Baum Bugle28.2 (Autumn 1984): 4-6.

Oz - Oz and Kansas: A Theosophical Quest

Oz and Kansas: A Theosophical Quest
By John Algeo
University of Georgia

From Proceedings of the Thirteenth AnnualConference of the Children's Literature Association, University ofMissouri--Kansas City, May 16-18, 1986, ed. Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson, c. 1988, pp 135-39.

Theosophical Society - The Wizard of Oz as a Theosophical Quest. Toto and Dorothy, Tin man, scarecrow Undoubtedly the best-known modern American fairytale is The Wonderful Wizard of 0z, written by L. Frank Baum and first published in 1900. However, the story is most widely known through the JudyGarland movie of 1939, which by its television broadcasts has spread knowledge of the story around the world and has made it part of our national popular lore. The Wizard of Oz is an archetypal American fairy tale; and that is what Frank Baum wanted to produce. As he wrote in the introduction to his book,"It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out" (85).

J. R. R. Tolkien has explained that fairy stories are not normally about fairies, but rather about Faërie, a land that he calls"the Perilous Realm" (42). Whatever else the perilous Land of Faërie may be, it is clearly a projection of the human psyche, and journeys in the Land of Faërie are explorations of our own inner landscape, efforts to map the common psychological experiences of humankind (as Bruno Bettelheim has shown).

The Wizard of Oz has all the essentials of a true fairy tale. It is set in a perilous, enchanted land, where the humanprotagonist is engaged in a quest. The questing plot of The Wizard makes a symbolic or allegorical interpretation almost irresistible, even though allegorical interpretation is not exactly on the cutting edge of literary critical theory these days. As Ursula K. LeGuin puts it, in untheoretical terms:

I hate allegories. A is "really" B, and a hawk is "really" a handsaw--bah. Humbug. Any creation, primary or secondary,with any vitality to it, can "really" be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast. (53)

It is impossible not to sympathize with a view elegantly stated with four literary allusions in as many lines. Moreover, there is a goodchance that Baum himself would have agreed with LeGuin. The Wizard, he said, "was written solely to pleasure children of today," who have, he believed, "a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal" (85).

Theosophical Society - The Wizard of Oz as a Theosophical Quest. Cowardly lion On the other hand, ever since the old New Critics taught us about the intentional fallacy, nobody believes authors when they talk about their own writing. And attempts to allegorize The Wizard have already been made. The best known is that of Henry M. Littlefield, who read the book as containing political propaganda, a celebration of populist ideals and support for adding silver to the gold standard. Littlefield made a strong case for Baum's sympathies to the social issues of populism, and it seems likely that political motifs are indeed present in the story, as Littlefield said, "ina minor key, subordinated to the major theme" of sheer fantasy (224).

The Wizard of Oz can also be read, however, as another sort of allegory, a theosophical one. The Theosophical Society had been founded in New York City in 1875, with the objects of fostering brotherhood, of increasing knowledge of Eastern, particularly Indic, culture in the West, and of investigating the spiritualist phenomena that had for some time been in vogue in America and Europe. Those objects appealed to Baum. Fifteen yearsafter the founding of the Society, Baum was writing sympathetically about it in his newspaper, The Aberdeen [S.D.] Saturday Pioneer.¹ In the first issue he edited, he initiated an occasional feature called "The Editor'sMusings," in which he wrote appreciatively of the Buddha, Mohammed, andConfucius, alongside Christ, and went on to say:

Amongst the various sects so numerous in America today who find their fundamental basis in occultism, the Theosophist[s] standpre-eminent both in intelligence and point of numbers.... Theosophy is not a religion. Its followers are simply "searchers after Truth."... TheTheosophists, in fact, are the dissatisfied of the world, the dissenters from all creeds. They owe their origin to the wise men of India, and are numerous,not only in the far famed mystic East, but in England, France, Germany andRussia. They admit the existence of a God--not necessarily a personal God. To them God is Nature and Nature God.... But, despite this, if Christianity isTruth, as our education has taught us to believe, there can be no menace to itin Theosophy.

Thereafter, Baum returned several times to a discussion ofTheosophical themes. In another "Editor's Musings" (22 Feb. 1890), Baum discussed fiction with a Theosophical content:

There is a strong tendency in modern novelists toward introducing some vein of mysticism or occultism into their writings. Books of this character are eagerly bought and read by the people,both in Europe and America. It shows the innate longing in our natures to unravel the mysterious: to seek for some explanation, however fictitious, of the unexplainable in nature and in our daily existence. For, as we advance in education, our desire for knowledge increases, and we are less satisfied to remain in ignorance of that mysterious fountain-head from which emanates all that is sublime and grand and incomprehensible in nature.

Baum went on to discuss authors who demonstrated this tendency. After the obligatory nod to Shakespeare, he mentioned Bulwer-Lytton,H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mabel Collins (a Victorian novelist and mystic who was prominent in the Theosophical Society at the timeBaum was writing). He concluded:

Mr. Lovell has taken an important step in publishing an "Occult Series of Novels" but one which we understand is liberally paying him. The appetite of our age for occultism demands to be satisfied, and while with the mediocrity of people it will result in mere sensationalism, it will lead in many to higher and nobler and bolder thought;and who can tell what mysteries these braver and abler intellects may not unravel in future ages?

It is clear that Baum's mind was already turned toward the expression of mystical and theosophical ideas in fiction. His own pressing need for money and his constant alertness for new ways in which he might make it could hardly have failed to note the entrepreneurial aspects of the public's appetite for such fiction. Only Baum had not yet discovered where his own talents lay.

Theosophical Society - The Wizard of Oz as a Theosophical Quest. Flying Monkey That discovery was to be made after he left South Dakota and moved to Chicago. There he told stories to his four sons and was encouraged by his mother-in-law to write them down. The result was a number of children's books, reaching their high point in 1900 with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.During this period, Baum had not lost interest in Theosophy. On the contrary,in 1892, not long after moving to Chicago, he and his wife both became members of the Theosophical Society. They were admitted to the RamayanaTheosophical Society in Chicago, having been recommended to membership by Dr.and Mrs. W. P. Phelon.² Baum's mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage,who is best known as an activist and historian of the Women's Rights movement,was probably the catalyst in Baum's Theosophical interests. She had become a member of the Rochester Theosophical Society as early as 1885, well before Baum showed any interest in the subject.³

Baum's sustained interest in Theosophical matters isattested by his niece, Matilda Jewell Gage, who continued to reside inAberdeen, but visited the Baums after they later moved from Chicago to SanDiego, California. She recalls that her uncle and her grandmother hadTheosophical interests and kept Theosophical books in the house, one title she remembers being The Devachanic Plane, a book by the early Theosophical writer, Charles W. Leadbeater.⁴ How long Baum maintained an active interest in Theosophy is unclear, but he certainly did so during the period he was evolving the story that was to become The Wizard of Oz.

Baum's Theosophical interests have not been widely known, but there is ample external evidence to show that he was sympathetic to and involved with the movement in the 1890s. There is also internal evidence from his writings, specifically The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. There is not time today to present a full-scale Theosophical reading of the book, so a few indications must suffice.

A central Theosophical teaching is reincarnation,specifically that after death the personality disintegrates, but the core of the individual's identity has a period of quiescence in a state of undifferentiated consciousness (called the devachanic plane), and then,impelled by its unsatisfied itch for life, returns to birth in another humanform. Further, Theosophical teaching is that the personality, which is developed anew in each incarnation, has three main constituents: the thinking mind, the affective or emotional psyche, and the physical organism through which the other two function. These three constituents of the personality are developed in embryo in the order named: mind, emotions, body.

