A Brief History of the Moorish Orthodox Church

In 1786 the United States signed the Treaty of Marrakesh with Morocco, creating trade and diplomatic agreements but, crucially, also guaranteeing that no Moroccan would ever be taken as a slave in the US. In the following decades, several Black Muslim groups grew up in the US. Among these were the Moorish Science Temple and, later, the Moorish Orthodox Church (MOC), who seized on the treaty as a secular guarantee of their essential freedom, a freedom itself rooted metaphysically in Islam as the ancestral religion of the Moors, a tradition stolen from them through slavery and exile, which they now intend to recover.

In the 1960s the Moorish Orthodox Church developed into a free-thinking, avant-grade spiritual and artistic movement, with a Dadaistic, Prankster style of communication and a parallel commitment to spiritual insight. Church members were in contact at times with Timothy Leary, and included Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), author of works such as CHAOS: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism (1984), TAZ / The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1985) and a stream of other books exploring esoteric Islam, anarchism, ecology, alchemy, pirate utopias, and other matters of vital interest.

It is through Hakim Bey that I first heard of the Moorish Orthodox Church, but the church has moved beyond him of late. In this instalment of the Traveller in the Evening podcast, I interview comrade Theophrastus El about the origins, history and beliefs of this radical spiritual group, united around the ‘five pillars of Moorish Science’; love, truth, peace, freedom and justice (while some add: beauty.)

Contact Theophrastus El.

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Theophrastus al-Razi El: The Straight Balance: Islamic Alchemy and Moorish Science

Download the pamphlet, The Straight Balance: Islamic Alchemy and Moorish Science, by Theophrastus al-Razi El, originally published by the Aurora Consergens Lodge of the Moorish Orthodox Church, Albion 2020.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank a number of people who have assisted in bringing this MOC pamphlet into being; Brother Ishraq El of Lodge Al Buraq, who provided important source material and, most importantly, feedback and encouragement, Brother El-Imran Arif of Lodge Aurora Consurgens, who read an earlier draft of this document and suggested a number of key improvements, and Brother Mustafa Al Laylah Bey, who deemed this worthy of publishing as a Moorish Orthodox Church pamphlet, and who worked on the layout and graphics. Brother Andy Wilson also stepped in for post-production  /  re-editing duties.

An earlier version of this paper was delivered as part of the MOC-UK online seminar series. I’d like to thank the attendees for their incisive questions and comments. Any errors and shortcomings in what follows are of course entirely my own.

Alchemy as Moorish Science

We are told that alchemy arrived in ‘Latin Europe’ on Friday, the 11^th February 1144, when Robert of Chester completed his translation of De Compositione Alchemiae. This manuscript allegedly consists of the teachings of the monk ‘Morienus’, as given to the Umayyid Prince Khalid ibn Yazid. According to legend, this shadowy figure assists Khalid in deciphering a cryptic manuscript describing the making of the philosopher’s stone, and then disappears into the desert.

As the inhabitants of Western Christendom came into contact with Islamic civilisation from the C 10^th CE, they found libraries full of works by Ptolemy, Galen and Aristotle, as well as manuscripts describing entirely new sciences – including alchemy. Scholars travelled to Sicily and Jerusalem in search of new knowledge, and manuscripts to translate. But most of all, as in the case of Robert of Chester and his colleague Herman the Dalmatian, they travelled to the Moorish Kingdom of Al Andalus. According to Sharif Anaël-Bey, the Caliphate of Cordoba was established in the C 8^th by Moors from Mauritania, who ‘were the recipients and custodians of the ancient… mysteries of Egypt.’

The Holy Moorish Koran, ‘divinely edited’ by Prophet Noble Drew Ali, declares that Moorish Americans were enslaved for forsaking their true nationality and must return to Islam, the religion of their forefathers. The text also contains a number of explicit alchemical references, to transmutation, sublimation and alchemical Sulphur (the ‘seed’ representing the human spirit). However, whilst the Caliphs of Cordoba may have been the inheritors of the mysteries of Egypt, Drew Ali derived most of the alchemical portions of the Holy Moorish Koran from the Aquarian Gospel, a New-Age Christian text from the turn of the C 20^th. The Gospel’s author may have been inspired by Victorian occultist writers, themselves drawing on Paracelsus or Agrippa. By the late Renaissance, any influence on European alchemy from Islamic Spain had been thoroughly ‘occulted’. So there is no direct chain of transmission from Al-Andalus to Moorish Science, at least if we stick with the realm of historical evidence, rather than that of mythology and ‘poetic facts’.

What follows is therefore not an attempt to uncover non-existent historical evidence, but rather a search for resonances and parallels between Moorish Teaching and Islamic alchemy. This is a modest attempt at ‘returning’ Moorish Science to its original sources of inspiration, however broken and fragmented the actual lines of historical transmission. The Arabic root meaning ‘return’, gives us the terms for both ‘repentance’ (tawba) and ‘hermeneutics’ (ta’wil). Perhaps what follows is a very modest venture in hermeneutical interpretation in the guise of repentance for the appropriation of alchemical knowledge by the Fallen Europeans, from its original Moorish, Islamic, and ultimately Egyptian sources.

Theophrastus al-Razi El