Category: Spirituality

I detta föredrag vid Theosophical Society in Americas 130:e Summer National Convention 2016 belyser Horowitz på utmärkt sätt Blavatskys historiska betydelse i USA och den dramatiska omvärdering av den esoteriska traditionen som ägt rum i väst de senaste årtiondena.

Viktigt att hålla i minnet, vilket Horowitz också gör, är att för Blavatsky och teosofin dessa traditioner, d.v.s. de västerländska traditionerna eller vad som kan sägas ha blivit västerländska traditioner även om deras ursprung i några fall var förkristna och delvis österländskt eller åtminstone när-österländskt influerande under antiken, som ensamma med rätta benämns esoteriska, var relaterade till de stora österländska sofiska lärornas introduktion och spridning i väst.

The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

Bantam Books, 2009

Amazon.com (2010)

Wikipedia

Publisher’s Description:

From its earliest days, America served as an arena for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that eventually swept the globe. Esoteric philosophies and personas – from Freemasonry to Spiritualism, from Madame H. P. Blavatsky to Edgar Cayce – dramatically altered the nation’s culture, politics, and religion. Yet the mystical roots of our identity are often ignored or overlooked. Opening a new window on the past, Occult America presents a dramatic, pioneering study of the esoteric undercurrents of our history and their profound impact across modern life.

Reviews:

“What a fascinating book. So it happens that another equally compelling take on our complicated national narrative lies just beneath the surface of things; not the grand procession of presidents, generals, and wars, but something more hidden, more mysterious, but often no less revealing.”

Ken Burns

“Invisible and mysterious forces have shaped and guided the destiny of individuals and nations throughout history. From Moses to Gandhi, Jesus to Muhammad, Lincoln to Obama, hidden dimensions, in both our personal and collective consciousness, were conceiving, constructing, and shaping the course of civilization. In his precise and often detailed history of mysticism in America, Mitch Horowitz, has, in a way, tracked the evolution of our consciousness over 300 years.”

Deepak Chopra

 “A sparkling, down-to-earth and often deeply touching account of a powerful, much misunderstood force in the formation of America’s cultural and spiritual identity.”

Jacob Needleman, author of The American Soul and The New Religions

“Occult America is a truly remarkable achievement. Exhaustively researched, it takes the reader from the early concepts of the supernatural, personified by Mother Ann Lee, Joseph Smith, and Madame Blavatsky, through such modern-day figures as Henry A. Wallace and Norman Vincent Peale. It opens the eyes of the relatively uninitiated, in which I include myself, to the effect the occult has had, is having, and will have on the American experience.”

John S.D. Eisenhower, author of The Bitter Woods: The Battle of the Bulge and So Far From God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846-1848

“Religious people tend to be afraid of the word occult. Horowitz examines this aspect of life and religion in penetrating ways…and revealing its not unsubstantial influence on mainline Christianity. Truth seekers have always come from the edges. Religion itself should be glad they do.”

John Shelby Spong, author of Jesus for the Non-Religious

“This book is a delightfully original tour through American history, as seen through the lives of men and women devoted to all manner of mysticism. Across these pages troop spiritualists, prophets, seers, psychics, numerologists, transcendentalists, theosophists, and historical figures from Mary Todd Lincoln to Marcus Garvey to Henry Wallace. Their stories are part of the deep-seated American tradition of searching for the new – a tradition that Occult America both explains and enriches.”

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
 
“Occult America treats esoteric ideas and movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness that is too often lost in today’s raised-voice discussions about religion and belief systems.”

Washington Post Express
 
“One of the most readable histories of American mysticism ever written…This is historical reporting that is crafted so well, it holds the reader much like a Voodoo spell.”

Tucson Citizen

“Horowitz teases out fascinating stories of the ‘dreamers and planners who flourished along the Psychic Highway’…in showing how the paths of these figures occasionally intersected with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Horowitz argues that the influence of the occult extends beyond the séance room and into the mainstream of American thought.”

Washington Post Book World

“A brilliant job of tracking down how positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale borrowed his core self-help philosophy from a religious movement called New Thought.” 

Washington Times

About the Author:

Wikipedia

JOB’s Comment:

Unfortunately Horowitz seems somewhat to exploit the tiresome nomenclature of the “occult” and “secret” rather than duly problematizing it in light of the specific western historical religious and cultural contexts and preconditions of esotericism (the contexts and preconditions that account for the use of the term esotericism too, and indeed “mysticism”).

This hardly helps the cause of esotericism in the west. And in line with this, he devotes too much space to odd forms of popular belief and practice that are far removed from the kind of philosophy by means of which I think the proper, discerning assimilation of what is true and valid in western esotericism – in combination with the serious assimilation of the eastern traditional and metaphysical traditions, which fortunately he does emphasize – is alone possible.

