Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 3, December 2003
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Versluis, Arthur. The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance. Oxford & New York: Oxford U P, 2001, 234 pages. ISBN 0-19-513887-2.
Reviewed by
Arthur Versluis, a leading authority on the link between esotericism and literature, is the author of Wisdom’s Book: The Sophia Anthology (2000), Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (1999), Gnosis and Literature (1996), Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity (1994), and American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (1993). In The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance, a ground breaking work that promises to open new vistas for scholarship in American literary and cultural studies, Versluis begins with a comprehensive overview of Western esotericism and its presence in North America. The first four chapters deal with the early European currents of esotericism, examining their many offshoots in colonial America and their deep influence on the American Renaissance. The remaining 11 chapters trace the influence of esotericism on the specific works of major 19th-century American writers, including Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson.
Building upon his earlier work, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, Versluis shed’s new light on 19th century American literature and offers original readings of many classical texts. He examines the spiritual currents of esotericism, which include alchemy, Hermeticism, Kabbala, Rosicrucianism, and Chritian theosophy, as well as their practical currents, such as necromancy, astrology, herbalism, and magic. The focus throughout the applied chapters of the book centers on literature rather than esoteric practices, for as Versluis emphasizes, “what strikes one most about these authors of the American Renaissance is how not one of them delved into practical forms of Western esotericism, but rather almost without exceptions limited their contact with esoteric traditions to the realm of literature alone.” Not one to make unsupported claims, Versluis draws upon new historicism to examine the historical/spiritual contexts of American Renaissance writers, providing evidence from a wealth of sources too often overlooked by postmodernist critics.
Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a lesser known figure discussed by Versluis, argued that alchemy was not a pretended science for converting base metals into silver and gold, but rather symbolized the spiritual transformation of ordinary men and women. Hitchcock says that “Man was the subject of Alchemy, and that the object of the Art was the perfection, or at least the improvement, of Man,” with the terms silver, gold, sulphur, and lead referring to questions of nature, God, and man. Hitchcock’s esoteric topics can be found in the most unlikely places, as in the short stories, poetry, and non-fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. As Versluis shows, however, Poe draws upon the esoteric tradition for his own literary purposes, which are often skeptical. Baudelaire and others considered Poe to be a believer in mesmerism who was given to Swedenborgian thought. Poe, who concealed his sources, mocked the Swedenborgian view of afterlife and often undermined esoteric meanings in his fascination with the Gothic themes of death and decay. But as Versluis convincingly demonstrates, Poe’s poems and macabre stories were inspired by Western esotericism: “Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, alchemy, astrology, all are here, but never affirmed.”
Nathanial Hawthorne, on the other hand, seemed to have feared and mistrusted the esoteric. The alchemical symbolism of The Scarlet Letter ostensibly serves as a warning against alchemical interests, including herbalism. Hawthorne is original insofar that his fictions offer what Versluis calls a “literalized esotericism,” in which alchemy is regarded as an “illegitimate and vain search for earthly immortality.” Hawthorne held the esoteric tradition, which he often associates with horror, at “arm’s length,” using it mainly “to illustrate Christian themes.” Herman Melville, on the other hand, remains enigmatic in terms of esotericism, although his greatest affinity seems to have been with Gnosticism. As indicated by The Confidence Man, he had no fixed perspective on the esoteric, with Transcendentalism being implicated in the confidence game itself. If anything, Melville’s work as a whole in all its ambiguity manifests a “kind of jaundiced, heretical, anticosmic Gnosticism at its center.”
Unlike Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose work reflects his vast reading in both the European and Asian traditions, considered Hermeticism to be open to all like the sky. He uses direct, unambiguous language to reveal the truth that “nature is the symbol of spirit,” and to assert that “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” As Versluis puts it, he held that “Anyone can ponder this miracle of consciousness, and to do so is simply miraculous good fortune worthy of wonder.” Strongly influenced by Jacob Böhme, the German mystic, Emerson regarded language as the medium of consciousness. In Nature, he calls for a knowledge not only of man but also of God, and in “Prospects” he describes a new science, one based not solely on quantification but on a visionary wholeness, or, what Versluis describes as a “true Hermetic knowledge that encompasses and directs wisely all its various branches and technologies.”
Regarding Walt Whitman, Versluis disagrees with the analysis of David Kuebrich and the current fashion of reading Whitman in homosexual terms, showing instead how he represented “an antinomian, world-embracing mysticism” that he made uniquely American. Kuebrich argues that Whitman wanted to begin a new religion based on his work that would foster the spiritual development of his readers; Versluis qualifies this claim by arguing that Whitman’s new religion was not one of self-transcendence, as in European or Asian mysticism, but rather one of “self-worship or the infinite expansion of self.” He rightly sees Whitman’s amorousness in Leaves of Grass as omnisexual rather than homosexual. In a reading of “I Am He That Aches With Love,” he shows that the universalizing of sex to encompass nature is “Adamic,” “an almost shamanic reunion with nature at the dawn of time, sharing with the orgiastic rites of the Greek mysteries what Eliade called the primal characteristic of religions, the breaking through of timelessness into time, the reconnection with origins.” In his “Children of Adam” poems, Whitman, “singing the phallus,” shows the spiritual power of sex, but as Versluis notes, the “mystic deliria” of sexuality at the basis of his new religion has many historical antecedents. Nevertheless, Whitman more than Emerson is the “poet-father of the New Age Movement, as also of the so-called sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the ‘Beat’ and ‘Hippie’ movements.”
Emily Dickinson, the last and perhaps most unexpected author studied here, may not have read much in the Western esoteric traditions, but as Versluis argues through a close reading of several poems, her poetry reveals what “we may call a spontaneously auto-initiatic spirituality.” Versluis refutes the claim by John Cody and others that Dickinson was mad. On the contrary, he clarifies the truth of her line, “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” arguing that Dickinson seems to have had spontaneous experiences of shamanic initiation or pure, transcendental consciousness. Without suggesting that Dickinson’s life and poetry conform to rigid stages, he sorts her poetry into four main categories: psychic dismemberment or dissolution, divine reconstitution or illumination, insight into the nature of death and invisible beings, and the ecstasy of spiritual illumination. Much of Dickinson poetry seems to be about death, but as Versluis suggests, death also symbolizes transcendence.
While
other critics may have pointed out the influences of esoteric traditions on the
American Renaissance, Versluis shows that this influence, as in the case of
Dickinson, is more extensive that most scholars have recognized.
In his concluding chapter, Versluis notes that while the early settlers
came to America in search of religious freedom, later generations fell away from
esoteric pursuits, often regarding them as superstitious nonsense as they became
increasingly Americanized and absorbed by industrialization and scientific
rationalism. As a result, the
American Renaissance can be seen as having transferred esoteric traditions from
daily life to literary consciousness—another example of the integration of
high art and popular culture. In The Esoteric Origins
of the American Renaissance, Arthur Versluis offers a fascinating study of
the intellectualization of the esoteric through literature—the “imagination
of esotericism.” Given the
intellectual inspiration of Western esoteric traditions, he calls for new
studies to fill the gaps in our understanding of how these traditions connect
with “religious traditions other than those of Judaism and Christianity.”