Quest Magazine

Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen

Gary Lachman
Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 2008. Paperback, $19.95, xxiv + 276 pages.

Most books presuming to deal with politics and the occult have been marred by a conspiratorial premise ("the Illuminati are secretly running the world!") and a cavalier attitude toward fact checking. Indeed, conspiracy peddler Texe Marrs once filled a thirty-five-dollar, six hundred-page book with photos of politicians giving "V for victory" signs, "OK" signs, and just about every other hand gesture under the sun and interpreting these as secret Illuminatist and Satanic signals.

Luckily, Gary Lachman's latest book takes a saner and more even-handed approach to the considerable overlap between matters political and occult. This is not surprising, as Lachman has emerged over the past twenty years as one of our most readable and reliable writers on spiritual and esoteric systems and personalities.

The task that Lachman sets for himself in Politics and the Occult is straightforward enough: Beginning with the Rosicrucian uproar at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Lachman provides a historical survey of the political impact in the West of occult and esoteric ideas over the last four hundred years. He nimbly leads the reader through controversies surrounding British and European secret societies, the French Revolution, curious erotic mystical sects like the Moravian Brotherhood, and more recent occult figures such as Nicholas Roerich, Papus, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, and Julius Evola. The book ends with a meditation on the parallels between the present Christian Right in the United States and manifestations of a spiritually tinged fascism that Lachman discusses in earlier chapters.

For the bulk of Politics and the Occult, Lachman is content to provide an anecdotal chronology of colorful characters in a generally nonjudgmental manner, simply letting the facts speak for themselves. It is only in the final chapters, as the people under consideration begin to brush up against twentieth-century "isms," particularly fascism, that Lachman seems obliged to render judgments, albeit judgments circumscribed by considerable ambivalence.

For instance, what are we to make of the sympathy of Mircea Eliade, the distinguished scholar of comparative religion, for the mystical-fascist-nationalist Legion of the Holy Archangel Michael during his young adulthood in Romania? Or Eliade's ongoing correspondence with Julius Evola, the brilliant Italian Traditionalist who synthesized a kind of esoteric fascism that inspired youthful extreme rightists to engage in a nihilistic terror spree during the 1970s in Italy? Do these instances of Eliade's hidden past totally undercut the value of his considerable later scholarship in shamanism, cross-cultural studies, and religious myth? Lachman considers such questions at some length and provides enough thoughtful analysis for the reader to grasp the difficulty of a single clear-cut answer.

In considering the contemporary Christian Right, Lachman steps most fully off the fence and voices his concerns that their theocratic yearnings, if put into practice, would usher in an era of totalitarianism reminiscent of earlier fascist regimes. Given a choice between the modern world with all its flaws (materialism, consumerism, celebrity worship, and all the rest) and the flight from modernity (whether quasi-fascist Traditionalist or Christian Rightist), Lachman ultimately sides with a modern world that allows at least enough freedom to voice one's opposition to its faults.

For the reader who has only a vague sense of the history of the Western occult traditions' interaction with the political arena, Politics and the Occult should serve as a salutary overview. In a genre loaded down with garbage, Lachman's book is a breath of fresh air.

However, I feel compelled to note that if your reading of esoteric history has already encompassed books by James Webb (The Occult Underground, The Occult Establishment, and The Harmonious Circle) and Joscelyn Godwin (Arktos and The Theosophical Enlightenment), as well as Mark Sedgwick's thorough study of the Traditionalists (Against the Modern World), you may find little new in Politics and the Occult. Lachman draws heavily on these sources, and while he serves up a highly readable distillation, no new ground is broken (to wildly mix metaphors).

Moreover, more than once Lachman cites, as sources, books that can most charitably be described as "speculative." The works of Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince purveying "alternative history"—such as The Templar Revelation, The Stargate Conspiracy, and The Sion Revelation, the last of which Lachman cites several times—may be both engaging and exciting (as well as best-sellers), but their presence as footnoted sources does not breed confidence in the thoroughness of Lachman's research. Similarly, the citation of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's Temple and the Lodge for anything having to do with the Knights Templar and Scotland is problematic. (See Robert L. D. Cooper's The Rosslyn Hoax? for a valuable debunking of most such claims about Scottish Templars.)

Luckily, such speculative sources are few in Lachman's book, and for the most part, their use is confined to minor matters. Pop histories such as Politics and the Occult fulfill an important role in disseminating information to intelligent readers who don't have the time or resources to thoroughly read across a given field. Lachman has a gift for taking on complex subjects and personalities (Rudolf Steiner and Emanuel Swedenborg, for example) and making them accessible. I just hope that the pressure of making a living in the literary marketplace doesn't cause him to surrender to what the Traditionalist René Guénon called the "reign of quantity."

