Idol Chatter

“The Seven Candles of Unity,” found in `Abdu’l-Bahá’s authoritative writings, was one of his approaches to foretelling the future progress of the world toward unity.

The most noteworthy—and controversial—of the seven is the fifth candle, of which `Abdu’l-Bahá’ says:

… is the unity of nations—a unity which in this century will be securely established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common fatherland.

Selections from the Writings of `Abdu’l-Bahá’, pg. 32

Because of prophecies such as this one which `Abdu’l-Bahá’ was fond of repeating, Bahá’ís expected world peace to be “securely established” in the 20th Century. This expectation was confirmed and encouraged by Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice. If any Bahá’ís believed otherwise, I didn’t hear of it.

Now that we find ourselves a decade into the new millennium, world peace and unity seem as remote as ever—no surprise for those among us not graced by divine foresight.

Let’s have a look at those candles, and see if we can hold them up to the winds of change.

Unity of Politics & Action

First, let’s look at the first two candles of unity.

1. Unity in the political realm … the early glimmerings of which can now be discerned
2. Unity of thought in world undertakings … the consummation of which will erelong be witnessed

It is interesting that `Abdu’l-Bahá’ seems to have expected these first two candles to be on the verge of realization, but of course, they are both cold and dark a century after the prophecy was made. If either candle bears the slightest flicker, it would have to be the latter, as some efforts toward common action have been made among groups of nations, but we’re a long way from unity. We can’t even cooperate enough to stop bands of Somali pirates!

Universal Freedom

“Unity in freedom” is in as much danger as ever, as slave labor is becoming more mainstream in the new international marketplace. Sex slavery in particular is thriving.

Any progress in lighting the first and second candles is likely to take the oxygen from this third candle. Cooperation between governments is likely to come into direct conflict with progress in civil liberties and human rights, as international cooperation depends upon compromise.

Unification of Religion

This one gets my vote for the most comical candle. `Abdu’l-Bahá’ doesn’t speak here of harmony or tolerance; no—he speaks of unity. This can only mean conversion.

Eventually, “all nations and kindreds” will be converted to the Bahá’í Faith:

“all nations and kindreds will be gathered together under the shadow of this Divine Banner, which is no other than the Lordly Branch itself, … Religious and sectarian antagonism, … will be eliminated. All men will adhere to one religion, will have one common faith, …”

Some Answered Questions, pg. 65

Bahá’ís refer to this great world conversion as “entry by troops.”

Did `Abdu’l-Bahá’ mean that the world would convert to his religion in the 20th Century? It would be difficult enough to achieve harmony and tolerance among the world’s religions, but to foretell the conversion of all the world’s peoples to one faith—particularly such an obscure one—is to overtax the imagination.

One World Nation

Back to the big kahuna:

The fifth candle is the unity of nations—a unity which in this century will be securely established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common fatherland.

Shoghi Effendi, `Abdu’l-Bahá’s authorized—and purportedly unerring—interpreter, confirmed this prophecy by bringing it to the Bahá’í world’s attention:

“This is the stage which the world is now approaching, the stage of world unity, which, as `Abdu’l-Bahá’ assures us, will, in this century, be securely established.”

—The Promised Day Is Come: Religion and Social Evolution (1941)

And again:

The fifth candle is the unity of nations—a unity which in this century will be securely established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common fatherland.

—World Order of Bahá’u’lláh: Seven Lights of Unity (1931)

As a world, are we even close to this ideal? If anything, nations have fragmented and multiplied. Political convergence, which would be necessary for the first candle, seems as remote as ever. Strife among the peoples of the world has led more to talk of ideological warfare and irreconcilable cultural divides with failures at nation building in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. How can one even speak of unity?

This candle which was promised to be “securely established” in the 20th Century, but it has not even appeared momentarily. It would be absurd to claim that the unity of nations is “securely established.”

This was not an isolated case. `Abdu’l-Bahá’ was found to make similar prophecies on other occasions:

“[The permanent peace] will be established in this century … It will be universal in the twentieth century. All nations will be forced into it … the nations will be forced to come to peace and to agree to the abolition of war … By international agreement they will lay down their arms and the great era of peace will be ushered in.”

—`Abdu’l-Bahá’, “A Compilation on Peace” compiled by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice

Race

This one is going to take awhile yet:

The sixth candle is unity of races, making of all that dwell on earth peoples and kindreds of one race.

