Quest Magazine

Radiance from Halcyon: A Utopian Experiment in Religion and Science

Paul Eli Ivey
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
328 pp., paper, $25.

From its beginnings, Theosophy has always been associated with the scientific investigation of the cosmos. The Mahatma Letters specifically state that "modern science is [Theosophists'] best ally" Paul Eli Ivey's historical examination of the Temple of the People in Halcyon, California, in the first part of the twentieth century focuses on the relationship between spirituality and science. It also examines h ow a group of Theosophists chose to live in an intentional community based on Theosophical principles. Under the guidance of the Master Hilarion, as interpreted through Blue Star (Francia A. LaDue) and Red Star (William H. Dower), the Temple of the People developed a utopian community that embraced Theosophy as a way of life and was based on occult principles.

The first half of the book is organized chronologically, detailing the formation of the Temple movement. In 1895, a conflict between the TS leadership in America (under William Q. Judge) and the headquarters in Adyar (led by Henry Steel Olcott and Annie Besant) resulted in most of the American lodges breaking from Adyar and operating independently under the leadership of Judge and then Katherine Tingley. (The current American Section of the Adyar TS is descended from the lodges that remained loyal to Adyar or chose to reaffiliate later on.)

Initially the members of the Syracuse, New York, Lodge joined with the newly independent American lodges. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the members were moving away from this group (by then known as the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, today called the Theosophical Society in America [Pasadena]) and more towards an independent organization, the Temple movement. As part of this process, the members relocated from Syracuse to California, establishing the Temple of the People and the city of Halcyon.

The latter half of the book is more thematic. Focusing on the intersection of art, architecture, and music, these chapters document the way the community members applied Theosophical principles to their artistic endeavors. Yet throughout the whole book there is one reoccurring theme, and that is the way science, particularly medical science, was viewed as connected to spiritual science. Both were employed by the community at its central hospital, the Halcyon Hotel and Sanatorium, overseen by Dower, a licensed medical doctor. The residents of the Temple were convinced that science would demonstrate the Theosophical principles they understood to permeate the universe. As Ivey notes, "To Temple members, scientific investigations would prove the veracity of The Secret Doctrine" As a result, radiation, X-rays, electricity, magnetism, and other "invisible" rays were seen as evidence of the powers of the universe beyond the senses.

This point was stressed when the sanatorium opened and Dower demonstrated his X-ray machines, which allowed attendees to look at the bones in their hands and arms. It was also the basis of a large number of therapies Dower instituted at the sanatorium. By the early 1920s, he was experimenting with a variety of "radiant rays," from standard radiology to the electricitybased therapies developed by Dr. Albert Abrams. In each case Dower's medical practice became the place where people combined rest, nature cures, scientific therapies, and occult principles in order to restore their health.

In terms of the history of Theosophical teachings and the emergence of a larger metaphysical spirituality in America, Ivey pays particular attention to how ideas from other traditions, particularly New Thought and, to a much lesser degree, Christian Science, also become integrated into the teachings of the Temple members. Ivey writes, "New Thought ideas of healing did have a place in Temple theology, and one pamphlet claimed that the Masters, through Helena Blavatsky, inaugurated both Theosophical and New Thought organizations"

Of course all intentional communities have their troubles and conflicts. The Temple of the People was no different. Ivey documents the various challenges and internal struggles among members. Initially the community was organized along socialistic lines, but this plan did not work, and eventually opportunities for private ownership of land and proceeds were devised to keep the community functioning. Similarly, there were conflicts about leadership, messages from the Masters, and the overall direction of the community. In each case compromises were made, directions were changed, or, in some cases, individual members left the community.

The last chapter traces how a few of the children living in the community grew to become world-renowned scientists and engineers. George Russell Harrison taught at various schools, including Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won prestigious awards, and had numerous patents. Russell and Sigurd Varian developed early radar systems that were essential parts of the Allied defense in World War II. For all these figures, the Theosophical principles learned at the Temple were applied practically and became the basis of their successful engineering careers.

Radiance from Halcyon is an excellent historical account of one utopian community that applied practically the principles of Theosophy as they understood them. It gives rich details of both highs and lows in the utopian experiment, all without losing the human dimension that made the community so attractive and enduring. Anyone interested in the history of intentional communities, the history of Theosophy in America, or how one group of people interpreted and implemented Theosophical principles will find Ivey's narrative both thought-provoking and instructive.

