We live in 2005. (Most of us, anyway).
There is an "ethos" of interest in the occult everywhere just as there always has been. People are superstitious in equal measure to their ignorance of how the world really works.
Over 100 years ago the level of human ignorance and the superstitious preoccupations of fantasy were rampant. Families conditioned each other toward this mindset by substituting urban legends for fact.
For a thousand years previously humanity suffered a virus unlike any other that has ever plagued a living species. That virus, extraordinarily contagious, was a contagion of memes in the form of religious naivete.
If you think we today are susceptible to outright belief in UFO's, bigfoot, conspiracy theories, ESP, astrology and out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, Elvis sightings and spoon bending--you'd be stunned at how ordinary all that would be a hundred years ago.
There was so little skepticism it would amaze you.
People craved fanciful tales that titillated their sense of wonder, mystery and awe.
Charles Taze Russell was a spellbinder and a bedazzler. He found a hook that worked on himself first, and, by extension--his followers. He dabbled like many young rich men dabble. His passion was end times speculations. He could afford to collect them like a small child might collect stamps or Star Wars action figures.
Russell collected enough disperate End Times "proofs" that he could weave into a new story and peddle to others just as naive and disengenuous as himself.
Yes, he convinced himself he was really on to SOMETHING BIG.
He was the salesman who sold himself to himself.
You might say that Russell's motto was: "THIS STUFF JUST HAS TO BE TRUE!"
Why? Because it all "fit" so well into a scenario. If you read those early writings closely you see that it pops up over and over and over again; the naive sense of wonder that so many things fit together to tell the same story predicting the END.
What Russell failed to notice was that he was pleasing himself in the first place. He only chose what seemed convincing to include in his bag of tricks. Then, stepping back from the collection he was wowed by how it all was so instructive and predictive! Circular reasoning 101 in a nutshell. Russell was the nut and his religion was the shell.
The proliferation of Masonic influence is just the profusion of SYMBOLOGY which infected everybody's thinking back then. It was "magic thinking" par excellence. You see, anything.....anything at all that smacked of mystical connotations would be targeted for decorative distribution around whatever belief system happened to be in place. Why? To create the artificial sense of wonder that all such mystical props provide.
Think of the stained glass and organ music of a magnificent cathedral and recognize what drama this is designed to evoke; what sense of majesty and transcendance it is constructed to engender to push reality aside in favor of awesome supernatural wonderment.
So too with all magic words, symbols, parables, prayers of invocation and ritualistic practices. It takes you out of the here and now and the every day mundane ordinary world and transports you to fantasyland where things are much more exciting and the stakes are higher.
Masonry is a game for little boys who have grown up and find life to ordinary.
Russell was a little rich kid spoiled by his own religious imagination who could afford to build a Disneyland for adults to lose themselves in while pretending the world was about to end and their frolics were serious fun which would bring about heavenly rewards.
Somewhere along the way, Russell became the Walt Disney of End Times speculations. He kept reworking the symbols, the dates and the arguments to make it all stay exciting fun. But, reality intrudes. It always does. The claims are too large to be realized. He had to settle for what he got: WWI. The entire religion was rescued by the advent of WWI.
And we fell for it too.
SUCKERS!
T.
