Tag Archives: history

Funeral in Berlin

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Funeral in Berlin [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Len Deighton, book 3 of the Harry Palmer series.

Where Horse Under Water (the immediately prior “Secret File” by Deighton) had a crossword conceit, Funeral in Berlin is instead ornamented with chess tactics. I read it as a chaser to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and it worked well that way, highlighting the distinctive styles of the two authors–not to mention the fact that Deighton’s book did in fact follow le Carré’s by about a year (i.e. 1963, 1964).

The anonymous narrating agent cracks wise with even more consistency than in the previous books. There are fifty-one short chapters, which tend to lengthen slightly towards the end. The extremely circumspect first-person prose is broken up with five chapters that use third-person passages to give the viewpoints of other key characters. There are also a set of six brief appendices furnishing overviews of relevant intelligence agencies and legal and technological contexts. These are helpful for readers enjoying the book more than a half century after it was written, but for some reason I was irked by the footnote method of referencing them during the story.

There were a couple of curious and welcome minor details during the closing chapters. Chapter 45 saw our man unwinding with a copy of J.F.C. Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World. In chapter 49 he discussed with his superior Dawlish the organizational need “to take the social pressures off the homosexuals.”

The 2009 edition I read was equipped with a new author’s introduction regarding his “most successful book” by certain commercial measures. Deighton reflects there on his own experiences in East Germany and his disinterest in writing “serious literature.”

At the rate I’ve been reading these “Secret File” novels, I won’t finish them until 2035 or thereabouts, but they are all at the public library, and they read fast enough individually that I could mop up all of them next month. I certainly aim to continue at some pace or other.

In the Center of the Fire

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966-1989 [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by James Wasserman.

This “warts and all” account of an American Thelemite’s personal quest also chronicles the axial development of the Thelemic movement in the second half of the 20th century, as well as the New York City occult scene of the 1970s. It reads very quickly. The prose is occasionally transparent as the factual condensation of diary data, but the honesty concerning events described is positively bracing. When I first heard announcement of this book’s impending publication, I knew I would need to have a copy. And now that I’ve read it, that knowledge is thrice-confirmed by the way that it ties together its fascinating matter through the integral experience of a true magician. Br. Wasserman doesn’t hesitate to relay his personal judgments of those characters — living and dead — with whom he has interacted, and in those cases where I have my own personal acquaintance with them, I concur with his verdicts. As rewarding as the text is, the many glossy pages of photos are especially gratifying. My Other Reader considered at least one of them “scandalous,” and they provide an important set of images to complement the narratives I have been gradually learning for the last two decades.

Sufism

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Sufism: The Formative Period [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Ahmet T Karamustafa.

Karamustafa’s Sufism: The Formative Period is a digestible and fairly thorough account synthesizing the latest scholarship on the medieval origins of the Sufi movement. The author is sympathetic to his subjects and charitable toward their motives and capabilities, but he is justly skeptical about the integrity of the relevant hagiographical literature. He is so skeptical, in fact, that he questions whether Hallaj ever said “I am the Truth” as later sources unanimously attest!

The book is highly modular, composed of six chapters, each of which contains two or three subchapters that could stand on their own. All together, however, they do articulate and illustrate Karamustafa’s thesis that Sufism per se began as a form of renunciant piety among a network of upper-middle-class Iraqis, and developed at first through hybridization with neighboring mystical schools and customs. Throughout this period there was tension and exchange between conformists and antinomians, traditionalists and scholars.

The development of dedicated Sufi communities was succeeded by a synergy between the popular reverence of saints and the development of the role of the sheik as spiritual director. Eventually, the robust complex of traditions and institutions of Sufism became useful and/or threatening to the political establishment. Later trends in spiritual mendicancy created the cultural conditions for the recovery and permanent encoding of the germinal paradoxes underlying the earliest Sufi piety.

This is a rewarding read for those interested in early Islam, and in the development of religious forms generally, especially the social and cultural dimensions of mysticism.

Strange Rites

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Tara Isabella Burton.

