Speculative alchemy, Lodge 49, and the Tarot’s Fool
In the lyrical first episode of the AMC drama, Lodge 49, unwitting protagonist, Sean “Dud” Dudey (Wyatt Russell) blunders into the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx through a series of synchronistic events. The Lynx blend elements of fraternal organizations like Freemasonry and ritual societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The deep roots of both styles of initiatory society, the more secular-leaning and the more explicitly magical, lie in Rosicrucianism, an obscure seventeenth-century phenomenon that created the blueprint for speculative alchemy as an initiatory pursuit.
But Dud doesn’t know any of this, and it’s likely that only a small share of Lodge 49’s audience was ever aware of the show’s commitment to accurately representing the plate tectonics of modern occultism. Dud is a Fool, an affinity hammered home when we see him gazing on the famous Rider-Waite version of the Tarot’s Fool — because it happens to be rendered on a tile in the lodge bathroom over the urinal where he is peeing. The symbolism of the Tarot’s Fool is embedded in every aspect of Dud’s character, and overlaps seamlessly in the show with other seeker archetypes such as Christian Rosenkreuz, mythical founder of the Rosicrucian Order, and the Fisher King of medieval legend.
It is my purpose here to try and do justice to the welter of references to speculative alchemy and related Hermetic currents in Lodge 49 by looking narrowly at its first episode. While the show maintained its authentic and nuanced portrayal of occultism throughout its lamentably short run (2018–2019), the first episode is a piece of perfection all by itself and, furthermore, I can avoid spoilers by confining my discussion to Lodge 49’s beginnings. As to the larger “why,” it probably has something to do with the fact that Wyatt Russell came out recently (in a piece published on April Fool’s Day) to say that he would pick up the role of Dud at any point in the future to complete creator Jim Gavin’s vision of Lodge 49. Hope springs eternal, as it does for all seekers, and Lodge 49 has a special place in my heart for providing a window into the real lives of occultists as no show has before.
Perhaps I better explain why I am an overdetermined audience for Lodge 49. I live in Long Beach, California, where the show is set. I have in the past belonged to initiatory societies similar to the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx. I wrote my PhD dissertation at UCLA about esoteric societies and Rosicrucianism in particular. Would you believe it — I don’t currently have an academic job, but rather make my living as an astrologer (cue Blaise St. John, Lodge 49’s resident apothecary, enthusiastically shouting out “Seen and unseen” in the show’s first episode). Though Blaise’s character arc functions as a kind of cautionary tale against putting the unseen before the seen, lest you lose touch with reality, for some of us that’s a whole lifestyle. The dreamlike nature of Lodge 49 unfolded against the backdrop of my real life in Long Beach, where I discovered Dud’s house less than a mile from my own, and realized with wonder that the fanciful Mer-tiger-corn emblazoned on El Confidente’s van was derived from a mural on the outside wall of a liquor store nearby my old place at Cherry and Broadway. Like the characters in the show, I couldn’t always plumb the meaning of these pregnant synchronicities, but for a time, Lodge 49 made me feel that I was living an enchanted life in my gritty urban neighborhood, and that it was possible to build a community around my pet form of obscurantism.
Beginnings: The Alchemist and the Fool
To even start talking about Lodge 49’s first episode, I first have to tell you that Rosicrucianism began with a series of messianic Protestant manifestoes that appeared mysteriously in the early seventeenth century, and alluded to a worldwide secret order that could initiate worthy men into occult superpowers. These tracts were very probably fictional. Lutheran Theologian John Valentin Andreae later referred to writing one of the Rosicrucian tracts as a ludibrium, Latin for a joke or a game, a word which appears surely not coincidentally as the name of a dubious mental health institution in Lodge 49. Regardless of what you might read on the internet, there is no evidence that any Rosicrucians existed prior to the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestoes. There is, however, copious evidence of initiatory societies springing up all over Europe after the publication of the tracts, in emulation of the benevolent society founded by the fictional Christian Rosenkreutz.
