As we noted in the previous posting in this series, Academia
was in terrible shape in the 1920s — at least when it came to upholding
orthodox Jewish, Christian, and Islamic belief systems and philosophies in a
world that seemed to have completely lost its mind, or at any rate its sense of
identity. As Fulton Sheen commented in
the Preface to Religion Without God,
published in 1928, “Present-day religion is not in evolution, but in
revolution.” As he continued,
“Evolution implies growth from a
germ, revolution a rupture with a principle; evolution has antecedents,
revolution knows not its parentage. When
we say that there is revolution in religion, we mean not merely a break with
the past, but an abandonment as well of much that is best in the culture and
heritage of tradition.” (Sheen, Religion Without God, op. cit., vii.)
While Sheen was primarily concerned with the aspects of the
revolution that resulted in the invention of a new kind of religion in his
particular milieux of Church and Academia, the effects — or perhaps
battlegrounds — were also evident in popular culture, and the effects were more severe. In fact, if Academia was inundated with the
sort of nonsense Sheen (and Chesterton and Knox) saw in organized religion and
the universities, popular culture was worse in many respects. To paraphrase slightly, “As we live, so we
believe.”
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| "Eenie, meanie, chili beani, the spirits are about to speak!" |
In the popular fiction of the period, for example, the turbaned
Swami with mystic powers was a standard fixture. Séances became a socially acceptable way to
win friends and influence people — alive or dead. Having a known (and notorious) historic
figure as your spirit guide was almost passé
(as well as a bit hazardous if a real historian started asking uncomfortable
questions during a session), but (never fear) there were always plenty of
25,000-year old Atlantean and Lemurian sages to go around.
Adventure stories and mysteries began including Tibetan lamas and Mysterious Chinamen as stock characters, and relying on the
supernatural as key plot elements. Msgr.
Knox, of course (himself a novelist), rejected such things in his famous “Ten
Rules of Detective Fiction.” It was, nevertheless,
almost required to be a theosophist or cult member if you wanted to be an
author or artist in certain circles.
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| Theosophical themes. |
For example, “Talbot Mundy” (William Lancaster Gribbon,
1879-1940), a popular novelist, was a theosophist, as his fiction plainly
shows. H. Rider Haggard (Sir Henry Rider
Haggard, 1856-1925), author of King
Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She: A
History of Adventure (1886) was “interested” in Spiritualism, and had a
great influence on children’s literature.
So did L. Frank Baum (Lyman Frank Baum, 1856-1919), a member of the
Theosophical Society whose children’s books have themselves attained cult
status.
Of course, there were novelists who simply used such things because
they were popular and in the public mind, and thus useful to make a buck. The best known of these is probably Edgar
Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), the creator of Tarzan. Burroughs used theosophical themes and
beliefs, incorporating them into his stories with a sly humor. This was possibly as
satire or simply as handy plot devices, especially in his Martian novels, which
are awash with theosophical concepts.
(See Fritz Lieber, “John Carter: Sword of Theosophy” a 1959 article in George H. Scithers Amra fanzine, although Lieber seemed to
assume that Burroughs was a theosophist, rather than just a wholesale borrower
of useful gimmicks for his pulp fiction.)
Theosophical elements also show up in some of Burroughs’s
Tarzan novels and other works. Nothing,
however, leads one to believe that Burroughs was serious about theosophy. The fact that his first Martian novel, A Princess of Mars (1912), submitted and
first published in All-Story Magazine
as Under the Moons of Mars using the
pseudonym “Normal Bean” — to indicate he was compos mentis (changed by a typesetter to “Norman Bean”) — suggests
that Burroughs was fully aware that theosophy was nothing in which a sane
person would become involved. (See Dale
R. Broadhurst, “John Carter: Sword of Theosophy Revisited, ERBzine, http://www.erbzine.com/mag11/1107.html.)
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| Houdini exposed frauds. |
Not that the pervasiveness of the New Age went
unchallenged. The great stage magician
and illusionist Harry Houdini (Erik Weisz, 1874-1926), despite later claims
that he was involved in the occult, was active in exposing spiritualists and
mediums as frauds. An article Houdini
had published in Weird Tales, “The
Hoax of the Spirit Lover” (Vol. III, No. 4, April 1924), relates what happened on
one occasion when he was called in to expose a charlatan . . . and didn’t get
the chance, due to an amazing coincidence — which we won’t spoil for you if you
should happen to locate a copy of the article.
There were, of course, authors who were opposed to this movement
in popular fiction. Anna Katharine Green
(1846-1935), who is credited with inventing the murder mystery genre and the
“series detective” with her bestselling The
Leavenworth Case (1878), simply stopped writing. Green felt that her work did not reflect the
taste of readers any longer. Being a
staunch Presbyterian, she refused to write what she regarded as spiritually
dangerous tripe.
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| Chambers: New Age dangerous. |
Robert William Chambers (1865-1933) used spiritualist and
theosophical elements in his horror stories, but in such a way as to suggest
that he blamed many social and religious problems on their influence,
especially among the idle rich and social hangers-on. He referred to these types as “the Yellow
Set,” to distinguish them from the rich who contributed to society in useful
ways and people who worked for a living.
Chambers’s classic short story collection, The King in Yellow (1895), featuring a book that drives readers
insane, can be interpreted as a devastating critique — it’s a little over the
top for good satire — on what Chambers regarded as dangerous New Age-type books
as well as the Yellow Set. His
mainstream fiction consistently upholds traditional moral values, especially
marriage and family, contrasting what he regarded as normal life with the
damage done by gambling addiction, alcoholism, drugs, and, particularly, the
growing incidence of divorce.
Not surprisingly, the whole
thing turns out to be a hoax. The novel
highlights the insanity of spiritualism, “psychical research,” and all the
other themes of theosophy in what has to be one the most surreal satires of the
twentieth centuries until Knox pulls off the mask . . . thereby ensuring that
the book would be forgotten, as people don’t like to be made fools of, even
fictionally.
Knox also got into the act with his rare 1926 novel, Other Eyes Than Ours. This was possibly due to Knox wanting to warn
some of his friends away from their unhealthy interest in such things. In the novel, a group of spiritualists manage
to listen to the “other side” by means of a radio. They discover that, while the spirits are
receiving messages from the material world, the ascended ones have lost all
memory of having lived in this plane of existence. At one point the spirits wonder whether it’s
worth their while to respond to messages emanating from what their “Physical
Research Group” has termed “séances.”
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| Murder by magic? |
Perhaps more effectively — as well as directly related to
our subject — the villains in G.K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown” stories often
rely on asserting some New Age or theosophical phenomenon as the only possible
explanation of a crime for which they hope to escape detection. Naturally, everybody at first accepts this solution
until the seemingly prosaic priest exposes it (and the criminal) as a piece of extremely
dangerous nonsense — both temporally and spiritually — with the application of a
little common sense.
Obviously, from popular culture to politics, and from the
temples of religion to the temples of learning, the world of the 1920s was
saturated with New Age thought, practices, and beliefs. Fulton Sheen would have been brought face to
face with it on an almost daily basis, and — as an Aristotelian-Thomist as well as a Catholic — would
have been appalled.
Unfortunately, New Age thought was joined with a very powerful ally,
so to speak: the rise and rapid spread of socialism in reaction against the
abuses of capitalism, which we will address in the next posting in this series.