The following article appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Esopus (www.esopusmag.com), a biannual of arts and culture. It is also available at: www.mitchhorowitz.com.

OUIJA!

How this American Anomaly Became
More than Just Fun and Games

By Mitch Horowitz

Ouija. For some the rectangular board evokes memories of late-night sleepover parties, shrieks of laughter, and toy shelves brimming with Magic Eight Balls, Frisbees, and Barbie dolls.

For others, Ouija boards – known more generally as talking boards or spirit boards – have darker associations. Stories abound of fearsome entities making threats, dire predictions, and even physical assaults on innocent users after a night of Ouija experimentation.

And the fantastic claims don’t stop there: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill vowed until his death in 1995 that his most celebrated work was written with the use of a homemade Ouija board.

For my part, I first discovered the mysterious workings of Ouija nearly twenty years ago during a typically freezing-cold winter on eastern Long Island. While heaters clanked and hummed within the institutional-white walls of my college dormitory, friends allayed boredom with a Parker Brothers Ouija board.

As is often the case with Ouija, one young woman became the ringleader of board readings. She reprised the role of spirit medium that had typically fallen to women in past eras, when the respectable clergy was a male-only affair. Under the gaze of her dark eyes – which others said gave them chills – the late-night Ouija sessions came into vogue.

Most of my evenings were given over to editing the college newspaper, but I often arrived home at the dorm to frightening stories: The board, one night, kept spelling out the name “Seth,” which my friends associated with evil. (Probably connecting it with the malevolent Egyptian god Set, who is seen as a Satan prototype.) When asked, “Who’s Seth?” the board directed its attention to a member of the group, and repeatedly replied: “Ask Carlos.” A visibly shaken Carlos began breathing heavily and refused to answer.

Consumed as I was with exposing scandals within the campus food service, I never took the opportunity to sit-in on these séances – a move I came to regard with a mixture of relief and regret. The idea that a mass-produced game board and its plastic pointer could display some occult faculty, or could tap into a user’s subconscious, got under my skin. And I wasn’t alone: In its heyday, Ouija outsold Monopoly.

Ouija boards have sharply declined in popularity since the 1960s and 70s, when you could find one in nearly every toy-cluttered basement. But they remain among the most peculiar consumer items in American history. Indeed, controversy endures to this day over their origin. To get a better sense of what Ouija boards are – and where they came from – requires going back to an era in which even an American president dabbled in talking to the dead.

SPIRITUALISM TRIUMPHANT

Today, it is difficult to imagine the popularity enjoyed by the movement called Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, when table rapping, séances, medium trances, and other forms of contacting the “other side” were practiced by an estimated ten percent of the population. It began in 1848 when the teenaged sisters Kate and Margaret Fox introduced “spirit rapping” to a lonely hamlet in upstate New York called Hydesville. While every age and culture had known hauntings, Spiritualism appeared to foster actual communication with the beyond. Within a few years, people from every walk of life took seriously the contention that one could talk to the dead.

For many, Spiritualism seemed to extend the hope of reaching loved ones, and perhaps easing the pain of losing a child to one of the diseases of the day. The allure of immortality or of feeling oneself lifted beyond workaday realities attracted others. For others still, spirit counsels became a way to cope with anxiety about the future, providing otherworldly advice in matters of health, love, or money.

According to newspaper accounts of the era, President Abraham Lincoln hosted a séance in the White House – though more as a good-humored parlor game than as a serious spiritual inquiry. Yet at least one vividly rendered Spiritualist memoir places a trance medium in the private quarters of the White House, advising the President and Mrs. Lincoln just after the outbreak of the Civil War.

MAKING CONTACT

In this atmosphere of ghostly knocks and earnest pleas to hidden forces, nineteenth-century occultists began looking for easier ways to communicate with the beyond. And in the best American fashion, they took a do-it-yourself approach to the matter. Their homespun efforts at contacting the spirit world led toward something we call Ouija – but not until they worked through several other methods.

One involved a form of table rapping in which questioners solicited spirit knocks when letters of the alphabet were called out, thus spelling a word. This was, however, a tedious and time-consuming exercise. A faster means was by “automatic writing,” in which spirit beings could communicate through the pen of a channeler; but some complained that this produced many pages of unclear or meandering prose.

One invention directly prefigured the heart-shaped pointer that moves around the Ouija board. The planchette – French for “little plank” – was a three-legged writing tool with a hole at the top for the insertion of a pencil. The planchette was designed for one person or more to rest their fingers on it and allow it to “glide” across a page, writing out a spirit message. The device originated in Europe in the early 1850s; by 1860 commercially manufactured planchettes were advertised in America.

Two other items from the 1850s are direct forebears to Ouija: “dial plates” and alphabet paste boards. In 1853 a Connecticut Spiritualist invented the “Spiritual Telegraph Dial,” a roulette-like wheel with letters and numerals around its circumference. Dial plates came in various forms, sometimes of a complex variety. Some were rigged to tables to respond to “spirit tilts,” while others were presumably guided – like a planchette – by the hands of questioners.

Alphabet boards further simplified matters. In use as early as 1852, these talking-board precursors allowed seekers to point to a letter as a means of prompting a “spirit rap,” thereby quickly spelling a word. It was, perhaps, the easiest method yet. And it was only a matter of time until inventors and entrepreneurs began to see the possibilities.

BALTIMORE ORACLES

More than 150 years after the dawn of the Spiritualist era, contention endures over who created Ouija. The conventional history of American toy manufacturing credits a Baltimore businessman named William Fuld. Fuld, we are told, “invented” Ouija around 1890. So it is repeated online and in books of trivia, reference works, and “ask me” columns in newspapers. For many decades, the manufacturer itself – first Fuld’s company and later the toy giant Parker Brothers – insinuated as much by running the term “William Fuld Talking Board Set” across the top of every board.

The conventional history is wrong.

The patent for a “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” was filed on May 28, 1890 by Baltimore resident and patent attorney Elijah H. Bond, who assigned the rights to two city businessmen, Charles W. Kennard and William H.A. Maupin. The patent was granted on February 10, 1891, and so was born the Ouija-brand talking board.

The first patent reveals a familiarly oblong board, with the alphabet running in double rows across the top, and numbers in a single row along the bottom. The sun and moon, marked respectively by the words “yes” and “no,” adorn the upper left and right corners, while the words “Good bye” appear at the bottom center. Later on, instructions and the illustrations accompanying them, prescribed an expressly social - even flirtatious - experience: Two parties, preferably a man and woman, were to balance the board between them on their knees, placing their fingers lightly upon the planchette. ("It draws the two people using it into close companionship and weaves about them a feeling of mysterious isolation," the box read.) In an age of buttoned-up morals, it was a tempting dalliance.

TRUE ORIGINS

The Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore employed a teenaged varnisher who helped run shop operations, and this was William Fuld. By 1892, however, Charles W. Kennard’s partners removed him from the company amid financial disputes and a new patent – this time for an improved pointer, or planchette – was filed by a 19-year-old Fuld. In years to come, it was Fuld who would take over the company and affix his name to every board.

Based on an account in a 1920 magazine article, inventor’s credit sometimes goes to an E.C. Reichie, alternately identified as a Maryland cabinetmaker or coffin maker. This theory was popularized by a defunct Baltimore business monthly called Warfield’s, which ran a richly detailed – and at points, one suspects, richly imagined – history of Ouija boards in 1990. The article opens with a misspelled E.C. “Reiche” as the board’s inventor, and calls him a coffin maker with an interest in the afterlife – a name and a claim that have been repeated and circulated ever since.

Yet this figure appears virtually nowhere else in Ouija history, including on the first patent. His name came up during a period of patent litigation about thirty years after Ouija’s inception. A 1920 account in New York’s World Magazine – widely disseminated that year in the popular weekly The Literary Digest – reports that one of Ouija’s early investors told a judge that E.C. Reichie had invented the board. But no reference to an E.C. Reichie – be he a cabinetmaker or coffin maker – appears in the court transcript, according to Ouija historian and talking-board manufacturer Robert Murch.

Ultimately, Reichie’s role, or whether there was a Reichie, may be moot, at least in terms of the board’s invention. Talking boards of a homemade variety were already a popular craze among Spiritualists by the mid-1880s. At his online Museum of Talking Boards, Ouija collector and chronicler Eugene Orlando posts an 1886 article from the New-York Daily Tribune (as reprinted that year in a Spiritualist monthly, The Carrier Dove) describing the breathless excitement around the new-fangled alphabet board and its message indicator. “I know of whole communities that are wild over the 'talking board,'” says a man in the article. This was a full four years before the first Ouija patent was filed. Obviously Bond, Kennard, and their associates were capitalizing on an invention – not conceiving of one.

And what of the name Ouija? Alternately pronounced wee-JA and wee-GEE, its origin may never be known. Kennard at one time claimed it was Egyptian for “good luck” (it’s not). Fuld later said it was simply a marriage of the French and German words for “yes.” One early investor claimed the board spelled out its own name. As with other aspects of Ouija history, the board seems determined to withhold a few secrets of its own.

ANCIENT OUIJA?

Another oft-repeated, but misleading, claim is that Ouija, or talking boards, have ancient roots. In a typical example, Frank Gaynor’s 1953 Dictionary of Mysticism states that ancient boards of different shapes and sizes “were used in the sixth century before Christ.” In a wide range of books and articles, everyone from Pythagoras to the Mongols to the Ancient Egyptians is said to have possessed Ouija-like devices. But the claims rarely withstand scrutiny.

Chronicler-curator Orlando points out that the primary reference to Ouija existing in the pre-modern world appears in a passage from Lewis Spence’s 1920 Encyclopedia of Occultism – which is repeated in Nandor Fodor’s popular 1934 Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. The Fodor passage reads, in part: “As an invention it is very old. It was in use in the days of Pythagoras, about 540 B.C. According to a French historical account of the philosopher’s life, his sect held frequent séances or circles at which ‘a mystic table, moving on wheels, moved towards signs, which the philosopher and his pupil Philolaus, interpreted to the audience...’” It is, Orlando points out, “the one recurring quote found in almost every academic article on the Ouija board.” But the story presents two problems: The “French historical account” is never identified; and the Pythagorean scribe Philolaus lived not in Pythagoras’s time, but in the following century.

It is also worth keeping in mind that we know precious little today about Pythagoras and his school. No writings of Pythagoras survive, and the historical record depends upon later works – some of which were written centuries after his death. Hence, commentators on occult topics are sometimes tempted to project backwards onto Pythagoras all sorts of arcane practices, Ouija and modern numerology among them.

Still other writers – when they are not repeating claims like the one above – tend to misread ancient historical accounts and mistake other divinatory tools, such as pendulum dishes, for Ouija boards. Oracles were rich and varied from culture to culture – from Germanic runes to Greek Delphic rites – but the prevailing literature on oracular traditions supports no suggestion that talking boards, as we know them, were in use before the Spiritualist era.

