United States Secretaries of the Arcane
In today’s global village, we know the Atlanteans have always been with us. Yesterday’s ringing nostrums about the “Great Awakening” of the early 20th century are widely recognized as elitist, Eurocentric historiography. The early researchers of the Atlantean Rite and Scientific Spiritism – Donnelly, Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Murray, Jung – simply
codified an understanding of our relationship with the Atlantean ancestor spirits. The relationship has existed, taking different forms, in every human civilization. Nevertheless, it is important to recall that spirit channeling was treated as a novelty for decades. We may mock Socialist Europe’s policy of official disbelief, but the highest levels of the United States government denied the mounting evidence for far longer than was credible. Despite corroborated reports of the Russian Empire’s military use of channeling on the Eastern Front during the First Great War, it was not until President Robinson’s 1930 invitation of Edgar Cayce to the White House that the United States publicly acknowledged the achievements of Scientific Spiritism. It was almost a decade after that until the government deigned to harness its power…
1939-1947: Nicholas Roerich (nonpartisan) [1]
(Serving under Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Henry A. Wallace)
1947-1948: William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan (Republican) [2]
(Serving under Henry A. Wallace)
1948-1949: Marvel Whiteside “Jack” Parsons (nonpartisan) [3]
(Serving under Henry A. Wallace)
1949-1951: vacant
(Department’s operations suspended – all property and personnel at the disposal of J.F. Kennedy as Chief Counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations)
1951: Lafayette R. Hubbard (Democratic) [4]
(Serving under Wright Patman)
1951-1955: Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (nonpartisan)
(Serving under Wright Patman and Lucius D. Clay)
1955-1961: Charles P. Cabell (nonpartisan) [5]
(Serving under Lucius D. Clay)
1961-1969: Joseph Campbell (Republican) [6]
(Serving under Clifford P. Case)
1969-1972: Lyn Marcus (Democratic)
(Serving under Dick Nixon)
1972-1973: James R. Schlesinger (Republican) [7]
(Serving under Dick Nixon)
1973-1975: John C. Lilly (nonpartisan)
(Serving under Kenneth Arnold)
1975-0000: Claiborne Pell (Republican) and Judy Knight (nonpartisan) [8]
(Serving under Kenneth Arnold)
[1] Ever efficiency-minded, President Roosevelt led the charge to consolidate all Atlantean affairs into a single Department of the Arcane. Upon the advice of his Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt appointed Nicholas Roerich to lead the consolidated agency. A Russian émigré, channeler, artist, and mystic, Roerich had been Wallace’s confidant for some years. While the Vice President had no channeling ability, Roerich’s ancestor spirit helped Wallace interpret his dreams and gave him political advice.
As the public face of a phenomenon still mistrusted and feared by most Americans, Roerich spent most of his early tenure on public speaking tours promoting understanding of the Atlantean Rite. Underlings recruited from the armed forces, along with an eclectic crew of channelers still exploring their own abilities, performed most of the technical and military research demanded by the administration.
When Wallace himself ascended to the Presidency, Roerich transformed from a mystical barnstormer into a canny adviser, ever-present in the Oval Office. When the United States attacked Japan in 1942 before the Imperial Navy could besiege American possessions, rumors swirled that the tip-off had come not from military intelligence but from Roerich’s ancestor spirit. The post-war settlement drew more rumblings from anti-Atlantean groups both on the Christian right and Socialist left. Newspapers circulated the text of an alleged secret agreement between President Wallace and the Czar to abandon China to the Russian sphere of influence. Wallace was a fool, or bewitched, and Asia was being abandoned to the pagan despots by their spy in the White House. (All to help the Russians in their pending war against the brave workers of Mitteleuropa, the
Socialist Appeal added.) The controversy came to a head in 1947 when Representative Sam Dickstein was arrested as a spy for the Okhrana. It was politically impossible for Roerich to stay on any longer. His protégé bid him a tearful farewell before the former Secretary flew to Tibet ahead of an impending Congressional investigation.
