K. Paul Johnson's Blog

Marvin T. Jones and I will be speaking at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City about Carolina Genesis on Sunday, September 26th.  Here is the poster the Museum created to advertise the program.

Museum of the Albemarle

Marvin T. Jones speaking at Lincoln Memorial University, with fellow authors (l-r) Cyndie Goins Hoelscher, Scott Withrow, and KPJ.   Photo by Carol Joice Jones.

The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives by Shankar Vedantam (Spiegel and Grau, $26.95)

This new book by a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post offers a fascinating summary of recent psychological findings on the unconscious mind.  Three of the ten chapters focus on race in various ways, while others analyze how the hidden brain’s implicit biases influence our behavior in matters including gender, disaster response, and terrorism.   The first chapter about race describes the research of Canadian scholar Frances Aboud, who has worked with children of all ages exploring the way bias develops.  Multiple researchers have found that young children tend to assign positive adjectives to white people and negative adjectives to black people, regardless of the beliefs of their parents and teachers.   (Also independent of the race of the respondent.)  Aboud discovered that friendships across racial lines are common among very young children but become steadily less so into adolescence.   But the same pattern was found with linguistic communities in Canada.  Aboud studied a bilingual school in Montreal and found that children coming from anglophone and francophone homes  increasingly choose friends of the same background as the get closer to adolescence.  Vedantam relates this to the increasing emphasis of adolescents on group membership and identification.  His conclusion about Aboud’s findings is that “What is disturbing to me…is not that children are biased.  It is that pervasive bias can occur without anyone—parents, teachers, or the children themselves—wanting it to happen.”(p. 75)

Racial bias in application of the death penalty in the US has been repeatedly demonstrated in statistical analyses, but in his chapter “Shades of Justice” Vedantam explains something that I had not previously known.   Studying only African American defendants, a Stanford University research team found that “Defendants who looked more stereotypically black than average were more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty as those who looked less black.”(p. 177) This would suggest that implicit bias is not binary in black and white but rather a continuum, at least in the case of juries and defendants of color.  The last chapter focusing on race, “Disarming the Bomb,” is an account of the 2008 Obama campaign’s recognition of implicit bias, and its generally successful attempts at countering it.  Psychologist Drew Westen and pollster Celinda Lake are interviewed, and at the close of the chapter Westen is quoted as saying that Obama’s skin color “made a big difference” and “Had he looked like Kwame Kilpatrick, it is not at all clear to me that he could have made it.”(p. 229)

 This research is relevant to Melungeons and other mixed ancestry groups because it shows a pervasive unconscious bias against dark-skinned people, a bias against which darker people are themselves not immune.    This explains the tendency to genealogical dissociation, people cutting off darker branches of their family trees and denying/ignoring the mixed ancestry in their backgrounds.  At least we are now in the position where most Americans consciously reject racism, and thus can identify and analyze unconscious biases that are the legacy of centuries of oppression.  But being able to confront unconscious bias does not necessarily entail being willing to do so.

Here I am speaking about the plight of Pasquotank County Quakers in the wake of the Nat Turner insurrection, at the 14th Melungeon Union as part of a panel of Carolina Genesis authors.  Photo by Marvin T. Jones. 

The last weekend in June, it was my pleasure to join three fellow authors of Carolina Genesis for a symposium at the Melungeon Union held on the campus of Lincoln Memorial University.   A report on the entire event is now posted on the Melungeon Heritage Association website.  A week earlier, Marvin T. Jones and I spoke on our chapters and signed books at the Ahoskie Chamber of Commerce.  A friend used Marvin’s camera to take this picture of us with Chamber director Jerry Casteloe.  

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Another DNA testing company, Decodeme.com, offered free reports for 23andme customers who provided their data.  With the half-million markers, Decodeme came up with an autosomal percentage report closer to DNAPrint’s based on 175 than to 23andme’s: 93% European, 4% East Asian, 3% African.  This company does not pretend to distinguish between East Asian and Native American unlike DNAPrint.

