OCCULT AMERICA by Mitch Horowitz

by Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation (Bantam hardcover 2009, Bantam trade paperback October 2010).

Discussions about the occult tend to stir passions, which is natural because we’ve been raised to regard occult spirituality as something diabolical or just strange. I argue in Occult America that mystical and supernatural-themed religions are communities of belief and should be understood as a vital part of America’s religious development – indeed we can’t really understand our religious past (and present) without coming to terms with them.  They have exerted a remarkable influence on mainstream life.

To reply to Juan Oskar’s good question about feudalism and the European church, there were, of course, tendencies in Europe that attempted to modify or overturn hierarchical religious structures. Radical movements emerged from the Reformation – such as German Pietism (a Protestant mystical movement) and Rosicrucianism, an early-seventeenth century ecumenical and occult philosophy. The rise of Freemasonry, which became a public force in the early eighteenth century, can also be seen as part of this trend. Masonry, like Rosicrucianism, advocated early forms of religious toleration and liberty, and honored the individual spiritual search.

In Occult America, I argue that these movements attained their greatest influence in America, where they helped ignite a culture of religious experimentation. This began in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, long before the Constitution was codified. So, European and early American movements were both on the move against feudalistic styles of religion. I think their greatest success was attained in the U.S., which developed a remarkably diverse religious culture even in its colonial period. 

To the comments under “The Way I See It,” I would note that there is nothing evil or diabolical in occult practices. Renaissance scholars applied the term “occult,” or hidden, to ancient Egyptian-Hellenic religious ideas that began to reemerge in the fifteenth century. In the Renaissance mind, occult spirituality encompassed pre-Christian religious practices (ranging from astrology to alchemy to spirit mediumship). These rites and methods became unmoored from any church, temple, or priesthood as the religious orders of the ancient world faded. They reappeared as a kind of unchurched spirituality during the Renaissance renewal of Europe.

In antiquity, as in modern times, their acolytes never saw themselves as having anything to do with black magic or Satanism. Those terms were epithets that early Church Fathers directed at the fading pagan powers as the church ascended in late antiquity. Misdirected charges of Satanism sometimes also arise from a modern misunderstanding of African-influenced religious traditions, such as Voodoo, Santeria, and hoodoo. In essence, no real tradition of Satanism has ever existed in the West – other than in the form of stories and historical hearsay.

I very much admire (and share) your urging that the individual should search “the yearning…written in our hearts.” But I would note to you and the commenter who immediately follows that when we ask someone to search his or her heart, we must be willing to let that search go beyond our own footsteps. “Truth,” as Jiddu Krishnamurti put it, “is a pathless land.”

Finally, in reply to G’s comments: I view the New Age movement as a very relevant and meaningful spiritual culture on its own in American life; it is also an unacknowledged influence on mainstream religion. The point I make in the piece is that the earlier occult subcultures, which morphed into the New Age, have reshaped America’s traditional faiths as vehicles that must respond to the day-to-day needs of the individual (as well as to higher or salvational yearnings). In general, I see this as a positive development. As I write in the piece, esoteric and alternative religious movements today are rightly viewed “not as oddball trends but as forces that reflected a serious and widespread search for meaning.”

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A widely known writer and speaker on the history and impact of alternative spirituality, Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and the author of Occult America (Bantam 2009/2010), which The Washington Post Book World called: “Fascinating…a serious, wide-ranging study of all the magical, mystical, and spiritual movements that have arisen and influenced American history in often-surprising ways.”   Horowitz has written for U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, Parabola, and BoingBoing. He has recently appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, and All Things Considered. You can visit him online at www.MitchHorowitz.com

THE GRAND DESIGN by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, authors of The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010)

According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots.

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason—with a good dose of intuition—to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test—in other words, modern science.

Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” He meant that, unlike our homes on a bad day, the universe is not just a conglomeration of objects each going its own way. Everything in the universe follows laws, without exception.
 
Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not “arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature.” Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was “created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition.” The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.

Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth’s human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. But today we know of hundreds of other solar systems, and few doubt that there exist countless more among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Planets of all sorts exist, and obviously, when the beings on a planet that supports life examine the world around them, they are bound to find that their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist.