John L. Crow

John L. Crow is a Ph.D. candidate in American religious history at Florida State University. Currently he is writing his dissertation, which focuses on how Theosophists lived Theosophy and understood the cosmos and its relationship to their bodies during the early twentieth century.

Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

Bart D. Ehrman
San Francisco: Harper One, 2012. 361 pp., hardcover, $26.99. 

We live in an age of suspicion. Verities that were once universally accepted are now seen as dubious. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than with the issue of the historical Jesus. Gospel truth is no longer seen as true; more and more things about the founder of Christianity seem to come into question all the time. It's not surprising that, as New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman points out in his latest book, Did Jesus Exist?, many now believe that Jesus was a mythical creation.

As Ehrman shows, the impulse to question Jesus's historical existence arose during the late eighteenth century, when certain scholars argued that he was yet another manifestation of the type of a dying and resurrecting god also personified in pagan deities such as Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris. More recently, similar views have gained currency in the film Zeitgeist, popular on the Internet, and in Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy's 1999 book The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God?

As a result, Ehrman says he has been asked over and over again whether Jesus actually lived as a human being. These initially came as a surprise to him: after thirty years as a New Testament scholar, he had come to doubt many things about Jesus, but not his existence. Nevertheless, he discovered a wealth of literature making this argument. He quotes Earl Doherty, one of today's leading proponents of this "mythicist" position, who defines it as follows: "the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition"

Ehrman replies that this view is held by practically no reputable scholars in this field. In fact they almost universally agree that "Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea" He spends the rest of his book showing why.

Ehrman rapidly dismisses some of the most popular mythicist accounts, such as Freke and Gandy's Jesus Mysteries, on the grounds that their "factual errors abound at an embarrassing rate" He gives a partial list of errors in The Jesus Mysteries on pages 28–30; one of the most familiar is the claim that the emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. "No, he did not," Ehrman replies. "He made it a legal religion. It was not made the state religion until the end of the fourth century under Theodosius"

Ehrman devotes most of his book to demolishing claims by better-informed authors, including Earl Doherty, Robert Price, and George A. Wells, who generally manage to avoid elementary mistakes. He devotes individual chapters to examining non-Christian sources for the life of Jesus, to the Gospels as historical sources, and to evidence for Jesus's existence outside the Gospels.

One of the most interesting parts of the book has to do with the claims about dying and rising gods in antiquity, which mythicists argue were the prototypes for the Jesus story. Citing work by scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago, Ehrman points out that evidence for these dying and resurrected gods in antiquity is skimpy or nonexistent: none of these gods both died and was resurrected. To take the most familiar example, the Egyptian god Osiris was murdered and dismembered by his brother Set, and reassembled by his sister and wife Isis. "The key point to stress, however," Ehrman writes, "is that Osiris does not—decidedly does not—return to life. Instead he becomes the powerful ruler of the dead in the underworld"

Ehrman also shows that there are several independent sources for Jesus's existence in the New Testament itself. While the four Gospels do not always agree, this very fact indicates that there are multiple accounts of Jesus's life: they are not a single fictional creation. The earliest writings in the New Testament, the epistles of Paul, also attest to Jesus's physical existence. In many passages (e.g., Gal. 4:4), Paul emphasizes that Jesus lived as a human being and had a human mother. Moreover, Paul says that he personally knows the disciples as well as Jesus's brother James.

Overall Ehrman's attempt to prove that there was such a figure as the historical Jesus is successful. And yet in a sense his book is dissatisfying and disingenuous. Among the core data about Jesus is the assertion that he rose from the dead and was seen by many people afterward. This was a central claim of the "Jesus movement" from the outset; it is as well attested as the less controversial facts that he lived and was crucified. Ehrman admits as much, but he does not quite know what to do with it. If this is a myth (and he suggests that it is not), then all the other supposedly historical details about Jesus may well be myths also. If it is not a myth, what did the disciples see and what did it mean? Was it all just a mass hallucination? Ehrman does not say.

At the beginning of Did Jesus Exist? Ehrman says that his next book will be about "how Jesus became God" In that work he will have to deal with the evidence for the resurrection and its implications. It's unfortunate that we will have to wait for the next installment to find out what he thinks.

