Printed in the Fall 2023 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "American Metaphysical Religion: An Interview with Ronnie Pontiac" Quest 111:4, pg 12-17
By Richard Smoley
Recently scholars have made an astonishing discovery: the history of American religion is not merely a matter of denominations. It includes a huge array of currents, trends, individuals, and movements, many of them short-lived, some eccentric in the extreme, but all an integral part of the variegated spiritual climate of this nation.
Ronnie Pontiac has explored this rich stream in his new book American Metaphysical Religion, published by Inner Traditions International. His topics range from colonial alchemists to The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ to the Sekhmet revival to A Course in Miracles to the profound influence of the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood, California.
For seven years, Pontiac worked at Los Angeles’ Philosophical Research Society (PRS), founded by Manly P. Hall, author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages and many other esoteric works. He served as Mr. Hall’s research assistant, screener, and substitute lecturer for seven years. His wife, Tamra Lucid, who also worked at the PRS, published a memoir of her time there entitled Making the Ordinary Extraordinary: My Seven Years in Occult Los Angeles with Manly Palmer Hall (reviewed in Quest, spring 2023).
I interviewed Pontiac on his book and Manly P. Hall for a Theosophical Society YouTube video, which can be viewed online. Below is an edited version of the transcript.
Richard Smoley: What do you mean by American metaphysical religion?
Ronnie Pontiac: Some scholars argue that it indicates nothing, that American metaphysical religion doesn’t exist at all: it’s merely an umbrella term for a wide group of alternate approaches, sometimes dismissed as superstitions, that exist outside traditional religion.
On the other hand, there have been scholars, notably Catherine Albanese, who wrote two books that were extremely important to the development of this concept in academia. One of them is called Nature Religions in America. The other is called A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. She has another one that has just come out, whose title is The Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness.
In her books, especially A Republic of Mind and Spirit, Albanese lays out the idea that the term American metaphysical religion really does describe something that has been going on in America for 150 years, and that it comprises a whole set of beliefs and practices, many of which go back to Europe, Hermeticism, the Kabbalah, and other elements of the esoteric tradition. It has been greatly informed by influences from all around the world in the melting pot that is America.
I’ve delved into this subject because the new research that’s been happening for the last ten or twenty years is very exciting and has revealed sources that had not been available.
I wasn’t trying to argue that American metaphysical religion exists or does not exist. I wanted to show all the areas in which the concept is reflected in the history of the nation, going all the way back to the seventeenth century, when the French Huguenots arrived here. Many of them were alchemists and Kabbalists practicing Jacob Boehme’s mystic Christianity.
Smoley: What do you mean exactly when you use the word metaphysical in this context?
Pontiac: I used the term as a nod to academia, where metaphysical religion is now considered a legitimate area of study. However, my own definition would not be in the traditional sense of philosophical metaphysics, but in the sense of meta as meaning above—above physics, above the physical. Then in America there are the metaphysical bookshops. Esoteric has a different, more academic tone, perhaps. Metaphysical seemed like a good word for the whole melting pot of practices that arrived here.
Smoley: As I remember, in San Francisco about forty-odd years ago, there was a bookshop called the Metaphysical Town Hall. This does bring up a subject that you’ve already mentioned, which is the key role of the metaphysical occult bookshop in shaping this movement. Maybe you could tell us your impressions of how important this type of bookshop has been.
Pontiac: I agree with you; I don’t think it should be underestimated. I worked at the Philosophical Research Society, which had a small bookstore, mostly featuring the work of Manly Hall, but with some other selections that he also wanted available, along with the usual crystals and interesting gifts, augmented by Mr. Hall’s habit of picking out some small treasure and deciding to sell it at a ridiculously reasonable price in the gift shop. This place was like a magnet attracting people, and lives were changed by the books that they found there.
Then I have a chapter in this book about the Bodhi Tree Bookstore, which might be one of the great examples of what we’re talking about. The impact of that bookstore cannot be underestimated. When I was writing that chapter, I talked to people who had been going to the Bodhi Tree from other countries, and they mentioned the thrill that they felt when they arrived there and how they would go and find the right book.
The Bodhi Tree was really a wonderful part of the community. I was very fortunate to start going there when it was very small. I went looking for poetry by Rimbaud. I was kind of a punk rocker at the time, and I thought that the whole hippie vibe was terrible, but it won me over completely, and I got to see the store grow; I even met all the shop cats over the years. It was an inestimable loss for Los Angeles when that place closed down because of gentrification.
The Bodhi Tree had a used book branch, which was in a small stucco house next door. If you knew the buyers there, they would call you and tell you that they had just gotten in an amazing bunch of books by figures such as A.E. Waite or something else that you’d been looking for. Many great libraries were built out of that used book branch, because they had such reasonable prices, and they were considerate and interested in getting these books into the right hands.
