The Transcendentalists

My time in Japan has largely been a series of train trips. Thanks to the JR (Japan Railways) local and inter-city lines, the Hankyu and Hanshin privately-run railroads, and the Osaka and Kyoto subways, I have not missed having a car at all - indeed, I'm feeling disappointed that I'll have to drive when I get back home to Baltimore.

That's partly because of one of the big benefits of train travel: it is highly conducive to reading. (Well, except on a crowded rush-hour commuter train, where one usually barely has space to breathe.) That's great for me - I had dozens of books shipped over here because I can't imagine three months without plenty of reading material.

I've been catching up on the Transcendentalists, reading some Whitman and Emerson. It's great to read Whitman's transcription of the American carols while in a foreign land -- I'm far enough away from home to silence the noise of the contemporary political "dialog", such as it is, and to really contemplate what it is to be an American.

I'm coming to see that Whitman, and the other Transcendentalists, had a vision of their nation as a world leader. Not in the spheres of politics or military power, but artistically and spiritually.

It was 1837 When Emerson gave his landmark lecture "The American Scholar": six decades since the American colonies had declared their political independence, and a quarter-century since they had made it stick in the War of 1812. But like a teenager who has just moved out on their own, the U.S. still sought to define its own identity.

In literature and the arts it still looked to England rather than to any domestic tradition. Socially and economically it was dealing with the Industrial Revolution, and in politics it still wrestled with issues its Enlightenment-inspired founders hadn't settled -- chiefly, slavery.

The question, "just what is America, anyway?" was being urgently explored, and was so divisive that within Emerson's lifetime tens of thousands would be killed trying to settle it by force.

Tumultuous times have often given impetus to spiritual or religious movements. The turmoil caused by plagues and "barbarian" attacks helped open the way for Christianity in Rome. The "Little Ice Age" and the Black Death caused such disruption in Europe that the Catholic Church split in two, each side claiming to have the genuine Pope. It was only was 25 years between Columbus's voyage and Luther's theses; six years between the start of the English civil war and when George Fox started preaching, the start of the Quakers.

So, early nineteenth century New England gave birth to the Transcendentalists. They had an vision that was in some ways similar to that of the original Puritan colonists, who saw the new nation as a shining "city upon a hill" that would be a guide to the world. But where the Puritans sought to build a rigid order based on received Biblical truth and a structured clergy, the Transcendentalists wanted to enable each person's individual and direct religious experience.

As Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile ... perhaps a generation or two ... dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place ... the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future... . They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.

Their vision was much more individual and mystic than that of mainstream Christianity. It was also very heterodox: they were among the earliest Westerners to take a serious interest in Buddhist and Hindu thought. Emerson's famous poem Brahma riffs off the Bhagahada-Gita, and Thoreau was the first to publish (in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial) an English translation of a Buddhist scripture.

Historian Arthur Versluis has devoted an entire book, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, to the subject of the Transcendentalists and Asian religion. He writes:

[O]n the whole, the Transcendentalist movement, both early and late, was a product of Unitarianism, Puritanism, and other currents of Western thought and also of contact with the world religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, which was largely seen in the light of "universal progress".

Emerson even went so far as to claim Buddhism as part of the Transcendentalist movement, in his famous lecture "The Transcendentalist"

In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment; any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist who thanks no man, who says, "do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

Also in that lecture we can see the influence of Vedantist (Vedanta being the philosophy of Hinduism) and Buddhist ideas that the world we experience is a construction of mind, and that the "self" has no existence separate from the world:

Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena....

...

I -- this thought which is called I, -- is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me.

Both directly, and through their inspiration of the twentieth century Beats, the Transcendentalists had a tremendous influence on the development of Buddhism in the West.

They also helped promote to industrialized Western civilization the idea that contemplation of nature could be a spiritual activity. In this they followed the trail blazed by the Romantics movement, especially the British Romantic poets. Both Romantics and Transcendentalists found poetry to be far, far more than an amusing diversion: Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote that "poetry is connate with the origin of man" and called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," while (as we saw above) Whitman predicted that "the new breed of poets" would displace the priests. Emerson went even further, rhapsodizing:

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, -- a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. ... It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. ...

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, -- opaque, though they seem transparent, -- and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real.

And like the British Romantics, the Transcendentalists were not afraid to pay homage to the Old Gods, especially Pan. In the space of a few paragraphs in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau pays his respects to Pan, Buddha, and Jesus, and throws in a reference to the necessity of the Divine Feminine for good measure:

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks. I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosised, so wholly masculine, with no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me.... The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumoured. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

...

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

In their syncretism -- Whitman, for example, said that he "had perfect faith in all sects, and was not inclined to reject a single one" -- in their insistence on individual experience over revealed truth, and in their love of Nature as a spiritual force, we can see much that contributed to the modern Pagan movement.

It might even be argued be argued that, depending on definitions, the Transcendentalists were the first American Pagans. Tim Zell, who was one of the first to use the word Pagan in its modern sense, included them in an explanation of the term in Green Egg in 1968.

And perhaps they were the first American Buddhists as well. That argument is strongest in the case of Thoreau -- he published the Lotus Sutra, name-dropped the Buddha as we saw above, and owned a copy of R. Spence Hardy's A Manual of Buddhism, which respected enough to bequeath to his friend A. Bronson Alcott. His peers seem to have thought it apt to call him Buddhist: his classmate John Weiss said of Thoreau that he "went about like a priest of Buddha who expects to arrive soon at the summit of a life of contemplation."

In the words of Rick Fields, "[Thoreau] forecast an American Buddhism by the nature of his contemplation, in the same way that a certain quality of transparent predawn forecasts a clear morning.... He was certainly not the only one of his generation to live a contemplative life, but he was, it seems, one of the few to live it in a Buddhist way."

But whether we draw the lines of these movements to include them or not, the Transcendentalists certainly laid down a grove that infuenced the later development of Paganism and Buddhism on American shores. They prepared the ground that would receive the seeds of modern witchcraft and occultism from Britain, and the seeds of Buddhism -- especially of Zen -- from Asia, and sprout forth many strange and interesting flowers in the twentieth century.

They were just one thread in the tapestry of the Buddhist and Pagan revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a strange weave of poets, Theosophists, Buddhists, magicians, witches -- and jesters.

The Romantic Poets

One of the other books I've brought with me is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon. It's an excellent history of the revival of Pagan witchcraft in England. Besides covering the roles of the usual suspects -- occultists like Aleister Crowley, anthropologists like Margaret Murray, and the founder of modern Wicca, Gerald Gardner -- Hutton makes the point that the literary environment of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries, especially the work of the British Romantic poets, played a significant role.

One of the themes of the Romantic movement was an admiration for classical Greco-Roman mythology. This admiration might have roots in the attempt by artists in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance to resolve their Christianity with the classical Pagan roots of their civilizations. This is evident in the Divine Comedy, where Dante's guide through Hell is the great Roman poet Virgil. It's also in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where the "Knight's Tale" is a story of Theseus of Athens that involves the Greco-Roman pantheon as active characters. Works like this made it acceptable to at least mention the old gods.

Then the "Enlightenment" of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries did much to weaken the hold of Christianity on the western mind. It emphasized "Reason" -- or a least, a version of "Reason" -- over old religious dogmas, and saw the triumph of patriarchal monotheism over more natural religions as a regrettable thing.

The end of the Enlightenment period, and the beginning of the Romantic, is generally regarded to be around the late Eighteenth or earth Nineteenth Centuries. In the bloody upheaval of the French and American Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, and with the Industrial Revolution wrecking havoc on established social structures, it become clear to many that "Reason" -- at least in the form proposed -- was not enough. So the some of the British Romantics -- especially the "second generation" -- followed the thread of their intellectual heritage back, to a point before both Christianity and Reason, to the ancient Greco-Roman pantheon.

