Clarke, P. (ed.) (2006) Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. - ISBN: 0415267072
This 686-page volume is one more instance of a genre of reference works endeavouring to provide the casual researcher with an A-Z guide to the plethora of spiritual societies, schools, teachers, philosophies, systems, sects and cults that seem to sprawl in our increasingly globalised world of the beginning of the 21st century. Each dedicated entry carries a bibliography with suggestions for further reading; each of the entries is attributed to its author, and the authors’ affiliation, an academic affiliation in most cases, is also supplied.
In addition, the book offers a summary introduction to some of the issues in the sociology of such religious groups and their opponents. It is perhaps in these summaries that much of the strength of this particular guide resides. Thus the entry by James T. Richardson, “Cult and new religions” (pp.129-131), for instance, provides a lucid discussion of the politics associated with the abuse of the term cult, whilst another of his entries, “Typologies of new religions” (pp.581-584), leads one to the conclusion that such term actually tells us more about the prejudice of those who utilize it than about the so-called “cults” themselves.
Centered on the UK, the entry by Elisabeth Arweck about the “Anti-cult movement” (pp.31-34) offers an organisational history of the sprawl of anti-cult groups and groupings. An effort to be objective from the outset is apparent in her writing. Unfortunately, however, such impartiality relents towards the end of her piece, which offers a useful collection of group acronyms nonetheless.
David V. Barrett writes a promotional entry for “INFORM” (pp.274-275), an information centre based in London, UK, which he presents as an instance of a “cult-watching” organisation. Similarly, Massimo Introvigne provides an entry about his own “CESNUR” (pp.90-92), which he describes as an international “information and research centre on new religious movements” with its headquarters in Italy. An entry on “Information and research centres on NRMs” (pp.276-278), also authored by Introvigne, gives an international overview of some such centres, including the California-based ISAR, as well as of CESNUR and INFORM.
It is again Introvigne who contributes an entry reviewing “Literature in Italian and Spanish on NRMs” (pp.323-329), a review structured following a typology that distinguishes between four categories, viz. “academic”, “anti-cult”, “counter-cult”, and “official”, and which carries through from Italy to Chile, through Switzerland, Spain and Latin America. Other entries, contributed by different authors, review literature in French, German, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Also worth noting are the entries on “Deprogramming” (pp.143-148) and “Brainwashing” (pp.66-70), written by David G. Bromley and Massimo Introvigne respectively. Members of the public who have been confused by the anti-cult hysteria or felt persecuted by counter-cult lobbies, will find some relief in these well-researched summaries, which provide a fair introduction to the state of the scholarly discussion.
In his discussion of the CIA’s Cold War propaganda coinage of an Orwellian concept as brainwashing (pp.66-70), Introvigne visits preceding formulations of the similarly constructed concepts of fringe or “strange” religion, mesmerism or hypnotism, Freudian ideological manipulation, Marxist political indoctrination, authoritarian totalism, thought reform, coercive persuasion, and simply religious conversion in general. This is followed by a brief history of how in the U.S. in the late 1960’s the anti-cult movement adopted the media construct of brainwashing, which provided an occupation for some psychologists who claimed to offer a service of counter-brainwashing, or deprogramming, until these activities were eventually declared illegal by the courts and became largely discredited among academia and the wider profession towards the 1990’s.
Bromley (pp.143-148) traces the origins of the practice of deprogramming back to the U.S. in the 1970’s, where suppositions about cultic programming resulted in thousands of individuals being abducted and physically restrained to make them abandon their affiliations to new religious movements, until this practice proved to be not only inappropriate but also illegal and was gradually abandoned by anti-cultists in favour of “a non-coercive alternative termed exit counseling”. Bromley recounts the crude practices of the deprogramming entrepreneurs as well as he portrays the uncomprehending social reactions that provided a market for their industry.
