I, Dynamo

Debunking The Biblical Creation Myth:

Water Vs. Dirt

by

R.E. Prindle

One of the great conflicts in the course of the development of the human intellect is that of science vs. religion.  The conflict should not be confused with Evolution that relates to physical changes, while science and religion are mental approaches.  Both science and religion have existed through out history.  As science requires physical confirmation and religion doesn’t science has developed more slowly.

Again science requires confirmation while religion is ‘revealed.’  Thus the Asiatics of the East End of the Mediterranean tended to be religious while the Egyptian and the Greeks tended toward the scientific, as primitive as it might appear.

Somewhen in the Pisces  side of twelve hundred BC the notion of what the religionists are pleased to call monotheism was determined, which was supposed to invalidate polytheism, was adopted as the official stance of the Jews, or Hebrews and succeeded as the official stance in subsequent Western history.

Polytheism is actually primitive science with each god representing a facet of reality.  Naturally rather than disappearing polytheism was transmogrified into the Godhead and the ten emanations or Sephiroth.  Thus the Gods and Goddesses coursed through history gradually becoming what is called collectively Science instead of the Godhead while the various scientific disciplines replace the Emanations or Sephiroth.

Zeus, for instance became the Godhead transmogified and the minor gods and goddesses became the Emanations.  Fundamental actually.

A major problem to the human intellect is the problem of life and that involves the elementals-earth, water, air and fire.  The Greek Pre-Socratics wrestled mightily with this problem while the discussion was universal which also involved the Jews.  In their mythical history they opted for earth as the primary material of life as they saw dirt and humans as solids.  This was a serious error in science, but no problem in religion, as human life is actually based in water being something like 98% with the other 2% composed of atomic elements.

Jewish theory was hobbled by their religious belief that the earth and universe was created at the beginning of the Age of Taurus.  Ludicrous on the face of it.  Thus all of existence had a very short period for development or evolution.

The Jews, or their Hebrew Semitic ancestors, splintered off from the Semitic main body in Mesopotamia at the cusp of Taurus and Aries while retaining the beliefs current of Taurus.  The main body that retained the science of the Sumerians who they replaced in Mesopotamia, were aware that civilization went back a hundred thousand years and before that the age of the Earth was indeterminant.

Circumstances shackled the mind of Western man to the Jewish version of creation, that is of the years of the Taurian Age. ‘God’, that is the Jewish version of ‘God’, said the Jews, came into existence at the same time and he created Man by picking up a clod of dirt and sculpting an image of himself breathing life into it.  So I look like God, you look like God, right?, unless you’re a woman and then you are a clone of the first man fashioned from the material of his rib right?

As I say, circumstances foisted this ridiculous nonsense onto the mind of Western man universally as fact until some time in the eighteenth century of  Pisces  when the science of geology demonstrated the impossibility of the planet being only four thousand years old at that time.

Subsequently we have come to accept, based on scientific rather than religious grounds that the planet may be four and a half BILLION years old.  Thus the Semitic religions fall to pieces.

Here’s a problem that worries lots of people:  where did water come from?  The prevailing ‘scientific;’ explanation is that water came from outer space.  Comets dropped it off.  This raises the problem of why are oceans of water floating around in outer space looking for planets to make a real splash down on?

Personally, I accept the science that water is made right here on this planet.  Space cats are going to have to come up with real proof.  The fact is that the giant iron core of the planet rotates at a different speed than the outer layers.  The outer layers are unstable slipping around the core at a lower speed.  The friction between the core and the slipping outer layers.  The slipping creates a magnetic field called gravity.

The heat and pressure generate chemical changes while the outer layers transmute the different elements into different substances.  Hydrogen and oxygen being the two elements that combine to make water.  The water, then, is extruded onto the surface.  Even today great subaqueous springs continuously extrude to refresh and replenish the water supply.  The low lying lands slowly filled with water to create the oceans.  The water evaporated, as water will do, and various gases including oxygen constitute air.  In the process the elevated part of the planet came to know fresh water.

Here is an astounding fact:  In one billion years, prepare now, the Sun will be 10% brighter making it hot enough for Earth to lose enough hydrogen to space to cause the planet to lose all its water. (Fact taken from Wikipedia.)  Thus while oxygen may remain there won’t be enough hydrogen to form H2O.

There is no need to look to outer space to know where water comes from; it is a natural process of the planet.

Thus the oceans were formed.  In the process of extrusion the various elements (iron, copper etc.) were dissolved in the water.  Therefore water (hydrogen and oxygen) has many trace elements of which about eighteen are used to create life.  This can only happen in water.

Rabbi Loewe, a fifteenth century European Rabbi formed the monster called the Golem, whose role was to kill anti-Semites, out of dirt that he breathed air into its nostrils and brought it to life.  This is magic of the highest order.  Neither ‘God’ or Rabbi Loewe ever created life that way.

So, all of these elements were floating around in the primordial soup, that is to say oceans, where they bumped into each other forming various combinations that bonded into primitive one celled organisms that began to mutate and change into various forms.  Life began in the oceans.  There originally was not much oxygen in the atmosphere  but when it reached about 21% life became possible.  How long ago that was isn’t known.  We know it was when the atmosphere became 21% because that is the percentage needed today to sustain life.  If the oxygen were reduced sufficiently the various forms of life would become sluggish and inefficient; if the oxygen content rose life forms would burn oxygen more brightly and expire.

Thus, humankind evolved in water and assumed the appearance of solidity.  As Isaac Asimov (who was Jewish by the way) said:  Humans are just big bags of water.  No dirt involved.  Another Jewish myth debunked.

A Review:  The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin

by

R.E. Prindle

Heylin, Clinton:  The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, 2021, Little Brown & Co.

All good things come to an end and Bob Dylan’s ‘Never Ending Tour’ terminated in 2020 after the Great Magical Virus of 2019 arrived.  The world was put in lockdown.  Bob returned home.  He will be 80 years old this May 24^th.  I think it doubtful that he will return the road.  Hopefully he will sit down and draft a second volume of his chronicles.  Probably not.  Vol. I was criticized and he doesn’t like criticism.  Strange that he would put out a three volume set of Sinatra songs.

It almost seems malicious that Clinton Heylin would release yet another biography on Bob that details his early career from 1960 to 1966 when Bob’ personality disintegrated under the strain of too much fame.

Bob was born in 1941 , making him thirteen in 1954, the seminal year of our times when the Supreme Court issued the famous decision of Brown vs. The Board Of Education of Topeka.  Thus the disintegration of the United States began that is almost complete today.  Thus Bob and I were present at the creation of seventy some years of racial turmoil.  The Black-White situation would be central to Bob’s musical career.

To this point in time there has been only one permissible opinion of the importance of that Judicial decision.  I view here my interpretation of that momentous decision and its aftermath.  The matter was not handled correctly but as the starting point of the Negro Revolution reaching a crescendo today the matter should have been thought out better.

The Supreme Court of 1954 was the very opposite of the Supreme Court that Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited in 1933 at his inauguration.  Then the Court consisted of men born during the Gilded Age, anathema to FDR.  As they continued to reject liberal edicts, one might say revolutionary policies, he became frustrated and made an appeal to pack the Court with enough Liberal judges to override the existing Court and rubber stamp his policies.  As he was always willing to use any means necessary no matter how illegal the country was horrified at the idea of overturning the democratic process. 

But then  a couple Justices died, a couple advisedly handed in their resignations and the Court became Liberal as FDR refilled the vacant seats.  After twenty years of treason, as Joseph McCarthy phrased it, appointments by FDR and Harry Truman turned the Court so Liberal it was nearly Red.  It shifted from interpreting the law to making law, thus usurping the purpose of the House of Representatives, the so-called legislative body.

While I don’t understand Heylin’s notion of a double life of Bob Dylan I do understand the double life of the United States of America.  That double life was the Negro nation vs. the White nation.  All other problems are secondary to that problem for which there is no resolution other than the elimination of one people or the other.  It sounds harsh but it is a fact.

Absurdists today have totally exacerbated the problem insisting that Black people on their arrival in 1619 have been the reason for the success of the US to a point ten years earlier than 2021.  First there was slavery, then the Jim Crow period that ended in 1954 then to the freefall of today.

