In Shadow Worlds, self-described “cultural mercenary” Andrew Paul Wood has given us an enthusiastically researched book about alternative spiritual communities in New Zealand, from Pākehā settler society to the present time. He demonstrates how this raw frontier provided fertile ground for spiritual experimenters, reformist utopians, mystics and greedy necromancers, who cultivated their messages and visionary systems.
As Wood shows, these “shadow worlds” at their best offered an alternative to the traditional religions of Europe; fostered community among marginalised groups; provided women with a space where they could hold positions of power; and promoted worthy social causes. While some movements withered, others blossomed. Freemasons counted governors and ministers among their ranks. Late-19th century premier Harry Atkinson and Sir Edmund Hillary were on the Theosophical Society’s membership rolls.
Wood gets off to a wobbly start, with a taxonomy of alternative spirituality that is generous to the point of flabby. His subject embraces the “occult, esoteric and the magical”, “magical thinking”, “parapsychology” and “occulture”. This “counterculture of esoterism”, he claims, has had “a major influence on moulding Western modernist identity”, without evidence or defining what “Western modernist identity” is. Blanket generalisations such as this, and frequent use of such words as “perhaps”, “it seems” and “allegedly”, do damage to Wood’s narrative.
Examples of “magic” abound, from ouija boards, self-help books and lucky underwear to marketing campaigns and gender fluidity. A changed pronoun, he declares, shifts “consensual reality on its axis”. Wood parboils the complexity of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy into a single sentence to make the claim that his thought was a foundation for the “metaphysics of magic”, whatever that is.
Things start to look up when he situates himself in mid-19th-century New Zealand, and narrative can take over from speculation. His story follows the origins of various spiritual movements and then how these found a home in New Zealand. He begins with the Theosophical Society. He then moves on to the flamboyantly garbed Order of the Golden Dawn, founded by Freemasons and whose building in Havelock North had a basement temple entered through a wardrobe; Rudolf Steiner’s pseudoscientific anthroposophy, which gave us the Waldorf School; and spiritualism, whose adherents tried to pierce the membrane between living and dead.
Continuing into this century, he considers such phenomena as “Zenith Applied Philosophy”, a homegrown mishmash of Scientology and anti-unionism, and Satanic New Zealand, whose good works extend to Soles for Satan, a charity drive that collects warm clothing for the homeless.
The virtue of Shadow Worlds is its research (despite having no bibliography). It’s also a vice. It’s a virtue for the reader who welcomes the torrent of names, meetings, deaths, séances, dates, and letter and newspaper excerpts rushing past and appreciates the stories and characters pulled by the roots to the last exasperating tendril. For that reader, this might make a good sourcebook to plunder. However, for one looking for a capable narrator to tell a streamlined version of the rollicking good story of alternative spirituality in New Zealand, this is probably not the place to start.
To take one of too many examples, Wood provides a serviceable account of Robert Felkin, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practised Hermeticism. Then, he veers off into detail about Felkin’s two sons, who have nothing at all to do with the occult, spiritualism or anything else in the book. We learn that in World War I, Samuel Felkin was posted in Berlin. In World War II, he was promoted to “flight lieutenant and placed in charge of the Air Intelligence section A11(K), and later became the Chief Interrogation Officer at Trent Park POW facility north of London …” There is no need to continue, though Wood does.
When it comes to deciding what details to include, Wood is a child in a sweet shop. He wants them all. His research would have benefited from a guiding thesis or argument to focus it, rather than resting on descriptive history. He rightly pays tribute to his predecessor in this field, Robert Ellwood, whose Islands of the Dawn is a gem of a book that covers most of Wood’s subject, but has the virtue of concision and a thesis to guide the writing.
Wood’s prose style can’t rescue his book. Some sentences are pedestrian (“It seems likely that religion, or rather religiosity, will become an increasingly divisive issue within society”), while others give you whiplash, as when visiting spiritualists “hit the quiescent meat of the New Zealand circuit like a caffeinated jolt of Frankenstein’s stolen lightning”.
Still, there’s a good story buried here if you are ready to dig for it.
Shadow Worlds: A History of the Occult and Esoteric in New Zealand, by Andrew Paul Wood (Massey University Press, $55)