Language

The seventh candle is unity of language, i.e., the choice of a universal tongue in which all peoples will be instructed and converse.

This one’s gonna be a piece of cake. It may be the one candle that can actually hold a flame.

God help us

How sure was `Abdu’l-Bahá’ of all this? Here’s his answer:

Each and every one of these will inevitably come to pass, inasmuch as the power of the Kingdom of God will aid and assist in their realization.

So there you have it. This is no mere vision; this is the will of God. It’s got to happen.

Yes, you can have your own official FBI* agent card! Print them while they last!

The official FBI agent card. Don't leave home without it.

Print this image (200 dpi), sign it with your alias of choice, slip it into your wallet, and be prepared to parade it at all Bahá’í functions. This will enable you to hoard the food and refreshments while all Bahá’ís-in-good-standing dutifully shun you!

Caveat: As FBI agents are becoming more and more common, you may need to divide the spoils with agents at an increasing number of events.

*FBI is an unregistered trademark of the Forum for Bahá’í Investigations. All rights reserved.

Here’s a single sentence that captures Bahá’u'lláh’s megalomania and narcissistic self-pity to an extent that perhaps no other statement of his does:

Verily, no God is there but Me, the Wronged One, the Exile.

—Tablets of Bahá’u'lláh …

The term “Wronged One” is a title that he appears to have adopted early in his career, and taken a great liking to later in life.

Here’s a tally of instances of “this Wronged One” or “the Wronged One” in selected volumes of Bahá’u'lláh’s writings:

• Epistle to the Son of the Wolf: 102
• Tablets … after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas: 55
• The Summons of the Lord of Hosts: 5
• Proclamation of Bahá’u'lláh: 4
• The Book of Certitude: 2
• The Most Holy Book: 0

Bahá’u'lláh’s son`Abdu’l-Bahá also referred to himself as the Wronged One, it turns out. In his Will and Testament, he refers to himself as “this Wronged One” ten times.

I just stumbled across yet another grand example of idolatry in the Bahá’í religion. Bahá’u'lláh is here identified by his great-grandson as, among other names, the “Lord of Lords,” the “Self-Subsistent,” and the “Day-Star of the Universe.”

Read it and cringe …

He was formally designated Bahá’u’lláh, an appellation specifically recorded in the Persian Bayán, signifying at once the glory, the light and the splendor of God, and was styled the “Lord of Lords,” the “Most Great Name,” the “Ancient Beauty,” the “Pen of the Most High,” the “Hidden Name,” the “Preserved Treasure,” “He Whom God will make manifest,” the “Most Great Light,” the “All-Highest Horizon,” the “Most Great Ocean,” the “Supreme Heaven,” the “Pre-Existent Root,” the “Self-Subsistent,” the “Day-Star of the Universe,” the “Great Announcement,” the “Speaker on Sinai,” the “Sifter of Men,” the “Wronged One of the World,” the “Desire of the Nations,” the “Lord of the Covenant,” the “Tree beyond which there is no passing.”

—Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By

Dwight.

I didn’t get any vaccinations as a kid, so I acquired my immunity the old-fashioned way: I earned it.

Before ... and After

I can specifically remember suffering through the measles, mumps, and chickenpox. But I got through it all fine. I can’t complain.

The only vaccination I received before age 30 was for smallpox, strangely enough, because it was required for travel into South Africa. Being members of the Bahá’í Faith, we had been strongly encouraged to travel abroad to spread our gospel, and we’d heard that Africans were receptive to the Word, so we each got vaccinated for God’s sake.

My parents are as staunchly anti-vaccination as they are anti-establishment (against what Bahá’ís call the Old World Order). My father is a retired chiropractor, but it would perhaps be more accurate to categorize him as a naturopath, as he has used a variety of extra-chiropractic modalities over his career, including applied kinesiology (“muscle testing”), magnet therapy, a wide variety of targeted nutritional supplements, and I think he may have dabbled in homeopathy and reflexology.

I recall one specific treatment that we underwent as a family — a balloon-up-the-nose technique that made my dad very sick (he thinks it may have revived his diphtheria). Surprisingly, this nutty nostrum appears to be a legitimate procedure, though in our case it was presented as something everyone needs, so I got a balloon too. The balloon really gets up there, and there is a small risk of brain injury. All I know for sure is I’m never doing it again — very disconcerting to feel one’s head expand from the inside.