The Hubble Space Telescope snaps new images of the oldest galaxies ever seen. A senior scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explains to WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz and Simon Constable how he did it-and what it means.
It is possible to turn that last statement into a scientific principle: The fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. For example, if we did not know the distance from the Earth to the sun, the fact that beings like us exist would allow us to put bounds on how small or great the Earth-sun separation could be. We need liquid water to exist, and if the Earth were too close, it would all boil off; if it were too far, it would freeze. That principle is called the “weak” anthropic principle.

The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints, not just on our environment, but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves.

The idea arose because it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life, but also the characteristics of our entire universe—and its laws. They appear to have a design that is both tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is much more difficult to explain.
 
The tale of how the primordial universe of hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium evolved to a universe harboring at least one world with intelligent life like us is a tale of many chapters. The forces of nature had to be such that heavier elements—especially carbon—could be produced from the primordial elements, and remain stable for at least billions of years. Those heavy elements were formed in the furnaces we call stars, so the forces first had to allow stars and galaxies to form. Those in turn grew from the seeds of tiny inhomogeneities in the early universe.

Even all that is not enough: The dynamics of the stars had to be such that some would eventually explode, precisely in a way that could disperse the heavier elements through space. In addition, the laws of nature had to dictate that those remnants could recondense into a new generation of stars, these surrounded by planets incorporating the newly formed heavy elements.

By examining the model universes we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5% in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4% in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2% heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms.

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.

The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed “in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design.”

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.

Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

Excerpted from The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

Stephen Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including, most recently, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His books for the general reader include the classic A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, and A Briefer History of Time. He lives in Cambridge, England.

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist at Caltech and the bestselling author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, and Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life. He also wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation. He lives in South Pasadena, California.

OCCULT AMERICA by Mitch Horowitz

by Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation (Bantam hardcover 2009, Bantam trade paperback October 2010).

In 1970, philosopher Jacob Needleman opened a new discussion about religion in America. His book The New Religions was one of the first scholarly works to consider esoteric and alternative religious movements not as oddball trends but as forces that reflected a serious and widespread search for meaning among young Americans.

A generation later, this discussion has been expanded by a broad range of mainstream religious scholars – from Catherine Albanese to Jeffrey J. Kripal to Ann Braude – who are transforming how we understand the nation’s alternative religious culture.  New Age or metaphysical movements are no longer viewed within academia as fringe oddities but as crucial aspects of our religious history. This line of study should be encouraged. Without it, we cannot fully understand the nature of America’s religious life.

In my book Occult America, I enter this discussion by arguing that the nation’s occult and esoteric religious movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries shaped today’s culture of therapeutic spirituality, and helped spread widely held liberal attitudes about religion.

First a definition: I use “occult” to describe religious or spiritual systems that believe in an unseen world whose forces act upon us and through us. This hidden world, it is believed, can be tapped for personal insight and practical help. Think of channeling, séances, astrology, numerology, and the type of mind-power mysticism popularized in The Secret. Of course, these things also exist within mainline faiths. But practices such as spirit channeling, divination, or mind-power metaphysics are traditionally considered occult or supernatural when pursued outside the parameters of established churches and congregations.  

Early American history is entwined with this kind of esoteric spirituality. North America’s first intentional mystical community reached its shores in the summer of 1694. That year, the determined spiritual philosopher Johannes Kelpius led about forty pilgrims out of Central Germany – a region decimated by the Thirty Years’ War – and to the banks of the Wissahickon Creek, just beyond Philadelphia. The city then hosted only about 500 houses, but it represented a Mecca of freedom for the Kelpius circle, who longed for a new homeland where they could practice their brands of astrology, alchemy, numerology, and mystical Christianity without fear of harassment from church or government.

Soon more mystical thinkers from the Rhine Valley journeyed to America, building a larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. A young woman named Ann Lee fled persecution in her native Manchester, England and relocated her esoteric sect, the “Shaking Quakers” – or the Shakers – to upstate New York in 1776. That same year, a Rhode Island girl, Jemima Wilkinson, declared herself a spirit channeler, took the name Publick Universal Friend, and began to preach across the northeast. The trend was set: America became a destination for religious idealists, especially those of a supernatural bent.