It reminds me of an Internet hub—a primitive version of the Internet. It was somewhere that you could go, even if you were isolated. For example, the Tarot expert Mary K. Greer told me about a bookstore that started her whole path for her when she was a student in Florida. She was trying to find a Tarot deck at a time when that was really a challenge. She asked her colleges, “Is there some kind of store where I can find a Tarot deck?” Sure enough, there was a ramshackle little metaphysical shop across town, and her entire journey into metaphysics and Tarot started there.
Smoley: Your description of the Bodhi Tree corresponds to my memory of it. For many years, I could never imagine visiting LA without stopping at the Bodhi Tree. Other examples come to mind, including Weiser’s bookshop, which was on lower Broadway in New York for a long time, and Fields Book Store in San Francisco.
I think the Quest Book Shop, which the TS operates in Wheaton, Illinois, still fulfills that function. I go in myself and chat with people—sometimes the clerks, sometimes the customers. But as we’ve seen, many of these bookshops have vanished. Do you see anything comparable that’s rising to take its place?
Pontiac: There’s been both good and bad in the changes that have occurred. The bad is that you do lose a sense of community. You lose the ability to go to a place with people that get to know you, and together you grow and provide information and emotional support and realizations for each other. There’s an isolation when one is studying alone.
The Philosophical Research Society was a wonderful example of that community at the time I was there—an incredible, welcoming community of elders. I was just a kid. The people there were giving me books; they were telling me what to read; they were advising me about my life. They were the best friends you could have.
Even so, there are some great advantages about going online. My book probably could not have been written except for the fact that there was a golden age for a while on Amazon when you could search any book you wanted. I was able to search for fine details in academic books that I couldn’t afford; it was really like a utopia for someone who’s into research. Google Books is the same idea. You can also find many of these books to read online in digital formats—books that were so rare back in the day that they were in the vault at PRS. Now they’re available online for anybody. It reminds me of the Rosicrucian ideal of a worldwide invisible college that would be available to anyone anywhere.
There can be groups and chats where people can exchange ideas and educate each other, and there are some wonderful ways that people are using the Internet. We can bring together people that otherwise might not get to meet and speak with each other.
Maybe another thing that’s not so great about this trend is that it seems to bring out a brand consciousness, where people feel they have to be selling. If they’re on a video, they have to present themselves, in a sense, as celebrity wannabes. That is encouraged, I think, by the nature of social media.
Smoley: Let’s go on to Manly P. Hall, whom you’ve mentioned—the author of Secret Teachings of All Ages and many other works. You and your wife, Tamra Lucid, knew Mr. Hall quite well, and I enjoyed Tamra’s memoir about him. Perhaps you could share some of your most dramatic memories and impressions of him.
Pontiac: It was all so dramatic, yet all so undramatic. He was a very pleasant person to be around. He liked small talk, and he could tell you a joke. He loved telling jokes, and he actually kept a joke book by his bed. That’s what he would read at night when he was going to sleep: jokes and cartoons. He would tell jokes, which often had meaning in them.
It was amazing to be in the room when Mr. Hall was lecturing and see his strange habit of looking right at people to say something that was very important to them, even though he really couldn’t see them very well; at that time, his vision wasn’t very good.
To give a small example, I was coming from a juvenile delinquent background. I had been involved in various petty crimes, including theft, and I still had some of those instincts.
When I encountered Mr. Hall’s book The Secret Teachings of All Ages at the used branch of the Bodhi Tree, I put it on layaway, because I couldn’t afford it. Even though it was the black-and-white reduced edition, it still looked like an old tone, and I assumed that the author must have passed.
I was told by a friend that indeed Mr. Hall was giving lectures not far from where I lived. I was scared to go, because I thought he would look right through me. I felt the place would not want someone like me around, given my background. However, eventually I was prevailed upon to hear him lecture.
At the time, I had an earthquake paranoia, started by friends that were into Edgar Cayce. In that lecture, Mr. Hall looked straight at me and said: “Fears and irrational phobias, such as earthquakes, are actually caused by one’s guilt over bad behavior and realization that their lives must change.”
As you can imagine, I was astonished by his wholesome common sense. It seemed like water in a desert. I’d never heard anybody like him. I really hadn’t encountered much. The reading I had done was more in the area of Sartre and the existentialists, and I was more of a nihilist if anything. The things he was saying—he would just reel off these dates and names and events in history, and I thought it was wonderful.
I wanted to volunteer at the PRS. They wanted my wife, who had office skills, but they couldn’t find anything for me to do. They asked me if I had any knowledge of languages. I had grown up around people who spoke several languages, so I did know my way around some French and German.
