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.
Pt. II Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
May 20, 2019
Pt. II: Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
G.W.M Reynolds On Vice And Virtue
by
R.E. Prindle
This essay will concentrate on the novels, Robert Macaire or, The French Bandit In England, The Mysteries Of London, Faust, and Wagner, The Wehr Wolf. Their respective dates were 1840, 1844-48, 1845-46 and 1846-47. As can be seen the latter two novels are encompassed by the dates of The Mysteries Of London and they must be related to the greater novel- two side excursions, so to speak.
We know that Reynolds went out on his own in a foreign country at the age of sixteen, going immediately to take up residence in France with a fair sized sum of money in his pocket inherited from his father as he hints in his novel Faust; then in 1833 at the age of nineteen he inherited a bit more through his mother. He was a natural scholar so that he studied extensively in many fields including literature and history. For such a young man, twenty-five and twenty-six in 1839-40 he writes with an astonishing, indeed, unbelievable maturity and knowledge both experientially and from study. Apart from being fictionalized his history seems to be accurate.
He is especially interested in vice and virtue in humanity. The configurations of his interest were formed by his reading of the Marquis de Sade; he read and internalized de Sade’s novels Justine, Juliette and Philosophy of the Boudoir. While de Sade, from whom the term Sadism is derived, is probably known by name only to most. I append here a short biography so that the reader knows how I understand him. De Sade was born in 1740 and died in 1814, the year Reynolds was born so we may assume that de Sade was still something of a sensation when Reynolds hit Paris in 1830.
De Sade’s fame as the source of the term Sadism was well earned although somewhat stale in the 21st century as films and novels have far surpassed his exploits. There is no longer anything to astonish in his novels. His problems began when his parents denied him marriage to the woman of his choice thus causing an extreme reaction. His reaction was so extreme and notorious, causing his parents such grief, that they had him imprisoned where he began writing his novels. Released by the French Revolution, which was crazier than himself, he functioned well. Napoleon, not so tolerant, had him committed to the famous insane asylum of Charenton. This aided immeasurably in making him a cult figure which he remains to this day.
He committed his grief to two most read novels, Justine and Juliette. He posited as a universal reality that a life of virtue led to unhappiness, pain and failure as characterized by Justine; and a life of libertinage and self-indulgence characterized by Juliette led to happiness and self-fulfillment.
When Reynolds read de Sade’s novels between 1830 and 1837 isn’t known. My guess is that he read them sooner than later and the antitheses between virtue and vice worked in him as he began writing.
Author of Mysteres de Paris and The Wandering Jew
An echo of Justine and Juliette can be found in the Mysteries of London. Reynolds transposes the sexes and has two male brothers Eugene and Richard Markham as protagonists. They are associated with two trees. (The symbolism of the two trees isn’t yet clear to me.) A financial disaster hits the Markham family leaving it and them destitute. Eugene, following the path of Juliette’s example opts for a life of crime to repair his fortunes while Richard decides to pursue virtue. They are to meet by the trees twenty years on to compare results.
This gives Reynolds the means to display his knowledge of vice and virtue. He certainly seems to know the ways of criminality. This investigation is continued in the first two novels written in conjunction with Mysteries titled Faust and Wagner the Wehrwolf. The first of his crime novels was Alfred de Rosann, quite astonishing as a novice novel, I will deal with it later, followed by Grace Darling, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands and the Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England. After a hiatus of two years from 1842 to 1844 when he wrote nothing Mysteries began. Faust and Wagner were written in succession.
The third of his crime novels was Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England.
One imagines that Reynolds first heard of the famous French bandit at the theater either in 1833 or ’35 or perhaps he saw both. Macaire was a famous French highwayman, but as Reynolds has Macaire tell his sidekick Bertrand, times were changing and the place of the highwayman was becoming as obsolete as buggy whips would in the twentieth century. Thus while Macaire was involved in stagecoach situations his milieu was shifting to swindling and financial crimes. The future was clear. Reynolds has his ear to the ground.
Published in 1840 Macaire was his third effort following Pickwick Abroad. By this novel he has pretty well learned his craft although his powers will grow exponentially by Mysteries. Macaire is tightly plotted and well written with every evidence of Reynold’s powerful mind. It shows little evidence of de Sade, clear evidence, even borrowing, from Frederic Soulie. Soulie was a French writer of ghastly crime/horror fiction who was, at least, an early model for Reynolds.
As in Mysteries of the Court of London an inspiring incident carried throughout the story ends it. The novel involves an enmity between the practitioner of virtue, Charles Stanmore, and the follower of vice, Robert Macaire. Close to the plots of de Sade’s Justine and Juliette.
