Subscribe Feed (RSS)Welcome to the Lapis blog. As you can see, the Lapis Magazine site has been totally upgraded to create an online magazine that is much more visually appealing and more capable of handling multimedia content.
The first topic for discussion here is the upcoming New York Open Center/Lapis Magazine Conference on Inner America – the History and Renewal of the American Soul.
With a more progressive new administration in power, this is a prime opportunity to engage again with the values and qualities that have made this country a source of inspiration to many over the decades. The event in August will be the first time a significant conference has been produced on the esoteric streams that flow through America’s history.
What are they, you might ask? Below, former Gnosis magazine editor Jay Kinney talks about the question of the involvement of Freemasons in the founding of the United States. There is much speculation on this subject but what do we actually know? With his usual common sense, Jay begins to lay out the facts. (Click here for the interview.)
This is followed by an interview with Mitch Horowitz, a prominent editor at Tarcher Penguin who has been responsible for the publication in recent years of many half-forgotten American esoteric classics. Here he describes such phenomena as the Burned-Over District, the region in Central New York State that was to the mid-19th Century what California was to the Sixties – a place of explosive spiritual and social innovation. (Click here for the interview.)
Lastly, Los Angeles Times staff writer Lous Sahagun, author of the first book on the life of Manly P. Hall, speaks about the biography and influence of this remarkable man whose admirers ranged from Bela Lugosi to Elvis Presley. Hall was for many decades the maestro of Southern Californian esotericism and is the author of the The Secret Teachings of All Ages, an American esoteric classic. (Click here for the interview.)
These three interviews should give you a sense of this forthcoming event, the latest in a series of conferences on the Western Esoteric Tradition that I and my dedicated colleagues have produced since 1995. For more complete information about the Esoteric Quest for Inner America, see www.esotericquest.org.
Ralph White
