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.
Thuvia, Maid Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Review
March 14, 2009
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
A Review
Thuvia, Maid Of Mars
by
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Part I
Review by R.E. Prindle
This very interesting sdtory was written shortly after ERB returned to Chicago from his first San Diego excursion. It was placed between the Girl From Fariss’s, the last story written in San Diego and The Cave Man.
The material deals almost exclusively with suggestion and hypnosis. Although hypnosis is a recurring theme in Burroughs one is startled by his concentration on the subject and his seemingly informed ideas of it, especially the role of suggestion.
One wonders why his interest surfaced at this time and where ERB learned or developed this information. He was just back from San Diego and I’m going to suggest he picked it up from his hero, L. Frank Baum. As Baum was such a significant influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs perhaps it may be worthwhile to attempt an assessment on Baum’s role in literature and history. There can be no question but that the OZ series of Baum took a central place in the American psyche and a place in the European psyche. Baum’s books have been in demand since 1900 when he began writing them to the present. Baum put Kansas on the map. The Wizard, Dorothy and Toto are household names. Baum’s play from the Wizard was a box office success while MGM’s movie is certainly in the top ten of influential movies, perhaps even in a tie for first with Gone With The Wind. Even American Negroes made their own Black version called The Wiz. The list goes on.
I’m going to suggest that Fritz Lang, the movie Director, was highly influenced by Baum as reflected in his important film, The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lang was also very familiar with Burroughs.
Baum himself was a committed Theosophist. Introduced to the religion by his mother-in-law Baum picked up his card in 1893. By 1913 when he met Burroughs he had been a practicing member for twenty years. When he left Chicago he first went to Coronado across the Bay from San Diego. Katherine Tingley had established her Theosophical organization on Point Loma near that city. Baum must have been an important member of that congregation. Perhaps he had a falling out with Tingley but he did remove himself to Hollywood in 1910. In Hollywood he undoubtedly connected with the Pasadena Theosophical Society that at present is the mother organization.
As a Theosophist Baum would have had to have been familiar with the works of Madame Helena Blavatsky. Her great works are Isis Unveiled and The Secrect Doctrine. Theosophy of course is on a par with the Semitic religions of Judaism and Christianity. While Madame B is often referred to as nonsense she is in fact very learned in the ancient religious doctrines of the human mind that went to form all Middle Eastern religious expressions. Hence while Madame B’s works are metaphysical in nature they are no less relevant to the development of the human intellect than say, St. Augustine or others of the metaphysical ilk.
Madame B had some strong opinions on hypnotism. Hypnotism had come to the fore of Euroamerican consciousness in the years preceding the French Revolution through the efforts of Dr. Franz Mesmer. Though discredited as as a charlatan he was dealing with the real thing as subsequent history shows. He originally called hypnotism Animal Magnetism. That was changed to Mesmerism and then to Hypnotism. As far as possible influences on Burroughs it will be remembered that Edgar Allan Poe wrote Mesmeric Revelation in 1844 and The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar in 1845. There are clear indications that ERB was familiar with the Valdemar story.
Now, the essence of hypnotism is the suggestion. Suggestion is perhaps the most important intellectual or psychological phenomenon. Suggestion isperhaps the basis of intellect, intelligence and psychology. C.G. Jung in his investigations of symbols was dealing with the nature of universal suggestion from nature. Freud early learned to separate suggestion from the hypnotic trance. Artfully used suggestion obviates the need for trancelike states. Thus people don’t understand that and how they are hypnotized by movies and TV.
The art of successful literature is merely to suggest scenes and situations and have the reader visualize them in his own mind. Once accepted the suggestion becomes part of the intellect of the reader. He may be able to reject it later but that is a separate volitional act. The great writers realize this. Freud understood perfectly, while Baum developed the art of the concrete image to a remarkable degree. His works are a series of remarkable images. If Freud had had Baum’s skill, and he wasn’t far short, he would have been even more effective than he has been.
The prescient Fritz Lang picked up on Freud, Baum and hypnotism in his remarkable Dr. Mabuse series of movies. The first story, Dr. Mabuse The Gambler of 1922, concerns a Freudlike megalomaniac named Dr. Mabuse. Freud’s activities during the Great War and after would be known to the cognoscenti. It would be foolish to think that Adolf Hitler and other Volkish leaders wouldn’t have been aware of what Freud was up to. Mabuse is into all kinds of criminal activities to undermine society and the State, as was Freud. He is also a master hypnotist as was Freud. In a scene reminiscent of the scene in Thuvia where Jav says ‘You want to see them? Then, look.’ The scene of ancient bustling Lothar then appears to Carthoris and Thuvia’s wondering hypnotized eyes. As well as mine, certainly. I had no trouble seeing what Burroughs wanted me to see. So Dr. Mabuse in his role of stage hypnotizer, the man wore many hats, makes a parade appear before the wondering eyes of his audience. It can be done. I saw a man make Diamond Head disappear before the whole world on TV. Pretty amazing.
At the end of the movie Mabuse is captured and conveniently tucked away in an insane asylum. He goes catatonic until 1930 or so when Lang made the sequel The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse. The Dr. emerging from his catatonic state makes signs that he wants pen and paper which the head of the asylum, one Dr. Baum, provides.
Mabuse then turns out page after endless page of instructions to destroy civilization not unlike what Herr Dr. Freud was doing from his study in Vienna. The writing had an hypnotic effect on Dr. Baum who executes the plans of the cell bound Dr. Mabuse.
The use of the name Baum could be a coincidence but Dr. Baum like the Wizard Of Oz is an unseen superior. He issues orders but is otherwise an unknown to those he directs. In issuing his orders we are led to believe that he sits behind a curtain unseen while giving his directions. Then, just as Dorothy did, the hero dares to pull back the curtain and he finds…a phonograph player. Unlike Dorothy who finds a tubby timid little imposter, there is no one there. Surely this is a parody of Dorothy’s famous scene which makes the name Dr. Baum less of a coincidence.
So it would seem that L. Frank Baum’s influence extended to Germany and an originator of film noir. Not so unlike as Baum’s stories are much darker than they might appear at first reading. At any rate his literary images make long remembered illusions of reality not unlike that of Dr. Baum while being of a suggestive hypnotic nature. I can still visualize Dorothy pulling the curtain back exposing the mild mannered Big Brother sixty years after. I can remember the image I formed.
So, my suggestion is that L. Frank Baum was the direct inspiration for Thuvia of Mars. As noted ERB was probably familiar with Poe’s stories of hypnotism while I am certain that he had read George Du Maurier’s Trilby concerning the hypnotist Svengali and probably also Du Maurier’s other two novels, Peter Ibbetson, and The Martian both related to unusual psychological states. Len Carter believes that ERB read William Morris who also uses some hypnotic themes in his fantasy novels. Lew Sweetser, ERB’s mentor in Idaho via Yale, might also have given him some information on hypnotism while ERB was still a boy. Plus I’m sure hypnotism was a hot topic of popular discussions.
ERB’s emphasis on suggestion as the operative means of hypnotism points to some more direct instruction. Most think that ERB first met Baum in 1916 which means the two formed a fast friendship immediately. I think it more likely that they met in 1913 renewing the acquanitance in 1916. Whether Baum had read any of Burroughs’ stories in 1913 which seems would be paying pretty close atention to literary trends in pulp magazines he may have heard of Tarzan. Probably aware of this ERB may have brought along a magazine or two to show Baum. If Baum then read the proffered stories he certainly would have seen his influence in the Mars stories if ERB didn’t actually point them out to him hoping for the Zeusian nod of approval from the master.
Probably flattered Baum would have encouraed the relationship. Assuming that to be true the two men having similar interests would certainly engage in conversations on Theosophy, hypnotism, writing techniques and whatever.
Certainly Burroughs writing style which while always colorful was a little heavy on the narrative side seems to open up to a more allusive suggestive style blossoming significantly in 1915’s Tarzan And The Jewels of Opar.
I can’t find a more immediate source for ERB’s sudden interest in hypnotism. But, on to the story.
A Review: Kevin MacDonald: Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes
December 18, 2008
A Review
Kevin MacDonald:
Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes
by
R.E. Prindle
MacDonald, Kevin: http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-CrewsFreud.html
This is a review or commentary of Kevin MacDonald’s paper of 1996: Freud’s Follies: Psychoanalysis As Religion, Cult And Political Movement.
The paper has apparently been retitled here as Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes: The Moral And Intellectual Legacy Of A Pseudoscience.
I don’t know Kevin but I have had some correspondence with him over the internet so I hope he won’t find me presumptuous by referring to him as Kevin. As a Professor at California State University At Long Beach Kevin MacDonald has a distinguished record adding to the luster of the faculty.
His book Culture of Critique is a valuable addition to the literature. Generally speaking I endorse all his conclusions in this paper with the exception of his condemnation of psychoanalysis. I do not believe the discipline to be a pseudo-science. The problem is with Freud and not psychoanalysis. The investigation of the mind was in its elementary stages at the time Freud entered the picture. Indeed people had a horror at the very notion of almost any psychological concept and still do. To my mind Freud’s most valuable contribution was the The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life. Even the study of simple everyday psychologically revealing traits was derided. The thought that a ‘Freudian slip’ could give away one’s inner thoughts was too horrifying to contemplate.
But there it was in bold relief- the subconscious, or unconscious as Freud called it. Freud neither invented nor discovered the unconscious as many people still believe. The unconscious had been a topic of investigation for some time. It was a mystery then, a mystery to most now, many people disbelieved the concept then, many still do.
The trouble with Freud’s vision of the unconscious is that he believed it was inherently evil, uncontrollable and actually a separate entity of the mind but connected somehow.
His error was pointed out to him at the time but as Kevin points out Freud had insulated his vision of psychoanalysis by making an Order of it. He thus separated his thoughts from scientific criticism building a wall around them just as his Jews built a wall around Torah. As Kevin points out:
The apex of the authoritarian, anti-scientific institutional structure was the Secret Committee of hand-picked loyalsits sworn to uphold psychoanalytic orthodoxy, described by Phyllis Grosskurth in ‘The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle And The Politics of Pyschoanalysis. By insisting the Committee must be absolutely secret, Freud enshrined the principle of confidentiality. The various psychoanalytic societies that emerged from the Committee were like Communist cells, in which the members vowed eternal obedience to their leader. Psycholanalysis became institutionalized by the founding of journals and the training of candidates; in short an extraordinarly effective political society.
Thus Freud was able to separate his doctrine from scientific scrutiny while creating a terrific mystique about himself and his ‘science.’
In fact while his doctrine was based on sound, for the state of learning at the time, factual research he fashioned the facts into a tool or weapon for a specific purpose for which any changes to the doctrine would weaken its effectiveness. It was essential that it stay the same.
As Kevin points out Freud was a politician first, researcher secondly and a scientist thirdly. While more scientific outsiders were critical Freud’s fellow Jewish insiders picked up the ball and ran with it.
Freud was a member of the International Order of B’nai B’rith. He attended meetings regularly in Vienna while lecturing on psychological matters frequently. Can it be a coincidence that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was created in the United States in 1913? Does anyone believe that the subtle psychological methods weren’t worked out in Vienna?
When the Frankfurt School Of Social Research was organized in Germany in 1923 incorporating Freudian psychology does anyone believe that was a coincidence? The Marxists embraced a Freudian agenda. You may be sure that Franz Boas applied Freudian doctrines to Anthropology.
There was a good deal of natural reisistance to Freudian doctrines in Europe but the Nazi disaster played into Freudian hands completely. After Hitler’s election in 1933 droves of Freudian analysts and the whole Frankfurt School fled Germany most choosing to settle in the United States in the cultural capitols of NYC and Hollywood.
While psychoanalysis was all the rage through the fifties the reaction set in during the sixties. There was much to disagree with in what was essentially an unchanging doctrine that was hostile to the non-Jewish world. Freud’s reputation has gradually been demolished among the goyim since the sixties. However this is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what the goyim think. The tool, the wapon is in the hands of Freud’s fellow Jews where it has been and is being wielded effectively.
So, while Kevin MacDonald’s critque and condemnation is accurate and effective among the goyim it is of no consquence to the effective application of the doctrine by Freud’s fellow Jews. It’s like Machiavelli. Just because you’re appalled by his doctrines doesn’t mean they don’t work and aren’t being used.
One would do better to educate people to defend themselves against this pernicious doctrine than to merely condemn it.
While I agree with Kevin’s analysis I do disagree with his condemnation of the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic approach.
The key to Freud’s misuse of psychological analysis is his description of the unconscious. As a scientist it is diffiicult for me to believe that he actually perceived the unconscious in such a way. I have to believe that his private understanding was quite different then his public description. It is possible that his understanding is purely religious based on Kabbalah and Talmud and having nothing to do with science. The notion that the unconscious exists independently of both mind and body is absurd on the face of it.
One thing to bear in mind is that Freud was well informed on the subject of hypnosis. He studied (for a couple months) under the Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot who associated hypnotism quite correctly with hysteria. Freud also visited Bernstein of the Nancy hypnotic school. He must have had a reasonable understanding of hypnosis and its active agent, suggestion.
When he says that he abandoned hypnosis for subliminal recall which he says he found just as effective he is betraying a profound knowledge of the relationship of the un- or subconscious mind and conscious actions. He actually discovered that he no longer needed to put people into a trance to obtain the same results. Contrary to his statement I’m sure he was very effective as a hypnotist.
In point of fact in the interchange between the conscious and the unconscious he had discovered the true nature of the subconscious. That is what the interior dialogue is- a discussion between the clear conscious mind and the fixated subconscious which distorts reality to conform with its mistaken understanding.
Further, I would be surprised if Freud didn’t understand that fixation was merely hypnotic suggestion. By suggestion I dont limit the notion of spoken suggestions by others but to suggestion by circumstances. For instance if one is defeated at a game by another this may suggest a lack of manliness on one’s own part. In retreating into a hypnoid state the suggestion of unmanliness may be translated into a fixation of emasculation that renders one effeminate in relation to other men. This is done unawares to oneself but the fixation controls all future responses unless exorcised. It is possible that an exorcism may occur spontaneously in relation to another event later in life but otherwise the fixation has to be recognized and rectified by analysis.
The inadequacy is a diminution of ego. Such a diminution of ego always takes a response of a sexual nature.
In fact, Freud’s work centers on hypnosis and suggestion, emasculation and sex. He himself was severely emasculated and sexually repressed. So there you have the core of Freudian psychology. This understanding is then used to further the Jewish cause in the warfare with European ‘Christian’ society. I exclude America because Freud was too European to extend his interest further.
Freud then devised a plan to mass hypnotize, confuse and psychologically conquer Europe and by extension the West. Running his special knowledge as an Order, as Kevin indicates, he was under no compunction to share his knowledge in a scientific manner. In other words he sought to control his knowledge uninfluenced by outside contributions that would render his intent ineffective. Even inside the Order as Kevin points out Freud strictly controlled psychoanalysis by the use of his Secret Committee and strict disciplining of what he considered deviant thought.
Both facets were absolutely necessary if his plan of subversion was to work. So far the plan has functioned perfectly.
There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water however.
Freud and Freud’s doctrine should be repudiated.
Psychoanalysis however is a valid psychological approach. However administration of it take great skill. Once a correct understanding of suggestion and hypnosis is adopted as the basis of psychology and its relationship to fixation in a subconscious having an active relationship with the conscious, fixations can be located and exorcised freeing the mind from compulsive behavior.
