In the beginning of
what became the standard edition of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ,
the first book that announced to a wide audience the arrival of the Age of Aquarius,
the publisher spoke of the seer named “Levi” who had produced it. She revealed
only the barest facts of his life. Indeed, she wrote, “Regarding the
personality of Levi we are permitted to write but little.” Then, after a few
more brief words about him, she abruptly drew the curtain of mystery back
around him:
Further references to
the personality of Levi are, seemingly, unnecessary. It matters but little who
he is; his work in the transcription of the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus, the
Christ, stands unimpeachable. The lessons of this book all bear the stamp of
the Nazarene, for no man except the world’s greatest master could have touched
the high chords of divine Love and Wisdom which characterize the pages of this
marvelous book.1
The publisher - who
was in fact Levi’s wife Eva - diminished his role in the creation of the book
in order to suggest that he was only the clear channel through which the full
story about Jesus had been revealed to the world. On the other hand, referring
to him only as “Levi” also mythologized him, elevating him above the mundane
world, where people have family names and ordinary histories. I have to admit
that pursuing Levi back down into that world disregards his wife’s wishes. In
light of his book’s influence over the past century, however, it is surprising
that no one has done this before. Is it too late to make the effort now, as the
last memories of the Age of Aquarius—even as a caricatured object of
nostalgia—fade away after a much shorter era than the two thousand years it was
supposed to endure?2 Is it too late to look at its first prophet now, before
the last Aquarian UFOnaut packs it in and heads out
to the Pleiades?
Levi H. Dowling, the
book’s author, was born in a log cabin in Bellville, Richland County, Ohio, on
the morning of May 18, 1844, the son of William Dowling and Rachel (Biggers)
Dowling.3 Levi’s family and friends often called him “Lee,” and he generally
referred to himself that way.4
His father was an
enthusiastic early minister of the Church of Christ, the movement founded by
Alexander Campbell that was meant to be a restitution of the original, ancient
Christian church before it was fragmented into sects. William Dowling was an
eager minister of that vision. He ministered to congregations of the Church of
Christ in Mansfield (a few miles north of Bellville), in Ashland, and in West
Point, Ohio.5 From Mount Gilead, Ohio, he wrote to Alexander Campbell in 1833,
saying that,The good work of converting souls to the
gospel of the Son of God is still progressing among us, and the sectarians are
greatly discouraged in this place. The disciples are all alive to the great
concerns of eternal life. The ancient gospel was first preached in this place
by your unworthy servant, who was the first that was called in this place of
the ancient order; but thanks be to God who giveth the victory through our Lord
Jesus Christ. Our number is now very considerable.6
During Levi’s early
years, his family lived in Mt. Gilead, and then near the town of Kendallville,
Indiana. The 1860 Federal Census shows young Levi, age fourteen, living on a
farm with his parents and some of his sisters. Living on adjacent farms were
Levi’s older brothers William Worth Dowling and John Biggers Dowling, who were
already married and were raising families.7 Levi attended school in
Kendallville, where his older brother William taught for two years.8
“Levi was always a
student of the deeper things of life,” says the brief and cryptic biography set
at the beginning of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ. “At the age of
thirteen, in his first public debate, he took the negative side against a
Presbyterian Elder on ‘The Everlasting Punishment of the Wicked.’ He began
preaching at the age of sixteen.”9
According to one of
his friends, he never did believe in “impossible hells,” and he took his point
of reference from the Campbellite search for a primitive and pure religion
underneath what was supposed to have been an encrustation of dogma. His father
“had instilled into the young man’s life, by the Spirit of the Living God, the
great need of a reformation and the emancipation of the people from the creeds
and confessions of faith, into the truth as set forth by the life and testimony
of Jesus.”10 How far his journey away from creeds and confessions would eventually
take him, no one could have guessed at the time.
At the age of
eighteen, Levi briefly became pastor of a small church.11 In a ceremony
presided over by evangelist and preacher William T. Horner, Levi married a
neighbor, Sylvia Ann Demmon, in the town of Allen,
just south of Kendallville, on November 12, 1863. She had been born March 16,
1844, one of her parents’ nine children. Her father was Leonard Demmon; her mother was Nancy (Boughey) Demmon.12 Levi and
Sylvia soon had a baby, named Frankie.
Toward the end of the
Civil War, still living in Kendallville, young Levi “assisted in recruiting a
company of volunteers,” and enlisted in Company S of the 152nd Indiana
Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He was mustered in on March 16, 1865. His brother
William wrote that, “Like the sons of most pioneer preachers of that day, he
expected to devote his life to the ministry, and had ‘exercised’ his gifts’ on
numerous occasions. As a consequence of his ability as a speaker soon after
reaching the field, he was appointed a chaplain, and was perhaps one of the
youngest men who ever held such a position.”13 His Chaplain’s commission was
that of Captain.
The Regiment left
Indiana for Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, where it was assigned garrison duty,
and was posted in Clarksburg, West Virginia for the few months until the end of
the War.14 The Regiment lost no personnel from combat, but forty-nine by
disease, a smallpox epidemic had spread through the region.15 A few days before
Levi was mustered out, his wife Sylvia brought their young infant, Frankie, to
visit him in Clarksburg. “Both took sick,” Levi later wrote. The child died on
August 27th, and Sylvia died on the day he was mustered out, August 30, 1865.
Levi took both bodies home with him.16 He buried them in Kendallville.17
Later that year he
went to Indianapolis and there enrolled as a student at Northwestern Christian
University (now Butler University) during the academic year of 1866-67.18
During this time, his brother, William, also a Church of Christ preacher, was
teaching at the University and was actively building up the Second Christian
Church in Indianapolis, a mission of the First Church to African-Americans in
the city. William was also helping preach at the Fourth Christian Church there,
in its mission Sabbath School.19 Levi began helping him publish Sunday School
literature, lesson plans and songbooks, and a children’s religious newspaper.
Levi also published
The Christian Almanac for the Year of Our Lord and Saviour
1867 in Indianapolis. It was simply a listing of Church of Christ ministers and
where they were serving, as well as statistics about the Church.20 In addition,
he worked with famed hymn composers George Frederick Root and Philip Paul Bliss
in editing The Crown of Sunday School Songs, which one reviewer, soon after its
publication, would describe as “the new singing book that is taking our
Sunday-schools by storm.”21 Levi and William together published a weekly
newspaper, The Morning Watch, issued in Indianapolis, beginning in 1867, “for the
Sunday School, Family and Church.” Levi also published a hymn collection, The
Palm of Victory, especially for Sunday Schools. William would continue to
publish such material for the next three decades.22
In order to conduct
the religious publishing business, Levi moved from Indianapolis in 1868, to
Chicago, where he lived until 1871, then briefly to Bloomington, Indiana, and
then on to St. Louis, where his brother headquartered their business.23 Also,
on June 16, 1868, while living in Chicago, Levi married again, to Kate S. Mayo,
in that city. William wrote of Levi that, During this time he traveled
extensively organizing schools, introducing the then new International Lesson
system; holding institutes and conventions; forming teacher classes and, in fact,
“blazing the way” and formulating the plans which Sunday-school evangelists
have been largely following ever since.24
The “International
Lesson system” evolved out of the National Sunday School Convention that met
annually in Indianapolis, which, in 1871, adopted a uniform lesson plan.25
Levi and his brother
made a business of setting up Sunday Schools, by preaching at a church and
encouraging the establishment there of a Sunday School for adults and for
children. They then trained the teachers, demonstrated model classes for
different aged pupils, and provided standardized lesson plans, hymnals, and
teaching materials.26
William and Levi also
published a series of children’s Sunday School newspapers from Indianapolis and
Chicago - William had begun the first one in January 1865 and named it The
Little Sower - with the titles Little Thoughts, The Little Watchman, The Little
Ones and The Little Chief.27 These were not small run papers - the number of
copies printed of
The Little Sower for
its monthly issue of July 1871, for example, was 118,500.28 Some of the
teaching books Levi published included The Sunday School Hand-Book for 1873,
and a series of materials arranged for “Dowlings’
Sunday-school Banking System.” These included The Sunday School Accountant’s
Record Book, The Church and Missionary Banking Systems, and Dowling’s Sunday
School Reward System - all meant to organize and increase the efficiency of the
management of the Sunday School.
In light of Levi’s
later publications, it is interesting that he also published at this time, The
Life of Jesus, which was described in a review this way:
This is a series of Sunday School lessons issued in sheets - four lessons on
each sheet, designed to present a harmony of the Gospels, or a connected view
of the life of Jesus, accompanied with such information as will aid the student
in understanding the text. . . . They will be found to add to the interest of
Sunday School instruction, and to facilitate the preparation of the teacher.29
It was one of many
Gospel “harmonies” that were created especially for use in teaching children.
Such works were sometimes more than a tabular comparison of Gospel passages.
Their authors often created the text of the narrative themselves as a framework
to support the Gospel passages.
Levi also indulged a
fondness for writing poetry. An example of what he was capable of is this
selection from a longer poem, entitled “Preach Christ Crucified”:
Beware of division,
contention and strife,
But hold the sweet spirit of unity dear;
And sacrifice nobly each power of life,
To the cause of the Savior, with meekness and fear.
Press on to encounter
the fierce “man of sin,”
Whose armies are marshalling now for the fight;
Be prayerful and vigilant, then you will win,
For Jesus your captain will guide you aright.
You will meet with
discouragements here, very true,
In preaching the gospel of infinite love;
But keep the reward of the faithful in view,
And you’ll gather with joy in the kingdom above.30
Levi traveled
throughout the American Midwest, preaching and organizing Sunday Schools
throughout the 1870s.31 He became the Church of Christ’s Sunday School
evangelist, general agent, and superintendent for the State of Illinois.32 He
did not shy away from applying pressure to his Sunday School missionary troops,
when it came time to ask for financial support, as is evident in his first
missive to his charges across the State:
We ask every
Christian Sunday School in the State to adopt the following financial plan:
Lift quarterly collections that will average at least five cents from every
member of the Sunday School, teacher or officer. . . . Now, brethren, come up
to this work, and let us do something worthy the name that we bear.33
While resident as
pastor of the Church of Christ in Waukegan, he printed and distributed cards to
the residents encouraging those who had been baptized only by “sprinkling” to
come to him for a real baptism, by immersion, as adults.34 By 1879, he was
preaching to the Christian Church in Ottumwa, Iowa. All in all, he continued
right up through the 1870s in every respect a committed and vigorous missionary
for the Church of Christ.
Nevertheless, soon
afterwards, Levi’s path of success, which he had trod alongside his brother,
turned away. Most importantly, in May 1877, his wife Kate left him, “wholly
disregarding her duties,” and never returned.35 In addition, perhaps partly as
a consequence, Levi turned aside from religious publishing. We may, perhaps,
also see in his search for something new, a disillusionment with the conflict
within the Church of Christ, which would eventually result in 1906 in the
division between the conservative Church of Christ and the progressive
Disciples of Christ. The more conservative faction within the Campbellite fold
distrusted attempts to establish institutional organization, such as the
complex system of Sunday Schools in which the Dowlings
were a moving force, as a falling back into denominationalism. They also
distrust- ed, as a hindrance to pious simplicity, the use of complex musical
and instrumental settings in church services, and the Dowlings
were intensely committed to hymns and the marketing of music for use in
worship.
Levi now decided to take
up the study of homeopathic medicine. He first attended and graduated from Hering Medical College in Chicago and then from the
Homoeopathic Medical College of Missouri, in St. Louis, where he received a
Ph.D. and was briefly installed on the faculty as professor of chemistry and
toxicology.36
While he was living
in St. Louis and practicing medicine, he formally divorced Kate, his wife of
fourteen years, in October 1882.37 He had not bothered to do this before. The
immediate occasion for Levi’s filing for divorce was clearly his intention to
marry someone else.
Levi’s third wife,
Eva M. Sellers, was born in Albia, Monroe County, Iowa in 1844. Her father was
James Crawford Sellers; her mother was Aby Ann (Read) Sellers.38 Eva was the
oldest of five children.39 It was her first marriage. She married Levi in
Oskaloosa, in Mahaska County, Iowa, on November 9, 1882. The ceremony occurred
less than a month after the St. Louis Circuit Court issued its decree divorcing
him from Kate. The service was conducted by a friend of her family, the
Reverend George H. Laughlin, another Church of Christ minister and Sunday
School teacher, who was President of Oskaloosa College in Oshkosh, Iowa (the
predecessor of Drake University in Des Moines).40 Eva’s father, James, was a
very successful life insurance agent, and was the secretary and a trustee of
the Board of the College. He was also a deacon and elder in the Church of
Christ.41 Levi and Eva established their residence in St. Louis, where they
stayed until 1885.
For a while after the
marriage, Levi continued intermittently to practice medicine and to preach. But
he also “entered into the temperance field as a lecturer and publisher for the
Prohibitionists.” He traveled the Midwest, including at least a short residence
in Topeka, Kansas, using the same organizational skills for the Prohibitionists
as he had developed for the Church of Christ.42 A friend described his
activities at the time as combining his preaching and pastoral skills with the
healing arts, a natural combination at a time in which the religious movements
of New Thought and Mental Healing were being born:
He preached to the delight and edification of all the congregation, and in less
than two weeks from the beginning of his preaching, we built a large tabernacle
in Topeka in which we held our meetings, for more than two months, preaching
every night. It proved to be the largest and most successful meeting ever held
in the state of Kansas by any Christian workers. Preaching at night and
visiting the sick through the day and administering to their ailments . . . By
his faithful and devoted work many were encouraged and lifted out of beds of
sickness and placed in the pathway of health and strength.43
In this work, Eva
assisted her husband, as a kind of deacon and nurse. The couple moved from one
place to another, mostly spending only a year or two in each, but travelling
together as itinerant healers. In 1892, they were living in St. Joseph,
Missouri. Eva gave birth there to their son, Leo Worth Dowling, on February 5th
of that year.44 From there they moved back again to Kendallville, then in 1895
to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
In Fort Wayne, Dr.
Dowling opened a practice specializing first in rheumatism, paralysis
(strokes), nervous debility (depression), nervous dyspepsia (gastritis,
ulcers), bronchitis, catarrh (inflammation of the mucus membrane, flu,
allergies, hay fever, colds) and consumption (tuberculosis). His ads in the
local paper assured readers that “His methods of treatment are new and his
success is, usually, all that can be asked.”45 Nevertheless, he also advertised
himself at the same time as a dermatologist and a “diligent student of
Bacteriology.” On the basis of this self-appraisal, he opened “Dr. Dowling’s
Mole Cure Parlors,” where he promised to use “newly discovered oxydizing agents” to destroy the hair bulbs at the base of
moles, preventing the possibility that the moles might become cancerous. He
presented his case to his readers by telling them about the observations of an
expert - undoubtedly Levi Dowling:
Recently, on a day when the streets of Fort Wayne were crowded with people to
see a big show parade an expert took occasion to gaze. In a short time 6,500
persons passed by, and of this number 2,740 were so notably marked with Moles
that it took no opera glass to see them.46
Homeopathic medical
practitioners have often described their system as the result of having turned
away from the “regular” or “allopathic” medicine. They have seen themselves as
deliberately rejecting unnatural treatments - such as non-vegetable medicine -
and doing for medicine what the Protestant reformation did for Christianity,
turning it away from false “priestcraft.” Homeopathy had the same allergy to
orthodox dogma that Dowling would have grown up with as a devout Campbellite.
New Thought Visionary
The same inclination
to heterodoxy was cultivated in the occultism of the time. This included
spiritualism, New Thought, Christian Science, and Theosophy, which was
inaugurated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and several associates in New York in
1875.
While the Dowlings lived in Fort Wayne, the city had a thriving
Spiritualist Society and professed clairvoyants who practiced astrology and
held seances. It was also home to an Annie Besant Chapter of the Theosophical
Society. The Fort Wayne chapter would soon change its name to the Lotus Circle
of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society. It sponsored
well-attended public discussions, complete with visiting lecturers from the
national headquarters of the Society. And in Fort Wayne, there was also an
Occult Science Society, of which Dowling was a member.47 Apparently, this did
not prevent him from appearing on the membership rolls (along with Eva) of the
West Creighton Avenue Christian Church in Fort Wayne from the time of its
founding in 1896. At least one minister in the city, however, David W. Moffat,
the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, had preached against the Fort
Wayne Occult Science Society in particular - and the belief in spiritualism in
general.48
In 1894, Levi had
received a vision that demonstrated that he had delved deeply in the literature
of Theosophy. His vision had come to him as he was meditating, or, as he would
later put it, using a New Thought term, as he was “in the silence.” In his vision,
the Theosophical sages had come to him with an initiation and a commission -
“The hour is come when the good news of peace must be preached in all
fullness,” they said, and “Thou art Levi, a teacher of all things.” One of his
friends recounted another of his visions, in 1899, when, Levi was taken into
the great Councils on other planes, and there it was revealed to him how he
should organize councils on this plane, Councils of Wisdom, of Execution, of
Light, of Strength. Every detail of the work was shown to him, even to the
white robes that should be worn by each member of the councils when they were
in session.49
Dowling could
therefore turn the organizational and marketing skills he had developed as a
proselytizer for the Sunday School movement and for Prohibition to a New
Dispensation, endowed with lesson plans of graded difficulty, ceremonies,
branches and chapters, and so on. It also meant that he began publishing
articles and poems in the journals and newspapers of New Thought, Theosophy and
spiritualism. Eva was his enthusiastic supporter and a “close student,” it was
said, of his new revelations. One of the tendencies of New Thought
interpretations of Jesus’ redemptive activities was to focus away from his
proclamation of the coming of the Kingdom of God and his sacrifice on the
Cross, and onto his moral teachings and, especially, onto his healing of
people’s bodies and minds. This corresponded well to the trajectory of Levi’s
own career, from preacher to healer.
The Dowlings moved again, this time to Grand Rapids, Michigan,
where Levi practiced medicine. The city directory for those years lists him in
1902 as “Lehigh H. Dowling” and in 1903 as “Leigh H. Dowling.”
Levi “finally retired
from the medical profession to resume literary work,” his brother wrote. This
was connected with Levi’s next move. About 1903, the Dowlings
moved to Los Angeles.50 There in the City of the Angels, Levi’s “years were
spent, in the practice of medicine; in philosophical and psychological
research; in lecturing and in writing and publishing magazines and books along
the line of the ‘New Thought.’” So wrote his brother later, and then - in a
statement that came as close as one could expect, in an obituary written by a
brother, to criticism - “This work rather put him out of touch with those with
whom he had affiliated in earlier days.”51 Little wonder, for Levi finally came
to believe that he was a medium for an entirely new truth about Jesus Christ.
