[WikiEN-l] FYI: Cosmotheism

[Mr Paul Vogel]

Cosmotheism

by Dr. Robert S. Griffin


Pierce told me that during the early 1970s he
formulated a race-based religious orientation to
provide the spiritual basis for the direction he was
taking with the National Alliance. He needed a name
for what he had put together, he said, and he came up
with Cosmotheism. He's not sure whether he ran across
the term in an encyclopedia or made it up. One day
when I was in his office with him in West Virginia, I
asked him to help me understand what Cosmotheism was
about. He rose from his desk and went to a file drawer
and pulled out some pamphlets, sorted through them a
bit, and then handed three of them to me. "You can
look these over. I wrote them on Cosmotheism back in
the late 1970s. They are going to sound a little
naive, but here they are." 

I spent a minute or two looking them over. The three
pamphlets were each about twenty pages in length and
had the Life Rune prominently displayed on their
covers. The pamphlets inform the reader that the Life
Rune, or Rune of Life, is the insignia worn by the
members of the Cosmotheist Community on their jacket
lapels or blouses. Of course, it is also the symbol of
the National Alliance. The Life Rune is one of the
characters in an ancient alphabet of northern Europe
and represents the processes of birth and renewal. The
Cosmotheist literature says that it signifies "the
upward Path of Life which we strive to follow." 1 

As I was paging through the pamphlets, I noted that
they were written in stilted, bible-like prose. One of
the them, entitled The Path, was printed in 1977. The
second, On Living Things, was printed in 1979. The
third, On Society, was printed in 1984. They were
produced by the Cosmotheist Organization, not the
National Alliance. I asked Pierce about this
Cosmotheist Organization. 

"The National Alliance came first.” Pierce replied.
“We had meetings every Sunday evening at our offices
in Washington. Members of the Alliance were invited to
bring other people, and a variety of people showed up.
In fact, too big a variety— but I'll get into that.
One of the more interesting people who came, I
remember, was John Gant. Gant had degrees in both
medicine and physics, and he was a professor at George
Washington University. He did medical research and was
a consultant to the Air Force. He was also an amateur
astronomer— as matter of fact, there is a crater on
the moon named after him. He died about fifteen years
ago, and I inherited some astronomical instruments
from him. So I had people like that coming to the
Sunday night meetings. 

"On those Sunday nights, I'd show movies that I got
from the local library. They were from a series called
Civilization hosted by an Englishman named Kenneth
Clark. I think the series may have played on PBS. [It
did.] Clark was a fairly subtle man. While he never
spoke out directly about racial matters, there were a
lot of implicit messages in his series. For example,
in one of the episodes he compared an African tribal
mask from the Guggenheim collection in New York with
the Apollo of the Belvedere sculpture which reflects
the epitome of Greek art. Clark said that while the
carved mask is indeed art, it is fair to say that the
Apollo sculpture is an expression of a higher artistic
sensibility. He did this kind of thing a number of
times, and to me it was an indication that he was
sensitive, intelligent, and insightful, and hadn't
been subverted by political correctness. At the same
time, he didn't want to stick his neck out and buck
the forces around him. So he would come out with these
little hints and just leave it as a ‘word to the
wise,' as they say. 

"After the Clark movies, I would give talks, some of
which we have on tape. [“Our Cause,” paraphrased in
the last chapter, was one of them.] Some of the talks
got into racial differences, comparisons between
whites and blacks, that kind of thing. I know Stephen
Jay Gould [the Harvard University evolutionary
theorist] and others disagree with me, but I believe
that the groups that remained in the tropics simply
did not evolve as rapidly as those that migrated to
the northern hemisphere. The northern peoples had to
deal with severe seasonal changes in climate, and the
sorts of attitudes and behaviors that sufficed in the
tropics simply wouldn't keep you alive in northern
Europe eons ago. There was a much more rigorous
selection process in this kind of challenging
environment. The result was that whites evolved
further. We developed certain faculties to a greater
extent than blacks did. Evolutionary development, and
particularly racial differences, is a basic idea
behind Cosmotheism. Although if you look over those
pamphlets on Cosmotheism I put together, race isn't
mentioned very much at all. 

"When I would speak about race on Sundays, I noticed
that it appealed to a certain type in the audience.
Other times, the lesson I drew from one of Clark 's
episodes was more subtle and related to certain
aspects of our own nature as a people and as a
civilization. I noticed that some people were
interested in that, but I could see the eyes glaze
over in the first group, the ones that liked the race
material. What was going on was that some people
wanted me to tell them what we were going to do about
the problem we have right here in Washington, D. C.
with blacks and Jews. They didn't want to hear about
anything else. The way they looked at it, we had these
very immediate and urgent problems to deal with, so
cut the philosophical stuff, who wants to hear about
that? 

"My attitude about their way of thinking was, yes, we
have immediate problems, but if we want to arrive at a
good, lasting solution to them we need to think about
these other things that I was bringing up. Some people
who came to the meetings agreed with me on that, and
others didn't. So what I did was split the group up. I
would invite everybody to the National Alliance
meetings on one Sunday, and then, on alternate
Sundays, I'd invite just the people who I thought were
receptive to the more fundamental things I wanted to
talk about. That second group became the Cosmotheist
Community. 

“The Cosmotheist group didn't just get into abstract
things. Sometimes we discussed very practical things,
like how to raise children. Suppose you are a parent:
how can you possibly keep your child from being taken
over by the people who are wrecking our civilization?
Is there any way you can compete with television and
the school system and the corrupted kids your kid
comes into contact with? We got into questions like
that. 

