The simultaniety of Conrad Beissel, Peter Miller, Christopher Sauer of those communities in that mileau must be taken together, so that there is no one chronology or narrative. Each explains the other. Conrad Beissel's Virgin Heart (1786)
We temper our judgment of religious zealots by the great works their extremes produce in their committments. In spite of what follows therefore, if Beissel is mad, it is a spectrum. But a virgin pure of heart, free of lusts, but maybe not of hopes and dreams, he is not. He was full of threatenings, pomposities, fears, conflicts, collisions and pride, not qualities of virginity. So if we beg to view the Ephrata Cloister in a context of the body as a hermeneutical category, to borrow from (Nancy Pereira Cardoso, The body as hermeneutical category): first the natural, then the spiritual. (I Cor. 15.46):
"For many centuries the importance of the body, of matter, has been
devalued. Importance has always been given to the human "soul"
or, in another generalizing view, a person's place in the
socio-political structure and the economy. But history shows that the
body has always been the main locus of the oppression and appropriation
of women, as it has also been with other oppressed groups (for example
indigenous and black peoples): this has been done through rape,
aggression, denial, abuse, manipulation, idealization. For this very
reason, the body cannot be considered as a mere side-issue in any
reading of the Bible which asks questions about gender relations. Life
and death manifest themselves through the body. Restoring the physical
body to its rightful place is a fundamental part of our affirmation of a
real and sensual life."
Woman. Denying the Literal
This theology was Englished by Miller in his translation of Beissel's work called Dissertation on Man's Fall (1765), which
shows another intense period in the cloister, but not always clearly.
Miller compares Eckerlin's opacity with Beissel, "the Prior wrote so
much at this time...his witness also was confused and unclear" (136).
Reading the coded language of Miller and Beissel on marriage and the
feminine is not as revealing as reading it as an exposed species of
gnosticism shorn of its beauty and mystery in the service of criticism, like those sisters who kept their bald spots and shearing. Chapter XXI of the Chronicon on these prophecies is poignant in this, but so is XXIV of the later singing schools.
The Ephrata spirit of self denial suffered continual plots. Miller calls them variously attacks, disagreements, difficulties, fissures, conscience smiting, gossiping, quarreling, spiritual tyrannies and vexations (133-135). The attempt of the Order to name Beissel as Father illustrates it. It caused so such trouble that any title was left off the grave stone. Miller rationalizes this incompleteness, "everything in this world must be mixed with hypocrisy if it is to be acceptable" (118). John Hildebrand, who "had a deep insight into the writings of Jacob Boehme," was much opposed to the title Pater, but Miller spiritualized away the factions of the disagreements by analogy to the tribes of Judah and Ephraim (115). Not only are political parties and their renamed geographies Old Testament, namely Ephrata's Zion, but naming and renaming father or brother, baptizing, rebaptizing, they took new names as a matter of course when they joined (113).
Woman. Denying the Literal
Prophetic emphasis against the natural often summoned adroit interpretation.
When the Moravians visited Ephrata to argue for marriage
justification, one said that "Enoch walked with God for 300 years and
begot sons and daughters"
and that therefore Enoch was married. Enoch of course would be the patron
saint of the celestial virgin since he did not die. Peter Miller, writing in the Chronicon, responded
that "the fathers before the deluge represented but figures of the
future and that Enoch represents the fruitfulness of the Sabbatical
church" (148).
This rejection of the literal text mirrors the
rejection of the body that bode such ill in the Sabbatical church. Take
away the first floor of the building and there is only airy
fabrication. Reject the text, reject the body, argue that your wife's
breasts are meant only for an infant's nourishment despite the literal text that you
should "rejoice in the wife of your youth...may her breasts satisfy you
always" (Proverbs 5.18f) and the rejected natural cannot prepare the spiritual.
Such quasi-medievalisms formed Beissel's core belief that marriage was "a house of correction
for carnal minded persons" (147). His views of marriage and
justification by faith both tie to the carnal, when he says, "in the churches the blood of
atonement was permitted to become a shield in the hands of the old
Adam, the consequence of which was a carnal security" (146-7). He presumably refers here to Paul rhetorically arguing that forgiveness should not become a license to sin, should we continue in sin that grace may abound.
Peter Miller had already take a denial of the literal a step further to prove his allegiance to Beissel when he *publicly burn the Heidelberg Catechism (an historical pastime). Miller expands the literal effect to celibacy when he says, "who does not know that
carnal intercourse stains not only the soul, but also weakens the body,
and renders the voice coarse and rough; so that the senses of him must
be very blunt who cannot distinguish a virgin from a married woman by
her voice. Much concerning the fall of man can be explained from the
voice" (161). Demagogues argue all manner of things with adroit passion. Making yourself immortal by celibacy or its opposite, as D. H. Lawrence, argues in the unification of
the male and female principles in intercourse (Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1921) or Count Zinzendorf's Taoist sex. The cloistered Brothers in all this intended to make themselves
"immortal" by their efforts.
Opposition to the body could not help but contaminate their view of woman. A modern gender deconstruction in Voices of the Turtledove
(Jeff Bach) puts the most favorable construction possible on this by
arguing that both sexes lacked fulfillment of the other, as in Plato, but
there was a preponderance of negative stereotype of the feminine in the
Order. A notion of the false husband or false Christ never complemented their doctrine of the false
woman, the displaced Sophia feminine. Miller argued
Eckerlin deluded in his inherent contradiction of priesthood, "it is strange that men who were already
divorced from the wife of the world were still thus extraordinarily
tempted by the false priest-spirit; and it sees that this was harder to overcome than the attractions of a mortal wife"
(187).
