This view is most famously represented in the monumental study The Golden Bough by J.G. Frazer.

As modern a theory as it may seem to some, it had long been thought of—and derided.

In work On Isis and Osiris¸ Plutarch, in the first century AD, writes:

And we shall also get our hands on the dull crowd who take pleasure in associating the [mystic recitals] about these Gods either with changes of the atmosphere according to the seasons, or with the generation of the corn and ploughings, and in saying that Osiris is buried when the sown corn is hidden by the earth, and comes to life and shows himself again when it begins to sprout. . . .

For these in nothing differ from those who regard a pilot as sails and ropes and anchor, and a weaver as yarns and threads, and a physician as potions and honey-brew and barley-water; nay, they put into men’s minds dangerous and atheistic notions, by transferring names of Gods to nature and to things that have no sense or soul. (Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, 65.1, 5; translated by G.R.S. Mead; bracketed insertion is Mead’s)

Copyright © 2026 by Richard Smoley

Thus it’s been a pleasure to read Roger Lipsey’s admirable study Gurdjieff Reconsidered.

Roger cites a number of sources who remark Gurdjieff’s extraordinary personal magnetism. For example, from pupil François Grunwald:

My ineradicable impression is that Mr. Gurdjieff was made of another clay than the rest of us. I felt him as come from another planet to convey something that our earth-bound intelligence cannot easily encompass, and above all to share the immense force which emanated from him until he left us.

Grunwald adds:

Today I am convinced as an inner majesty did not emanate from his person as such, rather that he was a channel, a way of access to a “higher” force which, without the least doubt, he rendered perceptible.

These comments raise a question not only about Gurdjieff but about many others who seemed to stand higher than the typical level of humanity: Pythagoras, Rumi, Sri Ramana Maharshi.

Were they really made of “another clay” than the rest of us? Were they from another planet (like Gurdjieff’s character Beelzebub)?

Let me presume to answer in the way I think Gurdjieff might have done. It has to do with the “higher force” which is the real, if frequently hidden, objective of the Gurdjieff Work: a higher, finer substance, undetectable to current science, that permeates and transforms the ordinary human being. If an organism, through certain practices including but not limited to study and deep devotion, is sufficiently suffused with this force, the nature of its being changes, and it does indeed seem to be made of “another clay.” It is then able to impart some of this higher force to the surroundings.

Copyright © 2026 by Richard Smoley

Speaking of Lucretius and atoms, I interviewed Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics etc. for Quest in 2022. I asked him about an issue that has always bothered me. Atomic particles appear to consist of the motions of smaller particles. These particles in turn are composed of the motions of still smaller particles.

So where does it end? Is it tortoises all the way down, as the expression goes, or do we end up back with the indivisible atoms of Democritus, which, if they existed, would be the strangest entities of all? Even if you call them strings, it comes to the same thing.

Capra seems to think it is tortoises all the way down.

Smoley: Let me turn to a different question, which has to do with particle physics. My background is in the humanities, I have no scientific training, but, as I understand it, at one point there were believed to be atoms that were supposedly indivisible. Then they were divided into protons, electrons, and so on. Later, these were divided into still simpler particles, known as hadrons, quarks—whatever the terms are. In your book, you mention one of the latest theories, which is string theory. It says that subatomic particles are composed of vibrating strings in a bizarre nine-dimensional space.

So what are these strings supposed to be made of? Is there something that makes them up in turn, and so on? Is this an infinite regress, or are you going to end up with some fundamental particle, like the indivisible atoms of Democritus?

Capra: It seems to be an infinite regress, although the strings are very abstract. They are mathematical vibrating structures that are not material. The activity, the vibration, involves certain patterns of energy which, according to Einstein and relativity theory, are equivalent to certain masses. String theory is a very elegant theory that says at this level of abstract strings, everything is self-consistent: there is a fundamental vibration in the universe that creates the various patterns, which then manifest as subatomic particles.

The problem is that it’s not a proper scientific theory, because it doesn’t explain the observed quantities in the subatomic world. Also there’s not just one string theory; there is a whole range. You can vary the parameters and get different theories, and you can’t decide which one is the most accurate. Still, its elegance is compelling, and that’s why most particle physicists today are working in this world of string theory.

