Ancient Tidbits.
November 11, 2024
by, R.E. Prindle
4.Let us consider what the earth, the Northern Hemisphere, may have looked like near the end of the ice age in the Age of Leo. The ice cap was immense and after perhaps six thousand years, what?, eighteen to twenty five thousand feet deep. Sound right? All of the mountains under glaciers of immense size. Now, the water to create all that ice and snow had to come from somewhere, and it came from the oceans. Water converted to snow meant the ocean levels dropped to provide. Estimates run a retreat from five hundred to fifty feet hundred feet. Thus all land over that was exposed. All the evidence points to the fact that it was inhabited.
Two choice bits of exposed land were the Mediterranean and the valley of the Persian gulf with the Tigris-Euphrates running the entire length into the Indian ocean. Thus we have the two civilizations, the one that became Egypt and the one that became Mesopotamian. Let us first consider the latter. The Persian Gulf today is only three hundred feet deep so that it was well above sea level and wouldn’t be affected for some time as the waters rose. This requires some conjecture.
The Sumerians and later speak with some reverence and awe of Ethiopians, while the Jews say that Eden was to the East, that is toward India, down in the valley, India, at that time, was occupied by a Black race. Whence the Black race? When India split off from Africa way back when and beyond the flora and fauna went with it. The animals are much the same, some evolution involved, and the human population was apparently black, but not necessarily Negro. These are the Ethiopians the Sumerians were talking about. They must have been the civilizers represented by Oannes who rose from the flooded gulf to educate them. Throughout history the civilizers seem to come by sea.
Why was the gulf a paradise? An aside: When I was in the Navy we visited Pago Pago in American Samoa. Weather wise this was a paradise. Samoa is on the equator and so should have been blistering. Pago Pago, a mere settlement, no city, was located at the bottom of a mountain on the sea shore. A wind blew constantly down the mountain cooling the temperature as it came so that Pago Pago was a constant 70 degrees. Delightful. I conjecture that that was the case with the Gulf valley. Couldn’t ask for more.
Of course, as the waters continued to rise the Ethiopians were flushed out of the Valley moving into the hills upstream. There they came into contact with the less developed back country people bringing their civilization with them. Thus the post flood civilization began. Well, that’s a tough one. How rapidly did the waters rise?
Perhaps the entire Age of Leo were rising waters, coastal settlement having to be abandoned regularly. There is some evidence of human presence in the Age of Cancer with greater development in the Age of Gemini increasing in the Age of Taurus until blossoming in the Age of Ares inro Pisces. By then the ocean levels were close to ours. They say the level is still slowly rising so that may go on until the Big Freeze comes around again. On to Egypt. (Cont.)
Century Society Notes 8/25/2023
August 27, 2023
Century Society Notes 8/25/2023
by
R.E. Prindle
This session we will take a break from the Aries/Pisces cusp to investigate the Pisces/Aquarius cusp of the present day.
To clarify the Zodiacal position of the Great Year: the last Ice Age ended in the Age of Leo according to the Sumerian records and that resulted in the Great Flood as the frozen waters were released beginning the rise of the sea levels.
Let me take a moment here to put the Biblical accounts of the flood with which we are all familiar into perspective. The Hebrews or Jews had no memory of the flood. They came into existence only at the cusp of Taurus and Aries hence all biblical accounts are adapted from original records for Jewish purposes. For a more accurate representation of Genesis one has to go to Taurian accounts of the Mesopotamian peoples. For these peoples the Zodiac was basic to their religion. The Jews rejected the tenets of that religion.
Thus the Flood had nothing to do with forty days of rain etc. While the cause of the Flood was not known it was remembered.
With the bursting of the glacial flood the waters rose quickly obliterating the existing civilization of the lowlands and valleys such as the Persian Gulf. This became the Eden of Mesopotamian and hence Jewish lore.
The Age of Leo therefor represents the beginning of Spring of the Great Year and the rise of sea levels from approximately -500 feet to our present level. Leo, Cancer and Gemini are therefor the first quarter of the Great Year. Taurus, Aries and Pisces represent the second quarter or the Summer of the Great Year. Aquarius, Capricorn and Sagittarius represent the third quarter or Autumn of the Great Year and Scorpio, Libra and Virgo represent the Winter or Ice Age of the Great Year.
So, we are at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, that is the tail end of the Summer of the Great Year, naturally we are in the hottest part of the Great Year, or the equivalent of August of the annual year.
An Age is twenty-one and some years of centuries. Our well being depends on how we plan for the coming twenty-one centuries. The high point of humanity’a lives have been the Ages of Aries and Pisces. Whether we survive Aquarius is problematical. Consider the history of mankind over the last twenty-one hundred years of Pisces and try to imagine humanity’s journey through the twenty-one hundred years of Aquarius. The first quarter of the Age will be warmer than the last quarter and cooler than it is now. We will then enter Global Cooling and can put Global Warming to rest. Sea levels will stabilize or possibly begin lower toward levels which will again be -500 feet from today.
The Ages of Aries and Pisces allowed mankind to prosper. Those conditions were ideal, or as ideal as they will ever be. As conditions became amenable and mankind’s mental abilities improved so did living conditions, but it was slow work.
The Age of Pisces began for mankind as an era of religious superstition and ended as scientific knowledge even though religious superstition was still prevalent. However science and its attendant technological advantages got out of hand and destructive in its maturity so that the environment if not already destroyed is on the edge of destruction so that humanity itself will not survive in its current configuration.
The population of the world is eight billion plus while showing no evidence of pausing in its growth so that within the first quarter of Aquarius, probably early in the quarter the planet will not be able to support its human population while the animal population will be eliminated except for scavengers like rats and other small rodents. So, addressing the population explosion should take first priority. There are no solutions that are palatable to the human psyche. That involves a genocide on a massive scale. Obviously the reduction of the population from eight billion to one billion or less is the desired result. I leave it to you to ponder that reality.
Science and technology have created a situation in which all the resources, including water are being rapidly consumed, shamefully wasted, even sent into space. One cannot imagine more than one hundred years into Aquarius before everything has been consumed. Now Society is based on absolute mobility both short and long. In other words one is able to almost immediately cross town in automobiles in a matter of minutes. Without automobiles it might be a day trip
In every day matters such as hospitals and grocery stores I can reach a superb hospital within ten minutes. Without a car this mere five miles to that hospital might be a morning walk. Therefor I would be dead before I reached the hospital, if I could even attempt it.
Grocery shopping would be a day’s effort while being incredibly difficult as I would have to push or pull a wagon. In my case that would mean pushing or pulling the cart up a steep hill. Out of the question. Thus society would have to be transfigured from its current sprawl into compact units much as existed before 1950.
At present untold numbers of people are able by buying an airplane ticket to transfer themselves immense distances of four, eight, ten or fifteen thousand miles to points of the globe in a few to fifteen hours. One can go from Seattle to London for instance and back in one day. That will all cease probably in the first fifty years of Aquarius, if not sooner. Thus, it will be said: There’s no place like home.
One sees that the Aries-Pisces Cusp that brought on immense changes will be nil compared to the Pisces/Aquarius Cusp. Our discussions at the Society age getting more lively with every passing day.
The present and its future are very exciting.
Welcome to the Age of Aquarius.
Puzzling Out The Nature Of Jesus
July 28, 2023
Puzzling Out The Nature Of Jesus
by
R.E. Prindle
Perhaps the most difficult and significant religious problem in religion is the nature of Jesus. That nature can be divided into two parts: one is his role as the avatar of the Age of Pisces and the other is his role as the Savior, the ‘historical’ Jesus. The ancient basal astronomical religion represented by the Zodiac is the pavement under all Western religions.
There will perhaps be objections to my introducing the role of the Zodiac into the problem; however the Zodiac played a large role in the religious life in ancient history. The Zodiac is both a religious symbol and a calendar or time keeping devise. The transition points between the Ages is fraught with danger. One only has to examine the transition points between Taurus and Aires and from Aires to Pisces to see great points of conflict. That between Pisces and Aquarius is shaping up to be worse than the former two..
The ancients well before the current Great Year had worked out the astronomical fact of the Great Year. While they might not yet have had the ability to work out the whys and wherefores with their limited knowledge, they understood that a Great Year of 25,900 years or so corresponded with the wobble of the earth caused by the Plane of the Ecliptic as we now understand. Just as the annual year was divided into twelve months, on the principle of as above, so below, the Great Year was divided into twelve Ages of 2100 and some odd years.
To identify the Ages of the Great Year they organized great star constellations ordered around the earth. Thus, as the wobble progressed the sun rose in the stars of each Age. As a religious symbol each Age was ruled by a male and female avatar. Thus, in the Ages crucial to our history are those of Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries, Pisces and now Aquarius. Six Ages add up to a half year, thus as Leo begins the Spring of the Great Year so Aquarius begins the Fall. Many see the Zodiac as a fortune telling device but the ancients used it differently so that to understand the problem we have to view it in their context.
So there were twelve pairs of gods to reign over the twelve signs. Twelve thus became a sacred number as in twelve tribes of Israel, twelve gods of Greece posited by Homer and so on. The Greek avatars of Taurus and Aries are quite clear and the avatar of Gemini is faintly visible. The three represent six thousand three hundred plus years
The avatar for Gemini was Uranus, for Taurus Cronus and for Aires Zeus, for the coming Piscean Age, Dionysus was scheduled.
The world problem down to our times was at the transit from Taurus to Aires. The Age of Aires Is actually the period of the rise of mankind.
As it was supposed, the transit was to a new sky and a new earth. In other words the stars of the constellation of Aries were different than the stars of the constellation of Taurus, thus a new sky.
It was then expected that as the constellations changed above so people would adopt the new avatars as their gods. As the stars represent the primordial universal religion of mankind all peoples did,own except one splinter group of Asians, the proto-Jews. They maintained that Saturn, the avatar of Taurus was an eternal unchanging god. They continued to worship Saturn thus cutting themselves off from mankind.
It took a millennium for the name Jews to be affixed to these people who were known then as Hebrews. This people was known as a peculiar people and they have remained so through the Ages. Taurus, Aries, Pisces and as we transit to the New Age, Aquarius.
Prior to Aries the Jews were of the great tribe of Semites from all the Semites occupying Mesopotamia, happy as clams of the Age of Saturn, Taurus. The Jews were however obstinate they were demanding and not giving. What was the solution to the problem? Quite simply expulsion. The Jews were driven out. Problem solved, right? Not quite. The stage was merely set for the next act.
Now things get really difficult to explain.
The Jews were now hurt in their amour propre. How to explain their rejection to themselves. Not so difficult. They were simply correct and the majority was wrong. Four thousand years later this is still their position. They believe themselves incredibly intelligent and the rest of the world irredeemably stupid. They were the master people, not the subordinate. But, not content with just believing that, they had to dominate.
