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Do the Rosicrucians still run those magazine ads where they offer to initiate you into the occult sciences by mail? I
haven't seen one in years. But perhaps I am reading the wrong magazines. The ads seemed to have been designed in the 1930s
and never updated. My hunch is that the Rosicrucian grandkids knew better than to mess with any part of the family business.
There'll always be a market for ancient wisdom, reasonably priced.
The imaginary history of a similar organization,
the Gnomon Society, is recounted in Charles Portis' comic masterpiece Masters of Atlantis, first published in 1985
and currently available in paperback from Overlook Press. The ranks of the Gnomons begin to swell in the late 1920s, when
one of its founders "got his hands on a mailing list titled 'Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana,' which, by no means exhaustive,
contained the names of some seven hundred men who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote
letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms that were filled with rocks or newspapers. In short, independent
thinkers ..."
Portis creates a whole gallery of rogues, rubes, cranks and illuminati. My favorite is Professor Cezar
Golescu, the great Romanian scholar and practicing alchemist. Asked why he has come to the United States, Golescu says, "Romanian
peoples are restless peoples. ... Always the jumping around. Very nervous. In all Romanian literature there is not a single
novel with a coherent plot."
Portis' own plot is certainly episodic, if also utterly American. But the book holds together
through his command of tone - something brief excerpts can never convey. How to express it? It's dry but warm ... sweetly
biting ... ironic without a hint of the merely sarcastic. It's genius, is what it is.
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