The woman is seen as "Wife of the world," a temptress who makes the
man a victim and casts him as her inferior, as one renamed Berenice who
"denied herself her carnal bridal-couch here below" (69). Such denigration of
the bride explains much of the Cloister's fear of the body. John Donne's love sonnets and O my America, and among the Puritans, the body of
forests and landscapes, extended by later settlers to clearcut and
plow the prairie, which in the modern day blows tops off of mountains in
West Virginia to mine coal, while power plants belch hydrocarbons, oil
spills, nuclear waste, all accordingly, are varieties of the power of dominion over
the body, the woman and the world. All set the stage of the ultimate
victimization of woman and earth by the modern trans-human cohorts of nephilim out of Genesis 6.
The virgin goes intact to his dream, wants to revirginize, but Beissel never takes up the phrase that he should be made a "eunuch for the kingdom of heaven," he always uses the feminine. The choices for Beissel were to be a spiritual virgin or a married prisoner, not to be a spiritual eunuch. As a eunuch he'd have made the neighbors less nervous, for as a "virgin" he had a way of (spiritually) seducing neighbor wives the way Christopher Sauer's wife left her husband in a snowstorm in order to walk to Beissel and be a spiritual virgin. Renamed Sister Marcella, she believed that "marriage tarnishes the clear crystal of the soul's purity."
The virgin goes intact to his dream, wants to revirginize, but Beissel never takes up the phrase that he should be made a "eunuch for the kingdom of heaven," he always uses the feminine. The choices for Beissel were to be a spiritual virgin or a married prisoner, not to be a spiritual eunuch. As a eunuch he'd have made the neighbors less nervous, for as a "virgin" he had a way of (spiritually) seducing neighbor wives the way Christopher Sauer's wife left her husband in a snowstorm in order to walk to Beissel and be a spiritual virgin. Renamed Sister Marcella, she believed that "marriage tarnishes the clear crystal of the soul's purity."
Every aspect of physical existence was tainted with flesh
for Beissel. Tainted is the crux. This axiom of
loathing denied the redemption of the body at the cross as much as it
sought to attain it in the cloister. A denial of redemption? The
crucifixion hallows the incarnation which hallows physical existence. It never
occurred to Beissel to see how his denial body was opposed to the incarnation. His
spiritual vs. natural woman was a constant, "strife between the
Celestial Virgin and Eve's daughters for the possession of Adam's empty
side" (215). Adam however is given a pass.
We realize that Beissel himself would never have attained birth had not a daughter of Eve been his mother. Isn't it obvious that natural effects predate spiritual
rhetoric? No. Constantly issuing and revoking their own writs of divorce and
then revoking them in turn (200, 216), marriage was a stumbling block.
When such behavior came before the Pennsylvania justices they said "by
God, this man can do more than God and the king" (216).
Denying the literal, whether in Enoch, himself or the world, Beissel advised Matthias Baumann to "smell of his own stink",
but did not do so himself. Divorce from the literal was linked to
emaciation and death bed agonies, "for he [Beissel] was a living
skeleton until his death" (132). They starved like so many "Lachrymae Christi" out of Crane's Bridge, lean long from sable, slender boughs, unstanched and luminous. The brotherhood's "lean and pale appearance"
(132) was almost a stigmata, but with implicit boasting of the superior
condition of privation. Miller seems to approve that "thus the Prior
brought the Brotherhood into such thralldom that the only difference
between a Brother of Zion and a negro was that the latter was a black
and involuntary slave, while the former was a white and voluntary one"
(132).
Chronicon uses these conditions to evidence the rightness
of their lives, for had they not been righteous, he argued, they
would all have died: "How otherwise would it have been possible for
them, amidst their severe labors, to live in such abstemiousness?" "They
again ate of the Verbo Domini and so satisfied themselves" (135)
at the "sumptuous banquet" of "unceasing prayer." Of emaciation and denial of the body, spiritual overuling the natural,
they contended "it was still possible to live without animal food and
without evacuation of the bowels" (135). In a later time Max
Weber could argue that had they not all been righteous they would not
have been made rich.
This theology was Englished by Miller in his translation of Beissel's work called Dissertation on Man's Fall (1765), which
shows another intense period in the cloister, but not always clearly.
Miller compares Eckerlin's opacity with Beissel, "the Prior wrote so
much at this time...his witness also was confused and unclear" (136).
Reading the coded language of Miller and Beissel on marriage and the
feminine is not as revealing as reading it as an exposed species of
gnosticism shorn of its beauty and mystery in the service of criticism, like those sisters who kept their bald spots and shearing. Chapter XXI of the Chronicon on these prophecies is poignant in this, but so is XXIV of the later singing schools.
It is not far from denial of the body, denial of woman and the world to the denial of property. They
declared "property...sinful" (121), that it was to "be accursed of
ownership" (121), but "anyone who should leave...should forfeit whatever
he had contributed" (121). So "all private ownership was declared to be
an Ananias-sin" (138). This was probably helped by their all having
given up the original names in which their property was held in the
first place. The list of names is allegorical, as in all orders. So, as
with Peter Gehr, those who failed to be slavish followers of a "bestowal
and withdrawal of confidence were loosed upon their death beds" (131).
