an occult poetics, or, the secret rhetoric of religion

JOSHUA GUNN

An Occult Poetics, or,The Secret Rhetoric of Religion

ABSTRACT. Drawing from a number of "New Age" or occult texts,

the essay characterizes the rbetorical functions of tbe deliberate use

of difficult language in occult discourse as tbe outworking of an "occult

poetics." Tbe essay suggests that most contemporary New Age discourse

tends to follow a pattern illustrated in the Platonic dialogues: I) it

emphasizes the limits of language; and 2) it tends to stress the necessity

of new vocabularies or novel expressions for intuiting ineffable, spiritual

truths. The essay concludes by comparing occultism to the contemporary

academic debate over obscure theoretical terminology.

Yogibogeyhox in Dawson ehambers. /,si.s Unveiled. Their Pali bookwe tried to pawn. Grosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot hethrones an Aztee logos, funetioning on astral levels, their oversoul,mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe forehelaship, ringabout him. . . . Lotus ladies tend them i'the eyes,their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god, he thrones, Huddhunder plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls, shesouls, shoalsof souls. Engulfed with wailing creeeries, whirled, whirling, theybewail. (.James .loyee 157)

I n the ninth ehapter of James Joyee's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, a witty youngaesthete and aspiring poet seeking atonement (and eventually finding it in his

intelleetual father, Leopold Bloom), enters a room at the National Lihrary andeneounters a number of boisterous seholars. The seene is based on the mythicUlysses' navigation of a tumultuous sea amid the Seylla, a nasty, multiple-headed ereature, and the Gharybdis, a treaeherous whirlpool. The dangersfor Stephen, however, are the barbed remarks of the seholars, presentlyengaged in a diseussion of Goethe's novel, Wilhelm Meister. The danger of thispartieular navigation is not physieal, but rhetorieal (Blamires 71).

Determined to outwit them, Stephen attaeks the arguments, observations,and platitudes of the talkative seholars with sharp remarks, often at personalexpense. The mightiest head of the Seylla is "A. E." or George Russell, anavowed Neo-Platonist and Romantie who believes that art reveals a hidden.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29Spring 2004 I Volume 34 | Number 2

spiritual world behind the world of appearances (Blamires 72). On the basisof textual elues, it seems that Russell has embraced an occult cosmologyknown as Theosophy, a "New Age" system of beliefs revealed by a Russianspiritualist and psychic, H. P. Blavatsky, in the late nineteenth eentury(Gunn). Seeing Russell in the library, Stephen is reminded of the difficult,esoteric language of Theosophy. "Yogobogeybox," thinks Stephen in moekerj'of the Theosophist's voeabulary. "/.si.s Unveiled. Their Pali book we tried topawn," he continues thinking, signaling his distaste for Blavatsky's famous newage book, which was popular among the leamed elite during Joyee's lifetime."Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, the mahamahatma,"muses Stephen, likening Theosophieal language to a "whirled" and "whirling"Gharybdis, drowning true believers in "quintessential triviality." As if sufferingfrom the weight of Stephen's psychic disapproval, Russell retreats, "afraidI that he is| due at the Homestead" (Joyce 157).

In the fall of 1998 I attended the EGl^NKAR "World Wide Seminar"at the Minneapolis Gonvention Genter in Minnesota. EGKANKAR, a religionbased on "Soul Travel" and the "Aneient Science of Prophecy" known as theEGK-VIDYA, was founded by a Kentuckian named Paul Twitehell in 1965.'When 1 walked into the convention hall 1 was overwhelmed by the number ofpeople there. The size of this contemporary religious movement surprised mebecause it is premised on what other occultists or "metaphysicians" wouldterm astral projection—the notion that one's conscious soul or ego could leavethe body and travel to different geographic regions among multiple dimensionsor "planes of reality." Given the rise and fall of the transcendental meditationmovement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, 1 had assumed astral projeetionwas unfashionable. I was wrong. There exists a vast, little seen and little knownsuhcultural world of occult or "New Age" groups who elaim tcj travel mentally,projecting their astral bodies through the imagination and into the manyworlds beyond the here-and-now.

In numerous workshops and seminars over the course of three days, theEGKers (as they prefer to eall themselves) diseussed dreams and soul travel,past-life regression and hypnosis, reincarnation and karma, meditation, andother metaphysical fare. The highlight of the conference was the keynoteaddress that was delivered by the sole Living Spiritual Master, or Mahanta,appointed by the (presumably superhuman) EGK Masters. In one largeconvention hall, almost 3,500 people from around the world convened to hearSri Harold Klemp, a mild mannered, middle-aged man from Wisconsin. He hada eharming smile. He wore wide-framed spectacles and a suit that seemed justa tad too large for his small frame. He spoke in a monotonous, hypnotie tone,and despite a dry sense of humor and a general lack of dynamism, the audiencewas transfixed.

30 Rhetoric Society Quarterly

\\'Tiat was particularly interesting to me about Klemp's talk was not somuch his GEO-style presentation as it vvas his eonspieuous use of speeializedterms. Throughout the evening one heard of "karma," the spiritual and material"planes of existence" ("soul," "etheric," "mental," "causal," and "astral"), the"Golden Heart," the "EGK-VIDYA," the "SHARIYAT," and most important,"HU" (pronouneed "hue"), the divine name ofthe "SUGMAD" (God). Like themore familiar "OM," at one point during the keynote address all 3,500 membersof the audienee—excepting myself and my partner at the time—chanted "HU"simultaneously. The effect was jarring, unsettling, and strangely pleasing; thelarge, domed eonvention hall rumbled with a continuous, harmonic drone thatundoubtedly goose-pimpled many partieipants. It certainly goose-pimpledme.

1 did not think of these strange terms as comprising a quintessentialtriviality, as Stephen Dedalus put it; the sheer number of ehanting EGKerswas refutation enough of Stephen's thesis.- Rather, I think that the specializedvocabulary of EGKers, as much as the "yogibogeyboxes" and "mahamahatmas"of the imagined Theosophy of Ulysses, eomprises a particularly meaningfulpoetics for the true believer. Esoteric language allows the New Age adept and/or oecultist to express or perhaps do things that ordinary language does notseem to permit. As Burke noted of religion in general, for the New Age adeptor occultist, esoterie language reaches, with hope and promise, toward theineffable (Rhetoric of Religion, 7-42).