There can be no doubt that belief in reincarnation was held by various members of Baum's family. His mother-in-law, Matilda Gage,once wrote to one of her grandchildren:

There is one thing I want you to remember first of all: This is that what is called "death" by people is not death. You are more alive than ever you were after what is called death. Death is only a journey, like going to another country. You are alive when you travel toAberdeen just as much as when you stay in Edgeley [North Dakota], and it is the same with what is called death. After people have been gone for awhile, theycome back and live in another body, in another family and have another name.[Cited by Wagner 6.]

To be sure, reincarnation is not explicitly mentionedin The Wizard, but the plot of the story allegorizes the concept. [There follows a summary interpretation, as in "The Wizard of Oz: The Perilous Journey."]

Theosophical Society - The Wizard of Oz as a Theosophical Quest. Tin Man The theme of self-reliance is central to TheWizard, as it is to Theosophy. For example, the best known work of thatMabel Collins whom Baum mentioned as a novelist is a collection of aphorisms called Light on the Path, in which these sentiments appear:

Desire only that which is within you....For within you is the light of the world--the only light that can be shed upon the Path. If you are unable to perceive it within you, it is useless to look for it elsewhere. (17)

The Wizard of Oz came to Baum as a kind of inspiration. Baum was a remarkably motherly man. He looked after his children--all boys--in their sicknesses and accidents; he comforted them in their sorrows. He told them bedtime stories. Baum's stories became so famous that neighboring children would come to the Baum house every day to hear the evening tale. One evening a story come to Baum that he recognized as having great potential; so after the children were put to bed, he jotted down the essentials of the story on such scrap paper as he had at hand. The result was the outline of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In later years, when asked how he had written the book, Baum said,

It was pure inspiration.... It came to me right out of the blue. I think that sometimes the Great Author has a message toget across and He has to use the instrument at hand. I happened to be thatmedium, and I believe the magic key was given me to open the doors to sympathy and understanding, joy, peace and happiness. [Cited by Hearn 73.]

Baum certainly did not set out to write an allegory, but he was inspired to write a story that, like all good fairy tales, has depths of meaning of which the writer himself would have been only dimly aware.Nevertheless, as shown earlier, Baum's background and beliefs were such as to fit him for the writing of a fairy tale that is also a Theosophical allegory.

Notes

For access to the file of this newspaper, I am indebted to Janus Olsen and Dolores Campton of the Alexander Mitchell Public Library inAberdeen, SD, and to Barbara Rystrom of the University of Georgia Library.
William P. Phelon was one of the organizing members of the American Section of the Theosophical Society in 1886, when it was established as a semi-autonomous unit in the international organization.
The evidence for the Baums' and Matilda Gage's membership in the Theosophical Society was kindly furnished by Grace F. Knoche and Kirby Van Mater of the Theosophical Society with headquarters in Pasadena,California. Their membership roll enters the names of Lyman F. Baum and (Mrs.)Maud G. Baum of 34 Campbell Park, Chicago, Illinois, as of 4 September 1892 and records that their permanent diplomas (or membership certificates) from the international Society were issued on 5 December 1892. The name of Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage of Fayetteville, New York, was entered as of 26 March 1885.
4. The information from Matilda Jewell Gage comes from a personal interview with her in Aberdeen, SD, in January 1985. She volunteered the title of the book in answer to the question, "Do you remember any particular Theosophical books in the house?"

References

Baum, L. Frank, ed. TheAberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Aberdeen, S.D., 25 Jan. 1890-21 Mar. 1891.
---.
The WonderfulWizard of Oz. 1900. Reprint in The Annotated Wizard of Oz, ed.MichaelPatrick Hearn. New York:Clarkson N. Potter, 1973.
Bettelheim, Bruno. TheUses of Enchantment. New York: Random House, 1977.
Collins, Mabel. Light on the Path. Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1971; 1st pub. 1885.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Wizard of Oz.New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973.
LeGuin, Ursula K. "Dreams Must Explain Themselves."In The Language of the Night, 47-56. New York: Putnam's, 1979.
Littlefield, Henry M. "TheWizard of Oz: Parable on Populism." 1968. Reprint in The Wizard of Oz,ed. Michael Patrick Hearn, 221-33. New York: Schocken, 1983.
Tolkien, J. R. R. "On Fairy-Stories." In EssaysPresented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis, 38-89. Grand Rapids, Mich.:Eerdmans, 1974; 1st pub. 1947.
Wagner, Sally Roesch. "Dorothy Gage and DorothyGale." The Baum Bugle 28.2 (Autumn 1984): 4-6.

Oz- The Myth

Reviewed by John Algeo

Reprint from Quest 88 (November-December 2000): 218-23.

Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. By Michael O. Riley.Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Hardback, $29.95; paperback, $15.95,xiv + 286 pages.

Secrets of the Yellow Brick Road: A Map for the Modern Spiritual JourneyBased on The Wizard of Oz. By Jesse Stewart. Hygiene, CO: SunShine Press, 1997.Paperback, $14.00, 175 pages.

The Zen of Oz: Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow. By JoeyGreen. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1998. Hardback, $16.95. 140pages.

The Wisdom of Oz. By Gita Dorothy Morena. San Diego: Inner ConnectionsPress, 1998. Paperback, $15.95, 232 pages.

Golden Wizdom beyond the Emerald City: A Conscious Journey to Wholeness.By Ilene Kimsey. Loveland, CO: Toto-ly Ozsome Publishing, 2000. Paperback,$21.95, 239 pages.

Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years. Ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal. Pierre:South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2000. Hardback, $29.95; paperback,15.95, [vi] + 182 pages.

One hundred years ago, a children's book was published which has attained the status of a classic, not for children only but for many adults as well: TheWonderful Wizard of Oz, by the Theosophist Lyman Frank Baum. That book is a phenomenon in its appeal, its popularity, and its character.

Appeal. The phenomenon of a book written ostensibly for children having an appeal for adults is not unique. Lewis Carroll's stories Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are well known examples, as also areKenneth Grahame's fable The Wind in the Willows, A. A. Milne's books aboutWinnie the Pooh, J. R. R. Tolkien's fairy story The Hobbit, and most recently J.K. Rowling's magical stories about Harry Potter. The Wizard of Oz is in that company.

Adults may adopt a "children's book" as their own for many reasons, of which the most obvious is nostalgia for childhood. But other reasons are stronger.Personal nostalgia is, in fact, a weak explanation because many persons first encounter these books in adulthood. Of course, it may be argued that such books represent a generalized nostalgia for the state of childhood, the condition of lost innocence, the condition described by Wordsworth:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home.

If that is the reason certain children's books appeal to adults, a reductionist theory of nostalgia for childhood is irrelevant, for it is not a personal memory of one's own child state that those books appeal to, but a different sort of memory of a different sort of state. The state is one of spiritual wholeness and simplicity, which is quite different from the complexities of biological childhood, and the memory is a transcendental one of the realm of the clouds of glory.

Popularity. Related to its appeal across age levels is the continuing popularity of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The best-selling children's book ofChristmas 1900, it has never been out of print since, and the story has acquired a life of its own. Although its author, Frank Baum, wanted to turn his attention in other directions, and tried several times to do so, the popularity of thestory repeatedly forced him back to Oz. Between 1900 and his death in 1919, Baum wrote fourteen Oz books and produced a number of spin-offs.

The series was continued after Baum's death in twenty-two books by Ruth Plumly Thompson and in eighteen other books by eight other writers. Oz storiesin various genres continue to be produced right down to our own time, often explicitly for adults. Sean Connery's film Zardoz, the black musical The Wiz, and the novel Was, by Geoff Ryman, are examples of adult-focused Oz productions.

