Introduction

We live in a world in which change has become the norm. The mountains, rivers, seas and continents may preserve an appearance of immutability, seeming as fixed and as stable to us as they ever seemed to our ancestors, but the fabric of our society, the pattern of rules which governs the complex interrelationships of human beings, is tearing and changing as never before in history. Two centuries ago it was possible for a man to live his life through in an environment devoid of change, with technology static and social laws and philosophical beliefs rigid and unquestionable. Neighbours would remain neighbours, houses rarely changed owners, and the tools which a young man might start work with would be passed on with his death to a new generation. Attitudes to life and death were governed by the religious dogma of the time and were generally held without question and even without much consideration. For most people, apart from those caught up in the convulsion of some war or insurrection, the time course of significant social and political change was such that it could barely be detected within any one lifetime. Society must have seemed as stable as any mountain, as predictable as the procession of the seasons.

The Industrial Revolution wrecked all this. Hillsides which had produced grass and trees for a hundred thousand years were suddenly torn apart and blackened in the hunt for coal. Villages which had maintained social and agricultural dominance of a region since Roman times dwindled into insignificance in comparison with the new industrial cities, populated by migrant workers who have travelled distances which their fathers would have been unable to contemplate. Communications networks of road and rail sprang up, linking all urban and rural communities irrevocably, and human beings began in earnest that restless shuffling from place to place which is the lot of nearly all of us today.

Other data communication networks - cheap books and newspapers, telephones, radio and television - all combined to totter the happy complacency of the old societies. Men could impose their personality and their philosophy on other men by the astute use of such networks infinitely more rapidly, and with far greater effectiveness, than could the conquering generals of the past.

At this time the frenetic rush continues, with technological development hurtling ahead of the conceptual and ideological advances which should ideally match its pace. The tremendous successes of the American and Russian space programmes, which have considerably exceeded even the most optimistic predictions of the science fiction of the 1940s, should warn us of what we are about to face in the future. Even more significant, and yet almost totally unappreciated by the ordinary man or woman, is the really remarkable growth of computer technology which will impact in its most spectacular and far-reaching form in the 1980s to make the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution look tranquil and insignificant.

Faced with these facts, and with the inescapable signs of the impact of science and technology on the world's social organization, one sees some critical questions that need to be answered. The first is probably simply whether Man can survive changes of this kind without some vast neurotic upheaval manifesting either in a major move towards what might be called `drop-out anarchy', or in a manic swing into nuclear war. To date, no psychologist, anthropologist or sociologist seems to have been able to confront this question adequately - we have no way of knowing whether the human species has the inherent or potential capability to handle the technology it can create, and at the same time preserve identity at both the personal and social level. For this we will have to wait and see, and those of us who are optimists are the fortunate ones. The second major question, which embraces the subject matter of this book, concerns the apparently widening gap between Man's ability to manipulate his environment - as with engineering, physics, astronautics, etc. - and his capacity to comprehend the implications of his technological success and to become a part of the much wider world that has opened up to him. It is in this area - the system of beliefs by which Man relates himself to the unknown forces of the Universe and the great mysteries of space and time, of beginnings, middles and ends - that what we know generally as Religion has lately failed in its ancient role. This failure has become more obvious and dramatic in the last decade, though the rot set in at the time of Copernicus and the first overt signs of decay did not appear until a century ago.