William, however, wrote, “In the midst of all these, however, he never lost
faith in the Bible, nor in Jesus as the Divine Teacher and Redeemer.”
That is one way to
put it, but the Jesus that Levi encountered “in the silence” was radically
different from the one described by scripture and tradition. “Orthodox
Christian ecclesiastics tell us that Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ were
one,” says the introduction to The Aquarian Gospel, “that the true name of this
remarkable person was Jesus Christ. They tell us that this man of Galilee was
the very eternal God clothed in flesh of man that men might see his glory. Of
course this doctrine is wholly at variance with the teachings of Jesus himself
and of his apostles.”52 Believing that, Levi had made psychic contact with the
spirit of “The Christ” and “transcribed” a new scripture, The Aquarian Gospel
of Jesus the Christ, which would set the story straight.
Not only did it tell
the “whole” truth about Jesus, but it also announced the passing of the world
from one grand Age into another - from the “Piscean Age” into the “Aquarian
Age.” It was “the philosophic and practical basis of the religion of the
Aquarian Age of the World and of the Church Universal.” In an oracular voice,
The Aquarian Gospel prophesied, “And then the man who bears the pitcher will
walk forth across an arc of heaven; the sign and signet of the Son of Man will
stand forth in the eastern sky. . . . The wise will then lift up their heads
and know that the redemption of the earth is near.”53 Christian millenarianism
- which saw the “New Age” as a single final break in history and a culmination
of time - was transmuted here into an acceptance of an eternal cycling of ages.
This “New Age” is just one in a never-ending succession of ages.
The “New Era” beloved
of the Christian utopian radicals and spiritualists of the nineteenth century
was often called a “New Age” once it had become transmuted by spiritualists and
Freethinkers like James Martin Peebles and by Theosophy founder Helena
Blavatsky. Peebles portrayed Jesus in his 1869 book, Seers of the Ages, as
merely the appropriate seer for just one age out of many. The ages, then, were
cycles, which Blavatsky - reflected in her associate Alfred Percy Sinnett’s fanciful 1883 work, Esoteric Buddhism - explained
as the long cycles mirrored in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, which were
predictable through astrological calculations. In her 1888 tome, The Secret
Doctrine, and in her 1889 essay, “The New Cycle,” she prognosticated a new age
- a post-Christian one - to begin around that time. Theosophist Gerald Massey
had made clear that the Age just ending - the Christian one - was the Piscean
one.54 Levi and Eva, therefore, had little left to do to conceive of the coming
Age as the Age of Aquarius. In fact, it amounted to little more than taking a
hint from a footnote of Helena Blavatsky’s own vamp on Massey’s description of
the Piscean Age and its consequences:
There are several
remarkable cycles that come to a close at the end of this century. First, the
5,000 years of the Kaliyug cycle; again the Messianic
cycle of the Samaritan (also Kabalistic) Jews of the man connected with Pisces
(Ichthys or “Fish-man” Dag). It is a cycle, historic and not very long, but
very occult, lasting about 2,155 solar years, but having a true significance
only when computed by lunar months. It occurred 2410 and 255 B.C., or when the
equinox entered into the sign of the Ram, and again into that of Pisces. When
it enters, in a few years, the sign of Aquarius, psychologists will have some
extra work to do, and the psychic idiosyncrasies of humanity will enter on a
great change.55
Eva’s introduction to
The Aquarian Gospel explained that Jesus was not God, as the Christian
tradition maintained, but merely an enlightened human being—although he was
also the ideal sage and annunciator of the Piscean Age. Jesus was the man;
Christ was the God (consciousness) in him. On the other hand, we learn, Levi
was the annunciator of the Aquarian Age, which the world has just entered, and
which will be a joyful fulfillment of the blessed Millennium spoken of in the
Book of Revelation and elsewhere. Levi’s Age, therefore, by implication, will
be superior to Jesus’.
In light of Levi
Dowling’s years of experience in explicating the Bible, it is difficult not to
see another detail of the book as deliberately significant. Eva, undoubtedly
giving voice to Levi’s own exegesis, explained that “It is conceded by all
critical students that the sun entered the zodiacal sign Taurus in the days of
our historic Adam when the Taurian Age began.”56 In
other words, Adam was the annunciator and representative of the Taurian Age, just as Jesus was of the Piscean Age, and Levi
was of the Aquarian Age. But Levi had another astrological identity. He was,
after all, born in Bellville, Ohio, on the morning of May 17, 1844, as Eva
tells us in the preface to The Aquarian Gospel. That makes him a Taurus. Thus
Levi was in effect a “Second Adam,” the title that the Christian Church had
always reserved for Jesus. Levi would restore to humankind what Adam had lost
(Jesus, if he was born on December 25th, was only a Capricorn). In other words,
Jesus was down, Levi was up; Pisces was bad, Aquarius was good. All of that
aside, perhaps here is the place to note that, in fact, if the Age of Aquarius
begins when the vernal equinox starts to occur in the constellation Aquarius,
it will not actually begin for another six hundred years. The equinox slowly
shifts from one constellation to another because of the Earth’s precession.
These days, the vernal equinoctial point (where the celestial equator
intersects the ecliptic) is in Pisces. Hopeful apologists for the Aquarian Age
character of the present day, however, have sometimes allowed for premonitory
effects of the coming age beginning to appear in the present.
The publishers of The
Aquarian Gospel, this was, primarily, Eva Dowling, described how Levi had come
to produce the volume. “This book was transcribed,” she wrote, “between the
early morning hours of two and six, the absolutely ‘quiet hours.’” 57 She did
not say whether she was awake during those hours to witness it. It was first
copyrighted in 1908 (Can “The Book of God’s Remembrance” be copyrighted?)
and first published by the “Royal Publishing Company” (probably the Dowlings themselves) in 1909 and sold by mail order,
advertised in New Thought and spiritualist newspapers and journals. It was also
published in London in 1909 by the literary agent and publisher C. F. Cazenove,
and then by the publishing company established there years before by American
phrenologist Lorenzo Niles Fowler. The first American edition was soon sold
out, and a second printing was immediately issued. It has not been out of print
since then.
Califorgnostification
To suggest some of
the influences on Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel is not to say that he copied it
from anything he read (but leaving aside, for the moment, the question of
“copying” it from some divine archive). It is simply to draw the outline of the
religious context of the time. His Aquarian followers said that he had several
decades of experience in meditation on “metaphysical speculative systems” or
that he was a “Gnostic” from the time of his youth. Dowling, however, was
probably fairly unaffected by the Occult until a few years before he and Eva
and Leo moved to Los Angeles, which is to say, about four years before The
Aquarian Gospel was first published in 1909. Indeed, his brother said as much,
and his business activities until then suggest the same thing. So we might well
look to Los Angeles itself as the cauldron in which Levi finally transformed
himself into a seer. It was there that he wrote about an “Interworld
Brotherhood” that controlled human evolution and all the affairs of creation.58
“Of course all Occult students know that the physical body of man has nothing
to do with the true man, the individuality,” he wrote, demonstrating his
transit away from Christian orthodoxy toward Blavatsky’s notion of the
“reincarnating ego.” “This is a garment of flesh which the master can put on
and lay aside at will,” wrote Levi, dependent again on Blavatsky’s idea of
“astral projection” and C.W. Leadbeater’s development of that idea.59
Blavatsky had
predicted that the higher “Coming Race” that was to evolve in the new cycle,
would do so first on the West Coast of the United States. Her prediction would
stimulate would-be leaders who reckoned that they had already evolved to move
to the West. In time, this would include Theosophist Katherine Tingley, who
wound up in San Diego at Point Loma, as well as renegade Theosophist and con
man Edward Arthur Wilson, who, in 1927, would locate the Aquarian Foundation on
Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Blavatsky herself mentioned, vaguely, the
period around 1900. Because Levi was preparing himself to act on his commission
from the mystic sages to be a teacher, he had an ideological predisposition to
move to California to prepare for a revelation of the new truth.60
The religious ferment
in Los Angeles at the turn of the century was intense. One outgrowth of it was
the modern charismatic Pentecostal movement, which began with the Azusa Street
Revival in Los Angeles in 1906. But the climate of Southern California also
drew to the area many advocates and practitioners of fringe health treatments, including
homeopathy, osteopathy, “chromotherapy,” fasting, the “raw fruit cure,” and
more, and Levi Dowling was one of these advocates. A frankly entrepreneurial
and speculative spirit also pervaded the region, affecting everything from real
estate, mining, water rights, and agriculture to politics and religion.
Los Angeles was a
refuge for those who were averse to dogmas and creeds. It was and still is a
place that embraces the paradox already proclaimed by New Thought believer
Frederick Pease Fairfield in 1908, “It is a truth,” he wrote, “which is coming
with the New Age and which will become its chiefest
pillar. That truth is Truth is Many Sided, and No Statement of Truth is
Adequate, and Truth Consists in Opposites.”61 It was a dream factory suited to
a spiritual salesman like Levi Dowling.
One registrant of the
1908 copyright on The Aquarian Gospel (besides Eva Dowling) was former Wyoming
Congressman Henry Asa Coffeen, who also wrote the
introduction to the first edition. His moves over the course of his career
roughly paralleled those of Levi’s. Both of them were born in Ohio around the
same time. Coffeen’s family moved to Indiana when he
was young, then to Illinois. After college, he became a member of the faculty
at Hiram College, the college of which George Laughlin, who married Levi
Dowling to Eva Sellers, was at one time President. Coffeen
then moved to Wyoming. One could guess that Coffeen
and Dowling were acquainted and kept in close contact in their later years.
Perhaps his copyright means that he underwrote the publication expense of The
Aquarian Gospel.62 In any event, Coffeen and Dowling
were fellow Theosophists. Coffeen wrote that he “took
up the study of the inner and psychic nature of man” in 1881.63
To many people, his
Aquarian Gospel has looked like fiction, but Levi gave it to the world as a
true transcription from the grand Cosmic recording library, as he called it, in
Theosophical terms, the “Akashic records.” “?k??a” is the normal Sanskrit term
for “space” or “sky,” but Theosophy founder Blavatsky and her associates, long
before Dowling had produced The Aquarian Gospel and had become “The Akashic
Seer,” had narrowed its meaning as an English loanword. They used it to mean
something like the Ether or cosmic plenum that was without form, but that
served as the ocean out of and into which all things flow.64 In this, she was
apparently influenced by translations of such ancient Indian philosophical
texts as the Ch?ndogya Upanishad, which described it
as the primordial element, the medium through which all things are
propagated.65
Levi was the New Messenger
who, despite and also because of being a “mere” instrument, was better able
than the past Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, to read the record
without obscurity. His gospel was therefore presented as more faithful to the
ultimate truth than the Bible accounts of Jesus’ life. From Levi’s point of
view, we might think of it as a grand Gospel harmony, which “harmonized” the
received Gospels, but also other scriptures and scientific and archaeological
discoveries as well, all together into a single threaded narrative. Levi had
received telepathically a huge and timely Lesson Book from the Great Sunday
School in the Sky, in “The Book of God’s Remembrance.” By “transcribing” it, he
did not tell Jesus’ story with the voice of Jesus himself, but with the
viewpoint of what literary critics call an “omniscient narrator.” Nevertheless,
its viewpoint does not reproduce God’s own omniscient remembrance, the master
record. It would be rather surprising, for example, if a universal master
record, God’s memory, as it were, was stored in English. Or that it was limited
at any point in a narrative to noticing one thing happening instead of all the
other infinite things that were happening too.
The text of The
Aquarian Gospel is rather more like the narration of someone who is not
actually omniscient, but is nevertheless able to float around events at will, like
a spirit, and read people’s minds. It was as if Levi had been watching a
heavenly documentary film, narrated by a Revelating
Angel, and wrote down what he had heard and seen in his vision. In fact, Eva
Dowling’s preface to the first edition of The Aquarian Gospel explained that
Levi had simply made a copy of the collected series of the records of Jesus’
life. These had been originally made on “etheric films” in what she equated
with the Book of Life that is referred to in Revelation 20:12. She also made
this album synonymous with the Book of Remembrance mentioned in Malachi 3:16.
According to Eva,
Jesus, like every other human born into this world, had his own “recording
messenger” and “life-companion”, a kind of combination guardian angel,
spiritualist amanuensis, and documentary film producer, “who is commissioned to
light up the way and record every event.”66 These days, Los Angelenos actually
pay for such services, from publicists, personal trainers, and life coaches.
How appropriate that Jesus’ “recording messenger” and “life-companion” should
have arranged the first full public screening, as it were, of his life, in the
city of Los Angeles in 1908, the same year that the first movie was made there.
The Lost Years of Jesus in Asia
Much of The Aquarian
Gospel describes Jesus’ adventures during the years between his early boyhood
and the time when his public ministry began, years that were not described in much
detail in the traditional Gospels. In Levi’s role as a Sunday School director,
these years of Jesus’ youth would often have been the object of Levi’s
imaginative reconstruction for Levi’s young charges, as an image of the Great
Exemplar. Another reason for The Aquarian Gospel’s focus on Jesus’ youth lay in
the fact that these years had become a magnet for speculative reconstruction.
Also, in the decades prior to the turn of the century, Anglo-American culture
had turned its attention to childhood and its innocence, and had shifted its
focus away from the public, masculine sphere to the domestic sphere, under the
guidance of the mother, as a place to experience the sacred.
Insofar as The
Aquarian Gospel was presented as a report of Jesus’ formative years, one of its
precursors in the Occult literature circulating at the time was Theosophist
Franz Hartmann’s 1888 admitted allegory, The Life of Jehoshua, The Prophet of
Nazareth; an Occult Study and a Key to the Bible, Containing the History of an
Initiate.67 Hartmann depicted Jesus as traveling to Egypt to learn magical
secrets and being initiated into a secret brotherhood there. Dowling’s book has
Jesus journeying to Egypt, Greece, Persia, and to Far Asia, in particular, to
India and Tibet. The Aquarian Gospel describes, in chapter 36, Jesus somehow
being welcomed into a temple in Lhasa that in fact could not have been built
for at least another five or six centuries (after Songtsen
Gampo encouraged the introduction of Buddhism into
Tibet):
6 Now, after many
days, and perils great, the guide and Jesus reached the Lassa temple in Tibet.
7 And Meng-ste opened wide the temple doors, and all the priests and
masters gave a welcome to the Hebrew sage.
8 And Jesus had
access to all the sacred manuscripts, and, with the help of Meng-ste, read them all.
9 And Meng-ste often talked with Jesus of the coming age, and of the
sacred service best adapted to the people of the age.68
Dowling’s wording in
a couple of places in the section on India indicates that he had at least read
Russian journalist and hoaxer Nicholas Notovitch’s
The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, published years before.69 Nevertheless, we
must credit Dowling for the invention of the sage “Meng-ste,”
whose name, as it stands, is neither Tibetan nor Sanskrit nor Chinese.
Presumably, Dowling here simply misspelled the name of the fourth-century
B.C.E. Chinese Philosopher Meng-tse, that is, Mencius
(Mengxi).70 Notovitch’s
work also described Jesus’ trips to India and Tibet, as reported in an ancient
book—It was, alas, subsequently lost before anyone else but Notovitch
could see it (or perhaps it had been hidden away again). Notovitch
said he had discovered it at Hemis Monastery in
Ladakh, and that it had been written by a Hindu merchant about the life of a
contemporary of his, Jesus—or “Issa” as he was called in Notovitch’s
book. Jesus had somehow gone to India and studied Pali and thoroughly read the
Buddhist scriptures (which would, in fact, not be written down in Pali
for another four centuries). The Russian had been “inspired” by the writing of
a credulous civil servant in India, Louis Jacolliot,
who, in his book, The Bible in India, had placed Jesus on the subcontinent.71
At the turn of the
century, Tibet often appeared in the newspapers, as the victim and object of
the geopolitical Great Game being played in Asia by England, Russia, and China,
culminating in the British Expedition to Lhasa led by Francis Younghusband in
1903-04. But Tibet was also much on the mind of the occultist community at the
time because of the Theosophists’ insistence that “mahatmas” had found a refuge
there where they were maintaining a Brotherhood that protected great cosmic
secrets through the Ages.
Just a few years
before, in 1901, an eccentric ex-Anglican English clergyman named Gideon Jasper
Richard Ouseley had become a student of Theosophy. Ouseley claimed that a fragment of what he called “The
Gospel of the Holy Twelve,” which he had “found,” was part of an independent
and authentic Gospel.72 Actually, it was a bit of a genuine second- or
third-century, harmonized compilation of two of the Synoptic Gospels, which has
come to be called the “Gospel of the Ebionites.”
Nevertheless, Ouseley boldly claimed that the Gospel of which he had a
fragment was the original Gospel, from which the traditionally recognized ones
derived. He now presumed to have recovered the complete text through his own
spirit mediumship “in dreams and visions in the night” in which he saw
manuscripts on a revolving lectern, which he read and then wrote down in the
morning. Ouseley believed that the spirits of Emanuel
Swedenborg and of deceased occultists Anna Bonus Kingsford and Edward Maitland
had “edited” the manuscripts that he had seen. The Gospel revealed Jesus to
have been a proponent of Ouseley’s own favorite
causes of temperance, vegetarianism, and anti-vivisectionism.
Ouseley, in introducing it, wrote:
The early Christian Fathers did well their work of destroying the sources and
records from which they gathered the information and data put by them in the
Bible. But they failed to destroy it all. Some escaped, and as it is discovered
here and there by patient research workers, it is astonishing to see how the
world has been deceived by the Christian Fathers.73
His German publisher,
probably unwilling to disclose the book’s source in Ouseley’s
imagination, said that it had been preserved, way from the clutches of early
priests intent on corrupting it, by Essenes who carried it off to the mountain
fastness of a Tibetan monastery, where it had been guarded.74 Ouseley’s text had Jesus traveling to Egypt to learn from
the priests there. He then went to “Assyria and India and into Persia and into
the land of the Chaldeans,” teaching people to be kind to animals, visiting
temples, speaking to priests, and healing the sick, before returning to
Palestine to begin his public ministry.
Jesus’ so-called
“lost years” have been a matter of interest to heterodox writers, from as far
back as the third-century Gnostic creators of the “infancy gospels.” And at
least the Gnostic Gospel of James (otherwise known as the Protevangelium
Jacobi) influenced The Aquarian Gospel in its description of the boyhood of
Jesus. Heterodox authors thought that Jesus’ early life was “lost” and that it
needed to be recovered again. That was, nevertheless, merely an instance of a
larger “loss”, the culture’s loss of Jesus himself, due to the Higher Criticism
of the Bible then in vogue, as well as the growth of materialism and atheism at
large. It was because Jesus had been lost that a “quest for the historical
Jesus” to find him again seemed like such an important intellectual issue. To
many, the traditional Gospels no longer seemed to contain the largest truth.
