Sounds as if the Spiritualist movement had more than its fair share of colorful characters.
One of my favorites is the Publick Universal Friend, a spirit channeler who became the nation’s first female religious leader in 1776. She was a young woman named Jemima Wilkinson who grew up on a prosperous Quaker farm in Cumberland, Rhode Island. In the early 1770s, when Jemima entered her twenties, she converted to a fervent form of Baptism spread by the religious revival movement called the Great Awakening. By October 1776, when Jemima was twenty-four years old, she was struck with typhus fever and fell sick to her bed. After days of Jemima slipping in and out of a coma, her family wrote her off as dead. But one day she leaped from her bed—still skinny from her fever but her cheeks flushed with redness—and announced to her shocked household that the girl they had known as Jemima was now indeed dead, but the figure standing before them was reanimated by a spirit from the afterlife—and would answer only to the name Publick Universal Friend.
The Publick Universal Friend began preaching and delivering sermons around New England, upstate New York, and down to Philadelphia. Her topics were usually very tame, ranging from the ethics of neighborly love to the virtue of punctuality.
You have now mentioned two very public female religious leaders. Was there a unique presence of women on the occult scene in America?
Actually, Spiritualism provided an enormous outlet for women in the nineteenth century. In some ways, it was the first modern movement in which women could openly serve as religious leaders, at least of a sort. Most of the prominent trance mediums in the mid-nineteenth century were women. The mental-healing movement also had a number of significant female leaders and personalities. These movements provided an opening for women who wanted to participate in civic or religious culture. And both of these religious cultures helped seed the suffragette or voting-rights movement. In the mid-nineteenth century you could not find a suffragette activist who hadn’t spent at least some time at the séance table. This is one of several ways in which esoteric religion and progressive politics grew up hand in hand in America.
TLS is all about books, the prime source for “The Word” Peter Solomon lives and what Robert Langdon searches for. One book that Dan Brown singles out as being influential on his thinking is Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Who was the author of this mysterious book?
Manly P. Hall was a self-educated scholar of esoteric religion and symbolism. He came from very ordinary beginnings in rural Canada, where he was born in 1901 to a couple who quickly divorced. Hall was raised by his grandmother in the American West and had little formal education. But his grandmother cultivated his interests in religion and history through trips to museums in Chicago and New York. The really remarkable aspect of Hall’s life is that this precocious young man published in 1928 a magisterial encyclopedia of occult philosophy—The Secret Teachings of All Ages—when he was just twenty-seven years old. Dan Brown said in a recent television interview that the book was a key resource for him while researching The Lost Symbol and that it shaped many of his own attitudes about esoteric religion and symbolism.
As a book, The Secret Teachings of All Ages is almost impossible to classify. It is written and compiled on an Alexandrian scale and its entries shine a rare light on some of the most fascinating and little-understood aspects of myth, religion, and philosophy. It covers Pythagorean mathematics, alchemical formulae, Hermetic doctrine, the workings of Kabbalah, the geometry of ancient Egyptian monuments, Native American myths, the uses of cryptograms, an analysis of the Tarot, the symbols of Rosicrucianism, the esotericism of the Shakespearean dramas—these are just a few of Hall’s topics.
The source of Hall’s knowledge and the extent of his virtuosity at so young an age can justly be called a mystery. In terms of his motives, Hall saw the very act of writing and self-publishing The Secret Teachings of All Ages as an attempt at formulating an ethical response to the materialism that he felt was rampant in America in the 1920s.
The book stands up surprisingly well in the twenty-first century. While its entries are at times speculative, it remains the only codex to esoteric ideas that treats its subject with total seriousness. Other works, such as The Golden Bough, regarded indigenous religious traditions as superstition or as interesting museum pieces, worthy of anthropological study but of no direct relevance to our current lives. Hall, on the other hand, felt himself on a mission to reestablish a living connection to the mystery traditions.
In Occult America you discuss in some detail “Mystic Americans” and “The Science of Right Thinking.” Is today’s New Age movement a natural outgrowth of such ideas? What do they have in common? How do they differ?
As noted earlier, the culture of therapeutic and self-help spirituality that permeates America today grew out of the mental-healing movement pioneered by American mystics in the mid-nineteenth century. Starting around the 1840s, a fascinating range of religious innovators in New England began experimenting with a wide array of occult and esoteric ideas. In particular, they were interested in Mesmerism (or what we now call hypnotism), in the mystical ideas of philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, and in the writings of the Transcendentalists. They combined these thought currents with their own inner experiences to create a philosophy of mental healing, or mind power. They believed that the mind was causative and could shape outer events. Some went so far as to suggest that the subconscious was the same as the creative power called God.
