23 Books for Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards
12. Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion by David Gelernter
Publication Date: June 19, 2007
Official Description:
What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations?
Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right.
Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment.
Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism.
If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.
Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement.
A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.
Why Counterculture Conservatives Should Read It:
The people who first came to the American continent from Europe were Christian radicals escaping persecution, wanting to live in a land where they could worship God as they saw fit in their own temples. They were just imitating the words written in their Bibles, the stories of ancient Hebrews fleeing Pharaoh in Exodus. We are a nation of dozens of countercultures all stitched together on this basic premise of freedom from tyranny. In this vigorous, engaging collection of historical, polemical essays Gelertner shows how successive generations of American presidents performed a magickal act: they secularized Zionism to create Americanism.
Why Tea Party Occultists Should Read It:
Harry Truman’s understanding of America in these terms had profound effects in the real world:
Future editions of this list will include more books on Israel and Zionism… A fact of note: rocket scientist occultist Jack Parsons planned to relocate to the recently-created state of Israel before a mysterious explosion killed him in 1952…
13. Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
Publication Date: October 5, 2010
Official Description:
It touched lives as disparate as those of Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, and Mary Todd Lincoln–who once convinced her husband, Abe, to host a séance in the White House. Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this “hidden wisdom” transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.
Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history.
From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board, Occult America briskly sweeps from the nation’s earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:
• The spirit medium who became America’s first female religious leader in 1776
• The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith
• The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age
• The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey
• The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great DepressionHere, too, are America’s homegrown religious movements, from transcendentalism to spiritualism to Christian Science to the positive-thinking philosophy that continues to exert such a powerful pull on the public today. A feast for believers in alternative spirituality, an eye-opener for anyone curious about the unknown byroads of American history, Occult America is an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe.
Why Tea Party Occultists and Capitalist Wizards Should Read It:
This book contains all kinds of historical nuggets but the one worth understanding for the purpose of this list is the real secret behind occultism — what all the spells and magic wands and tarot cards and general silliness is really all about.
I’m not sure when I made the connection on my own — perhaps around the time when The Secret came out in 2006 — that “occultism” was really just self-help strategies with religious props. In Occult America Mitch Horowitz shows how this developed in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. Mystical and occult ideas sold heavily as mail order programs with promises of techniques that could transform the individual’s life and manifest wealth from nothing. And some of them worked. So to expand their appeal authors reinvented them in a secular context. And behold the modern self-help genre.
Today when John Hawkins submits his self-help articles to me for PJ Lifestyle, pieces with titles like 5 Simple Mind Hacks That Changed My Life and 4 Crucial Techniques for Reprogramming Yourself into A Better Person, he’ll lay out his own variations of common personal improvement strategies that worked for him and I’ll recognize their parallels in my own mystical practices. Likewise, when Dr. Helen recommends career and self-help books like Robert Greene’s Mastery one has to work hard to ignore that the methods for mastering a skill and career are the same ones that Aleister Crowley and other occultists explain for becoming a Master of the Temple.
As hokey and even crackpot as some self-help literature can be, the central premise remains sound: the root of changing the world is changing yourself, and the root of changing yourself is gaining control of your mind and thoughts. (Future editions of the list will include more on this subject…)
The next book shows why this has becomes such a necessary cornerstone of American Exceptionalism, a vital counterbalance to one of the surprising side effects of immigrant nations…
My first reaction to the list is – wtf?
Depending on whatever it is that is supposed to be the unifying idea here, I might suggest anything from “Futureshock” (a bit dated by of the right genre, I think) to “Lord of the Rings”, and possibly other scifi/fantasy. Also, as object lessons rather than theoretic tomes, “The Music Man” and “Animal House”.
It doesn’t seem to be *quite* limited to purely occult plus political works, but I’ll be diddled what does connect the whole list.
It’s already probably the longest entry I’ve ever seen on PJM.
Here’s the unifying idea:
“My intent with this list is to compile an annotated bibliography of sorts — a collection of books on a variety of subjects and genres that when put side by side can manifest fresh connections and new ways of looking at the world so we as individuals can solve our problems and live happier, more fulfilling lives.”
All of them, or at least a nice chunk of them, also seem to be written by people who in the final analysis are uncomfortable with pure ideologies. This makes them “independent” books, too, which ties into your theme of improving one’s life and taking charge.
just a note: the angel and the demon on donald ducks shoulders? are from the Shepherd of Hermas. The Shepherd of Hermas is a non-canonical, but still recognized as Christian text from the early fathers of the church. They,too, are wrestling with truth, and the divine, in the same piece of real estate.
the shepherd of hermas, and most of the early church fathers are more well-known in the orthodox church. this would be greek orthodox, russian orthodox, and so on.
as well, the pre-nicene council churches- the syriac, and so on- would sound similar but not the same in their formulations. these churches suffered persecutions before rome even became a christian empire.
st anthony shows up mostly as reference for odd painters. his writings are still published. you might like. his writings and his biography- the biographer was trying to sweeten him up.
for pure oddness, really, you cannot go wrong with an orthodox church.