They called me one morning and said, “Manly Hall wants you in the office tomorrow morning. He needs to speak with you.”
I was very nervous when I went. They let me in the office, and there was a flank of women around him who ran the place. He was sitting in a chair, he looked me over, and he said, “Sit down and make yourself miserable,” in a sort of W.C. Fields voice. I sat down. He shoved a pile of paper in front of me and said, “These are the galleys of my alchemical bibliography. I need someone to edit them, and I’d like you to do it.”
I had no education in bibliographical sciences, and I wasn’t even an avid reader. I could not understand, but he insisted that I was the right one to do it.
He handed me the galley, but as I walked out, the vice president of the PRS, Pat Irvine, took the galleys from me. I thanked her, because I thought it was a mistake.
A phone call that afternoon: “Come into Mr. Hall’s office next morning. He wants to see you.”
I go back. He slides the galleys back to me, and he says, “You will now only take orders from me. You’re going to work on this.”
I said, “I’m really the wrong person. I don’t know anything about it.”
“I will be there working with you. I will tell you what to work on, and then I will look over your work, and you’ll see: you’ll be fine.”
This project gave me access to the vault. I was allowed to look at every single book in that vault, because I was to check and make sure everything was correct. The original bibliographer, who really did most of the work on it, did not get along with Mr. Hall. I was always uncomfortable with getting a credit on that, because it was more my job to proofread. I did add things at Mr. Hall’s direction.
What an education that began! It was one of the most amazing periods of my life: I would have lunch with Mr. Hall in the vault and ask him questions about the books in the bibliography. It was magical—for instance, an amazing journal from a member of one of the very first Esoteric Section students in Theosophy. It had beautiful color paintings that he had done by hand of auras and other aspects of esoteric Theosophy. There were volumes by Robert Fludd, the seventeenth-century English metaphysician.
This is what gave a start to my book: I picked up a big leather tone and I was shocked to find inside it a newspaper called The Platonist. It had been published in Missouri around 1881—in the days of the Old West.
That introduced me to the paper’s copublisher, Thomas Johnson, who was an early Theosophist and who had connections to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, as well as his friend Alexander Wilder, another important early Theosophist. At the time, there was very little information about any of them.
Now the explosion of academic research into these people has just begun. I often wish Manly Hall was here. How much he would have loved to have these studies brought into his office!
Right now I’m working on the story of Elizabeth Stuart in Bohemia around the time of the Rosicrucian dawn in the early seventeenth century.
Smoley: Yes. Elizabeth Stuart was the daughter of King James I of England, and she was married to the Elector Palatine of Germany, who was made king of Bohemia, starting the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. They were very involved in esoteric currents, including Rosicrucianism.
Pontiac: Many of the books about this subject are simply wrong. Then Nadine Akkerman, author of Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts, after twenty years of research into letters and other materials that never been looked at, gave us a completely different view of Elizabeth Stuart and what was going on there at the time. Quite a few of these revelatory studies have been made available in papers and in books. One of my missions with my book is to make some of this material available.
Smoley: Let’s pick up a theme that was of great interest to Manly P. Hall. He had a pronounced vision of a secret esoteric destiny for the United States. Could you say a little bit about his views?
Pontiac: Mr. Hall would idealize, in a sense. In his early years, he would talk about Rosicrucians, invisible masters, and the need for initiation. He tried to inspire people, such as myself, to become initiates themselves. I had a bad case of initiate fever for a while.
His attitude toward America was similar. There was a time when he was talking about America’s special destiny in the world. Certainly World War I brought some of that out, and I think he believed that his whole life. Tamra and I were witness to his conversations with his wife, Marie. They both felt that America was an experiment where a lot of ancient Egyptians had reincarnating in order to “cap the pyramid.” They had ideas about America’s exceptional spiritual destiny, but it was somewhat toned down later.
Some of it was based on misinformation. For example, there is a story about a mysterious figure who showed up to inspire the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Some people say it was an angel; some people said it was the legendary adept the Comte de Saint Germain. But the truth is, this was a piece of fiction by a once-famous American writer.
Similar ideas influenced Guy Ballard and his I AM movement in the 1930s and ’40s. Ballard allegedly encountered Saint Germain on California’s Mount Shasta. When he was out hiking, a young man walked up to him, said he was Saint Germain, and gave Ballard some mystical fluid. He said that Ballard was chosen to lead America into a glorious new era. Ballard thought he would be elected president, and through him Saint Germain and the invisible Masters would rule the country. This was the ultimate destiny of America: to have Saint Germain in control through disciples.
I don’t think Manly Hall had any intent of encouraging those scenarios. He had a very realistic viewpoint about politics and the need for balance.
