Evolove: Bohemian Artist and Mystic Isaac Frazee [Bonus Audiobook]

The cover art of the original publication, designed by the author. Might make a good tattoo.

Jeff reads an abridged version of Isaac Frazee, Evolove: The Quest and Findings of an Efficiency Expert (1929). This book explores several themes related to the emphases of our podcast. Frazee’s biography and intellectual influence on Southern California culture is goin to take up a lot of his research agenda in at least the next year or so. His work is almost unknown today but reflects interesting challenges to industrialism, unquestioned capitalism, and religiosity that gets in the way of the way of Jesus. There is a bit of Christian anarchy and Christian socialism possibly behind this text. Eventually, Jeff will try to determine whether the themes in this book that resonate with the Tao Te Ching are accidental or are evidence of Lao Tzu’s influence on Frazee.

For the full text and additional photos related to Frazee, check out our other site here.

We (Jeff and Stacie) have started a little project we call the “Taosurfer Ranch” on a small piece of Frazee’s old property in rural San Diego canyon. He later moved to Laguna Beach, where he was responsible for the arts scene that ultimately led to the famous Pageant of the Masters.

If you are a descendent of Frazee or have additional information, documents, or artifacts from his life, please reach out to us directly. Please also reach out also if you are interested in either A) being part of a project where we publish the entirety of this text, along with an introduction to Frazee’s life and legacy as either a for-credit or volunteer research assistant [this will also be a research class in the History and Political Thought Program with Jeff at CUI next year] or B) helping us fund a solid publication and perhaps documentary on Frazee.

This “audiobook” is a rough run through to demonstrate the concept and concepts in the book. Eventually, we hope to produce a complete, unabridged, and professionally produced audiobook, along with a critical edition with extensive footnotes. There’s a lot going on beneath this text that won’t be immediately apparent without footnote commentary and identification of the many allusions contained in it.

Note that Frazee was a man of his times and some of his language reflects ways of conceiving indigenous religion and culture that—while in no way evidence of racism, patronizing attitudes, or ill will—would not be used today if Frazee were alive. For instance, he uses “Indian” and “red” to describe the fictional people the protagonist encounters in the Sonoran desert. An academic offense that is not so politically sensitive is reference to the then broadly excepted “essentialism” of the anthropology of religion, such as when it is said that “all primitive cultures” tend to find albino things auspicious. That is how most scholars, such as Mircea Eliade, would have investigated religions. This has been replaced by the approaches of non-essentialist, non -totalizing scholars of religion like Jonathan Z. Smith and Stephen Protero. With their legitimate insights, scholars have come today to emphasize nuance and uniqueness in indigenous religious beliefs, but it seems valuable to at least occasionally pull back and note family resemblances. As mentioned elsewhere, one of Jeff’s priorities when researching Frazee is to determine the extent to which the spiritual and ethical ideas in Evolove are most influenced by direct contact with indigenous Californian and other Southwest peoples or was projected upon their pre-Columbian society in order to sketch out a utopia based more on the spiritualism, transcendentalism, or eastern philosophical ideas being explored by educated nonspecialist at the time.

Portrait of the author by Joseph Kleitch.