OUIJA BOOM

After William Fuld took the reins of Ouija manufacturing in America, business was brisk – if not always happy. Fuld formed a quickly shattered business alliance with his brother Isaac, which landed the two in court battles for nearly twenty years. Isaac was eventually found to have violated an injunction against creating a competing board, called the Oriole, after being forced from the family business in 1901. The two brothers would never speak again. Ouija, and anything that looked directly like it, was firmly in the hands of William Fuld.

By 1920, the board was so well known that artist Norman Rockwell painted a send-up of a couple using one – the woman dreamy and credulous, the man fixing her with a cloying grin – for a cover of The Saturday Evening Post. For Fuld, though, everything was strictly business. “Believe in the Ouija board?” he once told a reporter. “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian – been one ever since I was so high.” In 1920, the Baltimore Sun reported that Fuld, by his own “conservative estimate,” had pocketed an astounding $1 million from sales.

Whatever satisfaction Fuld’s success may have brought him was soon lost: On February 26, 1927, he fell to his death from the roof of his Baltimore factory. The 54-year-old manufacturer was supervising the replacement of a flagpole when an iron support bar he held gave way, and he fell three stories backward.

Fuld’s children took over his business – and generally prospered. While sales dipped and rose – and competing boards came and went – only the Ouija brand endured. And by the 1940s, Ouija was experiencing a new surge in popularity.

Historically, séances and other Spiritualist methods proliferate during times of war. Spiritualism had seen its last great explosion of interest in the period around World War I, when parents yearned to contact children lost to the battlefield carnage. In World War II, many anxious families turned to Ouija. In a 1944 article, “The Ouija Comes Back,” The New York Times reported that one New York City department store alone sold 50,000 Ouija boards in a five-month period.

American toy manufacturers were taking notice. Some attempted knock-off products. But Parker Brothers developed bigger plans. In a move that would place a carryover from the age of Spiritualism into playrooms all across America, the toy giant bought the rights for an undisclosed sum in 1966. The Fuld family was out of the picture, and Ouija was about to achieve its biggest success ever.

The following year, Parker Brothers is reported to have sold more than two million Ouija boards – topping sales of its most popular game, Monopoly. The occult boom that began in the late 1960s, as astrologers adorned the cover of Time magazine and witchcraft became a fast-growing “new” religion, fueled the board’s sales for the following decades. A Parker spokesperson says the company has sold over ten million boards since 1967.

The sixties and seventies also saw the rise of Ouija as a product of the youth culture. Ouija circles sprang up in college dormitories, and the board emerged as a fad among adolescents, for whom its ritual of secret messages and intimate communications became a form of rebellion. One youthful experimenter recalls an enticing atmosphere of danger and intrigue – “like shoplifting or taking drugs” – that allowed her and a girlfriend to bond together over Ouija sessions in which they contacted the spirit of “Candelyn,” a nineteenth-century girl who had perished in a fire. Sociologists suggested that Ouija sessions were a way for young people to project, and work through, their own fears. But many Ouija users claimed that the verisimilitude of the communications were reason enough to return to the board.

OUIJA TODAY

While officials at Parker Brothers (now a division of Hasbro) would not get into the ebb and flow of sales, there’s little question that Ouija has declined precipitously in recent years. In 1999, the company brought an era to an end when it discontinued the vintage Fuld design and switched to a smaller, glow-in-the-dark version of the board. In consumer manufacturing, the redesign of a classic product often signals an effort to reverse falling sales. Listed at $19.95, Ouija costs about 60% more than standards like Monopoly and Scrabble, which further suggests that it has become something of a specialty item.

In a far remove from the days when Ouija led Parker Brothers’ lineup, the product now seems more like a corporate stepchild. The “Ouija Game” (“ages 8 to Adult”) merits barely a mention on Hasbro’s website. The company posts no official history for Ouija, as it does for its other storied products. And the claims from the original 1960s-era box – “Weird and mysterious. Surpasses, in its unique results, mind reading, clairvoyance and second sight” – have since been significantly toned down. Given the negative attention the board sometimes attracts – both from frightened users and religionists who smell a whiff of Satan’s doings – Ouija, its sales likely on the wane, may be a product that Hasbro would just as soon forget.

And yet...Ouija receives more customer reviews – alternately written in tones of outrage, fear, delight, or ridicule – than any other “toy” for sale on Amazon.com (280 at last count). What other “game” so polarizes opinion among those who dismiss it as a childhood plaything and those who condemn or extol it as a portal to the other side? As it did decades ago in The Exorcist, Ouija figures into the recent fright films What Lies Beneath and White Noise. And it sustains an urban mythology that continues to make it a household name in the early twenty-first century. There would seem little doubt that Ouija – as it has arisen time and again – awaits a revival in the future. But what makes this game board and its molded plastic pointer so resilient in our culture, and, some might add, in our nightmares?

“AN OCCULT SPLENDOR”

Among the first things one notices when looking into Ouija is its vast – and sometimes authentically frightening – history of stories. Claims abound from users who experienced the presence of malevolent entities during Ouija sessions, sometimes even being physically harassed by unseen forces. A typical storyline involves communication that is at first reassuring and even useful – a lost object may be recovered – but eventually gives way to threatening or terrorizing messages. Hugh Lynn Cayce, son of the eminent American psychic Edgar Cayce, cautioned that his researches found Ouija boards among the most “dangerous doorways to the unconscious.”

For their part, Ouija enthusiasts note that teachings such as the inspirational “Seth material,” channeled by Jane Roberts, first came through a Ouija board. Other channeled writings, such as an early twentieth-century series of historical novels and poems by an entity called “Patience Worth” and a posthumous “novel” by Mark Twain (pulled from the shelves after a legal outcry from the writer's estate), have reputedly come through the board. Such works, however, have rarely attracted enduring readerships. Poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wrote haunting and dark passages about their experiences with Ouija; but none attain the level of their best work.

So, can anything of lasting value be attributed to the board – this mysterious object that has, in one form or another, been with us for nearly 120 years? The answer is yes, and it has stared us in the face for so long that we have nearly forgotten it is there.

In 1976, the American poet James Merrill published – and won the Pulitzer Prize for – an epic poem that recounted his experience, with his partner David Jackson, of using a Ouija board from 1955 to 1974. His work The Book of Ephraim was later combined with two other Ouija-inspired long poems and published in 1982 as The Changing Light at Sandover. “Many readers,” wrote critic Judith Moffett in her penetrating study entitled James Merrill, “may well feel they have been waiting for this trilogy all their lives.”

First using a manufactured board and then a homemade one – with a teacup in place of a planchette – Merrill and Jackson encounter a world of spirit “patrons” who recount to them a sprawling and profoundly involving creation myth. It is poetry steeped in the epic tradition, in which myriad characters – from W.H. Auden, to lost friends and family members, to the Greek muse/interlocutor called Ephraim – walk on and off stage. The voices of Merrill, Jackson, and those that emerge from the teacup and board, alternately offer theories of reincarnation, worldly advice, and painfully poignant reflections on the passing of life and ever-hovering presence of death.

The Changing Light at Sandover gives life to a new mythology of world creation, destruction, resurrection, and the vast, unknowable mechanizations of God Biology (GOD B, in the words of the Ouija board) and those mysterious figures who enact his will: Bat-winged creatures who, in their cosmological laboratory, reconstruct departed souls for new life on earth. And yet we are never far from the human, grounding voice of Merrill, joking about the selection of new wallpaper in his Stonington, Connecticut home; or from the moving council of voices from the board, urging: In life, stand for something.

“It is common knowledge – and glaringly obvious in the poems, though not taken seriously by his critics – that these three works, and their final compilation, were based on conversations...through a Ouija board,” wrote John Chambers in his outstanding analysis of Merrill in the Summer 1997 issue of The Anomalist.

Critic Harold Bloom, in a departure from others who sidestep the question of the work’s source, calls the first of the Sandover poems “an occult splendor.” Indeed, it is not difficult to argue that, in literary terms, The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterpiece – perhaps the masterpiece – of occult experimentation. In some respects, it is like an unintended response to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which not one man acting alone, but two acting and thinking together, successfully pierce the veil of life’s inner and cosmic mysteries – and live not only to tell, but to teach.

One wonders, then, why the work is so little known and read within a spiritual subculture that embraces other channeled works, such as the Ouija-received “Seth material,” the automatic writing of A Course In Miracles, or the currently popular Abraham-Hicks channeled readings. The Changing Light at Sandover ought to be evidence that something – be it inner or outer – is available through this kind of communication, however rare. It is up to the reader to find out what.

VOICES WITHIN?

Of course, the Merrill case begs the question of whether the Ouija board channels something from beyond or merely reflects the ideas found in one’s subconscious. After all, who but a poetic genius like James Merrill could have recorded channeled passages of such literary grace and epic dimension? Plainly put, this wasn’t Joe Schmoe at the board.

In a 1970 book on psychical phenomena, ESP, Seers & Psychics, researcher-skeptic Milbourne Christopher announces – a tad too triumphantly, perhaps – that if you effectively blindfold a board’s user and rearrange the order of letters, communication ceases. A believable enough claim – but what does it really tell us? In 1915, a specialist in abnormal psychology proposed the same test to the channeled entity called Patience Worth, who, through a St. Louis housewife named Pearl Curran, had produced a remarkable range of novels, plays, and poems – some of them hugely ambitious in scale and written in a Middle English dialect that Curran (who didn’t finish high school) would have had no means of knowing.

As reported in Irving Litvag’s 1972 study, Singer in the Shadows, Patience Worth responded to the request that Curran be blindfolded in her typically inimitable fashion: “I be aset athin the throb o’ her. Aye, and doth thee to take then the lute awhither that she see not, think ye then she may to set up musics for the hear o’ thee?” In other words, how can you remove the instrument and expect music?

Some authorities in psychical research support the contention that Ouija is a tool of our subconscious. For years J.B. Rhine, the veritable dean of psychical research in America, worked with his wife, Louisa, a trained biologist and well-regarded researcher in her own right, to bring scientific rigor to the study of psychical phenomena. Responding to the occult fads of the day, Louisa wrote an item on Ouija boards and automatic writing adapted in the winter 1970 newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research. Whatever messages come through the board, she maintained, are a product of the user’s subconscious – not any metaphysical force: “In several ways the very nature of automatic writing and the Ouija board makes them particularly open to misunderstanding. For one thing, because [such communications] are unconscious, the person does not get the feeling of his own involvement. Instead, it seems to him that some personality outside of himself is responsible. In addition, and possibly because of this, the material is usually cast in a form as if originating from another intelligence.”

For his part, the poet Merrill took a subtler view of the matter. “If it’s still yourself that you’re drawing upon,” he said, “then that self is much stranger and freer and more far-seeking than the one you thought you knew.” And at another point: “If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become!”

TO OUIJA -- OR NOT TO OUIJA?