Politics and the Occult is a good book. Here's hoping that Lachman's next one is even better.

Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney was the publisher and editor-in-chief of Gnosis magazine (1985-99) and is coauthor (with Richard Smoley) of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (Quest, 2006). His forthcoming book, The Masonic Enigma, will be published by HarperOne.

Into Great Silence

DVD. Zeitgeist Films, October 2007. 162 minutes.

Symbols play an important part in human life. In their concreteness, they have the ability to touch the whole person with all his feelings and senses. As a result, they can have a greater impact than can an abstract discussion directed to the intellect alone.

Into Great Silence can be regarded as a symbol in this sense. It is a three-hour film, mostly silent, that takes the viewer into the realm of monastic life. The director, Philip Gröning, stayed at a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps for six months and let his camera follow the monks in their daily and weekly life—all in silence.

The camera observes the hermits in their individual cells, eating their meals, chanting in the chapel, doing manual labor, and participating in the liturgical celebrations of the yearly feasts. It also depicts the lovely alpine scenery surrounding the monastery and its changes during the seasons of the year. The deep forest, the blue sky with sun and clouds, the birds flying in the air, the rushing streams, and the agricultural plots participate in the silence of the hermits and surround it with nature's beauty.

As one sits through the film for three hours and experiences the rhythm of this silent life, one realizes that this is a story of love. Supplied with the bare necessities of daily living, the monks have the freedom and time to focus on this meeting with God. The divine speaks in silence, and the audience experiences this truth in the rhythm of the film. Briefly at the very end, the film shows a monologue of a blind hermit who talks about the centrality of God in human life. His few words sum up what the audience has experienced for three hours. More words are not needed.

Robert Trabold

This reviewer has a Ph.D. in sociology with specialties in urban issues and the religious expressions of people in transition. His reflective poetry and articles on contemplative prayer have been published in Quest and other journals.

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

Richard Dooling
New York: Harmony, 2008. 272 pages, hardcover, $22.

Having an avid interest in technology and its "spiritual" implications, I tend to follow anything that sounds a cautionary note regarding technological advances. For those with a similar taste, the field is currently dominated by the writings of Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who have highlighted to great effect both the promise and peril of our technological future(s).

The central point of Richard Dooling's Rapture for the Geeks is its concept of the Technological Singularity. This is an event which (unless you have read The Secret Doctrine) appears to have no precedent. The general view is that somewhere around 2045, technological progress will go off the scale exponentially. The Wikipedia Web site defines this "Singularity" as "a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence." Essentially this means that we will evolve ourselves out of existence—largely by producing computers that are smarter than we are. Like Kurzweil, Joy, and others, Dooling seems nearly certain that this Singularity will take place.

When approaching Dooling's book, I expected it to be a timely update of earlier writings principally by Kurzweil. Unfortunately, although Dooling's book is written for a much more general audience (and is sprinkled with humor and bits of JavaScript, xml, and other bits of programming that serve to illustrate his points), for the most part he rehashes material from Kurzweil and others without adding much that is new in the way of current research.

Probably the most valuable part of the book is Dooling's advice for those who have no desire to become obsolete. He suggests a number of actions readers can take to become better equipped to handle the ever-quickening pace of technology. First and foremost is to learn some programming languages. For some (especially those who have mangled Sanskrit terms when reading Theosophical literature), the task may seem daunting, but Dooling makes programming seem doable by just about anyone.

From a Theosophical perspective, the most worrisome aspect about this discussion is that its assumptions proceed in the classic pattern for Western science: from the bottom up. We create conscious machines and we upload the contents of our brains into them, or we augment capabilities already present using technological means. Eastern philosophy, by contrast, holds that our existence is possible because of consciousness, and that evolution is a process which takes place in the realm of the spiritual, with effects manifesting in the physical realm. Current views of the Singularity seem to be urging us to make yet another attempt at forcing "evolution" from the bottom up. But what if Eastern modes of thought are correct about the nature of consciousness? What are the likely outcomes? What needs to take place in order to guide technological "progress" in a healthier direction?

I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who wants to quickly understand the issues we are facing and doesn't mind having a good laugh along the way. (Beware of a little off-color humor.) For a more thoughtful exploration of the subject, however, I would strongly recommend three classics from Ray Kurzweil:The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and The Singularity Is Near.