The ancients had colleges of priests to maintain nearly timeless memories. The priests remembered Astronomical things such as the Zodiac and passed the information down generation to generation. The Jews became in their own imagination ‘a nation of priests.’ They realized that they were a small minority so that a plan of action was necessary. They needed to be a large nation so the plan was to go forth and multiply, in modern terms, to weaponize their population.. As an example by the time of the Roman Empire they may have been the largest nation by number in existence, because they had gone forth and multiplied. They were present throughout all of the cities of the Roman Empire. They had a very large presence in Rome itself, millions in Egypt, hundreds of thousands in Anatolia and the Perian Empire.
The priests had devised methods to keep the satellite settlements unassimilable so that the that the nation remained loyal. It would be silly to believe that the settlements were undifferentiated from each other just as in the US today New York Jews are different from LA Jews, etc., but they remained united. They were all Jews. But we are time traveling here a little; matters have to progress from their expulsion from Ur of the Chaldees. It was a long haul down the Age of Aries, twenty-one hundred years. Just as now we are looking at twenty-one hundred down the Age of Aquarius and not planning very well.
Their career did progress as it had begun. Next they had a layover at Padan Aram, another great religious center. Here they were caught swindling their masters with some absurd, impossible scheme. Expelled again. The pattern develops.
If I am correct this last expulsion coincided with the volcanic eruption of the island of Thera in the Aegean Sea. This was the defining event of the Age of Aries. The eruption was immense wearing the majorityof a fairly gigantic volcano down below sea level. The ash distribution was wide and immense and it went on for a long time. The winds must have been the Western Zephyr, if in Summer, or the Boreal blast if in winter. Ash was delivered in large quantities over the cities of the Near East and probably in some quantity over Egypt.
It is very likely at this time that the Jews escaped from Padan Aram. As they progressed down through what would become Palestine crops buried in ash created a great famine so that the Jews continued on down to Egypt. So in about 1600 BC they entered Egypt and stayed for about 400 years down to 1200 BC
How to characterize their presence in Egypt. The end result of their behavior matched their beginning and that or Padon Aram and would be repeated in their expulsion from Spain in mid Pisces. Remember that their expulsion from Ur of the Chaldees was caused by the inability to accept the authority of the priestly castes of which they undoubtedly had members and this intransigeance was probably abetted by violent behavior. Throughout the Arien Age the Jews in all their various locations were noted for tearing down other religions altars backed by a belligerent attitude.
In Egypt also they disdained Egyptian religious practices. The Egyptians had large classes of sacred animals which were protected from killing. The Jews scoffed at the idea of sacred animals and refused to honor the practice killing them at will. This offence was added to all their other refusals to honor Egyptian customs. They mocked Egyptian skills claiming theirs were better. If you have a Christian background you will remember the contest between Moses and the Egyptian magicians for instance in which according to the Jews they won hands down. The Egyptian side of the contest hasn’t surfaced yet.
They put themselves in competition with the Egyptians in such a manner according to them that the Pharaoh noticing that their population was growing so inordinately fast that they might outnumber his own people while bring greatly superior took action. Thus, he declared the Slaughter of the Innocents. He decreed the slaughter of all new born Jewish boy children. This, of course, incensed the Jews who were not slow to develop defensive measures.
I interject a passage from Rabbi Louis Ginzberg’s amazing compilation, ‘The Legends of the Jews’ pp.207-208. This is longish but amazing:
Quote:
The king then spoke to Job, and said: “What sayest thou, Job, and what is thy advice respecting the Hebrews?” Job replied: “Behold, all the inhabitants of the land are in thy power: Let the king do as seemeth good in his eyes.”
Balaam was the last to speak at the behest of the king, and he said: “From all that the king may devise against the Hebrews, they will be delivered. If thou thinkest to diminish them by the flaming fire, thou wilt not prevail over them, for their god delivered Abraham their father from the furnace in which the Chaldeans cast him. Perhaps thou thinkest to destroy them with a sword, but their father Isaac was delivered from being slaughtered by the sword. And if thou thinkest to reduce them through hard and rigorous labor, thou wilt also not prevail. For their father Joseph served Laban in all manner of hard and rigorous labor, and yet he prospered. If it please the king, let him order all the male children that shall be born in Israel this day forward to be thrown into the water. Thereby canst thou wipe out their name, for neither any of them nor any of their fathers was tried in this way.’
THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS
Balaam’s advice was accepted by Pharaoh and the Egyptians. They knew that God pays measure for measure, therefore they believed that the drowning of the men children would be the safest means of exterminating the Hebrews, without incurring harm themselves, for the Lord said unto Noah to never again destroy the world by water. Thus, they assumed, they would be exempt from punishment, where in they were wrong, however. In the first place, though the Lord had sworn not to bring a flood upon men, there was nothing in the way of bringing men into a flood. Furthermore, the oath of God applied to the whole of mankind, not to a single nation. The end of the Egyptians was that they met their death in the billows of the Red Sea. “Measure for measure”—as they had drowned the men children of the Israelites, so they were drowned.
Pharaoh now took steps to the faithful execution of his decree. He sent the bailiffs into the houses of the Israelites, to discover all new born children, wherever they might be. To make sure that the Hebrews should not succeed in keeping the children hidden, the Egyptians hatched a devilish plan. Their women were to take their little ones to the houses of the Israelitish women that were suspected of having infants. When the Egyptian children began to cry or coo, the Hebrew children kept in hiding would join in, after the manner of babies and betray their presence, where upon the Egyptians would seize them and bear them off.
Furthermore Pharoah commanded that the Israelitish women employ none but Egyptian midwives, who were to secure precise information as to the time of their delivery, and were to exercise great care, and let no male child escape their vigilance alive. If there should be parents that evaded the command and preserved a new-Born boy in secret, they and all belonging to them were to be killed.
Is it to be wondered at then, that many of the Hebrews kept themselves away from their wives? Nevertheless those who put their trust in God were not forsaken by Him. The women who remained united to their husbands would go out into the field when their time of delivery arrived, and give birth to their children and leave them there, while they themselves returned home. The Lord who had sworn unto their ancestors to multiply them, sent one of His angels to wash the babes, anoint them, stretch their limbs and swathe them. Then he would give them two small pebbles, from one of which they sucked milk, and from the other honey. And God caused the hair of the infants to grow down to their knees and serve them as a protective garment, and then he ordered the earth to receive the babes, that they be sheltered therein until their time of growing up, when it would open its mouth and vomit forth the children, and they would sprout up like the herb of the field and the grass of the forest. Thereafter each would return to his family and the house of his father.
When the Egyptians saw this, they went forth every man to his field, with his yoke of oxen, and they ploughed up the earth, as one plows it at seed time. Yet they were unable to do harm to the infants of the children of Israel that had been swallowed and lay in the bosom of the earth. Thus the people of Israel increased and waxed exceedingly. And Pharaoh ordered his officers to go to Goshen, to look for the male babes of the children of Israel and when they discovered one, they tore him from his mother’s breast by force and thrust him into the river. But no one is so valiant as to be able to foil God’s purposes, though he contrive ten thousand subtle devices unto that end. The child foretold by Pharaoh’s dreams and by his astrologers was brought up and kept concealed from the king’s spies. It came to pass after the following manner.
Unquote.
That was the prequel to the birth of Moses. So Moses is more than likely a fictional character and an impossible one. Who was Moses supposed to be? Let’s follow his story through.
He’s a proscribed baby boy, so was Zeus. He was buried in mother earth. He was given stones of milk and honey to suck on for sustenance for eighteen to twenty one years.
Zeus was proscribed and born in a cave with goddesses as nursemaids.
Moses was dug up, miraculously finding his way to parents he had never seen as with their house.
An alternate version says that the Egyptians found him as a baby and thrust him into the river to be rescued by an Egyptian Princess, thus becoming an Egyptian Prince. Sargon of Mesopotamia followed this prescription also.
Having been received by Mother Earth Moses was subsequently raised to the highest level on a mountain top much like the Greek Zeus where he was greeted by God, talked to him, gazed on his face and given twin tablets that he dropped on the way down the mountain so that he had to go back for two replacements. These contained innocuous commandments that were common everywhere and certainly in Egypt in which the Jews had been living for 400 years, and remember Moses was reared by Egyptians thus knowing little of Jewish customs. He was as a stranger to them.
At the time of death on the brink of the promised land he disappeared no one knew where. With his association to the Zodiac through Zeus, the Greek avatar of Aires, I would project that he was intended to be the ‘eternal’ god Saturn who didn’t die on the cusp of Aires but lived in the Jewish mind and who would soon be replaced by Jesus on the cusp of Pisces. While Saturn failed to displace Zeus in Aires, Jesus/Saturn would replace Zeus’ intended successor Dionysus/Osiris combined into one entity. Two vegetation gods. Thus Jesus/Saturn the Jewish candidate displaced the vegetation god of the Hellenic/Egyptian candidates. Thus, the Jews proved to their satisfaction that Saturn was eternal over three signs and we’ll see what happens in the Age of Aquarius.
Now, at the time of Moses in Rabbi Ginzberg’s styling, who says he has examined all existing Jewish texts to compile his rather magnificent ‘The Legends of the Jews’, the Jews were in full revolt against Pharaoh. Pharaoh, exasperated, drove the Jews out of Egypt.
That may be true, but this scene in the life of the Jews took place c. 1200 BC when the Middle East was in turmoil and Egypt was beleaguered in the Delta and by invading Asians by land. I coordinate these events to have taken place after the Greek destruction of the holy city of Troy. Thus fleeing Trojan bands might easily have ejected various locations driving the peoples into Egypt as it were creating mass chaos. The Greek leader, Menelaus, is said to have taken his troops down to Egypt rather than going home. Thus it is possible that in the chaos the Jews were simply ejected over the overland route as part of the general warfare. But, once again the Jews suffered expulsion adding to their ferocity. The record is lengthening.
Remember that we are dealing with immense swatches of time. In a rather bloodthirsty entry of the Jews into Palestine involving various genocides and total destruction they established themselves from c. 1200 Bc to 486 BC.. In 486 in a war with Babylon Jerusalem was leveled and the population trekked off to captivity. Woe, but another expulsion. Babylon fell to the Persians about 436 B.C. and any Israelis who wished could return to Jerusalem, a smattering of people did while the majority chose to remain with the fleshpots of Babylon which were substantial. Thus over the remainder of Aires of four hundred years the Jews formed a very large population in the Persian Empire quite independent of those in, shall we now call it, Israel? Actually the term Israel is applied to the Jewish people, while the land of Israel is so named aftter its people. At the time the land would have been called Judaea.
Don’t get too comfortable in your seat because change is ever the law in the world and we’ve got a lot of changes coming up.
After Alexander of Macedon conquered the Eastern end of the Mediterranean and extended his conquest to the Aryan settlements of India he had achieved the near universal State of the ancient world. The Hellenic world was united but only temporarily for Alexander died on his return, the Empire was divided among his generals. The General Seleucus took all lands that lay above Egypt including Israel. His bad luck.
