Sudden Changes of Method

THE GREAT SCHOOLS
The Egyptians, Essenes, Gnostics, Manicheans, Cabbalists, Neo-Platonists, Primitive Christians and Christian Mystics, Hermetics, Alchemists, Paracelsians and others, and lastly the Rosicrucians, all secret organizations with methods of teaching and training. A few of these continue to exist, observing all the "Ancient Landmarks," remaining true to their original intent and purpose. Many members of thse authentic organizations have advanced far in the attainment of higher powers and spiritual insight, leading toward the goal which is Initiation, an attainment recognized by many as Soul Illumination.

The Secret Schools had their beginning long before there was a written history of the activities of men. In all ages the leaders and members of these Schools were ready to serve the best interests of the people by teaching, leading, and guiding them so that they might receive the greatest possible benefits from life with the least possible sorrow and suffering. History records that only a limited few have been willing to accept the "truth which makes men free." The majority, natively selfish, saw fit to live their lives in ignorance, sometimes in great luxury for a few years; then sorrow, suffering, and the final departure into the "limbo of forgotten things."

The fundamental teachings of the Secret Schools, beginning with the early Egyptian Coptics and pre-Christian Gnostics, have never changed. Each age, however, has demanded a new interpretation and a fresh application of the Law to the needs of individuals and nations, and, at times, sudden changes of method.
- R. Swinburne Clymer, The Rosicrucians and their Teachings (1941)

My (sadly metaphorical) travels with Robert Dodsley's Oeconomy of Human Life--the book I alluded to in my last post—-introduced me to another unexpected group of people: the American Rosicrucians. Now, like many people, I have read Illuminatus! and was not entirely unprepared for the alphabet soup and bizarre genealogies that awaited me as I dug into this little world. What I didn't expect just how accurate Illuminatus! was about them.

The story, of course, starts with Freemasonry. Marxists like to argue that Freemasons represented the rising bourgeoisie's attempt to manufacture a legitimizing narrative for itself that would be analogous to a noble's genealogy, and they may well have been right (though noble genealogies were generally fabrications anyway). But the problem with Masonry is that it was fundamentally the product of a simple faith in the ability of an egalitarian circle of the elect to solve society's problems in an Enlightened manner. The degrees and rituals were just window-dressing to ensure that the elect were the right people, and of course to add the spice of the forbidden to the gatherings. (The eighteenth century was legendary for its pseudo-occult drinking clubs.) But, it turned out, solving society's problems was far less interesting than working one's way up through the degrees, a kind of early-modern version of WoW. Freemasonry, with its puny three degrees leading to the unassuming title of "Master Mason," just wasn't occult or mystical enough.

The result was a series of superstructures built on top of traditional Masonry, each of which claimed to be both older and purer than the last. (Eventually, some lodges claimed to recognize upwards of thirty different degrees.) Rosicrucianism, in its contemporary incarnation, was one of these. Unlike most Freemasons, Rosicrucians emphasized mysticism and spirituality and attacked rationalism. The degrees of normal Masonry, Rosicrucians claimed, were just an initiation; only the truly elect could transcend them and become Rosicrucians, which meant getting into alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone and astrology and Paracelsus.

Many lodges and other societies that participated in this esoteric explosion, including Rosicrucianism, made their way to the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In many cases, they retained the organizational structure and nomenclature but lost the mythology almost completely—hence the weird titles used by people in the Ku Klux Klan, a typical nineteenth-century secret society. Lodges with elaborate mystical hierarchies became popular even among marginal groups like free blacks, who wove their "reconstructed" tradition together with mythologies of pan-Egyptian and "Asiatic" commonality.

It was in this context that the first indigenous American Rosicrucian organization was founded: Paschal Beverly Randolph's 1860s "Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, American Section." Randolph was a mixed-race freeman abolitionist whose primary interest was in sex magic (he was an important influence on Aleister Crowley). Although the air of decadence in the term is unmistakable, Randolph presented sex magic as usable only by properly married couples. He confessed that the Rosicrucian background of the Fraternitas was mostly a product of his imagination, but that has not stopped the group—which still exists and operates in Quakertown, PA—from devoting much of its time to proving its authenticity. (Sex magic, alas, has fallen by the wayside.)

In 1915, finally, a competitor was founded: H. Spencer Lewis's Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. Following the traditional principle of occult societies, Lewis one-upped Randolph by claiming descent, not from the sixteenth-century occultists, but from the notoriously monotheistic ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. The FRC and the AMORC have spent the ensuing hundred years publishing enormous volumes of highly "well-documented" accusations that the other society is engaging in Satanism and has connections to Crowley (who is now the bad guy, as it turns out).