I was in the tenth grade in 1954 when the Brown decision was announced.  I gave a little shudder as I realized what was ahead for the country.  As I say, the racial problem can only be resolved by the extinction of one race or the other, that is a genocide, that genocide will be achieved through sexual miscegenation.  The direction of the genocide today is against the Whites.  Whiteness must be removed from the planet they proclaim.  Could anything be plainer?   This may seem improbable or impossible as Whites vastly outnumber Negroes.  Not as big a problem as it may seem as will be revealed.

Few, if any,  recognized Brown as the opening shot in the Negro rebellion conducted by asymmetrical methods as well as violent revolution.  Nor, was anybody aware that everything had been planned for the attack.  My home town, Saginaw, Michigan had two high schools, Saginaw High and Arthur Hill.  Saginaw High in 1954 was fully integrated being half Black and Arthur Hill was all White.  I attended Arthur Hill as I lived on the then White West Side.  Within days days of the Court decision a gigantic Black Guy, easily forty years old claiming to be a high school student,  showed up at my French class.  It was clear to me that he had never finished school.

I have no idea why he came to converse with a French teacher.  Perhaps Mrs. Jacobson was a member of NAACP or affiliated in someway, hence a co-conspirator.  I was astounded by the urgency of the guy’s presence while it seemed that the two were acquainted.  At one point I blurted out that he wasn’t a student for which I was physically threated by this giant.  As he was a foot and half taller than myself and four time my weight I chose to make discretion the better part of valor.

When we were playing football with Saginaw High their all Black team was well over eighteen year old  semi-pro players.  Fortunately they were more intent on beating up White kids than winning the game so Arthur Hill miraculously won the game but limped and crawled back to the West Side.  Saginaw was an industrial magnet so there was a steady stream of both White and Black migrants from the South moving North of which Saginaw got its share.  Now, you can say what you want about a Mississippi education vs. the North but the White emigrants had no trouble meeting educational standards and blending right in while the Black emigrants from, say, Mississippi, could not meet educational standards but blended in perfectly with the Black population.  Both were equal within their respective race.

I, therefore, concluded that there were inherent differences of intellectual capabilities since Mississippi was alleged  to have the most wretched educational system in the US; while, on the other hand, the cultural differences were so deep and apparent while  reinforced by  social separation that I realized that it would be decades, if ever, that any integration could take place.  However, the Blacks were not disposed to wait but wanted social and intellectual equality if not supremacy.  The only result could be the dumbing down of the educational system.

At that time reparations was not an issue but when they did become one it became apparent that the only acceptable reparation would be the enslavement of Whites to Blacks.

I took a deep breath figuring the future was going to be impossible and I have been proven right.  War is hell and the race war began with the Brown Board of Education decision backed by the full military force of the US Government, tanks and all.  Blacks may have been inferior in numbers but the full backing of the military and Judicial System the Whites were cowed.

Bob Dylan, the subject of this article lived away up North on the Canadian border in Hibbing Minnesota, just below Duluth on the Iron Range.  US ore deposits were exhausted because of FDR’s stripping the country of its mineral resources to be deployed in foreign wars not only supplying the entire continent of Europe but the teeming millions of China and Far East.  FDR was a wastrel without a grain of common sense.

Hibbing was in full decline.  The town apparently had no Negroes but was populated by a variety of European immigrants, at that time first, second and third generation.  Bob was part of the Jewish segment numbering three or four hundred people.  His parents were Orthodox Jews, his father representing  the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

The commercial life of Hibbing was in the hands of the Jews so that there was some hostility, perhaps more than anyone wants to discuss, between the two factions.  One gathers that Bob’s father was aggressively Jewish and was resented by the non-Jews.   Consequently Bob had a rough time growing up.  Pictures show him just as an ordinary middle class kid rather preppy and chubby wearing penny loafers.  An emasculated kid’s gear.  At the same time he is described as a wild kid and rather hoody.  Hard to recognize the one style in the other in the pictures.  Certainly in New York he assumed the scruff character.  This latter description would square with his account that he was sent to reform school at Redwing, Minnesota on highway 61.

On the other hand when he had married Sara Lowndes and was living in Woodstock he reverted to the preppy style he had in Hibbing.  After replenishing the earth with four offspring according to biblical requirements he reverted to the scruff personality and went back on the road to resume being the real Bob Dylan.

In 1961 he left Minnesota for the Big Bagel, New York City to make it as a folk musician.  I haven’t seen any of his biographers give him credit for this but the move was both intelligent and quite nervy.  In order to make it in the music business in 1960 New York City was the winnowing site.  The recording industry hadn’t yet surfaced in LA although it would begin to do so soon so it was impossible to get attention anywhere else except maybe Nashville if you were Country.  So Bob took on the Big Bagel and succeeded gloriously.

Rather than just show up in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian center of the US located in lower Manhattan, with the rest of the arriving Greenies he chose to take a couple months  to scope out the scene and plan his attack.  Good strategic move.

I don’t know whether they still do it but every year a contingent arrived from smaller locations in the US where their life style wasn’t accepted, i.e. they were homosexuals or there was no future where they were.  NYC absorbed them all.

Now, this is incredible, Bob says that to make ends meet he became a male prostitute, what Heylin calls a ‘rent’ boy using British terminology.  Heylin, like me, is incredulous, however one would think that such activity would be the last thing one would admit, true or false.  Thus, I have to take Bob at his word in this case although the history of himself that he related to his fellow folkies was pure fabrication.   

Bob arrived in New York as the Negro Revolution was reaching an early apex, only seven years after Brown.  While scoping out the scene he quickly realized the Village was a Jewish, Left and homosexual scene and that a Negro revolution was going on that had to be catered to.  Whether his work on 42^nd St. came in handy isn’t known.  It was known that he was a complete womanizer.

However Bob’s musical education was rooted in Country and Western.  Having read many biographies, I see this aspect of his background, if noticed, passed over.  I am three years older than Bob born on May 26, 1938 while we both came from the same record listening background.  We both have nearly identical mental catalogs of Country/Hillbilly songs.  If you want to notice the importance of his C&W background notice that after he came back from his nervous breakdown in 1967 John Wesley Harding was as a country singer and on his Nashville Skyline album he tips his cowboy hat with a howdy and I’m just a C&W singer look.  He didn’t write that out but that was the import of the picture.

Bob was ideally placed for radio reception of the great Country stations in Hibbing that blasted up from the South and Mexico/Del Rio Texas. (www.THERADIOHISTORIAN.org/xer/xer.hdml)  The station had the best C&W going while the ads touted the most amazing stuff you’ve ever heard and there were lots of items.  Another great station operated out of Waterloo Iowa also with the greatest ads ever.  Moving slightly East, maybe not so convenient for Hibbing Minnesota was the fantastic WCKY-WCincinnatiKentucky.  I could get a staticky Wheeling West Virginia that played the real mountain music.  Bob and his biographer always mention Shreveport Louisiana, home of the Louisiana Hayride but the reception was too poor for me.

I lived in Saginaw, Michigan, son of a hillbilly as the Southern Whites and Blacks came North for jobs.  Hillbilly music was despised.  I mean you didn’t mention you listened to it or you were blacklisted.   Black music was not heard or listened to except for a few White Negroes. Even Detroit, that heavily Black city only played a half hour show that I tuned into a few times but Black music was too foreign for my tastes.  Ertha Kitt and Harry Belafonte were popular Black performers but their music was no way related to Black music, nor was that very popular Black group, The Platters.

The first Black artist to break on through to the other side was the incredible Little Richard.  He blazed a trail that Black artists could follow.

Little Richard unbuckled his seat belt in 2020 at the age of 87 heading for the Top 10 in the sky.  He claimed that he was the inspiration for James brown and many others.  Brown never really broke through, as James Brown and His Famous Flames of the mid-fifties he was going nowhere.  Then, about 1960 Berry Gordy came up with a successful formula for Black music.

When Bob says that back in Hibbing he had been into R&B, other than Little Richard, I don’t believe him. His Hibbing radio station was totally middle of the road.  His Rainy Day Women off his Blonde On Blonde album was his version of Little Richard’s breakthrough Tutti Frutti, very nearly as astonishing.