The individual with a proper understanding can then be put on guard to prevent new fixations. I think it may require a certain amount of intelligence.
Freud’s system completely negates the role of intelligence and the conscious mind in favor of compulsive behavior. Thus by emphasizing the individual’s ability to control both his conscious and subconscious minds he will be able to master his own will and act without interference from fixations.
Those are the key factors. While I second Kevin MacDonald in his analysis of Freud and Freudianism I affirm the scientific nature of psychoanalysis itself. Just because Freud used his knowledge dishonestly doesn’t mean he wasn’t onto something.
Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconscious
November 22, 2008
Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconcious
Redefining A False Vision
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition, Orig. Issued 1965, Dover edition of 2004
Movie: The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, 1932, Fritz Lang, auteur.
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/something-of-value-i-2/
Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see above for link) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition. Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah, which I haven’t read or studied; nor do I intend to unless I exhaust my other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely. You never know though.
However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its antecedents? Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere? Bakan seems to believe that the Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu. I don’t believe this to be true. The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian traditions as is a great deal of ancient Jewish culture. Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD. This is probably true.
The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Cabala took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted. Hemeticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth. The Zohar and Cabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs. The whole can be traced back to Alexandria. It will be remembered that there was a large colony of Jews in Alexandria from long before the first century AD.
The Zohar is a mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Bar Yohai, and it was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain in the sixteenth century. Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century Jewish messiah, Sabbatai, Zevi.
According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah. I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse. While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.
Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific method acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order. While Freud himself was at war with European civilization, the international Jewish organizations of which he was a member extended his field of influence to the United States and Canada. Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.
2.
A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to be the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur. Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on all Europeans.
Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life. He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.
However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans. As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church. Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism. This experience had a great effect on young Freud. In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation. From Bakan:
…that my ‘primary originator; (of neuroses) was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.
On October 15, 1897 he quotes his mother speaking about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young:
“Of course,” she said, “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed. She was always taking you to church. When you came home you used to preach and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.”
His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation it was. He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hating her. When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds she was dishonored and actually sent to jail. Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her. But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge. If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred of her to Jung.
Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship with Jung. As Freud would have known, the compulsion toward repitition would have been a component in his relationship with Jung through his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this. So much for his self-analysis. He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the love of the child Freud. Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.
A third situation occured late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism. Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian. This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity. Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys. A neat job of transference. Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of facts.
Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century, it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him. He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations. No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.
3.
Like most people Freud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood and his true ambitions by a 
circuitous route.
The editor’s note to 1927’s The Future Of An Illusion says this:
In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘signficant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade. “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.”
He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter. As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the personal meanings behind the general meaning of his words. Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.
As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah. Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew. Or else atheism has a more specific meaning for him.
I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915. My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the coming Jewish Revolution until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895. That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches. Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution. At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoananlysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah. I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence. Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind. As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore the facts if favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’
Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’ That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism. Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing. Then, sometime between 1913, the year of the beginning of the Jewish revolution, and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies.’ In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Psychology.
Just as Freud learned that there were screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways. Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key. In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot. Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly without the uninitiated understanding, while only those with the key can twig it. Ya dig?
The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter. Freud then, in attempting to diguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’ while secretly admiring it because of his nurse who gave him an inflated opinion of his importance, and his desire to avenge his father and hence all Jews through his Moses fixation, developed his program. Thus he acted in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.
Freud was very seriusly conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan. Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into a cocked hat in the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe. Compare Freud to Rebbe Schneerson in America.
Thus, the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans. In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’
Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possibly a degree of insanity. In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind. Indeed, Fritz Lang’s movie The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career. Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed the movie.
Lang also had a hand in the making of The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari from which film he was dismissed. Lang’s departure from Caligari changed the ending of that movie to the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane. Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud. Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane. Although the problem appeared to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from Mubuse’s cell, now occupied by Dr. Baum who has assumed Dr. Mabuse’s identity, looms like a spectre over the denouement.
While Freud was never incarcerated as he sould have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva which held such fascination for Freud. It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief of Gradiva’s heel on which the story of Gradiva was based that the displayed prominently in his office. The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.
Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture. He makes a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism. At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory. One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.
As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.
His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse. Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations. This would have been an expression of a repetition compulsion. Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicated the situation with Jung. His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity. His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly through a Jewish projection of possibilities. He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.
From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamerica and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization. His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there. In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US. While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted on an international scale. Act locally, think globally. Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there. This is really an incredible repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner. Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.
At this point I think it mght be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail. While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referrred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scientific researchers for a hundred years Freud has been given the credit for discovering it. The exact nature had not been determined before Freud nor does Freud determine it. His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.
4.
In David Bakan’s view Freud made a compact with ‘Satan.’
Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any 
moral precepts, to achieve fame. Bakan points out the supercription to Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams a quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo, superos, Acheronta movebo. Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, than I’ll move all hell. Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamated the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality. Since Freud has been successful in altering both Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satanic’ criminal doctrines it is imperatvie to debunk his personal projection of the ‘unconscious.’
As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil. This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.
He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious. He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven. The notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be. There is no possibility that the function of the subconscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious. If you actually think abut it for a moment you wil realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.
Now, nature is not flawless. The order that the religious seem to find is not there. Nature functions in a much more imperfect or haphazard way. It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.
However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrupted especially in the early years of the organism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it. The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but functions through the conscious and subconscious minds.
The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference. Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference. The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for the appropriate response. When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say, the personality is integrated, the system works properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations. This is very easy to see in Freud.
However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points. If an appropriate response is made there is no problem. If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience may be in variance, the earlier response which has become fixated will over rule the current response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response. Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.
The inappropriate response will usually result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, one’s sexual identity. In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.
The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit. Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experience providing responses. None of this, of course takes in intelligence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.
Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as the Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality al la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi. Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war. While this infusion may not have reached down through the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas were thoroughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the International Jew.
The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War. Men, money and munitions flowed in a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia. Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations. If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews. Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent or unresisting. To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freudian/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspecting Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form. This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details. The literature exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious. In other words, history has been denied and censored so that the crimes can’t be known. Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these books concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by. All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.
In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly. Don’t ever think that historical memories are short. Remember the Amalikites.
Freud sat confortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred. If, as believed, the tenor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924. By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution in Russia was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civlilation when he published The Future Of An Illusion. By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished. The Rome of the Popes should have fallen.
In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes. Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.
David Bakan closes his volume with these words:
…under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests. In this respect, however, just as Freud may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah. Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between Jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah not only for Jewish culture but for Western culture as well.
Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western ‘culture’. Language as a screen.
Bakan’s is a hefty statement. Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans. Truly in this scenario good comes from evil in the Jewish mind, assuming that the Messiah is good. In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming. Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture. Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.
By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated to the unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored. The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism has been obliterated, hence the revival of religion happening today. Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freud’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.
The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings. He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as a fact. As always there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strict limits imposed by science. Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible. The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels. Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock. Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.
Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientific but it isn’t. there are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence. Like the rest or Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up. As always he notes only the negative societal destructive effects. He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it. But as Fritz Lang points out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psychologist of the asylum, the objective scientist himself, Dr. Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell of Mabuse to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did. Indeed, as the West has. Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution. The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible otherwise. Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire psychotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties. Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.
To return to 1919.
Part 5 Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review
May 19, 2008
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man
Part 5
by
R.E. Prindle
First published on the ezine, ERBzine
Tarzan, Obroski And Burroughs
Burroughs has been ridiculing Obroski right along as an arrant coward. Wherever the action is, Stanley isn’t. When it’s over he shows up ready to fight. When a call for the safe job of kitchen help is made after the porters desert Stanley raises his hand.
The cowardice is in contrast to his magnficent physique. Standing 6’8″ or 9″ in his bare feet while his strength is as prodigious as that of Tarzan. No one in the safari has yet seen Tarzan but he and Stanley are as identical twins. When Stanley becomes fever stricken and disappears from the story the movie cast will confuse Tarzan for Obroski providing some amusing moments.
Over the oeuvre Burroughs uses the divice of a Tarzan double a number of time times. Esteban Miranda in Tarzan And The Golden Lion/Ant Men, here as Stanley Obroski and again in Tarzan And The Forbidden City as Brian Gregory stand out. The doubles are quite obviously aspects of Burroughs’ own character. As the doubles are all cowardly, inept or both one has to assume they represent Burroughs as he perceived himself before becoming a success while Tarzan represents Burroughs as a success. There was obviously a constant psychic tug of war between the two Burroughs. This was something ERB was desperately trying to resolve in favor of the Tarzan persona.
The quesiton is, was he ever successful in resolving the problem by psychologically integrating his personality? At several times in the corpus he seems to have succeeded even to the extent of killing off his old persona. But then there are doubts and Brian Gregory appears a few years later.
If I live long enough I will try a comparison of Miranda, Obroski, Gregory and Burroughs. Notiice the progression of the double from Spanish to Slav to Anglo. The Spaniard was the epitome of worthlessness at the turn of the century while the Slav though higher was despised. Gregory as an Anglo would indicate that Burroughs may have reconciled his self-esteem at least.
As a more or less irrelevant aside it is known that Tennessee Williams (1911-83) was a Tarzan fan. He was twenty-three years old when Lion Man was issued while A Streetcar Named Desire was staged in 1947. It may seem tenuous to make the connection between the names of Stanley Obroski and Stanley Kowalski but there it is. There are resemblances between Stanley-Naomi and Stanley-Blanche allowing for the fictionalizing powers of Williams. There is no proof that Williams specifically read Lion Man that I know of but it is neither impossible or improbable given his admiration for the character. Perhaps the germ of Stanley-Blanche was placed in Williams’ mind in 1934-35 germinating away in his subconscious to blossom eleven or twelve years later. I don’t say it’s so but it is worth investigating.
In the construction of this novel the story of Obroski and Tarzan forms Ring Three. The story moves from Ring Two, The Safari and will segue into the inner ring.
In Chaper 8, The Coward, Burroughs devotes six pages to explaining or rather justifying the character of Obroski. In justifying Obroski Burroughs is justifying himself which is why he took such pains with this book.
During the last Bansuto attack in Chapter 8 Obroski panicked. As the Bansuto attacked from one side Obroski ran off in the opposite direction. Unfortunately the Bansuto were on both sides and Obroski ran into their open arms. Now cornered Obroski fought from reflex: pp. 46-47:
Death stared him in the face! Heretofore Obroski’s dangers had been more or less imaginary; now he was faced with a stark reality.
Terror galvanized his mind and his giant muscles into instant action. He seized the black and lifted him above his head; then he hurled him heavily to the ground.
The black, fearful for his life, started to rise. Obroski fearful for his own, lifted him high overhead and again cast him down. As he did so a half dozen blacks, closed upon him from the tall surrounding grasses and bore him to earth.
His mind half numb with terror, Obroski fought like a cornered rat. The blacks were no match for his great muscles. He seized them and tossed them aside, then he turned to run. But the black he had first hurled to the ground reached out and seized him by an ankle, gripping him; then the others were upon him again and more came to their assistance…In all his life Stanley Obroski had never fought before. A good disposition and his strange complex had prevented him from seeking trouble and his great size and strength had deterred others from picking quarrels with him.
So, while Obroski was a coward when he had time to consider, in the grip of terror he was quite capable of using his great strength and size to fight back.
His cowardice was not his fault or part of his nature. Burroughs reflects further. p. 45:
We are either the victims or beneficiaries of heredity or environment.
Obroski was obviously the result of nurture. Thus we have no responsibility for what we are and can take no credit as we are either victims or beneficiaries. This is a fairly serious position statement.
Stanley Obroski (Burroughs) was one of the victims. Heredity had given him a mighty physique, a noble bearing and a handsome face. Environment had sheltered and protected him throughout his life. Also everyone with whom he had come in contact had admired his great strength and attributed to him courage commensurate with it.
Never until the past few days had Obroski been confronted by an emergency that might test his courage, and so all his life had been wondering if his courage would measure up to what was expected of it when the emergency developed.
He had given the matter far more thought than does the man of ordinary physique because he knew so much more was expected of him than of the ordinary man. It had become an obsession together with the fear that he might not live up to the expectations of his admirers. And finally he became afraid- afraid of being afraid.
It is a failing of nearly all large men to be keenly affected by ridicule. It was the fear of ridicule, should he show fear, rather than the fear of physical suffering, that Obroski shrank from, though perhaps he did not realize this. It was a psyche far too complex for easy analysis.
It is impossible to know for certain at this time what psychology texts Burroughs had been studying but ‘a psyche far too complex for easy analysis’ points in the direction of Freud, Jung or both. ERB seems to have been involved in Depth Psychology of some sort. David Adams finds traces of Jung. I am not prepared to concede so much at present but David may be much more sensitive on that score than myself. I don’t rule it out although I would lean more to Freud as the better known. Still, as I find ERB to be a very inquisitive guy there is no reason he couldn’t have known of both. Either would likely have been mentioned in his varied reading and we know he was an omnivorous reader.
At any rate it seems clear that Obroski’s heredity was overridden by the conditioning of environment. Unable to overcome the conditioning or hypnotic suggestion he became as we find him.
There seems little doubt that here ERB is explaining himself. Obroski and Tarzan are identical in stature and abilities but in order to realize his Tarzanic potential he must overcome his environmental conditionings and assume his proper being.
Whether the emergency Tarzan/Burroughs is facing in his difficulty with MGM or something else it seems likely MGM as the struggle is placed in the context of the MGM/BO Studios filming Trader Horn/Tarzan, The Ape Man.
So Obroski is captured by the Bansuto and made prisoner in their village. Here he encounters Kwamudi, captain of the safari Blacks and a couple porters who had been captured after deserting. Obroski learns that the Bansuto are cannibals and that he will be the man who came to dinner.
Burroughs gets in some sly humor here. Bound and starved Obroski complains about his treatment. p. 51:
“This is no way to treat people you’re going to eat.” grumbled Obroski. “You ought to get ’em fat, not starve ’em thin.”
ERB has already given notice that he is in psychological mode. He says that Obroski’s psyche is too complex for easy analysis, whatever that might be. That’s what we all say and it’s bosh. When I was younger I thought my psyche so unique and complex I wanted to offer myself to science as a specimen. As my own self-psychoanalysis evolved I realized the only thing that made it so complex was the resistance involved in facing the fixations. So with Burroughs. In a few pages he lays out out completely the problem he is facing in symbolical or dream imagery. Only resistance anf fear prevent him from breaking on through.
A psychoanalyst could lay your whole problem before you but if you weren’t ready to deal with it, in other words, overcome the resistance, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You’d think he was talking about someone else. So here ERB lays out his whole problem before you but if you weren’t ready to deal with it, in other words, over come the resistance, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You’d think he was talking about someone else. So here ERB lays out his whole problem. Whether he resolved it is a matter of debate. David Adams thinks not while I have not yet made up my mind.
The problem he is dealing with is his central childhood fixation of John The Bully. I have already gone into this in Doubles and Insanity but it won’t hurt to give a variant interpretation as this very key incident meets with a lot of resistance from Bibliophiles on its own.
