A Short Story of American Destiny (1909-2009)

Kevin Dann, Fortunatus, San Rafael, CA, 2008, 156 pgs.

Review by Walter Alexander

A Short Story of American Destiny (1909-2009), by historian Kevin Dann, for its modest 156 pages (plus nine pages of a biographical essay), is an ambitious book. It “bookends” the twin 1909 celebrations in Burlington, Vermont and New York City of tercentenary anniversaries of the Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson 1609 “discoveries” (for westerners) of the lake and river now bearing their respective names with the especially significant quatracentenary year 2009. All of this serves as a superstructure for the much larger themes of the return of the etheric Christ and the incarnation of the Antichrist. That is a large sweep, and emblematic of Dann’s ambition to find in local, relatively recent events (Kevin Dann was teaching history at SUNY Plattsburgh not far from Burlington at the time) viable links to the mainspring of the cosmos.

Even though 2009 has come and gone, the subject matter remains current because Dann, via his mentor Robert Powell, sees that year—and specifically, the July 22 solar eclipse—as the beginning of a three-and-one-half-year period ending with the much ballyhooed terminus of the Mayan calendar in 2012.

Dann weaves among the various geographical and thematic locales, starting with the 1909 celebrations, which become in his skilled hands windows into a cusp between ages. These celebrations (in New York City, it was billed as a Hudson-Fulton event) were moments of great excitement—more over the Promethean sense of emergence for America as a power among nations, one seemingly born to wield the amazing emerging technologies displayed at them, than over the history itself. For many, the New York City event’s highlight was Wilbur Wright’s daring 12-minutes total soaring over the Hudson in two flights of his “airship.” This first over American waters was viewed by more than a million astounded souls. Afterward, Wright spoke of being buffeted by winds swirling around Manhattan’s skyscrapers, among which was the new Singer building, the world’s tallest at 187 feet. On the river below him as he flew steamed a ten-mile long flotilla of international warships, bedecked later that night with thousands of electric globes. Similarly, 100,000 electric lights traced the outlines of City Hall, the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb, and the East River bridges. To the dazzled spectators, most of whom shared as their common experience the quiet hues of lantern-lit evenings and the nonmechanical clack of horses’ hooves on pavement, these were rays from the irresistible sun of a technological dawn. Dann calls the aeronautics/ electrical combo a “magical technological communion.”

When we wonder, free of any indulgent intoxication with our own progress, what a world without radio, TV, cinema, Internet, email, and such was like, we do well to remember Shakespeare’s “Full fathom five” lyric:

Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

Which is to say that the rich and strange phenomena of radio, TV, and so on did not emerge suddenly whole out of the head of Zeus, but are externalizations of aspects of our psyche that manifested earlier, but in different forms. And what Kevin Dann shows, through his true historian’s love of time’s receding minutiae, is a picture of a stage in the evolution of human consciousness strongly resembling our own—except shifted back a shade, and also resembling a still earlier one where the differences are substantial enough that could we juxtapose it with ours, the contrasts would be quite jarring. Think of a consciousness environment already well forward of that which produced the Salem witch trials two hundred years earlier, but one still working at unconvincing itself of the reality of demons and spirits—in preparation for the cold categories of the arriving technological future.

Dann’s exploration of University of Vermont yearbooks and celebrations going back to the early 1890s revealed a society fascinated by “Indians” and a mythology around them, but not yet really seriously interested in them. The clash with native peoples, brutal especially to them, was still too recent. For parades and pageants, real “Indians” or folks dressed like them were absolutely essential, though real local native Americans (Lenapes, for example) were ignored and passed over in favor of representatives of tribes better known in mythologized fictions and photos (eg, Iroquois).

Those parades and pageants, central to the tercentenary celebrations, were staged with intentionality—not just as entertainments, but as vehicles for the teaching of a predictably selfserving/-aggrandizing historical narrative that served also as a unifying vision for the increasingly diverse and growing populations of the still-young nation. While the heyday of American historical pageants was from 1910-1920, Dann says, remnants of these spectacles, I assume, still survive in parade floats, Mardi Gras, and even some college football half-time extravaganzas.

What Dann’s exploration of the yearbooks, midwinter masquerades with “Kakewalk” (derived from the twostep “cakewalk” dance craze of the 1890s), and parades reveal about the psyches of the players is well worth the reading. We see elite white ethnocentrism both intrigued and unconsciously intimidated by the unrestrained and “primitive” strengths of African- Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Islanders, and immigrant populations. At the same time we see emerging scientism relegating the figures of Satan, assorted other devils, sorcerers, ghouls, and spiders to yearbook decorations and carnival skits—but by their sheer volume telling us that they are still well entrenched in the community’s anxious heart.

As counterpoise to the 1909 celebrations in New York City and Burlington, Dann soon introduces Rudolf Steiner’s Christology, spoken of by Steiner in talks in Cassel, Germany, simultaneously with these celebrations. This Christology of Steiner, since ambition has already been cited, ties all human history to the evolution of the Christ Being in the cosmos—which includes that being’s uniting itself through an elaborate and long-unfolding process with the person of Jesus at the baptism in the Jordan and ultimately with the earth itself at what Steiner calls “the turning point of time.”