As I have devolved into a casual skeptic as an adult, I don’t subscribe to everything I was taught as a child, but it’s taken awhile, and I still nurture a healthy fear of hospitals — let’s be real: physicians are only human. I didn’t do so much as get my teeth looked at until age thirty.

I remain proud of my parents for what they have accomplished. My father isn’t just any naturopath: he has been blind since childhood. My mother has a blood sugar condition that once haunted her with severe (grand mal) seizures. In spite of these afflictions, this match made in heaven has enjoyed sustained success throughout their 50-year partnership. I may not agree with my parents at every turn, but I do admire their resourcefulness and perseverance. Theirs is a remarkable story, which I hope will survive them.

The antivaxxer stance is rather ironic in my father’s case, for reason of the primary cause of his blindness: diphtheria. This preventable disease reduced his eyesight to a featureless blur. He ultimately lost his eyes to glaucoma, brought on by a wrestling injury. In addition to his blindness, he suspects diphtheria to have caused the persistent sleep disorder and head pain that dog him. I recently had the temerity to respectfully suggest to him that he might have been sighted and healthier had he been given the new diphtheria vaccine as an infant. His response was that only improved hygiene has eradicated diphtheria and smallpox (though he also contends that it’s silly to wash one’s hands as a means of flu prevention).

I know: smallpox could not possibly have been eradicated by hygiene. Squalor is worse worldwide today than it has probably ever been. My modest response to my father was that we’re practically swimming in bugs, meaning that we can’t possibly hope to keep clean enough to keep them all off of us. At that point we agreed to disagree, which was a good outcome, I think.

Thy will be done, O Universe!

Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life, pg. 627

In the preface to his Seven Mysteries of Life, Guy Murchie wrote that when he had set out to write the book, he had intended the project to be an exploration of life in its entirety, but somewhere on that seventeen year journey he had discovered something — something philosophical. He reported that he’d discovered

fresh insights as to why the world is the way it is, where it is going and what it means … a discovery in philosophy.

This was quite a remarkable pronouncement. Unfortunately, the preface does not identify what these insights were. I can only make the considered guess that the discovery he speaks of is the set of mysteries which the title of the book refers to. The difficulty I have with that guess is that not all those seven mysteries — if they may justifiably be called mysteries — were all that new to the world.

The first mystery, the abstract nature of the universe, was something he’d already delved into in his previous book, Music of the Spheres.

This first mystery was never all that mysterious. It was really just a declaration of philosophical idealism, as well as a recognition that mathematics is everywhere in nature.

A rather generous definition of "life"?

The next two mysteries were, though not commonly recognized, not all that new in 1978. The first of these, the interconnectedness of all creatures, was quite in vogue by 1978, and the second, the omnipresence of life, was just as fashionable, as evidenced by the advent of the Gaia Hypothesis.

Then came the ancient idea of Heraclitus and the Tao, canonized by Hegel, and echoed by the likes of Marx and Mao Zedong, that the world is a kind of embodied dialectic, a harmonious interaction of opposing principles. Murchie calls this dialectic the polarity principle.

contrast and struggle, … far from diluting beauty, only etch it deeper.

pp. 626–7

Appropriately, Murchie recognized that Heraclitus shared this deep insight with him:

wasn’t it Herakleitos of Ephesos who said, in the fifth century B.C., that “the way up and the way down are the same”? And wasn’t it he who later generalized the concept by adding, “it is sickness that makes health pleasant … weariness that precedes rest, hunger brings on plenty and evil leads to good”?

pp. 471–2; also see Music of the Spheres, pg. 522

And again:

Herakleitos who went so far as to declare Homer misguided when he prayed, “Would that strife might parish from among gods and men!” because the poet hadn’t realize he was asking for the destruction of the universe, since, should his prayer be answered, all things must pass away. Herakleitos obviously recognized the Polarity Principle and saw that “the sun is new every day” and “no man can step twice into the same river since the waters that flow upon him are ever fresh.”

pg. 495; also see Music of the Spheres, pg. 489

Murchie had been meditating on this polarity principle while writing Music of the Spheres, and, like Heraclitus, he took it very seriously:

I see the abstraction we have called Polarity transcending toward ultimate Divinity, …

pg. 627

Next came another principle that Murchie had visited often in Music of the Spheres, which he now had named transcendence. This was perhaps the most obscure of Murchie’s mysteries. He was not clear at all as to what he really meant by transcendence. He called it that because he wanted to give it a sense of spiritual progress, but what he meant, if one looks closely at his development of the idea, is closer to what might be called progressive perspectivism. This is where Murchie begins to tip his Bahá’í hand.