The conquest introduced the Greek style of civilization to the Eastern Med where it was warmly received by everyone including a large portion of Israelites called the Sadducees. The Jewish reactionary party was called the Pharisees. The Seleucid overseers had too much on their plate losing their control to the Jewish Maccabean revolutionaries. Israel thus briefly became an independent State of golden memory.
Egypt had been allotted to General Ptolemy. The Ptolemaic empire prospered for three hundred years before falling to Rome. Now things are beginning to take shape.
With only three hundred years left in the Arien Age it was time for planning the accession of Pisces. One must assume that the priestly colleges began to organize their agenda to create the event. Bear in mind that a Jew, Jesus the God will be chosen the avatar who is neither Jesus of Nazareth nor Jesus the Christ while Jesus the Christ is Judeo/Greco/Egyptian and no longer wholly Jewish.
The End of the Age of Aries is quite different than the beginning. The Hellenes have become totally dominant at all points in the culture. Egyptian dominance has retreated although the priestly college of Memphis is powerful backed by the Greco-Egyptian Library of Alexandria; Rome has completed the universal State begun by Alexander of Macedon. The Jews coming into existence at the beginning of Aries have survived all the vicissitudes of Aires to become a major influence at the end. A sliver off the Semites at the beginning they have now become one of the most numerous people at the end. While only the smaller people of Israel is today considered, at the time Egypt contained at least two million, the Persian Empire millions more while every city in the Empire had a large colony and Rome’s population itself probably equaled that of Alexandria. Throw in the population of the islands and you have perhaps what could amount to a mighty nation and under Paul that dispersed population essentially subverted the Empire, becoming the Empire’s successor as the spiritual Roman Catholic Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, two Jews. Of course the Empire went to hell as a result. The loss of 70 was avenged.
THE DAWNING OF THE AGE OF PISCES
We are concerned here with the religious development of Aries and Pisces. The small unrelated kingdoms of early Aries were now coalesced into a universal State under the aegis of Rome. Such a universal State required a universal religion. In the new state of affairs the field was open. Any universal religion might aspire to become primary. It would have been impossible to organize all the old Hellenic religions under one god. The only existing religion with possibilities was the Jewish national religion which had an invisible god that could be adapted to all peoples as Paul ultimately was able to do, but. In the final quarter of Aries Godt was inflexibly bound to the Jewish people.
The Hellenic Empire with its pantheon probably seemed appropriate to be the winner, especially united with Egyptian religion. The great priestly college of Memphis had the ways and means. The college was not reactionary; it saw the problem clearly and was not inactive. It therefore designed a new religion and put it into execution. This was the religion of Serapis. It was a beautifully designed universal religion. It also had the perfect means of dissemination through the second city of the Empire, Alexandria. Alexandria was perhaps the first seaport of the Empire. Egypt was the breadbasket of the Empire shipping wheat to every city. All ships came to Alexandria so that the crews could be proselytized there and carry the seeds of the Serapian religion to every port in the Empire. Those boys in Memphis were not sitting on their hands.
The religion was doing very well. So well, that it terrified the Jews who determined to scuttle it. The Jews comprised nearly half of Alexandria’s two million people while they were not averse to the judicious use of violence: tearing down altars, burning churches, good old fashioned terrorism, slander, the works. The universal church was one thing, the other was capturing the avatar of the Age of Pisces.
The avatar’a period of rule is, of course, limited to the sun passing through a sign to twenty-one hundred and some odd years. After that period he is off to far tartary, the other side of the Zodiac, a forgotten entity. Thus the time of Zeus was nearing its end. The transitions were quite stormy in human terms and this one, the period of the Jewish-Roman wars would be as bloody as they come. It appears that the Greek candidate for avatar of Pisces was Dionysus, who, if you can think this way was recognizably being groomed to replace Zeus, while the Egyptian candidate was their vegetation god, Osiris. The priesthoods were busy at work backing their candidate.
Now, the birth story of Jesus is pure astronomical myth. It never happened. Nothing close to it ever happened, There are at least three different visions of Jesus, he of the mythical birth, the historical or quasi-historical Jesus and the consensual Jesus the Christ, that is Jesus-Dionysus-Osiris. The whole process took hundreds of years to work through.
Let us examine the preposterous birth story. The story is all magical, that is impossible. There is no possible way for the divine baby to have been found and recognized. According to the myth three kings of the orient, that is the East, one of which was Persia, other two unknowns got wind that the avatar of Pisces was to be born in Samaria, if they had ever heard of the place and knew where to find it. Their significance was that their countries Arien avatars were doing obeisance to the Jewish and/or Greco-Egyptian avatar. Thus the known world would be in united under one avatar who was Jewish, or, at least, Samaritan.
The Jews would have and did usurp the role away from the Mesopotamians, thus avenging their expulsion over Aries. Pisces belonged to them and, yea, verily, it came to pass. The charade of the manger in the barn may mean that the three mighty kings were compelled to come to ‘little’ Israel bearing extremely valuable gifts thus humbling themselves.
Nobody can actually follow a star- being led by it. So the symbolism there is that they were following the star or stars of Pisces announcing the New Age. Rather odd that such an astonishing event passed with so little notice isn’t it? Rather than gathering their new found riches together, hiring a few asses to bear them along with the new mother and babe and returning home the new parents slipped away unnoticed where they resumed their old life in apparent poverty. Odd, but no more so than Mary’s strange pregnancy. Supposedly the spirit of God entered Mary’s ear, left or right isn’t known, and impregnated with the spirit of God. It follows then that Jesus himself was a god as he would have to have been if he was avatar of Pisces.
THE HISTORICAL JESUS.
The later Roman Empire was god obsessed. Through the deification of the Roman Emperors who first were deified after death, then living gods on earth and finally through the Christian any human being was promised eternal life in heaven, that is godhood. The success of the Christian movement more than anything else was based on the promise of everlasting life. The great masses were persuaded to forego happiness on earth by the hope of going to heaven
In a world of gods, the notion of monotheism is one of the great jokes in history. While the Jews claim to have invented monotheism they have never practiced it. I’m sure the heavenly hosts, many people just like you and me are having a good laugh at our expense. So innumerable gods existed and just like any other community there must have been a king or president thus there was great competition amongst the peoples for the honor of providing the most high god. None of the existing gods could hope to attain that distinction. The Jewish conception of the invisible god, ostensibly resembling no particular people was best fitted for the role and would succeed in the Christian dispensation but only be forfeiting his Jewishness. Catholic means universal. A universal god could not favor any one people, and especially not the Jews. The Jews then disqualified themselves from universal leadership. They were already abhorred even as Pisces dawned.
The priesthoods were laboring away to come up with a universally successful god. The priests of Memphis, Egyptians knew religion, came up with an excellent conception in the Serapian religion and they had the perfect distribution point for sending out disciples. Unless I’m mistaken the established seminaries in Alexandria meant to train missionaries. It is impossible that the priests didn’t recognize what the Jews had done in establishing religious colonies through out the Roman Empire. Thus the plan was laid out for them.
However one thing in which they erred was to create a magical idol to represent Serapis. The Jews were nearly half the population of Alexandria which had to have been the center of the religion. When it comes to being tricksters the Jews are second to none so that they easily penetrated and exposed the fraud of Serapis. Before they did cadres of missionaries had been dispersed throughout the Empire including Israel to which a lad named Jesus was sent.
I think it highly probable that Jesus was not Jewish but a gentile Serapian missionary. As part of his education he was sent to various places to be indoctrinated. The middle east was a hive of religious speculation from which the national Jewish religion was excluded because of their intense exclusiveness. It is perfectly obvious that the man called Jesus had been initiated into the Greek cult of Eleusis to which everyone in the Empire aspired. Eternal life was one of the promises of Eleusis. Thus in the Last Supper Jesus gave away the secret of Eleusis.
For the rest Jesus’ magic was so much blather. Nobody multiplies loaves and fishes or turns water into wine. His wisdom was organized in Memphis and all the Serapion missionaries would have been repeating the same stuff. You may ask how I know this. Psychology. The human mind is limited and always works in the same way. What is had to be done. Nothing is spontaneous. Look at the way our minds are being manipulated today. Same thing but with better electronic devices.
A universal god was required. The Jewish national god could not be universal. ‘For God so loved the Jews that he made them His own special people to whom all honors were due. Jesus is said to have said: ‘For God so loved the world that he favored no single people. That negated Judaism. Jesus was therefore a revolutionary. Besides the Jews would have known that the formula came straight out of Alexandria and was part of the Serapion religion. Give the ancients some credit; there were as many spies then as there are today. Read the ancient texts with open eyes; it’s all right there plain for open eyes to see.
So Jesus was a spy in Jewish eyes, got caught and paid the price. That would have been the end of it except for Paul.
The Deification of Jesus: Jesus Becomes The Christ and Turns Into A God
The past, history, turns people into stick people, ossifies them, as the personalities are stripped from the living. It Is therefore important to restore them to a living milieu. The fact is that there was who ever that saw Jesus of Nazareth. There are no eye witnesses reporting. Here is Jesus then claiming to b a supreme magician who can multiply loaves and fishes, walk on water and turn water to wine. It never happened, ever, by anyone. Israel and Egypt were filled with magicians. The priestly colleges studied to come up with magical tricks to fool the rubes.
In Egypt where they had apparently discovered the laws of magnetism the Serapion temple had an iron idol that was suspended in mid-air through magnetism. Apparent real magic displaying the power of the god. It was a fraud. The Egyptian priests knew it. Jewish priests knew it even if they hadn’t discovered the how.
The great nineteenth century French magician Robert Houdin, as fraudulent as magicians come, knew of electricity, He contrived a trick in which an iron was placed on an iron board, the board activated by an electric switch. He called from the audience for the strongest man to come forward to attempt to lift the magnetized iron on the board, then Houdin hit the switch magnetizing the iron to the board, the strong man huffed and puffed but couldn’t lift the iron. He was dismissed and Houdin called a little girl forward, flipped the electricity off and lo and behold the little girl lifted the iron up. Great trick but it was a fraud. No one in the audience knew anything of either electricity or magnetism.
If Jesus actually claimed to have performed his feats the Jewish magicians saw through the tricks as tricks. Simon Magus was so impressed that he offered to buy the secrets of the tricks from Jesus. It wasn’t probity that prevented Jesus from taking Simon Magus up, it was that he didn’t have anything to sell. The elders then were watching this guy, Jesus, with suspicious eyes. And then Jesus committed the ultimate revolutionary act. This must have sealed his fate.
On the porch of the Temple the usurers set up their tables and conducted their business on the high holy days. Now, consider this: the usurers were making a lot of money in priestly territory. That means that the priesthood was getting their cut. It follows from human nature, no documentation is needed. So Jesus walks up and overturns the usurers tables scattering money every which way, declaring the practice is an abomination. That is a revolutionary act disturbing the equilibrium of the State. Is it any wonder that he was arrested and had to be condemned to death? It was done. The Roman governors were merely tools in the hands of the Jewish judges who condemned Him.
