Quest Magazine

Nicholas and Helena Roerich: The Spiritual Journey of Two Great Artists and Peacemakers

Ruth A. Drayer
Quest Books, 367 pages, Softcover, $23.95, 367 pages.

The great Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) is today more known in America for his art than his other many accomplishments. A great philosopher, explorer, archeologist, adventurer, Theosophist, and man of peace, he was the first Russian to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Even less is known in most American households of his wife Helena (1879-1955), who matched him in intellectual and spiritual intensity. Ruth Drayer's book on the travels, writings, lectures, and teachings of this extraordinary couple provides a great service in bringing them into the spotlight.

Although Russian by birth, Nicholas and Helena were also relatively unknown in their homeland because of the ban placed on them by the KGB in the 1930s, a ban that lasted until the fall of Communism in 1989. Almost immediately thereafter, all things Roerich became the rage in Moscow. With Russia's newly rich entering the international art market, the price of a Roerich painting soon increased from five or ten thousand dollars to well over a million. During his lifetime, he is thought to have created almost seven thousand paintings, making him one of the most prolific artists in human history, and the collective value of his work valued in the hundreds of millions.

Fleeing from the Communists, the Roerichs traveled widely through Asia, Europe and the Americas. In 1923 they established the Master School of United Artists in New York and in their early years in America took the country by storm. Nicholas's lectures around the country met with universal acclaim. His Roerich Peace Pact, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt and two dozen world leaders, became a cornerstone of the American peace movement, and won him the public praise of Albert Einstein.

It might seem that this early success in America would have placed him high in the American consciousness. However, like so many foreigners of his generation, the fear of Socialism—of which he himself was in fact a victim—saw him banned from re-entering the United States. He settled down in the Kulu Valley of Himalayan India, and spent the reminder of his life writing and painting in his mountain hermitage at Nagar. Americans, with the short attention spans of the forties and fifties, soon forgot his name.

In 1907 amongst their many other activities, Nicholas and Helena also met and studied with the great Buriatia lama Agvan Dorzhiev. Known in British literature as Tsenzhab Dorjiev, this great master was a guru to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and also became a spiritual advisor to Tsar Nicholas II. When the Tsar was unable to conceive a male heir, Lama Agvan Dorzhiev suggested that His Majesty send an offering to the Great Thirteenth and request a healing and fertility rite. This indeed came to pass. The Great Thirteenth performed the ritual from Lhasa, and soon thereafter the Tsarina gave birth to a prince. The Tsar instructed Lama Agvan Dorzhiev to build a Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg, and the young Nicholas Roerich was commissioned to create the stained glass windows on the second flow.

Lama Agvan Dorzhiev was an adherent of the Kalachakra School of Tantric Buddhism, with its emphasis on the mystical land of Shambhala, and it is from this time that Roerich became fascinated with the Shambhala legends. The theme appears repeatedly in his art and writings. Dorzhiev believed that if the young prince who was born from the blessings of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama would survive to maturity, he would become a great world leader and usher in a thousand years of a golden age. This, alas, was not to be; World War I saw the depletion of great stores of the good karma on the planet. In 1917 the barbaric Communists overran Russia, and the entire royal family was murdered. Russia was plunged into the depths of darkness under Lenin and then Stalin and the rest of the world entered a century of mass warfare, economic chaos, and social unrest. This in turn produced a culture of fear and greed, from which we still have not emerged.

Nicholas and Roerich were strong believers in the powers of beauty and vision, in the ideal that these two forces can unite mankind, end conflict, and usher in a golden age. They probably were right.

This being so, their message is as relevant today as it was three generations ago. In fact, it is perhaps even more desperately needed today, when mankind seems poised for another world conflict, when greed has surpassed even the instinct of basic survival in its obsessive rape and pillage of the earth, threatening the very life of the very planet on which we live, and when humans have become even more polarized and insulated from one another than ever before.

Ruth Drayer's book is a timely infusion of enlightened thinking into a world desperately in need of simple solutions to complex world problems.

Glenn Mullin

This reviewer is author and translator of over a dozen books on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. He lectures internationally and in May 2007, he led the Theosophical Society's pilgrimage to Blavatsky's Tibet and Mongolia.

The Heavens Declare: Astrological Ages and the Evolution of Consciousness

By Alice O. Howell
Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2006, 287 pages.

The astrological community has been enriched by the recent publication of several significant books. The Heaven’s Declare by Alice O. Howell is one of them. One of today's most respected astrologers, Howell continues to profoundly educate and nourish readers. Moreover, the depth and breadth of her accumulated wisdom is reflected in the humility and clarity of her carefully crafted prose.

The title of this revised and updated version of her publication of fifteen years ago seems so right. The Heaven's Declare (the glory God), from Psalm 19, is a clear call to recognize astrology's gift of a larger awareness through its uniting of religion and science, and its proof of "an unfolding evolution of consciousness that suggests a sacred purpose of awesome dimensions revealing itself in the immense mystery of the cosmos of creation."

