I found this perfect ode to Poe’s cosmology Eureka years ago but don’t know the name of the artist! Please message me if you do.
Miss your English class in college? Have a fascination with the occult?
Then you will super-love my upcoming offering, “Practical Hermeticism in Great American Literature.” It’s four sessions, with fun reading assignments by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, and it will be conducted online so you can join from anywhere. The total cost is $200, but you can sign up for the individual sessions if you prefer. The four sessions will be broken up into the following topics:
Alchemy and Treasure-Hunting (March 14)
Illuminati Panic/ Secret Societies (March 28)
Spiritualism and Mesmerism (April 11)
Astrology (April 25)
What qualifies me to teach this course? I spent ten years conducting the research that went into my PhD dissertation, “Occult Americans: Invisible Culture and the Literary Imagination.” My sense is that Americans are generally ignorant of the richness of their own spiritual and metaphysical history. The “New Age” that most of us are a part of, whether we like the term or not, was an American product: we could say one beginning was the Spiritualist craze that took over the nation in the 1840s. Another oft-cited beginning is the New York publication of Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877), the book generally credited with inaugurating the occult revival.
The question I asked before undertaking this research was: what came in between? If a lot of what is popular now - namely astrology, magic, and conversation with disincarnate beings - was also popular in the medieval era, then how did these practices survive the Enlightenment? Who carried occult ideas forward into the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, when the occult supposedly went underground?
This class will answer that question, in a manner that is loads more fun than reading my dissertation would be. This class reveals, as does my related project, The American Renaissance Tarot, that in many cases, fiction writers were the primary carriers of the Western Hermetic tradition through the Ages of Science and Materialism. Ever had your idea of reality re-arranged by a novel, even though it’s a total fiction? Then you’ve experienced what I’m talking about. If I had a dollar for every witch who told me she came to her faith after reading The Mists of Avalon …
Texts by British authors, like The Epicurean by Thomas Moore and Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, created a blueprint for initiatory experiences that were later re-enacted by influential occult groups (and ripped off by Madam Blavatsky). But does this mean the occult is a fiction??? Yes and no. In some very important ways, every religion is “made up,” the product of a human mind or a hive mind and/or the human transcribing the dictates of a disincarnate being. So in that way: yes, the occult is a fiction, it doesn’t exist as a transcendant structure outside the humans carrying it forward, and it’s a cultural product like everything else created by humans. But in another very important way, the occult is not “just” a fiction if its practice produces mind-bending and transformative results in your life. If it has meaning for you, it’s no longer a fiction, it’s a guiding myth.
Stories have tremendous power. The action of creating narrative awakens the imaginal realm, the part of us that can see beyond what we are right now to what we could become in the future. Wait, what does this have to do with literature again? You may be familiar with the idea of life imitating art. Or you might also consider the heaps of modern technological realities that first appeared in the science fiction of Jules Verne. A story is never just a story. It is the engineering of reality by an author.
Herman Melville, Star Rover
So to bring these lofty ideas back to earth, many of which appear throughout the works of Jeffrey Kripal, head of Religious Studies at Rice University, I will argue that the fictions of a nation shape the destiny of that nation. So it really does matter that there is an astrological metaphor at the very center of what has long been considered “the great(est) American novel,” Moby-Dick. It matters that Melville exploited the low cultural form of astrology as the central conceit of his “warm-up” to Moby-Dick, Mardi.
I think it matters that Poe’s favorite of his own poems was Al Aaraaf, which takes place on the supernova discovered by the astronomer Tycho Brahe in the 16th century. It matters that Poe wrote a poem during Venus retrograde, about Venus retrograde, in the wake of his beloved wife’s death. Not only do these examples tell us something that is very exciting to know, namely that some of the most brilliant minds in American history were followers of astrology, these occult texts also inform us about our own potential as Americans. Literary critics have long noted how Poe’s obsessions have eerily predicted later trends in American culture, such as our fascination with abnormal psychology and our greedy consumption of violence as a form of entertainment.
But what else are we consuming when we read Poe? Are we also tapping into his lovely Platonic otherworlds and his occult erudition? Can we access the mystic power of the human will when we read a “horror” story like “Ligeia”? “Ligeia” was quoted by Aleister Crowley and likely shaped his philosophy of Thelema. We are not somehow reading “incorrectly” when we let stories influence our perception of the world and its possibilities. Rather, we are co-creating a new version of reality with an author as our guide.
We have, as a culture, already crowned Poe an occultist of sorts by ritually reading “The Raven” every Halloween. But we can make the association more explicit by looking at Poe’s occult references, beliefs, and sources. We can ask ourselves why it is that America’s most popular and enduring nineteenth-century writer explores angels, demons, and altered states of consciousness, and what that says about us as Americans.
We might think of Melville as a less spooky writer than Poe, and Moby-Dick simply a narrative of hubris, featuring a despotic Captain and his senseless quest. But what if Moby-Dick is also a warning? The doomed ship is called The Pequod, named for a Native American tribe encountered by the first colonists, and its crew is racially and ethnically diverse. But except for narrator Ishmael, all these souls perish in the Captain’s mad quest for whiteness, a sacrifice to the white whale’s inscrutability. Put another way, the mania for whiteness sinks the floating microcosm of America. Maybe Melville actually understood America’s potential, positive and negative, far better than we’ve realized yet.
Don’t worry, I’ll only make you read one chapter of the behemoth Moby-Dick, and it’s the one in which the many characters contemplate the signs of the Zodiac. What does it mean that the most analyzed chapter in the most “classic” work of American literature redeems the astrological worldview? What does that say about the nation? What if astrology was consciously incorporated into our national myth? What does it mean that the best-selling novel of the 1840s, The Quaker City by George Lippard, positively profiles a real-life astrologer and puts him at the center of the novel’s action? Oh, and also in that same book, an ascended master materializes to inspire the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and just as quickly de-materializes. Lippard’s story is quoted reverently by spiritual teacher Manly P. Hall, and told as the gospel truth (speaking of fictions that have become guiding myths).
What does it mean that America’s first professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, wrote obsessively about the Illuminati as well as enigmatic magi with the uncanny ability to be in several places at once? To be honest, I’m not exactly sure, but I do know that America’s literature is just as magical as the culture that produced it; the religious freedom that has been this nation’s hallmark from the colonial period forward has welcomed legions of radical thinkers and metaphysical experimenters to its shores.
The benefit of reading these texts in a class setting is that your inspiration and participation are encouraged. I no longer work in academia because I defiantly believe in “words off the page,” or the idea that language is meant to get in your head and re-arrange the furniture, not just sit there blankly waiting to be analyzed (and contained) by brilliant interpreters. I live these texts, and I’m pretty sure we’re all co-authors in this collective dream. In this class, we will look at some great American literature as our access point to both the occult history of the country and to the weird and wonderful present that these occult texts have authored into being.
Click below to purchase individual class sessions; scroll all the way down to purchase the series discount.
https://celestialspark.as.me/schedule.php