Drawing Down the Moon (46 page)

That was merely the beginning. It was followed by a procession of courses—vegetables, fish, beef, and fowl—from shrimp in sauces, deviled eggs, and stuffed clams to plates of stuffed grape leaves, sweet fried plantains, pita bread with various dips, tomatoes and peppers, and platters of pigeons, oysters, chickens, and geese. Each set of dishes had been prepared by the priests; they appeared with the flourish of cymbals and drums, and each course was washed down with a strong, foamy punch. In the midst of the banquet came the ritual meal of the bride and groom, and in contrast to our feast, it was simple. Two fish were broiled and served with parsley. Dessert included carrot cakes, wedding cakes and puddings, honeycombs dripping in honey, rows of papayas, persimmons, pomegranates, figs, and dates.

During the feast I came across a bowl of enormous goose eggs. I picked one up and gazed at it, to remind myself later that this had been a feast out of a fantasy. Finally, I could contain myself no longer. I walked up to Odun and said, “This is the most amazing feast I have ever seen, barring the banquet scene in Fellini's
Satyricon.
”

Odun gave me a wry smile and said with a touch of affected humorous contempt, “Remember
Satyricon
was
merely
a movie.”

The Sabaean Religious Order moved to New Orleans in 2000. At the time of this latest edition, Odun had suffered a terrible stroke from which he still has not recovered. Bill Koeppen, a Sabaean who has been with Odun for many years, says, “There is a void in all our lives without his presence and all of us pray to the Am'n for his well-being.” As a result of Hurricane Katrina the staff of the Sabaean Religious Order made the decision to move to Denver, Colorado. Sabaeanism will continue. The priesthood intends to complete the books Odun was working on and publish them in his name. It plans to reopen the temple and storefront again.

Feraferia and the Sabaean Religious Order each sprang from the vision of one person. The power of these two groups reflects the energy, charisma, and talent of their founders.

The Church of the Eternal Source (CES), a federation of Egyptian cults, stands in contrast—devoid of charismatic leadership. Instead, it centers on the power, artistry, and beauty of a culture—ancient Egypt. Involvement in CES depends on a direct personal, intellectual, and emotional encounter with the force of Egypt, with its gods, with the beauty of its art. Most members usually had such an encounter at an early age, perhaps in a library or a museum, or through a book or a film. Since relatively few people in our culture have had such a fortunate experience, the Church of the Eternal Source is very small.

Many of the founders and priesthood of CES have similar stories: early identification with ancient and classical cultures—Greek, Roman, Egyptian—and an early religious bent. The late Donald Harrison, for example, one of the founders of the Church of the Eternal Source, was a commercial artist whose home was decorated with exquisite hand-carved replicas of Egyptian works of art. Harrison began carving statues of gods and models of temples as a child. Later, he converted to Catholicism and entered a Benedictine monastery. Then he rebelled, declared Christianity “anti-life,” and left the monastery a confirmed Pagan, determined to reestablish the ancient religions. Influenced by Gore Vidal's novel
Julian,
in 1967 he founded the
Julian Review,
one of the earliest Neo-Pagan journals. Believing that the ancient Egyptian religion was too esoteric for most people, he joined Michael Kinghorn in founding the Delphic Fellowship, a group devoted to Greek Paganism. In the meantime, he began a six-year-project to create a full-size replica of the throne chair of Tehutimes III, hand-carved in two thousand pieces of ivory and rare woods. Finally, when the Church of the Eternal Source was established in 1970, after much study, Harrison declared himself a priest of the Egyptian god Thoth and began to reestablish the Thoth cult.

Jim Kemble had planned a career as an Episcopalian priest, but later became enamored of the classical religions of Greece and Rome. In high school he performed secret ceremonies to the old gods. He would walk to the beach in California and drop wine and bread into the sea, invoking Zeus, Poseidon, Bacchus, and Pluto. After 1970 he came upon CES, and the gods he had worshipped merged into the figure of Osiris. He began to study Egyptian history and religion and became a priest of Osiris, reviving the Osiris cult.