"After a time, we— I'm talking about the Cosmotheist
group— decided that it would be worthwhile to try an
experiment. We'd try to create an environment more
under our control than it is now and live with people
who share our values and raise our kids in that sort
of setting. We talked about buying some land on which
we could build a community. I said to the group,
'Look, I have so many thousand dollars in savings I
can put toward it, but it isn't enough. Some other
people are going to have to cough up some money, too.'
I wanted to open up a bank account. I also told them,
‘We are going to have to do this in a business-like
way. What we really are is a church— we're like one
anyway. So why don't we call ourselves a church,
because there are some advantages to that. For one
thing, we won't have to pay taxes.' 

“When I said all that, I really didn't have the
foggiest idea what I was talking about. For example,
you don't have to pay taxes on a fund like the one we
were setting up in any case. We could have called
ourselves the Ajax Land Requisition Society, anything,
and all the gifts to that entity would have been tax
deductible. It didn't have to be a church. Although
then again, there were some advantages to being a
church, because if you are the Ajax corporation rather
than a church and put money into an interest-bearing
account, you have to pay taxes on the interest the
fund accrues. But I didn't know all those details
then. 

"I also talked to the Cosmotheist group about how
anything that has ever made an impact and shaped
people's lives has been more than just an idea. It has
been an idea with a concrete embodiment. It not only
had a doctrine, it had rituals and songs and priestly
vestments, things like that. For example, if you walk
into a Methodist ceremony you can immediately
distinguish it from an Episcopal ceremony or Roman
Catholic ceremony. 

"As it turned out, we did organize ourselves as a
church. So first we were the Cosmotheist Community and
then we became the Cosmotheist Community Church. I had
assumed that if we became a church we would
incorporate and have a board of directors and so on,
but then I found out that Virginia [Pierce's
operations were in Arlington, Virginia, just outside
of Washington] doesn't incorporate churches. The
attitude of the state is that it and the churches
shouldn't have anything to do with one another. The
churches should regulate their own affairs and not ask
the state to do it for them.” 

"How many people were involved in the church?" I
asked. 

"Around twenty," Pierce replied. 

"Did you have a title in the church, minister or
something like that?" 

"I never had a formal title. ‘Teacher' was one I often
used. When I had to deal with the government taxing
agencies and so forth in order to qualify for
something, I would call myself a minister. But I
always felt a little funny and awkward with that
because the idea of a minister reminds me of these
potbellied hypocrites in fancy collars preaching pap
to the congregation of sheep on Sunday morning. I
didn't want to have anything to do with that." 



I read through the three pamphlets on Cosmotheism that
Pierce gave me and listened to a tape of a talk he
gave back in 1976 at one of the Sunday evening
meetings called “Cosmotheism: Wave of the Future.” I
concluded from that that what Pierce calls Cosmotheism
is a version of a religious orientation called
pantheism. It helps to understand Cosmotheism if it is
put in its pantheistic context. 

Pantheism as a religious perspective and tradition
differs from three others which are more familiar to
us in this culture: theism (Judaism and Christianity
are examples), atheism, and humanism. 2 Even though
pantheism doesn't have a strong foothold in Western
society, it is far from a rare phenomenon in the
world. 3 Taoism, some forms of Buddhism, Confucianism,
the religions of American Indian tribes, and the pagan
religions of northern Europe before the Christian
influence all embody a pantheistic outlook. Many Greek
philosophers reflect a pantheistic frame of reference,
including Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics, as did
philosophers of more recent times such as Spinoza,
Fichte, and Hegel. (Spinoza, by the way, to whom many
attribute the term pantheism, was Jewish.) Among the
prominent literary figures whose work reveals a
pantheistic perspective on the world are William
Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, D.H. Lawrence,
Robinson Jeffers, and Gary Snyder. 

And what is this perspective on the world? The words
used to express the pantheistic orientation vary
greatly, but what they all share is a picture of how
everything fits together. Pantheists get beyond the
particulars, this discrete entity and that one, to a
perception of an all- encompassing and unified order
to things. Pantheism is the view that everything that
exists— nature, animals, human beings, everything—
forms an integrated whole. To the pantheist,
everything is interrelated. Thus, pantheists see human
life not as independent and self-contained but rather
as an integral part of the world. This stress on
wholeness should not be taken to mean that pantheists
are contending that "all is one," that there aren't
separate entities in the world, that the perception of
distinctions is an illusion. Rather, pantheists— or
most of them, anyway— are saying that the various
elements that comprise the world are not merely
distinct; and that most fundamentally, most
importantly, they are not distinct. When pantheists
look at the world, they see connectedness, they see
unity. What makes pantheism a religion and not simply
an insight or a philosophy is that this unity that
pantheists see is divine — it is sacred. To
pantheists, the world isn't simply a set of
interrelated concrete phenomena. There is more— call
it God— and this “something more” infuses, permeates,
the world. It is part of everything, and everything is
part of It. It divinizes the world and makes it holy.
When pantheists look at the world, they see God. 

Pantheism can be better understood if it is contrasted
with theism— again, Christianity and Judaism fall in
this category. The theistic tradition is characterized
by the belief in a personal God— that is to say, a God
with the characteristics of a human being. This
theistic God has a personality and bearing— like that
of a commanding father perhaps. This is a God who can
hear and see and pass moral judgment and make
decisions and take purposeful action. He is focal: all
power and holiness flow from Him. He was so powerful
that he had the power to create the universe, a
universe which he now in a parent-like or monarch-like
way oversees. He is separate, distinct from nature and
mankind. He is not of this world. He is apart, above,
transcendent, looking down on us all. 