By the 1820s, Keats and Shelly were invoking the Goddess through images from Greek mythology. (The idea of a single Goddess, as opposed to the multiplicity of goddesses found in ancient pantheons, is mostly a Romantic creation, at least in contemporary Western civilization.) However, they looked at this mythology in a post-Enlightenment context.

Thus, Shelly could write a treatise titled The Necessity of Atheism, explicitly targeted against the idea of a god outside of the universe -- but could also invoke the Goddess in his poetry and raise an altar to the Great God Pan.

Indeed, it was thanks to these Romantics that Pan became a Great God rather than a bit player. Apollo had long been seen as the patron of poets, in the original Greco-Roman tradition and in its Renaissance revival. But his restraint and moderation didn't fit well with Romantic ideals, with their rebellion against the coldness and hyper-rationality of the Enlightenment.

By the 1890s the satyr had trumped the sun god, as William Hazlitt gladly declared that English poetry "has more of Pan than of Apollo". Not bad for a little rural god who was considered comic at best, grotesque at worst, by the ancient Greeks.

The Romantics made Pan an incarnation of the natural world, until by the end of the nineteenth century Maurice Hewlett had him say, "I am Pan and the Earth is mine", and in Kenneth Grahame's 1908 The Wind in The Willows Pan appears as an awe-inspiring demi-god who protects the animal children of the forest.

It is not a coincidence that it was during this same period that the image of Satan took on the goat-horned and goat-legged appearance we know today. Prior to this, the devil was portrayed with the horns of a bull and the wings of a bat or dragon, or had dog- or snake-like attributes. This re-imaging of Satan was almost certainly a reaction -- conscious or unconscious -- against the resurgence of Pan.

The Romantics influenced generations of followers, including a little-known poet named Algernon Charles Swinburne. In 1866 Swinburne (who was also at the time a big fan of Walt Whitman) published his anti-authoritarian, Shelly-imitating collection Poems and Ballads -- work that was later admired and quoted by Alistair Crowley and Gerald Gardner.

About two decades later, another admirer of Shelly and Keats enters the story. David Hewavitarne, more widely known by his dharma name Anagarika Dharmapala, was a Sinhalese who played a key role in the Buddhist revival. But it took an outside force to help set him on his way. It wasn't just his native Buddhism that inspired him, nor the work of the romantics. It took the Theosophists to help connect him to Buddhism, and to bring him to the attention of the world.

Theosophists

The story of the Theosophical Society beings with Helena Petrova Blavatsky. "Madame Blavatsky", as she was often known, was born in Russia but traveled extensively in Europe, America, and the Far East.

While in Paris in 1858, she discovered Spiritualism -- an American trend that had begun a decade before. It was based around "mediums" who could supposedly communicate with the "spirit world", and who demonstrated this with evidence such as coded rapping noises, the sounds of bells and voices, movement of furniture, claims of clairvoyance and even the apparent materialization of solid objects.

(You may have a relic of Spiritualism in your house -- it is from Spiritualism that the planchette, the "pointer" used on a Ouija board, originated.)

Blavatsky supposedly "discovered" that she had mediumistic abilities, and eventually brought them to the United States. Now, before proceeding any further with this part of the tale, we ought to reveal that Blavatsky's abilities -- like those of Fox sisters who started the Spiritualism movement -- were eventually revealed as a fraud.

There may have been some honest Spiritualist mediums, people of extraordinary intuition who attributed their own insights to external influences. But as for the more exotic apparitions, while it took magicians like Houdini to uncover the most clever tricks, no one was able to produce their exotic phenomena under rigidly controlled conditions.

Blavatsky may have had good intentions. She may have been trying to bring about positive social and political changes. She may have been using what the Buddhists refer to as "expedient means" to get her spiritual ideas across. She may have even managed to convince herself that she genuinely had powers. But for the record, your author stands squarely on the side that declares Spiritualist phenomena a bunch of trickery.

In 1874, Blavatsky was attracted by spiritualistic goings-on to the Eddy farm in New York. There she met and befriended Henry Steel Olcott, a journalist and lawyer of sterling reputation. Blavatsky and Olcott became the center of a social circle focused on the investigation of spiritualist phenomena and of the "laws which lie in back" of them -- in Blavatsky's word, Occultism. They soon founded the Theosophical Society to pursue these investigations.

The Society's stated purposes included helping members to "acquire an intimate knowledge of natural law, especially its occult manifestations," "to oppose the materialism of science and every form of dogmatic theology, especially the Christian, which the Chiefs of the Society regard as particularly pernicious", "to make known among Western nations the long-suppressed facts about Oriental religious philosophies," and "to aid in the institution of a Brotherhood of Humanity, wherein all good and pure men, of every race, shall recognize each other as the equal effects ... of one Uncreate [sic] Universal, Infinite, and Everlasting Cause."

Blavatsky claimed that in her travels she had encountered a group of teachers, variously referred to as "Masters", "Adepts", "Mahatmas", or "Chiefs", who represented the peak of spiritual evolution and who were the origin of the teachings she presented.

The idea of a hidden order of adepts is very similar to ideas presented in the 1790s by the Christian mystic Karl von Eckartshausen in The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, a work that had a great impact on later occult societies. Blavatsky may have adopted it from the "Unknown Superiors" found in the Rosicrucian Freemasonry of her great-grandfather.

Most skeptics have assumed that Blavatsky's Secret Chiefs were entirely fictional. But more recently, historian K. Paul Johnson has suggested that Blavatsky was initially in league with Masonic and Rosicrucian societies who wanted to undermine dogmatic Christianity and revive occultism, and later allied herself with anti-colonial activists in India. With a bit of disguise, the leaders of these groups were the Masters who guided her and Olcott.

If this is the case, how should we regard Blavatsky's fraud? Her mediumistic tricks were a way to promote her Theosophy, but was her Theosophy merely a way to get people to follow her political causes? Or was there a genuine spirituality, and the phenomena an expedient means to draw attention to the teachings she thought true?

Claiming direction from her Masters, in 1877 Blavatsky published Isis Unveiled, which proposed that the world's religions were decayed fragments of an original system taught to the world by the civilization of Atlantis. It was an idea she seems to have borrowed (without credit) from an 1837 work by Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis. Blavatsky, however, placed more emphasis on Eastern philosophy, and identified the Atlanteans with her Mahatmas.

Isis Unveiled was a great success, selling out its first run of 1,000 copies within ten days. But the Society itself started to dissipate: Blavatsky refused to produce mediumistic phenomena, claiming that the underlying philosophy was more important, and Spiritualists drifted from her movement away.

Olcott and Blavatsky decided to follow up contacts in India and Ceylon, where anti-colonial and nationalist movements were causing renewed interest in Vedanta and Buddhism. At the end of 1878 they departed for India.

Buddhists

After spending most of 1879 establishing the Theosophical society in India, Blavatsky and Olcott arrived in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) on May 17, 1880.

Ceylon had been a stronghold of Theravada Buddhism since the Emperor Ashoka sent missionaries there in the third century. But by the late nineteenth century, it had been repressed by European colonists for almost five centuries.

Things weren't as bad under the British as they were when Portuguese missionaries slaughtered Buddhist natives, burned the sutras, and wrecked the temples. Still, under the British only Christian marriages were recognized by the government, Bible study was mandatory in the schools, and Christian missionaries waged a continual campaign to try to discredit Buddhism. The ground was ripe for a cultural and religious revival, and the Sinhalese natives were overjoyed to see white people treating Buddhism with respect.

A few days after their arrival, on May 25, Blavatsky and Olcott performed the ceremony of pansil , vowing to uphold the five precepts for Buddhist lay practitioners. In so doing they apparently became the first Americans to formally enter the Buddhist fold. (Blavatsky had become a naturalized American citizen the year before.)

To be sure, their Buddhism was somewhat idiosyncratic. The Theosophists claimed that their Masters practiced a sort of "pre-Vedic" Buddhism, supposedly identical to the "Wisdom Religion of the Aryan Upanishads" -- in other words, they papered over some significant differences between their own interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, the Sinhalese practice of Buddhism, and Vedanta (the Hindu philosophy of the Upanishads). But neither side cared to argue fine points, and they readily accepted each other as allies.

