Modern Religious Cults and Movements Part 18

And finally, though this is rather a commonplace observation than an aspect of our investigation, there is little to be gained in the necessary business of solid living by such an interweaving of the two worlds as spiritism carries with it. One life at a time is plainly enough all that we are equal to. Those who surrender themselves to such conclusions and inquiries are in very great danger of being so detached from the actualities of the present order as to become themselves errant and eccentric spirits, finding their true interests in endless seances and investigations which have no practical bearing upon life as it now is.

_The Real Alternative to Spiritism_

The writer's observation of the effect of much going to mediums upon those whom he has personally known leads him to distrust the whole matter and possibly to react too strongly against it. A discriminating critic has said that Spiritualism is not Spiritualism at all, but a subtle materialism, in that it is the effort to verify the reality of the spiritual in terms of the material. It is, therefore, just one more unexpected aspect of the hard skepticism of the time, which trusts nothing it cannot hear, or see, or touch. A faith which is not solidly established in reason, which does not continue and complete in its own regions what we know and understand, is a cloud-built faith, but a faith, on the other hand, which refuses to adventure beyond the limits of the senses is a faith too largely empty of any n.o.ble content.

If the phenomena under examination, then, cannot be explained in terms of animism and if the spiritistic hypothesis is gravely open to question, what explanation is left? In what follows the writer has been greatly influenced by the suggestion of the students of abnormal personality generally, and partly by the work of certain Frenchmen who, with French logic and brilliancy of insight, are working toward far-reaching psychological restatements and even to recasting of the accepted scientific understandings of matter and force. Maeterlinck says somewhere in substance that our universe is as tightly sealed as a sphere of steel and that whatever happens inside must be explained in terms of its own resident forces, and, in general, the whole of science and the weight of experience are on Maeterlinck's side. Of course this a.s.sumes that a good many things have been put inside this sphere to begin with. Speaking in terms of religion, this does not shut G.o.d out of the world, but it does shut up life and experience to conformity with their own laws and forces them to explain their phenomena in terms of their own content.

In a sentence, just as the resident forces of the outside world have been heretofore sufficient, in the measure that we have been able to discover them, to explain all the phenomena of the outside world, it is reasonable to believe that the content of personality is sufficient to explain all personal phenomena, whether normal or abnormal, and that it is to ourselves and not to the discarnate that we have to look for the explanation of the phenomena of alleged spiritism.

_The Investigations of emile Boirac_

The men who are working along this line, particularly Geley and emile Boirac, by no means deny the phenomena, but they offer another solution.

Boirac, particularly, finds his point of departure in hypnotism and suggestibility. Now here is a continuation of the line of approach and interpretation which cleared up the whole confused matter of mesmerism.

We have already seen how the French investigators found the explanation of what Mesmer and those who followed him have been able to accomplish, not in magnetic influence or any such thing, but in the remarkable changes produced in personality by exterior or autosuggestion, and just as this was the key to the phenomena of mesmerism, it is more likely than anything else to prove the key to the explanation of the phenomena of spiritualism, for these are really nothing more than simply aspects of the trance state, however induced.

It is not necessary to follow, in this connection, Boirac's a.n.a.lysis of the phenomena attendant upon the trance state, or to consider his theories as to hypnosis itself. He believes that there are in our personalities hidden forces which, in the normal conduct of life, are not brought into action. They are no necessary part of our adjustment to our working environment; on the whole they complicate rather than simplify the business of living and they are best--though this is not his statement but the writer's conclusion from the whole matter--they are best left unawakened. What we are normally is the outcome of the adjustment of personality to those creative and shaping forces in response to which life is most happily and usefully carried on. But when the waking self and normal self is for the moment put in abeyance and new forces are evoked from the "vasty deep" of our souls, we are capable of an entirely different set of manifestations. First of all, those usually a.s.sociated with the hypnotic state which do not need to be further considered here--a great docility to suggestion, unconsciousness to pain and the like. We have also the possibility of powers which Boirac calls magnetoidal. "These appear to involve the intervention of forces still unknown, distinct from those that science has so far discovered and studied, but of a physical nature and more or less a.n.a.logous to the radiating forces of physics: light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc."[81]

[Footnote 81: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 24. Some recent French investigations seem to indicate that this force--Myers'

Telekinesis--operating through barriers, changes the magnetic properties of that through which it pa.s.ses. Carrington, the most skeptical student in this region, is inclined to admit its existence. See "The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism," p. 359.]