The rumblings of the Jewish revolt against Rome were already under way when Jesus was executed, if that part of the story is true. The Jews were already refusing to pay their Roman taxes. Now, put this into context. The Jews were double taxed; first by themselves throughout all their colonies in the way of tithes, next by the Romans. A steady annual flow of gold from all over the Empire flowed into Jerusalem every year. The Jews had no government to support so that the gold was accumulating at a great clip while gold was being drained from the Empire. Thus we have a tactic of asymmetrical warfare. Had the Jews been a little more patient they might have been able to win the war.
At any rate the war broke out in 66 and by 70 the Jews were crushed. Meanwhile a cult had grown up around Jesus, a purely Jewish cult. It can’t be emphasized too heavily that the Jesus cult began as an entirely Jewish affair. Initially Paul was talking to exclusively Jewish colonies in the various cities of the Empire. The appeal to non-Jews was only achieved by jettisoning Jewish customs that had no appeal to non-Jews. Even then the Minian religion, a it was called then grew slowly.
The early Roman Catholic church must have been mainly for Jews who organized it. Many of the early popes must have been Jewish When Constantine made Christianity the official sole State religion that must have opened the Church to majority non-Jews.
That development took hundreds of years.
Jesus only became the Christ after the issue of the avatar of the Piscean Age was settled. Greek and Egyptian claims had to be accommodated so that the avatar combined the nominally Jewish Jesus, the Greek Dionysus and the Egyptian Osiris. The three were combined into the Greek term The Christ. Thus he became a sort of non-Jewish Jesus of Nazareth and a universal Jesus the Christ.
Now, as part of the deal, I’m elaborating the psychologist, C.G. Jung here, Jesus was the dominant avatar for only the first half of Pisces. The second half was consigned to the female avatar that was a combination of the Egyptian Isis and the putative mother of Jesus, Mary, wife of Joseph. As events turned out Isis/Mary only served for Southern Europe. She was repugnant to Norther Europe that preferred the divine huntress, Artemis of the Greeks passing under her Roman name of Diana. Unless I’m mistaken the Diana cult continues until today although it is time for the Aquarius avatars to take over.
That will happen unless the Jews capture the Astronomical Religion and succeed in discarding it in favor of their vision of the eternal god Saturn. I have heard some squeakings in that direction and from an unlikely quarter.
The ancient priesthoods may be gone but their role undoubtedly has been passed on to another college that is still functioning.
The Origins of Jesus
April 1, 2023
The Origins of Jesus
by R.E. Prindle
This discussion relies heavily on P.M.. Fraser’s history Ptolemaic Alexandria.
The discussion has delayed proceedings since there was a rather hot discussion concerning nationality of Jesus.
Our approach here is a psychological one while the discussion is on the macro or societal level and not the personal. It is necessary then to introduce a more detailed account of the conditions in the East Mediterranean at the time of Jesus. The great mélange of nations in Alexandria under the Ptolemies.
It appears that many of the terms we have been employing were not understood by our members.
Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern world to the Western part of India. He died on his and the Army’s return, the Hellenic Empire he created then being divided among his generals. The province of Egypt fell to the general named Ptolemy, hence Ptolemaic Alexandria, which city he founded in the conquest. Thus the Delta of Egypt from -300 to approximately the year 0 was governed by Greeks. Greek customs, mores and language.
A concept that may be hard to grasp apart from the annual calendar time is that it existed within the Ages of Aries and Pisces of the Zodiac. There are two manners of counting time involved. At this exact time the Age of Aries was ending and the Age of Pisces was beginning. That meant that the avatar of Aries, Zeus was now displaced and that there was a search for the new avatar of Pisces. In the Greek version of the Zodiac, their god Dionysus had been appointed to succeed Zeus. But, the conquest of the East Mediterranean by Alexander had created a larger Greek dominion of various gods and goddesses thus demoting Dionysus to merely a candidate.
The key players the Greeks, the Egyptians and more especially the Jews had to be placated. Rome would enter the scene near the year 0. Determining the outcome would take a few hundred years of religious turmoil and great political changes. The question will be asked, who did this? I think probably the religious schools of the time and the place Alexandria.
The great Egyptian religion that had existed for thousands of years was the focal point. Egypt had been battered by various conquerors over the last eight hundred years or so, that’s eight hundred, call it a millennium, so that the priesthood had had to be flexible and adaptive to maintain itself at all. It had done that and now on the annual level when the Greek governors assumed control about the year -300 the priesthood of Memphis had come up with a solution. They simply legislated a new god, Serapis. Serapis was a universal god becoming no longer strictly an Egyptian god.
Imagine that, creating a god. What does that say about godhood. If you can just create a god how much is being a god worth? And what happens to the old gods? There must have been a horde of gods asking: What next?
Well, there was an answer. You simply amalgamate gods with similar functions. The bigger States having the bigger say. So, Dionysus, the Greek putative avatar of Pisces was amalgamated with the chief Egyptian god, Osiris. Osiris in his original form in Egypt couldn’t be exported so he was folded into Dionysus.
In his Egyptian form Osiris was the god of the rise of the Nile. The Nile before all the dams, rose and flooded Egypt in August at the time of the Dog Star. In brief and to the purpose his story is that he had a battle with the evil Set.
Losing he was dismembered into fourteen pieces and distributed around. His wife and sister, Isis, searched and found all the pieces and put them back together while Osiris’s penis had been thrown into the Nile and couldn’t be recovered. Thus in the annual procession before the rise of the Nile celebrating Osiris the body of Osiris was carried along with a wooden penis operated by strings so that it could be raised into an erection and lowered. When erect the magical effect was that the Nile would rise and flood the land again because Osiris’s penis was in the waters. A mighty fine procession but it wouldn’t be the same outside Egypt so Osiris became the Egyptian contribution to the avatar of Pisces.
Now, I’m going to have to take this out of order. The Jewish contribution to Pisces was Jesus. Thus Jesus is a tripartite image. Dionysus/Osiris/Jesus. Now, leaping ahead let us consider the alleged birth of Jesus in the manger. That is pure Zodiacal myth that was manufactured long after the fact when the succession had become clear..
Let us compare the birth of Jesus with the birth of Zeus. Zeus was the avatar of the Age of Aries, his father Cronus was the avatar of the Age of Taurus, and his father was Uranos the avatar of Gemini. The Ages change every two thousand one hundred and fifty years so historically we’re looking at six thousand and odd years between Gemini and the end of Aries..
When Cronus heard that he was to be replaced by one of his children he attempted to evade the problem by eating them when they were born. When Zeus was born on the island of Crete he was immediately hidden in a cave and carefully watched so no signs were visible to Cronus until Zeus was grown and could do battle, and there was a tremendous battle that Zeus ultimately won thus taking his place as the new avatar.
Now at the Age of Pisces the matter was handled thusly. Remember the human mind is now two thousand and odd years matured and what was possible at the beginning of Aries was no longer credible at the end. Times change. And the times were in turmoil. Also bear in mind that this myth of the baby Jesus in the manger was put together many long years after the crucifixion and backdated. That was likely real. A historical Jesus must have existed however it is impossible that he would have been recognized as an infant. Therefor we have a myth of the birth of the Age of Pisces attached to the death of Jesus.
The story goes that two obscure Jewish people with no distinctions, the woman, Mary being not only pregnant but at the point of delivery arrive at the inn. The inn of Nazareth refuses to admit them. Now I don’t know how the reader envisions an inn of a small dusty dump of a town but I see it as a small dirty building of three or four rooms and a dining room. I’m sure the inn was full, no rooms available. This is a normal situation but as Mary is in extreme labor pains at that very moment they are put up in the only unoccupied place available, that of the barn or stable. Mary drops the kid on the spot in the Manger. Lucky her. Now, this isn’t any ordinary kid, it is the child of destiny. How do we know this? Because there are three great kings from the East traveling from afar because they somehow know that a child is being born. How do they know? Because they are ‘following’ the star of the new age of Pisces, which apparently hovers over the stable in Nazareth.
Now, these guys traveled from afar, from Persia. They somehow divined some years previously, one presumes, as would be natural is they were studying the skies, that a baby, who is destined to be the light of the world will be born in a town none of them ever heard of and located they couldn’t know where.
By what magical means did they find the way to where X marked the spot? They followed a star. There is a great debate of which star that was. It isn’t even an inkling of a mystery. The Age of Pisces had dawned and the Kings followed the star of the constellation of Pisces. Worked for some reason.
These kings are portrayed to be in magnificent raiment, wearing gold crowns and carrying gifts the price of which would feed all Israel for at least a year. Now, picture these three kings walking along for months with these gifts in their hands, without a military escort to ward off bandits and here they are at the exact moment Mary drops the Babe. Her last scream of pain hadn’t yet faded away and here come the three kings though the door. This never happened, don’t even think it.
Compare this with the Zeus of two thousand years earlier. Instead of a cave like Zeus, the Babe is born in hovel with a strong aroma of urine and droppings. Zeus had to be protected so the goddesses looked after him. Cronus was not going to eat him! By the way, Mary and Joseph didn’t exist either. I don’t know about the inn.
So, in Jesus’ case word gets around that a Holy Babe has been born who will be the King of Israel. Well, King Herod says ‘We can’t have that.’ So, get this, he orders that every male child in Israel born in the last two years be snuffed hoping to eliminate his successor. Sound familiar. In order to secure the Babe from immolation he was sent out of the country. To where? Where else than Egypt, that weak reed that the Jews always relied on.
So, some many decades later when Jesus wins election to be the avatar of Pisces this myth was invented and affixed to him. The Babe never existed but in +33 a historical Jesus does and he has offended the elders of Israel. Who was Jesus and where did he come from? Let’s go back to Egypt.
Remember the Memphite Egyptian priest? History sort of deprives the ancients of personality but they were real people dealing with real problems. They weren’t stick figures. The City of the Sun was near Memphis. Real people devised the City of the Sun as a utopia while the longing for a utopia lived past the end of that dream. Euhemerus wrote his utopia The Sacred City in this era. The fact that the Memphites could invent a god out of whole cloth and impose him on the population is a sign that the gods were no longer taken viscerally but more intellectually. Jesus himself would be a new god, a manmade god as it were.
Alexander’s conquest heralded the need for a universal god for at least the East Med as their notions of geography were somewhat limited. But there was a problem that existed and had existed for a long time and that was the exclusiveness of the Jews. In our time, of course, we have been taught to revere the Jews on their own terms, but this was not the case in ancient times. The Jews were a stumbling block on all terms, they refused to cooperate with anyone.
