WESTERN ESOTERIC INFLUENCES ON THE

NATION OF ISLAM'S COSMOLOGY

James L. Kelley 2015

Scholars have taken notice of the kinship between The Nation of Islam's teachings
and western esotericism. These efforts have gone far in establishing links between
the NOI and esotericist forerunners such as the Moorish Science Temple of
America and the Theosophical Society [1]. However, a sustained study of the
western esoteric basis of the NOI's doctrines has yet to appear [2]. I hope to push
the discussion further with a few words on the NOI's cosmogonic myth, which
could better be labeled a myth of God-man-nature's origin [3].
The Nation of Islam's teachings are put forth mainly in a number of short
books and pamphlets authored by NOI leader Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah
Poole [1934-1975]). In one important compilation of Muhammad's sayings
Yakub: The Father of Man-Kindthe African-American religious leader offers a
cosmogony according to which God created himself (or spontaneously sprang up)
out of a cosmos of total darkness or blackness [4]. As in many systems of
ancient Gnosis, the NOI cosmo-theogony presents God as a first manifestation of
light out of a primal darkness or abyss. The following passage will afford the
reader a notion of the substance of the myth, as well as a feel for Muhammad's
rhetorical style:
This is the way [God] was born; in total darkness. (-) Out of the total
orbit of the Universe of darkness there sparkled an atom of life. (-)
How could that atom of life make a record of its own creation? It
could not write its own creation, the record of it, because He was the
First; there was no recorders around Him. He was First to record His

Own self. (-) He had to wait until the atom of life produced brains to
think what He needed. (-) But he was a Black Man! Coming out of
total darkness at that time, we all could say that we are produced by a
white god, but there was no light nor any white anywhere; there was
All Darkness. (-) In that Darkness, which had no end to it therethat
Darkness Created an atom of Life, and the Color to be the Color had to
be Black, as there was no light; therefore, it had to be the Color of the
thing that Created it! [5].
Here Muhammad presents the birth of God (and, by extension, the birth of the
cosmos and man) as the appearance of light from an original darkness. And this
God is spatio-temporal, since its primal form is an atom of life that rotated as it
sparkled. That Muhammad has in mind an analogy between this first splinther of
divine light in the cosmic darkroom, on the one hand, and the emission of white
seed from a black human body, on the other, is evinced through statements of his
such as: ...[I]f, by nature, we can think through darkness, and bring light out of
that darkness by our own brains, we did so with the white race. Look right into the
sperm of life and find himhere's an unlike. Take it! Separate it! Your first
separation from the white and Black was done; and Out of the womb of our
mother did we come. We were created there out of the sperm that was emitted into
that total dark room, the womb. It took that to make that child. He couldn't be
made in the light [6].
Just to show that Elijah Muhammad's notion of God-man-nature's birth as an
emission of a luminous life-water is not a metaphor, but is in fact to be taken
literally, note the leader's words:
'1' was already in the darkness, but nothing did not give it to us until
the time brought it about. When the time brought it about, it was out
there in our view as a revolving light; light revolving that's hidden
there in the dark. We don't know how many trillions of years it was
there, but it was there. With a fine atom of water out there, it made
itself out of an atom of water that was found in the darkness of the
universe. We could not see light emerging out of the space without
water, because we can't produce life without water; therefore, it was
some water out there in that darkened world of space [7].
Another aspect of the NOI's white seed-black body theme is underscored in the
above excerpt: as in the hermetic Poimandres and in the Gnostic Apochrypon of
John, the NOI cosmogony is communicated to the gnostic visually, as a spectacle