The novel opens with Macaire in France holding up a stage containing Stanmore and killing two people while sadistically tying Stanmore to one of the large wheels. If the horse hadn’t remained still as Stanmore remarks he would surely have been killed by the revolving wheel. A sadistic crime in itself.
Papers taken from Stanmore tell of a banker in England who looks ripe for the plucking so Macaire and Bertrand head for England. It is not clear how these two desperadoes pass themselves off as businessmen, especially the clownish Bertrand but they do and Pocklington, the English businessmen invites them in, indeed, ask them to take up residence while in London. He has a beauteous sixteen year old niece, Maria, who falls head over heels for the forty some year old Macaire. As she is to inherit a large fortune Macaire plays the swain.
It so happens that Stanmore also has his eyes on Maria so he develops an inveterate hatred of his rival not realizing that the French bandit and Macaire are the same. Now, it also happens that Stanmore’s father had disappeared on a journey to Lyons in France where he was to establish a new business five years previously. He had waylaid by Macaire, robbed and murdered in a town thirty some miles from Paris on the way to Lyons as will appear later in the story. Macaire was acting as a member of an organized ring of criminals to which he still belongs being one of the leaders.
After mentioning that Macaire is posing as the financial agent named LeBeau who he learns is now on his way to London the two bandits determine to kill him before he arrives to prevent his ruining their plans. Using old skills they waylay his stage on his way to London, brutally drag him from the stage and stab him to death. These two are thoroughly evil men. This is important because while Reynolds is contrasting virtue and vice, he also holds that virtue and vice are equally mixed in a person so that after a life of vice, Macaire will very improbably turn to a life of virtue. But, Reynolds believes he can and it’s his story.
Stanmore becomes suspicious of Macaire and more especially Bertrand so he returns to France to investigate them. His findings lead him to an inn in the town in which his father was murdered. He is directed to the out of the way inn in which the murder occurred. The innkeeper intends to kill Stanmore for his money, but the latter overhears the plot being discussed and in the ensuing struggle kills the innkeeper. Questioning the innkeeper’s wife about his father she points out the place in the inn where Stanhope’s father’s body was immured. Concentrating on opening the wall Stanhope fails to notice that the wife has set the building on fire and fled.
The wife runs for some woods where Stanmore overtakes her. Then borrowing an incident from Frederic Soulie (pronounced Souliay) he ties the woman to a tree while he goes back to main road and inn and forgets her in the rush of events. By the time he gets back to her she is dead, half eaten by varmints.
Macaire has to return to France to account for Lebeau’s absence. Macaire gets into financial schemes and is recognized by the police and arrested. He would have been a goner except for his criminal network. Having pulled off a couple successful escapades Macaire does the necessary repairing to the gang’s den to distribute their share of the booty. This gets an immediate reward when his confederates help him escape from two different prisons.
This brings up the question of Reynolds’ own relationship to the law. Reynolds provides such exact descriptions of various prisons, police quarters, court affairs and prison customs that one wonders how he obtained his knowledge and familiarity. As a newspaperman he would have perhaps entered the various criminal retreats but that doesn’t seem a satisfactory explanation. Dick Collins, an eminent researcher of Reynolds and the period of Penny Dreadfuls gives Reynolds a questionable character.
Collins seems to have ransacked official sources for his information but fails to reference them. In addition to cheating at dice, that rather indicates that Reynolds was one of the shifty hangers on in Paris that he mentions in Pickwick Abroad.
Collins says: Quote: It is alleged- on poor evidence- that Reynolds stayed at the expensive Long’s Hotel in Bond Street and was arrested for trying to steal jewelry to pay the bill.
Unquote.
And there were a series of bankruptcies. One in France in which he was arrested in Calais trying to flee. Then in England in 1939 he spent six months in the Queens Bench Prison for unpaid debt. After becoming a leader in the Chartist movement he displeased the leadership because of unnamed financial schemes. So, let us say that Reynolds was probably flexible in his attitude toward strict probity. One does get that feeling.
One wonders then, was Reynolds personally aware of these criminal hangouts; did he actually mingle with them? His knowledge seems too precise for sheer invention. Also he seems too complimentary of the gendarmes who he says have absolute integrity and are the only upright characters in his novels. Was he trying to stay on their good side just in case?
In any event his descriptions of the prisons from which Macaire escapes are described in minute detail. Having once been caught in the meshes of the French police Macaire seems doomed to remain there as the police are hot on his trail after his last escape.
Now, at the inn at which Macaire had murdered his father, a beautiful young orphan girl, Blanche de Longville, had been placed there by Macaire who for some reason had been made her guardian. She had captured Stanmore’s heart, making him forget Maria, and resulting in a marriage. They were living in a posh area in Paris.