The Eastern world accepted the conquest of Alexander and found Greek customs, attitudes and thinking amenable except for the Jews. Well, the Sadducee faction adopted Greek manners and customs but not the Pharisees. The Maccabees, more as bandits than a national army, fought the Syrian Greeks, to whom they were subject, tooth and nail and for a brief period were independent and then the Romans came and brought the Empire with them.
In Egypt they were a minority, a numerous minority, but unable to dominate, in Jerusalem they were the dominant people and not only that but within the Empire they were located in every city as a relatively large minority. The Jerusalemites levied a 10% tithe on every Jew in the Empire from Rome to Jerusalem. The gold flowed East and the Jewish province became very wealthy. So wealthy that it thought it could challenge the Empire…and win.
The problem then was what to do with the Jews. No anti-Semitism, just a stubborn block of people who wouldn’t submit to the standard but couldn’t impose their rule on the Empire.
In Alexandria and Egypt means of persuasion were sought. It was probably conceived that the main problem with the Jews was that they believed themselves a separate and superior people who their god had made his own people to the exclusion of all others. In their vision of creation their god had created the peoples of the world. Having done so he examined them all and found the Jews worthy and all others not. So he made them his own special people, not human, but somewhere between the angels and the rest of mankind. Well and good but their belief was shared only by themselves, as, indeed, it was only their fancy.
Therefore the attempt would be made to negate their exclusivity. Hence, the Memphites created the Serapis and sent him downriver to Alexandria and said something like, ‘Try this.’
The idea was to preach Egyptian values to the Jews wrapped in the bright wrapping of an individual. Now, remember, at this time the overarching astrological universal religion was changing Ages. So two things where going on. Hence, an agent was necessary to carry the word to the Jews, that the god, their god, had changed his mind and no longer needed a special people. After Jesus’ ministry it was phrased that God so loved the world at large that he sent his only begotten son to redeem not only the Jews but all the peoples of the world.
Now, who was Jesus? Forget the Babe in the Manger, that is a pure myth created later to explain the supposed divinity of Jesus while also appointing him the avatar of the Piscean Age. Sort of quid pro quo. None of this happened all at one time but was spread out over a few hundreds of years. It did not catch on easily or rapidly.
Jesus himself must have been trained in Egypt because his program was wholly Egyptian and hence was an abomination to the priesthood of Jerusalem. Was Jesus Jewish? There is no way to tell. He educated and reared in Egypt. He might as easily have been an ethnic Greek or Egyptian. There is no way to tell. At the very most he is termed Jewish because that was his ministry. The Pharisees wasted no time in giving evidence of their displeasure labelling Jesus as a revolutionary, Which he was, by the way.
So, Jesus must have been educated and trained in Egypt, hence he would have had Alexandrine appearance and manners, perhaps an Alexandrine accent. If you read biblical history there were lots of saviors running around. Jesus was only one but as it turned out he had the best organization.
I can only speculate that the Memphite religion of Serapis was organized as nearly all religions are and that they had a corps of missionaries to spread their good word, and that was that god so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to redeem it, or at least that is what the Jews did in Jerusalem. Other missionaries would have gone to other locations with whatever success they had.
Jesus would have been recognized immediately as a Serapian missionary. His whole program was Egyptian while being by its very nature antagonistic to Jewish beliefs. Remember that these people were just as leery of innovators as today. The execution of Jesus solved no problem for the Pharisees, the ruling party in Jerusalem. The reason being that a very effective organization survived. The Pharisees persecuted them to death.
Paul rescued them by coming up with a plan to convert the goyim to the Minian religion, that is the Jewish predecessor to Christianity. It was a good plan but it would only work when Jews were in the majority. When the goyim became more numerous power naturally shifted to them and members of the dominant goy majority then took control. The role of messiah and avatar of the Age of Pisces had to be conceded to the Jewish faction for the good of all, but the Greek Dionysus and the Egyptian Osiris had to be recognized and they were combined with Jesus under the title of the Christ, to form the Christian religion. Jesus, the Christ. Jewish/Greek/Egyptian. The Christ being the Greek anointed or awaited one. That must have taken a couple hundred years to work out. The church became ecumenical at that point but the Jews remained outside the Catholic or Universal Church remaining as they were previously an irritant.
Nothing had been settled, only changed. The future would be just as troubled as the past had been.
One can’t expect all the members of a society to be convinced but the Society will move ahead on this basis.
from the minutes of the Century Society 3/19/23
March 19, 2023
from the minutes of the Century Society 3/192023
The birth of Christianity was not wholly Jewish. The plethora of gods, goddesses and religions could not be excluded and they weren’t. A hotbed of religious activity not properly understood is at Alexandria, the second city of the Roman Empire and the first intellectually. The arrival of the Greeks as conquerors fueled religious speculation while it was obvious that on the cusp of the Airean and Piscean Ages a new Age was beginning. A new sky (Piscean stars) and a new earth, In the distance from the Taurean Age to the Piscean the mentality of humanity had advanced dramatically. Change was in the air.
As pointed out previously the universal Roman Empire called out for a universal religion. The Jews themselves were not susceptible to change reveling in ages old practices. The belief that God so loved the Jews especially could not stand up. As the Roman Empire was universal and a universal religion proclaiming that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to proclaim it was I believe developed in Alexandria.
Now, when as Jewish legends have it the Jews fled Egypt it is ridiculous to think that the entire Jewish population, the Jews having been in Egypt for 400 years, all chose to leave. The fleshpots of Egypt were much to alluring.
Even fifty years after having been transported to fabulous Babylon when the Jews were given the option of returning to Jerusalem or remaining in Babylon only a small group of cranks preferred to leave. The main body chose to stay. It cannot have been otherwise in Egypt. Thus there were probably more Jews in Alexandria and Egypt than in Palestine. There were nearly a million in Alexandria. Mingling with the Greek and Egyptians religionists the main challenge to Jewish beliefs came from those two religions.
Of the three peoples the Greeks were the most internationally minded having conquered the Eastern lands the least stubbornly rooted in old ideas. One must assume that the idea of a universal religion came from them, possibly even before Alexandria became Roman, certainly so. Now, Jesus, was a universal religious symbol. It is recorded that he was sent to Jerusalem to preach the new gospel, which he was in fact preaching. If he was sent he came from somewhere else.
I think it more probable that Jesus and perhaps a dozen or two others were selected as infants to be raised in the new universal religion, thus they would know nothing else. A myth was created to associate Jesus. with Judaea, perhaps after the fact of his ministry. The myth of the three wise men from Persia following a star is one. The star obviously was the star of Pisces, thus indicating that Jesus was the avatar of Pisces. Trained in Alexandria, he was sent to the religious capitals of the Empire to assimilate a universal attitude. Thus he was initiated into the Greek Eleusis religion which was in itself international in scope. Anyone in the Empire who was any one would be required to be an initiate.
Proof that Jesus was initiated is provided by the Last Supper as indicated at another of our sessions. At the supper Jesus toasted the members by saying first with a loaf of bread, this is my body, then with a goblet of wine, this is my blood. The bread from the earth represented the temporal world and wine from sun represented the spiritual, thus uniting the two spheres, the above and the below. Thus he gave away the secret of the Eleusis ritual which had been a closely guarded secred.
How the ritual of communion developed isn’t clear but surely the Last Supper is a myth. We will continue this issue at our next session.
From the minutes of the Century Society 3/16/2023
March 17, 2023
From the minutes of the Century Society 3/16/2023
Today the discussion was a back and fill of the minutes of last session. The defeat of 70AD caused the Jews to reflect but not desist. Even though the temple was destroyed and the population decimated forty-five years later two of the largest Jewish colonies were convinced to revolt, or perhaps, other colonies preferred to remain quiet.
The expression of this Jewish revolt was no military action, but rather the Jews rose up and began murdering the non-Jewish population in a sneak attack. The two colonies affected were the very large settlements of Alexandria, Egypt and the island of Cyprus. Two hundred fifty thousand Alexadrines and two hundred fifty thousand Cypriots were slaughtered and not just slaughtered; the Jews were said to wear their intestines as belts and other atrocities.
So, in real terms not much different from the holocausts of WWII. The reactions of the Mediterranean world must been to be aghast. It also must follow that Jews in all parts of the Empire were shunned, distanced and avoided. The slaughter was horrific. What the reaction was in attacked Jewish colonies was isn’t recorded but it must have been harsh. This was a mere forty-five years after the Jewish defeat. There must have been many people alive who remembered that.
Twenty years later in 135 the Bar Kochba revolt was waged that exasperated the Romans beyond endurance. The legions descended on Israel slaughtering how many. while masses were deported, mainly to Spain. Then a manhunt was conducted to kill any militants and planners left alive.
The Romans forbade the Jews to inhabit Israel for all time in hope that without their home of Jerusalem survivors would blend In with the population. But the colonies and Jews in Mesopotamia still existed.
The result must have been the detestation of Jews everywhere, how could it have been otherwise. Yet Jewish resistance was not done yet although clandestine.
Meanwhile the Catholic, or Universal Church, for that is what catholic means, was slowly taking form. The Christians were persecuted from time to time by various Emperors but their numbers were increasing although they remained a minority.
Constantine would win the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, subsequently to make Christianity, as the Catholic Church, the State religion. All the old gods were not yet finished still being practiced at that time.
This date 3/16/2023, Sec’y R.E. Prindle
Century Society Minutes 3/15/2023
March 16, 2023
From the minutes of the Century Society:
With a tip of the hat to the late great historian, Arnold Toynbee
The current problem in world affairs stems from the political and religious conditions of the conquest by the Roman Empire of the myriad populations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. By consolidating the littoral and surrounding people the Romans unintentionally created a universal State. Roman mores extended over this ancient world.
Each of these various nations had their own chief god and other gods. Thus, as examples, Zeus and Yahwey; the former Greek and the latter Judaic. The two gods were equal along with the Phoenician Baal, and the Egyptian Isis and Osiris among others.
The political unification of the Mediterranean thus demanded an accompanying universal religion. The people having the most qualified god to offer as this universal god were the Judaics. They leaped to fill the void. While other gods represented only their respective people, the Jews had fashioned their god as a universal god above all other gods.
The Jews themselves, seeking to impose their god on humanity, made the attempt by reproducing themselves at a fantastic rate. ‘Go ye forth and multiply.’ their god told them. Asymmetric warfare. With the admonition to bring all the other peoples to him alone. Having followed their god’s desire the Jews had multiplied sending colonies out to all the cities of Rome including Rome itself.
Therefore by the year 0, Julian calendar, and at the cusp of the Age of Pisces according to the Zodiacal calendar the Jews having thoroughly infiltrated the Empire declared war on Rome much as they would do in Germany in the twentieth century. It was their intent that the colonies in Roman cities would rise with them thus keeping Roman troops so dispersed that an easy conquest would ensue. The colonies did not rise and the Roman legion smashed Jerusalem and Israel in 70 AD. Jewish military hopes were shown to be impracticable.