So for the first time I have a report that identifies “triracial” ancestry rather than just one kind of admixture.  This feels right intuitively based on historical evidence, although the percentages seem high.

http://boingboing.net/2009/10/01/esoteric-classics-a.html

Family traditions of “Indian” blood, devoid of any tribal identification, juxtaposed with Bertie County colonial tax records showing four lines of my ancestry to be “Free Mulatto” in the 18th century, led to my taking a series of DNA tests.  Those from DNAPrint, which is now out of business, were reported in Pell Mellers; they made Native American ancestry seem more likely than African.  Last summer I took the DNATribes test which reported highest matches mostly in Italy and other Mediterranean countries, and showed neither subsaharan African nor Native American results.  But only now with 23andme.com have I gotten results that finally answer the non-European admixture question, “were my ancestors partly African, partly Native American, or both?”  With more than half a million snps versus fewer than 200 for DNAPrint, the result is clearly positive for African, negative for Native American ancestry.  The 1% African result is shown in terms of stretches along specific chromosomes, so this part of the question is settled.  The possibility of Roma or East Indian ancestry seems remote but not out of the question.  The one result that is continuous throughout all the tests is that my deep ancestry is about half Northern European, half Southern European.

Books citing K. Paul Johnson, 1994-2009

1994:

Bertin, Francis, Prophetisme et politique.  Politica Hermetica #8.  Paris: l’Age d’Homme.

Godwin, Joscelyn, The Theosophical Enlightenment.  Albany: SUNY Press.

Greenfield, Allen H., Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts.  Lilburn, GA: Illuminet.

1995:

Fideler, David, ed., Alexandria: The Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions.  Grand Rapids: Phanes.

Godwin, Joscelyn, Christian Chanel, and John P. Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.  York Beach, ME: Weiser.

Kuschel, Karl-Josef.  Abraham: A Sign of Hope for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  New York: Continuum.

Lemkow, Anna, The Wholeness Principle.  Wheaton: Quest.

1996:

Academic American Encyclopedia.  New York: Grolier

Caldwell, Daniel H., K. Paul Johnson’s House of Cards?  Tucson: the Author.

 

Gilchrist, Cherry, Theosophy.  San Francisco: Harper.

 

Prothero, Stephen, The White Buddhist.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

 

Stein, Gordon, Encyclopedia of the Paranormal.  Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

 

Tollenaire, Herman A.O., The Politics of Divine Wisdom.  Nijmegen: Uitgerij Katholieke.

 

1997:

Conser, Walter H., Jr., and Sumner B. Twiss, eds, Religious Diversity and American Religious History.  Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Deveney, John P., Paschal Beverly Randolph.  Albany: SUNY Press.

Finneran, Richard J., Yeats: An Annual Collection of Critical and Textual Studies, Vol. XIII (1995).  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

McKay, Alex, Tibet and the British Raj.  Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.

O’Brien, Geoffrey, ed., The Reader’s Catalog.  New York: Reader’s Catalog.

 

Rawlinson, Andrew, The Book of Enlightened Masters.  Chicago: Open Court.

 

Schneider, Carl J. and Dorothy, In Their Own Right.  New York: Crossroad.

 

Tompkins, Peter, The Secret Life of Nature.  San Francisco: Harper.

 

Van Den Broeck, R., and Wouter J. Hanegraff, eds., Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times.  Albany: SUNY Press.

 

Verhoeven, Martin J., Americanising the Buddha: The World’s Parliament of Religions, Paul Carus, and the Making of Modern Buddhism.  Madison:: University of Wisconsin Press.

1998:

Adamson, Linda, Notable Women in World History: a Guide to Recommended Biographies.  Westport: Greenwood.  

Banner, Lois W., Finding Fran.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Brown, Mick, The Spiritual Tourist.  New York: Bloomsbury.

Crowley, Aleister, Commentaries on the Holy Books and Other Papers.  York Beach, ME: Weiser.

 

Dann, Kevin T., Bright Colors Falsely Seen.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

 

Encyclopedia of Religion and Society.  William H. Swatos, Jr., ed.  Lanham, MD:

 

 

Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion.  Leuven, Belgium: Peeters.

 

Lopez, Donald S., Prisoners of Shangri-La.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Melnyk, Julie, ed., Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain.  New York: Garland.

 

Pouvoir du symbole.  Paris: L’Age d’Homme.

1999:

Cayce, Edgar, The Lost Memoirs of Edgar Cayce.  Compiled and edited by Robert A. Smith.  New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lazzerini, Edward J., Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History.  Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

Ludmer, Josefina, El Cuerpo del Delito.  Buenos Aires: Perfil Libros.

Meyer, Karl E. and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows.  Washington: Counterpoint.

 

Ramiro, Rafael, Jubilo en la Tierra, Jubilo en el Cielo.  Madrid: Caritas Espanola.

 

Reigle, David and Nancy, Blavatsky’s Secret Books.  San Diego: Wizard’s Bookshelf.

 

Smoley, Richard and Jay Kinney, Hidden Wisdom.  New York: Arkana.

 

Taves, Ann, Fits, Trances & Visions.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Taylor, Eugene, Shadow Culture.  Washington: Counterpoint.

 

Trahair, Richard S., Utopia and Utopians.  Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

2000:

Copley, Antony, ed., Gurus and Their Followers.  New Delhi and New York: Oxford.

Jenkins, Philip, Mystics and Messiahs.  New York: Oxford.

 

Kirkpatrick, Sidney, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet.  New York: Riverhead.

 

Krassa, Peter, Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor.  Boca Raton, FL: New Paradigm.

 

Pierce, Lori Anne, Constructing American Buddhisms.  Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

 

Sanat, Aryel, The Inner Life of Krishnamurti.  Wheaton: Quest Books.

 

Sutfliffe, Steven and Marion Bowman, Beyond New Age.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

 

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, according to Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup’s English rendering; compiled and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, 4^th ed.  Oxford: Oxford.

 

Vernon, Roland, Star in the East.  London, Constable.

2001:

Brown, Mick, El turista espiritual.  Barcelona: Oasis.

Caldwell, Daniel H., compiler, The Esoteric World of Madame Blavatsky.  Wheaton: Quest Books.

Chryssides, George D., Historical Dictionary of New Religious Movements.  Metuchen: Scarecrow.

Clore, Dan, The Unspeakable and Others.  Holicong, PA: Wildside Press. 

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6^th ed.  New York: Columbia University Press.

 

Dixon, Joy, Divine Feminine.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

 

Dodin, Thierry and Heinz Rather, eds.  Imagining Tibet.  Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications.

 

Godwin, Joscelyn, Il mito polare.  Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee.

 

Goonatilake, Susantha, Anthropologizing Sri Lanka.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

 

Kirkpatrick, Sidney, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet.  New York: Riverhead.

 

Lawton, Ian and Chris Ogilvie-Herald, Giza.  Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities.

 

Lewis, James, ed.  Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions, 2^nd ed.  Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

 

Nation und Religion in der Deutschen Geschicte.  Frankfurt: Campus.

 

Regardie, Israel, The Tree of Life.  St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn.

2002:

Auffarth, Christoph, Jutta Bernard, and Hubert Mohr, Metzler Lexicon Religion, Vol. 4.  Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.

Cayce, Edgar, La mia vita di veggente.  Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee 

Decker, Ronald and Michael Dummett, A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970.  London: Duckworth.

Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schussler, Bread Not Stone.  Boston: Beacon.

Hemmila, Olavi, En Yogi kmor till Stan.  Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International.

 

Hower, Edward, Shadows and Elephants.  Wellfleet, MA: Leapfrog Press.

 

Indologica Taurinensia, v. 28.  International Institute of Sanskrit Studies, Istituto Indologica.  Torino: Edizioni Jollygrafica.

 

Kargupta, Sanatal, Mystical Buddhism.  Kolkata: Asiatic Society.

