Esoteric Coffeehouse

It’s almost April Fools Day, and you should be either thinking of a prank or considering how to avoid being ‘fooled’. That’s because, on 1st of April, there are only two types of people out there: the pranksters and those being played a prank.

Nobody has been able to decipher the actual origin of April Fools Day. Theories abound from attributing it to the Bible and the Gregorian calendar change to the Holi festival in India, which has similar characteristics. You can read all about it in the Wikipedia article (1). I’m interested so much in where the celebration came from but why it survives to this day. What makes us still enjoy playing the April Fools game in this day-and-age?

Before answering that question, it is perhaps a good idea to look at the characteristics of this informal celebration. As we all know, it always occurs on the 1st of April, which is the first month of real spring (after the spring equinox) and used to represent the first day of the Julian New Year (2). Thus, it is a time of unclear, tentative beginnings, where things are not yet settled in their ordered pattern. The weather is still capricious, windy and cold; winter wrestles with the spring, and nothing is certain yet.

This time of disorder, uncertainty and ambiguity is an ideal period for the emergence of the ‘fool’. The fool is a person socially defined as ridiculous, inferior or incompetent (3) or, an unintelligent person, somebody considered to lack good sense or judgment (4). The fool is someone who is made fun at. We can see from these definitions that the fool is a role assigned by the others, or perhaps assumed by someone by himself or herself – it does not exist outside a social environment. Thus, a fool is ‘made’ (5). A good example of ‘making a fool’ is certainly the April Fool prank. The prankster seeks to prove the ‘prankee’ as a fool – a gullible or weak-minded person. If the ‘prankee’ falls for the joke, he has been made into fool.

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Before New Age, there was Spiritualism. Just like New Age, Spiritualism started as an American counterculture movement. Just like New Age, it was a spontaneous, ‘democratic’, unorganized form of belief that did not have religious hierarchy or sacred books, at least until very late. The vestiges of Spiritualism are still with us today: ghost sightings, poltergeists, haunted houses, possessed people, mediums etc. Movies like Ghost and the Sixth Sense are but the latest manifestations of a movement that sprang in the middle of the 19th century. Even though Spiritualism waned sometime between the two World Wars, beliefs in ghost manifestations have survived. After all, a 2006 Gallup Organization poll revealed that 32% of Americans believe in ghosts (1).

At the core of Spiritualist belief was the alleged phenomenon of ghost apparitions. The dead appeared to the living in organized sessions called séances, being channeled by human beings with special paranormal gifts called mediums. The pattern was laid out through the first séance that launched the Spiritualist craze, which took place in Hydesville, New York in 1848. The Fox sisters allegedly communicated with the spirit of a dead person which heralded a new era when “the spirits clothed in the flesh are to be more closely and more palpably connected with those who have put on immortality” (2). From there on, the Spiritualist movement spread like wildfire across the United States. Mediums appeared everywhere, organizing spectacular séances where noises (rappings), table turning, automatic writing, levitation, partial or total ghost materialization and others occurred. The democratic nature of séances attracted a great number of those disgruntled with organized religion as well as women seeking liberation from Victorian conventions (3).

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I have written sometime ago an article on the Egyptian myth of the Tarot (you can find it here if you missed it). I mentioned there that the ‘creators’ of the Tarot as we know it were basically 18th century esoteric writers Antoine Court de Gebelin and his friend the Count of Mallet. Yet Tarot would not be the esoteric phenomenon it is today (a search on the internet on ‘tarot’ would pull a staggering amount of 28 million entries) if it weren’t for another Frenchman, Alphonse Louis Constant, known as Eliphas Levi (1810 -1875).

Levi was a shoemaker’s son, just like another famous esotericist, Jacob Boehme. He was due to become a priest, but he gave up and got involved in the whirlwind of the 1848 revolution (1). When his political ambitions became frustrated, Levi turned to a serious study of Western esoteric traditions. In the process, he became acquainted with two key traditions: the Jewish Kabbalah and the Tarot.

The Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings developed by medieval Jews, and based upon a hidden understanding of the Hebrew Bible. At the core of the Kabbalah stays the Tree of Life, a complex system representing the 10 emanations of God into His Creation and the relationships amongst them. Kabbalah had been enthusiastically taken up by the Hermetic thinkers of Renaissance Europe, particularly Pico della Mirandola, Johann Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa and others. Christian Cabala, or Qabalah, as it became known, may have altered the original Jewish thought, but it had a tremendous influence on modern esoteric traditions. Levi enthusiastically subscribed to the Kabbalah and included it in his works.

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