[2] “Wild Bill” was the only man who could have saved the department. Donovan was a dashing war hero, a veteran of both the Great War and the FBI’s first experiments with channeling who had resigned his seat as Governor of New York to return to duty in the Pacific. While he had no preternatural gift himself, he craftily used others’ talents, infamously researching Japanese mythology to discover the visions and nightmares best suited to driving enemy soldiers mad. Only the fringes questioned his Americanism when he was appointed to succeed Roerich, and his assurances that all was well at Donnelly Hall – the Department’s new headquarters in Foggy Bottom – poured cold water on the Dickstein affair. Yet Donovan’s real motives soon became clear. Scarcely a year into his term, and with Congress still investigating his underlings, he resigned to run for President.
[3] Donovan’s failure to reshuffle the department before his departure almost certainly contributed to his landslide loss in November. Acting Secretary Jack Parsons and his battle with the Dies Committee dominated the newspapers throughout the fall of 1948. Parsons was America’s most technically skilled channeler but its most mercurial, eccentric, and dangerous. A polymathic polygamist who dabbled in the nation’s biggest bugbears – Socialism and the Atlantean-supremacist Vril Thought then gaining ground in Britain and the Russian Empire – Parsons should have been kept in the chalk circle, not in the secretary’s chair. His narcotics abuse and bizarre public appearances soon became national scandals. When called upon to address Congress over his foreign ties he replied in the millennia-old voice of his ancestor spirit, Prince Rama of Atlantis, cursing Representative Dies and his progeny.
[4] The Democratic Party had identified Liberal Republicanism with godless Atlantean channeling from the start, and they had been raring to take down both for sixteen years. It came as no surprise when the new administration and its sympathetic Congressional majority closed the department entirely. Many of its leading lights – including Jack Parsons, who Vice President McMahon had derided as “a bisexual Beelzebub” on the campaign trail – were placed under extensive FBI surveillance, while its libraries of confidential records were turned over to Johnny Kennedy, the slimy young counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
The grand investigation only claimed two scalps. In May 1951, a pair of junior staffers were convicted of perjury on the testimony of Lafayette Hubbard, Parsons’s deputy and rival. The stolid naval officer was publicly feted as an American hero, and when the Patman administration reopened the department, Hubbard was the obvious choice for Secretary. Only days after his confirmation, Jack Parsons was found dead. The apparent cause was an aneurysm brought on by excessive channeling, but rumors persist.
[5] The new Secretary did not last long. Hubbard had been nominated against the personal recommendation of J. Edgar Hoover in an effort to boost the administration’s flagging poll numbers. The brave, humble seaman with whom America had fallen in love on television was in fact a paranoid philanderer more compromised even than Parsons – and with a violently authoritarian streak to match. With the drums of war beating in Europe and the lunatic Mackenzie King menacing America from the north, Hubbard was quickly eased out in favor of a military man better suited to the sensitive situation. His grand plans to end the war before it started with a form of apocalyptic sex magic were scrapped, although they caused quite a stir when they were declassified in the 1970s.
A non-channeler and an excellent delegator, Hillenkoetter bent all the department’s resources towards victory in the Third Great War. Under his conservative leadership, Vril sympathizers were purged and channelers were pushed out of leadership positions and onto the battlefield.
[6] There would not be another channeler in charge of the Department for a generation – the war put paid to that. The heroism of the Cayce Battalions was instrumental in the capture of Beijing, but bias and wartime secrecy meant that the only images of channeling in the newsreels were those of America’s foes: the Company of Merlin whipping up deadly sandstorms in North Africa, Mackenzie King’s phantom hellhounds driving his terrified subjects to their slaughter. American wartime channelers returned home to mistrust, even hatred.