The author has long worked the mixture of astrology, Jungian psychology, mythology, religion, linguistics, symbol systems, history, literature, and systems theory in the cauldron of her own psyche. Here, as in her earlier Jungian Symbolism in Astrology (Quest Books, 1987), she structures her chapters as letters to a friend, which accommodate a conversational style perfect for her enlightening integration of insights from this broad spectrum of subject areas.

Howell presents her material under two broad headings: the Astrological Signs and the Astrological Ages. The first half of the book studies the Astrological Signs and offers a combination of traditional as well as personal understandings of astrology's principle ingredients; specifically, "The Elements: Four Levels of Being." There are chapters about each element- -“Fire: Light, Life, Love"; "Water: Fluctuation, Femininity, Fruition"; "Air: Idea, Intelligence, Intellect"; and "Earth: Stuff, Structure, Stability." These are followed by a chapter on "The Houses'' and several rabies: the Planets, the Astrological Signs, the Natural Zodiac, and Fixed, Cardinal, and Mutable Signs. The explanations are always clear, always encouraging.

The second half of the book studies the Astrological Ages. In these chapters the author discusses the evolution of human consciousness with an analysis of the psychological evolution of our human family through history. Our human ancestors have experienced changing paradigms and shifts in awareness during each of these time segments which generally last approximately 2,200 years allowing for transitional interfaces. These ages and their associated collective consciousness ideas are as follows: the Age of Cancer (c. 8000-6500 BC)- Love and Fear; the Age of Gemini (c. 6500-3750 BC)-Consciousness and Choice; the Ageof Taurus (c. 4000-1800 BC)-Property and Resurrection; the Age of Aries (c. 1800-07 BC)-Ego and Justice; the Age of Pisces (c. 7 BC-1800 AD with interface to 2012 AD)-Faith and Reason; the Age of Aquarius (c. 1800-4000 AD)-Individual and Cosmos.

Alice Howell teaches us how she carefully looks and listens to the heavens and its declarations. These attentions have enabled her to conclude that there is "a cosmically ordered unfolding of meaning," and that, in the emerging age, each human being has an individual contribution to make to the unfolding of that collective meaning.

Simply put, this work is a gem. Now, when I am asked to recommend a book for someone to begin their study of astrology, The Heavens Declare, by Alice O. Howell, is the one I recommend.

-DAVID BISHOP

May/June 2007

The Taliesin Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship

Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman
NY: HarperCollins, 2006.Hardcover, $34.95, 704 pages.

Roger Friedland, a cultural sociologist, and Howard Zellman, an architect, have written a very good book about a strange and little known subject, the Taliesin Fellowship of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, himself, is certainly well-known through his buildings, his writings on architecture, his autobiography, and a number of other biographies. Oddly enough, however, until Friedland and Zellman published The Fellowship, little was known of the school that Wright set up in the depths of the Great Depression, ostensibly to train the cream of American youth to be "organic" architects.

Building had come to an abrupt stop across the country as America sank into the great economic depression of the1930s. There was no architectural work to be had anywhere by anyone, and to Wright, with his extravagant ways and adverse publicity and notoriety of his personal life, the Depression was an unmitigated disaster. But Wright had an answer, an answer perhaps born of desperation and unlikely coincidence, but a brilliant solution for all of that. Wright had toyed for several years with the idea of opening an architectural school at Taliesin, his estate in Wisconsin. After all, his spinster aunts had made a living from the old Hillside Home School on the Taliesin property. As it turned out, however, the "Fellowship," would not be an ordinary school, not even an architectural apprenticeship under his direction, as Wright had at first thought. It was to be indirectly, but inextricably, linked to the ideas of that other extraordinary man, G. I. Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff seems to have been an incomprehensible mixture of self-appointed messiah, visionary genius and mystical seer. Acquainted from an early age with the magical beliefs and powers of the peasants among whom he was raised, he was absorbed in all aspects of the occult. There is little doubt that he possessed remarkable magical powers, which were carefully cultivated throughout his life. He was, in fact, a magus, or magician in the old sense of the word and he had a messianic message, simple in essence. We are all asleep, he taught, lost in the mechanical repetition of response patterns of behavior. Freedom is to be found in awakening, in becoming aware of who we are, and what we are. This may be achieved through "the Work," a system of constant mental and physical challenges whereby a student may be shaken into a state of higher awareness. An essential part of the Work was the performance of sacred dances that were designed to align the dancer with the mathematical laws of the cosmos. One of the students and dancers that had followed him on his long journey from Tiflis to Paris was Olgivanna Hinzenberg, who eventually became the third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The authors point out that Wright and Gurdjieff had much in common, and there were "uncanny correspondences in their thinking." Both, for instance, used the term "organic": Gurdjieff to refer to a harmony with cosmic forces and Wright to his architecture. Both were also inspired by forms found in nature, and both were devoted to the beauty of Gothic art. Moreover, Wright was already aware of Gurdjieff and his ideas through Zona Gale, a Gurdjieff follower.