So, when he got to NYC he had a lot of catching up to do.  It was right about the time he reached NYC that CBS released the two  Robert Johnson LPs that began to turn White bluesmen’s heads.  It should be borne in mind that as important as Johnson’s records are touted to be absolutely no one in the general population ever heard of him and still have never listened to the records as late as 1970 and possibly ever.  Outside of a very limited circle he was unnoticed.  Blues artists may have imitated him to some extent but Johnson inspired no one at the time.

Dylan however says he listened to the albums a couple times and was ecstatic.  Don’t try to find too much Johnson in his music though.  Remember that he recruited Mike Bloomfield, a notable Blues guitarist to play for him then told him not to play that Blues shit but to be more country.  When you’re listening to Bob you’re listening to transmogrified Country.  Once Bob hit his stride with Bringing It All Back Home I loved his stuff.

Back to NYC Folk Music, the most boring stuff ever recorded.  Race is central to understand the US.  New York City was a Jewish town.  It had the largest colony of Jews anywhere in the world.  The Jews looked on NYC as the New Promised Land.  It was theirs.

Sitting in NYC and despising anything South and West as all New Yorkers do, or did, they looked out at the hillbillies and country folk and laughed as considering them less than human but listening to the music they played from a musicological point of view they thought that they may be dopey but they sure liked the music but that it should be altered to Jewish tastes.  And they were right about the music but wrong about the people.

That is another matter but let’s look at it anyway.  Social attitudes have been altered completely since 1950-60 which period is involved here.  The old country and Hillbilly people have disappeared today subsumed in modern culture but at the time the Hillfolk were considered great comic material.  Al Capp was foremost with his Li’l Abner comic strip in which he was quite vicious in demeaning  the country he called Dogpatch.  At the same time the Barney Google comic strip laughed at the hill people.  The great Gasoline Alley strip laughed at Urbanbillies.

The most demeaning of all was the two books of a creep called Erskine Caldwell.  His books were Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.  They were positively evil and ‘cultured’ people accepted them at face value while the characterization of the impoverished White formed the image of ‘ignorant’ Whites that persists to this day.  Caldwell was indelible moreso than Al Capp. 

The persona adopted by Dylan, ironically himself a Jew, was that of the despised Hillbilly.  An Okie, the likes of those who invaded LA and Bakersfield/Fresno during the Dust Bowl and Depression.

So, New Yorkers discovered Hillbilly music and Southern Black music at the same time.  They revered Black music that was just as or more eccentric as Hillbilly while the Black people were more acceptable than the White Hillbilly.  No matter they altered the Blues as well as Hillbilly.  Actually both were closely related but done in a different way.  Jewish musicologists grabbed their bulky primitive recording equipment and headed South to record these precious musics before they were papered over by the hand of time.  Most of this was done during the thirties of the Roosevelt years.

If a Black guy was singing some pop song they’d never heard before they threw down their machine, handed the singer a microphone and said Sing into that.  Coming from NYC there was a lot they didn’t know but they weren’t aware of that.  If the Blacks weren’t totally up to date they weren’t hanging back either.  It was that they talked as funny as the White Hillbillies but with a different accent.  The Southerners came from the English/Scottish Border country primarily during the eighteenth century and spoke the uneducated English of their time which was then picked up by the Negroes and became their standard English.  Remember these people came direct from Africa and learned the English the Southern Whites were speaking at the time.  The Negro dialect that sounded funny in the twentieth century was the same English spoken by most of the English of the eighteenth century.

The tapes or records came back to NYC and these Jewish gentlefolk were appalled by the appearance of the singers but liked the songs that they turned down in their originals then adapting the music for Jewish tastes.   They made it pretty boring stuff.  Their crap was going nowhere  until Little Richard Redux in the person of Bob Dylan showed and put some life into them.  It was easy, wasn’t it Bob?

There is some discussion of when Bob decided to go electric.  That is to abandon NYC folk and play the pseudo Hillbilly music that he loved.  When CBS, the label that signed him to promote his first album he came up with a raucus something that was a cross between Sun Records and Little Richard  in his hokey Okie voice called Mixed Up Confusion.  In the lyrics he confesses that his mind, is mixed up and confused.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH2hyQeZo1U

Bob would later confess that the Folk thing was a shuck.  In slang shuck means to deceive and manipulate.  He also said that he chose folk as entry point because it was vacant at the time meaning there was little competition at that time and it was a surreal time in which all the rules were suspended, which was true.  If the folkies could be wowed by songs like Masters of War and God Is On Our Side,  the whole act was vacant and beneath notice which in 1963 was exactly as I saw it.  Bob used the scene as a stepping stone and it worked.

The miracle is that while appearing talentless in 1960, 61, 62, 63 and part of 64 he was able to put together a supreme act for an audience of limited appeal.  What he considers his two song masterpieces, Positively Fourth Street and Like A Rolling Stone are vindictive and nasty in tone, possibly for that reason pulled from Top 40 radio.  The two songs were strong variations of Mixed Up Confusion.  This was not music for general public and for that reason for all the noise Bob made he didn’t sell all that well.  He really wasn’t in the same league as the Beatles.

It is hard to understand the milieux in which the Beatles and Dylan became celebrated.  One is led to believe that there was something out of the ordinary or different to the tremendous buildup the two acts received.  For a couple years nearly every move they made was broadcast worldwide on television news channels.  And one must remember these were acts- shucks.  There may be something to the notion that the world wanted relief from the events surrounding the period of the Kennedy assassination.  Perhaps that even presaged the end of an epoch and the beginning of another. Perhaps when the Beatles emerged from the plane it was the annunciation of a new epoch. Perhaps it represented the end of the Roosevelt reaction to the Gilded Age.

In 1958/59 the mob backed singers Fabian and Frankie Avalon received the same buildup.  Of course, they were Mafia backed with no performing background, non-singers as it were, who needed the buildup to recover the mob investment.  The Beatles and Dylan were authentic acts before their wild promotion.  So far as I know Fabian was the first of the buildups and except for young girls, at whom his career was directed, he was a non-entity.

There was a difference in the build up of the Beatles and Dylan.  The Beatles were a proven commodity in Great Britain while when their LP was released in the US on a minor label it was a failure.  Certainly the Beatles were surprised, even amazed, by their reception in the US at the NYC Idlewild airport.  It was like people, young people at least, were looking for a savior.

The Beatles English record label EMI’s US subsidiary Capitol Records was ordered to pull out all the stops to make the Beatles a smash and Capitol did.  A trainload of girls was recruited  at the airport to give the Beatles a screaming reception.  These four guys stepped off the plane looking like four ordinary yobbos (British for punks), gazed in wonderment and right before our eyes transmogrified into the Beatles, the saviors of the world.  Soon Lennon would make the mistake of announcing that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.  That’s when their heartaches began.  They went away from the US and never again returned.  But they still were the Beatles and that long strange trip into the Sixties began.

Dylan was another case, he was a beat up homme, fairly thoroughly emasculated as was Lennon.  He covered that up with a sort of comic bluster.  I refer you again to Mixed Up Confusion.  It was even more difficult to explain the media attention that Bob got.  He was an American version of the yobbo.  Both the Beatles and Dylan had nothing to offer for their sanctity other than a few songs.

With the example of the Beatles before them, all the groups who were part of the British Invasion exalted themselves as the bearers of a New Dispensation, and yea verily, we believed it, as did the most prominent of the American groups after 1966 with the exception of the Monkees who were a made up corporate shuck with songs from professional song writers hence not to be taken seriously.  They were all yobbos and leaders in that revolution.

The loyalty was to the Beatles and Dylan.  Being so rapidly exalted, well above their status in life, going from poverty to millions upon millions of dollars, had a devastating effect on their personalities.  The Beatles, with the exception of Lennon with his Jesus fixation, handled the fame, the situation well with cool heads, or seemingly so.  Dylan had a very difficult time of it.  That problem is the central issue of Clinton Heylin’s The Double Life of Bob Dylan.  Heylin chronicles Dylan’s descent to his nervous breakdown in 1966 when Dylan was overwhelmed by difficulties of fame.  Essentially he retired from the business at the height of his fame after composing the three records that indelibly established his reputation as a savior:  Bringin’ It All Back Home, Highway ’61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde.  The Lyrics sounded deep and knowing but meant nothing, reflections on his sex life, while the music sounded new and exciting.  Without electricity Bob was dull.

