Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [107]
In another of Benjamine’s lesson plans, “The Sacred Tarot,” he uncritically stated that the twenty-two major trumps of the Tarot deck were reproductions of images that lined the walls of an Egyptian mystery temple. He seems to have adopted the concept from nineteenth-century French occultist Paul Christian, who fatuously attributed it to Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus. The Church of Light advertised Benjamine’s Tarot deck as “painstakingly designed from description of the figures seen on the walls of the Ancient Egyptian Initiation Chamber.” Many of the images were actually painstakingly copied from those published in 1896 by still another Frenchman, René Falconnier. An actor by profession, Falconnier had enticingly reconstituted the medieval-era figures of Tarot into Egyptian-style characters that resembled early costume designs for a Cecil B. DeMille movie. In fairness to Benjamine, he probably considered the Falconnier images authentic replicas of the “Egyptian” originals and was not trying to copycat another’s work.
What Benjamine’s writings lacked in scholarly rigor, they made up for in a surprising tone of civic-minded ethics. In his 1934 volume, Predicting Events, Benjamine emphasized the “Responsibility of the Astrologer to His Client.” He inveighed against manipulation and fatalism, and insisted that the soothsayer should “ever bear in mind the power of suggestion” and always “point out the path of constructive endeavor” so that each reading would urge recipients to “CONTRIBUTE THEIR UTMOST TO UNIVERSAL WELFARE.”
In the midst of the Great Depression, Benjamine conceived of a universalist belief system he called the Religion of the Stars. He saw it as an occult religion that could unite humanity under a peaceable, nonsectarian creed based in the study of ancient astrology and the pursuit of social welfare. Benjamine reasoned, quite cannily, that the festivals and cycles of most historic religions—from solstice celebrations to Christmas—coincided with astrological phenomena. Hence, he believed the ancient art could form the basis of a primeval, ecumenical faith. His 1930s print ads for the Religion of the Stars reflected the social values of Henry A. Wallace’s “New Deal of the Ages.” One showed a torch-bearing horseman riding a winged steed labeled The New Civilization and holding a flag that echoed Benjamine’s motto: CONTRIBUTE YOUR UTMOST TO UNIVERAL WELFARE. The horse and rider leaped over the words WANT, FEAR, CENSORSHIP, ATHEISM. It was a stark counterpoint to contemporaneous ads by fellow occultist and neo-Nazi William Dudley Pelley, who advertised his “Silver Rangers” with another flag-bearing horseman, this one encircled by ominous slogans like: Take Back the Nation from the Alien and Liberty Under Law.
In the late 1940s, Benjamine traveled on lecture tours up and down both American coasts, attempting to recruit converts to his cosmic religion and its ideals of astrology, social welfare, and self-awareness. Shortly before his death in 1951, Benjamine wrote: “It seems inevitable that The Religion of the Stars shall become the world religion of the future because it includes all significant demonstrated facts of both the outer plane and the inner plane.” If Benjamine never attracted quite the membership for which he hoped (his newsletters reached a peak of sixteen thousand people), he succeeded in imparting his style of liberal values to the American occult. Paul Foster Case’s B.O.T.A. came to voice similar aims to those of the Religion of the Stars, defining itself as a “religious organization whose major objective is the promotion of the welfare of humanity through the realization of the potential inherent in each and every human being, utilizing the methods of the Western Mystery Tradition.” It was as though the reformist and occult