When I knew him, he was really more about trying to help people live better lives. He sometimes referred to himself as a last resort for many people, and as his screener, I saw that firsthand. Many people, damaged by various aspects of spiritual practice, would turn to him when they had nowhere else to go. There were people like that there all the time. Having seen so much of that, he avoided extremism.
Smoley: What you’ve said just now leads into another major theme: the concept of the secret Masters, the unseen adepts. You’ve looked into this subject a great deal. What have you concluded?
Pontiac: My studies have taught me to be comfortable with doubt and to be open to all the possibilities. I have not experienced enough of the world, and I don’t have spiritual attainment at a level that would let me say, “I’ve met one or two masters.” Yet I cannot categorically say that no one has ever ascended and become an invisible master, and there are intriguing historical examples.
A good example would be Thomas Johnson, whom I’ve already mentioned. He was the president of the Committee of Seven for the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. He ran the American chapter in the West, and he was a very important leader for that influential group, which remains mysterious even after a great deal of study. He was seen by some as a master. His letters, particularly his exchanges with Alexander Wilder, are wonderful and give all kinds of fascinating information.
Johnson was an enthusiastic Platonist, although he was fascinated in all areas of spirituality. In fact, The Platonist was one of the first places to ever publish anything about Sufism in America, and at one time Johnson started a small offshoot of the Hermetic Brotherhood that was Sufi.
Johnson was upset that the new generation of Platonists did not see Plato as he had, and Thomas Taylor had, and Emerson and Bronson Alcott had. This was the invention of the twentieth-century Plato: We’re going to leave behind all the mystical stuff in the tenth book of the Laws and say that Plato must have been senile when he said that the heads of the government should be Orphic priests. We’re going to say that what’s important about Plato is the mathematics, the political science, the social science.
Johnson keenly felt that he had never been accepted. He had done many translations, he’d been encouraged by Emerson and by other leading lights, yet he was never asked to teach at a college. His books were always self-published. Now he was seeing academia put together a vision of Plato that he thought was damaging, because it left out the soul and the spirituality. The entire Neoplatonic perspective on Plato, which is so precious to the esoteric tradition, was being excised from Platonic studies in universities; watching that happen eventually led Johnson to melancholy.
I remember romanticizing Thomas Johnson at the PRS, when I saw The Platonist. When I found that he was involved in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, I thought, “This surely must be one of the hidden masters.” When I studied him in depth, I found a wonderful human being. I think that by idealizing these masters and putting them at such a high level, we miss their humanity, which makes them so beautiful to me. Manly Hall is another example of somebody that could easily be mistaken for a master, and who was a wonderful human being. So all the potential that we see in the initiates and in the ascended Masters is our own potential: it’s our birthright and in our souls.
Smoley: All these personalities lived very much in the context of their times, and they were obstructed by the views and context of their times, which is forgivable. That leads me to ask what obstructions and preconceptions we are living with right now that will come to seem limited, ridiculous, or even immoral in the future.
Pontiac: Perhaps the greatest fault at the moment is that there seems to be a real pandemic of certainty. People are so sure that they know what’s going on. spiritually or politically.
Some people read a book or two, and then they say they’re teachers. They go up on TikTok, and they’re teaching thousands of people, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
The temptation to immediately rush into social media and display one’s skills for profit is hard to avoid at this point.
We’re not comfortable with doubt. We’re not comfortable with suspense. I think that one of the greatest things that a human being can work on is developing comfort with not knowing. That’s one things I love about what’s happening in academia with American metaphysical religion right now: their job is not to decide if it’s legitimate or not.
I think Harold Bloom anticipated this trend in his book The American Religion, where referred to the New Age as American Orphism, or rather California Orphism. He thought that there was an American Orphism, a kind of Gnosticism, which had affected even Christianity in America.
I too argue that the that American metaphysical religion has significantly changed Christianity. Its preoccupations have become those of a lot of Christianity. We’re no longer living like Calvinists, feeling that we must certainly be damned. We’re wondering how come we’re not rich; we must not be giving enough money to the church. If we’re loved by God, we’re supposed to be rich. That’s American metaphysical religion at work right there.
Smoley: This certainly fits in well with the national character. To go back to your comment about TikTok, I think G.I. Gurdjieff had a useful perspective on this issue, saying that even these people, as little as they know, perform a useful function: they do introduce something. Gurdjieff even went so far as to say that for some people, the truth can only come in the form of a lie.
Pontiac: I agree with you. It’s a great thing for beginners. People feel comfortable to be out there representing these ideas and trying to teach them to other people. It’s come out of the closet in a way that was unthinkable not that long ago. Everyone gets a chance to grow together, because people will correct and inform others if they’re mistaken. As long as communication is kept open, it’s an advantage, and it’s exciting to see.