By the 1830s and 40s, a region of central New York State called “the Burned-Over District” (so-named for its religious passions) became the magnetic center for the religious radicalism sweeping the young nation. Stretching from Albany to Buffalo, it was the Mt. Sinai of American mysticism, giving birth to new religions such as Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism, and also to Spiritualism, mediumship, table-rapping, séances, and other occult sensations – many of which mirrored, and aided, the rise of suffragism and early progressive movements.

Spiritualism possessed a surprising culture of egalitarianism and social activism. The movement attracted the interest and participation of social reformers because, among other things, it provided one of the first settings in modern life in which women could serve as religious leaders, at least of a certain sort. Most spirit mediums were women – and the social opening that Spiritualism provided attracted a generation of suffragists. “Spiritualism,” announced the voting-rights pioneer Mary Fenn Love, “has inaugurated the era of woman.” The nation’s social and spiritual radicals were becoming joined, and the partnership would never fade.

In the 1840s, American mystical movements were also developing the first stirrings of a therapeutic or healing-based spirituality. One of the most important of these was the “mental healing” movement that emerged in New England.  By mid-century, a Maine clockmaker named Phineas Quimby, partly acting on his own ideas and partly though the influences of Swedenborgian philosophy and Mesmerism, began experimenting with how people’s moods could influence their physical wellbeing. He codified his system into a set of cosmic laws – or a “Christian science,” a term adopted by his most influential student, Mary Baker Eddy.

Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, Spiritualism also developed a healing spirituality, though more of a psychological sort. In an age of high rates of childhood mortality, grieving families rarely had anywhere to turn to relieve their suffering. Calvinist Protestantism offered nothing in the way of pastoral counseling. Hence, many people sought solace at the séance table. The letters and diaries of the era attest to educated people experiencing some of the most moving episodes of their lives with hands joined around a darkened séance circle. Those who believed in the reality of contact often testified to having an experience of catharsis. The earliest stirrings of a therapeutic spirituality appear in both mental-healing and Spiritualism.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, mediums and mind-cure practitioners were applying their supernatural principles to other areas of life. The mind-power, or positive thinking, movement that grew out of Quimby’s experiments seemed to hold the answer to economic anxiety and the urge for upward mobility. To a nation tempted by mass-produced goods, and possessed of a bootstrap mentality, a mental approach to success felt intuitively right.  This became the template for the leading self-help philosophies of the twentieth century from Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, and finally, in our own time, to the mega-selling book and movie The Secret.

In the mid-twentieth century, the new spiritual therapies – from meditation to motivational thinking – began revolutionizing how religion was understood: not only as a source of salvation but as a means of healing. This laid the groundwork for the culture of self-help spirituality often associated with the New Age. Indeed, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, there no longer existed any easily discerned “occult” or “Eastern” or “yogic” subculture; rather, America experienced the rise of a vast metaphysical culture that appeared ever-expanding, ever accommodating, and perpetually read to adapt to an individual’s needs. As seen through the success of Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, concepts that had once seemed magical could easily be recast in language with which the church-going public was comfortable. Hence, the spiritual avant-garde entered the mainstream.

As I write near the end of Occult America, religious Americans in the early twenty-first century shared, to a greater or lesser extent, these traits:

1. Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas.

2. Belief in a mind–body connection in health.

3. Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages.

4. Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality.

5. Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine.

To a very great degree, these ideas, in their most popular form, entered our culture through occult personas and groups, only a few of which I’ve noted here. These concepts were once the domain of America’s occult and alternative spiritual movements – and today are found across the religious landscape. In this sense, “occult America” had changed our world.   

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A widely known writer and speaker on the history and impact of alternative spirituality, Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and the author of Occult America (Bantam 2009/2010), which The Washington Post Book World called: “Fascinating…a serious, wide-ranging study of all the magical, mystical, and spiritual movements that have arisen and influenced American history in often-surprising ways.”   Horowitz has written for U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, Parabola, and BoingBoing. He has recently appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, and All Things Considered. You can visit him online at www.MitchHorowitz.com

LOST TO THE WEST by Lars Brownworth

by Lars Brownworth, author of  Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization (Crown, 2009).

There are few words as controversial—or as misunderstood—as ‘crusade’.  Those who doubt that need only remember nine years ago when President George W. Bush casually used it to describe the War on Terror.  The ensuing firestorm caused frantic verbal backpedaling, and resulted in the President spending the next seven years repeatedly explaining that he was not waging a war against Islam. 