The appropriate relationship to the theistic God is
deferential and devotional. He is prayed to. He is an
object of worship— the sole object of worship. The
worshipper does not identify himself with God or seek
to merge with God or become God; that would be
blasphemous. Rather, the fundamental objective of
religious practice in the theistic tradition is to
establish a proper relationship with God. Cultivating
this proper relationship brings the worshipper peace
and happiness and perhaps an ecstatic joy, and it
gives him direction in living in accordance with God's
will and in escaping God's displeasure or wrath. The
worshipper gains strength and guidance from God—
perhaps with assistance from a messiah— in the
lifelong task of achieving salvation in this life and
bliss and serenity in the next life. 

In theistic traditions, there is the belief in
personal immortality. The faithful will survive death
in some form. Death is regrettable to be sure, but
that regret is softened by the conviction that the
next world will be a better place than this one is. In
fact, in theistic traditions existence on earth is in
large measure perceived as a time of preparation for
the afterlife. 

Like theists, pantheists believe in God; pantheism is
not a disguised form of atheism or a substitution of
naturalism for religious faith. Where the difference
lies is that pantheists do not perceive of God as a
person or anything like a person. The pantheistic god
doesn't have a personality. It doesn't have a mind. It
doesn't perceive as does a human being. It doesn't
formulate intentions and carry out actions in response
to circumstances in the manner of a person.
Pantheistic religions tend not to play up the
creator-of-the-universe conception of God as do
theistic religions. There is more of a tendency in
pantheism to attend to God and world— however they/it
came to be— simply as realities to be encountered and
taken into account at this time and in this life. 

Pantheism denies the beyondness, the otherness, of
God. God isn't up there, over there, someplace else,
transcendent. God is here, a part of all this,
immanent. God penetrates everything in the universe.
God is in nature. God is in human beings. God and man
and nature are not distinct— or at least not totally
distinct, or only distinct. What makes things a bit
complicated is that while pantheism emphasizes God's
immanence, there is also a tendency within this
tradition to view the being of God as if it were not
completely exhausted by the universe. That is to say,
God has a transcendent dimension as well as an
immanent one. Some scholars have used the term
panentheism (note the "en" in the middle) to
distinguish the strand of pantheism that stresses both
the immanent and transcendent quality of God. 4 So we
need to be careful not to set up rigid dichotomies.
Still, however, the most useful distinction to keep in
mind for our purposes is the basic one between a
transcendent God (theism) and an immanent God
(pantheism). 

If God exists but isn't a person, then what is It? (To
have used He at the end of this last sentence would
have personalized God and been at variance with
pantheistic thinking.) One finds a variety of words
used to describe God within pantheism. God is
described variously as the Force, the Divine Spark,
the Principle of the World, and the Plan for the
Universe. Alternatively, God may be referred to as the
Spirit of the World or the Soul of the World. Still
other possibilities, God may be spoken of as the
Divine Unity or the Process— or Unfolding— of the
Divine Unity. Yet another way of referring to God
within the pantheistic tradition, the world is called
the Self-Expression of God. These aren't the clearest
of terms imaginable, but then again cloudiness of
meaning is not unheard of in matters of religion, and
they do communicate a basic sense of how pantheism
conceives of God. 

What is the proper relationship of human beings to the
pantheistic God? Since God is not a person or separate
from everything, it isn't a personal relationship in
the way two people would relate to one another. There
isn't a deferential posture toward this God. Rather
than a worshipful response to the presence of God as
one finds in theism, in pantheism there is respect,
awe, wonderment. And rather than devotional practice,
in pantheistic religions there is an emphasis on the
search for knowledge of the Unity and the development
of personal resources of a certain kind: namely, the
understanding and wisdom and personal strength that
will contribute to one's living a life in accordance
with the Unity or, another way to say it, that will
allow one to integrate with the cosmos. Thus
meditative and contemplative activities are more
consistent with pantheism than prayer. Really, any
activity—whether intellectual and non-intellectual—
which brings people into closer contact with things as
they actually are and to a better understanding of how
it all goes together and where they fit in the larger
scheme of things— including a walk in the woods— is an
appropriate religious practice within the pantheistic
tradition. 

Within pantheism, there is more of a focus on
integrating into this world than winning forgiveness
of sin or a place in the next world. Also, in contrast
to theism, this integration may well include a merging
with God, a realization of one's identity with, or
sameness with, God. The result may be happiness and
joy, but more likely it will be more along the lines
of a thoroughgoing peace of mind or sense of being
truly home. Most pantheists deny the possibility that
they will survive death in some conscious form, so
they aren't seeking personal immortality through their
religion. They tend to believe that whatever happens
must happen in this lifetime and with no help from God
or a messiah. For them, death is regrettable because
it deprives us of experience and the possibility of
doing further good on this earth. 

Other characteristics of pantheism that shed light on
Pierce's Cosmotheist beliefs include: 

It needs to be underscored that most pantheists are
not monists. They aren't saying All is One. They
aren't contending that there is only one Being and
that all reality is either identical with it or modes
of it. They are pluralists. That is to say, they
believe that there are many kinds of things. They
don't regard the existence of real, finite entities as
inimical to unity. As pluralists, these pantheists
don't see just one human nature but various human
natures. Pierce carries this idea over to race. Where
some would see one human race, he sees a number of
human races. 