Macaire, quite desperate to escape finds his way to Stanmore and Blache’s mansion to throw himself on her mercy after maltreating through her teen years, expecting what that mercy might be wasn’t clear. Stanmore returns home to find police combing the area and Macaire, his arch enemy, in his wife’s boudoir. However Blanche manages to placate him explaining that if Macaire escapes the police and finds his way to Switzerland he is going to change his ways and end his days as the archetypal French bandit.
So, this Macaire, who had robbed him, possibly condemned him to death by tying him to the carriage wheel, actually murdered and robbed his father, beat him out for the love of the delectable Maria and other crimes too numerous to mention as well as heading up organized crime in France, throws himself on the mercy of Stanmore.
Well, love conquers all, doesn’t it? Rather than offend his wife, Blanche, Stanmore forgives all, gives Macaire traveling money, lets him out the back door and directs the police in the opposite direction, and sententiously pats himself on the back for redeeming a hardened criminal. Reynolds has Macaire living out his days living quietly in Switzerland and that redeems his murders and crimes, for you see good and evil are equally mixed in men. No one is totally bad.
His next novel, Master Timothy’s Bookcase concluded his first period and after a two year hiatus when, one presumes, Reynolds was recharging his batteries, perhaps searching for a more successful approach, organizing himself for the grand charge he began his magnum opus The Mysteries of London, that was a great compendium of crime. He was in fact inspired by Eugene Sue’s Mysteres de Paris but Mysteries of London doesn’t reflect much derivation from that work, however, this was apparently because he couldn’t fit much of it into his story.
Wonderful details preyed on his imagination so that at the same time he was writing Mysteries he also wrote two longish novels, Faust in 1845-46 and Wagner the Wehr Wolf in 1846-48.
Faust is rather an extraordinary novel. Here his inspiration was derived from the European myth of the man who sold his soul to Satan. He combines this story with the story of the German criminal organization called the Holy Vehm. As an adjunct to all he gives an exciting account of the Borgias, Pope Alexander VI, Caesar and Lucretia, or Lucreza as he spells it, Borgia. An amazing novel.
In this novel Reynolds extends his field from France and England to encompass Central Europe—Germany, Austria, Carniola and Italy. Eventually he will draw a circle from England into the Mediterranean touching the Africa of Homer’s Lotus Eaters, through the Dardanelles to Mingrelia or ancient Colchis where the Golden Fleece was kept through the Crimea thus encircling historic Europe. Interesting conception.
Whether he visited these parts during his period in France isn’t clear and his details are fairly sketchy although fairly sharp for Italy. Carniola is an Alpine province of Austria along with Styria and Corinthia. Reynolds probably chose this province for a couple of reasons, the first because as no one had probably heard of it, it was therefore exotic and secondly because a ferocious sexual pervert who lived there in a castle as recorded by de Sade in his novel Juliette. This guy was so incredible that even de Sade hastened away.
Murder, crime and gore in profusion, Reynolds seems in a frenzy to outdo de Sade, Frederic Soulie and Eugene Sue combined and a fine job he does of it too.
Eugene Sue in his magnificent Wandering Jew, that great Armageddon, as his story unfolds the great march of Cholera out of the East that advances at the rate of thirty miles a day closes in on the Paris of 1830 and its revolution of that year. Sue knew how to erase millions of people at a time. What a story, and it goes on for over a thousand pages. Now, if Reynolds did reach Paris in 1830 he must have witnessed the devastation caused by the Cholera epidemic or, at the very least, its aftermath which would have been a topic of conversation. If as Collins suspects he arrived in 1833 he still would have heard stories of the great Cholera terror. If the hints in Reynolds novel, Grace Darling, are correct he places the time of that novel in 1833 so he might likely have still been in England at that time. His descriptions of the Revolution of 1830 in Alfred de Rosann are so sketchy that he may not have arrived in France in 1830 on the heels of the action as he claims.
In Faust he replicates the Cholera epidemic of Sue when Faust orders Satan to create an immense bubonic plague in Vienna and Europe that like the Cholera epidemic rises in the East and rolls over Europe. Thus the spectre derived from Sue’s Rodin makes its appearance in Reynolds. Further both the Cholera and bubonic plague are accurate history. Reynolds’ Faust takes place from 1480 through the first decade of the sixteenth century. Reynolds is very careful with his dates so that events actually occurred in the years he indicates. The bubonic plague he mentions occurred between 1500 and 1503. Interestingly he doesn’t blame fleas from rats in Genoa but, like the Cholera, has it arrive from the East. Current theories indicate that that may have been the case. The first plague of mid-fourteenth century swept through Europe so quickly that there must have been another source than ship rats. In the first place no crew would have been immune to the flea bites hence the Med would have been filled with ghost ships while the spread would have been slower and the diffusion more easily traced. Reynolds always appears to have read and thought deeply.