Realizing the futility of military means the Jews adopt a bore from within strategy by religious means. Thus Paul began the process of converting the Jewish followers of Jesus of Nazareth to a universal god while admitting the goyim. The goyim were unimpressed with circumcision and the peculiar dietary laws so that these were dropped as a condition of admittance. At the same time the Greek avatar of the emerging Piscean Age, Dionysus was joined to Jesus under the title Jesus the Christ, or the anointed one. Hence Christianity. Then Christianity escaped them after the religion had been organized by them in Rome. By another change of name Christianity became the Catholic or Universal Church.
From that point on the history of Europe evolved into the situation of today in which the Jews are claiming spiritual and temporal domination.
Dated this day: 3/15/2023. Sec’y of the Century Society, R.E. Prindle
G.W.M. Reynolds, Psychology, Pickwick And A Link To Edgar Allan, Poe
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts: Pickwick Abroad, Teggs Edition.1839
The Youthful Impostor, reprint, original 1832, rewritten in 1835.
As I’ve said, I’ve read Pickwick Abroad three times. I think the book is slighted the first reading because of its appropriation of Charles Dickens’ characters and story idea. The shock to one’s proprieties is quite strong. Bedazzled by the daring of Reynolds one tends to be critical of the novel compared to the original. Time passes, a deeper understanding of Reynolds is acquired and a finer understanding of Pickwick Abroad begins.
Reynolds was quite young when he wrote the book, a mere twenty-three. Forced out onto the world at the tender age of sixteen, the book fictionalizes his experience in the land of his exile, France. All the memories are raw from just having been experienced, while his future was very uncertain.
Reynolds left England in 1830 some few months after the July Revolution in France. The revolution would have a profound effect on the boy, turning him into what was called a Red Republican, that is one who endorsed the violence of the First French Revolution and the bloody three days of the second, or July Revolution. He would carry this attitude with him back to England.
At the age of eighteen he married a girl his age by the name of Susannah Pierson. Her death only, in 1858, ended the marriage. She was apparently the perfect help mate for him, being herself an author of several books their interests meshed. Little is known of her but if Reynolds remembrance is factual he probably met her father on his arrival in the French port of Calais. This man unidentified by name opened Reynolds’ perception to the criminal side of human behavior. He showed young Reynolds how to see the world. Indicating to him the methods of criminals thus broadening young Reynolds perspectives by double. Pickwick Abroad thus becomes a history of petty criminals, con men and sponges, that is parasites. This was recorded in The Youthful Impostor.
Little is directly known of Reynolds’ doings in France other than what he tells us of his explorations. To see and do what he describes must have occupied the bulk of his time. Would that we knew more of his associates. He moved in literary circles acquiring a sound background in editing and publishing that was of use to him on returning to England. He immersed himself in French culture and history as will begin to be evident later in this essay when he displays his knowledge of activities in psychology and its center at the Salpetriere Asylum in Paris.
Thus he viewed the major attractions in and around Paris becoming familiar with the police and judiciary. A constant grey presence throughout the length of novel is the gendarme Msieu Dumont. The presence is beneficial while Reynolds expresses great admiration of him and actually of the police and the gendarmerie. Here one wonders if the model for Dumont might be the father of Susannah and hence Reynolds’ father in law. Pickwick met Dumont in Calais and It was in that town that Reynolds had his eyes opened. Ah, but that might be too convenient.
The chapters of XXXII, XXXIII and XXXIV held special interest to me. These are Reynolds at his best. In chapter XXXII Pickwick and his entourage of conmen, spongers and hanger ons along with his club members and the irrepressible Samuel Weller go out for the evening. They enter what appears to be a restaurant but as the evening progresses many women at the table d’hote begin acting zany and get madder and madder when a woman jumps up jumps up on the table to do an obscene dance. The entourage realize that they are in a madhouse. The proprietor is a Doctor.
This introduces the subject of the Salpetriere. The women’s asylum. Later in the novel. Reynolds will introduce us to the men’s asylum the Bicetre, another very interesting episode. This now brings us to the connection of Reynolds and Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe was of course a profound psychologist, much more than Reynolds although in many ways whatever the latter learned in France put him well ahead of anyone in England. The French themselves were the psychological leaders of Europe. While Freud preempted them in a shameful way he owed nearly everything to Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and the doctors around Charcot at the Salpetriere. One might say that without his French connection there would have been no Sigmund Freud.
Of course Charcot was just beginning his career when Reynolds wrote Pickwick Abroad. We have to know a lot more about what circles Reynolds ran in. We do know that he once bought a story from William Makepeace Thackeray and actually paid him. Most magazines either refused to pay or put it off as long as they could. Nevertheless Reynolds must have actually visited the Salpetriere and Bicetre as these chapters around the institutions are actually quite intense and heart rending.
The question then is did Reynolds’ story influence Edgar Allan Poe. Reynolds published in 1839 and Poe in 1845. Poe was certainly well known in English literary circles by 1845 as Poe more or less took them by storm. Reynolds was known in the US by 1836 when his rewritten story The Youthful Impostor was published in the US. It is not unreasonable then to think that Pickwick Abroad was also published in the US shortly after 1839 and that Poe at sometime between say, 1840 and 1844 read the book and was impressed by the named chapters under discussion. He took the hint and turned it into the brilliant story of The System Of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether. There may be a clue to Reynolds in the use of the word ‘system’ by Poe.
Reynolds has a running joke about his character Hook Walker, Hamas Ambulator as another character translates the name into Latin. Walker has a system for every thing his systems becoming somewhat a tiring joke. Actually the name Hook Walker is a joke that would have been funny to many readers. A book published in 1841, still de riguer for the cognoscenti, Chales Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness Of Crowds, explains the meaning of the name Hook Walker to Renolds. I quote from the chapter titled Popular Follies Of Great Cities:
Quote.
‘Hookey Walker’ derived from the chorus of a popular ballad, was also in high favor at one time and served like its predecessor ‘Quoz’, to answer all questions. In the course of time the latter word (Walker) alone became the favorite, and was uttered with a peculiar drawl upon the first syllable, a sharp turn upon the last. If a lively servant girl was importuned for a kiss by a fellow she did not care about…the probable answer he would receive was, ‘Walker!’ If a dustman asked his friend for the loan of a shilling and his friend was unwilling to accommodate him the probable answer he would receive was ‘Walker!’
Unquote.
So I suppose the meaning was something like ‘Fat Chance.’
Hookey Walker was a ballad popular some time earlier. The character of Hook Walker would have provided hilarity throughout PA. The book itself, which is very comedic, must have been thought hilariously funny, or Reynolds hoped so.
Poe being an honest writer, while he doesn’t directly indicate Reynolds as the source for the idea, Poe’s narrator and a companion are riding down the road discussing insanity and his friend point’s out the famous asylum of Dr. Tarr The narrator turns off to investigate while his friend rides on. I interpret that as Poe indicating he got the story idea from Reynolds (or someone as Reynolds isn’t named) but his own story is quite different being more highly developed. Poe, then, as I interpret had read PA and borrowed the idea. Thus Reynolds for at least one story had an influence on Poe.
At the end of chapter XXXII one of the madwomen slips a letter to Pickwick that he pockets. Carrying on the looniness of the times Reynolds shifts from the ladies to the men in a parody of Craniology in chapter XXXIII. He portrays a different kind of lunacy, that of Prof. Franz Gall’s Phrenology, or the reading of the contours of the head. Phrenology was misunderstood at the time and roundly ridiculed, but Gall was vindicated in later times as the functions of the different areas of the brain have been understood. A number of good horror films from the thirties to today deal with the issue, an excellent one being ‘The Black Death’. Another mad doctor. Everybody gets a good laugh at the joke played on the craniologist and then we get on with the story.
Pickwick finds time in his busy schedule to open the letter written by the madwoman that details the descent into madness off herself and her lover and would be husband.
From my point of view Reynolds really turns on the juice to rival Poe in his understanding of psychology.
The psychologist Dr. Jean Martin Charcot working in the sixties, seventies and eighties in the Salpetriere on what was then called hysteria initially believed that hysteria had a physical origin while others contended it was a psychological reaction to a traumatic event or events. Writing in the late thirties Reynolds was already certain of the latter. Women during the nineteenth century were treated very badly. The burdens placed on their psychological well being were horrendous, especially in the lower economic classes. One would think that this would have been immediately clear to Charcot where he had an asylum full of mistreated women.
Reynolds presents two sides to the problem. Another point of view was that insanity was inherited, a family characteristic. I’m not sure which side Reynolds took on this issue, he may have been ambivalent or believed both.
Pickwick’s letter gives the woman’s side of what happened. This is a very tragic story, detailed in chapters XXXIV and XXXV. The woman and a man fall in love. Both are ardent. The woman’s problem is that she thinks insanity is inherited in her family line. She therefore believes that she is destined to go insane at some future time while at the same time she doesn’t want to bring any children into the world who will inevitably carry what we would call today, a gene of insanity.
While she is in love with her future husband she refuses to marry him without saying why; the deeper reason being that her children will have the insanity propensity or gene. This refusal to marry drives her lover to distraction. Thus we have a traumatic cause of insanity on both sides without any neurological damages.
Her prospective husband has a reaction to disappointed expectations traversing through depression to insanity. There is a great deal of depth to Reynolds that is easily overlooked by a casual reading. This first story in Pickwick of the horrors of Madness comes from deep down. In his five year residence in France with visits to almost all significant sites, the next will be the prison and insane asylum of the Bicetre at which Dr. Pinel worked. Reynolds seems to have been inside each as well as nearly every prison in France. And he is going to take all of this profound experience back to England to be digested
George W. M. Reynolds And The Many Novels In The Mysteries Of The Court Of London
by
R.E. Prindle
One may think that the ten volumes of George W. M. Reynolds’ Mysteries Of The Court Of London is one long novel, which of course it is, yet in that one novel are many others. In this essay I would like to discuss that of Prince George, Tim Meagles and Lady Lade.
Let us start with a chat about the changing times and change of consciousness occurring in the revolutionary age that existed from1789 to perhaps, gosh, I don’t know, perhaps 1860 or even 1880, at which time the revolutionary Benjamin Disraeli cast off his mortal coil. At least that phase of revolution which metamorphizing from shape to shape is continuing today and into the future,.
Now, I’m just discussing in the next few passages an idea I find interesting. Philip Jose Farmer, a twentieth century American novelist, noted that a comet fell on the town of Wold Newton in England in 1795. Musing from this point he dates modern popular literature as a unit he denominates the Wold Newton Universe. There is also an interesting French version of the Wold Newton Universe.
Now, it just so happens that 1795 was the approximate year that modern consciousness consolidated and emerged. As an indicator of its accuracy I point out that the Monthly Magazine of England changed it typography from the late Medieval style to the modern following the year 1795. Typeface did a transfiguration to the new fonts, most significantly changing the ff for ss to ss.