As has been noted Burroughs was plagued by dreams of appearing naked in public. Nakedness is a significant theme in the oeuvre. Tarzan himself runs around naked except for a skimpy g-string; so Tarzan’s natural condition and Burroughs dream fears mesh. He has made a virtue of necessity.
In psychological terms John The Bully so emasculated Burroughs that he lost his offensive and defensive armor which is to say to the civilized man his clothes. Burroughs always says of Tarzan that his veneer of civilization went no deeper than his clothes. Nothing could be clearer than the relationship to ERB’s situation on the corner. ERB explains the nature of nakedness to the civilized man. p. 58:
“He says for you to take off your clothers, Bwana.” said Kwamudi, “he wants them.”
“All of them?” inquired Obroski.
“All of them, Bwana.”
(Note the excruciating deliberateness as ERB painfully drags this scene out.)
Exhausted by sleeplessness, discomfort, and terror, (Here ERB makes excuses for himself.) Obroski had felt that nothing but torture and death could add to his misery, but now the thought of nakedness awoke him to new horrors. To the civlilized man clothing imports a confidence that is stripped away with his garments.
So, in real life, Burroughs had been psychologically stripped naked by John having lost his self-confidence. This is an accurate understanding. When he constructed his alter ego, Tarzan, he made him naked in his uncivilized state, hence full of self-confidence though naked, but then clothed him handsomely in his civilized state in which he was uncomfortable. Thus ERB attempted to resolve the problem.
Now when John bullied ERB he forced a split in his personality. while his physical self was humiliated his psychological self split off symbolically taking to the trees for refuge. Hence Tarzan’s fabulous arboreal exploits while he views so many scenes from above in a tree.
Now comes the very interesting scene in Rungula’s village where Tarzan suffers the shock of recognition as he looks down on his own replica from the tree to the ground.
Tarzan is in no rush to visit Rungula’s village, perhaps indicating resistance. Here’s how ERB describes it. p.61:
Tarzan of the Apes was ranging a district new to him, and with the keen alertness of the wild creature he was alive to all that was strange or unusual. Upon the range of his knowledge depended his ability to cope with the emergencies of an unaccustomed environment. Nothing was so trivial that it did not require investigation: and already, in certain matters concerning the haunts and habits of game, both large and small, he knew quite as much if not more than many creatures that had been born here.
For three nights he had heard the almost continuous booming of tom-toms, faintly, from afar; and during the day following the third night he had drifted slowly in his hunting in the direction from which the sounds had come.
Surely an old jungle baby like Tarzan could understand the language of the drums? That is called procrastination.
And so on the third day ‘He was arisen.’ Hmmm. In Tarzan Of The Apes the birth of Tarzan replicated that of Moses and now Obroski is to die while a new Tarzan arises a la Jesus.
I had my attention called to this Moses part while visiting a Jewish site. The writer was marveling that Superman was Jewish and that his birth replicated that of Moses which it does. I had always thought that the two teenage Jewish boys who created Superman were replicating Tarzan’s birth and that may be equally true.
In the Moses story he is born to a Jewish woman who places him in an ark then puts it in the Nile on which he floats downstream to be rescued by an Egyptian princess who rears him among a different people. This story presupposes that heredity overcomes environment which is nonsense. One is not born a Jew one is educated into the identity.
Superman is born a Kryptonite, placed in a rocket ship that crashes into this goyish earth couple’s backyard. They then rear the Kryptonite child as their own who then has a double identity as an ineffective Earthman while retaining his Kryptonite powers. Thus the Jew represents himself as superior to the goy.
Tarzan too is born to a human mother who dies. He is lying in his cradle when the ape, Kala, snatches him up rearing him as her own. The different people Tarzan grows up with are apes. Thus he too has a double identity.
All three stories are identical while Moses is first, Tarzan second and Superman third. Thus in his first incarnation Tarzan appears to be a Moses figure.
In Lion Man Tarzan apperas to be born again when he absorbs his other split off half- Obroski. Thus on the third day Tarzan assumes a Christ like identity.
Many have noted that the intitials of John Carter and John Clayton are JC and they call attention to the fact that they are the same initials as Jesus Christ.
So, here we have Tarzan, a walking dead man so to speak, who after three nights -Good Friday to Easter Sunday- looks down on the other half of his split personality and recognizes himself. The two halves then begin a process of amalgamation becoming one again. So Tarzan/Burroughs is born again or arises from the dead.
Tarzan then unites the Old and New Testaments being at one and the same time both Moses and Jesus Christ. The old Adam and the new Adam. Fairly astonishing stuff. What does it mean?
Tarzan then hauls Rungula up into his tree i.e. John the Bully is brought up to Burroughs split off personality where Tarzan demands that he release Obroski i.e. John restore Burroughs other half to himself while at the same time making him promise to be always kind to Whites.
Obroski then leaves Rungula/John’s village where he joins Tarzan. Thus Burroughs symbolically reunites his split personality or in other words appears to integrate his personality. At least he makes the attempt.
At the very least he has analyzed himself to the threshold of integration. Whether he actually stepped over the threshold is open to doubt. As a comparison let us examine Feodor Dostoievsky’s great nineteenth century novel Crime And Punishment. There is no direct evidence that Burroughs might have read the book but the possibility exists that his curiosity led him to this very famous 1866 novel. If so, Dostoievsky’s analysis of Raskolnikov might have influenced ERB on the unconscious level. I had to read the novel three times to get a conscious grasp of it.
The novel concerns the character’s dependence on women. Raskolnikov is dependent on his mother and sister who make tremendous sacrifices of their own well being to put him through law school. Raskolnikov resents his dependence yet can’t tear himself from it even when offered a simple and easy opportunity to do so. His solution to his psychological problem bypasses analysis for an impossible external one. He decides to symbolically kill his mother and sister hoping thus to free himself. Psychologically this is not a viable method.
As his victim he selects an old female pawnbroker. This woman has large assets stored in her apartment. Thus Raskolnikov takes valuables from her in lieu of the money he is receiving from his mother. In the process he kills the old woman and when her daughter appears he kills her too. Thus he has killed surrogates of his own women. The pawn broker’s body lies before him. To free himself, according to Dostoievsky it is necessary for him to step over the body thus completing the crime. Raskolnikov cannot do this, walking around the body instead thus negating the benefits of his murder.
In Burroughs’ case his imaginary alter ego, Tarzan, convinces Rungula/John to release Obroski/Burroughs from custody. In other words, exorcise the fixation. However, psychologically Rungula/John cannot do this. It is necessary for Burroughs to confront his fixation and recognize it thus negating the hypnotic suggestion that made it his fixation that he is a coward thus freeing himself. That is the only way it can be done. Thus as Raskolnikov did not step over the pawnbroker’s body so Burroughs does not cross over the threshold of integration at this time.
Instead his imaginary self, Tarzan, attempts to teach his temporal self, Obroski, to be brave and fearless. Hence, in what might be seen as high comedy, Tarzan introduces the Faux Lion Man to the real lion. However Tarzan advises Obroski to be careful around Jad-Bal-Ja’s new love of whom Tarzan has no experience.
As soon as Tarzan disappears Obroski/Burroughs who had been freed by John scurries for the security of the lower terrace where he cowers until the Big Bwana’s return. Subsequently he catches fever not unlike Raskolnikov, if Burroughs read Crime And Punishment. Tarzan entrusts the unconscious Obroski to a native chief to nurse. From that point on Tarzan assumes both identities as the movie company who have never seen him and are unaware that he and Obroski are twinlike mistake him for Obroski which Tarzan lets them do. Obroski then dies.
If Burroughs thought he had solved his problem by wishing himself into the role of Tarzan he had to be mistaken. As Jung pointed out in Mysterium Coniunctionis one cannot will one’s fixations away. No matter what temporary success you may enjoy the fixation will out.
In the role of Tarzan Burroughs set himself an impossible task to perform. Tarzan is an ideal to hold before oneself for emulation’s sake but an impossible role to fill. Burroughs admitted this in his posthumously published novel Tarzan And The Madman in which in the end he simply gets into a plane and flies off into the sunset.
The story of the two Lion Men forms the third ring in the story. We will now examine the inner ring, the center of the storm, and then the other side of ring three, the parellel story of the two female lookalikes, Naomi and Rhonda.
Advance to Part 6: The Center Of The Circle
Greil Marcus In The Threepenny Review
March 16, 2008
Greil Marcus And His Problem Fathers
A Psychological Analysis
by
R.E. Prindle
Part I
Greil Marcus has a new article on his old theme in the Spring 2008 Threepenny Review. The way it is written it appears to have been a talk or lecture at some unidentified place. His obsession must be intense for while the theme is of an interesting psychological motif I don’t really understand why he thinks the theme is of such general interest it bears repeating so often.
If he’s looking for a psychological interpretation I am prepared to offer him one. It must be understood that I offer an objective analysis of that which M. Marcus has publicly aired. Whatever I say is based on what he says. No unkindness is intended. This version of his obsession is the fullest he has yet offered. To read the article go to: http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marcus_sp08.html
The main facts are these: M. Marcus’ father and mother met in 1944 during WWII. She had just graduated from Stanford in May or June. He, Greil Gerstley, came from Philadelphia. He was an officer in the Navy, apparently a full lieutenant so he may have been in uniform since shortly after hostilities began. They met in San Francisco which was crawling with Navy in 1944. M. Marcus either doesn’t know or doesn’t tell us but it would appear that as a wartime romance they met and married within a week or two. M. Marcus doesn’t tell us what Gerstley’s social status in Philadelphia was but it appears as though he came from an affluent background. We are left uninformed as to the time of year they met. I’m guessing September or October. Shortly after marriage the couple left for Seattle where Gerstley shipped out. He was subsequently lost at sea six months and a day before M. Marcus was born in the summer of ’45.
Approximately three years later in 1948 his mother married Mr. Marcus whose first name, I believe is or was Gerald. He apparently married the mother and adopted the son in one swift movement.
Thus, and this is crucial, for the first three years of his life of which he says he has only haunting memories, M. Marcus was Greil Gerstley. Even though he has only faint memories of the period this dual identity has left an indelible impression.
Now we get into what C.G. Jung calls the collective unconscious. M. Marcus is not responsible for any of his reactions. They all emerge from the true unconscious.
Gerald Marcus and his mother gave him siblings. M. Marcus’ half-brother Bill looks out for him and runs an internet alert. I have been in communication with brother Bill. In 1955 the family moved into a fine new home in Menlo Park, California. Menlo Park is a very affluent suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula so Gerald Marcus was a good provider. M. Marcus seems to have no complaints about his step-father. Indeed as Gerald adopted him on marriage it would appear that he was trying to sidestep unconscious psychological animosities by making another man’s child his own, at least in name.
Shortly after moving into the house in Menlo Park M. Marcus was toying with the radio and heard an announcement about American GIs fathering babies on Korean mothers and then abandoning them. M. Marcus immediately related that announcement to his biological father’s marriage to his mother and subsequent death that struck a subliminal chord related to the abandonment of the Korean children. Now the response is not rational but unconscious and fully explicable on that level.
At some later time M. Marcus saw David Lynch’s movie Blue Velvet. Certain homey scenes struck the subliminal chord of his father’s abandonment making him believe that the idyllic scenes were what he had lost with his father’s death or abandonment. He subconsciously perceived his father’s death or non-return as abandonment.
These are the facts for Part I.
In analysis there seems to be a sense of loss between birth and the age of three when his mother remarried. A blank spot in his life. When he questioned his mother (now deceased) about his father she had nothing to tell him as she had only known the man for two months or even less. Thus M. Marcus virtually knew this man he had never met almost as well as his mother. Whether he has been able to accept her statement or not he doesn’t make clear but there seems to be some doubt. Some nagging sense of the need for closure which cannot be obtained.
Now, M. Marcus carries the genes of Greil Gerstley and not those of Gerald Marcus. Therefore Gerald and his progeny must always have seemed foreign to him. M. marcus may have resented Gerald’s co-habitation with his mother. For instance my mother divorced my father when I was three although I have plenty of memories of my first three years, remarrying seven years later. I never thought about it then but I always resented my step-father having access to my father’s woman at the same time, my mother. The attitude comes from the collective unconscious and is not a conscious reaction. There is no defense against it. Therefore from three to ten M. Marcus probably suffered a degree of alienation from his step-father with some lingering resentment of his mother and that resentment was brought into focus in this new house when he heard of the abandoned Korean children. Even though his step-father was providing well M. Marcus believed, thought or hoped that his real father would have provided even better. Once again, the reaction was unconscious and could not be helped. Still this attitude must have distanced him from his step father a little probably causing some resentment on Gerald’s part.
When M. Marcus saw Blue Velvet with its idyllic opening scenes the subliminal message was that life would have been like that with Gerstley but that had been irrevocably lost when he ‘abandoned’ M. Marcus in the same way the Korean children were abandoned. I’m almost surprised that he didn’t change his name back to Greil Gerstley.
A secondary problem is with his mother. I suspect that he has a haunting feeling that perhaps Greil Gerstley may not be his father and indeed there is a chance that this is so.
M. Marcus makes a point of saying he was born exactly six months and a day after his father was lost at sea. but, he refuses to give us his birth date instead saying that he was born between VE and VJ days which leaves some lattitude. Nor does he give us the date the couple were married or the date Gerstley shipped out. His mother destroyed any letters received from Gerstley so that resource is missing.
Certainly apart from the wartime conditions of romance the hasty marriage might have implications. No one can now know but I suspect the fear haunts M. Marcus.
I know that children in his situation have real difficulties with their fathers. I have known adopted children who went to great lengths to locate a biological parent inevitibly being disappointed. For myself I never saw my father again but neither have I had real curiosity about him.
Greil Gerstley is gone from M. Marcus’ life and his is stuck with the frustrating situation of being able to do nothing about it except possibly accepting the fact that that was the hand fate dealt him. That’s how I’ve always dealt with this early part of my life. What can you do but play the cards you were dealt. Wartime conditions produce wartime results. What can anyone say or do?
Then one day M. Marcus almost miraculously learned the details of the day his father’s ship went down.
That in Part 2.
Something Of Value Book II Part 3
February 5, 2008
Book II
Something Of Value
Part 3
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3
Bad Motorcycle With The Devil In The Seat
Don’t go out tonight,
They’re sure to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.
-John Fogerty
(a.) The Evolution Of Religion 0-1875
Prior to, say, -800 the approximate date of Homer’s Iliad, religion was comprosed of all three facets of learning: Religion, Philosophy and Science. The reason for the Priesthood was intact. Then beginning with Homer in the Greek world, who was reverenced with good reason, learning became gradually secularized as the Pre-Socratics developed Philosophy and Science independently of the Priesthood. In the West this was the real deathblow to religion; in the Semitic East no such development took place. The Semites are incapable of either Philosophy or Science.
About this time also, Astronomy as a science developed, which doomed Astrology to insignificance although its traditions linger on as the world prepares for the Age of Aquarius. It will really happen too. Don’t ask me how, but it will, it is happening. If you want to read an excellent analysis of aspects of the Age of Pisces check out C.G. Jung. The amazing thing is that there is little to indicate a system for perpetuating this design of ancient times, no evidence of a secret society forwarding Astrological designs. The ancients having set the plan in motion apparently knew it would be self-perpetuating as individuals like myself, and I have no interest in Astrology per se would penetrate the workings of the design moving it forward whether advertently or inadvertently. But you have to look at it to see it. My interest was aroused when I detected a constant presence. I myself have no prejudices, I don’t dismiss phenomena out of hand. The Tarot has its significance also. You don’t have to believe it, you study its historical development.