In line with this pluralist mentality, pantheists
don't believe that there is just one way to live in
accordance with the Unity. They don't insist on one
lifestyle or set of activities for everyone. They
believe that personal well-being and the welfare of
the whole will be best attained by people living
within parameters dictated by their own essential
natures. The idea is to do what is natural to you
given the reality of the whole of which you are a
part. Pierce, for instance, doesn't contend that the
rural, dig-your-own-well-and-cut-your-own-wood way of
life he has chosen to live is right for everybody. In
his view, his way is not the only way to be happy, and
it is not the only way to serve the Life Force or the
Creator, his terms for God. 
Along this same line, pantheists don't hold up any one
human attribute above the others as automatically
being on a higher plane than the others. A good mind,
for example, can be positive and it can be negative
depending on the use to which it is put. In fact, one
picks up a coolness toward intellectual prowess in
pantheism; or anyway, that it is not essential to a
good life, and may actually interfere with it. 

Pantheists are critical of humanism. They reject the
secularized, human-centered world view. In their eyes,
humanism sets man up as the sole concern, as being all
important. Humanists, the pantheists contend, have
substituted worship of man for the worship of God.
This contradicts the pantheistic view of man as a part
of nature, and pantheism's contention that the meaning
and purpose of life cannot, should not, be made with
reference to human beings alone. 

Pantheists disagree with an existentialist posture
that would have man simply choose the meaning of his
life. There are dictates inherent in man's being and
in his context, pantheists hold, that place
obligations on him and limit the scope of his freedom
to choose his path in life. Man is what he is and is a
part of everything, and these realities direct how one
should live. Man should not, say the pantheists, be
viewed as an end in himself. 

Pantheists are critical of a reliance on science as
the source of answers to the questions of existence.
There is more to the world than can be accounted for
by the natural sciences and their ways of coming to
know things, contend the pantheists. Pantheists don't
claim to know all there is to know about the Divine
Unity. They admit that they still have questions about
creation, immortality, and the meaning and purpose of
life, but they don't believe that science has the
answers to them either. 

Pantheists usually believe in free will. Most often,
they aren't determinists. They don't believe man's
actions and fate are determined by either God's will
or earthly circumstances. They believe in the power of
choice and moral responsibility. They derive their
concept of morality from the nature of the Divine
Unity, not from the nature of a personalized God and
His word. A person's conduct cannot be assessed apart
from his overall context, pantheists believe.
Pantheists judge the goodness of an individual act,
and a total life, with reference to the individual's
relationship to the Unity. Pantheists believe living
in harmony with the Unity is morally good, and living
in discordance with It is morally bad. 

As might be expected, pantheists tend to love nature
and seek to establish a relationship to things
natural. They tend to believe that if one doesn't
contact nature, one is less likely to come to the
pantheistic world view. If one never hikes in the
wilderness or gazes at the sunset or sails on the
water, if one never gets out of his own little orbit,
he is less likely to see the pantheistic truths.
Pantheists live more in an ethical than mystical
relation to nature. They perceive that living in
proper relation to nature presupposes its preservation
and protection. They tend to be environmentalists.
They tend to see urban life as adverse to both
personal well-being and the well-being of the Unity.
They tend to be of a mind that technology despoils the
environment and separates people from It. At the same
time, however, they tend to think of pantheism as an
approach to life that can be lived out in any locale,
including urban settings. 

Pantheists regard organized churches and religious
leaders with suspicion. They doubt whether the life
that pantheism seeks to attain can be facilitated by
hierarchically organized, clergy-centered,
empire-building religions. 


Pierce says he can't remember where he got the term
Cosmotheism. I did some investigating and found that
the English Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher
Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the term in the early
nineteenth century. In Coleridge's writings,
cosmotheism referred, in one instance I came across,
to an identification of God with the universe and, in
another, to the worship of the world as God. 5 So
Pierce may have picked it up from his reading of
Coleridge. Another possible source of the term can be
found in Pierce's Sunday evening talk of July 24th,
1977 called “Cosmotheism: Wave of the Future.” 6 Early
in that talk, Pierce quotes the writer D.H. Lawrence
as saying "We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a
vast living body of which we are all parts. The sun is
a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest
veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve center from
which we quiver forever. All this is literally true,
as men knew in the great past, and as they will know
again." So it could be that reading Lawrence was
Pierce's inspiration. But it was a long time ago, and
Pierce doesn't remember, so this will have to remain
speculation. 

In the “Cosmotheism: Wave of the Future” talk, Pierce
puts Cosmotheism in its historical and philosophical
perspective. He describes Cosmotheists as people who
are bearers of the Creator's purpose or, another way
to state it, bearers of the Universal Will. He says
that many people over the course of history have
understood parts of Cosmotheism, and he lists a number
of examples, among them ancient Greek and Roman
philosophers, northern European pagan philosophers,
Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Pope, and the
European philosophers Fichte and Hegel. 

Pierce says in his talk that the pantheistic tradition
is central to the history of the white race in Europe.
Before Christianity was exported to Europe by the
expanding Roman Empire, he asserts, European religions
stressed the oneness of God and man. He says that this
emphasis contrasted with the Christian church's
dichotomous conception which emphasizes God and man's
distinction and separation from each other. 