As I was preparing for this article, I began to revisit notes I had made months earlier. These presented me with several questions. Among them: Should I be practicing with the Ouija board myself, testing its occult powers in person? Just at this time, I received an email, impeccably and even mysteriously timed, warning me off Ouija boards. The sender, whom I didn’t know, told in sensitive and vivid tones of her family’s harrowing experiences with a board.

As my exchange with the sender continued, however, my relatively few lines of response elicited back pages and pages of material, each progressively more pedantic and judgmental in tone, reading – or projecting – multiple levels into what little I had written in reply (most of which was in appreciation). And so I wondered: In terms of the influences to which we open ourselves, how do we sort out the fine from the coarse, allowing in communications that are useful and generative, rather than those that become simply depleting?

Ouija is intriguing, interesting, even oddly magnetic – a survey of users in the 2001 International Journal of Parapsychology found that one half “felt a compulsion to use it.” But, in a culture filled with possibilities, and in a modern life of limited time and energy, is Ouija really the place to search? Clearly, for a James Merrill, it was. But there exists a deeper intuition than what comes through a board, or any outer object – one that answers that kind of question for every clear-thinking person. For me, the answer was no.

It was time to pack up my antique Ouija board in its box and return to what I found most lasting on the journey: The work of Merrill, who passed through the uses of this instrument and, with it, created a body of art that perhaps justifies the tumultuous, serpentine history from which Ouija has come.
__________________

The New York Times recently published the following letter in connection with Peter Jennings' ABC special on UFOs. It was written in response to an off-handed remark made by the otherwise penetrating columnist Frank Rich.

* * *

ARTS AND LEISURE DESK
TV NEWS; Equal Time for U.F.O.'s

Published: March 13, 2005, Sunday

To the Editor:
Frank Rich does an uncharacteristic disservice to open debate when he dismisses the interview subjects of Peter Jennings's recent U.F.O. special as ''fanatics'' [''Gonzo Gone, Rather Going, Watergate Still Here,'' last Sunday]. The one distinction the Jennings special may claim is that it separated the fanatics -- the awkward paranoiacs who dominate ''ufology'' -- from ordinary people who believe they've witnessed something fantastic.

Reasonable people sometimes encounter unexplained phenomena only to be told, tut-tut, that science makes no room for personal anecdote. This tends to force them to the fringes, if they want to be heard at all. ABC's motives may have been less than stellar, but the network did, for an evening, buck that unfortunate pattern.

Mitch Horowitz
Manhattan

The following article appeared in the March/April 2005 issue of Venture Inward magazine (www.edgarcayce.org). It also appears at www.mitchhorowitz.com.

Unlocking the Mysteries of Sedna

A New Planet Discovered;
An Ancient Myth Revived

By Mitch Horowitz

Twenty-first century astronomy sits on the brink of a Renaissance of new discoveries in our outer solar system. As new objects are found – such as the tiny, unimaginably faraway planetoid Sedna early last year – the more thoughtful among astrologers face new questions. Chief among them: Should the astrological canon expand to accommodate new discoveries?

The ancients made no division between astronomy and astrology. In their studies of the sky, cultures encompassing the Egyptian, Persian, Vedic, Hellenic, Chinese, and Mayan found correspondences between the positions of celestial bodies and events on Earth, from the shifting of the tides to the cycles of the human body. The great cultures went further, extending their understanding to correspondences between outer phenomena and the make-up of the human psyche: In their own fashion, each located the cosmic traits of their gods – and the antecedents of human nature – amid the Milky Way.

“Astrology – the vital aspect of astronomy – is integrated in a synthesis that represents myth,” wrote esoteric Egyptologist Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, “and should not be considered as a separate philosophical speculation as our rational mentality would lead us to believe.”

And yet, the separateness that Schwaller speaks of prevails: The doors of mainstream science are as closed to astrology as the Church itself once was to astronomy’s insights. But when a planet is newly discovered in our time, it heightens the question of whether these two approaches – the physical science of astronomy, with its dedication to reason and cause-and-effect; and the ethereal search of astrology, with its quest for connection between human nature and physical world – must be so at odds. It will take years before a consensus forms as to how or whether Sedna will find a place in astrology; but we possess a few enticing hints – from both astronomy and astrology – from which to begin our inquiry.

A New Neighbor Amid the Stars

Astrology begins with geology – with the physical realities of heavenly objects. These traits impact how a planet, asteroid, or other kind of body is eventually understood within an astrological framework. Hence, it is helpful to first examine what we know about Sedna from a physical perspective.

Initially identified by astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, Yale, and Hawaii’s Gemini Observatory on November 14th 2003, Sedna’s discovery was announced to the public on March 15th, 2004. Considered the furthest – and coldest – known object in our solar system, Sedna is about eight billion miles away from the Sun at its closest point. Its surface temperature rarely rises above minus 400 Fahrenheit as it traces an unimaginably slow orbit around the Sun every 10,500 years. The last time Sedna would have been at its current point in the sky, humanity was emerging from the last Ice Age.

Sedna now displaces Pluto as the most faraway known planet-like object in our solar system – and as one of the smallest. Indeed, there is controversy over whether Sedna’s size – the highest estimates put it at 1,100 miles across, or about three-quarters the size of Pluto – allows us to consider it a planet at all. But astronomers quickly acknowledge that there exists no firm consensus on what makes an object a planet. Some argue that for an entity to be a planet, it must possess greater mass than the sum total of all other objects in its orbit. Others maintain that the shape of an object’s orbit is what distinguishes planets from comets or asteroids. Still other astronomers say that a planet is defined by its roundedness, i.e., it must have sufficient mass in order to be shaped spherically (otherwise an object has the more potato-like shape of an asteroid).

Indeed, the discovery of Sedna has revived a longstanding debate about whether Pluto itself ought to be considered a planet. At the very least, most experts agree that Sedna – if not our 10th planet – can be considered a “planetoid,” or planet-like object. Sedna is spherical, possesses a distinct – though incredibly slow – orbit around our sun, and early evidence suggests that it may even have its own moon.

We can only speculate as to what Sedna is made of. Its discoverers believe that it may be a mixture of primordial rock and ice. In an intriguing note, observers have found the planet inexplicably colored a bright, shiny red. One of its chief discoverers, astronomer Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology, expressed puzzlement: “Sedna is one of the most red objects in the solar system – almost as red as Mars. Why? We’re currently baffled.”

If even its discoverers understand relatively little, how then should Western astrology begin to approach this odd new world? What can we make of a neighbor so faraway that our Sun itself would be obscured by the head of pin if one were looking out from Sedna’s surface?

Toward an Astrological Understanding

Astrologers typically spend years looking for patterns in how a planet, planetoid, or asteroid appears in the charts of a vast range of individuals. An object’s date of discovery, and the astrological and earthly events that coincide with that general time period, are also scrutinized. Consensus forms over a course of many years: Even the meaning of the asteroid Chiron – named nearly thirty years ago for the wounded centaur of Greek mythology – remains a subject of dispute. Many astrologers interpret Chiron as a symbol of deep-seated suffering and potential catharsis in a birth chart, while others eschew its use altogether.

According to tradition, astrology will also pursue its consideration of Sedna with an eye toward the attributes that led her discoverers to propose the planetoid’s name. Astrologers generally ascribe synchronicity and meaning to the name a planet is given. More than any other single factor, the founding myth behind how these planetary objects are named tends to color their perception in astrology. Sedna – like other recent finds such as Pluto and Chiron – was named by the consensus of her discoverers. Says Cal Tech’s Brown: “Our newly discovered object is the coldest, most distant place known in the solar system, so we feel it is appropriate to name it in honor of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea, who is thought to live at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean.” In Fall 2004, the name of Sedna received formal confirmation by the International Astronomical Union.

Sedna is the first planetary name drawn from the Native American traditions, rather than Greco-Roman antiquity. Sedna’s team of discoverers have, in fact, proposed that future outer solar system discoveries be named for figures from Inuit tradition. Yale astronomer David L. Rabinowitz, a member of the discovery team, spoke of the intent behind the name:

The reason we chose the name Sedna is because the astronomical community has agreed that all the objects in the outer solar system should be named after characters from creation myths (or underworld figures if their orbits are coupled like Pluto’s to Neptune). We might have chosen Greek or Roman gods, but they have all been used. So we looked at Inuit mythology. The Inuits are naturally familiar with the cold appropriate for distant planets. Sedna’s association with the icy seas and sea creatures is also appropriate for the outer solar system since Uranus and Neptune are also associated with the ocean.

The goddess of Arctic sea life and a dweller in the icy ocean depths, Sedna is traditionally depicted as a tragic and wrathful female god – a young woman who suffered horrible betrayal by those around her and who was conscripted to immortality at the bottom of the ocean after her own father abandoned her during a deadly storm.

In the West today, we often recast myths in search of an affirming moral: the Death card in Tarot becomes routinely interpreted as a card of rebirth; Pluto – or Hades – in the astrological canon becomes associated with insights of the unconscious; the Greco-Roman gods are often stripped of their malice and vanity in popular renderings. But myths like Sedna’s demand we look at that which is bitter in life.

A Distant, Suffering Goddess

Sedna’s story is complex and variegated. At least two primary versions exist: One involves a young woman who weds a dog-god, to whom she bears many offspring: human children, who become Inuit, and mongrel children, who become the white man. (This is Sedna’s connection to the “creation myth” spoken of earlier by one of her discoverers.) In another related version, perhaps more widely known and accepted, a vain young woman is tricked into marrying a malevolent bird-god. This tale emphasizes the stream of events leading to Sedna’s tragic immortality, and it is this version that we will explore in depth. Based on several sources, here is a contemporary rendering:

Sedna was a lovely but vain young woman with beautiful, flowing hair. She lived with her widowed father in an Inuit fishing village. While many suitors vied for her affections, she found none to her liking – leading her father to fear that his daughter would never wed.

One day a mysterious hunter entered the village, his features hidden behind a robe. He vowed to Sedna’s father that he would provide riches to Sedna and her family in exchange for the young girl’s hand in marriage. Despite his daughter’s reluctance, Sedna’s father sent her off with the hunter, assuring her that she would be well cared-for, and that the hunter would bring her lots of seal meat and other good things to eat.

The hunter brought her to a strange and faraway island – where he shed his cloak and revealed his true form: He was not a hunter at all, but instead was a fearsome birdman. Sedna was less his bride than his prisoner.

Isolated and lonely, Sedna waited daily on the island while the birdman set off to hunt. As a great bird, he caught only fish – and Sedna grew weary of the same diet day after day. It was around this same time that Sedna’s father began to feel guilty about his decision, and set off in his kayak to visit his daughter. He arrived while the birdman was away, and Sedna complained of her plight – how they had been deceived, and how sad she was to be struck on an island with nothing to eat but fish. Her father vowed to take her back home.