Looking at the development of the idea, we see that much of the chapter on transcendence dwells on the phenomenon of superorganism — an phenomenon that would certainly warrant its own chapter, but Murchie wants superorganism to serve another idea which holds more dear; an idea that he had probably held dear since he became a Bahá’í.

What I think Murchie was attempting to express in speaking of this mystery of transcendence was the idea that what we see in the world can change radically with a change of perspective, and a little dialectical thinking. This perspectivism, he hoped, could give hope that life’s puzzles could be solved.

… we need even more the principles of polarity and transcendence if we are really to explain why adversity is important and (as I believe) actually vital to our progress as spiritual beings.

pg. 621

Note that Murchie speaks of transcendence as a principle, rather than a mystery.

Murchie continues to tell the reader what he’s ultimately after in making such use of this transcendence. He thinks the world is a “soul school.” He thinks the world is hear to facilitate the education of souls. He thinks the justification for evil in the world can be found in correcting our shortsightedness. In other words, Murchie was a Bahá’í, and he needed this principle of transcendence to make his theology practicable.

Thus at last we arrive at the only hypothesis for the troubled world that fits all the known facts — the hypothesis that the planet Earth is, in essence, a Soul School.

pg. 621

Yes, that’s quite a leap that Mr. Murchie was asking the reader to make, and it’s clear now why he needed polarity and transcendence to pull it off. I for one can feel his yearning for justification of evil, though I personally have not been able to make that leap.

Transcendence … is not material so much as mental. And, to an even greater degree, spiritual.

pg. 494

When Murchie used the term transcendence, he was actually leading up to the Bahá’í doctrine of spiritual progress, which is related to the Bahá’í doctrine of unification, which is where the idea of superorganism came in. It’s not immediately apparent that this was the case, as Murchie went to great lengths to make his argument sound scientific, but it was more a rhetorical argument that sought to appeal to the reader’s yearnings.

transcendence … the development of our perspectives on space and time as we grow older, … a wider awareness as one matures spiritually … from our present earthly finitude toward some sort of an Infinitude far beyond.

This was actually nothing new to Murchie. When he began to work on Seven Mysteries, he had been a Bahá’í for 23 years. What he called transcendence was really none other than the Bahá’í doctrine of the soul’s progress through the worlds of God.

Murchie puts this Bahá’í doctrine of spiritual progression and collectivization to work as he presents his sixth mystery,

Germination of Worlds

With this mystery, Murchie put the fledgling Gaia Hypothesis to work for a Bahá’í doctrine, just as he had put superorganism to work for two other Bahá’í doctrines. In this case, the Bahá’í doctrine to be corroborated was to be the blossoming of humanity with the arrival of the promised one of all ages, Bahá’u'lláh; the Bahá’í notion that the very order of the world was to be overturned in favor of a new World Order, and Bahá’ís had long considered the advancements in science to be products of this spiritual New Jerusalem.

Rhetorically, Murchie couldn’t afford to be too explicit, but he was explicit enough to list out a number of Bahá’í principles as characteristics as this coming of age of humanity:

• elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty (pp. 577–8)
• gender equality (pp. 579–82)
• elimination of racial prejudice (pp. 579-82)
• universal education (pp. 582–3)
• universal auxiliary language (pp. 583–4)
• world government (pp. 584-586)
• progressive revelation (pg. 612)
• harmony of science and religion (pg. 615)

One can imagine Murchie reading these items off a Bahá’í brochure as he composed this chapter. This is Murchie at his most transparent as a Bahá’í evangelist.

The Gaia Hypothesis, born in the 1960s and raised in the 1970s, was not categorically new. The idea that Earth is an organism is as old as the science of geology itself. The very word “Gaia,” as it was adopted by the formulators of the Gaia Hypothesis, had actually been coined by the father of geology, James Hutton. The idea that the world would someday blossom was as old as Zoroaster. What Murchie wanted from the Gaia Hypothesis was a scientific foundation for what Bahá’ís like him had long believed.