But Lewis could outdo Randolph in one thing: as an ad executive from suburban New Jersey, he knew how to run a business. As a result, unlike the rather feeble FRC, AMORC now controls a large Egyptoid museum and complex in San Jose and has spread out to dozens of countries, including post-independence Nigeria, where it has become a major social force. Lewis's society sold the familiar panoply of occultist manuals, but the anchor of it all was his magazine, the Rosicrucian Digest.

Reading the Rosicrucian Digest is delicious. It is as if the protagonists of Foucault's Pendulum were modern American self-help gurus instead of European pseudo-intellectuals. Although there are plenty of spooky insignia and allusions to occult knowledge, the magazine references historical Rosicrucianism quite rarely. Instead, readers are fed the same basic message that underlies all of American occultism, whether cult-driven or popular: that they are powerful, that in comparison to their potential the world is insubstantial, that right thinking and right knowledge can unlock their hidden powers. (In fact, random people on the Internet claim to have found lots of direct connections between American "Rosicrucian" ideas and The Secret.)

I'm always tempted to deal with this bunch in a demystifying kind of way, but that just feels like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course it's all a fraud; of course the supposed documentary evidence was manufactured; of course it's mostly about making money and always has been. What's interesting is the sheer amount of work the Rosicrucians had to put in to buttress their obviously ridiculous claims. Among the many books published by FRC Grand Master R. Swinburne Clymer is a two-volume set of folios, weighing in at a couple thousand pages, leather-bound and printed on thick paper with gorgeous hand-colored plates—and almost its entire text is a rambling and incoherent attempt to demonstrate the evilness of AMORC. (A page from the AMORC response is below.) If we believe the book, it required a substantial amount of European travel—and even if we assume it all to be a forgery, the amount of labor involved in inventing all these endless interconnecting societies and manifestos must have been wearying.

The best explanation I can come up with is that occultism in fact has little to do with history or religion or even sociability. In fact, it is an art form. The historical parameters within which post-Mason secret organizations are supposed to function, even if they are largely fictive or imperfectly understood, provide the imaginative occultist with a vocabulary of terms, forms, and ideas that can be recombined in endlessly satisfying ways, much like a fantasy writer designs a world. This is what has made Illuminatus! and Foucault's Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code so popular. The line separating Umberto Eco from his characters is probably narrower than he might like to think (although this is in fact a theme of the book).

The extension to political conspiracy theory is obvious. What distinguishes conspiracy theory as a genre of explanation from other such genres, after all, is that it not only resists Occamian parsimony but actively works to subvert it. Most conspiracy theorists make the leap from the Bilderberg Group to the Illuminati eventually, sealing the circle. (In eighteenth-century Russia, the Rosicrucians were apparently actually involved in a plot to make Paul I an initiate of their lodge, dethrone Catherine, and hand the country over to the Prussian puppetmasters who were pulling the "Rosicrucian" strings.)

Rosicrucianism and its allied figments rest on an appeal to two unimaginable sublimes: mystical power as achieved through occult self-transcendence and its double, control over others as manifested in the Illuminati world government. Perhaps less obvious is that they come into being together as superficially opposed entities. Nineteenth-century conservative anti-Masonry, which held the Masons to be a conspiracy which had organized the French Revolution and was even now plotting the subversion of republican institutions, was every bit as detailed and imaginative as the occult literature of the groups it had fingered as culprits.

What binds them together is a common artistic language, in which the names of texts and organizations repeat with remarkable consistency (though with utterly fluid meaning) from one composition to another. This is, of necessity, a deeply conservative vocabulary, since it can reproduce itself only by copying its antecedents—even if new terms can sometimes arise on the margins. Its continued existence and flourishing alongside and within modernity—despite its often explicit or implicit anti-modern tone—is monumentally impressive.

The Demon-Haunted World

Joseph Peace Hazard (1807-1892) was born in Burlington, New Jersey, the son of Rowland Hazard I and Mary (Peace) Hazard ...

Like his brother Thomas, Joseph was a dedicated spiritualist, and wrote an article titled "Dignified Versus Undignified" for the March 14 1857 issue of the Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph and British Harmonial Advocate. In this article, he asserted that "spirits appear to be quite as anxious to communicate, as we are to hear."

... This collection is divided into three series: personal correspondence; subject files; and memorandum books. The correspondence files are quite incomplete, with the bulk relating to various land disputes from the final years of Hazard's life. The subject files cover most aspects of his life, but especially spiritualism, genealogy and his property in South Kingstown.

