The European Holocaust Part Two
April 1, 2015
The European Holocaust
Part Two
by
R.E. Prindle
Those who cannot draw conclusions
From three thousand years of learning
Stay naïve in dark confusion
Day to day living undiscerning.
–Goethe
The Europeans
While the origin of the Jews is clear, the origins of the Europeans is shrouded in mystery. In fact, one has to go back to the origins of the species. According to the ‘consensus’ opinion Homo Sapiens originated in Africa about 150K years ago. At that point we are told they evolved from whatever species preceded them. How and what happened next is anyone’s guess.
At sometime in the last 150K years the last Ice Age began that endured until the recent Age of Leo about ten thousand years ago. Shortly after the Deluge of Leo fairly advanced communities began appearing around the Mediterranean shores. This was after the Deluge.
Prior to the Deluge three significant memory traces of previous civilizations survive. They are Atlantis, Lemuria and Shambala. While no remains have been identified of the three it would still seem clear that something must have existed in the 140K years before the last Leo. Thus I have to believe that all three memory traces had to have existed although the actual forms may be beyond recall, nor are any space visitors involved.
During the Ice Age the ice masses trapped enough water to lower ocean levels including the Mediterranean by three to six hundred feet. This would have exposed the continental shelf in the Atlantic while exposing vast stretches of land on the Pacific shore.
Thus as Atlantis is said to have existed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, rather than being a vast island that sank it seems more reasonable to suppose that it existed on the exposed continental shelf. It is conjectured that as the ice melted it remained dammed behind an ice barrier that breaking through released all at once a veritable ocean of water that raised sea levels very rapidly inundating the coastal regions and the Mediterranean. Thus the notion that the wells under the earth gushed up becomes more intelligible. Atlantis and Lemuria would have disappeared beneath the waves.
Shambala is said to have been an island in a large sea behind the Himalayas. This would have been the home of the Aryans. As is well known due to continental drift Africa has moved North and East from the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland while Australia split off moving to the far side of the Indian Ocean. Madagascar probably was formerly attached to Antarctica on the East and certainly Africa on the West. India separated moving North and East.
Over a period of millions of years it collided with what was then South Central Asia. The South of Asia and the North of the new sub-continent were then crumpled up into a long transverse group of mountain ranges stretching from the Alps of Europe into China. The Himalayas formed by the collision of India with Asia formed the highest mountains in the world.
Behind the ranges the Black, Caspian and Aral seas have survived into our times. The three seas form an arc so that it is not difficult to envision a fourth sea further East perhaps where the Talamakan desert is today. At some time after the Deluge then if the memory traces are correct a place called Shambala or its equivalent did exist. Whether the lake or sea in which the island of Shambala is supposed to have been was lush or dry the area was very likely lush enough to support a permanent city. As the Himalayan Mountains rose to block precipitation northerly rivers still flowed North down the slopes from the glaciers. Even today rivers flow from the Himalayas into the Taklamakan Desert where they are absorbed so life could have been supported well into the period of current desiccation.
When it became too dry the city would have broken up forcing the Aryans out. As the Aryans moved from the area into China, India and parts West with a high level of civilization, a fully formed body of mythology they had to have before invading other areas. They must formerly have had the leisure to form a history that is expressed in their mythology. The various forms of that mythology from India to Europe are derived from that same source. Indeed the languages from India to Europe come from a common source. Nothing could be plainer.
The European then can confidently be traced back to a common source in Central Asia, possibly to the memory trace of Shambala. The various European peoples arrived at different times in what was a very long diaspora, the Celts and the various German tribes. In the course of time the Aryans were followed by the Mongols who possibly drove the Aryan before them. First the Huns were driven West and then back out of Europe; then the hordes of Genghis Khan entered European history who also were forced to retreat, leaving Europe to the Europeans and…the Jews.
The two great mythological cycles that express the European mind are the Homeric and the Arthurian while the Old Testament of the Jewish bible gives expression to the Jewish mind. They are very different in outlook.
Perhaps because the Homeric cycle is difficult to understand its immense worth is unappreciated even by the most cultured minds. The Homeric cycle is one of the great achievements of the human mind. While it is closely related to the Indian Aryan mythological cycle perhaps a variation in culture and other Indian additions make it more obscure to the Western Aryan mind.
In any event the simplistic Semitic vision of the Jews displaced the Homeric cycle in credibility; as impossible as that may seem, it became the foundation myth, at least, of Southern Europe while Northern Europe borrowing from the Caucasian remnant and Homer formed the vast, the immense, Arthurian cycle.
Thus the Jewish bible centered Christian religion and the medieval Aryan Arthurian cycle came into conflict. This conflict was resolved by introducing certain biblical concepts into the Arthurian cycle subverting it to Christian ends.
The lineage of King David through Jesus of Nazareth in this story was transferred to Europe, not Europe as a whole but through what became England to the exclusion of Europe as a whole. The kings and queens of England are, or were, believed to have inherited the sacred kingship of the line of David making England the new Israel. Hence, one has the sect of the British Israelites. Quite legitimate mythologically too.
To make the transfer, a myth was invented in which Joseph of Arimathea was said to have been given a chalice containing the holy blood of Jesus by Jesus himself. Joseph of Arimathea then transported the chalice to England in a magical way making the English kings and queens of one blood with the House of David. Thus England is the New Israel in that scheme of things.
On the other hand the ‘true’ story of the Grail was granted to Germany through someone called Kyot who appeared to the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach giving some authority to Germany. Whether than has anything to do with the enmity the Jews cherish against Germans is open to conjecture.
The development of the Arthurian cycle took up most of the Middle Ages. The last redaction was made by Mallory in the fifteenth century. By then Europe was within striking distance of the Englightenment displacing mythology.
Leaping forward to that period it was then that the Aryan mind began to unfold in all its glory. By then the European mind was ready to pass from the mythologic and mythopoesy of the biblical and Homeric mentalities to a rational understanding of external reality. Thus the vanguard of the Enlightenment prepared the way for the Scientific outlook or Weltanschauung while Judaism and Catholicism remained sunk in subjective mythology.
The sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the development of the European mind into a splendor the like of which the world had never witnessed. Truly, a New Man came into existence. Godlike, as it were.
While a disruptive cleavage was necessary and inevitable political developments that erupted into the French Revolution of 1789 made the changeover the most destructive event the world had seen to that time. A new murderous frame of mind came into existence. The revolutionary bigots were cruel and merciless. The bodies hit the ground and heads rolled in the sand. This would set the tone for all future so-called revolutions.
The French Revolution evolved the reorganization of society that took place under the aegis of Napoleon. When the Napoleonic world collapsed in 1815 it was a new world, bourgeois, and what has been called the Romantic Period.
The Romantic Period was a mythological reaction to the Enlightenment. The Nixies and Pixies did not go quietly. Frankenstein and Dracula rose in their stead. The Nixies and Pixies throwing fairy dust put up a beautiful and entrancing if futile battle. Science drove ahead. Out of the demise of Medieval times arose one of the greatest achievements of the European mind, the University system. The University was something that wasn’t even dormant in the world’s other societies, not African, nor Asian East and West.
The University allowed the brightest and best minds society had to provide a place to develop and innovate and discover. For the first time intelligence was freed from superstition.
All the disciplines moved rapidly forward, Chemistry, Physics, Psychology, Botany, Anthropology, Geology, all of them. These developments and sciences had to be organized into a system and that was done by a man called August Comte who established Positivism in competition with Romanticism.
Comte’s organization of the sciences was masterful; giddy with his sense of achievement Comte lost his cool nearly vaporizing in delusions of grandeur. His great successor was the Englishman Herbert Spencer who carried things forward in a great leap. By the time Darwin announced his vision of Evolution in 1859 the groundwork or future developments in learning was laid
The problem with Science and the Common Man is that most scientific concepts are uncommon, they can’t be seen or handled in the sense of, say, blacksmithing. Of course machines and devices can be devised, microscopes and electron microscopes, so that things that Nature probably doesn’t even know are there can be seen but even the machines are beyond the comprehension of the Common Man.
So the world as it existed in religions like Judaism and Christianity was slipping away. The Common Man’s world was being turned upside down. Frustrated and uncomprehending he was supremely ready for manipulation.
After Darwin and Positivism came the New Romantics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a beautiful period of the human mind. Unable to resist the findings of science the New Romantics blended science and fantasy in a very attractive fashion. While it hasn’t really been given the attention it deserves the science of Psychology had been quietly developing and if not noticed at least not with alertness.
About the time of Darwin’s Origin Of Species the awareness of the conscious and unconscious minds was becoming more prominent. First looming into human awareness through the researches of Dr. Anton Mesmer in the latter eighteenth century there was furious activity. Central to psychology is the concept that Mesmer first exposed- hypnotism. Hypnotism is the key to the unconscious. Called variously hypnotism, Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism throughout the Nineteenth Century hypnotism is the basis of the unconscious.
While from Mesmer to Jean Martin Charcot hypnotism had been derided as charlatanism suitable only for stage shows, Charcot working from the French hospital, the Salpetriere, legitimized hypnotism as a medical procedure. He and the great Pierre Janet developed the basic concepts of what would be called psycho-analysis when organized by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung.
Psychology, hypnotism and the unconscious mixed perfectly with Neo-Romanticism. Wonderful novels appeared. The now neglected stories of the Frenchman, Camille Flammarion, R.L. Stevenson’s great Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the wonderful three novels of George Du Maurier of which his middle novel, Trilby, is a dream one wishes one could have dreamed, Marie Corelli wrote some wonderful stories, Sherlock Holmes probably fits in there as well as the Oz stories of L. Frank Baum. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels. William Morris, Rider Haggard, an astonishing list of writers and their stories. An amazing period. H.G. Wells.
While Freud made the concept of the unconscious rigid, in the last half of the nineteenth century the unconscious was more fluid and flexible. While Freud made it the repository of evil impulses, the early researchers made it a source of creativity. It is actually an individuals’ choice. One’s future hinges on that choice.
While these marvelous intellectual developments were in process the practical world was also changing rapidly. Science turns into technology and technology turns into money. Money turns into banking and the medieval world is left behind.
While money was significant in the medieval world, wealth in that world was land based. One might say European wealth contrasted to Jewish wealth. In the New Order money wealth would be dominant over land wealth, hence the rapid Jewish rise in the nineteenth century after Emancipation.
One might say that the need for money became necessary during the reign of Louis XIV in France. Metals were no longer an adequate way to conduct business. The man for the times was named John Law. He introduced the concept of paper money. Law was a Scottish adventurer who had thought deeply on money matters. He came to the conclusion that the proper basis of money was what an economic unit, say France, could produce. In fact his plan was activated in France. While his scheme was sound if the money supply was kept in line with national production unfortunately Law issued more paper money than the market would bear and his plan went awry. However paper money was here to stay as other thinkers began to work at the kinks in the money supply.
Thus the basis of the modern economic structure was laid. Money and what it bought became the basis of our economic system. With the money economy inevitably went compound interest or in another word, usury. The conversion to money from land as a basis of wealth underwrote the destruction of the old European aristocracy that knew little of the functions of money or usury and the rise of the moneyed Jew.
The technological development of modern society was funded by money, not land. The advent of steam, specifically the railroad called for vast sums to build the infrastructure. In Europe only the Jews had the necessary cash although the need for money called for pooling of money which led to selling fractions of the roads to the general public as shares. The shares led to the creation of an entirely new monetary device called the stock market- Wall Street in the US. As a new device the stock market was a mystery to its users, not unlike computers today. Coupled with the avarice of its users the market was and perhaps has been since a cause of great anguish.
In the course of things Europeans began sending its culture to various places in the world trying to make a better life for themselves perhaps not unlike these outlier communities who are now sending colonists to Europe seeking a better life than they can provide for themselves there. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
The principal outlying European communities were in North America- Canada and the United States. In inhabiting this very sparsely settled continent the Europeans merely shoved aside the indigenous stoneage peoples to occupy the land themselves. This activity was still in process in 1800 when the unfolding of the European mind began in earnest.
Steam was actually first applied to locomotion in this raw land when a way was devised to apply steam power to a ship.
As revolutionary as this was it was as nothing compared to the steam railway. The utility of the railroad was recognized by the Americans immediately. Railroads sprang up in the original colonies and with them came the stock market. After Lewis and Clark showed the way to the Pacific and the actual extent of the continent was known the westward move was on. How extraordinary that the railroad would arrive just when it was needed.
The discovery of gold in California thirty-four years later called for a trans-continental railroad. Nineteen years later, interrupted by a devastating Civil War of five years, there was one. The trans-continental railroad was a vast undertaking calling for more money than any individuals, combines of individuals or even joint stock companies could manage. Hence the assistance of the people through the US government was called for. The country demanded the railroad. The government supplied money while donating millions of acres of land to the builders from the public domain. Of course there was graft; when isn’t there graft? But the job got done in more than a timely manner.
While the Jews were firmly entrenched in Europe, they were very few in the US until after 1870. As the Protestant United States had fluid mores, no landed aristocracy, while already as a trading people being somewhat familiar with money and interest the Jews having lost their advantage had a negligible part in the economy until after the Civil War then developing rapidly with the influx of the East European Jews from 1870 to 1900 and beyond.
Thus by 1900 the German Jews were already established and while being in competition with the European Americans on equal terms began to assume a controlling and dominant role in the US and Canada. The Jews led at least a semi-autonomous existence on both sides of the Atlantic, what Henry Ford would later accurately call the international Jewish conspiracy.
This whole race issue goes much deeper than that. What was implied by Evolution was later confirmed by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. Galton was a sociologist. There has been no escaping the obvious conclusion which those condemned by biology to a lesser degree of mental ability find their inferiority intolerable. Quite naturally the next step for the lesser endowed is to destroy those more favored by biology.
Darwin announced Evolution at a time of the highest level of White Supremacy among the world’s cultures. In 1860 Whites were as gods to Africans, Middle Easterners, the Chinese and East Asia in general. Had the superiority been a matter of surprise and temporary military efficiency as when the Mongol Huns overran Europe or when Genghis Khan’s hordes swept across Central Asia into Europe a military domination of that kind may be endured but it will pass.
However if one race or species is genetically advanced indicating permanence how can one measure the loser’s grief? In point of fact one side must exterminate the other and it will happen as it is happening today.
Secondly Francis Galton began devising a means where the unseen could be measured; in other words he began to devise tests that could measure intelligence. It would thus be learned that only fifteen percent of the White population had what might be termed superior intelligence; that is they could deal with abstract matters. This was of cardinal importance in an increasing scientific and intellectual milieu in which fully eighty-five percent of the most capable race or species were mentally less able. As for the other races they were completely out of the running. These crude nineteenth century findings would later be confirmed by genetics in the next and twenty-first centuries.
Thus the horrors of the twentieth century German hatred began to form in the nineteenth century. Discrimination against the superior took form. In the course of history by the mid-nineteenth century the leading nations were France, England and Czarist Russia. Italy and Germany still had no nation State but were a congeries of small principalities. As pictured literarily as comic Ruritarians they were jokes to the French and English while allowing those countries to dominate a ‘balance of powers.’
Then both Italy and Germany unified into national States thus upsetting the balance of power. The Germanies having united under Prussia’s Bismarck in 1871 avenged their humiliation by the Frenchman Napoleon by overrunning France thus announcing that a new sun had risen.
While the Germans had always evidenced an intellectual superiority in their cutting edge universities, now united they began to challenge England and France for industrial and commercial pre-eminence while at the same time the US was also trying to achieve economic dominance. Thus England and France began to cultivate a German hatred. This hatred was not directed at individuals but the German people as a whole. As symbols of the German people Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler might have had the force of hatred directed at their persons but only as an obvious object of German hatred.
After the First European Holocaust of 1914-18 the weak and divided Weimar Republic which may be seen as an extension of the comic principalities was tolerated but only because it had been completely emasculated thus no longer able to compete with the French, English and Americans. Most of the criticism of Bismarck, the Kaiser and Hitler can be dismissed as anti-German envy.