 

Maillard, Christine, Sciences, Sciences Occultes et Litterature, 1890-1935.  Strasbourg: Universite Marc Bloch.

 

Pearson, Joanne, ed.  Belief Beyond Boundaries.  London: Ashgate.

 

Theologische Realenzyklopadie.  Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

 

2003:

 

Coward, Harold, ed., Indian Critiques of Gandhi.  Albany: SUNY Press.

Dawson, Lorne N., Cults and New Religious Movements.  Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Gilman, Susan, Blood Talk.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Hale, Christopher, Himmler’s Crusade.  New York: Wiley.

 

Greer, John Michael, New Encyclopedia of the Occult.  St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn.

 

Kranenborg, Reender and Mikael Rothstein, eds., New Religions in a Postmodern World.  Aarhus, Denmark: University of Aarhus Press.

 

Lawton, Ian, Genesis Unveiled.  London: Virgin.

 

Lopez, Donald S., Fascination Tibetaine.  Paris: Autrement.

 

Metzger, Richard, Book of Lies.  New York: Disinformation.

 

Propp, Steven H., Beyond Heaven and Earth.  Iuniverse.

 

Sisson, Marina Cesar, A esfinge, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.  Brasilia: Editora MCS.

 

Virtue, Doreen, Archangels and Ascended Masters.  Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.

 

Wellbeloved, Sophia, Gurdjieff: the Key Concepts.  London: Routledge.

 

Zeitschrift fur Genozidforschung, Vol. 4, Issue 2.  Institut fur Diaspora und Genozidforschung, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum. Leverkusen: Leske & Budrick.

2004:

Blavatsky, Helena, Helena Blavatsky, edited and introduced by Nicholas Goodricke-Clark.  Berkeley: North Atlantic.

Buescher, John B., The Other Side of Salvation.  Boston: Skinner House.

 

Cayce, Edgar, The Essential Edgar Cayce, edited and introduced by Mark Thurston.  New York: Tarcher/Penguin.

 

Free, Wynn, The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce.  Berkeley: Frog.

 

Gallagher, Eugene V., The New Religious Movements Experience in America.  Westport, CT: Greenwood.

 

Gulbekian, Sevak, In the Belly of the Beast.  Charlottesville: Hampton Roads.

 

Hammer, Olav, Claiming Knowledge.  Leiden: Brill.

 

Henry, Jane, ed., Parapsychology.  Boston: Routledge.

 

Ludmer, Josefina, Glen S. Close, Corpus Delicti.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

 

Morris, James Mathew, and Andrea l. Kross, Historical Dictionary of Utopianism.  Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow.

 

Ramaswamy, Sumathi, The Lost Land of Lemuria.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Ravagli, Lorenzo, Unter Hammer und Hakenkreutz.  Stuttgart: Verlag Freies Geistesleben.

 

Sedgwick, Mark, Against the Modern World.  New York: Oxford.

 

Stuckrad, Kuchu von, Was ist Esoterik?  Munchen: Verlag C. H. Beck.

 

Treitel, Corinna, A Science for the Soul.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

2005:

Abdill, Edward, The Secret Gateway.  Wheaton: Quest Books.

Farnell, Kim, Mystical Vampire: The Life and Work of Mabel Collins.  Oxford: Mandrake.

Garlington, William, The Baha’i Faith in America.  Westport, CT: Praeger.

 

Hamm, Berndt and Russell Smandyck, eds., Cultural Imperialism.  Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.

 

Hanegraaff, Wouter, et al, eds., Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism.  Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

 

Jenkins, Philip, Dream Catchers.  New York: Oxford.

 

Joshi, S.T. and Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Supernatural Literature of the World, an Encyclopedia.  Westport: Greenwood.

 

Katz, David S., The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day.  London: Jonathan Cape.

 

Penn, Lee, False Dawn.  Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis

 

Perspectives on Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  Boston: Routledge.

 

Smith, Robert A., No Soul Left Behind.  New York: Citadel.

 

2006:

Abd-Allah, Umar F., A Muslim in Victorian America.  New York: Oxford.