In this essay I examine the functions of "esoterie language" and describeNew Age and oceult diseourse as a creative linguistic practice or poetics(by using the term "poetics," I mean to evoke the dynamic, creative, andimaginative connotations of the term that are based on its rooting in the Greekpoietikos, "inventive," and poiein, "to make").-^ More specifically, in this essayI argue that oeeult diseourse—whieh I define broadly as the study of secretor previously seeret knowledge, which subsumes the revelations of so-ealled"New Age" literature—can be understood as the end-result of a dynamic,generative paradox or antinomy (a stark eontradiction between two principles)that structures and in some sense determines the invention of diffieult orstrange language. The antinomy is comprised of a seemingly contradictorystance among occultists and mystics that, on the one hand, regards spiritualtruths as ineffable, but on the other, assumes that there is much to say aboutineffability. In order to describe this antinomy and how it contributes to apoetics particular to occult. New Age, and similar religious texts, this essayis divided into two main sections. First, 1 describe the relationship betweenoccultism and the concept of the ineffable. Gontending with the concept ofineffability in occult diseourse gives one a better sense of how occult secretsare understood and discussed by occultists. Then, I show how occult notionsof ineffability are, ironically, wed to what I term the Platonie or "fixed view" of

Gunn I An Occult Poetics 31

language. With this background, I then move to the second main section of theessay, where I describe how the uneasy fit between ineffability and the fixedview of language ereates a produetive paradox or contradiction that animatesoceult texts in ways that are relatively independent of the intention or willof a given occult rhetor. I conclude by comparing the esoteric language ofoccultism to the theoretical jargon of academics.

Ineffability and the OccultEver>' night before retiring, relax on the bed and watch the goingto sleep process. . . . As the body relaxes and the mind settlesdown, and the change of viewpoint takes place which we call sleep,maintain the attitude of awareness for the upper levels. . . . Thenyou will eome into the state of beingness which is characterizedby the elarity of mental vision. . . . while the body is resting youawaken in the Atma Sarup (soul body) which is when we findourselves in eternity, the overcoming of death. This is the freedomwhich is spoken so mueh about in EGKANK/\R. (Paul Twitehell105)

Gentral to the use or ereation of strange voeabularies in oceult texts iswhat is sometimes referred to as "the problem of mystical speech" (Katz 3-4). The most famous artieulation of the problem eomes from Lao Tzu's TaoTe Ching: "The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchangingname" (47); or, to name the Tao is to fail to know the Tao. Expanded to theeentral problematic of all mystical speech, this notion ean be described inthe following way: true wisdom and spiritual knowledge cannot be expressedin human language, for it resides beyond or outside human signification."The supernatural is by definition the realm of the ineffable," wrote Burke,and "language by definition is not suited to the expression of the 'ineffable'"(Rhetoric of Religion 15). This common observation is premised on theidea that language cannot possibly characterize ultimate reality preciselybecause it is human, and humans are imperfeet. Occultists, as mueh as thetraditionally or "mainline" religious, respond to this problem in one of threeways: Eirst, occultists deny ever having direct access to ultimate reality andoften prescribe meditation and silence as a better tack. The silence strategyis most frequently characterized as "mysticism," and is a common route tospiritual enlightenment in Eastern religious traditions. Insofar as silence canbe characterized as the dialeetical counterpart of rhetoric, however, I will notconcem myself with this strategy except to acknowledge that it exists amongoccultists (as the absenee of speeeh, silence leaves the critic little to analyze).The second and third strategies, however, are important beeause ihey generatediseourse. The second strategy concerns the attempt to gain access to ultimatereality by transcending human language in some sort of imaginative dialectic.


The strategy here is to use language against itself in order to aseend to higherstates of awareness. I call this strategy "Platonic dialeetic" for reasons that Iwill detail shortly. The third strategy concerns an occultist's claim to havediseovered or been given a privileged, divine vocabulary for accessing, bymeans of ritual, chant, and so forth, spiritual realities. I eharaeterize this thirdstrategy as the artieulation ofa "pure language."

Piatonism for the Masses

I opened this essay with a passage from .loyee's Uly.sses because it is notmere happenstance that Stephen Dedalus engages the Neo-Platonist "A. E."as the multiheaded Scylla. The body of occult discourse is that of Plato, itsmany heads but so many variations of a eommon poetics or logie of invention.Because I believe that the strategies for contending with ineffability are n)otedin the Platonic dialogues, a diseussion of Plato's conception of ultimate realityvis-a-vis the ineffable is called for. A sketeh of the Platonic views on language,ineffability, and ultimate reality provides a useful foundation for analyzingoeeult discourse.

--. i Jn The Republic Plato has Soerates instruct readers that natural languageeannot diselose the Absolute, expressed to the enlightened soul as knowledgeof the immutable, abstraet, and etemal "Eorms." Plato's Socrates urges therigorous study of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics in orderto eondition the mind of the student of Truth to think beyond natural languageaad free him from the gross and illusorj^ world of appearances to whieh naturallanguage necessarily refers (Republic 235-50). Only after one has masteredformal abstraction is he ready to praetiee dialectics, which for Plato is theuse of dialogic speech as a means of mentally ascending toward ultimatereality and harmonizing with the etemal Eorms, eventually apprehending theultimate Form of The Good (Republic 250-55). Training the mind to think interms of form as opposed to content (e. g., the meaning of partieular words)enables the philosopher to "intuit" ultimate reality.

Key to Platonie dialectic is the power of speech, which Plato suggestsis more immediate and "real" than writing. In the Phaedrus dialogue I'latoexplains that dialeetic is neeessarily premised on the present-tense or "now"that is part of the spoken word. Once words are spoken, they are lost foreverand survive only as traces in the memories of those in dialogue. The fleetingquality of speech is important to Plato for two reasons. Eirst, the intangibilityof speech better mirrors the materiality of ultimate reality (which is abstract,not concrete). Second, speech is a preseneing phenomenon that features thequality of immediaey. Thus speech has a power of adaptation that writing doesnot. Plato seems to suggest that the immediacy of speech gives the individualthe ability to use words that mean something particular to the individual heis eonversing with, often in ways that ean better addresses his inner being.