The Judy Garland movie of 1939 was a major impetus in continuing the popularity of the Oz story. Its release to television in 1956 and subsequent annual broadcast kept the story alive in the collective consciousness and drummed it into the collective unconscious. Today, themes, lines, and allusions to the story and its characters are rife in popular culture, and their reference is almost invariably to the MGM movie version.

Character. The story of Oz is not just an adventure in an imaginary land,however; it is also a myth. Myths are works that embody the ethos of a people and at the same time deal with concerns that are common to all human beings.They explain us to ourselves in a way uniquely suited to a time and place. Oz isan archetypically American myth; it is also a spiritual allegory of the journey that all of us, as strangers in a strange land, find ourselves engaged in.

Like all true myths, the story of Oz can be told in many ways, according to the perception of the teller and the interest of the audience. The character ofOz is multifaceted: an amusing and entertaining story on the surface, it has depths of interpretation. We may say about it what has also been said ofTheosophy: it has shallows in which a little child may safely wade and depths in which even a giant must swim. The comparison of Oz and Theosophy is appropriate,for Frank Baum was a member of the Theosophical Society, and The Wizard ofOz can be read as a Theosophical allegory.

The six books that are the focus of this essay are evidence at century's end of the wide appeal, enduring popularity, and multifaceted meanings of L. FrankBaum's "modernized fairy tale," as he called it in his introduction of April1900. They envision the story of Oz, the American myth of the twentieth century,from several viewpoints.

*******

In Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, Michael Riley, a teacher of children's literature at Castleton State College, Vermont, surveys the evolution of the Oz myth during Baum's lifetime. He is concerned exclusively with Frank Baum's work, the fourteen Oz books and some related publications and productions. Post-Baum children's stories are briefly treated in an epilog, but the movie and adult spin-offs not at all.

In tracing the stages by which the Oz fantasyland developed and evolved inBaum's writings, Riley notes a reversal in value of the Land of Oz. In the first book, the 1900 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Land of Oz is a wonderland, but like the traditional land of Faërie, it is a place to escape from, not to get to.Dorothy has been carried willy-nilly to Oz, and her one desire while she is there is to find her way back home to Kansas. In the later books, Dorothy's quest is to get to and remain in Oz.

Oz was originally a world of illusion. As Riley (88) says: "Illusion--whether interior (as in the self-deceptions of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and theLion) or exterior (as in the tricks of the Wizard)--plays a part in all ofBaum's fantasies . . . almost no character is what he appears to be or what hethinks himself to be." Oz, like our own world, is mayavic. The original contrast between Kansas and Oz is between permanent Reality and fluctuating illusion.

At the end of his detailed, informative, and perceptive account of the historical development of the Oz theme in Baum's writings, Riley addresses the important question of why the Oz stories have had such appeal and been so popular:

The question is: Why Oz? Why did Oz capture the imaginations of his readers? . . . The most generally accepted answer is that the uniqueness and appeal of Oz lie in its American quality. . . . Oz is an authentic American fairyland, . . . a place--unlike the German forests of the Brothers Grimm or theEnglish Wonderland of Lewis Carroll--that can be just over the hill or beyond the prairie in this land of limitless possibilities. [228-9]

Baum's Oz also has another quality. It is "an authentic and recognizable Other-world." Just as Arthur Conan Doyle (another author with Theosophical connections) created in Sherlock Holmes a character with a life apart from Doyle's books, so Baum created a land with a history of its own:

The "existence" that these creations have outside the narratives in which they figure is what makes them such real, living entities that actually seem to have a life apart from their creators. Sherlock Holmes is still solving cases longafter Doyle's death; every year sees the publication of new Holmes stories by various writers. The same is true with Oz; that marvelous fairyland continues tobe explored and mapped in new books and stories. Baum's Other-world did not die with him. [229]

Oz is typically American, and it is authentic with a life of its own. Butthose qualities, important as they are, do not fully explain the appeal of Oz.For that fuller explanation, one needs to look in another direction.

*******

In Secrets of the Yellow Brick Road: A Map for the Modern SpiritualJourney Based on The Wizard of Oz, Jesse Stewart blends the 1900 book and the1939 movie in an interpretation of their archetypal symbols. His reading is highly suggestive of the spiritual depths of the story.

Dorothy is an orphan; humanity is "the great Orphan," according to KuthumiLal Singh, one of the early Theosophical teachers. Dorothy is brought into the world of illusion by a cyclone, the cycle of birth and death; she begins her journey home by following the Yellow Brick Road, which is an unwinding spiral,thus complementing the cyclone by reversing the path of her involution. Her three companions represent both three aspects of the human personality(thinking, feeling, and will) and the three paths of Yoga: knowledge, devotion,and action.

Dorothy and her companions wander off the Path, however, and come to a broadriver; they try to cross to the other side (shades of Buddhist metaphor), but find themselves in deep water, drifting out of control. Eventually they get to land and enter a field of soporific poppies; the flowers are like those in theHall of Learning of The Voice of the Silence: "the blossoms of life, but underevery flower a serpent coiled."

In the Emerald City, Dorothy meets the Wizard, who finally turns out to be an impostor. He is the ego-self within us, "just a common man." When Dorothy says,"I think you are a very bad man," the Wizard replies, "Oh, no, my dear; I'm really a very good man; but I'm a very bad Wizard." The ego-self is very good at what it is, but if we try to make it more than that, we make a humbug out of it.When the Wizard has given Dorothy's three companions illusory substitutes of what they long for, he muses: "How can I help being a humbug . . . when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can't be done?" It is we who make the ego-self a humbug wizard by expecting it to do what it can't.

*******

The Zen of Oz: Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow is based on the movie. In it Joey Green analyzes the story in terms of ten Eastern qualities:karma; the inner spark (atma); the Yellow Brick Road, "a path paved with the promise of golden opportunity" (marga); spiritual essence, pure consciousness,or intelligence (buddhi); doing good for others (altruism); courage (virya);self-surrender (vairagya or nishkama karma); energy (prana); the guru; andEnlightenment. In this reading, Glinda is a Zen Master, Dorothy a chela, and"Follow the Yellow Brick Road" her mantra.

*******

Not all recent interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are general symbolic readings like the two books mentioned above. Some are more personal.The latter sort is exemplified by The Wisdom of Oz, whose author is agreat-granddaughter of Frank Baum, Gita Dorothy Morena. Her given name was"Dorothy," but in the course of her own journey through Oz, she adopted the name"Gita" or "song." The combination of the two names, Eastern and Western,together signifying "The song that is the gift of God," is a sign of the linkage of Eastern and Western wisdom in Oz that would surely have pleased Frank Baum.

Gita Dorothy reads the Oz story as a psychological allegory with specialreference to the challenges in her own life and the path she followed on her ownYellow Brick Road of personal discovery. She is a psychological counselor who uses the Oz myth in her practice. The story, as reflected in her life, thus becomes a model for her readers. The book also contains photographs of fourgenerations of the Baums and a final note from the author's mother, Ozma Baum Mantele, named for the Princess of Oz.

*******

Another work that treats the Oz myth primarily not as a story, but as a framework for psychological exploration is Golden Wizdom beyond the EmeraldCity: A Conscious Journey to Wholeness by Ilene Kimsey. In it, eight characters from the story articulate what they have discovered about themselves in Oz. They are Dorothy, Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Lion, the "Witch ofCelebration" (a.k.a. the Good Witch of the North), the "Witch of Transformation"(a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West), and the Wizard. These characters are roles we all fill, members of an inner Emerald Council that can serve as mentors to our outer selves. The book also includes fifty Golden Touchstones, or aphorisms for contemplation and internalization.

*******

What, then, is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz--a fairy tale for children, a fantasy world for adults, an allegory of spiritual archetypes, or a guidebook for therapeutic techniques? It is, to be sure, all of those, and more. But how did Frank Baum come to write a book that appears to be all things to all readers? That question is addressed in admirable detail by Nancy Tystad Koupalin Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years.