In fact, until somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century - probably there is an association with the disquiet accompanying the Industrial Revolution - the average individual looked to the Bible and to orthodox religious teaching for answers to what he considered to be the important questions about the Universe. At the time these were such natural ones as, `What is Man?', `How did he come into existence?', `Where does God live?', `What happens after death?', etc., etc. If studied assiduously, the Bible in fact gives fairly straightforward and quite categoric answers to all such questions, and with a little imagination can produce reasonable answers to a good many others of a less religious kind. At the time of Galileo, for example, a flat quotation from Joshua 13 `...and the sun stood still...and hasted not to go down about a whole day' was counted as being a most suitable refutation for the theories of Copernicus which were based on painstaking scientific observation, but only a few gallant diehards would take this line today. In the past hundred years in particular, what we might term the `religious answer' has progressively lost its punch, with more and more people turning to the textbooks of science in an attempt at understanding the strange physical and mental environment we live in. The galloping decline of the authority of the Church - particularly in liberal societies such as England, and, to a lesser extent, in the USA - is evident in the shrunken congregations at Anglican churches, and in the decaying brick buildings, proudly erected as Baptist churches a century ago, which now spend their last days ignominiously as cut-price carpet centres, or temporary warehouses. And this decline, despite all the best efforts of media-conscious Bishops on motorcycles, shows no sign of being arrested. For who in this day and age, now that astronauts have waddled around the moon, can really feel that the Archbishop of Canterbury has anything important to say on celestial matters?

Unfortunately where the answers provided by religious dogma fail to satisfy, there is frequently, as we have pointed out above, no suitable alternative answer provided by science. Science in general refuses to speculate, proffering to its adherents only those facts it considers to be established by virtue of the inductive experimental method. It is useless to ask a scientist - in his working role - such questions as `Why are we here?', or `How could the Universe come into being?', for he will merely say that he does not know. Answers are, of course, available from religious teaching, but they are answers which to most people simply don't gel and are really no better than no answer at all. The gap between the discoveries at the frontiers of science and their assimilation into some useful cosmological theory is already immense, and there is a danger that it may grow wider still. To the working scientist this is not necessarily alarming. He realizes that his technology can easily outstrip his philosophy, and holding himself to be a technologist he is content to leave it to the philosopher to make sense of it all. To the vast majority of mankind, however, who are still not yet scientists by any stretch of the imagination, but who are acquiring a more articulate curiosity which modern telecommunications only serve to titillate, this attitude is basically unsatisfying. In their heart of hearts most people still want some fairly simple, reasonably logical answers to the questions that human beings have always asked - answers which will ease the chill which we have all felt when, in the small hours of the morning, we wonder about life and death, time and space, creation and destruction.

These gaps, we will have to agree, need plugging. And if science and present-day philosophy - currently obsessed with semantics and linguistics - are unprepared to offer help, while the great world religions offer only outdated, timeworn and implausible concepts, then the field is ripe as never before for stop-gap systems, pseudo-scientific philosophies, quasi-technological cults and new Messiahs to emerge. They are, in fact, already here, and there is evidence that their strength is growing. We shall examine some of them in this book, and when gazed at with a clinical eye they amuse rather than alarm. Yet they beg for careful study for they are sociological phenomena of great interest and significance. Perhaps more important, they give one a taste of things to come, for if the decline of the old-established religions continues at its present pace, and if technology continues to outstrip advances in the philosophy of science, the need for such cults will increase so that not only will they proliferate but some of the existing ones will rise to real power.

What form do these surrogate belief-systems take? To some extent this depends upon their antiquity, for a full-fledged cult requires some time to mature. Scientology, for example, which is perhaps the most important and in some ways the most disturbing, has now got a measurable history behind it and an international organization with considerable financial resources to support it. It also has a leader who is of the greatest possible significance to the movement, and an organized dogma with means for distributing it. On the other hand, there are more nebulous cults - such as that surrounding a belief in flying saucers - not crystallized into any single organized body, but with considerable intellectual and emotional support in all parts of the world. Yet again there are relatively tiny cults, run by minor eccentric individuals and commanding limited support, though always with the potential for rapid expansion. Some are intellectually naive, others sophisticated to the point of semantic complexity. All are equatable in that, when looked at in close-up, they serve to fill a need which science and technology have created by cutting away the power of the old established religions.

In this book, in the interests of keeping it down to reasonable size, I have concentrated on a cross-section of cults and fads. The best documented and the most immediately significant - that of Scientology - I have tackled at some length for its origins, history and evolution are immensely revealing and of the greatest interest to anyone interested in psychology and sociology. I have also gone into the topic of flying saucers at some length, for, while there is no single dominant cult connected with this, the belief in flying saucers - as Jung pointed out a decade ago - is another important sociological phenomena of our time.

