off the shelf old books reviewed anew

(During the past three months of the Corona virus kabookie, I've been rifling the shelves at the chateau for something to read or reread. This occasional column reviews long published titles which have once more come to hand.)

Women In Search Of The Sacred, by Anne Bancroft. Published by Penguin Arkana 1996.

A feminist left this book in my house to annoy me. It always seemed like a form of surrender to throw it out.
So I still have it.
(cf Robert Fisk books on my shelf and a leftist trying to annoy me.)
Over the years I've occasionally browsed through it in order to angry up the blood when I'm feeling a bit inert.
A shot to the system and all that.
What doesn't bore us to death makes us stronger they say, etc etc.
The book features character studies of ten women, all on the face of it, quite interesting choices. The problem is that we meet them mediated through Anne Bancroft's own sensibilities and her manipulative viewpoint. The end results have a cloying, joyless sameness. There is a real feeling that the real women's real characters have not really emerged.
The author should have tried a more adversarial approach, subjecting her subjects to critical scurtiny, or she might have tried letting them speak for themselves more completely, rather than titrating their personas into something cultish that appeals to her personally.
An additional problem is that rightly or wrongly I find the editor Anne Bancroft's orientations towards pseudo cult of Theosophy to be indicative of deliberate or accidental satanism.
Kind of a deal breaker for me.
The ten women whom she features are a supposed Catholic nun called Elaine MacInnes; the writer Iris Murdoch; the writer Suan Howatch; a scientist called Danah Zohar; some sort of spiritual guru called Marianne  Williamson;, the writer Annie Dillard; a witch who calls herself Vivianne Crowley; a yoga practitioner styled Ma Yoga Shakti; the writer Jung Chang; and the doctor Sheila Cassidy.
This is a book about the sacred.
The closest we get in this book to somebody who has a clue about the sacred is Jung Chang who on the strength of her Chairman Mao biography is clearly a seeker after truth, and Sheila Cassidy who spent her life in service to humanity through the medical profession, and Annie Dillard who, well I've always just liked Annie Dillard.
Glimmers of individual characterisation now and then do manage to shine through Anne Bancroft's manipulative anodyne depictions of her subjects.
Danah Zohar is presented as advocating Quantum theory as a new spirituality while wheeling out that hoary old chestnut beloved of atheists and teenagers: "There's no such thing as truth."
One cannot help wondering: "Is that true?"
Annie Dillard is shown through extracts from her Pulitzer prize winning book A Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, gushing merrily as Annie Dillard does, about her attempts to spritually experience the world nay the universe, by holding in her consciousness simultaneously the name of and an awareness of every living thing, every phsyical object and every cosmological process.
Could get quite tiring.
One feels like saying: "Calm down girl. You'll give yourself a headache. For heaven's sake, just relax and enjoy."
Sheila Cassidy is shown endlessly intellectualising her act of faith.
To her I would have said as I would say to myself: "Doubt no more but believe."
I wonder did she ever make the leap.
Perhaps her work with the dying was her leap and her act of faith.
It's certainly a more significant testimony than anything attributed to her by Anne Bancroft.
But the absence of specific genuine convinced Christian witness from this book cannot be an accident.
You pays your book reviewer and you takes your chance.
I am suggesting that Anne Bancroft is masking something malign behind what she calls feminist spirituality.
Over all her subjects she drapes the cloth of her own intellectual dispositions, her own necromancy as it were, her own arid obfuscating pseudery.
The characters she sets out to reveal are not revealed.
Their notions of spirituality are contextualised by Anne Bancroft into a worthless seamless New Age smorgasbord.
Cutting to the chase.
If peseudery or conflict theory feminism was the only agenda here I could relish the challenge to my delicate pre raphaelite sensibilities.
My sniffiness about the material is that on reading it, I felt. as mentioned above, that there was an advocacy for devil worship contained in the editor's agenda.
I am suggesting that the sameness of the characters as evoked by Anne Bancroft is because she is marshalling them to justify satanism.
The old Theosophy schtick is everywhere bubbling beneath the surface.
Elaine MacInnes is presented as a Catholic nun who has links to Theosophy.
Ma Yoga Shakti is openly a Theosophist with links to the founders of Theosophy.
The salient critique of Theosophy, a practice emerging in the late 19th century among European aristocrats and self named God wisdom by its adherents, is that it is a front for devil worship.
Ho hum.
I've raised the matter with certain senior members of a supposedly Theosophistic supposed charity, styled the Camphill community, in the small Irish town of Kilcullen where I live. The Camphill ethos is inspired by the early twentieth century German philosopher I mean nut job, Rudolf Steiner, whose links to Theosophy are well known and whose adherence to satanism remains disputed but certainly an elephant in the drawing room for any who scratch the surface in these matters.
Those I've spoken to at Camphill were a bit coy when I asked them if Theosophy is devil worship.
Their precise answer was: "It's not that simple. There are energies which we seek to bring into balance."
I was not pleased by this answer.
My suggestion vis a vis the book under review is that Anne Bancroft and at least three of her subjects (Elaine MacInnes, Ma Yoga Shakti and Vivianne Crowely) have picked the side of hell and are advocating for it.
The other characters are so roundly obscured by Anne Bancroft's verbiage that it's impossible to know what they believe.