He led Sedna to his kayak and began to paddle away before the birdman returned. But the birdman saw the daughter and father from the skies and angrily swooped down on them. The father paddled furiously, but the birdman possessed mighty powers of the air, and he conjured up a terrible storm. Sedna was tossed into the icy waters. “Leave her to me,” the birdman commanded “or die with her!”

Sedna swam furiously back to the kayak. Terrified of his small boat capsizing, however, her father beat her away with his oar, striking at her fingers as they clutched the side of the kayak. So hard did her father strike that he severed the fingers from her hands. Sedna’s fingers fell into the ocean – and were magically transformed. Her thumbs became whales, her other fingers seals, walruses, and other sea mammals. Sedna fell to the ocean depths to join the creatures that her fingers had become.

Thus was the sea populated with life that grew from her severed fingers. Sedna became the mother and master of sea creatures at the ocean floor. Her once-beautiful hair became matted with plants and detritus of the ocean – having no fingers she could not comb it. From time to time, Sedna weeps terribly – for her isolation, for her betrayal at the hands of her father, and for her hair, now matted and thick. When she sinks into her deepest sorrows, Sedna withholds the mammals of the sea from man, and hunters return home without food, their families going hungry. At such times, village shamans must enter ethereal states where they can visit Sedna on the ocean floor and comfort her by combing her hair. When so sated, Sedna softens and once again allows the Inuit to partake of the animals of the deep – the children of her betrayal.

As Above, So Below

Astrologers tend to calibrate the discovery of new bodies – such as Uranus in 1781 and Pluto in 1930 – to changes on Earth. The discovery of Uranus, the planet of revolution and innovation, is looked back upon as a herald of popular revolutions – the French revolution in particular. Pluto – often associated with the underworld and hidden passions – is seen by some to have coincided with the rise of fascism in Europe. How might the myth of Sedna coincide with events in our time?

First, let’s look at where Sedna falls in the current astrological schema. One of Sedna’s chief facets is its slowness. As noted earlier, Sedna requires an astounding 10,500 years to work its way around the Sun – making it the slowest known planet in our solar system. Because of its long, elliptical orbit, virtually everyone alive today will find Sedna in their charts in either one of two signs: Aries or Taurus. At the start of the last century, Sedna was at 7 degrees in Aries and moved into Taurus in 1966. It will enter Gemini in 2023. (Because the Earth is constantly moving apropos of Sedna and the constellations, Sedna will appear in different houses of a birth chart depending on birthplace and time.)

According to information presently available to us – and at this early stage Sedna’s ephemeral data may change – the planetoid will require approximately 50 years to pass through one zodiac sign in the 21st century. But at the furthest reaches of Sedna’s highly elliptical orbit – when the planet travels as far as 84 billion miles away from Earth – the picture changes dramatically. At Sedna’s furthest point from the sun, it can sit for centuries in a single sign. Thousands of years from today when Sedna reaches its orbital elongation in the sign of Scorpio, it is estimated to remain there for roughly 1,500 years.

What is perhaps most remarkable is Sedna’s relative closeness to the Earth at this present moment. According to its discoverers, Sedna will actually make its nearest sweep to Earth within about 72 years – a flash of time in its 10,500-year orbit. From an outward perspective, this closeness is part of the reason that observers have succeeded in locating Sedna. From an esoteric perspective, however, what can we glean about the heightened influence of such rare proximity?

Let’s return now to the mythological Sedna – a goddess who harbors terrible wounds from anger and betrayal. Many traditions view the ocean depths as synonymous with the unconscious or subconscious mind. In the Tarot deck, for example, cards with water are considered hallmarks of the subconscious. One might see those areas where Sedna appears in a birth chart as a place harboring unconscious pain, perhaps from a source so dim and faraway – like the tiny planet itself – that its cause may seem mysterious, or its very existence may be easy to miss.

Throughout 2005, Sedna sits at 18 and 19 degrees in the sign of Taurus – a sensual, earth sign. Sedna may come to be seen as a painful and victimized aspect of the fertile and earthy qualities that Taurus is thought to represent. Some astrologers already suggest that Sedna connotes a need for feminine healing. Viewing Sedna as a woman stripped of choice, the more politically inclined might see Sedna as the harbinger of a worldwide decline in reproductive rights, or something else associated with feminine social concerns, just as Uranus and Pluto were thought to coincide with outward events of their day. Continuing to look outwardly, we may also consider whether Sedna harbors an environmental message for our era. Here is an angry, suffering sentinel of the ocean depths in a material sign of earth, birth, and the physical world. Is there some correlation to what many today view as a global ecological crisis, including the diminishment of ocean life?

Turning inwardly, astrologer Maria Rodreguiz of the New York Open Center has suggested that Sedna may come to be seen as the ruling planet of the sign Virgo. Virgo is currently considered under the rulership of Mercury – which jointly rules both Virgo and Gemini. Some have long detected an unsatisfying contradiction in this. A feminine sign, Virgo is sometimes considered to connote fussiness, methodicalness, yet also dependability. Is this sign compatible with the expansive, communicative Mercury? Consider: the vain young Sedna, who prized her beautiful hair, becomes a suffering immortal unable to brush the detritus of the sea from her matted locks. This is a predicament suggestive of what is experienced by the overly meticulous Virgo. Is this distant planet perhaps a more fitting ruler for the barren, feminine sign that Virgo is sometimes considered?

Virgo is often associated with the Greek myth of Demeter and her ill-fated daughter Persephone – a story that bears striking resonance to that of Sedna’s. Consider: Persephone is a beautiful and carefree young woman who is kidnapped by Hades, who forces her to live with him in his subterranean world. Stricken with grief at her daughter’s disappearance, Demeter – goddess of the harvest – withholds the fruit of the earth until a bargain is struck in which Persephone is free to roam the Earth part of the year, but is condemned to live in the underworld the other part. During Persephone’s absence, Demeter again withholds the harvest in her despair.

To the Inuit, the life of the sea is the Earth’s bounty: there is no other means of sustenance. The goddess of the hunt suffers betrayal at the hands of a malevolent suitor who separates her from her family and causes events that conscript her to life at the depths. From her dark world, Sedna routinely withholds the life of the sea in her sorrow. There is correspondence to these myths, both of which resonate within the sign of Virgo, the woman of the harvest.

The Future of Sedna

We live in an era in which the discovery of new planets, or planetoids, may actually become more routine. In 2004, Michael Brown of Cal Tech told The New York Times, “Our prediction is that there will be many, many more of these objects discovered in the next five years, and some of them will probably be more massive.” Indeed, the joint paper of the team that spotted Sedna reports that astronomers have detected a possible 831 “minor planets” beyond the orbit of Neptune. Someday, the discovery of new planets may no longer be considered newsworthy.

When such a day arrives, it will represent a great step forward for observatory science; but, in other respects, it could pose a diminishment of the awe we experience when we look to the heavens. Recent history suggests an abundance of information can lead to inertia rather than understanding. The sense of the familiar can blunt our questions.

In this respect, real astrology – the astrology of seekers rather than that of the funny papers – endures in Western culture because it sustains mystery in a world in which superficial answers appear so close. “The general interest in astrology,” religious scholar Jacob Needleman wrote more than thirty years ago, “represents, at the very least, a rebellion against the idea of an unalive cosmos which modern science has given us, a cosmos in which man is at best a lonely anomaly.”

Without a conception of our relationship to a living universe, the sheer vastness of space can indeed make us feel purposelessly alone. But perhaps not everything in the telescope is so terribly distant or so separate from us. The ancients – their powers of observation sharpened to a degree that arouses wonder today – correlated the effects of the cosmos not only to natural phenomena on Earth, but also to man’s inner state. To study that sense of connection between our lives and the cosmos would compel us to look to the stars in wonder – even in an era in which new discoveries become common.

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Sources Quoted in this Article

Michael E. Brown; California Institute of Technology website; www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/.

Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujullio, David Rabinowitz; “Discovery of a candidate inner Oort cloud planetoid;” submitted to ApJ Letters, 3/16/04; www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/papers/ps/se...

Stacey Dresner; “Yale Researcher Helps to Discover New Planet;” Jewish Ledger: 4/16/04.

Jacob Needleman; The New Religions; Doubleday: 1970.

Juan Antonio Revilla; Sedna Ephemeris; Riyal Software: www.karmicastrology.com.

Isha Schwaller de Lubicz; Her-Bak: The Living Face of Ancient Egypt; Inner Traditions: 1980.

John Noble Wilford; “Astronomers Discover Most Distant Object in Solar System;” The New York Times: 3/15/04.

The author gratefully acknowledges filmmaker and writer Kurt Teske for conversations that contributed to the ideas and astronomical data in this article.

In 1928, the mystical scholar-sage Manly P. Hall -– not yet 30 years old –- published one of the most remarkable compendiums ever of the esoteric wisdom of antiquity, "The Secret Teachings of All Ages." His wisdom can also be found in some of his shorter expressions, or aphorisms. Below is a sampling. (Some of these can be found at http://rosicrucianzine.tripod.com/index.htm)

The universe always has work for those who are qualified to perform it.

Illumination is the proving of that which is believed.

An individual who cannot achieve where he is cannot achieve anywhere else.

Discipline is living up to what one knows, and not forcing oneself to live beyond one's understanding and philosophy.

Ethics may be defined as that branch of philosophy which applies the great truths of life to the social relationships of the individual.

Thinking is not merely an exercise of the mind, it is a directing of the mind.

There is an old saying that there are seventy-two names for God, but only one God. Likewise, there are many nations, races, and social orders, but only one basic purpose – to advance the brotherhood of all that lives.

I’d like to hear about good, bad, or indifferent experiences anyone has had with Ouija Boards, or talking boards, as they are more generically known.

If you want to visit two outstanding websites on this unusual phenomenon, check out: www.museumoftalkingboards.com and www.cryptique.com. You will not be sorry.

Everything old is new again. How do we understand talking boards in the 21st century?

Cheers, Mitch Horowitz, www.mitchhorowitz.com

The following article appeared in the November issue of Science of Mind magazine (www.scienceofmind.com)

From the Socks Up: The Extraordinary Coaching
Life and Simple Wisdom of John Wooden

By Mitch Horowitz

For John Wooden, it all begins from the socks up.

On the eve of his ninety-fourth birthday, the man considered America’s “winningest coach” recalls a simple, but decisive routine that he used with each new season’s players during his twenty-seven years of coaching UCLA’s legendary basketball team to unprecedented victory.

On the first day of practice, the coach would tell his hotshot recruits, “Gentleman, today we’re going to figure out how to put our shoes and socks on.” Some players would blanch. Wooden would calmly explain that most players are benched for blisters, and the easiest way to avoid them is to pay attention to the basics. He would meticulously show them how to roll up their socks and tighten their laces. “I wanted it done consciously, not quickly or casually,” he said. “Otherwise we would not be doing everything possible to prepare in the best way.”

