Peasant art, tramp art, folk art connects to the radical religious Anabaptist and demonstrates an integrity of its life. These extremes are juxtaposed against each other but are nothing compared with old world extremes where celebration of baptism was held to be worthy of death. Switzerland vs. Pennsylvania was the greater contrast.The Baptisms of Beissel
Conrad Beissel was a star in the stellium of radical artists who operated in the prophetic 18th century. The illuminations of books and prints in Ephrata embody utopian society a century before Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) or Brook Farm (1841-47). New England got all the press but it imitated the real transcendence of Pennsylvania. The social relationships of these communities were as difficult as New England's, but lasted longer. Hawthorne quit Brook farm over its nastiness in 1841. Beissel was just hitting his stride in 1741, but, as will happen with the individual and the prophetic, his mentality and individuality in isolation were more extreme. At one time he attempted to baptize himselfto baptize himself which is as hard as marrying yourself, which he also tried to do. "This questionable act, however, failed to convince him...yet he considered his old master [Peter Becker]...so far beneath him... that it would be too great a humiliation for his proud spirit to receive baptism at their hands." (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 102). In the revival on the Pequea (1724) he compared himself with Jesus, " even Christ had humbled himself to be baptized by so lowly a person as John" (103). Then he was immersed face forward three times.
Sachse, himself a Rosicrucian, empathizes with Beissel in November 1724 as he "plunges beneath the flood, and through it again enter[s] the material world cleansed from all taint and sin...yet his pride forbade him to humble himself, as he considered, to bow to his old master [Peter Becker] and receive the rite at his hands" (103). These exaggerations match the pride of the celebrant, for cleansing from taint did not last too long. It had to be redone, so was no cleansing at all. Of course all this must be in further imitation "apostolicwise," Sachse says. "Apostles" appeared in Pennsylvania as much as they did in latter day Scottsdale. Aposticity seemed to go along with autocracy when down he went "face forward, under the cold flood...this baptism in the Pequea was the most noteworthy one in the history of the sect-people of Pennsylvania" (Sachse, 104).
But not so fast. Those baptized in muddy water had to later rewash. Four years later Beissel renounced this baptism lest there be any taint on his authority in having been baptized by a group he now severed from (Becker's baptists). It puts a whole new meaning on Anabaptist when Beissel rebaptized again, that is he back down to the river and got re-baptized twice. By any proper count we are now at four. First he was unbaptized backwards to wash off the former at the hands of Becker, three times backwards. This was done to an accompaniment of Rosicrucian fours and sevens only Sachse comprehends. Then Beissel, being unbaptized, flipped over on his face and went down forwards. Backwards means face up in renunciation and frontwards means face down in restoration. In 1738 Beissel enacted baptisms in and for the dead, (Chronicon, 122). The son of Alexander Mack was (re)baptized in his father's stead in order to qualify him for Celestial Virginity. Incongruent baptisms were common knowledge. In his polemic against Beissel Christopher Sauer says, "I have, without baptizing myself and letting myself be baptized four times (like him) (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 344). They could not leave baptism alone. Anabaptists again and again took to the water. They rebaptised as rededication, repentence and a show of solidarity until in 1745 repeated baptism was joined with hair cutting. The whole sisterhood was rebaptized as many as ten at one time, fourteen at other, all performed by Beissel. It was "purposed a yearly custom" (192) after the trying period when the Eckerlins had left, accused of "church-robbery" (190).
Sabbath and Celibacy
Spiritual lawlessness attracted other peculiarities, contention over the sabbath, denial of sexuality, fervent separation from the world. Whether it be wife from husband or sensuous goose from the table, the "luxurious indulgence" of the world was as much offense to them as Buñuel's Simon of the Desert. It's hard to believe they're serious when they exchange death threats to each other, but establishment charismatics Paul Crouch, Benny Hinn, et al. continued the practice of death threats (xvii) against Hanegraaff and his children. Prophetic authority, tithing, healing were all turned to lawlessness as much as baptism, chastity, Sabbaths and communal living. Convinced they were headed east they called it west.