Faust is essentially a historical novel so that the eruption of Vesuvius in 1485 is accurate but the accuracy of the description of the actual eruption must be fictional. The eruption was however a major one.
So also Reynolds account of the Borgias is historically accurate allowing for description and motives to be interpretations. The villains of Sue’s Wandering Jew are the religious sect of the Jesuits, Reynolds replaces them with the German organization of the Holy Vehm whose description is accurate given a little novelistic license. What we have here, then, in this story is a magnificent contrast between virtue and vice, good and evil. The contrasts are carried out on many levels. The Vehm operates as a government within the government just as the Jesuits were a church within the church. In this case the Austrian government is upright but the Holy Vehm is not. Faust once he has sold his soul to Satan is the representative of a blend of virtue and vice with vice having the upper hand. Faust as the story develops is guilty through his machinations of the deaths of millions. As the representative of vice Faust’s counterpart is Otto Pianella who represents undivided virtue. Faust’s wife represents virtue, or Justine, while Faust’s mistress, Ida, Otto’s sister, represents Juliette or vice. Of course, she is as nothing compared to the mighty Lucreza Borgia, the scariest woman who ever lived.
Reynolds while considered a feminist is, actually, a realist. In general, he deplores the manner in which women are treated but he isn’t so silly as to believe all women are above reproach, thus one has a variety of female types. Lucreza Borgia in the novel is a willful completely evil woman while Nisida in the next novel, Wagner the Wehr Wolf is a ‘strong’ woman but a blend of good and evil. Thus, Reynolds avoids the sappy feminist sentiment of the present.
He was perhaps overawed b Lucreza’s ruthless exercising of her will so that there is no good mixed with her evil. Lucreza was not going to go to Switzerland and while away her time after the Borgias’ power was destroyed.
Mortally offended by de Sade’s dictum that vile living always succeeds on this Earth while virtue always leads to unhappiness, in this novel practicing virtue succeeds while vice fails. Perhaps in Sue’s breathtaking Armageddon in which all the characters but one are immolated, Reynolds changes the end so that each virtuous character lives happily in the end while all the vicious characters die or end unhappily.
The Holy Vehm is destroyed, Ida checks out early, the Borgias seemingly on the way to success are thwarted, first their power is broken, then as fugitives Caesar Borgia after a number of failures is killed in an ignominious battle in Spain while Lucreza suffers a horrible death at the hands of her husband on the island of Lissa belonging to the Duke of Ferrara near Venice. This is one of the most terrifying depictions in the novel. Disregarding Lucreza’s terrible reputation the Duke of Ferrara espouses her with the assumption that she will reform her wicked ways, that is, give up vice.
Apparently, she has until Otto Pianella and his family are marooned on the way back to Vienna by snowstorms in the Julian Alps of Carniola. They put up on Lissa which comes to Lucreza’s attention. She arrests Otto and places him in the Iron Coffin. I won’t replicate the entire story that Reynolds makes as suspenseful as possible, but the Iron Coffin is a large room made of iron shaped like a giant coffin. The walls are moveable and gradually compress down to the size of an actual coffin in which the victim is entombed, where he gradually dies of starvation and dehydration.
As Otto’s situation grows dire Satan appears offering him the Faustian deal. No, no, says Otto, never, never, I put my faith in a higher power. So, in a choice between vice or virtue Otto remains true to God, or virtue. Well, one of Lucreza’s retinue finks to the Duke who is outraged that Lucreza has violated her oath so, at the last moment he releases Otto, justifying Otto’s trust in God, while condemning Lucreza to what would have been Otto’s fate. Thus, the terrible end of the truly vicious Lucreza Borgia.
Now, we are down to Faust himself. Faust had driven a lousy bargain with Satan receiving only twenty-six years of seeming prosperity and unlimited power. Now both hands of the clock, or clysidra, clocks hadn’t been invented yet, are pointing straight up. Remembering Reynolds’ description of the 1485 eruption of Vesuvius Satan takes Faust to the edge of the boiling caldera and after a lengthy triumph and lecture Satan pushes Faust in.
De Sade is repudiated, the results of Justine’s and Juliette’s lives are reversed and Reynolds triumphs over the Marquis de Sade.
While the main novel, The Mysteries Of London, raged on in its contests of virtue and vice, Reynolds began another rather lengthy novel he titled Wagner the Wehr Wolf.
And why not? While good and certainly interesting it doesn’t quite toe the mark made by Faust. Faust was well above the average while Wagner is closer to average but still with all of Reynolds’ inventiveness.