Astrology was still a very active force as the Age of Pisces dawned. The Semitic Jewish reaction was based on the dawning of a new Age, the Piscean. When this mistaken adventure ended in 135 AD, when it became clear that the New Age meant little in concrete terms, although defeated militarily and dispersed from Palestine the Jews still had that old ace in the hole. Religion.
There was still the spiritual world. While the Rabbis censured Jesus of Nazareth as an imposter a cult of Jewish followers developed after the death of Jesus. The Jews in those days or just previous to the Jewish Wars had been active proselytizers. Large Jewish communities existed in all the cities of the Roman Empire including Rome itself. For various reasons these facts have been downplayed. Any serious historical study of the role of the Jews in the Roman Empire is severely discountenanced, at least in American Universities.
As orthodoxy required circumcision and following the ridiculous Jewish dietary laws, I mean, what makes wine kosher or not is whether it has been touched by non-Jewish hands somewhere in the winemaking process, the limits of conversion may have been reached. A lot of folks might think such a condition mere bigotry but I decline to comment. Paul realized this, thus he wisely discarded circumcision and the dietary laws in his version of Christianity. This at least made it possible to convert the Gentile although without bigotry Christianity could never have succeeded in being more than a prevalent religion. Persuasion can only go so far. A religion can’t get anywhere without bigotry.
After Constantine made Christianity the official religion, empowered, the Catholic Church went to work to suppress all other forms of thought, religious, philosophical or scientific. The academy of Plato was shut down while the library at Alexandria was burned to the ground.
Thus the Semito-Roman Catholic Church solidified its position as the official representative of Christ on Earth.
Now, after Jesus was crucified the remaining disciples and adherents were run to earth where possible and killed. It became expedient to flee into hiding. From this dispersal has arisen the tradition of the Holy Grail. This fabulous literary repository has come down to us attached to the exploits of King Arthur. Known to most through the collation of Mallory, the original documents run to tens of thousands of pages. The Vulgate-Lancelot alone is close to ten thousand 350-400 word pages.
The legends which begin with the crucifixion represent a secret history of Europe. There is much interesting investigation being forwarded on the topic currently by Laurence Gardner and his series of books, he can be accessed at his Mediaquest site on the web, and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in two interesting books: Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy. There are others but these two series are most direct. There’s a lot more actually but much of it is very speculative. Worth looking into though by the right minds.
According to these writers Mary Magdalen fled Palestine for Marseilles in southern France where she bore a son of Jesus. This son became the progenitor of the Merovingian line of kings of France. These in turn presented a challenge to the authority of the Semito-Roman Catholic Church. Thus the Church encouraged the usurpation of the throne by the line that would be known as Carolingian which when the Church succeeded in crowning Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor it gained the right to invest the royal houses of Europe. The Merovingians were thus dispossessed.
With the right to make or break kings in a quasi-theological empire the success of the Church was more of less assured although in a still very difficult political situation. Still, all Europe West of what became Russia was brought within its sway, hence the recent Polish pope.
Not content with leaving well enough alone the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged the recovery of Palestine from the Moslems. Contact in the East introduced two heresies which were to have a decisive and devisive impact on subsequent history down to the present day.
The Europeans chose to invade Palestine during the heyday of the chief of the assassin cult, Hassan i Sabbah. Thus while having only a limited military success, still a Christian presence was maintained for over two hundred years which is about as long as the United States had been in existence, the crusaders were infected with a heresy. At the same time the Cathar heresy was introduced into Europe from the East. The Cathars also known as the Albigensians, and the Knights Templar presented the Semito-Catholic Church with a soul destroying problem. This is where the Church met its Waterloo although it would be difficult to understand what else they could have done.
Westerners don’t seem to understand that if you’re going to interfere in other people’s lives you have to go all the way or suffer the consequences. The assassins of Hassan i Sabbah introduced a very potent brand of heresy into Europe in vengeance for the invasion of Palestine. Both examples have proven very pernicious and ought to have been suppressed.
The watchword of the Cathars is given expression in the Rabelasian phrase: Do What Thou Wilt. I haven’t read Nietsche but he gave a different formulation in ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’
Thus the Moslems through the Assassins were able to corrupt the morality of the West. Thus Cathars prospered across Southern France where the aurthority of the Semito-Catholic Church was challenged. If the Cathar heresy, really an error, grew the Church would find itself displaced.
The rule of the Church is that the Church cannot shed blood, which is why heretics were burnt, but they could get others to do it for them. Establishing the Inquisition to smell out heretics the Church called on the French crown to crusade against the Albigensians. What do you do with people who will believe differently than you do? As Victor Hugo said, you have to kill them so that a new world may arise. As Lenin and Stalin believed, you have to exterminate the recalcitrants. As Hitler said, there is the final solution. Well, that’s what they did to the Albigensians. The soldiers asked how they were to determine whether one was or wasn’t a Cathar, they were told to kill them all, God would know his own.
The devastation if not total was a very serious attempt.
Here you have one of those insuperable problems, what are you going to do? If you do nothing you lose, if you let God sort out his own, you lose. The Cathars would have been enough trouble but then the Church was faced with the Templar heresy. Same solution, same results.
The only consolation the Semito-Catholics had was that at about this same time the troops of Genghis Khan swept over the Middle East rooting the Assassins out of their ‘impregnable’ mountain fastness.
The result of the Church’s action and that of their royal accomplices was a seething hatred of both by the survivors who after all, believed nothing was true and everything was permitted. Dangerous people with dangerous ideas. Several subversive organizations arose, the Free Spirits, Beghards and Beguines who eventually came together as the Libertines in pre-Revolutionary France.
The Church demonized the survivors, according to Laurence Gardner as witches, hence the witch hunts. I’m not sure it is true but it does make sense, provides a rational motive for the persecutions. With the inquisition in place Europe was made a hell on Earth. Nevertheless learning wiggled out from under the suppression of the Church to flower forth as the Enlightenment. Thus after the Cathars and Templars Science presented a challenge to the Church which has been the knock out blow. Both the Semito-Catholic Church and the Semitic Jews were presented with a very difficult problem which no amount of persecution could resolve.
The Church has stubbornly clung to its authority giving up only a minimum to reason. The Inquisition itself was only discontinued in mid-nineteenth century. The Jews, on the other hand, were thrown into complete disarray by the Enlightenment at least in the West. The great bloc of Judaism in the Pale of Eastern Europe responded much more slowly but then very large numbers of that group emigrated to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the religion faced even more serious challenges.
The Western Jews ran through a whole series of experimental forms before, under the influence of the Eastern Jews, the compromise of Zionism was evolved.
Along the way Marx, Einstein and Freud evolved political, physical and psychological pseudo-scientific ideas which had the effect of confusing the West.
Aiding the emergence of Science and the freeing of speculative religion from the suppression of the Church was the French Revolution of 1789. The Revolution was as epochal an event in the Piscean Age as the crucifixion of Christ. The Revolutionists restarted their calendar at year one which was probably symbolically correct.
It is probably signficant that Jean Baptiste de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck, was appointed professor of invertebrate zoology at the Paris Museum of Natural History in the critical year of 1793. As an evolutionist Lamarck preceded Charles Darwin. In his Tarzan And The Lion Man Burroughs mentions Lamarck along with Gregor Mendel and Darwin as well as the proposer of the germ theory of evolution, August Weismann, who Burroughs did not mention by name. While Burroughs played with evolution in many fantastic ways his playfulness was informed by a thorough grounding in the learning of his day.
One has to be very alert and attentive to see just how playful he is.
In Tarzan The Terrible the primitive species, mistakenly called races in most discussions, had tails. When Tarzan wishes to disguise himself he affixes a severed tail to his posterior. Now, there was a legend of a tailed people in the Congo Basin. The legend was based on the fact that this tribe affixed animal tails on their posteriors much as Tarzan does. Thus Burroughs combines evoltuionary speculation with historical legend and fact in a humorous episode. It’s possible he may have been waiting a hudred years anyone to get that joke. He picked up his information from H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.
The Revolution itself was not as spontaneous as it is often depicted nor is the wanton destruction the result of a frustrated peasantry. The Revolution was planned and coordinated by the descendants of those very Albigensians and Templars Church and Crown had crushed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Albigenian and Templar heresies and error were thus released on the world in a more concentrated form than previously. The disorder in society today is caused by the followers of those errors.
Burroughs was born a short 70 some odd years after the failure of the Revolution. Sixteen years after Darwin released his Origin Of Species on the world. In between incredible advances were made. Champollion broke the hieroglyphic alphabet of Egypt opening the ancient world to us. The ancient civilizations of the Middle East were unearthed. Surely all those ruins Burroughs speaks of were influenced by those discoveries. Babylonians, Sumerians, Hittites, Cretans and other discoveries such as Schliemann’s unearthing of Troy and Mycenae. The Church was delivered one blow after another as the authority of its Holy Scriptures crumbled into falsehood.
At the same time a plethora of suppressed religious speculation burst the bonds of repression. Esotericists stumbled all over themselves to formulate doctrines. The Spiritualist movement sprang up fully formed like Athene from the forehead of Zeus. The greatest of the great, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, ransacked the religious speculative literature of the ages to reassemble it into a spectacular tour de force she called Theosophy. Just as religion, Philosophy and Science had diverged c. -800 she now tried to reunite them under one head. She couldn’t do it but her work is a magnificent effort none the less.
If you’ve got the time and patience The Book Of Urantia is an equally stunning tour de force. Great science fiction if nothing else.
Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into this incredible religious, intellectual and scientific ferment. Learning had become so vast that no one mind could grasp all the details, but like Madame B, it were better to fail gloriously than never to make the attempt. Underneath all the foolery and fantasy of his fiction ERB went at with a will.
(b.) Relations Of The Sub-species 0-1875.
At the risk of being repetitious it might be appropriate here to quote Darwin again to keep the thought fresh in our minds:
Quote:
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera.
Unquote.
So, when the Semites erupted from the desert the modern phase of competition between the Homo-Sapiens sub-species began. The populations had now expanded so that there was not room for all. One sub-species must drive out all the others. Thus the outer reality, or world of appearances, will and must triumph over the inner world of wishful thinking. So the world turns.
Darwin again:
Quote:
We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congenor. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species, and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature, but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species had been victorious over another in the great battle of life.’
Unquote.
Let us never forget that there is a great battle for life while with Homo Sapiens we can precisely say why one species will be victorious. I cannot show the victory but I can show, for my purposes here, how the struggle progressed to 1875. The next section following will take us to 1950, the next after that to 9/11 and than a fictional effort will end with a possible scenario of the end of civilization as we know it.
The method followed by Homo Sapiens is easily learned, you just have to condition yourself to accept the facts, the outer reality rather than the inner world of wishful thinking. In encounters before this period the method was simple. A band of invaders conquered the indigenous folk, slew all the males, kept the females for themselves. In an evolutionary sense this is the natural method.
Amongst, lions for instance, a male is only allowed to enjoy his Pride for a limited time. Then a couple males gang up on him, driving him away. One of the new males then acquires the lionesses killing the former lion’s offspring at the same time. The complacent females then go into heat producing a new group of offspring for the new male. Simple. Why the simp lion helps his fellow for no reward is beyond me but it works the same way among Homo Sapiens.
So when the Saxons drove the Britons out of England into Brittany where the Britons conquered the natives, the Britons not only massacred the males but they cut the tongues out of the women so that the language wouldn’t be corrupted. Very offensive to our professed standards but completely within the range of normality. I mean, you know, get real. This sort of thing can and will happen again. Nazi Germany wasn’t any aberration. The Jews of today are calling for the extermination of one billion White people. This is a fact. Google Noel Ignatiev and see for yourself. Your problem will be that you just won’t take him seriously although the evidence is clearly before your eyes.
In this great struggle of life all sub-species of Homo Sapiens are more or less physically equal. Mental genetics have given HSII and III the edge in scientific intelligence. Along with the intelligence comes the ability to see farther and clearer so that lacking tunnel vision the will is blunted. Rather than following the ancient methods and disposing of indigenous peoples, which they could easily have done at the time, the HSIIs and IIIs created a legacy of ill will through their misguided benignity which at the end of this period began to come back to haunt them.
From the period of Mohammed the sub-species began to be moved around in earnest.
A legacy of the Semitic Moslem triumph was that the West was cut off from all intercourse with the East. The Moslems blocked all the formerly active trade routes. The legacy remains today when otherwise well educated historians know nothing of Africa and many points of the Near East.
Having conquered the Mediterranean littoral of North Africa the Semites began the penetration of sub-Saharan Africa. Superior in both intellignece and will to the First Born the Semites treated them as though they were mere animals, intelligent Apes. If the African slave trade hadn’t existed before, it began then. It was brutal.
Many Africans converted to Moslemism because it gained them immunity from being enslaved. They in turn captured non-Moslem Africans to sell to the Arabic Semites. This Moslem African slave trade began c. +700 and continues to the present day although the Semites will deny it.
North of Arabia the Moslems captured part of the Byzantine Asian lands while occupying Persia, central Asia and parts of India plus a fair penetration into China. Today if one includes Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as a unit the Indian subcontinent is predominantly Moslem.
In the West the Moslems were slowly driven from Spain which was accomplished just as the Ottoman Turks who had invaded the Middle East from Central Asia destroyed the last vestiges of the Roman or Byzantine Empire.
The Ottomans then began the conquest of the Balkans moving into the Ukraine, Romania and Hungary to the very Gates of Vienna before the combined forces of Austria, Poland and Russia drove them back to the present borders just as Edgar Rice Burroughs was being born. An incredibly long struggle that was just a pause in hostilities. After that defeat the Ottomans were known as ‘the sick man of Europe.’
During this entire period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fifteenth century Europe was in turmoil as society reformed from a congeries of Germanic tribes into a semblance of the modern nation states.
In 1492 a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus changed the direction of European society. Cut off from the East by the Moslems who took advantage of straddling the trade routes to charge exorbitant prices for Easter luxuries, Portugal led European exploration of the world circumnavigating Africa finding an ocean route to the Orient thereby bypassing the Arabs eclipsing their prosperity sending them into complete stagnation. Maybe this is what Bernard Lewis means by ‘something went wrong.’
Columbus found the islands of the Caribbean Sea occupied by the Caribs. Here we can see clearly Darwin’s dilemma resolved. Between the introduction of virulent diseases to which the Caribs were unacclimated and brutal treatment the Europeans like the Asian cockroack drove their predecessors before them. What had been a Carib lake became a European lake and would soon become an African lake.
The islands were perfect for the labor intensive sugar industry but the Europeans didn’t want to do the intensive labor themselves. They in turn went to the great slave capitol of the world which the Semites had not yet exhausted to bring large numbers of the First Born out of Africa. Like all ruling classes the HSIIs and IIIs having displaced the native Caribs, were now displaced by the First Born who at present have possession of the Caribbean Islands.
So now if Darwin were alive he could see how it works. Caribs>HSIIs & IIIs>First Born. Simple.
The Spaniards also overran Mexico, Central America and South America. Here their numbers were few in comparison with the indigenes who were apparently of a hardier stock than the Caribs. The Spaniards were able to maintain their dominance over the indigenes of the area. Even today the President of Mexico is of obvious European descent while the peons are Indios.