Aravamudan, Srinivas.  Guru English.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Auffarth, Christoph, and Hans G. Kippenburg, Worterbuch der Religionen. Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner.

 

Bradford, Roderick, D.M. Bennett, the Truth Seeker.  Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

 

Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Crews, Frederick, Follies of the Wise.  Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard.

 

Goonatilake, Susantha, Re-colonization.  London: Sage.

 

Greenfield, Allen, Roots of Modern Magic.  Lulu.com

 

Greer, John Michael, Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Hidden History.  New York: Barnes and Noble.

 

Tyson, Joseph Howard, Madame Blavatsky Revisited.  Iuniverse.

 

Warburg, Marget, Citizens of the World.  Leiden: Brill.

 

Webb, Mohammed Alexander Russell, Yankee Muslim.  Rockville, Md.: Wildside Press.

2007:

Austin, June, The Genesis of Man.  Tadsworth, Surrey: Pigsty Press.

Gilman, Susan Kay and Alys Eve Weinbaum, eds.  Next to the Color Line.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

Godwin, Joscelyn, The Golden Thread.  Wheaton: Quest Books.

 

Greer, John Michael, Atlantis.  St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn.

 

Lierl, Hg. Karl and Florian Rode, Anthroposophie wird Kunst.  Munich: Anthroposophie in Munchen.

 

Livingstone, David, Terrorism and the Illuminati.  Charleston, SC: BookSurge.

 

Melton, J. Gordon, The Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena.  Canton, MI: Visible Ink.

 

Morrison, Mark S., Modern Alchemy.  New York: Oxford.

 

Nigosian, Solomon A., World Religions: a Historical Approach.  New York:Macmillan.

 

Smoley, Richard, Forbidden Faith.  New York: Harperone.

 

Smoley, Richard and Jay Kinney, Hidden Wisdom, New Edition.  Wheaton: Quest Books.

 

Vera-Barros, Tomas, El sueno occulto del espacio en la obra de Leopoldo Lugones.  Buenos Aires: Lerner, Editora SRL.

 

Zander, Helmut, Anthroposophie in Deutschland.  Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.

 

2008:

 

Cayce, Edgar, Toate suflete trec dinculo.  Bucharest: Libraria Asmicart.

 

Crooke, William, Mysticism as Modernity: Nationalism and the Irrational in Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil and Max Frisch.   Bern: Peter Lang.

 

Diem-Lane, Andrea.  The Guru in America.  Walnut, CA: MSAC Philosophy Group.

 

Fitzgerald, John, The Necronomicon: Everything You Never Wanted to Know.  Creatspace.

 

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Kinney, Jay, ed., Esoterismo E Magia No Mundo Ocidental.  Sao Paolo: Editora Pensamento.

 

Lachman, Gary, Politics and the Occult.  Wheaton: Quest.

 

Lane, David Christopher, Believer/Skeptic.  Walnut, CA: MSAC Philosophy Group. 

 

Levenda, Peter, Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation.  New York: Continuum.

 

Lopez, Donald S., Buddhism and Science.  University of Chicago Press.

 

Monteith, Ken, Yeats and Theosophy.  Boston: Routledge.

 

2009:

 

Conway, D. J., Guides, Guardians, and Angels.  St. Paul: Llewellyn.

 

Initiates: Webster’s Quotations, Facts, and Phrases.  San Diego: Icon International Group.

 

Morris, James, The A to Z of Utopianism.  Metuchen: Scarecrow Press

 

Nance, Susan, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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The oldest text online I found referring to Scottish Gypsies in Virginia is dated 1894.  More recent books refer to ongoing deportations of Gypsies from Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  A 2001 book describing large numbers of English Gypsies in Virginia in 1695 is only one of many references to this date.  A new social science book refers to the fate of early Virginia Gypsies as unknown.  An overview of Roma slavery is found in this encyclopedia.  In addition to Romany slaves, Virginia and its neighbors also had slaves and indentured servants of East Indian origin, according to this article outnumbering Native Americans in colonial records after 1710.