This book’s more journalistic work follows in the steps of scholarship such as David Chidester’s Authentic Fakes in applying the tools of religious studies to American popular cultures. After an introductory anecdote regarding author Tara Elizabeth Burton’s own religious participation in “intense subcultures,” she starts by reviewing the demographics of the “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) who make up a large and growing portion of the American population. In particular, she observes the prevalence of the “faithful nones” who maintain “spiritual” identities while distancing themselves from “religious” institutions and traditions. She advances the label “Remixed” to designate the adherents of the sort of secularized quasi-sacred value systems and communities that propagate themselves through the consumerism of 21st-century mass society, with an emphasis on their customizable individualism.

Burton categorizes the faiths of the Remixed as “intuitionist religion,” and her thumbnail history of this phenomenon considerably overlaps the “Metaphysical religion” chronicled in Catherine Albanese’s Republic of Mind and Spirit. She traces one vector from 19th-century New Thought through 21st-century wellness culture; another of sexual revolution from Free Love to kink, polyamory and “consent culture” over the same historical span; and a yet another of neopagan occultism through the New Age and eventuating in a “Magical Resistance” in Trumpian America.

All of these past trends have had consequences in the three “postliberal paganisms” (246) that Burton sees as durably emergent from contemporary American culture. While some readers may be accustomed to noticing these alignments as political valences, this book observes (accurately, I think) that their political potency is a function of their differing and compelling religious visions. The first of these, already touched on in her prior discussion of activist witchcraft, is the social justice movement with its aim of moral renewal and measures to redress sexual and racial oppression. The second is the right-libertarian techno-utopian culture valorizing “rationality” and transhumanism. The third is the reactionary authoritarianism and chauvinism of a burgeoning neo-atavist movement. Burton notes perceptively that although adherents of these faiths may profess affection for or opposition to inherited theologies or metaphysics, none of them are incompatible with the starkest mechanistic materialism.

This book published in the first half of 2020 was then up-to-the-minute in its cultural assessments, but it predated the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, the protest wave following the police murder of George Floyd, and the US Capitol riot of January 2021. Each of these watershed events could be viewed as a manifestation of one of Burton’s three contending para-religions. The protests were clearly a development of the social justice movement. The lockdowns forced commerce and culture online, accelerating various techno-utopian projects (and enriching and empowering their proponents). The attempt to violently overturn Trump’s electoral defeat was an authoritarian disruption that demonstrated social cohesion among ideological actors previously characterized by “lone wolf” reactionaries.

(I couldn’t help recalling my reading of Mary Farrell Bednarowski’s New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America, where I correlated her three religious genera to the chapters of Liber Legis. In this case, I think it is fairly evident that Burton’s understanding of the social justice movement corresponds to the first chapter, her techno-utopians match the second, and her apocalyptic atavists fit the third.)

Witness Against the Beast

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by E P Thompson.

E.P. Thompson’s Witness Against the Beast is a wonderful piece of history and criticism. Its subtitle “William Blake and the Moral Law” might have more accurately been “William Blake Against the Moral Law,” since that is the position expressed in Blake’s works. Thompson points the fact out again and again, while noting the earlier critics who have managed to ignore it.

“Inheritance,” the first of the book’s two sections, paints a cultural backdrop for Blake in the world of English antinomian religion. The second “Human Images” treats Blake’s biography and works in relation to that tradition and to the Republican and Deist impulses of the late eighteenth century. Thompson focuses on the Songs of Innocence and Experience, with some attention to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and commissioned paintings. He is very sympathetic to Blake, and avers himself to be a “Muggletonian Marxist” (the first term referencing an antinomian sect which may have influenced Blake through his family). At the same time, he seems careful not to project his own ideas onto Blake — much more careful than most Blake critics of my reading — and not to rashly infer lines of influence or authorial intentions.

The fifteen black and white plates in the book are very well chosen. In the course of illustrating Thompson’s points, they also make up one of the best possible collections of Blake’s images on such a small scale.