Beissel summoned the long title of his Mysterion to defend his notion of the Sabbath: the "Lawless ANTICHRIST discover'd and Disclos'd, Shewing that all those do belong to that Lawless Antichrist, who wilfully reject the Commandments of God, amongst which, is his holy, and by himself blessed Seventh-Day Sabbath." Reversals prevailed in his writing, a code where bride means whore, rest means turmoil. So the preface to the reader of this Mystery of the Lawless invests Beissel's own word, the editorial "we," dozens of times in two pages. His proof of truth is that it must first be spoken before it is written, that is, by himself. That makes it apostolic. "The Whore and her Cup," "explain the Words of God after her crooked Serpentine Will." So it is necessary to "withdraw with all his Heart and whole Mind from all Vanity, and Love of Creatures, and from all Worldly and carnal or fleshly Desire." "Denying the world," is always a favorite topic of the sanctified ones even while the whole of Pennsylvania art celebrated the world its religion forswore. "The Whore together with the Antichrist" was the facetious Beissel himself.
Baptism and the Sabbath were crucial issues in 1728 and 29 when Beissel's confederate Michael Wohlfarth insisted on his own inspired authority in Philadelphia, "I have a message to you from the Lord" (Sachse, 150) and exchanged broadsides with opponents. Wohlfarth and Beissel found themselves on the court house steps of Philadelphia arguing about the days of the week (154). The odd thing in this mix of genius and idiocy is that while Beissel was proclaiming himself sultan of the left wing, introverting sexuality, baptizing again and again, he was early associated with Ben Franklin, his printer, and coined the atonal music of his later community that fostered decorative art to the nth degree. All this is more or less simultaneous with Beissel's second theosophical work in print, the first with Franklin (c. 1729), 32 pages, of which the 99 maxims printed were, as Sachse helpfully explains, "the figure 1 stands for the finite or man, while the 0 represents the infinite, and to make the number 100 would have been to place the finite before the infinite" (162). We can't have that.
These NINETY NINE MYSTICAL SENTENCES exist translated by Peter Miller (1768), issued in part by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1912. So Beissel in quick succession in two years published four books, the Mystery of Lawlessness, 99 Sayings, a hymnbook of 62 hymns, 31 of his own, Gottliche Liebes (Franklin, 1730) and one on Matrimony, Ehebuchlein (Franklin 1730) in addition to Wohlfarth's Seventh-Day-Sabbath (1729). These points of contention would occupy him the rest of his years: baptism, the Sabbath, wisdom, hymns and music, celibacy.
Denial and promotion of sexuality as a kind of perversion had opposite programs in Beissel and Zinzendorf, celibacy on the one and tantiBaptism and the Sabbath were crucial issues in 1728 and 29 when Beissel's confederate Michael Wohlfarth insisted on his own inspired authority in Philadelphia, "I have a message to you from the Lord" (Sachse, 150) and exchanged broadsides with opponents. Wohlfarth and Beissel found
themselves on the court house steps of Philadelphia arguing about the days of the week (154). The odd thing in this mix of genius and idiocy is that while Beissel was proclaiming himself sultan of the left wing, introverting sexuality, baptizing again and again,cism on the other. Enforcing their own law of anti-law, their supercharged terms for sexual denial were similar if opposite. The productivity of such efforts is measured by their autocracy and amazing energy, which should not necessarily seem a product of sublimation. Beissel kept publishing prolific editions of his hymnbooks in 1730, 32, 34 (ms. edition) and 36, with Franklin, most of the hymns written by Beissel. He was a propaganda machine. The First Century of German Language Printing attributes eight of the twelve known printed works in the colony to Beissel and Wohlfarth (2) before 1738, the Mystery of Lawlessness, German and English editions of 1728, 29, the Ninety-nine Mystical Sentences of 1729-30, a book on marriage as the penitentiary of man, Ehebuchlein...Menschen of 1730 and the hymn books. His community built houses for neighbors and held theater when they marched the road.This Ephrata community was analogous to a large family, although one feels under this surface a substitute for a real family more like a gang. How to explain celibacy's extremities? A prejudice against life? You can see it in theosophy in the cycle of death and rebirth. One life is never enough for Those dying generations at their song, as Yeats says, dying generations, entropy, life is never sufficient. Celibacy, tantrism, magic rituals, incantations, death, rebirth, drugs oppose existence in and of itself. Their negativity was so strong it cast itself as positive and maligned the positive as negative. This negativity also produced huge creativity, push a thing down here and won't it come up there? Polarized or natural? We are unable to think clearly when the poles are reversed! Commonplace phrases of esoteric teachings increase the reversal: rites, secret rituals, mystic theosophists, altars, fires, esoteric speculations, Celestial Eve, heavenly virgin, spiritual virgin, celestial virgin, virgin Sophia, mixed with the mystic, dogmas, awakening, simplicity, revival. All you need do to attract a following is tie up a sack and call it love. But he negative joined to its opposite is still negative, so if St. Paul had a agapetae, meaning a live-in snuggle bunny, the real version of which might be David's girl who warmed him on his deathbed, there will be some priest who will give him a bastard, and some critic to write about it. The root of negativity is to overturn authority to create authority. The one thing none of this bears is the thought that all human relation, every act, every thought, each moment is infused with redemption, so no matter what you have done, thought or said, there is redemption for it.