Pierce argues that the twentieth century is congenial
to the pantheistic perspective. Modern science, he
tells his audience, has moved us from a static to a
dynamic view of the universe, and pantheism is more in
alignment with that paradigm than is the church's
conception of the world as a finished creation. Since
Darwin, Pierce points out, the world has come to be
viewed as undergoing a continuous and not-yet-finished
change or evolution. Pantheism is more congenial to
this perspective, he asserts, than are theistic
religions such as Christianity. To be sure, Pierce
acknowledges, Christian doctrine with its static view
of the universe is still accepted by many people.
However, he notes, very few of the leading thinkers of
our time buy into the Christian conception of the
world. 

Cosmotheism, Pierce tells his audience, differs from
most other religions with their dependence on truth as
revealed through revelation or as passed down by
authority. It also departs from pure rationalism.
Cosmotheism is grounded in a synthesis of objective
and subjective knowledge, says Pierce. Cosmotheism is
the union of the Creator's immanent consciousness,
what our reason and senses tell us about ourselves and
the world, and the findings of science. In addition,
offers Pierce, Cosmotheism is in accord with the truth
that comes from deep within us if we are willing to
attend to it, from our genes, from our collective
race-soul. 

The problems Cosmotheism faces in being accepted in
this culture do not stem from its validity, Pierce
contends. A major problem Cosmotheism confronts is
that the mass of people will never have the chance to
accept or reject it on the basis of its merits,
because they will never learn about it in the first
place. Those who control the public discourse in
America— the news and entertainment and publishing
industries and the schools— do their best to censor
and malign anything like Cosmotheism, claims Pierce.
Plus, if people do manage to learn about the tenets of
Cosmotheism and accept them as valid, they still face
the tough challenge of manifesting them in their
lives. Given the religious and ideological orthodoxies
of the moment, Pierce declares, it requires a good
measure of personal independence and strength of
character to stand up to the rejections, pressures,
and sanctions that result when people think the
"wrong" things or act in the "wrong" ways. The best
way around that state of affairs, says Pierce, is to
break our isolation from one another and to form a
community of “consciousness and blood.” 



It appears to me that Cosmotheism is basically an
elaboration of the pantheistic perspective George
Bernard Shaw articulated in Man and Superman, the play
that made such a strong impression on Pierce when he
was a graduate student at Caltech. 7 Pierce modified
what Shaw put forth, changed nomenclature in places,
punched up certain ideas in Shaw and played others
down, extrapolated from what Shaw offered, and added
some new things of his own, especially around how
people can organize themselves to realize the
Cosmotheist ideal. A shorthand way of describing the
end result of Pierce's formulations is that
Cosmotheism is essentially what Shaw had to say in Man
and Superman with a National Socialist twist to it. 

While Shaw wrote of Life, or the Life Force, Pierce's
Cosmotheism talks about the Creator. By and large, the
Life Force and the Creator are synonymous concepts,
with Pierce's idea of the Creator perhaps carrying a
bit more of a divine or sacred connotation than Shaw's
idea of the Life Force. And while the Creator, like
the Life Force, is essentially immanent, I pick up
more of a transcendent, "other," dimension in Pierce's
concept than the Shavian one has. If one can draw the
distinction between a philosophy and a religion, it
seems to me the Creator in Cosmotheism has more of a
religious feel to it than Shaw's Life Force. Of
course, we are talking about Pierce of twenty years
ago here. In my dealings with him I have never heard
him refer to the Creator— it has always been the Life
Force, serving the Life Force. My guess is that twenty
years ago and up to his move to West Virginia in the
mid-1980s, Pierce had more of a religious orientation
than he has today. His current use of "Life Force"
language and the absence of "Creator" talk may reflect
a reversion back toward the Shaw influences that began
it all over forty years ago. 

As with Shaw's Life Force, there is a dynamic quality
to the concept of the Creator in Cosmotheism. The
Creator more than just is, more than just exists, more
than just began it all and now watches and judges or
selectively intervenes in earthly affairs; the Creator
is a force and is definitely going someplace. Pierce
uses the term Urge to get at that dimension of the
Creator. The direction the Urge is seeking to travel
in Cosmotheist doctrine is the same as Shaw's Life
Force: toward self- consciousness, self-understanding,
and self-completion. And as in Shaw's formulation,
there is a dynamic quality in Cosmotheism to man's
relationship with the Creator. It isn't simply a
matter of being with the Creator or integrating with
It; it is a matter of doing with the Creator. And
again as in Shaw, that doing takes the form of serving
the Creator by being Its brain and taking action to
further Its process. 

There is the idea in Cosmotheism that man can make the
choice of whether or not to serve the Creator.
However, I pick up more of a sense in Cosmotheism than
in Shaw that this kind of service is not only a good
thing to do, you really ought to do it. 

Cosmotheism agrees with Shaw that there isn't just one
way to serve the Life Force or Creator. What is
important, both orientations hold, is to get a grasp
of the big picture, how it all works, and then to find
the way to support the Life Force/Creator's process
that is natural to you and most effective. 

Cosmotheism makes salient the pluralistic outlook of
pantheism and uses it to serve a racial agenda.
Cosmotheist doctrine stresses that the parts of the
whole are as fundamental a reality as the unity of all
things, and that we can't ignore the differences among
the parts, including their qualitative differences.
All to say, from the Cosmotheist perspective
individuals are different in nature from one another
and some are better than others, and the same thing
holds true for races. According to Cosmotheism,
individuals can be measured against what they were and
did in the past and what they can become and create in
the future, and so too can races. 