that must be taken in by the eye. Specifically, the NOI teaches that God is the
ALL-EYE-SEEING; God's status as supreme origin and highest divinity is
dependent upon His being seen by humans, by those having brains (and thus
thought) [8]. God, we remember, was born as a drop of rotating, luminous lifefluid; apparently, God was not able to define Himself until trillions (yes, trillions)
of years of evolution produced a black human being who could look at his own
viscous, chalky issue and make the Gnostic analogy between his onanism and the
birth of God from the primeval darkness [9].
Our vignette of NOI cosmology would be incomplete, however, if we failed
to mention its mathematical aspect: God indirectly constituted himself by creating
a cosmos that produces a black human race with the power to think God's original
manifestation of white fluid out of the original Black womb. But this human
thought is only efficacious because it can measure the motion of the rotating,
glowing excreta. Elijah Muhammad recalls the NOI's original teacher W.D. Fard to
have said: Mathematics...is Islam, and Islam is Mathematics [10]. NOI leader
Louis Farrakhan gives us further insight into the mathematical basis of the
Nation's doctrine:
In the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 40, the questions are asked: Who else
has held the oceans in his hand? Who has measured the heavens in his
fingers? Who else knows the weight of the Earth, or has weighed the
mountains and hills on a scale? What kind of Man is this Who came
among us? Master Fard Muhammad told us that the total area of land
and water of the planet Earth is 196,940,000 square miles; that the
circumference of our Planet is 24,896 miles; that the diameter of our
Planet is 7,926 miles; that the Land is 57,255,000 square miles; the
Water is 139,685,000 square miles. The Atlantic Ocean covers
41,321,000 square miles; the Pacific Ocean covers 68,634,000 square
miles; the Indian Ocean covers 29,430,000 square miles; the Lakes
and the Rivers cover 1,000,000 square miles. The Hills and Mountains
cover 14,000,000 square miles; The Islands are 1,910,000 square
miles; the Deserts are 4,861,000 square miles. Mount Everest is
29,141 feet high; the Producing Land is 29,000,000 square miles, and
that the Earth weighs six sextillion tons, the unit '6' followed by 21
zeroes [11].
It seems that the NOI logic goes something like so: (1) God gave birth to himself
in time as rotating, glowing life-fluid, but he did not know himself, since he had
no brain and thus no thought; (2) life evolved over trillions of years until a black

human race originated, which had a spark of divinity within it, and which could
measure anything in the cosmos through empirical observation and
experimentation; (3) W.D. Fard knows the measurements of the earth and
everything in it; thus W.D. Fard is Allah; (4) through the NOI, W.D. Fard's selfdivinizing knowledge is available to all black men; (5) ergo, black men discover
their inner divinity (and God, as a nice side-effect, overcomes his ignorance of
himself) by following the teachings of the NOI.
It is important for us to note that we are not dealing with a straightforward
message here. It is not simply that blacks are given a few measurements (most of
them empirically inaccurate, it should be noted) and that is that. Rather, in true
Gnostic fashion, the mathematical Islam of the NOI is a consciousness-raising
praxis designed to elevate the worshiper to the original cosmogonic effulgence,
the joyous outpouring of living water of which we have already said so much.
We will end by pointing out a few ancient parallels to the NOI cosmotheogony:
(1) Many gnostic texts from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD present a theogony
at the heart of which is a luminous life-water in which God is born, not unlike a
fetus in amniotic fluid. The Apocryphon of John, for instance, has God waking up
in a bath of light-water: He who perceives himself in his own light which
surrounds himhe is the source of the water of life, the light which is full of
purity. (-) [God the Father] knew his own image when he saw it in the pure water
of life which surround him [12].
(2) I have written elsewhere of what I have tentatively termed IndoEuropean homogenesis, which is the tendency in I-E religious texts to consider
all forms of generation (either of gods, cosmoi, or humans) as properly having a
male father as birthgiver and a male son as the issue, the latter being the only
true image of the father [13]. This religeme, I am convinced, is reflected in
(3) the Vedic belief in amtra or soma as a divine reproductive secretion that
confers life and power upon its human quaffer. The reader is referred to the studies
of David Gordon White and Gordan Djurdjevic for links to modern religious
practices [14].
(4) Finally, the NOI's divine secretion theme may be a variant of the blood
piety found in Western Christianity in the late Middle Ages and beyond [15].
NOTES
[1] See Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad
(New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 403, for comments on Muhammad's teacher W.D.

