Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [102]
* I Am is a mystically rooted term for God that attracted considerable use in twentieth-century occult teachings.
CHAPTER TEN
SECRETS FOR SALE
I do a better business when things are bad. I think the churches find the same thing is true.
—ZOLAR FROM “DEAN OF ASTROLOGERS,” THE NEW YORKER, 1959
The European occult lodges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could seem to cling to secrecy almost as an end in itself. Theosophy’s Annie Besant never tired of creating elite offshoots of the organization: orders within orders and inner lodges, each with its own badges, seals, and ceremonies. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the preeminent organization of Europe’s occult revival, required that initiates pass through a grueling series of degrees before being allowed in on its inner doctrine and ceremonial rites.
Starting in the 1920s in America, however, that approach to the occult was blown to pieces. A generation of teachers and impresarios, who arose from ordinary backgrounds in cities and farming communities, wrestled occult ideas away from secretive lodges and exposed them to so broad an audience that, by mid-century, practices like astrology and numerology became as widespread as bridge games and crossword puzzles.
Occult Rebel
The revolution began around 1900, when a pole-thin, intellectually curious teenager named Paul Foster Case was struggling to make a living on the American vaudeville circuit. Born in 1884 outside Rochester, New York, he began his stage career at sixteen. Case’s mother, Ella, had died three years earlier, probably of typhoid. His father, Charles, planned to remarry and move away, and told the boy that it was time to prepare for life on his own. Case visited a Rochester talent agency and found work as a performer of card tricks and as a piano player. He had learned the organ at his community church and otherwise pulled together his own education—and probably his early stage act—from the books he found at the local free library, where his parents had been custodians.
A chance encounter soon altered the course of his life. In 1901, as Case recalled it, he was performing at an area charity benefit when backstage he met a publisher and architect, a man who had designed several prominent buildings in Rochester: Claude Bragdon. Bragdon was an American patron of mysticism who befriended Manly P. Hall and helped translate work by the influential Russian mathematician and philosopher P. D. Ouspensky. The older man asked Case a simple but pivotal question: Where did he suppose ordinary playing cards came from, the kind he used in his magic act? For a bookish teen whose education had been cut off, the question presented an enticing challenge. Case began an intensive study of playing cards, a move that led him to learn about the Tarot, a seventy-eight-card deck of mysterious images—such as Death, the Juggler, and the Tower—that appeared, without obvious precedent, in early-fifteenth-century Italy. European occultists later extolled Tarot as everything from an oracle to a record of hidden wisdom.
For several years, Case balanced between the study of occultism and his stage act—until another fateful encounter, far more dramatic than the first. In a scene now recognizable from the mythos of American occultism, Case described meeting an imposing stranger who called himself a messenger from a “Master of Wisdom.” The man approached him on a Chicago city street in 1909 and declared that the vaudevillian was now at a “crossroad” and had to choose between a life devoted to the stage or the serious pursuit of occult knowledge. A stage career would be easy, the stranger said, while an occult career would be filled with difficulty and require “dedicating yourself to fully serve humanity and play a vital part in its evolution for this coming