Blavatsky had been briefly exposed to Tibetan Buddhism as a child and had identified herself as a Buddhist as early as 1875; however, in an 1887 letter to her sister she revealed that deep in her heart, she always remained a Russian Orthodox Christian.

But Olcott seems to have taken firmly and wholly to Buddhism. Along with Sumangala Nayaka Maha Thera, a Sinhalese high priest and scholar, he helped developed a "Buddhist Catechism" to help educate the Sinhalese about their native religion. This work was eventually translated and published in Japan and India.

Based on his efforts in reviving Sinhalese Buddhism, Olcott was invited to Japan in 1888. Buddhism there had been on the defensive since the Meiji restoration, which made a perverted form of Shinto the state religion and elevated the Emperor to the status of a living god.

It is remarkable that just three decades after America pried Japan open to the world, Japanese Buddhists asked an American to help revive their religion.

Olcott was accompanied on his trip by a young man named Anagarika Dharmapala (born David Hewavitarne), who had joined Olcott and Blavatsky's circle in Ceylon shortly after their arrival. Blavatsky became a sort of mentor to him, and Dharmapala became a great promoter of the Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society. (Dharmapala was a great admirer of Shelly and Keats. At one point he wanted to find their reincarnations so that he could introduce them to the Buddhist teachings they'd never had a chance to hear.)

Olcott carried to the Japanese Buddhists a letter from Sumangala -- probably the first official communication between the Mahayana and Theravada branches of Buddhism in several centuries. On his three month visit he gave 75 lectures, attended by 187,000 people; after which he returned to Ceylon with three Japanese priests who intended to study Pali and Theravada Buddhism.

While Olcott's visit may have been the renewal of official contact between Northern and Southren Buddhism, unofficially there were already currents converging. In 1887 the Japanese Rinzai Zen monk Soyen Shaku came to Ceylon to study how Theravada monks lived and practiced. After three years in Ceylon he returned to Japan, and shortly thereafter, in 1891, became the master of the Engakuji temple.

It was also in 1891 that Dharmapala made a pilgrimage to India to visit Bodh-Gaya, the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. His visit was prompted by an article by Edwin Arnold -- the author of The Light of Asia, the first popular account of the life of the Buddha to be published in the West -- decrying the decay of the site, and suggesting that it should be returned to Buddhist ownership.

The effort to accomplish that became the center of a movement that united the Buddhist world, and also the center of Dharmapala's life. The goal would not be achieved until 1949, sixteen years after Dharmapala's death, when a newly independent India turned the site over to Buddhists.

His work on Bodh-Gaya and his connection with Olcott and Blavatsky -- along with a healthy portion of his own natural charm -- got Dharmapala noticed. He was invited to the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, as the representative of the Buddhists of Ceylon.

The Parliament was part of the Colombian Exhibition held in Chicago. Its chairman, John Henry Barrows, saw the opening of the East as a new opportunity to spread Christianity, and may have invited the Asian delegates with the goal of introducing them to Western faith. But the Parliament seems to have done more to introduce Asian religions to the West than to introduce Christianity to the heathen Orient.

In many ways, the Parliament was the formal introduction of Buddhism to the West. Representatives included Buddhists from the Zen, Jodo Shinshu, Nichiren, Tendai, and Esoteric schools; also represented were Hinuds, Parsis, Sikhs, Jains, and a Confucian. They came from Japan, India, China, Siam, and Ceylon.

The Zen Buddhist representative was Soyen Shaku, the Japanese master who had studied the ways of bhikkus in Ceylon just a few years before. His lectures were read by Barrows from an English translation provided by Shaku's student Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki -- better known by his initials, D.T. Suzuki.

Shaku's appearance at the Parliament led to a return visit to the U.S. in 1905. He spent nine months traveling and teaching, cementing his place in history as the first Zen master to teach in the United States.

And D.T. Suzuki's translation of Skaku's address ended up getting him invited to the U.S. for a few years to work for Paul Carus at Open Court press. This began Suzuki's career as a key popularizer of Buddhism to the West. After returning to Japan for several decades, after World War II Suzuki settled in New York, where his work inspired the Zen boom of the late 1950s.

But all that came later. The immediate result of the Parliament was to induce enough fascination with Buddhism -- especially the Buddhism of the charismatic Sinhalese representative Dharmapala -- that within a few years some Westerners were heading to Ceylon to learn more. One of these was Allan Bennett, who eventually became the second Briton to become an ordained Theravada bhikku. He is also known to history by his Buddhist name, Ananda Metteyya.

Another Briton who went to Ceylon to study was Bennett's old roommate, the famed occultist and magician described by one writer as "the wickedest man in the world": Aleister Crowley.

Magicians

Trying to puzzle of the history of the ritual magic movement of the nineteenth century is tricky. The trail is complicated both by the casual attitude towards literal truth held by some of the principal players, and by the nature of the secret societies that contributed, directly or indirectly, to the magical tradition.

We'll start with one of these, the "Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia", founded in 1865 by several high-ranking British Freemasons. The name is an allusion to the "Rosicrucian Society", a supposed hidden society of adepts dating back to the Middle Ages; the SRIA claimed to be linked with the Rosicrucians via the initiation of one its founders into the German "Order of the Gold and Rosy Cross". (For more on the origins of Masonry and Rosicrucians, see the Timeline in the Appendix.)

The SRIA's stated purpose was to "search out the Great Secrets of Nature", by studying Western mystical philosophies such as cabala (Jewish mysticism) and the Hermetic tradition of alchemy (which is more about self-transformation than about transmuting lead into gold). Among SRIA's members were William Wynn Westcott and his protegee, Samuel Liddel -- who later used the name, and became better known as, MacGregor Mathers.

About twenty years later, Westcott and Mathers became part of another group with a similar mission, the Hermetic Society in Britain. This was founded by a British mystic named Anna Kingsford, who had been president of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. But Kingford encountered political friction within that group. She was a devout Christian whose interests lay more in the Western traditions than in the Eastern philosophies then being emphasized by Blavatsky and Olcott. (But she was definitely not hostile to Buddhism -- she worked to have a play based on The Light of Asia produced in London.)

So in 1884, she and Edward Maitland founded this new group, to futher study the mystical side of Christianity, as well as cabala and the "Greek mysteries and the Hermetic Gnosis". Westcott and Mathers were closely involved with this society, and presented lectures during its final series of meetings.

Kingsford fell gravely ill at the end of 1886, bringing to an end the activities of the Hermetic Society. In 1887, Westcott and Mathers, along with William R. Woodman and Alphonsus F.A. Woodward, started to organize a new group: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn was formally chartered on March 1, 1888, just a week after the death of Anna Kingsford.

Five years later, upon the death of Blavatsky, Mathers claimed to have been contacted by her "Secret Chiefs", and authorized by them to create an inner order to the Golden Dawn, which he called the Rosy Cross.

And here is where things get interesting.

All the groups mentioned so far -- the SRIA, the Hermetic Society, and the original Golden Dawn -- were strictly philosophical societies, dedicated to spiritual development through the study of mystical teachings. But initiates into the Rosy Cross were permitted to perform actual ritual magic.

What is this ritual magic? According to Ronald Hutton, historian extraordinaire of the witchcraft revival, prior to the nineteenth century learned ritual magic "promised to give the operator control of ... forces, which ... placed superhuman powers at the disposal of the magician: demons, angels, or the hidden names of God. Those powers were still, however, expected to be used for practical ends...the classic grimoire is designed for somebody who is impoverished, embittered, and (above all) very lonely." As Hutton puts it, "Traditional scholarly magic was at basis an elaborate way of ringing for room service."

What Mathers and Westcott -- building on work by the author Eliphas Levi -- did, was combine the Hermetic goal of spiritual development with this operative high magic. The spirits or deities were invoked not for practical ends, not for wealth or worldly power, but instead to allow the magician to become spiritually empowered -- to experience a unity with the divine forces involved.

