Thursday, July 27, 2006
DR. KEIZER'S WISDOM SEMINAR
Dr. Lewis Keizer has taught at the university level, though his Academic Resume indicates he is currently teaching Earth Sciences and Physical Sciences at Westmont High School in Campbell, California. His academic back ground includes Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley where his dissertation was devoted to Tractate 6 of the Nag Hammadi Codex VI.
Today he offers a series of "Wisdom Seminars" as distance learning courses. One of those courses, "Rosslyn Chapel and Esoteric Freemasonry" is particularly pertinent to my area of interest. Is there a Catholic alive today who has never heard of the DAVINCI CODE? Anything about Rosslyn Chapel sparks interest in curious Catholics.
I found the Syllabus for "Rosslyn Chapel and Esoteric Freemasonry" online. Take a moment to read through the modules. You will get the history of Freemasonry and esoteric movements from the Dan Brown perspective. He notes Catholic campaigns against Freemasonry in Module 4. I couldn't help but wonder, while reading through the topics, whether Dan Brown was one of his students.
Jay Kinney, writing for "New Dawn Magazine," notes the same association, even citing Dr. Keizer as a source for information about wandering bishops in footnote 3. His article opens with a discussion of Dan Brown.
The Church, of course, still takes the same position on the Gnostic heresy She has always taken.
19th century esotericism is seen by some as completely secularised. Alchemy, magic, astrology and other elements of traditional esotericism had been thoroughly integrated with aspects of modern culture, including the search for causal laws, evolutionism, psychology and the study of religions. It reached its clearest form in the ideas of Helena Blavatsky, a Russian medium who founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Olcott in New York in 1875. The Society aimed to fuse elements of Eastern and Western traditions in an evolutionary type of spiritualism. It had three main aims:
1. “To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, caste or colour.
2. “To encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science.
3. “To investigate unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in man.
“The significance of these objectives... should be clear. The first objective implicitly rejects the 'irrational bigotry' and 'sectarianism' of traditional Christianity as perceived by spiritualists and theosophists... It is not immediately obvious from the objectives themselves that, for theosophists, 'science' meant the occult sciences and philosophy the occulta philosophia, that the laws of nature were of an occult or psychic nature, and that comparative religion was expected to unveil a 'primordial tradition' ultimately modelled on a Hermeticist philosophia perennis”.(32)
A prominent component of Mrs. Blavatsky's writings was the emancipation of women, which involved an attack on the “male” God of Judaism, of Christianity and of Islam. She urged people to return to the mother-goddess of Hinduism and to the practice of feminine virtues. This continued under the guidance of Annie Besant, who was in the vanguard of the feminist movement. Wicca and “women's spirituality” carry on this struggle against “patriarchal” Christianity today.
Dan Brown has, in effect, thrown down the gauntlet. I get the impression that Dr. Lewis Keizer, among others, is happy to pick it up.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