In the East in order to develop their country the Romanov Emperors had invited several tens of thousands of German to settle in Russia in the Ukraine and the Volga Delta. Thus there was a large Volga settlement as well as eventually a few millions in the Ukraine. These immigrants were given favorable concessions to lure them to Czarist Russia.
The Germans employing superior intelligence and industry rapidly prospered more than the Russian and Jewish farmers. Now, a slight aside, until mid-nineteenth century Jews named themselves Isaac ben Abraham and such but those who used no last names, Germans included, were required to assume a last name. Russian Jews thus could choose either a German or a Russian last name. As Germany was viewed as superior vast numbers of Russian Jews chose German last names rather than Russian offending the emperor. One of these families were the Bronsteins, farmers in the Ukraine. One Bronstein later took a Russian name calling himself Leon Trotsky. Now, the Bronstein family lived across a ravine from a colony of German farmers. In his autobiography Trotsky compares the sod huts and run down farming equipment of his family with the German farmers across the way. He admiringly notes that their wood frame houses were well maintained and painted. Even the farm equipment was well maintained and freshly painted as well. The Germans working virtually the same land prospered more than his family and the other Russian or Jewish farmers in the area.
Given such a superiority it would have been only a matter of time until the Germans became the most wealthy of the Russian peoples while one presumes they would become prominent as Russian politicians. Essentially occupying the position the Jews envisioned for themselves. This apprehension enraged the Czars. Thus by the 1880s the Czarist government began to harass, that is demean, their German population. The benefits that had lured them to Russia were withdrawn. While the German youth had been exempt from military service they were now drafted at the age of twenty-one. Once in the military they were discriminated against, severely punished for minor infractions or perhaps no infraction at all. This in turn caused large numbers of twenty year olds to return to Germany while those Germans remaining were persecuted under the Czars while under the Communists they were subjected to genocide before the German invasion. Stalin deported them en masse to the gulags and essentially murdered the lot. Genocide. None of these crimes had anything to do with Hitler or the Nazis. It was just German hatred because the Russians could not compete with them. This also applies to the Jews who immersed themselves in German hatred because of their perceived inferiority.
Jewish German hatred was also in evidence from the nineteenth century on. Jewish envy of the fabulous unfolding of the scientific European mind unmatched by anything Jewish drove them into a frenzy, it totally contradicted their fantasy of their own superiority.
The envy has been made evident by today’s Paideia Foundation of Barbara Spectre in Sweden in which she hatefully condemns nineteenth century European brilliance that she describes as ‘European knowledge’ contrasting it with ‘Jewish knowledge’ that she is working to put on an equal basis with ‘European knowledge’ by legislation. She says this must be done so that Jews won’t be shamed by the contrast.
Unable to surpass European scientific knowledge the Jews tried to subject scientific knowledge by injecting Jewish religious interpretations.
The problem was reaching crisis level at century’s end. At the time of Darwin’s announcement of Evolution Patriarchalism was firmly established having triumphed over Matriarchalism during the Arien Age. Matriarchalism had been forgotten, erased from the memory, until memory traces were detected after Darwin by the brilliant Swiss mythologist, J.J. Bachofen. Resistance to Bachofen’s rediscovery was very strong not receding until after 1950. Behind Matriarchalism Bachofen also detected an earlier stage of mental evolution he called Hetaerism or one of shared use of women. This would have been a form of communism or collectivism that may be natural to humans. Communism too was suppressed in the West in favor of Individualism and private property.
The communist mentality submerged reemerged out of the French and Industrial Revolutions taking the form of Socialism in reaction to the other natural order of things, that is, Individualism and private property that Socialists labeled Capitalism depicting it as evil. Just as Socialism failed in the Hetaeric period so it fails in the modern age. Nevertheless the Socialist party was captured by the Jews who then used it to defeat the European order of things. This was achieved in 1917 but the conflict was reaching a head at the turn of the century.
This spawned two unique events, to take the lesser first: Then as now the Jews infiltrated all European establishments. Having done so all European information, plans and so forth were made known to them while Jewish information and plans was more or less impenetrable to Europeans. Or perhaps they were just comfortable and invulnerable in their superior position.
Posing as European national patriots this information, spying, was shared by the International Jewish Organizations. Thus in 1895 the French military discovered that a Jewish army officer was spying. This was true, but the French accused him of spying for the Germans, this was not true. Like all other Jewish spies Dreyfus was passing the information to Jewish organizations who were thus informed as to the intents of in this case the French government but other national governments were infiltrated in the same manner. Thus the Jews were able to control or at least direct the course of events.
Thus in the twentieth century the Jews, Johnathan Pollard, was spying for the Jews in the US. The Jews, Israelis, then used this information for their own world wide purposes. When caught Pollard was sent to prison where he remains today despite all Jewish attempts to free him.
Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island. This set off a colossal effort to reverse the decision that split France into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards while becoming an international cause celebre. Eventually toward century’s end the Jews triumphed freeing Dreyfus. The Dreyfus Affair went far toward giving the Jews parity or semi-autonomy in France, having shamed the French, and actually throughout the West.
The second major event was the success of the Austrian based Jew Theodore Herzl in setting up Zionism after 1895 which being embraced by the Jews of Russia furthered the revolutionary Jewish war against Russia. It is highly probable that a document that came into importance in 1917 was written at this time. This document was the infamous Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion. I think the word Zion in itself gives away its provenance. No members of the Russian secret service, the Okhrana, posited as a possible author would have been aware of the importance of Zionism at the time the Protocols were written. It had to be the Jews.
Herzl, the founder of Zionism was Viennese. Vienna, at the time was home to Sigmund Freud as well as being a center of furious Jewish activity coordinating the transfer of the Jews of the Pale to the US. 1895-96 was nearing the height of Jewish emigration from Russia to the US. Vienna not surprisingly also had a very active lodge of the Jewish International Order of B’nai B’rith, a sort of Jewish Freemasonry. Sigmund Freud had a deep abiding hatred of Europe and Europeans. He would have exterminated them all and after 1917 he got his chance. In 1895 Freud joined the B’nai B’rith lodge of which he remained a member all his life attending the weekly meetings. This would give B’nai B’rith almost equal importance to Freud as his weekly meetings of his Psycho-analytic Order.
Freud said he joined because he had found a lodge of men like minded to himself. Thus one must think, they wanted the destruction of Europeans too.
Also in 1895 Theodore Herzl the founder of Zionism wrote his book The Jewish State published to acclaim in 1896. The Jews had been agitating for the overthrow of the Russian State for decades, assassinating a Czar or two along the way. In 1903 Zionism already the Eastern Jewish religion, the First Russian Revolution was generated by the Jews.
The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion first saw light at the end of the revolution in 1905. The document made no impression at that time having to wait for the Second Russian Revolution in 1917. At that time the Jews indignantly labeled the Protocols a forgery of the Car’s secret service, the Okhrana, written in Paris using the Dialogues as a template. A huge mystery has been created around the Protocols making it difficult to solve the problem of provenance for which no satisfactory solution has ever been made. I propose the solution here.
Knowing that they would be accused of fomenting the First Russian Revolution, which they did, the Jews anticipated the need for a red herring to confuse the issue. I don’t know whether Theodore Herzl was a member of B’nai B’rith but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was.
At any rate we have a group of likeminded men one of which was the master propagandist Sigmund Freud. Freud was well along in the development of his psychological ideas while he would become the master propagandist of all time. It might be said that he directed or coordinated the propaganda campaign from Vienna though personal encounters as well as his hugely influential writings.
The Protocols are written in a heavy handed Jewish manner that seems authentic enough. Since Freud either directed or had a hand in directing the revolution of ’17 and its brutal aftermath there is every reason to conjecture that he had a hand in concocting the Protocols. The Protocols once disseminated had a two fold purpose.
On the one hand they could be used to ensnare the European reader so that he could be denounced as an anti-Semite for believing such ‘an obvious forgery’ as was Henry Ford and on the other hand as a manual of instruction for Jewish revolutionaries hidden in plain sight.
It has been claimed that the Protocols are based on an earlier 1860s book The Dialogues Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli In Hell said to have been written by the Jew Maurice Joly in 1860s France but this is poppycock. There is little similarity between the two while it isn’t improbable that the book was written after the fact to mystify the Protocols. It was announced that the Protocols were based on the Dialogues however the Dialogues were non-existent, no extant copy could be found. Thus a dramatic search was conducted to find the Dialogues to prove the provenance of the Protocols. It was positively stated that this book that no one had ever seen would do this. After several fruitless searches through all the libraries of Europe a copy was said to have been found in the British Library. Obviously this was as stage managed as finding the record ‘An Old Shoe’ in the Library of Congress in the movie Wag The Dog.
If one were to transpose the story of the Protocols into Wag The Dog the story would be nearly identical. In Wag The Dog Washington politicians wanted a phony war to influence an election. They call the imaginative people in Hollywood and ask if they can dummy up a war until after the election. As the powers can control the media the unsuspecting public is fed canned news that no one can check out for accuracy stirring the public into a patriotic fervor. The producers dummy up a hero named Shoemacher. He is to be the returning hero. In order to drum up support the producers get their musical hacks to dummy up a song sounding like a twenties country song called ‘Good Old Shoe.’ This song is recorded then aged to sound appropriate to an old 78 RPM. The record is then placed in the Library of Congress where it is miraculously discovered becoming an immediate hit.
There in a nutshell you have the story of the Protocols Of Zion. I conjecture that the Protocols were dummied up in the Lodge of B’nai B’rith probably under the supervision of master propagandist Sigmund Freud. As they are called The Protocols of Zion it seems positive they were written no earlier than at least 1898 or shortly thereafter. A copy was then given to the Russian priest Sergei Nilus who appended them to the end of a book he wrote where they were ‘discovered’ in 1905. As the revolution failed they were apparently not needed so saved for the 1917 revolution at which time when the suckers took the bait they were denounced as raving anti-Semites hence sub-human or less. Animals, my god, pure Animals.
When the need for a predecessor document was needed the idea of the Dialogues was invented. After a long exciting search, I’m not going to go into the whole story here, through all the libraries of Europe the single copy that escaped destruction by Napoleon III was unearthed in the British Library. Sound anything like Wag The Dog?
The Jews ruthlessly pursued the Czar in the years leading up to the 1903-05 Russo-Japanese War which they fomented. On the one hand labor unrest was driven to a fever pitch as the Japanese were stirred up. To finance the war the Czars needed loans. The Jews withheld loans while admonishing the European bankers to withhold loans also.
Now, at the turn of the century the safe haven of the US became the base of operations for the international Jewish conspiracy as Henry Ford said. While the Japanese wanted to war on the Russians they lacked the means to pay for one. Here the US Jew Jacob Schiff of the Investment Banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb stepped up to the plate. Schiff was a trustee of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. The Equitable had two hundred million in reserves that Schiff appropriated to lend to the Japanese clandestinely. They attacked and defeated the Russians but the revolution coordinated to the Japanese attack failed.
So Jewish vengeance was delayed for a decade or so. The First Russian Revolution would lead to the First European Holocaust of the Great War or what would later be called WWI.
The European Holocaust Part Three follows.
A Review: Isidor Sadger Recollects Freud: Emasculating Freudian Theory
December 16, 2011
A Review
ISIDOR SADGER RECOLLECTS FREUD
Emasculating Freudian Theory
By
R.E. Prindle
…Jung had been infected with Aryan blood from his family.
Deep in his heart,
he was anything from a philosemite.
Now, however, he encountered Judaism
in its most highly gifted embodiment
Of Jewish knowledge shining in front of him.
Was it any wonder that he began by being blinded
With the feeling that never before had he stood before
The countenance of a greater genius?
But his lineage was not to be denied.
One day he sat down and carried out scholarly studies for months
Which resulted in his finding his way back
Through the Mithraic cult to primitive Christianity.
In practical terms
This may be seen that as a Christian prophet,
He fully stripped the libido of its sexual character
And reduced it to merely spiritual energy.
This was, so to speak, the decontamination
Of the poisonous Freudian teachings
Through Christianization and total cleansing.
But since the master could not easily go along
With the desexualization of his teaching,
Which went to the foundation of his theories,
He saw with a heavy heart
That he needed to cut the cord between him and the clinic. (Bergholzi)
Isidor Sadger, Recollecting Freud pp. 71-72
Sadger, Isidor: Recollecting Freud, 1930, first published 2005, UWisconsin
It is very difficult to know where to start in analyzing the above quote from Isidor Sadger. First it might be pertinent to identify Isidor Sadger. He had a history with Freud from 1895 into the 1930s. He attended with two others Freud’s first psychoanalytic lecture. He was a founding member of Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In 1930 he published this little volume of biographical notes on his relationship with Freud.
Freud’s circle did not take kindly to the publication of these memoirs doing everything they could to suppress them. In this they were successful. The book was never distributed and only rumored to be in print until this publication in 2005 by Alan Dundes and UWisconsin. Even acquiring a copy of the book by Dundes was nearly impossible. He relates pp. xlii-xliii:
When I looked up Sadger on my computer data base, I found not only the article (Sadger had written) in question but the title of a book: Sigmund Freud: Personliche Erwinnerunger. As I was not familiar with that work, I decided to send for it via interlibrary loan….In due course, the latter arrived but the effort to procure a copy of the former proved unsuccessful. I was informed that there was no known copy in the United States available for borrowing. Since I knew the book had been published in Vienna, I asked if we could try to locate a copy in Europe and the obliging staff in interlibrary loan agreed to do so. A few weeks later, I learned that there was no known copy in any European library available for borrowing.
I was told, however, that there was one, just one, copy listed that might be utilized and that copy was located in the library of Keio University in Japan. Again, inter library loan made a request on my behalf and this time with some partial success….I next asked interlibrary loan to request a photocopy of the entire book…The Keio University Mata Media Center informed (me) that it was unable to comply with my request….
…One of my anthropology doctoral students…was returning to Japan. I asked him to do me a favor and get me a photocopy…
Which he did and almost by a miracle the text was recovered to be published for human consumption some seventy-five years on. As Freud claimed to be a scientist one is amazed that supposed scientists would go so far as to deny publication of Sadger’s memoirs. But, so it was.
In tackling the quote from Sadger let me approach it from the point of view of ‘Jewish knowledge shining in front of him.’
One must ask the question of what is Jewish knowledge and how is it special to their culture? This is important not only from past implications but also in light of today’s Barbara Spectre and her Paideia organization whose intent is to place ‘Jewish knowledge’ on a par with Aryan knowledge or what Sadger calls Christian knowledge.
While Freud may have been a Jew working in the scientific field of psychology and psychiatry and while he may have made some important discoveries in the field that had been developed by Aryans his own contributions arose from that body of accumulated Aryan learning. Since Dr. Anton Mesmer in the mid-eighteenth century until Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams Aryans had been slowly accumulating the knowledge on which Freud built his theories. That knowledge had no racial identity per se nor did that which Freud added to it. As Freud claimed that he was a scientist then his contributions were scientific, not Jewish, and the common property of mankind. He may have been Jewish but the scientific field he was contributing to had no ethnic identity but Science, which is to say, none at all.
Sadger himself is taking a bigoted view in attempting to sequester Freud’s theories to the Jews. In fact, as Sadger indicates Freud did not want his theories to be studied and furthered by anyone else. When C.G. Jung, who Freud tried to make his disciple attempted to examine Freud’s concept of the libido and came to perhaps a more correct understanding of the concept, which after all was scientifically unproven, Freud broke off his relationship with him and the Bergholzli Clinic of Switzerland. He, in fact, severed any Aryan connections. He became interested only in Jewish contributions which then became Jewish knowledge in Sadger’s mind.