Following Columbus’ lead the English and French invaded further North in lands that became the United States and Canada.
Once again here we can plainly see how one species of Homo Sapiens displaces another just as one species of swallow did to its great congenor.
The new invaders from Europe displaced the native Homo Sapiens along the seaboard then as their population steadily increased they rolled the aboriginals back before their advance. There was no attempt at extermination although there was callous disregard for life in the human sense. In the evolutionary sense there was no consideration of aboriginal rights.
At the same time the First Born were removed from Africa to serve as laborers in the English colonies of North America. The First Born would never have left Africa had they not been removed by the Semites and HSII and III. The First Born secured no presence in the Middle East with whatever implications that holds, but from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States First Born territories were extended greatly.
The orginal HSIII population which originally controlled Central Asia was either driven from the area by invading Mongolid tribes or exhausted their numbers migrating West. As numerous HSIII populations have existed in the Caucasus and in other pockets of central Asia the latter is unlikely. The HSIIs were undoubtedly driven before the Mongolids in the Darwinian sense. the Mongolids first made their appearance in the West with the fifth century Huns. They swept all before them until defeated in what amounts to a last ditch stand by the French. From the Huns forward Central Asia belonged to the Mongolids.
Then in the thirteenth century on the heels of the Western Crusades Genghis Khan organized the Central Asians to conquer both the Chinese Mongolids in the East as well as sweeping West to overrun Russia and Eastern Europe to the North before retiring back into the Steppes from which they exercised hegemony over Russia for hundreds of years.
To the South the Mongolids rolled over the Moslems before being defeated in Mesopotamia then, again, retiring back into the Steppes.
The russians eventually threw the Mongolid yoke off, then by running gunboats on the Volga they were able to prevent the Mongolid hordes from crossing. Thus Central Asia was brought under control.
The French and English quickly followed the Portuguese into the East. By then the Spanish had already seized the Philippines. European religious interference caused the Japanese to close their borders to both ingress and egress. From the early seventeenth century to nearly the birth of ERB Japan was isolated taking no part in world history.
With either superior luck or organization the English branch of HSII and III was able to be the most influenctial branch in the East. All of India was brought under their control, both Hindus and Moslems. Southeast Asia acknowledged at least the hegemony of England. The Dutch seized Indonesia while the French annexed Indo-China.
England, France and Germany were in the process of annexing China itself when they were interfered with by the United States. As usual the United States with so-called good intentions produced the opposite result. John Hay of the United States announced his Open Door Policy in regard to China forcing the European branches to back down from their concept of spheres of interest. America has been a very destructive force in world politics.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lacking sufficient colonists of their own, England began moving Indians and Chinese from their homelands into their colonies. Thus these peoples who up to that point had been quite content to remain where they were realized the advantages of colonization themselves. Before too long they would in their turn be colonizing Europe and the Americas.
Although Chinese and Japanese migrations will fall mainly in the period after ERB’s birth, well before mid-nineteenth century the Chinese had begun a substantial migration to the West Coasts of the Americas. In 1849, the time of the California gold rush, they represented a very substantial percentage of the West Coast population. It was because of the Chinese that Dennis Kearney announced that California was White Man’s Country.
Fearful of being overrun by the Chinese, which was a very well founded fear, Kearney led the effort for a congressional law excluding Chinese from immigration. This law was secured in 1882. It was repealed or superseded by the 1965 revision of the immigration act which was promoted by the Semitic Jews.
Americans concentrate only on what happens in this country but in fact once stirred up by the British the Chinese began to emigrate to all parts of the world as circumstance allowed. Americans refuse to allow volition to any other people assuming the role of world directors is some sort of perversion of Manifest Destiny
End Of Part III. Go to Part IV.
Book II-2 Something Of Value
January 11, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II-2
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
Your world is out of step in the planetary procession.
– Book Of Urantia
The melting of the ice caps threw the evolutionary world out of equilibrium. As the peoples fled, who can now be called Libyans, they bumped into populations settled in what were formerly the highlands. In Egypt this caused a confrontation with the Upper Egyptians that may have lasted a couple millennia or more until the Libyans of Lower Egypt were conquered by the Upper Egyptians uniting the Two Lands.
No one knows what took place on Crete which may already have been part of the Basin civilization while it is possible that the Cretans spread the Basin civilization to Pelasgia on the mainland.
Probably North Africa including Egypt and Crete received the bulk of the emigrants. Smaller numbers unable to hold their own obviously settled in the Levant and adjacent areas. The wonderful temples of Catul Huyuk dated to 6500 B.C. must have been built by the fleeing Libyans. These settlements may have later been overwhelmed by their savage neighbors. A group may have reached present day Hungary since this area seems to have been a hotbed of intelligence. Laurence Gardner in his interesting series of books believes writing originated there from whence migrants carried the knowledge to Sumer about- -4000. Might be true, timeframe is possible.
We tend to see such occurrences as History outside Darwinian evolution. Viewed from a perspective of Darwinian evolution what we have here is a clash of sub-species. Darwin poses this problem in his ‘Origin of Species.’
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species; and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.
With Homo Sapiens we will be able to see precisely why. The discussion I make will not be based on morality but on the exigencies of the battle of life. The sub-species of Homo Sapiens are part of the natural order engaged in the struggle for survival and not outside it. Altruistic ideas about the brotherhood of man are all very well but such ideas can be interpreted in different ways. For instance one might argue that we will all be brothers when all are Moslems; or, we will all be brothers when under Chinese hegemony. But it is doubtful that very many but the totally naive believe we are all brothers as things stand.
Many peoples who have existed no longer have an existence and it is certain that in the not too distant future many others are going to become as extinct as the legendary Dodo bird. That’s why people talk about being dumb as a Dodo, you Dodo, etc. So no sentimentality here.
The initial clash came between the Semites and the Sumerians. While the origin of the Sumerians is in doubt, as they had a proto-scientific civilization they were not Semites. However as they built up their civilization creating something from, as it were, nothing, envy will draw attention. The Semites of the desert attracted by this glittering something which far exceeded their own thinking began to infiltrate Sumeria.
As Darwin put it: How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another… The Sumerians chose to be tolerant with a people who are by nature intolerant. By the year -2000 or the beginning of the Age Of Aries the Semites had overrun and displaced the Sumerians. Sumerian institutions which had great allure for the Semites were not abandoned or destroyed but the Semites gutted the forms of their scientific content replacing it with their own brand of stasis.
At the Dawning of Aries according to Genesis a conflict arose between the Terachites and the Mesopotamians over the nature of God. It will be remembered that the transition of the Ages between Taurus and Aries in Greece saw the replacement of Cronus by Zeus. In Greek mythology this was represented as the battle between Zeus and the Titans. In Sumerian mythology it was represented by the killing of the Bull of Heaven by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Having succeeded in their heroic task the haunch of Taurus was made a constellation over the North Pole. In other words a remnant of the previous Age.
The Lugal Banda assumed the reins from the fourth king after the Flood. Now, we are led to believe that the Terachites under their Astrological genius Abram objected to the notion of Ages. Abram insisted that there was one god who was eternal. As the Old Order would not give on this point we are told that the overriding genius Abram and the Terachites were caused to flee for their lives. They wisely did, however they kept this idea alive for two thousand years becoming an ever greater cause of disturbance during the transit from Aries to Pisces.
Thus, one may say the battle was joined between the Astrological Religion and Semitic religious ideas. This battle is central to understanding world history. We will see a refinement of the Jewish position when Mohammed formulated his own even sillier religion.
Let us take a moment to examine the Semitic position. The question is not one of Jews and Arabs as the two are parts of the same stock, but that of Semites. The religions of Judaism and the Moslemism that Mohammed formulated are quite close. They both give their people preeminence amongst the peoples of the world and they both take an adamant position against change. The Jews wish to make their god sole and eternal while the Moslems hope to stop time and change by declaring Mohammed the last prophet and his word the last word. Vain hopes!
Now, in the seventh century the Moslems burst from the desert overrunning large areas of North Africa and Asia forcing their religion on the subject peoples. Some people, Bernard Lewis for one, fancy that this rule was liberal but that something went wrong a couple centuries later. Nothing went wrong from the Semitic point of view, everything went right. It merely took them that long to suppress the scientific and intellectual vitality of the subject peoples. The story was the same as in Sumer. Once in control they suppressed science and knowledge in favor of their projection of Allah or his early formulation as the god of stasis.
Edgar Rice Burroughs recognized this in a passage of Tarzan Of The Apes that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Archimedes Q. Porter and Mr. Philander are walking down the beach apparently discussing the Alhambra and the Moors in Spain. Philander’s was a stock argument still current in my childhood and apparently still current with scholars of the stripe of Bernard Lewis.
Samuel T. Philander is speaking:
‘But, my dear professor,’ he was saying, ‘I still maintain that but for the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella over the fifteenth century Moors in Spain the world would be to-day a thousand years in advance of where we now find ourselves.’
‘The Moors were essentially a tolerant, broad minded, liberal race of agriculturists, artisans and merchants- the very type of people that has made possible such civilization as we find in America and Europe- while the Spaniards-‘
‘Tut, tut, Mr. Philander,’ interrupted Professor Porter, ‘their religion positively precluded the possibilities you suggest. Moslemism was, is, and always will be a blight on that scientific progress which has marked…
Before 9/11 a reader might have skimmed over that passage without a remark but the Twin Towers have given it a new significance. Burroughs presciently put his finger on the Moslem problem that is its antipathy to science; to that knowledge that contradicts the word of Allah as imparted to Mohammed sitting on a rock baking in the hot desert sun.
Mr. Philander voices the received wisdom of society as it existed down to my childhood while if Mr. Bernard Lewis and his ‘something went wrong’ is representative of the present is still current today.
Burroughs through the mouth of Professor Porter boldly contradicts the almost universal opinion. Furthermore he is right as events have amply proven. ‘Moslemism was, is and always will be a blight on…scientific progress.’
Moslemism per se is a tool of the Semites in their bid for universal dominion as per Darwin. The Semite ever was and always will be opposed to any science that denies him that role. The Science of Bruce Lahn and genetics have driven that last nail in the Semitic coffin.
The Semite then as now seeks to arrest the development of knowledge and intelligence keeping things perpetually in stasis.
When Sigmund Freud gave us Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego the coupling of the two states means that there is a group ego and that it can be analyzed. A group, any group, has its objectives and goals for which it creates an agenda it follows. The Semites as a whole, both Jews, Arabs and others form a psychological group with objectives and goals. Therefore their group psychology can be analyzed.
Their methods and ways and means can be analyzed. As Freud indicates, such an analysis does not constitute bigotry or ‘hate.’ It is just scholarship. I didn’t mean to interrupt my narrative but I felt it was time to clear the air on that issue especially in light of what is happening to Mr. Le Pen in France.
Now, the Semite has a fear of being overwhelmed by numbers and being relegated to the dust bin of history. They wish preeminence. They realize wishful thinking won’t obtain it for them. It takes action. The year -2000 is when that action began in earnest.
First the Semites overran Sumer subordinating the people and its culture to Semitic ideals of Stasis.
I personally do not believe the Jewish account in Genesis. I believe that the Hebrews, as their Northwest Semitic dialect indicates, were located far to the West and North before they descended on Palestine. The whole of the first eleven books of Genesis must have been concocted from Mesopotamian records studied during the captivity after -586.
So I will not consider a Jewish influence before the final invasion of Palestine c. -1200.
After the investing of Sumer and the acquisition of Mesopotamia conflicts between the sub-species became more frequent. In the Darwinian sense the sub-special contest for dominance had begun. As Darwin stated: ‘We can see…why competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature…’
First Pharaoh toured the East disturbing the peoples, then the Hittites and Greeks entered civilization. The Asians countered by invading the Delta which was a long occupation before they were driven out.
The contest between the Semites and Egyptians was between HSII and the Semites. That of the Hittites was between the Semites and HS III. That of the Greeks between HSII and HS III and then as the Greeks and Semites clashed moving in the opposite direction between HS III and Semites.
As Greek legend tells it, the Semitic king, Agenor, had three sons (read surplus population) which he sent to populate new areas. One went to Cilicia in Asia Minor, another went to Crete while the third, Cadmus settled at Thebes in mainland Greece. This provoked a major war to eject them. Just before the assault on Troy the Argives waged a two generation war to eject the Semites, or sub-species competitors, that was commemorated in the legend of the Seven Against Thebes. Sarpedon, the son of Agenor, was also expelled from Crete returning to the mainland.
Subsequent to Troy the Greeks invaded and occupied the Anatolian littoral also occupying Crete and Cypress. The Aegean became an HSIII lake.
The Semites meanwhile threw out colonies from Phoenicia from whence came Agenor. The most famous was the Semitic power of Carthage which was to come into conflict with both Greeks and HSII Romans. The Semitic Assyrians who had become the paramount power in Asia found the strength to smash Egypt which terminated that ancient HSII nation as a power. The Assyrians and Babylonians were in their turn brought low by the HSIII Persians who seemed to have been or were assimilated by the Semitic culture.
Then the Macedonians organized a terrific military campaign under Alexander and his HSIII Greeks and Macedonians overran the entire Eastern Mediterranean. Alexander died at the end of the conquest which broke theEast into three Hellenic kingdoms. A Macedonian, a Greek kingdom, the kingdom of the Seleucids in Asia and the kingdom of Ptolemy in Egypt. For the moment than the HSIII were dominant.
The Hellenic culture was so attractive that the majority had no problem adapting to it. The Semites seemed pleased to act HSIII. Then, as Bernard Lewis might say, ‘Something went wrong.’ As might be expected there were Semitic dissenters.
Chief among these were the Jews. The Jews since their alleged expulsion from Ur had been active. Colonies of Jews had been established in all the major cities which transferred the struggle from the military to the religious sphere. Unlike today, at that time the Jews were active proselytizers.
They set themselves up as a quasi-empire in Jerusalem not unlike the later Roman Catholic Church based in Rome, in fact as the Roman Catholic Church is quasi-Semitic, Jerusalem probably served as the model. Tithes flowed from every part of the Mediterranean into the coffers at Jerusalem just as they later would to Medieval Rome.
The Jews fought the Seleucids to a standstill but then the really Big Boys entered the picture. The Romans had already disposed of the Semitic Carthaginians but now the Semitic Jews established colonies everywhere in the Empire including Rome itself. The chief authority for this period is the Jewish traitor Josephus. Burroughs had a copy of the works in his library.
So as the Age of Aries drew to a close the Mediterranean was under the military domination of the HSII Romans while the cultural and religious sphere was dominated by HSIII Greeks and Semitic Jews.
Just as the transition from the Taurean Age to the Arien Age was fraught with wars so now the transition from Aries to Pisces was blighted by a major conflict between HSII, HSIII and the Semites. As you may note the transition between Pisces and Aquarius is being fraught with a major war between the Semites and the rest of the world.
Much of the nonsense of the Jewish War can be explained by the notion that the Astrological Age change was the literal end of the world. When Jesus spoke of the end times he wasn’t being vague, he meant right then. The Jews on Masada could never have killed themselves if they hadn’t believed that they were going to rise up within the next few days and come into their inheritance. Poor deluded people, their successors probably won’t make that mistake again.