It is pure Wooden – simple yet ingenious, zeroing in on what really matters most. A coach of extraordinary achievement – he led UCLA to an unequalled ten national championships, eighty-eight consecutive victories, and a more than 80% win record – Wooden continues to inspire unusual loyalty nearly thirty years after his retirement. Since leaving the basketball court, Wooden has become a twenty-first century Will Rogers – a man whose straightforward words and unadorned style of living exercise enormous pull on those around him. His 1997 book of observations, Wooden, is one of the top-selling titles of its kind. In 2003, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Today, athletes, reporters, and everyday people alike dote on him for advice – though Wooden prefers to speak of “suggestions” or “opinions” rather than “advice.”

And his suggestions are often disarmingly simple – lessons culled from childhood years on an early 20th century farm in Centerton, Indiana. Indeed, Wooden is a living link to an era in which wisdom was hard-won and time-tested, in which it rarely came from the literature of self-improvement that is so prevalent today. “I tried to rely on the teachings of my father to begin with,” Wooden told Science of Mind, introducing one of his key precepts: “Don’t be too concerned with regard to things over which you have no control, because that will eventually have an adverse effect on things over which you have control.” In other words, put your shoes on properly before you start to worry about what the other team is up to.

Valuing the Basics

Wooden believes the things within a person’s control – such as attention to detail and dedication to hard work – are more important than the talents with which someone is born. “I’ve had some players that didn’t have great natural ability,” he says, “but they learned to do things properly – and maybe they couldn’t do them with the grace and quickness that the more natural athlete could, but they would still get the job done. You couldn’t have great teams if they were all like that, but I don’t think you can have a great team without some like that.”

While Wooden coached many superstars – including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton – he never wavered from a dedication to the basics – repeatedly drilling players in passing, shooting, and running. “If you get to the point where you think you know it all, you’re going to stop learning,” he says. “I would not permit fancy stuff in the teaching of my players at all.” It is another Wooden hallmark: he speaks rarely of coaching, and more frequently of teaching.

In an era in which sports is increasingly dominated by flash and cash over substance and values, Wooden’s folk wisdom may appear to mark him as a man from the past – until one realizes what is so universal in his enduring appeal: His credo is available to everyone, and it comes down simply to hard work and preparation, both mental and physical. “Failure is not making the effort to execute near your own particular level of competition,” he will say, prepping a listener for one of his most oft-used expressions: “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Now, in some cases, the other fellow is just better than you are, and that’s no failure.”

A Gentle Strength

Wooden admires the everyman who achieves excellence through steadiness and continual effort. It is unsurprising that the figure he most reveres is perhaps history’s greatest underdog: Abraham Lincoln. “I think of Lincoln as the common man,” he said. “He came up under very difficult circumstances in many ways; educated himself in many ways; but Lincoln never put himself above others.”

Wooden quotes many expressions from memory, and a favorite of his from Lincoln is: “There’s nothing stronger than gentleness.” Wooden witnessed this principle in the life of his father, Joshua – and it became, in a sense, his north star as a coach. “I saw my father in rather simple ways that somehow had a deeper effect. You might see fractious horses that some people would be having trouble getting gentled down; maybe they were stuck in a gravel pit and were pulling against each other back and forth, and I saw dad walk over to them, and they were stomping and frothing at the mouth, and dad would talk to them, pat them, and before long they gentled down and then he’d take the reins and they’d pull right out. I never thought about it at the time, but as years went by and I looked back I saw there was a gentleness about him. Physically he was not a heavily muscled man, but he was a strong man because he knew how to use his strength in different ways to maneuver. But in these other things, in his speaking and in his corrections, there was a gentle way.”

Wooden would use this approach to control his temper during various storms – such as an episode years ago when a rival coach falsely accused him of using profanity on the court. Though he was tempted to angrily confront his accuser, he let the incident pass. “You never really forget, but I think you can forgive without forgetting.”

A Man of Faith

Another influence on Wooden was the religion of his youth – and the girl he shared it with, Nell Riley. “I was baptized with the young woman who was to be my wife later on, the only girl I ever dated, in 1927,” Wooden says. “We were juniors in high school and she was the only girl I ever went with and we had a relationship and she suggested that we join at the same time. I don’t want to say that I accepted Christ at that particular time because of the fact that I did this primarily because she wanted me to. But my acceptance came gradually as time went by.”

Wooden’s 53 years of marriage to his high school sweetheart was a partnership that would mark his life – and present him with his most anguishing challenge following his wife’s death in 1985. Although she had been ill for several years, Wooden professed to be totally unprepared for Nell’s passing. He was reported to be depressed, lingering around his house and rarely venturing outside, friends said. But eventually his famously indomitable spirit prevailed.

Wooden took great solace from the Bible, a copy of which sits in each room of his home today. His favorite passage, 1 Corinthians 13, reads in part: “Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” It is yet another theme that marks his life: “I do believe that adversity makes you stronger,” he says, “And I do believe in many ways, perhaps not in financial ways, that adversity from hard work does make you able to accept the more difficult things as they would come along later in your life.”

Today, religion continues to be major factor in Wooden’s life. He reads Scripture daily, attends the First Christian Church of his childhood, and professes deep admiration for evangelist Billy Graham, who is a personal friend.

In matters of faith and in other respects, Wooden is unmistakably traditional. Coaching during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, Wooden was sometimes considered conservative by the standards of the day. When a player once asked him to cancel practice to honor an anti-Vietnam protest, reports have it that the look on the coach’s face could have curdled milk. Practice continued as planned. And yet Wooden possessed an extraordinary touch for dealing with players from a wide range of backgrounds and outlooks, including the seven-foot-plus Lewis Alcindor, the future superstar who would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “A reporter in my presence asked one of my black players: ‘Tell me about your racial problems,’ and he said: ‘You don’t know my coach, do you? He doesn’t see race at all, he sees ball players’ – and he turned and walked away from him. I was very proud of that.”

Wooden would later tell the Los Angeles Times, “I learned more from Alcindor [Kareem Abdul-Jabbar] about man’s inhumanity to man. I never realized how cruel people can be … Like how people would make remarks with his hearing – ‘Look at the big freak!’ and things of that sort.”

Belief In Self

For the all the fame and publicity that came with UCLA’s success, Wooden has always been motivated by an inner force. “I do believe that the only pressure that amounts to a hill of beans is the pressure you put on yourself,” he says. In fact, while coaching for UCLA, he reportedly never earned more than $32,500 a year for the job.

Today, Wooden occupies the same unassuming San Fernando condominium that he shared with his wife since the early 1970s. A man of uncomplicated tastes, he politely refuses most gifts and has resisted corporate entreaties for product endorsements. Visitors have noted the modesty of his home relative to his fame, a sign that his values matter more than wealth. “If I don’t feel comfortable doing it,” he has written, “then I’m not going to do it, regardless of how much money they want to pay me…I may not have their money, but I do have my peace of mind.”

In this sense, Wooden has found lasting comfort in the core attribute that he spent a lifetime cultivating in players: belief in self. “In times of crisis, the best players won’t start forcing things and getting away from what got them there in the first place. I believe it’s the confidence they have in themselves, without being over-confident. The better ones believe in themselves, probably more than anything else.”

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Mitch Horowitz is an editor and publisher of many years experience with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. The Executive Editor of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, he has published some of today’s leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. Visit his website at: www.mitchhorowitz.com.

Dear Friends, I am writing an historical profile of the influential New Thought teacher and mystical philosopher Neville Goddard (1905-1972), who wrote under the solitary pen name Neville. I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who has source material or recollections relating to Neville. You can reach me via my website: www.mitchhorowitz.com or at mitch.horowitz@us.penguingroup.com. Many thanks, Mitch Horowitz

The following article appears in the current issue of Science of Mind magazine (www.scienceofmind.com)

The Evidence of Things Not Seen:

How ‘America’s Fastest Woman’ Found
Inspiration the Across the Lines of Time

By Mitch Horowitz

One young girl grew up black in a segregated Southern town where childhood polio forced her to walk with a limp until she was eleven years old. She went on to become a three-time gold medalist in Olympic track and field, the first American woman ever to win the gold three times.

Another young black woman suffered from a crippling bout with Graves Disease, so severe at one point that medical authorities believed her legs would require amputation. She recovered to become what The New York Times this year called “the greatest combination sprinter/hurdler to put on track shoes.”

Two generations apart, these two women – Olympic legends Wilma Rudolph and Gail Devers – would touch one another’s lives in an uncanny yin-yang of perseverance, positive thought, and personal excellence. They would meet only twice – both times in 1993, the year before the older Rudolph died of brain cancer – but each of their lives would indelibly touch the other’s.

Champions Are Made

Today, Gail Devers, 37, has won three Olympic gold medals and a variety of world championships. Yet, to all appearances her career as a runner and hurdler was over when she was forced out of the 1988 Olympic Games by an undiagnosed case of Graves Disease. The thyroid disorder had sapped her energy, and almost led to the amputation of her legs after catastrophic side effects caused by radiation treatments. But in one of the most miraculous recoveries in sports history, Devers re-emerged from the ordeal to capture the gold at the 1992 games.

Devers credits her comeback to drive, determination, and affirmative thought – “I think positive begets positive, and the same is true on the opposite side. We’re magnets.” And, perhaps, to a childhood voice that was whispering in her ear. Devers, it turned out, had something to draw on that seemed almost programmed into her life. As a 6th grade girl growing up outside San Diego, Devers told Science of Mind that, “As part of an assignment, we had to go to the library and everyone had to pick a book. I walked down an aisle and a book fell out. So I picked up the book and I took it home, and I said, ‘okay this is the book for me, I don’t have to figure out what I’m going to read.’ It ended up being the Wilma Rudolph story.”

As the future Olympian tells it, “I kept the book and each year I read it over and over and over until it didn’t have a cover any more. I believe in destiny. I didn’t have any interest in track and field, I wasn’t running track and field; I just thought it was interesting that she had gone through polio, and I did use that as a source of inspiration myself going through my Graves Disease, saying that, ‘If Wilma could do it so can I.’ ”

Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a more inspiring figure in 20th century American sports than Wilma Rudolph. The twentieth of twenty-two children, Rudolph was born prematurely in 1940 with a disease that would routinely cripple children until its vaccine was discovered more than two decades later. Raised in a poor family in Clarksville, Tennessee, Rudolph was homebound by a steel brace that straightened her crooked, weakened left leg. Without a cure for polio, it was doubtful that Wilma would ever walk without assistance. But through constant exercise, faith (“the doctors told me I would never walk, but my mother told me I would, so I believed in my mother”), and the finest treatment that her black Baptist family could afford at Nashville hospitals, Wilma not only recovered her ability to walk unattended but became a notable high school athlete. By the age of 16, she was on her way to becoming the first three-time American female gold medalist in history.

Devers’ victories took an equally unlikely path. A rising track star, Devers bottomed out in the 1988 games. Soon after, she would begin an athlete’s nightmare: She experienced severe fatigue, dizziness, migraines, and fainting spells – and yet physicians again and again dismissed her problems as being “all in her head.” Devers was relived to finally receive a firm diagnoses: she was suffering from Graves Disease, a disorder that inflames the thyroid gland and disrupts the body’s metabolism. Yet things were fated to get worse before they got better.