Too few people die and Nisida the villainess is a pale reflection of Lucreza Borgia, but still no slouch as a ‘strong’ woman. Nor is there a Jesuit Order or the Holy Vehm, just a highly organized criminal gang that is terrorizing Florence Italy. Reynolds may have lifted that idea from Dumas’ Count of Monte Christo and the gang in the Italian catacombs. The main story takes place in Florence but changes location to more exotic places including Constatinople, name not yet changed to Istanbul, and Sicily.
Reynolds’ geography embraces a rather large area from England, France, Central Europe, the Balkans, Italy to just off the coast of Africa to include the Greek Islands, Western Anatolia and Mingrelia on the East Coast of the Black Sea, formerly the Colchis of the Argonauts then turning west to the Crimea following in the tracks of the Argonauts and that pretty well encompasses the parameters of historical Europe. One wonders how Reynolds is writing all these novels, maintaining a growing family, keeping up on his reading and accumulating fairly detailed historical studies and he wrote several historical novels, Faust being one.
The adoption of a fantastic Werewolf story seems strange, but then, James Malcolm Rymer, his contemporary Penny Dreadful author was scoring big with his novel Varney The Vampire and would soon after write the classic story of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd, a hit musical fifty years ago was the barber who turned his customers into sausages and sold them to another set of customers. Who would believe cannibalism in nineteenth century England?
Varney the Vampire, an incredibly long novel must have nudged Reynolds’ interest in that supernatural direction so he chose to explore another of the great medieval myths or legends of Medieval Europe, that of the Wehr Wolf. So, really, this era produced the subject matter for the next hundred and fifty years or so, Frankenstein, Faust, Varney the Vampire, Sweeney Todd and Werewolves and organized crime. The Curse of the Mummy would come later.
Wagner has a highly organized criminal gang that is central to the story maintaining its connection to the main frame of Mysteries of London. It is a true underworld inhabiting caverns deep into the earth. Whether meant intentionally or not by Reynolds its lower levels rest next to the lower levels of the Catholic nunnery that has an extensive underground. The doings in the nunnery in its underworld are as criminal as those of the criminals only a few feet awaythrough the rock. The two worlds are blended when the crime world is attacked, and the walls accidentally broken through and down. Thus, both the criminal underworld and the equally criminal nunnery were destroyed.
Reynold’s religious interests are intriguing. At this time in his life Reynolds was thirty-two. The Mysteries had solved his financial problems to this moment so his mental comfort zone was probably elevated. He had every reason to believe he could continue his success although the success of his future blockbuster, Mysteries of the Court of London might have astonished even him. At any rate he was relieved of youthful anxieties; he was successfully launched.
How he developed, or found time to develop his religious ideas isn’t obvious to me. Collins alleges that he did write a book of biblical criticism in 1833 when he was only 19 years old and would have had to have been in London at that time. At this point he has the North European abhorrence of the Catholic Church although an apparent strong belief in the existence of God or a deity, however, that could have been a front so as not to offend the reading public. His attitude toward the Moslem world seems to be a tolerant affection. Wagner makes a visit to then Constantinople, now Istanbul, a mere twenty-five years after the Christian capital fell to the Moslems. He forms connections and in order to free Florence from the dominion of the criminal gang he marches a Moslem army to Florence to do it. I must say I read that episode with a certain amount incredulousness.
One imagines that his fantasy was that he could unite the two worlds. The novel was placed in the years following 1516, a mere twenty-four years after the Moorish expulsion from Spain and the completion of the Reconquista. The Moslem slave raids probably hadn’t begun and from this time to 1830 when the French annexed Algeria and wiped out the Corsairs, the Moslem predations on the Mediterranean coast was constant. Eugene Sue’s The knight of Malta is a good representation of the situation and reads as well as Reynolds.
Sue, as Reynolds, was entranced with Byron’s epic poem The Corsair; the sentiments seem to coincide with their own. Indeed, The Knight of Malta can be read as Byron’s poem in novelized form. The opening lines of Byron establish the mental state:
Quote:
O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!
These are our realms, no limits to their sway—
Our flag the scepter all who meet obey.
Ours the wild life in tumult still to range
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Unquote.
To a large extent The Corsair forms a part of the mental equipment of all these early Victorian authors.
In addition to Christian and Moslem concerns one considers his evaluation of the Jews as an independent nation living in and on its host; this is difficult because Westerners have been indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that Jews are innocent victims. They are not, not in Hellenic times, not in Roman times and not in Medieval times and certainly not now. During early Christian times they were given the greatest boon that could be imagined: the monopoly of loaning money at interest. Christians, the Catholic Church, laid its congregation at the feet of the Jews to be exploited.
Do not believe that the Jews became money lenders because they were forced to. They have always been money changers. They did so on the porches of the temple where Jesus overturned their tables as sacrilegious. As usurers, even the simplest mind could easily figure out that the entire money supply must inevitably be in their hands. Nor did they loan on reasonable terms but at expropriatory rates of forty or fifty percent for a single day. The West was impoverished so that in Florence first, a State pawn shop was instituted to save both the State and its people financial grief. Other cities followed Florence’s example.