With Murchie’s final mystery, divinity, we finally see a topic that actually qualifies as a mystery. The point of discussing this topic was apparently to argue for the existence of God as a mysterious but necessary concept, primarily by citing the preponderance of order and non-randomness in the universe. Here Murchie brought his religiosity to the fore, and he used Bahá’í terminology, such as unknowable Essence and veil of Glory (pg. 627), in speaking of God.

It now seems obvious to me that Murchie had been consciously working on a synthesis of current science and his particular religion, and I think he did remarkably well. I’m not sure that he began the project with this goal in mind, but I believe it began to take form as a religious project when his interest in religion was revived in 1963, and began to see himself as a Bahá’í author. Seven Mysteries certainly gained him the favor of many Bahá’ís and non-Bahá’ís around the world. Notwithstanding the lack of structure and logical lapses in Murchie’s colorful elucidations, to say nothing of his endorsements of pseudoscience (pp. 306–7), he might have had more of an impact on the popularity of the Bahá’í Faith had it not been for more traditionalist forces simultaneously gaining ground in the Bahá’í world community. We can see those forces at work in Murchie’s late life as we read through his autobiography. As early as 1979, we find him defending his ideas against critics within the Bahá’í Faith; critics for whom the harmony of science and religion was perhaps a lower priority than it was for Mr. Murchie.

I just had the pleasure of reading the first volume of Guy Murchie’s Music of the Spheres, titled The Macrocosm, and I can see that a lot has been learned about Earth, the Moon, and planets since I was born. Take this sectional illustration of Earth’s crust for example:

A rather outdated cross section of California

Note the complete absence of tectonic plates. Note that the Sierra Nevada is represented as a folded range, which it’s not. Furthermore, today we don’t think there’s a basalt layer beneath North America, and in fact, we don’t think there’s any root at all beneath the southern Sierra. That last bit has been discovered rather recently.

Another example of the obsolescence of this volume are the two outdated hypotheses of Moon formation. The preferred hypothesis at the time of printing appears to have been a fission model, which is no longer accepted:

An outdated moon-birth hypothesis

Of course this book was written before astronauts stepped on the moon — before we began to collect samples of lunar rock. Murchie can only guess that the Moon is a solid ball of granite, whereas today we know the Moon to be a stratified body like Earth, with a crust composed of basalt and anorthosite. We’ve obviously learned a thing or two about the Moon since the 1960s.

We’ve also learned a lot about the interior of Earth since then. We now believe that the source of most of Earth’s internal heat is nuclear radiation, and that Earth has a solid inner core. We’ve learned about plate tectonics and the greenhouse effect. We’ve found rings around Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, we’ve discovered a number of dwarf planets and over 400 extrasolar planets, and we’ve discovered over 130 planetary satellites (moons), including some rather significant moons of Neptune. We’ve even watched a comet collide with Jupiter! With all that, we’re not as ready to send astronauts to Mars as Murchie and Werher von Braun were in 1961, but we’re doing quite well sending robots.

Of course we should not blame Murchie for what we didn’t know in the 1960s. Still, there are some areas where Murchie may have fallen short even for his time. There are places where he omitted pertinent facts, such as the role of bacteria in producing oxygen in the early atmosphere. There are also places where he may have misrepresented the basic science, such as with his treatment of heating by compression of solids (pg. 148–50). Murchie seemed to assert that pressure alone will cause any substance to glow, but a solid (so long as it behaves as an incompressible solid) will resist compression under high pressure. If a material does not compress under pressure, it will not heat, and it will not glow.

Digressions, Flourishes, & Religion

Murchie’s composition was sometimes distracted and his prose was sometimes needlessly flowery. He would sometimes graft in digressions — often religious — that could seem extraneous and even forced:

The dozens of human jet-age stargazers waiting around for the zero hour of launching then always remind me of the faithful shepherds of similar deserts in the ancient Holy Land who have long had an equally great faith that the world can be changed. Even though on the face of it the two kinds of change are different, I think they are also profoundly related in a way that will one day be made manifest to all.

Music of the Spheres, page 24

That’s more than a statement of belief; it’s a prophecy (too ambiguous to be anything else).

I don’t mean to denigrate the idea of spiritual progress — or political progress for that matter, but I don’t understand what Murchie is getting at here: what do the Bedouin have to do with progress?