If you want to see the real Bob Dylan, reverting in 1964-65 you need to watch the Pennebaker film Don’t Look Back in its original form before Bob suppressed it and replaced it with different material.  Pennebaker’s version is an accurate portrayal of the actual situation if you analyze it nearly frame by frame.  In the movie Dylan and his yobbo entourage are staying at London’s premier Savoy Hotel.  Loaded on booze and drugs the raucous party is disturbing the sedate hotel.  I stayed there once, didn’t like it. 

Now these yobbos are completely out of their element and wish to show their disdain for ‘the rich.’  A couple loonies decide to throw the glass shelves from the bathroom out the window into the street.  Dylan completely drops his disguise shedding his entire Bob Dylan persona to return to the emasculated Bobby Zimmerman as he pleaded with them to not do that. Groups were famous at the time for trashing hotels and they were going to trash the Savoy.  Very uncool.  That is the real personality behind, as Heylin would say, the shades.  The situation deteriorates badly when the manager comes up to request that they hold it down.  Naturally the yobbos start taunting the guy.  Only Dylan’s reputation and perhaps Grossman’s  intervention save Dylan from being expelled from the hotel.

So, Robert Zimmerman had to develop and then had to maintain the character of Bob Dylan that Zimmerman had created.  He became increasingly distressed as he realized his dream augment by massive does of alcohol and drugs.  Alcohol had been a problem since high school.  Some say he was a heroin addict and I’m sure he dabbled but his main drug was the drug of NYC, methamphetamines.  

As far as amphetamines went Bob was violating no laws. Amphetamines were legal to 1967 a year after Bob broke down.  NYC was awash in amphetamines.  Andy Warhol’s crowd at the Factory lived on the drug until that scene too crashed, worn out by exhausting agitation.  Several Dr. Feelgoods, led by Max Jacobson who injected then president Jack Kennedy, a true meth head, and everyone who was anyone.  Jacobson’s history is very interesting.  Read Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes, Dr. Feelgood:  The Shocking Story of the Doctor Who May Have Changed History.

Jacobson had combined meth with vitamins in his massive shot.  It was apparently believed that the vitamins negated the deleterious effects of the amphetamines.  Many were the celebrities who discovered otherwise.

As Bob was headed to his confrontation with the realities of fame and its obligations, the whole of the rock scene, the hippies, what was known as the counterculture was also dealing with harsh realities and not doing it very well.  Bob, at least, realized his limitations thus relying almost completely on the integrity of his manager, Albert Grossman who was betraying his trust as he found otherwise. 

In the early years of his success he refused to deal with monetary matters leaving them up to Grossman.  Dylan wisely wanted to concentrate on building his career of song writing on which, after all, his career rested.  An artist’s obligation is to his art and there isn’t time or space in his life to trifle with mundane matters.

Grossman like all managers was seduced by the huge amounts of money he was dealing with and like Elvis’ manager Colonel Parker he wanted a bigger and bigger percentage and finally Parker and all other managers cursed their unlucky star that they couldn’t have it all.  With Parker and Elvis the day of reckoning never came; with Bobby his eyes were opened with the inevitable feeling of betrayal.

Unlike most managers Grossman didn’t necessarily make Bob as Bob proved himself a major talent.  The raw material was there but it had to be made accessible.  Bear in mind this is a Jewish affair.  Bob surrounded himself with his fellow Jews while his fellow Jews sought him out.  Bob at one time was associating with the notorious terrorist unit the Jewish Defense League and the criminal Jewish Defense Organization.

Bob’s performance and voice would have depressed his chances had not his song writing saved him.  Now, in the music business song writing royalties is where the money is.  BMI and ASCAP are the two organizations that monitor and collect the royalties distributing them to the writers, after skimming the top of course.  That is they get paid 50% of the royalties and writers share is 50%.  Grossman’s deal with Dylan was a 50-50 share of the remaining 50%.  That is each was to get 25% of their 50%.  Then in violating Dylan’s trust Grossman also took 50% of Dylan’s 25% share of the whole leaving Dylan with just 12 and a half percent of the 100 percent.  When Dylan was finally convinced that Grossman would do this to him the split occurred.

Now, put in terms of a gold mine Dylan was the goldmine.  Grossman was the extractor and refiner.  Grossman did work like a beaver and got Dylan’s songs into so many cracks and crannies that he fairly earned his twenty-five percent but an extractor and refiner has nothing to do without a gold mine.  Grossman was a prospector who found the mine and wanted all.  But, all artists get screwed by their managers either intentionally or inadvertently.   Some say Grossman made Dylan.  The fact is Dylan might never have made it without Grossman’s management.

By 1966 Dylan was worn out and knew that he was at the end of his rope and then he learned that Grossman, perhaps wisely believing that one should make hay while the sun shone, lined up a string of dates that when Dylan saw it he knew he could never make it through.  He hit the wall.  I can’t be certain that I detect a note of glee in Heylin’s literary voice but he does cut the story off there.  Bob Dylan the First was dead.  He was no longer busy being born he was among the walking dead.

He retreated to Woodstock, marriage and fatherhood while he reorganized his mind to be reborn.  However, his muse had left him never to return.  The second Bob Dylan was on a long weary trail when he abandoned his wife to renew the endless search for a new self. During the seventies and eighties he wandered but without a muse was not very interesting.  Then in desperation he became a wandering minstrel on his Never Ending Tour.

That tour ended in 2019 destroyed by a virus.  I earlier in the essay said that I didn’t think he would resume performing.  Just a few days ago I received an email from BobDylan.com advising that Bob was going to stream a concert on 7/18/21.  Tickets were priced just short of thirty dollars.  I bought one.

Rectifying The International Exodus From Egypt

by

R.E. Prindle

Having been raised on the Bible in fact, one is reluctant  to continue to believe the Bible as history rather than just mythology no different from any other mythology.  One can compare the Jewish method to that of Homer’s Greek mythology.  For instance the alleged parting of the Red Sea is no different than the goddess Athene coming down from Olympus to seize Achilles by his golden locks while whispering ‘Don’t do it.’  as he considers attacking his king Agamemnon.

Put into real terms the Jews were merely one of many peoples, ‘vile Asiatics’ as the Egyptians called them who were driven from a reconquering Egypt at approximately the same time.  Thus the Jews were only one group of ‘vile Asiatics’ occupying Egyptian lands. They took advantage of the Asiatic invasion to get a piece of the action. There was nothing special about them. They were driven out sometime between Pharoah Amose c.1600d BC and the Ramesside Pharoahs c. 1200.  The chronology of the Age of Aries is unclear.  There was nothing miraculous is their expulsion.  That means that the Passover ceremony is a fraud.

From 1700 BC or so to 1200 BC or so the Eastern end of the Med littoral  was in turmoil as many peoples were on the move.  This is part of the Age of Aries.  About the beginning of the Age of Aries the Aryans began to move out of Central Asia from about where the Uighurs are now.  The Uighurs are very probably the remnant of the Aryans left behind.  The Aryans migrated East, South and West.

In China they faced a very determined resistance being defeated and then assimilated.  If I am not mistaken the extreme antipathy of the Chinese to the Uighurs of today is in remembrance of the Aryan invasion of 2000 BC.

The invasion of India and its results are well known and need no comment.  In the West the Aryans initially settled Persia, renamed Iran today in memory of them.  Other migrants moved North of the Persians into the Eastern marge of the Black Sea, along the Northern marge and down into the Minoan Thalassocracy of Crete, which temporarily delayed their move into Egypt.  The Minoan civilization was superior to their own so that the Aryans assimilated Minoan customs.  As they later would when they confronted the superior Egyptian culture of Lower Egypt.

The Greeks then at this point were intermingling with the peoples that were causing the troubles of Egypt.  Greek elements would be among the Sea People and the Shepherd Kings occupying the Delta of Lower Egypt.  The Hittites were harassing Asia from the North and displaced peoples  the Jews called  Philistines probably of a congeries of peoples that occupied Palestine.   This was the milieux in which the Jews were battling for a place.  They, themselves, would be displaced from what they called Israel, by the Assyrians and Babylonians and removed en masse although later a remnant would return.