Thus Reynolds introduces us to the Jewish money lender, Issachar. Now, both Reynolds and Dickens had had their run in with Jewish damage controlmen. Dickens was disciplined over his Jewish character in Oliver Twist, Fagin. Reynolds had been dressed down for some remarks in Grace Darling.
Jewish emancipation from the rule of the Catholic Church had begun in France by Napoleon after 1800, by 1840 it was working its way through Central Europe. The Jews qua Jews didn’t become powerful until after Napoleon’s defeat and Nathan Rothchild’s capture of the English currency in 1815. As a result of England’s victory the Rothschilds were in the early stages of consolidating their power. Naturally one of the first steps was controlling the press and publishing, at that time the only effective means of disseminating information. By the time of Wagner Disraeli had published most of his novels and was becoming a power in the State. Both Dickens and Reynolds had heeded their chastening, Dickens submissively and Reynolds with his usual cheek.
Issachar is portrayed as the archetypal Yiddish money changer living in dirty squalid quarters but above the physical portrayal of the usual Jewish caricature he is lauded as the long suffering noble victim, a man of virtue unfairly maligned and Jews so for millennia. Thus Reynolds has fulfilled his obligation to laud the Jews. He describes Issachar as a man of integrity however Issachar is the biggest cheat and crook alive. Nisida’s mother had pawned the family diamonds with Issachar, however, Issachar without hesitation steals the diamonds replacing them with paste. The father being something of an expert immediately discovers the imposture. Issachar justifies himself in some unsatisfactory way and Reynolds blithely goes on about the long suffering Jews.
It is generally thought therefore that Reynolds was genuinely sympathetic to the Jews. I’m not sure that’s true. I think he was just doing to wise thing so he could go on publishing.
For story continuation, we have Wagner, a ninety year old man, living deep in the Black Forest of Germany with his beauteous grand-daughter. Reynolds is very keen on sixteen year old beauties. They abound in his stories. According to Dick Collins Reynolds married his wife Susannah when she was seventeen. Collins says Reynolds may have been her second husband, she having already been taken to wife at 14.
Clara, Wagner’s granddaughter and main support, disappeared one day no one knew where. Wagner is unable to support himself and about to expire when a demon appears offering to restore him to youth. This a much better deal than Satan offered Faust in the previous novel. All Wagner has to do is spend one day a month as a wolf. He knows the day because his fate is based on the lunar calendar. The contract ends when Wagner fails to honor it. As can easily be seen this, on the face of it is good deal, what makes it a great deal is Wagner also gets a substantial guaranteed annual income. Wagner may be old but he is no fool; he signs the deal.
Now a sprout of forty with cash in hand Wagner need no longer skulk about the woods of the Black Forest where all things strange happen. Anyone who is up with German stories of this period knows there are so many desperadoes haunting these woods that they are no place for a fun loving young Wehr Wolf. Wagner hies himself to Florence, Italy where the climate agrees with his clothes.
There he runs into his granddaughter Clara. It wasn’t easy to pass himself off to her as his grandfather but like any young guy of independent means Wagner is a smooth talker.
He then finds some digs and runs into Nisida, the daughter of a Lord who, in fact, turns out to be the reason that Clara disappeared from the Black Forest. He has persuaded the virtuous and beautiful Clara to abandon her virtue and become his secluded mistress. Daughter Nisida learns this determining to kill Clara and therein hangs the tale.
Reynolds throws in the description of some of Wagners transformations which are exciting and well done. On his monthly rampage Wagner merely tears through the countryside like a tornado.
The other part of interest is at the end when Wagner establishes contact with the Rosicrucian Order in Sicily. This perhaps establishes Reynolds’ own religious position. He is a Rosicrucian. He is said to have been a Deist so that fits. I rather accept that Rosicrucianism was his faith. Having studied the religion somewhat I consider myself a Rosicrucian also if one needs a label. And we all do.
Between 1844-48 then Reynolds has launched his career successfully with his Mysteries of London, worked through his French period and examined a major legend of Germany and Central Europe.
In Part III I will deal with Dickens early output in relation to Reynolds.
Eugenics and Dysgenics Pt. 2a: Actions and Reactions
July 3, 2018
Eugenics And Dysgenics Pt. 2a
Actions And Reactions
by
R.E. Prindle
The fabulous nineteenth century progressed from Enlightenment to sound scientific knowledge with an accelerating pace that meant that what was learned in one’s youth was passé in one’s maturity. Thus the knowledge of a sixty year old was out of date for a thirty year old. The eternities were disturbed. Initially overwhelmed, by century’s end the forces of reaction had had time to realign and offer challenges to the new world of knowledge even as their reaction to the new knowledge had been surpassed by newer more current knowledge.
