Reading Wednesday: Black Israelites, New Thought, and the Holy Piby

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been engaged in a self-directed class in pseudoarchaeology. Most of what I’m doing these days is constructing an alternative reading list for the discerning pseudoarchaeologist who wants to explore the outer fringes of archaeological thinking without succumbing to racism, colonialism, or nationalism. In fact, my original goal for this project was simply to prove that a non or even anti-racist, decolonizing, and global pseudoarchaeology was possible. Now, I’m becoming more and more convinced that pseudoarchaeology provides a unique perspective on archaeological thinking and that advances in pseudoarchaeological practice can help the discipline adapt to global challenges and the needs of displaced communities. More broadly, infusing the discipline of archaeology with a more refined appreciation of early- and mid-20th century pseudoarchaeological thought offers a set of intellectual tools and perspectives that might contribute to how the discipline understands its capacity to make the world better.

This big picture way of thinking doesn’t always shape what I’m reading, but it is the goal that I’m starting to recognize more and more clearly as continue to read scholarship that explores pseudoarchaeology-adjacent ways of thinking about the past and the present.     

1. New ethnicity. Last week, I read Jacob Dorman’s Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (Oxford 2013). My goal was to explore how groups in the US created ethnic identities for themselves that connected their experiences to Biblical (or more broadly Near Eastern) antecedents. The Black community in the US, struggling against racial discrimination, poverty, and Jim Crow America, sought to construct identities for themselves that located their experiences within a global narrative that either isolated slavery as a necessary phase for the Exodus and the arrival in Zion or that saw the suffering of Black Americans as confirming their identity as the lost tribe of Israel.

Some of this trajectory had its origins in Black slave religious traditions which yearned for liberation from the Babylon of slavery. These traditions took on new power after emancipation as African American communities sough to negotiate their relationship to the economic, political, and social power of white society. The growth in traditions that connected African American communities to Israel and often, then, to Ethiopia became a conduit for the construction of a new identity that both recognized their displacement and exile (in Babylon, of course), but also presented a literal (or symbolic) hope for physical or spiritual repatriation. 

This commitment to adapting, appropriating, and incorporating Israelite narratives of exile and return influenced and supported the emergence of new understandings of Biblical and Near Eastern history and archaeology. Whether incorporated into mystical or esoteric practices associated with Black Israelite groups, influencing new forms of public worship, or creating new ways of understanding Black history, these Biblical and Near Eastern traditions and narratives contributed to Black pseudoarchaeology in the mid-20th century. Far from being racist or explicitly colonialist, the influences sought to redress the experience of displacement and to mitigate the struggle for rights, prosperity, and political representation in the US.   

N.B. The Black Israelite tradition has frequently had a tense relationship with Judaism. In most cases, they took pains to distinguish their identity from that of the Jews, but there were episodes of collaboration and cooperation. In recent times, as Noah Kaye noted in his comment on this post, Black Israelite groups have adopted anti-semitic positions as well as other intolerant attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community and Muslims. It is worth noting that Dorman goes to some pains to demonstrate that this was not a preordained trajectory for these groups. 

2. Father Divine and New Thought. I also had a chance to hang out with Jill Watts’s God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (Berkeley 1995). It’s a nice treatment of Father Divine and his International Peace Mission Movement through the 1930s. In particularly, she connects Father Divine’s teachings to the New Thought movement. The New Thought movement had many influences and iterations and is more a loose cluster of ideas than a cohesive intellectual current. The current that Father Divine followed, according to Watts, grew from Charles Fillmore’s Unity Church which grew to significant popularity and influence in the early 20th century. Fillmore’s New Thought emphasized the power of the mind to influence the body and material conditions through the existence of God within each of individual.

In Father Divine’s hands, New Thought provided a way not only to articulate his healing powers (through faith and positive thinking) as well as his remarkable ability to accumulate a real estate empire during the height of the Great Depression, but also formed a framework for the bodily discipline he expected of his followers (celibacy, communal living, lavish [and abundant] meals and so on).

In the context of pseudoarchaeology, groups like Father Divine’s International Peace Mission Movement were less concerned with the construction of a new ethnicities or the production of new genealogies to empower Black (and white) members and were more interested in producing tangible, physical results through the power of faith and belief. In other words, their interest in material culture (whether architecture, food, bodily comportment) was as a manifestation of the relationship of the divine to the human. This template for reading the material world, of course, can inform both the past and the present.   

3. Holy Piby. Finally, there is this vast gaggle of religious literature produced around the turn of the 20th century. For whatever reason, I’ve been drawn to a text called the Holy Piby composed through a series of revelations by a West Indian named Robert Athlyi Rogers. 

The Holy Piby is esoteric and, at times, downright weird, but there’s something remarkably prescient in it as well (once you get by the strange notion of the angel being called “Douglas”). The final book of the text “The Fourth Book of Athlyi Called Precaution” for example, anticipates interstellar travel and an increasingly interconnected world.  

By combining revelation and the futurism, it anticipates major strains of mid-century Afrofuturism especially in the work of Sun Ra, Elijah Mohammed, and other charismatic Black leaders who sought to negotiate social change at the intersection of religion and technology.

Of course, these works also inspired Afrofuturist pseudoarchaeology whether grounded in Afrocentric perspectives on the past or through the construction of technologically advanced ancient civilization. They also drew on the shared tradition of esoteric, revelatory, and mystical religion.