Quest Magazine

Physician: Medicine and the Unsuspected Battle for Human Freedom

By Richard Leviton
Charlottesviile, VA: Hampton Roads, 2000. Paperback, xii + 579 pages.

An emotionally colored mixture of incongruous elements, often angry, intended to disparage current medical healing practices, while touting obsolescent sickness care systems, this book is a jumble of news reports and quotations from the daily press, with few from respected scientific journals. Virulent attacks on physicians' associations and the current health care system mark the first chapter, followed by uncritical rambles through unproven fields of health care, new and ancient.

The book's statement of the relations between bacteria, bacteriophages, and viruses is incorrect. It often treats information and relationships described in fiction and motion pictures as valid scientific observations.

Alternative and complementary approaches to medical care are not necessarily in conflict with customary medical practice. The author unreasonably makes them so, overlooking that practitioners of each depend on an accurate knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and all other health care disciplines. All medical care requires an accurate diagnosis, must treat illness as part of the patient's life, and depends on remedies, whatever they may be, which should be regularly and thoroughly tested.

Change in all these elements should be expected. To prove means to test, not to confirm. Each form of therapy, orthodox or other, must be continually tested if it is to succeed or prevail. Systems, whether of care or of relationships to others or to Deity, can never be considered final statements if they are developed by human beings.

This book is worthless as a whole and unreliable as something to live by. It wanders from topic to topic, here scientific and there uncritical, with only an occasional piece of some worth.

-JOHN B. DE HOFF, MD, MPH

March/April 2001

The Incredible Births of Jesus

By Edward Reaugh Smith
Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1998, Paperback, 109 pages.

The gospel accounts of the life of Jesus are, as is well known, inconsistent with each other and in some respects contradictory. A single example, one of many, will illustrate. Matthew and Luke give different genealogies for Jesus. Both trace the descent of Jesus from David (important for establishing his claim to Messiahship), but do so by quite different lineages. Matthew (1.6) reports that Jesus descended from David's son Solomon, whereas Luke (3.31) reports a descent from David's son Nathan.

Annie Besant discovered such contradictions when she tried to make a harmony of the gospels, and that discovery broke her faith in a simple, pious acceptance of literal Christianity and started her on the road to Theosophy. Today the contradictions are a problem mainly for fundamentalist believers in the literal truth of scripture. Scholars generally regard the gospels as attempts to set forth certain ideas through whatever history, myths, legends, or traditional topoi best served the purpose. Theosophists tend to regard them as symbolical or metaphorical expressions of spiritual realities.

The German esotericist, quondam Theosophist, and founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, had his own ideas about the subject, which are the basis for The Incredible Births of Jesus. Briefly, "the divine spiritual intuition of Rudolf Steiner" (66) was that there were really two persons named "Jesus." One, the descendant of Solomon, who was a reincarnation of "the most advanced Ego humanity has produced, that of the ancient Zarathustra" (67), was born in Bethlehem but was taken to Nazareth as a youngster. The other, the descendant of Nathan, was born in Nazareth He had no permanent Ego, but was the recipient of the astral body of the Buddha.

When the Nathan Jesus was twelve years old, his parents presented him at the Temple, and at that time the Zarathustra Ego left the body of the Solomon Jesus (who then died) and entered the body of the Nathan Jesus. The father of the Solomon Jesus also died, as did the mother of the Nathan Jesus. The surviving parents married each other, and thenceforth there was one family and one Jesus. The story is much more complex than that, those being only the bare bones of the tale.

What is perhaps most interesting about this Anthroposophical interpretation is that it accepts as literal truth the gospel accounts of the nativity and tries to make sense out of their contradictions. That aim accords with the aspirations of the most literalist of Christian fundamentalists. Few of the latter, however, are likely to find much satisfaction in this effort to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable.

-JOHN ALGEO

March/April 2001

Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community

Ed. John J. Guthrie, Jr. Philip Charles Lucas, and Gary Monroe
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Hardcover, xxi + 241 pages.

Cassadaga, a modest but picturesque community in east central Florida, is one of the most unusual villages in the South. The principal church in town is not of an evangelical denomination, but is Spiritualist. In it one hears not revival preaching, but talk of the soul's endless pilgrimage, and those edifying words may be the voices of departed teachers or loved ones coming to us through the lips of entranced mediums. On the street, general stores and fast-food outlets mingle with plaques advertising mediumship and New Age bookstores.

Cassadaga was established over a century ago as a southern outpost of a Spiritualist camp in upstate New York, and has retained this character through many vicissitudes down to the present, attracting seekers, practicing Spiritualists, and Spiritualist retirees. The present book, written by several hands and attractively illustrated, is a worthy tribute to this exceptional place. Though an academic book by professional scholars, it is rarely dull or inaccessible to the ordinary reader.

One great virtue of the volume is the way in which its cooperative nature enables the reader to look at Cassadaga from several angles. One finds authoritative articles on the history and basic philosophy of the community, on its architecture (with many pictures), and on the activities and spiritual biographies of prominent senior members, fascinating accounts based on extensive interviews. The book ends with a photo essay documenting mediumship, healing, and worship services at Cassadaga. 

In the past, the relations between Spiritualism and Theosophy have often been acrimonious. In particular, Theosophists from Helena Blavatsky on down have pointed out that the entities present in mediumistic seances are usually at best only partial shells of the deceased individual, and may well be deceptive elementals. These concerns are significant and cannot be ignored. At the same time, this book and my own experience as a visitor at Cassadaga make clear that Spiritualists today have much in common with Theosophists. Their bookstores carry many of the same books, their discourse uses terms familiar to Theosophists such as karma and reincarnation (controversial among Spiritualists until recently), and the Cassadaga Spiritualist church has even offered a class on Blavatsky's major work, The Secret Doctrine. Perhaps it is time for Spiritualism and Theosophy, two kindred but long estranged movements, to renew ecumenical outreach and dialogue with each other.

-ROBERT ELLWOOD

March/April 2001

Shaman, Jhankri, and Nele: Music Healers of Indigenous Cultures

By Pat Moffitt Cook
Roslyn, NY: Ellipsis Arts, 1997. Compact disc and book.

Although indigenous healers have employed music to restore health through countless centuries, these rhythms, chants, and songs seem endangered. Cook presents eighteen healing rituals recorded in Peru, northern India, Haiti, the San Bias Islands, Nepal, the Amazon, Tuva, Mexico, Korea, Panama, and Tibet.
-Daniel Ross Chandler

January/February 2001