The terrific war with unbelievable bloodshed continued from 66 BC to 135 AD when with the defeat of Bar Kochba the Jews threw in the towel. Peace is just war conducted by other means as the famous General said.
2.
The Semitic Jews were defeated decisively in 135 AD. However the Kingdom of Heaven remained unconquered. The Jews had been proselytizing the Mediterranean world for centuries and not without success but it was slow work while having its limits. For too many people circumcision and the absurd dietary laws were an insuperable obstacle. Enter Saul/Paul to the rescue. There is no reason to take any of the legend of Paul too seriously. Stories like his are mere hagiography.
Suffice it to say that he discovered a way to turn the discredited Jewish messiah to account. Rather than making him the savior of the Jews he made him the savior of the world discarding the objectionable circumcision and the laughable dietary laws. Paul may have been a bigot but he wasn’t stupid.
What the Jews couldn’t accomplish on their own the hybrid Gentile-Jewish religion of Christianity did. The Semitic mentality was grafted unto the Gentile. Christianity was therefore repressive and bigoted. It is no accident that Freud made repression a centerpiece of his dogma.
Within only a couple centuries ‘something went wrong’ as Bernard Lewis would put it. Absolute Catholic orthodoxy was imposed which allowed for no further discussion or speculation. Anyone who questioned the central authority was run to earth and murdered, ‘exposed’ as a heretic and discountenanced in every way. It is interesting that Hitler is condemned for bookburning when these Semito-Catholics destroyed the greatest repository of ancient learning in a magnificent bonfire at the library in Alexandria. I doubt if any greater crime has ever been committed and that includes the so-called holocaust.
Thus just as in Sumer, when learning was crushed, everything was going right for the Semites. If Bernard Lewis weren’t a Semite he might see things somewhat differently.
The Semito-Catholics were still wrestling with stubborn dissidents when the ‘last of the prophets’ sat down on his rock amidst the burning sands to dictate his little notes and thoughts. Mohammed could neither read nor write. He still thought he could talk to God. God most have thought it was an amusing conversation. He’s probably still laughing.
The ‘brotherhood of man’ sure as heck isn’t.
I’m sure that Mohammed surveyed the scene, listened to the talk in the cafes, Semites complaining of how the nasty Gentiles prevented them from realizing the sovereignty of the world and how they had almost captured the whole ball of wax when by some dirty tricks they were defeated by the Romans. With a level playing field, you know, they would have won.
Undoubtedly they laughed because the stupid goyim were actually practicing Semitic religion and didn’t know it.
Judging from the results Mohammed thought that what the Jews lacked to realize the Semitic dream was a sufficient military arm to convert the goyim by force. The man did create an ideological force that when joined to the Arab military force was able to overrun North Africa, Persia and the Asian interior as well as parts of Asian Byzantium. By the end of the +eighth century the Moorish auxiliaries of the Arabs occupied Spain. So as this period ended the Semite sub-species in the Darwinian sense had imposed themselves on much of HSII, part of HSIII and large goegraphic areas controlled by the Mongolids. They were doing as well as those swallows would in the United States.
3.
Brief Interlude
…presumptuous attempts to conquer the outer world of appearances by the inner world of wishful thinking.
-S. Freud. Letter to Arnold Zweig 5/8/32 as quoted by Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying.
Time now for a little recapitulation, reflection and analysis. Regardless of that endlessly repeated dogma that no system of thought is better than another, everything is relative; noting is good or bad but thinking makes it so, etc. there are some signal differences between the Astrological Religion and the Semitic Religion; the latter stultifies while the former liberates into a glorious freedom. Which would you rather be, a stupid slave or an intelligent free man? Judging from all the chat about freedom we hear I’m going to assume your answer rather than wait for it. Free and intelligent, right?
Freud hit the nail on the head in the above quote. The Astrological Religion accepts the world of appearances and attempts to adjust to them, hence it has a scientific outlook. Astrology is based on a mistaken apprehension of reality which is why on the intellectual level it is no longer taken seriously. However the Astrolgical theory is based on a great many correct astronomical facts. Astro in both words refers to the stars. I’m sure the ancients would have expressed their hard won knowledge differently if they had had more accurate facts. It is all very well to sneer at Astrology as stupid but Astrology is not stupid. It is merely mistaken. Determining the Great Year is a tremendous discovery made by people who couldn’t read while having mastered the barest rudiments of language. Do not sneer at your ancestors; they can still tell you a thing or two.
Furthermore by dividing the Great Year into Ages they left room for the evolution of intelligence. If you study the transits carefully you will see that at each transit a revolution was necessary for the new age to come into existence. Thus our genius ancestors made certain that mankind would never stultify itself by being unable to grow.
Now compare this freedom loving program with that of the Semites with whom we are now contending for supremacy or, in Darwinian terms, survival as a species.
Beginning with the failed Semito-Jewish revolt at the beginning of the Age of Aries the Semitic doctrine has been opposed to any change. Their god is ‘eternal’ and unchanging. The Jews created a psychological projection based on their ‘inner world of wishful thinking’ as defined by their compatriot Sigmund Freud. Thus the Semitic religion is closed to innovation. There is no consideration of the world of appearances. The Jewish god, Yahvey must be offensive to any thinking person. Nor can the Jews dismiss criticism as ‘oh, that’s anti-Semitism.’ That’s one interpretation, another is why should anyone be stultified by a religion that promises nothing to anyone who is not by blood a Semite?
Think that over now, fellas.
The same is true of the Arab god, Allah. Allah is not even a projection of the Arab people being only the psychological projection of the inner world of wishful thinking of a demented Mohammed.
My god, man.
As with the Jews and their Eternal Yahvey Mohammed creates his own eternal god to supplant that of the Jews and then declares himself the final prophet beyond whom no further speculation is permitted. Mohammed wants to stop history in its tracks. Mohammed had probably never heard of science. As Edgar Rice Burroughs pointed out science never shows up in Mohammed’s doctrine.
Mohammed was able to stultify his own people and a very large percentage of mankind. Bernard Lewis is mystified about ‘what went wrong?’ I’m mystified by Bernard Lewis.
Religious speculation did go on in the West while Moslem children bobbed and weaved ‘studying’ the worthless psychological projecton of Mohammed’s called the Koran. Here’s a guy who learned to fool all the people all the time.
The West produced a wonderful succession of speculators working against the ever vigilant Semito-Catholic Church. Paracelsus, Meister Eckehardt, Jacob Boehm, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the nineteenth century Spiritualists including the incredible Madame Helena Blavatsky. Arising from all these is an astounding organization dating from 1955 in Chicago called Urantia.
Check this out: The Book Of Urantia claims his paper was presented by:
…a divine counselor, a member of the group of celestial personalities assigned by the Ancient of Days on Uversa, the headquarters of the seventh superuniverse, to supervise those portions of these forthcoming revelations which have to do with affairs beyond the borders of the local universe of Nebadon. I am commissioned to announce these papers portraying the nature and attributes of God because I represent the highest source of information available for such a purpose on any inhabited world. I have served as a Divine Counselor in all seven of the superuniverses and have long resided at the Paradise center of all things. Many times have I enjoyed the supreme pleasure of a sojourn in the immediate personal presence of the Universal Father. I portray the reality and truth of the Father’s nature and attributes with unchallengable authority; I know whereof I speak.
The writer wisely pefers anonymity to revealing his ‘earthly’ identity. Makes you smile doesn’t it? Yet that writer in his Book of Urantia is intelligent and well read. Much more so than Moses or Mohammed but you refuse to believe his claims and rightly so. But then why do you give credence to the equally laughable Moses and Mohammed. Just because they lived a couple thousand years ago?
How can you accept the psychological projections of Yahveh and Allah as ‘real’ when you would laugh at anyone who believed Bran Stoker’s psychological projection of Dracula was real. Or, if you think Yahveh and Allah are real why should you not think that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ psychological projection of Tarzan the Jungle God is not real?
Tarzan has as much reason to claim to be an extension of Dionysus as Jesus of nazareth. Now that the Age of Aquarius is dawning why shouldn’t this exemplar of Dionysus be the religious archetype of the Age of Aquarius and Edgar Rice Burroughs his prophet?
Tarzan’s world is based on scientific conceptions and their developments thus there is room to grow. Rather than being reserved for the so-called elect of God which excludes those of us who are not Semites any of us can aspire to be as Tarzan- a healthy mind in a healthy body. If you want to be a hulk, with application you can turn yourself into one. We can be men like gods if we elect or we can be stultified cretins if we follow the Semitic path.
The Age of Aquarius will be ruled by the more free masculine side of Dionysus as the Age of Pisces was ruled by the gentle, loving feminine side of Dionysus. Tarzan as a psychological projection for us all is a perfect specimen; he is master of both his conscious and sub-conscious minds as well as master of his environment. Thus he moves freely in the world of appearances while being in control of his inner world of wishful thinking.
Tarzan is God and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet. Move over Mohammed.
Is that any less believable than Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet?
Think about it.
The next section should take us to the marriage of Burroughs and Emma.
Tarzan The Untamed
January 3, 2008
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#7 Tarzan The Untamed
By
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs seems to be searching for his sexual identity in Tarzan The Untamed. The untamed may refer to the notion that he may be married but Emma has not domesticated the roaring Lion Man.
On my first reading of the novel I merely picked up the surface story, that, to tell the truth, I don’t find very interesting perhaps even implausible and ridiculous. On the second and third readings however the story behind the story, ERB’s psychological dilemma begins to emerge coloring the story with interest.
The story even begins to assume a certain beauty, a poetic shimmer, that takes form as you stare into it. I began to relate Untamed to other novels and stories, that seemed to me to be related and partake of the same dilemma. I don’t know that I can successfully relate them to Untamed but I’ll give it a shot.
For the last few years shifting around in the back of my mind have been the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman. Just a moment ago as I write this I finished another tale of the German romantics, a charming story that I recommend highly, Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouque. And finally although this may be difficult to see Fyodor Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Untamed begins with the murder of Jane, Burroughs aspect of female sexuality, and Tarzan’s killing of the panther or his emasculated sexuality that manifests itself as a homosexual latency.
One then is led to believe that by killing sexual desire Tarzan or ERB believes that he has eliminated the troubling sexual ambivalence of his character. Yet, just a few pages on they flicker to life again in the character of the putative German spy Bertha Kircher. Tarzan first sees Kircher as a woman in the German camp so grasping at the obvious he assumes that she is a German spy. He doesn’t realize and we won’t be told until the end of the story that she is a double agent. In reality she is an English spy posing as a German spy. There’s a complexity there that eludes me at the moment.
She is thus introduced to Tarzan as a woman. The next time he sees her is as a man disguised as a British agent in the English camp. He doesn’t recognize her although he know he has seen him somewhere before. Thus the old sexual ambivalence resurfaces. In what seems to be your standard adventure story delicate psychological nuances begin to flicker around the action story like St. Elmo’s Fire. No matter what the surface story is about the secondary story is about something else.
La Motte Fouque in his Undine also addresses the problem of a man faced with a sexual dilemma that lies within. The path is clear for the hero, Huldbrand, it is only his own weakness that creates the problem for him. In Huldbrand’s case his decision is between two women amidst elemental forces of nature that contrast with the elemental human nature. Undine is a story of astonishing beauty that I can only slaughter in interpreting . I highly recommend you read it. For those deeply into fantasy you will find Undine as fantastic as anything you have ever read; for those into myth and fairytale it is a masterpiece of the kind. Anyone who reads around in this area will have heard it mentioned. I have known of the title for many years but recently in my researches into H.G. Wells it was mentioned that Undine was a favorite of his. I thought it necessary background so I added this gorgeous story to my memory stacks. I should have waited so long; it is a superb Anima-Animus story.
In the December 14th ERBzine George McWhorter provided a list of a few post-WWII books that ERB read. As ERB titles the list, a few of the books he has read, and the list is astonishingly long from a few one can only guess that ERB’s full list must have a couple hundred or more. As reading was a lifelong habit for him and if he consumed titles at that voracious pace then it is truly difficult to guess how many books he read from, say, 1888 to 1910 just before he began writing. Of course his potential list to select from before 1910 was much shorter than ours is today. Titles as obscure today as Undine were relatively well known then. I may be wrong but I pick up hints of Crime and Punishment in ERB’s corpus from time to time. Certainly by his WWII list he had crime on his mind.
We do know that the stories that disappeared into his capacious mind from the period before 1910 gestated for decades in the back of his mind finally finding expression thirty or forty years later. I’m thinking of George W.M. Reynold’s Mysteries Of The Court Of London that burst forth in the 1938 version of The Lad And The Lion. So while I can’t say for certain that ERB read these three authors there is a certain wistfulness and fairy tale quality to the story of Tarzan, Bertha Kircher and Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick that reminds one of the three authors that I have mixed up with Untamed.
So, a woman named Bertalda sends the knight Huldbrand into the elemental forest to prove his love for her. Thus Huldbrand goes to a destiny he never imagined. In the sense of C.G. Jung’s collective unconscious which as I interpret as a set of symbols common to the Western mind, Burroughs also sends Tarzan and his two sexual identities into the elemental jungles of Africa.
La Motte-Fouque invents the water spirit Kuhleborn to forward the action. The presence of so much water indicates that the action takes place in the subconscious of Huldbrand.
Water plays a very different role in Burroughs’ story. In his tale Tarzan braves a watered land to traverse eight very deep and steep ravines that become progressively drier until in the last he almost dies of thirst. As Burroughs’ story covers the four years in his life from late 1914 until mid-1919 one may assume that he had eight bouts of progressively severe depression the eighth and last occurring as he writes his story.
On the other side of the last canyon the well watered jungle begins again. Thus the main story of Tarzan, Bertha and Smith-Oldwick takes place on the edges of the forest and a meadow.
In La Motte-Fouque’s story the elements had set up the conflict from the beginning. As we are told Kuhleborn stole the baby Bertalda away from her parents in an apparent drowning. He then restored a child to the bereaved parents with the child Undine who was actually a water sprite. Bertalda was left by the side of the road where a noble couple found and adopted her. She is the lost daughter of the now aged couple of Undine’s adoptive parents to which Kuhleborn now leads Huldbrand.
Undine’s parents live on an isolated peninsula. As soon as the storm drives Huldbrand to the peninsula the elemental Kuhleborn in the form of a raging torrent turns the peninsula into an island from which there is no escaping. Huldbrand and Undine are thus thrown together. Elemental spirits have no souls. This notion would certainly have had great appeal for Burroughs for whom men without souls was a preoccupation. Undine can only acquire a soul, which she greatly longs for, from the love of a man who has one. She therefore in effect seduces Huldbrand. Kuhleborn disapproves but as to a point Undine’s magic is stronger than his he is reluctantly forced to accede on certain conditions.
A wandering priest is tossed up on shore by Kuhleborn who ties the knot for Undine and Huldbrand. They return to civilization and Berthalda where the conflict between a human woman with a soul and a water sprite without one puts Huldbrand to the test.
So Tarzan who is first associated with Bertha Kircher is once again presented with his emasculation conflict when Smith-Oldwick appears in the picture. The name Smith occurs in Burroughs’ work with some frequency while Old-wick may have sexual connotations unless I’m being too Freudian.
Before Smith-Oldwick does appear Tarzan has to cross the continent from East to West. His wish is to return to his father’s cabin, build an addition or two to make it more roomy and comfortable then settle in as a sort of gentleman farmer. Ah, to be so world weary. And yet that is what Burroughs is about to do.