Private ownership scruples were compared to death bed agonies. Beissel had to rebaptize some
people that Benedict Yuchly had baptized (107), which gave rise to
bitterness among "wooers of the Virgin." Yuchly had schemed to leave the
Order to repossess his European estate, but without saying so. To get
passage to Switzerland he pretended to sign over his wealth in case of
death, but died before he ever left, so Beissel became his beneficiary.
On this occasion Miller observes that over their tithes generally "more than twenty of both sexes in
the Settlement...similarly paid the penalty with their lives" (107) for
false behavior. That means they died. He says of Yuchly that "the
judgment overtook him." At the same time they wer edying like flies from
their failure at tithes and offerings, Count Zinzendorf was condemning
others to death among the Pennsylvania spiritually lawless. Again and again Miller speaks of agonized leave takings at death, as in the obituary of Michael Wohlfahrt,
whose conscience "rose up against him severely on his death bed." With
"anguish of heart" he said he had been "reckoned...with the godless and
[God] hath become cruel toward me.' To show this was no unusual event,
they believed as Miller says, that "the spirits of righteousness
obtained the right to cut off his approach to the kingdom of grace"
(142). Such bizarre interdictions of the natural by spiritual afflicted
much conscience among them. To be sure it was all a setup for Beissel
to come and anoint Wohlfahrt for his relief.
The Ephrata spirit of self denial suffered continual plots. Miller calls them variously attacks, disagreements, difficulties, fissures, conscience smiting, gossiping, quarreling, spiritual tyrannies and vexations (133-135). The attempt of the Order to name Beissel as Father illustrates it. It caused so such trouble that any title was left off the grave stone. Miller rationalizes this incompleteness, "everything in this world must be mixed with hypocrisy if it is to be acceptable" (118). John Hildebrand, who "had a deep insight into the writings of Jacob Boehme," was much opposed to the title Pater, but Miller spiritualized away the factions of the disagreements by analogy to the tribes of Judah and Ephraim (115). Not only are political parties and their renamed geographies Old Testament, namely Ephrata's Zion, but naming and renaming father or brother, baptizing, rebaptizing, they took new names as a matter of course when they joined (113).
No greater slight was ever given Conrad Beissel than when Pennsylvania German printer Christopher Sauer called him an amateur poet (below). He was a major dreamer to reinhabit the unfallen Adam after the Fall. This meant acquiring a glorified body before death, finding "again an entrance unto the tree of life" (Chronicon 135), which is the essence of transhumanism occult, except by the Tree of Knowledge, more clearly seen today than ever before in the various stratagems so offered. This was to be done by sacrificing the body, called the appetites of the flesh. One cannot be immortal while eating strudal. Beissel's Paradiesisches Wunderspiel [Paradisiacal Wonder Music] (1754) or in other words, "the wonders of the last times through the revelation of the heavenly Virgin-estate and of the Melchizedekian priesthood in America" (Chronicon Ephratense, 1786, 135) embody this contradiction.
That all these American agrarian Utopian schemes prepare for the acceptance of the new world order is not a conclusion anyone wants to accept. An important byproduct of the Chronicon is the clue it gives to its editor Peter Miller as a prophetic character. He is called Pastor Miller who had first been a pastor of the Reformed. His second or third post was in the Reiff Church of Salford founded by Boehm but disestablished by the usurping Weiss, a story in itself. This Pewter Miller turned silver as it were, and then gold in his loyalty to Conrad Beissel. But since Beissel, with the stellium of artists around him, thinks he will survive the Fall, a new world order whose lyrics restore Adam before division, these prophecies of heavenly virginity in the priesthood of Melchizedek (Chronicon, 165) are "a prevision of the New World, consisting of an entirely new and uncommon manner of singing, arranged in accord with the angelic and heavenly choirs" (167). Prophecies [and songs] streamed forth from the Superintendent at all the meetings... still to be found in the hymns then composed by him" [at least by 1738 and following] (90). These prophecies "satisfied ...with unceasing prayer as though they had been at a sumptuous banquet; all which Adam forfeited when he descended to earthly things" (135). The hymns of Zionitic Incense Hill, (1739), with the Paradiesisches Wunderspiel and the Chronicon make it obvious that Beissel himself and Peter Miller, especially hold these gnostic views. As editor, Miller was always shaping, amplifying and writing the text, defending the Order while transmitting his urbanity and wit, evident from tone and style, so that, unbelievably, it is a pleasure to read: "The Spirit sought to restore, even externally, that unity in all things, which was destroyed by the fall of man, and transformed into diversity" (88). Climbing up the ladder from low physical state, Beissel tangled his unity of existence with its negation. Punitive rules and regulations produced that rebellion inherent when good is imposed from without. But when prophesy reechos in the Ephrata Community it is not only of personal fame or infamy, as was Count Zinzendorf's prophesy to Prior Eckerlin that he would succeed the Superintendent in office (149), except Eckerlin died twenty years too soon. Eckerlin's rebellion and removal from the community produced much blessing and cursing, including Beissel's prophesy that "the Brotherhood in Zion would yet have a great fall" (173). This was simultaneous with that other speaking that occured when "the language of the spirit, which requires no words, was still spoken in the Settlement" (180).