Murchie also made some rather reasonable points in favor of religion, such as pointing to Johannes Kepler’s religious motives for seeking natural law — which he Murchie equated to divine justice — in the heavens. And I ought to give Murchie credit for having kept his religion out of the science itself. Murchie can be credited, for instance, with having resisted the temptation to follow the precedent of the Bahá’í “perfect exemplar” `Abdu’l-Bahá’, who spoke out against the idea that we are descendants of animals.

… we are the cousins, if not the descendants, of the very most successful of all the most daring of fish, …

Page 25

The Heart of the Matter

Notwithstanding these faults, I’m inclined to believe that Murchie’s core ideas transcend such particulars. Indeed, one wonders why he included quite so many particulars, knowing that such detail might water down the message. Perhaps Murchie was striving to make Music of the Spheres a comprehensive historical survey of physical science, but that might have been overly ambitious given his affection for big, broad ideas. Perhaps had he dealt separately with (1) music in nature, (2) math in nature, and (3) the boundless frontiers of discovery, this book would have been more enduring and more versatile.

A Segue into the Mysteries of Life

As Murchie stated in the forward to the 1967 edition of Music of the Spheres, he intended the two-volume set to form a larger set with his next book, which he intended to name Melody of Life, but was eventually named The Seven Mysteries of Life.

I am six years along in writing a sequel and companion volume to Music of the Spheres on the subjects of life and mind. The work, now about half done, will probably be titled Melody of Life, and in due time I hope it will be offered with the present book as an integral set.

G.M., 1967

Indeed, the two books share a central thread or three, including the core theme of Music of the Spheres — what Murchie calls the abstract, musical nature of the world. The Seven Mysteries of Life actually began as the chapters of Music of the Spheres that didn’t make the cut in 1961.

This time it was about life, philosophy and things I didn’t have space enough to include in my Music of the Spheres. It was another case of one book’s leading right into the next for fulfillment.

Guy Murchie, The Soul School, pg. 352

Here’s a timeline of Guy Murchie’s life that I’ve constructed to help me understand his autobiography better. Page numbers are of The Soul School. Please consider this a work in progress. I expect to continue modifying it as I acquire new data. Enjoy!

• 1907, January 25 — Born, Beacon Hill, Boston, MA.
• 1925, October — Introduced to future wife Eleanor Parker. (pp. 37-9)
• 1929 — Graduated from Harvard; began trip around the world.
• 1930 — Completed trip around the world.
• 1932 — Men on the Horizon published.
• 1932, March — Married Eleanor Forrester Parker (b. 2 Oct 1880, Newark, New Jersey), AKA “Worgzle” and “Piggie”.
• 1934 — Began work at the Chicago Tribune.

• 1938 — Converted to the Bahá’í Faith after being assigned to write a story on the Wilmette temple (pg. 180).
• 1939 — Divorced Eleanor … on amicable terms (Eleanor was 26 years his senior) (pg. 253-4, 306). See dedication to The Seven Mysteries of Life.
• 1940, April 29 — Began working as the Chicago Tribune’s first war correspondent.
• 1940, September 17 — Survived a fall from a bomb blast during the Battle of Britain.
• 1940/1 — “Married” Josephine (Jogie) Egan, “an Irish midwife, a refugee from wartime England” (pp. xii, 251).
• 1942 — Began working as a Navigation instructor.
• 1942 — Divorced Josephine (Jogie) Egan (pp. 253–8).
• 1942, December 23 — Married illustrator Barbara Cooney.
• 1947, April — Barbara left with kids Gretel and Barnaby (pp. 288–9, 296, 355). According to a bio of Barbara, they simply divorced in March.
• 1949, January — Married Katie Rautenstrauch, “a Prussian refugee from Hitler’s Germany” (pg. xii, 297).
• 1953, April 21 — Son Jed died of a sudden illness. (pp. 307–8)
• 1954 — Song of the Sky published. Astronomical content that didn’t make the cut would lead to next book, Music of the Spheres.
• 1958, July 13 — I am a Bahá’í published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. Appears to have been written earlier, while Shoghi Effendi was still living.
• 1960, June 30 — First wife Eleanor (divorced) died in Newport, Rhode Island (age 79). (pg. 350)
• 1961 — Music of the Spheres published. Began work on The Seven Mysteries of Life, beginning with material that didn’t make the cut for Music of the Spheres (pg. 352). Soviet cosmonauts orbit the earth (on two occasions).