In a rather remarkable episode Tarzan is crossing Africa when he comes upon Bertha Kircher out there somewhere. He takes her captive but for some unknown reason doesn’t relieve her of the pistol at her side. Even stranger he walks along in front of his captive. Bertha not slow to grasp an opportunity reaches up and lays the butt of her pistol alongside the back of the Big Fella’s head. There’s one bash in the head so far.
Bertha takes off for the railroad leaving Tarzan lying face down in the trail. As he lies Sheeta the panther comes upon him. This presents a sexual problem difficult of analysis. Does it mean that Tarzan is unaware of his attraction to Bertha or what? Tarzan is all but dead as Sheeta prepares to spring on him when who should appear but the Lion whose will Tarzan broke earlier in the story. Now totally devoted to his oppressor he kills Sheeta. Tarzan regains consciousness to find himself nose to nose with Numa. Reminds you of that horrid joke Hillman told a while back about the elephant. In this case it was the same lion.
So the Lion and Tarzan are united in spirit. Tarzan is not yet known as the Lion Man but he will be. In any event the Lion is a guardian spirit for him. In the second book after this one, perhaps reflecting this lion Tarzan will raise and tame the Golden Lion who will be his helpmate and guardian angel. I suspect that the lions Tarzan kills would have been tigers if someone hadn’t objected to the fact that there are no tigers in Africa. In some ways panthers are substitutes for the tiger.
Relieved to find that this lion is his lion Tarzan gets up giving the lion a pat and then trots off down the trail in search of Bertha. In a sort of hobo flashback Bertha finds the train line and hops a freight a few steps ahead of the White Ape. Tarzan misses the connection so we find him forsaking the middle terraces for a trudge down the tracks into town.
I don’t know how many people find these two sequences funny but I do.
Tarzan loses track of Bertha so he begins the long walk to Gabon. Here he has to traverse the eight deep canyons. These canyons have vertical walls while being very deep so that even for the Ape Man these thing become too difficult. Each crevasse gets drier and drier so Tarzan gets weaker and weaker being deprived of, as it were, the feminine water of life. By the time he hits the eighth canyon he is spent. I mean, he has had it. This may be as close to death as the Great Tarmangani has ever come.
He lays down in a manner that indicates he will never get up. The chapter is titled Blood Will Out. A little double entendre. A vulture descends to wait for his meal to die. Instead Tarzan grabs the vulture by the neck sinking his strong white teeth into it throat. Here’s the joke: Blood Will Out. Tarzan’s inherited greatness appears while the vulture’s blood saves his life. Tarzan sucks the vulture dry gaining liquid refreshment while eating the flesh. He now has just enough strength to climb out. He discovers he has crossed the desert and is now in a watered land.
One may assume then that Burroughs has fought off several bouts of severe depression from 1914 to 1919.
Back up on the surface he discover Bertha Kircher in the possession of a Black German trooper. At the same time Smith-Oldwick is flying on a reconnaissance mission when he develops engine trouble landing in a meadow. He whips out his monkey wrench, fixes the problem but before he can take off he is captured by the locals.
Thus he Tarzan and Bertha are brought together. So Tarzan having thought he had resolved his sexual hang-ups at the beginning of the book now learns he hasn’t. The old ambivalence returns in the persons of Bertha and Percy Smith-Oldwick.
In a series of interesting adventures the three Whites are brought together. Tarzan’s male figure falls in love with Bertha. The plane is relocated. An adventure with Usanga the Black German soldier intervenes that is not germane here. Tarzan’s intention is still to go off alone to his father’s cabin so he sees Smith-Oldwick and Bertha off as they begin the flight back to Kenya. Thus we have a second resolution to Burroughs’ sexual dilemma. He packs his sexual problems in a plane and flies them off higher above him than he is high above his daily cares in the trees. He is seen standing in a tree safely above it all watching the plane disappear into the distance. The plane is soaring very high over the tree tops when it takes a dive back to earth. Thus that dream of Burroughs’ getting rid of his ambivalence crashes.
Even this attempt to resolve his sexual dilemma is doomed to failure. He can’t abandon the two so he starts back into the desert from which he almost met his death. His sexual ambivalence has landed in the eighth and most desolate canyon. Undaunted Tarzan returns to near certain death to resolve his problem. The three are in an impossible situation from which it appears that there is no escape.
There he learns that a very unintelligent vulture had apparently mistaken the plane for a dead something. Descending on it the vulture became entangled in the propeller. Never one to lose a chance to bash someone/anyone on the head Burroughs has the bird break a piece of the propeller loose that bashes Smith-Oldwick in the forehead. The bashing definitely establishes Smith-Oldwick as Burroughs’ sexual alter-ego as he presumably now has the same scar on his forehead that both Burroughs and Tarzan sport.
The vulture is an ancient symbol of the mother. One can’t be too sure how aware Burroughs may have been of this but in the Jungian sense of the collective unconscious the symbol would have or may have suggested itself from the common fund. As a student of Africa Burroughs would certainly have had plenty of time to consider vultures especially as his idol Rider Haggard includes vultures in most of his African novels.
If Burroughs is using the vulture as a symbol for his mother that opens the interesting problem of what exactly his relationship to his mother was. First Tarzan strangles, drinks the blood and eats the flesh of the vulture, with perhaps a very sly joke of blood will out, and then the vulture attacks his sexual identity destroying any chance Burroughs may have had of successfully resolving the issue. I merely raise the point.
Having been bashed but not knocked unconscious Smith-Oldwick recovers in time to ease that airplane down. Tarzan arrives but there seems to be no hope of the three leaving the canyon alive.
At this point the residents of the lost civilization of Xuja capture them. Once again not germane to my point here after a series of very interesting hair raising adventures the trio is rescued by some British troops searching for Smith-Oldwick.
Burroughs and Tarzan still have to resolve the sexual dilemma.
The rescue officer advises Tarzan that Jane is not after all dead. This fact apparently resolves the problem for Tarzan. Bertha and Smith-Oldwick return to get married while Tarzan now psychically reunited with Jane returns to East Africa to begin the search for Pal-Ul-Don rather than returning to his father’s cabin.
We don’t know where this leaves Burroughs in August of 1919, more or less the anniversary of the beginning of the Great War in 1914, when he finished the book. We don’t know what his relations with Emma were except that possibly they had reached an accord psychologically.
The story began in Tarzan’s mythical Africa during the War. In the novel the story must take place in 1914-15 but in real life the war ended in November of 1918. This probably coincides with Tarzan drifting off from East Africa back West to Gabon. At the same time in real life Burroughs left Chicago in January 1919 moving West to Los Angeles.
So the village of Usanga in the middle of Africa must represent Chicago. The lost city of Xuja that is located in a desert valley watered by canals brought from a distance must represent the move to LA. So that Burroughs is recording his sexual dilemma and also the move from Chicago to LA against the background of the Great War. Pretty nifty footwork.
He and Emma must have been together as it is very difficult to believe he would have absented himself from her and Tarzana so that this long separation of Tarzan from Jane must represent a mental estrangement from Emma. Perhaps the strain of the move was more than she could bear.
In the next novel Tarzan The Terrible Tarzan makes the long trek to the lost land of Pal-Ul-Don in search of Jane. While the succeeding novel Tarzan And The Golden Lion opens with Jane, Jack and Tarzan returning from Pal-Ul-Don reunited again. At that time there is a distinct coolness between Tarzan and Jane. Whatever reconciliation took place between Emma and Burroughs it was less than satisfactory on Burroughs’ side.
In Golden Lion the two discover a lion cub on the trail that Tarzan takes home to raise as the Golden Lion. The Lion is always cool toward Jane while seeming to protect Tarzan from her. As soon as the lion is mature and trained Tarzan takes off to visit La at Opar. In this instance he and La come close to being a couple while the Golden Lion becomes a close male companion.
Thus Bertha and Smith-Oldwick have turned into La and the Golden Lion. Still unable to resolve his real life problem Burroughs ends Golden Lion by having Tarzan return to Jane. Burroughs has now resolved his emasculation problem by having the Golden Lion as Tarzan’s male buddy. As a beast he is not threat to Burroughs’ masculine identity. The Golden Lion remains Tarzan’s male pal throughout the remaining novels.
Now I have to return to Tarzan The Untamed. This is a very complex novel and I don’t know if I can do it justice.
Exhuming Bob: The Jewel In The Forehead Of The Toad
December 11, 2007
Exhuming Bob:
The Jewel In The Forehead Of The Toad
By
R.E. Prindle
I ride on a mail train; can’t buy a thrill.
-Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan. How did this guy get into my life? As someone said of Hank Williams: Bob Dylan sang my life. Up to a point. How he could know so much about me is totally unbelievable. I’m three years older than Bob which is not all that much, especially at this age. Our mental states were quite similar while we were working out our mental problems in somewhat the same way, not that Bob had ever heard of me but one of the hazards of exposing yourself on records or in print is that kindred spirits recognize each other. One of the occupational hazards, I suppose.
I’m going to use as a starting point Dylan’s record of Mixed Up Confusion. I must confess that I had never heard the song until a couple years ago. I had bought three copies of Biograph when it came out but never opened one. I bought all three copies as an investment and that turned out to be one lousy investment. So after twenty years these sealed copies weren’t listed for much more than I paid for them so I didn’t think I’d be losing much by opening one. It was then I first heard Mixed Up Confusion. Was it a revelation you ask? Hell no. It was just a noisy song. But as I was sitting watching the river flow and reading Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces it occurred to me that the book needed some constructive criticism so I gave it. You may have read that criticism right here on this blog. Then having the kind of mind I do I had to read the rest of Marcus so as to make knowing and intelligent comments on the guy. Marcus reopened the subject of Dylan in my mind. I dismissed the guy a few years ago, right after hearing Mixed Up Confusion. I had to start thinking about the Bob again because I couldn’t figure out exactly what I used to see in him.
Bob and I first made extra-sensory contact back in ‘64 and as you are well aware this is ‘08. A lot of water had flowed by in the river and under the bridge while I was sitting and watching it since way back when.
In the interval I had worked out my mental problems even integrating my personality according to the tenets of C.G. Jung. I’ve got the same old face, and getting older, but I’m a different guy.
Here’s the rub. I lived by Dylan for maybe five years from Blonde On Blonde until my life began running so fast I had too many other things to think about. Greil Marcus raised some irritating points about Dylan that made me regret my former adulation. Now, this created a small problem because I love my life and I have the notion that I have perfect taste and that whatever I have ever liked I must still like or I don’t really have perfect taste. You can see how Marcus put me up against the wall. Another one of those extrasensory contacts. And there was Bob getting more ambiguous by the moment as Marcus plodded on.
Damn near threw me into a panic.
So now I had to develop a new perspective for my infatuation of the toad with the jewel in his forehead. That’s how I look at Bob now. Well, you know, I’ve read most of the books on Bob, not so much reviews or interviews so that I have the means to analyze this prime influence on my young manhood.
I’m standing in my library when my hand fell on a Dylan book I bought some time ago. It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t read this one yet. The book was the Rough Guide To Bob Dylan by Nigel Williamson. English fellow, obviously never been to America. Nigel had a pretty good handle on Bob so my mind focused on the jewel in Bob’s forehead. Mixed Up Confusion. This was where Bob was at in 1962. The rest of his career is the working out of this song. Trying to clear up the confusion. Get Straight. Walk like a man and the words of that tune..
Not enough attention has been devoted to Bob’s boyhood in Hibbing although guys like Howard Sounes in Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan have made a stab at it. Nobody has touched on the real source of Bob’s malaise though. I mean why was he living in mixed up confusion? His songs give off hints that could be investigated by someone in the right frame of mind but it’s not going to be me. I’ve got other things to think about. I’ve got my own life to live. Bob does generously provide the lyrics on his web site however for anyone interested.
Obviously the early years were not so happy as they could have been. Bob had difficulties with his mother and father; nothing too egregious but one gets the notion that perhaps Bob thought parents and child were mismatched. Should have been born to someone else. I live with that feeling too. Bob and I both knelt at the same altar praying: There must be some way out of here… But just through that door over there and when it closes behind you you can’t get back in. I didn’t design this place I just live here.
How well he got along at school isn’t absolutely clear but it seems that no one felt any compunction to take Bob at his word which should be the finger on the sign pointing: This Way.
That Bob had time on his hands is obvious by his listening habits on the radio and his reading habits. Bob took it all in as did I. Country, Rock, Swing, Folk, Easy Listening. He doesn’t seem to remember the Folk very much but he must have heard those Harry Smith songs before if he crawled all those late night country stations beaming up on a million watts or so from Del Rio, Texas. He must have got Waterloo real clear. One of the great country stations of the Midwest. I don’t know if he could get WCKY in Cincinatti O-ha-o, as the announcer always pronounced it up there in Hibbing or Wheeling West Virginia. Boy Wheeling used to play some unusual items. Came in pretty clear in Michigan where I lived. Carter’s and all that? Old hat.
So I don’t know what blew his mind so much when he got to Dinkytown down at U. Minnesota. Atmosphere I guess. The hip thing was pretty heady. Tickled my fancy.
I’m totally amazed he was blown away by Woody Guthrie. Never had much use for Guthrie myself. This machine kills fascists! Who the hell ever saw a Fascist in America? I never did and I looked. I was curious. I wanted to find one.
Read Bound For Glory too. Left me cold but then that’s a matter of taste or perhaps temperament. Anyway Bob’s got all these musical influences rolling around in his mind and he meant to do something with them. He took off hitchhiking for NYC in the middle of a Minnesota winter. God, what balls. If anything got him into the Hall of Fame that must have been it.
I’ve done it. Not Minnesota but over on the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan side. Must have been out of my mind. Well, just young and dumb, but even that’s no excuse. I bet Bob feels the same way. There I was in three feet of snow with trucks going by at fifty miles an hour. Rearranged my own personal snow bank every time it happened. But this isn’t about me, well, actually it is but only in relation to Bob.
This hitchhike through the winter wonderland must have left an indelible stamp on Bob’s mind. Did mine. Made him cold. Bitter. Put bite into some of his songs. Tears of rage. Hello New York City sayonara Chitown. Boy, there’s two places that’ll give you a vivid impression of mankind. Did me.
Bob was there at the creation of Rock and Roll and it was a life changing experience for him. Some guys like Eddie Cochran and Ricky Nelson could settle into quick and easy imitations but Bob had trouble sorting our his influences and making a sound that was his own. Landing in Greenwich Village and its vibrant Folk scene, if some of those guys can be called vibrant. I’ve got a whole collection of their records and some of ‘em are so dull they make Bobby shine.
So Bob settled in doing things like Talking New York and other folkie stuff as he put his musical roots down coming up with Hank Williams influenced Folk stuff. He was doin’ all right too but he couldn’t forget those Rock and Roll rhythms.
So just as he was drolling out Folk anthems in ‘62 he went into the studio and did this strange Rock and Roll record called Mixed Up Confusion. Tryin’ to be Elvis Presley. Sun years. Hot licks and all that jazz.