Rosicrucian-style initiatory societies from the mid-seventeenth century forward became hotbeds of occult activity where one might learn about Hermetic arts like astrology and alchemy, engage in lofty ceremonies or crude conjurations, or receive treatment in Paracelsian medicine. Not all lodges were this exciting of course, but collectively, speculative fraternities (and some co-ed ones too) were the means through which Western occultism spread before the invention of that great equalizer, the internet. Paradoxically, or perhaps predictably, the speculative brotherhoods that mushroomed during the Enlightenment became houses of refuge for anti-Enlightenment ideas and discredited knowledge systems. Lodge members felt welcome in attempting to access divine powers through supra-rational means, whether that meant experimenting with a piece of local folk magic or resurrecting an ancient ritual. For example, mesmerism, the prototype for practices that we now refer to as hypnotism and reiki healing, spread like wildfire through the fraternal lodges of eighteenth-century France.
Dud will shortly encounter just such a convivial environment that is also friendly to speculative pursuits at Lodge 49, but he doesn’t know that when we are first introduced to him, scanning for treasure on the beach with a metal detector. His device beeps and he pulls a golden ring from the sand; it is inscribed with the symbol of the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx. Some of the first dialogue we hear on the show is Dud’s triumphant, “Found something!” as he attempts to cash in his treasure at the pawn shop in the same mini-mall as his father’s pool supply store. “Salvation,” the unflappable proprietor replies sarcastically, without missing a beat.
The pawn shop becomes an important weigh station in the series for characters who are ever in and out of luck. I could wax rhapsodic about the pawn shop as a metaphor for salvation in a Capitalist society that seems to care less and less about “middle men” (the title of Jim Gavin’s book of stories about the failing middle class), but I think that metaphor is too literal (the pawn shop has paid my rent before). So instead I’ll just venture my opinion that Bert, the pawn shop’s proprietor played by Joe Grifasi, is secretly the real, unnamed master alchemist of Lodge 49. Dud the Fool enters “Two Star Pawn” hoping to exchange shit (the found ring) for gold (his dead father’s watch). Bert, who keeps a man named Herme in his employ, lets Dud know that the ring is worthless, that it’s not real gold. “Some day you’ll know the difference,” he says archly, with subtle foreshadowing. Hermes Trismegistus was the ancient god of the alchemists, and Bert is both the authority on gold, as well as the master of Herme(s), whose primary function in the scene is to accent this allegory of alchemist to his novice.
In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s sweeping, surrealistic film Holy Mountain (1973), about alchemy, astrology, and the shamanic quest for enlightenment, a feral thief (whose full hair and beard match Dud’s in Lodge 49) attacks the character of the alchemist. He is the Fool, and he has come for the alchemist’s gold. But the alchemist subdues him, and models his laboratory processes for turning shit into gold. The scene ends with the alchemist, played by Jodorowsky himself, saying to the Fool: “You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.”
In Lodge 49, Dud as a modern-day Fool frequently berates Bert the pawn-shop alchemist, who turns junk into cash. But Bert never reacts to Dud’s abuse, knowing as he does that Dud is perpetually in his thrall or in need of his services. Dud always resignedly (if not humbly) submits to Bert’s authority as the keeper of the gold or, in this formulation, high-interest loans for small sums. The first episode accomplishes the transition from physical alchemy (the quest for gold) to spiritual alchemy (purification of the spirit) neatly by having Dud cash in his hoped-for payday, the junk Lynx ring, into spiritual gold at the lodge.
But it isn’t just chance when Dud’s yellow-gold Volkswagen runs out of gas right outside the front door of Lodge 49, where he recognizes the lynx symbol from the ring on the building’s entryway. The heavens have ordained this date with destiny. A massive jet takes off just over Dud’s head, and the noise lays him flat. We learn later that the jet was a “Jupiter,” the last one to fly out of Long Beach after the closing of the Orbis plant, which is Lodge 49’s thinly-veiled reference to the real-life withdrawal of Boeing from the city. Any astrologer, occult magician, or alchemist knows that Jupiter on the Midheaven is a good omen, and so the luckily-named jet crossing over Dud’s head is an especially nice and subtle touch on the part of the show’s writers. Early Americans, incorrectly rumored to have all been uptight Puritans, were also familiar with Jupiter’s lucky qualities. The influence of the greater benefic was sought out to bless treasure-hunting expeditions. Edgar Allan Poe knew this and so named a character “Jupiter” in his alchemically-themed tale of a successful treasure hunt, “The Gold-Bug.”
