Jonesing the Logos

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The town of Echt, close to the southern tip of Holland, has a Carmelite convent and a railway station. It was from here, in 1942, that Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (born Edith Stein) was taken by the Gestapo to her death at Auschwitz, following a statement by the Dutch bishops denouncing the Nazi invaders’ treatment of the Jews. She had just that morning finished writingThe Science of the Cross. “We go for our people,” she is said to have told her sister Rosa, who had joined her in the Carmel, and who with Edith and 40,000 other Jewish converts to Christianity were killed in the Nazis’ monumental act of spite.

A couple of miles from Echt is the village of Maria-Hoop. There’s one bus an hour from the station. If you’ve got luggage the driver will take one look and say, “Klooster?” The cloister in question is the only reason anyone would travel to Maria-Hoop. It’s no exaggeration to say that the village is dominated by this former Catholic seminary. The building is one of those imposing brick structures seen in Catholic, or formerly Catholic, countries all over the world. To the left of the wide, wide building stands the church, Moeder der Heilige Hoop, after which the village is named. Or I should say renamed; before 1953 it was known as Diergaarde, Dutch for zoo. There is no zoo in Maria-Hoop. There is almost nothing in Maria-Hoop apart from that great big brick building. Cycle lanes line the half-dozen streets that make up the village, and behind those empty cycle lanes are neat houses with tidy lawns or gravel. Some of the gardens are adorned with folksy statuary, usually a bespectacled Geppetto mending a shoe, or something of that ilk, but every now and then you still see a Cross or a Virgin. Beside the church there’s a hall where an oom-pah band rehearses. (The summer I was there they were laboriously perfecting the theme from Grease: “It’s the word, have you heard . . .”) Opposite the primary school, hidden from the road, is the village’s only shop, a fast-food joint selling potato fries and impossibly long sausages. There was a bank but it has been turned into a house, its safe room now containing a flotation tank. 

Maria-Hoop is well supplied with such things. If you want a Reiki treatment, acupuncture or some reflexology, you’ve landed on your feet. There are therapists of every stripe and hue: physio, psycho, aroma and beyond. Crystals and dream catchers abound. One lady constructs tiny diagrams with mystical properties. You put them above your door.

All these services radiate out from the former seminary, known to its residents as the Danda, a Sanskrit word meaning stick or staff. In the absence of Catholic vocations, the building has long been given over to the devotees of an American guru called Adi Da, who died in 2008 having visited the place twice. He wasn’t impressed. One of his other ashrams was (and still is) a whole island in Fiji.

Adi Da

Adi Da

Meanwhile Moeder der Heilige Hoop provides Mass on Sunday. The rest of the time its big doors are locked. Visitors to the Danda tend not to visit the church. It’s sort of a thorn in the side of the Danda, and vice versa. But one weary Sunday I took a peek. Inside, the church is shorter than it should be. Its traditional cruciform body has been truncated roughly at the transcept; directly behind the altar is a partition wall. On the other side of the wall is the Kapel, now accessible only from the Danda. The dais of the Kapel goes head to head, as it were, with the tabernacle of the church.

It’s hard to find out much about the past life of what is now the Danda. Accounts vary as to whether it was a seminary or a monastery. But some history is hard to erase. Several bricks out front have bullet holes. They’re in just one spot, an internal corner formed by the southern wing. Presumably ad hoc executions took place here during the war. Were they monks? seminarians? Did they die for their faith or their nationality? No one seemed to know. In any case when I arrived for a long retreat, devotees told me that it had been through the forest to the rear of the Danda that German soldiers entered the country in 1940.

When the guru visited the building in 1986, he too came in the back way. He was on a long juice fast and wearing only indigo. Normally a corpulent man, he was at the time emaciated and his countenance was so intense that his left eye socket seemed to have become independently mobile. He sat cross-legged on the dais, his back to the partition and the Catholic altar beyond, and gave a long, spontaneous sermon on doubt. The European devotees who had so eagerly awaited him loved it, and several pledged their eternal devotion in tearful terms. Perhaps it was a Saturday, because he said: “Tomorrow they’re going to come into that church and they’re going to feel something. They’ll think it’s Jesus, but it will be me.” I know this because every word he ever spoke was recorded. It’s a lot.

Da was born Franklin Jones in Queens, New York, in 1939. He was brought up a Lutheran, and studied at Columbia and Stanford. At the latter he took LSD as part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind-control program. Ken Kesey was a fellow volunteer. At one or both of these temples of learning, Franklin may have learnt more than the English and philosophy that are on his resume. Stanford is a known intelligence facility, while at Columbia, a decade or so after he passed through, one of the 20th century’s better-known new age “love” religions was incubated (A Course in Miracles).

After college Franklin was living on a beach (and writing down his every thought) when he received instructions in a dream to head back east. He showed up at a Manhattan bookstore and submitted himself to the proprietor, a homosexual Jew who had decided to become a guru. Later it was agreed – as a sort of test of his obedience, the story goes – that Franklin should study for the priesthood. This he did, first at a Lutheran and then at a Russian Orthodox seminary. But all this was before he transcended his own gurus and “came out” as God himself.

He headed west where, like Dionysus in The Bacchae, he drove all the women crazy and introduced new forms of worship based, at least in part, on granting access to the ensuing spectacle. It worked like a dream. Franklin had picked up Latin and Greek during his biblical studies. Among the many titles he gave himself was Eleutherios, a name for Dionysus that means Liberator. But it is not the sort of liberation the Dutch might have wanted while under the Nazis. It is more along the lines of liberation from self, the approach to Nirvana (or “extinguishing” of the separate identity), achieved by submission to the guru and, when the guru wants to party, by the kind of derangement of the senses beloved of those towering spiritual figures Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison.

As well as Eleutherios, he became Adi Da (Primordial Giver), but to those on the inside he was always known as Beloved. He was, you see, Love itself, and everything that went down around him, for good or ill, was love as well. The title he most insisted on was Avatar, denoting a god in human form, which the ex-Christians among his devotees would quickly pick up, was a guru characteristic covering the central claim of Jesus. In Eastern religions, Da would tell his followers, to insist on the historical truth of an avatar’s incarnation is considered jejune. Who were they to doubt? He had been a straight-A student at seminary and knew a lot about religions. Also he could smoke more dope than them.

Curiously Da never invoked the title Logos, although The Knee of Listening, his autobiography and his first of many lengthy books, has a portentous scholarly introduction that cites Aldous Huxley: "The Logos passes out of eternity into time for no other purpose than to assist the beings, whose bodily form he takes, to pass out of time into eternity." (The Perennial Philosophy)

Steven S. Jones

Steven S. Jones

You get the picture. Having read a book by another Jones, Steven S. Jones, I am beginning to get the picture too. Authenticating Christianity and Distinguishing It From Heresy, to give it almost its full title, is a wonderful book if you have recently emerged from the new-age mire, as I have, thanks in no small part to yet another Jones, E. Michael Jones. EMJ’s interviews on YouTube introduced me to the idea of Logos, and I have followed his work since (though I have yet to read Logos Rising). What got me about EMJ was that every characteristic of modern society he inveighed against seemed to have started as an attack on the Church. He was on the right side of history. I, on the other hand, by deserting my Catholic roots and following a guru, was part of the problem. One of the first interviews I watched of EMJ was by Jan Irvin, who runs something called Logos Media, and so when I noticed recently that he had another Jones on the show talking about Logos I thought I’d better tune in. 

[…]

This is just an excerpt from Culture Wars Magazine, not the full article. To continue reading, purchase the May 2020 edition of Culture Wars Magazine.

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