As I noted in an earlier essay prior to the Age of Leo and the ending of the last Ice Age most of the Med Basin was at 500 foot lower Ice Age levels.  As the planet warmed the ice melted and the waters rose to approximately today’s levels.  As humanity has always preferred living by the sea the great flood displaced whole civilizations to the four corners of the Earth.

In our times was a rumor of a White people existing in the Sahara.  These would have been remnants of the people flushed from the Med Basin by the rising waters into the adjacent highlands. 

The Civilization bearers settled in the Nile Delta probably at Memphis.  The flood would have thousands of years before Egypt emerged so the Delta not as silted as today must have been smaller area and a bigger swamp.

The migrants were intruding on the territory of the Upper Egyptians, an entirely different people, which began a very long period of warfare between the two peoples that ended about 3300 BC, Age of Taurus, with a unification of the two peoples.

Just as the Delta had been easily accessible to the migrants fleeing the flood so the Delta remained throughout its history.  Egypt, somewhat like the United States of the nineteenth century became legendary as a land of plenty, thus luring people ‘seeking a better life.’  People continuously raided and invaded Lower Egypt.  Thus they established a rival kingdom in the Delta at about the same time that the Greeks were established themselves in Greece and battling the Minoans.  Lower Egypt had to be reconquered by the Egyptians.

Thus the ‘vile Asiatics’, Greeks and Libyans occupied the Delta.  As Egypt provided a better life than the ‘vile Asiatics’ there were constant efforts to enter through the mountain passes to the East of the Nile.  Thus the Egyptians had to also garrison the Eastern approaches to keep Egypt, Egyptian.  This was a constant for thousands of years.

About the time of Ramessides the Delta was once again completely under Egyptian control.  The ‘vile Asiatics’ had been expelled and that included the Jewish people.  Pharaoh not only let them go but he drove them out.  There were no miracles.  The entire story of the next forty years of so-called Jewish history is a myth.

A myth that turns an expulsion into an attempt to migrate into a very uncertain future is a psychological reversal of fact.  The, uncorroborated, at least, Jewish version is that in a magical contest between Pharaoh and the Jews Jewish magic was more powerful than Egyptian magic, another reversal in fact as Egyptian magic was legendary.  But nobody can top the Jews.  Magic today is no longer a criterion so guess what?  Jews are said to have the highest IQ of all the races while they maintain at the same time that race does not exist.

The Jews according to their version then decided to leave Egypt of their own free will.  Rather than lose such valuable people Pharoah sent his army out to bring them back.  Somebody’s wet dream.

One must imagine that this huge forced transfer of multiple peoples  back into Asia unsettled the entire Eastern Med.  While this was going on in the South, up North at Troy the Greeks and Trojans were battling for an entire decade as the Greeks sought to capture that Sacred City and wipe its people from the face of the Earth.  They succeeded but then strangely they did not go back home.

One who did, King Agamemnon, discovered that his wife, Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra had seized the country and was ruling it as a Matriarchy with her male consort.  The Queen Bee did the obvious thing, she murdered Agamemnon getting out of the bath.  So ten years of fighting the Trojan Matriarchy went down the tube as the Matriarchy had triumphed in Agamemnon’s ten or eleven year absence.

Fleeing Trojans and other displaced people sought new homes with some them obviously washing up n the shores of Palestine who became known as the Philistines.  Paris France is believed to have been settled by the exiled Trojans.

Odysseus spent the next ten years wandering the Mediterranean with his ship and crew as the winds were unfavorable.

Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother, the victim for whom the war began, didn’t even try to get home, he and his ships went to Egypt, actually returned to Egypt, from which he had been recalled to fight in Troy.  As the Trojan War began Menelaus had gone to Egypt ‘on business’ leaving his wife Helen to be lusted after by the Trojan, Paris who had come from Troy to seduce her.  (See the Judgment of Paris to understand why.}

Now, why did Menelaus leave for Egypt?  He sure didn’t buy a ticket and go alone.  What with the fighting going on in the Delta he probably left Greece with twenty ships or so and a full contingent of fighting men to take part in that war.  As his profession was military, I imagine that he either left to take part in looting or perhaps as Egyptian auxiliaries.  When the recall from the Egyptian  war, came from Troy he turned around and sailed North.

After the Sacred City was looted I imagine the guys looked at each other and asked, what next?  Well, there was still the ruckus down in Egypt.  Probably like the White Company who had spent their lives fighting in the Hundred Years War that Conan Doyle describes who couldn’t just return to domestic life, if they had ever had one. The White Company decided to carve a kingdom our of France and Italy.   Menelaus and his troops with their adrenalin still up opted for more action rather than the hearthside.  ‘We could go down there and kick ass, they said, carve out a kingdom for ourselves.  And so they did.

The Egyptians and the Greeks always got along, they were natural allies against the ‘vile Asiatics,’ so maybe they fought alongside the Egyptians.  Bet on the winners.

The Egyptians then ran the Asiatics, including the Jews, out and once out they carried war home to the Asiatics.  Kept the flow of history going.

When I was in school Greek, Asian and Egyptian history were kept in airtight units.  But, when you consider the Arien Age as a unit, and this all occurred in the Arien age the interlocking the cultural units provides a somewhat  different story unaffected by Jewish magic.  The Jews were very minor players.

ERBzine 3620: ERB – Wells – Wold Newton

Locating The Garden Of Eden

by

R.E. Prindle

Now comes a knotty problem  that I have to deal with, that of the mythical Garden of Eden.  The Garden is a problem propounded by the Jews in the first book of their mythology, Genesis.  The Jews threw all Western civilization askew when they succeeded in making the mythology a ‘historical’ standard that has survived for well over two thousand years.  Today in the United States well over half the population believes the Garden of Eden myth history.

I think it likely that the notion of an early paradise was based on fact by the Sumerians who passed the quasi-historical story on to the invading Semites who adopted Sumerian myth and history as their own as they had none.

While we were all led to believe that prior to what we call recorded history all mankind was dumb and stupid while the early historians were thick and didn’t have any idea of what they were talking about this isn’t so.  History began, according to textbooks, in about 3500 BC in either Egypt or Mesopotamia, that is with the Sumerians who occupied lower Mesopotamia, that is at the then mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers.  Mesopotamia means- between two rivers.  The two rivers will be important in my conjecture.

In point of fact the Egyptians and Mesopotamians had memories that went back hundreds of thousands of years.  They were aware of the Great Year.  The Great Year has a cycle of about 2600 years.  Thus, when  the North Pole aligns with the star Polaris the summer of the Great Year is in progress and will remain so for about four thousand years.  We are currently one degree beyond Polaris so the Great Year summer is just beginning and will last 4000 years.

Thirteen thousand years from now when the North Pole aligns with the star Vega, the depths of Winter will be on the planet thus, an Ice Age.  There have been at least three interglacial summers.  These long cycles are caused by the Plane of the Ecliptic, that is, the planet is not upright in its relation to the Sun but tips over at an angle of about 23 degrees.  Thus, the Sun is vertical at the equator one day of the year further West each year. That is called the Precession of the Equinoxes.

Our Ancient ancestors observed and recognized this and as the Solar Year follows the exact same process and was divided into twelve months so the Great Year was divided into Ages of about 2100 years each.  This calendar was named the Zodiac.  It was a celestial calendar.  We know, therefore, that there is nothing to fear from so-called Global Warming.  It is a natural process and cannot be stopped.  The Earth has been warming since the North Pole passed the star Vega thirteen thousand years ago.  Mankind has survived at least three or four inter-glacial summers and the consequent winters.  It’s all good.

As the Earth cools in the winter of the great Year as in the Solar Year water freezes and snow falls.  A great snow cap forms in the Northern Hemisphere thousands of feet thick.  Great glaciers cover the mountain peaks and highlands.  Instead of rising the ocean levels fall, perhaps from 300 to 500 feet.  At that point land that is now under water was above water.

Mesopotamia that is currently situated at sea level at the mouth of the Twin Rivers was once hundreds of miles from the sea and a rural backwater of civilization.  What is now known as the Persian Gulf was exposed and a terrestrial paradise.  The Tigris and Euphrates formed one river filled summer and winter in a temperate climate providing an unending source of water for the peoples who inhabited the Valley of the Gulf.  The waters of the Two Rivers passed through the Straits of Hormuz and cascaded out into the sea.