Sadger who had been Freud’s earliest disciple deeply coveted the role of being Freud’s pet or ‘favorite son.’ Freud for whom ambivalence was central to his character, even though he hated Aryans as a homosexual he was attracted to the ‘great blond beast’; hence, while carefully concealing his motive he selected Jung who had the requisite scientific qualification to be not his ‘son’ but a necessarily platonic lover. Sadger could never qualify.
Now, what was Jung’s sin that brought about his rejection by Freud:
One day (Jung) sat down and carried out scholarly studies for months which resulted in his finding his way back through the Mithraic cult to primeval Christianity…this may be seen as a Christian prophet, he fully stripped the libido of its sexual character and reduced it to merely spiritual energy.
Unquote.
So, having committed to Freud although ‘infected with Aryan blood from his family’ that he would abandon certain anti-Semitic understandings that he had. In what seems an obvious betrayal of his pledge to Sadger Jung ‘carried out scholarly studies for months; which resulted in his coming up with a different perception of the libido that downplayed the rutty sexual projection of Freud’s Jewish psyche for what Sadger terms Christian spirituality. To Sadger’s mind Jung had betrayed his pseudo-Judaism pledge to return to Christianity.
This raises several problems. Is anti-Semitism a mere prejudice or is it based on observations of how Semitism functions and its rejection on that basis? In other words, based on observed actions Semitism is rejected and not on prejudicial grounds but for accurate scientific reasons.
Further, in dogmatically insisting on his own interpretation of his creation, the libido, Freud was definitely unscientific. At the same time his topography of the mind was completely off base. In point of fact the libido is neither sexual nor spiritual, it doesn’t exist. While Freud had a good working hypothesis his ideas were merely that based on the scientific, not Jewish, knowledge of his time. Freud became dogmatic at a time when he knew, or should have known, what he didn’t know. There was a lot of physiology to be yet discovered that would uncover the biology of life.
This biology would be clarified in 1947 when Crick and Watson discovered the genetic code of DNA.
Freud in his rutty, close to pornographic, interest in sex, by which he meant sexual intercourse made the absurd statement that the more frequently a man ejaculated the better person he would be. Is it any wonder that Jung was turned away from Freud in disgust? While Freud may have thought he was severing ties with the Bergholzli; the reverse would seem to be true.
With the discovery of DNA the biology became clear making it possible to elucidate the psychological basis of sex based on that biology.
Freud frequently had the right idea but he seldom thought the application through being infected with his own need for greatness by creating a science of his very own and his Judaism to whose Weltanschauung he was totally committed as Sadger indicates.
To take the psychology first: Freud correctly differentiates between the individuals inner wishful thinking and his confrontation with outer reality. Or, in other words, religious superstition versus a scientific understanding of objective reality.
Thus, when the child is expelled from the womb he comes into contact with the outer world. Whatever conception of reality he had in the womb bears no relationship to the reality of the world beyond the womb. In the Freudian sense then the child’s mind is all Id with at best a nascent Ego. As Freud’s desideratum is Ego shall displace Id the child has some serious adjusting to do.
This adjustment is called experience and education. In the absence of education the child would grow up to be ignorant savage with an improper understanding of reality causing him to give all the wrong reasons for the phenomena he encounters. This being mankind’s original condition over the millennia this ignorance was replaced by religious speculation based solely on inner wishful thinking. Nor was not adequately understood. As people might, for instance, decide that they are the chosen people of their god, make that god a universal deity and then weave their notions of external reality around that projection. That was the condition of Freud and his Jewish people.
The conflict for Freud and his Jews became acute when the Aryans with a different Weltanschauung sought to understand external reality on its own terms and adjusted their inner world of wishful thinking to reflect as much as possible objective reality. When Freud mentions the science of Kepler and Darwin as being shocks to the human mind, he meant Jewish mind which was now faced with the irreconcilable fact that their Arien Age Weltanschauung being based on false data was obsolete. While Freud considered the organization of the mind the third great shock it was one that could be manipulated for his own ends, unlike Astronomy and Biology, and perverted to serve those ends. Hence his dogmatic and ridiculous view of the unconscious and sex.
Now let us look at the nature of the human sexual function. DNA with its double helix, one strand from each contributor, each remaining separate but combining information through bridges, visibly demonstrates how the entity is constructed. The spermatic strand contributed by the male forms the stronger, more active, and slightly larger right side of the body and left side of the brain; the ovate strand contributed by the female forms the weaker, more passive, slightly smaller left side of the body and right side of the brain.
This means that the Xy chromosome of the male carries a male version and a female version, thus there is a female component to the male. This was picked up the psychoanalysts as bi-sexuality in the carnal sense. This is not true. A man is not by nature available for sex by either sex. Hormones reaffirm the sexual identity.
As should be easy to see all activity is controlled by the brain. Information is communicated up and down the spinal cords which emanate from the brain. One cord for each chromosome. Thus, there is a nerve connection from each side of the brain to the commensurate testicle or ovary. Sperm is manufactured according to the dictates of the autonomic system. After one reaches puberty the seminal fluid builds up. Without any other release the fluid will discharge automatically whether one wills it or not; these are usually termed nocturnal emissions. These alone are all that is necessary to relieve the over supply.
As the only biological function of sex is reproduction the male is always ready to penetrate the female. In a normal psychological function a comfort level can be maintained by one or two ejaculations a day or even less. That Freud could make the absurd statement that the more ejaculations a day the better the person means that as a homosexual he had a psychic need or that the was merely trying to pervert Aryan society.
Now, the spinal cords run down the length of the body from the brain to the testicles where they terminate, making the brain and testicles a unit. Nerves run from the spine to the various organs. There we have the basis for psychosomatic reactions. While the cords are grounded at the testicles I believe they have more free play at the brain level. The bi-sexuality the psychoanalysts noted is caused by the Xy and XX chromosome combinations. Both Freud and Jung given the biology of their day had differently accounts for the apparent bi-sexuality thus they called the spermatic brain ending the Ego while Jung claimed that the male had an Anima and the female an Animus. In actuality both males and females have an Anima and an Animus or, in Freudian terms, a Libido and Ego.
Freud also discovered the concept of Emasculation. When the Ego or Animus, male or female, is given an affront or insult to which it cannot properly respond this creates a reaction or hypnotic suggestion that forms a fixation. This fixation will have a psychic or physical or both affect. Fixations are of different intensities and qualities; the most severe is the central childhood fixation, also with psychosomatic affects an example of which each fixation creates.
In the case of the homosexual the affront is give by the male who thus creates a severe psychosomatic reaction which is what homosexuality is. In the attempt to negate the reaction the homosexual then seeks to visit his fixations on other males while being compelled to seek multiple ejaculations many times a day which he equates with masculinity.
Thus a normal male can be satisfied with a normal schedule of ejaculation or relieving the pressure of the sperm build up, while a fixated person is compelled to more frequent ejaculation. Thus Freud completely misunderstood sex erring on the side of homosexual emasculation. Thus he was transferring his sexual neurosis or psychosis to Aryan society. Probably in vengeance as he undoubtedly believed his own emasculation was caused by Aryans.
So, Freud’s whole conception of sex is skewed and should be rejected, replaced by a more accurate and balanced interpretation. Jung had good reason to reject the libido or sexual theory of Freud that Sadger and the Psychoanalytic Society was required to embrace because Freud, their master, had spoken. Freud must, or should have known, the limits of the biological knowledge of his time while understanding that great advances would come that might invalidate or require adjustments to his theory. Therefore his attempt to dogmatize his first thoughts was unscientific to the extreme.
Contrary to Sadger’s orthodoxy Jung was quite right to pursue the libido theory further. In desexualizing it, in Sadger’s term, Jung was on the right track as Freud’s interpretation was absurd on the face of it. While Jung was certainly ‘infected’ with a Christian based view, as a scientist he was trying to give a scientific basis to sex rather than ‘Christianizing’ it as Sadger thought. But then, Sadger was definitely intellectually limited by his Judaism.
In using such terms Sadger gives away the intense Jewish separation of Jewish and Aryan Kulturs. There can be no specific Aryan or Jewish knowledge; there can only be one knowledge and that is Scientific truth. If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.
While Freud built his theories on Aryan scientific psychological investigations he then infused the knowledge with Jewish superstition and goals which bent the science of psychology back toward a religious application which Freud undoubtedly hoped would negate the Astronomical and Biological shocks to the foundations of Judaism or Semitism.
Not only had Freud and his followers buried the reputation of the great French psychologist, Pierre Janet, from whom they borrowed or stole so much but in their successful attempt to freeze psychoanalytic investigation into the Freudian framework they brutally slandered Jung while discrediting his own scientific work. It was not until the sixties of the twentieth century that Jung began to be understood and credited for his contributions which were certainly equal to and mainly independent of Freud.
Thus we have the persistence of Alan Dundes pursuit of Sadger’s little volume to thank for casting a few rays of light on this thorny problem of psychoanalysis.
A Review: Pt. 3, Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 1, 2011
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3:
Two Peas And The Pod.
The ease with which ERB shifts from one complicated subject to another is truly remarkable; no less so in the facility he has for organizing these matters into a few lines or paragraphs. No one can do this without a firm grasp of his subject matter. ERB is simply one of the best informed writers of his era.
In a little less than a page ERB summarizes the Torrio-Capone years in Chicago from the beginning of Prohibition in 1920 while incorporating a fictional history of his character, Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick. Patrick as his name indicates is Irish. He was part of the Dion O’ Bannion gang led bhy Bugs Moran after O’Bannion’s demise in 1924. According to Burroughs Patrick took part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.
…but Danny Patrick was ambitions. For years he had been the right hand of a Big Shot. He had seen his patron grow rich– “lousy rich” according to Danny’s notion– and he had become envious.
So Danny double crossed the Big Shot, went over to the other side, which, incidentally, boasted a bigger and better Big Shot, (Al Capone) and was a party to the hijacking of several truck loads of booze belonging to his former employer.
—————-
Many of the Big Shot’s enemies and several of his friends, had Danny taken for a ride. He knew the power of the Big Shot, and feared him. Danny did not want to go for a ride himself, but he knew that if he remained in dear old Chi he would go the way of all good gunmen much to soon to suit his plans.
Patrick is not not a nice guy, he is definitely not a nice guy. For my tastes ERB is much too tolerant of a man he describes as a psychopathic killer. “many of the Big Shot’s enemies, and several of his friends’ implies that Patrick has many, perhaps dozens, of murders to his credit yet Burroughs is going to have Tarzan befriend this guy.
While O’ Bannion was done in in 1924 by the Capone gang, being succeeded by Moran, ERB seems to telescope the years reversing things so that O’Banion is still alive after the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre– ‘The Day Chicago Died.’ ERB is clearly following and thinking about the situation in Chicago as he says, p. 27:
(Patrick) knew that sooner or later, the Big Shot woud have a grand funeral with truck loads of flowers and, at least, a ten thousand dollar casket.
Underworld funrals were prodigious affairs. There is a certain irony in the fact that Dion O’ Banion ran a flower shop. As a big crime figure it would be expected that the flowers for those expensive funerals would come from his shop. Is it any wonder Patrick was taking so many people for a ride. O’ Banion had a good racket going there.
Not wanting to be taken for a ride himself Patrick had opted for an extended vacation taking his typewriter with him. A Chicago typewriter, of course, was a Thompson machine gun. Tommy gun. The Chicago underworld qauickly adopted the Tommy gun which was new at the time. The Tommy made those Dick Tracy comic strips so thrilling. Although one has come to accept the Chicago hoodlum story as a commonplace if one actually thinks about it the open war between the underworld and legitamate society is so startling that one should be appalled. ERB like the rest of his contemporaries seems to have taken the fact in stride even, in his case, making Patrick a hero.
It is almost as though he made Patrick the dark side of the mild mannered Geology professor, Lafayette Smith. Or, in other words, himself. In this series of books from Invincible to Lion Man ERB explores the split or dual personality as examined in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. Convinced as ERB is that the Animus is represented by two archetypes, whith which I find no difficulty other than it can be three, four or more, in this story as usual he divides the two aspects of the personality between two characters. Although Lord Passmore who is Tarzan in disguise has a decidedly homosexual feel, which would make four personalities.
Lafe Smith is clearly an alter ego of Burroughs. Borrowing from ERB’s own experience he says of Smith, p. 11:
…Lafayette Smith, A.M., Ph.D., Sc.D, professor of geology at the Phil Sheridan Military Academy.
——————-
For a school year now, he had been an instructor in an inconspicuous western military academy.
Here we have ERB as he would like to have been with a string of degrees after his name. First in this dream life he is a professor of Geoplogy athe Phil Sheridan Military Academy which sounds pretty impressive but then he is mysteriously down graded from a professor to a mere instructor (which ERB was in fact) for a schoolyear, nine months, at an inconspicuous military academy. Thus fantasy collides with reality.
Another fantasy, now Smithe was on his way to achieve another cherished ambition, that of going to Africa to study the Great Rift Valley perhaps as ERB himself might have liked to have done but which he never did.
So ERB has his ego ideals, his Jekyll and Hyde sides going as pals to Africa. As Tarzan is also an ego ideal we have an actual trinity. Jekyll and Hyde and what? God? David Adams who is a pretty thorough Jungian is mystified by the lack of the benevolent old man in Burroughs’ work who according to Jungian theory should have been there. This is more htan likely a very involved question but I am going to sugest that possibly characters like Tarzan and John Carter seve in that capacity of Old Man/Jekyll figures while the actual Old Man figures who are betrayers serve perhaps as the Hydelike figures representing his father.
In real life Burroughs ‘old man’, his father, was a betrayer who had little good to say about his son even to the extent of defaming him to all and sundry. So, it is possible that ERB split the Jungian benevolent Old Man figure into Jekyll like Tarzan and John Carter and his father into the Hydelike Old Man character. As he was conflicted with a love/hate relationship with his father it would be easier for him not to mention his father by name. I offer this interpretation only as a suggestion and do not insist n it, still it is a possible solution to the problem perhaps leading to a full solution.
You can take the boy out of Chicago but you can’t take Chicago out of the boy. ERB was always fascinated by slang. Gunner Patrick gives him the opportunity for extensive and amusing word play. The criminal culture from which patrick comes has what amounts to a patois. At one point ERB calls it by the French term of argot. Even though he is pronouncing English words that the English speaking characters can recognize the meanings of the meaning he attaches to the words are beyond the comprehension of his auditors. Thus one has the intersting effect of the cultural clash between two examples of what should be the same culture but is not.
Of course ERB is in full command of not only both these cultures but seemingly all cultures. In his zany multi-cultural world he is the Master of Cultures. I pretend to the succession of ERB.
Thus disembarking from a ship the bright and dark sides of ERB tramp across Africa in the direction of the Great Rift Valley. Perhaps like Kitchener they came down the Nile to Khartoum and cut up the Blue Nile to Ethiopia like Samual Baker. Now Burroughs has to integrate his master alter ego, Tarzan, into the Jekyll and Hyde pair.
A psychological interpretation is that Tarzan must accept the Hyde of Burroughs’ personality as well as the Jekyll. Indeed, Tarzan seems to respect the Hyde side much more than he does the clown like but educated Jekyll side.
As the story is told Tarzan hears the sound of a machine gun and goes to investigate. Patrick had fired into the bush hoping to hit a lion nosing about the safari camp. He succeeds in temporarily scaring it away, giving Tarzan time to locate the camp.
The lion returns. Imagine this scene. Patrick with this Tommy gun is standing under the convenient tree, while Smith stands behind him with his nickel paltged .32 that he doesn’t even know how to aim. Here ERB’s dark side is in command while his incompetent but intelligent bright side is subordinate to the dark. What does this mean in real life?
As Patrick fires on the lion the Tommy gun jams leaving both sides of Burroughs’ alter-ego defenseless. At this time the Master alter ego falls on the lion from the tree killing him and saving the lives of the subordinate alter egos, Patrick and Smith. Patrick is Irish and the more aggressive while one presumes Smith is English and more passive. Thus a major theme of Irish and English which runs throughout the corus is here erepresented. While ERB claimed to be ‘pur’ English he was actually only English on his father’s side while Bennsylvania Dutch, in other words, Rhineland German, and Irish on his Mother’s side. the Irish surfaces not only here but in the following year when he assumed his Irish ancestral name of John McCulloch to write Pirate Blood. Also as David Adams points out the killing of the lion puts the seal on the relationship between Tarzan, Smth and Patrick.