Lodge 49 begins with a Eureka moment — “Found something!” — though Bert quickly deflates Dud’s enthusiasm by pointing out his spiritual problem. Dud is more in need of salvation than he is of cash or a job, though he’s pretty desperate for those too. The whole arc of the show is told in the first few words exchanged by Dud and Bert. While all the characters are seeking something, whether it’s money or recognition or a woman or an end to debt, the mundane fulfillment of their pedestrian dreams doesn’t address their existential hungers. Lodge 49 provides the elusive salvation, which is found as much in the loving community of members who support one another as it is in their shared belief that an unseen world undergirds the seen one.
Speculative Alchemy and American History
At this point it would probably behoove me to explain how medieval alchemists attempting to transform lead into gold with chemical operations has anything to do with the occult. The history of science is generally very partial, and likes to privilege its success stories while fudging over the centuries of failed experiments that laid the groundwork for those successes. I’m pretty sure this historical forgetting is why the term alchemist has now come to be synonymous with “delusional.” But in alchemy we find the history of both modern chemistry and pharmaceutical medicine (I might also include the history of perfume and spirituous liquors). Alchemy turns out to be not that laughable or delusional when you really dig into it. The most relevant thing I might say regarding alchemy for the purposes of this discussion is that alchemy pre-dates our current concept of “science” as detached, empirical inquiry by a thousand years, or maybe two thousand, depending on how you draw the timeline. In other words, alchemy developed in an animate universe, in a world that was still enchanted. The distinction we now make between “material” versus “spiritual” alchemy was not one that would have made sense to any alchemist prior to the Age of Enlightenment.
Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung made famous the idea that medieval alchemists were acting out psychological processes with their physical experiments on matter. And while Jung introduced modern people to some delightful new language for understanding the Self, the original alchemists were largely aware that they were engaged in a symbolic work that would transform the Soul. I’ll use a colorful example from American history to illustrate how the alchemical life overlapped with the spiritual life. The son of a founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, Jr. (1606–1676) earnestly sought to make contact with the Rosicrucians when a young man in England. He undertook an alchemical education, and shipped crates full of alchemical equipment marked with the wizard John Dee’s iconic monad symbol to the New World. Winthrop also got his hands on a good portion of Dee’s occult library. John Winthrop, Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and likewise became a colonial governor. But his spiritual ardor appears throughout his biography; Winthrop never really lost the Rosicrucian fervor for a new dispensation, the belief that the Earth could be purified of corruption with right action. He later operated a sort of Rosicrucian hospital on his property in Connecticut, thereby acting out the primary directive that appears in the original tracts: “heal the sick, and that gratis.”¹
Trying to draw all the through-lines that connect alchemy, Protestantism, Rosicrucianism, and science in the early modern period, without boring you to tears or losing my credibility, is no mean feat. For some reason I’m reminded of my breathless enthusiasm when I declared to my doctoral adviser that Edgar Allan Poe’s hollow-earth novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was connected symbolically to both ancient Egypt and the lost city of Atlantis! I think I was reading Ignatius Donnelly at the time, or maybe it was John Irwin. My adviser’s eyes widened with terror, and then softened with pity. The occult is like that, it yokes unlike and unlikely histories together with hidden links, and seems to have the potential to connect everything if you could just puzzle it all out. Lodge 49, incidentally, hinted in Season 2 that the never-materialized Season 3 would follow a hollow-earth plot, hollow-earth being a favorite conspiracy theory of the occult fringe. The aggrieved PhD student in me was vindicated!