Perhaps that truth, they thought, was hidden in “lost” teachings of Jesus or in
the “lost” portions of his life.
Something similar
happened in Buddhism. The authors of the Mahayana Perfection of Wisdom Sutras
lived several centuries and more after ??kyamuni
Buddha. They nevertheless produced scriptures that presented themselves as
having been enunciated by the Buddha at different times and in different realms
and to different audiences (smarter ones, it is almost unnecessary to point
out) than those described in the scr iptures with which Buddhists were already familiar. But
they had been hidden away until such time as people were psychically prepared
to hear them. And so, the Mahayana added them to its canon of scriptures.75
This Buddhist method
for supplementing scriptures must have been known to anyone—like Dowling—who
had delved into esotericism. A section of Levi’s “The Cusp of Ages” that Eva
reproduced in her introduction to The Aquarian Gospel suggests this. In a
reported dialogue between Levi and “Ramasa,” a
Cherub, it offers a remarkably similar rationale for keeping secret its as-yet-unheard-of teaching about the passing of the Age
of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. “I heard the history of the Piscean Age
from Piscean Cherubim and Seraphim,” Levi says. “And when I took my pen to
write Ramasa said: ‘Not now, my son, not now; but you
may write it down for men when men have learned the sacred laws of Brotherhood,
of Peace on earth, good-will to every living thing.’”76 Even more explicitly,
Eva’s preface to the first edition said that, “Even after more than three years
of intimate companionship with the Master the disciples were not ready to
receive all the truth.” But now, “The world has at last risen to the plane of
spiritual consciousness where men can grasp the higher meanings of the life and
lessons of Jesus, and the Spirit of truth has torn away the veil, and a son of
man”, Levi Dowling,“. . . has been permitted to enter the great galleries where
all life histories are recorded and make a copy of these records.”77 She called
Levi the “translator,” not the author, of the book.
Conspiracies of Biblical Proportions
Another probable
influence on Dowling was the genre of “corrected” gospel stories published by
American spirit mediums, beginning practically from the start of the
spiritualist movement in America in the mid-nineteenth century. In all of
these, Jesus or his contemporaries take the opportunity to speak again, using
spirit mediums as their instruments, to tell what they say is their real story.
According to them, this had been lost due to the ignorance or deliberate deceit
of the later followers or priests. Most of the stories made a point of
demonstrating that Jesus’ original teaching was not “superstitious” or
“Papist.”
In these renditions,
Jesus was either simply nonexistent, a convenient fiction, or he was a simple
moral teacher. Or he was a pious scribe, or a plain good man, a sort of
ultra-Liberal Protestant, actually. Or, as appropriate for the later nineteenth
century, he was an anti-clerical, working-class revolutionary who had tried to
usher in a socialist paradise, or he was a purveyor of pantheistic, universal,
cosmic knowledge, a mystic hierophant.
All of these
“Jesuses” blamed the retrograde Church for telling the wrong story about him.
The spirit medium Olive G. Pettis, for example, in 1894 published the
Autobiography by Jesus of Nazareth; Being His Historical Life Given by Himself
through the Inspiration of the Scribe O. G. P. She wrote in the introduction
that, “Catholicism is but the device of heathen appointed priests in order to
hold control and nothing more.”78 Jesus’ apostles, speaking through the spirit
medium Alexander Smyth, reported that Jesus preached, in trance, to a crowd
about progressive humanistic science, “Yes, my brethren, we have gone astray
from the principles implanted in us by the God of Nature, and believed the
false fabrications of a vile Priesthood.”79
The Aquarian Gospel’s
Jesus, too, is the image of a nineteenth-century, non-dogmatic, and somewhat
eccentric Christian. Jesus’ travels to India and Tibet are like those of a
Victorian tourist on the Grand Circuit, or like those of an agent of the
American Foreign Mission Society. Unlike other stories of Jesus in Asia
produced by Theosophists and occultists, Dowling’s does not show Jesus learning
or practicing yoga or sitting at the feet of gurus waiting for instruction from
them.80 He may have “read all their books” in Lhasa, as The Aquarian Gospel put
it, but we are not told that he found much of value, if anything, in them that
he did not already know. He brings light to Asia, instead. He is, in fact, when
it comes right down to it, decidedly non-relativistic in his outlook, even
judgmental, one might say. Release the chains of your slaves, he tells the
Brahmin priests. Stop worshipping idols and offering sacrifices to your false
gods.
Levi Dowling’s Church
of Christ was a liberal movement, appealing across denominational lines. It
wished to restore the Church to its original purity, to jettison dogma, and to
rely only on Scripture.81 But Scripture is incomplete because it is open to a
variety of interpretations. It is also dubious, if one is disposed to being
suspicious, because it was so long in the hands of an already formed (and
therefore suspect) Church, which had made choices about what to include in it
and what to exclude from it. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discoveries
of heterodox and Gnostic gospels, therefore, had the potential to undermine the
Faith when that Faith relied on Scripture alone. The problem was expressed in a
poem entitled “The Intelligibility of the Bible” that Dowling had years before
selected to publish in The Morning Watch in 1871. The poem had dramatized a
debate between two speakers representing two approaches to Scripture. The first
speaker says,
How precious is the
Word of God,
Which He to man has given;
Its teachings are so plain a child
May learn the way to heaven.
And by the assisting
grace of God,
May safely walk therein;
The Spirit helps those on this road
In their warfare with sin.
To which the second
speaker replies:
So plain! I thought it was as dark
As the ancient’s mystic lore;
Its teachings so in myst’ry wrapt,
In vain we o’er it pour,
Till light from heav’n around us shine
That we its truths may see;
The Spirit gives that light divine,
Would it were shed on me.82
Dowling’s emphasis on
the integrity of the individual’s unmediated relationship with God, together
with his liberal desire for a universalistic salvation, combined with his sense
that scriptures were the most important basis for Faith, but that those scriptures,
as he had received them, were incomplete. All of this prepared him to channel a
new gospel.
It would be a new
gospel that would be universally inclusive in the sense of placing the previous
Christian savior and teaching in a larger context of many different religions
from many different ages.
It is not surprising
that Levi would search for other gospels that would make sense of them all. And
it is not surprising that he should search for them in the interior expanse of
his own spirit. And it is not surprising that he should find one there and that
he should place his confidence in it as true. What he entered inside himself
was the whispering gallery of the universe, which contained not only the Bible,
but also other scriptures, such as the Jewish Kabbala, which were “not in the
scriptures preserved by the Christian Church,” as he put it. He may still have
been relying, like Protestants before and after him—on Scripture alone, but the
dimensions of that Scripture were now as vast and unconstrained as space and as
intimate as his own imagination. One of his acquaintances wrote that, Dr.
Dowling’s faith was not built upon a religion of spiritual exercise, creeds and
dogmas. He was but little concerned with matters of doctrine, but service and
kindness were to him a divine system of the humanities; likewise health,
happiness and a sense of fair play were valuable attributes. . . . Dr. Dowling
had a conscious communion with God, where it was nothing but God and the human
soul on a spiritual mountain top, where the human and divine come together, an
open and clear sky between the soul and God, where he had direct communion and
spiritual immediacy.83
His “God
consciousness,” as New Thought writers called it, was unconstrained by mere
material fact.84 Henry Coffeen’s introduction to The
Aquarian Gospel quoted ex-Anglican clergyman and Theosophist Charles Webster
Leadbeater with approval on the superior access to the historical record that
clairvoyants (including Leadbeater himself) possessed:
All knowledge is theirs
for the searching, all that is, which does not transcend even this lofty plane;
the past of the world is as open to them as the present; the Akashic records
are ever at their disposal and history, whether ancient or modern, unfolds
itself before their eyes at their will. No longer are they at the mercy of the
historian, who may be ill-informed, and must be more or less partial; they can
study for themselves any incident in which they are interested, with the
absolute certainty of seeing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth.85
Coffeen speculated that this facility for excavating distant
times, past and future, and places, on Earth and elsewhere, operated like the
then-new radio receiver. But this wireless telepathy was not the invention of
Theosophists. Spiritualists had developed the technique for exploring what some
of them had called “the Summerland,” where the spirits of the deceased dwelt.
They had also explicitly applied the technique to exploring via clairvoyance
the distant past, including the ancient civilizations they discovered, such as
Lemuria and Atlantis, but also the future, which they almost always found to be
a utopia. Spiritualists regarded this psychic exploration as capable of filling
in gaps in historical knowledge gained through conventional means. Or as
capable of overturning information gained through such mundane methods as
archeological excavation, analysis of the fossil record, or other means. They
called this technique “psychometry.”
Unfortunately,
psychometric findings routinely contradicted one another and provided little or
no evidence that ever turned out to yield true results that were not obvious
from more mundane methods. On the contrary, clairvoyants’ histories of ancient
cultures often contained specific errors of fact that could only have been made
by having been copied from commonly available published works of comparative
religion or mythology.
Coffeen, quoting Leadbeater, explained that a seer’s
advancement in developing psychic vision was like progressing from turning the
pages of a photo album of still pictures, to watching moving pictures, to what
today we might describe as being actually teleported into another time and
place. The result was the seer’s ability to correct the historical record. “Not
only can he review at his leisure all history with which we are acquainted,
correcting as he examines it the many errors and misconceptions which have
crept into the accounts handed down to us,” wrote Leadbeater, “he can also
range at will over the whole story of the world.”86
Occultists of the
time warred against conventional history with another argument as well. History
and myth, they said, were identical products of the plastic imagination, one
could be fashioned into the other, since they were both written in the “Akashic
record,” as Theosophist and Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner would explain it in
1923. He used words that would have been plain to any spiritualist in the
nineteenth century or to any postmodernist in the twenty-first:
Those who have enlarged their field of knowledge are no longer dependent on
external evidences where past events are concerned. They can see that which is
not sensibly evident, yet which time cannot destroy. And so, from available
sources of history we can pass on to those which are imperishable. Such history
as this is written in very different letters from those which record the
every-day events of past times, for this is Gnosis.87
Those who demand
empirical evidence would read this as a refusal to distinguish sharply between
fact and fiction. To lead such people into the higher truth, an enlightened
teacher might present fiction dressed up as if it were fact, in order to pry
students from their retrograde ideas about an objective reality, external to
their minds. The tool for doing this was “alternative reality literature.” In
the decades before the turn of the century, the genre of “Occult fiction” had
come into its own. Students of the Occult regarded many individual works, such
as Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story and The Coming Race, or Blavatsky’s
Nightmare Tales as containing truth that was veiled from the unworthy by having
been dressed up as fiction. We may wonder if some sympathetic readers (and, of
course, the writer) of The Aquarian Gospel recognized it in some sense as a
fiction, or perhaps they called it a “myth”, but still took it to be true in
some fundamental way. Would they have seen close criticism of it as a niggling,
unenlightened approach that had not yet comprehended that myths were true, or
that all truths were no more than myths?
This was the path
that led many Christian progressives away from orthodoxy in the nineteenth
century. The Higher Criticism had erased, for them, the Bible’s uniqueness and
authority. Some believed that it had shown that Jesus himself was, objectively
speaking, a fiction, and that Christianity was mere myth. They held on to
Christianity but did not seek the truth in historical fact, but rather in
timeless or subjective myth. Progressives could not accept the Gospels as
historical and could not accept the literal content of the Faith. They
therefore found value elsewhere, either in myth and allegory, or in the
inheritance of Christianity trimmed of reference to the supernatural—in its
ethics or its abstract, natural philosophy. They may have been prepared to
believe in the Occult or in spirit contact, but they saw themselves as
rationalists and Freethinkers.
They often accepted
the Deists’ old contention that the story of Jesus was simply made up, based on
the legends surrounding the Greek sage Apollonius of Tyana.
This idea was first forcefully made to the English-speaking public as far back
as 1680. In that year, Charles Blount published a translation of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, appending to it a set of
notes that attacked the Gospel accounts of Jesus. Modern scholarship now
understands that the influence between the Life of Apollonius and the Gospels,
if any, was in the reverse direction, with Philostratus’
second-century biography being, in part, a pagan reaction to the Christian
Gospels. This was not definitively clear at the beginning of the twentieth
century, however, when Dowling penned The Aquarian Gospel.88 Significant to
Levi’s rendition of the life of Jesus, therefore, is that Philostratus’
fabulistic biography described travels of Apollonius
to India, among other places, where he studied with Brahmins.
A “Christian” who
believed that the Gospels were fiction and that truth lay entirely within his
or her own subjective faculties might not hesitate to “improve” the traditional
Gospels or update them with more fiction. He or she would probably not conceive
of this as a fraud. Nor could he or she easily distinguish between producing
any particular text by “automatic writing”, in which the entranced human author
might plausibly deny conscious agency, and constructing it elaborately and
deliberately by careful cutting and pasting from other published sources. Or by
some mix of the two, producing a text that felt inspired but had also been
editorially enhanced.
Without detailed
evidence of how Levi Dowling produced his text, we cannot say what, within this
range, his method and motives were. Nevertheless, Levi’s and Eva’s use of the
word “transcription” in describing the process encouraged the notion that it
was something that Levi did automatically, without much, if any, deliberation
or filtering. Whether they imposed this image of automatism on the text
entirely after the fact in order to elevate its divine authority is impossible
to say. The sheer length and complexity of the document, however, suggests that
a significant amount of mundane editorial work went into the production of the
finished work.
Disguise is in the
nature of occultism, both old and new. Occultism often presents forged bona
fides as part of its strategy of subversion of those in power, and to protect
itself from those who it judges should not have the truth. Dowling did this in
presenting his new Gospel and his new picture of Jesus, as if this information
had been hidden away by a conspiring Church and kept away from the Faithful in
order to make them easier to lead.
Nevertheless, The
Aquarian Gospel offers a picture of Jesus that is, in many ways, transitional.
It lies between the traditional Christian view of Jesus as unique, as the sole
Messiah, and as God, and some of the Theosophical versions of Jesus, Notovitch’s for example, as merely one enlightened
spiritual adept among many. For that reason, we may even wonder whether Dowling
actually thought of himself as an opponent of a certain sort of Theosophy, rather
than its willing collaborator, or at least whether he believed that he had
offered a vision that could guide it into a recognizably Christian esotericism.
Dowling did something like this with Blavatsky’s prediction that human
evolution would be led by a “Sixth Race,” to appear on the West Coast of
America. He wrote of this evolution as if it had first manifested when the
Pilgrims, separatists from the Established Church in England stepped onto
Plymouth Rock, carrying their Race’s human seed with them. Further evolutionary
progress had proceeded along the same dissenting religious lines away from
orthodox creeds. He formulated a synthesis of Blavatsky’s occultism with
Christian millennialism. It appears to have been filtered through Charles
Leadbeater’s writings, which predicted that the full-blown appearance of the
New Race would occur in several centuries of evolution rather than (as
Blavatsky believed) in tens of thousands of years. Dowling wrote:
Races develop very slowly. Nearly 300 years have passed since the beginning of
this Sixth Race, and now only a small percent of the descendents
of these Pilgrims have the Telepathic sense developed in a very perceptible
manner; but thousands of both Americans and Europeans are upon the cusp of the
Races, and those who are willing to pay the price in consecrated effort may
soon attain.89
Here he links the
Christian millennial expectations to an evolutionary jump in human nature. In
doing so, he adopted the occultist idea that human evolution was being directed
by non-earthly intelligences who would effect humans’ salvation by liberating
them from their bodies, their lower, animal natures. This was a variation on
the ancient Gnostic myth that reckoned the material world as a oppressive prison built and maintained by lower
demiurges. Bodies were material prisons of the eternal souls, spirits, or
lights seeking freedom to travel to the stars. The idea was well known to
Theosophists from Blavatsky’s explanation that beings from elsewhere than Earth
had infused the human spirit in the bodies of primates (her answer to Darwinian
Evolution). It was an idea, however, that already had wide currency among
spiritualists, who believed that elevated spirits were about to intervene
directly in human reproduction in order to make humans more spiritual. Here we
may see in an early form today’s Aquarian Age advocates’ belief in
extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, their stories of aliens’ experimentation
with human reproduction, and their visions of an interplanetary apocalypse heralded
by starships rescuing a remnant of believers from destruction.
Dowling’s
Christianity was more traditionally devout than that. For him, Jesus was not an
extraterrestrial. Nor was he merely a garbled myth. Dowling supported the claim
that Jesus did in fact exist. This distinguished him from the radical critics
of the time, like poet Gerald Massey, who argued that he was entirely made up.
The so-called “historical Jesus,” to these critics, was a bricolage, a hasty
assemblage of bits of mythic flotsam bobbing about in the ancient ether that
had flowed in from elsewhere, particularly Egypt, from centuries before. For
Massey, every item in the historical record actually existed in what seem to be
a kind of timeless and unorganized attic, his version of the “akashic record”
perhaps, a sort of cluttered Victorian museum of fantastic proportions. His
wanderings through it resulted in his writing massive tomes on comparative
religion that are nowadays forgotten by everyone but conspiracy theorists who
ply their trade on the internet.
Massey was a popular
speaker on the spiritualist lecture circuit, where he delivered a presentation
that declared him to be a vehement opponent of the Christian “hoax.” But he was
unable to navigate reliably through the cosmic ether into which he floated all
historical records. For him, the authentic and the fraudulent (gospels
included), the true and the false, were all the same. They were all myths
floating about, waiting to be collected together and fashioned into something
good or ill:
The “apocryphal” Gospels are not a mere collection of “foolish traditions” or
fables forged or invented to supply an account of that period in “our Lord’s”
history, respecting which the accepted Gospels are almost silent. They are
disjecta membra of the original matter; the mythos reduced to the state of Märchen; the story of the miraculous child told as a
folk-tale which was at last repeated as a history in the Gospels with matter
like the above omitted because it was too naturally incredible, and could not
be utilized by the most desperate expedient of miracle.90
Here we meet again
the machinations of evil priests, preying on the superstitions of the common
people. Massey’s own politics, one may not be surprised to learn, were radical
and socialist. He was a Chartist spokesman against the prerogatives of the
nobility. But his conspiracy orientation placed him squarely among the
Gnostics. They believed that (so-called) reality must be rejected, in order to
pass entirely into the Light. This has continued to be a potent idea, certainly
into the 1960s and 70s Aquarian Age and beyond.
Massey and his fellow
Freethinkers and Jesus-debunkers were actively publishing in the 1880s and into
the early years of the twentieth century. Massey was widely traveled in America,
too, as a lecturer. In fact, it may well have been Massey’s works, especially
his 1883 book, The Natural Genesis, that suggested to Dowling that the evolving
Ages of mankind were aligned with astrological Ages (which Blavatsky had
designated “Messianic Cycles”), and that the “Jesus Age” was the Piscean Age.91
We may, in fact,
further speculate on the very specific Theosophical context in which Dowling
produced his book. In 1906, Charles Leadbeater had withdrawn, under threat of
dismissal, from the Theosophical Society, because of a potential scandal
involving his having encouraged young boys to masturbate in order to release
oppressive inhibitions. The details became public in 1908 when Annie Besant had
him reinstated in the Society, which created a crisis among its membership and
a schism in the Theosophical Society, with the London Lodge becoming
independent for a while.
One of the aspects of
the brand of Theosophy that Leadbeater and Besant promulgated was that it was
more positive toward the historical Jesus and Christianity than the system of
Theosophy that Blavatsky and her associate Henry Steel Olcott had formulated.
Blavatsky wrote of Jesus as if he had been merely a Gnostic hierophant and
spiritual teacher and prophet, and that his Divine identity was a pure fiction
created by his later followers.92 Leadbeater allowed that Jesus was a real
person and a real “Divine” figure, although, one might say, not the one
described by traditional Christianity, but rather a person with a highly
developed “Christ consciousness.” Jesus, in his interpretation, was an avatar
of the spiritual Christ, who had reincarnated throughout history in a variety
of individuals, and would continue to do so. Leadbeater, in fact, would soon
find the Liberal Catholic Church, an esoteric mixture of High Church
Anglicanism and Theosophy.
In this respect, Levi
Dowling in his Aquarian Gospel clearly revealed himself as a coadjutor of
Leadbeater rather than of Blavatsky. This link with the Leadbeater faction is
evident in the many references to Leadbeater’s works in Coffeen’s
introduction to the first edition of The Aquarian Gospel. In addition, assuming
a link to Leadbeater provides a possible explanation for the disappearance of Coffeen’s lengthy introduction in all the editions after
the first, beginning with the 1912 edition. By that time, Leadbeater’s
activities with boys had become a matter of public scandal. As a result,
relying heavily on him as a source in the introduction to The Aquarian Gospel
would have been inexpedient. Dropping the introduction would have been a way to
distance The Aquarian Gospel from an association with him.
In addition, in 1909,
Leadbeater had “discovered” the young Indian boy Jiddu
Krishnamurti and had begun promoting him as the new
reincarnation of “the Christ” and “the Messiah.” Dowling and his admirers would
most probably have found this, also, to have been, as one might say, “inexpedient,”
if for no other reason than that Dowling himself had some claim to be the
“messenger” of the coming age, rather than a John the Baptist to the boy Christ
from India. Dropping the Leadbeater-infused introduction from The Aquarian
Gospel, therefore, would have been the probable result of Dowling’s reaction to
the continuing scandal within Theosophy over Leadbeater, and a way to have his
text stand on its own.
The Aquarian Gospel
tells the life of Jesus in a third-person narrative, not as Jesus’
autobiography. A garden full of gospels recently “dictated” by “Jesus” or his
associates or contemporaries were available at the time.93 Spiritualist
clairvoyants, from nearly the very beginning of the spiritualist movement, had
taken dictation, as it were, not just from the spirits of ordinary folks, but
also from those of Jesus and his immediate disciples.94 There were also a
number of self-admitted romances or novels, the authors of which, however,
claimed to have been peculiarly inspired, verging on something like spirit
possession, including such works as General Lew Wallace’s 1880 effort, Ben Hur; a Story of the Christ.95 Wallace, we may note, like
Dowling, was a Hoosier member of the Church of Christ.
In 1885, spiritualist
and Theosophist Susan Elizabeth Gay anonymously published a re-rendering of the
Gospels, The Spirit of the New Testament; or, The Revelation of the Mission of
Christ, by “A Woman.”96 According to the advertisements for the book, the
author possessed an exquisitely wrought feminine sensibility, her “finer
feminine intuitions” and her psychic ability as a medium of “higher
inspirations.” Her “acute perception of the inner meaning of the words and
works of Jesus and his disciples” had allowed her to “see” things there that
had been always been hidden before (from those male priests and clerical
authorities). This enabled her “to throw a flood of light on much that is
obscure” in the Bible. The book therefore claimed an authority superior to that
of a mere interpretation or explanation of the Gospel, and hinted that, in its
reliance on an enlightened vision, its authority was antecedent to that of the
canonical Gospels themselves. Not surprisingly, perhaps, her feminine
sensibility allowed her to detect a rather more feminine Jesus than had been
revealed before, and her exegesis itself was “at once unique and significant of
the intellectual progress of Woman.”
In a similar way,
Levi Dowling presented his book, however others may have regarded it, as a
completion and fulfillment of the story of Jesus, rather than a refutation of
or a replacement for it. It reformed Christianity, he believed, rather than
refuting it. It filled in the gaps of the years of Jesus’ youth. It told the
full story of his public ministry in Galilee. It provided details that allowed
its readers to see the story, as reported in the New Testament, in a different
context. Henry Coffeen called it a “fuller gospel
record” meant to “revive and rejuvenate the old church and remodel it for a new
cycle of life.” As he put it, “this new work, which is but a fuller restatement
of the old, recovered by psychic method from the everlasting astral records, comes
forth ‘out of the heavens’ true to the ancient ideals and Essenic environments
and yet again it is true to the psychological discoveries of our times.” He
expected that the ignorant and benighted traditional churches of Christianity
would oppose it:
The church needs the
new book, and hearts that yearn for the more complete life and words of Jesus
need this new book, whatever may be the dictum of hirelings who sometimes stand
in official places. Such would not recognize the Christ when he was among them
in Judea in the olden time, and would not today.97
Most assuredly
implied here, but not directly stated, was that “the Christ” was in fact making
his appearance again today, in the form of The Aquarian Gospel. Coffeen makes that claim a page later:
I have no hesitancy in saying, for myself, touching the personal character and
ability of the compiler of these records, for whom I have great respect, that I
believe neither he nor any other living man could have produced this book
without help from the higher planes of vision.
It has qualities,
tone and temper, spiritual insight, ethical teachings, conformability to the
age and country, charm so divine and values so high that it stands out and
takes its place among the world’s most wonderful books.
Let critics sneer if they must, and science ignore, and clerics gather their
official robes about them and pass by; but the life of Jesus, the Divine
Master, once walking up and down the ways of Judea and Galilee, in these pages
breathes again upon the world.98
Dawning of the Age of Aquarius
Spiritualist authors,
Dowling’s California associate James Peebles among them, had developed a theory
that reduced Jesus to a misunderstood spirit medium, and all present-day spirit
mediums as somewhat equivalent to Jesus.99 They assumed that the Gospel writers
were mere instruments of the divine, or trance mediums.
Among the various
gospels channeled by spiritualists, Levi Dowling included something in his that
allows us to see the salesman and evangelist in him. Not only is Levi
represented as the channel for the communication, he is also represented as
present in the story itself, as the prophet and messenger of the New Age.
According to The Aquarian Gospel, thousands of years before, the Egyptian
teacher of Jesus foretold the coming of Levi, as Eva made clear in the book’s
introduction:
About two thousand
years ago Elihu, who conducted a school of the prophets in Zoan,
Egypt, referred to Levi thus:
“This age will
comprehend but little of the works of Purity and Love; but not a word is lost,
for in the Book of God’s Remembrance a registry is made of every thought and
word and deed;
“And when the world
is ready to receive, lo, God will send a messenger to open up the book and copy
from its sacred pages all the messages of Purity and Love.
“Then every man of
earth will read the words of life in the language of his native land, and men
will see the light.
“And man again will
be at one with God.”100
Eva also provided a
selection from another manuscript, also channeled by Levi, in which “Visel, the goddess of wisdom”, commissioned Levi to the
task of “Akashic Seer” Visel’s name, we may note, is
a scramble of “Levi” with a sign for inversion, “s”, at its axis, and so is
presumably Levi himself, in the person of his divine consort in a mystical
union within him. She commanded Levi, as “message bearer of the Spirit Age,” to
“go forth into these mystic [Record] Galleries” and “take up your pen and
write” what he found there.
Embedding yourself in
the scripture that you are “transcribing” is a useful device for adding to your
authority, as being the one foretold and commissioned. It increases the chances
for the scripture’s successful distribution. It is a literary device similar to
that used in the Mahayana sutras, in which the Buddha predicts a future time
when these very sutras themselves, invisible for a time, would be revealed. The
scriptures have the Buddha promise merit to those who copy and disseminate
them. If Levi had read some of the Mahayana sutras then widely circulating in translation
among Theosophists, perhaps he had recognized the potential of this device.
Many of Blavatsky’s
ideas and terminology, developed in The Secret Doctrine appeared in The
Aquarian Gospel or in other of Dowling’s writings. These included such ideas as
the “Akashic Record” itself, but also, the notion of the evolution of humans
into various “root races,” and the stories of the lost continents of Lemuria
and Atlantis.
More than those
single ideas, however, that link The Aquarian Gospel to Theosophy was the
larger idea that it was a hidden scripture that would supercede
all others. Many people assessed The Aquarian Gospel as a sheer fabrication
created to diminish, if not entirely replace, the Biblical Gospels. And many
people assessed Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine in the same way. It purported
to be a massive commentary on a “root text.” That inner text, Blavatsky said,
was The Book of Dzyan, which she had received from
one of her mysterious masters in Tibet. It had been hidden away from profane
eyes, but was, in reality, she said, the true seed text from which all other
scriptures around the world had been derived, and of which they were all lesser
reflections. It was in a now-extinct language, “Senzar,”
and its source was ultimately extra-terrestrial. Again, alas, the original that
Blavatsky claimed to have translated had mysteriously disappeared again after
she had finished with it. Dowling would have been influenced both by
Blavatsky’s Occultic view of truth, behind the appearances of the world, as well
as by her production of a new scripture, meant to outrank and therefore to supercede all others.
The Universal
Brotherhood and Theosophical Society was headquartered in San Diego, at Point
Loma, but this had become independent in 1895, and was at odds with the
American Branch of the Adyar Theosophical Society, which, in 1912, moved from
New York to Hollywood, California. Dowling initiated his Los Angeles students
into “the great White Lodge,” a term that indicates his identification with the
Leadbeater group.101 One curious item in The Aquarian Gospel suggests a kind of
contradiction from, or competition with, the group at Point Loma. Eva wrote in
the introduction that, “Early in life, when [Levi] was but a mere lad, he had a
vision in which he was told that he was to ‘build a white city.’ This vision
was repeated three times with years intervening. The building of the ‘white
city’ was ‘The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ.’” Levi’s later follower
Anna Patrick told the story with a few more details, saying that Levi first had
this vision when he was twenty years old:
. . . the veil of the
beyond was lifted by the Mystic Masters and they said to Levi: “The Masters
have need of thee, put on the whole armor of God and wait. The time has come
when the Empire of Peace must be established. The Capital City shall be built
in security. Its foundation shall be laid in the solid rock, and shall stand
forever. In the midst of this city shall arise a temple far surpassing in grandure [sic] the temple of Solomon; and this white city
and this temple shall be built in the land overshadowed with wings, and where
the mountains dip into the sea.”102
And thus to Los
Angeles did Levi go, when he came to believe that the time of the fulfillment
of the prophecy was at hand. But Katherine Tingley, who, shortly after 1897,
began building the Center at Point Loma, the School for the Revival of the Lost
Mysteries of Antiquity, as the headquarters of a branch broken from the main
trunk of the Theosophical Society, wrote that, by establishing her Center, she
was fulfilling a childhood vision she had of a “White City” where students
could be educated in mystic wisdom. Her vision was probably influenced by the
Masonic imagery of her grandfather, building the White City in the West was equivalent
to rebuilding the Temple of Jerusalem in a new location, and not just in the
West but in the microcosm, the interior of the soul.103
Theosophy, occultism,
astrology, New Thought, and spiritualism all intermingled in the cultural
climate of Southern California then, as they do now. Many New Thought devotees
and Theosophical students had found their way to Los Angeles at the time, such
as Frank Homer Curtiss and his wife Harriette Augusta Brown Curtiss. Frank was
an “alternative” physician, as we would say today, and a passionate advocate of
physical exercise regimens, numerology, and the tarot. Harriette was the
“instrument” of “Rahmea, Priestess of the Flame,” the
head of the “Order of Christian Mystics” and the “Order of the 15.” The
Priestess gave through Harriette the teachings Curtiss published as the
Blavatsky-inspired 1913 work, The Voice of Isis, in which Curtiss had referred
to “cycles of fulfillment.” This, she pointed to a few years later, in 1921,
after The Aquarian Gospel was widely known, as a reference to the Age of
Aquarius. Or, more properly, to the “Age of Aquaria,” for by that time Curtiss
had become the voice of “Aquaria,” the Holy Ghost’s name in the New Age, as she
explained, following Dowling’s own gospel’s declaration that the Holy Spirit
was feminine.104
Nevertheless, it is
reasonable to look farther afield for the sources of Dowling’s “Age of
Aquarius.” Those sources included the writings of French occultist Eliphas Lévi (aka Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810-1875), whom
Dowling quoted in lectures he gave at his Los Angeles home, demonstrating that
he had absorbed from him a predilection for magic, Kabbala, and astrology,
probably through Arthur E. Waite’s translations of Levi’s works.
Levi’s residences in
Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, also call to mind two New Thought
advocates of the time who triangulated their careers on these three cities. The
first was self-made publishing entrepreneur, Charles Francis Haanel, who pioneered self-help seminars for business
executives, who learned the same mix of pantheism and personal empowerment that
people today still pay to hear under a variety of names.105 Haanel
taught his students that their own will is identical to God’s, and that they
can exercise that will, through “visualization,” as he called it, to bring
about their own material success and achieve whatever their goals may be.
The other New Thought
leader of the time who was active in the St. Louis-Chicago-Los Angeles triangle
was William Walker Atkinson, who was intent on Eastern-based methods of
self-realization, including yoga. Nevertheless, he was also an enthusiastic
student of the Western Occult crafts of “psycho-magic,” as he called it,
including clairvoyance, psychometry, telepathy, crystal gazing, astral travel,
and divination. He was a tireless writer and publisher of books on the subjects
of “character power,” “creative power,” “desire power,” “faith power,” “memory
power,” “personal power,” “reasoning power,” “regenerative power,” “perceptive
power,” “the art of salesmanship,” “the secret of success,” and the
grandly-titled “Mastery of Being.”106
Atkinson’s works are
typical of the New Thought movement, which denied that the material world was
real. Instead, “thoughts are things” and, conversely, one might say, things are
just thoughts, and so may be changed by changing one’s thoughts. This is
because the world and its weal and woe is created by our minds, and “the body
is only the instrument by which the mind acts.” With this conviction, one may
hope for the perfection of mind over matter and for the healing of the body
through right thought.
The Aquarian Commonwealth
Levi Dowling was
listed in the 1911 Los Angeles City Directory, modestly, as a teacher. He had,
in fact, become a New Age mystic dynamo, the center of grand expectations,
based on the initial popularity of The Aquarian Gospel among spiritualists,
occultists, and New Thought devotees. He called himself “Levi d’Guru,” undoubtedly thinking that nom de plume was
humorous.107 He was a “true Illuminate,” teaching “Biopneuma,”
a course of lessons in “the true science of the Great Breath,” that is, yogic
mastery. It included prohibitions against tight clothing, sexual impurity,
tobacco smoking, impure language, and the use of drugs and alcohol. It included
admonitions to engage in deep breathing of “ozone”-filled air, “proper
willing,” and “forceful thinking,” daily outdoor exercise, bathing, controlling
one’s temper, masticating each bite of food twenty times, keeping regular
waking and sleeping hours, and keeping regular times for eating, for
defecation, and for one’s devotions, that is, meditation. This meant that one
should “practice concentration of magnetic force upon yourself and others at
least two hours a day.”
Levi now equated his
term “Biopneuma” with the Holy Spirit, adopting an
overtly Gnostic view that encouraged entering “The Great Silence” to be filled
with the Biopneuma in order to become an Illuminate.
To achieve this, Levi recommended the recitation of a formula that he said he
had repeated to himself “for forty long years.” Then the clouds had parted and
“the glory of the Lord” had shown forth and “the Mysteries of the Ages” had
been revealed and had become “as an open book.” It was “Wisdom! Wisdom! It must
be mine; Light! Light! I will see the true light; Illumination! Illumination! I
will attain unto divine illumination, through Jesus Christ, my Lord.”108
Levi had established
himself as the “National Hierophant” and “National Seer” of “The Aquarian
Commonwealth,” a fledgling socialistic Occult brotherhood and mutual aid
society headquartered at his house on Figueroa Avenue.109 At its height, its
members numbered perhaps a few hundred. Eva had become the organization’s
“National Scribe.” Membership was open to individuals around the world, One
dollar a month qualified a member to receive an insignia button and monthly
mimeographed lecture notes of an ongoing series of teachings that Levi
continued to record from the Akashic record. It included material on Kabbala
and on other complex systems of Biblical allegory. It also contained
speculations on esoteric sexual practices with a strong admixture of Indian
tantra:
The Tree of Life is SEX, with its two pole connection in each human, mystically
called the REINS, and in East Indian literature Ida and Pingala. The fruit of
this tree is its concentrated forces, and comes into existence because in the
AIR man BREATHES, there is a VITAL FORCE of life, called “Spiro” in Greek, and
“Spirit” in English. It is this same force, mechanically concentrated, that gives
us our electric lights, runs our street cars and elevators as well as the human
and animal body.
Now, it is the
concentration of this Spiro in the air we breathe that, in its union with the
MAGNETIC CURRENT that FLOWS THROUGH ALL, becomes the SPIREMA in the Greek
Bible. In plain English, the concentrated life force, the FIRE OF LIFE IN SEX,
the FRUIT OF THE TREE OF LIFE. And as true as its use in generation procreates
and brings to earth human beings in new human bodies, just so true is it that
when men and WOMEN learn to USE the SAME FIRE and fruit of life in regeneration
that they now use in GENERATION and PLEASURE, they will have found the SECRET
OF LIFE and WILL SURELY cease to die.
But this secret cannot
and will not be given to the race as a WHOLE until selfishness leaves man in a
greater state of freedom than he now lives in. MAN must find the secret of the
way to live in sweetness, Peace and plenty without owning even as much as the
clothes on his back. Then want, sickness and death will leave the land and all
mankind shall be richer than the richest today, without a single earthly
possession that he can call his own in the way that man owns things today.
TODAY this secret is occasionally given to advanced natures of sweetness,
learning and unselfishness. But it is always transmitted in exchange of
feelings and not by words, and those who do receive it never tell of it. Nor do
they ever die like common mortals. Nor do they remain long on earth, long
simply because they can, but they leave the body for a vacation when they
choose, with as much ease as the ordinary man leaves the house. We state
further, that regeneration as it is taught in the world today is a mistake and
will NEVER do the things it is believed to do. CELIBACY has always failed and
ALWAYS will. Sex was made for regeneration as well as for Generation, and, in
fact, sex would NEVER have been made for the purpose of begetting species. Its
value is yet unknown to modern man. In twos Gods are, in twos man came, and in
twos we must return. The secret of secrets is hidden in sex, and this secret
man must learn. . . .
The mortal mind in
its three parts, and the body MUST dip to the bottom of ALL there is to dip to,
or in, and become WISE in ALL, and WHOLLY SATED with EVERY PHASE of emotion,
sensation and life, known to all the world OUTSIDE the sweet repose in the ark,
or Garden of Eden, or at oneness with God in man, before we can enter the
Father’s house, the citadel of Jesus, the BONY CAVERN in the forehead, above
and between the eyes.110
Dowling was evidently
a quick study, but now he was clearly not “preaching Christ crucified,” but
rather “Christ illuminated.” Nevertheless, one can imagine the old Sunday
School master using the same methods and accounting and lesson plan books, the
same blackboard techniques, the same weekly lectures mailed to paying
subscribers, but now directed not to young students of the Bible, but to adult
students of sex magic.
Entrepreneur that he
still was, he hopefully divided the world into councils, provinces, and
chapters, the Pacific and the Atlantic, for example, and assigned these
territories to individuals to cultivate. In payment for the Atlantic franchise
of the Brotherhood, there were commissions for new members (perhaps in a
pyramid recruitment system), the Aquarians acquired The New Age magazine.111
This had been a somewhat puffy spiritualist and New Thought journal,
published in Boston by Frederick Pease Fairfield.112 After the Aquarians took
it over, they brought it to Los Angeles, changed its name to The Aquarian Age
Magazine, made its graphic design more sophisticated, and used it as the
official organ of the Aquarian Commonwealth. Aquarian member Frank J. French
edited it. If recruitment was organized in a true pyramid form, it was in the
same multi-level marketing pattern that would manifest itself in the later,
very typical conjunction of New Thought (“create material success, health, and
wealth through mental power”) and the New Age.
Levi’s associates in
the Aquarian Commonwealth included, first and foremost, Eva, who was his
amanuensis. Levi may have first produced The Aquarian Gospel by automatic
writing (that is, written by his own hand while he was in trance), which Eva
would have then transcribed on the typewriter. Or, he may have voiced the work
in trance, with Eva taking it down in writing. Or, he may have simply written
down drafts of the manuscript in his normal conscious state at night, and
simply given them to Eva in the morning, explaining to her that he had been
inspired. In any event, she also produced the typewritten transcriptions of his
weekly lectures, copies of which she mailed to subscribing members of the
Aquarian Brotherhood.
The core members of
the Aquarian Commonwealth included three spirit mediums who had already a
longstanding reputation in spiritualist circles for their writings, their
trance mediumship, and their abilities as spiritual healers. By this time they
had all moved to Los Angeles. They were William Wilberforce Juvenal Colville,
Nellie Beighle, and James Martin Peebles. All three
had supplemented their spiritualism with a study of occultism, comparative
religion, Theosophy, and New Thought, and had written and spoken in public
about the “harmony” of all of these. Beighle, for
example, had published The Book of Knowledge; Psychic Facts in 1903. Colville
had a long career in trying to reconcile various forms of esotericism, most
particularly spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought—all under the principle,
he said, of “the supremacy of mind over matter.” As an example of this
reconciliation, he believed that the Age’s “metaphysical movement,” was in fact
“the second coming of Christ.” This, he believed, happens “in ourselves” when
we are true to our inner light. And, he argued, it was something not
comprehended by Christians after the first century or so, who “degenerated into
extremes” and “then put the second coming of Christ far into a remote
period.”113 Colville was also a writer of “Occult fiction.” In The Garden of
Eden, “the problem of universal religion is presented for solution.” His
Onesimus Templeton, “a psychical romance,” was advertised as occupying the
neverland between fact and fiction, “Though this work is professedly a novel,
it abounds in short essays and sparkling dialogues exploratory of the Spiritual
Philosophy and all things related thereto.” Another of his books, Dashed
Against the Rock, would also have to be shelved in the fiction-as-fact section.
This book by Colville was “a scientific and mystical novel, dealing with
spiritual laws and the latest attainments in practical science.” Actually, it
was essentially a promotional piece for Colville’s friend, con man and crank
inventor of perpetual motion machines, John Worrell Keely. It “contains authentic
interviews with John Worrell Keely and introduces in popular form amazing
information concerning Nature’s mysteries.”
Having James Peebles
associate himself with the Aquarian group was particularly auspicious because
of his place in the forefront of the spiritualist movement. He was also an
early, although eventually disgruntled, associate of Theosophist founders
Blavatsky and Olcott. Peebles was eventually installed as the “President of the
Council Apostolica” of the Aquarian Commonwealth in
May 1911. He also contributed a couple of articles to The Aquarian New Age
Magazine, but by June, he had dissociated himself from the group, excusing
himself on the grounds that his own writing and lecturing commitments left him
little time to participate in their affairs.
Peebles was a friend
of Edgar Lucien Larkin, an astronomer associated with the Lowe Observatory, who
was also recruited into the group of budding Aquarians.114 One writer described
Larkin this way:
. . . an elderly occultist who for some years before his death in 1924 ran the
Mount Lowe Observatory in California, not to be confused with the nearby Mount
Wilson Observatory. Whereas the latter is a great scientific institution, the
Mount Lowe Observatory was operated as a tourist attraction by the Pacific
Electric Railway in connection with their Mount Lowe Inn. Larkin showed
visitors the stars through a small telescope until in the 1930s the telescope
mechanism broke down and the Inn burned.115
Larkin was tied to
some of the most exotic manifestations of occultism in Southern California.
This included his involvement with Frederick Spencer Oliver, a young man who
had channeled a revelation from a character named “Phylos
the Thibetan,” entitled A Dweller on Two Planets; or,
The Dividing of the Way. It was first published by Oliver’s mother in Los
Angeles in 1905, and so was more or less contemporaneous with The Aquarian
Gospel and added to the lore passed among the members of the Aquarian
Commonwealth.
This work of
speculative fiction, another of the primary sources for the New Age movement,
whose adherents have often tended to regard it as more than fiction, described
a hidden Lemurian village still in existence down a secret tunnel in the center
of Mount Shasta. Professor Larkin was supposed to have invented a
“spinthariscope” which allowed him to view this hidden village.116 In the core
of Mount Shasta, he wrote, lay a hollowed-out cavern, where a mysterious object
lay, a sort of prototype of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was, in
the words of the title of his 1916 self-published book, A Matchless Altar of
the Soul, Symbolized as a Shining Cube of Diamond, One Cubit in Dimensions, and
Set within the Holy of Holies in All Grand Esoteric Temples of Antiquity. It
was the catalyst for a human evolutionary or millenarian jump into the New Age.
Spence’s book
described a meeting of sages around that sacred object. The meeting served as
an initiation and a commission ceremony.117 Its description is an imaginative
reconstruction of a Theosophical Lodge meeting, but it is also similar to
Dowling’s own rendition in The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus’ final initiation and
commission at a meeting of world sages in Alexandria.
Another enthusiastic
member of the Aquarian Commonwealth was Harry Gaze. He was a New Thought
advocate of self-healing and the author of the ambitiously-titled How to Live
Forever; The Science and Practice, first self-published in 1900, and then
published in Chicago by sexologist and women’s rights activist, Alice Bunker Stockham. At the time he joined the Aquarian Brotherhood,
he was writing Life, Youth and Success, Constructive Psychology from A to Z, an
Alphabet of Affirmation, and teaching classes in esoterica, including one “to
advanced students only” on sexual secrets (“auto-genetics”). He would later
publish a few children’s books, meant to teach their young readers about the
joys of creating a magical wonderland with one’s imagination, in the same way,
one could say, that adults needed to learn how to benefit themselves from
creating their own myths and fairy tales. Gaze’s children’s books included The
Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland; Coppertop: The Queer
Adventures of a Quaint Child; its sequel Coppertop Cruises: The Wonderful
Voyage of the Good Ship “Queercraft”; and The Merry
Piper: or, the Magic Trip of the Sugar Bowl Ship.118 He also became an
effective leader of the New Thought movement, both in America and abroad.119
Other active members
of the Aquarian Brotherhood who provided the bulk of its funding included Dr. William
C. Watson, a physician, and James M. Wishart, who owned and operated the New
Age Gold Saving Plant in Pasadena, where he reprocessed gold ore. Ex-Christian
preacher Dowling was particularly effective in attracting other disaffected
Christian clergymen to his organization. James Peebles had been a Universalist
minister before he turned to spiritualism. Other clergymen among the Aquarian
Brotherhood included ex-Catholic priest Thaddeus Vincent Jakimowicz,
ex-Baptist ministers Younger Pitts Rothwell and Charles Clark Pierce,
ex-Presbyterian minister Thomas Caunce, and
ex-Methodist minister Lawson H. Worthington.120
The spiritual
development that The Aquarian Gospel says that Jesus underwent allowed him to
become the manifestation of the “Love of God.” In other words, “after thirty
years of strenuous life the man [Jesus] had made his body fit to be the temple
of the holy breath and Love took full possession.”121 This suggests that Levi
himself, as the new messenger, would have trained himself in order to be a fit
vessel for the spirit. And indeed his devotees said that he had spent forty
years in the Great Silence. Levi, in his course on Biopneuma,
made clear that, on the authority of his personal experience, the power of
telepathic control over another person was one of the real results that
meditators practicing his techniques could expect to achieve.
Nevertheless, it is
difficult to imagine Levi Dowling as a yogic athlete. In 1907, during the time
he had just finished channeling the spirit of Jesus the Christ in the wee hours
of each morning, Levi gave a deposition to an examiner for the Pension Bureau
in applying for a military pension (He had just turned sixty-three years old).
At the time, he was not quite 5’ 11” and weighed two hundred and twenty pounds,
not exactly the picture of a tantric adept.122
He was an
indefatigable spiritual salesman and organizer, however. In the summer of 1910,
the Aquarian Commonwealth advertised to find members to establish a commune, in
a kind of joint stock project, in the San Gabriel Valley, in parcels of the
Etiwanda Vinyards. “Levi, the Transcriber of the
Aquarian Gospel,” the advertisement read, “has personally inspected this
property, and believes it to be an ideal homestead site, and the opportunity of
securing the lands most excellent.”123 They did not succeed in attracting many,
if any, settlers.
The activities of the
Aquarian Commonwealth multiplied rapidly. In January 1911, the Aquarian College
of Teachers and Healers opened, offering correspondence courses, as well as
weekly lectures and instruction leading to two degrees, the “A. Ph. D.,” the
“Doctor of Aquarian Philosophy,” and the “A. H. M.,” the “Master of Aquarian
Healing.” These degrees trained “Aquarian Ministers” and “Aquarian Healers.”
Among the teachers were the Dowlings, James Peebles,
Harry Gaze, and Edgar Larkin.
In May, the “First
Aquarian Congress of North America” was held in Los Angeles, mostly at the
Dowling’s house, with resolutions passed and officers ordained and a
fundraising campaign launched. In June, the Aquarian Age Magazine noted that,
through the generosity of the Dowlings’ wealthy
patrons, Dr. and Mrs. Watson, “Levi has gone into semi-retirement in the
mountains of the gem of the Ocean, Catalina Island, where he may more easily
complete the transcriptions from the Akashic Records of the gospels of Enoch
and Melchizedec and other parts of the Sacred Books
of the Aquarian Age.”124 But before Levi took full advantage of that resort, he
went to Chicago to supervise the printing of a new edition of The Aquarian
Gospel. Overwork while he was in Chicago and the rigors of the return trip over
the Rockies took their toll on his heart.
Levi Dowling, the
“Aquarian Hierophant,” “stepped behind the thin curtain that separates the
‘here from the hereafter’” on August 13, 1911.125 His was a sudden death, an
“acute dilation of the heart”, while riding the train in South Pasadena,
accompanied by Eva and Leo en route to their “resting
place in the foothills.”126 It must have been a shock for his followers, who,
if they seriously believed his tantric teachings, would have been inclined to
think that he was immortal. A memorial service was held for him on August 17th
at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. His body was cremated.127
In a special session
of the Aquarian Congress immediately after Levi’s funeral, those present
elected Eva to take his place. “Under the title Leva,” the account read, “she
will, by the help of the Eternal Masters and the direction of the Holy Spirit,
take up the work.”128
After Levi’s death,
Eva and Leo continued living in their house on Figueroa Street, together with
Eva’s younger sister Adelle.129 Leo found a job as an actuarial clerk for a
life insurance company. He and his mother published two volumes of Levi’s
collected lectures, Self-Culture; a course of lessons on developing the
physical, unfolding the soul, attaining unto the spiritual and Complete Course
in Biopneuma: the true science of the Great
Breath.130 Although Levi’s books, most particularly The Aquarian Gospel, continued
to sell steadily, the Aquarian Commonwealth itself and all its various
activities, including The Aquarian New Age Magazine, rapidly collapsed after
Levi’s death. The ideas of the “New Age” and “The Age of Aquarius” and the
cosmic pantheism and theosophical syncretism that were an integral part of
Levi’s book, however, all gained a life of their own and spawned countless
reincarnations.
Eva Dowling, after a
short illness, died in Los Angeles at the house in which she lived with her son
on January 9, 1923.131 Their Aquarian associate, the Reverend Charles Pierce,
officiated at the funeral services, which were conducted at their home. Eva,
like Levi, was cremated, but at the Los Angeles Crematory. She bequeathed her
son Leo her half-ownership in the house and lot at 503 South Figueroa Avenue,
which she and her sister Adelle jointly owned. “She left sufficient assets to
defray the expenses of her last sickness and death,” he told the Bureau of
Pensions examiner. Leo also inherited from her the rights over The Aquarian
Gospel and Levi’s other books. These included compilations of his
Kabbala-filled lectures in which Levi had organized the events in the life of
Jesus as described in The Aquarian Gospel according to a kind of Midrash around
the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Leo marketed these works until he died in
Los Angeles in August 1974.132
The influence of The
Aquarian Gospel on the New Age movement has been extensive. It began almost
immediately after the first publication of Dowling’s book. Joseph Harris’ The
Triune Mind and the New Aquarian Age (the Age of Woman) 1914 to 4414 A.D; the
Conscious and the Subconscious Mind and the Soul Mind Explained is just as one
example of direct influence. It was written by a Utah phrenologist in 1924 and
published in Los Angeles. It reproduced great gobs of The Aquarian Gospel in
its text. So did The Mystical Life of Jesus, written in 1929 by Spencer Lewis,
the founder of AMORC (Ancient Mystical Order Rosae
Crucis), which became the largest Rosicrucian group in the world.133 But these
books were not unique. Dowling’s text was cut and pasted, in part or in full,
into a plethora of New Age books, from the time of its publication to the
present. Numerous translations of the book have been published over the
years.134
Beyond the actual
text, however, the ideas in it, the Age of Aquarius, the Akashic Record, the
Cosmic Christ, Jesus in Asia, and on and on, became an indelible part of the
New Age movement itself. They surfaced in the 1930s through the 1950s in
psychic literature by such channelers as Edgar Cayce and Elizabeth Clare
Prophet and in the travel writings of eccentric explorer and Theosophist
Nicholas Roerich.135 Theosophists almost immediately took the explicit title of
the Aquarian Age and applied it seamlessly to the “New Cycle” they were
expecting. Theosophist Alice Bailey and her “Tibetan sage Djwhal
Khul,” for example, used the language of the “New
Age” interchangeably with the “Aquarian Age” in her 1948 essay, The
Reappearance of the Christ.136 Proponents of New Thought did the same to Levi’s
“Age of Aquarius,” applying it to the “New Age.” Even as early as 1918, a group
in Manchester, New Hampshire, calling itself the National Astrological Society,
reformed itself into the “Universal Church of Aquarius” and offered its
acolytes instruction on becoming “magi.”137
Nevertheless these
were fringe movements. Their terminology and ideas did not begin to pervade the
larger culture until the counterculture eruption in the late 1960s. The entry
point of “The Age of Aquarius” into the larger culture was the series of
astrology columns that Gavin Arthur wrote for the San Francisco Oracle during
its heyday in 1966-68. Public discussions that Arthur conducted with
astrologer, Theosophist, and avant-garde musician Dane Rudhyar
during this time, on the subject of when the Aquarian Age would begin, also
contributed to the spread of the idea.138 It became more generally known in the
wider culture through the song, “The Age of Aquarius,” in the off-Broadway 1968
musical Hair, and the song’s 1969 hit version by The Fifth Dimension in their
medley “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In” on their album “The Age of Aquarius.” In
the years since then, the “Aquarian Age” has replicated itself into the
farthest trivial recesses of world culture. It has appeared on everything from
massage-parlor matchbook covers to Japanese Anime characters. It further
expanded into the wider culture with the publication of Marilyn Ferguson’s 1980
pop sociology book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, which drew together, as part of
the Aquarian Age, various sociological, spiritual, and political phenomena, and
solidified the image of the New Age as a cultural movement.139
Dowling’s gospel
itself, over the past hundred years, has also had a potent effect on the
formation of other new religions. The Aquarian Gospel has stimulated wave after
wave of what might be called the “Further Adventures of Jesus,” as avatar of
the Cosmic Christ principle and the modern-day dawning of the Aquarian Age.
This was taught by Guy Ballard, founder of the “I Am” Movement in California in
1932, and is still taught in the Aquarian Academy of Robert E. Birdsong in
Eureka, California.
The Aquarian Gospel
has spread, in a particular way, to Korea as well, connected to the
syncretistic Unification Church headed by the Reverend Sun Myung-Moon. One of
the first proselytizers for the Church in America, a Korean missionary named
Young Oon Kim, used The Aquarian Gospel and other New
Age material as part of her presentations on the new church founded by the
Reverend Moon.140
The Aquarian Gospel
continues to claim a place at the center of the New Age movement, with some of
its devotees regarding it as “the most important book ever written.”141 Some of
the organized Aquarian groups have incorporated into their beliefs the
millenarianism of the New Age, with an apocalyptic tenor, together with the
notion that hidden or extraterrestrial intelligences are guiding the
evolutionary development of the human race. Jesus’ home was “off planet,” so to
speak, and he and other “Christs” have manifested here to act as catalysts for
human evolution. Jesus, according to one baroque variation on this theme, was
an n-dimensional being projected into simpler four-dimensional space-time. He
was a quantum fluctuation, yielding zero-point energy.142 The Christ, coming in
a divine invasion of saucers or comets, would be beaming up those who had
plugged into this energy and had “dropped the body,” and had thereby become
“transhuman,” a thoroughly Gnostic goal.
The Aryan Race and The “New Cycle”
The growth from the
germ of the notion of a millenarian “New Cycle,” after it was grafted onto
notions of race and human evolution, occult histories and priestly
conspiracies, has produced some strange fruit over the past hundred years. In
Germany, Nazi theory and practice looked for the evolution, through controlled
breeding, of the Aryan race and the elimination of “lesser” races in a
thousand-year Age. In Southern California, the Heaven’s Gate cult, convinced
that the Aquarian Age would begin with their ascension to a higher level,
committed suicide en masse in 1997, expecting to be
teleported a la Star Trek onto starships that they imagined were trailing the
Hale-Bopp comet.
Among the hundreds of
groups that have taken up the name “Aquarian” are the Aquarian Age Teaching and
the Aquarian Age Educational Group in Sedona, Arizona, and the Aquarian Church
of Universal Service in Portland, Oregon. Most uninhibitedly fun, perhaps, is
the Aquarian Perspectives Inter Planetary Mission, a UFO group whose leaders
receive messages from “Futron” and the “Rainbow Star
Legionnaires.” The leaders are a couple, “Dr. RA-Ja ‘Merk’ Dove” (aka Stephen Stass) and “Prof. Moi-RA ‘Lady of the Sun’/ ‘Quan Yin’
Dove” (aka Rosalia Borja). They are “Intergalactic Ambassadors from Venus and
the Pleiades, Global Star Shepherds, and Anchors for the Taos Ashram of
Ascended Masters.”
More significantly,
The Aquarian Gospel was also present at the founding of the Nation of Islam.
Timothy “Noble” Drew “Ali,” a railway worker from North Carolina living in New
Jersey, incorporated much of Dowling’s Gospel into the first nineteen chapters
of his scripture, The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America
(sometimes called the “Circle Seven Koran”).143 He established his church in
1913, very shortly after Dowling’s death. The Aquarian Gospel continued to live
on, synthesized with plenty of other sources, in Elijah Muhammad’s writings.144
And it has continued to make itself felt in the literature of the Five Percent
Nation, called the Nation of Gods and Earth, founded in 1964 by Clarence Smith
(Clarence 13X). The Five Percent Nation points out that Dowling’s Jesus went to
study and was initiated in Egypt, which is in Africa, and that (White) Romans
killed him, and that the coming Age will include some Black on White payback.
In this way, The Aquarian Gospel has conveyed to later generations a message of
racist evolution as part of its subtext.
Levi Dowling, who
thought, perhaps, that his Aquarian Gospel would provide a basis for a
unifying, inclusive form of Christianity, beyond dogmas and creeds, would
undoubtedly have been surprised at the uses to which his scripture has been
put. But the unity that he envisioned required the acceptance of a conspiracy theory
in which all orthodox forms of Christianity had to be subverted in favor of an
esoteric form. And conspiracy theorists are hardly known for their ecumenism or
tolerance, even when the conspiracy is merely an Aquarian one.
They should not have
been surprised. To achieve a unity of culture and religion, the New Age
downplays or denies the distinctive truth claims of each culture and religion
it uses. Each is welcomed into a multicultural universal brotherhood as long as
it appears dressed as a simplified, disembodied, and spiritualized version of
itself, that is, as long as it accepts being made merely relative. Impervious
particularity of form is a scandal and an affront. The various races of peoples
and their religions are melted down and refashioned into a super-race and a
super-religion.
All must yield to the
New Order of the Ages, which dissolves distinctions in its universal solvent,
its Philosopher’s Stone, its elixir of youth, its permanent revolution. All
contrary evidence, all protest, must disappear behind a willing suspension of
disbelief, into a vision of a new utopia cleansed of dissonant elements through
an alchemy applied by the play of the dialectical imagination. Woe to those,
Black or White, Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist, whose distinctive claims or
discrete identities resist this transmutation. But the “Coming Race” and its ueber–religion, whenever it is conjured, always betrays
marks of what the conjurer has pretended to make disappear. It never really
escapes its origins. Its imagined future is always a parody of the present. Its
materialized spirit, when examined closely, always resembles the conjurer who
has called it forth.
Frederick Fairfield,
the editor of The New Age Magazine, subscribed to the mailed typewritten
manuscript teachings that Dowling offered for sale to the Aquarian Brotherhood.
He glowingly reviewed a collection of them, entitled Truisms of the Great
Masters, in his magazine. Included in his comments was this:
It is full of “meat,” but all of Levi’s writings are, for that matter. Where
does he “get the goods”? I don’t care, do you? I believe he has access to the
sources he claims. But what matters it? Is truth something that somebody says?
No, truth is something which I discover. And your truth is something which you
discover. If some man says something which appeals to you and calls forth a
truth which was sleeping within, then be thankful, and offer praise to the
Giver of All Truth. Truth is always Internal. Truth is always Recognition.
Truth is always Self-Evidence.
This is the message
of the New Age. It deliberately brackets objective truth. It makes truth
entirely subjective. It recommends the willing suspension of disbelief as the
highest form of knowledge. It dotes on the play of youth rather than yielding
to the authority of elders. Readers of Munchausenesque
stories of Western seekers traveling to Tibet can say that these are
revelations of veritable events, but when faced with massive evidence to the
contrary, can also say that they do not care whether any of it actually
happened.
The protagonists, and
the authors, of occult fiction present themselves as moving through a world of
discoverable evidence, common sense, and testable structures of objective
truth. But that is as much a sham as the robes covered with luminous paint that
spirit mediums don in materialization séances in the dark. When the lights are
turned on, when contradictory evidence is presented, the mediums turn against
those who have exposed them, saying that what they were presenting was simply
an entertainment. Those who have exposed it, they say, have not comprehended
the spirit in which it was offered. They have not understood that truth resides
in the imagined world created in the performance, not in the stage machinery
that produced it.
The view that the
real truth lies in what appears, not in what occluded little minds offer as
objectively real, provides both method and content to occult fiction, in which
the villains (internal and external) are those who do not understand this view.
By the time Theosophy appeared in the 1870s, self-described advanced thinkers
regarded Christianity itself, insofar as it had not progressed to the
self-destruction of its own authority, as having betrayed the revolution (or
even the Protestant Reformation). That revolution aimed at making immanent the
highest spiritual truth, which is that truth is a hall of mirrors, all of which
reflect back onto the inner ineffable self. The universe is a whispering
gallery of sounds singing our own name.
By 1910 Dowling was
envisioning The Aquarian Gospel as the first volume of a trilogy that would be
called “The New Age Sacred Scripture.” The second volume would be entitled “The
Philosophy of the Aquarian Age.” It would “comprise the postulates upon which
all religions and true philosophies are founded, together with a full report of
the great work of the Seven Sages of the Aquarian Age.” It would be a
collection that included the canonical gospels but also a great mass of
heterodox and apocryphal writings. The third volume, “The Aquarian Key,” would
be “a book of ethics giving in detail the duties of every man to himself, to
every other man, to inferior life, to angel, to cherubim and to God.”
The trilogy would
present Christianity as only one limited manifestation of a higher truth. Jesus
is only the “Christ” of the Piscean Age. There are many other “Christs.” They
are all fragmentary reflections of a higher truth that resides in the self.
Dowling transcribed
the first portion of “The Indian Gospel of Jesus the Christ of the Piscean Age”
by “Lamaas” from the “Book of God’s Remembrance” and
published it in The New Age Magazine in 1910. Its narrative has Jesus spending
his youth in India. The sage Lamaas reveals that
Jesus “read the Sacred Books [of the East] with interest” and that “The Gospel
of the Buddha of enlightenment was his delight.” One day, a Brahmin asks him if
there is “yet a power in Brahmic faith or Buddhic
faith to save the world?” which is to say, is there a universal truth here in
the religions of India? Jesus replies:
7 All truth is one.
Through his appointed messengers God gave this truth to man, and out of it man
formulates his doctrines, creeds, and ethic laws.
8 In ages long ago
men thought that they had every useful phase of truth condensed to meet the
needs of every man. They formed some postulates, drew up a form of doctrine,
made a creed and then declared, “What we have written is the secret Doctrine of
the gods.
9 And men who found
it tiresome to think, accepted without question what these good men wrote; and
it was well, for what they wrote served well the purpose of the age in which
they lived.
10 But time passed on
and men required added light, and other good men seized the truth of God from
which they formulated other postulates, made other creeds . . .
All of these
teachings (and one can assume that, for Dowling, Jesus’s public teachings would
be subject to the same fate) “do not light up the mountain top. Their lights
are darkness for the people of this age. The world needs higher lights; and
they will shine.” Dowling has Jesus say:
23 An old religion
cannot be reformed; when one disturbs its postulates, its doctrines and its
laws, it goes to pieces, like an ancient fabric in a gust of wind.
24 Go to, and from
the one great truth of God, form postulates, and state in language clear and
most concise, the doctrines of the Deity that people of the coming age require
and can comprehend.
25 The people of the
coming age will walk in higher planes of life than did the people of the ages
gone.
But is this really
Jesus speaking? It certainly is Gnostic hierophant Levi Dowling, trying to
break free of the chains of historical contingency. And it is the spirit of the
Age of Aquarius, articulating its progressive religion. Truth is subjective and
relative. It is an industrial light and magic show: Journey to the stars, but
always follow your own feelings, and may the Force be with you.
continue to The Aquarian Gospel Movie
homepage:
1. Eva S. Dowling, in
Levi H. Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ; The Philosophic
and Practical Basis of the Religion of the Aquarian Age of the World and of the
Church Universal; Transcribed from the Book of God’s Remembrances, Known as the
Akashic Records (London: L. N. Fowler, 1964), 11. The second edition, from
which all subsequent ones derive, was published in 1912. Most of the book’s
latest editions were published by DeVorss &
Company, Los Angeles. The entire text, which is now in the public domain, is
available on the web at <http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/agjc>.
2. Let us
acknowledge, however, that keepers of the millennial Aquarian Age flame, have
found various systems of exegesis in order to explain the dawn of the Age of
Aquarius as occurring anywhere from two hundred years ago, to six hundred years
in the future. But, according to some, it has already died,
killed either by Hell’s Angels at Altamont or by Charles Manson or by Marshall
Applewhite, or at the moment that a child of hippie parents registered as a
Young Republican.
3. William Dowling,
of Scots-Irish descent, was born August 28, 1800, in Pennsylvania; he died
December 12, 1873, in Kendallville, Indiana. Rachel Biggers was born on March
7, 1803 in Washington County, Pennsylvania; she died June 18, 1882, in Kendallville
and was buried there at Lake View Cemetery; see Frances Dingman Chapter, DAR,
Noble County Indiana Tombstone Inscriptions (Kendallville, 1935), 275.
4. Affidavit of
Mahala L. Weaver, December 4, 1911; Levi H. Dowling, Widow Pension Application
(Eva S. Dowling), Case File (Application 973.948; Certificate 734.797); Records
relating to Pensions; Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior,
Record Group 48; National Archives Building (NAB), Washington, D.C.
5. Albert Adams Graham,
compiler, History of Richland County, Ohio; (Including the Original
Boundaries.) Its Past and Present, Containing a Condensed Comprehensive History
of Ohio, Including an Outline History of the Northwest; a Complete History of
Richland County; Its Townships, Cities, Towns and Villages, Schools, Churches,
Societies, Industries, Statistics, &c.; a History of Its Soldiers in the
Late War; Portraits of Its Early Settlers and Prominent Men; Miscellaneous
Matter; Map of the County; Biographies and Histories of Our Patrons and the
Most Prominent Families, &c., &c. (Mansfield, Ohio: A. A. Graham &
Company, 1880), 474-475, 681. See also, A. J. Baughman, History of Richland
County, Ohio, from 1808 to 1908, volume 1 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1908), 446;
and, for William Dowling’s preaching in Ashland, “History or Origin of the
Disciples in Ashland and Vicinity,” Ashland Press, December 27, 1888. When they
lived in Bellville, the Dowling children attended school in the town of
Jefferson; see “School Records of Jefferson Twp., Richland County, Ohio, Dist.
No.1, 1843,” The Pathfinder: Quarterly Newsletter of the Ashland and Richland
County Chapters, Ohio Genealogical Society, vol. 2, issue 4, October 1983, 29.
6. Millenial Harbinger (Bethany, Va.), vol. 4, no. 7 (July
1833): 326; see also Alexander Hall, comp., The Christian Register; containing
a statistical report of the Christian Churches in Europe and America (Loydsville, Ohio, 1848), 6. And, for William Dowling’s
ministry at Mount Gilead, see History of Morrow County and Ohio (Chicago: O. L.
Basin, 1880), 302, 308, 311.
7. Lisbon post
office, Allen township: “The Disciple Church was first started at Lisbon; but
before it was completed it was taken down, and the material was conveyed to
Kendallville, where it was used in building the present church”—Weston A.
Goodspeed and Charles Blanchard, eds., Counties of Whitley and Noble, Indiana;
Historical and Biographical (Chicago: F. A. Battey, 1882), part 2, 133. William
Worth Dowling (1834-1920, b. Ohio) (m. Julia, b. 1839, Ind.) and John Biggers
Dowling (b. 1832, Ohio) (m. Rebecca, b. 1830, Ohio; Grace Eggleston). His other
siblings included Josephine E. (m. William W. Glosser) (1847-1933), Miranda (m.
David Lash), Melinda (m. Horace Taber) (1827-1894), Matilda C. (m. John W.
Berry), and Mahala L. (m. Samuel Weaver). See [William Worth Dowling,] “Emigratus,” Front Rank (St. Louis), October 7, 1911. (The
article is unsigned, but on a copy that Eva Dowling submitted to the Bureau of
Pensions and is now in her pension casefile, she has written that it was
authored by William Worth Dowling. Its final sentiment, too, makes it clear
that he wrote it.) Information on Levi’s sisters and their marriages also comes
from Noble County marriage records, obituaries, and cemetery records,
transcribed at http://www.rootsweb. com/~innoble/index.htm
and from “Early Marriage Records, 1844,” The Ohio Liberal (Mansfield), vol. 11,
no. 49, March 19, 1884.
8. Goodspeed and
Blanchard, eds., Counties of Whitley and Noble, Indiana, part 2, 129-130.
9. Eva S. Dowling,
“Who Was Levi?” in Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel (1964), 7. More biographical
details are in the article, “In Memoriam: Dr. Levi H. Dowling; Levi—the Akashic
Seer,” The Aquarian New Age Magazine (Los Angeles) (September 1911): 305-314. A
brief biography of Dowling is in J. Gordon Melton, ed., Encyclopedia of
Occultism & Parapsychology; A Compendium of Information on the Occult
Sciences, Magic, Demonology, Superstitions, Spiritism, Mysticism, Metaphysics,
Psychology Science, and Parapsychology, with Biographical and Bibliographical
Notes and Comprehensive Indexes. 5th edition (Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 2001),
vol.1, 443-444. He is also listed briefly, as “Lee Dowling,” and described as
“clergyman, physician, author, poet,” in Thomas William Herringshaw,
Herringshaw’s Encyclopedia of American Biography of
the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: American Publishers’ Association, 1898), 312.
See also Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels (Freeport, New York:
Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 25-30, and Per Beskow,
Strange Tales about
Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983),
75-80.
10. Recollection of
James Wishart in “In Memoriam: Levi H. Dowling,” Aquarian New Age Magazine
(September
1911): 308.
11. Eva Dowling, “Who
Was Levi?” The Aquarian Gospel (1964), 7.
12. Frances Dingman
Chapter, DAR, Marriage Records of Noble County, Indiana, 1859-1875
(Kendallville, Ind., 1942). Sylvia’s parents: Leonard Demmon
was born June 14, 1814, in Chesterfield, Massachusetts; he died on February 9,
1899, in Kendallville, Indiana; Nancy Boughey was born July 19, 1820; she died
on February 15, 1908, in Kendallville. See the transcription of the obituary of
Leonard and Nancy Demmon at
http://www.rootsweb.com/~innoble/Obituaries/De.htm. Among Sylvia’s brothers and
sisters were Isaac, Olivia, Roselda, Josephine,
Gertrude, Lenna, and Elwood. Professor Isaac Newton Demmon
(1842-1920) (m. 1871 to Emma Regal, settled in Ann Arbor, Mich.), Olivia
(1846-1912) (m. George P. Alexander), Roselda A.
(1849-1947) (m. William T. Holsinger and Linus Pike), Josephine (1847-1933) (m.
William W. Glosser and William Palmer), Gertrude J. (1854-) (m. Milton L.
Blaney), Lenna (1858-1879), and Elwood F. Demmon (ca.
1862-) (settled in Grand Rapids, Mich.). Isaac N. Demmon
taught school, 1860-63, then attended Northwestern Christian University,
1863-66, was Sergeant in 132nd Indiana Infantry during Civil War; entered the
University of Michigan and graduated in 1868; was Professor of Greek at Mount
Union College, Alliance, Ohio, 1868-70; Professor of ancient languages, Hiram
College, 1870; Principal of Ann Arbor High School, 1873-76; Assistant Professor
of English at the University of Michigan, 1876-79, and of English, 1879-1881,
when he was elected to the full chair of English and Rhetoric. He published on
library matters and bibliography. Harvey Clelland De
Motte, The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, vol.
3 (Boston: The Biographical Society, 1904), 209-210.
13. W. W. Dowling, “Emigratus.”
14. Samuel E. Alvord,
Alvord’s History of Noble County (Logansport, Ind.: B. F. Bowen, 1902), 138;
Frederick Henry Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, Compiled and
Arranged from Official Records of the Federal and Confederate Armies, Reports
of the Adjutant Generals of the Several States, the Army Registers, and Other
Reliable Documents and Sources, 3 vols. (Des Moines, Iowa: Dyer Publishing
Company, 1908).
15. Goodspeed and
Blanchard, eds., Counties of Whitley and Noble, Indiana, part 2, 109, 116.
