Damian Rollison
Temple Talk, October 13, 2024
My theme today is the Order of the Twenty-One and what it means to me. I’d like to begin by quoting from Dr. Paul Ivey’s essay on the Temple in the 2024 Artisan. Here, Paul is speaking of the establishment of the inner and outer orders of Temple membership:
“Members [of the Temple] moved through orders, a concept that echoes Masonic traditions. The Order of the Forty-Nine was all of humanity. Members were first elected to the Order of the Thirty-Six, the order of the Avatar, and made their pledge to the inner work of the Temple. The Order of the Twenty-Eight was the novitiate for the Order of the Fourteen. The Order of the Fourteen was known as the Order of the Holy Grail, and included the ordained exoteric priesthood. It served as the novitiate for the Order of the Seven, which was the esoteric order of the priesthood. The Order of the Twenty-One was established for nonmembers interested in the exoteric dimensions of the Temple, particularly artists and scholars.”
Paul Ivey once greeted me as a fellow member of the Order of the Twenty-One, which gave me pause momentarily, because I didn’t remember ever being elected to it. But the spirit of the Order of the Twenty-One, as I understand it, is similar to that of the Order of the Forty-Nine, which includes all of humanity; one can be a participating member of the Order of the Twenty-One without ever knowing it by that name or consciously acknowledging the Temple as a source. The Order of the Twenty-One reaches across belief systems and points of origin and strikes at the common desires and goals of people everywhere, and especially to the shared motivations behind all art and philosophy. That’s what I’d like to explore today.
I’d next like to read to you the text of the Temple pamphlet “About the Order of the Twenty-One”:
“The Order of the 21 is the first exoteric order of the Temple yet, in a sense, it is semi-esoteric. The Order of the Twenty-One will be animated and inspired by those forces that may be summed up in the one word, Expression. Therefore, this order will seek to express The Temple to the world on the lines of art, science, and philosophy. There will be no dues in this Order, nor any particular obligation to be assumed more than interest in the objects of the Order.
“Non-Temple members may belong to this Order wherever situated. It should be the aim of this Order to associate artists, scientists, and educators in this Order, either in full membership or honorary, as there may be interest in its objects. The number twenty-one numerically represents, and is, three sevens.
“As far as possible, and as may be wise, the Order of the 21 should indicate the fundamentals of those truths on which religion is built, in the sense that true religion is that knowledge and force and light that serve to make correlations, consciously, between the creature and the Creator of all things, thus helping to bring back to humanity lost and forgotten truths and reviving, in humanity, the memory of its inherent divinity. ‘Back to God!’ the slogan.
“This Order should endeavor to arrange lectures and classes at Halcyon, and elsewhere, to promote its objects, all being under the auspices of The Temple of the People. Permanent classes should be held at the Center as may be possible and expedient.
“The ideal should be held in mind that, if these objects can be carried out, steadily and consistently, there will eventuate a school or college in which may be taught and revealed the mysteries of life and living, all being based upon and being an extension of the known facts of modern science, art, and philosophy.
“All things go in cycles, and the Order of the Twenty-One is no exception. There have been times of re-ensouling it in the intervening years since 1924, when the need was apparent. Now is such a time. The Arts have always been concentrated here at the Center: graphic arts, pottery, the dance, performing and composing of music, wood working, and anything that involves the conscious use of skill and creative imagination. Under the ongoing expression of the creative spirit through the Order of the 21, the University Center Gallery is the showpiece for current creative imagination expressed through many mediums. We see everywhere the outpicturing of what Dr. Dower saw as a human need to make the correlations between the Creator and the Created of all things.
“The other two branches of this Order, Philosophy and Science, have not been activated. However, the seed has been planted. Who knows when the time is right for its growth and flowering?”
For some of us, such as Dr. Ivey, participation in the Order of the Twenty-One has to do with a dedication to philosophy, which these days we often give the more quotidian name of scholarship. But I was reminded of the broader and more humanistic sense of philosophy as a discipline when I recently read a biography of Galileo Galilei, one of the great geniuses of our shared history. In his time, the people we now call scientists were more commonly known as philosophers, and their disciplines usually covered a much broader range of human knowledge than is the case with the highly specialized scientists of today. Galileo contributed to our understanding of mathematics, physics, astrophysics, music, civil engineering, and many other areas of knowledge, and he was also a poet and a playwright as well as a fierce debater and compelling lecturer. Like Plato and Aristotle before him, he valued the pursuit of knowledge in all areas as a humanistic goal. We would all do well to remember that the more each of us remains curious about all aspects of life, the more likely we are to be prepared to receive and comprehend truths from all corners and perspectives.