Elaine Amiro, a priestess of Neith, was fascinated as a child by native American and Egyptian cultures. She was attracted to the desert and at various times kept many strange animals, including iguanas, bobcats, monkeys, ocelots, and alligators. She taught Navajo children in New Mexico and studied the Navajo religion although, she told me, “as an Anglo, I was barred from learning much of the rites.”

After returning to her home in Massachusetts, Amiro said, she discovered the Goddess at the end of a period when her life had “just seemed to fall apart.” One day she was looking in an encyclopedia at the names of Egyptian gods and goddesses. “One name caught my attention,” she wrote me, “and I kept coming back to it. I had never heard of the Goddess Neith before. I wondered why I was so attracted.”

Neith, writes Amiro, was the great lady who was mother and daughter to Ra, the sun god, who “brought forth herself in primeval time, never having been created.” She was the “first to give birth to anything, when nothing else had been born, not even herself.”

Amiro found that her name matched Neith's numerologically, and several strange experiences convinced her that Neith was her spiritual guide. She wrote that after this discovery her creative energies seemed set free. She began to paint, to write poetry, even to carve statues. “Life has never meant more to me than when I rediscovered ancient Egypt and the Goddess. All my talents began to surface. I was amazed at the number of things I could do and do rather well.” She began doing healings. Amiro, the mother of three children, worked as an elementary school teacher. She told me that she made Egypt and other ancient cultures come alive for children.

Later she found out about the Church of the Eternal Source and established the cult of Neith at her home in West Wareham, Massachusetts. “I finally discovered who I was and what my job on earth was—to be a servant and priestess of Neith.” Only after this, she said, did she really begin to live.

Harold Moss was one of those most instrumental in founding the church. One could say that CES began in fun, as a series of Egyptian costume parties originating with a group of students known as the Chesley Donovan Science Fantasy Foundation (CD). The group was formed in 1953, when Harold Moss was in high school in California. A CES pamphlet described the Chesley Donovan Foundation as “an elitist science fiction club and atheist organization.” Its members “quoted Thomas Paine and Willy Ley and Robert Heinlein, read horror comics, wore military helmets with meat cleavers implanted in them to social functions and school, and used ‘normal,' ‘average,' and ‘Christian' as swear words.”
³³

Harold Moss is a warm and compassionate man who, when I first met him, worked as an engineer in the daytime and by night lived in a house whose walls were covered with shelves of classical records. We spent a long evening talking, listening to Bach cantatas, and looking at pictures of the California desert. Harold told me that he had long been fascinated by the sophisticated cultures of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

“Just precisely how I became aware of Egypt is pretty clear to me. I did a lot of reading as a child and I loved to go to the movies. I was aware of the Arabian Nights stories, and movies such as
The Thief of Baghdad,
and even the old
Cleopatra
—as corny as it was. Roman epics fascinated me.

“I remember I particularly liked the idea that ancient people wore few clothes. I thought clothes were stupid and ridiculous and even as a child I kept trying to take them off. The Hebrews always seemed to wear too many clothes, whereas the Romans and the Egyptians ran around naked, and this made a lot of sense to me as a child.

“But mainly, I was captivated by the sense of beauty of the Egyptians. I find I am using this phrase a lot these days. I was utterly captivated by this magnificently developed sense of beauty. I felt there was no possibility that anything could be wrong with a people who could manifest such beauty.”