This philosophy branched off into several directions. In the mind of Mary Baker Eddy, it emerged as the new religion of Christian Science. In the hands of a wide range of American mystics, it became known by such names as New Thought, Science of Mind, and the Science of Right Thinking, to cite a few. By the early twentieth century, this positive-thinking philosophy had spread across the nation and formed the basis for the most influential self-help books of all time, such as Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. It ignited a belief across the American spiritual scene that religion should not only be a force for salvation but also a force for healing and self-improvement. Today, Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs expect religion to provide practical help in facing the difficulties of daily life, such as addiction, relationship issues, financial problems, and the search for happiness. In a sense, this is the American religion. And it is rooted directly in the ideals of American mystics and religious experimenters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Chapter Five
Man Meets God, and God Meets Man
What’s Been Lost and What Needs to Be Found in Our Times
an interview with Rabbi Irwin Kula
Irwin Kula is one of America’s most deep-thinking and thought-provoking rabbis. Kula has inspired millions worldwide by using Jewish wisdom to speak to all aspects of modern life and relationships. A self-described “trader in the global marketplace of ideas,” he has led a Passover seder in Bhutan; consulted with government officials in Rwanda; and met with leaders as diverse as the Dalai Lama and Queen Noor to discuss compassionate leadership. Secrets of the Lost Symbol coeditor Dan Burstein interviewed Rabbi Kula about the range of ideas, meanings, and interpretations of TLS.
You’ve just finished reading The Lost Symbol. Your overall reaction?
It’s The Da Vinci Code but set in Washington, D.C. It’s a lot of fun. It takes three days to read, and you can’t put it down. In that respect, it’s wonderful. On a more serious level, Dan Brown captures the Zeitgeist of what is happening in religion in the West. We’re moving from what might be called exoteric toward more esoteric traditions . . . from an emphasis on external belief, dogma, creed, and tribal belonging–type religion to a more esoteric focusing on inner development, the cultivating of awareness, and the-raising-of-the-consciousness type of religion. Brown captures this movement in society’s thinking perfectly in The Lost Symbol.
The two most important recent studies on American religious identity, the American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS), which came out in the spring of 2009 (now in its thirtieth year), and the Pew Study concur: all mainstream religions—that means nonfundamentalist Judaism and Christianity, basically all nonevangelical, nonfundamentalist forms of religious belief, including Catholicism—are weakening dramatically in America. In Europe it’s already largely over for these religions. When we add the projected effects of generational change as Gen X, Y, and the Millennials come to dominate the culture, we are going to see a massive hemorrhaging of followers of these liberal forms of organized religion. What will replace it? A menu of wisdom and practices that can work across all boundaries, chosen from the religious and spiritual stew that already very much exists. I call this emerging cohort “mixers, blenders, seekers, and switchers.” Curiously, someone like Karen Armstrong is making much the same case as Dan Brown in her new book, The Case for God.
On a visit to the National Cathedral, which itself plays an important role in the plot of The Lost Symbol, I noticed that Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God was selling in a big display in the bookstore right next to a big display for The Lost Symbol.
In some surprising ways, they are really the “same” book. Armstrong’s book is unbelievably erudite and Dan Brown’s is quite obviously a work of pop fiction. But they are the same in that they both are making the claim that there is a deeper, more important truth than the simple surface read which claims that all that exists is material reality. They are also both implying and claiming that conventional religion is not working to get the job done that people need. Both books are inviting their readers to explore the more profound ideas and esoteric strands in religious traditions.
Let’s talk about the Akedah—the story of Abraham and Isaac—and Dan Brown’s use of that motif, which runs really from the very first moments of the book to the end. Tell us about the traditional biblical account, as well as your personal thoughts on how this story has been told in Jewish history.
I read the traditional Bible account as a terrifying story. At the end of a long relationship between Abraham and God that has spanned close to twenty chapters of Genesis and a lifetime of seeking, journeying, promises, disappointments, wanderings, and a complex but purposeful direction in Abraham’s life, God orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the very embodiment of the promise of his future. This is a horrifying thought, and yet there is complete silence in the text from Abraham. At the very last moment, with the knife in Abraham’s hand as he is about to slaughter Isaac, an angel intervenes and says, “Stop, Abraham, I now know your full commitment to God. You’re not afraid to give everything.” And thus Isaac, and Abraham, get a reprieve.
This is, of course, the paradox of faith as a movement between sacrifice, death, and rebirth, which figures prominently in The Lost Symbol: you have to die to be able to be reborn. What does it mean to surrender so completely, as Abraham did, that one can feel and experience the depth of that alignment, that oneness and deep connection—the moth burning in the flame?
Now, the story has had every possible interpretation, from ancient times to today. There is a medieval Midrash—a commentary—that suggests Abraham actually did kill Isaac and that Isaac was resurrected. The great Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote one of his most important books on this subject—Fear and Trembling—in which he offered the argument that this is a great moment of faith that necessitates “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” In other words, Abraham’s intent to obey God’s commandments and to submit himself to the eternal plan is considered sufficient justification to sacrifice Isaac, since it is “transethical.” At the other end of the continuum, you have Woody Allen making a claim that Abraham was a madman, crazy to listen to the commandment from God to sacrifice his own son. This last interpretation, a particularly modern one, is repeated in the recent Harold Ramis movie, Year One.
