The Profits of Religion Part 18

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 flourishing 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, worshipped 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 accomplishing 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 leadership 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.

Shall I say that there are no auras, simply because I do not happen to have this gift of seeing them? In the same way, having read Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living," I am not ready to ridicule the claim of the Yogi adepts, that they are able to project some kind of astral body, and to communicate with one another from distant places. But granting such occult powers in a world of economic strife, what follows? Simply new floods of charlatanism, elaborate and complicated systems of ritual and metaphysic for the deluding and plundering of the credulous.

I have seen the thing working itself out in one case known to me. A young man had a gift of mental healing; I know, because I saw it work; but it did not always work, and that was annoying. He was penniless and had a taste for power, and to eke out his erratic endowment he got himself books of Eastern lore, and day by day as I watched him I could see him becoming more and more impressive, mysterious and forbidding.

Today he is a full-fledged wonder-worker, with the language of a dozen mystic cults at his tongue's end, and the reverent regard of many wealthy ladies. I have never tried to break through his guard, but I feel certain that he is a deliberate charlatan.

This is an economic process, automatic and irresistible. Just as the manufacturer of honest foods is driven out by the adulterator, so the worker of miracles drives out the sincere investigator. As a result we have here in America a plague of Eastern cults, with "swamis" using soft yellow robes and soft brown eyes to win the souls of idle society ladies. These teachers of ancient Hindoo lore despise us as a race of barbarians; but they stay--whether because of love of man or woman, I do not pretend to say.

There are the Theosophists of many brands, with schools and inst.i.tutes and temples and colonies, and a doctrine as complex and detailed and fantastic as that of the Roman Catholics. I have already referred to the writings of Madame Blavatsky, a runaway Russian army officer's daughter, whose career reads like a tale out of the Arabian Nights.

And there is Annie Besant, who was once an ardent worker in the Social-democratic Federation; H.M. Hyndman tells of his dismay when she went to India and walked in a procession between two white bulls!

Here in California is Madame Tingley, with a colony and a host of followers in a minature paradise. Men work at money-lending or manufacturing sporting-goods, and when they get old and tired they make the thrilling discovery that they have souls; the theosophists cultivate these souls and they leave their money to the soul-cause, and there are lawsuits and exposes in the newspapers. For, you see, there is ferocious rivalry in the game of cultivating millionaire souls; there are slanders and feuds, just as in soulless affairs.

"Don't have anything to do with Madame Tingley," whispers a Theosophist lady to my Wife; and when my wife in all innocence inquires, "Why not?" the awe-stricken answer comes, "She practices black magic!"

Let me add that I do not say that she practices black magic. I do not believe that she could practice it, even if she wanted to--I do not believe in black magic. My purpose is merely to show how theosophists quarrel: going back to the days of Anu and Baal and the bronze Image of the Babylonian fire-G.o.d:

Let them die, but let me live!

Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!

Let them perish, but let me increase!

Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!

Mental Malpractice

This is the other side of the fair shield of religious faith. Why, if there be a power which loves and can be persuaded to aid us, may there not also be a power which hates, and can be persuaded to destroy? No religion has ever been able to answer this, and therefore none has ever been able to escape from devil-terrors. Even Jesus was pursued by Satan, and the Holy Catholic Church has its ceremonies for the exorcising of demons, and a most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our friends the Christian Scientists, proclaiming the unreality of all evil, their ability to banish disease by convincing themselves that they are perfect in G.o.d--yet tormented by a squalid phobia called "Mental Malpractice", or "Malicious Animal Magnetism".

Christian Science is the most characteristic of American religious contributions. Just as Billy Sunday is the price we pay for failing to educate our base-ball players, so Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy is the price we pay for failing to educate our farmer's daughters.

That she had a power to cure disease I do not doubt, because I have a little of it myself. At first my opinion was that her "Science" made its way by curing the imaginary ailments of the idle rich. If a person has nothing to do but think that he is sick, you can work easy miracles by persuading him to think that he is well; and if he has nothing to do but think that he is well, he will help you to build marble churches and maintain propaganda societies. But recently I have experimented with mental healing--enough to satisfy myself that the subconscious mind which controls our physical functions can be powerfully influenced by the will.