In 1954, after seeing the film
The Egyptian,
Moss went to the library and read James Breasted's
History of Egypt.
The child of Theosophists, Moss was brought up as a free thinker, and it was natural for him at the time to identify with Akhenaten and the religion of Aten, finding it to be a kind of Pagan rationalism. “I was under the spell of Breasted,” Moss said, “with all his highly fictionalized accounts of Akhenaten as the lonely progressive in a world of hidebound people who were worshipping blindly, through habit. Akhenaten was the one who dared to think, to do something different, to be unusual. So, of course, he was the proper hero for an eighteen-year-old.”
³⁴

Members of the Chesley Donovan Foundation adopted Akhenaten as their hero and began to wear ankhs. Moss pursued his interest in Egypt with his friends, who may not have taken it as seriously as he did. As the years progressed, he came to realize that he was captivated by
all
of the Egyptian religion, not just Akhenaten. By 1967 he had rebelled against Akhenaten's monotheism, declared himself a polytheist, and immersed himself in the classic cult of Horus, the god of light.

Moss and a number of friends had started a tradition of Egyptian summer costume parties in 1964. Eventually, they were scheduled to coincide with the ancient Egyptian New Year's celebration in mid-July. By 1970 Moss had come into contact with other Pagans, including Feraferia's Fred Adams and various Wiccan groups. He met Don Harrison and Sara Cunningham, a priestess of Wicca, and together they founded the Church of the Eternal Source officially on August 30, 1970. It was incorporated the next January. Sara Cunningham later left CES and returned to Wicca.

 

The Church of the Eternal Source considers itself to be the
refounded
religion of ancient Egypt, authentic in spirit, scholarly, and intense. An early CES leaflet proclaims:

But what does it mean to be authentically Egyptian today? CES understands that the answer to that question is complicated, and that it can easily be misunderstood by those who think of ancient Egypt simply in terms of pyramids, burial customs, bureaucracies, and powerful pharaohs.

The priesthood of CES sees Egypt as the first truly religious culture and to them “Egyptian” means remaining true to the spirit of the ancient religion, a spirit exemplified by three things: ecumenicism, polytheism, and the mythopoetic view.

CES encourages its students to continue any religious practice they have found meaningful in the past. “We think our general viewpoint is more meaningful, more powerful and more satisfying, but whatever of value you have found we will urge you to keep. . . . Our purpose—the purpose of true religion—is to help you become
more;
not to tell you a lot of things you have to give up, nor to insult you, nor try to terrorize you.”
³⁶

What, then, is this more meaningful, more general viewpoint? First of all, it holds that the Egyptian gods are not “Egyptian” in any national sense of the word. CES has no ties with the present-day Arab world. It views Egypt today as a place that has been devastated and violated by unbelievers and infidels. The sanctuaries have been desecrated; the shrines are in ruins. The Egyptian gods are seen as eternal forces, and all modern religions are simply aspects of the Egyptian view narrowly focused. For example, modern Judaism may be seen as a cult of Ra, Christianity as a cult of Amen-Ra-Harakhte with a touch of Isis thrown in, Buddhism as a cult of Amen. “This,” wrote Moss to a Protestant clergyman, “makes perfect sense, explains why men disagree, and gives us the ultimate answer to ecumenicism—freedom.”
³⁷

The priests of the Church of the Eternal Source have often said that there is more of the truly Egyptian in Nepal, or in a Hopi pueblo, than in late Egyptian texts, which are tainted by foreign elements. CES encourages dressing in the Egyptian manner, learning hieroglyphics, using Egyptian dates and names, but at the same time it upholds the view that “the Egyptian culture we imitate was ancestral to the present culture of all Western nations,” and that therefore understanding of and respect for all religious practices are beneficial.
³⁸

I asked Harold Moss how he looked at the gods. “I'm a Jungian introspectionist,” he said. “The Egyptian gods and goddesses represent constructs—personifications. . . . Do the gods exist? Yes. The conceptualization of polytheistic divinities is a useful way of explaining the kind of contact we
do
have with the transpersonal and transinfinite forces of life. These forces are beyond human conception, but we can establish a path of communication so that these forces react to us, to people,
as though there
were gods.” “Still,” Moss added, “the gods are real.”
³⁹