Even if Beissels's tract against marriage has no known copy there is plenty of evidence of his view. About 1735 he was awakened in his hut by intruders who whipped him presumably for seducing one of the Reformed wives to seek her virginity with him (Sectarians, 254). All opposites! Along with chastity came mortifying the flesh, full beards, pilgrim costume with the implicit violence of that garb. Whether to be a full hermit or merely a monastic seemed the choice in their minds. Of the immediate temptations in this holy melancholy we have Buñuel again to spank. To borrow from conspiracy theory, the processes of this control through sexual repression are mesmerist, patterning and depatterning, inversion techniques, hypno-illusions, etc., and even if we question the applications in politics, the techniques are seen in the Pennsylvania communes.
Zinzendorf
There were many of these mystics. The meditations of Zinzendorf riding horseback to take the gospel to the Indians may resemble the meditations of Crashaw and Donne, but Zinzendorf, like Beissel, is also a consumed megalomaniac. His mysticism is tantrism, his community autocracy. Pennsylvania is more than toy statistics in the bathtub however. Christopher Sauer's wife went one snowy night to become the spiritual bride of Conrad Beissel at Ephrata. Alexander Mack, called Brother Timotheus at Ephrata (Sectarians, 88) got baptized for his godly father (after his death!) founder of the Baptists. Conrad Weiser bounced from Lutheran to Beissel to Zinzendorf and back to Muhlenberg's daughter after burning all his prayer books. The New Mooners of Pennsylvania, played trombones at the new moon in the wilderness, holding that prayer ascended in the waxing but descended in the waning moon as did deceased souls (Sectarians, 431). The entrance to the doorway of the Ephrata chapel was so low to force the entrant to bow (404). Iron was prohibited in their building because it was unholy in the
Sachse says they aped the monastic customs of the Middle Ages in night vigils, tonsures, regalia, priesthoods (375) and mystical theology that included baptism for the dead, even more primitive than reincarnation, the most absurd instance being the creation of "immunity for deceased or absent kinfolk" (366) gained by the outer faith. It's all about the outer. Look who has entered the human plane, they tell you. So medieval that in his high calling and self esteem Beissel was forced to adopt the office of Vater instead of merely Brother, a title "too commonplace" (367). These orders, rituals and hierarchies of law and outer ceremony were just opposite of the Oley Newborn so totally dominated by inner vision and yet the impetus to egotism and domination were the same. Signs, countersigns and mystics, how embarassed was Yeats when he practiced the rituals of the Golden Dawn?
The words of Beissel and Zinzendorf had a bite. They could not mutually humble themselves enough even to meet in the flesh. Beissel "regarded himself as of a higher rank in the theosophical fraternity, considered it against his dignity to call on Zinzendorf (Sachse, 448) who responded by letter to Beissel that he "should descend from his spiritual height that others might sit alongside of him without danger to their lives" (449).
This pearl comes from the same Zinzendorf who threatened to kill Weiser. The two are paired. Both loved secret orders, paraphernalia of medals, robes, rituals and the power to command others. The Moravians had the Order of the Mustard Seed and the Order of the Passion of Jesus (Sachse 4548f). Both were social visionaries. Zinzendorf held seven ecumenical conferences to found "one congregation of God in the Spirit" (442). Throughout these things their words about Christ and love are enticing to the extreme, but the liberty and love they spoke were completely opposite their autocratic practice of the
If it is a mystery how Blake yokes such disparates in his visionary poems, bespeaking at the same time primitive biblical devotional language with an allegorical remake of the nature of man, describing his Fall in mysterious quaternaries, he is just another lovable case of 18th century mind whose renaissance cabala remarried a pietistic lifestyle. Were there such extremes in England who turned up in Penn's Woods with the renaissance pictographs of the spiritual bride? Blake got it from Swedenborg. Swedenborg got it from Zinzendorf. Thus the teachings of "the occult philosophy of the Mystics and Cabalists of the Middle Ages [were joined] with the severely simple Sabbatarian worship and tenets set forth in their primitive Bible teachings" (German Sectarians, 31). There was always a heavy blend of Rosicrucianism in Boehme, in the mystics of the Wissahickon, in Beissel, Zinzendorf, in them all, Muhlenberg aside.