Frank Baum spent only a few years in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, arriving there on September 20, 1888 (just one month to the day before the first volume of H. P. Blavatsky's most important book, The Secret Doctrine, came off the press), and leaving in the spring of 1891, about the time of Blavatsky's death.Baum's two and a half or so years in Aberdeen were, however, important times for him and presaged his future. In the Aberdeen weekly newspaper he edited for fourteen months, he acknowledged his familiarity with Theosophy and alienated some of his readers and neighbors with his unconventional views.

Nancy Koupal recognizes Theosophy's seminal importance for Baum:

Baum had not formed his ideas about religion within the local community but under the longstanding influence of his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage ofFayetteville, New York. A well-known supporter of woman suffrage, . . . Gage,who became a member of the Theosophical Society in 1885, had long been sharing its magazine, the Path, among family and friends. Sending a recent issue to her son T. Clarkson Gage in Aberdeen in 1887, for example, she reported that Baum's wife Maud and other members of his family, who then resided in Syracuse, NewYork, were reading Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877) and other texts on EsotericBuddhism and eagerly anticipating Blavatsky's forthcoming book The SecretDoctrine (1888). [66]

The "Editor's Musings" [in Baum's newspaper] began as a weekly feature,occupying a prominent place on the editorial page. . . . He began with a topic that would become increasingly important to him through the year and in the rest of his life--Theosophy. . . . In ways small and large, the ideas of Theosophy permeate most of Baum's "Editor's Musings" columns [reprinted on pages 107 -33of Koupal's book]. [62 -63]

Evidence also supports the fact that Baum's interest in the East and its religions was operating strongly at the time that he was creating The Wizard ofOz. He and his wife joined the Theosophical Society in 1892. . . . [Mabel]Collins was another of the modern authors that Baum mentions. . . . In 1896 or1897, Gage, who was living with the Baums in Chicago, recorded that Frank had acquired the book The Astral Plane by C. W. Leadbeater. [72 -3]

It is clear that, whatever else it may be, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an expression in archetypal symbols of the Theosophical ideas that occupied FrankBaum's attention during the ten years before the publication of the book.

*******

The Wizard of Oz on Theosophy

LYMAN FRANK BAUM (1851-1919), author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and prototype of the Wizard himself, joined the Theosophical Society along with his wife, Maud Gage, on September 4, 1892. Their membership records are in the archives of the Theosophical Society with headquarters in Pasadena, California(kindly made available by Grace F. Knoche and Kirby Van Mater).

The Baums joined the Society while they were living in Chicago, about eight years before he published what was to become the best-known American children's book. But Frank knew about Theosophy earlier than that, doubtless first learning of it from his mother-in-law, the noted feminist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, who herself had joined the Society on March 26, 1885. Not only did Frank Baum know about Theosophy, but he also wrote about it more than two years before he joined the Society and ten years before he wrote The Wizard of Oz.

For fourteen months (January 25, 1890, to March 21, 1891), Baum published and edited a South Dakota weekly newspaper called The Aberdeen SaturdayPioneer. Baum frequently contributed to the paper a feature he called "TheEditor's Musings." The following is that feature from the very first issue of the newspaper under his editorship. It shows, not only his knowledge ofTheosophy, but the Theosophical frame of mind with which he viewed the world.

The Editor's Musings
[The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, January 25, 1890]

The age of Faith is sinking slowly into the past; the age of Unfaith becomes an important problem of to-day. Is there in this a menace toChristianity? This unfaith is not the atheism of the last century. It is rather an eager longing to penetrate the secrets of Nature--an aspiration for knowledge we have been taught is forbidden.

*
* *

Many ages ago Budda came to enlighten the civilization of the East.

The pure and beautiful doctrines he taught made ready converts, and to-day his followers outnumber those of any other religion.

To the fierce and warlike tribes of Arabia, Mohammed appeared. His gentlenessand bravery tamed their fierce natures. They followed him implicitly, asmillions of their descendants follow him still.

Confucius with ready sophistry promulgated a "religion of reason."

His works are to this day the marvel of all intelligent people; his myriads of disciples have never wavered in their faith.

The sweet and tender teachings of Christ, together with the touching story of his life, have sunk deeply into the hearts of those nations which rank highest in modern civilization.

In their separate domains all these religions flourish to day. Their converts are firm and unflinching, their temples cover the land, and each in its own waysends praises to a common Creator--a Universal God.

*
* *

Yet in every nation there is a certain element in society which acknowledges no religion and is bound by no faith.

*
* *

Amongst the various sects so numerous in America today who find their fundamental basis in occultism, the Theosophist stand pre-eminent both inintelligence and point of numbers.

The recent erection of their new temple in New York City has called forth the curiosity of the many, the uneasiness of the few. Theosophy is not a religion.Its followers are simply "searchers after Truth." Not for the ignorant are the tenets they hold, neither for the worldly in any sense. Enrolled within their ranks are some of the grandest intellects of the Eastern and Western worlds.

Purity in all things, even to asceticism is absolutely required to fit them to enter the avenues of knowledge, and the only inducement they offer toneophites is the privilege of "searching for the Truth" in their company.

As interpreted by themselves they accept the teachings of Christ, Budda andMohammed, acknowledging them Masters or Mehetmas, true prophets each in his generation, and well versed in the secrets of Nature. But the truth so earnestly sought is not yet found in its entirety, or if it be, is known only to the privileged few.

*
* *

The Theosophists, in fact, are the dissatisfied of the world, the dissenters from all creeds. They owe their origin to the wise men of India, andare numerous, not only in the far famed mystic East, but in England, France,Germany and Russia. They admit the existence of a God--not necessarily a personal God. To them God is Nature and Nature God.

We have mentioned their high morality; they are also quiet and unobtrusive,seeking no notoriety, yet daily growing so numerous that even in America they may be counted by thousands. But, despite this, if Christianity is Truth, as our education has taught us to believe, there can be no menace to it in Theosophy.

Clouding

Originally printed in the September - October 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation:O'Grady, John P. "Clouding." Quest 90.5 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002):164-169.

By John P. O'Grady

Theosophical Society - John P. O'Grady is the author of Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature (University of Utah Press, 2001). After a stint in northwestern Pennsylvania, he has returned to the western mountains, where he is working on a new book and watching clouds. The ability to recognize kinship is a god. That at least was the ancient wisdom, and it still holds true today. "I know you!" A bright idea. Love at first sight. A letter from a long lost friend. An old photograph found in an antique shop that proves to be an exact likeness to your mother, your child, or yourself. Like being drawn unto like. Kinship. All of these are epiphanies or theophanies, each one tender as a bolt of lightning.

Etymology suggests that the atheist is not the one who refuses belief in the divine, but the one who has been abandoned by the gods. The atheist is the archetypal lonely guy. I've known a few of them in my day, and I've observed that while the divine may sometimes forsake an individual, sooner or later a blessed—or terrifying—reunion takes place: the lonely guy falls in love. It may be with a person, but just as dramatically it might be with an idea, or what lies behind the idea. In any case, when the forlorn one is unexpectedly visited by a passion, life suddenly becomes head-in-the-clouds.

Traditionally, clouds are symbolic of things indeterminate. Composed of air and water, their essential nature can be attributed to neither element but arises in an obscuring of the two, a betwixt-and-between phenomenon, not unlike human beings, those nebulous creatures, who themselves seem caught between realms, floating along between the shimmering horizons of birth and death, here and there, earth and heaven. Buddhist psychology refers to the aggregate of what we call personality as "the five clouds of entanglement."