Richard Smoley

The Faraway Nearby

Rebecca Solnit 
New York: Viking, 2013. 259 pages, hardcover, $25.95.

Reading sometimes offers a chance to tag along on an author's dark journey of the soul. As you proceed on a descent into the underworld, a straightforward and leisurely path all at once turns serpentine, then braids off into obscurity. You arrive in the midst of a shadowy wood and dismal night, no destination discernible. Panthers and wolves lurk in the gloom. You consider retracing your steps, starting over, but even this course leads to an impasse of doubt. Finally, you arrive at a sea of despair. Yet perseverance furthers. In the case of Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby, the reader is led into a literary labyrinth, only to discover "that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it."

Solnit, an accomplished essayist in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, describes this, her fourteenth book, as a "history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company." She is drawn to reading fairy tales for the "impossible tasks" the heroes must perform. "Enchantment in these stories is the state of being disguised, displaced in an animal's body or another's identity. Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself." Over the course of the book, Solnit's attention roams where it will,through the spacious fields of history, religion, politics, and literature,establishing a compelling tension between these borrowed truths and the direct truth of her own experience as a writer, a daughter, a medical patient, and a traveler in the wider world. Her license is the authority of her prose.

The Faraway Nearby opens with the arrival of a hundred pounds of apricots on the narrator's doorstep, three big boxes of them delivered from a tree in her mother's yard. The mother at this point has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Her children, particularly the daughter-writer, are suffering the all-too-familiar trials of caregiving for an elderly parent, including finding her a new and secure home even as they prepare to sell the old one. "I thought of my mother as a book coming apart," Solnit writes, "pages drifting away, phrases blurring, letters falling off, the page returning to pure white, a book disappearing from the back because the newest memories faded first, and nothing was being added." As if the stress and strain of attending to a failing parent were not enough, Solnit herself receives a cancer diagnosis and he points out the many ways people undermine intimacy and often get tangled up in self-defeating, dysfunctional relationships. The only problem in this argument is that Buddhists are more interested in dissolving or altogether eliminating ego than making it more functional! While Amodeo's sentiment is appealing, he doesn't sufficiently take into account the differences between Eastern meditation and Western psychology. The latter aims to heal or at least improve relations (attachments) between people, while the former seeks to transcend desire through nonattachment. Psychological intimacy brings us closer to satisfying our ego desires,a better marriage, security, forgiveness. Buddhists, on the other hand, have their sights set on transcending life. I agree that meditators should not alienate themselves or avoid others using meditation, but augmenting a Buddhist practice with psychological techniques that emphasize somatic and emotional experience confuses spiritual and psychological paradigms by putting at odds their respective goals. Buddhists use meditation as a means of dissolving the subject-object relationship to experience samadhi, a state of pure awareness. Using this spiritual method, they seek to be liberated from this world of suffering. is suddenly propelled into what she laconically calls "my medical adventure." The collapse of physical health long taken for granted lands her in "the country of the ill."

The turning point in The Faraway Nearby comes with an unexpected invitation to visit Iceland. Yet the narrative takes considerable time in arriving there. Along the way, Solnit leads the reader across a wide range of subjects, including meditations on the nature of storytelling, the virtues of Buddhism, and the calamities now facing polar bears, just to name a few. Those readers who prefer that memoir take a less errant course in achieving its purposes may find these excursions distracting or even irrelevant. I for one did not, and as the author herself points out more than once, when it comes to the task of assaying one's experience, "the route is seldom direct."

Indeed, a kind of subterranean chapter runs across the bottom of the book's pages, requiring the reader at the end to go back to the first page and follow this new thread across each of the book's 259 pages. In both form and function, the essay that unfurls here serves as a poetic reprise of the book's main themes.

As Solnit makes amply clear right from the start, "stories are compasses." Our lives are guided by them, for good or for ill. Not only are happy endings unlikely, there may not be any endings at all, at least none that are clearcut. "Essayists too," she reflects in the book's closing pages, "face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea." Again, some readers might find such open-endedness discomfiting. Others, and I include myself among this lot,take refuge in having a chance to try it all again, to bring the boat about toward open waters, and see what might be in the offing.

