Ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex

An Excerpt from My Autobiography (Richard Bolstad)

I grew up in Christchurch, an English garden city transplanted to the South Island of Aotearoa / New Zealand. My mother, Margaret, and her family, who also lived in Christchurch, prided themselves in being hard working and down to earth British folk (in fact they always referred to Britain as “home”, as if the whole colonial experience was just a summer holiday that got out of control). “Never be afraid of an honest day’s work” was one of the clichés that my mother had memorized from her father. For her, hard work was the source of all good things. She sometimes held that we were “middle class” – “not too rich and not too poor”, but in truth, her family were lower working class people with a pride in their laboring class as the “salt of the earth”. Her father grew up the son of a Welsh village blacksmith, and he developed, as he told me repeatedly “a deep and abiding terror of poverty.” This drove him first to emigrate to Australia as an indentured labourer, and then, after serving in the armed forces, to invest his money in what he thought was a practical business venture: running a fishing boat. When the bottom fell out of the fishing market, he took up a job as a Policeman. Here he realized that, as an older cop told him, “The police serve the ruling class: if someone wealthy is robbed, the pressure is on us to solve the crime. When someone poor is robbed, we really don’t have the resources to do much.” My grandfather, already soaked in left-wing ideas, left the police, joined the New Zealand Communist Party, and took up a career as a Psychiatric Nurse, where he felt his social conscience was better served. In Psychiatry, he operated on the philosophy “Suffer fools gladly.” (2 Corinthians, 11:19 “For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.”). Sadly, his patience met its match with my father’s family.

My father, David, was, for most of my childhood, a signwriter (in the days when signs and painted scenes on buildings were painted by hand with brushes), having graduated from the School of Arts at Palmerston North Technical High School and a Wellington apprenticeship. But in his dreams he was far more, and eventually he attempted to branch out to advertising and then to sales. Three times, he would argue with his boss at the firm where he worked, and leave to set himself up in a business that would go bankrupt due to his overconfidence within a year or two. In his self-image he was a misunderstood artist, and he dreamed of being a wealthy entrepreneur (indeed he often assured me this was just about to happen). Meantime, we were so poor that some years I had no shoes that fitted me, and I noticed that our family was always a couple of years later than my friends’ to get new commodities like a washing machine, a functioning car or a television. For some time before he had his own house, he ran his sign writing business from one of my grandfather’s fowl houses. This seemed like a great cost-saving solution, but it brought the two sides of my family into more contact than they could manage.

My father met my mother at a dance in Wellington, in 1951, when she was on holiday. At the time she was working at Iggo’s chemist shop, and then later at McArthur’s chemist shops, and was planning a future as a cosmetician. My father “swept her off her feet” as she described it, and the next year they married, moving into a small, cramped, apartment in Cranford Street, Christchurch. My father’s own parents lived in the North Island, and they came down by ship for the wedding, and again for my birth in 1955. After that, I did not see this second set of grandparents again until 1964, when I was nine. Until then, I did not realise that the two sides of my family represented two profoundly different worldviews.

It was no mere holiday that brought us together again. It was a gathering of the Freemasons Society. My father had become a member of the Masonic Lodge, a kind of international “gentleman’s club” whose members included Prime Ministers, heads of business, and (famously) the architects of USA Independence two centuries before. Members swore to keep handshakes, passwords and rituals secret, and believed that these rituals had come to them from ancient times, when they were part of the initiation for priests and temple builders in Ancient Egypt and Israel. For me the Lodge was simply a place that my dad disappeared to on Wednesday nights, dressed in fancy clothes and carrying a secret turquoise apron covered in mystical symbols. When he returned, he brought some peppermints smuggled from the meeting. Once a year, in summer, the Lodge held a picnic and the families got to meet each other, so by the time of my parents’ divorce in 1967, my mother had made friends with many of the other wives of members. Indeed, after the divorce she successfully applied to get funding for my “education” from these families – the lodge acted as a kind of charity or “friendly society” supporting members in difficulty. For my father, the Lodge was a sacred brotherhood that betrayed him; for my mother it was a practical social network that helped her survive my father’s grandiose ideas.

So in 1964, when my father was two years away from his stint as “Master Mason”, we took the overnight ferry from Christchurch to Wellington, and drove up to Rotorua for the national Lodge meeting. After a magical couple of days in Rotorua, when we also visited the Whakarewarewa Maori village and “thermal wonderland”, we drove up further to Hamilton, where my father’s parents, and his siblings Colin and Muriel, lived. A whole other side of my family was about to be revealed to me. A side that could not contrast more with my mother’s family and their hard working, down to earth, Welsh socialist ethic.

