Part 18 (1/2)

Newo Newi New, who called himself ”Archbishop of the Newthot Church,”

and gathered about him a harem of devoted females in San Francisco, and was landed in jail for using the mails to defraud. Or there is ”Oahspe, the Cosmic Bible,” a work of brand-new revelation with a brand-new view of the universe and all things therein:

The reader soon discovers that he must radically revise not only his ideas of celestial Cosmogony, but the order and significance of names and t.i.tles commonly applied to the Transcendental Brethren. The great provinces of Etheria are presided over by chiefs, chosen for their superior development in wisdom and love. For our solar system to cross one of these provinces requires about 3,000 years, and between them are belts of high Etherian light which take several years to pa.s.s over. The pa.s.sage of each province is a cycle of earthly history, and the crossings are called Dawns of Dan.

And here is Koreshanity, a revelation vouchsafed by the Lord to Dr.

C.R. Teed of Chicago in the year 1889. This new seer took the name of Koresh, which is Hebrew for Cyrus, ”the Shepherd from Joseph, the Stone of Israel, the Sun-Man; the illuminating center of the Son of man”, and went out on the streets of the city to preach that the earth is a hollow sphere with the stars inside. The street urchins of the pork-packing metropolis threw stones at him, and the irreverent newspapers took up his adventures, with the result that followers gathered, and now there is a flouris.h.i.+ng colony in Florida, with a dignified magazine called ”The Flaming Sword”, and a collection of propaganda volumes: ”The Cellular Cosmogony, an Exposition of Koreshan Universology and the New Geodesy”; ”The Immortal Manhood, the Laws and Processes of its Attainment in the Flesh”; ”The Great Red Dragon, by Lord Chester”; ”The Coming of the Shepherd from Joseph, The Standing of the Great Ensign, by Koresh.” The ”Religio-science” of this Chicago revelator is based, first upon some precise measurements of the earth which prove that its surface is concave; and second upon some philological discoveries very much resembling puns. Thus the ”cross of Christ” is explained in a sense of the word more common among horse-breeders than among theologians:

The highest characteristic of the alchemical law is the cross of Christ with sensual man. The cross means that the Lord G.o.d, in order to perpetuate his own being, descends into the race of sensuality.

And again, when someone asks about meteors:

The word Heaven means things heaved up, that is, heaved up from their material basis, the earth; thus, the meteors which fall to the earth are composed of metallic, mineral, and geological substances, being materialized or actually created in the atmosphere by an alchemico-organic process from zones or belts periodically open, which precipitate their contents in the form or shape of meteors.”

And perhaps I ought also to quote the ”Indicia of Human Progress”, by ”Berthaldine, Matrona”. I don't know what a ”Matrona” is--unless it is a female matron. This female matron tells me that now is the ”Time of Rest.i.tution”, and explains that ”the prolification of the human race has reached a fruition of the adultery of the truth and good of the Lord with the fallacies and evils of the mortal h.e.l.ls” ...We have come, it seems, to the ”age of Pisces”, which is ”one of the greatest radical prolification”; and what we now need is the ”power of polarization”, so that we may join the ”White Horse Army of the Most High”, which is the organization of the ”Aquarian age”, proclaimed by Koresh on January 15th, 1891.

Mazdaznan

And here is another and even more startling revelation from Chicago, given to a seer by the name of Dr. Otoman Prince of Adusht Ha'nish, prophet of the Sun G.o.d, Prince of Peace, Manthra Magi of Temple El Katman, Kalantar of Zoroastrian Breathing and Envoy of Mazdaznan living, Viceroy-Elect and International Head of Master-Thot. If you had happened to live near the town of Mendota, Illinois, and had known the German grocer-boy named Otto Hanisch, you might at first have trouble in recognizing him through this transmogrification. I have traced his career in the files of the Chicago newspapers, and find him herding sheep, setting type, preaching prestidigitation, mesmerism, and fake spiritualism, joining the Mormon Church, then the ”Christian Catholic Church in Zion”, and then the cult of Brighouse, who claimed to be Christ returned.

Finally he sets himself up in Chicago as a Persian Magus, teaching Yogi breathing exercises and occult s.e.x-lore to the elegant society ladies of the pork-packing metropolis. The Sun G.o.d, wors.h.i.+pped for two score centuries in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, has a new shrine on Lake Park Avenue, and the prophet gives tea-parties at which his disciples are fed on lilac-blossoms--”the white and pinkish for males, the blue-tinted for females”. He wears a long flowing robe of pale grey cashmere, faced with white, and flexible white kid shoes, and he sells his lady adorers a book called ”Inner Studies”, price five dollars per volume, with information on such subjects as:

The Immaculate Conception and its Repet.i.tion; The Secrets of Lovers Unveiled; Our Ideals and Soul Mates; Magnetic Attraction and Electric Mating.