Church of Adam
Denial of the body and the natural is a older equivalent of submitting the mind and spirit to the vagaries of madmen, entertaining as they are. The real path of peace, not that anybody found it in any community, did not run from to Brook Farm from Ephrata and then to the Golden Dawn, but more to all the surrounding Mennonite communities. From Beissel and Bishop Christian Funk to S. L. Mathers, autocracy was the most universal expression of this madness, contrasted with the notable example of the peacemaker Bishop Andrew Mack. Newer vagaries of madmen and their denials occur with the psychology of poet Robert Bly, who founded his own community in his garage and around campfires, where the take on anger is from shame, a similar appeal as Beissel's invitation to celibacy. These are all the language and thought of severity not mercy, as they will all say of severity, "iron sharpens iron." All systems of such discipline are control, judgment and submission to the Order and social control. If you are a member you may attend after a year of discipleship. Beissel's intent that "mere external forms of divine worship...were never meant to be the end itself" (attributed to Stephen Koch, Chronicon, 95), that "outer forms of service...became their lord and master...the church of Adam" (96), makes this tension between submission of the outer to discipline the inner like the more modern psychology of Robert Bly's shadow mythopoetic (A Little Book on the Human Shadow). The Ephrata Order becomes thus a displaced church of Adam, which begs the question as to the proper role of the outer, meaning the body, resisted by the inner even while benefiting from it. Outer forms, prayer and fasting, celibacy, 40 day fasts cannot deny the inner truth of prayer without ceasing (but not an emaciated kind), joy never ending, which sounds impossible to the imposed vigilance which actually prevents it, making joy a duty. The effect this has on Bly likens him to a more spiritual outlaw, hence a kind of Beissel. The first principle of organized lawlessness is to pretend law to control the thoughts and actions of those in and out of community. Differing versions proclaim the sacredness of their particular Ark where the condemned must die for their disregard of the holy. Such talk is commonplace in the counsels of severity.
Since there had been no guardian over Adam to prevent his Fall, Superintendent Beissel served instead. He stipulated that the "good [that] sought to possess them" (129) must be protected from "too much of the good [falling] into their natural life." This natural life he called "man-power" (130), or the "selfish possession" of the good. Purging the natural Adam however could get punitive. Women practiced "head-shearing" (126), cut a bald spot on the crowns of their heads in yearly tonsures. In these meetings, along with the oaths of perpetual Chasity, the hair of the Sisters' heads was laid on the table (126), while the absurdly puling Alexander Mack Jr., son of his illustrious father, [Alexander Mack (1670-1735)], like Isaac getting baptized for Abraham, was baptized for the salvation of that godly man (122), founder of the Church of the Brethren. This in no fiction.
The"falling and rising again of man" (205) preoccupied them, so rites of rebaptism were yearly enforced with off-again on-again marriages, letters of divorce and removal of such worldly entrapments. The trades and bells installed by Eckerlin were done away with as well as chopping down an "orchard of 1000 trees...to lay open the inner man" (193). The social psychology of these actions and motives was dubbed a "divine comedy...that you must learn to be both high and low, rich and poor, etc. without a change of mind" (196). The point in all this is that among these changes of mind the mill came to stand for the natural so it had to be destroyed. So "many Brethren turned towards the mill whenever they wished to escape the disciplines of the Holy Spirit" (209). They fell "into unbelief and bought the mill" for their livelihood, instead of seeking "support mostly from offerings" (209). So as the brotherhood traveled about with "their wan and pale faces...[to] hide their afflictions...under the mask of a serene countenance, that no one could read on their foreheads what transpired in their hearts" (203), even as these contradictions were prevalent, the "fires of the first love still burned" (121), Miller said. When the bell rang for prayers at midnight in the cloister, homes for four miles round were supposed to have roused to join in "home worship." The period of the bell under Eckerlin ironically coincided with its golden age of prophecy. These contradictions and oppressions seemed appropriate to everyone concerned at the time. Cult members always think so. It's no good arguing with them about it either, then or now; it is a kind of brainwashing. If you doubt this, continue on your way. Do not go here and read more absurd contradictions and oppressions than you ever believed could be sold.
Was this unity confined only to
male/female division? Have you seen the missing self? Where is the Garden? Directly conflicts of severity and mercy, the true spiritual path.
This golden age came, went, and came again with braggadocio. In 1752 it was a retake of Elijah preventing rain for three years (James 5.17) when Beissel prayed that an abuse of abundant harvest be met with "check... that in future the inhabitants of the land may not be able so often to enjoy Thy gifts of love" (222). He cursed the rain. Is this a mighty man or what? Beissel puts himself in the company of Elijah (I Kings 17) and the two witnesses in Revelations (11.6) who prevented rain for a similar amount of time. The offense was that the community had used an abundant wheat harvest to fatten hogs and distill drink instead of distributing to the poor. This required retribution to establish control. Imagine if that happened on Wall Street. Chronicon reports "for three summers thereafter a drought followed" (222), but "...no one sought for the causes of this severe judgment" (223). The Superintendent repented his curse but the "drought" did not relent, placing Beissel in the position he may have sought all along, that "the judgment was not revoked by it...therefore he warned against finding fault with God on account of benefits he had bestowed" (223). He did not take the other possible clue that his self-arrogation was as the sahib in Africa claiming supernatural powers for the moon's disappearance during a lunar eclipse. The outer worlds practice the inner. Beissel's "judgment" was only removed when the "Brethren...refractoriness" was. Then "the Superintendent also was permitted by God to take back what three years before he had laid before him in regard to the country" [no rain]" (223). It should be obvious that such appeals were aimed at total domination and control.
