Ephrata Cloister: The Prophecies of Conrad Beissel in Chronicon Ephratense (1786) Take I
The English translation of the Chronicon Ephatense of 1786 published in 1889 is a history of the community of Seventh Day Baptists at Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, primary resource on Ephrata. Written by two orignal members of the community, it includes a biography of the spiritual order's founder Conrad Beissel, whose spiritual name in the Ephrata Cloister was Friedsam Gottrecht.
To read the Chronicon is easier than reading about the Order. Snobberies and shibboleths of mysticism, emaciated hermits said to be singing to Rosicrucian alchemists. The critical verbiage is even worse from the spiritualized knowledge that mystics say they have, through tantric and siddhi power, to adulation. The modern texts have none of the power of the original, its faith and experience also having been vaporized.
To read the Chronicon is easier than reading about the Order. Snobberies and shibboleths of mysticism, emaciated hermits said to be singing to Rosicrucian alchemists. The critical verbiage is even worse from the spiritualized knowledge that mystics say they have, through tantric and siddhi power, to adulation. The modern texts have none of the power of the original, its faith and experience also having been vaporized.
Chronicon navigates these paths of irrelevancies and asides with good humor. Rising in night at 3 AM to read Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas, I picked up the Chronicon one night. 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 fluidly modern, the autocratic charismatic experience is and is not, depending. Prophets rule like Neptune and declare all naturalism void. Beissel is a prophet, failing naturalism there is no defense from the prophetic curses that sweep the country with railings, self-exaltation and boasting.
Before fully appreciating the language of this American "paradise," that is, the Novus Ordo Seclorum, called the Invisible Empire in its global reach, I had read it as a fantasy, a contradiction and fulfillment of sexual repression. After all, were America in any way this kingdom it would have inscribed upon its Capitol Dome and currency not the slogans of Egyptian Illuminati that are there, with E Pluribus Unum, but "Gather Together In One All Things In The Messiah, both in heaven and on earth in Him." America has seen dozens, hundreds of schemes groping to a millennial end, but instead of invoking Psalm 2 which says, Kiss the Son whose kingdom is set upon the holy hill, the Masonic American symbols invoke Hosea 13.2, images the work of craftsmen where the sacrificers of men kiss the calves. The sacrifice of men is pursued in The War on Neptune. Beissel's pagan visions are not completely gone!
Before fully appreciating the language of this American "paradise," that is, the Novus Ordo Seclorum, called the Invisible Empire in its global reach, I had read it as a fantasy, a contradiction and fulfillment of sexual repression. After all, were America in any way this kingdom it would have inscribed upon its Capitol Dome and currency not the slogans of Egyptian Illuminati that are there, with E Pluribus Unum, but "Gather Together In One All Things In The Messiah, both in heaven and on earth in Him." America has seen dozens, hundreds of schemes groping to a millennial end, but instead of invoking Psalm 2 which says, Kiss the Son whose kingdom is set upon the holy hill, the Masonic American symbols invoke Hosea 13.2, images the work of craftsmen where the sacrificers of men kiss the calves. The sacrifice of men is pursued in The War on Neptune. Beissel's pagan visions are not completely gone!
Pewter Miller
With the stellium of artists around Beissel sing a new world whose lyrics restore Adam before division. Prophecies of heavenly virginity and the priesthood of Melchizedek (Chronicon, 165), "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).
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| The Making of Conrad Beissel |
No greater slight was ever given Conrad Beissel than when the German printer, Christopher Sauer, called him an amateur poet (below). He was a major dreamer. To reinhabit the unfallen Adam after the Fall meant acquiring a glorified body before death, finding "again an entrance unto the tree of life" (135)! Today this would be taken as a trans-human foresight,to be done by sacrificing the body. One cannot be immortal while eating strudel. It was a political vision as well, foreseeing a millennial kingdom in America before the Mormon vision of the same, sharing with the Puritan somewhat The Paradiesisches Wunderspiel [Beissel's Paradisiacal Wonder Music] (1754) "the mysteries...the wonders of the last times through the revelation of the heavenly Virgin-estate and of the Melchizedekian priesthood in America" (135, 167).