In the same period of time he wrote Pirates Of Venus and Pirate Blood. Although pirates had figured in his early writing as the Black Pirates of Barsoom and the pirates of Pellucidar unless I’m mistaken this sudden efflorescence of interest in pirates has to do with the ‘pirating’ of Tarzan by MGM.
While not introducing himself Tarzan peremptorily gives the pair some instruction on how to comport themselves in the jungle then disappers up his tree.
The next time Tarzan and Patrick meet is a bonding session in which Tarzan accepts Burroughs’ dark side, Patrick.
Tarzan is squatting on the edge of the cliff observing Capietro and Stabutch in their camp below. the ground gives way precipitating Tarzan over the edge. He attempts to save himself by grabbing the chance tree growing out of the cliff face- the chance tree- even here Burroughs equates trees with safety- but the tree gives way. Tarzan falls through the grass roof of a hut landing safely. He is imediately engulfed by the goons of Capietro.
Now, having lunch under another tree not too far away, yards actually, is Gunner Patrick. HIs attention called to the Ape-man who he had previously not noticed he gets up to investigae. Aiding Tarzan he lets loose with a blast from the Thompson. He succeeds in dispersing the crowd as well as Capietro and Stabutch. this is almost commical: Tarzan shouts to Patraick to not go away, he’ll be right up. Good as his word he appears above.
Now come this very interesting bonding session in which Tarzan accepts Patrick. P. 98:
The “Gunner” was waiting for him upon the summit of the cliff directly behind the village, and for the second time these strangely dissimilar men met- dissimilar and yet, in some respects, alike. Each was ordinarily quiet to taciturnity, each was self-reliant, each was a law unto himself in his own environment; but there the similairty ceased for the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes as remotely separated as the poles.
The ape-man had been reared amidst scenes of eternal beauty and grandeur, his associates the beasts of the jungle, savage perhaps, but devoid of coarse, petty jealousy, treachery, meanness and intentional cruelty; while the “Gunner” had known naught but the squalid aspects of scenery defiled by man, of horizons grotesque with the screaming atrocities of architecture, of an earth hidden by concrete ans asphaltum and littered with tin cans and garbage, his associeates in all walks of life activated by grand and petty meannesses unknown to any but mankind.
Now, Burroughs signed his contract with MGM on April tenth of 1931 while he didn’t finish Triumphant until May twentieth so had forty days in which to realize his mistake. If he did realize his error so quickly it might acount for some of the misanthropic bitterness in the above passage and elsewhere. Filching his character would certainly be considered a grand meanness. On the other hand his misanthropic interpretation was a continuation of his longstanding dislike of mankind and civilization.
It is of interest that both Patrick and Tarzaqn have killed many men. Some of Tarzan’s kills, quite frankly, verge on the psychopathic. I can’t get over how he literally ripped a man’s head off his shoulders in Ant Men. Of course, he may have merely underestimated his strength being a fourth his size but having his full sized strength.
Nevertheless both are laws unto themselves in their own domains so theoretically they do as they please. Still, and I don’t know how to interpret this, ‘the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes as remotely separated as the poles.’ I’m clear on Patrick’s extreme but I’m not sure which extreme Tarzan represents.
These extremes were caused by the differences in the environments of the two men. Tarzan was raised amongst beauty , while Patrick was raised amongst squaor. As Burroughs roamed over Chicago, and it seems certain he searched out nooks and crannies, he was appalled byh the ‘screaming atrocities of architecture’. Chicagoans have been quite proud of their architects and architectures so Burroughs critique is quite different. The paving over of the environment bothered him as much as it does me. We no longer see the tin cans and bottles but the dumping of garbage wherever by certain people still goes on.
Tarzan was raised among the ‘noble’ beasts while Patrick was raised essentially among thieves and cheats.
Still, invironment aside both men had many kills or murders to their credit. Seems like a double standard to absolve Tarzan while condemning Patrik especially since each is obviously a product of their environment while neither therefore is inherently good regardless of their environment.
Perhaps Tarzan kills only for just reasons, of his own reckoning as he is a law unto himself, while patgrick kills for gain is where the difference lies. Perhaps that is the difference between constituted society and the criminal world. There are times when the most mild mannered and best of men and women must kill, whether in the individual or collective sensel. Burroughs brings this out when Lafe Smith attempts to liberate Lady Barbara and Jezebel from the Midianites. As he faces the Midianites with his .32 a cultured English voice comes down from the cross telling him that he is goint to have to kill someone if he and women wish to survive.
Perhaps this scene isn’t just entertainment but Burroughs relating a hard fact of life. No matter how good you may be a situation in life will appear when you will have to do that which goes against evrything you believe if you wish to survive.l Such is the West’s situation in the world today; commit suicide yourself or shoot to kill. Sometimes it comes down to that; left multi-culturalism or no.
This scene may be a very important psychological moment for ERB. There is wry truth in Tarzan’s next utterance to Patrick: “‘ A machine gun has its possibilites,’ the ape-man said with the flicker of a smile.'”
Perhaps ERB is in some midlife evaluation. The scene with his alter-ego Smith’s entry into Midian is laden with symbolism also. Let’s see how Burroughs handles that as he and Fate continue to weave the warp and woof of this remarkable tapestry to bring out the pattern.
Continued in Part 4: Lafe Smith, Born Again.
Edgar Rice Burroughs As A Feral Child
July 18, 2011
Edgar Rice Burroughs As A Feral Child
by
R.E. Prindle
Cronus:
Cronus married his sister Rhea, to whom the oak is sacred, But it was prophesized by Mother Earth and by his dying father Uranus, that one of his own sons would dethrone him. Every year, therefore, he swallowed the children whom Rhea bore him, first Hestia, then Demeter and Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon~ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
I. The Father As A Cannibal Figure
Following Poseidon came Zeus. In place of Zeus Cronus was given a stone which he swallowed instead. When Zeus grew up he then castrated Cronus, replacing him.
While on the one hand an astrological myth denoting the precession of the equinoxes from one Astrological Age to another, on a psychological level the myth relates the fear of the Father that as the strength of his sons waxes his own wanes resulting in an eclipse.
Different human fathers react in different ways. Some nurture, some castrate or cannibalize their young. This is a serious problem for the son. For instance, what Tom Brokaw, a thoroughly castrated son, is pleased to call The Greatest Generation who were so enamored of their success in WW II, that they chose to emasculate a whole generation rather than surrender or even share power.
I correspond with David Adams from time to time while doing my writing from whom I sometimes receive valuable input. I had come to the conclusion that ERB’s father, George T, was a problem for ERB, especially as represented by ‘God’ in Tarzan And The Lion Man. The new year opened with Hillman publishing Dodds’ feral child collection which clicked in my mind. The week before ERBzine published my Part III, Two Peas And A Pod of the Tarzan Triumphant review. David Adams commented favorably on my comments about the Jungian Old Man archetype. He said in an email to me:
I agree with your interpretation that “characters like Tarzan and John Carter serve in the capacity of Old Man/Jekyll figures while the actual Old Man figures who are betrayers serve perhaps as Hydelike figures as represented by the father.” (David quoting me.) Those old man figures, early and late, are also cannibals who are hell-bent on eating him up while then spreading the bones across some desert for the hyenas to chew. Who was that old cannibal with the cancerous face followed by a pair of African wolves? (Jungle Tales of Kipling)
As can be seen I picked up on the Father figure but adding the cannibal detail adds the needed dimension for full comprehension.
George T. had been bothering me for some time. The love-hate relationship ERB had with him is quite obvious, but then it occurred to me that the other sons had the same relationship to their father while George T. appeared to program them all for failure- that is they not surpass him in their lifetime somewhat like Cronus of Greek mythology. He made them all dependent on him. The supplicating tone of the letters from college of sons George and Harry is all too obvious. George T. sending the boys to Yale without the means to support a position would have had the effect of emasculating them relative to their fellow students thus subordinating them.
Then on graduation he took them into his battery business. As a businessman in Chicago it wouldn’t be unreasonable to believe that George T. had some relatively influential contacts in town who might have been able to place Yale graduates advantageously but he chose to keep the boys with him and subordinate to him.
The battery factory proved dangerous for his son Harry who developed respiratory problems from the battery chemicals plus perhaps in psychological reaction to suppression by his father. He went West to join fellow Yalie, Lew Sweetser, in Idaho. Son George, who had had enough of working for his father, also fled to Idaho to join Harry and Sweetser.
None of the three knew enough about the cattle business to survive so that by 1913 when George T. had his basket pulled up all the sons were back in Chicago in various degrees of failure or, at least, lack of success. As of that date it would appear that like Cronus George T. had swallowed or cannibalized his sons.
There was a Zeus figure in the bunch who didn’t want to be swallowed and that Zeus figure was ERB. Like Zeus ERB was the youngest son. ERB developed independently of his brothers who were approximately ten years older than he. Thus when they were at Yale ERB was attending grade school.
As I pointed out in my Books, Burroughs and Religion George T. was especially rigorous in the attempt to emasculate his youngest son. His effort culminated when he sent ERB to military school. This was a form of dislocation and rejection that ERB could not bear. He tried to escape but his father sternly returned him to the Michigan Military Academy.
The effects of this were that ERB was declassed as he considered the MMA a rich kid’s reform school. Thus to some extent he was criminalized in his own mind. His reaction was also seminal in the formation of his two principal characters John Carter and Tarzan.
His hurt was so strong, his separation from his parents and home so complete that he became psychologically orphaned. His parents died to him the day he was returned to the MMA. He adopted the drunken Commandant, Charles King, as his mentor or surrogate father. While betrayed by his father ERB apparently thought he found a friend in King. In that capacity King became the model for Lt. Paul D’Arnot of the French Navy. D’Arnot was the man who tamed the feral boy that was Tarzan introducing him to civilization much as King taught Burroughs how to survive and prosper at MMA. Or Burroughs remembered it in that manner. There may also be a literary connection to D’Artagnan of Dumas’ Three Musketeers.
This makes the period between the arrival of Jane and her party and the arrival of D’Arnot in Tarzan Of The Apes of special interest. I’m not sure what the period represents in Burroughs’ own life.
As his creation Tarzan is a feral child it follows that ERB considered himself alone and on his own as a feral child himself. A romantic notion but one no less real to him. Thus just as Tarzan’s parent’s died with the baby becoming a member of an ape tribe so Burroughs began a wild and difficult period as his parents died for him.
These events occurred just as Rider Haggard was becoming famous for his great African trilogy of King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain which ERB undoubtedly read at this time. Conan Doyle began his Sherlock Holmes mysteries and H.M. Stanley disappeared into an unknown Congo in pursuit of Emin Pasha. The West to East transit of the Congo impressed ERB greatly as his own heroes later crossed Africa in the same direction.
Being a complex individual ERB no longer wished to even acknowledge that he had ever had parents; thus his first creation- John Carter. As Carter only came into existence when ERB was 36 the writer had plenty of time to knock around learning the odd legend here and there. John Carter then is a version of the Great Historical Bum- the hundred thousand year old man of folklore.
John Carter could not remember his parents. In his memory he had always been the same age he was. In the words of one of my famorite songs, Stewball, he didn’t say he was born at all, just blew down in a storm. Certainly Burroughs had heard of the Comte de St. Germain who flourished at the time of the French Revolution. As esoterical cult figure today, St. Germain’s legend would have been more prominent from 1875 to 1911 than today. Like Carter St. Germain claimed to have been alive forever. In Revolutionary Europe he got away with it. Calgiostro was another Revolutionary charlatan claiming mysterious antecedents who would have intrigued ERB’s imagination. It seems certain the two would have been topics of conversation in the time before radio, TV and movies so it wouldn’t have been necessary for ERB to have read anything.
I doubt if he had read any of the books on Dodds’ list although one never knows but the list goes to show that the feral child would have been a popular topic of conversation. In my opinion then ERB’s literary future was cast when his cannibal father returned him to MMA.
He graduated from the MMA in ’95 but either couldn’t or wouldn’t return home staying on as an instructor. In ’96, just before the summer break which might have necessitated a return home he joined the Army being sent directly to Arizona without passing through Chicago. Was he avoiding returning home? One can’t say as in ’97 having found Army life not to his liking he received an early discharge. He could have kept going, of course, as many of us in his boots did, to LA, San Francisco or wherever but he chose at that time to return to Chicago. Of course, Emma was calling.
From ’97 to ’03 or so he worked for his father which he found as difficult as his brothers had. Fleeing Chicago to Idaho in 1903, when he came back a year and a few months later to do anything (that word anything has some meaning in this context) rather than work with his father. He became one of the poet Robert Service’s ‘men who don’t fit in.’ He had a very difficult few years from 1905 to 1913 bumping along the bottom.
But then in 1911 he began his rise via his intellect. He began to write becoming an immediate literary success of sorts. By 1913 when he was about to become a financial success through his intellectual efforts thus escaping his father’s curse, his father died. The young Zeus thus never got to castrate his father Cronus.
One can’t know what would have happened to his psychology had ERB been able to present his father with evidence of his success. I’m reasonably certain George T. would have belittled or rejected his success as like Cronus his youngest would have replaced him. He wouldn’t have liked that.
II. A Hand From The Grave
Had that happened and ERB been able to prove himself a greater than his father it is interesting to speculate as to what effect that might have had on ERB’s psychological development. As it was, a few months after his father’s death he packed up family and belongings and got out of town as far as he could go to San Diego, California and stayed away nine months. Time enough to be reborn.
There are numerous examples of betrayers who are cannibals in his corpus, in fact there is so much betraying and cannibalism in Burroughs’ work I find it slightly offensive. Rather than work up a list, which for the time being I leave to David, I’d rather concentrate on the most spectacular cannibalistic betrayer of the oeuvre, God of Lion Man.
I know I just wrote about Lion Man but with David’s interpretation of cannibalism I can present a much more cogent image. David’s much more into Jungian synchronicity than I am but the scene with God presents a remarkable occurrence of synchronicity. The scene is very complex.
George T. was born in 1833 so the book was written on his 100th birthday. Chicago was incorporated in 1833 while it was celebrating its Century Of Progress forty years after the Columbian Expo at the same time. Both events occurred just at the time that Burroughs realized he had lost control of his ‘meal ticket’ to MGM.
MGM was undoubtedly a component of God, the Father, being combined with the Chicago that fathered him and George T., his actual father, in his mind. From these components ERB then creates the magnificent apparition of God as man and beast. God has the mind of divine power such as had Zeus but is still a Cronus, is, in fact, the ultimate cannibal.
Tarzan and Rhonda represent Burroughs’ Anima and Animus so that God has the whole man in his power in its component parts- the X and y chromosomes. God tells the pair that he is going to use them to rejuvenate himself by cannibalizing them. The Father’s desire and the Son’s fear.
If God represents George T. on one side, MGM on another and organized religion on a third then even though ERB thought he escaped his father in 1913 by his intellectual efforts the father reaches up from the grave on his 100th anniversay to claim his son again.
At this time Burroughs also wrote Pirates Of Venus and Pirate Blood. Both would refer to the idea that MGM pirated his creation from him while the very despondent Pirate Blood is almost terrifying in its manic depression as the balloon rises and sinks being almost submerged in the ocean or the waters of oblivion, the subconscious mind, insanity, that I believe we can see it as the insanity of despair. At the end of that story the hero pairs up with a desperate woman who I believe we can read as Florence. All very transparent really.