Copyright © 2022 by the Theosophical Society in America

You may have noticed that I have removed these chapters, and I will not be posting any more.

That’s because I have signed a contract with Monkfish Publishing to publish the novel. It will appear in spring of 2028. The contract obliges me to remove the copy from my Substack.

I’m very grateful to Paul Cohen, founder of Monkfish, and editor Jon Sweeney for their kind interest in my book. This will be my first published novel.

I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read so far and you will look forward to reading the whole book when it comes out.

Recently I completed my project of reading the whole of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”) in the original Latin. It is long: my rough estimate is that it is around 7,000 lines. (Lucretius’s dates are c.99 BC–c.55 BC.)

It was a pleasant experience. I usually read somewhere between 50 and 100 lines during breakfast. (No, I am not going to write a book called Breakfast with Lucretius.) I used Cyril Bailey’s edition with translation and annotations, although I bought a more recent Teubner edition from 2019 to see what the latest thoughts were about the text.

Because the text of Lucretius isn’t in good shape. The earliest manuscripts date from the eighth or ninth centuries. They are traced back to an original made in France around the fourth century. (Textual criticism of ancient works is an enormously subtle, complex, and fascinating matter.) One passage from the first book looks like this (see photo):

You don’t have to know Latin to see that these lines are incomplete. Why? Because the manuscripts are all copied from a single original, which had a corner torn off or eaten by a mouse or something. (Editors have made various efforts to fill in the missing text of the lines.)

To me this is a startling example of the tenuousness of our connection with classical antiquity.

Lucretius is a materialist. He is expounding the atomic theory of Epicurus. Nothing exists, he says, except atoms and the void. All objects are derived from the collisions and unions of these objects, which have greater or lesser affinity with one another depending on their shape and density. As such, nothing is permanent. A famous line says, “Nec minus ante haec quam tu cecidere, cadentque”: “No less than you these things that were before have fallen, and are falling.”

This line points to a central objective of Lucretius’s poem: to overcome the fear of death. He contrasts the vision of Epicurus with that of Greco-Roman religion, which posited a kind of hell that is i the direct progenitor of the Christian hell. Lucretius believes that this fear of hell is one of the greatest impediments to a rational human life. From the epic cycle he cites the example of Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis in order to lift winds that were preventing his fleet from sailing to sack Troy.

A famous line from this passage: “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum”: “Such were the evils religions could induce.”

Lucretius would not be happy to see how many people 2,000 years later live in dread of hell.

Epicurus’s view is materialistic. Both the soul and the body are composed of atoms that disunite at death, leaving nothing behind. You will be gone, but you won’t be around to miss it. Not everyone finds this consoling, but Lucretius did.

Some of you may remember that early on in my Substack history, I posted my translation of part of the first book of Lucretius. I did it back in 2003, then abandoned it for other projects. (It is still up.)

The English scholar D.R. Shackleton Bailey (a professor of mine at Harvard) remarked that De rerum natura is the greatest poem in the Latin language. I agree.

Copyright © 2026 by Richard Smoley.

The Secret Doctrine of the Jews: Jewish Theosophists and the Kabbalah

Boaz Huss

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025; xii + 298 pp., casebound, $120; paper, $35.95.

The relation between Theosophy and Judaism has been a recurring theme in Theosophical scholarship. In this volume, Boaz Huss, a professor at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, draws a great deal of information together to show how Jewish members took part in and influenced Theosophy from its earliest days.

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It wasn’t really a New Year’s resolution, but it turned into one.

In December 2024, I bought a used copy of Bible in a Year at the Quest Book Shop. Since it was close to the New Year, I decided to start in with the daily readings on January 1. Since it was a Catholic version (old Revised Standard Version), it included the Apocrypha, so I got to read that too. I went through it all to the end of 2025.

I’d read large chunks of the Bible over the years, but there were patches missing. Coincidentally, those were the parts that I liked the least: the major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, which I had avoided on the entirely correct grounds that they were mostly long, boring rants against the sins of old Israel as well as the Great Powers of c.600 BC.

Many if not most of these prophecies never came true. One example: Ezekiel 26:7–16 predicts that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, will sack the city of Tyre (in present-day Lebanon). But this did not happen. Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre, but it did not fall. Ezekiel 29:18, three chapters later, admits as much: “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon caused his army to serve a great service against Tyrus: every head was made bald, and every shoulder peeled: yet he had no wages, nor his army, for Tyrus, for the service that he had served against it.”