Fearing ejection from competition for using banned substances, Devers refused the drugs that were intended to mitigate side effects from the radiation therapy required to treat her enlarged thyroid. The results were as unexpected as they were calamitous: Devers developed excruciatingly painful lesions on her feet, and sores and scales all over her body and face. Her weight plummeted. She grew weaker. Devers was so distraught over her appearance – “alligator woman,” she called herself – that she covered all the mirrors in her Los Angeles home. “I look at myself in mirror and I remember what I looked like during those times, and I see myself now, and if I didn’t know me back then it would be hard to remember what I used to look like and what I went through.”

Devers’ condition would deteriorate even further. Her feet swelled so severely that the 5-foot, 3-inch runner could squeeze only into a size-12 men’s sneaker – and eventually she couldn’t walk at all. Family members had to carry her to the bathroom. Her feet grew so swollen and infected that medical authorities actually believed they might require amputation – a diagnosis Devers fought with all her might. Eventually, recovery came and Devers began a lifelong program taking a synthetic thyroid pill. Most remarkably, Devers – with the help of legendary track and field coach Bobby Kersee – began to run again. At first, she rode a stationary bike at trackside; then she walked; then jogged; and eventually began to sprint and jump – amazingly, in time to become a gold medalist at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.

Oddly enough, Devers is adamant today that running was never her true passion. “I don’t like to run,” she insists. “I never thought I’d be an athlete at all. I wanted to be a teacher.” But she finds a deeper logic in how things turned out: “As I look at my life now, I am a teacher – I have a bigger classroom, though.” Devers is committed to passing on lessons about recovery, achievement – and something about life’s larger principles.

A 1993 ceremony in Washington, D.C., honored some of the leading athletes of the 20th century, including Muhammad Ali – and Wilma Rudolph. Devers was selected to present Rudolph with a lifetime achievement award. “I talk about the Circle of Life,” Devers says of meeting her hero. “Everything starts and ends at the same place.” Devers and Rudolph met for the first time earlier in 1993 at the world championships in Stuttgart, Germany. The 54-year-old Rudolph would die the following year.

“She played a very special part in my life,” Devers says, “The Circle always closes; you don’t ever see an opening in the Circle – that’s not a circle. And it all has closure – and that was closure for me. The start of it was the book at a young age; and the similarities in the Circle were: we both had a disease, and we both had trying times that we had to go through, and then the ending of that Circle was her talking to me in 1993 and giving me words of encouragement and advice, and then my giving her an award at the end of that same summer and sharing with her what she means to me.” Devers recalls Rudolph seeking her out at Stuttgart, rather than the other way around.

“I don’t believe that there are coincidences,” Devers said. “Destiny plays a great part in it.” She goes even further: “The positive forces that guide my life made sure that was supposed to happen.” While ardently unaffiliated – “my affiliation is that I have a connection with God, bottom line” – Devers admires the principles of Science of Mind. “There’s a force out there in nature that allows or puts things in place, and sets it in place for people – whatever you call it. Even in science there is a force of nature that allows things to keep moving in the right direction. That’s how I look at life, that’s how I live my life…there’s all kinds of forces out there; now, I chose, and what seems to bond with me is, the positive.”

Again, Devers sees herself first as a teacher. “Once I’ve realized that I’ve overcome something, I can’t just leave it at that; I’m the type of person who has to share it with somebody else.”

On Her Own

Today, Devers can easily be considered one of the most self-motivated figures in all of athletics. She successfully competes at an unusually late age for a runner, and – remarkably – she coaches herself. “I’m 10-to-12 years older than anyone I’m competing against…I have the title of grandma, but it’s a title I take proudly. I’ve been in the sport 22 years, that’s a long time.”

Ending her professional relationship in 2001 with Bobby Kersee, Devers is one of the only major runners in the world today who works without a personal coach. In 2004, Devers made history by winning back-to-back victories in the 60-meter dash and 60-meter hurdles in the U.S. indoor championships. “A lot of people say you cannot coach yourself in a technical event, there’s no way. And I’ve had my most success since I’ve been on my own, but I tell people that I’m not really on my own.” Devers possesses a deep, personal instinct for how to build a spiritual base of support for herself – sometimes alone, and sometimes with the help of others. She identifies several steps:

· Bible and Prayer. Devers cites her favorite Scripture passage as Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” With this in mind, she prays all the time. “I’m constantly praying. Do I have a certain time that I sit and meditate? No. Is there a certain way I do it? No. I’m constantly calling on God and asking Him to help me through my day.”

· Sacred Contracts. “I actually sign a contract with myself for any goal that I set out to do, no matter what it is; because that holds you accountable.”

· Journaling. Devers writes constantly: to relax, to sort out ideas, and to inspire friends. “I like to write…that’s how I clear my head.” She gives inspirational writings to friends – and wants to one day publish her “own small inspiration oracle.”

· Faith in the Higher. Devers insists that her Olympic comeback was one part work, one part faith. “Nobody gets where they are by themselves, there is something or some force out there that has helped you. For me, it’s asking God to come into your life. I tell kids all the time we get into trouble when we ask man to help us…when He created me, He gave me a box of potential, and all He asks is that we keep reaching into that box, and He’ll keep blessing it.”

· Family Power. While Devers’ marriage to a fellow runner ended in divorce amid the pressures of her illness, her childhood family remains a wellspring of support. She speaks fondly of her past: “We were a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ family; we sat down and ate at a certain time; did things together as a family on weekends; we did chores together; we were very close knit … I have one brother 14-months apart, so he and I talk all the time. When we were kids, my dad was not one who would come in and tell you to turn the TV off, but he would ask you a trivia question that he made up; immediately we’d just get a pen and paper and try to figure out what the answer was.”

Defining Success, Not Being Defined By It

There is another element in Devers’ life, perhaps the key thing that characterizes her. It comes down simply to a belief in what athletes call personal best. “To me success does not mean that you have to be number one or have the most money or own the company, it means that you have to give your all. I tell people that at the end of every task, ask yourself a question, a very basic one: ‘Did you do all that you can do?’ And if the answer is ‘yes,’ you’re successful, and don’t let anybody tell you anything any different.” In her own life, Devers cites a hurdling injury that bounced her out of the 2000 Olympic Games: “I was injured going into the meet; I guess I thought I was superwoman. There are ten hurdles in a race, and in the semi-finals for every hurdle that I went over, it was like a piece of paper tearing, which was my hamstring. I got through five, and then I was out of the race. And all I heard was: ‘Devers is out.’ Although my friends told me no one said that! Well somebody told me! But I was successful in the Olympic Games because I gave it my all.”

“We let society define what success really is, and that’s wrong. The Olympic year comes up and people will say, ‘Did you win an Olympic medal?’ And if I say ‘no,’ they’re like, ‘oh, that’s too bad’ – no it’s not. Do you know how many people can make it to the Olympic Games? Do you know how many people can make it to the finals? Do you know how many people can get on that podium? If you look at a race, and there’s eight people in the race, are you going to tell me that there can only be one person that comes across the finish line first?”

This is the quality that allows Devers – an Olympic champion in what many would consider the winter of her career – neither to fear the future, nor cling to the past. By Spring 2004, Devers had already qualified for the trials to the Athens summer games; but had not yet decided whether to attend. “I really go meet-by-meet,” Devers said, revealing no feelings of pressure over the decision she faces.

“What are you?” she asks. “Are you society-made? Man-made? Who do you live for? That sets up the race. I could walk away from track and field and know that my life is complete.”

* * *

Mitch Horowitz is an editor and publisher of many years experience with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. The Executive Editor of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, he has published some of today’s leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. His website is www.mitchhorowitz.com.

The following article appeared in the March/April 2004 issue of Atlantis Rising magazine (www.atlantisrising.com).

The Inscrutable Manly P. Hall

The Author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages Remains an Enigma

By Mitch Horowitz

To speak of special gifts or powers possessed by contemporary spiritual teachers is to enter risky territory. Charlatanism and chicanery are wearily familiar among “messengers” who claim to possess clairvoyant perception, channeled wisdom, or supernormal abilities. Yet once in a great while a man or woman produces an achievement that eludes easy explanation – something that strains the bounds of our ordinary efforts at evaluation.

In the case of Canadian-born spiritual scholar Manly P. Hall, such an achievement came in the form of a single book, though Hall would write many in a career that spanned much of the last century. In 1928, Hall self-published what may be the most thorough, learned, and variegated codex to the esoteric wisdom and mysteries of antiquity: The Secret Teachings of All Ages – completed before he had turned 28 years of age.

Originally published in an oversized, coffee-table format, the Secret Teachings was expensive, hefty and, sometimes difficult to read. As a result, the book spent much of its seventy-five year life as the closely held – though widely venerated – treasure of students of ancient mysteries and the occult. Late last year, however, the Secret Teachings was made broadly available for the first time in an affordable and compact edition. Yet even in its new reader-friendly format, the book’s sheer depth of material retains its ability to astound: Pythagorean mathematics; alchemical formulae; Hermetic doctrine; the workings of the Kabala; the geometry of Ancient Egypt; the Native American myths; the uses of cryptograms; an analysis of the Tarot; the symbols of Rosacrucianism; the esotericism of the Shakespearean dramas – these are just a few of Hall’s topics.

The scale of his bibliography alone is extraordinary. Its nearly 1,000 entries range from the core works of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, to translations of the Gnostic, Nicene, and Hermetic literature, to the writings of Paracelsus, Ptolmey, Bacon, Basil Valentine, and Cornelius Argippa, to works of every variety on the ancient and esoteric philosophies – religious, mythic, or metaphysical – that have expressed themselves in symbol or ceremony.

Who was this great and gifted master of ancient wisdom? His early life provides few clues to his virtuosity: Hall attended no formal university, his roots in Canada and the American West were comfortable if ordinary, his youthful letters betray no special fluency with the complexities of the ancient world, and one of his first forays into professional life was as a Wall Street banker. Can we simply conclude that the Secret Teachings was the effort of a precocious and preternaturally gifted young man? One is tempted to say so, and yet: the sheer volume and depth of understanding presented in his book – it would seem to be the product of a whole lifetime, and a worthy one at that; his having written it before age 28 with none of the resources we take for granted today; his mastery of subjects ranging from Egyptian geometry to Greek philosophy to the complexities of Kabala, are nothing less than jaw dropping. The question reasserts itself on nearly every page: How did this large-framed young man with little formal education produce the last century’s most unusual and masterly book on the esoteric wisdom of antiquity?