Under this general head he considers Animal Magnetism, what is known generally as mesmerism, the power, that is, to create hypnotic states in others; the phenomena of Telepathy "comprising numerous varieties, such as the transmission or penetration of thought, the exteriorization of the sensitiveness, psychometry, telepathy, clairvoyance or lucidity, etc.," and finally states "where physical matter appears to exert over animate beings, especially human beings, an action that does not seem to be explicable by any physical or chemical properties already known." He believes also that there is in human beings a radiating influence susceptible of being exercised at a distance over other animate beings or else upon inanimate objects. He finds in trance mediums.h.i.+p all the elements which enter into any hypnotic state. "The trance is produced and developed spontaneously, without the intervention of any visible operator, under the sole effect of the nervous and mental conditions in which the medium is placed, and among which the _belief in spirits_ and the expectation of their intervention would appear to play a considerable part."[82] The italicized words "a belief in spirits" are extremely significant. In the entranced personality there is the suggestion, already strongly established, that whatever is experienced during the trance will be due to spirit intervention or revelation. This introduces the element of expectant attention. We know on the physical side of what expectant attention is capable. It becomes a real factor in all faith healing; it may produce, either for the better or the worse, far-reaching changes in physical states and it is perfectly possible for such an expectant attention once fully in action in the trance--given of course, to begin with, the att.i.tude and interests of the medium in a waking state--to create all the machinery of controls, revelation and the like, which characterize trance mediums.h.i.+p.

[Footnote 82: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 271.]

Boirac finds, therefore, in spiritism a complex determined by certain particular nervous and mental states into which there enter, in one form or another, almost all the facts of abnormal psychology and he believes that science, faithful to the principle of economy, should consider the alleged phenomena of spiritism, until proved to the contrary, reducible to facts of the preceding orders. He does not call the spiritistic hypothesis impossible; he does believe it ought not to be called in until every other explanation has been examined and found inadequate and he is not inclined to believe that we have as yet exhausted other possible explanations.

One man's authority here is by no means final. F.W.H. Myers has taken into consideration many of the facts upon which Boirac dwells and on the whole has reached a different conclusion. But, in general, the more deeply we advance into the region of abnormal personality and the phenomena of hypnotic and related states, the more reason there seems to be for believing that there are resident in human personality powers which, if at once evoked and released, are sufficient to account for all mediumistic revelations without a.s.suming that they come from the discarnate.

_Geley's Conclusions_

Geley has gone much farther in some directions here than any one else.

He is more concerned with the physical phenomena. He has a striking series of photographs of materialization, the authenticity of which it is difficult to doubt. He finds an ascending series in abnormal psychology from neuropathic states to mediums.h.i.+p with gradations which intensify the abnormal or the supernormal, but in which the continuity of development is never broken. His a.n.a.lyses here are both keen and suggestive and tend to confirm the conclusions of other students that we have resident in human personality elements which are adequate to the explanation of any phenomena which have been as yet presented.

As far as the physical phenomena go, he cites experiments which seem to reveal "threads of substance and rigid rods, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, proceeding from the fingers of the medium" and serving as a real mechanism for the movement of distant and sometimes quite heavy articles. He argues from this that there is a possible exteriorization of power which may itself be governed by ideas and believes also that such facts as this will eventually compel us to recast our conceptions of matter and force and profoundly affect biology and all evolutionary theories. The whole matter is necessarily obscure, but such studies do give a new direction and a larger significance to our whole subject matter.