Plato also argues that speech is better than writing because it can attend tothe contingencies of one's speaking situation (by clarifying misunderstandingsbetween participants of a dialogue, and so on) and thus can more directlyaddress the "soul of the hearer" (Phaedrus 101). Because of its presence orproximity to the moment of utterance, aetive speech is able to communicateideas immediately, and further, promises a window for transeending thehorizon of utteranee, the limits of language, by inspiring a non-linguisticintuition between participants. Speech is preferred to writing because thelatter undermines the possibility of interpersonal inspiration or intuition.Eor Plato, speech paradoxically holds out the promise of silence, the momentwhen Truth is intuited in its trans-linguistic immanence and glor>'.

Although the primary medium of occultism is the book, Plato's viewson human language and the neeessity of dialectic appear frequently inoccult texts: many occult texts assume the ability of specialized language to"presence" elements of ultimate reality better than ordinary language. Eorexample, writing about the early EGKANKAR teachings of Paul Twitehell,the current Mahanta Harold Wcmp suggests that Twitehell struggled with the"petty, awkward words of the human language." Twitehell

did what he could to find the proper w(jrds and metaphors thatwould strike an image in the reader's mind. Sometimes he useda world that wasn't quite right; at other times he would leave anextra' word or two that appeared to cause a contradiction. . . . it'sfoolishness to think that the words come out golden the first time;they don't. The human language, at best, is only a poor reflectionof the truth that comes from a higher level. What is known as truthon each plane is but a poor reflection of the truth on the next,higher plane. This is life. (Klemp 8-9)

Like Plato's forms, the spiritual truths of ElGKANICMl teaehings expose thelimitations of human language. Klemp stresses, however, that it "is importantfor I EGKers] to use the EGK language among ourselves. Our terminology—words sueh as SUGMAD, EGK, EGKANK̂ VR, Arahata, and Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad—has a special meaning for us; it is one of our bonds" (Klemp 151).The EGKANK(\R voeabulary, stresses Klemp, is a better approximation ofthe divine and helps to create a sense of community and belonging. "Ourterminology" thus signifies the ability of the EGKANKAR vocabulary to addressthe soul of the reader or hearer better than ordinary language, as well as beingthe lingviistie equivalent of a secret handshake.

In a similar, predictable manner, the spiritual truths revealed in TheUrantia Book, a 2097 page cosmology presumably revealed by superhuman"Gounselors," are described as being impossible to capture in English:

It is exeeedingly diffieult to present enlarged concepts andadvanced truth, in our endeavor to expand cosmic consciousness


and enhance spiritual pereeption, when we are restricted to theuse of a eireumscribed language of the realm | Urantia, or earth |.But our mandate admonishes us to make every effort to eonveyour meanings by using the word symbols of the English tongue.We have been instructed to introduee new terms only when theconcept to be portrayed finds no terminology in English whieh eanbe employed to eonvey sueh a new eoneept partially, orieven withmore or less distortion of meaning. (1)

An example of rone of the hundreds of these "new terms" is "Solitarigton,"which refers, eonfusingly, to "'the bosom of the Eather and the Spirit' and. . . the rendezvous of a magnifieent host of unrevealed beings of origin inthe conjoint acts of the Universal Eather and the Infinite Spirit, beings whopartake of the traits of the Eather in addition to their Spirit inheritance" (146).In the gradual eomprehension of a number of neologisms and new concepts,presumably the Urantian (or "Reader," as believers refer to themselves) isbetter able to intuit the Truth.^

Einaliy, one of the best examples of the Piatonism of occult texts isG. 1. Gurdjieffs Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. In this 1238 page"allegory," Gurdjieff deploys his oeeult cosmology in a strange and frequentlyincomprehensible story of extraterrestrial beings witnessing the folly ofhumanity from on high. A humorous, exemplary passage comes from thechapter titled, "The Law of Heptaparaparshinokh":

In order that you may approximately represent to yourself andunderstand just how such exeeptions may occur among | three-headed beings of our great Megaloeosmos|, you must first of allknow that, in spite of the fact that from the time when all theeonsequenccs of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer beganto be erystallized in them and it became proper to them tohave automatic-Reason during their responsible existence, yet,nevertheless, always and up to the present time, at the arisingand the beginning of the formation of each one of them, thereis always in their presence the germs of all possibilities for thecrystallization, during their completing formation into responsiblebeings, of corresponding being-data, whieh later during responsibleexistenee could serve for the engendering and function ofobjective-Reason, whieh should be the eommon presences ofthree-brained beings of all natures and of all external forms, andwhich, in itself, is nothing else but, so to say, the 'representative-of-thc-Ver>'-Essenee-of-Divinity.' (815)

Eollowers elaim that Gurdjieffs neologisms and long, tortuous sentencesin Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson are deliberately designed to "dismayautomatic thinking" and expand eonsciousness to higher levels of reality.'


Unlike the vt)cabulary of EGKANKAR, which is deployed as a better, pragmatieapproximation of Truth, or the neologisms of The Urantia Book, which areadvaneed as being the closest to the divine or pure language of God, however,Gurdjieff admits that the language of his system is pure fiction and deliberatelymisleading. Just as Plato frequently resorted to allegories to give the readeror hearer a catalyst for apprehending something trans-linguistic, so too doesGurdjieff elothe his teachings in calculated obfuscations and misdirections.

Despite their unique differences, all three occult vocabularies that 1have referenced are premised on the idea that spiritual truths are somehowineffable, and that one must cultivate a type of thinking, memory, or cognitionthat is beyond language in order to access them. Each system features aprivileged voeabulary that is either built on a pure language or invented fromscratch to better approximate the divine. Yet there is a diseernable tension inthese systems: If ultimate reality is ineffable, then how does one know if hervoeabulary or language is, in fact, a better approximation? Unlike a traditionalreligious priest, who would likely invoke the necessity of faith, the occultisttypically responds with the confirmation of occult experience: If a givenesoterie vocabulary did, in fact, provide one with glimpses of ultimate reality,if the language seems to work, then it must be true. The problem with thispragmatic answer, however, is that it is paradoxieal.