Rainfall was plentiful, thus a great civilization grew up in the Valley and the Arabian uplands, which is now one of the driest areas on Earth was then well watered.  Legend has it and I view the legends as memory traces, a number of civilizations that grew up during this winter of the Great Year,  Atlantis, Shambala, Mu and the Ethiopia of the River Valley of the Twin Rivers.  All these memory traces would be enshrined in mythology.

According to the Sumerians, supported by the Egyptians, the Great Flood occurred during the Age of Leo of the Great Year.  Thus semi-recorded history began in the Ages of Taurus and Aries.  The period of these ancient civilizations then must have been in the Ages of Virgo and Libra.  Earlier than that is anybody’s guess although we know that the Earth has been occupied by so-called Homo Sapiens for a couple hundred thousand years while here is no accurate accounting for those earlier years, all is speculation, nothing is known for certain.  The Neanderthals were discovered only in mid-nineteenth century.

We do know that civilizations rise and fall followed by dark ages when all knowledge disappears existing only as memory traces.

For the purposes of this article we must not confuse the Zodiac with Astrology; they are two different things although Astrology, or the worship of stars, probably arose from the Zodiac or was joined to it.  The Zodiac existed and exists independently of Astrology.  Concerning Astrology:  While predicting future events is impossible, Astrology nevertheless was a phase passed through by the human mind while having an influence on men’s thinking and actions down to our own times.  The subject merits historical attention.

Thus during the four thousand years of Virgo and Libra the sea levels were still falling  and mankind of the four mentioned civilizations prospered.  The back country folk remained primitive compared to the four civilizations which the memory traces depict as great miraculous prosperous wise civilizations.

Then as the Age of Leo warmed the Earth, Spring and Summer approached as one would expect.

As some point a great sound as of celestial thunder boomed as winter released its hold and the balmy days of Spring and Summer were on the horizon.  The waters rose, very quickly as the ice cap collapsed and the glaciers shrank.  The seas began flooding the lands.  The Valley of the Two Rivers which is very shallow, three hundred feet deep, or less, at the present time rose over the civilization submerging it completely and the Spring heat began to dry up the lands of Arabia while the jet stream and weather patterns adjusted to the new conditions.  The Lost Quarter of Arabia sank into oblivion no longer able to support life.  Today it is the driest of lands.  The Twin Rivers began shrinking and the Gulf waters lapped Sumerian shores gradually depositing silt extending into the Gulf.

In legend the flooded valley that disappeared in the Great Flood became an idyllic place, a paradise.  The Great civilization of Atlantis was remembered and revered by the Lower Egyptians who escaped the waters.

The Ages of Leo and Cancer passed. Some memories of the Age of Gemini exist while the Age of Taurus began the return of civilization that exploded in the Ages of Aries and Pisces and into the Age of Aquarius that we are now entering.

The Sumerians remembered being uncivilized rough savages until a fish man name Oannes (John in today’s parlance) appeared from the sea, that is the Persian Gulf, and instructed them in the ways of civilization.  Of course, there was no fish man but Ethiopian survivors seeking higher ground just as the Libyans who fled the rising Mediterranean lowlands occupied Lower Egypt, the Delta of the Nile, thus bringing civilization to the Upper Egyptians who were in the same position as the Sumerians.

All events occur organically, there is no Magic.  A mystery is nothing more than an unexplained situation.  All mysteries can be explained simply with adequate knowledge.  The above account is how things must have happened.  Naturally, no Magic, no mysteries.  No men from outer space, no Jewish vision of the Garden of Eden.

Now, the Jews are not an ancient people.  According to their own records they came into existence at the cusp of the Age of Aries from Taurus.  They refused to accept the change from Taurus into Aries clinging to the beliefs of Taurus.  They claimed that Saturn the male avatar of the Age of Taurus was an eternal, unchanging God.  This created conflict in the Civilization and the Jews began a revolt that resulted in their ejection from Mesopotamia.

As they were a splinter of the Semitic Mesopotamians  all they could do then to distinguish themselves was to recreate, rearrange existing legends into their own narratives.  Thus they denied the long age of the Earth and said that the Earth was created at the beginning of Taurus whose god was the eternal Saturn thus sealing off future change in Aries and Pisces.  There’s the problem.

The Age of the Flood and the disappearance of Paradise were turned into supernatural events. Magic.  Judaism is rooted in Magic.  Of course, as no one could have knowledge of actual causes there was a mystery that can only now be explained.  Nevertheless, the Jews- or proto-Jews-  created the story of Adam and Eve who then had to have existed at the beginning of the Age of Taurus when the Jews theorized that God, that is, Saturn created the Earth. 

The Garden of Eden was thought to have existed somewhere to the East, that is in the submerged valley.  The name Ethiopians would later be given to the peoples of the Upper Nile although the Greeks referred to the Ethiopians as being to the East who were very wise.

The first couple chapters of Genesis then were converted from the records of the Sumerians, the Semites being later invaders who displaced the Sumerians but retained their priestly knowledge, the Jews splitting off from their fellow Semites circa 2000 BC.

Thus the Garden of Eden is located and explained.

George W.M. Reynolds:  The Rich And The Poor: Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle

by

R.E. Prindle

One/ And as all things come from the One, from the meditation of the One, so all things are born of the One by adaptation./  Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon;  The wind carries it in its belly; its nurse is the Earth./  It is the father of all wonders of the whole world.  It’s power is perfect when it is transformed into earth./  Separate the Earth from the Fire into the subtle from the gross, cautiously and judicially./  It ascends from Earth to Heaven and then returns back to Earth, so that it receives the power of the upper and the lower./  Thus you will possess the brightness of the whole world, and all the darkness will flee you./  This is the force of all forces, for it overcomes all that is subtle and penetrates solid things./  Thus was the world created./  From this wonderful adaptations are effected, and the means are given here./  And Hermes Trismegistus is my name, because I possess the three parts of the wisdom of the whole world. 

The Hermetic Museum, Alchemy And

Mysticism:  Alexander Roob, Taschen

2001.

All that is solid melts into air:  Karl Marx

There is something ineffable about George Reynolds that feeds deep reservoirs of longing and understanding.  Whether we know it or not it moves in contact with the One.  He examines life on many levels in a sympathetic manner without condensation but with unsparing accuracy.  One of his favorite themes is the contrast between the Rich and the Poor.

Julius Braunthal. more Left and less sympathetic, writing a hundred year on starkly posits the problem in his 1943 volume Need Germany Survive, a Jew writing from England about the ‘poor’ reflects 1940s England p.174.

Quote:

It is clear that the problem of poverty is not primarily a problem of the distribution of wealth.  But gross inequality of poverty and income is in itself an intolerable challenge to the principle of equality from which the spirit of democracy arises.  From the Distribution of National Capital (1924-30) we learn that of the people of Britain aged twenty-five and over, between 76 and 79 per cent each owned 110 pounds of wealth or less—i.e.  altogether 3-6 percent of our national capital –that 15-17 per cent, each owning property valued between 100 pounds and 1000 pounds had collectively 10-11 per cent of the national capital; and that the rest, a tiny group of people, each of whom was worth 100,000 pounds or more owned no less than23 per cent of the national capital.

Unquote.

While Reynolds was a Chartist hence of the Left he was not a Marxian Communist as was Braunthal.   From Braunthal’s title Need Germany Survive you can see that he was a brutal genocidal maniac.  One is shocked.  However we are talking of the Rich and Poor not World War II memoirs.

What the Communists miss is that wealth is not a limited unit that needs sharing, wealth increases or decreases through economic activity.  Hence, the Rich and the Poor are fluid classifications. The Rich may become Poor, and the Poor, that is economically disadvantaged may become rich but not if they are poor in spirit.  One must have inner resources and they can only be obtained by cultivation.

And in this Reynolds, who was never abjectly poor, but might easily have been, had to struggle to succeed.  And succeed he did while laboring against the grain of English politics.  He was not poor in spirit.

He depicts the sliding fortunes of the Rich and the Poor very well.  He shows the various methods, legal and illegal, of the attempt to rise and evade the horrors of poverty.  His depictions of the destitute are made with devastating accuracy.  He depicts some of the most horrific criminals futilely trying to escape poverty by illegal means.