Nebuchadnezzar fulfilled the will of God (served “a great service”) against Tyre, but he didn’t conquer Tyre.

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Let me now turn to the institution that, far more than any religion, is regarded as the central authority of our time. Anything that wants to be taken seriously in our age must confront the edifice of science. Science is the great myth of our time, in both senses of the word: like the myths of the great world religions that preceded it, it provides a background of meaning for a civilization; and also like the myths of the world religions, its claims will, I suspect, ultimately be found to be not entirely true in an objective sense. But this discovery probably won’t occur within our lifetimes.

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Other people’s dreams are routinely boring, but I will recount this one because it may contain more wisdom than most:

It had a kind of science fiction premise. There was some genius who had managed to fabricate three reasonably close simulacra of human beings. He was long dead and had become a legendary figure. I went up to some mountain community to check out a couple of his specimens. There were two women and a man. I remember nothing of them except that one of the women had blond hair and something funny about her teeth and lips. (Although these were reasonably successful simulacra, they still had some imperfections.) The cabin and the compound they lived in were unimaginably filthy.

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Looking into this journal, I came across something I had written as recently as September 5, 2025 but had completely forgotten. Here it is:

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Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President?

Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for reasons:

(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all awake,

South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)

From “By the Roadside”

Responses to this daring act varied. I personally thought the outfit looked rather painful to wear—an impression heightened by Ms. Roan’s characteristically lugubrious expression, which calls to mind some female Christian martyr in a Baroque painting.

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Messrs. Douthat, Obama, Nixon, Gleason, et al. on unexplained aerial phenomena

In this week’s Sunday New York Times, Ross Douthat has an article entitled “Four Serious UFO Questions for the White House.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/obama-trump-aliens.html

The subject has resurfaced as the result of a recent response by Barack Obama to a question about the subject.

According to Mr. Douthat, “last week a YouTuber and podcast host named Brian Tyler Cohen asked Barack Obama about aliens, and the former president indicated that they exist while disavowing any personal knowledge of extraterrestrial secrets. This led to a subsequent clarification from Obama that he just meant that aliens are probably out there somewhere. (It’s a big universe!)”

Anyone who has followed this subject is familiar with this back-and-forth. Some days NASA releases news stories saying that aliens definitely have made their presence felt on earth. Other days it tells us that there is no evidence at all.

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One could do this. Marketed the right way, it could prove lucrative for New Age entrepreneurs, a crowd that seems to be doubling every week. Many people have grasped the truth of L. Ron Hubbard’s dictum that in order to make a lot of money, all you have to do is start your own religion (which he proved by creating the Church of Scientology). But given the discord that each new religion provokes, at this point anyone who tries to add another to the list probably does not have humanity’s best interests in mind.

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From P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of a Forgotten Teaching (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 266.

Boaz Huss

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025; xii + 298 pp., casebound, $120; paper, $35.95.

The relation between Theosophy and Judaism has been a recurring theme in Theosophical scholarship. In this volume, Boaz Huss, a professor at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, draws a great deal of information together to show how Jewish members took part in and influenced Theosophy from its earliest days.

The Jewish connection goes back to the earliest days of the Society’s history, extending to a founding member, one Étienne David de Lara (1796–1879), whom TS cofounder Henry Steel Olcott describes as a “a learned and most loveable old gentleman, of Portuguese Hebrew extraction, for whom H.P.B. and I felt a great affection and who remained an F.T.S. [Fellow of the Theosophical Society] until his death, which occurred two or three years later.”

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As far as I can see, there is only one way out. The Epistle to the Hebrews alludes to it in a famous verse: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). This is a paradoxical utterance, rather like Kierkegaard’s clever extravagances, although much more profound. Faith is both substance and evidence; that is, it has a palpable aspect, even though (as the verse also makes clear), it is not palpable in the ordinary sense of the term. Nevertheless, in some way and at some level, faith must be based on experience. A person who has faith does so not because of authority or reason or desire but because, however obscurely, he senses an unseen reality that is drawing him in its direction. This, I would suggest, is the only way that faith can be immune to self-delusion.

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