It was in this state of confusion that the world entered the new even more rapidly evolving twentieth century that left the nineteenth century in the dust. And, this quick evolution was very unevenly distributed. It was shared by no other place on Earth than the US/Canada and Europe, that is the Aryan race. From those locations scientific knowledge began to be distributed by the Aryans throughout the world. Assimilation to the scientific knowledge was not easy and still has not been achieved.
As the Western world entered the Post WWI years the glories of what was called the Victorian Age, once revered, became despised. But they would reemerge in the twenty-first century as Steampunk.
One of the more interesting reactions came from the re-emergence of the Romantic era as the neo-Romantic era that flowered from nineteen-nineties through the outbreak of WWI and has persisted into the twenty-first century as science fiction, horror and fantasy- three different expressions of the demolished fairy world.
To return to the nineteenth century. The neo-Romantics could not return to the Land of Faerie unaffected by scientific achievements. The literature of the neo-Romantics was as beautiful as that of the Romantics. Several seminal works were to persist in influence through the twentieth century to the present. Of first magnitude was Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Published in 1886 it incorporated elements of the psychological unconscious that were then emerging. The story ranks among the most influential. Naturally there was a great difference in the dissemination of the story between the two centuries.
In the twentieth movies had come into existence and by 1927 the talkies began to replace silent films. This was revolutionary. With sound, movies came into their own. I’m sure a silent film of Jekyll and Hyde was made but it was the first sound version that gave the story universal distribution. Many versions and variations were made of Stevenson’s story some of which distorted the original story to the point of unrecognition. The original sound version is the one most people know, or knew. As that version is now nearly a hundred years old several generations may never have seen it except for film buffs. The novel version is quite different from all film versions.
Looking back toward the late Victorian Age the movie makers make Dr. Jekyll a rather stuffy academic type who, as a chemist, or possibly an alchemist, while experimenting discovers a drug that releases him from all inhibitions letting the evil or mostly evil unconscious of Jekyll emerge as Mr. Hyde
This in itself was an expression of the understanding of the unconscious. The discovery, or examination of the unconscious began with Dr. Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century and by Stevenson’s time in 1886 when his story was published was a well-known phenomenon among the cognoscenti. In Stevenson’s story Jekyll had been a wild and rowdy lad in his youth and longed to relive those golden days. Many drugs, including absinthe, were in use already in those days thus their effect on personality being noted so that Jekyll using some sort of concoction was able to remove his inhibitions with disastrous consequences.
Literary characters of dual personalities began to pop up everywhere. One duo, as influential as Stevenson’s was Conan Doyle’s marvelous creation of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. It isn’t noted that the two were complementary aspects of the same personality.
Perhaps the writer most devoted to the Jekyll-Hyde problem was the fantastic American late neo-Romantic writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
This extraordinary writer was perhaps at one and the same time the most Romantic, scientific, fantasy and horror or proto-sci-fi author of all time. He carried the Jekyll-Hyde story to new heights and wide variations.
In his first published novel, A Princess Of Mars, his chief character, John Carter, who had survived the split personality of the US in the Civil War as a Confederate officer, while running from an Indian war band of the post-civil war Western era stumbles on a cave of strange provenance where he abandons his body to be, one assumes, spiritually transmitted to Mars. Thus, this photo-copy of himself takes up a career on Mars while his body remains in the cave on Earth.
Another novel, one that made Burroughs’ life, Tarzan of the Apes, followed a year later. In this story Tarzan, or John Clayton, to give his civilized name, was born on the coast of Gabon in Africa to noble English parents who were killed by the ‘Great Apes’. These Apes are of no known species, perhaps they were meant as the Missing Link, a great evolutionary trope of the day when it was thought there was a single link between apes and humans that was missing.
Rescued from death by the ape Kala, who had lost her own ‘balu’ or baby, the baby Tarzan was reared as an ape. His ape name Tarzan thus means ‘white skin’ as opposed to the hairy black apes. While not exactly having super powers, yet Tarzan as a boy discovers his parents tree house containing a primer or two intended for John Clayton’s future education, he teaches himself through pictures and texts how to read and thus discovers he is not an ape at all but a human being. Thus in Jekyll and Hyde terms he becomes the Man-Beast. Stevenson’s novelette had been read by Burroughs who entered into the notion of dual personality whole heartedly. Thus, when wearing civilized clothing Tarzam is a cultured English lord but when he strips to the loin cloth he becomes an actual beast. Still intelligent but a sort of noble savage. Tarzan had other dual personalities. At one time a look alike named Esteban Miranda challenges him for the love of his wife while Tarzan is repeatedly bashed in the head at which he becomes a different amnesiac personality. Dual personality was a real fixation of Burroughs. He himself was cracked on the head at the age of twenty-two which definitely changed his own personality.