The Bases of Paradox: Presence and the Fixed View of Language

. The Platonic views of the function of speech, language, and dialecticare paradoxical beeause they are based on a fixed understanding of languagethat maintains signification presences the signified. In more basic terms, theparadox eoneerns saying one thing and doing another, aptly illustrated in thedialogues of Plato. Although Plato condemns writing as evil, the dialogues are,in faet, written. Although Plato describes the Eorms as ineffable, dialecticallanguage enables their apprehension. Or in other terms: as William .lamesobserved of all mystieal and occult belief systems, true believers necessarilybelieve that an experience of the Truth cannot be expressed in humanlanguage (319). Ironically, testimony about the ineffability of ultimate realityand spiritual truths is expressed with human language. Is this apparentcontradiction between belief and action a problemV

One answer to this question is the resounding and eomplex "yes" locatedin the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Derrida argues that thedifficulty Plato highlights in the Phaedrus eoneerns his ironic preferenee for"speech" over that of "writing," which Plato seems to have believed was moreimmediate and closer to Truth. In his widely read analysis of the conclusionof the Phaedrus, Derrida asserts the primacy of writing over speech and usesthis experimental inversion to illustrate how Plato's condemnations of writingpresuppose a logie common to writing and speech: the "play" of absence.


Although Derrida's argument is complex and diffieult to explore thoroughlyhere, a brief sketeh is helpful for highlighting the bases of the paradox or the"problem" of mystical and occult discourse.

Derrida argues that Plato's privileging of speech over writing is premisedon a erroneous commitment to the "the metaphysics of presence," a conceptthat speaks to the eentral ontologieal eommitment of all religious diseourse.The metaphysics of presence refers to the assumption that something externalto language (a presence) guarantees the correetness or correspondenec ofrepresentation to a reality. Eor Derrida, the metaphysics of prescnee is acommon mistake that everyone makes, but it is a mistake nonetheless andone that we ought to avoid if possible. In reference to Plato's celebrationof the immediacy of speech, Derrida argues that speech, like writing,is a representation of something else, and hence is a "sign funetion" orrepresentational seheme of sounds and words that is premised on a neeessaryabsence of that whieh is represented. Derrida suggests that representationor signification is based on both a distance from a signified and a differenceamong terms. Derrida expresses the simultaneity of this kind of distance anddifference with the term "difference," which he describes as "neographism"("Difference" 1-27; also see A Derrida Reader, 114-39). NotwithstandingDerrida's own brand of neologistic occultism, the term difference is usefulbeeause its terminological strangeness underscores the idea that meaning isfundamentally referential and intersubjective—that one can only mean, andpurportedly understand, in the interior of a language and in the absence of asignified (A Derrida Reader 126-28). Thus the notion of absence is related tothe concept of difference in two important ways. Eirst, words refer to objeetsthat are not present. Second, words can only mean in relation to other wordsthat are, by virtue of the positivity of utterance, unspoken. The signifieationof "cat" on this page, for example, is distant from an aetual eat in a patentlymaterial way and is meaningful only to the extent that I am aware of theabsent differences implied by the term, such as "not dog," "not parrot," "notgoldfish," and so on (viz., de Sassure's paradigmatic axis). In rhetorical studiesa similar notion has been expressed as the "dialectic of rhetoric and silenee":"In speaking we remain silent," obscr\'es Robert L. Scott, "and in remainingsilent, we speak" ("Rhetoric and Silenee" 146-47; also see Ehrenhaus 41-57;Johannesen 25-35; Sewell 169-79; and Scott, "Dialectical Tensions" 1-18).Silence speaks a positivity in the absenee of language as mueh as speakingmust inevitably refer to the unspoken or silent. This indicates that thepossibility of pure presence or immediaey that Plato argues speech promises—a metaphysics of presence—is a deeeptive fantasy; not even silence is "pure"of distanee or difference.''

With the eoneept or "neographism" of difference, then, Derridadeeonstruets Plato's elaims that speeeh diseloses a "presenee" or is the proper


avenue to Truth by analyzing the practice of writing. Derrida suggests thatdespite the philosopher's striving toward the apprehension of the materialityof the Forms (which exist in an ideational realm), the Eorms cannot bemeaningfully ineffable because ofthe abscnce-logie of language itself: Nothingmeans for human beings outside of Umguage, written or spoken. There is nooutside "guarantee" for language that it "presences" in writing or speeeh. Thisimplies that the ineffable as a diseursive locality can be a "silent" space only inthe sense of a negative signification or absence. As the most famous occultistof the nineteenth eentury, 11.P. Blavatsky, has expressed the idea, there isalways a linguistic positivity in any negative expression: it is the voiee oiNada,"the Voiee of Silence," the positivity (voice) of no-thing (silence; Blavatsky 1-22). Henee Plato is shown to be saying one thing and doing another in a moreproblematic sense than it initially seemed: the contradiction of word and deed isnot merely that of writing about the ineffable, but is bom of an erroneous beliefin the preseneing power of speeeh. In other words, Derrida's argument againstthe metaphysics of presence suggests that the ineffability ofthe spiritual truthswith which occultists are concerned is actually motivated by the ineffabilitythat inheres in language: language as such necessarily fails to grasp or eapturepresences, it fails to diselose diffdrence itself.' This is tantamount to sayingthat the paradox of oeeult diseourse speaks the oeeultist.

It is important to note that Plato's supposed belief that speech evokesthe positive presenee of the signified is based on the idea that language is"fixed." Indeed, the metaphysics of presenee goes hand-in-hand with a fixedunderstanding of language. Such an understanding of language holds thatmeaning is anchored and guaranteed by something extemal to it (viz., apresenee); in Plato, this is the Eorms, and dialeetic helps one to re-memberthem as they were once more directly apprehended by the soul before itbecame enfleshed and fell to earth ("anamnesis", Republic 502-11). In Plato'sdialogues, as well as traditional religious texts, language is thus an imperfectcopy of something translinguistic. Eor the Ghristian this external guarantee isGod, hence the gospel according to St. John begins, "in the beginning was theWord, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."" Eor the occultist,the guarantee can be any number of supernatural entities, such as the "astrallight" of Eliphas Levi or "The Divine Principle" of H. P. Blavatsky. The fixedunderstanding of language thus presumes a meaningful, mind-independentreality that language, however inaeeurately, represents, a presumption that.lacques Derrida has dubbed famously "logocentrism" (Of Grammatology 3-5;18-26).