The Sauer Quarrel, Theosophic Monstrosity
Constant jockeying and quarreling within and without the the Order occurred with printer Christopher Sauer who had a press before Ephrata did. The Order had first printed with Ben Franklin then with Sauer. But Sauer had old country scruples with his healthy dose of self esteem. Astrology made the meddling printer seek to purge Beissel's words. In the same way that printers corrected Elizabethan puritans and dramatists, sometimes refusing to print their works, he wrote to Beissel and protested verse 37 of a hymn for its pretentiousness, being offended at its paganism. The Order representative on site, Peter Miller, suggested to Sauer that the verse was the foible of "amateur poets," which phrase Sauer throws at Beissel three times in his letter as "one foolish hymn after another came before me" (79). "In the 36th he says, he who has made this little hymn, ought never to be despised. In the 37th, 38th and 39th verses, Mercury springs to the front, and jumps upon the throne and cries, "Sehet, sehet," etc. And this stuff people are to sing! Surely one's hair ought to stand on end at such blasphemy if he were not stricken blind or mad" (Pennypacker, 85).
Beissel's hyperbole in reply exceeds Sauer's. The modern historian Alderfer argues that Beissel is above criticism because "it is presumptuous to try to dissect the magical complex of an inner spirit and psychic engine of a man like Beissel" (68), but Pennypacker correctly says that while "the text alone would hardly seem to justify the criticism of Sower...[from] the remarkable influence wielded by Beissel ...and the intense mysticism of the doctrines...we are apt to conclude there was some foundation for the interpretation" (78). Sauer naively asks Beissel in his letter whether he had "considered what a dreadful production it is" (Pennypacker, Quarrel, 88). Beissel's Order name was Vater Friedsam but in the trials with the Eckerlins he signed himself "FRIEDSAM, a Nonentity" (181). Although Miller gives a favorable view of the Father, whatever his amateur poetry, Miller admits that the writing of Dissertation on Man's Fall, which he translated in 1765, "is somewhat unclear in its expressions" (135). So goes the magical complex. The printer Sauer contended that Beissel represented himself as Christ, but Peter Miller's defense of Beissel further antagonized. He told Sauer that people thought Beissel "a great wizard" and gave an example where Beissel was made "invisible" (103), claiming siddic powers to refute claims of divinity. In this theosophic monstrosity, perhaps Miller speaks tongue in cheek, but Sauer says (Pennypacker, 87) Eckerlin (the corrector, Chronicon, 104) further troubled the printer when he asked "whether he then believed only in one Christ" (104). Chronicon depicts Beissel as Christ and as the Holy Spirit where Beissel is likened to Elijah in quotation of Hebrews 4.12, "the sharpness of his spirit pierced such an one through bone and marrow" (131) or of the Temptation (Matthew 4.4), "his emaciated body was nourished by the Word that proceeded out of the mouth of God" (132). Whatever the sources of Beissel's elevation, Chronicon says he is one "who bore in his heart the seal of the redemption of the whole world" (123) and that "whoever opposed him struck at the very apple of God's eye" (126). Printer Sauer would not have been comforted to read later that Beissel compounded the gifts of Lucifer and Adam. Continual reversion to classical sources, since nothing could be simply what it was but must be seen in the perpetual context of good and evil, made "these events have a great resemblance to the fall of the angel of envy and of the first man" (170). Beissel, to whom "much was entrusted to him by God at his awakening, namely, it was that good through which the grand-duke Lucifer was turned into the devil" (170).
Beissel's hyperbole in reply exceeds Sauer's. The modern historian Alderfer argues that Beissel is above criticism because "it is presumptuous to try to dissect the magical complex of an inner spirit and psychic engine of a man like Beissel" (68), but Pennypacker correctly says that while "the text alone would hardly seem to justify the criticism of Sower...[from] the remarkable influence wielded by Beissel ...and the intense mysticism of the doctrines...we are apt to conclude there was some foundation for the interpretation" (78). Sauer naively asks Beissel in his letter whether he had "considered what a dreadful production it is" (Pennypacker, Quarrel, 88). Beissel's Order name was Vater Friedsam but in the trials with the Eckerlins he signed himself "FRIEDSAM, a Nonentity" (181). Although Miller gives a favorable view of the Father, whatever his amateur poetry, Miller admits that the writing of Dissertation on Man's Fall, which he translated in 1765, "is somewhat unclear in its expressions" (135). So goes the magical complex. The printer Sauer contended that Beissel represented himself as Christ, but Peter Miller's defense of Beissel further antagonized. He told Sauer that people thought Beissel "a great wizard" and gave an example where Beissel was made "invisible" (103), claiming siddic powers to refute claims of divinity. In this theosophic monstrosity, perhaps Miller speaks tongue in cheek, but Sauer says (Pennypacker, 87) Eckerlin (the corrector, Chronicon, 104) further troubled the printer when he asked "whether he then believed only in one Christ" (104). Chronicon depicts Beissel as Christ and as the Holy Spirit where Beissel is likened to Elijah in quotation of Hebrews 4.12, "the sharpness of his spirit pierced such an one through bone and marrow" (131) or of the Temptation (Matthew 4.4), "his emaciated body was nourished by the Word that proceeded out of the mouth of God" (132). Whatever the sources of Beissel's elevation, Chronicon says he is one "who bore in his heart the seal of the redemption of the whole world" (123) and that "whoever opposed him struck at the very apple of God's eye" (126). Printer Sauer would not have been comforted to read later that Beissel compounded the gifts of Lucifer and Adam. Continual reversion to classical sources, since nothing could be simply what it was but must be seen in the perpetual context of good and evil, made "these events have a great resemblance to the fall of the angel of envy and of the first man" (170). Beissel, to whom "much was entrusted to him by God at his awakening, namely, it was that good through which the grand-duke Lucifer was turned into the devil" (170).