First, there was my grandmother Thelma or “Tuppy”. Like my more familiar “nanny” in Christchurch, Thelma Bolstad was obese, but there was something else extra-ordinary about her appearance. Her hair was shiny black, and her eyes were also black. Her skin colour was just a little more olive than usual. The ancestry that gifted her these things was a mystery out of Enid Blyton children’s stories and fairy tales: she was Roma (the itinerant people usually called Gypsy).When I checked my DNA ancestry in 2018, all my ancestry led back to north Europe (Poland, Norway, Wales and Scotland mainly) except for a few percent of markers from the area that is now Pakistan/Afghanistan. Over a thousand years ago, the Roma people migrated from here through Alexander of Macedon’s ancient trade routes, via Egypt (hence the term E’gypsies), into Europe. They brought those genetic markers that I carry in my cells. They brought with them their language, their caste system, their strange beliefs. They plied their trade as metalworkers, dancers and fortune tellers. And they brought with them a magic “book of Thoth” – called by its Egyptian Arabic name طرق turuq (ways or paths – in French “Tarot”), describing a series of spiritual paths, and forming both a base for a game of chance and a system of fortune telling.

After each meal, the New Zealand custom was to have a “nice cup of tea”, and after that, my grandmother Thelma would sometimes take everyone’s tea cup and “read their fortune”. My father told me that once when he was a child, a friend of the family came over and offered his tea cup, but his mother refused to read it. When the man left, she told the family “He will be dead within a week”. Indeed, he was hit by a bus a few days later. [Is it too late to assure you that my grandmother was not a bus driver?] It was a freaky story, of the type that my other grandfather (a trained psychiatric nurse) would dismiss as “psychotic nonsense”. Of course, I was fascinated by the whole magical idea of fortune telling. My grandmother had learned from her mother, and her mother from her mother, far back into the past. Now, my grandmother promised me that one day she would teach me, and I would be the one to whom she passed on these mysteries.

As it happened, she never did, but she certainly encouraged in me a fascination about the supernatural. By 1973 I was exploring both astrology and Tarot card divination, and had become delighted by the links between the Marxist theory of dialectics, and the Kabbalistic theory that the Gypsy Tarot was based on. Dialectics is the idea that truth is revealed by the kind of yin-yang interaction between one worldview (thesis) and another (antithesis) and their transcendence in a higher order (synthesis). Karl Marx saw the evolution of society from class society to future communal society (synthesis) in these terms, as a result of the interaction between the capitalist worldview (thesis) and the proletarian worldview (antithesis). In fact, the first written work I ever got published was a series of articles on occultism and its relationship to dialectical materialism, published in the Canterbury Students Magazine (“Canta”) that year. It was another 42 years (2015) before I was publishing my own Tarot deck and teaching a training linking it to my system of coaching.

An acceptance of fortune telling was not the only difference in belief system between my father’s family and my mother’s though. At one point in this holiday, my grandfather (Roy) made me a spoon shaped wire circle for creating bubbles out of dishwashing liquid. As he made it he cut his hand and when he told my grandmother, he said “I always cut my hand when I’m working out there in the shed.” Triumphantly, she explained “And that is WHY you do – because you believe you will cut it.” I looked shocked – I had never heard anyone claim that beliefs unconsciously affected actions. “I’m a great believer in that.” she told me. The next day, I saw how far that belief extended. I, my younger sisters Anne and Christine, and our cousins (children of dad’s brother Colin and aunty Dorothy) were playing in the back yard, and my cousin Arthur hurt himself. He ran screaming and crying into where all our parents were sitting talking. Uncle Colin took hold of him and fixed him with a calm stare. “Does it hurt?” “Yes” sobbed Arthur. “No. It doesn’t hurt; it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt” chanted my uncle. “Does it hurt?” “Yes”, repeated Arthur, and the chanting began again, until Arthur agreed that it did not hurt. “Don’t cry” he was then ordered. “Now go and play.”

As we got ready to run out and play again, I listened to my parents discussing this strange event with my father’s family. “If you hug them and give them an orange drink,” uncle Colin explained “Then every time they want an orange drink or a hug, they will hurt themselves. It’s conditioning. In Scientology, we believe in clearing the “engrams” of these traumatic events from the memory, immediately.” That night, in the caravan where my parents, my sisters and I were sleeping, my father explained it all to my mother. My father defended Colin’s action, which my mother clearly thought was a kind of child abuse. I had discovered that there was a whole different way of thinking about the world.