But I digress, which is another hallmark of the true occultist (I already mentioned that I don’t have an academic job, right?) So let me come back to the premise that the alchemists of old still lived in an enchanted universe. The appearance of veins of metal in the earth gave rise to the idea that subterranean processes transformed the humblest of materials, even dirt and shit, into precious metals like silver and gold. If humans could somehow replicate these processes, they would have more gold. But because these secret processes were not very forthcoming, and because so few succeeded at reproducing them, it was thought that the alchemist must make frequent appeals to spirit in order to be blessed with favor in his work. “Search deep within the earth with right action and you will discover the Philosopher’s Stone.” Notice that bit about “right action”; God wouldn’t grant just anyone the power to tyrannize over the world with infinite gold-making ability, right? So the alchemist must be humble, and pious, and more interested in spiritual gold than personal wealth. Though a spoof of the art, Ben Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist makes this devotional component of popular alchemy clear. “Subtle,” the sham alchemist in Jonson’s play, bilks his dupes out of ever more cash by selling them rituals of spiritual purity necessary for completing the gold-making work.
I’m tempted to say that my most uncanny Lodge 49 experience was realizing that Dud as the Fool was the modern-day equivalent of the alchemist Fool in my forthcoming American literary Tarot deck. But I think it’s rather that I’ve just been reading the same occult sources as the show’s writers. AMC released some promotional images of Lodge 49’s characters as Tarot cards, and Dud as the Fool holds his metal detector instead of the traditional bindle or knapsack. On the Fool card for the American Renaissance Tarot, we feature Mormon prophet Joseph Smith dousing for precious metals with a divining rod. OK don’t stop reading just yet! Joseph Smith’s family participated in a number of popular occult practices like Masonic rituals, planetary magic, and yes, treasure-divining. Smith was once arrested for dousing for a gold mine.² I chose Smith to represent the Fool because he began his spiritual quest scratching around for precious metals, and ended up discovering “spiritual gold” in a series of visions that became guiding lights for the Mormon religion. While I’m not a Mormon, I’m enough of an occult historian to think it’s pretty cool that Smith leveraged so much popular Hermeticism into his ostensibly Christian cult.
Yes, early America was a whole lot more occult-friendly than you’ve been led to believe, and the best treasure-trove of oddball incidents of magical ritual and practice in North America that I can think of is The Refiner’s Fire by John L. Brooke, a book that details Smith’s occult milieu. While elite New Englanders like John Winthrop, Jr. could afford to have fancy alchemical apparatus shipped to the backwater of America, poor folks in the mid-Atlantic colonies like Smith had to make do with divining rods and seer-stones. Brooke’s book reveals that treasure-hunting was a popular early American past-time, a fact also evidenced by Washington Irving’s story collection devoted to the practice, “The Money Diggers.” In these stories, a “high German” or occult doctor is typically invited to oversee the success of the venture, and this venerable figure who consults the stars and knows the proper incantations came to replace the alchemist in the traditional gold-working. The treasure-hunt represents alchemical ideas at play outside the laboratory and restored to the Earth as magical womb. The alchemists believed that there is a seed of gold in everything, or that all matter could be perfected into its highest state with the right spiritual attitudes and chemical processes. Early Americans applied these beliefs to their treasure-hunting endeavors, and hoped that planetary alignments and the right spells of protection against treasure-guarding demons would yield salvation in the form of buried treasure.
There’s nothing in traditional Tarot that explicitly connects the Fool archetype to the alchemist’s quest for gold, and so Lodge 49’s blending of the two types of seeker pays homage to a whole culture of early American treasure-hunting that we used Joseph Smith to represent in the American Renaissance Tarot. Smith was considered a Fool in his times because the “golden plates” he discovered in the hills of Palmyra never materialized, and yet Smith’s golden vision has clearly inspired religious seekers for going-on two centuries and counting. Lodge 49 reproduces the alchemical components of Smith’s vision in an allegorical painting of legendary Lynx founder, Harwood Fritz Merrill. Like Smith, Merrill also claimed to have unearthed a book of “Egyptian” secrets, and this golden, glowing book is represented under the ground beneath his feet using a cutaway technique in the painting. Like Smith’s original Book of Mormon, the whereabouts of Merrill’s book of speculative alchemy remain mysterious.