None of Beissel's grandiosity makes the printer's point about the hymn. Sauer's polemic confuses his own astrology and alchemy with Beissel's planets. He calls him Mercury and unless we are willing to engage the symbolism the point is lost, but if we must, Miller observes that the offending stanza was "so flowery and ambiguous a wise that one could not know of whom he spoke" (Chronicon, 104). Sauer published Beissel's horoscope alleging a "strange...conjunction of stars" (104) and the number of the mark of the Beast coded in his name in Latin. This was as much caused by his wife joining Beissel's order to be a "spiritual bride," as Sauer's scruples. But the continual occasions of Beissel's "bestowal and withdrawal of confidence" more argues his manic depressive state than his divinity, "falling and rising alternated continually; he who today was exalted on spiritual heights, tomorrow was laid low" (131). Whether these are taken as methods of purged selfishness or manipulative control of his followers, it was the cult of personality refined, typical fare of manias without Lithium.
We compare Zinzendorf's cultivation of tantric powers against Beissel's spiritual celibacy. How else become immortal except by either expression or suppression of sex? How far anyway is spiritual celibacy from tantric sex? The severity of both however masks very well with sincerity. If it is important to know inner life in truth, be glad for Greek statuary (and Michelangelo), as in the Winged Victory. Even if shorn of interpretation, the lines themselves suggest the nature. For all his philosophical curiosities and his administrations, Beissel was at root an artist and musician who invented his own notion of harmonies and antiphony, typically, as from the angels. There was a writing school and calligraphies individually designed. These things have been given much more attention than the philosophic.Whatever holiness was involved in these affairs was a species of Severity
*Zinzendorf taught the tantric to Swedenborg who taught it to Blake, they say.
Peter Miller
Chronicon is a product of the genius of its contributor-author, Peter Miller
(1710-1796), elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1768, who
put the Declaration into the seven major languages of Europe. Miller
tends to be invisible in discussions about Ephrata, but he is by far the
most important if unseen character. His prose makes the community
visible. His skill of indirection, humor and understatement is marvelous
when we know the background of the events he is handing. Arrived August 1730. Ordained by Presbyterians about Sept 1730. Served about a year as pastor of Skippack, Germantown
and Philadelphia,
then c. Nov 1731 goes to Goshenhoppen. “In course of time Miller
extended his activity. In 1733 we find him ministering to the Reformed people in the Conestoga valley, Lancaster County,
and in the Tulpehocken valley, Berks
County.” 79
As quoted by Boehm in his letter to the Classis Nov 12 1730:
" There is such a glorious liberty in this country that
the people themselves are free to elect, accept and also dismiss their
preachers. It is not right to attempt to deprive them of this liberty and to
subject them to a Classis, which can then force upon them such ministers as she
desires. Christians have liberty and are in this world under no head, Christ
alone is their head in heaven." 75 Hinke. A History of the Goshenhoppen
Reformed Charge
Boehm replies, “I furthermore reminded him, that I also
regarded Christ as the head of his church, yet I believed that Christ ruled his
church on earth through agents, wherefore I would rather be under supervisors
divinely appointed, in order to preserve good order in the Church of Christ,
than stand up on my own freedom." On this point he did not agree with me.”
Hinke comments: “Miller, easy-going,
chafing under restraint, glad to be free from the restrictions of the old
world, caring little for traditions and customs, or even for the visible
Church. To his sanguine temperament the ideal and spiritual alone appeals. He
thinks of the liberty of the children of God and the glory of the invisible
Church.”
“The same unwillingness which the people of Skippack
manifested to submit themselves to the supervision of the Classis of Amsterdam,
appeared also in Philadelphia, under the inspiration of Weiss and Miller, for Boehm writes again:80
With respect to the Reformed people
of Philadelphia,
I have been compelled to hear repeatedly, with a sad heart, from several of
them the reply, (when I recommended the good work to them): " We are here
in a free country, and the Classis of Holland has no right to give us any orders."