The changed fonts is a more significant event than one might think, because along with it went a change of consciousness. Men thought differently.
Of course, the evolution of consciousness was deeply affected by the emergence of the Industrial Revolution as well as the social, religious and political revolutions and the evidence became apparent in 1795.
This first act of modernity, Revolutionary Age, continued through the novelistic pen of George W. M. Reynolds. When he set down his novelistic pen c. 1860 England, at least, was passing into the second stage which we may say was initiated by Charles Darwin’s declaration of human evolution in 1859.
There is no coincidence that the Gothic literary period c. 1795, surfaced at the time of the Wold Newton comet. The post-Medieval period that ended in 1795 was one of mysterious supernatural happenings. At that period leading into the modern period the novelists began their tales on a supernatural, mysterioso basis of inexplicable circumstances then reduced them to understandable events by eliminating the supernatural mysteries through reason or rationality. Everything was made clear through the application, as it were, of scientific knowledge thus exemplifying the change in consciousness.
The world of mystery was left behind and writers began to write in rational terms. The writer GPR James neatly straddles this evolution of consciousness in his psychological outlook.
The Industrial Revolution solved certain societal problems and created others. At that time the population was expanding rapidly causing problems and creating opportunities. The population could not be absorbed under the pre-1795 conditions. Unless means could be devised to incorporate the new masses starvation must have resulted as Malthus predicted. But, the application of scientific principles and their technological application made the railroads a means of creating a massive number of jobs thus absorbing the surplus population; the change of scale from X to X+1 demanded additional workers.
However, as the under classes multiplied faster than the aristocrats this tended to make the aristocratic position untenable. This was the situation when George Reynolds came to maturity and exploited as a novelist. Thus he became a revolutionary or Red Republican attacking the aristocracy and monarchy while championing the underclass. His take was eminently successful.
.2.
Let us consider for a moment George’s place in the hierarchy of great novelists. In my estimation he belongs in the first rank whether eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth century. The times were changing rapidly although not at the warp speed of today. George’s popularity was based perhaps on a more parochial approach than a universal one. It was more closely identified with his specific time period.
I rank his Mysteries of the Court of London amongst the great literary achievements of the post-1795 modern period, as great or greater than Les Miserables by Victor Hugo or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Times as examples. Further, I would say that Reynolds was a significant influence on English writers who succeeded him. If he was in fact the most successful novelist of nineteenth century literature as is claimed, his contemporaries and successors had to take note of him. Just as one example in Vol. IV, Mrs. Fitzherbert, in the tale of the Monster Man he lays out the complete plot of Stevenson’s Jekyll And Hyde. It is well known that when as a child Stevenson was laid up with his illness he read the Penny Dreadfuls and obviously this stories of Reynolds. Seriously, Stevenson lifted the complete story. While he says that the story appeared to him complete in a dream, he must mean that his subconscious retrieved it from his early reading.
I think that W.M. Thackeray in his epic novel Vanity Fair, that has survived two hundred years being still read today, is very dependent on Reynolds style, as well as Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. And others. Victor Hugo, the French writer gives indication of having read Reynolds most especially in Jean Valjean’s episode in the sewers of Paris. A couple of Reynolds more startling passages are his characters mucking about in the sewers of London before Hugo wrote Les Misérables . If Hugo wasn’t influenced by Reynolds in that respect then Reynolds definitely takes priority in sewer episodes.
Bear in mind that things are rapidly changing now and almost the whole of the last two hundred years is being discarded as inapplicable to current consciousness, as well as what went before. When the older people now existing are gone a curtain will fall between the old and the new. The past will have become irrelevant. But, as the past is still relevant I will speak of it as timeless.
Hugo has two of the great novels of the period, Notre Dame De Paris, or under the movie title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Court of London easily surpasses Les Misérables and measures up to Notre Dame De Paris. The latter is in a special category of genius. Reynolds has greater genius than Marcel Proust and I think is substantially superior. Proust’s style did produce excellent results but in a peculiar way. Reynolds easily matches Cervantes. I’ve only read a few pages of Tolstoy but I have no respect for his premise. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is another in the special class of genius. It’s not really a very good novel but Dostoyevsky penetrates to the heart of the matter.
And then, as George was hanging up his pen in the Sixties the style began another change. Along came the beginning of Science Fiction with the Frenchman Jules Verne and on top of Jules the Empire writer, H. Rider Haggard, emerged with his tales of African adventures along with the real life adventures of Samuel Baker, Richard F. Burton and the immortal Henry Morton Stanley. Fiction could barely stand up to those guys. The pursuit of the source of the Nile is one of the three great Western epics: The Iliad, The Arthurian saga and The Source of the Nile. What a trilogy, but, that’s another story. So-called Literary fiction continued apace under numerous other writers, interesting but not exciting. With this change the Wold Newton Universe began in earnest.
Back to George Reynolds. As I intimated earlier the Court of London as a whole is built around the character of George IV. He is the central character of all the sub-novels. One also has to include London as Central character after the manner of Hugo and Notre Dame. Reynolds much admired Notre Dame De Paris in which Victor Hugo examines architecture as an indicator of civilization making his story revolve around that churches structure. Reynolds follows that method with the city of London.
As I indicated the first of these sub-novels of Court of London first series, I’m undertaking is the story of Tim Meagles and his companion Lady Lade.
The Court of London is essentially a historical novel taking place from 1795 to 1820. Can it be a coincidence that George’s unhappy marriage to Caroline of Brunswick occurred in 1795? Boy, that Wold Newton comet was some comet wasn’t it? As a historical novel many of the characters are historical or based on historical characters.
Having read the novel twice before, this third reading I was surprised to find that Lady Lade was a historical figure and presented fairly accurately while Tim Meagles appears to be an amalgam of the very interesting Beau Brummel and perhaps an Irish character, maybe Daniel O’Connell, I’m just guessing on the latter.
Meagles seems to be a favorite character for Reynolds. Meagles model Beau Brummel was also a hero to Reynolds. The Beau was the premier Dandy at the time while in Reynolds’ pictures he also appears as a Dandy.
Tim Meagles
Tim Meagles is one of the very best characters George Reynolds created. He, Lady Lade and George IV would make a wonderful movie or a terrific streaming series.
We don’t have access to the depth of Reynolds knowledge for his fictional history of George IV was, but he has obviously studied George’s life. Reynolds is very knowledgeable about history. His reading sources would be much different from ours; while at the same time he would have had conversations with knowledgeable people who may have lived through the times as well as bull sessions with associates and friends. Much of that would have been gossip and much would be fact.
Much that he writes may seem preposterous to our eyes, but the times, customs and possibilities were different from our times but still amazingly similar if you look behind the façade.
One telling point he made concerning George IV’s times compared to his was that there were no New Police back then. One was virtually free to do what one wished, that there were no police means that it was a wide open society while the influence of Rabelais and his famous dictum in Gargantua and Pantagruel: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law while diminishing still prevailed. The spirit of the Hell Fire Clubs slumbered in the embers.
Two law standards existed, Rabelais for the aristocracy strict morality for the common people. Reynolds repeatedly calls this out.
George IV according to George Reynolds held that there was a third law that existed for him alone: The King, or heir apparent, could do no wrong. George IV was a libertine Rabelaisian of a high order in the spirit of the Hell Fire Clubs. That particular past weighed heavy on the mind of George IV.
The only difference was that the power of the English kings was being rapidly usurped by the Parliament; he was under scrutiny while the Hell Fire Clubs operated with impunity. Therefore, in Reynolds’ fictional history Tim Meagles’ function was to do dirty deeds dirt cheap. Tim found the ways to bail George IV out of difficulties.
Beau Brummel, Tim’s model was merely an arbiter of fashion having a hand in shaping men’s fashions at the time. He was the son of a successful entrepreneur who died leaving him with twenty thousand pounds and a burning desire to be ennobled. Thus the Beau had to try to enter high society with no title and inadequate means; he was a simple Mr.
Assuming the pose of the Dandy he succeeded in making himself the arbiter of fashion while insinuating himself into George’s favor thus succeeding to make himself the arbiter of fashion, the King of the Dandies, Men About Town and Men of the World.
George IV allowed him to live in his private residence, the Carlton House, whileTim Meagles had a key to a private entrance directly to George’s quarters so that he could come and go as he pleased without being observed.
The Beau unfortunately failed to remain in his subordinate place foolishly trying to make himself greater than George, while actually he was a mere hanger on. The crisis in the relationship came and the Beau was expelled. While the Beau had been badgering George to be ennobled he had failed. Out of favor then, he had no status.
Desponding, the Beau ran through his inheritance, ran into debt, and had no choice but to exile himself to Calais. He died a shattered man.
Lady Lade
If George Reynolds liked Tim Meagles, he loved Lady Lade, she was the woman of his heart his belle ideal. She appears in many forms and under many names is this fabulous work. Lady Letitia Lade was a very real person, as significant as Beau Brummel, that George presents almost unfictionalized. She was very notorious in her time being avoided by respectable ladies. She came from the bottom stratum of society working her way up. She was said to have been married to the notorious highwayman Sixteen String Jack Rann who lived fast, loved hard and died young, 24 years old, at the end of a rope.
Apparently a strong minded woman, she worked her way up, marrying a Lord, John Lade. Reynolds has her surviving her aged husband but in reality she died in 1825 while her young husband strung his life out to 1838.
George also makes her a transvestite wearing men’s clothes exclusively whereas John Stubbs, the painter, in his portrait of her, pictures her wearing a voluminous dress sitting side saddle on a rearing horse. Her athleticism was masculine.
George also relates her mythologically with the Roman Goddess Diana, in Greek Artemis, Our Lady of the Animals, or the huntress. George gets fairly deep here as he is inferring a deeper knowledge of European Mythology than one expects. I also think that this links him with the European Faery religion that still has a subterranean existence.
If you remember, Shakespeare in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream revives the Faeries and their king Oberon who was said to have abandoned his role in Bordeaux at the end of the story of Huon. Elizabeth I was known as the Faerie Queen and the heroine of Spenser’s poem of that name. The transition from Elizabeth to Charles I represented a significant break from the past.
If you have delved into the massive work of King Arthur you will remember that Lancelot was abducted by the Faerie Queen, Vivian, in France and reared beneath the Lake in preparation of reestablishing Faerie rule. Lancelot then when he turned eighteen was sent by Vivian/Diana to challenge Arthur for the Faerie kingdom of Camelot. He rode forth from the lake dressed in flowing white satin, his horse caparisoned the same. It appears that Vivian sent her acolyte to usurp the kingdom of Arthur, thus Arthur unknowing sent Lancelot to escort Gwenivere his future queen to Camelot. Well trained in Faerieland Beneath the Lake by Vivian/Diana, the Queen of the Faeries, Lancelot had no trouble winning Gwenivere’s heart from Arthur. There began the last stand of the Faeries that resulted in the destruction of Camelot.