Fard's association with the Theosophical Society. On the Moorish Science Temple
of America's influence on the Nation of Islam, see Ernest Allen, Jr., "Identity and
Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of
Islam," in Muslims on the Americanization Path?, edited by Yvonne Yezbeck
Haddad and John Esposito (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 163-214; and
Stephen C. Finley, Hidden Away: Esotericism and Gnosticism in Elijah
Muhammad's Nation of Islam, 259-280 in Histories of the Hidden God:
Concealment and Revelation in Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical
Traditions, edited by April D. DeConick and Grant Adamson (Durham: Acumen,
2013).
[2] However, see Stephen Carl Finley, Re-imagining Race and Representation:
The Black Body in the Nation of Islam, Ph.D. dissertation, Rice University, 2009;
Jacob Michael King, Clearing the Planet: The Adoption of the Teachings of L. Ron
Hubbbard by Louis Farrakhan, and its Significance for the Eschatology of the
Nation of Islam. M.A. thesis, Claremont Graduate University, 2014; and chapter 2
of Martha F. Lee's The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996) for discussions of various topics
relating to NOI theology.
[3] The term God-man-nature is borrowed from Anoine Faivre, who on p. 7 of
his Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, translated
by Christine Rhone (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000) spoke of a
God/Human/Nature Triangle. In my Anatomyzing Divinity, I used the term
cosmotheanthropic rhythm to limn the core feature (or cluster of features) that
define what Wouter Hanegraaff and some other scholars of western esotericism
have agreed to term Gnosis. However, I have since opted for the less unwieldy
God-man-nature.
[4] Elijah Muhammad, Yakub: The Father of Man-Kind, accessed 28 May, 2015,
http://www.scopeandability.com/wp-content/uploads/yakub-jacob-the-father-ofmankind.pdf [Orig. pub. Atlanta, GA: Secretarius MEMPS Publications, 2002],
chapter 1.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., emphasis added.
[7] Ibid., chapter 8, emphasis added.

[8] Elijah Muhammad, The Supreme Wisdom: Lessons by Master Fard

Muhammad to His Servant, The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad for The LostFound Nation of Islam in North America, accessed 28 May, 2015,
http://www.ciphertheory.net/supremewisdom.pdf., 17.
[9] In the [self-]making of God Himself, He could not have had a Will until he
had brains capable of thinking. He was created, self-created from an atom of life
[who as well] produced flesh, bones and blood from the earth that He was created
onself-created (Muhammad, Yakub, chapter 1).
[10] Ibid., 6.
[11] Louis Farrakhan, God Will Send Saviours, accessed 29 July, 2015,
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Minister_Louis_Farrakhan_9/article_763
0.shtml,
accessed 29 July, 2015. Farrakhan's text is, in part, an explication of the teachings
of Master Fard Muhammad (W.D. Fard).
[12] Apocryphon of John 26.15ff. and 27.1ff.; trans. David Hill in Werner
Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts, edited by R. McL. Wilson, Volume
1: Patristic Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 108. Cf. idem
30.1ff (p. 109): [Barbelo] turned to [the Father], and gave birth to a blessed spark
of light..., a passage that recalls the NOI's cosmogony, which features a liquid
atom of life that sparkles (see above).
[13] See James L. Kelley, The Indo-European Homogenesis, accessed 29 July,
2015, https://romeosyne.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/the-indo-europeanhomogenesis/; and idem, The Indo-European Homogenesis, Part Two: Marriage,
Laconian Style, accessed 29 July, 2015,
https://romeosyne.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/the-indo-european-homogenesispart-two-marriage-laconian-style/.
[14] See David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in
Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); idem, Kiss of the
Yogin: Tantric Sex in Its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2003); and Gordan Djurdjevic, India and the Occult: The Influence of South
Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014), esp. pp. 30ff.

[15] On Medieval blood piety see James L. Kelley, The Zombie Mass: The First
Crusade and the Origins of Zombie Hysteria, accessed 29 July, 2015,
https://romeosyne.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/james-l-kelley-the-zombie-massthe-first-crusade-and-teh-origins-of-zombie-hysteria/.