So Mixed Up Confusion is not good but it’s not bad either. All his miserable past is focused into that song and all his magnificent rise emanates from it. The song is a knot. It’s like when I first started writing. I could tell my whole life story in three Ernest Hemingway style sentences. Brief and pithy but there couldn’t possibly be that big a demand for a haiku on my life. I’d have to kind of elaborate, get loquacious, a little. That’s what Bob did after Mixed Up Confusion. He began to elaborate. Stretch it out. Separate those musical strands. Mercerize it whatever mercerize means. Seen the world somewhere. Memorized it. This might be the appropriate time to use it; might not.
2.
Now, I only heard the song in 2005 but in the way memory works I was able to shift it from here to there so that me and Bob was in two places at the same time together. You know, we went to the same school together at different times. It was a lot easier to do than explain.
Bob and I began to work out our problem in the same way, he singing, me listening. See, I told you it was easy. First though Bob had to dump those Folkies. He was made of stiff stuff though. It was a lot easier for him to do it than it would have been for me. But he was gonna climb that mountain no matter how high. When you get to the top you’ve left everyone behind anyway. I’ll say I know but that wouldn’t be 100% true. Wouldn’t be a 100% lie either though. Kinda half way between the pillar and the post. You could kinda reach out and touch each one with your hands. Have to be kind of a contortionist though. I saw a guy once who could fit himself into a shoe box, big shoes, cowboy boots, size nineteens, but I never wanted to emulate him.
So Bob had been laying this folk stuff on the people pretty thick. They believed in him. They thought he was sincere, didn’t bother to ask. But he got himself a hot electric band and showed ‘em what boogie folk was. That’s when the sh.., uh stuff, hit the fan. It was messy. Got all over everybody. But Bob was kind of a Magic Man. He survived it. Prospered. Took more balls than I got to do it though.
They booed him. Loud. Shouted things at him. Like, Judas and Traitor and Go Home. He said he didn’t believe them but that must have been sheer bravado. They had their point. Well, don’t look back as Farragut said in Mobile Bay. Full speed ahead boys. Let ‘em deal with this.
Bob knew a thing or two about himself, if you know what I mean. He was beginning to sort his Rock and Roll ideas out. Tears of Rage. All the anger and frustration of his youth was finding a vent. The mood was terrific, who in the hell cared what it meant. If you wanted your songs to sound heavy but mean something plain you could borrow the Sound of Silence from Simon and Garfunkle.
He was beginning to be able to project his vision of Rock and Roll. It would appear that he wanted to create an entirely new paradigm as he does manage to sound different but retains similarities to both Presley and Little Richard, two of his major influences. The tentative gropings of Bringing It All Back Home progressed through Highway 61 Revisited to full realization in Blonde On Blonde. Rainy Day Women is a weird and raucous vision of Rock music but in reality is neither fish nor fowl. The general reaction to Blonde On Blonde was one of puzzlement. The music of Rainy Day Women was repellent to most while the lyrics of that summer of ‘66 were impenetrable. Nobody and I mean nobody had any idea of what Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands was about. Still Dylan’s vision of Rock was loose and exciting.
Bob Dylan had also reached a plateau with the release of this his major opus. He had realized or perfected the style. No farther development was possible. The rage and resentment that had fueled the music even perhaps psychotic had reached a culmination.
Thus in the summer of ‘66 Dylan had no place to go. I presume he was out of ideas hence his accident and retirement.
The summer of ‘66 was traumatic for the Dylan, myself and the country. While Bob’s new record lay on the counter waiting to be bought on July 13th Richard Speck committed a horrific crime in Chicago. He ritually murdered a passel of nursing students. At the time the memory of Kennedy’s assassination was still strong. At the time he was shot there were people who thought and said that the assassination would release an epidemic of murder. I don’t know that Speck had any relationship to Kennedy, perhaps his killing was merely a harbinger of the murderous unrest stalking the land.
I had just graduated from Cal State at Hayward that June of ’66. I was taking graduate courses at UC Berkeley. Twenty-eight years old at the time. The Dylan record had hit the stores at the end of June. Now, the record was psychologically disturbing and unsettling by itself. Records were the generation’s means of expressing itself, replacing the movies of the previous generation and books of still earlier generations, so Blonde On Blonde had earth shaking qualities not present in CD s today. Not only did Blonde On Blonde erupt in that memorable summer but Procol Harum, Cream and Canned Heat first emerged. All exhibited a new form of craziness what with Cream’s I Feel Free and Canned Heat being named after a drug substitute. The following June, The Summer Of Love would see the release of the even crazier record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles.
So we were reeling from Speck’s astounding crime under the influences of the psychotic or near psychotic Blonde On Blonde when two weeks after Speck Charlie Whitman barricaded himself in his tower and opened fire on the world or at least as much of it as he could reach on the University of Texas campus. Whitman killed or wounded dozens.
At the time I was cracking my brain trying to learn a year’s worth of Latin in an intensive six week course while trying to prepare for a move to graduate school at the University of Oregon.
At the same time Bob was working out his rage and hatred in full view of the world with what were actually night thoughts I was privately doing the same under the influence of his lunacy as he exposed himself on records. I was still hurtin’ every single day searching for my own release and the way out of from where I was at. I was strange enough, hair parted in the middle getting longer by the day, to feel some affinity to Speck and Whitman as well as Dylan. Whatever I saw in Dylan I saw aspects of in Speck and Whitman. Dylan did too; at least he said so at an awards ceremony setting his audience on their ears. I know what he was talking about and everyone in that audience should have too. No man is an island, send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
3.
In the summer of ‘66 the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was in the mopping up stage. The new paradigm of ‘Freedom’ was in place at the home of the Golden Bears. The obscene rag The Berkeley Barb was being hawked on the street corners and wherever. The homeless and runaways were throwing down their sleeping bags in doorways creating the new street sitcom of the Brave New America.
The man who dubbed what went before as The Old Weird America had graduated from US Berkeley that very same June of ‘66. He was on his way over to San Francisco to become the reviews editor of the new journalism espoused by The Rolling Stone, the most successful of the generations publishing ventures. The San Francisco Oracle published for a year then disappeared.
I gathered my things together and headed North to the land of perpetual overcast, Oregon.
While I was familiar with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 with the addition of Blonde On Blonde I began to immerse myself in the three records for about three years. I listened to a side a day every morning when I got up. I know that when Bob talks about his hour of darkness he really means his whole life. That’s what I would mean by it. That’s what I meant by it. It wasn’t a question of not dark yet it was a question of when is the sun going to shine. I was trying to stay on the sunny side of the street but I just couldn’t figure out which side was it. It was going to be dark for a while yet.
Those Dylan years were dark years for me. Probably as dark as it has ever been. Let’s hope so because I don’t want to go there again. But I suppose I have to thank Bob for steadying me through the dark period. Apart from the stray line popping up in my memory from time to time I cannot remember the lyrics of a single song or could I quote a whole verse. The titles were terrific though and I remember a lot of them. Whole novels were in those titles. Whole novels were in many of the lines. I responded to the title It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry. How great. I didn’t need the song that rumbled and loped in the background of the thoughts it released. The tone and mood were the perfect background to the darkness swirling in my mind. Occasionally a line that was another novel in itself would break in like ‘I ride on a mail train, baby, can’t buy a thrill.’ One more line and I would have had a trilogy. Possibly I could have named the trilogy The Weird Old Greil Marcus. I might yet.
4.
Here’s Greil Marcus forming this weird extrasensory relationship with Bobby. Marcus gets himself all wrapped up in the lyrics of Like A Rolling Stone; begins to live his life like it’s the fifth gospel right after John. I mean, Dylan’s good, but…
Dylan had an effect on a lot of people not least Greil Marcus. Marcus had seen Dylan in ‘63 in Philly and was blown away. He attended several concerts between ‘63 and ‘66 each apparently a religious epiphany. As just a spectator in the audience he could do nothing but adore his idol. Beginning with his job at Rolling Stone in ‘66 he had an entrée backstage at anyone’s concert including his idol Bob’s. Thus he could get up close and personal with his hero. Ask almost any question; form a relationship. Shape Bob’s thinking and attitude a little even in time display his SI credentials.
Apparently Marcus got as involved with Bobby’s lyrics as much as I did, heck, as much as a multitude did. Marcus has followed Bobby down seemingly owning all the records and CD s having heard all the songs at least once, as indeed has Nigel Williamson who wrote the Rough Guide. I can’t really go much further than John Wesley Harding. I gave up on Bob after that, not necessarily because his stuff wasn’t that good, but wherever he was going I wasn’t following. Our minds and problems slipped out of sync. Most likely he went his way and I went mine.
But Greil Marcus became obsessed with one Dylan song: Like A Rolling Stone. He went so far as to write a long essay on the song published as a single volume. A song has to be in your gene’s to devote that much effort to it.
From this point on I’m going to refer to Marcus as Greil for convenience and because I’m going to get more personal. I hope there are no objections.
Speaking from the ‘bully pulpit’ that Greil has created for himself he has declared Like A Rolling Stone not only the best of Bobby’s extensive canon but the greatest song of all time. As an influential critic he has got the ball rolling in the direction he wants it to go. But, there are dissenters.
Nigel Williamson, who may be considered an authority on Dylan’s entire oeuvre equal to Greil, in his Rough Guide to Dylan lists what he considers Bobby’s Top 50. He lists Like A Rolling Stone no higher than eighteen of Dylan’s best not even considering the whole song corpus of the world. Williamson’s top 18 all come from Bobby’s albums before John Wesley Harding. Further of those songs which I know well I would agree with Williamson with the exceptions of #4 Girl From The North Country, #5 Mixed Up Confusion and #8 Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll. I would move To Ramona closer to the top. The Flying Burrito Bros. Version of the song is as good as it gets.
The extravagance of Greil is alarming in a critic. The excess can only be explained by Greil’s relation of the song to some intense personal problem. Now, Greil has not only written several books that almost repeat the same thematic material, John Winthrop- Abraham Lincoln-Mike King Jr., but he has written numerous reviews, essays and been interviewed many times. A great many are available for downloading from the internet so that Greil’s psyche can be searched. In searching through his essays one comes to a remarkably irrelevant and revealing essay. Irrelevant because it has nothing to do with any subject anyone would go to here him lecture about.
On Oct. 13, 2006 Greil read a piece for an audience at the Richard Hugo House. In it he revealed his central childhood fixation.. Because of the death of the inseminator of his mother, a father he never knew by the name of Greil Gerstley, Greil Marcus apparently considers himself an orphan which he is in a manner of speaking in fact.
The incident that catalyzed his feeling he tells thusly:
http://www.hugohouse.org/newwork/marcus_obsessive_memories/
Quote:
It was 1955; I was 10. We had just moved into a new
house in Menlo Park, California. There was a big radio set up, and I’d play with it at night, trying to pull in the drifting signals from across the country; Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha, even New Jersey. One night a few lines came out. I don’t remember the exact words, but the gist is clear: “When American GI s left Korea, they also left behind countless fatherless babies. Once everyone talked about this. Now nobody cares.”
————————–
As I got older I realized it was an echo of something other than what the words from the radio described. I know it was an echo of an absent memory of my own father, whose name was Greil Gerstley, who was lost in a typhoon in the Pacific when his destroyer went down.
———————————
So in times of teenage unhappiness, the fantasy that I might have lived a different life, been a different person with a different name, was more a fact than a fantasy. If my father had lived, both my mother and I would have lived very different lives. But it was the kind of fact that, when you try to hold onto it, slips through your fingers like water.
Unquote.
Alright. Bobby’s song is addressed to a woman while Greil dwells on, delights in the line ‘How does it feel.’ So, what woman does Dylan’s song call to mind in Greil’s experience. I’m afraid it must be his mother. I won’t speculate on whatever lingering fears Greil may have. Suffice it to say that his mother and father in the pressures of war were a dockside romance and marriage. Virtually as the marriage was consummated Greil Gerstner was shipped to his death in a Pacific typhoon.
Greil tells us that he was born six months and a day after his father’s ship went down. Thus as his father sank into the waters of the Pacific Greil was a mass of stem cells evolving into hands, fingers, ears, eyes, nose and…a memory. It is almost eerie the way he dates his memories from this period when he was scarcely recognizable as a human being..
I suspect he considers his mother’s remarriage in 1948 some sort of betrayal of the memory of Greil Gerstner. One wonders if Greil is a Junior. One has the feeling that he was never really comfortable with his adoptive father, Mr. Marcus. I can understand this. There was no genetic affinity to the man. When my mother remarried also in 1948 when I was ten I could never consider my step-father as other than a stranger and an interloper in my mother’s bed. I was furious that he was sleeping with her when my inseminator, my own genetic material, wasn’t.
Both Greil’s reaction and my own were irrational but fully natural and understandable. It matters little that the Gerstners would have undoubtedly been divorced within two years of his father’s return while he would have ended up with a step-father anyway. He can thank his lucky stars his mother remarried as well as she did.
At least his half brother Bill is looking out for him. Thank the Lord for what few favors he bestows.
Greil’s mother is his problem and the source of his admiration for his favorite song and he has become obsessed with his dead father. Then things began to happen. Someone was doing a documentary on the death of the Hull, his father’s ship. Certain stories were told Greil in the course of the documentary that don’t make sense to my experience.
I was in the Navy on a Destroyer Escort, a hundred feet or so shorter than a Destroyer. We were sent through the heart of a typhoon also. I know what the term ‘towering seas’ means. The ship came close to dying several times but we made it through. If the ship had rolled there would have been no survivors. I can’t understand how there were any survivors of the Hull, Gerstner’s ship. In seas like that the ship is tightly sealed to prevent flooding and consequent sinking. The only exit is on the bridge to allow changes of the watch and whatever. When that sucker rolls it is a floating coffin. Nobody gets out. If you happened to be on watch on the bridge you would be thrown into frigid waters with a life expectancy of two minutes at most. To protect myself from the numbing cold I had on so many clothes that they would have saturated and pulled me down before I could come up for air the first time.
I do not understand that there could be survivors of the Hull.
Greil should check his facts more closely, the ship rolls over it doesn’t pitch over. The ship will not right itself at something like a thirty degree roll. Anything more than that and it’s Hello, Davy Jones, goodbye San Francisco.
All that baloney about breaking out of a trough is sheer nonsense. Only a fool would cut the engines. There are so many things happening with the water that survival is sheer luck. At one time the seas were flowing beneath us faster than our headway. That makes the rudders useless. If you don’t have control of the ship you’re sunk. I don’t know how we made it. I really don’t.
So Greil should research his father’s situation more fully and stop blaming everyone. It was just one of those things. Could have happened to anyone. Ask me.
At any rate Greil made the connection of those abandoned Korean children with his own and his father’s. Greil obviously believes that he is as one of those abandoned kids.
The problem then gets back to the woman of Like A Rolling Stone. Only Greil’s mom situation makes Like A Rolling Stone the greatest song ever written. He has to come to terms with his feelings about his mother. That’s all I’ll say. If he rereads Obsessive Memories closely she should be able to find his way out and maybe find another world’s greatest song.
Greil’s obsessions with Like A Rolling Stone soured Bobby beyond redemption for me. However in forcing me to reexamine my own fixation on Bob’s three greatest LP s he has compelled me to come to a truer understanding of what I found in those songs. The use I made of them.
Unfortunately as one door closes another opens. Memories come flooding back of that memorable summer of ‘66. I ride on a mail train, baby, can’t buy a thrill while it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. Blonde On Blonde, Richard Speck, Charlie Whitman, there’s a novel or two or a trilogy in there somewhere. Can it be found before I die?
I, Dynamo 