So there Tarzan/Rhonda/Burroughs is trapped in a prison. He attempts his earlier escape of rising through his intellectual powers, that is, he ascends through a shaft in the roof. Unlike the first time when he surprised and astonished the world with John Carter and Tarzan, God, the Father, is waiting for him preventing his use of his intellect. In point of fact Tarzan And The Lion Man was a dismal sales failure thought by Burroughs to be caused by MGM.
If his previous four previous Tarzans under the Burroughs imprint had been successes it seems strange that the truly excellent Tarzan And The Lion Man should have failed. Failing proof of sabotage on the part of, say, MGM, one can only say the public taste is fickle or perhaps the innovative dust jacket didn’t look like the usual Tarzan dust jacket and fans just passed it by. It is also true that the book was a put down of MGM.
Tarzan/Burroughs sallies forth from his hiding place against superior forces. He is knocked unconscious. A sure sign that Burroughs is under supreme stress. Meanwhile God’s castle, in other words the literary structure of the last twenty years is going up in flames. The MGM pirates have lifted ERB’s life work.
He has to finish the story so he turns the tables on God taking him captive and making him do his bidding. Tarzan helps God recapture his City then abandons him disappearing down the hole of the subconscious to a lower level from when he emerges to be claimed by the Wild Thing- Balza, the Golden Girl, or Florence.
In a thinly disguised scene Tarzan, unwittingly it seems, wins Balza from her former husband much as Burroughs took Florence from Ashton Dearholt. The important thing here is that a transition has been effected from one world to another. The intellectual City of God has been abandoned in favor of a world of the senses.
It is at this point ERB abandons his own feral boy persona of horses, puttees and other symbols to become a sort of effeminate Dandy. He now affects tightly fitted fashionable suits almost effeminate in appearance. He turn into a party animal and if he had been a moderate drinker during his teens, twenties and early thirthies he now becomes almost a lush.
So, in the end, ERB was probably devoured by the Father in Cronus fashion. In the Myth Zeus forced Cronus to vomit up his brothers and sisters and he castrated him. In real life ERB was castrated and swallowed down.
He put up one heck of a fight that arouses the warmest admiration of him. One wonders, that if when all is said and done anyone can escape the imprint of those formative years. Is one’s whole horoscope cast in the womb and those few short months after birth? Sure hope not.
A Review: Part IV, She by H. Rider Haggard
December 4, 2009
A Contribution To The
ERBzine Library Project
A Review Of
SHE
by
H. Rider Haggard
Review by R.E. Prindle
Part IV and end:
Herself Portrayed
The idea of a twenty-two hundred year old woman patiently waiting for the reincarnation of a man she had murdered in that far off time is in itself an extraordinary concept. As an imaginative flight of fancy very likely Rider Haggard can be seen as its originator. Burroughs would borrow the notion twenty-seven years later in his The Eternal Lover when he reverses the sexes and has a cave man asleep for millennia wake to find his reincarnated woman. Since then variations on the theme have become quite common.
She, or Ayesha, was a powerful image of a woman. C.G. Jung saw her as the personification of his Anima theory. Haggard drew on many personal and historical details to create her. Ayesha was titled She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. As a child Haggard had a doll to which he gave that name. The doll must have represented his mother. If he invested characteristics of his mother into Ayesha then she must have been both warm and loving and cold and imperious. Over all one gets the impression that she was not particularly loving. Thus, Ayesha, while appearing to be in love with Leo/Kallicrates is nevertheless imperious, demanding and self-centered. In her only real display of afftection she kisses Leo on the forehead, as Haggard says, like a mother. As Haggard says of Meriamun in The World’s Desire, her love was not so much for her lover but an expression of her own vanity.
Haggard represents her as a living corpse in white funereal garments, completely shrouded. She has a strange accoutrement in the serpent belt with two heads facing each other. This is close to the caduceus. Perhaps Haggard had no idea of what the symbol meant in 1886 but by 1890 he had come up with an explanation. In The World’s Desire of that year Queen Meriamun of Egypt keeps something she calls the Ancient Evil in a box. The Evil is a small blob. When she warms it in her bosom it grows. World’s Desire pp. 144-45:
Thrice she breathed upon it, thrice she whispered, “Awake! Awake! Awake!”
And the first breath she breathed the Thing stirred and sparkled. The second time that she breathed it undid its shining folds and reared its head to her. The third time that she breathed it slid from her bosom to the floor, then coiled itself about her feet and grew as grows a magician’s magic tree.
Greater it grew and greater yet, and as it grew it shone like a torch in a tomb, and wound itself about the body of Meriamun, wrapping her in its fiery folds till it reached her middle. Then it reared its head on high, and from its eyes there flowed a light like the light of a flame, and lo! its face was the face of a fair woman- it was the face of Meriamun!
Now face looked on face, and eyes glared on eyes. Still as a white statue of the Gods stood Meriamun the Queen, and all about her form and in and out of her dark hair twined the flaming snake.
At length the Evil spoke- spoke with a human voice, with the voice of Meriamun, but in the dead speech of a dead people!
“Tell me my name,” it said.
“Sin is thy name,” answered Meriamun the Queen.
“Tell me whence I came.” it said again.
“From the evil within me.” answered Meriamun.
“Tell me where I go.”
“Where I go there thou goest, for I have war and thee in my breast and thou art twined about my heart.”
This quote gives an idea of what the snake belt worn by Ayesha signifies.
Of signficance while Meriamun is dealing in magic Ayesha denies all connection with the art saying she utilizes nature. She doesn’t use the word science but nature; nature would include psychology. She therefore draws on natural processes discovered but not scientific processes exposed. Thus when she kills her rival Ustane she does it by utilizing electro-magnetism, somehow using her own electro-magnetism to negate Ustane’s thus extinguishing her life force. We have then an example of tele-kinesis- action at a distance. As I’ve noted in other essays tele-kinesis was amongst an array of mental powers thought to reside in the unconscious being investigated by the Society For Psychical Research. Thus Haggard, probably through Lang, is up on the latest psychic developments.
The ability to kill by telekinesis places a moral burden on Ayesha. If one agrees that the use of such a power may be necessary the question arises of when it may be misused. It would seem that the killing of a sexual rival was an inappropriate use, so the warring good and evil heads of her snake belt refers to the moral dilemma Ayesha faces.
Her belt seems somewhat different than that of Queen Meriamun of The World’s Desire. The latter having accepted the aid of the Ancient Evil was committed to evil being unable to remove the belt. There seems to be an element of volition remaining to Ayesha. She is not ‘possessed.’ Of course Ayesha began her life some thousand years after Meriamun so perhaps psychology was somewhat further evolved at that time or evolved with her over her two thousand year life span.
Indeed, a topic of discussion Haggard introduces shouldn’t be dimissed lightly. That topic is the age old discussion of whether good can come from evil and evil from good. This is indeed a dilemma as bad results can arise from good intentions and vice versa. There is a serious side here.
Ayesha is pure irresistable beauty. Once she shows her face no man can resist her. She glories in this power. In The World’s Desire of four years hence Haggard will separate good and evil making Meriamun represent evil while Helen, the world’s desire, is all good.
Holly is an interesting character who may be a back hand slap at the concept of evolution. Holly also makes this the story of a beauty and a beast. Holly is described as having a low forehead with a hairline growing out of his eyebrows, further his beard and his hairline meet. He is said to have a hugely broad chest and shoulders with extra long arms, perhaps down to his knees although this is not stated. What we have in Holly then is the Wolf Man combined with King Kong. Monstrous indeed.
In contrast Leo Vincey is a Greek god, a sort of Apollo. As Ayesha is irresistable to men Leo seems likewise to be irresistable to women. Indeed, he was married to Ustane within minutes of arriving in Kor. He appears to have sincerely liked Ustane even though on sighting Ayesha’s face he too loved her. Ustane was a rival for a portion of Leo’s affections so Ayesha cut off her electrical supply.
Of several truly dramatic scenes in this spectacularly well constructed story a very dramatic one is when Leo confronts his twenty-two hundred year old incarnation 0f Kallicrates. Haggard doesn’t dwell on Leo’s understanding of this strange phenomenon although from the potsherd and his father’s letter he must have been convinced of the truth. Strangely he doesn’t ask Ayesha for an account of this earlier life, nor how it was that she came to Egypt from Yemen to interfere in his romance with Amenartas.
Haggard and Lang were aware of the early history of Yemen from whence Ayesha as a pure Semite came. She was pre-Christian, although not pre-Jewish, of some ancient Arabic religious beliefs. How she got to Egypt is never disclosed or how she came into conflict with the Egyptian princess Amenartas for Kallicrate’s affections.
Ayesha, by the way the name translates as Life, merely confronts Leo as the neo-Kallicrates without any preparation. A year or so to get to know her and become accustomed to her face might have been nice. Although, Leo was married within minutes of arrival in Kor and was apparently satisfied with his wife. He was a pretty adaptable guy.
At any rate Ayesha rushes him into immortality and while tomorrow may be a long, long time, eternity is even longer. One might want to consider a moment about a relationship of that duration. Nor does she adequately prepare Leo’s mind for the ordeal of fire that she wants him to go through to become immortal. Twenty-two hundred years of waiting had done little to improve her patience.
Haggard has put everything he has into this story. He was granted clear vision only once in his life and he took advantage of it. In later years he was frequently asked why he didn’t write another story as good as She. His reply was that such a story may only come once in a man’s lifetime. The concentration and focus probably will never return again. While Allan Quatermain, his third successive attempt to create a lost civilization was on the weak side I would argue that his last, Treasure of the Lake, comes close to She.
So, the four of them set out for the place of the fire of life. Masterful effects. High in the mountains there is a gigantic balancing rock, a huge mushroom type cap balanced on a spire. It would seems that Zane Grey was also greatly affected by She as Riders Of The Purple Sage hews very close to She. A narrow ledge of rock extends out opposite with a gap of fifteen feet. To cross this gap with high winds howling through, a plank carried by the ever patient Job has to be lowered across the gap. No mean task I’m sure, with only one chance of getting it right. Once in place, thousands of feet above the gorge each has to walk from side to side; plus they have only a few minutes for all four to get over during a single beam of light from the setting sun.
Fortunately all four make it crossing the balancing rock to descend into a cave leading to the bowels of the mountain. There an eternal flame that ensures the life of the planet rumbles by every so often. Twenty-two hundred years before Ayesha had bathed in this fire which following esoteric doctrines had burned away her gross, earthly, moral impurities making her essentially, pure spirit.
A famous incident of the process is recounted of the goddess Demeter in her travels after the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades. Coming to Eleusis Demeter in her form of an old crone was taken in by King Celeus and his wife Metaneira. As a reward for her kind treatment Demeter set about to make their infant son Demophon immortal. Thus each night she held him over the hearth fire to burn away his mortal impurities. Surprised one night by a startled mother, Metaneira, the process was disrupted so that Demophon retained mortal impurities and failed to attain to godhood.
In this sense then the fire that maintained the life of the Earth traveled a route through this mountain at the center of the Earth. It appeared something like Old Faithful at Yellowstone periodically. When it swept by, if one stood in the flame it burned away one’s mortal impurities leaving one, it is to be assumed, wholly Spiritual. All the materiality was gone.
Spirituality and materiality are still being discussed today. Some talk of Spirit as though it exists while the materialists aver that all so-called spirituality is a seeming effect of materiality. I am of the latter school of thought. Oneself is all there is, there is nothing more. The effect of spirituality is nothing more than a mirage created by intellect and consciousness which is entirely material. It is all reduced to psychology which is a description of material existence.
In Haggard’s story it is clear that Ayesha having lost her materiality to the flames is purely spiritual. This is going to cause her problems as she steps into the flames the second time.
The flame passes by while Leo dithers. Impatient for Leo to assume immortality Ayesha strips, as the flames will flame the material garments about her but not her body. As the flame comes around again Ayesha eagerly stands in its way. However having been once purified it is good for eternity. The second time is disastrous. Perhaps spiritually dessicated by the double dose Ayesha begins to wither devasted even in her death throes by her loss of beauty. Love in vain.
Job is so horrified he dies of fright leaving Leo and Holly alone.
The story for all intents is over but Haggard takes a dozen pages or so to get his heroes out of the caves and back to civilization.
Ayesha’s existence wasn’t extinguished. Her dying words were that She would return. Room left for the sequel which not surprisingly was called The Return Of She appeared in 1906.
Haggard hit the groove sharp as a knife in this incredibly well devised and executed story. One will find evidences of it strewn all through Burroughs’ corpus. Not least in his own character of La of Opar. La itself translates from the French as She, of course, so Burroughs even appropriates the name.
La is as ardent for Tarzan as She was for Leo/Kallicrates. Tarzan himself remains cold and indifferent to La throughout all four Opar stories finally abandoning her in Tarzan The Invincible.
She by Haggard is well worth three or four reads to set the story in mind and savor the wonderful and unearthly details
End of Review
A Review: Part II She By H. Rider Haggard
November 20, 2009
A Contribution To The
ERBzine ERB Library Project
She
by
H. Rider Haggard
Review by R.E. Prindle
From London To The The Caves Of Kor
She is dedicated to Andrew Lang:
I Inscribe This History To
ANDREW LANG
In Token Of Personal Regard
And Of
My Sincere Admiration For His Learning
And His Works
One may well ask then who is this Andrew Lang and what is his learning? In point of fact Haggard not only dedicated She to Lang but wrote three books in collaboration with him. Andrew Lang, 1884-1912, was a Scottish scholar specializing in folklore, mythology and religion so you can see where Haggard came by much of his esoteric knowledge. In addition Lang was one of the founding members of the Society For Psychic Research and a past-President. Lang wrote dozens of books over his lifetime. He even wrote a parody of She in 1887 called He. Today he is remembered only for his collections of fairy tales. Twelve volumes in all each titled after a color such as The Crimson, or Blue or Pink or Gray Fairy Book. The volumes are undergoing a fair revival now with a collector’s edition published by Easton Press and several nicely bound volumes by the Folio Society.
The nineteenth century was the one in which advanced knowledge of the past was rapidly extending European knowledge greatly. The Rosetta Stone deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics had been achieved as recently as the 1830s. Nineveh and the Assyrian ruins had been unearthed. Schlieman had discovered the locations of Troy and Mycenae.
The exoteric side was covered by the academics while the esoteric side was covered by independent scholars like Madame Blavatsky and probably Andrew Lang. There was a clean split between the academic Patriarchal view of ancient history and the emerging Matriarchal view that had just been developed by the Swiss mythologist, J.J. Bachofen. Bachofen organized ancient history into Hetaeric, Matriarchal and Patriarchal periods. He himself was a member of the successor Scientific period.
The academics totally rejected the notion of a Matriarchal period. This, of course, led to a complete inability to understand Homer, both Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad especially is a description of the war by the Patriarchy to destroy Matriarchy.
Lang seems to have understood the Matriarchal phase of ancient history. He must have passed this knowledge on to Haggard. Ayesha, as She, rules a Matriarchal society. While the ideas represented in She must have seemed bizarre or merely an amusing reversal of the Patriarchal world at the time, today it all reads comprehensibly. It rings true if not exact.
C.G. Jung, the psychologist, who developed such notions as the male Anima and the Shadow was very immpressed by what he saw as the male Anima in She. Madame Blavatsky lauded the book for its esoteric content. But then, Haggard was firing on all eight cylinders when he wrote it, it is difficult to conceive of a more perfect fantasy/adventure novel. Indeed Haggard subtitles the novel: The History Of An Adventure.
Haggard was an excellent Egyptian scholar. He not only visualized Egypt convincingly in his Egyptian novels but his Egyptian ideas pervade the African novels. Many of them involve Egyptian influences and even peoples filtering down into East and Central Africa. The Ivory Child is a case in point as is She.
The set up to the trip out is brilliant incorporating details that become cliches in B movies.
Leo Vincey’s father before he died gave a metal box to Leo’s guadian, Horace Holly, that wasn’t to be opened until Leo was twenty-five. This box is now opened. It contained a letter to Leo, a potsherd (a piece of a broken jar) covered with ‘uncial’ Greek lettering, a miniature and a scarab containing Egyptian hieroglyphics that read ‘Royal Son of the Sun.’