I told the story of some of these experiments in Hearst's Magazine for April, 1914. Suffice it here to say that if you will lay your hands upon a sick person, forming a vivid mental picture of the bodily changes you desire, and concentrating the power of your will upon them, you may be surprised by the results, especially if you possess anything in the way of psychic gifts. You do not have to adopt any theories, you do not have to do it in the name of any divinity, ancient or modern; the only bearing of such ideas is that they serve to persuade people to make the experiment, and to make it with persistence and intensity. So it has come about that "miracles" of healing are a.s.sociated with "faith"; and so it comes about that scientists are apt to flout the subject. But read of the work of Janet and Charcot and their followers at the Salpetriere; they have proven that all kinds of seeming-organic ailments may be entirely hysterical in nature, and may be cured by the simplest form of suggestion.

Understanding this, you may find it more easy to credit the fact that cripples do sometimes throw away their crutches in the grotto of Lourdes. For my part, I can believe that Jesus performed all the miracles of healing attributed to him--including the raising up of people p.r.o.nounced to be dead by the ignorance of that time. I am convinced that in the new science of psycho-a.n.a.lysis we have a universe as vast as the universe of the atom or of the stars.

The Christian Scientists have got hold of this power; they have mixed it up with metaphysic and divinity, and built some four or five hundred churches, and printed the Mother Church alone knows how many million pamphlets and books. I once invested three of my hard-earned dollars for a copy of the Eddy Bible, and let myself be stunned and blinded by the flapping of metaphysical wings. It is unadulterated moonshine--as the Platonist and Berkeleyan and Hegelian and other orthodox collegiate metaphysical magi can prove to you in one minute.

What interests me about the phenomenon is not the slinging of tremendous words, but the strictly Yankee use which is made of them.

There is no nonsense about saving your soul in Christian Science; what it is for is to remove your wen, to nail down your floating kidney, and to enable you to hustle and make money. We saw in our politics the growth of a Party of the Full Dinner-Pail; contemporaneous therewith, and corresponding thereto, we see in our religious life the development of a Church of the Full Pocket-Book.

It is a strict religion--strictly cash. The heads of the cult do not issue cheap editions of "Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures", to relieve the suffering of the proletariat; no--the work is copyrighted, in all its varying and contradictory editions, and the price is from three to seven-fifty, according to binding. Treatments cost from three dollars to ten, whether you come and get them or take them over the telephone. And we have no nonsense about charity, we don't worry about the poor who fester in our city slums; because poverty is a product of Mortal Mind, and we offer to all men a way to get rich right off the bat. You may; come to our marble churches and hear people testify how through the power of Divine Mind they were enabled to antic.i.p.ate a rise in the stock-market. If you don't avail yourself of the opportunity, the fault is yours, and yours also the punishment.

As to the management of the Church, the Roman Catholic hierarchy is a Bolshevik democracy in comparison. The Church is controlled by an absolutely irresponsible self-perpetuating body of five men, who alone dictate its policy. I have in my hand a letter from a Christian Science healer who was listed as an "authorized pract.i.tioner", and who withdrew from the Church because of its att.i.tude on public questions.

He sends me a copy of his correspondence with the editors of the "Christian Science Monitor", containing a detailed a.n.a.lysis of the position of that paper on such issues as the Ballinger land-frauds. He writes:

I am thoroughly convinced now that the policy of the Church is consciously plutocratic. The only recommendation I have heard of the latest appointee to the Board of Directors is that he is one of the richest men in the movement.

After the t.i.tanic disaster, Senator La Follette brought in a carefully drawn bill to compel steamship companies to provide life-boats and trained crews. The "Christian Science Monitor" opposed this bill; and when my correspondent cited the fact, he brought out a quaint bit of metaphysical logic, as follows:

One would prefer to travel on a vessel without a single boat, rather than on some other vessels which were loaded down with life-boats, where the government of Mind was not understood!

Science and Wealth