By John M. Edwards “What on my first two visits has seemed gay and bizarre (was) now like a game that had gone on too long.” —Graham Greene, on Vietnam’s Caodai cult.It really didn’t make sense. There in front of me, outside the smudged bus window, was “The Great Divine Temple” at Tay Ninh, Vietnam—a whacked-out EPCOTy architectural hallucination resembling Gaudi on opium—and I didn’t really want to go inside. The idea of a cult creeps me out. Er, would they try to abduct and brainwash me?I had come all the way to Vietnam to investigate a weird supernatural religion called Caodaism, an attempt to fuse the ideal faith, “a universal religion,” from a potboiled spiritual pho centered on Spritism (which swept the Americas in the 19th century with its occult séances, tarot cards and crystal balls, as well as popularizing the German practice of Christmas trees inside the house) and just about every other religion on the planet. You name it. But what really attracted me was that their adherents whimsically and wisely worshiped Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as a saint!Also venerated are Sun Yat-Sen, the leader of the Chinese Revolution of 1911; Trang Trinh,… Read full this story
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