The third segment of the book is devoted to an examination of an interesting, but I hope allowable, diversion from the main theme - the various devices grouped under the generic heading of `Black Boxes'. Time and again I have found that individuals interested in one or other of today's cults have been peripherally fascinated by mysterious gadgetry of one kind or another, varying from devices such as pendulums used for detecting hidden gold or oil to elaborate boxes with valves, coloured lights and intriguing rotating parts. These devices, I believe, play a very significant role in providing quasi-scientific backing for many cultish beliefs, and are treated - as is the case with the Scientologists' E-meter - with considerable reverence by adherents. They serve to demonstrate (to believers) what is after all the fundamental thesis lying behind all cults - that the mind or soul of Man is a real thing, not a mere epiphenomenon of the brain, and as such is measurable to some degree. They are an attempt to provide tangible proof of the existence of the spirit or life force that motivates our actions, and that survives the disintegration of our puny physical bodies.

Finally I have included a section on a number of the strange varieties of Eastern religious beliefs which are currently flourishing and which have attracted such excitement in the media. If I appear to have spent so little time on such significant figures as the Maharishi Yogi, and concentrated on such lesser characters as Mr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, it is because in a curious way the latter seems to be exhibiting more staying power. Perhaps the Maharishi's message was really too ascetic for most people's tastes - or maybe Mr Rampa simply tells a better story!

I have deliberately refrained from a detailed analysis of the rather well-known variants of religious belief such as Christian Science, Theosophy, Spiritualism, etc., since these are well-documented elsewhere. Christian Science is a world religion of minority status which sprang up in the nineteenth century as the result of the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, curious and dominant personality whose principal belief was that all sickness was illusion - essentially the product of inadequate mental or spiritual outlook. Faith in the fact of the illusory nature of illness is sufficient in itself to ensure total restoration to health. Like Spiritualism, another vigorous minority religion which preaches the possibility of communication with the spirits of dead people, Christian Science is essentially an attempt at a practical expression of basic Christian belief - in one case the power of Faith to heal and in the other the survival of the soul after death. Both these tenets are implicit in orthodox Christian belief (and in most major religious systems even of a non-Christian nature) but are supposed only to have been demonstrated practically in the past by great spiritual figures such as Jesus Christ, certain saints and so on. The upsurge of both these important variants of Christianity in the nineteenth century is a significant comment on the growing feeling that the orthodox lure was weak in some important aspects. Only now, after decades of formal opposition either to spiritual healing or psychic manifestations, are certain sections of the Established Church beginning to see in these outcrops of orthodoxy their one possible hope for the salvation of a fading cause, and it is no coincidence that a good number of Bishops are members of the Church's Fellowship for Psychical Study and that the Archbishop of Canterbury thought it worthwhile only a decade or so ago to set up a Commission to investigate divine or supernormal healing. However, the rush to incorporate the alleged findings of psychical research to bolster religious dogma appears to have come too late, as these findings are now themselves viewed with the utmost scepticism by most scientists, unlike their eminent Victorian predecessors who treated them with grave sympathy.

They are also not truly contemporary cults, arising to fill gaps in cosmology caused by the onslaught of science, but rather attempts at practical application of one or other aspect of Christian thought. (Nowadays both varieties have almost totally dissociated themselves from the Christian Church, many Spiritualists in fact refusing to accept the divine origin of Christ.) The cults and fads that follow are, as the reader will soon see, products not of the nineteenth century, but very much of the second half of the twentieth century. They draw their logic, their language and their philosophy more from the raw material of science, of psychoanalysis and of the existentialist philosophers than from the traditional sources of religion. The mixture is often a bizarre one, but it is evidently potent enough to capture the minds of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of sane men and women on earth today. The students of society among us will watch their evolution with care, and contemporary religious leaders may look to them for possible practical truths, and perhaps even for some useful lessons to be learned.

 

Title

In the Beginning