Thus Haggard captured most if not all of the elements that went into the intellectual aura fostered by B moves primarily in the first years of the talkies through the thirties. That entailed things like the Curse of the Pharaohs, movies like The Mummy melding into Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein and African juju spells. Things against which Europeans had no defense because the ancient magic was stronger than modern science, or so we were led to believe. I can’t speak for others but it took me a while to shake this oppressive spirit. This was pretty strong stuff for my ten to twelve year old brain. Not to mention being bombarded by The Creature From The Black Lagoon, The Thing and The Day The Earth Stood Still. We wuz tried in the fire and come through good.
The gist of it is that Leo’s ancestor Kallicrates lived in the time of the last Pharaoh Nectanebo as one of the royal family. Spookier still Nectanebo was said to have fled Egypt before the conquering hordes, going to Macedon where he secretly impregnated Olympia, Philip’s wife, who then gave birth to Alexander which made him the rightful heir to the Pharaohship instroducing Greeks as rulers into his city of Alexandria.
At any rate Kallicrates girl friend, Ayesha, killed him in a jealous rage. The family nursing vengeance for all these two thousand years it is Vincey’s mission if he chooses to accept it, to follow the ancient map to the Caves of Kor and kill Ayesha or, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed who has been nursing regrets over killing Kallicrates two thousand years previously. Listen to me, I’m tellin’ ya it’s all here.
So Vincey, Holly and their man Job set out to find this place in Africa even more remote, if possible, than King Solomon’s Mines. And a heck of a lot more hostile too.
The trip out is some of Haggard’s finest writing. They are to be looking for a rock formation on the coast in the shape of a gorilla’s head. Sailing the coast they miraculously spot this head just as a terrific squall sends their felucca, dhow or other exotic ship from foreign climes to the b ottom.
But, even though the ship sinks they beat the reaper because they brought a boat containing unsinkable water tight compartments. As the storm subsides the three survivors along with an Arab float into the mouth of the appropriate stream as though it were all foreordained. What follows is some excellent writing with details I don’t need to recount.
Suffice it to say they are dragging their boat along an ancient canal when they are accosted by men from Kor. Ordinarily these guys would have speared them and moved on, no strangers needed in Kor. Using her magic She had learned of Leo’s coming a week previously thus ordering their lives spared while they were to be brought to her. Uh huh.
The detailing is terrific, this book is tight and well organized. It moves right along. The land is under the thumb of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. This is a tight Matriarchy as we now recognize not just some strange place where a woman is in charge.
While the three are entering the Caves of Kor, Leo Vincey, being the cynosure of all female eyes, a knockout named Ustane steps up and kisses him. Not averse to a public display of affection Leo lays one on her back. New to the area and not aware of the customs of the place Leo had just accepted Ustane as his woman. In town for a few minutes and already married. That’s the way things happen in this particular Matriarchy. Ustane is now in conflict with Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.
The stage is now set for the main drama when Ayesha recognizes Leo as her long lost Kallicrates come back from all those reincarnations at last.
The exoteric Catholic Church is thus thrust aside in favor of all the heretical doctrines of the esoteric which have been bubbling under the Hot 100 for two thousand years. These unfamiliar esoteric doctrines would become the mainstay and staple of science fiction/fantasy for the next one hundred years.
Just as an example of how Burroughs probably learned esoterica, I became familiar with estoeric themes myself from reading 1950s science fiction and fantasy- Amazing Stories, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and all that sort of stuff without realizing what I was taking in, thus Burroughs surrounded by the Society for Psychical Research, Camille Flammarion, George Du Maurier and Stevenson et al. naturally learned the esoteric language. No mystery, he was speaking in tongues before he knew it.
Leo is awaiting the summons from Ayesha which will be covered in Part III.
Edgar Rice Burroughs Meets H. Rider Haggard
October 25, 2009
A Contribution To The
ERBzine Library Project
Edgar Rice Burroughs Meets Rider Haggard
by
R.E. Prindle
Among the very many important influences on Edgar Rice Burroughs, contending for the top spot was the English novelist of Africa, Henry Rider Haggard, frequently named as just Rider Haggard.
Haggard was born on June 22, 1856 in Norfolkshire. He died on May 14, 1925. When Burroughs was born in 1875 his future idol was beginning his stay in South Africa of seven years duration. It was there that Haggard learned the history of the Zulu chiefs from Chaka to Cetywayo that figures so prominently in his African novels.
In Africa at twenty, he was back in England at 27. Even though Science was surging through England and Europe curiously Haggard was untouched by it all his life. There is not even an acknowledgement that he had ever heard of Evolution in his novels. Nor was he religious in the Christian sense. Instead he became well versed in the esoteric tradition leaning even toward a pagan pre-Christian sensibility. Perhaps very close to African animism.
One supposes that on his return to England he might have immersed himself in Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled published in 1877. He certainly seems to be a theosophical adept in his first two African novels, King Solomon’s Mines and She but he must have been pursuing his esoteric studies in Africa to have known so much. If so, he is certainly knowledgeable of Zulu and African lore having a deep sympathy for it. Indeed, he frequently comes across as half African intellectually.
Once he began writing he apparently never put down his pen. I am unclear as to how many novels he wrote. For convenience sake I have used the fantasticfiction.com bibliography which lists 50, but as I have sixty so there are obviously some missing. In addition Haggard wrote a dozen non-fiction titles.
While writing dozens of African novels Haggard also wrote a dozen or so esoteric novels placed throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Mexico and Nicaragua. These are all terrifically impressive displays of esoteric understanding, breathtaking as a whole. Usually disparaged by those without an esoteric background and education these volumes are almost essential reading for anyone so inclined. For those who would deny ERB’s esoteric training and background I refer them to Haggard’s novels.
The key to understanding Haggard’s thinking and works are a batch of novels exploring the relationship of the Anima and Animus. Haggard’s quest in which he failed was to find union with his Anima.
His fictional seeker and alter ego was Allan Quatermain. Thus the first of his esoteric novels is King Solomon’s Mines, in which he introduces Quatermain establishes his Ego or Animus. With his next novel, She, he introduces his Anima figure Ayesha otherwise known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Early Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle.
She was much acclaimed as the epitome of the Theosophical doctrine by Madame Blavatsky while C.G. Jung asserted that She was a perfect representation of the Anima figure. Haggard followed She (1886) with Ayesha, The Return Of She (1905) and the final volume of the trilogy, Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life And Love Story Of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923). Terrific stuff, well worth a couple reads each. She, of course, became the model for Burroughs’ La of Opar.
Haggard died in 1925 so it can be seen that he was obsessed by his quest for union with his Anima. Two additional volumes deal with his problem. The trilogy does not include Allan Quatermain so Haggard had to write his alter-ego into Ayesha’s story. This was begun in She And Allen of 1920. You can see that he closer he got to his death the problem became more urgent. The end of the story was told in his postumously published Treasure Of The Lake (1926).
Treasure is the most hauntingly beautiful title Haggard wrote. Just astonishing. In the novel Quatermain is ‘called’ to travel to a hidden land. He has no idea why but fate is visibly arranging things so that he must obey. Terrific stuff. The Treasure Of The Lake is none other than Allan’s Anima although no longer called Ayesha. She lives on an island in the middle of a lake in an extinct volcano, She being the Treasure. Heartbreakingly she is not for Allan. He is only to get a glimpse of the grail while a character is rescued by Allan who bears a striking resemblance to Leo Vincey, the hero of She who is winner of the Treasure. The Treasure is reserved for him. Thus Allan and Haggard journey back from the mountain’s top having seen the promised land but not allowed to enter. By the time the first readers, which included Edgar Rice Burroughs, turned the pages H. Rider Haggard had crossed the bar, his bark being far out on the sea.
Burroughs was impressed. His 1931 novel, Tarzan Triumphant, is a direct imitation in certain episodes. Largely on that basis I have to speculate that Burroughs read the entire Haggard corpus at least once.
The Anima novels of Haggard then are:
1. King Solomon’s Mines
2. She
3. Ayesha, The Return Of She
4.Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life And Love Story Of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed
5. She And Allan
6. The Treasure Of The Lake
The writing of the titles span Haggard’s writing career.
His first esoteric novels which I heartily recommend are Cleopatra, The World’s Desire (top notch), The Pearl Maiden, Montezuma’s Daughter, Heart Of The World, Morning Star and Queen Sheba’s Ring.
What most people think of and when anyone thinks of Haggard is his character Allan Quatermain. The makes and remakes of Quatermain and She movies are numerous. You could entertain yourself for many an hour.
Fourteen novels were published during Haggard’s lifetime, the best known being King Soloman’s Mines and Allan Quatermain. Many people have no idea he wrote anything else. She, of the first African trilogy, doesn’t include Quatermain.
Both of the first Quatermains were highly influential on Burroughs. Tarzan was fashioned to some extent on the character Sir Henry Curtis, the original white giant. While most people look for the origins of Tarzan in the Romulus and Remus myth of Rome that is only a small part of it that reflects Burroughs’ understanding of ancient mythology. The models for Tarzan are more diverse including not only Curtis but The Great Sandow who Burroughs saw and possibly met at the great Columbian Exposition of 1893. The list of titles in the Quatermain series: (N.B. It is Quatermain not Quartermain.)
1. King Solomon’s Mines
2. Allan Quatermain
3. Allan’s Wife
4, Maiwa’s Revenge
5. Marie
6. Child Of The Storm
7. The Holy Flower
8. Finished
9. The Ivory Child
10. The Ancient Allan
11. She And Allan
12. Heu-Heu or The Monster
13. Treasure Of The Lake
14. Allan And The Ice Gods
As I look over the list I find that they were all pretty good. The trilogy of Marie, Child Of The Storm and Finished, concerning Chaka’s wars is excellent. The Holy Flower and The Ivory Child are also outstanding. The Ivory Child introduces the notion of the Elephant’s Graveyard that captivated Hollywood while taking a central place in MGM’s Tarzan series of movies.
Other noteworthy African titles are Nada, The Lily, The People Of The Mist and Benita.
In addition to the Esoteric and African novels Haggard wrote various contemporary and historical novels. All of them are high quality but mainly for the Haggard enthusiast. Burroughs may have been influenced to write the diverse range of his stories by Haggard’s example.
In the current print on demand (POD) publishing situation nearly the entire catalog is available. The Wildside Press publishes attractive editons of forty-some titles. Kessinger Publishing publishes most of what Wildside doesn’t and most of what they do but in relatively unattractive editions. You can search other POD publishers and probably come up with what you want.
Haggard is wonderful stuff. You can choose at random and come up with something that truly entertains you.
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#5 Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar
Part V
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Du Maurier, George: Peter Ibbetson
Dudgeon, Piers: Captivated: J.M. Barrie, The Du Mauriers & The Dark Side Of Neverland, 2008, Chatto And Windus
Hesse, Herman: The Bead Game
Neumann, Erich: The Origins and History Of Consciousness, 1951, Princeton/Bollingen
Vrettos, Athena: “Little Bags Of Remembrance: Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson And Victorian Theories Of Ancestral Memories” Erudit Magazine Fall 2009.
While it is today commonly believed that Sigmund Freud invented or discovered the Unconscious this is not true. As so happens a great cataclysm, The Great War of 1914-18, bent civilization in a different direction dissociating it from its recent past.
Studies in the earlier spirit of the unconscious continued to be carried on by C.G. Jung and his school but Freud successfully suppressed their influence until quite recently actually. Through the fifties of the last century Freud’s mistaken and harmful, one might say criminal, notion of the unconscious held the field. Thus there is quite a difference in the tone of Edgar Rice Burroughs writing before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
There are those who argue that Burroughs was some kind of idiot savant who somehow knew how to write exciting stories. In fact he was a well and widely read man of varied interests who kept up on intellectual and scientific matters. He was what might be called an autodidact with none of the academic gloss. He was very interested in psychological matters from hypnotism to dream theory.
The scientific investigation of the unconscious may probably be dated to the appearance of Anton Mesmer and his interest in hypnotism also variously known as Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism. The full fledged investigation of the unconscious began with hypnotism. Slowly at first but by the last quarter of the nineteenth century in full flower with varied colors. Science per se was a recent development also flowering along with the discovery of the unconscious.
While Charles Darwin had brought the concept of evolution to scientific recognition in 1859 the key discipline of genetics to make sense of evolution was a missing component. It is true that Gregor Mendel discovered the concept of genetics shortly after Darwin’s Origin Of Species was issued but Mendel’s studies made no impression at the time. His theories were rediscovered in 1900 but they were probably not widely diffused until after the Great War. Burroughs knew of the earlier Lamarck, Darwin and Mendel by 1933 when he wrote Tarzan And The Lion Man. His character of ‘God’ is the result of genetic mutation.
Lacking the more complete knowledge of certain processes that we have today these late nineteenth century speculators seem ludicrous and wide of the mark but one has to remember that comprehension was transitting the religious mind of the previous centuries to a scientific one, a science that wasn’t accepted by everyone then and still isn’t today. The Society For Psychical Research sounds humorous today but without the advantage of genetics, especially DNA such speculations made more sense except to the most hard nosed scientists and skeptics. The future poet laureate John Masefield was there. Looking back from the perspective of 1947 he is quoted by Piers Dudgeon, p. 102:
Men were seeking to discover what limitations there were to personal intellect; how far it could travel from its home personal brain; how deeply it could influence other minds at a distance from it or near it; what limits, if any, there might be to an intense mental sympathy. This enquiry occupied many doctors and scientists in various ways. It stirred George Du Maurier…to speculations which deeply delighted his generation.
Whether believer or skeptic Burroughs himself must have been delighted by these speculations as they stirred his own imagination deeply until after the pall of the Revolution and Freud’s triumph.
Burroughs was subjected to dreams and nightmares all his life. Often waking from bad dreams. He said that his stories were derived from his dreams but there are many Bibliophiles who scoff at this notion. The notion of ‘directed dreaming’ has disappeared from popular consideration but then it was a serious topic. Freud’s own dream book was issued at about this time. I have already reviewed George Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson on my blog, I, Dynamo and on ERBzine with Du Maurier’s notions of ‘Dreaming True’. It seems highly probable that Burroughs read Ibbetson and Du Maurier’s other two novels so that from sometime in the nineties he would have been familiar with dream notions from that source.
Auto-suggestion is concerned here and just as support that Burroughs was familiar with the concept let me quote from a recent collection of ERB’s letters with Metcalf as posted on ERBzine. This letter is dated December 12, 1912.
If they liked Tarzan, they will expect to like this story and this very self-suggestion will come to add to their interest in it.
Athena Vrettos whose article is noted above provides some interesting information from Robert Louis Stevenson who developed a system of ‘directed dreaming’ i.e. auto-suggestion. We know that Burroughs was highly influenced by Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde while he probably read other novels of Stevenson. How could he have missed Treasure Island? Whether he read any of Stevenson’s essays is open to guess but in an 1888 essay A Chapter On Dreams Stevenson explained his method. To Quote Vrettos:
Rather than experiencing dreams at random, fragmented images and events, Stevenson claims he has learned how to shape them into coherent, interconnected narratives, “to dream in sequences and thus to lead a double life- one of the day, one of the night- one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving false.” Stevenson describes how he gains increasing control of his dream life by focusing his memory through autosuggestion, he sets his unconscious imagination to work assisting him in his profession of writer by creating “better tales than he could fashion for himself.” Becoming an enthusiastic audience to his own “nocturnal dreams”, Stevenson describes how he subsequently develops those dreams and memories into the basis for many of his published stories, most notably his 1886 Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.