For the Golden Dawn, those divine forces were rather Christian in appearance. For example, initiates to the inner order were tied to a cross and had the stigmata (wounds of the Crucifixion) traced on them; while the "Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram", designed by Mathers and taught to novices as a daily practice, involved a recitation of part of the Lord's Prayer in Hebrew and the invocation of angels.

However, Mathers came out of the Theosophical tradition that held that the same basic truths lie behind all religions: in his words, "whatever the errors, corruption, or mistakes in any particular form of religion, all are based on and descended from the acknowledgment of Supreme Divine Powers." Additionally, the Golden Dawn arose in the context of the revival of the classic Pagan deities brought about by the Romantics. Thus in among the Christian imagery both the Great God Pan and the Goddess, in the form of Isis, also made their appearance: Pan as the "Goat of Mendes", and the Goddess under the syncretized identity "Isis-Urania", after whom the Golden Dawn's first temple was named.

Mathers' Golden Dawn work made another important contribution to the theory of magic. While they were by no means materialists, they did understand that the spirits invoked in ritual magic could be understood as psychological rather than supernatural in nature. As Mathers and Crowley wrote in a preface to their version of The Lesser Key of Solomon:

...What is the cause of my illusion of seeing a spirit in the triangle of Art?

Every smatterer, every expert in psychology, will answer: "That cause lies in your brain."

...

The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.

...

If, then, I say, with Solomon:

"The Spirit Cimieries teaches logic," what I mean is:

"Those portions of my brain which subserve the logical faculty may be stimulated and developed by following out the processes called 'The Invocation of Cimieries.'"

...

...There is no effect which is truly and necessarily miraculous.

Our Ceremonial Magic fines down, then, to a series of minute, though of course empirical, physiological experiments, and whoso, will carry them through intelligently need not fear the result.

[The preface in question is probably the work of Crowley.]

This idea is much like Buddhist teachings, especially in Zen, that tell us that there are no powers outside of ourselves to search for -- and yet recommend meditations and rituals devoted to a whole host of Bodhisattvas and deities. As Nyogen Senzaki explained a ritual of reciting sutras before a painting of the Bodhisattva Manjusri, "A true Mahayanist [Mahayana Buddhist] never worships anything but his own true inner self. The recitation is an expression of our prajna, perfect understanding, and nothing else."

So this was this system into which Allan Bennett and Aleister Crowley were initiated in the 1890s: magical practice used as a tool for spiritual development, and compatible with religious beliefs of all sorts.

Bennett (who some sources allege was Mather's foster son) explored many spiritual paths before coming to the Golden Dawn: Hindu literature and the practice of yoga, as well as Spiritualism, Theosophy, the Western mystical traditions, and psychology. He discovered Buddhism in 1880 when he read Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia.

He joined the Theosophical Society in 1893, and was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1894. Here he gained a reputation as "the one Magician in who could do really big-time stuff", in Crowley's words.

In 1900, driven both by an interest in Eastern mysticism and by a need to seek warmer climes to treat his severe asthma, Bennett went to Ceylon. Crowley paid his way -- with money he obtained from an old love interest under questionable pretenses -- hoping that Bennett would help spread Western occultism in the East. But things turned out the other way around, and Bennett took strongly to Buddhism. In late 1901, finding the Buddhism in Ceylon lacking, he traveled on to Burma to take ordination as a bhikku, and a few years later engaged in Buddhist missionary work to England.

(Regarding the state of Buddhism in Ceylon, remember that it had only recently begun to recover from the wounds of centuries of colonialism -- Sinhalese bhikkus had even abandoned meditation. Dharmapala had also found Ceylon's Buddhism wanting and had finally received guidance from a Burmese teacher.)

But before he left for Burma, Bennett was joined in Ceylon for a few months by his friend and student, Aleister Crowley.

Crowley remains one of the most perplexing figures in the history of ritual magic and of the introduction of Eastern philosophy to the West. His influence on occultism is unmatched, and he was a dedicated investigator of matters spiritual who wrote some wonderfully clear texts on magic, yoga, and on philosophy. Yet he was also a self-pitying classist sexist asshole of the first rank, whose collection of mental health issues could have kept a small team of expert therapists busy.

His father died while he was very young, and he was raised by his mother and his uncle in the fanatical Christianity of the Plymouth Brethren. He had no affection for his mother, whom he regarded as a "a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type". His uncle he hated with a white-hot passion: in Crowley's assessment, "No more cruel fanatic, no meaner villain, ever walked this earth." He learned their faith forward and backward -- and loathed it. When his exasperated mother called him "a beast", he took it to heart and delightedly identified himself with the Beast of the Book of Revelation, the Anti-Christ.

A demonstration of how disturbed a child he became is given in his "autohagiography", The Confessions of Aleister Crowley:

There is one amazing incident; at the age of fourteen as near as I can remember. I must premise that I have always been exceptionally tenderhearted, except to tyrants, for whom I think no tortures bad enough. In particular, I am uniformly kind to animals; no question of cruelty or sadism arises in the incident which I am about to narrate.

I had been told "A cat has nine lives." I deduced that it must be practically impossible to kill a cat. As usual, I became full of ambition to perform the feat. (Observe that I took my information unquestioningly au pied de la lettre.) Perhaps through some analogy with the story of Hercules and the hydra, I got it into my head that the nine lives of the cat must be taken more or less simultaneously. I therefore caught a cat, and having administered a large dose of arsenic I chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull and, when it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might remove the ninth life. In fact, the operation was successful; I had killed the cat. I remember that all the time I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the interest of pure science.

Note the way in which he disassociates himself from his cruelty in relating this incident -- it is an important symptom he exhibited repeatedly.

Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1898. Shortly thereafter, he invited Bennett (who was then in dire financial straits) to share a flat with him. They lived together for about eighteen months, and Bennett became Crowley's mentor in occultism -- and probably also in Hinduism and Buddhism -- as Crowley moved quickly up the initiated ranks of the Order.

Bennett's mentorship was of immense importance to Crowley. In his Confessions, he wrote, "I did not fully realize the colossal stature of that sacred spirit; but I was instantly aware that this man could teach me more in a month than anyone else in five years." Confessions is dedicated in part to Bennett, with the notation, "who did what he could". More, his admiration for Bennett is proved by the negative: he was one of the very few people against whom Crowley never spewed his vitriol.

After Bennett went to Ceylon, Crowley visited him for several months and joined his studies of Yoga, Vedanta, and Buddhism. For a while Crowley enthusiastically embraced Buddhism -- in a 1902 article "Berashith" he stated "I confidently and deliberately take my refuge in the Triple Gem", and he repeated this allegiance in his 1903 "Science and Buddhism". (Taking refuge in the "Triple Gem" of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha is the formal ritual means of declaring one's self a Buddhist.)

But by 1904 Crowley had begun to move away from Buddhism. Some of his arguments remind me of Zen's deliberate blasphemies, intended to bring the student away from reliance on external salvation. Given his later unfavorable comparison of the Buddhism he encountered to the Taoism of Lao Tzu, I sometimes wonder what would have happened had Crowley met Zen rather than Theravada -- a wounded Theravada, at that.

If when visiting Kamakura on his way to Ceylon, he had followed up on an impulse to settle for a while in one of the monasteries there, we might have a quite different tale.

But beyond his objections to what he saw as hollow practice among Buddhists he saw, his move away from Buddhism followed shortly after the writing of The Book of the Law, an event central to Crowley's life and the origin of his system Thelema.

In April 1904, Crowley "channeled" a "being" named Aiwass, and wrote down a text called The Book of the Law (or Liber AL vel Legis). The Book is written from a perspective of vicious and hostile strength: for example, "Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world."

At first Crowley rejected the "message" he received: "The fact of the matter was that I resented The Book of the Law with my whole soul. For one thing, it knocked my Buddhism completely on the head." But it maintained a hold on him.

