Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [26]
In France, a highly speculative and widely influential interpretation of the Tarot cards—which had appeared, with little obvious antecedent, in early-fifteenth-century Italy—identified ancient Egypt as the source of their beguiling imagery. The self-styled historian Antoine Court de Gébelin produced a string of subscription volumes on ancient history, Monde primitif (The Primitive World), which in their 1781 series deemed Tarot a secret book of primeval Egyptian wisdom. Closely following de Gébelin was an antiquary and fortune-teller who went by the single name Etteilla (the not-terribly imaginative backward spelling of the surname of Jean-Baptiste Alliette). Etteilla embraced the Egyptian connection and designed the first Tarot deck used expressly for divination.
Translations of Far East mystical literature, such as the mysterious source of Taoist philosophy Tao Te Ching and the divinatory masterpiece the I Ching, also began to emerge from the West’s reencounter with China. Hindu literature, such as the allegorical wisdom book Bhagavad Gita and the magisterial epic Mahabharata, were translated and read in Europe and America for the first time.
In Europe as in America, the theories of Darwin had the dual effect of undermining old ecclesiastical certainties while creating a new hunger for mystery in a biologically ordered world. And there existed, perhaps, a troublesome sense that Europe’s material progress and scientific reason had failed to resolve the inner and outer perplexities of life, particularly as the squalor of industrialization and the bleakness of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” became increasingly evident.
For avant-garde artists and intellectuals who had lost faith in old-line religion, a new light began to shine. In 1855, Éliphas Lévi, in his Transcendental Magic, proclaimed the existence of an occult philosophy hidden at the base of:
all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies.
In Lévi’s vision, occultists discovered a new sense of mission and drama.
The European occult revival attracted formidable intellects and earnest seekers, though with a peculiar twist: European occultists often adopted airs of secrecy and pageantry, as if mimicking the outer appearances of ancient temple orders and mysterious sects would assist their quest to revive lost or fragmentary knowledge. Sometimes on the thin pretext of concealing hallowed doctrine, they cloaked their study groups and fraternities in mystery. They used—or, more often, invented—the names of antique cults, such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In turn, they employed ceremonies and costumes that aped incredibly old, only dimly understood rituals. These groups drew hasty connections between the divinatory arts, such as Tarot and modern number mysticism, and the civilization of ancient Egypt. Indeed, Europe’s leading occultists typically—and often fatuously—claimed lineage to mythical or underground brotherhoods in which the old teachings were said to be preserved.
As a result, the European avant-garde’s laudable efforts at translating and reinterpreting ancient and esoteric doctrine,