In the humanities today the fixed view of language has been replacedwith a fluid view of language, and most scholars would concede that languageis contingent and never corresponds to the material world in a director transparent way (a presenee). After the publication of Wittgenstein's


groundbreaking 7%i7o.sop/itcaZ Investigations (and to a lesser extent, a renewedinterest in Nietzsche's theory of language), many philosophers, rhetoricians,and other scholars of linguistic practices have come to understand languagein decidedly anti-Platonic terms. Instead of eorresponding to some mind-independent reality or divine presence, language is a self-contained, differentialsystem that establishes a horizon for what can be expressed and experiencedas meaningful. As soeial beings, humans are players in a particular "languagegame" or vocabulary that enables us to do or think some things and prevents usfrom doing or thinking others (particularly those things that cannot be markedin language; see The Blue and Brown Books 16-17; Philosophical 23-36). Asthe pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty explains, language cannot be a "thirdthing intervening between self and reality" because language is constitutiveof .self and reality. Rorty suggests, like Wittgenstein, that language is a toolor a eolleetion of "marks; and noises" that enables us to cope with the world.Although there is, undoubtedly, a material world that exists independent oflanguage, Rorty argues that this world is meaningle.ss to humans absent theeoping teehnology of language or representation.

Eor Rorty, language is also prophetie in the sense that new metaphorscan herald new ways of thinking. Vocabularies are a means "for doing |orthinking! something which could not have been envisioned prior to thedevelopment of a particular set of descriptions, those which it itself helpsto provide" (Contingency 13). The fluidity of language thus refers to thepossibility of expandingithe horizons of expressability through the creation ofnew metaphors and the destruction of old, "dead" ones. With this perspective,Rorty suggests that

revolutionary' aehievements in the arts, in the seienees, andin moral and political thought typically occur when somebodyrealizes that two or more of our voeabularies are interfering witheach other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary' to replaceboth. [Sueh new voeabularies| are not discoveries of a realitybehind the appearances. . . . To come up with |a new| vocabularj'is more like discarding the lever and the chock because one hasenvisaged the pulley . . . . (Contingency 12)

Sueh a characteristically contingent understanding of language denies theoccultist (or the religious person, for that matter) any ultimate, divine realitythat ean be signified in language. Instead, the fluid view regards the occultistfrom an exterior vantage and deseribes her as a poet attempting to expand thelimits of expressability through the creation of new vocabularies. Whether theoccultist-poet is conscious of her literary expansions is ineonsequential.

These strivings to expand vocabulary and the range of expression arepremised on feelings many experience confronting the inadequacy of language,preeisely the ineffability of human experienee signified by Derrida's eoneept


of difference. As Barry Barnes has eloquently expressed the problem, for "allthe complexity and richness of language, experience is immeasurably morecomplex, and richer in information" (28). Or in other terms, our attemptsto expand vocabularies are born of an experience of absence (as opposed tothe ineffability of presence presumed by the religious). Despite the limits ofrepresentation, there remain aspects of experienee that elude our attempts atmeaning-making. The poet is an individual who can work within a languagegame to extend and make previously inexpressible and meaningless elementsof human experienee expressible and meaningful.

The refutation of old vocabularies and the creation of new ones is madepossible by experiences that are not immediately expressible in a givenvocabulary. The possibility of creating language for new meanings thusneeessarily involves the oecultist-poct in a political process insofar as hervoeabularj' is to replace another. That there is something politieal at stakein a poeties will be familiar to readers of eritieal theory and eontinentalphilosophy. For example, because works like Heidegger's Being and Time andHorkhcimcr and Adomo's Dialectic of Enlightenment are deliberately difficult,readers are forced to work exceedingly hard to understand them. It is arguedby Adomo and others that intense intellectual labor is needed beeause it helpsto de-naturalize a comfortable linguistie horizon, and in tum point to newways of thinking about ourselves and the world that make change possible (secAdomo 101-102; 219-21). Similarly, commenting on her own, dense writing,Judith Butler argues that "some newness of the world |is| opened up throughmessing with grammar," and that her playful neologisms and difficult sentencestrueturcs help to locate spaces in which people can resist oppressive culturallogics, such as heterosexual gender norms (or "heteronormativity"):

Taking for granted one's own linguistic horizon as the ultimatelinguistic horizon leads to an enormous parochialism and keepsus from being open to radieal difference and from undergoingthe diseomfort and the anxiety of realizing that the seheme ofintelligibility on whieh we rely fundamentally is not adequate, isnot common |or universal to all humans |, and eloses us off fromthe possibility of understanding others and ourselves in a morefundamentally capacious way. (Olson and Worsham 765)

Hence, the idea that language is fluid refers to both the notion that it is notguaranteed or fixed by something extemal, and to the notion that new formsof expression and meaning are possible despite the obvious limitations oflanguage at any given moment in time.

The Specificity of Occult Poetics: The Rhetorical AntinomyPlaced in front of the historical backdrop of the encroachment of

seientific discourse in the modem era, many brands of occultism—from


EGKiVNKAR and Gurdjieff to Seientology and Theosophy—can be understoodas confronting the "rational" and scicntistie vocabulary of the modem era, avocabulary that Kenneth Burke warned redueed the ambiguity and fullnessof human experienee, the "drama" and "aetion" of life, to mere "motion"(Grammar ]34-.'^9; also see Govino 1-3). Yet as a partieular brand of poeties,oecult diseourse must have a unique logie to it that explains its strivings toexpand or transcend vocabularies in ways that are different from traditionalreligious discourse contending with scientism. An occult poetics must be, asAristotle suggests of the making of tragedy and epic, a "produetive science" inthe sense that oeeultism is premised on a set of rules or eonditions that help togenerate a rhetoric distinct from others (Aristotle sec. 8). In short, an occultpoetics qua poeties must contain a logic of rhetorical invention particular orspecific to itself ("specificity").

Given the foregoing discussion of the limits of language, it would seemthat the esoteric language of oecult discourse funetions in ways that aresimilar to that of religious rhetoric and academic jargon. What distinguishesoccult discourse as a genre that is distinct from the mainline religious is therole of seerecy and the continuous impulse to create new vocabularies for atranslinguistic reality. Unlike the word of God, whieh is as final as it is public,any given occult text announces itself as a better approximation of ultimatereality, novelty thus becomiiig a central characteristic. The "novelty" ofoccult vocabularies, however, is always expressed in terms of revelation andis not necessarily neologistic (henee a "new way" can be introduced thatheavily employs the ambiguities of older or "ancient" terms, like "karma").**Moreover, occult poetics can also be distinguished from traditional religiousforms of invention beeause of the stability of the rhetorical repertoire of thelatter: Although God is in faet ineffable, there is a traditional way to go aboutrepresenting His truth in language that has gone relatively unchanged forcenturies: homiletics.