From his training in the Golden Dawn system, Crowley had learned that the spirits that appear in magical rituals are aspects of the magician's own mind. But he was never able to understand Aiwass in this way. For many years he claimed that Aiwass was one of the Secret Chiefs that Blavatsky and Mathers claimed to be agents of; later, he identified Aiwass as his "Holy Guardian Angel" (a reference to the magical practices of Abramelin the Mage).

This inability to understand Aiwass as a fragment of his own personality, this disassociation from cruel attitudes, is the same symptom that we saw when he related the story of killing the cat as a teenager. It lies at the root of Crowley's tragic failure. Illuminated visions and mystical experiences are of no use if they are not built on that firm foundation proscribed by the Delphic Oracle millennia ago: Know Thyself.

At first Crowley didn't attach too much importance to the Aiwass experience. In different circumstances, maybe it could have been the start of a "healing crisis" that brought about an integration of Crowley's damaged personality. But that was not to be.

In 1905 Crowley -- a skilled mountaineer -- took part in a disastrous attempt at scaling Kangchenjunga that resulted in five deaths. In early 1906 while traveling across China he began intense long-term magical work, his "Augoeidies" ritual, which placed a great strain on his mental energies. Upon returning to England in June he learned that while he had been at this, his daughter had died of typhoid. He blamed his wife; she subsequently slipped deeper into alcoholism, and they divorced in 1909.

The stress during these years had to have been enormous.

We saw Crowley above claiming refuge in the Triple Gem: the Buddha, the enlightened or divine nature within all beings; the Dharma, the wisdom teachings; and the Sangha, the supportive community of seekers. He was indeed learned in many teachings, and pursued the divine with great zeal. But Crowley had no Sangha to turn to for support. The Golden Dawn organization had fragmented before Crowley was initiated into the inner order. Bennett had gone to Asia, and they saw each other only a few times after that. He was estranged from Mathers. He did keep some contact with his original sponsor in the Golden Dawn, George Cecil Jones, and they did some work together. But it was clearly not enough.

To put it bluntly: Crowley lost his grip on consensual reality. Always a fractured personality, he seized on the Book of the Law and came to believe that he had been specially anointed by the rulers of the world, the Secret Chiefs: that he "was the chosen prophet of the Masters, the instrument fit to interpret their idea and work their will." He was "the Prophet chosen to proclaim the Law which will determine the destinies of this planet for an epoch," he was "in a class which contains only seven other names in the whole of human history".

You don't need to be a psychiatrist to looks at those assertions and declare that Crowley had gone off the rails.

But that doesn't mean his work is valueless -- crazy wisdom is great. But we have to be careful to distinguish crazy wisdom from just plain crazy: and with Crowley, the closer something is to the specifics of Thelma and Aiwass, the more likely it is to be plain crazy rather than wise crazy.

An example of the wise crazy is that even as he lost himself in Thelema, Crowley could see a Pagan nature religion coming. In a 1914 letter to his friend George Jones, he wrote:

...the time is just ripe for a natural religion. People like rites and ceremonies, and they are tired of hypothetical gods. Insist on the real benefits of the sun, the Mother-Force, the Father-Force, and so on; and show them that by celebrating these benefits worthily the worshippers unite themselves more fully with the current of life. Let the religion be Joy, but with a worthy and dignified sorrow in death itself; and treat death as an ordeal, an initiation....In short be the founder of a new and greater Pagan cult.

Crowley knew that he would not be the one to bring this Paganism about. He was here suggesting that Jones take it up. But instead the person who would play the key role was a much younger man, who was then in Malaya working on a rubber plantation and befriending the natives and the primitive tribes of the jungle: Gerald Gardner.

Witches

Gerald Gardner, generally regarded as the founder of modern Wicca, first met in Aleister Crowley in May 1947, just a few months before Crowley's death. But their paths had come within hailing distance when both were in Kandy, Ceylon, at around the same time in 1901.

It's interesting to compare Crowley the occultist, the foremost popularizer of "high" magic, with Gardner the witch, popularizer of "low" magic. While Crowley grew up in a family that afforded him no intellectual or emotional support, Gardner's father was "kind and gentle" and his mother was an intellectual of wide literary interests. Where Crowley believed that any sort of manual labor was degrading work that should be left lower classes, Gardner worked on tea and rubber plantations in Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaya. Where Crowley went through women as disposable means of satiating his physical needs, and never respected them in the least, Gardner was happily married for over 30 years.

But it is an odd coincidence how their paths crossed in Ceylon - and how it was asthma that drew them both there. Like Alan Bennett, Gardner looked to find relief from his asthma in a warmer climate. (Crowley also suffered from asthma -- he became addicted to the heroin he was prescribed for bronchial spasms. And Crowley's secretary Israel Regardie, who became a noted writer on the occult, also suffered from asthma. Regardie notes a theory -- from an unnamed English author and occultist -- that asthma is an occupational hazard to magicians and mystics. It is interesting to consider. Or maybe it just says something about air pollution in England!)

From 1900 until 1936 Gardner made his home in the colonies in Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaya. In Ceylon he encountered Buddhism and was interested by (what he interpreted to be) its idea of reincarnation, but that seems to have been the extent of its impact on him. On one of his occasional visits to England he became interested in Spiritualism, and while he found some mediums to be frauds, he believed that others had genuine abilities to contact the spirits of the dead.

In the years he lived in the East Gardner spent much time learning about the local cultures. He witnessed the religious and magical rites of the Dyak and Sakai tribes, and studied the mythology and folk magic of the Malays, especially that centering around their traditional weapon, the kris. (His fascination with the kris may explain the predominance of the athame in Wiccan ritual.) He became interested in anthropology and archeology, and had his work published in the Royal Asiatic Society's Journal.

The magic that he saw the Dyak and Sakai tribes perform was quite different from the "high" magic of Mathers and Crowley. This was not work done in isolation by intellectuals, referencing ancient tomes and grimoires. What he saw with the Dyaks was more like Spiritualism, with a medium acting as a voice for spirits; while the Sakai danced and sang themselves into a frenzy, and treated disease with spells to cast out demons. It was Paleolithic, shamanistic, community activity. In the Muslim culture of the Malays he saw sympathetic folk magic and divination practices not too different in character from those found in European cultures.

Two other influences from his time in the East came through clearly in his later development of Wicca. First, during his time in Ceylon he became a Freemason. Second, after suffering a a minor medical mishap in a Singapore hospital, he turned the most ancient and natural healing treatment: sunbathing. The relief he obtained from sunshine and fresh air turned him into a naturalist.

Gardner retired to England in 1936, and in 1938 -- looking for a safe location for his collection of archaeological artifacts and exotic weapons if the looming war came to pass -- he moved to the New Forest district of Hampshire. During lulls in his work as an air raid warden, he followed his interest in the unusual by visiting a group in Christchurch that styled itself a "Rosicrucian Theatre".

Despite some Masonic and Theosophic ties, it was a generally silly group -- its leader claimed to be immortal, and to have in his possession the Holy Grail! But there was a small clique that he got on well with: a group of newcomers, Co-Masons who had followed Mabel Besant-Scott when she moved to the New Forest area.

According to Gardner this group was a witch coven, practitioners of an pre-Christian European religion that had survived down the ages, and he was initiated into their coven in 1939.

Ten years later, he published a novel, High Magic's Aid, which contained disguised descriptions of the (claimed) rituals and beliefs of this group. He portrayed their witchcraft as equal in status to "high magic", but less elitist and more closely linked to the forces of nature.

The descriptions had to be fictionalized because under the 1736 Witchcraft Act and the 1824 Vagrancy Act, it was a crime to claim to practice witchcraft in Britain. After the repeal of these laws in 1951, Gardner published another book, Witchcraft Today. This was a (purported) non-fiction work in which he posed as an independent anthropologist reporting on the discovery of a surviving pre-Christian religious system.