John P. O'Grady

John P. O'Grady is the author of Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature and Pilgrims to the Wild (both published by University of Utah Press). He lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York. 

Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History

Richard Smoley
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2013. 230 pp., paper, $12.95.

In the opening chapter of Supernatural, a collection of essays written by Quest editor Richard Smoley over the fifteen years between 1997 and 2012, he recalls a sensation he experienced as a child when listening to his parents and party guests occasionally discuss topics related to the paranormal, such as "Atlantis, UFOs, Edgar Cayce, and other matters that were of great interest to my father"

That sensation was a vast expansion of his sense of scale, in which he was no longer in a living room but rather "surrounded by a vast and limitless space that was both awe-inspiring and somewhat terrifying".

Smoley's late father would no doubt be proud of the erudition and critical acumen his son brings to writing on the "unknown history" of Western esoteric spiritual teachings.

In sixteen pithy chapters, written in a popular, accessible style, Smoley's Supernatural succeeds in not only creating but vitally informing the reader's own sense of "limitless space" that inevitably accompanies the act of questioning received doctrines and ideologies.

In this book, he touches principally on topics concerning the efficacy of prophecy and changes in the ages (e.g., Nostradamus, the Kali Yuga, 2012), the influence of esoteric traditions on civilization (the myth of Atlantis, the significance of Freemasonry, the influence of "hidden masters"), and the relationship between consciousness and its creations, including questions regarding the reality of demons and the effects of what best-selling author Larry Dossey called "toxic prayer"

Smoley likes to lay out what is known or can be known about his topics, put that knowledge in historical, personal, and cultural perspective, separate the grain from the chaff in a process of critical deconstruction of claims and attributions, and then see what remains that may be of value, what lessons we may learn, what morals may be drawn.

In general, Smoley does an excellent job of sketching the outline of his topic or profiling the personalities he describes.

His essay "Masonic Civilization," for example, is probably one of the best short overviews of the origins and development of the Masonic tradition anyone has written in recent years, both linking it to the development of liberal democracies and describing it as a system of spiritual development.

Likewise, his profile of the French Traditionalist René Guénon and his critique of the "reign of quantity" in modern civilization is a wonderful introduction to a philosopher who refused to accept that one's value equates to one's economic worth, and is a highly appropriate contribution in the wake of the economic apocalypse the U.S. and the world experienced in 2008.

There are times, though, when Smoley seems to miss a larger world of discourse that is relevant to his topic, and neglects to mention its implications and significance.

In "Secrets of The Da Vinci Code," for example, Smoley eloquently skewers some of author Dan Brown's assertions to the effect that the Bible was collated by the "pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great" and that Mary Magdalene was descended from the "House of Benjamin".

He also reminds readers who did not see the news years ago in the now-defunct magazine Gnosis (which Smoley edited) that the contemporary "Priory of Sion," which features prominently in Brown's novel, was a post–“World War II French right-wing political organization cloaking itself in the longstanding myths concerning a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and persons who claimed to be their descendants.

Smoley's culminating discussion of the significance of the theme of Mary Magdalene as a harbinger of a resurgent Divine Feminine ends on the bittersweet note that an appreciation of the Divine Feminine may in time "bear fruit in an age of healing, beauty, and wisdom" despite all evidence to the contrary.

It was remarkable, though, that Smoley did not describe or reflect the extraordinarily rich diversity of discussion the Magdalene has inspired in recent years among feminist theologians who aim to use her to reform Christianity itself, and other writers (notably Riane Eisler) who point to the popularity of the idea of a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a harbinger of a new model of partnership in sexual relationships, rather than the dominance of one gender over another.

Surely those examples of the esoteric moving into the mainstream deserved more attention and reflection.

Throughout Supernatural, Smoley applies generous doses of common sense to topics and teachings that have long been made confusing by unprofessional popular writers, or distorted by cult leaders for personal gain. Given that we are now on the very uncertain "other side" of 2012, such an approach to the esoteric tradition is a welcome guide to navigating the deep and rising waters in which we all find ourselves on this beautiful blue planet.

Ed Conroy

Ed Conroy is the author ofReport on "Communion" (Morrow, 1989; Avon, 1990), an investigation of the UFO -related narrative Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber. He serves as director of development for the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas.