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WORK TITLE: Occult Paris
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1960
WEBSITE: http://www.tobiaschurton.com/
CITY: England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
https://www.innertraditions.com/author/tobias-churton/ * http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/New%20Dawn%20Interview%20With%20Tobias%20Churton.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 86058729
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Churton, Tobias, 1960-
Variant(s): Churton, Toby, 1960-
Found in: Why I am still an Anglican, 1986: t.p. (Tobias Churton) p.
11, etc. (Toby Churton; b. 1960 in Birmingham)
Churton, Tobias. The golden builders, 2005: CIP t.p.
(Tobias Churton) data sheet (Churton, Tobias Alex; b.
08-04-60)
Gnostic mysteries of sex, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Tobias Churton)
data view (is Britain's leading scholar of Western
Esotericism, a world authority on Gnosticism,
Hereticism, and Rosicrucianism. An Honorary Fellow of
Exeter University, where he is faculty lecturer in
Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, he holds a master's
degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and
is the author of many books, including Gnostic
Philosophy, The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians,
and Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin. He lives in
England)
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PERSONAL
Born August 4, 1960, in Birmingham, England.
EDUCATION:Brasenose College, Oxford University, Th.M.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Independent scholar, filmmaker, writer. Exeter University, England, appointed Honorary Fellow and Faculty Lecturer in Western Esotericism, 2005. Gnostics, four-part documentary series, Channel 4 (UK), 1987, writer. Freemasonry Today magazine, founding editor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Tobias Churton is, according to New Dawn Online writer Richard Smoley, “one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism.” One of England’s leading scholars in Western esotericism and movements such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Churton first came to public attention as the writer for a four-part television series in 1987, Gnostics, which was accompanied by a best-selling book of the same title. Thus, as the Churton–who holds a master’s degree in theology from Oxford University–notes on his Website, “Long before Dan Brown scored a hit with The Da Vinci Code, [I] introduced a popular audience to the authentic world of esoteric mysteries.”
Since that first work, Churton has gone on to write numerous books on esoteric topics and biographies of individuals including Elias Ashmole, Aleister Crowley, William Blake, and George Gurdjieff. Speaking with Smoley, Churton commented on the personal meaning of gnosis (from the Greek for “knowledge”): “Gnosis to me personally means receiving a gift–a gift that carries with it certain responsibilities. It’s quite a heavy thing to be lightened–or enlightened! There’s a lot we carry that prevents us from rising and growing in divine knowledge. For me, gnosis means a love of truth, a sensitivity to the magical aspects of life, and above all, a permanent struggle with material consciousness. … I think people are interested in Gnosticism these days because there is clearly a spiritual vacuum at the heart of our culture. Science and mass production have done much for the outside of the cup, but the inside is empty and cannot be sated by drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.”
Gnostic Philosphy and Gnostic Mysteries of Sex
In Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, Churton provides an overview of the history of Gnosticism from the days of early Christianity to the modern age. As the author shows, Gnosticism is a name given to leaders of spiritual groups who, in the second to fifth centuries A.D., deviated from the orthodox teachings of Christianity. The Gnostics believed in personal revelations and esoteric insights, and was ultimately suppressed by Christianity. However, as Churton demonstrates further in his book, this movement was not destroyed, but instead went underground to continue to influence esoteric thinking from the neo-Platonists, to magical traditions of the Middle Ages, the beliefs of the Sufis, Rosicrucians, and Freemasons. Gnostics believe that each individual is a potential God in the making and Gnostic teachings are meant to take the individual to that the higher condition. Churton also looks at a number of individuals who have been influenced by and have furthered Gnostic teachings, including Jacob Böhme, Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and Aleister Crowley. Writing in Library Journal, Brad Matthies felt that Churton “presents a compelling case that identifies Gnostic philosophy as a key influence to the Western esoteric tradition.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer also had praise for Gnostic Philosophy, commenting: “Seasoned with excerpts from original texts and replete with multicultural narratives, Churton will pique the interest not only of professional academics but anyone interested in the Gnostics through the centuries.”
With Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity, Churton again returns to the topic of Gnosticism, focusing this time on its sexual practices and doctrinal secrets. Here the author examines ancient texts including those of the second-century Barbelo Gnostics and their connection to the biblical Sophia, the bride of Solomon, otherwise known as the Wild Lady of Wisdom. Churton details the principles of sexual gnosis, or the union with God through sexual practices. A California Bookwatch contributor termed this a “wide-ranging survey of interest to a range of spiritual seekers and students.” Similarly, Clint Travis, writing in Reviewer’s Bookwatch, called Gnostic Mysteries of Sex “exceptionally well researched, written, organized and presented,” and a “complete course of instruction under one cover … [that] should be considered essential reading for anyone studying the Gnosticism movement.”
Aleister Crowley, Jerusalem!, and Deconstructing Gurdjieff
Churton has also written an impressive number of biographical works on those involved in esoteric movements and the occult. In Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic, the author offers a glimpse of a two-year period in the life of the Gnostic poet, painter, and magician, Aleister Crowley against the backdrop of Weimar-era Berlin. Arriving in 1930, “The Beast” as he was known to his friends, stayed until 1932, just before Hitler came to power. Here Churton looks at Crowley’s activities–including working as a spy for British intelligence–and his contacts with Freemasonry and German Theosophy. Online Rain Taxi reviewer Spencer Dew had praise for this work, commenting: “Weimar and what happens after become, in Churton’s hands, the darkness against which to highlight Crowley with stunning chiaroscuro. The Great Beast here stands as a model of true liberation in contrast to the analgesic divertissement of Weimar nightlife, and the standard bearer of individualism.”
The poet and mystic William Blake comes under the lens in Jerusalem! The Real Life of William Blake. Churton draws on the usual texts about Blake as well as unpublished letters, diaries, books, and pamphlets that shed new light on the man’s life. “Churton goes to great lengths to establish the context of Blake’s life,” observed a Spiral Nature Website contributor of this biography. “Instead of painting him as a pure rebel, we’re given a picture of Blake’s world. This lets us really understand where he rebelled, where he didn’t, and what fueled his spirit.” The contributor added: “If you seek to understand Blake as a man, an artist, a mystic, or something else, I’ve come across no better biography than Jerusalem!.” Magnus Ankarsjö, writing in the online Bars Review, also had praise, noting: “All things considered, Jerusalem! … is a thorough and well-researched study. … It ought to be consulted by all experts of William Blake and those historically inclined. Churton obviously demonstrates his expertise within a wide range of topics, which can be used to analyse Blake’s œuvre.”
Deconstructing Gurdjieff: Biography of a Spiritual Magician is yet another biography by Churton of a major esoteric figure. The author looks at Gurdjieff’s historical epoch, personal life, and works. A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Churton “makes full use of his fascination with the cultural underpinnings of European esoterica in this biography of George Gurdjieff, an enigmatic, mischievous, and challenging mystic and spiritual teacher.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2010, Ilene Cooper, review of The Missing Family of Jesus: An Inconvenient Truth–How the Church Erased Jesus’s Brothers and Sisters from History, p. 15.
California Bookwatch, December, 2009, review of The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians; February, 2013, review of The Mysteries of John the Baptist; December, 2015, review of Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity.
Library Journal, February 1, 2005, Brad Matthies, review of Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, p. 84.
Publishers Weekly, January 24, 2005, review of Gnostic Philosophy, p. 237; April 10, 2017, review of Deconstructing Gurdjieff: Biography of a Spiritual Magician, p. 68.
Reference & Research Book News, November, 2006, review of The Magus of Freemasonry: The Mysterious Life of Elias Ashmole, Scientist, Alchemist, and Founder of the Royal Society; August, 2012, review of Aleister Crowley: The Biography: Spiritual Revolutionary, Romantic Explorer, Occult Master and Spy.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, November, 2015, Clint Travis, review of Gnostic Mysteries Of Sex.
ONLINE
Bars Review, http://www.bars.ac.uk/ (July 18, 2017), Magnus Ankarsjö, review of Jerusalem! The Real Life of William Blake.
Crazz Files, http://crazzfiles.com/ (March 4, 2017), Richard Smoley, “Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: An Interview with Tobias Churton.”
Esoterica, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/ (June 12, 2017), Christopher McIntosh, review of Magus: The Invisible Life of Elias Ashmole.
Hedge Mason, http://hedgemason.blogspot.com/ (November 7, 2015), E.C. Ballard, “A Scholar Who Makes Historical Facts Palatable: Tobias Churton.”
New Dawn, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/ (May 23, 2017), Richard Smoley, author interview.
Rain Taxi, http://www.raintaxi.com/ (July 18, 2017), Spencer Dew, review of Alistair Crowley: The Beast in Berlin.
Secret Book Review, http://thesecretbookreview.com/ (November 16, 2016), review of Occult Paris: The Lost Magic of the Belle Époque.
Simon & Schuster Website, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (May 23, 2017), “Tobias Churton.”
Spiral Nature, http://www.spiralnature.com/ (January 25, 2016), review of Jerusalem!.
Tobias Churton Website, http://www.tobiaschurton.com (May 23, 2017).*
Saturday, November 7, 2015
A Scholar Who Makes Historical Facts Palatable: Tobias Churton
For some years, since the late 1980s when he released his book The Gnostics, I have repeatedly succumbed to the temptation to read the works of Tobias Churton. Being written for a popular audience, I have justified such self indulgence by asserting that it was to get a quick but relatively accurate overview of material that I wished to study at greater depth and at more leisure. Or else my excuse was that it was a less boring way to acquire a decent if generalized bibliography. Both excuses were true as far as they went, but they were excuses. Having studied at Oxford and being a lecturer at Exeter, his credentials more than pass the most critical academic muster. However, his writing style is eminently readable, which is a rarity among academics in this day and age, and that is what kept me coming back to his titles over the years. Put simply, the man is worth reading.
While not all of his books are specifically focused upon Freemasonry, half a dozen include Freemasonry in the title, and in a few more the subject of Freemasonry more than touched upon. One has to note that his books relating to Rosicrucianism are also by default related to the subject of the craft.
While none of the titles I will mention are new, and while I would hope that most who have read extensively on Freemasonry have at least read a few of his works, I've yet to see a Masonic blog deal with his works as a body. They are extensive enough that they deserve collective mention. They are also intelligent enough to deserve attention. In fact, that may well be why they haven't to date received the attention they deserve from Freemasons. Unlike writers who cater to members of the craft, Professor Churton does not mince words when it comes to the flaws of our institution. That's probably another reason I like his writing, and another reason why all Freemasons should read his works.
In The Mysteries of John the Baptist, he remarks that 'there are two principle groups of people for whom John the Baptist has significant spiritual meaning, though in the case of Freemasons, I should say a group for whom John ought to have spiritual meaning; Masons have mostly forgotten why they were once "St. John's men."' In Freemasonry: The Reality, he discusses what he views as the "real meanings in the now completely misinterpreted rituals and symbols of the craft."
But lest you decide that a scholarly critique should be ignored, keep in mind that as a Freemason and a scholar, he has license to offer that critique and the knowledge with which to back it up.
He also has the knowledge and vision to focus on the deeper truths and to describe them in remarkably clear ways, such as when in his work on Ashmole, The Magus of Freemasonry: The Mysterious Life of Elias Ashmole--Scientist, Alchemist, and Founder of the Royal Society, he cuts through the acquired ignorance of a few hundred years, and notes that "the adjective speculative generally referred to an occult activity, or one that involved mathematics or imaginative projection: that is, conjuring. We have all at some time or another "conjured up an image." The earliest English masonic catechism, in answer to the question "How high is your lodge?" gives the answer "It reaches to the heavens." The lodge was an imaginative projection, "conjured up" by its members to embody a center of the universe."
In The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians, Churton digs deep beneath the surface and uncovers so much that came before the 18th Degree Rose Croix, Before Pernety, even before the Fama Fraternitatis to look at and connect the works of Arab scholars such as Abu Ma'shar al-Balki to the winding thread of history which led to modern Rosicrucianism. In the process of examining the connection between Rabelais and the Fama, he provides a warning which some in the fraternity today should take seriously to heart. "Let us look to the gates of Rabelais's "Abbey of Thélème." They bear the words "Here enter not vile bigots."... No narrow-minded, pompous churl, no puffed-up hypocrite — especially of the corrupt church and universities — will ever enter the abbey of "Do what thou wilt." To them, the abbey will always be closed, or nonexistent."
His other works of interest to Freemasons include The Golden Builders, an essay entitled Aleister Crowley and the Yezidis which is included in the volume entitled Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, edited by Henrik Bogdan, and the book which first drew him popular attention, The Gnostics.
If you are serious about Masonic education, take my advice. Give Albert Mackey a pass and read Churton first.
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Tobias Churton (born 1960) is a British scholar of Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Gnosticism[1] and other esoteric movements. He is lecturer at Exeter University and author of Gnostic Philosophy, The Magus of Freemasonry, and Freemasonry and other works.[2]
Churton has made several television programmes including Gnostics, a 4-part drama-documentary series made for Channel 4 (UK) by Border TV and accompanying book broadcast in 1987 and repeated in 1990.[3][4] Churton's studies include critique of heresiologists perceptions on the role of women in these "unorthodox" Christian movements.[5]
He has also written on John T. Desaguliers,[6] Rosicrucianism.[7]
Churton's biography of Aleister Crowley was released in 2011.
QUOTE:
Long before Dan Brown scored a hit with The Da Vinci Code, Tobias Churton introduced a popular audience to the authentic world of esoteric mysteries.
A world authority on Gnostic spirituality, TOBIAS CHURTON is Britain’s leading scholar in the field of Western Esotericism. Holding a Masters degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, he was appointed Honorary Fellow and Faculty Lecturer in Western Esotericism at Exeter University in 2005. Tobias is also a filmmaker, poet, composer, and the author of many books, including The Gnostics, Gnostic Philosophy, The Babylon Gene and biographies of William Blake, Aleister Crowley and Elias Ashmole.
BIOGRAPHY
author photo
Born in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, in 1960, Tobias Churton first came to public notice with the 1987 Channel 4 production, GNOSTICS. The 4-part, drama-documentary went out at peak time on Saturday nights. It won the New York TV Festival Gold Award for best religious series. Churton’s Channel 4/Weidenfeld & Nicolson book accompanying the series was a best seller.
Long before Dan Brown scored a hit with The Da Vinci Code, Tobias Churton introduced a popular audience to the authentic world of esoteric mysteries. In the words of Dutch scholar, Gilles Quispel, the TV series would “change the minds of millions”. Churton presented the facts, not the fantasy. Swedish theologian Jan-Arvid Hellström hailed Churton as a “religious genius” while Amsterdam bibliophile and industrialist Joost Ritman enthusiastically greeted the appearance of a new “writing star”.
The success of The Gnostics allowed Tobias to concentrate his energies on his first love: writing. After years of voluminous reading, mystical experience and creative endeavour (including a decade’s work in British TV), Churton had much to express.
Album Session
Recording "A SPELL INSIDE" album with vocalist Merovée Churton
Busy considering his twenty-first book commission, Tobias Churton is today internationally recognized for his insightful books on esoteric, spiritual history, Art and philosophy. Accessible and scholarly, Churton’s works address believers and doubters alike and, remarkably, have stimulated spiritual experiences in some readers. He has successfully widened the appeal of so-called “esoteric” spirituality. Churton’s warm style and depth of knowledge have entertained many thousands of readers in the process. Tobias is also a filmmaker, lecturer, poet and musician. He has recently recorded his orchestrated score for his prospective movie William Blake: Love is on Fire!, while his musical about Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder, YOU, ME AND YESTERDAY, co-written with artist and songwriter John Myatt, was performed to great acclaim at the Lichfield Garrick Theatre in 2011. He has composed and recorded three CD albums of original songs in the last two years, currently filing them away as “projects pending”.
BOOKS AND FREEDOM
A Talk given to the young people of Lichfield Cathedral School in 2008
I gaze out on to a sea of faces and what do I see?
I see a great library in the making.
Yes, I can envision each one of you as a book. Can you imagine yourself as a book for a second or two? Imagine your arms as the endboards holding within them the pages of your life – your hearts, brains and bodies make the paper, and something is going to be written on those pages.
Your life.
A small part of that story is written already, but I see a lot of blank paper – waiting to be filled.
Some of you may become small books, some big books. There will be neat and tidy books, rough and ready books, useful books, beautiful books, wonderfully original books, and, sadly, copy-books.
Maybe there’s a truly great book or two out there.
But there’s no reason why you should not all make for excellent reading; it’s up to you.
I can only say this: DON’T GET LEFT ON THE SHELF.
Don’t allow yourself to become so boring – such a dull read – that no one wants to pick you up. Dear Books in the Making, please take notice. Like any book, it helps if you’ve got something interesting to say: something to communicate. The book does not have to be long; but it must be good. Your life will be written on its pages – and some clever people will be able to read through the lines and see behind the lies we tell ourselves and others. Pretty or handsome paper does not mean the reader will hold you in his or her hands for very long. You have got to have substance, meaning, sense, mystery, humour, and knowledge. There will be some pages in your own book you may want to tear out, but they are part of your book, part of what you are. We live to be read.
Yes, we are all, in a sense, books, waiting to be written and read. What is it that does the writing?
Some time over Christmas you will have heard, or will hear yet, these words:
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
What word? Was it Aard Vark, the first word in some school dictionaries? In the beginning was the Aard Vark. Doesn’t sound right. Some people think the ‘word’ that was in the beginning means the Bible, because the Bible is sometimes referred to as the ‘Word of God’. Well, ‘the Bible’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘books’ – so it would say: In the beginning were the books. Surely not! The paper must have come first! Something had to do the writing, and that could be done only when there was something to write on.
Has something got lost in translation? I’m afraid it has. When the Book of St John’s gospel was translated into English to turn a foreign book into an English book, they had a problem. The original Greek said en archē ho logos ēn. Which probably doesn’t mean much to you. It means: In the beginning was the LOGOS. The Roman Latin writers translated this word LOGOS as verbum, indicating the speech of God: speech as an expression of God’s mind. That is, God said: Let there be Light and there was Light.
So it might have been translated : In the beginning was the LET. God’s word was to allow, or initiate, or to start a creation – the letting go of Light. He let the light go – and it is still running! Energy equals mass times the speed of Light squared! You physicists will understand.
But this is not really the whole point. The Greek word LOGOS means – well, several things – that’s why it was hard to find the right ‘word’ in English!
LOGOS means Mind, or intelligence, and was translated into Hebrew by some Jewish writers as Wisdom. In the beginning was Mind. In the beginning was intelligence. In the beginning was wisdom. Now that sounds right, doesn’t it? You have to have a mind before you can do anything. The divine – that is incomprehensible and mysterious - MIND AT THE BEGINNING made the universe. Which means that the universe is an expression of God’s mind
QUOTE:
one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism.
Gnosis to me personally means receiving a gift – a gift that carries with it certain responsibilities. It’s quite a heavy thing to be lightened – or enlightened! There’s a lot we carry that prevents us from rising and growing in divine knowledge. For me, gnosis means a love of truth, a sensitivity to the magical aspects of life, and above all, a permanent struggle with material consciousness.
I think people are interested in Gnosticism these days because there is clearly a spiritual vacuum at the heart of our culture. Science and mass production have done much for the outside of the cup, but the inside is empty and cannot be sated by drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.
New Dawn Interview
With Tobias Churton
By Richard Smoley
Tobias Churton is one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism. He first became interested in the Gnostics while reading for a degree in theology at the University of Oxford in the 1970s.
Soon after leaving, he became interested in exploring these ideas for television. “I’d got it into my head that there had never been any religious television – only programmes about religion,” he later recalled. “I had written a paper on the subject which recommended a new kind of television for this most neglected area, something on the lines of television, a kind of programme which would enter into the very nature of the religious experience and not simply observe it.”
Churton got his opportunity in the mid-1980s, when he produced a series on the Gnostics for British television. To accompany his series, he wrote his first book, The Gnostics, a history of this elusive esoteric movement from early Christianity to modern manifestations in such figures as Giordano Bruno and William Blake, and even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
In the years since then, Churton has pursued and deepened his appreciation for the Western esoteric traditions. He was the Founder Editor of Freemasonry Today magazine, and during the last year has published two new books. The Golden Builders: Alchemists, Rosicrucians, and the First Freemasons explores the background of Masonry from its antecedents in the alchemical and Hermetic traditions of antiquity through its modern manifestations. His latest book, Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, casts an even wider net, tracing the Gnostic heritage from its roots in Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and the Essenes to the 20th century magus Aleister Crowley and manifestations of gnosis in pop culture. Churton currently makes his home in Britain
.
– Richard Smoley
How exactly would you describe gnosis? What does it mean to you?
How would I describe gnosis? I should like to describe gnosis as the experience of knowing or having intimacy with what we call God. God, the Bible tells us, wishes to be known. The word ‘Gnostic’ – one who has experienced gnosis – was first used as a nickname by those who opposed the whole idea or thought it was all too much for human beings to claim.
In a way, it really is the most enormous act of cheek to say that one has had experience of God! John’s Gospel for example says that “no man hath seen God at any time.” Hospitals for the mentally sick are full of people who claim the most extraordinary intimacy with powers beyond themselves. In the Gnostic tradition broadly, sanity or peace of mind is a fruit of gnosis. And ‘sanity’ means becoming clean, or ‘whole’ so there is a moral as well as a physical and psychological dimension to be considered. It might be argued that one has got to share in Christ to know God. But clearly there has been gnosis outside of the Christian tradition. So God obviously wants to be known by everyone!
Gnosis to me personally means receiving a gift – a gift that carries with it certain responsibilities. It’s quite a heavy thing to be lightened – or enlightened! There’s a lot we carry that prevents us from rising and growing in divine knowledge. For me, gnosis means a love of truth, a sensitivity to the magical aspects of life, and above all, a permanent struggle with material consciousness. People would rather see a person burnt than their own money burnt. That, we would say, is only natural. Politicians are adept at appealing to us on this level. Being gnostic does involve an unusual attitude to the natural order. The merely human in us does come under scrutiny – the light shows up the shadows and darkness in us, if you like. Obviously, no one likes being ‘shown up’, so we persecute the light-bringers and hide ourselves behind images of who we think we are. Gnosis is light and, if I may say so, “my burden is light.”
Is it possible to experience gnosis for oneself?
I obviously believe it is possible to experience gnosis for oneself. One could hardly experience it for other people! But the experience changes and one might not always be aware that one is experiencing gnosis. It is not a single state. It is not the same as ‘instant satori’. The universe itself is a projection of gnosis, if limited. I should say that if one has no experience of gnosis, one can hardly say one has been truly alive.
Could you explain a little about the Gnostic schools of antiquity, and what happened to them?
There were many Gnostic schools in late antiquity, as far as we can tell, surrounding some particular teacher, or the self-proclaimed followers of such a teacher. They had visions, dreams, statements, stances and orders of followers. Some were probably charlatans and some ‘the real thing’, as one would expect.
The orthodox Christian teachers who made it their business to denigrate and destroy the Gnostic movement in the Church always tended to isolate the teacher. Naming names was a big part of the anti-Gnostic propaganda. Thanks to their efforts, we have some dim records of men like Basilides, Carpocrates, Marcus, Marcion, Valentinus, Simon Magus, Dositheos. The orthodox apologists Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius and Tertullian, for example, made it their business to present these Gnostic teachers as demented quacks leading their followers into what Irenaeus called – in about 180 CE – “an abyss of madness and blasphemy.” I don’t know how seriously one can take their presentations of the evidence. It’s a bit like asking George Bush whether he prefers Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Revolver!
The Gnostics represented a kind of counter-culture and therefore exposed themselves to persecution and ridicule. You can’t imagine Gnostics wandering around in suits and ties with briefcases talking about real estate values! Some seem to have met in catacombs and private places. There were Gnostics in the first ever monasteries of Saint Pachom in the Thebaid of Egypt. Indeed, it is arguable that the first monastic movement was chiefly inspired by the desire for a place to get away from the world and experience God, i.e.: a Gnostic inspiration. Clearly the monasteries have always had a special role in promoting authentic spiritual life, if usually in secret. The walls had ears.
Sadly, the British and German Reformations, in attacking the monasteries in the name of the Protestant tendency, tended to throw the baby out with the bath-water, so the position of today’s Gnostic has some kinship with that of the early Christian Gnostics. Where do we go?, they might ask. San Francisco obviously didn’t work for everyone!
However, as we know from the story of the Nag Hammadi Library, even in the desert monasteries the Gnostics were not safe. Official visitations weeded out the offending literature and condemned it to the flames. Soon the offending Gnostics would meet the same fate. The Church hooked up with the State in the 4th century CE and the true Gnosis was exiled. Just one good reason to keep religion out of politics!
How did this Gnostic legacy survive after the end of the old Gnostic schools? What sort of heritage did they bestow on our civilisation?
Thanks be to God, the Gnostic experience and challenge did just survive the end of the Roman eagle’s flight. As one might expect, it survived on the fringes of the old Empire – in Syria, Iraq, Bulgaria, Turkestan and Bosnia – possibly Ireland. Even, for a while, in Mongolia and China. The flame was kept alive through untold numbers of military campaigns, massacres and violent conflicts of kings, sultans, demigods, semi-gods, dictators and emperors. It was carried into the bosom of the Islamic Empire after the 7th century in the form of Hermetic philosophy as an inspiration to science and philosophy – examining God in His works and wonders. The Sabians of Harran – who were not Muslims but Sabians and permitted by the Koran – their role is extraordinarily important in keeping the flame alive.
The appearance of Islamic mysticism – or rather, gnosis – among the so-called Sufis in the ninth and tenth centuries was highly significant. Magic, philosophy, science, mysticism – in short, human progress, were fostered by the enlightened circles of the Islamic world – always playing, it should be noted, a kind of shadow-boxing game with the hard-line authorities who cared as little for personal experience of the divine kingdom as did the Roman Church in the west.
The annihilation of the so-called ‘Cathars’ in southern France and northern Italy in the 13th century showed just how far the authorities were prepared to go in attempting to destroy spiritual existence that was not controlled by the status quo – the ever-present authorities we find in every age: the manifest powers of invisible spiritual opposition, as the Gnostic sees it. The Gnostics have been the light of the world and the leaven in the bread. A world without gnosis would be a very dark place indeed. The Gnostic greets the Sun, the ‘visible god’. He or she is first to see the dawn – first, you might say, in the garden of resurrection.
Some scholars suggest that the term “Gnostic” is too problematic to be valuable, and should be replaced by something else. Do you agree?
Some scholars, you say, suggest the term ‘Gnostic’ is too problematic and should be replaced. Well, I’m sorry for them. Gnosis itself will always be problematic in this world. The day it fits cosily into some scholar’s dictionary will be the day it has ceased to have power. No, ‘Gnostic’ – like ‘Christian’ – began as a nickname and like all such names should be borne with pride in a blind world. Yes, there are problems of definition. In 1966 there was a Colloquium of scholars at Messina intended to define the term ‘Gnosticism’, but it could not hold the term down. So I, without even the benefit of the Italian sun, cannot do it for you in this interview. The subject could fill a book. There is, however, another tack we can follow. That is, Why should it be defined? Definition – like a census – leads to control. Much better that the Gnostic tradition bears the unique quality of resisting definition! There is no doubt that the issue has been muddied by the activities of the Christian churches that dominate thinking in the West to a greater degree than we perhaps realise.
When I was a student at Oxford University for example, it took me a long time to realise the full implications of the fact that the Theology courses were run by church leaders chiefly for their benefit. Admittedly, it would have been odd if they had been run by industrial chemists! But the point was that ‘Gnosticism’ for example dealt with a universal experience in terms only of its presence or exile from the orthodox Christian Church. Theologising it denied its root in authentic experience. If we cannot trust our deepest most personal and absolutely authentic experience, what can we trust? Anyhow, it would have been better, I think, in retrospect, to study the entire field of Gnostic philosophy, religion and so on as a stream of its own that interpenetrates – necessarily – with all of the so-called ‘great religions’ of the world.
One of the interesting things about the orthodox Church – if we may for just a second see the plethora of conflicting bodies as a broad unity – is that it finds it can eventually accommodate everything – everything, that is, except gnosis! By this I mean that Darwin was more or less accepted by the Church of England by the time of World War One. Church leaders – by no means all, I know – made accommodations with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini and – let’s face it, the Church has pretty well made its peace with the world. Gnostic types do not find themselves in such a comfortable position with regard to the world as it is.
There are many people who are on the road to gnosis who perhaps do not realise it, who out of love of God and fear of God – and fear of themselves and others – find themselves wasting years in very unsatisfactory Church gatherings which – in the name of God – demand their sacrifice and allegiance. I’ve always found that it was the most selfish groups that preached self-abnegation.
But to get back to the point, what other tame word could replace the tattered glory and battered bread of the words Gnostic, Gnosis – even that scholars’ word ‘Gnosticism’? Mysticism is too misty. Magick has been bowdlerised and Disneyfied. Spirituality – well! It used to have meaning, now it means anything and probably nothing. It’s only a matter of time before car manufacturers come up with a car that meets your spiritual needs! I really don’t know what people mean when they talk about ‘spirituality’. It’s so vague as to be useful to every pseudo-religious charlatan and greedy politician in the world! When you say ‘Gnostic’, you always have to explain it. And when you do, people are always fascinated, whether they admit it or not! So that’s what we’ve got and we have to make the best of it. Gnosis means knowledge. Get it?
What do you make of current attempts to revive Gnosticism? What value do they have?
You ask about recent attempts to revive Gnosticism. This is a difficult question for people like myself who prefer authentic experiences with some real history attached. This is the scholar and antiquarian in me speaking. My path is not your path.
I don’t believe ‘Gnosticism’ – that word really refers to the Gnostic groups that came into conflict with Christian orthodox authorities in the first five centuries of the known life of the Christian Church – can or needs to be ‘revived’. The patient is not dead – though the world might well be. “The dead are not alive,” as the Gnostic gospel has it, “and the living will not die.” This is my personal favourite among the many great Gnostic logia. The dead are not alive and the living will not die. How true.
Besides, there are several great authentic Gnostic streams still going strong – though at least one of them is severely persecuted. The Yezidis of northern Iraq, western Iran, Georgian Armenia – that is to say Transcaucasian Kurdestan – have the most unbelievably inspiring tradition. There’s nothing to compare with it in the whole world. It is in a class of its own. The Yezidis have been persecuted cruelly by those in power about them because they are not regarded as “people of a book” as defined – there’s that word again! – in the Koran. They have long been accused of ‘Devil worship’, but that kind of cruelty has been common among oppressors since Jesus was accused of being a devil’s mouthpiece all those years ago. It’s the oldest trick in the book and works because people fear every type of evil – except their own.
Yezidis are today being attacked and killed in and around Mosul and denied police protection in Georgian Armenia. This is fact.
The second tradition I was thinking of was that of the Mandaeans of lower Iraq, who claim John the Baptist as a special prophet and have referred, interestingly, to ‘Christ the Roman’. As far as ‘Gnostics’ go, these people are undoubtedly the ‘real thing’.
When I made the TV series Gnostics in 1985-87, we wrote to the Iraqi Embassy in London, and they denied any knowledge of the Mandaeans. I was worried that they had been wiped out under the last miserable Iraqi regime, but to my delight, I now observe that they have survived – though still having to justify themselves, surrounded as they are by the various Islamic traditions. I think they qualify as Sabians in the Koran and are therefore protected. The wonderful Yezidis, on the other hand, have been persecuted for 1300 years and have no such protection.
An independent Kurdistan would probably offer these unique and admirable people a future that may otherwise be in jeopardy. This would be a very good thing to come out of the current mess in Iraq. The great powers have been screwing up the Middle East since the fall of the Roman Empire, so one may legitimately question whether the mad, bad game of sharing out the property of the vulnerable will end in our lifetimes. We must hope, have faith and love. Spare some love for the Yezidis – even though most people have probably never heard of them.
This, to answer your question, would be a good way to care for the Gnostic tradition – the tradition, I should say, of the authentic spirit of man, enslaved in, and by, the world. The love of money is the root of all evil. The way to revive Gnosis, is to be revived by Gnosis.
Why are people so interested in Gnosticism these days?
I think people are interested in Gnosticism these days because there is clearly a spiritual vacuum at the heart of our culture. Science and mass production have done much for the outside of the cup, but the inside is empty and cannot be sated by drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll. The promised liberation is a brief delight followed by a swift fall. Grace looks away and the victim, must, if he or she be lucky, look within.
Even in countries which have not been so saturated by big business as we have – where washing machines, central heating and personal stereos and computers might be very welcome – there is a now well-articulated complaint that with all the money and the “promise of freedom and liberty for all” comes a great threat.
The threat is to the life of the heart and the delicate, invisible life – the thousand links with God – which have kept people alive for centuries in the face of countless dangers and privations. I don’t wish to romanticise here, but one must ask, ‘Who needs the most help?’ The East or the West? Clearly both suffer from poverty – material poverty and spiritual poverty – and, of course there is plenty of material poverty in the West and doubtless spiritual poverty in the East. But can’t we help each other? And thereby help ourselves? But how do we do this?
Well, Jesus offers a clue: “First clean the inside of the cup.” Clean it? we may cry – most of us don’t even know it’s there! Where is this ‘inside of the cup’? Where is this kingdom of heaven (a kingdom, note, not a democracy!) that is supposed to be “nigh and within” us? Well, the example and uncompromising commitment to spiritual reality is such a strong and powerful river surging through the Gnostic tradition, that it would be extraordinary if our bone-dry world did not desire to take a dip in its life-giving waters!
Until we sort ourselves out, we can only export our own confusion.
Could you say a little bit about the Western esoteric traditions as a whole? What is their situation today? What do they have to contribute to our civilisation?
You have asked me to say a little bit about the Western esoteric traditions as a whole and what they may contribute to our civilisation. The second part of that question is simple. What they have to contribute is civilisation. What is civilisation? It is clearly not power and might or the ability to force change. Otherwise we must rank Attila the Hun and Chingiz Khan as leaders of civilisation! Civilisation really boils down to the ability of a range of people to live in a city, organise themselves and get on with each other without falling into chaos. That which promotes the life of the busy hive may be described as a civilising influence. Civilisation is not then an arbiter of truth but of what works well. However, wise men and women have tended – against the odds – to the ancient conviction that nothing works quite as well as the truth, and that a rotten branch – rotten with corruption – will not even support itself for very long – never mind the burden of civilisation. Truth is good.
When I think of Western civilisation with all its inequalities of ability and social status, its wide variety of racial and religious types, its sheer density of pulsating human existence, its vulnerability to natural forces, disease, despair, hysteria, false expectation, boredom and so on, I can’t help thinking that organisations like Freemasonry and discreet societies of personal development are important. While corrupting forces always aim to work within the carcass, the healing agents must also work within the fabric of the human hive – not in fearful secrecy but with a modesty and love that is suspicious of fame, vainglory and social attention. The cool breeze works well unseen. This is perennial wisdom. I think the best of the masonic tradition has contributed hugely to understanding of tolerance and barrier-breaking social idealism. Occasionally, we even find a spiritual insight occurring in some of the most stubborn mental material!
Whatever good men and women try to achieve with this floppy idiot called man, the sincere busy bee is always up against our biological and moral heritage. This inheritance is surely dark enough to make strong men and women weep and give ample reason to despair or take refuge in a cynical stoicism of the type that Gore Vidal, for example, exemplifies with such taste and class.
There is much to be said for contemporary Rosicrucian societies for introducing people to the world of imaginative spiritual development. Many find insight in the worlds of Theosophy, Thelema and Anthroposophy, for example. This is all well and good, as far as it goes, but human society can be corrosive – even destructive.
Human beings really aren’t very nice – unless they’re in some kind of love with one another – and even then... well! The divorce rates with all their sad tales of acrimony and greed testify to the fragility of oaths built on enthusiasm and a lottery win. The Psalmist was being simply realistic when he uttered the words: “None is righteous. No, not one.” Involving oneself in groups may stifle the creative and divine spirit. But aloneness can be hard, and loneliness is, as Jimi Hendrix sang, “a drag.” Perhaps we need to revive in some adapted way the concept of the monastery – not, may I stress, that sad alternative, the ‘commune’. The hippies were hip to everything but their own depravity. Peter Coyote and the Diggers would doubtless tell me I just never saw the real hippies. He would be right. Maybe I was one of them – and how often do we see ourselves?
I suppose in the life of a person, one will, as one puts one’s hand into the hand of God – as much as we may know of Him – for guidance, one will find oneself encountering all kinds of groups and people. No one way works for all people or all occasions. That is how it must be. Those who require absolute certainties will be prepared to believe anything. The One is always present, if unseen.
Experience shows that there are many hidden veins to the cosmic life of humanity and I – for one – am glad – and have reason to be glad – that they exist. Gnosis is, as I said earlier, a gift. One has to be in the right place to receive it. No organisation can do that for anyone. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth. Heed the Spirit above all – and keep the powder dry!
Could you talk a little bit about your own background, how you came to be interested in this area, and what meaning it has for you personally?
You ask about my background. I am an Englishman born in Birmingham – the English Midlands – in 1960, who grew up to believe that something was seriously ‘out of kilter’ in my own dear country and in the world at large. This was something I found in myself as I grew older and travelled about the busy world. I had no special financial or educational advantages, but my father – a railwayman by choice in his later years – said “Seek and ye shall find.” I loved the past and had great respect for the ancients. I was always suspicious of words like ‘modern’ and ‘new’. No one knows the future and if, as someone once said, “the future is a poor place to store our dreams,” then I should say that a dream stored is a dream over. King Arthur will sleep so long as we do.
I cannot remember when I first became interested in the authentic tradition of spiritual life. It seems to have always been with me. I suppose studying the Gnostics at Oxford in the late 70s made me realise that I was not alone, but there were always shadows and intimations of gnosis in books, films – especially old films (the new stuff is generally too cocksure, superficial and loud to have anything to say worth hearing) – and in music.
I have often tried to ‘get away’ from Gnosis, rather like Jonah sailing to sea to avoid Nineveh, but I keep coming back to port, whether I like it or not. Often, I don’t like it at all. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the cold belly of the whale. The world, however, needs this insight, even if for me it now seems an old story. Somehow, it comes alive afresh again with each telling. And I discover so many new aspects to it, each time I willingly return to its study. It makes us wise and makes fools of us. Gnosis means creation because we do what we know. Creation is the fiery dragon whose scolding breath burns away the void and leaves the golden tree. We pick its fruit and create nothing.
I was lucky (by modern standards) to have both parents and that both parents believed in the individual and believed in the mystery and magick of life, and that they were plain speaking, virtuous and down to earth as well as being receptive to higher influence. That was a gift too. Come to think of it – it’s all been a gift. I’ve done little to deserve such a theatre of sorrow and joy! There’s so much more to do and life is really both too long and too short. We’re here and we’d better make the best of it. Long may She reign over us.
Could you tell us about your recent books, The Golden Builders and Gnostic Philosophy? What are they about?
My books The Golden Builders and Gnostic Philosophy took me ten years to write and were continuations of a work begun in 1986 when I wrote my first book, The Gnostics, at the age of 25. You could say that the new books are the considered works of research and experience – an attempt to bring readers of the first book into deeper acquaintance with the extraordinary Gnostic tradition. I was very aware that some terrible books have appeared in the last 20 years which have exploited the whole subject area and confused people with a lot of journalistic twaddle and conspiracy tales. Some have inspired a recent best-selling novel that suggested Leonardo Da Vinci worked with a code that could be understood by an idiot demented by marijuana.
I wanted to put the record straight. The truth is stranger than fiction and a good deal more interesting. The trouble with fiction is that you can’t live on it; you always want more. Perhaps if you wanted to define the Truth, you might – with tongue in cheek – call it NON FICTION. There is NON FICTION in magick, Gnosis, mysticism and spiritual understanding – but then, I suppose, your readers know this already, or they would not be suffering this interview with a distant star.
Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times is available from New Dawn Book Service for $39.95 postpaid.
Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: An Interview with Tobias Churton
The Crazz FilesMarch 4, 2017
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By RICHARD SMOLEY
Tobias Churton is one of today’s most visible and prolific writers on the Western esoteric tradition. He first came to the attention of the public in the UK in 1987, with the release of a four-part television series called “Gnostics.”
Since then he has written nineteen books, includingGnostic Philosophy, The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians, and biographies of William Blake, the seventeenth-century British esotericist Elias Ashmole, and Aleister Crowley. He holds a master’s degree in theology from the University of Oxford and is an honorary fellow of the University of Exeter in the UK. His website is tobiaschurton.com.
Churton was featured in a New Dawn interview that I conducted in 2005 (see New Dawn 91). In November 2015, I conducted another e-mail interview with him, this time focusing on his recent book Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity.
RICHARD SMOLEY (RS): Your latest book is called Gnostic Mysteries of Sex. Could you start by briefly sketching out who the Gnostics were?
TOBIAS CHURTON (TC): Not all Gnostics called themselves by the name, but it is a name attached by orthodox Church leaders from the second to the fifth centuries CE to leaders and groups of spiritual deviants from orthodoxy who regarded their experience or “knowledge” (Greek: gnosis) as a superior aspect of salvation to that of other Christians. Since Gnostics prided themselves on originality, personal revelations, and esoteric insights, their views on any number of doctrines vary considerably, but they share some speculative doctrines in common.
The first and most fundamental is that the universe perceptible to the senses derives from a deformation of spiritual being into something unintended by the source of being. This unknowable “Father,” knowledge of whom Jesus brings to the gnostic, is called the “Depth” – as in an unfathomable ocean or abyss. The material universe results from a primal catastrophe: a fall from ideal into relative being. In this deformation drama, sparks of divine seed have become alienated in an unfamiliar realm and experience pain and longing. Insofar as the universe is imperfect, it is the work of a Demiurge or “fashioner,” working with relative, not absolute being. This being knows no higher than himself, like the classic egotist. Sometimes identified with the Elohim (“God” or “gods”) of Genesis, the creator of the world is regarded as the enemy of Man as a spiritually conceived being, opposed implacably to Man’s enlightenment. “Lord of this world,” the maker senses there’s something special about Man. Man has something within him. The master of matter is jealous of this spiritual substance and, while incapable of understanding it, wants it, and failing that, determines to keep fallen Man ignorant of it, lest Man escape from the world’s finite grip and become free.
The hylic or material being (the earthly Adam), belonging to the sensual universe, dies with it, for the material universe is constrained by time, unlike spirit, which is eternal.
The only means of escape is realisation of divine origin and destiny – gnosis. This means to be spiritually awake, able thereby to see beyond the universe and the Demiurge. To effect realisation, Christ descended to earth, appearing as mortal flesh, to summon the awakened spirits and raise the weak by awakening the dormant psyches of the soulful, but lost, children of divine Wisdom (Sophia). Gnostic writers present Jesus as an esoteric philosopher holding the keys to the door to eternity, for which the world rulers conspire to destroy him and those who follow him.
The Gnostics presented sometimes highly intelligent twists on every aspect of established Gospel teaching. From alleged secret sources, they created an esoteric religion of wide-ranging meaning and applicability to Man, seen as being in existential distress. Gnosis has nothing to say to those comfortable with and in the world as it is.
Moral teachings among Gnostics vary widely, for in their view state of mind is of vital significance and superior in essence to actual conduct. There were somewhat contradictory streams of interpretations in Gnostic thought and practice, and their enemies were not scrupulous in delineating greater or lesser factors, since all Gnostics were deemed a mortal threat to orthodox faith. Gnostics were, generally speaking, indifferent to religious authorities, and their radical individualism became intolerable to the growing monarchic episcopacy of the Catholic or Orthodox church.
Brilliant enemies of gnosis, such as Tertullian in the late second to mid-third centuries CE, simply dismissed Gnostics for trying to turn the “saving faith” into philosophy, that is, something conformable to Socratic reasoning. This is not altogether fair, since the Gentile Church had from its beginnings been required to express its doctrines to people who used philosophy to justify religious practices. One thinks of St Paul in the Areopagus (Acts 17:16–34). After all, the Jewish faith never explained why the universe was created in terms philosophically explicable to the existential condition of human life. God willed it and thought it good, whether men could see it, or like it, or not. It is also important to recognise that a dominant stream of gnosis served essentially as a magical religion that sought God in the lowest effects as well as the highest causes. That is to say, the divine spirit or pneuma was not only scattered in Man for some Gnostic schools, but hidden in the recesses of Nature: such insights vitalised alchemy. The divine seed has been sown everywhere, as gnostic alchemists, or “Hermetists,” maintained.
Contemporary Western esotericism and its historical antecedents are impossible to conceive of without the Gnostic phenomenon of late antiquity. Insofar as esotericism still thrives, so does gnosis, though mediated, as ever, in diverse forms, including philosophy of religion.
RS: One of the most fascinating figures in your book is Simon Magus. Could you say a little about him and his views on sex?
TC: He is fascinating, isn’t he? This Samaritan magician gets a nasty walk-on part in Acts, and contradictory accounts of him appear in patristic and sundry apocryphal works. He was obviously a major threat to the apostolic efforts of the primitive Church. Just why is not altogether clear, especially from Acts, where he tries to buy the power of the Holy Spirit. This is telling, in its way, of the style of the magician. He recognised the Holy Spirit experience as a psychic phenomenon that could be induced if you knew the trick: nothing new to a magician for whom what we today call hypnosis was a stock in trade.
Acts does not mention the crucial detail that Simon was accompanied by a whore, Helen (= the “torch”), whom he saved from a Tyrian brothel to be his consort. Groups of Gnostics worshipped them both, at least by the second century, and it became established in that century that he was the first Gnostic heretic and that all the Gnostic streams derived from him. As for his teachings, or rather alleged teachings (we have no first-century evidence for his specific doctrines), we have fascinating accounts in the second-century writings of the orthodox Christian Hippolytus.
I may be the first to have realised that while Hippolytus’s accounts of Simon’s doctrines try to trash them as absurd Greek philosophy, Hippolytus’s accounts nevertheless transmit – probably without Hippolytus even realising it – a fairly complete system of sexual magic, expressed in symbols. What Hippolytus misunderstood as philosophy was, I think, the basis for working magical practice.
Simonian doctrine takes the view that sex has magical potential: it could be “redeemed” as a means to make supermen and superwomen. Looking at Simon anew was one of the most exciting things I discovered when writing the new book, and it became a real mind-opener: shocking perhaps, but definitely revelatory. It is no surprise that Simon had a work attributed to him called The Great Revelation. More intriguingly, he seems to have had some important link to John the Baptist.
RS: A main theme in your book is the connection between sex and enlightenment. How did the Gnostics see this relation?
TC: This is too big a question to be adequately dealt with in a magazine interview; the answer represents the substance of the book. Very briefly, the Gnostic understanding of sex is informed by the Platonist view that in the eternal world, there is a unity of substance. The eternal world, or world of the aeons, provides the eternal “ideas” that are used to fashion a copy or reflection of it and to make it manifest under the finite conditions of time and space. Those eternal characteristics are deformed and dissolved in the process or drama of pure radiant spirit descending into “darkness.” In order to create, we must move from one, unity, to two: reflection and manifestation. All reflection involves a measure of distortion.
Therefore, to manifest the divine mind, as Divine Wisdom (in the form of Lady Sophia) precociously endeavours to do imperfectly in Gnostic systems (creating the Demiurge in the process), is to make distortion inevitable. The idea of harmonious syzygies of divine powers becomes unbalanced through the act of creation. When this principle is linked to the existence of men and women, we note that the perfect Man, like God, is, in Gnostic thought, androgynous, containing masculine and female characteristics in perfect harmony.
In the sphere of manifestation, this harmony is lost, and man and woman appear separate and at odds. But gnosis can initiate the return to harmony. Gnostics made much of the Genesis story that Adam’s rib became the basis for woman, especially since it was extracted when Adam was asleep. Sleep, to a Gnostic, means the cosmic and spiritual unconsciousness or amnesia characteristic of material consciousness. Man and woman become each other’s tempters in the world of nature. This antipathy is reflected in the first human progeny, Cain and Abel, who are immediately opposed – opposition leading to the primal murder.
Following the logic of androgyny as being the original human form in the spiritual sense, it followed that perfected sexual union could become a sacramental and spiritual pre-enactment of the ultimate destined unity of the Gnostic spirit, restored to the Pleroma or “Fullness” of the Godhead. The mutual infusion of male and female enacts and prefigures the apocatastasis, the restoration, or what Gnostics called “the healing of the passions of matter”: the return to the One.
Obviously such sexual communion was a dedicated spiritual act. Interpretations of this essential dynamic of Gnostic sex varied very widely, but one can see echoes in the later theories associated with Hindu and Buddhist Tantric traditions. Enlightenment comes from manifestation and glorification of the divine seed. This seed is identified in many Gnostic traditions as the pneuma or spirit. In some groups, this identification was taken perfectly literally, but it is a feature I found to be of relevance to all Gnostic traditions, whether libertine or ascetic (the twin poles of Gnostic sexual morality).
I think much that I have found will shock and perhaps awe those used to the contemporary “soft” exposition of Gnostic thought and practice. Not least is my discovery of the identity and origin of the Gnostic feminine archangel called Barbelo; it should change minds considerably, given time.
RS: The Gnostics seem to have encompassed a wide range of attitudes toward sensuality, ranging from complete asceticism to a kind of hedonism. What inspired these differing stances?
TC: The body is the locus both of union and disharmony. It is mortal and it contains, even imprisons, the immortal pneuma or spirit, which needs awakening. Since the body is mortal, what flesh does with itself may have no ultimate significance. Its role is strictly that of a vehicle of spirit.
The body is linked to the lower worlds, so the Gnostic can afford to despise it, or, alternatively, use it for the spirit’s purposes. Gnostics, especially the followers of Carpocrates and those within the Sethian tradition, tended to believe that the spirit was so superior to flesh that flesh could not damage it. According to Irenaeus, these Gnostics said that the spirit is like gold: it can be mixed with dung but come up shining. On the other hand, the orthodox teaching was that acts of the body tarnish the spirit, injure it, and so such acts are culpable; moral choices indicate spiritual cleanliness or the lack of it.
Gnostics of radical persuasion gave these kinds of teachings their own twists. Being radical in the face of the world for them meant turning the follies of matter and its creator on their heads: flouting decencies indicated that one had seen through the façade of conformity to the Demiurge’s spiritually destructive way, the false “God of the law.” The Law governed flesh, not spirit, for the governor of spirit is the heavenly Father, and the heavenly Father is not, in Gnostic thinking, the author of the Law. They took – or twisted – this idea from the liberty Paul offered to the redeemed Gentile: free of the Law through grace and, insofar as practicing spiritual love with conscience, a “law unto himself” (Romans 2: 10-15). So, in short, some Gnostics used sex as a weapon against the Demiurge and his order, and regarded such behaviour as heroic.
There also appears to have been a movement that gained force in the third century and flourished in the fourth and fifth centuries called encratism (from the Greek enkrateia, meaning self-restraint). Encratite streams of gnosis advocated strict asceticism, bodily continence, and the maintenance of the seed in purity, as ordinarily understood. Sethian Gnostics, on the other hand, believed that sexual substances were changed in status when they were treated as sacraments, as bread and wine could be changed into body and blood of Christ by elevated intention. The book deals with all these complexities and sorts them out, I think; many are put in context for the first time. The subject remains highly charged, as it is so fundamental, and the basic issues are deeply relevant to us today, as we attempt to find a universal morality with spiritual authority behind it.
RS: Catholic Christianity became increasingly puritanical over the centuries. It finally reached the point where it viewed all sex as bad to one degree or another. What inspired this trend?
TC: We find encratism in the monastic movement with the third-century Egyptian Pachomius and his many followers, who persist to this day. Encratism’s essential fear of sex became critical in the final formation period of Catholic doctrine and is very much still with us, though finding itself greatly opposed by powerful commercialisation of the libido, and radically changed social mores. Originally seen as a heresy (by Clement of Alexandria, for example), encratism eventually triumphed over much of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, creating a two-tier morality: one for clergy, monks, and nuns, and one for the rest who were to aspire to the renunciation characteristic of the classes of the saved.
Sex was the battleground. Curiously, Isaac Newton and others believed that encratism originated among Gnostic groups, on the basis of the ascetic wing of that “movement.” I rather think that encratism was a doctrine that insinuated itself through all the churches, including the Gnostic assemblies, eventually splitting and arguably dissipating the Gnostic ferment.
There appears to have been a mood that hit the Roman Empire in the second century, a waning of the lamp, so to speak, when many considered having been born into this world a liability. In such a mood, it was not difficult to take on the widespread Christian doctrine that sin entered the world through the sin of Adam, transmitted every time a child was born. It was not difficult to conclude that by abstaining from procreation and sex, one was effectively contributing to the saving of souls, since it was deemed that lust conditioned most, if not all, births. Some countered that birth gave the opportunity for Christ and his Church to show God’s saving love. But this was, and is, something of a sop to comfort ordinary nonclerical Church members, while providing continued employment for the “sexless” pastors of the procreating sheep.
RS: One part of your book I found particularly interesting was the discussion of the resurrection of the physical body as seen by different early Christian sects. To all appearances the apostle Paul specifically denied the idea of the physical resurrection, but a couple of centuries later it was a heresy not to believe in such a thing. Could you talk a bit about this process?
TC: Paul inspired many Gnostics with his words that flesh and blood cannot inherit eternal life (1 Corinthians 15:50). It gave them fuel for the thought that only the destiny of the divine pneuma, spirit, mattered. The body had no part in salvation. However, the major heresiologists (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria) considered it one of the Gnostics’ chief heresies that they regarded the body as being of no significance in salvation. So although the orthodox circles might have respected the writings of Paul, there was clearly a stronger tradition that the resurrection of the body, prefigured by Christ, was axiomatic, and supported in Old Testament prophecies such as that of the vivification of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel. It was much more important to them than I think Christians today can possibly comprehend.
As I say in the book, no one who accepts cremation really believes in the resurrection of the body, even though the Christian liturgy still explicitly refers to the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Now we know that cremation has only become acceptable recently in the Church’s history. Many modern Christians seem to share the priorities of the Gnostics nowadays where the body is concerned. That is, they don’t expect their flesh to be resurrected.
Gnostics regarded the orthodox picture of Jesus’s body on the cross as “false vision.” The true body of Christ was spiritual. Rather – referring to the blindness of those without gnosis – it was “their man” who “they” nailed to the cross; it was in fact “their man,” their idea and their awareness of what they thought man was, that was seen being crucified. The enemies of Christ put themselves to death. The “lord of this world” defeated himself, as St Paul taught, for the “lord of this world” did not know the ancient secret of the Demiurge’s ultimate destruction by the secret processes of divine redemption. As Gnostics saw it, the real man, the spiritual, “living Jesus” was in reality above all that, high above the place of the skull (“Golgotha”) or “earth,” and was laughing at “their” folly, not so much laughing at the men who could not see spiritual reality, the crucifiers and blind onlookers, but the Demiurge himself, he who had thought in his jealousy he could frustrate the essential work of Christ by getting the powers-that-be to nail up Jesus of Nazareth to “their cross.” As the Gnostic Gospel of Philip has it: Jesus came “crucifying the world.” You see, there is a great subtlety to Gnostic doctrine here, and missing it makes it very easy for unsubtle orthodox evangelical minds simply to say that Gnostics were wicked because they denied that the Saviour suffered on the cross, and that therefore there is no salvation in gnosis. It’s not that simple.
It is fascinating that today a key Gnostic doctrine has become accepted by most Christians in some way or other, even if they resort to Paul’s other doctrine of a “spiritual body” raised incorruptible. All this says a great deal. There may be more to the relation of “spirit” and “flesh” than we understand properly; certainly such debates used to enliven conferences of 1890s spiritualists in a manner we should definitely find strange today, but perhaps the wheel has turned and we must look again at what is meant by “body.”
RS: There are many discussions of the sexual techniques of the Gnostics, but most of them are rather vague. What were they doing sexually, and what did they think it would accomplish?
TC: One notable thing about my new book is that I have been able to locate actual techniques used by different Gnostic sodalities, and comparisons are made in technical detail between kundalini yoga, various Tantric practices, and the practices of Gnostic groups, especially Sethian, Simonian, and Valentinian groups. Understanding may have been vague before, Richard, but not so now. The Gnostics appear to have transmitted explicit practices of what, since Theodor Reuss’s time in the early twentieth century, esotericists have called “sexual magic” or “magick.” The Gnostic claims of some modern esoteric groups now have a greater basis in fact, I think.
RS: Some Gnostic sects were accused of having a sacrament in which sexual fluids such as semen and menstrual blood were consumed. And in fact many magical traditions attribute considerable power to these substances. Do you think there is any truth to this idea?
TC: Not for me to say. That is the belief of some persons. I describe what some Gnostics believed and practised and leave judgement to the reader’s interest and experience. I would simply offer these questions: Is the occult power of any substance in the substance itself, or in the way it is conceived? Or could it be that power lies in the relation between substance and mind? When pagans saw, or heard of, the Catholic eucharist, they could only conclude that eating the Saviour’s flesh and blood constituted gross cannibalism. The Gnostics of course had their own take on this, and it is revealed in the book.
RS: You discuss William Blake and a tradition of sexual magic that he may have been heir to. Could you talk a little about Blake and how he fits into this theme?
TC: I was very interested in the relation between Blake’s riddle in his epic poem Jerusalem (not the hymn called by that name):
I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall
And Andrew Marvell’s poem “To his Coy Mistress,” written in the 1650s, a century and half earlier. In both there are clues to a powerful sexual magic, or mysticism if you prefer, consistent with Blake’s belief that the New Age would be characterised by the refinement of sensual knowledge, by which he was undoubtedly informed by the idea of an explosively sexual gnosis, which nonetheless had to be approached in a guarded form lest it be debased by debased minds.
This is the perennial problem with esoteric sexual doctrines. They have been kept secret to try to prevent their perversion. Of course the enemy always thinks such matters are perverted, but that may only indicate the debasement of their own minds. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned.
RS: To get more personal: what do think the connection is between sex and spirituality? Can sex really be used to move toward enlightenment?
TC: At least in the fields enjoyed by readers of New Dawn, who doesn’t share this interest? We are sexual beings. We are, in essence, spiritual beings, if not actually, then at least in potentia. Sex is the means of creation. From one, two, from two: all. Spirituality raises the created to its highest potential, in theory.
However, since you ask about my personal outlook, I rather accept that morality is not as relative as some antinomian Gnostics averred, and to understand the Ten Commandments seems to me to be a first vital step on the road to understanding divine love. We may approach spiritual things best with purity of mind, though I don’t think that means quite the same thing as puritanism of mind. In a sexual context, the Golden Rule might incur some moral debasement: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Some folk want things done to themselves I think other folk might best avoid, or be protected from!
Put in stark terms as you have – “sex used to move toward enlightenment” – well, I don’t really understand what that means. If I want “enlightenment,” I may go to the source of illumination. “Sexual magic,” as I understand it, is a discipline that is not for the foolhardy, or for anyone in search of a quick rush. In some ways, it may seem a very long way indeed up the hill, and clearly for most people it is far too long, difficult, and treacherous a process. There are abundant risks. But if the alternative to accepting that possibility is the idea that sex is a really bad thing and we’d be holier and safer without it, or that it’s solely for procreation, well, I think that’s pretty mechanical, uninteresting, and joyless.
When we were young, was not sex an intimation of heavenly things? And did we not spoil it all as time went on and innocent romance turned to selfish lust? True marriage gives us a way back to the first intimation, so long as we understand what is really meant and implied by the word union. The Valentinian Gnostics really invented romantic, spiritual love, though as I show in the book, it was surprisingly different to what we might think when we hear those words today.
Man is all potential, and precious little realisation. Gnostics give us a clue to what might be, perhaps even to what ought to be. Can we learn anything from their convictions, as well as their alleged errors? I think we can.
Tobias Churton’s new book is Gnostic Mysteries of Sex.
Tobias Churton is Britain’s leading scholar of Western Esotericism, a world authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism. He is a filmmaker and the founding editor of the magazine Freemasonry Today. An Honorary Fellow of Exeter University, where he is faculty lecturer in Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, he holds a master’s degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and created the award-winning documentary series and accompanying book The Gnostics, as well as several other films on Christian doctrine, mysticism, and magical folklore. The author of many books, including Gnostic Philosophy, The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians, and Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin, he lives in England.
QUOTE:
wide-ranging survey of interest to a range of spiritual seekers and students.
Gnostic Mysteries of Sex
(Dec. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Gnostic Mysteries of Sex
Tobias Churton
Inner Traditions
One Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767
9781620554210, $19.95, www.innertraditions.com
Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity is a recommendation for occult collections and readers and focuses on a secret inner teaching passed down by certain societies--that of sexual gnosis, or a higher union with God through sex. Chapters depict sex practices as hidden in the Church's own major representatives, reconstruct the idea and presence of Gnostic spiritual-erotic experiences, and explore not just a history of Gnosticism and its major figures, but the mystery surrounding Sophia, known as the Wild Lady of Wisdom. The blend of history, sociology, spiritual and new age text and more makes this a wide-ranging survey of interest to a range of spiritual seekers and students.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gnostic Mysteries of Sex." California Bookwatch, Dec. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA439035291&it=r&asid=2348b0391924109e6e6e85b6a0e458cb. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A439035291
QUOTE:
makes full use of his fascination with the cultural underpinnings of European esoterica in this biography of George Gurdjieff, an enigmatic, mischievous, and challenging mystic and spiritual teacher.
Deconstructing Gurdjieff: Biography of a Spiritual Magician
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Deconstructing Gurdjieff: Biography of a Spiritual Magician
Tobias Churton. InnerTraditions, $29.95
(368p) ISBN 978-1-62055-638-2
Churton (Occult Paris) makes full use of his fascination with the cultural underpinnings of European esoterica in this biography of George Gurdjieff, an enigmatic, mischievous, and challenging mystic and spiritual teacher. Churton, critically, asks the question of whether Gurd j ieff is "a reliable narrator of his own life" and centers his study on GurdjiefFs semi-autobiographical texts, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, and Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am. " He describes Gurdjieff's corpus as "filled with pseudo-objectivity ... and arch pretentiousness" before going on to explain his readings of the books through the realities of history and the context of GurdjiefFs personal life, focusing particularly on his poorly understood early life. Churton brings in many contemporary sources and concurrent spiritual movements, even as Gurdjieff himself only acknowledges the ancients and some Sufi and Yezedi influences on his work. While explaining some of GurdjiefFs best-known concepts--the three brains of fallen man, the ray of creation, the enneagram, the sacred dances--Churton undercuts GurdjiefFs declarations of the originality of his ideas, instead focusing on his strength of personality and ability to exploit weakness. Churton's remarkable ability to make a coherent narrative out of disparate information while also weaving in other research interests, such as the influence of Aleister Crowley, makes this a valuable resource for those familiar with Gurdjieff's work, and it's easily readable for those coming fresh to the topic. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Deconstructing Gurdjieff: Biography of a Spiritual Magician." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 68+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490319318&it=r&asid=4592f49a9835f5ca46d1c3aa4683fbc3. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319318
The Mysteries of John the Baptist
(Feb. 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
The Mysteries of John the Baptist
Tobias Churton
Inner Traditions International, Ltd.
One Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767
9781594774744, $19.95, www.innertraditions.com
The Mysteries of John the Baptist is a recommended coverage for any collection interested in the mystery of John in Freemasonry and the historical Baptist as presented in the gospels and early histories. From John's links with the Gnostics to how Paul challenged John's following, this offers many eye-opening glimpses into his life, influences, and connections with Freemasons and the Knights Templar, as well as his lasting influence over the centuries following his death. The result is a powerful spiritual and religious survey recommended for Christian and new age holdings alike.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Mysteries of John the Baptist." California Bookwatch, Feb. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA319974016&it=r&asid=a6a356f0ed52d516587a0a0d173be972. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A319974016
The Missing Family of Jesus: An Inconvenient Truth--How the Church Erased Jesus's Brothers and Sisters from History
Ilene Cooper
107.6 (Nov. 15, 2010): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Missing Family of Jesus: An Inconvenient Truth-How the Church Erased Jesus's Brothers and Sisters from History.
By Tobias Churton.
Nov. 2010. 256p. Sterling/Watkins, $24.95 (9781907486029). 232.9.
So what did happen to those brothers and sisters of Jesus mentioned in the Bible? After being ignored or written around for centuries--deemed cousins or stepsiblings--the family of Jesus has received more scrutiny in recent years, especially after the frenzy following Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Alas, Churton's book is not quite so readable as Brown's thriller. Although he proposes in his introduction to write a "fairly straightforward guide," it's not too long before he's whacking away through the weeds of begats, lineage anomalies, and historians' suppositions. He relies overmuch on the work of Robert Eisenman, author of James, the Brother of Jesus (2002), whose writings are considered on the fringe of biblical research. Still, a jaunty tone escapes now and again from the morass of detail, and for those with an interest in the subject, there is much here to ponder, especially Churton's theories about the relationship of Paul to the Jerusalem church.--Ilene Cooper
Cooper, Ilene
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cooper, Ilene. "The Missing Family of Jesus: An Inconvenient Truth--How the Church Erased Jesus's Brothers and Sisters from History." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2010, p. 15. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA243277179&it=r&asid=a7576766f866baab1d25b60f1d487820. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A243277179
The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians
(Dec. 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians
Tobias Churton
Inner Traditions
One Park St., Rochester, VT 05767
9781594772559, $24.95 www.innertraditions.com
The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians provides a fine history of secret societies and presents the first definitive, in-depth survey of these societies from their German origins in 1603 to their philosophy and development, including coverage of individuals who influenced the movement. The Rosicrucians shaped the spiritual consciousness of both North and South America, and this documents their lives and contributions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians." California Bookwatch, Dec. 2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA214528475&it=r&asid=d70fdffd7d98c760ad89ec078668e324. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A214528475
QUOTE:
presents a compelling case that identifies Gnostic philosophy as a key influence to the Western esoteric tradition.
Churton, Tobias. Gnostic Philosophy: from Ancient Persia to Modern Times
Brad Matthies
130.2 (Feb. 1, 2005): p84.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
CHURTON, TOBIAS. Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times. Inner Traditions. Mar. 2005. c.480p. bibliog. index. ISBN 1-59477-035-2. pap. $18.95. REL
Churton, an award-winning filmmaker and expert on Christian mysticism (The Gnostics), traces the history of Gnosticism from early Christianity until the present day. From the onset of his book he lays out two ambitious goals: first, rather than focus on the Gnostic movement of early Christianity, he intends to provide the reader a comprehensive exegesis of Gnostic thinkers throughout history. Second, he intends to make his work presentable to both the scholar and the layperson. On the first count Churton succeeds by demonstrating how differing personalities like Aleister Crowley, Jacob Bohme, Carl Jung, John Lennon, and others can be linked to the Gnostic tradition. Moreover, he presents a compelling case that identifies Gnostic philosophy as a key influence to the Western esoteric tradition. However, despite these successes, the book's subject matter is beyond the scope of most well-read laypersons, and many would find it daunting to say the least. Recommended for upper level academic collections that specialize in early Christianity, religion, or philosophy.--Brad Matthies, Butler Univ. Lib., Indianapolis
Matthies, Brad
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Matthies, Brad. "Churton, Tobias. Gnostic Philosophy: from Ancient Persia to Modern Times." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2005, p. 84. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA128255348&it=r&asid=251b96a984abff7d6c1407989d6d1fb7. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A128255348
QUOTE:
Seasoned with excerpts from original texts and replete with multicultural narratives, Churton will pique the interest not only of professional academics but anyone interested in the Gnostics through the centuries.
Gnostic Philosophy: from Ancient Persia to Modern Times
252.4 (Jan. 24, 2005): p237.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
GNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY: From Ancient Persia to Modern limes TOBIAS CHURTON. Inner Traditions, $18.95 paper (480t)) ISBN 1-59477-035-2
More than a quarter century after his award-winning documentary and book The Gnostics, Churton returns to the academic love of his life. Exhaustive (but not exhausting) in scope and copiously annotated, his work will spice up virtually any reading list of Gnosticism and early Christianity. Positioning religious and philosophical questions alongside those of science and history, Churton clarifies that while Gnostic philosophy "represents a thoroughgoing inquiry into truth values," it does not adhere to the "literary monolith that we have become accustomed to think of when we use the term philosophy." With great effort--and resulting effect--he succeeds in writing each one of his 14 chapters as a world unto itself. From the Magi to the Freemasons, the Hermetics to Jimi Hendrix, Churton unfurls an evolving awareness of and quest for truth across the ages. If there is a criticism, it is only that the rich history of the Knights Templar and the ensuing incarnations of the Freemasons could have been balanced with equally detailed study of the Enlightened literati and modern scientists. Seasoned with excerpts from original texts and replete with multicultural narratives, Churton will pique the interest not only of professional academics but anyone interested in the Gnostics through the centuries. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gnostic Philosophy: from Ancient Persia to Modern Times." Publishers Weekly, 24 Jan. 2005, p. 237+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA128022632&it=r&asid=76b38ffe435982d9a4b80bb672e44854. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A128022632
The Magus of Freemasonry; the mysterious life of Elias Ashmole; scientist, alchemist, and founder of the Royal Society
21.4 (Nov. 2006):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
1594771227
The Magus of Freemasonry; the mysterious life of Elias Ashmole; scientist, alchemist, and founder of the Royal Society.
Churton, Tobias.
Inner Traditions International
2006
303 pages
$16.95
Paperback
CT788
Churton (Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and Western esotericism; Exeter U.) presents a biography of Englishman Ashmole (1617-92), who he says was considered a great man by his contemporaries in a world where science and magic were still handmaidens to religion and science, and was one of the last men of learning to enjoy that milieu before science broke away.
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Magus of Freemasonry; the mysterious life of Elias Ashmole; scientist, alchemist, and founder of the Royal Society." Reference & Research Book News, Nov. 2006. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA153755097&it=r&asid=fa760b5ca922beb2283f71018d002cc1. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A153755097
Aleister Crowley; the biography; spiritual revolutionary, romantic explorer, occult master--and spy
27.4 (Aug. 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
9781780280127
Aleister Crowley; the biography; spiritual revolutionary, romantic explorer, occult master--and spy.
Churton, Tobias.
Watkins Publishing
2011
474 pages
$29.95
Hardcover
PR6005
Churton (Western esotericism, Exeter University) draws on 20 years of his own research and access to previously unpublished photos, letters, Crowley's manuscripts, government records, and personal interviews with Crowley's descendants, in this detailed biography of mystic, author, and artist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Although Crowley has been notorious for his occult activities and his own accounts of his opiate addiction, this biography uncovers less-known aspects of his life, including his work as a British spy during WWI, his original philosophical ideas and psychological theories, and the harm done to his reputation by Mussolini's fascist government. Churton sees Crowley as a major thinker, on a par with Freud and Jung, whose main achievements were unifying Western and Eastern esoteric traditions and promoting spiritual attainment independent of organized religion. The book includes 16 pages of b&w photos, color art by Crowley and his circle, and book jackets. The book is distributed in the US by Sterling Publishing Co.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Aleister Crowley; the biography; spiritual revolutionary, romantic explorer, occult master--and spy." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2012. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA298705349&it=r&asid=1b6bd062f99f60cf80d9e3834cea2646. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A298705349
QUOTE:
Exceptionally well researched, written, organized and presented
complete course of instruction under one cover and should be considered essential reading for anyone studying the Gnosticism movement
Gnostic Mysteries Of Sex
Clint Travis
(Nov. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Gnostic Mysteries Of Sex
Tobias Churton
Inner Traditions International, Ltd.
One Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767
www. innertraditi ons.com
9781620554210, $19.95, 320pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: In "Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity", author Tobias Churton (Britain's leading scholar of Western Esotericism, a world authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism) takes the reader on an exploration of the sexual practices and doctrinal secrets of Gnosticism. "Gnostic Mysteries Of Sex" rReconstructs the lost world of Gnostic spiritual-erotic experience through examination of every surviving text written by heresiologists; investigates the sexual gnosis practices of the Barbelo Gnostics of the 2nd century and their connections to the Gnostic Aeon Sophia, the Wild Lady of Wisdom; and explains the vital significance of "the seed" as a sacrament in Gnostic practice.
Examining every surviving text written by heresiologists, accounts often ignored in favor of the famous Nag Hammadi Library, Tobias Churton reveals the most secret inner teaching passed down by initiated societies: the tradition of sexual gnosis--higher union with God through the sacrament of sex. Discovering actual sex practices hidden within the writings of the Church's authorities, he reconstructs the lost world of Gnostic spiritual-erotic experience as taught by initiated masters and mistresses and practiced by Christian couples seeking spiritual freedom from the world.
Critique: Exceptionally well researched, written, organized and presented, "Gnostic Mysteries of Sex: Sophia the Wild One and Erotic Christianity" is a complete course of instruction under one cover and should be considered essential reading for anyone studying the Gnosticism movement and practices of the first three centuries of Christianity. Impressively informed and informative, as well as thoroughly 'reader friendly' throughout, "Gnostic Mysteries Of Sex" is very highly recommended for personal, community, and academic library Metaphysical Studies, Gnostic Studies, and Ancient Christianity Studies reference collections and supplemental curriculum reading lists. It should be noted that "Gnostic Mysteries Of Sex" is also available in a Kindle edition ($9.99).
Clint Travis
Reviewer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Travis, Clint. "Gnostic Mysteries Of Sex." Reviewer's Bookwatch, Nov. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA435637970&it=r&asid=18c62114813612d3bc6a7371eb2eaf11. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A435637970
QUOTE:
Weimar and what happens after become, in Churton’s hands, the darkness against which to highlight Crowley with stunning chiaroscuro. The Great Beast here stands as a model of true liberation in contrast to the analgesic divertissement of Weimar nightlife, and the standard bearer of individualism
Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin
beastinberlinArt, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic
Tobias Churton
Inner Traditions ($29.95)
by Spencer Dew
In this volume exploring Aleister Crowley’s two years in Weimar Berlin, Tobias Churton offers us a glimpse of a society in denial, gnashing at any possible distraction. Keg, thigh, drum, dance, makeup, androgyny: all the usual Weimar quirks are here, but read anew. Half-silks—weekend prostitutes—teeter down the Potsdamer Platz in heels, and transvestites belly up to the bar of the Eldorado club, as we see in a photograph from 1928, though Churton shows us, too, that club’s “transformation into a Nazi headquarters, 1933,” with swastikas clotting up the windows. Meanwhile, Hitler has begun whipping crowds into states of ecstatic fury with a few symbols and some barked incantations. What better place and moment in which to examine that creative and adventurous Briton who proclaimed himself the Great Beast?
In Churton’s view, Crowley is almost an anti-Hitler—as thinker, as willed agent-in-the-world, and, coincidentally, as painter, to which profession he dedicated much of his German time. In this last respect, the author compares Crowley with Otto Dix; as the dictator strips “men of the power to think for themselves” (Crowley’s words; he says also: “There is no room for any star in [Hitler’s] system”), Dix forces “the viewer to face reality even while so many of his characters, drawn from real life, looked the other way.” Churton shows us that gallery owners felt Crowley “had an instinctive grasp of the essences of contemporary German art,” but this isn’t just a case of a thumb on the au courant; rather, he argues, it “had long been Crowley’s own perceptual and expressive apparatus: to see things brutally, so that he might not be led astray by the pied piper of bourgeois narcolepsy.”
Churton is a partisan, to be sure, but he never conceals this. The book, after all, is framed with the explicit goal of “spiritual and artistic enlightenment,” dedicated “to Spiritual Artists of sound and vision everywhere.” Churton’s interest in Crowley’s 1931 Berlin exhibition of paintings, likewise, is personal: “The author would very much like to spearhead a major ‘Porza 2’ exhibition, reassembling as many of Crowley’s Berlin exhibition works as have survived.” So Crowley gets the hagiographic spin, but as the hero of Churton’s tour of a titillating but schizophrenic Berlin, he also gets plenty of space to speak for himself, largely in words drawn from journals and letters. If Churton’s correlation of magick with New Physics or the “national characteristics” of Germans (they “suffer from a surfeit of the rational principle”) can slow things down, Crowley’s contributions almost always add zest. Whether illuminating historical connections (cards between 666 and Aldous Huxley, for instance) or the magus’s aesthetic worldview (“the subject of a picture is merely an excuse for arranging forms and colours”), offering satirical social critique (“It’s against Nature! Howled the germinating Hydra when he/she heard about the new sexual process of reproduction”) or prophetic aphorism (“every phenomenon ought to be an orgasm of its kind”), the Great Beast delivers.
The esoteric is on offer here in two senses. Crowley’s negotiations to claim for himself the role of the Theosophical Society’s “World Teacher” represents the esoteric in the sense of occult adepts, but Churton also indulges in esoteric details of history, making the book feel, at times, padded with undigested data. On the Leipzig Thelema Publishing Company, for instance, we get, first, the shareholders and their respective number of votes and percentages of stock, then the books published with their page numbers and dates. Churton seems to miss certain key references in Crowley’s thought, as well: a discussion of the “I Am” and the “Ineffable Name” must, in the context of a self-described Kabbalistic expert, at least reference the Jewish roots of these notions, while Churton roots them to the New Testament. Likewise, the array of reproductions here imparts the flavor of the Weimar moment, but readers will likely want to see a broader range of Crowley’s own work (Kenneth Anger’s 2002 documentary of a Crowley exhibit in London, “The Man We Want to Hang,” is essential viewing on this front).
The pleasures of the book outweigh such small complaints, however. Moreover, by situating his lionized Crowley in the heart of a moment so blind to dark foreshadowings, Churton responds to ongoing debates about the politics of Crowley and his Thelema religion, albeit from an unabashedly confessional point of view. By Churton we’re shown Crowley at his most audaciously admirable, as in a tremendous (and timely) bit explaining how, as “We are God’s poems . . . begotten in his love-madness,” we do not offend Him but rather provide “Proof that the created is a live and independent Being” when we blaspheme. “Therefore, of all acts, Blasphemy is the most pleasing to God,” Crowley writes. Against such examples of Crowley, Churton reminds us of how history rolled on in the years after Crowley’s bohemian experience of Berlin:
It is conveniently obscured that the Nazis not only persecuted and murdered Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, resistant church leaders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with mental illness, children with severe infirmities, Slavs, democrats, and any number of political opponents; they also persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered Freemasons, Anthroposophists, astrologers, magicians, neo-Gnostics, Rosicrucians, and followers of Aleister Crowley.
Weimar and what happens after become, in Churton’s hands, the darkness against which to highlight Crowley with stunning chiaroscuro. The Great Beast here stands as a model of true liberation in contrast to the analgesic divertissement of Weimar nightlife, and the standard bearer of individualism rather than what Churton presents as a triumph not of “will” but of a “collective movement”—one that drove its followers, through propaganda and placation, to acts of dehumanization far more wicked than anything in the writings of a notorious occultist.
QUOTE:
Churton goes to great lengths to establish the context of Blake’s life. Instead of painting him as a pure rebel, we’re given a picture of Blake’s world. This lets us really understand where he rebelled, where he didn’t, and what fueled his spirit.
Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake, by Tobias Churton
Watkins Publishing, 9781780287508, 358 pp., 2015
William Blake is an ephemeral figure, his works are couched in his own esoteric world, and his life is even more obscure. Even though I have an English degree, and though I spent most of a year of that degree on Blake, and having read everything he wrote at least once, the man and his work still eludes my understanding.
Biographies of the man often are very one-sided, some focus on his mystical leanings, others on his political activities, and most frame his life through his artwork and poetry as if that is all there is to a man. This is not just the fault of biographers. Like many fascinating people, no one decided to write down much of Blake’s life while he was living it. So when he passed, and his life was put to writing it was often by critics or devoted admirers, either way the balance of truth was lost. As Churton puts it:
[A] Blake biography tends to leave you confused as to just where you are in the narrative. Years pass by unnoticed, historical context vanishes, critical comments about paintings or poems get mixed up with disparate quotations as if ‘Blake’ held the same ideas at all times throughout his life, the biography cherry picking the ones that suit the narrative, even where anachronistic.1
This is where Churton comes in, drawing on all the standard sources of Blake’s life, as well as William Blake’s Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision,2 and some never-before-published records such as letters, diaries, pamphlets, and books, which he had the great boon of inheriting. Along with great sources, Churton goes to great lengths to establish the context of Blake’s life. Instead of painting him as a pure rebel, we’re given a picture of Blake’s world. This lets us really understand where he rebelled, where he didn’t, and what fueled his spirit.
Churton begins not with Blake’s birth, nor an introduction of his family, but his death. Or perhaps better to say, the various accounts of his death. Did Blake die peacefully in his sleep? Was a painting of his wife the last thing he ever did? Did Blake spend his dying hours singing songs and describing to those present (was it just his wife, or were friends there?) the visions he had of heaven. Even the date of Blake’s death is wrong in some of these accounts. From the beginning we can see the confusion regarding Blake’s biography, and are introduced to the process of how Churton will investigate the truth. From both a historian’s perspective, and a reader’s, Churton’s process is a great thing to watch. Rather than providing a “finished” biography filled with facts and dates, we’re led through the evidence, where it conflicts and where it is missing, and we can watch as Churton illustrates potential meanings, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Essentially this book is not just a biography of Blake, but the crafting of such a biography, and I think Blake would appreciate seeing the crafting as much as the product.
We’re given a balanced view of Blake’s life, and while it is obvious Churton is a fan of Blake, he is not unwilling to point out the flaws in the man, or his work. An illustrative sample:
After that appallingly punctuated, bared introduction, we head downhill fast, to the point where the thought occurs: “You want to be a satirist, Mr. Blake? Don’t give up the day job.”3
While my main interest in Blake is due to his poetry and mysticism, this book covered so much more: details of his family life, his health, problems with Blake’s career and education, even the specifics on where Blake lived in the city. Now this might sound like it could be dry and dull, but it is far from it. In fact the prose of the book is actually compelling, something I never thought I’d say about a biography. A compelling and active sample from the introduction of the text:
If we ascend a flight of stairs, bounded by graceful Queen Anne balustrades and wainscoting to the first landing of No. 3 Found Court, we shall see two doors, lit by a window overlooking the backyard. The door on the left gives entry to the back room where Blake works, his wife cooks, and the loving couple sleeps.4
Also, no book on Blake would be complete without a collection of his artwork, and Churton, of course, obliges. Pictures of Blake’s illuminated poetry, sketches he had done (or sketches done of him), as well as photos of his grave are included with the book. There is nothing very new or different in the images included, but if you’re not familiar with Blake’s work it will give you a better sense.
If you seek to understand Blake as a man, an artist, a mystic, or something else, I’ve come across no better biography than Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake I cannot recommend this book more highly for those wishing to understand the wild genius that is William Blake.
Footnotes:
p. 27 [↩]
See our review of William Blake’s Sexual Path to Spirit Vision. [↩]
p. 111 [↩]
p. 3 [↩]
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OCCULT PARIS: The Lost Magic of the Belle Epoque by Tobias Churton
November 17, 2016 no comments 717 Paris, Pop Occult, Rosicrucian
OCCULT PARIS: The Lost Magic of the Belle Epoque by Tobias Churton (2016, Inner Traditions)
occult-paris
Occult Paris by Tobias Churton is a masterful study of the issues and people in the art world of Paris around the turn of the last century. The mystical component is almost an afterthought as Churton has a fascination for some people that is hard to describe. You don’t need a degree in French literature to understand this book, but it might help.
The Belle Epoque (French: beautiful era) was a period from the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) to the start of World War I (1914). This is the period the book covers with great detail. As the title says, it’s concerned with the area of Paris in particular and France in general. Churton quotes frequently in translation from many of the great writers and artists from this time period. I hadn’t heard of many before, with the exception of the great composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Debussy, I found out, was influenced by many of the occult thinkers of this era.
The book focuses on Joséphin Péladan and Papus, both writers and leaders in their respective communities. Péladan was famous for his decadent books and appearing as a fop in ornate clothing. Papus, whose real name was Gerard Encausse, was an esoteric book publisher and founder of several mystic orders. Both of the names are prominent in this account. If you don’t know much about them, as I didn’t, you’ll have to do some catching-up while reading the book.
Occult Paris has one of the best descriptions of Martinism I have yet to find. Martinism was a strange mixture of Christianity and Freemasonry that originated in Europe in the eighteenth century. It never took off in the United States and remains a cypher on this side of the big pond. However, many of the characters featured in this book were very interested in Martinism and it influenced them greatly. Rosicrucian thought was very big among these people and there were many Rosy Cross orders founded in their wake. Papus was a one-man initiator who started or was involved with more mystic groups than most people would ever encounter in their lives.
My prime interest in this book was that it detailed the rise of the Gnostic Catholic Church, Église Gnostique (French: Gnostic Church). There are novels that need to use this group as an inspiration point. To make things brief, Jules Doinel, an archivist who worked for the French Government, developed a keen interst in the heretical Christian Cathars (or Albigensians) of France in the thirteenth century. The author recounts how he started an independent sacramental church out of nothing during a séance in the autumn of 1889:
“’Around 10 p.m., after prolonged mental prayer, the heavy table began to tremble under the group’s fingers, as if life pulsed through its grain. A vibrating sound was heard that impressed everybody. It appeared to chant: “Est Deus in nobis, agiante calescimus illo,” whereupon the medium made a sign to Lady Caithness who seized the wand of evocation—a pendulum—and cast it over the alphabetic frame. The frame contained letters above which the wand would rest. She spelled out the words: “Prepare yourselves. Soon the Bishops of the Albigensian Synod of Montségur are going to appear.” Then sparks flew about the oratory and the effigy of Mary came alive. A smile played on the Queen of Scots’s lips and her eyes lit up in the dark. Doinel screamed. The “enchanted” oratory was enveloped in a profound, pregnant silence. Doinel felt a soft hand on his lap. His hair stood on end. A countess and princess close by went pale, bundles of nerves as the table assumed vibrating life, beating a rhythm for ten long minutes. At the climax, a huge bang came from the table’s center and the wand again ran over the raised letters of the frame, “magically” spelling out the following: “Guilhabert de Castres, bishop of Montségur and the forty bishops of the high synod are here.” The circle was seized by an impulse to stand and the evocation commenced with the prayer of the Paraclete, then the salute to the gnostic bishops, then the solemn interrogation….
…“The Assembly will be composed of Parfaits and Parfaites. The Holy Spirit will send you those males and females that he must send you. We bring you joy and peace, the joy of the Spirit and the peace of the heart. Now, kneel, O you who are the first fruits of the Gnosis. We are going to bless you.”Doinel and the assembled were seized by “an understandable emotion”; tears streamed from their eyes as their hearts were gripped by an anguish at once voluptuous and gentle. Doinel felt fire in his veins. Kneeling down, the table again began quivering to a rhythm while an “aura” enveloped them like a whirlwind and a voice was heard: “That the Holy Pleroma blesses you. That the Aeons bless you. We bless you as we bless the martyrs of the Pyrenaean Tabor. Amen. Amen. Amen.’”
After these auspicious beginnings, the patriarch of this new church went around making bishops and priests.
Just about every Gnostic church these days, and there are more than two, date from this beginning. The whole concept of “wandering bishops” almost originates with this church. I say almost because they go back a few years to schisms in the Roman Catholic Churches in Europe. However, if it wasn’t for this one séance, none of these groups might exist. At least not in their current form.
Occult Paris is not an easy read. The author has academic credentials and the book assumes the reader is knowledgeable of his favorite topics. I learned a lot from it. I will admit that when the book ventured into territory I did know about, it added to my own database. For these reasons I give it a recommendation, just expect to use a reference to check up plenty of obscure French artists if you are not well versed in this part of French history.
QUOTE:
All things considered, Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake is a thorough and well-researched study. Even though it is somewhat dense and difficult, it ought to be consulted by all experts of William Blake and those historically inclined. Churton obviously demonstrates his expertise within a wide range of topics, which can be used to analyse Blake's œuvre.
Tobias Churton, Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake. London: Watkins, 2014. Pp. xxxix + 358. £25. ISBN9781780287508.
With Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake Tobias Churton, Britain's leading scholar of Western Esotericism, has added to the great pile of Blake biographies. The question then is: Do we really need another biography of William Blake? Having read Churton's book, the answer must be yes. Churton's strategy is quite different from that of other Blake biographers and therefore the work has great value of its own. Instead of just recapitulating the well-known earlier biographies, Churton finds his own method by reading the life of Blake through his works. The usual anecdotes are there, of course, but always related to the art and poetry with considerable sophistication and originality.
Churton agrees with previous Blake scholars that there is 'little reliable first-hand biographical information' about Blake, which is a frustration when investigating him (27). However, by closely examining accounts by Benjamin Heath Malkin, Henry Crabb Robinson, John Thomas Smith, Allan Cunningham, Frederick Tatham, Alexander Gilchrist and others, Churton adroitly manages to question the truth of Blake's life and of several anecdotes. Taking as a telling example the familiar story of Blake having seen angels in some trees at an early age, he shows that it is only a legend concocted by several sources, which Alexander Gilchrist picked up in his monumental Blake biography from 1865.
The book is much more than just a biography. It is a thorough scholarly investigation of Blake's œuvre that works well as an analytical text. It is ambitious in its scope and objective, and Churton shows great learning throughout the study. The sense of detail is extraordinary. Churton even draws upon his own family records. Archdeacon Ralph Churton was an almost exact contemporary of Blake's, and Churton therefore makes use of his ancestor's writings throughout the book in order to further illuminate Blake's life and works. Context is a key concern: as Churton argues, 'an historical understanding of William Blake is impossible without a good knowledge of the cultural forces prevailing in his lifetime' (xxxvi).
Churton is keen to acknowledge the achievements of other Blake scholars and shows an appropriately humble attitude towards these. For one thing, he makes clear the significance of the astonishing findings about the Moravian background of Blake's mother by Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard, and these inform Churton's biography throughout (xxxviii).
The biography surprisingly takes Blake's death as its starting-point. Hereby, Churton skilfully sets the scene by giving the general background to the year 1827, politically, socially and otherwise. By relating the particular circumstances of Blake's demise, Churton introduces readers to William Blake as a person. Then, in the next chapter he goes back to Blake's, by now more-or-less established, Moravian background, on his mother's side. It is Churton's view that Blake's mother had absorbed something of Count Zinzendorf's spiritual liberty. She taught Blake such basics as Moravian hymns, prayers and intimacies between mother and child. Churton expertly reads Blake's poetry in relation to fundamental Moravian ideas. He pertinently contextualises events in Blake's life with those of the Moravians, and with other world events that had a bearing on the Blake family.
The study then usefully takes us through Blake's career in twenty-four interesting and, for the most part, intriguing chapters. Almost all of Blake's works are dealt with at various lengths in illuminating discussions. Perhaps more space could have been devoted to the longer poems The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. But it should be said again, that the unfolding of Blake's life by way of his works is extremely constructive and a fuller picture of Blake emerges as a result.
Churton makes an important conclusion on the subject of Blake's religious orientation. After some debate, Churton infers in Chapter 7 that 'Blake shows no visible signs of being a radical Protestant in the political sense: all the evidence suggests a tolerant, ecumenical approach to Catholicism' (88). This is all in line with the latest findings of Blake criticism in the field, in works by, for instance, David Worrall, Susanne Sklar, and Schuchard and Davies, as already mentioned.
However, a negative aspect of the study is that Churton does not always provide references. This is a major drawback from a scholarly perspective and quite puzzling given Churton's ambitions for the book. More precise information would have been helpful to readers wishing to orientate themselves within Blake's voluminous writing.
All things considered, Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake is a thorough and well-researched study. Even though it is somewhat dense and difficult, it ought to be consulted by all experts of William Blake and those historically inclined. Churton obviously demonstrates his expertise within a wide range of topics, which can be used to analyse Blake's œuvre.
Magnus Ankarsjö, University of Buckingham
Tobias Churton: Magus: The Invisible Life of Elias Ashmole
(Lichfield, UK, Signal Publishing, 2004). ISBN 0-9543309-2-7.
Reviewed by Christopher McIntosh
Bremen, Germany
Admirers of Tobias Churton’s previous books, such as The Gnostics, The Golden Builders and The Gnostic Philosophy, will not be disappointed by his new biography of one of the most remarkable men England has ever produced: Elias Ashmole, founder member of the Royal Society, Windsor Herald, Astrologer to the King, Alchemist, Hermeticist, early Freemason, founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and a “mighty good man”, as his contemporary the antiquarian John Aubrey called him.
Surprisingly this towering figure has had relatively few books devoted to him, the main previous one being C.H. Josten’s massive edition of Ashmole’s writings, published in five volumes by Oxford University Press in 1966, which Churton builds on and acknowledges as “the masterpiece of Ashmole studies”. Perhaps this scarcity of biographies is due to the difficulties of encompassing such a many-faceted figure, “a Renaissance man”, as Churton puts it, “in an era that was slip-sliding away from the limitless ambition of the Renaissance philosophy of human dignity”. Another reason may be a tendency in certain circles to denigrate Ashmole’s contribution to learning. “Ashmole ‘gets in the way’ of a neat classification of eras of knowledge. He is a Renaissance magus-type yet still a rational mathematician and founder member of the Royal Society. He is historically ‘inconvenient’.”
It is clear from these quotes that the author passionately admires Ashmole and the world view that he represents. Churton also has certain things in common with his subject. Both went to Brasenose College, Oxford, and both grew up in Lichfield in Staffordshire – Ashmole was a generous patron of Lichfield’s great cathedral and managed to save part of its library from destruction by Cromwellian vandals during the Civil War. Churton believes that Ashmole has much to teach the present age, which he clearly regards as a decadent one and frequently says so in his eloquent, sometimes abrasive and often witty manner.
“Ashmole would have borne an informed contempt for the ‘modern’ or its twisted offspring, the ‘post-modern’. Rather, we are all part of a living tree whose roots feed us vital sap from the past. That a thing was past did not mean that it ceased to be; rather the present and the future were utterly contingent upon the life that flowed through all time. The folly of man was to forget the reality that all that has been is. ‘It’ is in our eyes, our ears, our homes, our dreams, our aspirations, our blood. The memory required jerking from time to time – that was a task for the antiquarian. Nothing is dead unless it has been killed.”
Readers who find Churton’s particular style refreshing, as I do, will also appreciate the unusual format and presentation of the book. The pages are unusually large for a book of this kind (27 by 21cm) with wide margins to accommodate the many black-and-white photographs and illustrations. As the author explains:
“This is a photo-biography of a type that I hope may become more common in the future. Many a biography suffers from very limited illustrative possibilities, often a result of publishing cots. Modern technology enables a more exciting marriage of text and image. If every picture tells a story, then the reader has the opportunity to enjoy double the value of the research and share in a portion of the author’s pleasure in following the trail of his subject: a process of visual archaeology.”
Churton traces Ashmole’s rise from saddler’s son in Lichfield to one England’s greatest luminaries in a way that brings him vividly to life and makes us share the author’s admiration for him. The book is written from a deep understanding of the Hermetic, alchemical, masonic and Rosicrucian traditions that are so important for a full understanding of Ashmole, who emerges as a seminal figure in many different areas. His alchemical magnum opus, the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, “would become Isaac Newton’s most heavily consulted alchemical text when he came to search for the single divine principle through a thorough working of alchemical experiments”. Churton also throws much light on Ashmole’s important role in the history of Freemasonry – he was one of the earliest recorded initiates into a lodge in a non-operative capacity (at Warrington, Lancashire in 1646). Then of course there is the achievement for which he is probably best known, namely his creation of the Ashmolean Museum, which was partly inspired, as Churton argues, by the notion of a repository of universal knowledge as described in the Rosicrucian writings and in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. As the inscription on Ashmole’s tomb in St. Mary’s church, Lambeth, says “so long as the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford endures he will never die”. With these words Tobias Churton concludes this valuable and thought-provoking study of Ashmole’s life.