A Grand Jury intervenes, and the Prophet goes to jail for six months; but that does not harm his cult, which now has a temple in Chicago, presided over by a lady called Kalantress and Evangelist; also a ”Northern Stronghold” in Montreal, an ”Emba.s.sy” in London, an ”International Aryana” in Switzerland, and ”Centers” all over America.

At the moment of going to press, the prophet himself is in flight, pursued by a warrant charging him with improper conduct with a number of young boys in a Los Angeles hotel.

I have dipped into Ha'nish's revelations, which are a farrago of every kind of ancient mysticism--paper and binding from the Bible, ill.u.s.trations from the Egyptian, names from the Zoroastrian, health rules from the Hindoos, laws from the Confucians--price ten dollars per volume. Would you like to discover your seventeen senses, to develop them according to the Ga-Llama principle, and to share the ”expansion of the magnetic circles”? Here is the way to do it:

Inhale through nostrils for four seconds, and upon one exhalation, speak slowly:

Open, O thou world-sustaining Sun, the entrance unto Truth hidden by the vase of dazzling light.

Again inhale for four seconds, and breathe out the following sentence upon one exhalation as before:

Soften the radiation of Thy Illuminating Splendor, that I may behold Thy True Being.

I have a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper telling of the prophet's arriving there. He takes the front page with the captivating headline: ”Women Didn't Think Till They Put On Corsets”. The interview tells about his mysteriousness, his aloofness, his bird-like-diet, and his personal beauty. ”Despite his seventy-three years, Ha'nish evidences no sign of age. His keen blue eyes showed no sign of wavering. There were no wrinkles on his face, and his walk was that of a man of forty.” The humor of this becomes apparent when we mention that at Ha'nish's trial, three or four years ago, he was proven to be thirty-five years old!

Being thus warned as to the accuracy of American journalism, we shall not be taken in by the repeated statements that the Mazdaznan prophet is a millionaire. But there is no doubt that he is wealthy; and as all Americans wish to be wealthy, I will quote his formula of prosperity, his method of accomplis.h.i.+ng what might be called the Individual Revolution:

When hungry and you do not know where to get your next piece of bread, do not despair. Thy Father, all-loving, has provided, you with everything that will meet all cases of emergency.

Place your teeth tightly together, with tongue pressing against the lower teeth and lips parted. Breathe in, close lips immediately, exhaling through the nostrils. Breathe again; if saliva forms in your mouth, hold your breath so you can swallow it first before you exhale. You thus take out of the air the metal-substance contained therein; you can even taste the iron which you convert into substance required for making the blood. Should you feel that, although you have sufficient iron in the blood, there is a lack of copper and zinc and silver, place upper teeth over lower, keep lower lip tightly to lower teeth, now breathe and you can even taste the metals named. Then should you feel you need more gold element for your brain functions, place your back teeth together just as if you were to grind the back teeth, taking short breaths only. You will then learn to know that there is gold and silver all around us.

That our bodies are filled with quite a quant.i.ty of gold.

Black Magic

What all this means is that we have a continent, with a hundred million half-educated people, materially prosperous, but spiritually starving; so any man who possesses personality, who looks in any way strange and impressive, or has hunted up old books in a library, and can p.r.o.nounce mysterious words in a thrilling voice--such a man can find followers. Anybody can do it with any doctrine, from anywhere, Persia or Patagonia, Pekin or Pompei. I would be willing to wager that if I cared to come out and announce that I had had a visit from _G.o.d_ last night, and to devote such literary and emotional power as I possess to communicating a new revelation, I could have a temple, a university, and a million dollars within five years at the outside.

And if at the end of five years I were to announce that I had played a joke on the world, some one of my followers would convince the faithful that I had been an agent of G.o.d without knowing it, and that the leaders.h.i.+p had now been turned over to him.

I would not be understood as believing that all our cults are undiluted fakery, for that would be doing injustice to some earnest people. There are, in this country, many followers of the Persian reformer, Abbas Effendi, who call themselves Babists, and who have what I am inclined to think is the purest and most dignified religion in existence. There was a man named Jacob Beilhardt, who founded a cult in Illinois with the painful name of ”Spirit Fruit Colony”, who nevertheless was a man of spiritual insight, a true mystic; he was honest, and so he failed, and died of a broken heart. Also there are the Christian Scientists and the Theosophists, so exasperating that one would like to throw them onto the rubbish-heap, who yet compel us to sift over their mountains of chaff for the grains of truth which will bear fruit in future.

While we western races have been exploring the natural world and perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoo students have been exploring the subconscious and its strange powers. What Myers and Lodge and Janet and Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling us today they had hints of a long time ago; and doubtless they have hints of other things, upon which our scientists have not yet come. I have friends, perfectly sane and competent people, who tell me that they can see auras, and use this ability as a means of judging character.