He himself used his mind and pen so capably that he became well to do if not rich and he enjoyed his wealth.  His politics prevent what might be called a rise in society.  While he could afford excellent living quarters if not extravagantly luxurious; he had a large family, nevertheless a sign of above average prosperity.  But, he was never admitted into the great houses of the aristocracy which was only natural as he excoriated them relentlessly.

Thus, in his early years he lived among the disadvantaged so that he might study them closely as they were the grist for his mill.  His later novels move away from the worst scenes into a more affluent milieu.

In volume 3 of the Mysteries of the Court of London, the story of Lady Saxondale, he does limn the life of the aristocracy in a limited manner but as Lady Saxondale becomes enmeshed with the criminal world through the bizarre criminal Chiffin the Cannibal, he manages to show how the upper world and the lower world often intermeshed.

One has only to think of Jem Ruffles of the Mysteries of Old London- Days of Hogarth.  Ruffles was based on the person of the Duke  Wharton of the days of the first George who succeeded the good Queen Anne.  The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were wild and wooly.  The population of London increased much faster than the ability to police it.  The night belonged to gangs like Wharton’s.  Wharton in the daytime was a prominent politician, his Jekyll side in which he could offer protection to his hooligans, himself being above the law so to speak..

At night he transformed into his Hyde side and led his troops into battle against the Night Watch, the only keepers of order after dark.  You may compare Wharton and his Mohocks, that was their title, with George Soros and his Antifa of the twenty-first century.

This wild disorder was the The Days Of Hogarth.  Ruffles representing the same period while not a politician or aristocrat, just like Reynolds, had his gang of hooligans he led into the night.  At some point he decides his rough and rowdy days are over, dissolves his gang and begins his reformation.  Something like Reynolds in 1848.

Reynolds began his life allied with criminals, in fictional form Arnold and his people.  In his early novel first written at eighteen about the previous two years after he left Sandhurst Military Academy, he rather naively tells the whole story.  The story changed a great deal when he rewrote it as The Parricide in 1847.  It is easy to see his developing thought processes.  I am going to hazard an analysis.  It will be culled from his writings that are very autobiographical.  The central novels forming the analysis will be Days of Hogarth, The Steam Packet, The Youthful Impostor (read criminal), and The Mysteries of London.

In the rhird mentioned novel that is clearly autobiographical I will replace the fictional character with Reynolds.  Therefore I believe that on the return from an excursion to London to Hounslow Barracks Reynolds was held up by two highwaymen while a third, possibly training the two, Arnold in the story, watched from a way off.  Arnold is the criminal mastermind; something about the fifteen year old Reynolds appeals to him as being useful.  He slips forward then and offers Reynolds a criminal proposition that Reynolds readily accepted.

To place Reynolds in his real life situation.  He has found the military life not for him.  He was completely orphaned a few months earlier leaving him with a guardian, who he will be stuck with until he is twenty-one, that he hates or will learn to hate.  Alone and unprotected he is looking at a very bleak future.  Arnold offers him a way out that he can hardly refuse.  So, he becomes a criminal.  A swindler.  Not too different from George Montague Greenwood, one of his alter egos in The Mysteries of London.  So, in Greenwood Reynolds is describing a character that he knows well.

He must have quit the Academy.  This scenario would explain why.  He then enters the criminal world accepting the role.  Once associated with the underworld it is not so easy to extricate yourself so that it seems  very likely that from that point to 1848 when the path was cleared to  reenter straight society Reynolds had a loose relationship with the criminal world.  Half and half perhaps.

In 1848 he finished the fourth volume of The Mysteries of London combined with the beginning of success in writing and self-publishing gave him confidence to go completely straight.  But, he had to undergo a bankruptcy trial fostered by his old publisher, George Vickers.  Days of Hogarth was written in 1848 so the careers of Ruffes and Reynolds coincide. 

Now, what made Reynolds so willing to accept Arnold’s offer if he did. 

Reynolds’ father, who died in 1822 when the boy was eight, appointed his old friend Duncan McArthur as Reynolds’ guardian.  Both the father and the guardian were military men.  In the Steam Packet Reynolds mentions that as the Captain of a ship the Captain is as tyrannical as he wished.  This attitude probably carried over into family life and was undoubtedly shared by McArthur, an ex-naval surgeon.  It was he that placed the late twelve year old Reynolds in Sandhurst.  Separated from his mother, traumatic enough at twelve, she died in 1830 a few short years later.  Reynolds probably didn’t see much of her during his three years in Sandhurst so her death would be a severe jolt.  At that point he and his brother Edward, two years younger, inherited from both parents, the amount has not been determined, while Duncan McArthur became the executor of the wills.

Thus in the Steam Packet Reynolds complains that his guardian would never tell him how much money there was to inherit or in what form.  So, for five years from 16 to 21 Reynolds would have been penniless.  He was trapped.

McArthur while Reynolds was at the Academy kept him on short rations so that he could not participate in the social life of cadets from wealthier families.  When Reynolds left the Academy McArthur cut him off completely so that Reynolds, his alter ego assuming the lead role in the Steam Packet, complains how he literally hated McArther because of what was actually McArthur’s dishonesty.  We don’t know whether he ever released the inheritance or not.  I rather think not.

Now, Reynolds hated McArthur and that shows up, I believe in his Mysteries of London.  I have to thank Dick Collins for this lead from his bio reface to The Necromancer.  Duncan McArthur was a physician in the Kentish town of Walmer having retired as a Navy physician but then practicing in Walmer.  Doctors play prominent roles in Reynolds writing and they always buy corpses for anatomical research.  Dick Collins speculates that McArthur was one of those doctors.  He also speculates that a very young Reynolds was taken on one expedition to open a grave.  These grave robbers were called Resurrection Men, i.e. raising the dead.  The greatest of Reynolds fictional criminals is the Resurrection Man, Anthony Tidkins, of the first series of Mysteries of London.  Reynolds in one of his alter egos, the good guy Richard Markham, has an inordinate hatred of Tidkins which isn’t explained in the text.  He makes every effort to bring Tidkins to justice.  At one point he and the police corner Tidkins in his house, which so that it is certain in the police mind that they have their man, but Tidkins had mined the house with gunpowder and blows it up.  Richard and police assume that he has killed himself but not so, Tidkins escaped through a subterranean passage.  Interestingly he leaves his aged mother behind in the explosion.

What I suggest here is that Reynolds conflated McArthur with the Resurrection Man expressing all his hatred by transferring it from the doctor who purchased bodies to the Resurrection Man who provided them.  Tidkins will survive to the end of the book so that on one thread then is the death of Tidkins or in other words, McArthur.  This interpretation is certainly plausible.

Now, let us return to the Mysteries of Old London or Days of Hogarth.  The latter title appears to be an attempt to drum up consumer interest while honoring Hogarth who was a major influence on Reynolds and the writers and illustrators of his time.  Or, perhaps, there’s something deeper that I’m missing.  Maybe Wharton and the Hell Fire, Do What Thou Wilt, Clubs that came into existence at this time were the equivalent of the Wild West of America for the young readers of Reynolds’s time.

Hogarth was recording a certain society of his time in a sort of graphic novel to use 21^st Century terms.  Things were wide open, maybe even something like  Prohibition in the twentieth century US.  The Roaring Twenties.  Anarchy on a stick.  The Hell Fire Clubs were sexually violent so it was necessary to be clandestine.  The Hell Fire Clubs were based on Rabelais’ dictum in his Gargantua And Pantagruel, Do What Thou Wilt.  Anarchic affairs.  The stream of anarchy runs all through English history.  The Libertine culture set the code from 1720 on.

Reynolds does not appear to have been an anarchist although he was in favor of violent revolution as in 1789, 1830 and 1848.  He does reject the anarchy of the Duke of Wharton, disbands his gang of desperados and goes straight.  Now, the book was written in 1848, a critical year in Reynolds’ life.  George obviously regretted his youthful criminal career and, at the very  least, sharp practices. 

By 1848 he could see how he was going to prosper enough to make his fortune.  Thus he and his alter ego Ruffles decide to go straight.  After Ruffles had shucked his criminal connections he found a job with the East India Company, rounding out that aspect of English and European history that Reynolds was interpreting as a sideline. 