In substance the spiritistic hypothesis is inadequate; it is too simple, too easy. We are evidently only upon the threshold of the whole subject.

All conclusions are necessarily inconclusive; there is no region in which one has less right to be dogmatic. The bearing of it all upon immortality seems to the writer to be not at all where the spiritists place it. If human personality has in itself such latent powers, if there are these extensions of a mysterious force which operate beyond our normal mechanism, if there are contacts of consciousness deeper than consciousness itself in which information is given and received outside normal methods of communication, we are led to conceive that what for want of a better name we call spirit has an unexpected range and force.

We are by no means so shut in by the walls of the material and the sensible as we have heretofore supposed. There is a transcendence of spirit over matter and materially imposed conditions which must give us pause. If, in the murky ways which have been brought to our attention, spirit can transcend matter, we have at least one more reason for affirming its supremacy and one more suggestion of a force or a reality which may be able to survive even the dissolution of matter itself. In other words, here is a line of testimony, richly suggestive, though by no means clear, to the power of the soul to make its own conditions, and what is immortality but just this?

The phenomena of so-called spiritism, while not as yet justifying Spiritualism, certainly make a dogmatic materialism increasingly different. Those of us who are as anxious for a sustaining faith in immortality as any of our comrades in the great quest may possibly be, but who are as yet unwilling to accept their conclusions, may nevertheless find in this subject matter which is common both to us and to them, the permission to believe that that which is most distinctly ourselves possesses enduring possibilities. If it may from time to time break through in curious ways the walls which now shut it in, may it not in some very real way pa.s.s through the gate which Death opens and still continue in such a richness of consciousness and ident.i.ty as to organize for itself another life beyond the grave?

_The Meaning of Spiritism for Faith_

Faith may find its permissions and witnesses in many regions. The writer believes that faith in immortality finds an added permission in this region also. Beyond debate, there are laws which we now but dimly discern and possible forces which only now and again touch the coasts of our present experience, as tides which sweep in from distant and mysterious seas. Beyond debate, we may not confine the interplay of mind with mind to purely physical channels, and under exceptional circ.u.mstances effects may be produced whose causes we have not yet been able to tabulate. Our conscious lives are rooted deeper than we dream.

They reach out in directions which we do not ourselves know. It may well be, therefore, that they ascend to heights whose summits we do not see, and possess a permanence independent of the body which they inhabit, or the things of seeming sense which surround them, and it may be also that what is now occult and perplexing and capricious may in the future become as truly an organized science as the alchemy and the astrology of the Middle Ages have become the chemistry and astronomy of our own time.

Beyond this one may a.s.sert the wholesome commonplace that the main business of living is in the region of the known and the normal. It is for our own well-being that the veil hangs dark between this world and the next. An order in which there was constant pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing would be impossible. It would be either one thing or the other. It does demoralize us to be always searching after the secrets of the unseen.

Might it not demoralize those who have pa.s.sed through the veil to be always trying to come back? Surely the most fitting preparation for what awaits us hereafter is the brave conduct of life under those laws and conditions which are the revelation of the whole solid experience of our race. Beyond this it is difficult to go and beyond this it is not necessary to go.

XI

MINOR CULTS: THE MEANING OF THE CULTS FOR THE CHURCH

_Border-land Cults_

The cults which we have so far considered are the outstanding forms of modern free religious movements, but they do not begin to exhaust the subject matter. Even the outstanding cults have their own border-lands.

New Thought is particularly rich in variants and there are in all American cities sporadic, distantly related and always s.h.i.+fting movements--groups which gather about this or that leader, maintain themselves for a little and then dissolve, to be recreated around other centers with perhaps a change of personnel. The Masonic Temple in Chicago is said to be occupied on Sundays all day long by larger or smaller groups which may be societies for ethical culture or with some social program or other, or for the study of Oriental religions. One would need to attend them all and saturate himself far more deeply than is possible for any single investigator in their creeds or their contentions to appraise them justly. Their real significance is neither in their organization, for they have little organization, nor in their creed, but in their temper. They represent reaction, restlessness and the spiritual confusion of the time. They can be explained--in part at least--in terms of that social deracination to which reference has already been made. They represent also an excess of individualism in the region of religion and its border-lands.