Between his (claimed) initiation and the publication of High Magic's Aid, Gardner also joined a Druid revival group called the Circle of the Universal Bond (a.k.a. the Ancient Druid Order), and became a member of its governing council. And he met with Aleister Crowley, who initiated him into the Ordo Templi Orientis.

The O.T.O. was a German offspring of Freemasonry founded in 1904. Besides its basis in the myth of the Knights Templar, it was influenced by the "high magic" of Eliphas Levi, and by Indian yoga and tantra. Crowley was a natural for the organization, and they approached him in 1912; he became the head of its English branch. By the time of his meeting with Gardner, Crowley was running the whole show, and had converted the O.T.O. into an organ of his Thelema system.

After WWII the O.T.O. was moribund, and Crowley seems to have planned that Gardner would work to revive it in England.

So, leading up to 1949 Gardner (apparently) had experience, connections, and sympathies in the worlds of both "high" magic -- the O.T.O. -- and "low" magic -- the coven, and the tribal shamans he had seen in the Far East.

When he visited the U.S. in 1947, he was also able to make some contact with Voodoo practitioners. And sometime around here, by the 1950s at least, Gardner was also familiar with a British group called the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. This, as odd as it may seem, was a sort of Paganish offshoot of Scouting -- connected more with Ernest Seton's original Woodcraft Indians than with Baden-Powell's militarist, jingoist youth movement. (Some have even suggested that this Order, or an offshoot, was the group that Gardner refered to as the New Forest coven; however the historical evidence for this is muddled at best. See the Appendix for more details.)

After Crowley died in 1947, some in the O.T.O. viewed Gardner as his successor in the organization. But Gardner seems to have abandoned plans to revive the O.T.O., and decided instead to throw his lot in with the witches.

Assuming, that is, that there was a group in New Forest doing some sort of ritual work, and if, in fact, they were witches.

We have to use all these qualifiers in relating Gardner's encounter with the New Forest Coven for two reasons. First, historical analysis casts much doubt on the claim that this group was a survival of ancient Paganism.

Gardner's description of the witch rituals match very well the discredited anthropological theories of Margaret Murray. Murray published two popular books, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1933), about her theory of an "Old Religion". Her theory is most notable for two aspects. First, that the victims of the witch trials of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries had been practitioners of a pre-Christian Pagan religion. Second, that this religion was a fertility cult based around a horned god of generative power, and that it was spread across all of Western Europe, organized into small covens.

This theory might have been accepted by layman in the 1930s -- especially by Gardner, who knew Murray through the Folk-Lore Society -- but was not well regarded by contemporary experts, and has been thoroughly overturned by later research.

This points at an attempted reconstruction -- either by Gardner, or by the New Forest coven before he encountered them -- of witchcraft based on theories that were current in the 1920s and 1930s, rather than to a survival of an ancient religion.

Furthermore, the rituals that Gardner used in the late 1940s and early 1950s show many borrowings from the works of Crowley and Mathers, as well as poetry from Kipling, and ritual elements from Masonry, the OTO, and Thelema (the 'Gnostic Mass'). Gardner's explanation was that the New Forest coven's ceremonies were "fragmentary" by the time he encountered the group, and he used this other work to fill in the gaps.

But that brings us to our second reason for richly qualifying any statements about the origins of Wicca: Gardner had what his student Frederic Lamond calls a "devious creative attitude to factual truth." He was known to make bogus claims of university degrees, including a Ph.D. In Witchcraft Today, he falsely claimed to be a disinterested observer, rather than admitting to be a member of the culture he was describing. He claimed that the coven was led by a woman named Dorthy Clutterbuck, but historical evidence shows her to have been a pious Christian with no links to any sort of witchcraft; it seems he used Clutterbuck's name either as a prank, or as a blind to conceal the identity of the actual leader.

So with all these caveats, what can we clearly say about Gardner and Wicca? He didn't pull it out of some deep dusty closet where it had rested since the Stone Age. Nor did he make it up out of whole cloth.

Instead he wove together threads that had been floating around since the early nineteenth century. From the Romantic poets and the work of Murray came the notions of the Horned God and of the Goddess. From the Theosophists came connections between Western and Eastern traditions.

From Whitman up through D.H. Lawrence and (in an incomplete way) Crowley, the re-sanctification of sexuality. (Even with a bit of light kink -- Gardner shunned drugs, and as an asthmatic could not dance himself into ecstasy, and so made use of light bondage and flogging to achieve trance states.

From the occultists came ritual elements of initiation and invocation, and the idea of magic as a tool for spiritual development. From naturalism, the practice of working "skyclad". From primitive tribes, the raw methods of trace, and the emphasis on natural forces. And from Gardner's wide-ranging experience and exposure to Buddhism and Islam, came an inherent respect for diversity in religious practice.

With these elements, Gardner developed something special. It wasn't the first modern Pagan religion (see below), but it was the first to "break the surface", to spread widely and to have mass appeal. It combined methods from low magic and high magic, and applied them to small groups instead of solitary practitioners.

And it emphasized the role of the priestess and brought the Goddess, the divine feminine, to a new preeminence.

Pagans and the Counter-Culture

Gerald Gardner was living in the East during World War I and its aftermath. He spent a few months as a hospital orderly in Liverpool, but a recurrence of malaria forced him back to Malaya. So he missed directly experiencing the most wrenching period of change in Europe in centuries. By 1918, war, disease, and famine had killed 9,400,000 soldiers and 30,000,000 civilians.

Political, social, and artistic systems all over the continent were rocked by the wake of war. The Dada and Surrealist movements in art, the Communist revolution in Russia, the emergence of Freudian psychology -- all were consequences of the post-World War I shakeup.

Britain got off lighter than the mainland nations where the battles had taken place, but still suffered enormous loss of life and of wealth. After 1921 it slipped into chronic economic depression, lasting until the Second World War. It's not much wonder that some Britons in the 1920s and 30s were looking for an alternative to their mainstream culture and religion. Legends of their ancestors, myths (however inaccurate) of a ancient witch-religion, provided a pleasant alternative.

WWI was less cruel to the U.S. Entering the war "over there" late, it suffered only a fraction of the casualties that the U.K. did. And partly due to a strong market in exports to war-ravaged Europe, America enjoyed an economic boom during most of the 1920s. Even when the Great Depression seized the U.S. in the 1930s, the optimism of the "New Deal" quickly became pervasive. It wasn't until the late 1960s that the combination of a demographic hump with a particularly stupid war led to a widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream culture in the U.S.

But there were important precursors of the 1960s counterculture emerging in the late 1940s and 1950s, and some going back even to the start of the century.

One of these was the woodcraft movement started by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton. He looked to a pre-Christian culture to find what he found lacking in early 1900s North American life -- not a European pre-Christian culture, but that of the Native Americans. Concerned with juvenile delinquency, he set up the "Woodcraft Indians", a youth movement dedicated in part to the preservation and promotion of "the culture of the Redman". When Seton met Robert Baden-Powell in England in 1906, the Boy Scout movement was born; but Seton moved away from Baden-Powell's jingoism during WWI.

It was largely through Seton's work that Native American culture (or at least, Seton's interpretation of it) was popularized to the rest of the nation.

By the Great Depression of the 1930s the idea that something had gone awry gained more traction. The decade saw the publication of two important works on Native American religion: John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, the story of a Sioux holy man, in 1932; and Seton's The Gospel of the Redman in 1935, in which he described a mystical Native American monotheism, the religion of the "Great Spirit".

Another alternative religious movement during the Depression was an attempt at a strict classical Pagan revival. In 1938, Gleb Botkin established the Church of Aphrodite in West Hempstead, Long Island. But though it may have been the first consciously Pagan modern religion, this monotheistic, dogmatic group never really took off.

The 1930s also saw the first stirrings of the "back to the land" movement, such as Ralph Borsodi's "School of Living" started in 1934. If industrial society was so fragile and brittle that bankers and stockbrokers could destroy it, some reasoned, perhaps we ought to reconsider whether or not it truly represented progress. The back-to-the-landers found their prophet in the works of Thoreau, especially in Walden.