This story resonates strongly with Homer and Troy. Guinevere taking the place of Helen and Lancelot Paris, the battle before Lancelot’s Beau Regarde, that of the sacred city of Troy.
How much of this Faerie lore George Reynolds might have known isn’t clear to me but Meagles wins the heart of the Huntress, the Amazon, the desirable, the fascinating Lady Lade/Diana, the Faerie Queen, from John Lade. Could be true, nevertheless the Meagles/Lady Lade story is a most enchanting tale, my favorite of the Mysteries of the Court of London, first series..
.3.
The story has more than one center and at the center of each is George IV, the origin of all the stories is closely related to the Page and Julia Lightfoot story. It’s hard work but you have to keep all the stories in your mind at the same time. A clue mentioned off hand is realized a hundred or a hundred fifty pages on. Sometimes he refreshes the reader’s memory, sometimes not.
George III was thought to have been married to a Quaker woman named Hannah Lightfoot in his youth so this novel centers on the proofs of the marriage. Reynolds believes the story, constructing his story on the ‘facts.’ The facts, rather fictional or actual, consist of a couple documents and ultimately on a packet of letters written by George III. Reading George’s representation I conclude that there was no wedding ceremony but according to the old dodge he and Hannah were married ‘in the sight of heaven.’ That dodge was universal in its application then as now. No matter, Reynolds says they were married. As it’s his story he should know. Meagles and Letitia have come into possession of one half of the document while Page and Julia Lightfoot have the other half. Page plays a large role in the novel but I will deal with him separately in another essay. Here he had been captured and imprisoned by some villains. He escapes by digging through a wall entering the adjacent unit where Hannah Lightfoot’s brother lies dying. Julia Lightfoot, the brother’s daughter, Hannah being her aunt, returns from an errand to find Page sitting next to the now dead brother rifling through his wallet. Not particularly disturbed by her father’s death she and Page team up. A paper refers to some treasure secreted in the basement to which the two unite to find. The treasure seems to be six bags of sovereigns.
The papers have provided the proofs of George III’s marriage to Hannah Lightfoot, Julia’s aunt, and a seeming pile of gold if handled correctly. Ever scheming Page sees a fortune looming. He and Julia immediately marry. The marriage, a real one, seems made in heaven as destiny is apparently involved here.
Page learns that Meagles and Lady Lade have the other half of the document proving the marriage. They then sell their half to Meagles and Lady lade for a thousand pounds real money, the gold having been discovered as counterfeit as Julia’s father was a coiner.
The bold Meagles then makes his way to George III in an interesting scene to extort a peerage, you can read it for the details.
My first thought was that the scene was impossible but as I read into the history of the period I thought it could have been.
After the restoration of the crown after the Cromwellian intermission the Stuarts tried to restore the absolute power of the king. Charles II held on but under James II the magnates rebelled offering the crown to William and Mary of Holland. Now, the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who studied the era said that the Whigs wanted a ceremonial king after the fashion of the Doge of Venice. William refused the crown on those terms, he had no wish to be a powerless king, so an accommodation was arranged.
The last of the Stuarts was Queen Anne who succeeded William. When she died in 1720 a new dynasty had to be established. Avoiding a civil war, the Whigs went to Germany and recruited the Hanoverian sovereign George making him George I. He was ideal. He spoke no English, cared little for English affairs, spent most his time in Hanover, leaving the way open for the Whigs to usurp monarchical powers. Perfect for this Whigs. This continued under George II who was also considered a foreign intruder. Still perfect.
When George III, who was born and bred in England but was still considered something of a German intruder by the Whigs, became king he refused to be ceremonial and sought to recapture monarchical powers at which he ultimately failed. George IV, now thoroughly English rebelled at being ceremonial but royal powers were beyond redemption.
So, while George III was still king it might have been possible for someone like Meagles to gain access and extort benefits from the King of England. This is Reynolds portraying it so he must have thought it possible.
In an important episode Meagles, who did dirty deeds dirt cheap for George IV, at George’s insistence that he must have 15,000 pounds, found a dupe named Foster, a merchant, to proffer the money. Lending money to George IV was like sending a light beam into a black hole; it went in but never came out. Nevertheless, time passed, the merchant needed the money in an emergency. George said: Help me, Tim. Tim went to work.
Meagles and Lady Lade turned London upside down finally finding a French expatriate, this is during the French Revolution remember, French expatriates abounded, who was willing to advance his cache of 20,000 pounds to George. Taking the money George refused to give the 15,000 pounds back to Foster. At the climax, unable to meet his obligation, the now bankrupt Foster went home and shot himself in the head leaving his wife and daughter destitute. This ‘heartless’ attitude of George absolutely disgusted Meagles and the Amazon. Rose Foster subsequently turns up at Mrs. Braces House of Assignation under the name of Rose Morton. George is a regular patron of Mrs. Brace, (quite another novel) desiring Rose. Adventures ensue, Rose escapes Mrs. Brace, is recaptured and offered once again to George. Skipping details, George is about to rape Rose when Meagles and James Melmoth break into the room. The police arrive but since they cannot possibly arrest the Prince, George has them arrest the two knights errant. The Prince in his rage at Meagles has him exiled to America. Reynolds has a regular conveyer belt of criminals going to America.
James Melmoth will later appear as the Monster Man, another story, but the interest here is that it indicates that Reynolds has read the Irish author, Charles Maturin, who wrote his fabulous Gothic novel Melmoth, The Wanderer, flashes of which appear in Reynolds’ work, as here.
In a spectacular sequence of events the exiled Meagles is returned to England. Now this is interesting. The ship that carries him is named the Diana. Thus this whole sub novel of Meagles and Lady Lade is related to the Faerie and mythical kingdoms. Reynolds knows a lot more than he openly reveals. I would dearly love to know the books he read.
Leaving out the details leading up to Meagles’ success in extorting a Marquisate and 10K pounds a year from George III, then marrying Lady Lade whose aged husband had been frightened to death by George’s agents as they searched his house for papers relating to Hannah Lightfoot. Those important papers were a packet of love letters from George to Hannah Lightfoot.
The corrupted banker Ramsay had the packet. As that story evolved Ramsay determined to flee to, where else, America to try to begin a new life. As a last foray he intends to blackmail Lady Desborough. Meagles is onto him following him to Aylesbury on a hunch.
Having already despoiled the Desboroughs of thousands of pounds they are fearful that this will be a continuing situation so they determine to kill the parasite which they do. Meagles is in the bushes observing. he rushes out to offer aid in concealing the body. He thus discovers the Lightfoot letters in Ramsay’s pocket.
Bingo! Back to George III. Meagles and Lady Lade extort a Marquisate from George to gratify his desire to be ennobled and a bundle of cash, next getting married, then fleeing London for the shires.
Reynolds sums up Meagles’ career: Thus enriched, our sporting friend was enabled to cut a fine figure in the West End; and in due course it was announced in the newspapers that Mr. Meagles had laid claim to the dormant Marquisate of Edgemore. The matter was brought before the House of Lords; no opposition was offered, and behold! The dashing, gay, and unprincipled Tim became elevated to the peerage. He soon afterward married Lady Lade and the remainder of their days were passed happily enough. Thus George culminates his little fairy tale of Tim the faerie king and Diana the faerie queen.
This is unlike Beau Brummell who broke and depressed lived his last days in misery as a common man…
I think I will next review the sub-novel concerning Page the Commercial Traveler. Page apparently had no need of a first name and if Reynolds mentioned it, I missed it.
Note #21, George W. M. Reynolds And Numbers
September 15, 2022
Note #21
George W. M. Reynolds And Numbers
by
R.E. Prindle
While no records appear to exist concerning actual number of copies sold to make Geoge the most popular author of the nineteenth century as is claimed, he does tell us this in The Mysteries Of The Court Of London, Vol. III, Rose Foster, Part 2, p.91:
Quote:
Attired in an elegant deshabille, the beauteous patrician lady was now reclining in an armchair placed at a short distance from the cheerful fire in her bedroom; and when the Earl was readmitted to the chamber and the attendant’s had withdrawn, he availed himself of this opportunity to make revelations which were perhaps less anticipated by his wife than they are by any one of the two hundred thousand readers of this narrative.
Unquote.
So, George interjects himself into the narrative to claim 200,000 readers a week. As it was only claimed that forty thousand or so read The Mysteries Of London per week, and that was considered sensational, it would seem that the popularity of this work must have made it a sensation appearing every week for eight years. It must have worked its way into the consciousness of a substantial slice of England.
Its popularity must have been sustained as by 1909 it was the only work of George’s sill available and that magnificently so. It would appear that Boston USA contained wild Reynolds enthusiasts. By Bostonians an Oxford Society was established that published the work in many editions at the same time, some limited some not.
Of course Reynolds had been a mainstay in the US almost from his first book The Youthful Impostor published in the US in 1836. A major reprint publisher T.B. Peterson of Philadelphia maintained a substantial selection of Reynolds efforts all the way through the eighties. US publishers were mainly interested in Court of London which they divided in strange ways. Peterson published Rose Foster as one volume while making several volumes of others. Peterson, but there were many other publishers also, especially esteemed Series IV The Fortunes Of The Ashtons under several different titles.
Perhaps then the Oxford Society had a fairly strong base to publish what they called The Works that were only The Mysteries of the Court of London. At one point the Oxford Society had a sales office in London and then later combined with the Burton Society, also located in Boston USA.
There are Limited, DeLuxe, cheap hard back and a very nice flexible back editions. Most in ten volume editions and one, at least, in a deluxe five double volumes. Really amazing. Thus, in the early twentieth century then, the Oxford enterprise believed that some several thousand ten volume sets could be sold. Sales were probably active until 1914 when WWI began but when the war ended Reynolds was completely forgotten until fairly recently when interest was revived. This seems rather strange because as late as 1959 I was able to buy Reynolds Newspaper in San Francisco while there was a number of people who revered him as a very radical publisher.
With the print on demand revolution many more titles have bee made available. However they are all facsimile, hence in very small print and double columns but, nice illustrations.
At least we know that Court of London had 200,000 readers a week according to George. If we knew the social status of the buyers that would be nice. At present it is assumed that the lower classes of England were the chief customers. I would question that.
The quality of Reynolds writing is erudite, the vocabulary is extensive and the complexity requires a very literate readership, and not that of the newly literate. England was only about 50% literate at the time. Remember there are degrees of literacy so 200,000 readers would include a very significant portion of the affluent and upper classes.
Of the Oxford Society editions, ten volume sets are not sold to low earners. You have to be fairly comfortable and well educated to afford those. Remember, Boston USA was perhaps the most cultivated city in the US and probably the most Anglophile. Home to Harvard University and the snob capital of America. Reynolds did appeal not only to the impoverished slum dwellers but also to the elite. Over a period of eight years of weekly installments the impact of the novel must have been enormous. Imagine the popularity of Downton Abbey on today’s TV.