Now, directed dreaming and Dreaming True sound quite similar. One wonder if there was a connection between Stevenson and Du Maurier. It turns out that there was as well as with nearly the entire group of English investigators. Let us turn to Piers Dudgeon again, p. 102:
Shortly after they met, the novelist Walter Besant invited [Du Maurier] to join a club he was setting up, to be named ‘The Rabelais’ after the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Its name raised expectations of bawdiness, obscenity and reckless living, (which were not in fact delivered) as was noted at the time. Henry Ashbee, a successful city businessman with a passion for pornography, and reputed to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s model for the two sides of his creation, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, denounced its members as ‘very slow and un-Rabelaisian’, and there is a story that Thomas Hardy, a member for a time, objected to the attendance of Henry James on account of his lack of virility.
Virility was not the issue however. The members of the Rabelais were interested in other worlds. Charles Leland was an expert on fairy lore and voodoo. Robert Louis Stevenson was the author of The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1886) which epitomized the club’s psychological/occult speculations. Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a member of the British Society For Psychical Research, was a dedicated spiritualist from 1916. Henry James was probably more at home than Hardy, for both his private secretary Theodora Besanquet, and brother William, the philosopher, were members of the Psychical Society.
In many ways the Rabelais was a celebration that [Du Maurier’s] time had come. Parapsychological phenomena and the occult were becoming valid subjects for rigorous study. There was a strong feeling that the whole psychic scene would at any moment be authenticated by scientific explanation.
Du Maurier was obviously well informed of various psychical ideas when he wrote Ibbetson. In addition he had been practicing hypnosis since his art student days in the Paris of the late 1850s.
So this was the literary environment that Burroughs was growing up in. As Bill Hillman and myself have attempted to point out, ERB’s mental and physical horizons were considerably broadened by the Columbian Expo of 1893. Everything from the strong man, The Great Sandow, to Francis Galton’s psychological investigations were on display. The cutting edge of nineteenth century thought and technology was there for the interested. Burroughs was there for every day of the Fair. He had time to imbibe all and in detail. The Expo shaped his future life. That he was intensely interested in the intellectual and literary environment is evidenced by the fact that when he owned his stationery story in Idaho in 1898 he advertised that he could obtain any magazine or book from both England and America. You may be sure that he took full advantage of the opportunity for himself. As this stuff was all the rage there can be no chance that he wasn’t familiar with it all if he didn’t actually immerse himself in it. Remember his response to Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden was instantaneous. Thus you have this strange outpost of civilization in Pocatello, Idaho where any book or magazine could be obtained. Of course, few but Burroughs took advantage of this fabulous opportunity. It should also be noted that he sold the pulp magazines so that his interest in pulp literature went further back than 1910.
In addition ERB was enamored of the authors to the point of hero worship much as musical groups of the 1960s were idolized so he would have thirsted for any gossip he could find. It isn’t impossible that he knew of this Rabelais Club. At any rate his ties to psychology and the occult become more prominent the more one studies.
It seems to me that longing as he did to be part of this literary scene, that if one reads his output to 1920 with these influences in mind, the psychological and occult content of, say, the Mars series, becomes more obvious. He is later than these nineteenth century lights so influences not operating on them appear in his own work making it more modern.
At least through 1917 the unconscious was thought of as a source of creativity rather than the source of evil impulses. If one could access one’s unconscious incalculable treasures could be brought up. Thus gold or treasure is always depicted in Burroughs’ novels as buried. The gold represents his stories, or source of wealth, brought up form his unconscious. The main vaults at Opar are thus figured as a sort of brain rising above ground level. One scales the precipice to enter the brain cavity high up in the forehead or frontal lobe. One then removes the ‘odd shaped ingots’ to cash them in. Below the vaults are two levels leading back to Opar that apparently represent the unconscious. Oddly enough these passageways are configured along the line of Abbot’s scientific romance, Flatland.
In Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar the gold is taken to the Estate and buried replicating the vaults. Once outside Opar and in circulation, so to speak, the ingots are accessible to anyone hence the duel of Zek and Mourak for them. The first gold we hear of in the Tarzan series is brought ashore and buried by the mutineers. This also sounds vaguely like Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The watching Tarzan then digs the gold up and reburies it elsewhere. In The Bandit Of Hell’s Bend the gold is stolen and buried beneath the floorboards of the Chicago Saloon. Thus gold in the entire corpus is always from or in a buried location. These are never natural veins of gold but the refined ingots.
Not only thought of as a source of treasure during this period the unconscious was thought to have incredible powers such as telekinesis, telepathy and telecommunication. One scoffs at these more or less supernatural powers brought down from ‘God’ and installed in the human mind. As they have been discredited scientifically Western man has discarded them.
On the other hand Western Man deludes himself into accepting the oriental Freud’s no less absurd assertion that the unconscious exists independently of the human body somewhat like the Egyptian notion of the ka and is inherently evil while controlling the conscious mind of the individual. This notion is purely a religious concept of Judaism identifying the unconscious as no less than the wrathful, destructive tribal deity of the old testament Yahweh. Further this strange Judaic concept of Freud was allowed to supersede all other visions of the unconscious while preventing further investigation until the writing of C.G. Jung were given some credence beginning in the sixties of the last century.
In point of fact there is no such unconscious. The supernatural powers given to the unconscious by both Europeans and Freud are preposterous on the face of it. For a broader survey of this subject see my Freud And His Vision Of The Unconscious on my blogsite, I, Dynamo.
This so-called unconscious is merely the result of being born with more or less a blank mind that needs to be programmed. The programming being called experience and education. The maturation and learning process are such that there is plenty of room for error. All learning is equivalent to hypnosis, the information being suggestion which is accepted and furthers the development of the individual. Learning the multiplication tables for instance is merely fixing them in your mind or, in other words, memorizing them. All learning is merely suggestion thus it is necessary that it be constructive or education and not indoctrination or conditioning although both are in effect. Inevitably some input will not be beneficial or it may be misunderstood. Thus through negative suggestion, that is bad or terrifying suggestions, fixations will result. A fixation is impressed as an obsession that controls one’s behavior against one’s conscious will, in the Freudian sense. The fixation seems to be placed deep in the mind, hence depth psychology. Thus when ERB was terrified and humiliated by John the Bully certain suggestions occurred to him about himself that became fixations or obsessions. These obsessions directed the content of his work.
To eliminate the fixations is imperative. This is what so-called depth psychology is all about. The subconscious, then, is now ‘seprarated’ from the conscious, in other words the personality or ego is disintegrated. The goal is to integrate the personality and restore control. Once, and if that is done the fixations disappear and the mind become unified, integrated or whole; the negative conception of the unconscious is gone and one is left with a functioning conscious and subconscious. The subconscious in sleep or dreams then reviews all the day’s events to inform the conscious of what it missed and organize it so that it can be acted on. No longer distorted by fixations, or obsessions, the individual can act in his own interests according to his abilities. The sense of living a dream life and a real life disappears.
That’s why experience and education are so important. What goes into the mind is all that can come out.
But, the investigation of the unconscious was blocked by Freudian theory and diverted from its true course to benefit the individual in order to benefit Freud’s special interests.
So, after the War ERB forgot or abandoned the wonderful notions of the unconscious and was forced to deal with and defend himself against Freudian concepts. The charactger of his writing begins to change in the twenties to meet the new challenges of aggressive Judaeo-Communism until by the thirties his work is entirely directed to this defense as I have shown in my reviews of his novels from 1928 to 1934.
Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar then reflects this wonderful vision of the subconscious as portrayed by George Du Maurier and Robert Louis Stevenson
Then the grimmer reality sets in.
End Of Review.
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#5 Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar
by
R.E. Prindle
Part IV
From Achmet Zek’s Camp To The Recovery Of The Jewels
The nature of the story changes from the departure of Werper and Jane from Achmet Zek’s camp . To that point the story had been developed in a linear fashion. From Zek’s camp on ERB either loses control of his story or changes into an aggregation of scenes between the camp and the Estate leading to the return. Perhaps there is a modification in his psychology.
The struggle for the possession of the jewels and the woman contunues unabated. As always Burroughs tries to construct a story of many surprising twists and turns. This may be an influence of the detective story, Holmes, on him. He may be trying to emulate Doyle.
The problem of who the characters represent in ERB’s life becomes more difficult to determine. Werper continues as ERB’s failed self. I think as relates to Zek and the jewels Zek represents Burroughs’ old sexual competitor, Frank Martin, while Zek, the gold and the Abyssinians represent the deal between McClurg’s and its deal in 1914-15 with A. L. Burt. Burt first had the reprint rights to Tarzan Of The Apes, published in the summer of 1914. Those rights shortly passed to Grossett and Dunlap.
In my estimation Martin never ceased interfering with Burroughs’ marriage at least from 1900 to 1919 when Burroughs fled Chicago. We know that Martin tried to murder Burroughs in 1899 and that his pal, R.S. Patchin, looked up Burroughs in LA after the divorce in 1934 and sent a mocking condolence letter in 1950 when Burroughs died and after Martin had died sometime earlier. Patchin would obviously have been directed by Martin to taunt Burroughs in ’34. It’s clear then that Martin carried a lifelong grudge against Burroughs because of Emma.
Martin is thus portrayed as being in competition with Burroughs in 1914-15 and possibly but probably to a lesser extent in LA.
Jane is shown being captured by Zek twice in the story. Thus Emma was courted or captured by Martin when Burroughs was in Arizona and Idaho. In this story Jane is captured while Tarzan is absent in Opar. The second capture or courting by Martin is diffiicult to pinpoint by the inadequate information at our disposal but following the slender lead offered by the novelist, John Dos Passos, in his novel The Big Money I would think it might be in 1908 when ERB left town for a few weeks or months probably with Dr. Stace. It was of that time that the FDA (Federal Food And Drug Administration) was after Stace for peddling his patent medicines. Burroughs was probably more deeply involved with that than is commonly thought. At any rate his being out of town would have provided an opportunity for Martin. Whether something more current was going on I don’t find improbable but I can’t say.
I would also be interested to learn whether there was any connection between McClurg’s and Martin. Martin was Irish, his father being a railroad executive which explains the private rail car at his disposal, as were, of course, the McClurgs and so was the chief executive Joe Bray. If Martin knew Bray he might have pressured Bray to reject publication of Tarzan doing a quick turnaround when interest was shown by the Cincinatti firm. Martin then might have meddled with Burroughs’ contract with McClurg’s. The contract and McClurg’s attitude is difficult to understand otherwise.
The gold is buried which Zek is supposed to have gotten through Werper, then they have a falling out and Werper is captured by Mourak and his Abyssinians. Mourak would then represent A.L. Burt and a division of the the royalties. If McClurg’s had promoted Tarzan Of The Apes, which they didn’t, Burroughs would have received 10% of 1.30 per copy. Thus at even 100,000 or 200,000 copies he would have received 13,000 or 26.000 dollars. that would have been a good downpayment on his yacht. Martin who must have thought of Burroughs as a hard core loser from his early life would have been incensed by such good fortune that might have placed Burroughs’ income well above his own.
Instead, it doesn’t appear that McClurg’s even printed the whole first edition of 15,000 copies. The book immediately went to A.L. Burt where the price of the book was reduced to 75 or 50 cents with the royalty much reduced to 4 1/2 cents divided fifty-fifty between McClurg’s and Burroughs. It’s hard to believe that ERB wasn’t robbed as he certainly thought he had been. Thus when Mourak unearths the gold he is settling for a portion of the hoard when Zek’s men show up and the battle necessary for the story begins.
In this manner the key issues of gold, jewels and woman are resolved.
So, Werper with the jewels goes in search of Jane to find that she has already fled Zek’s camp. The scenes of the story now take place between the camp, perhaps representing McClurg’s offices and the Estate, representing Burroughs.
The latter half of the book, pages 81-158 in the Ballantine paperback is very condensed in a dream like fashion. The action within the very prescribed area with a multitude of people and incidents is impossible except as a dream story. The appearance of the Belgian officer and askaris must have been photoshopped it is so impossible. In other words, then, the whole last half of the book, if not the whole book, is a dream sequence in which dream logic prevails. I will make an attempt to go into late nineteenth century dream speculation in Part V.
A key point of the story is the regaining of the memory of Tarzan. This occurs near story’s end on page 139 and following. It’s fairly elaborate. In connection with his memory return I would like to point out the manner of his killing the lion when he rescues Jane from Mourak’s boma. The roof fell on Tarzan in imitation of his braining in Toronto while now he picks up a rifle swinging on the rearing lion’s head splintering the stock along with the lion’s skull so that splinters of bone and wood penetrate the brain while the barrel is bent into a V. Rather graphic implying a need for vengeance. Not content with having the roof fall on Tarzan’s head, while trying to escape the Belgian officer an askari lays him out with a crack to the back of the head but ‘he was unhurt.’ One can understand how Raymond Chandler marveled. My head hurts from writing about it. Also Chulk has his head creased by a bullet adding another skull crusher to the story.
The description of the return of Tarzan’s reason seems to fit exactly with Burroughs’ injury. I would have to question whether Burroughs himself didn’t have periods of amnesia. P. 139:
Vaguely the memory of his apish childhood passed slowly in review- then came a strangely tangled mass of faces, figures and events that seemed to have no relation to Tarzan of the Apes, and yet which were, even in this fragmentary form, familiar.
Slowly and painfully recollection was attempting to reassert itself, the hurt brain was mending, as the course of its recent failure to function was being slowly absorbed or removed by the healing process of perfect circulation.
According to medical knowledge of his time the description seems to apply to his own injury. His own blood clot had either just dissolved or was dissolving. Then he says almost in the same manner as in The Girl From Farriss’s:
The people who now passed before his mind’s eye for the first time in weeks were familiar faces; but yet he could neither place them in niches they had once filled in his past life nor call them by name.
In this hazy condition he goes off in search of the She he can’t remember clearly. His memory fully returns as he has Werper by the throat who calls him Lord Greystoke. That and the name John Clayton bring Tarzan fully back to himself. For only a few pages at the end of the book does he have his memory fully recovered.
In order to summarize the rest I have had to outline the actions of the main characters for as with Tarzan and his memory the story is one of ‘a strangely tangled mass of faces, figures and events.’ Whether this is artistry on Burroughs’ part or a dream presentation I am unable to ascertain for certain. Let’s call it artistry.
We will begin with Werper’s activities. While Tarzan promised to retrieve La’s sacred knife Werper appears to no longer have it as it disappears from the story. When Werper escaped from Zek unable to locate Jane he heads East into British territory. He is apprehended by one of Zek’s trackers. On the way back a lion attacks the Arab unhorsing him. Werper mounts the horse riding away directly into the Abyssinian camp of Mourak. Mugambi is captured at the same time. While the troop bathes in a river Mugambi discovers the gems managing to exchange them for river pebbles. Werper tempts Mourak with the story of Tarzan’s gold. While digging the gold they are attacked by Zek and his men. Werper rides off as Mourak is getting the worst of the fight. Zek rides after him. Werper’s horse trips and is too exhausted to rise. Using a device that ERB uses in one of his western novels Werper shoots the horse of the following Zek, crouching behind his own for cover. Zek has lost the woman but now wants the jewels. Werper hasn’t the woman while unknown to himself he neither has the jewels. In exchange for his life he offers Zek the pouch of river stones believing it contained the jewels. Zek accepts. Both men are treacherous. Werper waits to shoot Zek but Zek out foxes him picking up the bag by the drawstring with his rifle barrel from the security of the brush.
Discovering the pebbles he thinks Werper has purposely deceived him stalking down the trail to finish him off. Werper is waiting and pots him with his last shell. As Zek falls the woman, Jane, appears as if by a miracle reuniting the two. Could happen I suppose but definitely in dreams.
So, what are the two men fighting over? The sex interest, as the jewels are involved. Who do Werper and Zek represent? Obviously Burroughs and Martin. The stones are false but as Werper disposes of Zek in the competition for the woman Jane appears as if by magic to run to Werper/ Burroughs with open arms.
Werper with Jane returns to Zek’s camp now under the direction of Zek’s lieutenant, Mohammed Beyd. Rigamarole, then Werper deposits Jane in a tree from whence he expects to retrieve her on the following morning. The next day she is gone.