But in many respects he seems to be a knowledgeable representative of the esoteric tradition in America today.

F. D. Roosevelts vicepresident, som kom från en känd republikansk familj (hans far var jordbruksminister under Harding och Coolidge) men utvecklades i socialistisk riktning under the New Deal, och inledningsvis kvarhölls som minister men sedan avvisades av Truman, och själv, av för mig okända skäl, tycks ha anpassat sig till kalla-krigslinjen under Koreakriget.

I förening med sin humanitarianism, liberalism och socialism hade han ett starkt intresse för esoterism, “mystik” och österländska andliga traditioner, och deltog i Teosofiska samfundets verksamhet.

Han borde vara ett lärorikt fall att studera för förståelsen och utvärderingen – inte minst, men inte uteslutande, i ljuset av de för detta syfte nödvändiga analytiska perspektiv Babbitt i ett tidigare skede tillhandahöll – av den karaktäristiska helhetliga åskådning som under 1900-talet kunde ta form i väst i mötet mellan hans typ av politik och den esoförstådda andligheten.

Mitch Horowitz diskuterar honom i ett tal om esoterismens historia i USA.

A Historical Introduction

Oxford University Press, 2008

Amazon.com

Baksida:

“Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s introduction to the Western esoteric traditions shows the sure hand of an accomplished scholar at his peak. Everything is here, from ancient Alexandria to the present day, with the main schools and personalities, continuities and changes, all clearly drawn. This book has something for everyone. For the beginner, it is an authoritative introduction; for the expert, everything is put surely and clearly in its proper place, and perplexing gaps are filled. Goodrick-Clarke shows quite what the present day is heir to, and how. We see, for example, who Paracelsus and the Rusicrucians once mattered and still do matter – even if the Rosicrucians never really existed. After one reads The Western Esoteric Traditions, nothing will ever again seem quite the same.”

Mark Sedgwick, author of Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century

“In a field so often blighted by dubious claims and speculations, it is a pleasure to find a scholarly guide as responsible and experienced as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who leads the reader so expertly through the worlds of the occult, magical and esoteric.”

Philip Jenkins, author of Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History

“The cumulative result of decades of serious research is that Western esotericism has finally been recognized as a significant field of study. This new maturity is reflected in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s concise, accessible survey of Western esotericism. Goodrick-Clarke’s volume should prove especially useful as a textbook, both for graduate and undergraduate courses.”

James R. Lewis, editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements and author of Legitimating New Religions

Fram- och bakflapp:

Western esotericism has now emerged as an academic study in its own right, combining spirituality with an empirical observation of the natural world while also relating the humanity to the universe through a harmonious celestial order. This introduction to the Western esoteric traditions offers a concise overview of their historical development.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke explores these traditions, from their roots in Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, and Gnosticism in the early Christian era up to their reverberations in today’s scientific paradigms. While the study of Western esotericism is usually confined to the history of ideas, Goodrick-Clarke examines the phenomenon much more broadly. He demonstrates that, far from being a strictly intellectual movement, the spread of esotericism owes a great deal to geopolitics and globalization. In Hellenistic culture, for example, the empire of Alexander the Great, which stretched across Egypt and Western Asia to provinces in India, facilitated a mixing of Eastern and Western cultures. As the Greeks absorbed ideas from Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia, they gave rise to the first esoteric movements.

From the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, post-Reformation spirituality found expression in theosophy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Similarly, in the modern era, dissatisfaction with the hegemony of science in Western culture and a lack of faith in traditional Christianity led thinkers like Madame Blavatsky to look East for spiritual inspiration. Goodrick-Clarke further examines Modern esoteric thought in the light of new scientific and medical paradigms along with the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. This book traces the complete history of these movements and is the definitive account of Western esotericism.

Om författaren

JOB:s kommentar:

Alla dessa bristfälliga riktningar och rörelser som, tröttsamt, blev vad de blev, blev så ofullkomliga, skeva och ofta felaktiga som de blev, till helt övervägande del p.g.a. det oavlåtliga trycket från den i stor utsträckning av den världsliga makten som ordningsinstrument etablerade exoabrahamitiska ortodoxins literalistiska dogmatik med dess i andliga och sofiska termer otolkbara myter.

Att bara hela tiden hålla denna enda avgörande omständighet i minnet vid deras studium. Den förutan skulle antingen de österländska traditionerna ha spridits i västerlandet redan under antiken (såsom var på väg att ske), eller motsvarande insikter och praktiker där nåtts fram till dem förutan.