But if we are clouds, we are also luminous. Xenophanes, writing at the dawn of Western philosophy, tells us that the stars are actually clouds "ignited by motion," kindled in their rising and extinguished in their setting, like coals. The sun too is a burning cloud, and as with the stars, each day it's a different cloud that is set ablaze, for no two suns are the same, though they share in the same flaring grandeur—and this goes on forever because the world is imperishable, without beginning and without end. Herein hovers a magnificent hope: entangled clouds that we are, sooner or later in our driftings we're bound to catch fire, become a star or maybe even a sun, and not just for fifteen minutes but for a whole day or night. Every soul is combustible.

In 1939 the International Commission for the Study of Clouds published a manual on how to observe these objects that Shelley once called "nurslings of the sky." Before telling someone how to look for something, it is prudent to state clearly what is being looked for. Thus the International Commission tells us, in language a little less elevated than Shelley's, that a cloud is an atmospheric event consisting of "minute particles of liquid water or ice, or of both, suspended in the free air and usually not touching the ground." It's the "not touching the ground" part that sparks my interest.

The Pythagoreans spoke of a mysterious "Counter-Earth," a sort of shadow world that occupies the orbit exactly opposite to the Earth, so it's always behind the sun, hidden from our view. I like to imagine this Counter-Earth as a place where each of us has a provocative counter-self who lives a colorful counter-life amid a vibrant counter-culture, an existence that is not really opposite to the one we enjoy or suffer here, but rather is entirely other to it, much as our dream lives are not opposite but other to our waking lives. Though our memory of it may be sketchy, we visit this Counter-Earth every night. Perhaps clouds are its allegory, opening a correspondence between the two worlds. In this sense, each cloud ought to be received like a love letter—or a ransom note—from beyond, endlessly unfolding across the sky.

Another cloud book that recently came into my hands cautions its reader: "At first glance a cloudy sky may appear chaotic, but the perceptive observer will discern some semblance of order, the existence of recognizable patterns." Things up there in the sky are not what they seem, say the scientists, and this resonates nicely with what various occult traditions have been fond of saying for millennia: "As above, so below." It is regrettable that the International Commission's manual offers no additional speculations in this regard.

Knowledgeable authorities in the past, however, were less hesitant to enter these darkling realms. The druids, for instance, are reported to have practiced a form of cloud divination. When a king or queen wanted a glimpse of the future, the druid was dispatched to the summit of a nearby hill or mountain to consult the clouds, much as the augurs in ancient Rome gleaned insight by watching the flight of birds. Before that, Moses climbed to the top of a mountain to converse with God, God who would only meet him under the cover of a thick cloud: "And the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days." And coming down to us from fourteenth-century England is a book of mystical instruction titled The Cloud of Unknowing. I like to think of it as a manual on how to observe the weather of the mind. "When I say darkness," the anonymous author explains, "I mean thereby a lack of knowing. . . . And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is between thee and thy God." He also offers this salty advice to those who would plunge into such obscurities: "Short prayer pierces heaven."

We human beings remain fascinated by clouds, perhaps even more so today than in earlier times, because in their shape-shifting inexactitude, their openness to the world, clouds seem so entirely other to our rock-solid world of property rights, scientific and historical "facts," fixed identities, and the politics that go with them. "I'm a Republican!" "I'm a Feminist!" "I'm an environmentalist!" "I'm an anti-globalization Anarchist!" What's in a name? Wrong question. Better to ask, What's outside of a name? What you'll find there is nothing but clouds, free and easy wandering. One of my favorite Zen koans contains the line, "I am not a human being!"—a gentle reminder of the clouds where of each of us is composed.

Nevertheless, we persevere in our efforts to pierce heaven, now preferring telescopes to prayers. Contemporary cosmologists would lead us by the eye down their long tunnel and through their thick lens to the very heart of the universe, which is revealed not as the still point of old, but as a noisy "Big Bang." Contemplation replaced by a fireworks display. Yet, we are estranged from our very selves. Who among us can penetrate even the little secret of our own shifting moods, those storms of passion that characterize our most ordinary affections? "From day to day," writes Emerson, "the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown."

Consider that holy logic-chopper, Thomas Aquinas, who devoted his life to composing his multi-volume magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, regarded by many as the most important of all Christian theological works. It garnered for him a well-deserved renown, but no entry into that heaven he so diligently stormed with his intellect; instead, attainment came near the end, unexpectedly and without effort. The story goes that, just a few months before his death, Aquinas was celebrating a mass when suddenly he had a mystical experience. After that he gave up any further work on his Summa; he quit writing altogether. When somebody asked him why, he replied: "All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me." It's often the case that what we so desperately long for is nearer to the heart than the heart is to itself.

When I was in graduate school studying literature I came up with an idea that, had I pursued it, would have made me a rich man. Instead, I spent all my time on poetry, which is why now I write essays like this just to pay for the groceries. But anyway, it occurred to me that, given the American consumer's insatiable desire to lay claim upon the intangible—everything from acquiring a stock portfolio to owning a "piece of the Rock"—why not give them the ultimate pie-in-the-sky delusion, why not offer them an opportunity to buy and sell clouds? Allow me to explain.

At the time, I was living in Maine. My plan was to wait for one of those bright August afternoons that occur on days after a powerful cold front has moved through, a day when the sky is filled with those fluffy cumulus clouds, the sort Daisy Faye wanted to push Jay Gatsby around in, clouds clearly detached from one another and sharply delineated, each insisting upon its own individuality (if only for a moment), the kind that John Muir lamented were "hopelessly unsketchable and untellable."

But not un-photograph-able.

That was my plan—to take pictures of individual clouds, for each one to print up an elegantly lettered deed of title on parchment, and then put them up for sale. A typical deed would read something like this: "Witnesseth, that in consideration of Ten Dollars ($10.00), in hand paid, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged, the said grantor does hereby grant and convey, sell and confirm unto said grantee and to his or her heirs and assigns, all that certain piece or parcel of cloud situated, at 1:18 p.m. on the Eleventh of August, Year of Our Lord 1983, in the sky above Pemetic Mountain in the County of Hancock, State of Maine." One caveat, one encumbrance let us say, on this transaction: while each deed would confer full title to a particular cloud, and specify the exact time and location it was last seen, the burden of again locating said cloud rests entirely upon the buyer. That's why every deed would be accompanied by a photograph of the cloud—at least then the buyer would have a clear image of what it is he's looking for, and a place to start. Thus he's already two steps ahead of most idealists.

Consider this cloud scheme my contribution toward keeping the nation's economy on track. We all want to own a piece of the American Dream, but given a country with an ever-increasing population and a "limited resource" of land, comparatively few will be able to own real estate, but everyone can have title to un-real estate—we can all be cloud-owners! Poverty, says Plato, is not a function of small property but of immense desires. So give them clouds! People could even assign names to their cloud property, much as the wealthy do for their estates: "Sunnybank," "Olana," "Onteora." The sky's the limit when it comes to the number of clouds that can be put on the market. They are not, at least in many parts of the globe, a limited resource, they can't be used up, and the world keeps making more. In this sense, clouds are a lot like kisses: you can keep giving them away but they never run out.

My plan was to open a little Un-Real Estate office down on Cottage Street in Bar Harbor. "Cloud Nine" would be its name. Instead of pictures of houses posted in my storefront window, there would be clouds. Had my life not taken a very different course, and had the success of this business been anywhere near commensurate with my dreams for it, franchises would have spread out quickly, and today you'd be looking at a Cloud Nine Un-Real Estate office there in your town. Instead, you have Wal-Mart, and an awful lot of undeeded property floating by in the sky.