Theosophists well loved, notconfined to particular time and place station Percival Lowell in Occult Japan to make what we can only call a space jump when he undergoes possession in his Shinto ritual. Whether to be possessed by food or the gods? Or a girl? Shall we be satisfied merely to say our names in sobriety and let that be enough? Was Sauer's criticism mere sour grapes, for "all was well between the two men until Sauer's wife left her husband and family to follow…a stricter observance (313).
Mania can't hold still. Beissel is one who "journeyed towards the valley of the Pequea to bring about an awakening among the Mennonites, who had settled there, many of whom had become followers of the seductive Bauman and his noxious "Newborn" teaching.
"Many thousands of these people cared so little for religion [or so much] that it became a common saying in reference to such, who cared neither for God nor His word, that they had the Pennsylvania religion" (Spangenberg as quoted by Sachse, I, 442).
Hawthorne's Dimmesdale impregnated a naif to prove that human nature cannot be altered by ordinary means.
There was a continual flow between the Moravians at Bethlehem and Beissel at Ephrata about 1742 (Sachse, German Sectarians, 424).
Esoteric teaching, secret ritual, mystic lies
have truth meant as bait for all poor flies
who find the sweetness bitter as they dive,
but with enjoyment skim the surfaces.
Deeper dive to bitter seeming truth,
which is so sweet and satisfying beneath.
This is the way of opposites and earth.
Nothing is so unimportant as the principled/unprincipled conflict of principals.
Megalomania is incomplete without projection upon the other, that holiest of psychological mechanisms where the outer world is inflicted with the inner.
The comet must be punitive if Beissel says so.
It's easy to exaggerate liberty, from Gottlieb Mittelberger (1756) to Jack D. Marietta and Gail Stuart Rowe's Troubled Experiment (University of Pennsylvania, 2006), which is shocked to learn that the crime rate among Germans was greater than among English, as if there were such statistics. But Pennsylvania includes as many notable lawless mystical hard cases than libertines. These made a work of love and roaring contradiction. What makes up spiritual lawlessness can be left to induction from cases interesting in themselves, but it is a little ironic that one of the first publications in Pennsylvania was Conrad Beissel's The Mystery of Lawlessness (Andrew Bradford, 1729), translated by Michael Wohlfarth.
[One is tempted to be facetious and say that elaborations upon these practices in Felker's Schwamp coined a new deep pit baptism. In this ritual celebrants had their feet tied to a rope suspended from a branch over water and were raised and lowered three times head first. You believe that? Also, Oley Judizers practiced left and right side baptism. Then there was foot first baptism, reserved for sects whose final planting at burial, made ready to be raised. so they were buried standing up.] Why douse a sick girl with buckets of water three times in the middle of the night? To be able to say at her funeral that it was just in time for her death. Sprinkle or plunge, forwards or backward, splash one or three, that's obvious Pennsylvania.
Some Sources:
On the musical compositions of Conrad Beissel. Peter Miller to Ben Franklin, President of the American Philosophical Society (1768)
"The Present, which I have added, was the Father's musical Book, wherein are contained the most part of the Musical Concerts, by himself composed. It did cost three Brethren three Quarters of a Year Work to write the same: by the Imbelllshment thereof It will appear, what a great Regard we had for our Superior, In the whole Book there Is no musical Error. And as It was written before the Mystery of Singing was fully discovered, there- for are not all the Keys therein mentioned. The Masters of that Angelic Art will be astonished to see that therein a Man, destituted of all human Instruction, came therein to the highest Pitch of Perfection, merely through his own Industry. Also, that when he did set up a School In the Camp, not only the Members of the Single Station were therewith occupied for many years : but also the Family- Brethren were also thereby enamoured, that their natural Affection, to their Family suffered a great Loss.
It Is a Wonder, how the even Notes and few half-notes can be so marvellously transposed, as to make thereby 1000 Melodies, all of 5 Tunes, and some of 6 Tunes, yea some of 7 Tunes, also that they came not one the other In the Way. In the Composition the Father had the same Way as in his Writings, viz : he suspended his considering Faculty, and putting his Spirit on the Pen, followed its Dictates strictly, also were all the Melodies flown from the Mystery of Singing, that was opened within him, there- fore have they that Simplicity, which was required, to raise Edification. It Is certain, that the Confusion of Languages, which began at Babel, never did affect Singing: and therefore is in Substance of the Matter in the Whole."
Finally, it's very rare to find someone who writes down something and does not reveal their disease in the writing.