The theme of this visit to my grandparents was the discovery that adults do not all see the world the same way. My father, despite his belief in his own psychic ability, had some areas where he was perhaps cynical rather than sceptical. One was in relation to American culture. This trip happened very soon after we got our first (black and white) Phillips’ television set at home, and of course one of the frustrations of this trip was to be that my grandparents did not have television. To our amazement, when we got there, they revealed that they had rented a set for the time of our stay, and I wouldn’t miss my favorite programs. The first night we were there, an American melodrama was on and I was watching with my father and my grandfather. Every few minutes through this, my father expressed his frustration with how pathetically over-acted American TV was. I was quite used to this, and agreed each time that “Yes, this is silly”. Then, my father went out of the room and my grandmother came in. “Oh Tuppy,” my grandfather said, with tear-filled eyes, “You just missed a very, very sad program. Just beautiful.” I just about fell off my chair. It was not necessary to agree with my father’s assessment! What programs you liked was as subjective for adults as it was for children.

I understood that there was a theme behind Freemasonry, Scientology, and the Gypsy belief system. It was a belief in the almost magical power of thinking. My father had “investigated” yet another version of this “new thought” as it was called at the time. As a young man, he had a kind of counselling session with New Zealand teacher Herbert Sutcliffe, founder of the “School of Radiant Living”. The most famous champion of Sutcliffe’s school in New Zealand was Sir Edmund Hillary, in 1953 the first man to climb Mount Everest (Hillary actually attributed his setting the goal of climbing Everest to his holding to Sutcliffe’s philosophy, in the face of school teachers who ridiculed him). Sutcliffe took a couple of minutes to scan my father physically, and then proceeded to do what occultists would call a “cold reading”. He told him about his personality and hypothesized about his future. My father was astonished at what Sutcliffe seemed to know. Sutcliffe’s aim was not merely to show people how to “read” other human beings in this way, but how to become aware of their own inner world and change it. His motto was “Faith in goodness will produce good things. Faith in abundance will draw conditions of abundance around you.  Faith in health will establish health in body and environment.”

From that time on, my father was sold on “positive thinking”. In later years, even as he faced repeated bankruptcy, he continued to talk as if wealth was just a few steps away. Smoking over a packet of cigarettes a day, he scornfully discussed lung cancer as a result of negative thinking, right up until he died of it in 2007. My father would explain to my sisters and I “You are better than other people, because you are Bolstads. You are more psychic, more creative, destined for greater things.” I remember that one of the first books on psychotherapy I read, aged 16, was Karen Horney’s “Self Analysis”, in which she recommended doing a personal inventory to look for delusional beliefs about one’s own special nature. Suddenly I realized that this belief in Bolstad uniqueness, deliberately installed by my father, was in fact crazy. On the other hand, the idea that if things had always been a certain way, they probably always would be that way … that belief of my mother’s did not serve me either.

To my father’s family, my mother was a sad and disempowered victim of negative thinking, who failed to believe in my father’s unique talents. My father confided in me that it was my mother’s negativity that held him back from abundance. To my mother’s family, especially my grandfather, my father was simply “schizophrenic”, like the “mental patients” who sometimes came round to visit him at their home, after his retirement from the hospital. A lot of my life, in which I trained both as a Psychiatric nurse (the exact same job as my grandfather, who had of course the same name: Richard) and as a teacher of that ultimate “new thought cult” Neuro Linguistic Programming (essentially a modern day version of the School of Radiant Living), can even be understood as the attempt to reconcile the dialectic between these vastly different world views.

And as a historian, I also wonder if the difference goes even further back in history, to the great migrations of the proto-Indo-European speaking tribes who rode their horses out from the Russian steppes around 4000 BCE, some moving west into Europe and some south into Iran and eventually India. While both branches shared their horse and cattle herding culture, and their warrior-and-priest patriarchal social system, the traditional mythology simplifies by saying that the eastern or Vedic branch evolved into a far more other-worldly spiritually focused culture, while the west evolved into a more pragmatic and object-based culture. As the Latin saying has it “Ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex” (from the east comes light, from the west comes law). In my family, from the east (especially from my Roma ancestors, however small their DNA contribution) came fortune telling, cold reading, positive thinking and magical rituals; from the west came skepticism, working class pride, and practicality. Both have been precious to me. I, of course, like to believe that I am a ruthless individualist, making my own choices regardless of, even in defiance of, my family. The actual results of my choices are shockingly similar to theirs.