Joe Fulton

The reviewer is a Life Member of the Theosophical Society and past president of the Akron lodge. He is employed by a major software manufacturer, where he performs duties related to quality assurance, support, and innovation.

The Kingdom of Agarttha: A Journey into the Hollow Earth

Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre
translated by Jon E. Graham. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2008. 172 pages, paper, $14.95.

The Archeometer: Key to All the Religions and Sciences of Antiquity; Synthetic Reformation of All Contemporary Arts by the Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, translated by Ariel Godwin. Idyllwild, Calif.: Sacred Sciences Institute, 2008. xxxvi + 422 pages, hardcover, $300.

The Marquis (Joseph) Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842–1909) was not the most peculiar figure to emerge out of the French occult revival of the late nineteenth century, but he was among the most influential, largely because he remains one of the first sources for the tantalizing myth of a mystical kingdom hidden away in Central Asia.

The early part of Saint-Yves' life was unremarkable. The son of a doctor, in the course of his education he saw a future role for himself as the Pythagoras of Christendom. If he didn't entirely live up to this grandiose ambition, he went some way toward it, as we shall see. As an adult, he was befriended by a number of prominent occultists, including a friend of Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, author of the occult classic The Hebraic Tongue Restored (from which Saint-Yves was later accused of plagiarizing), and the son of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist and mystical adept. After a marriage to a wealthy noblewoman, Saint-Yves lived in high style in Paris and Versailles, although his desire to be accepted by the gruelingly snobbish French nobility was never fulfilled: his title, purchased from the papacy, did not in their eyes make him a genuine marquis.

In the 1880s, Saint-Yves published a number of works addressed both to occultists and to the world at large, propounding an esoteric view of what was wrong with the world and what was needed to set it right. The most ambitious of these, La mission des juifs ("The Mission of the Jews"), a 900-page secret history of the world published in 1884, has never been translated into English.

The next year, Saint-Yves took up the study of Sanskrit with one Hardji Scharipf, an individual of unknown (probably Afghan) origins who also styled himself "the Teacher and Professor H. S. Bagwandass of the Great Agartthian School." Saint-Yves pressed his teacher for more information about this school and was given to understand that Agarttha (the name is supposedly Sanskrit for "inaccessible to violence") was a secret, subterranean kingdom that was still flourishing somewhere in Central Asia.

In 1886, Saint-Yves published a book, Mission de l'Inde ("Mission of India"), which revealed his findings about this hidden kingdom: "In Asia alone there are a half a billion people who are more or less aware of its existence and its greatness—not to mention America, whose subterranean regions belonged to Agarttha in very remote antiquity." Saint-Yves foresaw that "certain powers, in their competition with each other across the whole of Asia" (i.e., Britain and Russia) would stumble upon this kingdom, but if they attempted to invade it, "every conquering army, even if it consisted of a million men, would see a repetition of the thundering response of the Temple of Delphi to the countless hordes sent by the Persian satraps."

As even these short quotes suggest, Saint-Yves' language is thunderous and bombastic and is likely to ring hollow to the reader of today. In any case, Saint-Yves had a mission to proclaim. The message of Agarttha was embodied in its system of government and, indeed, in the philosophy upon which the whole nation was supposedly based: a doctrine that Saint-Yves called "Synarchy" and which he claimed was Europe's only hope in order to avoid annihilation. By Synarchy he meant a unified government, both sacred and secular, that would include a "Sovereign Pontiff" who would "respect all that exists, give it his blessing, unite it in the same spirit of tolerance, and gather together all the teaching bodies at last reunited, in one bundle of Light, Wisdom, and Authority." The idea of Synarchy would later influence Rudolf Steiner, who would call for a "threefold social order" encompassing economy, politics, and culture, as well as some quasi-fascistic movements in twentieth-century Europe that were far from Saint-Yves' original vision.

After publishing Mission de l'Inde, Saint-Yves thought better of the matter and immediately withdrew the book from publication. As Joscelyn Godwin points out in his extremely valuable introduction, this was largely due to humiliation at being unfavorably depicted in a roman à clef written by his former lover, an opera singer, that appeared at the same time. As a result, Mission de l'Inde reached the public only after Saint-Yves' death in 1909. The Kingdom of Agarttha is the first version to appear in English.