The Tarot’s Fool
In Lodge 49, Dud is a Fool whose artlessness and faith inspire those around him. The Tarot’s Fool is typically understood as the call to follow your heart and leave rationality behind. Your very ignorance and inexperience are the assets that will guide you onto a spiritual path. Before Dud meets Ernie (played by Brent Jennings), his preceptor at Lodge 49, both characters are handed the same flier that reads “$$$ for Junk” as they sit in their old cars. The show is littered with this kind of alchemical suggestiveness. Dud and Ernie will shortly trade in their junky old lives for the personal gold of a shared quest that develops through their mutual investment in the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx. The doubling of the flier in the first episode indicates that the two characters share a destiny. Dud is desperate for the father figure he sees in Ernie, though all Ernie initially sees in Dud is a pain in the ass. Only as the series progresses does Ernie come to see that Dud’s dogged faith and well-meant Foolishness have liberated him from his own wonted rigidity and materialism.
Lodge 49’s feel of authenticity to practicing occultists comes from its steeping in esoteric history, and the show does as much justice to the Tarot tradition as we’ve seen it do to traditions of speculative alchemy and Rosicrucian-style societies. A “dud” is something that doesn’t work, something worthless. Dud’s very name therefore announces that he is a cipher like the Tarot’s Fool, a zero who cannot be counted in any existing system. Though paradoxically the blank slate of the Fool’s mind is the source of his faith (and thus an indication of his future success), Lodge 49 plays Dud’s Foolishness for maximum laughs. Dud is a bum who sponges off his sister. He has no plans for the future, no aspirations at all. His attitude toward money is ignorantly cavalier. He’s too Foolish to even be properly ashamed of his embarrassing behavior.
Early versions of the Fool card portray the Fool as a madman or a beggar. (Ernie jokes to Dud that he could be “a deadbeat or a psycho” and so asks for his identifying information). The fifteenth-century Visconti-Sforza Tarot presents a Fool who is incompletely clothed and barefoot, with feathers in his hair. I am reminded in this image of all the homeless people who wander my neighborhood in Long Beach, California, and suffer from untreated mental illness and the failure of the social network. Later Tarots like the seventeenth-century Tarot of Marseilles show the Fool as a jester with a bindle, and a small animal snapping at his crotch. We often see the Fool’s bare ass hanging out of his pants, and in some versions of the Tarot, his genitals. The Fool’s exposure of his naughty bits functions to remind us of our lower natures, our crude animal drives and needs. But the Fool as a symbol represents the null-point of consciousness; his preoccupation with his lower nature is embarrassing. This traditional association of the Fool with vulgarity is my best guess as to why we frequently see the homeless Dud toting super-packs of toilet paper. That, or the TP is meant to remind us that Dud himself is excrement on the road to becoming gold.
Dud can’t reconcile himself to a present in which his father has died, and so he wanders aimlessly in the past. He Foolishly takes a swim at his former family home, long since lost to foreclosure, and squats at the apartment he can no longer afford. When Dud is caught sleeping in his underwear at the empty apartment, he emerges from his closet hiding-space affable and unfazed. He’s too Foolish to be embarrassed at his near-nudity in this cringe-inducing scene, and pompously holds court with the prospective tenants. Here again the show’s writers show their familiarity with the deep history of the Fool archetype, by prompting vicarious shame in the show’s viewers at Dud’s bodily exposure, while Dud himself remains blissfully ignorant of the social impropriety of his situation.