Werper once again turns East. He is spotted riding along by Tarzan. The Big Guy falls from a tree throwing Werper to the ground demanding to know where his pretty pebbles are. It is at this point Werper recalls Tarzan to his memory by calling him Lord Greystoke. Also at the moment the Belgian officer appears from nowhere, having miraculously ascertained Werper’s whereabouts, to arrest him.
Tarzan wants Werper more than the Belgian so tucking his man under his arm he breaks through the circle of askaris. On the point of success he is brought down from behind. Another thwack on the head. Apparently in a desperate situation Tarzan hears voices from the bush. The Great Apes have their own story line but here it is necessary to introduce them as Tarzan’s saviors. The voice is from Chulk who Tarzan sends after the troop. They attack routing the Africans. In the process Chulk, who is carrying the bound Werper is shot. If you remember Chulk stole the stones from Mugambi, or maybe I haven’t mentioned that yet. Werper falls across him in such a way that his hands bound behind his back come into contact with the pouch. Werper quickly recognizes what the bag contains although he has no idea how the ape came by them.
He then advises Tarzan where he left Jane. The two set out when the furore in Mourak’s camp reaches his ears. ‘Jane might be involved.’ Says Werper. ‘She might.’ says Tarzan telling Werper to wait for him while he checks.
Werper waits not, disappearing into the jungle where his fate awaits him.
Those are the adventures of only one character in this swirling vortex of seventy some pages.
Let’s take Mugambi next as he is the key to the story of the jewels yet plays a minor role. After crawling after Jane and regaining his strength he arrives at Zek’s camp at the same time as Tarzan and Basuli but none are aware of the others. Werper and Jane have already escaped when Tarzen enters the camp to find them missing. Mugambi follows him later also finding both missing. He goes in search of Jane. He walks through the jungle ludicrously calling out ‘Lady’ after each quarter mile or so. Leathern lungs never tiring he shouts Lady into the face of Mourak and is captured. Being a regular lightfoot he escapes having lifted the jewels from Werper. Chulk then lifts them from him, Mugambi disappears until story’s end.
Let’s see: Jane next. Jane along with the jewels is the key to the story. The jewels represent the woman as man’s female treasure. Jane is the eternal woman in that sense. The various men’s attitude toward the jewels reflects their own character. Thus, Tarzan in his amnesiac simplicity wants the jewels for their intrinsic beauty. He rejected the uncut stones for the faceted ones in Opar. Even in the semi darkness of the vaults, or in other words, his ignorance, he perceived the difference.
Werper at various times thinks he can get the gold, the jewels and the woman at once. He is happy to settle for the jewels taking them to his grave. Mourak knowing nothing of the jewels is willing to settle for a few bars of gold. When he takes the woman into his possession it is for the sole purpose of a bribe to his Emperor to mitigate his overall failure. Not at all unreasonable.
Zek is too vile to consider as a human being dying in the fury of losing all. Mugambi and Basuli are happy in their devotion to the woman to whom neither jewels or gold mean anything.
Tarzan then, pure in soul and spirit wins it all, woman, jewels and gold. One is tempted to say he lived happily forever after but, alas, we know the trials ahead of him.
So Jane is carried off to Zek’s camp where all the action is centred while she is there. Both Tarzan and Mugambi show up to rescue her but she has escaped just ahead of Werper who would thus have had the woman and the jewels. Alone in the jungle she once again falls into Zek’s hands- that is to say those of Frank Martin.
Now, Tarzan, who has fallen in with a troop of apes chooses two, Taglat and Chulk, to help him rescue Jane from Zek. Chulk is loyal but Taglat is an old and devious ape, apparently bearing an old grudge against Tarzan, who intends to steal Jane for his own fell purposes much worse than death.
In Tarzan’s attempt to rescue Jane, Taglat succeeds in abducting her. He is in the process of freeing her bonds when a lion leaps on him. In the succeeding battle Jane is able to escape the lion who had just killed Taglat.
Wandering through the jungle she hears shots, the voices of men. Approaching the noise she discover Werper and Zek fighting it out. She climbs a tree behind Werper. When he shoots Zek he hears a heavenly voice from above congratulating him. Jane runs to him hands outstretched. So now Werper has the woman again while believing he can retrieve the jewels. He can’t find them because unbeknownst to him Mugambi had substituted river rocks.
Improbably, except in a dream, he returns to Zek’s camp where he has to solve the problem of Zek’s second in command, Mohammed Beyd. Werper spirits Jane out of the camp but finds her gone the next morning. She had mistaken Mourak and his Abyssinians for Werper. Mourak now in possession of the woman, no gold no jewels, thinks to redeem himself with his Emperor, Menelik II, with this gorgeous female.
During that night’s camp the boma is attacked by hordes of lions. Lions play an amazingly central role in this story. Interestingly this scene is replicated almost exactly in the later Tarzan And The City Of Gold. In Jewels Tarzan rescues a woman while in Gold Tarzan rescues a man. That story’s woman becomes his enemy.
But now Tarzan and Werper hear the tremendous battle with Tarzan entering the boma to rescue Jane. By the time of the rescue Tarzan has regained the woman and the gold but lacks the jewels.
Unless I’m mistaken we now have only Tarzan and the apes to account for.
ERB’s life was at a turning point. At this stage in his career he must have realized that he would have a good annual income for the rest of his life. If only 5000 copies of the first edition of Tarzan of the Apes sold he would have received 6,500.00 Add his magazine sales to that and other income and 1914 must have equaled his income of 1913 or exceeded it. His income probably grew until he was earning c. 100,000 per year for three years from 1919-1922. So he had every reason to believe the world was his oyster through the teens. That must have been an exhilarating feeling. A sense of realization and power must have made him glow. But the period was one of transition, a casting off of the old skin while growing into the new. Thus one sees ERB abandoning his old self -Werper- while attempting to assume the new in Tarzan. Thus in death Werper transfers the jewels, call them the Family Jewels, from himself to Tarzan.
Tarzan begins the novel as an asexual being unaware of what jewels were or their value and receives them a the end of the novel as a release from emasculation or awareness of his sexual prowess. Once again Werper fades in the novel while Tarzan unaware of who he is comes to a full realization. Presumably Burroughs thinks he is able to assume his new role as 1915 ends.
In the novel when Tarzan realizes Werper has stolen the jewels he goes off in search of this symbol of his manhood. Werper is not in Zek’s camp. On the trail Tarzan comes across the dead body of the Arab sent after Werper with he face bitten off. He assumes this is Werper but can’t find the jewels. Wandering about he discovers a troop of apes deciding to run with them for a while. Selecting Chulk and Taglat he goes back to Zek’s camp to rescue Jane. At that point Taglat makes off with Jane. Discovering Zek and Werper on the way to the Estate Tarzan becomes involved in the battle between Zek and Mourak. He sees Zek take the jewels and then throw them to the ground as worthless river rocks.
He encounters Werper in the jungle again and prompted by the man fully regains his memory only to have Werper arrested by the Belgian police officer. The battle between Mourak and the lions ensues. Tarzan goes to rescue Jane, Werper goes to his death.
The unarmed Tarzan faces a rampant lion. Picking up an abandoned rifle he brains the lion, apparently in vengeance for all the indignities and injuries ERB has suffered in life.
Leaping with Jane into a tree they begin the journey back to the Estate to begin life anew. Some time later they come across the bones of Werper to recover the jewels and make the world right.
The novel closes with Tarzan’s exclamation.
“Poor devil!”…Even in death he has made restituion- let his sins lie with his bones.”
Was Burroughs speaking of Werper as his own failed self? I believe sothe latter. Remember that a favorite novel of ERB was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and that he believed that every man was two men or had two more or less distinct selves. Human duality is one of the most prominent themes in the corpus; thus ERB himself must have believed that he had a dual personality. Tarzan will have at least two physical doubles, one is Esteban Miranda in Golden Lion and Ant Men, and the other Stanley Obroski in Lion Man. Both were failed men as Werper is here. Both obviously represented the other or early Burroughs as Werper does here.
In killing Werper ERB hoped to eliminate the memory of his failed self as he did with Obroski in Lion Man. In other words escape his emasculation and regain his manhood.
The jumbled and incredibly hard to follow, or at least, remember, last half of the book with its improbable twists and turns in such a compressed manner gives the indication that this is a dream story. Only dream logic makes the story comprehensible if still unbelievable. The story then assumes fairy tale characteristics that don’t have to be probable to be understood as possible.
Can be genius, can be luck. I will examine Burroughs novels in relation to dreams in Part V. This part will not be as comprehensive as I would like but time grows short and it is better to make the attempt as not.
Part V follows.
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
A Review
Thuvia, Maid Of Mars
Part III-A
What We Have Here Is Change
by
R.E. Prindle
In the recent American presidential campaign in the US the winner won by promising the inevitable, Change. A very safe promise as the history of the world is one of change. Indeed, the life of the individual is one of unending change from the cradle to the grave. Change is now and forever. The question is, what response is made to the changes.
The times of Edgar Rice Burroughs were a period of the most earth shaking and rapid of all. At the same time most perilous, as the evolution of actual scientific knowledge in all fields was in its infancy and subject to misinterpretation. One might say in Burroughsian imagery that a series of doors stood before mankind, entering the right door would be more beneficial than the wrong doors.
Burroughs and others made tantative moves for the right door but others entered by the wrong door drawing most others through with them. What looked like progress turned into a regression. To shut up criticism the regressives began to demonize all those of different opinions. Burroughs was among those.
Some say he adapted poorly to the flood of change but the peole who do so are so confident in their opinions that to disagree with them is to be accused of being not only wrong but either criminal or insane. One doesn’t take their opinions too seriously as change will certainly demonstrate their opinions as ludicrous if it hasn’t already. Nevertheless as they are quite vocal in their condemnation of Edgar Rice Burroughs we have to consider the accuracy of their accusations as well as that of their own viewpoint. How well do they understand the issues?
ERB has some interesting observations on the changes occurring in the history, society and racial matters of his times as well as the concealed role of hypnotism in the transformation of that society. The basis of hypnotism is suggestion. As ERB say in Thuvia all is based on suggestion and counter-suggestion. If one conciders life and learning from that angle it presents some interesting possibilites.
What is learning? What is suggestion?
When the child is conceived he must of necessity have a mind with a blank slate. Freud, Jung and many others seem to seriously believe that newborns can inherit ancestral memories even though there is no one beyond the womb who has ever recalled any.
In fact without experience or learning that has has been introjected into the mind there is nothing for the mind to consider, hence no cogitation at all. This mind can only begin to form with the ejection from the womb. This occurs with a brain still in the process of formation. The development of the brain can only be considered completed shortly after puberty.
It seems obvious then that you can’t get out of a mind what isn’t in it. It behooves society then to begin loading the mind of a child as soon as the child is capable of handling education. The education of the mind must be built step by step to provide a firm foundation for the intellectual superstructure. Whatever is in the mind must come from or be suggested from outside the mind. There is no internal system of knowledge. Thus all knowledge is suggested to the child’s mind by his caretakers. They may be good or bad, well or ill intentioned. The brain is organized to receive suggestions or, in another word, experience. The reactive structure may already be in place dut to experiences in the womb and the actual birthing process but the actual learning process begins the moment the newborn emerges from the womb and receives a slap on the bottom to get his lungs started.
Thus the mind of the child is extremely malleable during the time until about puberty and shortly thereafter. If education is neglected during this early period and shortly thereafter it is unlikely that the adult can ever make up the lack. For instance if the basics or reading, writing and arithmetic are not loaded into the brain during this malleable period it is very rare that the skills can be acquired at a later time.
Thus, as it was always known that the child is father to the man various doctrinaire organizations such as the Jesuits believed that if they could form the education of the child or, in another word, indoctrinte him, they could shape the future in their own image. In Burroughs’ time the mechanisms of education were more fully understood. Various schemes were proposed to revise educational methods many of which were just odd or crude, but the better thought to change the direction of society toward a higher ideal.
The Communists were well are at the time that suggestion was the basis of education. Lothrop Stoddard writing in his The Revolt Against Civilization of 1922 quotes Eden and Cedar Paul from their book Proletcult of 1921:
“There is no such thing as “scientific” economics or sociology. For these reasons…there should be organized and spread abroad a new kind of education, “Proletcult.” Thus…in a fighting culture aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and at the replacement of democratic culture and bourgeois ideology by ergatocratic culture and proletarian ideology…” The authors warmly endorse the Soviet government’s prostitution of education and all other forms of intellectual activity to Communist propaganda, for we are told that the “new education” is inspired by the “new psychology”, which “provides the philosophical justification of Bolshevism and supplies a theoretical guide for our efforts in the field of proletarian culture…. Education is suggestion. The recognition that suggestion is auto suggestion, and that auto suggestion is the means whereby imagination controls the subconscious self, will enable us to make a right use of the most potent force which has become available to the members of the human herd since the invention of articulate speech.
I’m sure you can find appropriate application of the doctrine since Stoddard wrote in education, movies, TV, books and phonograph records and CDs. While I would disagree with the Pauls’ notion of suggestion and auto suggestion the Freudian influence is quite clear. This would be abetted by John Dewey’s notions on education that deemphasized the educational foundation while directing it more toward ideological considerations, or ‘relatively unstructured, free, student-directed progressive education.’
God only knows what free, progressive education is but this sort of social engineering was the wrong turn being taken in this era of rapid change.
So, loading the brain to deal with life’s exigencies is of necessity a slow process. As the brain continues to develop outside the womb there is plenty of room for malfunction. As man is incapable of creating anything original the education of the child may be compared to the loading of a computer. First the operating system. Whether consciously or unconsciously since all man knows is his own brain he has replicated it in his machine. A computer functions just like a brain, which should astound no one, as man can only devise what he already knows.
Now, human experience dates back about a hundred thousand years. I intentionally leave out the African development as it had nothing to do with the education of mankind. The African contribution is nil. Education began outside Africa. Having painfully and laboriously accumulated the huge fund of knowledge it must be entered into the brain of the new being. This sort of suggestion is called education. There’s not much room for anything called ‘free’ or ‘progressive.’ Getting it ain’t going to be free, the child has to work like a mule. This is a slow, laborious process as extensive foundations must be laid down before any superstructure can rise. Thus years are consumed just to teach the child reading, writing and arithmetic. With these three tools he can learn anything else. Inexplicably this fact seems to have been lost sight of in today’s educational theories unless of course the Pauls’ dictum is being followed.
Once the foundation has been laid, a form of suggestion and actually hypnosis, the child, now a student, must be taught how to manage and interpret what he learns at an increasingly rapid pace. Unfortunately there will be children left behind; any other expectation is fatuous, some are just brighter than others. Managing and interpreting comes from within the experience of the organism. Here’s the real problem because the same data will by analyzed differently and produce different results and opinions.
Along with learning factual matters the child must at the same time develop emotionally and psychologically. Nasty work. This is a difficult part. As the child has little ability to understand and even less ability to accurately analyze it he has to reason from faulty premisses. This ignorance of reality is what forms Freud’s notion of the unconscious or Id. Correcting this unconscious to consciousness is the conversion of Freud’s Id to Ego. A child misinterprets suggestions. Some become fixated in his un- or subconscious. The fixations are what distort consciousness from the subconscious interfering with the integration of the subconscious and the conscious. While the child is made more conscious in his ability to understand and reject harmful suggestions these fixations like post-hypnotic suggestions control his responses. The fixations must be exorcised which is the intended function of the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung.
Once again, suggestion is everything outside your mind. Your mind cannot function without these suggestions because there will be nothing in the mind to function. Be carefull of what you put into your mind or, at least, that you do put something of value into it. Whether ERB realized this or not, his ideas of hypnosis and suggestion indicate he might have, he pursued a program of continuing education all his adult life. At the time of writing Thuvia he was working through Edward Gibbons’ Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, a vast minefield of amazing and truly educational suggestion.
Part B follows.