Shaw in Man and Superman alluded to breeding the race
into a higher form of being as a goal of the Life
Force, but he muted that point to a large extent.
Cosmotheism, on the other hand, puts that process
center stage and in bold print, as it were. And
Cosmotheism makes it clear even though it is not
stated explicitly (as it wasn't in Shaw either) that
race does not refer to the whole human race, all of
mankind, but rather to the white race. Cosmotheism is
at its core a white racialist world view. The
pantheist concept of world -soul becomes in
Cosmotheism the race -soul. 

Therefore, when Cosmotheists talk about serving the
Creator, they are referring to improving the white
race, their race. There is the tacit assumption in
Cosmotheism, as there well may have been in Shaw, that
this is a religion, philosophy, whatever to call it,
that applies to the white race only. It is about the
white race and for the white race. As it was in Shaw,
improvement of the race in Cosmotheism is conceived in
Nietzschean terms, that is to say, as the movement
toward the ideal of the Superman. And grounded in the
evolutionary perspective it shares with Shaw,
Cosmotheism assumes that that improvement will most
likely involve struggle and peril. 

Both Shaw and Cosmotheism see modern life in general
as working against the improvement of the race. (Shaw
equated modern life with Hell.) And while it is
obliquely hinted at in Shaw (the Devil in his play is
a Jew), it is very clearly written between the lines
that Cosmotheism considers Jews to be an impediment to
the fulfillment of the fundamental impulse and destiny
of the race. 

One difference between Shaw and Cosmotheism lies in
what is expected of the servant of the Life
Force/Creator. With Shaw, there is a mix of "ivory
tower" and "social work" expectations That is, what
the individual— Don Juan, say— would best do is go up
in the ivory tower, i.e., back off enough, get enough
distance from day-to-day existence, to be able to
reflect and become informed and wise enough to be the
philosopher's brain the Life Force needs. As well, Don
Juan or someone else who would go this route, informed
by the knowledge and wisdom he has acquired, would
take on the role of the Life Force's social worker,
that is, help It move in the proper direction. In all
of this, however, there is a "backed off,"
personally-removed quality inherent in this approach
to life: I got the sense from the play that Don Juan
was talking about them, other people, and it, Life,
and what they were like and what they were becoming.
But he wasn't talking about himself and what he was
becoming. 

When I read the Cosmotheist material Pierce put
together, there are, to be sure, the ivory-tower and
social-work aspects, as I am calling them, but there
is more. There is the idea in Cosmotheism that the
Creator includes you and me. We are a part of the
world and not just looking on and critiquing and
stepping in to help things along. We— you and I— do
more than merely point the way and pave the way, as
important, as crucial, as those things are. We have
the responsibility to become the way, to create in our
own beings and in our own lives the exemplification of
the upward unfolding of the race. 

A last difference between Shaw's and Pierce's
formulations: In Shaw you get the impression that Don
Juan's search for Heaven is an individual quest. He
was going to get there by himself. With Cosmotheism,
in contrast, this search is to be a shared, communal
endeavor. The message comes through in Cosmotheism
that it is not likely that you or I will ever get
there on our own. It is going to take the support of
other people, and a supportive social context, for us
to travel upward toward greatness. 



Now to the three pamphlets, or booklets, on
Cosmotheism that Pierce put together in the 1970s and
early 1980s. The Path, the first one, printed, in
1977, sets out the basic tenets of Cosmotheism. 8 It
describes the Creator, the Urge, the Path of Life and
the way that individuals embark on the Path
successfully, and the Cosmotheist Community.

Man and the world and the Creator are not separate
things, but man is a part of the world, which is part
of the Whole, which is the Creator. The tangible
Universe is the material manifestation of the Creator.
All the blazing suns of the firmament; the formless
gas between the stars; the silent, frozen mountain
peaks of the moon; the rustling trees of the earthly
forests; the teeming creatures of the dark ocean
depths; and man are parts of the Creator's material
manifestation. 9 

The Urge lies at the root of all things and is
manifested in the relations among all things.... The
Urge is in the tenuous gases of the void, for they
have a purpose, which is the flaming suns and all the
planets which form from them. The Urge is in the
earth, for it has a purpose, which is the realm of
plants and animals which flourish on it. And the Urge
is in man, for he has a purpose, which is higher man.
And the purposes of all these things are steps on the
Path of Life, which leads to the One Purpose, which is
the Self-Realization of the Creator: the Self-
Completion of the Self-Created. 10 

Those who attain Divine Consciousness will ascend the
Path of Life toward their Destiny, which is Godhood;
which is to say, the Path of Life leads upward through
a never-ending succession of states, the next of which
is that of higher man, and the ultimate that of the
Self-Realized Creator. 11 

True reason will illuminate the Path for them and give
them insight; it will be a mighty aid to the Creator's
Urge within them...True reason seeks to guide man's
actions in accord with the immanent consciousness of
the Whole, while false reason does not.... The man or
woman of true reason seeks order in all things, and he
shuns chaos. He is pleased by a harmonious
relationship between all the elements of his life and
the world. He rejects that which clashes and does not
fit, that which is alien. He is happy in the knowledge
that what was true and good yesterday will be true and
good tomorrow. Through order and harmony he seeks true
progress, which is the ascent of the Path of Life; but
he shuns frivolous change, which destroys the harmony
between the past and the future. He loves truth, and
he hates falsehood. He loves beauty, and he hates
ugliness. He loves nobility in all things, and he
hates baseness. And all these predispositions of the
man or woman of true reason are like rays thrown out
by the Divine Spark which burns in his soul. And this
Divine Spark is the immanent consciousness of the
Whole. It is the presence of the Creator's Urge in
him. 12 