Galileo is, of course, best known for being the first to advance the use of the telescope as a scientific instrument, using it to discover sunspots as well as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. These discoveries caused a great disruption in the belief system of Christian Europe in the 17th century. Galileo’s discoveries confirmed the earlier theory of Copernicus, which he derived purely through reasoning and calculation, that Earth and other planetary bodies rotated around the sun. Galileo, a devout Christian throughout his life, suffered persecution by the church simply for providing compelling evidence that the earth was mobile, not because his ideas actually contradicted the words of the Bible, but because church leadership in Italy clung at the time to a single-minded interpretation of Biblical text in an effort to protect its authority.
Protesting the notion that the Earth might revolve around the sun, the church fathers pointed to the book of Joshua, where, at the Battle of Jericho, Joshua prays to God for assistance, and God causes the sun and moon to freeze in their progress through the sky. Galileo felt the church’s interpretation of this and other Biblical evidence was unacceptably narrow and literal. He deftly resolved any apparent contradiction between religious doctrine and science when he wrote in a letter:
“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation, such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”
Galileo makes a clear distinction between the role of Scripture, which is to “persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation,” and the role of science. He suggests that the job of the philosopher or scientist is to investigate the universe on its own terms, not in order to find what Scripture tells you a priori is there, but using your divinely given senses, speech, and intellect to make sense of the world as you encounter it in actuality. Galileo was, in fact, one of the key figures in the development of what we now refer to as the scientific method, which considers all theories of the universe to be provisional and subject to revision through experiment.
This is, ideally, a healthy kind of skepticism that recognizes the limits of human understanding historically, collectively, and individually, and the need for effort on each of our parts to apply our intellect to the raw material of our experience in order to expand our perceptions. The knowledge of the true philosopher is earned knowledge, gained through trial and error and by testing one’s theories against the often unforgiving reality of one’s lived experiences.
The scientific attitude is well described by another episode from Galileo’s life. For hundreds of years, from the time of Aristotle, it had been assumed by scholars that the speed at which an object falls depends on its mass. Heavier objects fall faster and lighter objects more slowly. This was the Aristotelian theory and scholars on the whole did not question it, because it corresponded to a seemingly logical system of physics. In other words, it made sense on paper. But Galileo was not satisfied with received theory. Instead, he climbed to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and simultaneously dropped two objects of the same material but unequal weight, observing that they landed on the ground at the same time.
The purpose of Galileo’s experiment was to subject the raw material of experience to a controlled test in order to confirm (or in this case disprove) a theory. This is how science advances knowledge; at its root, the approach demands that we use our own experience to test and confirm, or overturn, received ideas. No matter whether what we are taught is right or wrong, we must try things out for ourselves. Doing so advances our individual and collective knowledge. It’s interesting to consider the extent to which modern society encourages us to abandon the scientific approach to life in regard to the very truths derived from science, to merely take as a given that atoms are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons, or that the universe began with a Big Bang. As much as possible, and especially so when they impact our lives directly, we should strive to understand the reasons behind theories about the world rather than accept them on pure faith.
How then do we draw a connection between philosophy and science on the one hand and the arts on the other? Why are they grouped together into the Order of the Twenty-One?
The arts proceed from a different vantage, but they also make use of the material of experience. Imagine Galileo’s Pisan tower experiment being framed as an artistic performance – a scene, perhaps, in a play or film. In this case, the intent would not be to use the material of experience to test a theory about falling bodies. Instead, the intent would be to vividly convey to an audience the feeling of being in a certain place at a certain time. Beyond that, the audience in this particular case would perhaps be invited to share in the scientist’s sense of discovery or in the awe of the observers of the scene. A vividly staged and acted scene thrusts us into the particulars of a momentous event that is distant from our own time and makes us feel that it is happening to us now.
Art isn’t easy to define because it is largely experiential – you know it when you see it, or hear it, or feel it. The arts of music, painting, sculpture, film, poetry, and fiction aren’t easily equated with each other, nor are their objects necessarily simple or easy to define. One of their common traits is what the Greeks called mimesis, which is that imitation of reality that makes you feel as though you are peeping into the life of Galileo, for example. Another Greek term is catharsis, the feeling of release one gets when experiencing strong emotions vicariously through art. But neither of these seems to me to sum up the feeling I get when I experience art that truly moves me.
Another more pertinent trait the arts tend to share is the ability to introduce into the daily here and now a depth of feeling that can be described as transcendent. Though this is one of the most mysterious and difficult to define qualities of art, I think it comes closest to describing its essence. When we call something transcendent, we mean that it exceeds what we think of as the normal boundaries of feeling or the ordinary range of normal experience. One of the better evocations of the feeling of transcendence through art is this by Emily Dickinson: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
It may seem paradoxical, but it seems to me correct to say that even for an art form like poetry that is designed to articulate experiences in words, the proper description of a transcendent response is that of an indescribable feeling. In this light let me repeat a passage from the Temple pamphlet on the Order of the Twenty-One that I read earlier: “The Order of the 21 should indicate the fundamentals of those truths on which religion is built, in the sense that true religion is that knowledge and force and light that serve to make correlations, consciously, between the creature and the Creator of all things, thus helping to bring back to humanity lost and forgotten truths and reviving, in humanity, the memory of its inherent divinity.” Awakening our memory of inherent divinity is another way of talking about transcendence.