The memorandum books contain mostly a daily log of Hazard's expenses, but may contain virtually anything else. The later books, especially from 1885 and 1886, are primarily concerned with daily reports on Hazard's pocket watch, which he apparently believed was a medium for spirit communications. Typical is the October 28 1885 entry: "On retiring to bed last night at about 9:30 I laid my watch under my ear, and was mentally speaking to the watch (that was ticking entirely normally) and had been so doing some minutes when it suddenly gave two or three consecutive ticks that rang like a bell, as was its old wont. I think this ringing may have been an accident on part of my spirit friend who was then attending me."
- from the "Historical Note" to the Joseph Peace Hazard Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society

 (The last few posts for this month—coming, alas, very belatedly—will be based on tidbits I've gathered while doing research for an interesting project involving the republication of an eighteenth-century moral text by American and Russian occultists and enlighteners.)

I stumbled on this set of papers, which I've yet to physically examine, almost at random—Hazard happened to publish an ediiton of the book I was studying. The Note itself, and the material on and by Hazard that I've been able to locate online, is fascinating. Why would this strange man, who built a turreted "castle" in his town as an apparent attempt to attract summer resort patrons, believe that his watch was a medium for spiritual communications?

As far as I can tell, the better question would be: why wouldn't he? Nineteenth-century America (and Europe) was, it seems, chock-full of people with spiritualist beliefs, and many of them went beyond the traditional table-séances. Many of them were religious, but many were not; some embraced all the kookiest occult paraphernalia, others (like, perhaps, Hazard) led apparently ordinary lives. Some even prefigured the '50s and '60s in their attempts to seek out and repackage Asian mysticism for mass consumption—the late nineteenth century was the point of origin for commodified yoga, which, as it turns out, was more "invented" than "discovered." The craze could even include respected, serious men of science like the ornithologist Elliott Coues.

What's striking is that although we—not historians, but ordinary people—have a pretty good mental image of the nineteenth century in our minds, it rarely includes this world to any substantial extent. We imagine robber barons, frontier capitalists, dour and unphotogenic Midwestern farm families, Civil War soldiers, but the idea that these people could be regularly taking notes on the activities of their pocket watches or contributing to spiritualist publications seems radically alien to us. Mysticism is supposed to be socially marginal, because the mystic's authority is supposed to come from isolation. Even if we don't believe this particular version of spirituality, we still assume that cults and sects come into the public eye only by accident. The mainstream was always soberly Methodist.

The more you look, however, the more this appears to be wrong. It's not just that lots and lots of normal-looking people were involved in various ways in the spiritualist phenomenon. It's also that the most arcane and esoteric trappings of spiritualism were also its most saleable commodities. It didn't even matter whether they were founded on genuine hidden knowledge; as soon as it became apparent that they fit the basic structures and expectations of spiritualism (self-empowerment being a major theme), any secrecy they possessed was instantly brought to market. The spiritualist manual was a creature of the mass reading public.  In my research, I came across this blockbuster book:

And then this delightful comment from the New York Times, 1912:

The central paradox of American spiritualism, then, is that it both claimed to be a body of secret knowledge and would not have been able to survive outside of the mass culture that created it. This meant that any response to the phenomenon would have involved one of two elitist, exclusionary, diametrically opposed standards of taste: the spiritualist versus the mundane, on the one hand, and the arbiter of taste versus the vulgar consumer, on the other. (A similar dynamic is, of course, at work with similar contemporary phenomena such as The Secret.) That is why, I think, it's still so hard to see spiritualism as normal. The very terms of the debate it sets up make it difficult.

Cyberpunk's Future

He leaned closer. "But that's not all of it. I'm not innocent enough to let chaos alone. I stink of the Net, Laura. Of power and planning and data, and the Western method, and the pure inability to let anything alone. Ever. Even if it destroys my own freedom. The Net lost Africa once, blew it so badly that it went bad and wild, but the Net will get it back, someday. Green and pleasant and controlled, and just like everywhere else. "
"So I win, and you lose-is. that what you're telling me? That we're enemies? Maybe we are enemies, in some abstract way that's all in your head. But as people, we're friends, aren't we? And I'd never hurt you if I could help it."
"You can't help it. You were hurting me even before I knew you existed." He leaned back. "Maybe my abstractions aren't your abstractions, so I'll give you some of your own. How do you think I financed all this? Grenada. They were my biggest backers. Winston Stubbs . . . now there was a man with vision. We didn't always see eye to eye, but we were allies. It hurt a lot to lose him."
She was shocked. "I remember.... They said he gave money to terrorist groups."
"I haven't been picky. I can't afford to be--this project of mine, it's all Net stuff, money, and money's corruption is in the very heart of it. The Tuaregs have nothing to sell, they're Saharan nomads, destitute. They don't have anything the Net wants--so I beg and scrape. A few rich Arabs, nostalgic for the desert while they tool around in their limousines.... Arms dealers, not many of those left. I even took money from FACT, back in the old days, before the Countess went batshit. "
- Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (1989)

