July 30, 2003 News & Views » Cover

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Inside The Spiritual Jacuzzi 

More people are mixing and matching ideas from various faiths

By
click to enlarge Jim Hunt
  • Jim Hunt

Page 5 of 6

And then, some pagans prefer to create their pantheons from thin air. A witch named Deborah Cooper has created a Temple of Elvis, identifying the king of rock & roll as the Horned God; in Modern Pagans, she declares: "I've seen many writings correlating Elvis and Jesus, but I don't think he's very Jesus-like. I think it's good for us pagans to reclaim him as ours." Thus can a popular culture phenomenon become entwined into a group's spiritual beliefs.

Spiritual Jacuzzi

Which brings us back to the Hot Tub Mystery Religion. "It was kind of an impromptu phenomenon," says Yehoodi Aydt, 39. "About 1991 or "92, several of us got together as sort of an affinity group, and we started doing events and parties and installations and putting out zines and whatnot. And it kind of evolved into a mystery religion."

One of the group's early inspirations was Alexander Scriabin, a Russian composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who dreamed of creating a work of art that would occupy every sense, driving the audience into a transcendental state. (The piece, called "The Mysterium," was to be performed in a specially built cathedral in India. It required, among other elements, "an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation" -- not to mention bells suspended from zeppelins.) The Hot Tub group's installations combined music, visual art, food, and sometimes mind-altering chemicals, along with symbols from Sufism, the Cabala, and other sources. Aydt participated in an annual Halloween event called the Disturbathon, which existed somewhere in the hazy territory between performance art and a haunted house.

"It involved nudism in a maze-like environment," he recalls, "and there was inevitably some kind of pit."

Sometimes the Hot Tubbists rented big warehouses for the events; other times, they met in an apartment in Euless, TX. Eventually, Aydt recalls, "It got to the point where our mutual goal was to provide a spontaneously occurring initiatory experience. It went from being an accidental, "Hey, we all got together and something very strange happened' situation to a more planned, "Well, if we play our cards right and do certain things, we can induce this same kind of group experience.'" And so a new religion, devoted to "monotheist pagan mysterianism," was born.

Such playfulness marks the so-called Free Religions. Under this header one finds Discordianism, the "Non-Prophet Irreligious Disorganization" devoted to the Greco-Roman goddess of disorder; and the Moorish Orthodox Church, which might best be described as Discordianism crossed with Afro-American Islam. Other Free Religions are one-off efforts, sometimes launched by followers of other free faiths. The Discordian filmmaker Antero Alli, for example, has invented a tongue-in-cheek "spiritual practice" centered around Fred Mertz, Ethel's husband on I Love Lucy. Mertz, he argues, was a Bodhisattva, master of "such sophisticated techniques as Senseless Bickering, Scathing Indifference, Bad Timing, Advanced Balding and the Five Secrets of Stinginess." There is, or was, a First Arachnid Church whose deadpan tracts honor "the Great Spider and the True Web," and there's probably a similar church out there devoted to the Great Pumpkin, though I haven't been able to locate it yet.

But there's more to the Free Religions than satire. The Hot Tub group, which drew heavily on both Discordianism and Moorish Science, was in no sense unserious in its efforts to reach a transcendental state. For the Discordians, the wisecracks are there, in part, as a defense against fundamentalism. The theory is that religious texts are metaphors at best, that some of the world's most hazardous social conflicts began because people took those metaphors literally, and that one way to overcome this is to develop a doctrine so absurd that no one could possibly take it at face value. If religion is art, then this is spiritual dadaism.

In a way, none of this is unusual. There have always been people who discard the elements of their faith that they dislike, and there have always been syncretic religions that fuse one spiritual system with another. What is new is the ease of the former, the speed of the latter, and the extent to which the two have combined.

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