Although oecult diseourse is similar to the jargon of academie discoursein terms of its mobility or openness to new vocabularies, it differs significantlyin terms of its stake in a meaningful, translinguistic reality. The Platonicassumption behind all occult discourse, that there is something "out there"beyond language that esoterie terms attempt to signify, denies the fluidity oflanguage that academics like Butler draw upon to "open up" spaces of culturalresistance. Eor this reason, 1 suggest that the eentral logie of occult poetics isbased on what one could term a "rhetorieal antinomy," which I define as theillusion ofa fundamental, ontologieal or metaphysical paradox.

When one speaks of a traditional "antinomy," the profoundly influentialwork of Immanucl Kant on various "conflicts of assertions" is often cued. The"Third Antinomy of Ereedom and Natural Law," for example, is the conflictbetween the assertion that there is a type of "causality" called freedom, and


the assertion that the world operates deterministieally in accord with certainlaws of nature that exclude freedom as a cause (Kant 484-89). In philosophy,W. V. Quine has updated Kant's concept of the antinomy by asserting that it isa paradox of reasoning that requires a repudiation of the concepts that allowedone to express the paradox in the first place (1-18). Quine's understanding ofthe concept of antinomy helps to explain why the qualification of "rhetorieal"is apt, because antimonies are aetually problems with our vocabulariesor language, not the "real world." The traditional "antinomy" of Kant isabout real-world conditions "out there"—what I am calling ontologieal ormetaphysical conditions. To understand an antinomy as "rhetorical" is torecognize the contingeney of truth and the social construction of reality, andhence to read contradictions about the "nature" of reality as epistemologicalor linguistic problems, not ontologieal or metaphysical ones. The rhetoriealantinomy represents a productive mistake.

In light of the examples of oeeult texts offered above, oecult discourseis the result of a rhetorical antinomy between a belief (A) and an action (B).The belief is this: (A) spiritual knowledge is trans-linguistic, or "ineffable."The act is this: (B) one can write and speak about spiritual knowledge. Again,here is the ghost of Plato's famous ironie reversals at the end of the Phaedrus:Although writing is condemned at the end of the dialogue as being ineapableof communicating spiritual truths (A), it is nevertheless the teehnology withwhich Plato attempts to impart spiritual truths (B) (see Derrida, "Plato'sPharmacy," 114-39). The rhetorieal antinomy is thus aptly summarized bythe statement, "The truth is ineffable, but let me tell you about it anyway."This basic contradiction is at the heart of the so-called "problem of mysticspeech."

What is unique about occult discourse, however, is that the rhetoriealantinomy is believed to be an ontologieal problem—a problem with something"out there"—and that belief, in tum, generates the discourse (again, theantinomy is different from traditional, religious forms of invention beeauseGod's truth is describable, and the model of describability is His authenticword). A rhetorical world view, of eourse, stresses the fluid view of languagementioned previously—a sophistie understanding of meaning that Robert L.Scott termed "epistemic" in the late 1960s ("On Viewing" 9-17). Regardlessof one's stance on "the real," the rhetorieal view implies that nothing meansoutside of human modes of representation, and that "truth" is merely theproduet of sentences. The oecultist, like Plato, believes in a transcendenttruth that cannot be completely understood in human language, and henee,the problem of mystic or oeeult speeeh is erroneously viewed as an ontologiealproblem. In actuality, the moment an occultist ceases to be silent about thematter of spiritual truth, the moment of the audible voice or the contact ofpen to paper, calls forth what Paul dc Man would term the "rhetorieity" of the


antinomy: The notion of ineffability itself necessitates a rhetoric to expressthe negativity of incffability. That is, the fundamental premise, that spiritualtmth is ineffable (A), requires the seemingly contradictory act of speakingor writing (B). \Vhat we have in occult poeties, then, is basically a generativeeontradietion. The rhetorical antinomy is invention by means of an illusorycontradiction.

Ill

Concluding Discussion: The Esoteric Language of High Theory

In this essay 1 have deseribed a generic feature of oeeult or New Agediscoui-se, the compositional forms of neologism and difficult prose, particularlyin respect to esoterie language. I first suggested that oeeult discourse ispremised on a Platonic eommitment to a trans-linguistie, spiritual realm, aswell as the idea that language is at best an imperfect copy of the truths ofthis realm. I then moved to characterize these eommitments as eonstituting a"metaphysics of presence," to use Derrida's phrase, which is in turn based onthe "fixed" view of language. I argued that the fixed view was a mistake, andthat this niiistake is responsible for a resulting rhetorical antinomy, or a kindof generative mode of invention in which the motivation for the location orcreation of esoteric vocabularies is based on the neeessar>' contradictions thatresult from a belief in the metaphysies of presenee. Although the rationalebehind the creation of given oecult vocabularies will differ from one oeeultgroup to the next, all of them can be described, in general, as a consequenee ofa paradox: The Truth is ineffable, but let me tell you about it.

From an internal or sympathetic perspeetive, I mentioned thatoccultists, as well as the religious, typically employ one of three strategies:The prescription of silenee (the way of the mystie), the diseovery of a purelanguage, or the creation of a vocabulary or mode of expression that gets eloserto the ineffable than does ordinarj' language. In this essay I drew on a numberof examples: The Gounselors of The Urantia Book, Sri Harold Klemp, andG. I. Gurdjieff seem to admit that human language can never eapture, in anabsolute or satisfaetory way, supernatural truths. I3efore closing, however, it isinstruetive to reconsider the deseriptions of the differenees between religious,occult, and academic discourse, for whatever their historical, tropological, andlogical differences, the effects of esoteric language might be said to remainconstant among all three.