Art is as intimately tied to experience as science is, but I’d suggest that its role is to inspire transcendent experiences in the here and now, rather than derive knowledge from the material of the everyday. Or if artistic experience leads to a form of knowledge, it is more of a reminder, as the Temple text says, that we are of the divine no matter how fallen we may often feel. In its ability to evoke this rekindling feeling, the experience of standing in front of a painting that moves you is not, fundamentally, very different from reading a poem that pulls you out of yourself, or hearing the performance of a piece of music that draws you into a wordless world of transcendent feeling. What these artistic forms share in common is something more than their ability to create an illusion or tell a story. Consider that art can be abstract and still meaningful; music can be wordless and still convey something beyond the ordinary. Certainly we’re drawn to stories and to expertly produced imitations of reality, but art gives us something more than the mere execution of skill. It lets us glimpse the divine through the raw material of experience.
William Morris, the English poet and designer, wrote, “There can be no art without a resistance in the materials.” I find this to be a key to understanding how art moves us, and a key more generally to understanding how to find truth behind appearances. It’s odd but true that the art we are most moved by often has an aspect of imperfection, where the hand of the maker and the struggle of creation are apparent in the result. Even the literal circumstances or subject matter of a work of art can be thought of as a kind of imperfection. We cannot, after all, conceive of anything perfect except through the imperfect channel of our limited perceptions. Why is it that evoking the specific circumstances of a person who grew up in another time, in another country, in a setting as distant from our own as possible, can sometimes make us feel that we finally understand a deep truth about ourselves? This is an aspect of transcendent experience, that it connects the particular to the universal.
So too, when we hear or perceive the human imperfection of the performer or artist as part of the artwork, we relate it to that same imperfection in ourselves and it becomes a vehicle for connecting to the divine. Even the very struggle of the act of creation – and every creative act involves a great deal of struggle — can help bring its transcendent qualities into being. The Romantic poet Percy Shelley wrote that inspiration begins to die when composition begins, and lamented the fact that he was never able to capture in words the full spirit of the inspiration that caused him to write in the first place. But to return to William Morris, if there can be no art without resistance in the materials, it is only through the difficult and often frustrating act of materialization that art reaches a form that can be communicated to others, and even communicated back to the self; and the act of materialization is a physical embodiment, symbolically something like the bread and water of communion, that allows us to share and awaken divinity collectively.
When it comes to music and my own approach to its performance, I am often struck by the fact that some of the music that I’m most drawn to comes from the Christian church. How is it that I can find Christian religious music so moving, growing up as I did in the Temple and only feeling a distant relationship to the Christian tradition? It is definitely not because I somehow become a Christian in a doctrinal sense during the time I’m singing a Christian hymn. I think that, again, it’s an example of how the particular connects to the universal.
I find one answer to this mystery in a quote from a Bob Dylan interview that has always stayed with me: “Those songs are my lexicon and prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from ‘Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain’ to ‘Keep On the Sunny Side.’ You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light.’ I’ve seen the light too.”
The Hank Williams song “I Saw the Light” has always been one of my touchstones as well. Here’s the first verse and chorus:
I wandered so aimless, life filled with sin
I wouldn’t let my dear Savior in
Then Jesus came like a stranger in the night
Praise the Lord, I saw the light
I saw the light, I saw the light
No more darkness, no more night
Now I’m so happy, no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord, I saw the light
Again, if you get too hung up on the doctrinal specifics in this song, you might assume that you can only sign on to its sentiment if you subscribe to a particularly Evangelical reading of the role of Christ as Savior. But who in life hasn’t felt the aimless wandering of the singer, and who hasn’t felt the desire to find the way that leads out of confusion to a life of peace? Similarly, one needn’t have experienced the deliverance described in the song to understand the desire for it.
The sentiment of a song like this is something all humans should be able to share, as long as they understand the basic message. But we might take things a step further and observe that the sentiment is somewhat beside the point. An even more fundamental message in the song is something like this: We are all connected; we are all together in this life. It’s the simplest thing in the world when you say it, but to feel it is something else again. The statement of that truth that I just made is much less powerful than the evocation of that truth in a beautiful song. Again, the power of art is to remind us of our common divinity. The Latin roots of the word “transcendence” are trans or across and scandere, to climb: to climb across the difficult, seemingly insurmountable boundary that appears to separate us and join together as one.