River God

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews River God [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Wilbur Smith, book 1 of the Egyptian series.

The conceit of this massive novel is that it is an elaborated translation of the chronicle of the Queen Regent Lostris of Egypt (ca. 1800 BCE) as narrated by her slave Taita. The latter is really the focus of the tale, as he is responsible for a multitude of stratagems and accomplishments of statecraft, warfare, and technology. Over the course of the book he invents indoor plumbing, Egyptian floral motifs, the spoked wheel, and bio-warfare, among other exhibitions of cleverness. If your credulity can bear up under that, the story is a sweeping epic with fairly vivid characters.

Ultimately, though, the impression delivered to the reader is that the Egyptians of four millenia gone were not so different from “us,” and Smith makes this moral explicit in his epilogue. In this respect, I find the book diametrically opposed to the volume to which I am most tempted to compare it, Norman Mailer’s Egyptian saga Ancient Evenings. Mailer impressed me with his ability to insinuate the reader’s understanding into a culture profoundly alien to modern “scientific” materialism. Smith seems to have done the reverse: keeping the events of remote antiquity within a moral and cultural compass that is already conveniently accessible to the modern reader.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Justin E H Smith.

This book written in 2020 reads more like a set of closely-linked essays than an integrated monograph. It is a pleasurable and stimulating read from start to finish, though. Author Justin E. H. Smith approaches the phenomenon of the Internet from a historical and philosophical perspective, emphasizing the human qualities and aspirations that it manifests, alongside the many ideas and achievements that anticipated it. Smith demonstrates its emergence from other inventions and enterprises within a larger sphere of technology, in a manner somewhat evocative of Heidegger, but Smith (rightly, in my view) slights Heidegger as “authenticity-mongering” (6-7). He expresses more sympathy with Foucault but criticizes and inverts that thinker’s emphasis on historical discontinuities of thought (12).

Current dilemmas of Internet experience are addressed in the chapter “A Sudden Acceleration,” which discusses the ways in which social media and other functions of the ‘net are hostile to the quality of attention, as well as subject to arbitrary dynamics of power and exploitation.

In “The Ecology of the Internet,” Smith not only questions boundaries between the Internet and other human inventions, but between human invention and the expressions of nature more generally. The mood here is both iconoclastic and heartening.

I found a little fault with Smith’s antagonism in “The Reckoning Engine” for what he called the “simulation argument,” in that he did not effectively distinguish between the simulation of consciousness and the simulation of its objects, sometimes falsely accusing expositors of the latter to be claimants for the former. I’m all for denigration of the “You might be an NPC” views of Elon Musk (who might be a boss monster), but I don’t think that’s the position reluctantly conceded by Neil deGrasse Tyson (90). This chapter also entails some discussion of “artificial intelligence” that alternated between useful insights and a few remarks that made me wonder whether Smith really understood why and how contemporary technologists distinguish “AI” from earlier forms of automation.

The final two chapters “The Internet as Loom” and “A Window on the World” are a return to strength, taking the angles of philosophically-informed cultural history and informal phenomenology respectively. The curiously upbeat ending reminded me a little of the Talking Heads song “Television Man” while addressing givens similar to those of Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Silence

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Jane Brox.

The “social history” promised by the subtitle of Silence is pretty limited in scope. Author Jane Brox focuses particularly on two environments: prisons and monasteries. Despite a brief engagement with Thoreau and some short tangential passages about the development of silent reading, silence in Quakerism, and so forth, institutional penitence dominates the account.

The fourth of the five parts is dedicated especially to the social effects of gender on expectations of silence. An extensive discussion of female silencing and related judicial punishments leads into the women’s particulars of incarceration and monasticism. Implicitly, silence is given to be a sign of obedient virtue in women for the history treated, but there is no clear sign of how any masculine silence compares or contrasts with it (let alone the silences imposed on exceptional gender and gender resistance).