The Governor of the East India Company may have been founded on the great Clive of India, the famous Governor who organized the direction of the company.

At the time the Company was impressing men for soldiers and sailors off the streets of London for service in India.  The other source of recruits was the impoverished Irish who took to the Queen’s uniform as their only viable way to survive unless they emigrated to the US.

Now, get this, after having given up a criminal career Ruffles becomes the Captain of a Press Gang for the company.  What would have been a crime as a private citizen, kidnapping, became permissible in the employ of the East India Company.  Through Ruffles Reynolds lauds the practice as it showed how Clive could get the job done.  One wonders if Ruffles snags his old mates to put them out of the way.  Another way to get the job done.

Ruffles was an orphan as many of Reynolds characters are and as he was himself.  Both parents were dead by the time he was fifteen while he himself was confined in the military.  One imagines that Reynolds reviewed his situation and thought:  There must be some way out of here.  Perhaps Arnold was his ticket to leave as an only option and then a few months later when the scheme exploded, off to exile in France.

Strangely enough Ruffles too leaves England.  But off to India instead of France.  Now, as it turns out, Clive’s wife was Ruffles long lost mother.  A stretcher I know but plausible in the story.  So, a real Resurrection Man, Reynolds reconnects with his mother.  Remember he essentially became an orphan at twelve when he was placed in Sandhurst which could serve as an orphanage while he would have seen his mother only very occasionally if at all thereafter.  Imagine the effect on him when he was told his mother was dead.

At this point in Days of Hogarth as he and his mother leave to join Clive in India where he becomes a great success just as Reynolds was hoping success lay before him.  Ruffles’ mother dies seeing her son a success.  In real life Reynolds is saying that he would have made his mother proud of him.  Clive dies and Ruffles becomes the Governor of the East India Company.

So, in 1848 Reynolds was born again.  By 1851 he was able to leave smoky London moving to Herne Bay on the Kentish seashore  and a very nice house to become, as it were, a gentleman.  Thus he passed from poor in wealth, though never poor in spirit.  He knew both ends of the mix, the Rich and the Poor.  He could write realistically of what he knew.

He must have taken long walks through the various poverty stricken neighborhoods of London to become familiar with the streets, haunts and lay outs.  After 1844 and the beginning of his fame he may have had a ticket to pass through neighborhoods as desperate as the Mint and Saint Giles as an honorary member.  Perhaps he could enter thoroughly criminal haunts and remain unmolested, even honored, as he wrote rather sympathetically about the plight of the poor and the criminals themselves.  Perhaps certain criminals recognized portraits of themselves. 

Unlike Dickens and Mayhew who describe others from the outside, and Mayhew says that he was frequently harassed because of his articles which, after all, were written to amuse the upper classes.  Reynolds was sympathetic to the desperate plight of the women.  He was not maudlin, he knew that women had their negative qualities also.  In England and France novelists were all sympathetic  to the horrors women had to endure at the hands of men.  One of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve read concerning the plight of women was Eugene Sue’s Matilda, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, apparently based on the Marquis de Sades’ novel Justine.  I cringed all the way through to the most heartbreaking of endings.  Sue is unsparing.

Is it any wonder that the Salpetriere of Paris, an insane asylum for women  was filled with women who had been brutally mistreated beyond endurance.  To read accounts of Jean Martin Charcot’s treatments of female patients is horrifying.  As Reynolds lived to 1879 it is quite possible he visited Charcot at the Salpetriere as many qualified English tourists did.  Insanity also fills many a page of the corpus.  I rather imagine the streets of the period were filled with the mad, deranged and insane.  When they closed the asylums in the US many mad people whose madness was dulled with drugs roamed the streets.

Reynolds manages to bring to life the people of his times.

Significantly George changes direction somewhat in and after 1848 when he begins his epic tale of George IV in Mysteries of the Court of London.  Two tales actually, his 1795 marriage to Caroline  and then his assumption of the Regency.

 In Mysteries of London George split his personality in two to explain his two sides to himself with his audience in mind.  With the two Markham brothers Eugene and Richard he explores the two sides of his personality, side one that of the sharpster, Man of the World George Montague Greenwood, the criminal who seeks to become rich by any means necessary, and the Good Boy, the virtuous Richard.  Richard, like De Sade’s Justine tries to live the virtuous life, is fleeced by his brother’s associates, spends a couple years in prison although innocent and generally has to tough it out until the wheel of fortune turns in his favor and his succeeding life turns into a fairy tale.

Running concurrently  throughout the story is Reynolds dark shadow the Resurrection Man Anthony Tidkins cum Duncan McArthur.  Following Richard’s attempt to capture Tidkins as related when Tidkins blew his house up, Tidkins captures Richard.  Richard manages to escape and as he reaches the night shrouded street he begins to run.  He runs top speed for several hours through the darkness of his psychological fixation.  After hours of running he takes a break.  Asking a Watchman who observes him he asks where he is.  The Watchman says:  Why, you’re in Walmer.  The Walmer district of London.  But, in fleeing his past in Walmer he finds himself where he began so to speak.  Nothing has been resolved.

For long stretches the Resurrection Man is the central character.  As an evil memory from his childhood Reynolds tries repeatedly to kill it, eliminate it from his mind but fails until the end.  As Tidkins is associated with his guardian Duncan McArthur’s probable habit as a physician of buying corpses from Tidkins’ father and is thought to have participated in at least one raising ,and this would have been before the lad had turned thirteen, he merged the person of Duncan McArthur whom the hated into the character of Tidkin’s who was a criminal being the victim of circumstances that turned him into a bad man.  Thus Reynolds kills two birds with one stone.

Dick Collins, writing in the preface to The Necromancer, says that there is a lot of autobiography in Reynolds’ work, and, verily, I believe it is true.  Reynolds melds experience and reading into a seamless whole.

His alter ego Greenwood/Eugene gives Reynolds a chance to explore the man on the make who associates with Men On The Town and the Men of the World.  These two are significant categories of his novels.  George considered himself a Man of the World.  Thus he presents a plethora of roles- Rakes, Dandies, criminals of various stripes, suckers, the poor and downtrodden, women in all their manifestations.  Women thrown unprotected on the world where they become courtesans, frails and lost women sinking from high class to totally depraved.  He breathlessly mentions the expose memoirs of Harriet Wilson one of the most famous courtesans of the time, recently published.

If the reader injects him- or herself into the story the novel is really quite terrifying.

Tough districts like The Holy Land, otherwise known as St. Giles, are presented in gory detail.  His hero’s night spent in the gypsy house in the Holy Land might easily give the reader bad dreams.

I’m sure that from twelve in Sandhurst to his return from France in 1836 was a harrowing and searing experience for George, a nightmare from which there seemed no end for George, although he made the most of it using the experiences to make his fortune.

Thus in 1848 he finished that phase of his life and moved on to record his vision of the aristocracy and middle classes.  The poverty class is still prominent but not the core of the novels.  Of course he still has his arch criminals and very shady ladies and men but generally speaking he’s dealing with people of means.

Before I wrap this essay up let me comment on the end of the Resurrection Man at the end of the story.  Earlier another criminal Cranky Jem had been betrayed by Tidkins, took the rap of a crime and was transported to the notorious Norfolk prison Island of Australia.  Jem escaped and returned to London.  As he is another alter Ego of Reynolds he realizes that he had been seduced into crime, much as Reynolds, realizes his error and goes straight.  He earns his living by making toy ships in bottles.  Interesting career, is that the same as writing novels? 

He wants vengeance and tracks Tidkins, who has had some amazing adventures, down and disposes him without shedding blood.

A final note:  George Vickers the publisher of the four series of The Mysteries of Paris, drove Reynolds into the bankruptcy court in 1848.  One wonders why.  May I suggest that it was because he was losing his meal ticket.  Vickers not only published The Mysteries but he also published Reynolds book of 1847, Faust, of which I have an original copy.  It is probable that, although I haven’t seen the original, that Vickers also published Reynolds’  earlier book, Wagner The Wehr Wolf, therefore he was losing a potential fortune for which he sued Reynolds in spite.  Possibly he sought to retain him  In vain, as George had his own printer, John Dicks, and a bag full of novels. His independent career was launched.

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