• 1963, April — Attended Bahá’í centennial jubilee in London with wife Katie. This may have sparked a greater interest on Murchie’s part for the Bahá’í Faith, and inspired him to write on its history.
• 1964, February — Begins research on Bahá’í history project. Travels around Middle East and Persia.
• 1964, May — Goes on Bahá’í pilgrimage.
• 1978 — The Seven Mysteries of Life published.
• 1979 — With his Bahá’í history project remaining, Murchie begins a two-year phase in his life as an active Bahá’í.
• 1985 — Bahá’í history The Veil of Glory rejected by the Bahá’í governing body, the Universal House of Justice. Continued to work with the Bahá’í publishing trust to make the book acceptable (pp. 609-10).
• 1986, May 3 — Death of Katie, wife of 37 years. Moved to California soon afterward.
• 1987, May 6 — Married Marie in San Francisco, at the home of Marzieh and Harold Gail.
• 1989 — Wrote the epilogue to his autobiography, The Soul School.
• 1995 — The Soul School published.
• 1997, July 8 — Died at a convalescent hospital in Fullerton, CA, at age 90. His wife Marie appeared to precede him in death. His second wife and mother of his children, Barbara, outlived him by three years.

Guy Murchie’s final book, The Soul School: Confessions of a Passenger on Planet Earth, which he called his autobiography, reads more like a diary or a journal, with as much frankness and honesty as any diary, and almost as lacking in compositional flow. Given this impression, I don’t intend to read all 657 pages of it, but I have picked up a theme or two that I’d like to share.

The book was published in 1995, but it only covers Murchie’s life up to an 1989 epilogue, at which time he was about 82 years old. He went on to live another eight years.

One interesting thing I learned from The Soul School is that Murchie had been working on a short history of the Bahá’í Faith for general audiences — which he titled The Veil of Glory — on and off for 25 years, not long after completing his Music of the Spheres. He began by visiting Bahá’í historic sites throughout the Middle East in 1964, turned his efforts toward his next book, The Seven Mysteries of Life, and finally completed the manuscript of the history in May 1985, but was unable to find a non-Bahá’í publisher. The major Bahá’í publishers were all interested, but the book was rejected at least twice by the Universal House of Justice, who feared that Murchie’s book, which was not fully sourced, would “muddy the waters of Bahá’í history.” He continued to make efforts to “adapt [his] Bahá’í history to the Universal House’s specifications” through the late 1980s. The last we hear of such efforts was in the fall of 1988, in the closing paragraph of the final chapter, Impotence and Cancer, 1987–1988.

Large and revealing as Murchie’s self-styled autobiography is, it is not a proper autobiography, for the compositional reasons I have already stated. With this in mind, his Bahá’í history appears to have been the major project of his late career as a writer. It seems a shame that the book will probably never be published.

The Soul School includes several revealing passages pertaining to Murchie’s personal religion. Several years after the publication of The Seven Mysteries of Life, he was questioned about his beliefs by Gloria Faizi, a Bahá’í author and the wife of a Bahá’í leader:

Gloria brought up the question of God in relation to my Seven Mysteries, which she had read, and asked if my concept of God was pantheistic or plural in any sense? I guess my discussion of the degrees of Divinity and the relativity of it prompted her question. I told her that I thought the matter of singularity or plurality was only a semantic issue if God is, and as the Baha’is say, an “unknowable essence.” (1979)

Murchie also discusses his personal religion in a chapter regarding his Bahá’í activities in Alaska:

I had been a Baha’i for forty-three years. The organizational aspects had never greatly attracted me, but the warm philosophy did, … (1981)

Later in the same chapter, he relates:

A Baha’i … wanted to correspond about philosophy, particularly about the Baha’i doctrine of infallibility. I said I thought there was a relativity to it, …

And from his time in England, during World War II:

Remembering one day that I was a member of the worldwide Baha’i Faith, I looked it up in the telephone directory and went to the address given, only to find that it was merely a booth containing literature but with no one attending. I filled out a form, mailed it and got no response. However my life was full and there was the war, which the Baha’is seemed not to believe in, so I put off thinking about religion and considered instead the more promising matter of replenishing my own uncertain supply of girl friends in England. (1940)