This section of the Wolff Archive contains documents that relate to Wolff’s work with various groups and organizations over the course of his life. In one way or another, Franklin Wolff was connected with a formal religious or spiritual group throughout his life. His father was a Methodist minister, and so as a child Wolff “had always automatically attended church and Sunday school.”[1] While in college, he became interested in Theosophy and began to attend meetings of a local theosophical society. Later, when Wolff decided to leave academia to embark on a spiritual quest, he first attempted to form his own spiritually-centered commune; when that effort failed, he ended up at the parent organization of the group that he joined while a university student. After leaving that community, there followed a string of associations until he and his first wife founded their own “assembly.”[2]
For the most part, Wolff’s group work centered around theosophical ideology: some of it was overt, such as his associations with the Temple of the People and the United Lodge of Theosophy; when he worked as a teacher for other groups, such as the Sufi Order in the West and the Benares League, he also managed to work theosophical ideas into his lesson plans. And, when he and his wife founded their own educational group, which was named the “Assembly of Man,” they adopted a generally theosophical orientation.
This is not say that Wolff wholeheartedly embraced all aspects of theosophical doctrine; in fact, when he began attending meetings of the local theosophical society in college, he was not impressed by the thinking he encountered:
I was not satisfied with the soundness of the thinking, and the result was that for three years I disputed the soundness of his position with the leader of the group; meanwhile, feeling that yet there was something here. It was a kind of thinking that was totally foreign with respect to that which I had found in the university. I knew the scientific soundness of university teaching. I knew mathematics and philosophy, or was experiencing it at that time, and yet here was something that seemed to make an appeal to another possibility. Ultimately, I was sufficiently interested to make a tentative association with the entity known as the Temple of the People. I became a member and attended its convention in 1912, just before I went for the year at Harvard. But I was not yet fully convinced that here was a door to truth; it was an intriguing possibility, but there were many elements that were not satisfactory.[3]
Later, Wolff would come to discern matters as follows:
Ultimately, that which I learned from this theosophical group was what we might call orientation to a goal, contrasting with what I learned from the university which supplied method, the means of sound thinking. Ever since then, I have held to these two aspects. I have not rejected one for the sake of the other, but dealt with the problem of reconciliation.[4]
In this light, one might argue that Wolff’s life embodied a function of religious or spiritual group work that Blaise Pascal emphasized in connection with his famous wager. Pascal maintained that the belief in the existence of God could be justified on prudential grounds; that is, that it is in our best interest to believe in God whatever evidence we may have for the claim “God exists.” Pascal also recognized, however, that even though one might be convinced by his argument, that it is not possible for a non-believer to suddenly become a theist. In modern terms, this is to say that we cannot treat belief as an action: beliefs are not something that we have control over. Pascal’s answer was to encourage non-believers convinced by his argument to go live among religious people. By doing so, he thought that habits of faith would take hold and that a belief in the existence of God would eventually come naturally.
Wolff’s life seems to fit this pattern quite well. At the moment that he was set to embark upon a career in the academy, he decided instead to set out on a spiritual quest. He based this decision on a way of thinking that he was unable to adopt as his own, but which had convinced him that there was “another kind of Consciousness where alone, it seemed, [a] solution to the antinomies of the subject-object consciousness could be found.”[5] Although Wolff would on more than one occasion question this decision, he evidently recognized that an association with like-minded individuals would not only help to assuage these doubts, but would provide the right setting for finding this other “kind of Consciousness.”
More generally (and esoterically), here is what Wolff had to say about the importance of group work:
One may ask the question, why are there groups or entities such as the Temple of the People, or of the Theosophical Society . . . ? Why are there stories of the initiates at the time of Plato and of Pythagoras in our Western history? Why do we speak of Egyptian mysteries, as well as of Greek mysteries, and of the hidden teachings of the Orient? In our ordinary approach to the subject of knowledge as given in our exoteric schools and universities, we think of knowledge as a common inheritance and that the problem is simply the training of individuals in the beginning so that they may acquire and understand this knowledge. But the mystic tradition which is handed down from the past involves something more; namely, that there is a kind of knowledge in the world which is not available to everybody, that indeed candidates for this knowledge may be subjected to many tests and trials and prove themselves as worthy, and usually the knowledge is given upon the basis of a pledge of secrecy. And one may ask why? There is one answer that is very easily found, and that is that much of this knowledge is of a sort that involves real power—and power that can be misused—and that therefore the custodians of this knowledge should be well-proven individuals in terms of their personal character and in terms of their discretion, so that this knowledge, which on one hand might be used for the edification and advance of humanity on one side, yet could be used by those with questionable motivation as a force for personal power and actually as serving the enslavement of humanity. Therefore, such knowledge should be handled with great care.
He continues:
Now, in a simple little organization like the Temple of the People, there naturally would not be present a grievously potent type of knowledge that could be easily acquired or even acquired with minor tests. But at least something of the preparation for the ultimate receiving of such knowledge could be learned in such small groups of people, in most cases quite sincere, but not always as wise as one might wish, so that there is a preliminary discipline or training toward a day when there may be demand made upon individuals to serve as custodians of a very potent kind of knowledge and power for the benefit of humanity, but which nonetheless should be kept safely guarded away from those who might use it to their own injury or otherwise unwisely, and even might employ it maliciously. The record of such institutions, or perhaps more precisely, the tradition of such a record, exists apparently from earliest times. It is therefore something to be taken very seriously.[6]
The various groups and organizations with which Wolff associated over the course of his life are listed below. These are links to a page that contains a synopsis of Wolff’s association with the group and a description of the documents related to this association that may be found in the Archive. Please note: much of this material is based on Dave Vliegenthart's pioneering work in the Wolff Archive, as related in his book on Wolff titled The Secular Religion of Franklin Merrell-Wolff: An Intellectual History of Anti-Intellectualism in Modern America[7].
Organizations & Group Work
The Temple of the People (1909-1922)
The Arcane School (Sarah, 1923)
The Sufi Order in the West (1923)
The United Lodge of Theosophy (1923-1928)
The Benares League of America (1925-1930)
The Assembly of Man (1928-1967+)
The Holistic Assembly (1952-1956)
Endnotes
[1] Franklin Merrell-Wolff, “Autobiographical Material: The Feminine Side of My Experience,” part 1 (Lone Pine, Calif.: May 19, 1982), audio recording, 1.
[2] As Dave Vliegenhart points out, Wolff was not alone; indeed, this period in American history saw an extraordinary number of individuals seeking spiritual answers collectively. See Dave Vliegenthart, Franklin Merrell-Wolff: An Intellectual History of Contemporary Anti-Intellectualism In America (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018), 90ff.
[3] Franklin Merrell-Wolff, “Autobiographical Material: A Recollection of My Early Life and Influences” (Lone Pine, Calif.: July 6, 1978), audio recording, 5.
[4] Franklin Merrell-Wolff, “Autobiographical Material: My Academic Life and Embarking upon My Spiritual Quest” (Lone Pine, CA: March 1, 1982), audio recording, 1.
[5] Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy: A Personal Record of Transformation and a Discussion of Transcendental Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 91.
[6] Franklin Merrell-Wolff, “My Academic Life and Embarking upon My Spiritual Quest,” 10.
[7] See especially Chapter 2, from which elements have been incorporated into the pages linked below. This work is Volume 158 in the Numen Book Series: Studies in the Philosophy of Religion.
