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PARTISAN REVIEW
He spent his nights at the different Hollywood churches, drawing the
worshippers. He visited the " Church pf Christ, Physical" where holiness
was attained through the constant use of chestweights and spring grips ;
the "Church Invisible " where fortunes were told and the dead made to
find lost objects ; the ' 'Tabernacle of the Third Coming" where a woman
in male clothing preached the "Crusade Against Salt" ; and the
"Temple Moderne " under whose glass and chromium roof " Brain·
Breathing , the Secret of the Aztecs" was taught.
. . . One Friday night in the "Tabernacle of the Third Coming ," a
man near Tod stood up to speak. Although his name most likely was
Thompson or Johnson and his home town Sioux City , he had the same
countersunk eyes, like the heads of burnished spikes , that a monk by
Magnaseo might have. He was probably just in from one of the colonies
in the desert near Soboda Hot Springs where he had been conning over
his soul on a diet of raw fruit and nuts. He was very angry . The message he
had brought to the city was one that an illiterate anchorite might have
given decadent Rome . It was a crazy jumble of dietary rules , economics
and Biblical threats . He claimed to have seen the Tiger of Wrath stalking
the walls of the citadel and the Jackel of Lust skulking in the shru bbery,
and he connected these omens with "thirty dollars every Thursday " and
meat eating .
A man called Johnson or Thompson.. . . As William Irwin Thompson
says, "In Los Angeles it is much harder to distinguish between personal
fantasy and social reality." The brain-breathing Thompson teaches at
Lindisfarne is not Aztec, but Indian. The congregation at Thompson's
Temple Moderne gather to celebrate "the wedding of the mystique of
German science and the mysticism of Indian Yoga ." But what Thompson
calls science is no more scientific than Scientology or the Church of Christ,
Scientist .
It
is the sign of an attempt to co-opt and counter the magic of the
unrighteous. Science is to cosmic consciousness what airplanes are to cargo
cults. The Oriental mysticism is there to .get religion in by the back door.
Thompson has staked everything on his bet that' 'we have reached the limit of
Western Christian civilization" by which he means the Protestant ethic and
the spirit of capitalism . While sharing with us the amazing coincidences and
portentous symmetries that mark the stations of his calling, Thompson lets
slip that he is' 'an apostate Catholic," but, as it turns out, one more Catholic
than apostate. What beyond doubt he really hankers for is "the concentric,
hierarchical, nonmechanistic values of the Catholic world view." The
repressed returns slowly and through crooked corridors, but inexorably. All
crisis cults are at once ne.wfangled and atavistic.
And all of them are symptoms of what they claim to cure. In societies, as
in people, the disease is nothing else but the sum of its symptoms. These
appear successively, each new one a product and complication of the ones that