The virgin would be intact in his dream. Rediscover your virginity would be a principle of Tantrism where during meditation the initiate incorporates numerous gods and goddesses, visualizes and internalizes them, a process likened to sexual courtship and consummation. Beissel shared this doctrine as it was unbelievably promulgated with the alchemical quirks of Count Zinzendorf, one of Beissel's adversaries. The central idea was that prevention of orgasm propagates long life. Some call it Taoist alchemy and cite it today on the authority of some Tibetan they say has lived, but they themselves die before they reach the average age of our Mennonite ancestors. This notion did not bring Beissel and Zinzendorf together. For all his biblicism and seeking to be a spiritual virgin Beissel never however took up the phrase that he should be made a "eunuch for the kingdom of heaven," though Miller at one point suggests that the Brotherhood was a kind of slavery implied in an oriental court. One can see that spiritual virginity and being a eunuch have something in common. A colony of eunuchs however would have made the neighbors less nervous, for Beissel had a way of (spiritually) seducing their wives! Beissel offered to his followers to either spiritual virginity or married servitude, the latter much inferior. Even if every aspect of physical existence was tainted for those people by the flesh, the sacrifices of a eunuch and a virgin are not the same Tainted is the crux. Loathing of the body denied its redemption at the cross and sanctification in all life as much in order to attain it in the cloister. This substitution was a denial of redemption. Not that Beissel had less scorn for the body than that advertised in commercials to sell perspiration products. Crucifixion includes Incarnation and hallows physical existence. Physical existence is such an easy target, witness all the prohibitions against it, all the while of course avoiding the real problem that lust or virtue is of the mind.
Quest for the Immortal / Denial of the Natural
Prophecies 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, editor of the Chronicon, especially hold these 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. "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). Was this unity confined only to male/female division? How does one become two? Have you seen the missing self? Where is the Garden?
Climbing up from the lower state Beissel tangled this unity of existence with negation. Punitive rules, regulations produced that rebellion inherent in the nature where good is imposed from without. But while prophesy reechos in the Ephrata Community it is not only of personal fame or infamy at first, such as Zinzendorf's prophesy to Prior Eckerlin that he would succeed the Superintendent in office (149), except he died twenty years too soon. During Eckerlin's rebellion and removal from the community there was much banter on all sides which produced blessing and cursing, including Beissel's prophesy that "the Brotherhood in Zion would yet have a great fall" (173). This was superimposed upon other speaking when "the language of the spirit, which requires no words, was still spoken in the Settlement" (180).Against the Natural
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 force he called "man-power" (130), the "selfish possession" of the good. It got punitive. Women practiced "head-shearing" (126), cut a bald spot on the crowns of their heads in yearly tonsures. Along with the oaths of Perpetual Chasity the hair of the Sisters' heads was laid on the table (126) even as the puling Alexander Mack Jr. baptized himself for the salvation of his illustrious and godly father (122) Alexander Mack (1670-1735), founder of the Church of the Brethren. Something like the latter Mormon custom. This is like Isaac getting baptized for Abraham. The"falling and rising again of man" (205) preoccupied them, which means that rites of rebaptism were yearly enforced with off-again on- again marriages, letters of divorce and removal of all 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 psychological pathology of these actions and motives was ironically called a "divine comedy...that you must learn to be both high and low, rich and poor, etc. without a change of mind" (196). Among these changes of mind the mill stood for the natural. So "many Brethren turned towards the mill whenever they wished to escape the disciplines of the Holy Spirit" (209). The mill was lost when they came to rely on it, that is they had fallen "into unbelief and bought the mill" for their livelihood, instead of seeking "support mostly from offerings" (209). So as they traveled 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 around roused to join in "home worship." The period of the bell under Eckerlin ironically coincided with its golden age of prophecy.
This golden age came, went and came again, consumed 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). Beissel in the company of Elijah (I Kings 17) and the two witnesses in Revelations (11.6) prevented the rain for a similar amount of time. Mighty man or what? The offense was that the community had used an abundant wheat harvest to fatten hogs and distill drink instead of distributing to the poor.