As 1 noted earlier, religious discourse differs from the oceult beeause of itsattempts to invite exoteric redemption, a movement against seerecy markedmost notably in Ghristian history, for example, by the Protestant Reformation:God keeps no secrets. Religious discourse also differs from the occult in termsof its repertoire of tropes: The word of God comprises a very old vocabulary,and there is nothing "new" or exotic in the great Holy Books of .ludaism,Islam, and Ghristianity. Religious discourse, however, can be characterized


as "oeeult" when there arc pockets of secreey (the Vatican, .lewish Kabbalah,Sufi orders, and so on) or when a new language is deployed to establish theauthority of one or more individuals (which is usually described in terms of thecreation of a sect or, in normative terminology, a "cult").

Academic terminology (most especially theoretieal voeabularj') is alsodeployed in a manner that is said to invite exoterie understanding, oftenfor the purposes of demystifying human behavior or soeial reality. Yetdespite the rampant secularism and agnostic party-line of scholars in thehumanities, that the world in-itself is "ineffable" and that it makes sense tous only in representation is a notion that atheists and agnostics share, witha little modifieation, with the religious and occult: the ineffability of "God"or the "Astral" realm is merely replaced with the ineffability of humanexperience, difference, or Laean's "real." The key difference orbits the notionthat one should understand language as fluid and rhetoric as an epistemic,reality-eomprising thing. Although theorists in the humanities have longdismissed the criterion of eorrespondence (and therefore the "metaphysics ofpresence"), theory should be understood as a proposed alternate vocabularyfor deseribing human reality. For example, Rorty has argued that the difficultvocabularies of Heidegger and Derrida represent a poetic or "literary" attemptto "suggest new questions in new terms" (Truth and Progress 328). Insofar aseverything meaningful is within the domain or map of human representation,new vocabularies help to expand meanings and, as Rorty suggests, possibilitiesfor change. The parallels of academie jargon to esoteric language cannot beignored, however, for just as mueh as the superhuman Gounselors of TheUrantia Book, 11. P. Blavatsky, Sri Harold Klemp, and G. I. Gurdjieff arerevered authorities of esoteric ltnowledge, so too are Heidegger, Derrida, andButler authorities of an esoteric language game in whieh many are discouraged,on the basis of its mystifying aura, from participating direetly without the long(and often sadistic) rites of GEI (Graduate Education Initiation).

For example, in a widely read essay by Martha Nussbaum in The Ne'wRepublic, .ludith Butler's writing is eastigated as "ponderous and obscure."Butler's allusions to other thinkers are "never described in enough detail toinclude the uninitiated," who would simply be "baffled by the thick soup ofButler's prose." In fact, Nussbaum says that "mystification and hierarchyare the tools of | Butler's] practice," and that ultimately Butler has fallenprey to the view of the "philosopher as a star who fascinates . . . frequentlyby obseurity." Nussbaum argues that Butler's enigmatie prose is a deliberatestrategy designed to create dependeney among her readers by becoming the"originating authority" of an esoterie vocabulary.'" To wit, Nussbaum hascharged Butler with spellbinding and witchery, and would have us burn her atthe (virtual) stake.


Although 1 am sympathetic to Butler's project and agree with her thatchallenging prose can work to create new possibilities and new styles ofthought, there is no mistaking the familiarity of Nussbaum's description:Butler, as much as Foucault, Deleuze, and even Burke, is a modem dayGurdjieff. Yet I would not go so far as to deseribe Butler's difficult prose aspart of a kind of "bad" feminism (an unfair claim at best). Rather, I wouldcharge Butler as simply being human. As Burke reminds us, as symbol usinganimals we are "goaded by .the spirit of hierarchy," a spirit built on both aeuriosity of the other and a need for belonging ("Definition" 15). Occultdiscourse functions to discriminate among those who are and are not privyto seerets, and thus it is a predictable foree of social order (indeed, one caneasily eompare a Freemason Lodge to an Ivy League school, as hoth requirea numher of elite elements—money, knowing the "right people," masteringthe protoeol, and so on—for admission). From this vantage, Nussbaum hasvictimized Butler as a scapegoat for the Academy's own, inevitable occultism,as well as her personal inability to disarticulate the social and normativefrom the epistemological, primarily because Butler's theory functions todiscriminate among seholars—among those who "get it" and those who donot. Thus the problem with Nussbaum's account is that she fails to admit thatwe cannot cleanse our epistemological and poetic projects from the social;the two are inextricably wed, however mueh we attempt to braeket-out oneor the other. Nussbaum's failure is an inability to reeognize that mystery andmystification are an inevitable consequence of rhetorical invention spawnedby the ubiquitous confrontation widi ineffability. Nussbaum erroneouslyidentifies this mystery as "evil," a common and unfortunate label in ourculture for the ambiguous or foreign.

The predictable consequenee of our confrontations with ineffability,jargon and esoteric language, is aptly and humorously caricatured in KennethBurke's modem version of the tower of Babel as the cacophonous andmundane "human barnyard," each of its critters chattering and goading eachother into hierarchies." From the devoutly religious individual confrontingthe ineffability of Spirit, to the atheistic academie confronting the inadequacyof language to capture the depth of human experience, all of us are caughtwithin a struggle against our own symbolicity—all of us are eaught within thedin of moos, elucks, and snorts. To claim that one can cut through symbolicityto "the real situation" and real people, as Nussbaum argues is possible with"praetieal polities," is to repress and ignore the rhetorical, the ways in whichthe "real" is made meaningful, and thus the ways practical politics are madepossible, in the first plaee.

As the most priestly and patently mystical of the philosophers of rhetoric,it is not surprising that Burke was led to the conclusion that theologicaldiscourse was The Paradigm Example of the maehinations of rhetorical


invention and the "dialectic" of suasive action (Burke, Rhetoric of Religion).The dialectical view, built on the inevitable production of alterity and thenecessarily differential structure of language, entails predictable consequences.That language is fluid and contingent necessarily poses the threat and joy ofworshipfulness insofar as our theoretical vocabularies are revelations, andinsofar as they create sites of identification for the creation of an inside andoutside group. As the rhetorician Richard Weaver would say, all talk abouttalk, all theory, is thus necessarily sermonie (2O1-205). Or as 1 would have it,all theory is occult.'-

Department of Communication StudiesLouisiana State University

AUTHOR NOTE: The author would like to thank David Blakesley, RobertL. Scott, and the reviewers for their advice and patience.