An examination of the church advertis.e.m.e.nt pages in the newspapers of New York, Detroit, Chicago or San Francisco reveals their extent, their variety and their ingenuity in finding names for themselves. On Sunday, February 25th, the Detroit papers carried advertis.e.m.e.nts of Vedanta, Spiritist and Spiritualist groups (the Spiritist group calls itself "The Spirit Temple of Light and Truth"), The Ultimate Thought Society, The First Universal Spiritual Church, The Church of Psychic Research, The Philosophical Church of Natural Law, Unity Center, The Culture of Isolan, Theosophy, Divine Science Center, and Lectures on Divine Metaphysics. Their leaders advertise such themes as: The Opulent Consciousness, The Law of Non-Attachment, Psychic Senses and Spirituality, The Continuity of Life, The Spiritualism of Shakespeare, The Voiceless Code of the Cosmos, The G.o.dlikeness of Divine Metaphysics in Business. Their themes are not more bizarre, it must be confessed, than some of the topics announced for the orthodox churches. (Indeed the church advertis.e.m.e.nt page in cities whose churches indulge generously in display advertis.e.m.e.nts is not altogether rea.s.suring reading.) But, in general, this list which can be duplicated in almost any large city is testimony enough to a confusion of cults and a confusion of thought. As far as they can be cla.s.sified, according to the scheme of this study, they are variants of New Thought, Theosophy and Spiritualism. If they were cla.s.sified according to William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" they would be seen as mystical rather than rational, speculative rather than practical.

Fort Newton, who speaks of them perhaps more disrespectfully than they deserve as "bootleggers in religion," finds in these lesser movements generally a protest against the excessively external in the life of the Church to-day and a testimony to the quenchless longing of the soul for a religion which may be known and lived out in terms of an inner experience. But this certainly is not true of all of them.

_Bahaism_

There is, however, one other larger and more coherent cult, difficult to cla.s.sify, which deserves a more extended notice. That is Bahaism, which, as it is now taking form, is a leaven rather than a cult. It is an attempt after spiritual unity and the reduction of religion to very simple and inclusive forms and a challenge to the followers of religions widely separated on the surface to be more true to what is deepest in their faith. It has a long and stirring history and curiously enough is drawn from Mohammedan sources. Its basal literatures are Arabic and Persian, "so numerous and in some cases so voluminous that it would hardly be possible for the most industrious student to read in their entirety even those which are accessible, a half dozen of the best known collections in Europe."

We find its genesis, historically, in certain expectations long held by Persian Mohammedans akin to Jewish Messianic expectations held before and at the time of Christ. There has been, we know, a tradition of disputed succession in Mohammedanism ever since the death of the prophet. Persian Mohammedans believed the true successor of Mohammed to have been unjustly deprived of his temporal supremacy and they trace a long line of true successors whose divine right would some day be recognized and reestablished. Perhaps we might find a parallel here among those Englishmen who believe that the true succession of the English throne should be in the house of the Stuarts, or those royalists in France who champion the descendants of one or the other former reigning houses. But the Persian faithful have gone farther than that.

They believe that the last true successor of Mohammed who disappeared in the tenth century never died, but is still living in a mysterious city, surrounded by a band of faithful disciples and "that at the end of time he will issue forth and 'fill the earth with justice after it has been filled with iniquity.'" A parallel here would be the old stories of Frederick Barbarossa who waits in his cave for the proper time to come forth and rea.s.sert his imperial power. This curious Persian belief has worked itself out in a time scheme much like the time schemes of other Apocalyptic beliefs, the detail of which is difficult enough.