Brox’s prose is generally lucid and occasionally beautiful. The history is leavened with reflexive anecdotes regarding her research experience and significant digressions about architecture. A considerable portion of the book is given over to thoughts from and accounts of the twentieth-century celebrity monk Thomas Merton.

I learned some history in the course of this reading. It was surprising that I was a little less ignorant of the ancient and medieval aspects of monasticism than I was of the modern evolution of the US penitentiary. But in any case, I never really arrived at the understanding of the social role of silence that the subtitle indicated would be on offer.

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Peter Lamont.

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed out loud so many times reading the front matter of a history book. Peter Lamont is witty as hell.

His history of the Indian rope trick traces the modern legend from its 19th-century origins through various 20th-century controversies, and also offers an epilogue-cum-travelogue which brings the subject into the present. Along the way, he offers a wild assortment of historical tidbits, including Charles Dickens’ turn as an Orientalized performing conjuror, the origins of the pay toilet, and Chicago newspaper wars. He also highlights the contexts provided by stage magicians’ guilds, the Society for Psychical Research, and the Theosophical Society, as well as the overarching dynamics of Western disenchantment and the British Empire.

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick is a very fast and enjoyable read. Lamont’s attitude toward his historical subjects is strongly skeptical, but richly humane. I recommend the book to anyone with an interest in its topics: the history of magical performance, modern rumors and controversies, and the Western appropriation of Asian culture.

Apocalypse of the Alien God

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Dylan M. Burns, part of the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series.

The “apocalypse” in the title of this book refers to both a genre of religious writings and to the more fundamental unveiling or revelation of the “alien God,” who is the Great Invisible Spirit of Sethian Gnosticism. Not only was this godhead metaphysically alien to the created world of matter, it was culturally alien to the Hellenistic society of intellectuals gathered around the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus in third-century Rome. The latter framing is the point of departure for this study of a specific school of ancient Gnosticism in its social context.

Author Dylan Burns perpetrates careful scholarship, and the early chapters offer a fairly slow start with orientation to the cultural factors involved in the historical scenario that he uses the final chapters to set forth. He avoids anachronistic conceptions of Christianity and Judaism. For example, he doesn’t see the unorthodox or even negligible jesuschristology (my ad hoc coinage) of the Sethians as a reason to distance them unnecessarily from the phenomena of early Christianity.

The theme of alienation is present in a sort of holographic manner in this study. Burns points out the religious trope of valorizing exile under the figures of the sojourn and the stranger as a peculiar attribute of Sethian Gnosticism that it held in common with many Christianities, some Judaisms, and virtually no Hellenism. Among the several sections of the book concerned to elucidate Sethian doctrines on the basis of the surviving writings, the one treating this theme was the most interesting to me not only for its socio-cultural implications, but for the disputable value of the actual religious ideas concerning the sojourn.

The study concludes that the floruit of Plotinus ultimately represented a “closure” of dialogue between Hellenic Platonism and the Gnosticisms rooted in Semitic scriptural traditions. This event is the second sense of the “Exile” in Burns’ subtitle, as the Sethians were exiled from the Roman Platonist milieu. Platonist dialectic withdrew from engaging Gnostic apocalyptic and vice versa. Still, he suggests that some forms of sympathy persisted, with the theurgy of Iamblichus as a notable possible instance.

Some attention to the possible practices at stake in Gnostic texts leads to helpful discussions of baptism, “angelification,” and the rite of the Five Seals (but not the Bridal Chamber, which seems not to have figured in Sethianism). I was interested in the implications of the designation of “Perfect Individuals” in the Protophanes Aeon of Sethian eschatology. “Perfect” is a conventional translation of a Greek term that can also mean “initiated,” and I inferred that the mode of transmitting knowledge through secret initiatory ceremony might have been another barrier between the Sethians and their Platonist peers.

On the whole, this book makes real demands on the attention of a serious reader, and it is not addressed to the idly curious. But it demonstrates that work in this field can advance beyond the wrangling over definitions and categories that has been a preoccupation of recent decades, and illuminate more of the historical realities regarding these ancient religious phenomena.

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