Wright was desperate for money to pay his debts, hold on to Taliesin, and continue to enjoy his lavish life-style. He capitalized on the beauty of his estate and his fame and reputation as an architect, by offering "apprenticeships" to those who would pay for the privilege of living at Taliesin and working under his direction. The students came and paid, and the scheme proved highly profitable. However, the school now called the Fellowship was not what many of them had been led to expect. For one thing, an apprenticeship implies the presence of a master with whom one works and learns, but Wright, at that time, had no work. Olgivanna, however, was eager to incorporate the ideas of Gurdjieff into the structure of the school. What resulted was a curious amalgam whereby the total reeducation of the students along lines established at the Priory somehow became the primary goal.

The great strength of the book lies in the way Friedland and Zellman build up a picture of life as it was lived in the ivory tower that the Fellowship became for both the Wrights and the apprentices. Through the stories of the apprentices as they reacted to Taliesin and interacted with the Wrights and through a careful description of the succession of events, both within the Fellowship, and in the outside world, that shaped and influenced life within the walls, we begin to sense what a strange place the Fellowship must have been. Most of the apprentices were young men and it seems that the women applicants were largely discouraged. Wright was similarly an outspoken anti-Semite, but depended upon Jewish clients and Jewish apprentices who deny ever experiencing discrimination at Taliesin. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Wright urged the apprentices to resist the draft. Most of them did out of loyalty to Wright while an unquestioning acceptance of whatever he said or was even believed to think, became an absolute requirement for those who wished to remain at Taliesin.

Gurdjieff died in October, 1949, but nevertheless continued to be a force in the Fellowship through Olgivanna and her daughter Iovanna. As Wright's health declined in his last few years, Olgivana moved to take more and more control of the Fellowship. Immediately after her husband's death, she seized control of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, under which the Fellowship was organized. The Foundation, under Olgivanna, continued the architectural practice, but her chief interest was forwarding the ideas of her master, G. I. Gurdjieff. The death of her husband gave her the free hand that she always wanted to teach Gurdjieff's principles as she understood them, and the authority to shape the lives of those within the Fellowship as one who had received the light directly from the master.

The authors point out that the Fellowship—with all its faults and problems—and Wright—with the enormous ego that the Fellowship fed—were justified by the buildings designed and constructed in the last decades of his astonishing career. Friedman and Zellman cite Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Administration Building, and the Guggenheim Museum as great architectural icons that could not have come into being without the emotional and financial support of the Fellowship and the Gurdjieffian philosophy that influenced Wright through his wife Olgivanna.

Herbert Bangs

This reviewer is a retired architect and author of The Return of Sacred Architecture (Inner Traditions 2006). He also met Frank Lloyd Wright while visiting Taliesin during the heyday of the Fellowship.

The Year of Magical Thinking

By Joan Didion
New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf 2005
Hardback, 227 pages.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a self-analytical look at a year of mourning by the author. In late December 2003, Joan Didion's only daughter, Quintana, fell ill with what was believed to be the flu. The flu turned into pneumonia and eventually her daughter went into septic shock. A week after her daughter is admitted to the hospital, Didion was in the kitchen preparing dinner, when her husband of forty years, John Dunne, quietly died of a heart attack while sitting in the next room.

It would be easy to cast this book aside, believing it to be a morbid look at loss, but Didion's writing gives expression to a detailed look at how the human mind works during the process of grieving a loved one. Her writing style is meditative, repeating events only to look at them more deeply while analyzing her thoughts and reactions. Throughout the book, she writes about avoiding vortexes-trigger points that will remind her of John and the things they did together. She writes about avoiding the restaurants they used to go to, the streets they would drive down, the theaters they would visit, until she realizes that she is no longer living, but running from pillar to post to avoid something that she is in need of facing. While this sounds melancholic, Didion is self-critical about these events, adding light-heartedness to the book. In the end, she realizes there is little she can do to avoid the vortexes because she and John spent very little time apart. They both worked at home critiquing each other's work, discussing events important to one or the other, and enjoying each other's company.

Didion's book is a very human look at grief and loss. Despite having spent more than half her life with her husband, Didion realizes she doesn't want it to end and recollects the previous years with him in order to hold onto his presence. But as we all know, these memories eventually begin to fade and we are left with the here and now. The message held throughout this book is that those who have departed live within us because of the things they have taught us and the gifts, material and otherwise, they have given us. This in turn is passed on to others. While this does not stop the mourning process, the realization of it helps lessen it for some. This book is recommended for those who mourn.

-ANANYA S. RAJAN

January/February 2007