Notes1. Although it has its peeuliarities, EGKANKAR resembles many other

Westem oecult and New Age groups. Most groups provide a narrative oforigins that features a familiar romantic tale of a solitary sojourner travelingto receive ancient wisdom from a secret wise person or group. For EGKers,this man was Paul Twitehell, and it is the EGK Masters who bestowed to him,and later the Mahanta Klemp, the most secret kinds of spiritual knowledge.For members of the Ishayas' Ascension, Maharishi Sadashiva Isham, referredto as the mysterious MSI in their literature, is the leader from Seattle whotraveled to the Himalayas to meet the powerful Ishayas. For the best-sellingNew Age author and psyehie extraordinaire, Sylvia Brown, earth-travel was notnecessary because the abode of seeret wisdom is another plane of reality—"theOther Side." Gaining access to the Other Side requires either psychic poweror death. Her spiritual guides are Francine and Raheim, spiritual emissariesof the collective of "advanced entities on the Other Side" known only as"the Gouncil." And for 11. P. Blavatsky, the advanced beings were the SeeretMasters or Ghiefs, collectively known as the "Great White Brotherhood."These supernatural beings lived in India and the Himalayas, and as Blavatskytells it, commanded her to reveal their ancient seerets, paradoxically clothedin difficult language, in the name of world brotherhood and peace (see Browne,esp. 16; H. P. Blavatsky, Isis; and Van Mater).

2. One must be careful to distinguish between .loyee's protagonist and .loyeehimself. After all, Joyce is responsible for writing the most jargon-rife, difficultwork of literature in the twentieth eentury: Finnegans Wake.


If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wingslike he'd eome from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet,humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First.We pass through grass bchush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls.Far calls. Goming, far! End here. Use then. Finn, again! Take.Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousdansthee. Lps. The keysto. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, pastFive and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings usby a commodius vicus of reeirculation back to Howth Gastle andEnvirons. (628, 1).

3. In his A Poetics Handbook: Verbal Art in the European Tradition, DanielAbondolo remarks that the term is "often used to refer to a kind of creativeprocess" (3). Additionally, keeping in mind that Aristotle wrote his Poeticsto counter Plato's moral condemnation of literature and art as "irrational,"an occult poetics is also an account of the basie logic of occult texts as saneand sensible. In other words, the term "poeties" is useful because it suggests asensible logic or pattern. 1 also mean to employ the term in a manner similarto Kenneth Burke's "poetics of appeal," a poetics that is inherently suasiveor rhetorieal, thus dispensing with the hard, traditional distinction betweenpoetics and rhetoric (also see Heath, 54-65).

4. In order to make sense of this complex book, I spent two months withtwo online discussion groups comprised of readers of The Urantia Book. Evenafter this period of time and interaction, I was still unable to make sense of thecosmology. The Urantia Book is, in my opinion, one of the most baffling occultsystems ever written/revealed.

5. The quote is from the jacket cover.6. I should mention that I am aware of the relevance of speeeh-aet theory

here. Among more analytical philosophers of language, the impossibilityof a meaningful ineffability is related, for example, to the "principle ofexpressability." For John Searle, this prineiple holds that "whatever ean bemeant can be said," irrelevant of one's ability to express her own privatemeaning. That is, because of the very structure of language as a system ofrelations, there always remains the possibility of expressing meaning in somerelational set or means of expression yet to be diseovered by an individual. Theprinciple of expressability is suggestive of two important observations. First,anything that ean be thought is a languaging of some sort. This observationdoes not imply the use of "explieit verbal constructions," nor the notion thatone cannot be eonseious without a language. Rather, it implies that one is notaware of meaningful objects or experiences in the absence of some systemof representation. Second, the prineiple of expressibility assumes the notion,marked in different terms by Derrida in the concept o(difference, that meaningis a relational produet typified by the fundamental absenee of the signified. If


it were possible to speak purely in the presence of objects of value, then therewould be no need for language, or, one would be continuous or "one" with whatWalter Benjamin has called a divine, "pure language." Thus the point here isthat representation always implies difference, and thus multiple absences andan inevitable interiority that denies the possibility of pure language^ absolutely(sec Benjamin, esp. 74; and Searle).7. Ben-Ami Seharfstein notes that Derrida's

explicit view is that we are imprisoned in words, which by their: fixity and their static concordances and oppositions do violence to

life. The result, to him, has been a long shift to inauthentic being.... The uses of at least the Westem languages have been Platonizedto the degree that they think and express themselves in signsthat have lost their natural relationship to what they signify. . . .Derrida believes | however, | that he is able at eertain moments ofsubversion to glimpse the 'nonexistent' trace or difference that inits 'inexistenee' hints at what language misses. (132)

Difference is the ineffable.

<S. In a similar manner, Rene Descartes' famous ruminations on the perfectionof God presenee God as the guarantee of truth and falsity: !-.

I reeognize that it is impossible for God ever to deceive me, sincein all fraud and deception there is some kind of imperfection. Andalthough it seems that to be able to deceive is a mark of acumen,. . . nevertheless to wish to deceive testifies without question toweakness or malice, which could not be found in God. Then, 11know by my own experience that I have some ability to judge, orto distinguish the true from the false, an ability which I have nodoubt reeeived from God just as I have received all other qualitieswhieh are part of me . . . . since it is impossible that God wishesto deeeive me, it is also eertain that he has not given me an abilityof such a sort that I could ever go wrong when 1 use it properly.(109)

9. F'or example, P. D. Ouspensky reealled that Gurdjieff described his uniquevocabulary as a reconfiguration of "old terms" in relationship to new principlesconcerning reality:

For exact understanding exaet language is necessary. And thestudy of systems of ancient knowledge begins with the studyof a language which will make it possible to establish at onceexactly what is being said, from what point of view, and in whatconneetion. This new language eontains hardly any new terms ornew nomenclature, but it bases the construction of speeeh upon anew principle, namely, the principle of relativity; that is to say, itintroduces relativity into all concepts and thus makes possible an


accurate determination of the angle of thought—for what preciselyordinary language laeks are expressions of relativity. (70)

The deep paradox here, of eourse, is that Gurdjieff calls for a fluid view oflanguage while simultaneously assuming the ubiquity of spiritual (external)presences.10. These remarks eome from the online edition, n. pag.11. Or as David Blakesley suggested to me while revising this manuscript,"Burke would say that Blavatsky was rotten with perfection, whereas he mightsay that Butler was perfeetly rotten (a form of faint praise I suppose)" (letter tothe author, 2001 August 29).

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