Alas, I wasn't the first to come up with the idea of capturing clouds on film. Late in his life, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz started making photographs of clouds. By all accounts, his illustrious career seemed to be winding down by 1915, but then something happened to reawaken his creativity. These days, art historians argue that this rejuvenation was a result of aesthetic insight gleaned from the work and ideas of Picasso, the Cubists, and other modern European artists. But I'm guessing it had more to do with Georgia O'Keeffe. The two met in 1916, and not long after that they became lovers. "She is much more extraordinary than even I had believed," Stieglitz wrote, in his modest way, to a friend in 1918. "In fact I don't believe there ever has been anything like her—Mind and feeling very clear—spontaneous—& uncannily beautiful—absolutely living every pulse beat." These are the words of a man whose mind is socked-in with the clouds of Cupid. Stieglitz, no doubt, had that ability to recognize kinship—even in the fog—and he acted on it, though it cost him a marriage of twenty-five years.

Over the next decade he generated an extended serial portrait of O'Keeffe. Many of these images, which seem almost Tantric in intention, depict O'Keeffe in various stages of undress as well as fully nude. In these photographs, Stieglitz—who was fond of saying that he made love through his camera—was not only challenging the taboos of his day against public displays of sexuality, but also intimating dark possibilities of nature-magic and rank fertility. After all, he had been reading Freud, who proclaimed the human body is on the one hand sacred, consecrated, and a veritable temple, while on the other "uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean." Talk about a Counter-Earth! O'Keeffe's lean and taut body affected the aging Stieglitz mightily. "When I look at her," he confesses in another letter, "I feel like a criminal.—I with my rickety old carcass [he was a quarter century older than O'Keeffe] & my spirit being tried beyond words."

It was right on the heels of making these erotically charged photographs of O'Keeffe (not to mention other women) that Stieglitz turned his peculiar form of lovemaking toward the clouds. The same creative energy (call it "libido") that he had lavished upon making photographs of the female body was now released skyward, like a bunch of doves. In a 1923 letter describing his new work to the novelist Sherwood Anderson, Stieglitz comes off sounding like a lickerish adolescent, admitting almost boastfully that "after many days of passionate working—Clouding!—I stopped. I had to catch my breath."

In all fairness to him, it should be remembered that Stieglitz always talked this way when it came to his art. Late in life, looking back on a long career, he reflected: "It's difficult to understand today the passion and intensity I poured into Photography in those early years. I spent hours, days, weeks and months. Photography had become a matter of life and death." Freud called this kind of thing sublimation, "the instinct's directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual gratification." Perhaps, but such claims are always dubious. The psychologist's words smack of a clinical interiority, just a little too walled-in from the vast Outside that was the subject of Stieglitz's art. More in the spirit of these photographs, it might be said that the sky was the only place ample enough to contain a vision as grandiose, and as lonesome, as his; after all, he was an artist, one of those personalities, to borrow the words of the International Commission for the Study of Clouds, "suspended in the free air and usually not touching the ground." Or, as Horace puts it, "I shall not die, my sublimations will exalt me to the stars."

Perhaps this is the way of all true artists. They're just like the old druids and Moses and maybe anybody who is madly, passionately in love: poking around up there in the sky, looking for something beyond reach, calling out to it and hoping it responds, so that, should it draw near, they can pounce on it. There's a certain impossibility in all these endeavors—to fix the future, to behold a god in all its splendor, to capture nature in its bare reality, to embrace the loved one forever. Isn't it the case that all who reach for the sky are bound to come home empty handed? "What can poor mortals say about clouds?" lamented John Muir.

Dorothy Norman reports that not long before he died Stieglitz was asked what is the perfect photograph? He responded by spinning a fantasy in which he himself had just taken that perfect photograph, and was now holding the glass negative in his hands, reveling in his accomplishment. "It is exactly what I wanted!" the artist exclaims. But suddenly the glass slips from his hands and shatters on the floor. "I will be dead," Stieglitz concludes sadly, "and no one will ever have seen the picture nor know what it was." The moral of the story seems to be that there is no place for perfection in this world, a view consonant with Plato's famous assertion that no sensible person would try to express their grandest thoughts—those thunderheads of the mind—in a form that is unchangeable.

In this regard too I think of the great artist-ornithologist John J. Audubon, blasting away with his rifle at his beloved American birds soaring in the limitless sky, that he might bag a few ideal examples of each species and immortalize them in his art. Yet, when all the birds were shot and all the drawings complete, each specimen splendidly depicted across the immense pages of his glorious books, did old John J., suffering the dementia of his last years, "his mind all in ruins," cast a now hazy marksman-artist eye upward through the bird-free sky and gaze longingly upon those high and companionable clouds, the only things now remaining between himself and heaven?

John P. O'Grady is the author of Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature (University of Utah Press, 2001). After a stint in northwestern Pennsylvania, he has returned to the western mountains, where he is working on a new book and watching clouds.

Stories Matter, Matter Stories

Originally printed in the September - October 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: de Quincey, Christian. "Stories Matter, Matter Stories." Quest 90.5 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002):177-181.

By Christian de Quincey

Christian de Quincey Are rocks conscious? Do animals or plants have souls? Have you ever wondered whether worms or insects might feel pain or pleasure? Can trees feel anything at all? Ever wondered where in the great unfolding of evolution consciousness first appeared?

If questions like these intrigue you, you are in good company, because they touch on the deepest mystery in modern philosophy, science, and spirituality: How are minds and bodies related?

How does consciousness fit into the physical world? These are not just idle musings of philosophers. How we answer such questions can dramatically affect the way we live our lives, how we treat the world of nature and other people, and even how we relate to our own bodies. If we are to feel at home in the cosmos, to be open to the full inflowing and outpouring of its profound creativity, if we are not to feel isolated and alienated from the full symphony of cosmic matter—both as distant as the far horizon of time and as near as the flesh of our own bodies—we need a new cosmology story. We need a new way to envision our relationship to the full panorama of the crawling, burrowing, swimming, gliding, flying, circulating, flowing, rooted, and embedded Earth. We need to be and to feel differently, as well as to think and believe differently.

Why? Well, listen to this from Bertrand Russell, one of the most respected and influential philosophers of our time:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

This may be the most terrifying story ever told—nevertheless, it is the one we are born into. It expresses the terrible poetry of a meaningless universe, rolling along entropic channels of chance, blind and without purpose, sometimes accidentally throwing up the magnificence and beauty of natural and human creations, but inevitably destined to pull all our glories asunder and leave no trace, no indication that we ever lived, that our lonely planet once bristled and buzzed with colorful life and reached out to the stars. It is all for nothing.

Such is the plot and substance of modern science boiled down to its bare essentials, a legacy from the founders of the modern worldview, such as Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, and Darwin.

Even if we have faith in a deeper spiritual dimension, somewhere in our nested system of beliefs that old story lurks, ready to rob our visions and our dreams, our loves and our passions of any meaning, of any validity beyond the scripted directions of a blind, unconscious, purposeless plot maker. If something in our experience stirs and reacts to this with disbelief, even with a question, it is surely worth paying attention to because the possibility that that story is wrong or incomplete has far-reaching consequences.

What if that sweeping materialist vision leaves something out? What if there is something other than an "accidental collocation of atoms" at work in the universe? What if, for instance, the experience or consciousness that contemplated the world and discovered the atoms was itself real? What if the ability of "collocated atoms" to purposefully turn around and direct their gaze to reflect on themselves was more than "accidental"? What if consciousness participates in the way the world works? What if consciousness can dance with the atoms and give them form and direction? What if the atoms themselves choreograph their own dance? What then?

In this article and in my new book Radical Nature, I explore an alternative story—one where the atoms do choreograph their own dance—a worldview that tells us consciousness matters and that matter is conscious.