Speaking of Christian music, an especially troubled relationship to the Christian tradition is that of African Americans, and yet it could be argued that the confluence of Christian music and African American culture produced the most influential and transcendent music of the modern era. Africans brought to our country as slaves took with them the banjo, a fretless instrument that was Westernized and became one of the foundations of American rural music. African Americans helped transform the guitar and the piano from classical instruments played in parlors to powerfully versatile channels for new musical experimentation. The invention of blues, jazz, and rock music, which all arose out of the African American musical tradition, can be attributed to the way African American musicians adapted, stretched, and transformed Western music, based largely in the music of the church.
One of the great innovations of African American music has to do with a kind of compromise. Remember, there can be no art without resistance in the materials. As you may know, the system of Western music is highly regimented and mathematical, with dozens of instruments all calibrated to harmonize with each other on a twelve-tone scale with strict divisions of tone and meter. African music is very different, less regimented and more aligned with the rhythms of the body and the sonic possibilities of naturally occurring objects such as gourds and animal skins. Neither of these musical traditions is right or wrong, of course, but they are in some ways incompatible.
But African American musicians found a way. They took John Philip Sousa marching band music and introduced to it the polyrhythms of syncopation, accenting the offbeats and inventing ragtime and jazz. They added the so called “blue note” to the pentatonic scale, bending the strings of guitars and playing the piano slightly off key in order to coax Western instruments to play the in-between notes of the African fretless banjo. They did this in order to keep the spirit of their own tradition alive in a setting that offered them no other tools or options, and in so doing invented the music that America brought to the rest of the world.
The African American musical tradition is perhaps our best illustration of achieving transcendence in art via resistant materials. Though the circumstances of struggle and inequality that gave rise to this cultural formation are nothing to celebrate, still we are all rewarded as humans by the resulting body of music and musical styles, which now exist as a repository artists and audiences will be able to draw from for as long as humans make music.
So I’m finally getting around to my title, “The Music of the Spheres.” This is, as you may know, a theory that predates Galileo and in fact goes back to the ancient Greeks, though it was most fully developed by a scientist who was active about a hundred years before Galileo, Johannes Kepler. The theory was that the disposition and motion of the planets in the heavens corresponds to the intervals of music such that they produce a grand universal harmony. Kepler didn’t believe this music was audible to the ear, but he thought that the soul could hear it, and that it offered a ”very agreeable feeling of bliss, afforded by this music in the imitation of God.” What I find interesting about Kepler’s theory is how aesthetically satisfying it is, even if it quickly falls apart as science. One might argue that aesthetic truth occupies a different plane from that of scientific truth, one where the only true test is that a spark of transcendence can be found within it. Music, in particular, can be thought of as the organizing principle of our souls even if it does not govern the planets. Thus the music of the spheres remains an artistic reality.
I noted at the beginning that the Order of the Twenty-One is like the Order of the Forty-Nine in the sense that its members may not be aware of the Temple but may still belong to it. I’d like to suggest that the membership of the Order of the Twenty-One extends, in an important sense, to all of humanity too. All of us are philosophers and scientists and artists in our own lives. Too often we feel our thoughts and ideas don’t count, and how many of us have said “I can’t hold a tune” or “I can’t draw”? And yet as children, we did all of this with no thought of shame or embarrassment, even if the end product wasn’t worthy to hang in a museum.
When it comes to music, consider that before the age of recording, families had a piano in the parlor, or a guitar if they couldn’t afford a piano, and playing and singing was a common feature of home life and communal activity. It’s only when recorded music made available to us cheaply available reproductions of professional musical performances that we gradually abandoned our own efforts, preferring to listen rather than produce music. But music is actually one of the most accessible of the arts, tied as it is to the human heartbeat, the voice, the rhythm of walking and clapping and beating a spoon on a tin pan. We all derive pleasure from these things, and even more, we can use artistic expression to remind us of our own divinity without the help of a professional. It’s even better that way.
In closing I’d like to read the text of a short Temple lesson from Volume II of the Teachings, titled “The Soul of Music”:
“The musician whose soul is throbbing with the melodies he expresses by voice or instrument is the greatest among all the scientists, artists, or creators of form among men. He not only gives expression to his art in tones which pleasure the ears of all within sound of voice or instrument, but he ensouls the themes he sends forth. He releases the pent up forces in Soundless Sound and sends his creations out to take the form conceived and born in his soul as a theme or melody.
“This ensouled form may circle around in the aura of the earth or some other planet for centuries of time, but some time, in some age, it must return to the plane of its first expression to take on material substance. It may be as crystal or plant, and eventually as animal and human life.
“His creations, conceived and born in pure and unselfish love, bear none of the marks which distinguish the work of the scientist or other earthly creator, being devoid of all selfishness. He pours out his soul in melody without thought of return and out of pure love for the imprisoned music which he strives to free. Therefore, his creations are eternal, as love is eternal.”