That elaborate process is detailed in Steiner’s spiritual science, and specifically in his astrosophy, a grand, overarching unification of the physical universe of planets, moons, and suns with the beings (earthly, super- and subearthly) associated with them and their interconnections through time. Dann focuses on the special significance of the three and one-half years mentioned here at the outset, which coincide with the span between the Jordan baptism and the crucifixion. Of that, Dann quotes Steiner saying that in that part of Jesus’ life “he did not take a single step without cosmic forces working in him” and that in that time “the total essence of the cosmos, to which the earth belongs, determined what Christ Jesus did,” playing out a “continuous realization of his horoscope.”

To this cosmic/human drama, Dann adds mirroring events in the New World among the Aztecs and their Toltec predecessors, including the known, horrendous black magic-inspired ritual murders, and the less-known, intentionally deceitful distortion of history reversing the identities of the good initiate Huitzilopochtli who, as told by Steiner, in 33 AD defeated the luciferic Quetzalcoatl initiates. This characteristic ahrimanic misdeed, Dann writes, is a prelude to further twentieth-century dark realizations through Hitler and the atomic bomb, all culminating with the Antichrist’s 3.5-year reign in the present century, ending in 2012.

Wright Brothers’ 1909 “fly by” of the Statue of Liberty

The coming of Ahriman, Dann points out, is for our spiritual evolution. But the inability of contemporary people to think “mythically” about the plane of history when it is close to them, Dann says, may have grave consequences if it is not overcome. With the return of the etheric Christ in 1933 obscured by the ascendancy of Hitler, and with a largely one-dimensional War on Terror emerging as the principal offspring of 9/11, there is plenty of cause for worry. Dann writes, “We must also do battle on the inner planes, and call forth our inner Sun forces to overcome the eclipse that threatens our consciousness every day. Surrounded by both the web of lies spun by the black magicians of political propaganda and the web of virtual reality spun by digital technology, we are—whether we are conscious of it or not—players in a cosmic drama, a ‘star war.’”

Does the fabric woven by Dann create a whole cloth? It is surely an interesting one, and one worth treading on (if not wearing) as a reader’s path because of its intelligent and clear exposition of themes rarely brought into relationship (i.e., history based on conventional documentation with that derived from clairvoyant reading of the akashic record via Steiner). But there is a disturbance in the weave worth observing.

With Rudolf Steiner, you always know where you stand with regard to where the knowledge comes from. You are invited to listen to, via reading and study, what he says out of his spiritually acquired perceptions and faculties. Then, aside from having the option of embarking, if you so choose, on the journey toward developing similar faculties, you are invited to subject that content to unprejudiced judgment, or better yet, to temporarily suspend judgment and then see how it wears. Steiner, for many of us, survives the progression of seasons very well, though chronic head-scratching is likely to be a lifelong side effect.

'In A Short Story of American Destiny' (1909-2009), Dann first mentions Robert Powell on page 133, noting that Powell worked from knowledge of astronomy, out of Steiner’s indications, and with specific details about Jesus Christ from the nineteenth-century visionary Anne Catherine Emmerich. From these, Powell calculates exact month, day, and year for a further specific chronology of Jesus’ earthly life’s events, Christ’s subsequent life in the etheric, and matching astrological configurations. Powell’s insights, based on precise calculations, themselves based on Catherine Emmerich’s visions, are—through verbs such as “discovered,” “recognized,” “uncovered,” “revealed,” and “determined”—presented as reliable facts that we are to accept.

In a subsequent entry to a blog on the “Evolver” website [at http://www.realitysandwich.com/christ_amp_ maya_calendar_2012_amp_coming_antichrist] and in private conversation, in both cases in response to the question “Was Powell able to read the akashic record out of his own faculties?” Dann affirmed that Powell had some clairvoyant experiences to which he applied his own methodology derived from astrosophy.

I found myself wishing for more clarity around this question, and I found myself uncomfortable with the precision of some of the provided “information.” It is hard to capture the quality of this discomfort, but the flavor emerges distinctly whenever enough detail is given to invite speculations as to which already known figure is the Antichrist or his/her messenger. There may well be such persons and events, but whether the identities matter as much as which profoundly living imaginations or what qualities of beings they are an enactment of is another worthy question. Glinting also from the hard, informational precision is a hint of mechanical determinism to which I am averse. Steiner often gave exact details out of his explorations into karma, but the details were never the point of the exploration, but rather guideposts toward an expanded and deepened beholding capacity—for us to wield in our further experience of the way the world works around, in and through us.

It isn’t until the post-scripted “Biographical Essay” that Dann tells us that Powell is his close friend and colleague, and that the book “owes its greatest debt to the understandings Robert has imparted to me over the last seven years.” That kind of statement, I feel strongly, belongs in a preface or introduction. The choice to delay revealing that relationship intensified my already mentioned discomfort over important details expressed as certainties, the source and rationale for which remain uncertain to me. The “Biographical Essay” is otherwise a loving expression of Dann’s respect not just for the work of others on which the book rests, but for the personalities themselves, who, like him, share in the gift of surrendering to the records and traces of lives, cultures and epochs—and who then bring them forth transformed to those who will listen.