Imagine if that happened on Wall Street, what excesses would instill. 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 but "the judgment was not revoked by it...therefore he warned against finding fault with God on account of benefits he had bestowed" (223), not taking the other clue that this self-arrogation was as deluded as the white explorer in Africa claiming supernatural powers during a lunar eclipse. Beissel's infatuation with judgment was 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), shoring up the event on both sides. It should be obvious how such appeals were aimed at social control.
Imagine if that happened on Wall Street, what excesses would instill. 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 but "the judgment was not revoked by it...therefore he warned against finding fault with God on account of benefits he had bestowed" (223), not taking the other clue that this self-arrogation was as deluded as the white explorer in Africa claiming supernatural powers during a lunar eclipse. Beissel's infatuation with judgment was 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), shoring up the event on both sides. It should be obvious how such appeals were aimed at social control.
Emphasis of the prophetic against the natural summoned adroit interpretation. When the Moravians visited Ephrata to dispute marriage and justification, one argued that "Enoch walked with God for 300 years and begot sons and daughters,"hence was married. Miller responded that "the fathers before the deluge represented but figures of the future and that Enoch represents the fruitfulness of the Sabbatical church" (148). His rejection of the literal text is like the rejection of the body that bode such ill for the Sabbatical church. Take the first floor of the building's interpretation, the base, and there is no top but fabrication. Reject the text, reject the body. Explaining away "rejoice in the wife of your youth...may her breasts satisfy you always" (Proverbs 5.18f) as another such quasi-rabbinical, medievalism overhung Beissel's core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (147). His views of marriage and justification are both tied to the carnal, "that 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). Peter Miller makes it worse. On celibacy he expands to the effect that "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).
After all, who madethese people immortal but their own efforts? A more modern prophet, D. H. Lawrence, also argues the unification of the male and female principles, but in intercourse (Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1921).
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 on this by arguing that both sexes lacked fulfillment of the other, but there was a preponderance of negative stereotype of the feminine in the Order. Never a notion of the false husband to complement the displaced Sophia. Miller says of Eckerlin's "delusions" that "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 seen as "Wife of the world," temptress, implicitly makes the man a victim, but ialso must cast him as her inferior. That psychology explains much of their fear of the body. The body, the woman and the world must be overcome. It never occurred to Beissel how counter this was to the incarnation. In 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), but not so much the "forfeit of Adam." Lacking the daughter of Eve Beissel himself would have been unable to obtain a birth. This obvious natural effect invalidates his spiritual rhetoric. 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 or himself, divorce from the literal 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 conditions of privation. Miller seems to say with approval 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 righteousness they would have all 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." In a later time Max Weber could argue that had they not all been righteous they would not have been rich.
This austere theology was Englished by Miller in his translation of Beissel's work called Dissertation on Man's Fall (1765). It shows another intense period in the cloister, but not always clearly. Miller compares Eckerlin 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 disturbing as reading it as a baldly exposed species of gnosticism, shorn of its beauty and mystery in the service of criticism as much as those sisters who kept their bald spots. Chapter XXI of the Chronicon on these prophecies is poignant in this, but so is XXIV of the later singing schools.
From these confusions, dictates and austerities the Ephrata order was beset with continual plots. Miller calls them variously attacks, disagreements, difficulties, fissures, conscience smiting, gossiping, quarreling, spiritual tyrannies and vexations (133-135), for the spirit of self denial is full of recrimination. The attempt of the Order to name Beissel as Father caused so such trouble that his 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, but Miller spiritualized the factions to the disagreements of the tribes of Judah and Ephraim (115). Not only are political parties, but their geography is Old Testament, namely Ephrata's Zion. Naming, renaming, father or brother, baptizing, rebaptizing, they took new names as a matter of course when they joined (113).
It is not far from denial of the body, denial of woman and the world to the denial of property. These denials involved money and the deathbed. Beissel had to rebaptize some 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. 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 "more than twenty, of both sexes in the Settlement...similarly paid the penalty with their lives" (107) for false behavior. He says of Yuchly that "the judgment overtook him." 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 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 compare to death bed agonies. Again and again Miller speaks of agonized leave takings at death as in the obituary of Michael Wolfort, 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 interactions of the natural and spiritual afflicted much of conscience among them. To be sure it was all a setup for Beissel to come and anoint Wolfort for his relief.