This statement, however, has been prompted, as I believe, by the persuasion of
Mr. Weis alone, which is now continued by Mr. Miller. “ 76
“A well known letter of Rev. Jedidiah Andrews, from 1698 to
1747 pastor of the old Buttonwood Presbyterian Church, supplies the omission
partially. It was written on October 14, 1730, to his friend, the Rev. Thomas
Prince, pastor of the Old South Church of Boston. In it he writes :82
There is lately come over a Palatine candidate of the
ministry, who having applied to us at the Synod, for Ordin'n, 't is left to 3
ministers to do it. He is an extraordinary person for sense and learning. We
gave him a question to discuss about Justification, and he has answered it, in
a whole sheet of paper, in a very notable manner. His name is John Peter Miller, and speaks Latin as readily as we do our
vernacular tongue, and so does the other, Mr. Weis.” 77
The Chronicon is a dark, shot with light, unlike anything written today. It combines passion, clarity, confusion and panoramas in a phrase, "two parties might get into each others wool" (123), like the extreme Elizabethan writings of the 1580's, the Martin Marprelate Tracts. Aside from the ready prejudice of Pennsylvania German scholars against their own people, their love of amulet and hex, omen and pow-wows is not the profound inner contradiction of the community leader Conrad Beissel (1691-1768). Contradiction upon contradiction can be thought of as poetry. Beissel's address, "Spiritual Whoredom and Adultery" (Chronicon, 92-94, 20 Nov 1736) rejects omens even while he is starving himself and sowing "seeds of the new manhood (Chronicon, 135). "As such whoremongers we designate all fortune-tellers, star-gazers, and interpreters of omens, who have not come over in their calling to the simplicity of Christ, but who, because the secrets of the starry magia are disclosed in them, have taken this instead of their heavenly inheritance.
[Beissel held at least a "double conversion," one under Moses to works and one under Paul where works were made desolate (147). There was at least a year trial period before admission to the order, and much trial of it, but the Moravians "said they could make a Christian in three days" (147).]
Old World and New
In the midst of these affairs repose sundry outlooks of wit, as where various immigrants passing through Ephrata are advertised as "new pietists" who in Grimsheim of the Palatinate "began to hold meetings in the fields...powers of prophecy were often felt....Roman Catholic and Reformed ministers sounded an alarm" (218). Besides prophecy the problem was that these people were "accustomed to sing and pray at their meetings, for this was forbidden under penalty" (218).
There was ample publication in book and song when Peter Miller, editor, writer of the Chronicon said the songs were the main source of the prophetic. Two varieties occurred, the first in a book issued by Christopher Sauer and the second from the singing school: "the contents of these songs were entirely prophetic (165). They were also aesthetic, "it was with him as with Solomon...to manifest the wonderful harmony of eternity" (165). Much of the fervor in doctrine and practice that comes from this period ended when "the prophetic spirit had withdrawn again into his chamber" (136).
This is to contrast Germany and America.
***
The Immortality Quest
They thought to make themselves immortal by esoteric works, days, lives, but the animal got confused with the flesh to justify the spirit. Is this nuts? Whatever the truth, their work had the opposite effect.They died sooner than they might. When it comes down to how to be immortal, not how to give up life, the depreciation is not well thought out. Austerities constrict blood vessels.
The immortality quest is more than freezing Ted Williams. Some make immortal by the way they think, the way they eat, the way they pray. Poor bygone child Pythagoras thought to do it by virtue! They die whole generations before those who live long lives out of Psalm 91. None of this has a corner on weirdness, but the religious aspects, from Tibetan monks to Van de Wetering in his second and third Zen books, show especially well the divisions and pettiness of the seekers. Loss of the golden age or small minded and ungenerous? Beissel's spiritual celibacy like his tantric cousin Zinzendorf? So what if you dry a wet towel on your naked body in winter by a mountain stream. The maelstrom continues within. So what if you cook marijuana in the monstrance on the altar during mass? More publicly, so what if you take those drug letters and get tight? It's little different from starving yourself on a tower in the desert like Buñuel's monk in Simon of the Desert. Henry Miller on D. H. Lawrence celebrates his death wish, the same in Battille and those quasi linguist/biologists that say the voice of death is the voice of the animal in the human, slandering the animal to justify the spirit. How to calm the waves, that storm of thought when the mind stops thinking?
Still the heart.
Disorder the mind and the brain will follow might be their motto.
***
The immortality quest is more than freezing Ted Williams. Some make immortal by the way they think, the way they eat, the way they pray. Poor bygone child Pythagoras thought to do it by virtue! They die whole generations before those who live long lives out of Psalm 91. None of this has a corner on weirdness, but the religious aspects, from Tibetan monks to Van de Wetering in his second and third Zen books, show especially well the divisions and pettiness of the seekers. Loss of the golden age or small minded and ungenerous? Beissel's spiritual celibacy like his tantric cousin Zinzendorf? So what if you dry a wet towel on your naked body in winter by a mountain stream. The maelstrom continues within. So what if you cook marijuana in the monstrance on the altar during mass? More publicly, so what if you take those drug letters and get tight? It's little different from starving yourself on a tower in the desert like Buñuel's monk in Simon of the Desert. Henry Miller on D. H. Lawrence celebrates his death wish, the same in Battille and those quasi linguist/biologists that say the voice of death is the voice of the animal in the human, slandering the animal to justify the spirit. How to calm the waves, that storm of thought when the mind stops thinking?
Still the heart.Disorder the mind and the brain will follow might be their motto.
Made immortal by Science!
Made wise by dope!
Rediscover your virginity!