Clarke’s A-Z actually includes an entry for the “Gnostic movement” (pp.212-214), which is authored by Pier-Luigi Zoccatelli. Overall, Zoccatelli’s piece seems a brave attempt to provide a fair summary of a very complex reality. Unfortunately, however, the piece is plagued by muddled prose, possibly resulting from a fudged translation from Samael Aun Weor’s Spanish to Zoccatelli’s Italian and then to the English version on Clarke’s guide. Witness to this is the quotation of an “Arcane AZF” instead of the more likely translation “Arcanum AZF”, where the original Spanish is the noun phrase Arcano AZF.
Furthermore, Zoccatelli’s description of the course progression in the Gnostic studies (p.213) is too narrowly conceived, while his figures on membership numbers and relative size of the organisations he chooses to mention are most likely out of date, providing again a limited picture of the movement as a whole. Moreover, Zoccatelli suggests only an article by himself as “further” reading: Zoccatelli, P.-L. (2000) “Il paradigma esoterico e un modello di applicazione. Note sul movimento gnostico di Samael Aun Weor”. La Critica Sociologica, 135, 33-49.
Nevertheless, lack of local editorial control may be the simple reason for some of these flaws, which could have been avoided with better proof-reading. Ostensibly, Zoccatelli’s sentence “sexual energy travels to the deepest fibers of the being and consciousness, rather than dispersing to the exterior, and is therefore reawakened” (p.213) ought to have gone into print as something like “sexual energy travels to the deepest fibers of the being, rather than dispersing to the exterior, and the consciousness is thus reawakened”.
Certainly worth preempting is the misrepresentation of Samael Aun Weor’s teachings that could result from the sentence “the central practice is called Sahaja Maithuna, and consists of a complete sexual act between a man and a woman involving the sublimation of sexual energy without experiencing orgasm, thus realizing a ‘transmutation’ of sexual energy” (p.213). Instead, Zoccatelli should have been able to clearly convey the fact that said practice, only one of three main practice areas, works exclusively between man and wife, i.e. between a loving heterosexual couple of partners in a long-term, well-established monogamous relation, as anybody who has properly studied Samael Aun Weor’s gnosis would be able to explain.
In conclusion, Clarke’s “Encyclopedia” of NRMs is well worth a perusal, not least for its apt coverage of the ideological conflict between the seekers of spiritual freedom and some of the interests that oppose them. When it comes down to the particulars of phenomena, however, the information should be treated with the caution deserved by summary desk research.
LeGrand, C. (1998) “Living in Macondo: economy and culture in a United Fruit Company banana enclave in Colombia”. In: Joseph, G., LeGrand, C. and Salvatore, R. (eds.) (1998) Close encounters of empire: writing the cultural history of the U.S.–Latin American relations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp.333-368. - ISBN: 0822320991
Not actually about Samael Aun Weor, or about his gnosis, this 575-page volume is a collection of essays by academic scholars delving into the post-colonial history of Latin America. These papers originated at a conference, “Rethinking the Postcolonial Encounter: Transnational Perspectives on the Foreign Presence in Latin America,” held at Yale University in October 1995.
Based on multiarchival historical research, LeGrand’s 35-page essay explores the impact of a Boston-based multinational on the society of the banana zone of the department of Magdalena in Colombia during the first half of the 20th century, which is supposed to be the real location of the novel Cien Años de Soledad (“One Hundred Years of Solitude”) by Gabriel García Márquez. In a brief overview of the cultural theme of the occult, Samael Aun Weor is mentioned as one of a number of people come to the old Indian town of Ciénaga from other places and whose “high standing in the community derived in part from their far travels and ‘universal’ knowledge” (p.349). This is referenced to an end note where LeGrand observes, “a glance at the Gnostic books shows sections on how to cure devil possession, how to cure the evil eye, and so on — that is, connections between Gnosticism and popular curing practices” (p.365), adding that “in southwestern Colombia (Cali, Popayan, and some smaller towns), there are Gnostic healing clinics” (p.365).
LeGrand’s study is ostensibly empirical and therefore of little use to the seekers interested in the gnosis of Samael Aun Weor for spiritual guidance on their inner path.