It took all the efforts of Joseph Campbell, a scholar of Scientific Spiritism and beloved public intellectual, to ease the fear of the Atlantean Rite in postwar America. A natural popularizer with an instinct for a poetic turn of phrase, Campbell is best known for bringing back Roerich’s barnstorming educational tours. He drew upon his own Catholic upbringing to explain humanity’s interaction with our ancestor spirits, assuring the country that there was nothing Satanic or blasphemous about the Rite. It was a phenomenon documented in myth and religion throughout human history, even in the Bible. He introduced the nation to the work of Msgr. John Tolkien, the British Catholic who had been bedeviled by Atlantean ancestor dreams until his ingenious realization that the princes and mages he spoke to were no more than righteous pagans in Purgatory. For the first time since the 1930s, the Rite was respectable again. Among liberal households, it even became fashionable to dabble, and many a society hostess or Madison Avenue maven went to great lengths to conjure up dreams of their own.
Less publicly visible was Campbell’s influence on foreign policy. The mythologist was instrumental in the Clay and Case administrations’ decisive turn against Red Europe and support for former Atlantean supremacists. The Socialists’ mounting involvement in the Middle East and in East Asia began to drive a geopolitical wedge between them and their erstwhile American friends. The United States needed a conservative power on their side to keep the oil flowing, and the rebuilt Britain and Russia fit the bill. Campbell’s professional connections to the Heritage Party leadership, mostly untouched by postwar purges and inching back into power, helped smooth over any lingering wartime mistrust.
[7] The Democrats were more suspicious of America’s newfound alliances. Dick Nixon – that working-class hero, enemy of the Atlantophilic chattering classes – was an outspoken foe of the Department, and the dismissal of Joseph Campbell was one of his signature campaign promises. His replacement, however, barely scraped through the Senate, even with its healthy Democratic majority. The squabble was to be the first of Nixon’s long and vicious battles with that august body.
In the early 1960s, while serving as a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, Lyn Marcus had written to the then-Governor of California when he heard Nixon’s anti-Atlantean rhetoric on the radio. Marcus was, like Nixon, a Quaker, an Anglophobe, and an avid reader of esoteric Marxist texts. The two men were kindred spirits. However, even with the Democrats dancing to Nixon’s tune, some party leaders were wary of promoting the President’s paranoid friend to power. Their fears proved justified. Seeking evidence of treachery, the Trotskyist witch-hunter began a noisy purge. Relations with crucial allies soured, and the Department’s talent pool shrank as many of its leading lights departed for more lucrative private practice.
The last straw came with the Irum Incident and subsequent Socialist-backed Egyptian invasion of the Arabian Peninsula. As oil prices skyrocketed, Nixon’s populist instincts overrode his ideological commitment and he gave his full backing to the Aickman regime’s intervention. Marcus, disgusted, resigned his post and delivered a full-throated denunciation of his former friend. His replacement by moderate civil servant James Schlesinger was hailed as the end of political Atlantophobia in the United States.
[8] Dr. John C. Lilly was the first channeler to lead the department in 22 years, although his personal abilities were very limited. His diligent and scientific enquiries into the nature of the ancestor spirits helped make his administration the most productive, in terms of research and development, that Donnelly Hall had ever seen. However, as the years passed, his intensive metaphysical explorations became somewhat of a political football. Democrats criticized his “dolphin channeling” experiments as a waste of funds and suggested that the psychedelic drug consumption he encouraged for all department channelers was more recreational than practical. The Anderson administration, preparing for a re-election bid, decided that Lilly was not in keeping with the responsible and fiscally reticent attitude they wanted to project.
After his dismissal, the role was split, with co-Secretary Claiborne Pell, a former Senator, dealing with the administrative side of things and young Judy Knight, one of the nation’s most powerful channelers, acting as a Presidential adviser. It’s been frequently remarked that Pell’s verve and curiosity are considerably more limited than Lilly’s were, and that the department’s output has slackened. Some Atlantophobes have seized upon the transition to claim that the good doctor was rolled after “getting too close to the truth” about the Atlanteans’ “real nature.” Of course, it’s a claim almost as paranoid and bigoted as their assertions that Lilly’s ketamine overdose last month was anything more than a tragic accident. America has moved beyond such superstitions.
As a sidebar: I remembered this thing for the first time in many months yesterday and decided to finish the writeup. Midway through, I checked back on AH.com and saw that
@Kovalenko had suddenly liked the
relevant Presidents list from back in June, the first activity the post had seen since then! Very apt for a supernatural scenario.