Like the concept, but this is incomprehensible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime
Dave,
You have made 2 of the first 5 comments. They are answers to comments to the effect that you have produced 19 pages of GodKnowsWhat.
Your first is, “Here is the unifying idea (delivered in gibberish).”
Your second, in answer to the word “incomprehensible,” is a link to a bizarre (is that your purpose?) Wikipedia page.
Are you attempting to communicate?
And succeeding with some of us. Dave is pointing to Korzybski’s notion that the state of being verb is a semantic trap: aclay1 says it “is” incomprehensible — but then someone else might come along who finds it perfectly comprehensible. So the assertion that it “is” incomprehensible is mistaken, but a statement like “I find this incomprehensible right now” would not be.
Correct. Many thanks, Charlie.
E’ is brilliant.
I am happy to read that Korzybski was an admirer of Wittgenstein’s. Their work appears to complements one another nicely.
RObert Heinlein, interestingly, was very involved with General Semantics, and at least ran in the same circles in LA as the OTO, Golden Dawn, and such.
It’s fun to see Crowley get his day here. So many of the occultists I know, and many of the liberals too, tend to think of his ideology as nothing but “yeah man, we can whatever we feel like.” In reality he had many conservative leanings, albeit coming to the same conclusions through alternative pathways.
And he was always a huge proponent of setting goals and working very hard to achieve them, not just waiting for someone else to take care of you. My favorite quote is another one from Magick Without Tears where Crowley was admonishing a student for being lazy and coming up with all sorts of excuses: “To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn’t matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue.”
Anyway, fascinating and eclectic mix of books, and I look forward to catching up on all of them, thought at the pace I’m going it’ll take me five years. Thanks for putting it together!
I may never finish this 19-paged article, but if nothing else I must note my thoughts on the statue of Disney & Mouse: a caption reading, “Someday, Mickey, all of this will be yours.”
Of related interest, there is a campaign to vote for Aleister Crowley for President going on this year:
“We realize that Aleister Crowley is dead. And British. And, moreover, not running for office. Nevertheless, we believe that the most effective vote you can cast in 2012 is one for Aleister Crowley.”
More at http://ac2012.com
Anyone who’s really interested in this stuff should read the Illuminatus trilogy. Bob Shea and Bob Wilson were both friends of mine, and they new amazing amounts of this stuff.
I believe Antti P. Balk’s latest, “Balderdash: A Treatise on Ethics” also covers many of these same topics (and people):
http://www.amazon.com/dp/9525700402/
I’m sorry, this is just silly.
Yeah, that was my thought, too.
But, don’t cede the field (don’t seed the feeled), because they’ve been writing in stone again, since the early 90s –and that one-world thingie is immune to negative results. Our world in terms of time is a light skiff running on the surface of a very deep pagan sea.
“They have failed to reveal one new truth, but have succeeded in repeating all the old errors,” so said William Blake, a countercultural icon, about the followers of another, Swedenborg.
Counter cultures come and they go, or as “firesign say” there’s a seeker born every minute.
As a veteren of the ashram industrial complex, I have learned there is an inherent contradiction in the “commoditization of cool,” or huckstering the Path.
Occultism is escapist obscurantism; flashlit faces in the pretend dark.
Everyone believes something but I believe you can learn more about “counter culture” from the Beatles and the Dead.
Or Orwell and Burgess.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
This was a thought-provoking and meaty article. I can see why it might be too much for some, but I enjoyed it.
Pushing people out of their comfort zone once in a while is a good thing. If I hadn’t been pushed a couple of times, I’d still be the kneejerk liberal my parents and teachers programmed me to be.
Good job, Mr. Swindle
Thank you very much. I look forward to more of your feedback as the series continues.
More drivel from Swindle. Get a life.
As an atheist and a fan of indie rock and Wes Anderson and Akira Kurosawa movies, along with being a video game and comic book nerd (most of my wardrobe is t-shirts advertising either superheroes or old 8-bit nintendo games), I think I classify as counterculture conservative. Although, mostly I’d just refer to myself as a skeptical nerdservative.
Yes, you qualify. Welcome. Perhaps in the future I’ll have to add books for Nerdservatives. Any suggestions?