In any event, on an important level this is a powerful, primal story about the relationship between fathers and sons, and the incredible complexity of that most basic relationship. When I read this story it is almost as if Abraham is our father and God saves us from our crazy father. But then who saves us from our crazy God? So the story is not just about saving a child from a father, but saving both from what I call a kind of parental narcissism. The Lost Symbol is picking up on that at a pretty significant level.
But isn’t the focus in The Lost Symbol on the son’s narcissism—in other words, Mal’akh’s extreme narcissism, not Peter’s?
Remember, this kid Mal’akh, who appears to be evil incarnate, is, of course, produced by Peter. We, the readers, experience Peter as this noble guy. And, yes, he is noble, but he is also flawed. Mal’akh is very much the product of Peter, “the narcissistic parent,” the parent who decided to leave his son in jail to teach him a lesson.
What’s so crazy in this book is that in some weird way, the Mal’akh character does understand the dethroning of self that is at the core of the Akedah story and at the core of a spiritual experience. He understands this at a much, much deeper level than Peter, who is a perfectly-in-control-of-everything self. Peter has his hand cut off and yet we don’t ever see him out of control. He is in control of his sister and he is in control of politicians and he is in control of a massive house and the Masons and the big secret. He’s in control of everything. He is the ultimate egocentric character. Now, just because you’re egocentric doesn’t mean you have to be a bad person. And Peter is not a bad person. But he is a control freak who has done great damage to his son. He is directly responsible for creating Mal’akh. But what Mal’akh understands is Spirituality 101—the dethroning of self so that one can be in the flow, that one can be at once in a state that doesn’t even need a “with” in that sentence, just that one could be One. Mal’akh gets that in his perverse way. But Peter, the man with the secret, the moral paragon, doesn’t. Peter is not an egomaniac, but he is the ultimate example of the separate self. He is generally a very moral guy. He wants to build a better world. But he’s the least spiritual character in the book. Katherine is much more spiritual than Peter.
How do you read the choice Peter offers his son between “wealth and wisdom,” between family money and knowledge of the secrets of the Freemasons that Peter is privy to?
I think that’s a very Christian kind of allegory. If you are Jewish, the choice between wealth and wisdom is not as stark. We don’t have the same sort of split between the material and the spiritual. Just look at King Solomon as an archetype. Who is the fountain of wisdom in the Bible? It’s Solomon. But who is the wealthiest person in the entire biblical tradition? That’s Solomon, too. And who has the most wives? Solomon. I believe that, while there is no necessary connection between wealth and wisdom, there’s also no necessary, inherent conflict between the two.
Any of us who work with children from wealthy families understand this problem. The average reader is naturally going to identify more with Peter than with the mad, demonic son. But Peter has his share of responsibility for creating the conditions that led his son in this direction. If one steps back from the narrative, it’s a very sinister story about the relationship between parent and child. And it’s not the good parent versus the evil child, as it first appears. It’s much more complicated. In some respects, this is the attempt of the child to actually redeem the father from being a narcissistic, controlling parent.
Speaking of the character Mal’akh, what about his name? It obviously connotes both Melech, the Hebrew word for king (as in King Solomon), as well as Moloch, the evil premonotheistic God of the Canaanites who requires child sacrifice.
I think that by choosing this name, Dan Brown is inviting us to understand that this relationship is more complex. Peter treats his son as a parental possession. There is this sense that his son is filling in one of the holes of his own psyche, rather than existing as a person in his own right. This produces profound
damage. It imprisons a person—and, of course, in this case it winds up with his kid in jail. And Peter never really takes responsibility for this. At the very end of the book he begins to cry a little, but he still doesn’t take responsibility. He writes Zachary off as his own independently troubled person, specifically not the father’s responsibility anymore. Given that Peter is the master of the Mysteries and knows, better than anyone in the book, that everything is completely interdependent, and that there’s nothing independent of the thick, intricate matrix of the cause-and-effect cycle, he should understand his own fundamental connection to Zachary. And yet the ultimate separation in the book, the ultimate lack of connection, is between Peter and his son.
Ironically, the son knows more about the Ancient Mysteries than the father and is more devoted and loyal to them. The son is leading the life demanded by the Ancient Mysteries. That’s the paradox: the son actually knows the wisdom better than the father and is actually practicing at a higher level, although obviously grasping it in a deeply flawed way. The son is more spiritually developed but at a lower, indeed pathological moral level, while the father is at a higher moral level but at a lower spiritual level.
In addition to the paradox of Mal’akh, there are numerous references in TLS to the dangers of the Ancient Mysteries. Over and over, Solomon or Langdon talk about the danger of too much knowledge or power, or of the ancient secrets falling into the wrong hands.
There are three basic systems of religious, spiritual thought out there in the culture right now, and they are all off base in different ways. We’ve got this New Age system that says everything is really pretty and nice and if you just get your thoughts aligned, life will work perfectly. The New Age thought fails to recognize the powerful moral choices we have to make, the terror and burden and sacrifice of a genuine spiritual life. This line of reasoning says we can discount evil, either because it doesn’t exist, is merely an illusion, a projection of our own thoughts, or because it’s not inherently a part of our lives. So it mistakenly separates good and evil, splits them apart and asks us to focus on the good and the positive only.
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 17