Deserts of Meaning

Each year it is becoming clearer that our society's profound reliance on the authority of scientific knowledge and its applications in technology is inadequate for resolving the growing crises we face as communities and as individuals. Besides environmental problems of global proportions, our science and technology appear helpless in the face of burgeoning populations, with attendant international crises of poverty and hunger. Our societies are stressed with internal pressures of social, racial, and economic unrest, and with external pressures fueled by excesses of governmental, military, and corporate policies that impact across national boundaries creating economic and biological havoc and, in extreme situations, wastelands and deserts.

These deserts are not only environmental, such as the destruction of the planet's dwindling rainforests and marsh lands; there are also existential deserts—deserts of the spirit, of the soul, and of the mind. Deserts of meaning. It is precisely this aspect of the global crisis that calls out for a rigorous and inspired philosophy of mind and a true science of consciousness.

We begin the twenty-first century living on a planet dominated by a technological society based on science, and we live with a science based on a materialistic paradigm. We live, in other words, in a world lacking any firm grounding in meaning, in values, in purposes or goals. With few exceptions, the goals and "purposes" that do exist within our social institutions have no metaphysical foundation. They emerge, for the most part, as expressions of an economic philosophy based on a materialistic metaphysics that denies any foundation to goals, purposes, and values—other than biologically driven urges or the relativity of social power plays. Our religious and artistic traditions have attempted to fill the gap, but increasingly succumb to a social preference for scientific knowledge as the final authority on how we should govern our lives.

But it is precisely the wisdom of meaning, of value, of experience that our societies need in order to balance the knowledge of physical science and the obsessive push for technological progress. I'm proposing a profound reexamination of our basic narrative premise—our culture's "guiding story" or cosmology—to see what alternative story (or stories) science and philosophy might tell.

The Problem in a Nutshell

We humans are not so special. Yet often we think we are. Human specialness lies at the core of our civilization's dominant stories. In the grand narratives we tell ourselves trying to make some sense that we are here at all—in our cosmologies, in our scientific and religious worldviews—humans,typically, are the central characters.

For the most part, neither mainstream science nor conventional religion recognizes that humans are not essentially different from the rest of nature. Both regard matter and the world of nature as "dumb." Both assert that human beings are somehow special and stand apart from nature because, they say, only human beings—or at least creatures with brains and nervous systems—have consciousness or souls.

On the one hand, according to science, human consciousness "emerged" from dead, insentient matter. Nature itself is without any intrinsic meaning, value, or purpose because it has no consciousness. For science, there is no spirit in nature. Humans are thus at odds with the rest of the world: We are intelligent, nature is dumb. By an accident of nature, we are special.

On the other hand, for many forms of religion we are special by divine fiat. God gave us souls so that we may survive and transcend the inevitable corruption of the flesh. Human consciousness, spirit, or soul is separate from the physical body, and the path to meaning and salvation is through prayer to a remote, transcendent God. Attention is focused elsewhere, either toward the heavens or toward priests, rabbis, or mullahs.

However, science may be seriously mistaken when it asserts that consciousness is a product of complex brains and that the rest of vital nature is a product of mindless, purposeless, unfeeling evolution. We may not be so special.

And as for religion, the path to the sacred may not be through priests or churches. In my experience, the sacred is all around us in nature—for example, in watching a sunset, playing with animals, walking through a forest or on a beach, swimming in the ocean, climbing a mountain, planting flowers or vegetables, filling our lungs with fresh air, smelling the mulch of rich nourishing soil, dancing through crackling autumn leaves, embracing a loved one, or holding the hand of a dying parent. The most direct way to God, I believe, is through touching and feeling the Earth and its inhabitants—being open to the expression of spirit in the most ordinary, as well as in the most awesome, events of daily life. The way to meaning in our lives is by reconnecting with the world of nature—through exuberant participation or through the stillness of meditation, just being present and listening. And when we do so, we hear, we feel, and we learn: We are not alone—we are not uniquely special.

Nature is sacred, inherently divine. As the ancient philosopher Thales said, "Nature is full of gods."Today, we might say it is full of God, full of spirit, full of consciousness. Nature literally carries the wisdom of the world, a symphony of relationships between all its forms. Nature constantly "speaks"to us, and feels and responds to our stories. Simply breathing in rhythm with the world around us can be a potent form of prayer. We can open our hearts and pray to the "god of small things," for God lives in pebbles and stones, in plants and insects, in the cells of our bodies, in molecules and in atoms. And by connecting with the God of small things, we can discover this is the same as "the god of all things," great or small. Yes, God is in the heavens, but God is also in the finest grain of sand.

In the religion of nature—of a natural God—priests become shamans, the whole Earth becomes our church, and the vast cosmos our cathedral. In nature spirituality, the role of "priests" is not to be an intermediary between Heaven and Earth. Rather, they are guides teaching us to listen to the sacred language of nature—helping us open our minds and bodies to the messages rippling through the world of plants and animals, rocks and wind, oceans and forests, mountains and deserts, back yards and front porches.

In this view, all of nature, all bodies—from atoms to humans—tingle with the spark of spirit. But this is an uncommon view, called "panpsychism," presenting a radical and controversial account of the relationship between bodies and minds, between matter and soul. True, the nature of mind or consciousness remains a deep mystery for science and philosophy. But success at healing the mind-body split so characteristic of our age depends, I believe, more on a revised understanding of the nature of matter.

Bruno and the Story of Matter

For most of Western history, the notion of matter was derived either from Plato's dualism, where matter was imperfect and corrupt (common to mystical and religious traditions such as Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Christianity), or from Aristotle, who described matter as intrinsically passive, wholly dependent on extrinsic form to give it shape and dynamic (the view that underlies so much of modern science). For nearly two millennia, the Western world, and for the most part this meant Christendom, had adhered to Aristotle's model of the cosmos, with the Earth, and therefore humankind, positioned at the center of the universe. This picture well suited Church doctrine about the relationship between nature, humanity, and God—a relationship that required the services of priests and bishops to intervene in the hierarchy between the divine and the mundane.

Only with the sixteenth-century arrival of Giordano Bruno do we get a view of matter that offers an alternative to the dualisms of Plato and Aristotle. A generation or so before Bruno, Copernicus had shocked the Church establishment by overturning Aristotle's model, replacing it with a sun-centered cosmology. But Bruno, an excommunicated Dominican monk, was even more radical, and declared that not even the sun was at the center of the universe. "There is no center," he said; the universe is acentric.

Copernicus was severely reprimanded for daring to overturn Aristotle and the geocentric model. By withholding publication of his ideas, Copernicus saved his skin from the horrors of the Holy Inquisition. However, Bruno, for his outrageous defiance of Church authority, was unceremoniously marched half-naked to the stake and burned alive in Rome, on February 17, 1600. Although Bruno's insistence on the truth of his acentric cosmology was most likely the main reason for the Church's extreme ire, his conception of the nature of matter was equally revolutionary, and equally subversive of Church authority.

Whereas Aristotle's matter was passive and inert—without quality or quantity—Bruno's matter was intrinsically active and self-informing. Form, the dynamic capacity for action and formation, was itself an intrinsic quality of matter, Bruno taught. His metaphysic, therefore, presented a thoroughly monistic view of the cosmos as composed of "intelligent matter," which he called mater-materia ("matter mattering," matter as the creative "womb" or "matrix" of all forms). This notion of "intelligent matter" is radically at odds with the dominant modern view.

With Bruno, therefore, we have a view of matter in which it is "animated" by its own intrinsic and essential soul. But Bruno's "soul of matter" is far from the dualist's "ghost in the machine," a "something added" to matter to make it alive. In Descartes' account, biological matter in humans is animated by God injecting an alien soul. Bruno's matter, by contrast, is naturally organic and ensouled, and is itself intrinsically intelligent. In modern jargon, we might say that Bruno's matter is "autopoietic," self-organizing.