Watts har för mig alltid s.a.s. funnits med, ända sedan slutet av 70-talet, representerad av några få böcker, men på något sätt bara i bakgrunden, även om jag alltid varit medveten om hans stora generella och principiella betydelse. Troligen har jag inte gjort den full rättvisa. Men det beror sannolikt på att jag uppfattat honom som alltför ensidigt zen-inriktad.

State University of New York Press, 1994

Amazon.com

Back Cover:

This is an intellectual history of occult and esoteric currents in the English-speaking world from the early Romantic period to the early twentieth century. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena P. Blavatsky, holds a crucial position as the place where all these currents temporarily united, before again diverging. The book’s ambiguous title points to the author’s thesis that Theosophy owed as much to the skeptical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century as it did to the concept of spiritual enlightenment with which it is more readily associated.

The author respects his sources sufficiently to allow that their world, so different from that of academic reductionism, has a right to be exhibited on its own terms. At the same time he does not conceal the fact that he considers many of them deluded and deluding.

In the context of theosophical history, this book is neither on the side of the blind votaries of Madame Blavatsky, nor on that of her enemies. It may, therefore, be expected to mildly annoy both sides.

“As in all his former books, Godwin’s style is not only elegant but clear and understandable. It lends itself to a pleasant reading by any person who, though being a layman in the field, has a minimal breadth of culture.”

Antoine Faivre, Sorbonne

“This is a wonderful work: witty, chaming, erudite, profound. It demonstrates on the basis of extraordinary research and scholarship that the thteosophical, spiritualist, and esoteric movements of the nineteenth century were significant in many ways we are only now in a position to realize.”

Christopher Barnford, Lindisfarne Press

About the Author (Wikipedia)

Den äldsta i det märkliga komplexet av fyra små sefardiska goggor i judiska kvarteren i gamla stan i Jerusalem.

Nu Jom kippur. Vikten, krigs-nu, av att verkligen, med vederbörlig urskillning, tränga ned till det djupaste, in till det innersta, i förståelsen av abrahamismen och dess egentliga och ursprungliga väsen.

Född 1884 anslöt sig Bertram Keightley till Teosofiska samfunder vid 20 års ålder, och assisterade Blavatsky under hennes vistelse i England och vid redigeringen av det eklektisk-spekulativa yvighetsverket The Secret Doctrine.

Enligt Theosophy World bidrog han till finansieringen av inköpet av huset på Lansdowne Road i London där Blavatsky kom att residera, och var han sekreterare för Londonlogen. Därefter grundade han och blev den förste generalsekreteraren för samfundets indiska sektion, och en av Annie Besants medgrundare av Central Hindu College i Benares/Varanasi. Under 1900-talets första år var han generalsekreterare för den brittiska sektionen, och bidrog enligt Theosophy World till tillkomsten av något som kallades The International European Theosophical Federation. Han publicerade Reminiscences of H. P. Blavatsky (1931).

Att förstå vad dessa människor höll på med, i en tid då forskningen om de österländska andliga traditionerna – och för den delen även de västerländska esoteriska – ännu var outvecklad, då få av deras auktoriteter och ledare besökt och blivit kända i väst, och då den traditionalistiska skolan ännu inte uppkommit. Att uppfatta den djupare innebörden av deras ifråga om det egna resultatet ofullkomliga strävan, vad de kan sägas ha varit på väg mot, vad de sträckte sig mot, åtminstone när de var som bäst och inte fastnade i all hopplös “ockultism”.

En nyformulering, i termer av den “mjuka” traditionalism vars önskvärdhet och möjlighet jag har försökt peka på, av den traditionalistiska skolans essentiella sanningar måste, föreslår jag, anses nödvändig. En nyformulering som skulle innebära en uppstramning, främst i form av ett avlägsnande av skolans ensidigheter, överdrifter och även rena felaktigheter på olika områden.

Det vore rimligen det rätta sättet att vidareföra och förmedla dessa centrala, avgörande sanningar i vår tid och till nya generationer. Förutom de absoluta, religions- och sekttranscenderande “metafysiska” insikterna i sig hör ju till dem inte minst påvisandet av den moderna och postmoderna populära andlighetens egna specifika svagheter och deras idéhistoriska bakgrund och orsaker.

Ett större verk av den härom året bortgångne kabbala-forskaren och förste innehavaren av Gershom Scholem-professuren i judisk mystik vid Hebreiska universitetet i Jerusalem Joseph Dan.

Att förstå den centrala frågan om, och i så fall hur, i vilken utsträckning, i vilken form, en rimligt definierad, kvalificerat universell esoterism kan rymmas inom ramen för vad som kan urskiljas och identifieras som den allmänna ur-abrahamismens åskådning såsom traderad av judaismen.

Den fjärde delen av detta verk är väl av störst eller åtminstone mest direkt relevans för detta.