Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [80]
Hall was not a writer who sifted through and repeated accounts that others had written. His chapters on Pythagorean mathematics displayed graceful ease over vast complexities, capturing the essence and splendor the ancient sage had discovered in the geometry of the natural world. Likewise, Hall cataloged and analyzed the complex symbols and ideas of alchemy, the arcane practice that formed the basis for modern chemistry.
While The Secret Teachings of All Ages has always been ignored within academia, it influenced some who chose more-traditional scholarly paths than Hall’s. The University of Chicago historian of ancient religion Mircea Eliade, whose work brought new respect to the study of Gnostic and esoteric belief systems in the twentieth century, confided to friends that as a young man it was Hall’s book that awoke in him the love of myth and symbol.
Hall was able to reach hungry young minds because he never lost his own sense of youthful idealism and wonder over the esoteric cultures he observed. He clarified ancient ideas that could otherwise seem beyond reach, writing not as a distant judge but as a lover of the rites and mysteries embodied in the old ways.
* This edition was published by the present author.
* Bragdon was not a mystic but rather an accomplished architect and publisher, who served as a prod and muse to many twentieth-century metaphysical writers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NEW DEAL OF THE AGES
Politics and the Occult
People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
—VICE PRESIDENT DAN QUAYLE ON THE CAREER OF RUSSIAN OCCULTIST GRIGORI RASPUTIN
It was a case study in how rumors start. At the beginning of an anxious summer in 1968, in a nation that had just experienced the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, writer and raconteur Truman Capote made strange pronouncements about a link between the killings. Since the 1966 publication of In Cold Blood, Capote had become sought after as an expert on the criminal mind, and on June 21, 1968, he was making one of his first appearances on NBC’s Tonight Show. From a live studio in New York City, he told host Johnny Carson of a chilling hypothesis: The assassination of both leaders was part of an occult–political conspiracy, the aim of which was to ignite a violent overthrow of the American government.
Within the writings of Theosophy’s Madame Blavatsky, Capote explained, “was a theory of how you could undermine the morale of a country and create a vacuum for revolution by systematically assassinating a series of prominent people.” The murderers themselves, he surmised, may have been brainwashed sleeper agents, of the sort found in The Manchurian Candidate. As a tantalizing bit of proof, Capote noted that Kennedy’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan, had requested (and received) from his jailers Blavatsky’s 1888 tome, The Secret Doctrine.
The writer’s remarks got picked up in newspapers and magazines, launching stories that the Russian madame had written a “Manual for Revolution,” now being used by leftist guerrillas in America. The ultraright-wing John Birch Society, in what must have been its one and only political alignment with the chic New York writer, purchased full-page ads in California newspapers decrying the long-dead Blavatsky as a force for violent revolution.
Capote’s theory was almost total imagination. There was no “Manual for Revolution,” nor had any such idea ever appeared in Blavatsky’s writing. It was correct that Sirhan had requested Blavatsky’s exegesis of occult philosophy and lost civilizations, The Secret Doctrine. He had also requested a far more obscure 1922 Theosophical text, Talks On: At the Feet of the Master. The latter was a series of commentaries by a leading English Theosophist, Charles Webster Leadbeater, on an earlier work,