And it was during the 1930s that Zen put down strong roots in the U.S. In 1931 two teachers from the lineage of Soyen Shaku (the Japanese priest who had represented Zen to the Parliament of Religions) formed groups to teach Americans. D.T. Suzuki's former roommate Nyogen Senzaki started the Mentorgarten Meditation Hall in Los Angeles, while in New York Sokei-an Sasaki formed the Buddhist Society of America.

Later, Sasaki's wife, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, played an important role in spreading Zen. In 1958 she was ordained a priest at Daitokuji, a prestigious Rinzai temple in Kyoto. Her son-in-law Alan Watts was key in introducing the West to Zen, Vedanta, and Taoism. And Senzaki's student Robert Aitken would do important work connecting Zen with the peace movement.

Also in the 1930s, in 1934 American Dwight Goddard founded a group called the "Followers of Buddha", but the group quickly foundered. Goddard fared better in publishing, and his 1932 collection of sutras, The Buddhist Bible became a success.

The development of Zen was interrupted by World War II. Both Sanzaki and Sasaki were among the more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, citizens and non-citizens, forced into the infamous concentration camps.

After the war, most Americans of the "G.I. Generation" just wanted to turn inward and live a quiet, normal life. But among those who had grown up with the war, the demographic group between the G.I. and the Baby Boomers, dissatisfaction was more common. The conformity, consumerism, and ongoing racism of post-war society, plus the growing consciousness of the threats of ecological devastation from pollution and of annihilation by nuclear war, prompted a search of alternative ways of living.

Some looked back to a "simpler" time, and the back-to-the-land movement picked up momentum. But when the forces of the real estate market co-opted the "escape the cities!" meme, the result was the suburbanization of the U.S.

Some looked to other cultures for a model. White hipsters, for example, looked to African-American culture, especially jazz. It was through the culture around jazz that cannabis use first became widespread, and introduced many to a new mode of thinking.

The writers of the "Beat generation" emerged from the "hip" milieu, starting around 1944 when Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, and William Burroughs met in New York City. The label "beat" originally came from the feeling of being "beat up" and "beat down". But later Kerouac repurposed it, linking it to the word "beatific".

The Beats were saddled with a reputation as nihilists -- clearly, anyone who rejected the wonders of post-war America must have been a pinko commie who hated all that was good in the world. But in truth they were trying affirm life, trying to say "yes" to a spiritual impulse that their society was burying under television and tranquilizers. In Kerouac's words: "I want to speak for things. For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammad I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out." They may have understood the feeling of being "starving hysterical naked", but they were also "burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night".

The poets of the Beat movement made connections to Buddhism both through looking to the past and through the impulse to learn from foreign cultures. Kerouac sought out Eastern philosophy after reading Thoreau, while Gary Snyder came to an interest in Zen through the works of D.T. Suzuki. Closing part of the loop, Philip Whalen was introduced to Buddhism as a boy in the 1940s through the books of the Theosophists.

When Snyder met Kerouac and introduced him to Zen -- and hiking and camping and mountaineering -- the result was Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, the book that brought Buddhist ideas to prominence in American popular culture. (Closing another part of the loop, on the day that The Dharma Bums was published, Kerouac visited D.T. Suzuki for an impromptu tea and haiku session. )

Snyder's Zen was influenced by his intense interest in Native America culture and woodsmanship -- when he organized a meditation retreat in December 1958, he replaced the traditional kinhin, or walking mediation, with a nighttime run through the woods, leaping over boulders and crashing through the undergrowth!

The Beats brought Buddhist, especially Zen, ideas to a new popularity. But their practice had real differences from traditional Buddhism. (At least, at first: after his meeting with Kerouac, Gary Snyder went to Japan to study, while in the 1970s Phillip Whalen became a bona fide Zen monk and Ginsberg a student of the Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.)

Alan Watts teased out the relationship in a brilliant 1958 piece in the Chicago Review called "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen". He contrasted the lawless, subjective, sometimes overly self-conscious "beat Zen", with the "square Zen" of rigid discipline, "a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approved and established authority. There will even be a certificates to hang on the wall." He concluded that either path could work, as the true experience at the heart of Zen was robust enough to not be damaged by either sort of silliness.

Around the same time in the late 1950s, three young men -- Gregory Hill, Kerry Thornley, and Bob Newport -- were turning to yet another alternative to the cultural and religious mainstream: salvation through absolute nonsense. Inspired in part by an interest in Zen and its tales of lunatic masters who refused to behave respectably, they originated the Discordian movement.

The Discordians argue -- and the seriousness of the argument depends on the Discordian and on the circumstances -- that Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and confusion, is the one true divine power in the universe. Eris is best known to students of mythology for her wedding gift of the golden apple inscribed "Kallisti (For the Prettiest One)", which Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena squabbled over until they got the Trojan War started. (Note that in standard versions of the tale Eris gets the blame, but she wasn't one of the ones bribing the judge to win a beauty contest!)

The argument that Eris is the supreme being has some strong points - after all, somebody had to put all this chaos here! And any group raising a fuss about a Goddess all the way back in the 1950s, is pretty remarkable.

This "Non-prophet Irreligious Disorganization" has become the sacred clowns of the Pagan movement, the safety valve that helps protect it against "the Curse of Greyface" - the idea that life is Serious Business and that Order must be preserved above all. At any sufficiently large Pagan event, you will hear someone yell "Hail Eris!" or "Kallisti!" -- paying their respects to the forces of chaos.

The Discordian influence on the counter-culture is a strange, largely unexplored historical territory. It has been claimed that they helped turn the "V" hand gesture from "V for victory" to the "peace sign": the Discordians associated it (via Roman numerals) with the sacred number 5. Of course, this claim comes from Discordians, and should be taken with heaping amounts of salt.

(The gesture was popularized in Japan in the 1970s, and now you'll see little old ladies getting their picture taken at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, flashing this Discordian symbol. Hail Eris, indeed!)

But the oddest part of the Discordian story is the tale of co-founder Kerry Thornley. He served together with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marine Corps, found Oswald a fascinating character and started a novel, The Idle Warriors, partly inspired by his defection to the USSR. This made Thornley the only author to write about Oswald before the JFK assassination, and brought him to the attention of the Warren Commission and, later, of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison.

Some conspiracy theorists believe that Thornley might have been "second Osawld", or otherwise involved in the assassination. Sucked into the weirdness vortex, for a time he became a genuine paranoid.

Such can be the risks of dealing with Eris. As Thornley told Greg Hill, "[I]f I had realized that all of this was going to come true, I would have chosen Venus."

Another group that started out as a joke and took on an unexpected depth was the Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA), formed at Carleton College, Minnesota in 1963. It was created as a humorous protest against a requirement for students to attend religious services, and had no intention of being an actual alternative religion. Its members were mostly members of mainstream religions who just happened to have a certain sense of humor and an anti-authoritarian streak.

But to the surprise of its founders, the RDNA persisted after the requirement was lifted, and eventually gave birth to the New Reformed Druids of North America, which took a definite Pagan direction. Out of the NRDNA evolved Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF), an influential Druidic group founded by Issac Bonewits.

For those looking for a different way of life, another source of ideas was found in science fiction and fantasy. In the 1950s and 60s, the best work of the genre had begun to mature from pulp adventure tales to deeper explorations of cultures that never were -- and in so doing cast a critical eye on our own society.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, published in a popular paperback edition in the U.S. in 1965, became a touchstone of the 1960s counter-culture. His "Middle Earth" was invented in the waning days of the first World War, and the Shire of his hobbits is a glorification of a pastoral English village. The hobbits ally with forest-dwelling elves and with dwarves who live under the mountains, and even with walking trees, to preserve their way of life against an enemy who embodies industrialization. His work echoes the Romantic movement's elevation of the pastoral over the urban, and the widespread longing in post-WWI England to return to a "simpler" time.

Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) gave readers a more human and sympathetic wizard than Tolkien's Gandalf. (Knowledgeable readers of Tolkien know that Gandalf is actually an Istari, a being something like an angel in Tolkien's cosmology.) Earthsea's hero, Ged, works toward balance and harmony rather than a military triumph of "good" over "evil".

Le Guin's work is influenced by her Taoist, feminist, and multi-cultural outlook. Literary critic and theorist Robert Scholes has said that she "works not with a theology but with an ecology, a cosmology, a reverence for the universe as a self-regulating structure...it is a deeper view, closer to the great pre-Christian mythologies of this world[.]"

(The Earthsea novels are simply fantastic. The recent television miniseries that claimed to be based on them had little connection, and was disavowed by Le Guin. Its creators need keel-hauling.)

On the science-fiction side, Star Trek (1966 to 1969) gave viewers the elfin-eared Vulcan Mr. Spock, who projected a logical detachment from destructive emotions while engaging in hypnotic, telepathic "mind melds" -- a sort of future Merlin to Kirk's King Arthur.

Star Trek's attitude toward religion was not one where gods fared well. In the (second) pilot episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before", after an encounter with a mysterious energy field a crew member starts to develop god-like powers, and Captain Kirk has to kill him. In a later episode, "Who Mourns for Adonais?", Kirk and the crew knock off Apollo. Several cultures have computers that the locals think of as being gods -- Kirk short-circuits them or blows them up.

Even though military hierarchy is strictly maintained on the ship, Star Trek radically overthrew the cosmic hierarchy of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and gave us something more in the Greco-Roman style: men (and women and Vulcans) who strive with gods.

Robert A. Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) told the tale of a Valentine Michael Smith, a human being raised by Martians. When he returns to Earth as a young adult, he brings Martian religions practices with him. These include the ritual of "sharing water" -- critical on a desert planet like Mars -- and the notion of "grokking", knowing someone or something so deeply that observer and observed unite. Tim Zell (later Oberon Zell-Ravenheart) and a few co-conspirators took the novel as inspiration and founded the Church of All Worlds in 1968.

The overlap between science fiction fandom and the Pagan movement remains strong to this day: both are cultures that respect bold imagination. (Of course, then there's that other religion that came out of science fiction: Scientology. Which shows the danger of taking suspension of disbelief too far. Really, "body thetans" resulting from frozen aliens being dropped into volcanoes and blown up with H-bombs?)

But even stranger than science fiction were the visions of "psychonauts" who experimented with the "psychedelics" or "entheogens" peyote, mescaline, LSD and psilocybin.

Peyote is ancient ceremonial drug of Native American cultures. Its use was promoted by Havelick Ellis as early as the 1890s. The main active alkaloid, mescaline, was isolated in the 1890s, synthesized in the 1910s, and popularized by Aldous Huxley in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception. Peyote and mescaline were popular with the beats; Ginsberg's "Howl" was partially inspired by a 1955 peyote vision.

Psilocybin, as found in "magic mushrooms", is another ancient psychedelic, used in Native cultures and popularized by Timothy Leary starting in 1960. But it was LSD, introduced into the world by Albert Hoffman in 1943, that made the movement. By 1959 LSD was being used by psychotherapists, and got a lot of attention when it was used by high-priced Beverly Hills therapists who treated celebrities like Cary Grant.

By 1962 Tim Leary had gotten ahold of LSD -- or it ahold of him -- and the avalanche began.

The experiences of the psychonauts were often similar to the states of mind described in some forms of yoga and in esoteric Buddhism. This inspired a great deal of interest in Eastern philosophy. Huxley and Leary, for example, both had a fascination with the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead Leary's research partner Richard Alpert went to India and became a convert, changing his name to Ram Dass. Images of Hindu and Tibetan deities became prominent.

The same deities, in different masks, can be found in Japanese Buddhism, even in Zen. But Zen had always taught that visions -- whether of heavenly pleasure-realms or of agonizing hells -- that arose during meditation were to be let go of without attachment. It was a system grounded enough to be neither much excited nor disturbed by all the psychedelic hubbub.

Which is not to say it stayed apart. Zen and the psychedelic movement came together in 1967 at the first "Human Be-In" in San Francisco. Gary Snyder read his poems, and Zen master Shunryu Suzuki made an appearance, holding up a single flower. Alan Ginsberg chanted the Prajnaparamita Sutra. Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary were there; Leary spoke about getting humans out of cities and back to a tribal or village organization, and urged the crowd to tune in, turn on, and drop out.

Shortly after the Be-In, the San Francisco Oracle (Haight-Ashbury's underground newspaper) gathered Leary, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Alan Watts for a discussion of what it all meant. Watts resolved to be a bridge-builder between the anxious "squares" and the "drop outs". Leary saw humanity spliting into two cultures, one organized as an dehumanized anthill or beehive while the drop outs formed an independent tribal society.

But Snyder looked forward to a long-term social evolution: "The children of the ants are going to be tribal people....We're going to get the kids, and it's going to take about three generations." In his view the psychedelic movement was merely an acceleration of this trend away from the consumer society, toward something more contemplative.

By this point, the alert reader may have noticed something about the historical characters mentioned: very few women. Perhaps this made the final contributor to the countercultural melange, feminism, more wild and way-out than even science fiction or psychedelic visions.

The idea that the half of the human race that had been largely ignored for most of history might, just might, be worthy of equal respect and have some worthwhile ideas to contribute, finally started to gain traction in the 1960s.

The ritual magic tradition of the Golden Dawn had been open to women on an equal basis. Gardner's Wicca continued that and went further, making Goddess imagery more prominent and redeeming the term "witch" from the picture of the wicked old crone to a wise practitioner of an ancient craft. (In Gardner's usage, "witch" is a gender-neutral word.)

American feminists seized on the myth of the witch, and especially the notion of the "burning times": the idea (from the inaccurate theories of Margaret Murray) that millions of women in Europe had been executed for practicing a pre-Christian religion. Witches became heroes to many in the women's movement.

For example, from the 1968 manifesto of WITCH - the "Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell", though the meaning of the acronym changed many times: "Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. (This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned.)"

Feminism and American Paganism have become so closely related that the 1996 edition of Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon -- the best general book extant on the Pagan movement -- is labelled by its publisher as belonging under two categories, "Religion" and "Women's Studies".

So this, then, was the supersaturated environment of the late 1960s: the anti-war, feminist, anti-racist, and ecological movements, all simmering together with a heaping helping of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

During the 1950s Wicca started to leak into the U.S. via the books of Gardner and a few others, but it officially came over when Rosemary and Ray Buckland founded a Gardnerian coven in 1964. This pro-nature, goddess-oriented, anti-dogmatic religion proved highly compatible with the counter-culture.

More, its claim of ancient origin was comforting to many who felt adrift -- what better response to critics who charged that the counter-culture had "no respect for tradition", than to adopt a religion tradition that (claimed to) pre-date that of the critics?

Wicca was a seed crystal dropped into the supersaturated environment of 1960s America. A new religious movement crystallized around it, including it but taking many elements also from the surrounding solution.

It was Kerry Thornley, co-founder of the Discordian Society, and Tim Zell, of the Church of all Worlds, who gave the new thing a name. Thornley had joined Kerista, "a sexually swinging psychedelic tribe", and wrote in the group's newspaper, Kerista Swinger:

"...[L]et us look at the jobs of the far less intellectual, but far more constructively functional religions of old. These were the `pagan' religions -- the religions that survive to this day in England and the United States as `witchcraft.'"

Margot Adler credits this as the first use in the U.S. of "Pagan" to describe past and present nature religions -- not just the witchcraft revival, but the broader phenomenon. (For the record, Thornley said his influence on the movement had been exaggerated. ) Tim Zell picked up Thornley's use of the word, and by 1968 was publicizing its use in the Church of All Worlds newsletter, Green Egg.

And from there, we have a Pagan movement.