16. Levi H. Dowling,
personal deposition, August 31, 1907; Levi H. Dowling, Invalid Pension
Application, Case File (Application 1364.603; Certificate 1144.608); Records
relating to Pensions; Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior,
Record Group 48; National Archives Building (NAB), Washington, D.C.
17. Affidavit of
Mahala L. Weaver, December 4, 1911; Levi H. Dowling, Widow Pension Application
(Eva S. Dowling), Case File (Application 973.948; Certificate 734.797); Records
relating to Pensions; Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior,
Record Group 48; NAB, Washington, D.C.
18. W. W. Dowling, “Emigratus,” says this study was “supplemented by further
studies at a college farther East.”
19. William Robeson
Holloway, Indianapolis: A Historical and Statistical Sketch of the Railroad
City, a Chronicle of Its Social, Municipal, Commercial, and Manufacturing
Progress, with Full Statistical Tables (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Journal
Print, 1870), 222-223; also, David J. Bodenhammer and
Robert G. Barrows, eds., Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 416.
20. Brief comments on
The Christian Almanac are in Discipliana
(Indianapolis) (July 1947): 24.
21. Published
Cincinnati: J. Church, 1871. For the comments of the reviewer, who does not
seem to be Levi himself, see “Indiana Sunday-School Convention,” The Morning
Watch (Indianapolis) (September 1871): 130.
22. For example, he
published (all by the Christian Publishing Company in St. Louis, Missouri) The
Christian Lesson Commentary, for the Use of Teachers and Advanced Students; The
Lesson Helper: An Aid for the Senior Classes on the Bible Study; The Guide
Book: A Manual for Sunday-School Workers in Organizing, Managing and Teaching (1887),
The Bible Hand-Book: an Aid in the Study of the Word of God, and a Guide to Its
Treasures of Wisdom (1887), The Choral Festival: A Book of Concert Services and
Class Exercises and Recitations for Sunday-Schools and Young People’s Societies
(1889), The Christian Psalter: A Manual of Devotion Containing Responsive
Readings for Public Worship (1890), The Helping Hand: A Manual of Instruction
for the Y. P. S. C. E. (1891), The Easy Book: Containing a Series of Bible
Lessons for Little Learners, the First Year’s Course (1903), The Normal
Instructor: A Series of Normal Bible Studies for Teachers, Classes, Institutes
and Assemblies (1894-1901), and Living Praise: A Collection of Sacred Songs for
Sunday-Schools, Young People’s Societies, Evangelistic Meetings, and All
Occasions of Church Work and Worship (1906).
23. Levi H. Dowling,
personal deposition, August 31, 1907; Levi H. Dowling, Invalid Pension
Application, Case File 1364.603; Records relating to Pensions; Records of the
Office of the Secretary of the Interior, Record Group 48; NAB, Washington,
D.C.; see also John M. Bramwell, “Proceedings of the Indiana Christian
Missionary Society,” The Christian Record (Bloomington, Ind.), August 1872,
359, which reported Dowling as living in Chicago in October 1868. The minutes
of the “Annual Missionary and Sunday School Convention,” reported in The
Christian Record (Bloomington, Ind.) (August 1872): 375, lists him as the
State Sunday School Agent for the Illinois Christian Missionary Association.
24. W. W. Dowling, “Emigratus.”
25. See “Being Dead
Yet Speaketh: Willliam
Worth Dowling,” The Christian (St. Louis) (March 25, 1920): 317; and “A
Condensed Record of a Very Busy Life” [of W. W. Dowling] (St. Louis: n. p.,
n.d.), pamphlet at Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Nashville, Tenn. For
an example of one of Levi Dowling’s “International Lesson-Thoughts,” see
“Memorial Stones,” the lesson for Sunday, January 17, 1875, printed in The
Christian (St. Louis) (January 14, 1875).
26. See recollections
of James Wishart, 307, in “In Memoriam: Dr. Levi H. Dowling; Levi—the Akashic
Seer,” The Aquarian New Age Magazine (Los Angeles) (September 1911): 305-314.
27. The Christian
Standard (Cleveland) (March 19, 1870): 93; also, on the career of William Worth
Dowling (and a portrait engraving of him), see The Christian-Evangelist (St.
Louis) (November 23, 1899): 1484; and “Being Dead Yet Speaketh,
William Worth Dowling: June 15, 1834-February 8, 1920,” The Christian (St.
Louis) (March 25, 1920): 317.
28. The Morning Watch
(Indianapolis) (August 1871): 128.
29. The Christian
Standard (Cleveland) (October 1879): 317. For notices of his other published
material, see The Christian Standard (January 11, 1873): 13, and (April 25,
1874): 133.
30. “Preach Christ
Crucified,” The Gospel Echo (McComb, Ill.) (January
1870): 25.
31. See Frederick
Snyder, “The Missouri State Meeting,” The Christian Record (Bloomington, Ind.)
(November 1873): 499.
32. Recollections of
James Wishart in “In Memoriam: Levi H. Dowling,” 307; also Nathaniel S. Haynes,
History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois, 1819-1914 (Cincinnati: Standard
Publishing Company, 1915), 453.
33. The Gospel Echo (McComb, Ill.) (September 1871): 440.
34. A copy of the card,
“Have I Been Baptized?” is in the archives of the Disciples of Christ
Historical Society.
35. Levi Dowling,
Affidavit, May 1, 1882; Levi Dowling, Plaintiff vs. Kate S. Dowling, Defendant,
Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis, June Term 1882.
36. W. W. Dowling, “Emigratus”; also, William Harvey King, History of
Homoeopathy and Its Institutions in America (New York: Lewis Publishing
Company, 1905), vol. 1; besides chemistry and toxicology, Eva lists physiology,
histology, and electricity as subjects he taught, see her “Short Sketch of the
Author,” in the introduction to Levi H. Dowling, Complete Course in Biopneuma: The True Science of the Great Breath; Opening
the Golden Gate unto the Healing of All Diseases, the Forgiveness of Sins and
Divine Illumination, 2nd edition [bound with Self-Culture: A Course of Lessons
on Developing the Physical Unfolding the Soul & Attaining unto the
Spiritual] (Los Angeles: E. S. Dowling, 1921).
37. Divorce Decree,
Circuit Court, City of St. Louis, October Term 1882, Wednesday, October 11,
1882, Levi Dowling vs (58853) Kate S. Dowling; Levi H. Dowling, Widow Pension
Application (Eva S. Dowling), Case File 1364.603; Records relating to Pensions;
Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior,
Record Group 48; NAB, Washington, D.C. See also, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
June-July 1882, for publication of the notice of court action filed against
Kate. The granting of the divorce was reported in the St. Louis Republican,
October 12, 1882. On Levi’s places of residence, see Levi H. Dowling, personal
deposition, August 31, 1907; Levi H. Dowling, Invalid Pension Application, Case
File 1364.603; Records relating to Pensions; Records of the Office of the
Secretary of the Interior, Record Group 48; NAB, Washington, D.C.
38. James Crawford
Sellers was born January 14, 1828 in Garrard County, Kentucky. He died in 1874
in Kendallville. Aby Ann Read was born in Putnam County, Indiana. She died in
1876, also in Kendallville.
39. Eva, Alice (m.
Dr. Smith Augustus Spillman), Adelle (“Dell,” “Della”) (m. Edward A. Brown),
Caroline (“Carrie”) (m. Henry Willey Comstock), and James C. (Jr.).
40. Affidavit of
Josephine E. Glosser and Olivia Alexander, December 4, 1911; Affidavit of E[lizabeth] M. Hammond, November 28, 1911; Levi H. Dowling,
Widow Pension Application (Eva S. Dowling), Case File 1364.603; Records
relating to Pensions; Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior,
Record Group 48; NAB, Washington, D.C. On Laughlin, see History of Portage
County, Ohio (Chicago: Warner, Beers, & Company, 1885), 747 (Hiram
Township). Laughlin filled the chair of Ancient Languages in Oskaloosa College,
before becoming President of the College. Afterwards, became President of Hiram
College in Ohio. “He has given many lectures on educational and religious
themes. He is of a metaphysical turn of mind. As a minister he is decidedly
non-sectarian, and as a public speaker he has been regarded as very
successful.”
41. A biographical
sketch and etching of James C. Sellers is in Manoah Hedge, Past and Present of
Mahaska County, Iowa: Together with Biographical Sketches of Many of Its
Prominent and Leading Citizens and Illustrious Dead (Chicago: S. J. Clarke
Publishing Company, 1906), 180-183.
42. James Wishart,
“In Memoriam: Levi K. Dowling,” 307.
43. “Recollections,
James M. Wishart,” The Aquarian New Age Magazine (Los Angeles) (September
1911): 307-308.
44. Levi H. Dowling,
personal deposition, August 31, 1907; Levi H. Dowling, Invalid Pension
Application, Case File 1364.603; Records relating to Pensions; Records of the
Office of the Secretary of the Interior, Record Group 48; NAB, Washington, D.C.
Also, St. Joseph, Missouri, City Directory 1892, listing for “Lee H. Dowling.”
45. The Fort Wayne
Sentinel (May 31, 1895): 3; see also, “Praise for a Fort Wayne Doctor,” The
Fort Wayne Gazette (May 31, 1895): 1, quoting the New York medical journal, The
Germicide.
46. “That Mole of
Yours Disfigures Your Face, Destroys Your Beauty and Threatens Your Life; May
Be of a Cancerous Nature; By a New Chemical Process It May Be Painlessly
Removed, and Leave No Scar; Superfluous Hair and Other Facial Blemishes
Destroyed in Like Manner,” The Fort Wayne Sentinel (May
25, 1895): 8.
47. For the
Theosophical Society chapter, see The Fort Wayne Daily Gazette (June 1, 1895):
8 and the Fort Wayne City Directory for 1893-94; for the Spiritualist Society
(May 25, 1895): 8 and the Fort Wayne City Directory for 1896, where we learn
that Dowling’s colleague in the Occult Science Society was also the Secretary
of the First Spiritual Society of Fort Wayne; for the Occult Science Society,
see The Fort Wayne News (March 28, 1896): 4. Other members of the Occult
Science Society included Dowling’s fellow homeopathic physician, Hiram Van
Sweringen.
48. Spiritualism; as
Viewed by Rev. Dr. D. W. Moffat, H. V. Sweringen, and L. O. Hull (Fort Wayne,
Ind.: Fort Wayne Occult Science Society, 1894), copy in the archives of the
Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.
49. Anna D. Patrick’s
account of “The Visions of Levi, the Seer and Teacher,” in “In Memoriam: Levi
H. Dowling,” 306.
50. In Los Angeles,
the Dowlings lived at 1344 Kellam Avenue, then at
1040 South Olive Street, then at 503 South Figueroa Street.
51. W. W. Dowling, “Emigratus.”
52. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1964), 8-9.
53. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1964), chapter 157, verses 29-30.
54. Gerald Massey,
The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (London: The Pioneer Press, 1921),
30 [This is one of Massey’s lectures that were circulated privately, but not
published until 1921]. Massey had already explored these themes in A Book of
the Beginnings, Containing an Attempt to Recover and Reconstitute the Lost
Origins of the Myths and Mysteries, Types and Symbols, Religion and Language,
with Egypt for the Mouthpiece and Africa as the Birthplace (London: Williams
and Norgate, 1881). Aleister Crowley, supposedly in
1904, had channeled The Book of the Law, a verse of which (verse 34, chapter
3), had indicated that a new eon had just begun. I have no idea whether Dowling
would have had any access to Crowley’s “news.”
55. H. P. B[lavatsky], “The Esoteric Character of the Gospels,” Lucifer
(November, December, 1887; February, 1888), footnote 5.
56. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1964), 5.
57. Eva S. Dowling,
“Who Was Levi?” in Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel (1964), 7.
58. Reflecting here
the Annie Besant-Charles Webster Leadbeater Theosophical doctrine of the “Inner
Government of the World.”
59. The Aquarian New
Age Magazine (Los Angeles) (September 1911): 294.
60. For H. P.
Blavatsky on “the Dawn of the New Cycle,” see The Secret Doctrine, vol. 1, p.
xliv, and “The New Cycle,” La Revue Theosophique,
March 21, 1889. This was supposed to occur in 1898. Later Theosophical exegesis
moved the event to the period from 1961-81. On Edward Wilson, see James A.
Santucci, “The Aquarian Foundation,” in The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of New Age
Religions, ed. James R. Lewis (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004): 243-70.
[An earlier version was published in Communal Societies 9 (1989): 39-61]; and
John Oliphant, Brother Twelve: The Strange Odyssey of a 20th-Century Prophet
and His Quest for a New Word (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Twelfth House Press, 2006).
The original edition appeared as Brother
Twelve: The Incredible Story of Canada’s False Prophet (Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart, 1991).
61. The New Age
(Boston) (November 1908): 352. This magazine is to be distinguished from the one
of the same name that was the official magazine of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.
62. Coffeen was born in 1841 and died in Wyoming on December 9,
1912. For more on him, see Leonard Schlup, “I’m Not a
Cuckoo Democrat,” Wyoming Annals 66.3 (Fall 1994): 30-47. In his introduction
to The Aquarian Gospel, 14, Coffeen wrote that he
intended soon to publish his own ideas on the science of
clairvoyance under the title Basis of Higher Consciousness, but I have found no
record of him having done so.
63. Introduction to
Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel (1964), 9.
64. Edgar Cayce would
also subsequently claim to have become a reader of the “Akashic Records.”
65. Chandogya Upanisad, 5.1.1.
66. Preface to
Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel (1964), 7.
67. Published in
Boston by the spiritualist newspaper, The Banner of Light.
68. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1964), 74-75.
69. The Unknown Life
of Jesus Christ (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1894), a translation of the
original La Vie inconnu de Jésus Christ (1894).
Contemporary skewerings of Notovitch
included F. Max Müller, “The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India,” Nineteenth
Century (October 1894): 515-522, and J. Archibald Douglas, “The Chief Lama of Hemis on the Alleged ‘Unknown Life of Christ,’” Nineteenth
Century (April 1896): 667-678, and his “Supplementary Note,” 205-209, in F. Max
Müller, Last Essays, 2nd Series: Essays on the Science of Religion (London
1901).
70. For some more of
Dowling’s anachronisms, see Goodspeed and Beskow.
71. The Bible in
India; Hindoo Origin of Hebrew and Christian Revelation (London: J. C. Hotten, 1870), a translation of the original La Bible dans l’Inde; Vie de Iezeus Christna (Paris: Lacrois 1869).
The influence of Jacolliot, as well as other attempts
at world syncretism such as that of Godfrey Higgins in his Anacalypsis,
was profoundly felt among spiritualists, who produced narratives of the
Jesus-Buddha-Krishna figure they supposed to have been the original source of
these and other stories, see, for example, the story written by trance medium
Fanny Green M’Dougall, “Christna.
The First Avatar,” Brittan’s Journal (New York) (January 1874): 60-74.
72. Ouseley lived in Brighton with his cats, “his only
followers” (as his neighbors said). He later found a few people to join what he
called “The Order of At-One-Ment and United Templars
Society.”
73. Ouseley, The Gospel of the Holy Twelve, introduction.
For more information on Ouseley and his relationship
to Theosophy, Hermeticism, and to the ideas of Kingsford and Maitland, see the
article by James Patrick Holding at
<http://www.tektonics.org/lp/ouseley01.html>.
74. Ouseley published it as, The Gospel of the Holy Twelve,
Known Also as the Gospel of the Perfect Life; translated from the original
Aramaic and edited by a Disciple of the Master, reprint (London: John M.
Watkins, 1956). It was first serialized in newspapers in 1900, and was
collected together and published in 1901, with enlarged editions published in
1903 and 1904. The German edition was published in Berlin in 1902 by Samuel
Krauss, under the title Das Evangelium des vollkommenen Lebens.
75. This allowance
for what might be called “continuing revelation” still occurs in modern times
in Tibet, with “treasure text” (terma) scriptures,
being “found”, materialized, by people who claim for them an early,
authoritative provenance. For an introduction to this subject, see Tulku Thondrup Rinpoche, Hidden Teachings of Tibet: An
Explanation of the Terma Tradition of Tibetan
Buddhism (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997).
76. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1964), 7. “The Cusp of the Ages” was never published
separately or in its entirety. It may have been one of the weekly teachings
that Levi had typed and sent out to the Aquarian Brotherhood.
77. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1964), 7.
78. Olive G. Pettis,
Autobiography by Jesus of Nazareth (Boston: J. P. Cooke, 1894), 8. Modern Mary
Magdalen devotees will be disappointed to learn that Mary affirmed, through
Olive, that she had, indeed, been a prostitute (though naturally pure, and only
driven into a brothel by the bestial lust of deceitful priests), and had no
revelations to make through Olive about being either an apostle or the sexual
consort of Jesus.
79. Alexander Smyth,
Jesus of Nazareth; or, a True History of the Man Called Jesus Christ, embracing
his parentage, his youth, his original doctrines and works, his career as a
public teacher and physician of the people, also, the nature of the great
conspiracy against him; with all the incidents of his tragical death, given on
spiritual authority, from spirits who were contemporary mortals with Jesus
while on the earth (Philadephia: The Author, 1864).
80. An example of
Jesus-as-yoga-student is in Nicolas Notovitch’s The
Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1894).
81. L. C. Rudolph,
Hoosier Faiths: a History of Indiana’s Churches & Religious Groups
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 61; see also, Commodore Wesley Cauble, Disciples of Christ in Indiana; Achievements of a
Century (Indianapolis, Ind.: Meigs Publishing Company, 1930), for a description
of the intra-denominational tensions in the latter half of the nineteenth
century.
82. The Morning Watch
(Indianapolis) (September 1871): 133-134. The poem is by Sallie W. Smith.
83. William C.
Watson, M. D., remarks in The Aquarian New Age Magazine (September 1911):
309-310.
84. On the New
Thought use of the term “Christ consciousness,” see Ursula N. Gestefeld, The Science of the Christ (N.p.,
1889). For examples of the general reconceptualization of Jesus along Gnostic lines
by the New Thought Movement (which is shared with spiritualism and Theosophy),
see Charles Brodie
Patterson, “The Mission of Jesus,” Mind (New York) (April 1899): 25-31, and
Rev. R. Heber Newton, “The New Thought of the Christ,” Mind (July 1900): 256-275,
and Charles Wesley McCrossan, The Mind Science of
Christ Jesus; a Treatise on Christian Psychology Showing the Power of
Suggestion and Revealing the Secrets of Mental and Spiritual Healing (Santa
Cruz, Cal.: Sentinel Publishing Company, 1913).
85. Levi H. Dowling,
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (Los Angeles: The Royal Publishing
Company, 1909), 12, quoting Leadbeater’s Clairvoyance (London: Theosophical
Publishing Society, 1903), 11.
86. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1909), 19-20, citing Leadbeater’s Clairvoyance, 116.
87. Rudolf Steiner,
Atlantis and Lemuria (London: Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1923),
preface.
88. See, for example,
“Great Theosophists: Apollonius of Tyana,” Theosophy
(July 1936): 385-395, which does not recognize Jesus as an historical
character; and “Apollonius of Tyana,” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings,
vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 611.
89. “Universal Communication,”
The New Age Magazine (Boston) (August 1909): 642. This system—like virtually
every other occult system of the time (until Noble Drew Ali), assessed the
northern European races as the human avant-garde, on the cusp of making an
evolutionary leap.
90. Gerald Massey,
Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), 767-768.
91. Gerald Massey,
The Natural Genesis; or, Second Part of A Book of the Beginnings, Containing an
Attempt to Recover and Reconstitute the Lost Origins of the Myths and
Mysteries, Types and Symbols, Religion and Language, with Egypt from the
Mouthpiece and Africa as the Birthplace (London: Williams and Norgate, 1883);
also, particularly on the Christian Age as the Piscean Age, see, for example,
the appendix in his Ancient Egypt. Massey’s deeply anti-Christian,
pro-spiritualist sentiments are on display in his lecture, “The Coming
Religion,” first published privately in 1900, and since republished.
92. For Blavatsky’s
views, see Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern
Science and Theology (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), volume 2, 192-196. For
Leadbeater’s, see Theosophical Talks at Adyar (First Series) The Inner Life
(Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1910), 19-22 and 114-119.
93. These included,
among them, medium Levi McKeen Arnold’s The Life of Jesus of Nazareth,
Spiritually Given by His Spirit (Poughkeepsie, N. Y.: 1853); Vermont physician
George C. Briggs, A True History of Jesus the Christ: Being a Detailed Account
of the Manner of His Birth, and of All That He Did and Suffered up to the Time
of His Crucifixion, Dictated by Himself (Boston: W. F. Brown & Company,
1874); Glasgow spirit medium and painter David Duguid, Hermes, a Disciple of
Jesus: His Life and Mission Work, also the Evangelistic Travels of Anah and Zitha, Two Persian
Evangelists Sent Out by Hafed, together with
Incidents in the Life of Jesus Given by a Disciple through Hafed
(Glasgow: H. Nisbet, 1888); M. Faraday [pseudonym], Jesus Christ, a Fiction:
Founded upon the Life of Apolonius of Tyana; the Pagan Priests of Rome Originated Christianity;
New and Startling Disclosures by Its Founders, and Full Explanations by Ancient
Spirits (Springfield, Mass.: Star Publishing company, 1883); Jonathan M.
Roberts, Antiquity Unveiled: Ancient Voices from the Spirit Realms Disclose the
Most Startling Revelations, Proving Christianity to Be of Heathen Origin
(Philadelphia: Oriental Publishing Company, 1892); the anonymously authored The
New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
as Revised and Corrected by the Spirits (New York: The Proprietors, 1861);
Charles Linton’s The Healing of the Nations (Philadelphia: The Author, 1864);
John Ballou Newbrough’s Oahspe:
A Kosmon Bible in the Words of Jehovih
and His Angel Embassadors (New York: Oahspe Publishing Association, 1882); and, of course, the
American prototypes of this genre, Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon: Another
Testament of Jesus the Christ, and the “gift” texts of the Shakers, such as
Alonzo Giles Hollister, ed., The Life and Sufferings of Jesus Anointed, Our
Holy Savior and of Our Blessed Mother Ann: in Two Parts, Written by
Inspiration, Envolved thru the Inner Consciousness of
William Leonard, in the Church at Harvard, Mass., October 1841 (Mount Lebanon,
N.Y., 1904).
94. The “Auburn
Circle,” for example, produced new revelations on the Gospels from the spirits
of Peter and Paul, which they published as Spiritual Exposition of the
Prophetic Scriptures of the New Testament, Received by J. M. Brown, E. H. Baxter,
E. A. Benedict (Auburn, N.Y.: E. H. Baxter and E. A. Benedict, 1850).
This circle was taken over by Thomas Lake Harris and moved to New York City.
See also The Spirit of Jesus Communicating through the Rappings!
(Rochester: The Tribune, 1851), a reprint of early spiritualistic material from
The Rochester Tribune. A new wave of Jesus-as-psychic explanations were
published in the period between the World Wars. Examples are Richard Arthur
Bush, Jesus at Work; a Selection from a Series of Communications upon Many
Subjects from the Spirit-Side of Life, Given through Richard Arthur Bush
(Manchester: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1929); Frederick B. Bond, The
Gospel of Philip the Deacon; Claiming to be a Reconstruction of the Original
Document Burned in Athens about the Time of Philip’s Mission (say AD 36-40),
through the Recall of the Spiritual Memories of the Past Which Ever Persist,
and Are Available to Mental Sympathy; Received by Frederick Bligh Bond through
the Hand of Hester Dowden . . . Embodying the Narrative of the Holy Nativity,
and the Messianic Constellation, the Passion, and the Resurrection of Christ,
the Pentecostal Gifts and the Story of the Sangreal,
the Sole Personal Relic of the Master Remaining on Earth (New York: Macoy, 1932); Hereward Carrington, Loaves and Fishes; a
Study of the Miracles, of the Resurrection, and of the Future Life, in the
Light of Modern Psychic Knowledge (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1935); John
Sebastian Marlow Ward, The Psychic Powers of Christ (London: Williams & Norgate,
1936); Daniel Boone Herring, The Thirteenth Man; a Revelation of the Actual
Spiritual Work of Jesus (Holyoke, Mass.: The Elizabeth Towne Company, 1936);
and James Arthur Findlay, The Psychic Stream; or, The Source and Growth of the
Christian Faith (London: Psychic Press, 1939). Channeling Jesus has continued
down to the present; see, for example, George King, The Twelve Blessings: The
Cosmic Concept for the New Aquarian Age as given by the Master Jesus in His
Overshadowing of George King, revised edition (of 1958) (Hollywood, Calif.: Aetherius Society, 1974); James Morgan, Jesus and
Mastership: The Gospel According to Jesus of Nazareth as Dictated through James
Coyle Morgan (Tacoma, Wash.: Oakbridge University
Press, 1990); and The Wholly Bible, What I Intended; by Jesus, the Christed (North Bend, Wash.: HeartHouse
Publishers, 1995).
95. See Lew Wallace,
“How I Came to Write Ben-Hur,” The Esoteric: A
Magazine of Advanced and Practical Esoteric Thought (Boston) 10 (September
1896): 105-110.
96. A Woman, The
Spirit of the New Testament; or, The Revelation of the Mission of Christ (New
York: Alliance Publishing Company, 1885). For an example of the advertisement,
see the back matter in Mind (April 1899).
97. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1909), 22.
98. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1909), 23.
99. Examples included
Allan Putnam, Bible Marvel Workers, and the Power Which Helped or Made Them
Perform Mighty Works, and Utter Inspired Words: Together with Some Personal
Traits and Characteristics of Prophets, Apostles, and Jesus; or, New Readings
of “the Miracles” (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1873), Moses Hull, Jesus and the
Mediums (Chicago: The Author, 1890), and James M. Peebles, Seers of the Ages:
Embracing Spiritualism, Past
and Present Doctrines Stated and Moral Tendencies Defined (Boston: William
White and Company, 1868).
100. She is quoting
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1964), chapter 7, verses 25-28.
101. See the remarks
of his associate L. H. Worthington in The Aquarian New Age Magazine (September
1911): 313.
102. “The Visions of
Levi, the Seer and Teacher; Collated from the Book of the Empire by Mrs. A. D.
Patrick, Who Had Known Him for Thirty-five Years,” The Aquarian New Age
Magazine (September 1911): 306.
103. Katherine
Tingley, The Voice of the Soul (Point Loma: Woman’s International Theosophical
League, 1928), chapter 1.
104. Harriette
Augusta Curtiss and F. Homer Curtiss, The Message of Aquaria; the Significance
and Mission of the Aquarian Age (San Francisco: Curtiss Philosophic Book
Company, 1921), viii, 23-34, and 73-83.
105. Charles Francis Haanel, The Master Key (St. Louis: Inland Printery, 1917); Haanel’s book followed on the heels of another book, by the
same name, by Lauron William De Laurence (Chicago: De
Laurence, Scott & Company, 1914), a similar New Thought exposition.
106. William Walker
Atkinson, The Mastery of Being; A Study of the Ultimate Principle of Reality,
and the Application Thereof (Holyoke, Mass.: The Elizabeth Towne Company,
1911). Perhaps his most popular book was the multi-edition Thought-Force in
Business and Everyday Life; Being a Series of Lessons in Personal Magnetism,
Psychic Influence, Thought-Force Concentration, Will Power and Practical Mental
Science (New York: Psychic Research Company, 1901).
107. So he signs
himself, as the author of the poem “Illumination,” at the beginning of Dowling,
Complete Course in Biopneuma.
108. Dowling,
Complete Course in Biopneuma, 56.
109. See, for
example, “The Aquarian Commonwealth,” The New Age Magazine (Boston) (September
1909): 701-704.
110. Pages 7-8 and 10
of manuscript in possession of the author, an old carbon copy of 18 pages,
single-spaced, undated, but by “Dr. Levi Dowling” and mentioning events in
California.
111. In the January
1909 issue of The New Age, Fairfield reviewed The Aquarian Gospel. In The
New Age (June 1909): 606, he reports himself as an “agent for the Gospel” of
the Aquarian Brotherhood and in May as in charge of a “Center for the North
Atlantic Council,” 576. By the June 1910 issue, The New Age was entirely filled
with Levi’s unsigned musings. Immediately afterwards, the journal relocated to
Los Angeles and its name was changed to The Aquarian New Age Magazine. It
continued through the September 1911 issue.
112 Fairfield would
turn his own hand to “speculative fiction” with a utopian and spiritualist
premise (and resembling Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward); see his Story of
the City of Works; a Community of Peace and Plenty, Where Every Man is His Own
Policeman, a New Order of Government, Anti-Socialistic, Free Street Cars and
Telephones, No Middlemen, No Capitalist Class, All Profit Accrues to Labor,
Farm and City Life Conjoined (Boston, 1919).
113. Metaphysical
Queries; answered by W. J. Colville, in his classes on mental healing, held in
Boston, Mass., during the season of 1885-86, reported and compiled by Miss S.
C. Clark. Sixth edition (Cambridgeport, Mass., 1898),
6.
114. See, for
example, Peebles’ consultations with Larkin, as reported in Peebles’ Spirit
Mates—Their Origin and Destiny, Sex-Life, Marriage, Divorce . . . also, a
Symposium by Forty Noted Writers, Spirit Mates—Their Pre-Existence, Earth
Pilgrimages, Reunions in Spirit-life (Battle Creek, Mich.: Peebles’ Publishing
Company, 1909).
115. Lyon Sprague de
Camp, Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature
(New York: Gnome Press, 1954), 71-72.
116. Frederick
Spencer Oliver, A Dweller on Two Planets; or, the Dividing of the Way, by Phylos the Thibetan (Los Angeles:
Mary Elizabeth Manly-Oliver, 1905). Professor Larkin’s perhaps apocryphal
expedition to Mount Shasta with his exotic spyglass was detailed in an article
by Edward Lanser, “A People of Mystery: Are They
Remnants of a Lost Race? Do They Possess a Fabulous Gold Treasure?” in the
Sunday magazine of the Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1932, reprinted in Lewis
Spence, The Problem of Lemuria: The Sunken Continent of the Pacific (London:
Mayflower Press, 1933); see bibliographic studies on material at the College of
the Siskiyous Library at <http://www.siskiyous.edu/shasta/bib/B16.htm>
117. For a similar
mythical ceremony of occult initiation, see Emma Hardinge
Britten, ed. Ghost Land; or, Researches into the Mysteries of Occult Spiritism;
Being a Series of Autobiographical Papers, with Extracts from the Records of
Magical Séances, Etc. Etc. Translated and Edited by Emma Hardinge
Britten (Boston: William Britten, 1876), 345-366, hearkening back as far back
as the 1617, Fama Fraternitatis;
or, a Discovery of the Fraternity of the Most Laudable Order of the Holy Cross,
yet another hoaxed, but highly influential and often believed, text, which
instigated the legend of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood.
118. Propaganda for
the children in the spiritualist cause, one might say, and for a belief in
fairies and the occult. Gaze’s Coppertop (New York: Harper & Brothers) and
Goblin’s Glen (Boston: Little, Brown & Company) were published in 1924; The
Merry Piper (Boston: Little, Brown & Company) was published in 1925.
119. See Charles
Samuel Braden, Spirits in Rebellion; the Rise and Development of New Thought
(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 187, 415-418, and 462.
120. Charles Clark
Pierce was the author of the self-published 1909 collection, Songs of Heaven
from Many Hearts, comp. by Rev. Charles Clark Pierce, D.D., which, from its
appearance, was a memorial souvenir volume of poems of consolation by such authors
as Whittier, Robert Browning, Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
Bulwer Lytton, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, compiled for the purpose of the
clients of the Pierce Brothers’ mortuary.
121. Dowling, The
Aquarian Gospel (1964), 10.
122. Levi H. Dowling,
personal deposition, August 31, 1907; Levi H. Dowling, Invalid Pension
Application, Case File 1364.603; Records relating to Pensions; Records of the
Office of the Secretary of the Interior, Record Group 48; NAB, Washington, D.C.
The Seer seems to have been inexplicably uncertain about his personal
characteristics—his eyes, he wrote, were “hazel, I guess,” and his hair color
was “brown” and then, on second thought, “nearly black.” He married Kate Mayo,
he wrote, “in 1868 I think.”
123. “Etiwanda Vinyards,” The Aquarian New Age Magazine (May 1910): back
matter.
124. The Aquarian New
Age Magazine (June 1911): 255.
125. W. W. Dowling, “Emigratus.”
126. Levi H. Dowling,
Death Certificate (South Pasadena, County of Los Angeles); Levi H. Dowling,
Widow Pension Application (Eva S. Dowling), Case File 1364.603; Records
relating to Pensions; Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior,
Record Group 48; NAB, Washington, D.C.
127. “In Memoriam:
Levi H. Dowling,” The Aquarian New Age (September 1911): 306.
128. The Aquarian New
Age (September 1911): 315.
129. 1920 Federal
Census for Los Angeles, California. Adelle S. Brown (b. November 22, 1864,
Iowa; d. March 2, 1941, Los Angeles) was the widow of Edward A. Brown, who had
been the editor of the Daily Press and the Daily Stockman of Nebraska City,
Otoe County, Nebraska; see the biographical essay on James C. Sellers in Hedge,
Past and Present of Mahaska County, Iowa.
130. Dowling,
Complete Course in Biopneuma (Los Angeles: E. S.
Dowling, 1912); Self-Culture (Los Angeles: E. S. Dowling, 1912); (Los Angeles:
E. S. Dowling, 1921) 2nd edition.
131. Declaration of
Leo W. Dowling, January 26, 1923; Levi H. Dowling, Widow Pension Application
(Eva S. Dowling), Case File 1364.603; Records relating to Pensions; Records of
the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, Record Group 48; NAB, Washington,
D.C. They were living at 126 North Vendome Street. For Eva’s obituary, see
“Religious Authority Is Called; Mrs. Eva S. Dowling Dies after Brief Illness;
Was Close Student,” The Los Angeles Daily Times, January 10, 1923. After his
mother passed away, Leo quit his job as an actuarial clerk and, by the time of
the 1926 Los Angeles City Directory, was in business as the publisher and
distributor of The Aquarian Gospel and “other books of Levi.”
132. Social Security
Death Index. Leo’s last residence was 91108 San Marino, Los Angeles.
133. Harve Spencer Lewis, The Mystical Life of Jesus (San Jose,
Cal.: Rosicrucian Press, 1929).
134. These have
included L’Evangile de Jésus
le Christ selon le Verseau
(French), Ewangelia Jezusa Chrystusa Ery Wodnika
(Polish), Il Vangelo Acquariano
di Gesù Cristo (Italian), Jeesuksen
Kristuksen Henkinen Evankeliumi (Indonesian), Das Wassermann Evangelium von Jesus dem Christus (German), El Evangelio de Acuario de Jesús el Cristo (Spanish), O Evangelho Aquariano de Jesus Cristo (Portuguese), Vodnárské
evangelium o je?íši chrestu (Czech), and Songyak Songso: pobyonggung sidae ui kidokkyo
pisa (Korean).
135. Elizabeth Clare
Prophet, The Lost Years of Jesus; on the Discoveries of Notovitch,
Abhedananda, Roerich, and Caspari
(Delhi: Book Faith India, 1994), reprint of the edition of Prophet’s Summit
University Press in Livingston, Montana. Nicholas Roerich quoted chapter 36 of
The Aquarian Gospel as “evidence” for Jesus in Tibet; see Roerich, Himalaya
(New York: Brentano’s, 1926), 153ff, and Altai-Himalaya (New York: F. A. Stokes
Company, 1929), 93-94.
136. Collected in
Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul,
Esoteric Philosophy, 79-82.
137. National
Astrological Society of the United States, Inc., Manual of the Magi of the
Universal Church of Aquarius (Manchester, N.H.: Prophecy, 1918).
138. Rudhyar was a friend of Alice Bailey. In 1969, he published
an exposition of the astrological details of the Age of Aquarius, Birth Patterns
for a New Humanity: A Study of Astrological Cycles Structuring the Present Worldcrisis (Wassenaar, Netherlands: Servire),
republished in 1972 as Astrological Timing; the Transition to the New Age (New
York: Harper & Row).
139. Marilyn
Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the
1980s (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1980).
140. Detailed in
Michael L. Mickler, “A History of the Unification
Church in the Bay Area,” M. A. Thesis, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley,
California, 1980.
141. See the website
of Michael F. O’Keeffe at <http://home.netcom.com/~mokeeffe/>; see also
<http://reluctant-messenger.com/aquarian_gospel.htm>.
142. Mel E. Winfield,
Aquarian Universology: The Book of Omni-Science, The
Book of Original Religion and the Sacred Forces and the Book of Polity
(Vancouver: Aquarian Universology Institute and
Association, 1977).
143. Noble Drew Ali,
The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America; Divinely Prepared by
the Noble Prophet Drew Ali (N.p.: n.p.,
1927)
144. Elijah Muhammad,
The True History of Jesus: Articles written by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad
(Last Messenger of Allah). Compiled and Published by Coalition for the
Remembrance of Elijah (Chicago: C. R. O. E., 1992).
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