But the idea of Agarttha did not die with Saint-Yves. It resurfaced in the 1920s, when Ferdinand Ossendowski, a Pole who had served in the White army during the Russian Civil War, published a highly successful memoir entitled Beasts, Men, and Gods that recounted his escape through Central Asia after the Whites' defeat. Ossendowski said that during his travels he heard legends of a figure called "the Lord of the World," the secret head of humanity, who was headquartered in a mystical kingdom called Agartthi. Scoffers claimed that Ossendowski had stolen the idea from Saint-Yves, but others, including the celebrated esotericist René Guénon, took Ossendowski at his word. Guénon wrote a monograph called The Lord of the World which upheld the claims of both Saint-Yves and Ossendowski.

Of course Agarttha is not the only hidden kingdom said to exist in Central Asia. There are Russian tales of a mystical country called Byelovodye ("Land of the White Waters") in the Altai Mountains. But the most famous legend of this kind is the Tibetan Shambhala, which the Dalai Lama has described as "a pure land which, except for those whose karma and merit have ripened, cannot be immediately seen or visited." It's hard to avoid seeing some connection between the Agarttha of Saint-Yves and the Tibetan Shambhala. As Godwin notes, some, probably most, esotericists have identified the two.

There's more to this rich and haunting saga than I can describe in a review, but Godwin's deft introduction to The Kingdom of Agarttha gives a clear picture. Nevertheless, if you haven't read much about the subject, this book is not the best place to start. A better introduction is Godwin's own Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, which is the most fascinating and far-reaching work to cover this topic, dealing not only with Saint-Yves and Agarttha but with various hollow earth theories and the weird Welteislehre ("world ice doctrine"), favored by the Nazis, which taught that originally the earth had been encased in ice.

Another teaching that Hardji Scharipf passed on to Saint-Yves was that of Vattan or Vattanian (sometimes spelled "Watan"; Saint-Yves also calls it "Adamic"), an otherwise unknown primordial tongue that shows some affinities with Senzar, a similarly mysterious language mentioned by H.P. Blavatsky. Saint-Yves recorded the Vattanian alphabet and claimed that it was the ancestor of both the Hebrew and the Sanskrit devanagari alphabets.

Saint-Yves deals with Vattan and similar subjects in another posthumous work, The Archeometer, which has also recently been translated into English for the first time. "Archeometer" sounds like the name for a device, and that is what it is. Dubbed by Saint-Yves as a "synthetic protractor of the higher studies," it is a colored wheel inscribed with a twelve-pointed star, inside of which are several other circles centering around a nine-pointed star. Supposedly integrating the symbols of the colors, planets, musical notes, and the letters of various alphabets (including Vattan), the Archeometer is "all at once the key to musician's sonometric scale, the painter's range of colors, and the architect's forms," according to Saint-Yves.

As a book, The Archeometer is vast, sprawling, and often incomprehensible, left unfinished by Saint-Yves at his death and imperfectly edited by a number of his pupils, including the French occultist Papus (Gérard Encausse). It not only describes the Archeometer as a tool but claims to trace the history of religion back to its roots. Unfortunately, as a synthesis of sacred science or indeed of anything, the Archeometer is disappointingly opaque. Godwin, whose son Ariel translated this text, sums up the situation thus: "I doubt that there is anyone today—even that there ever was anyone‑who shares the opinion of Saint-Yves: that the Archeometer is the result of the true, primordial wisdom of mankind...familiar to Moses and Jesus, but since preserved solely in the universities of the Brahmins, their very existence unsuspected to this day."

Despite these flaws, it's interesting at last to see The Archeometer, which, like many corners of the rich world of French occultism, has been hidden from the English-speaking world for so long. Nonetheless, this work is likely to be of interest chiefly to specialists and aficionados of the arcane (and, at $300 per copy, rich ones at that).

Finally, what of Saint-Yves' relations with Blavatsky? Despite the obvious resemblances, the two don't seem to have any real connection. In The Secret Doctrine (I, 471), Blavatsky labels Saint-Yves as a "French pseudo-Occultist," deriding his idea, expressed in La mission des juifs, that the Kali Yuga was a Golden Age and not, as most would have it, an age of darkness. Moreoever, in an early issue of the Theosophical journal Lucifer, an anonymous review (attributed to HPB) of a work by Papus contends that Saint-Yves is wrong in the degree of importance he attributes to the Jews in esoteric history (Blavatsky, Collected Writings, IX, 46). There is also the occasional contemptuous reference to Theosophy in The Archeometer. The upshot would seem to be that neither Blavatsky nor Saint-Yves owed much to the other and that neither one held the other in particularly high regard. But then the history of esotericism is rarely one of concord.

Richard Smoley