A Philosopher’s Progress

Hall was born in Ontario on March 18th, 1901 to a father who was, according to one close admirer, a dentist by profession and a mother who was a chiropractor. One scholar of Hall’s work reports that his parents later divorced and young Manly was raised by his maternal grandmother. In 1985, Hall wrote Growing Up With Grandmother, a tribute to the woman he called “Mrs. Arthur Whitney Palmer.” The short book is notable, in a sense, for what it reveals about Hall’s reticence to broach virtually any personal aspect of his childhood or adolescence. Born at the close of the Victorian Era, here was a man perhaps marked by a period in which the details of private life were not easily shared.

While Hall had little traditional schooling, one can follow a beeline through his early twenties that suggests a burgeoning interest in foreign travel and esoteric traditions: He wrote letters from Japan, Egypt, China, and India; he gave public lectures on arcane topics; he was reported to have studied for a time with Houdini; and he was named a minister by the Los Angeles-based Church of the People. For all his growing achievements, Hall’s literary output in those early years could be called uneven. His published letters contain little of the eye-opening detail or wonder of discovery that one finds in the writings of other early 20th century adepts encountering the East for the first time. Sometimes his letters from abroad read like little more than prosaic, if sensitive, linear travel diaries of their day.

Like a bolt from the blue, however, one is astounded to suddenly discover a short work of immense power from the young Hall – a book that seems to prefigure that which would come. In 1922, at the age of 21, Hall wrote a luminescent gem on the mystery schools of antiquity, Initiates of the Flame. Though brief, one sees in it the outlines of what would become The Secret Teachings of All Ages. On its frontispiece, Initiates of the Flame boldly announces: “He who lives the Life shall know the Doctrine.” The short book goes on to expound passionately and in detail on Egyptian rites, Arthurian myths, and the secrets of alchemy, among other subjects. Feeling the power and ease in its pages, one can almost sense the seeds of greatness that were beginning to take hold in Hall’s grasp of esoteric subjects. Hall collaborated on the work with artist J. Augustus Knapp, with whom he would later design a Tarot deck and whose paintings – grand re-imaginings of ancient events – would later run throughout the Secret Teachings.

Another factor behind the birth of the Secret Teachings may have been the young Hall’s reaction to the times he lived in: the Roaring Twenties. Hall was alarmed by the materialism of the day, which he encountered firsthand in his brief career at a Wall Street brokerage firm just before the Great Depression. In one preface to the Secret Teachings, Hall described the “outstanding event” of his Wall Street career as “witnessing a man depressed over investment losses take his life.” One could imagine the young, spiritually minded Hall worrying whether the fading Jazz Age-frenzy that gripped our culture would spell ultimate decline for our fluency in ethics, religion, myth, symbol, and the love of learning that characterized his later work.

Hall was working in an age that tended to marginalize native religious traditions or the newly discovered philosophies of the East. Even great spiritual studies of his day, such as The Golden Bough, characterized primeval religions as museum pieces, not living philosophies possessed of ideas still awaiting discovery. “With very few exceptions,” Hall wrote, “modern authorities downgraded all systems of idealistic philosophy and the deeper aspects of comparative religion. Translations of classical authors could differ greatly, but in most cases the noblest thoughts were eliminated or denigrated…and scholarship was based largely upon the acceptance of a sterile materialism.”

To signal how his approach differed from the prevailing mood, Hall would quote his philosophic hero, Francis Bacon, early in the great book that was now taking shape: “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

By 1928, Hall succeed in publishing his completed opus in a self-financed first printing of 2,200 copies, and the work – called “The Great Book” by its admirers – would never be out of print thereafter.

The New Life of ‘The Great Book’

In 1934, Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society (www.prs.org) in Los Angeles, which has published sumptuous, oversized editions of his volume ever since. In an historic first in spiritual publishing, my colleagues and I at Tarcher/Penguin (where I am executive editor) recently partnered with PRS to produce an alternate “Reader’s Edition” of The Secret Teachings of All Ages. While existing editions remain in print, this reset, reformatted, compact-sized, and affordably priced trade paperback makes the complete text of the Secret Teachings available to a large general audience for the first time.

Hall’s original volume is composed of varying columns, captions, and inset text – sometimes as jarring to the Western eye as a page of Babylonian Talmud. Hence, the task of newly formatting the work into a faithful, but reader-friendly, edition was ambitious – and arduous. At expenses that ran into many thousands of dollars – and amid surprising complexities – we began the process by electronically scanning the full text.

When an entirely new manuscript of more than 1,400 pages landed on my desk in a pile about 8-inches high – as though it had just rolled off of Hall’s Edwardian-era typewriter – it was a shocking experience: here was the freshly minted manuscript of a work that had stood largely unaltered for a lifetime. It was, however, revealing, in one of many senses, to dissect and reassemble the text of the Secret Teachings. Like a literal translation of the endlessly fascinating Chinese wisdom book the Tao Te Ching, one can take apart and scrutinize a whole work, put it back together again, and realize that you’ve come no closer to solving its mystery.

A Man Known and Unknown

It would be asking too much of Hall – or any great teacher – to suggest that he always found his mark. His literary or religious essays sometimes dwell on narrow points, such as a 1946 consideration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s meditation on spiritual laws, Compensation, in which Hall appears to miss the work’s full scope. Nor was Hall always judicious. In the first issue of his quarterly journal Horizon in 1941, he published an astoundingly insensitive essay entitled, “The Jew Does Not Fit In,” in which he postulated that Jewish business practices were Oriental in nature and therefore innocently chaffed at contemporary Western sensibilities. Hall concluded the essay – on a note to which he would return throughout his life – with a plea for a human family that transcends religion or nation.

Hence, in the figure of Manly Hall, we find remarkable powers of discernment mixed with the profound flaws of an everyday person. But still the question remains: How did a modest, solidly built young man craft what can be considered a one-of-a-kind codex to the ancient occult and esoteric traditions of the world – all before his 28th birthday? To read Hall’s work is to experience a readerly joy rarely associated with ordinary compendiums of wisdom – its depth, breadth, and detail are, simply put, not ordinary, and not easily understood.

In an obscure astrology magazine of the 1940s, a biographer of Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote a profile of Hall, which holds an interesting passage:

The question is constantly asked on all sides
as to how Mr. Hall can know and remember so much
on so many different and difficult subjects …
Perhaps a direct answer to this constant question
may be discovered in the following episode in the
life of Mr. Hall himself: The first question Mr.
Claude Bragdon, American mystic, asked Mr. Hall
after their first meeting in New York in 1937 was:

“Mr. Hall, how do you know so much more about the
mathematics of Pythagoras than even the authorities
on the subject?”

Standing beside both these dear American friends
of mine, I was wondering with trepidation in my
heart what reply Mr. Hall would make.

"Mr Bragdon," answered Mr. Hall quickly,
unhesitatingly, and with a simultaneous flash of
smile in his eyes and on his lips, "you are an
occult philosopher. You know that it is easier to
know things than to know how one knows those
things."

The Enduring Value of ‘The Secret Teachings’

To the question of how Hall achieved what he did, some of his admirers suggest that he was born with knowledge from other lifetimes; others that he had a photographic memory. In the end, perhaps one can only conclude such a question with still more questions. But this much is clear: Readers who discover The Secret Teachings of All Ages for the first time today will encounter a book probably unlike any they have seen before. The accomplishment of the Secret Teachings, in part, is that it may be the only serious compendium of the last several hundred years that takes the world of myth and symbol on its own terms.

Hall realized, perhaps more deeply than any other scholar of his time, that the ancients possessed extraordinary powers of observation – ways of understanding the correspondences between the outer natural world and man’s inner state – that were equally potent, and equally worthy of study, as their gifts for calendars, architecture, reason, and agriculture. One can read, for example, his masterly twelfth chapter, “Wonders of Antiquity,” and learn something about what was experienced – at least so far as we can venture – in the consultation of the oracle at Delphi. Perhaps speculative at times, his seventh chapter, “The Initiation of the Pyramid,” conveys something of the marvel of Egypt’s priestly rites, from an age when the rise of monotheism was as distant to the Egyptian adept as he is to us.

Hall would observe the workings of esoteric cultures with the same passion and awe that one finds in historians who were a living part of the history they wrote about. In the darkening night of the decayed Mayan empire, the late-18th century Mayan historian known as Chilam Balam of Chumayel, looked at the culture that had very nearly slipped away – at its calendars, its mathematical skills, its astrology, and lamented:

They knew how to count time,
Even within themselves.
The moon, the wind, the year, the day,
They all move, but also pass on.
All blood reaches its place of rest,
As all power reaches its throne…

This, in a sense, is the universal voice that finds its way into each century to tell of the wonders of the past. It found its way to the 20th – and now the 21st – century through Manly P. Hall. His is the voice that runs like a luminescent thread through history telling the stories of those who have passed, not as a distant judge, but as a lover of the knowledge embodied in the ancient ways.

* * *

Sources Quoted in this Article

Manly P. Hall; The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Reader’s Edition; Tarcher/Penguin; 2003; Philosophical Research Society; 1928.

___________; “Initiates of the Flame;” Collected Writings, Vol. 1; Philosophical Research Society; 1958.

___________; “The Jew Does Not Fit In;” Horizon; volume 1; number 1; August 1941.

___________; “Emerson’s Essay on the Law of Compenstation;” Horizon; volume 6; number 1, Summer 1946.

Demetrio Sodi Morales; The Maya World; Minutiae Mexicano; 1976.

Basanta Koomar Roy; “America’s Timeless Philosopher;” reprinted from Wynn’s Astrology Magazine; Horizon; vol. one; number 4; Nov.-Dec. 1941.

* * *

Mitch Horowitz is an editor and publisher of many years experience with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. The executive editor of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, he has published some of today’s leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. To learn more about The Secret Teachings of All Ages and other books, please visit his website at www.mitchhorowitz.com.

The following article appears in Lapis magazine at: www.lapismagazine.org/horowitz.html.

Bringing the ‘Secret Teachings’ Into the 21st Century

The New Life of Great Book

By Mitch Horowitz

In the past century, religion and academia have been on uneasy terms – to put it mildly. The philosopher Jacob Needleman once wryly noted that when he was coming up through university, one could study myth, religion, and symbol – but “any possibility that the ideas in religion were true was brushed aside.”

Even one of the 20th century’s most influential studies of symbolist religions and tradition, The Golden Bough, disparaged the meaning of its own subject matter: “In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art.”

It was in this atmosphere that a young investment banker named Manly P. Hall made a startling departure from the traditional scholarship of his day. In 1928 – at the unthinkably young age of 28 – Hall self-published one of the most reverent and thorough works ever to catalogue the esoteric wisdom of antiquity: The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Hall’s Secret Teachings became a one-of-a-kind codex to the ancient occult and esoteric traditions of the world. Its hundreds of entries shone a rare light on some of the most fascinating and closely held aspects of myth, religion, and philosophy. Seventy-five years after its initial publication, the book’s range of material remains astounding: Pythagorean mathematics; alchemical formulae; Hermetic doctrine, the workings of the Kabala; the geometry of Ancient Egypt; the Native American myths; the uses of cryptograms; an analysis of the Tarot; the symbols of Rosacrucianism; the esotericism of the Shakespearean dramas – these are just a few of Hall’s topics.