At no time does Conrad Beissel take up the phrase that he should be made a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, even though Peter Miller at one point allows that the Brotherhood was a kind of slavery. The virgin goes intact to his grave without that sacrifice. The choices for Beissel were to be a spiritual virgin or a married prisoner, not a spiritual eunuch. Are the sacrifices of a eunuch and a virgin the same? Every aspect of physical existence was tainted for him with flesh. Tainted is the crux. Flesh is the crux! This axiom of loathing implicitly denied the redemption of the body at the cross as much as it sought to attain it in the cloister. Redemption is unfolded as a process, an earlier step being the incarnation which hallowed physical existence. Not that Beissel had less scorn for the body than commercials designed to exploit perspiration. Physical existence is an easy target. Prohibitions marketed against it utilize all opposite strategies from making and unmaking obesity simultaneously to avoiding the real problems associated with the mind.***
So it all comes down to how can I make myself immortal, not how can I give up my life. This immortality quest is more than freezing Ted Williams, but not well thought out. Austerities constrict the blood vessels. I have met some who will make this happen by the way they think, or the way they eat, or the way they pray. I tell you they die whole generations before those who live long lives out of Psalm 91. None of this has a corner on wierdness. The religious aspects are appalling, from Tibetan monks on. Van de Wetering in his second Zen book catalogs especially well the divisions, the pettiness of those who seek, do you want to call it, truth? Small minded, not generous. But Beissel's control of the seminal fluid like his Taoist tantric cousin Zinzendorf has to be at the top of the deluded list. So what if you can dry a wet towel on your naked body in winter by a mountain stream. The maelstrom continues within. So what if you cook marijuana in the monstrance on the altar during mass? More publicly, so what if you take those drug letters and get high? It's no different that starving yourself on a tower in the desert like Bunuel's monk. Henry Miller on D. H. Lawrence celebrates his death wishes many ways. The same in Battille and in those quasi linguists/biologists that say the voice of death is the voice of the animal in the human.How to calm those waves, that storm of thought when the mind stops thinking, is elusive. Disorder the mind and the brain will follow might be their motto. Making yourself immortal by Science is like making yourself wise by dope.
Rediscover your virginity! To read the Chronicon about Conrad Beissel is less inhibiting than reading about the Order. Those snobberies, shibboleths and mysticisms generalized from emaciated singing hermits by Rosicrucian alchemists produce a worse verbiage about mysticism, spiritualizing knowledge that mystics say they have by tantrism and siddhi power.
Chronicon navigates these paths with irrelevancies and asides written in good humor. Rising in night to read Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas, one night I picked up the Chronicon. Thereafter, for about four weeks, reading a chapter or two a night, following meditatively and sequentially, I became aware of the tone, the change in narrative voice. But even if the language in the translation of 1889 is pretty modern, its charismatic experience is not uplifting. Prophets rule like Neptune who dictate all naturalism void. Failing naturalism there is no defense from the prophetic curses that sweep with railings, self-exaltations and boasting.
Rediscover your virginity! To read the Chronicon about Conrad Beissel is less inhibiting than reading about the Order. Those snobberies, shibboleths and mysticisms generalized from emaciated singing hermits by Rosicrucian alchemists produce a worse verbiage about mysticism, spiritualizing knowledge that mystics say they have by tantrism and siddhi power.
 |
| This version of the man of raw clay, contrasted with his firing at 2400 degrees is meant to show what Beissel thought could happen if the spirit were properly restored to Adam in his "prevision of the new world."" |
Everett Gordon Alderfer. The Ephrata commune: an early American counterculture. Mostly an uncritical summary of the events. John S. Flory. Literary Activity of the German Baptist Brethren in the Eighteenth Century. 2004. Hans Schneider, Gerald T. MacDonald. German radical Pietism. 2007.Jeff Bach. Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata. 2006. Easily it seems the best of all these works. Jan Stryz. The Alchemy of the Voice at Ephrata Cloister. As biased as Gordon, but in favor of alchemy. Jade Kierbow. The Women of Ephrata: Recovering the Importance of the Feminine at Ephrata. 2007. A student paper exaggerating the role of two women. Ronald J. Gordon. Conrad Beissel and his Communal Experiment. 1996. Evaluates Beissel as a spiritual raider of the lost ark type. Gives details of judgment out of the norm but accurate. Samuel W. Pennypacker. The Quarrel between Christopher Sower, the Germantown Printer, and Conrad Beissel. Yaacov Oved. Two Hundred Years of American Communes (1993). John Bradlye. Ephrata Cloister (2000). Consider Kripal, Jeffrey John, Reality against Society: William Blake, Antinomianism, and the American Counterculture.Common Knowledge - Volume 13, Issue 1, Winter 2007, pp. 98-112 http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/common_knowledge/v013/13.1kripal.html
Arthur Versluis. The esoteric origins of the American Renaissance
Baptism is the most important doctrine in PA. See below all about Beissel's baptisms. "Evangelical Mennonites baptized by single backward immersion. The Brethren by triple forward immersion" (Hershey, MHEP Quarterly, Spring 2010
Not that Beissel had less scorn for the body than that advertised in commercials to sell perspiration deodorants,
*Sachse, German Sectarians I, 243. "To accomplish this act of temporary aberration, all the German devotional books in possession of the various families were gathered and taken to Fiedler's house, and among them were a number, if not all, from Peter Miller's little library. It appears that upon the appointed day, Peter Miller, Conrad Weiser and others assembled at this lowly cabin, and there solemnly condemned the books and ordered them to be burned upon the scheiterhaufen. These libri herettci consisted of the Heidelberg Catechism ; Luther's Catechism, both the larger and smaller ; the Psalter, and a number of time-honored devotional books which for ages had been held sacred in the Fatherland.
Ephrata Cloister and the Prophecies of Conrad Beissel: Quest for the Immortal / Denial of the Natural.(1786)