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 compare to death bed agonies. Again and again Miller speaks of agonized leave takings at death as in the obituary of Michael Wolfort, 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 interactions of the natural and spiritual afflicted much of conscience among them. To be sure it was all a setup for Beissel to come and anoint Wolfort for his relief.
The Quarrel
Constant jockeying and quarreling within and without the Order occurred with printer Christopher Sauer who had a press before Ephrata. 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. He wasn't correcting Elizabethan puritans and dramatists when he wrote to Beissel and protested verse 37 of a hymn for its pretentiousness.
One Order representative on site, Miller, suggested to Sauer that this 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). To be sure, Beissel's reply exceeds Sauer's charges in offensiveness. The hyperbole of their style of communication results in magnified name calling. Alderfer dwarfishly argues Beissel above criticism because "it is presumptious to try to dissect the magical complex of an inner spirit and psychic engine of a man like Beissel" (68), but Pennypacker corrects that while "the text alone would hardly seem to justify the criticism of Sower...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 favorably biased view of the Father whatever his amateur poetry, Miller admits the writing of Dissertation on Man's Fall, which he translated in 1765, "is somewhat unclear in its expressions" (135). The printer contended that Beissel represented himself as Christ. In defense, Peter Miller had told Sauer that people thought Beissel "a great wizard" and gave an example where Beissel was made "invisible" (103). How comforting siddic powers to refute claims of divinity must have been. Miller maybe 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 rather depicts Beissel as Christ and in terms of the Holy Spirit, as above 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). 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). Who doesn't welcome that news? Whatever the sources of Beissel's elevation, Chronicon says Beissel 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). The printer would not have been much comforted to later read that Beissel had also compounded the same gifts as 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 confused 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). In retaliation 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 Sauer's 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.
Whatever holiness was involved in these affairs was Severity. A fair comparison might be Zinzendorf's cultivation of tantric powers over against Beissel's spiritual celibacy. How else become immortal except by 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 what 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.
Church of Adam
It may be enjoyable to compare the foibles of Beissel with the psychology of poet Robert Bly, similar cult figures, whose take on anger, that it is from shame, and what to do about it, has a similar appeal as Beissel's invitation to celibacy. That is, it is the language and thought of sanctity, or as they will all say of severity, "iron sharpens iron." The mechanisms of such discipline are control, judgment and submission to outer 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 to the outer to discipline the inner like the psychology of Bly's mythopoetic.
Among people who need this outer discipline, since they lack the inner compulsion of the prophet, Beissel's order fulfills the dictate reversedly, becomes thus a displaced church of Adam, which begs the question as to the proper role of the outer 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. What effect this has on Bly likens him to a more modern spiritual outlaw. The first principle of organized lawlessness is to pretend law to control the thoughts and actions of those in and out of community. When the condemned must die for their disregard of the holy, differing versions proclaim the sacredness of their particular Ark. Such talk is commonplace in the counsels of severity.
Postscript
Chronicon is a product of the genius of its 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 sleight handing.
The Ephrata community lived in a mood of contradiction. Chronicon Ephratense, A History of the Community of Seventh Day Baptists (1786), not only shows its mystical politics but in a language, a "garb...intended to represent a spiritual man" (88). As its translator Max Hark (1889) says, it invents a vocabulary to "muffle the mortal body in a style of garment:" "involved sentences, ungrammatical constructions, local idioms, mystical expressions and ecclesiastical words and phrases" convey a meaning quite foreign to ordinary usage (iv). To preserve the "peculiar flavor," Hark says he had "to sacrifice every trace of literary elegance and grace" (v), but this is as false as those scholars who say “the aesthetic quality of these writings is often inferior” ("The Present Status of Conrad Beissel/Ephrata Research," 1976).
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.
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
[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).
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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. 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 if it all comes down to how can I make myself immortal, not how can I give up my life, the immortality quest freezes Ted Williams, but is not as well thought out as Swift's Struldbruggs. Austerities constrict the blood vessels. I have met some who would make this happen by the way they think, or the way they eat, or the way they pray. 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 divisiveness and 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 of the first delusion. 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? So what if you take those drugs with all those 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 the storm when the mind stops thinking, is elusive. Disorder the mind and the brain will follow is their motto. Making yourself immortal by Science is like making yourself wise by dope.
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)