The Rider-Waite’s Fool is accompanied by a dog who appears to be trying to warn him that he is stepping off a cliff. Conversely, the dog in the older Tarot de Marseilles seems to be attacking the Fool. Is this a wild dog, and thus another symbol of the Fool’s animal nature? Perhaps it isn’t a dog at all. Students of the Marseille Tarot over the centuries have seen in the crude woodcut image a cat, a leopard, a hyena, even — wait for it — a LYNX! Swiss occultist Oswald Wirth’s Tarot deck, which predates the Rider-Waite deck by about twenty years, depicts the animal attacking the Fool as a lynx. I’d be willing to wager money that Lodge 49’s creators lifted the name of the show’s initiatory order from this thread of connection with the Fool card and the lynx. The Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Dog or Cat sounds too dumb, but Lynx has a dignified and esoteric ring to it. I’ll give my pals in the Lodge 49 Fan Group on Facebook credit for suggesting that the word “Lynx” makes a nice play on all the connecting “links” the characters must find between the seen and unseen worlds. But I still think the lynx is a reference to the Tarot’s fool.
While I’m no expert in Celtic mythology, Lodge 49’s first episode weaves in enough references to the Fisher King legend to suggest that Dud’s dud-like qualities are serving some archetypal purpose in his community. When we first see Dud scanning for treasure on the beach, he is nursing an injury to his foot. We later learn that he was bitten by a snake while on a surfing trip in Nicaragua (cue David Pasquesi as Blaise shouting “Signs and symbols!”), and that the wound never healed. In original versions of the tale, the King has suffered an injury to the foot, leg, or groin, and cannot stand; Dud can no longer surf or work a physical job. The Fisher King can fish, however, while sitting in his boat and waiting for the appearance of the Knight who can heal him. At the Donut shop, Dud tells Alice wistfully that the original inhabitants of Long Beach, the Tongva Indians, maintained a culture of fishing on the beach for three thousand years. He later gazes at the informational pamphlet he received from the Lynx, and dreams of the renewal he will experience with the Knights of that Order. Perhaps some distant ancestral tie-in to Celtic myth is intended by Dud’s very Irish-sounding name (Sean Dudley), and by the visual assault of cheesy iconography at “Shamroxx,” the bar where Dud’s sister Liz works.
I can dream, can’t I?
Welp, I’m more than four thousand words in here, and I’ve just been discussing the first episode. Lodge 49 is a really special show. I think perhaps what I like most about it is the way its many occult seekers are still buffeted by the needling irritations of modern life, instead of swept away by supernatural interventions that only happen on TV. As Amy Hale put it in her article, “Lodge 49’s Vision of the Magical Life,” “This is not the occult as wished for, this is the occult as it really is.” Lodge 49’s side-plots lampoon the absurdity of corporate culture, and the effect of this blending of seen and unseen realities is as if the film Office Space opened up into a Meow Wolf-style installation of immersive psychedelia.
Lodge 49’s abrupt ending after just two seasons left a lot of mysteries unanswered and a lot of plots unresolved. At the end of the first episode, Dud introduces himself at the lodge and is promptly cold-cocked by Larry Loomis, Sovereign Protector of Lodge 49. We never learn why, but presumably it’s because the coming of Dud has been foretold, and Larry is acting out in a fit of Knightly envy. Larry has been having some health problems though, and rants incoherently as he is carried out of Lodge 49 on a stretcher. I knew Lodge 49 was going to do justice to the true nature of “occulture” when Larry moaned, “It’s all a forgery. We are not the true lodge.” Determining what “truth” is when the authority for your society’s existence comes from invisible, incorporeal masters has long been a problem that’s plagued the occult, as you might conclude from the legions of “original” Rosicrucian societies that pop up in a single Google search. I was once told that I had been initiated by an “illegal” lodge, whose name I won’t tell you because I’m fairly certain the person who made that comment was ready to sue. The concern over authenticity introduced by Larry drives the occult in general, and set up the future of Lodge 49 for any number of quests to uncover the truth, answers that give way to more questions, and disappointing searches that yet yield redemptive results. That is the occult I know, and that is the occult Lodge 49 portrayed. Let’s bring it back, shall we?
Sources:
- Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute and North Carolina UP, 2010).
- John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994).