Reading old cyberpunk is a peculiarly weird experience. On the one hand, the whole genre is envisioned as a plausible reconstruction of an imminent and threatening future, so its inconsistencies with the realities of the future-as-lived are especially noticeable, while the endless thought experiments of the Golden Age era are somehow better-preserved. (It's true, though, that the strangely ambivalent sense of living in the future that I feel on a daily basis seems to align with cyberpunk more than any other sf subgenre.) On the other hand, because it's a characteristic product of the late '80s, cyberpunk also constitutes a temporally-grounded aesthetic; it's as difficult today to imagine Gibson's Case in flannel and vintage Converse as it was back then to imagine the disappearance of payphones. Steampunk, which has stripped away the aspects of cyberpunk that made claims on reality, doesn't have this problem: we don't care that the brass goggles and difference engines are unrealistic because they were never supposed to be real. So cyberpunk is strange because it sees the future as a radicalized present, and its overarching focus on the tendency of technology to aggravate the tensions of exploitation rather than mitigating them marks it even more as a product of the disillusioned late Cold War moment.

Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net, in that context, performs surprisingly well. Although he failed, like everyone else, to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, he correctly foresaw an end to the Cold War and the Eastern Bloc's turn to rapacious consumerism. In general, what is most attractive and compelling in Sterling's approach to futurology (and he has now become much weightier as a modern Nostradamus than as a novelist) is that he resists the narrativizing tendency of most predictive sf. In other words, he doesn't follow the traditional path of taking a single trend and extrapolating its momentous consequences. Instead, he identifies a complex of mentalities, social processes, technological developments, and climates of opinion which coalesce and cross—fertilize to produce a loosely coherent world. This happens to be how history actually takes place, so it's unsurprising that it makes for good history of the future.

In the world of Islands in the Net, the Abolition of nuclear weapons (the grand achievement of the Baby Boomers, as he tells it—hah!) has led to the creation of a quasi-world government and a worldwide complex of corporate and other institutions grouped together as "the Net," which is both a vaguely-described technological entity corresponding to the Internet and a sociopolitical one corresponding to what Hardt and Negri would call Empire. The plot revolves around the struggle between this entity and a variety of outlaw communities that both prey on the Net (as information brokers, for instance) and resist its homogenizing attempts to incorporate them. Sure, there are a few lazy archetypes here and there (what the hell is it with cyberpunk and Rastafarians, anyway? That deserves a post of its own), but by and large the picture is a convincing one.

Probably the most profound insight in the book is the way that the insurgents oppose the Net. Of course, they reject its founding liberal-democratic-technocratic principles, but they are not Luddites or (as most cyberpunk writers envision it) bricoleur-hackers who use scruffy, beat-up technology to defend themselves against bigger and shinier machines. Rather, the very fact of insurgency depends on the existence of the system. The "islands" are as much a product of the Net as the larger structures that oppose them. It is difficult not to recognize this as a prescient vision of contemporary Islamic insurgencies (which are heavily dependent on online forums and sites like kavkaz.ru) or, more charitably, the Zapatistas and other like groups. The rather frightening, or perhaps sublime in the eighteenth-century sense, lesson—that the Net abides whether one likes it or not—will almost certainly end up being cyberpunk's most lasting cultural legacy.

I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that cyberpunk as a genre is now dead. It was killed off by a variety of things, including William Gibson's acknowledgement that the world he was writing about had now arrived and thus near-future sf was increasingly irrelevant. The touchstone moment of its death, though, was the release of the The Matrix. I won't deny that the film is slick, that it is probably the first non-textual cyberpunk work to give it all the style and atmosphere it deserves (but see also the really odd and awesome '90s computer game BloodNet)—but that's precisely the problem. By abstracting away the historical, cultural, and geopolitical aspects of cyberpunk's central question, and replacing it with a bunch of tedious Philosophy 101 Cartesian bullshit, the Wachowski brothers effectively reduced the genre to a pure aesthetic, a point driven painfully home by the sequels. Although the problems cyberpunk once posed are especially relevant in the Wikileaks age, the genre's resurgence is an increasingly distant prospect.