Abstract
Neither Eileen Caddy nor Starhawk chose to describe what they wrote as “new Bibles” or new scriptures. Nor did those readers who took up their texts as guides for their own lives adopt a vocabulary that described them in scriptural or biblical terms. Both Eileen and Starhawk produced books that were authoritative, life-changing, and long-lasting in their impact and that were often treated with respect and reverence, but that was it. The texts considered in this chapter, however, voice more extensive aspirations. As the guiding text for the religious group that he founded in the 1920s and eventually headquartered in Chicago, the African-American prophet Noble Drew Ali produced The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple, generally known as the “Circle Seven Koran” for the symbol of an encircled number seven that appears on its cover.1 In a similar move, the Aetherius Society, which coalesced around the more than six hundred “transmissions” received by its founder, George King, from various extraplanetary “Cosmic Masters,” identifies one of its central texts, The Twelve Blessings as “a bible for the New Age.”2 Each new text explicitly invites comparison to an authoritative predecessor. Without any of the irony employed by LaVey in calling a collection of his teachings The Satanic Bible, Drew Ali and the Aetherius Society are consciously offering new scriptures to their new religious communities.
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Notes
The Aetherius Society, The Twelve Blessings: The Cosmic Concept for the New Aquarian Age as Given by the Master Jesus in His Overshadowing of George King, rev. ed. (Los Angeles, CA: The Aetherius Press, 1958), p. 8.
See Levi Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996, originally published in 1907, with an introduction by Eva Dowling in 1911).
For a detailed rundown of Drew All’s sources, see Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Tegacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 232–234.
See Sri Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant (n. p.: Slusser Press, 2011), originally published in San Francisco by the Oriental Literature Syndicate in 1925. I will follow the pagination of the 2011 reprinting.
See Edward E. Curtis IV, “Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple: Toward a New Cultural History,” in Curtis and Danielle Brune Sigler, eds., The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Pauset and the Study of African American Religions (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 70–90; quotation from p. 76.
See Herbert Berg, Elijah Muhammad and Islam (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 57. For the text itself see The New Moorish Literature, #13.
Susan Nance, “Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern Blacks and American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago,” Religion and American Culture: Ajournai of Interpretation 12 (2002): 123–166; quotation from p. 146.
See the reproduction of the Moorish Science “passport” in Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1993), p. 37.
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, “Introduction,” in Maffly-Kipp, ed., American Scriptures: An Anthology of Sacred Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), p. xv.
Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: New Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944, rpr. 2001), p. 49.
George King, with Richard Lawrence, Contacts with the Gods from Space: Pathway to the New Millennium (Los Angeles, CA: The Aetherius Press, 1996), p. 93.
Mikael Rothstein comments on how this text links King to Christianity in Rothstein, “Hagiography and Text in the Aetherius Society,” in Diane G. Tumminia, Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact (Syracuse, NA: Syracuse University Press, 2007), pp. 3–24, esp. 12–13.
See Roy Wallis, “The Aetherius Society: A Case Study in the Formation of a Mystagogic Congregation,” Sociological Review 22 (1974): 31.
Ibid., p. 50. The crucial role played by that Indian master of yoga in validating King’s mission, and King’s frequent references to the Great White Brotherhood of earthly masters, clearly show the influence of Theosophy on the Aetherius Society. On that influence see Simon G. Smith, “Opening a Channel to the Stars: The Origins and Development of the Aetherius Society,” in Christopher Partridge, ed., UFO Religions (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 84–102;
Brian C. Keneipp, Operation Earth Light: A Glimpse into the World of the Ascended Masters (Hollywood, CA: The Aetherius Press, 2000), p. 19.
See George King, The Nine Freedoms, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: The Aetherius Press, 2000), pp. 18, 54.
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© 2014 Eugene V. Gallagher
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Gallagher, E.V. (2014). A Moorish Koran and a New Age Bible. In: Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434838_10
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