The gathering of those who would become members of the
Community of Divine Consciousness is called the
Cosmotheist Community; it is the Community of those
who would become People of the Rune. And the People of
the Rune are known for these four things: knowledge,
consciousness, discipline, and service.... By
knowledge is meant understanding of the Truth.... By
consciousness is meant the awakened state of those who
have gone beyond knowledge and have partaken of the
immanent consciousness of the Whole which resides in
their innermost souls.... Discipline comes from within
and without. From without it is imposed on the members
of the Cosmotheist Community. By being so imposed it
brings forth the growth of discipline from within.
Without discipline there is no mastery, and he who has
not mastered the chaos of conflicting forces within
himself cannot render full service. But discipline
imposed and discipline which grows from within
together give those who have attained knowledge and
consciousness mastery over their own forces, so that
those forces may serve the Creator's Purpose.... The
members of the community of Divine Consciousness, the
Awakened Ones, the People of the Rune, serve in a new
way, which is the way of higher man, the way of true
reason. They are conscious agents of the Creator's
Purpose.... Through their service they resume the
ascent toward their destiny, which is Godhood. 13

The second pamphlet, On Living Things, describes the
measure of a man, the dangers that must be overcome in
creating the higher man, and the responsibilities that
the Community as a whole and each individual member
within the Community must accept. 14

[The qualities one uses to judge the value of a man]
are the trueness of his inner sense of direction, the
soundness of his constitution, and the purity of his
blood. 15 

[The two greatest dangers that must be overcome in
creating the higher man] are the corruption of the
spirit and the corruption of the blood. First comes
the corruption of the spirit, through the presence of
alien race soul. Alien values and attitudes become
intermixed with the values and attitudes of higher
man's stock who are not yet conscious of their
identity and mission. And then follows the corruption
of the blood of those whose values are confused; they
can no longer follow their inner sense of direction,
and in their confusion they mix their blood with that
of alien stocks; and they and their offspring become
abominations, spreading further corruption among the
stock from which higher man arises. 16 

They must become conscious of their identity and their
mission; they must seek and discover the values of
their own race-soul, putting aside all values which
have come from alien race-souls; and they must remove
from their midst all who have become abominations and
all who are of alien blood.... 17 

He must take into his own hands those forces which
change the seed of all living things from generation
to generation, and must use those forces under the
guidance of an awakening consciousness to lift his
stock over the threshold which separates man from
higher man, the realm of immanent consciousness from
that of Divine Consciousness. 18

The third, and last, booklet Pierce produced on
Cosmotheism was On Society. 19 Actually, the booklet
wasn't about society as a whole but rather about the
Cosmotheist Community itself— although there may be a
tacit hope embedded in the title of this document that
someday all of society will operate in the way the
Cosmotheist Community does. On Society describes the
integration of the religious and secular in Community
life (Community is capitalized because Pierce is
referring to the Cosmotheist Community) and discusses
four main social institutions: the family, the school,
the military, and the government. Pierce is an admirer
of the social and political arrangements put forth by
Plato in his treatise The Republic 20 and, ironically,
the way the Catholic church organizes itself, and this
is revealed in what he writes in this pamphlet. 



The Community is both church and state, and it does
not separate these two aspects of its being. It does
not separate guidance in striving for knowledge from
guidance in raising consciousness or building
character. It does not separate religious and moral
training from other training. It guides each member
toward knowledge, consciousness, and discipline
through the same institutions. 21 

[The four essential institutions of the Community] are
the family, by which the Community breeds and builds
itself; the academy, by which it trains itself and
grows in knowledge; the corps of guardians, by which
it defends itself; and the hierarchy, by which it
governs and guides itself. 22 

The community honors each man who is a father and each
woman who is a mother, and the family in which the two
are united, in a measure corresponding to the value of
the children they engender; and this value is measured
both by the qualities inherent in the children at
their birth and the development and strengthening of
their qualities through proper nurture. 23 

In the Academy, the children receive a uniform
grounding in language, history, music, and the other
elements of their cultural heritage; they are made
conscious of the spiritual basis of their existence
and of the Cosmotheist truth; and they begin the
lifelong process of building will and character
through discipline. 24 

The corps of guardians is the institution by which the
Community defends itself against its enemies, both
within and without: against those who would harm any
of the things upon which the life of the Community
depends, both its physical life and its spiritual
life. The men of the community who are chosen to
become guardians shall...come only from those ordained
to a life of service to the One Purpose, and they
shall be only the best of those. 25 

The hierarchy is the institution by which the
Community orders itself. It is a community of
priests....In structure it is a series of steps
leading upward....As he advances in knowledge, in
consciousness, in discipline, and in service, he is
judged by those above him; and according to their
judgment, he may progress upward, from step to step,
throughout his life. 26 

The hierarchy guides and judges. It shapes,
structures, and makes or changes rules, when those
things are needed; otherwise it preserves what it has
made. It looks to the future, foresees the needs of
the Community, and strives to fulfill those needs.
Above all else, the hierarchy keeps the community
moving ever upward: toward new knowledge, higher
levels of consciousness, greater strength and
discipline, more effective service of the Creator's
Purpose. 27 



"I wasn't always clear about what you meant by some of
the things you said on the tape and in the pamphlets
you gave me,” I said to Pierce. “When you talk about
'bearers of the Creator's purpose' and 'the perfect
union of the Creator's immanent consciousness and our
race soul'—" 

"Back then I was trying to get things sorted out in my
head,” Pierce interrupted, “and I may have expressed
myself in airy ways. I think I could do it more
precisely and clearly now. It was just that when I
first read Shaw I could feel the hairs rising on the
back of my neck. I felt it was true and an insight
into reality that few people have, and even fewer
people can express things as well as he did. It was
about this process— this purpose, this primeval urge
toward higher consciousness— that was trying to
continue. Shaw put things in a different light for me.
I now could examine things in this light. Did this
square with what I know about history, human nature,
and so forth? And when I did that, things did make
sense. If they hadn't, I would have rejected it." 