A New View of Mind and Matter

In this new (and very ancient) view, mind is neither outside nor inside matter, but is part of the very essence of matter—interior to its being. Mind, consciousness, or soul is that which is responsible for matter's ability to become what it is—what Aristotle called entelechy (pronounced "en-tel-e-ky").

This idea is out of favor in modern scientific and philosophical circles, where it is believed to be a throwback to prescientific cosmologies. However, I want to draw attention to entelechy because the idea fits so well when we begin to focus on the implications of the mind-body relation for practical human affairs—such as illness and health, and personal destiny. A worldview that acknowledges that meaning and purpose are in-trinsic to the very fabric of nature inevitably confronts the question: "How do we fit in?" How do individual human purposes fit in with the consciousness and purpose of nature or the cosmos itself? If consciousness goes all the way down—if my consciousness is rooted ultimately in the deeper or higher consciousness of reality itself—what might be the relationship between my personal consciousness and the transpersonal "Cosmic I"? Can I reconcile my belief and experience of free will with the idea that some larger or deeper purpose is guiding or directing us? What meaning do we give to free will if human acts of volition are individualized expressions of some greater creative impulse?

The idea of entelechy was revived earlier this century by philosophers and scientists, such as Hans Dreisch, to indicate a nonmechanistic vital force that urges an organism to self-fulfillment. Henri Bergson proposed a similar notion with élan vital, which he saw as a creative force pulsing through evolution, and responsible for the purposeful drives in all evolving organisms. Teilhard de Chardin also spoke of the "within" of things, a sort of psychic, subjective complement to the external forms and energy of atoms, cells, plants, and animals.

These later thinkers recognized that the conventional Darwinian view of evolution as the result of blind matter in motion (the mechanism of chance mutations in DNA) and external natural selection was inadequate to the task of explaining how evolution produces new species or how an individual organism develops its particular unique form from its single fertilized seed cell. Faced with such mysteries, philosophers, biologists, and psychologists have sought for alternative explanations to the dogmatism of mechanism and matter. It seems as if something else may be at work in evolution and in the unfolding of our personal lives. It is the entelechy of an acorn, for example, to be an oak tree; it is the entelechy of a baby to be a grown-up human being; it is every individual's entelechy to be uniquely who he or she is.

In his dream work with clients, Jungian analyst Edward Whitmont recognized the presence of entelechy shaping the forms that arise in a person's psyche (images and symbols) and soma (bodily illnesses and injuries). For Whitmont, entelechy complements and augments the current preference in Western philosophy, science, and medicine for purely physical determinism. The conventional notion of "determinism" reduces all life processes—including the operations of our psyches—to mechanistic causes. Such a science reduces us to little more than complex thinking machines, automatons—"accidental collocations of atoms" with no free will, no power to exercise choice against the random winds of fate.

In contrast, entelechy combines the sense of a "given" purpose with the sense of a freedom to resist or accept the unfolding of our unique purpose. We are not blindly driven or determined. Yet it is as if we were each dealt a specific hand of cards, and our task in life—Whitmont calls it our life's "drama"—is to exercise our consciousness in how we "play" our hand. It invites the image of sailing a ship: The movement of the ship is constrained by its particular bulk, by the turbulence of the waves, by the ocean currents, and by the caprice of the winds—yet as captain and crew of our own ships (our self-consciousness blending with our unique entelechy or essence), we do have choice and power in the unfolding of our destiny. We must blow with the winds of fate; nevertheless, we have the option for what Buckminster Fuller called "trim tabbing": making slight adjustments to the rudder that can result in major shifts of direction.

Working with his clients, Whitmont acknowledged that the dynamics of illness and healing (both psychological and somatic) are expressions of our inherent entelechy, our individual pulse of purpose informing us that we may be off-course and calling our attention to the need for a course correction, some adjustment in the forms of our life's "drama."

Ontologically, soma and psyche are all one reality—body and mind invariably go together. They go together not as two separate modes of being that mysteriously interact; they go together in the sense that body is implicit in mind, and vice versa. Physicist David Bohm expressed a similar idea when he spoke of phenomenal, explicate reality enfolded or implicit in the universal "holomovement" of the implicate order. As embodied beings, we experience both explicate body and implicate mind. And when we attempt to express (make explicit) this experience, we invariably introduce a conceptual dualism: We speak of body and mind as if they were separate and distinct. The mind-body problem arises only when we conflate this conceptual and linguistic dualism with an ontological dualism of substance.

As human beings, we are grounded in our bodies; they are our vehicles for the practical business of getting on with living. We are embodied beings. But our bodies are not separate from our consciousness; they are the media through which we experience our being-in-the-world, through which we experience ourselves and the world. Of course, this in no way implies that our bodies or brains generate consciousness, as various forms of materialism claim. On the contrary, our bodies are particular expressions of the entelechy—the intrinsic organizing principle—that we happen to be.

Listening to Nature's Story

Given this radical view of the relationship between mind and body, between consciousness and matter, the implications for philosophy and science are far reaching. In Radical Nature, I trace the lineage of the idea that the cosmos itself is, literally, the unfolding of a great story. The evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets, and everything that populates them is nothing less than the intrinsic narrative and great adventure of matter—of matter that feels, matter with a divine purpose. Matter really is adventurous, and evolution is its unfolding epic drama. And, as the bard said, we, too, must play our part.

I think we need a broader view of who we are, where we come from, and how we fit into the world. We need a new story beyond the usual dogmas of science and religion. We need a story where humanity is at home in nature—a story that reconnects us to the Earth, and to the wider cosmos. We need a story where human consciousness is not a stranger in the world but is simply a natural part of a world that itself tingles with spirit to its deepest roots—all the way down. We need a story where the flesh of the Earth—the entire world of matter—is recognized to be sentient and intelligent.

The simple fact is that we are conscious, intelligent beings embedded in an intelligent world. We are conscious beings because we arise from a world that is itself conscious all the way down. We live in a world brim-full of consciousness, brim-full with meaning and messages for us. But our ears no longer hear. We, most of us, no longer listen. For us, the stones have fallen silent.

We need to learn to listen again to the messages in nature, to let its deep meaning nourish us. We need to learn to feel our kinship with the vast, natural world—with the rooted folk, with the crawling,burrowing, flying, running, hopping, swimming, climbing folk. We need to be open to the deep intelligence of the world. We need to recognize the sacredness of nature. And we begin by acknowledging that matter itself—the very "stuff" of the world, whether here on Earth or elsewhere in the cosmos—tingles with consciousness, sparkles with spirit. Not just human brains, but all the cells in our bodies pulse with purpose and intelligence—and so it is in all the cells of all the other creatures, and in the molecules in those cells, in the atoms in those molecules, in the electrons and protons in the atoms, in the quarks or quanta or superstrings or whatever lies at the root of the world of matter. Wherever there is matter, there is some kind of mind.

References

Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Russell, Bertrand. "A Free Man's Worship." In The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903-1959, ed. R. E. Egner and L. D. Dennon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.
Whitmont, Edward. The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1994.

Christian de Quincey, PhD, is managing editor of IONS Review, a professor of Consciousness Studies at John F. Kennedy University, and an international speaker on consciousness, spirituality, and philosophy of mind at conferences and workshops in the United States and Europe. This article is adapted from his new book Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter (Invisible Cities Press, 2002), which is available through IONS' Website at www.amazon.com . Samples of his work on consciousness and cosmology are available on his Website, www.deepspirit.com . This article is reprinted with permission of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and originally appeared in IONS Review, no. 60 (June-August 2002). Further information is available at www.noetic.org .

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