But in substance this hidden and true successor of the prophet has had from time to time those through whom he reveals himself to the faithful and makes known his will, and these are known as Babs or gates; "the gate, that is, whereby communication was reopened between the hidden one and his faithful followers." The practical outcome of this would be that any one who could convince Persian Mohammedans that he was the Bab or "gate" would possess a mystic messianic authority. Such a confidence actually established would give him an immense hold over the faithful and make him a force to be reckoned with by the Mohammedan world.

_The Bab and His Successors_

As far as our own present interest is concerned, the movement dates from 1844 when a young Persian merchant announced himself as the Bab. If we are to find a parallel in Christianity he was a kind of John the Baptist, preparing the way for a greater who should come after him, but the parallel ends quickly, for since the Mohammedan Messiah did not appear, his herald was invested with no little of the authority and sanct.i.ty which belonged to the hidden one himself. The career of the first Bab was short--1844 to 1850. He was only twenty-four years old at the time of his manifestation, thirty when he suffered martyrdom and a prisoner during the greater part of his brief career. The practical outcome of his propaganda was a deal of b.l.o.o.d.y fighting between antagonistic Mohammedan factions. The movement received early that baptism of blood which gives persistent intensity to any persecuted movement. His followers came to regard him as a divine being. After his execution his body was recovered, concealed for seventeen years and finally placed in a shrine specially built for that purpose at St. Jean d'Acre. This shrine has become the holy place of Bahaism.

During one period of his imprisonment he had opportunity to continue his writings, correspond with his followers and receive them. He was thus able to give the world his message and we find in his teachings the germ of the gospel of Bahaism. Before his death he named his successor--a young man who had been greatly drawn to him and who seemed by his youth, zeal and devotion to be set apart to continue his work. To this young man the Bab sent his rings and other personal possessions, authorized him to add to his writings and in general to inherit his influence and continue his work. This young man was recognized with practical unanimity by the Babis as their spiritual head. Owing to his youth and the secluded life which he adopted, the practical conduct of the affairs of the Babi community devolved chiefly on his elder half-brother Baha'u'llah. What follows is a confused story of schism, rival claimants and persecution but the sect grew through persecution and the control of it came in 1868 into the hands of Baha'u'llah.

During the greater part of his life Baha'u'llah was either an exile or a prisoner. From 1868 until his death in 1892 he was confined with seventy of his followers in the penal colony of Acca on the Mediterranean coast.

Meanwhile the faith which centered about him changed character; he was no longer a gate or herald, he was himself a "manifestation of G.o.d"

with authority to change all earlier teaching. He really universalized the movement. Beneath his touch religion becomes practical, ethical, less mystic, more universal. He was possessed by a pa.s.sion for universal peace and brotherhood. He addressed letters to the crowned heads of Europe asking them to cooperate in peace movements. It has been suggested that the Czar of Russia was influenced thereby and that we may thus trace back to Baha'u'llah the peace movement which preceded the war.

Pilgrims came and went and through their enthusiasms the movement spread. After his death there was the renewal of disputes as to the proper succession and consequent schisms. The power came finally into the hands of Abdul-Baha who was kept under supervision by the Turkish government until 1908. He was freed by the declaration of the New Const.i.tution and carried on thereafter with real power a worldwide propaganda. He had an unusual and winning personality, spoke fluently in Persian, Arabic and Turkish and more nearly than any man of his time filled the ideal role of an Eastern prophet. He died in November, 1921, and was buried on Mt. Carmel--with its memories of Elijah and millenniums of history--his praises literally being sung by a most catholic group of Mohammedans, Jews and Eastern Christians.

_The Temple of Unity_

Bahaism as it is held in America to-day is distilled out of the writings and teachings of Baha'u'llah and Abdul-Baha. Naturally enough, in the popularization of it its contradictions have been reconciled and its subtleties disregarded. What is left fits into a variety of forms and is in line with a great range of idealism. The twelve basic principles of Bahaism as announced in its popular literature are:

The Oneness of Mankind.

Independent investigations of truth.