Yet for all the disbelief and outrage, most people today know only a few basic ‘facts’ about the Crusades.  They are largely regarded as an exercise in hypocrisy, an unprovoked assault into the Middle East by an expansionist West.  Goaded on by the Pope, the knights of Europe sewed crosses onto their shirts and smashed their way into Jerusalem, committing horrendous atrocities in the name of a supposedly peaceful religion.  The shocking events traumatized the Islamic world, poisoning relations and leading many Muslims to conclude that the West—and Christianity in particular—was out to destroy them.  The chance for peaceful co-existence was lost, and it has been war ever since. 

Like so many popularly accepted storylines, this one depends on a short view of history.  The Crusades were indeed filled with atrocities on both sides, and Christians did indeed seize Jerusalem from its Muslim masters, but Christendom’s contact with Islam goes back much further than the eleventh century.  It began in the year 628 when Muhammad allegedly sent a letter to the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Emperor Heraclius inviting him to convert to Islam or face the consequences.  If he did indeed get such a letter, the emperor is not likely to have paid any attention.  The Arabs had never been remotely threatening in the past, and he was preoccupied with a bruising war against Persia.  Muhammad, however, was no fleeting Arab strongman.  He united the squabbling tribes of Arabia and inspired them with a new vision of a world divided between those who had submitted to Islam (Dar al-Islam) and those who had yet to be conquered (Dar al-Harb).  Prevented from fighting each other, they spilled outward in the first great wave of jihad.

Six years after Heraclius had supposedly disregarded Muhammad’s letter, the Muslims reached imperial territory and Syria and most of Palestine fell in rapid succession.  When the Byzantine army tried to reclaim its lost provinces they were lured into the desert and massacred.  Land that had been Roman for centuries now found itself part of the Caliphate and was used as a springboard for further attacks.  Then in 637 the greatest blow fell.  Christendom’s holiest city Jerusalem, which had managed to hold out for four months, surrendered to the advancing Islamic army. 

The loss profoundly shocked the Byzantines, and they continued to fall back before the onslaught.  Within half a century Muslim armies had taken the rest of Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa.  At one end of the Mediterranean they had crossed over into Spain, and at the other they were beneath the walls of Constantinople itself poised to obliterate the Christian Empire.  Thanks to a secret weapon called ‘Greek Fire’ and a resourceful Syrian shepherd named Konon, the city was saved, but its days of greatness seemed over. 

For the next three centuries, however, Byzantium stubbornly clawed its way back.  By 976 two of their emperors had marched down the Levantine coast, and nearly managed to re-conquer Jerusalem.  Unfortunately for the empire, both of these soldier-emperors were assassinated before they could complete their work, and the imperial recovery was cut short by the arrival of the Turks.  The Byzantine army was broken in 1071 trying to defend Armenia, and Asia Minor was flooded with Turkish settlers.  Once again lands that had been Christian for nearly a millennium were wrenched from their orbit and absorbed into an expanding Islamic state. 

It took a decade for Byzantium to staunch the bleeding.  Under the deft guidance of an emperor named Alexius, the empire managed to hold the line in Asia Minor, but its armies were too hopelessly shattered to mount a counteroffensive.  Desperate for reliable troops, Alexius took pen in hand and wrote a letter to the Pope asking for a few mercenaries. 

What he got instead was the First Crusade. 

The Crusader’s conduct as they entered Jerusalem made it a black day for their faith, but it was hardly the defining moment in the long conflict between the two religions.  Nor, despite later attempts to cast it as such, was it somehow responsible for Muslim animosity against the West.  That struggle had been flaring for centuries before the first Frenchman knelt on the field of Clermont and swore to liberate Jerusalem.  The Crusades—and the larger conflict that they were part of—can’t truly be understood without first knowing the story of Byzantium.  The continuing tragedy is that here in the West, it remains largely unknown.   

Lars Brownworth, a former high-school history teacher, is the creator of the podcast phenomenon “12 Byzantine Rulers” that iTunes named as one of the “podcasts that define the genre.” Brownworth and his podcast have been profiled in the New York Times, Wired, and USA Today, and were featured on NPR.