"Is this right, that what you are trying to get at in
using terms like ‘divine spark' is something more than
what we think of as the biological unfolding of
evolution?" 

"Yes, what I'm talking about is more than that, or at
least it is a different way of looking at evolution.
It is the development of a certain kind of
self-consciousness. It seems to me that there is a
Life Force reaching out in the darkness, trying to
develop a more sensitive and refined tool for
understanding itself. There is this feeling we have—
or, I should say, the best of us have— in the presence
of beauty, truly fine art let's say. It's the basis
for the respect we have for the great philosopher.
This is more than just a recognition of ethical or
moral principles; it's being drawn to what is finest;
it's being drawn to genius, to what is really best. It
is that part of us that knows that accomplishment in
the sense of money-grabbing, getting to be a CEO, or
becoming a celebrity by telling jokes isn't really
worthy of respect. That sensibility, if you want to
call it that, doesn't have survival value as far as I
can see, but nevertheless, even though it is submerged
in so many people given the world as it is, it has
evolved as a part of our nature along with all the
other things. I'm trying to get at this impulse in
people, which isn't part of evolution as we usually
think about it." 

"When you talk about self-consciousness here, you
mean— " 

"I mean by that more than an understanding of who I am
in its popular psychological meaning, or some kind of
political or social self-understanding. What I am
talking about transcends that kind of thing. It is, in
the most fundamental sense, who I am relative to
everything around me and where things have come from
and where they are going— the really big picture, I
guess you'd say. It is a higher consciousness." 

"And when you say things like, 'My destiny is
godhood'..." 

"That is where Nietzsche fits in. If this process of
which I am a part continues as we would hope, the
result will be the emergence of what Nietzsche calls
the Superman. It is a type of being that very few of
us can get our minds around. And the Superman may be a
step toward an even higher being. If one extrapolates
indefinitely, the very end result— and we can only
begin to imagine it— I call godhood. We need to be the
agents of this process. We need to serve it." 

"And I hear you saying in the material I have reviewed
that each of us has a choice of whether to serve— or
retard, or be indifferent to— the Life Force, that
fundamental process." 

"Historically, only a small number have made the
choice to serve the Life Force. But fortunately for
us, in Europe there was an influential minority who
saw this larger reality and moved our civilization in
a positive direction. The mass of people followed
along. Now the choice is with us: are we going to
accept responsibility for being the conscious and
willing agents of the Life Force or are we not? The
future of the new millennium depends on our answer." 

“When you came out here to West Virginia in 1985, it
was at least to some extent to move the Cosmotheist
Church here and form the kind of community you'd been
talking about in Arlington, is that right?” 

"Yes. I took the money I had accumulated and bought
this land in the name of the Cosmotheist Community
Church. After I got here, I found out that there is a
law that limits how much property a church can hold.
If there wasn't a limit, churches would accumulate
larger and larger amounts of property and not pay
taxes on any of it, and the government wouldn't get
any revenue. This kind of law came out of the
experience in England, where the church had acquired a
substantial percentage of the landscape. Henry the
Eighth solved it by simply confiscating the church's
land, but that was a short-term solution, and they
came up with these laws. In West Virginia the limit is
sixty acres, so I put that amount in the name of the
Cosmotheist Community Church and the rest in my name. 

"It turned out that the church never really went
anywhere here in West Virginia. The other people
didn't move out here, and I really didn't have the
time to build up a church here— I had to keep the
Alliance alive. If you are a one-man band as I have
pretty much been, you are limited in what you can
accomplish. And then there was a big fight with the
IRS which I lost. They said that we weren't a church.
They were obviously under pressure to take away the
tax exemption we had. The IRS sent some agents out
here to check us out. I still have the report they
wrote. It had things like the road out here was very
rough and not conducive to people getting to the
services, and that we didn't have enough chairs and
where were people going to sit, and there was no
central heating system and so there couldn't be
services in the winter— a bunch of baloney." 

(The IRS revoked Pierce's church status and the
revocation was upheld in court. Pierce thinks the IRS
was responding to pressure applied on it by the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. While the vast
majority of people view the ADL in a positive light,
as an opponent of bigotry and intolerance, Pierce sees
it as a Jewish instrument of thought control and the
abridgment of freedoms. He contends that the ADL seeks
to harm or even destroy anyone or anything that gets
in the way of the Jewish agenda for this country,
which includes him and his organization.) 

"You think your racial views were the real reason the
IRS got on your case?" 

"If I had been preaching a doctrine that didn't
irritate the Jews they would have left us alone. There
are all kinds of snake-handling cults and everything
else up here in these hills, and the IRS lets them
call themselves a church and doesn't bother them. It
is no big drain on the federal budget, and the IRS
stays in good graces generally by not bothering people
more than it has to. But in our case they were
determined to get us, and it was strictly because of
what I was teaching on racial and Jewish matters." 

"Did they ever say that was why they were coming after
you?" 

"They are never going to say you can't be a church
because you don't have the right doctrine, so they
measure potholes and count chairs. But the truth of
the matter is that they were out here because we
didn't preach the right things.”




	
		
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