Hall wrote in an era immediately preceding the Great Depression. He described the “outstanding event” of his Wall Street career as “witnessing a man depressed over investment losses take his life.” One could imagine the young Hall worrying whether the fading Gilded Age-frenzy that gripped our culture would spell ultimate decline for our fluency in myth, symbol, and the love of learning that characterized the voices and figures who populate his volume. Where, the young man wondered, were we headed?

“With very few exceptions,” he wrote, “modern authorities downgraded all systems of idealistic philosophy and the deeper aspects of comparative religion. Translations of classical authors could differ greatly, but in most cases the noblest thoughts were eliminated or denigrated…and scholarship was based largely upon the acceptance of a sterile materialism.”

To signal how his approach would differ from the prevailing mood, Hall quoted his philosophic hero, Francis Bacon, early in the book: “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

A Classic, Old and New

In 1934, Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society (www.prs.org) in Los Angeles, which has published sumptuous, coffee-table sized editions of his volume ever since. But many readers have also found the book expensive, sometimes cumbersome in size, and often difficult to read on account of small typefaces and occasionally arcane fonts and page design. In an historic first in spiritual publishing, my colleagues and I at Tarcher/Penguin (where I am executive editor) have partnered with PRS to produce a new “Reader’s Edition” of The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Available in Fall 2003, this reset, reformatted, compact-sized, and affordably priced trade paperback makes the Secret Teachings available to a large general audience for the first time.

Packaging a new edition of the Secret Teachings is like trying to sculpt a rare and precious stone – one serious slip, and its splendor and luminescence are lost. What are the demands of preparing the first mass edition of a work that has previously been the closely held – if deeply influential – treasure of a relative handful among the reading public?

Back to the Reading Room

While the Canadian-born Hall lived and worked in Los Angeles for much of his adult life, he actually toiled over the Secret Teachings in perhaps the greatest citadel to public education our nation has: The beaux-arts Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Entering this magnificent, cavernous space today, it is not difficult to picture the large-framed, young Manly P. Hall surrounded by books of myth and symbol at one of the room’s huge oaken tables. Like a monk of the middle ages, Hall copiously, almost superhumanly, pored over hundreds of the great works of antiquity, distilling their esoteric lore into his volume. The scale of his bibliography is extraordinary. Its nearly 1,000 entries range from the core works of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, to translations of the Gnostic, Nicene, and Hermetic literature, to the writings of Paracelsus, Ptolmey, Bacon, Basil Valentine, and Cornelius Argippa, to works of every variety on the ancient and esoteric philosophies – religious, mythic, or metaphysical – that have expressed themselves in symbol or ceremony.

In creating his record of the ancient mysteries, Hall also meticulously selected drawings – more than 200 of them – illustrating the meaning and ideas embedded within man’s oldest symbols and figures. He worked closely with artist J. Augustus Knapp who created an additional 54 color paintings boldly recreating scenes from the past whose shape we can only speculate upon at the outer reaches of our learning. To publish the new, reader-friendly version of the Secret Teachings that we had in mind, it would be necessary to abridge Hall’s selected illustrations. Could this be done without detracting from the book’s majesty?

This task was too important to be performed without the greatest intimacy with the text. In what seemed akin to reading the Encyclopedia Britannica of the esoteric, I returned to Hall’s old haunt: the cathedral-sized Reading Room of the New York Public Library and, seated day upon day in one its hundreds of wooden chairs, pored over every word, caption, index note, and bibliographic entry in the great work. Which illustrations were imperative and which could be sacrificed? The key was to retain those illustrations – eventually about 125 in all – that worked in concert with – and, hence, were necessary to understanding – the ideas in the text. Making these choices was slightly eased by the knowledge that PRS would continue to publish its own complete edition of the Secret Teachings, so that no visual matter would be lost to time.

Above all, however, I set forth the principle that we would not abridge the narrative itself. The full text of the Secret Teachings appears in the “Reader’s Edition” – including Hall’s original – and extraordinarily detailed – index and bibliography. All that is missing is one of several short prefaces, which remains available in the PRS edition.

Bringing the Mountain to Mohammad

Perhaps the greatest of challenges was how to reset and reformat the text itself. The original edition is composed of varying columns, captions, and inset text – sometimes as jarring to the Western eye as a page of Babylonian Talmud. In its original trim size, the book’s dimensions are usually large: 12 x 18 inches. It has color plates, foldouts, and an overlay. The small size of its text is sometimes a strain on the eye. Our “Reader’s Edition” demanded a typestyle, format, and layout that was, well, readable – yet loyal to the vibration of the original work. This would be no simple task: Until today, none of Hall’s 1928 text has been available electronically; PRS, in its many reprints over the years, has used the original plates on which the book is based. In the information age, we are all-too-accustomed to text that can be easily manipulated. The Secret Teachings would give itself over with no such ease.

At expenses that ran into many thousands of dollars, we delivered an edition of the book to NK Graphics in New Hampshire, which was capable of scanning text. The book, however, was too large for their scanner beds, requiring the material at the bottom of its pages to be hand-typed. Then the scanned data was submitted to a computer program that – imperfectly – recognizes the symbols of letters and transforms the material into a new manuscript. Alas, such methods are never quite as advanced as we believe them to be, and a professional proofreader had to read the entire text of the Secret Teachings against the scanned material to ensure accuracy. Nor could the scanning technology pick up the many Greek and Hebrew characters spread throughout the book; this required us to insert each such character as an original piece of art.

In April 2003, an entirely new manuscript of more than 1,400 pages landed on my desk in a pile about 8-inches high – as though it had newly rolled off of Hall’s Edwardian-era typewriter. It was rather shocking to look at a fresh manuscript of a book that has stood largely unaltered for a lifetime. The task, however, was not to do something new with it – it was to keep something new from being done. We had to reset, reformat, and redesign the text so that it could be published in a standard size, at a standard price – but without “correcting” it. I implored our excellent copyediting and production staff to treat this like an ancient papyrus – arcane spellings, references, and language was to be left absolutely untouched. (For instance, Hall spells Shakespeare as “Shakspere,” following the only known signatures in the Bard’s own hand.) More than a few times I had to intercede to keep modern forms and styles of usage from disrupting the earlier perfection of Hall’s work.

Meanwhile, our design staff set about crafting a page design that would echo the hallowed feel of the original, while framing the text and illustrations within the trim size of a slightly larger-than-normal trade paperback. The words of this article cannot fully capture their success. My colleagues created a page design of classic beauty – one that set the columns in an imposing but inviting way, and that allowed ample space for the crucial illustrations to breathe, yet to be sized in such a manner that the book would be newly wieldy and manageable. When I saw how the text would appear on the printed page, I knew we were very close to success.

An eleventh-hour challenge emerged concerning Hall’s extensive index – itself a document of more than 6,700 entries. While we had assumed that a computerized word-search program would be sufficient to recalibrate Hall’s index to the newly numbered pages, again we discovered the Secret Teachings would not give itself over so easily. In a feature of the book that astounded the professional typesetters, proofreaders, and indexers working on the volume, they discovered that Hall had not necessarily organized his index by terms alone, but often by concept. Hence, the word “sun” in the index might correspond to the term “orb of the day” in the text. So, the indexer herself had to become fully versed in the narrative before the newly formatted index could be complete.

There were other considerations: The original edition uses Roman numerals throughout for page numbers. Also, the chapters themselves were unnumbered. We decided to use easier-to-follow Arabic, or contemporary, numerals to number the pages, while the chapters are newly numbered according to Roman style.

These and other measures drew us closer to publication. Our publisher, Joel Fotinos – perhaps the most spiritually committed executive in publishing today – worked heroically to hold our price down, so that the “Reader’s Edition” could be widely available. Obadiah Harris, the scholarly president of PRS today, pitched in to help, as well – and, with meticulous budgeting and cooperation on royalty rates and other matters, we managed to take a book that had been priced at $54.95 in its least-expensive edition, and make it available at $24.95. This, it seemed, was the final step we needed to make this new edition a reality.

A Work Enduring, A Work Reborn

Readers who discover The Secret Teachings of All Ages for the first time today will encounter a book probably unlike any they have seen before. The accomplishment of the Secret Teachings, in part, is this: It may be the only such compendium of the last several hundred years that takes the world of myth and symbol on its own terms.

Books such as The Golden Bough viewed the ancient past as we would look at items in a museum: interesting and worthy of study, even important, but never broaching the idea that things we read about in the annals of antiquity could be true for us today – true, if not in fact, than, more importantly, in what they whisper about the workings of the cosmos and man’s place within it.

We read Thucydides today and marvel at the Greeks’ gifts for oration, strategy, historiography, and at the drama of human events that marked the ancient world. How easy it is, though, to simply breeze past those passages in which great statesmen traveled to Delphi to consult the oracle. Contemporary readers rarely pause to notice such events – nor are they encouraged to – as if such episodes can be understood simply as interludes between the true lessons of the work.

For Manly Hall, however, there was no such casual bypassing. One can read his masterly twelfth chapter, “Wonders of Antiquity,” and learn something about what was experienced – at least so far as we can venture – in the consultation of an oracle.

Hall realized, perhaps more deeply than any other scholar of his time, that the ancients possessed extraordinary powers of observation – ways of understanding the correspondences between the outer natural world and man’s inner state – that were equally potent, and equally worthy of study, as their gifts for calendars, architecture, reason, and agriculture.

Hall would observe the workings of esoteric cultures with the same passion and awe that one finds in historians who were a living part of the history they wrote about. In the darkening night of the decayed Mayan empire, the late-18th century Mayan historian known as Chilam Balam of Chumayel, looked at the culture that had very nearly slipped away – at its calendars, its mathematical skills, its astrology, and lamented:

“They knew how to count time,
Even within themselves.
The moon, the wind, the year, the day,
They all move, but also pass on.
All blood reaches its place of rest,
As all power reaches its throne…”

This, in a sense, is the universal voice that finds its way into each century to tell of the wonders of the past. It found its way to the 20th – and now the 21st – century through Manly P. Hall. His is the voice that runs like a luminescent thread through history telling the stories of those who have passed, not as a distant judge, but as a lover of the knowledge embodied in the ancient ways.

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Sources Quoted in this Article:

The Golden Bough by James Frazer; Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics; 1999; original abridgement published 1922.

The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Reader’s Edition by Manly P. Hall; Tarcher/Penguin; 2003; Philosophical Research Society; 1928.

The Maya World by Demetrio Sodi Morales; Minutiae Mexicano; 1976.

Jacob Needleman, lecture, Atlantic University, May 31st, 2002.

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Mitch Horowitz is an editor and publisher of many years experience with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. The executive editor of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, he has published some of today’s leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. To learn more about The Secret Teachings of All Ages and other books, please visit his website at www.mitchhorowitz.com.