Burroughs was sort of an odd duck. He was a wide reader and the stories he read seemed to take on an independent existence in his head so that he apparently couldn’t differentiate his original story from a variation on someone else’s story so that in the sequel to Tarzan of the Apes, The Return of Tarzan, he retells Edgar Allan Poe’s story, The Murders In The Rue Morgue as his own. I’m not sure how his career survived that unless a very few of his readers had ever read Poe. Poe wasn’t especially well thought of at this time. However his editor Metcalf surely had. Metcalf rejected the novel but Return was later picked up by another magazine desperate for a Tarzan story.
Burroughs even titles his story ‘What Happened In The Rue Maule. Even though the source of Burroughs story is easily recognized in Poe’s story today still Burroughs manages his details in such a way that it seems a new and almost original story.
In Poe’s story the split personality is the lead character C. Auguste Dupin, the is CAD and the unnamed narrator. It should also be mentioned that Poe explored the dual personality in several of his stories of the 1830s-1840s including the remarkable William Wilson. Poe obviously suffered from a split personality.
In Burroughs’ story the suave cultured Tarzan now living in Paris, at the sight of blood reverts back to this savage upbringing among the apes, becoming a ravening beast. In Poe’s story an escaped Orang outang commits the murders, in what is essentially a locked room story and escapes.
In Burroughs story a hereditary enemy by the name of Rokoff sets up a situation to lure Tarzan into a building and apartment where there are a half dozen villains waiting to kill him. How Rokoff would know that Tarzan would be walking down the most villainess street in Paris, ask any policeman as Burroughs writes, isn’t adequately explained.
Nevertheless, hearing a woman’s screams of distress Tarzan rushed into the building, Rue Maule #27, third floor, Burroughs was always great at details, where in a sort of Badger game he discovers the woman and a roomful of villains. ‘Yoicks’ or something similar, he says, and the melee begins as Tarzan begins to demolish the mini mob out to injure him. Rokoff waiting outside quickly finds a phone, cell phones were not yet invented, while one is surprised to find one so easily available in Paris at this time. The point is that Rokoff calls the police to tell them there is a riot going on at #27, third floor. Still a savage beast although dressed in the height of fashion Tarzan flattens the cops, blows out the candle, phones being available in #27 but not electricity, and leaps out the window onto an adjoining telephone pole not unlike Poe’s Orang, scampers across the rooftops of Paris, as the telephone pole is taller than the third floor, similar to swinging through the jungle trees, drops to the ground, steps into a corner drug store to use the toilet to tidy up and wash his hands then, this is the word Burroughs uses, saunters, down the block just like any bored boulevardier. There you have Poe rewritten into a story only slightly inferior to the original.
Amazingly Poe’s story served as a basis for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes and Watson replacing Poe’s Dupin and narrator.
In this tremendously creative period another of the great genres persisting down till today was Bram Stoker’s incredible version of the vampire Dracula on which today’s versions of vampires are based. Stoker did not create the vampire character, there are earlier examples including Polidori’s short story that set the rage off. Among other versions Varney The Vampire a long novel by Rymer in mid-century really developed the theme and from blood sucking vampires, the psychic vampire also emerged. Our times’ Anne Rice had made a career out of vampire stories.
A creation of the first Romantic period, Mary Shelley’s man created life, Frankenstein and his monster, evolved into a whole genre of androids, robots and various forms of artificial humanity. Interestingly the ubiquitous Edgar Rice Burroughs offered his contribution of The Monster Men, as he covered almost all the modern genres adding The Mastermind Of Mars to the catalog of artificial life in the 1930s. He even managed to attach Henry Ford’s mass production methods to the process.
The reaction against the nineteenth century scientific revolution was epitomized by the Pre-Raphaelites of England. They were called Pre-Raphaelites because they rejected all society after the artist Raphael. Following in their tradition William Morris wrote a number of haunting nostalgia novels that are quite charming but overly sentimental.
Perhaps my favorite of the neo-Romantics is the English writer George Du Maurier and his three novels, Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian. Du Maurier himself was a Frenchman who was removed to England in youth causing a sort of split personality in himself. For a couple decades he made a name for himself writing and drawing for the great humor magazine of the period Punch. Then he was passed over when the editorship opened up; that was more than he could he bear. He quit and began writing his novels. Apparently his talents had been under appreciated at Punch as his great success took the magazines contributors by surprise.
The first novel, Peter Ibbetson was well thought of but didn’t establish him. His second, Trilby, was a smash mega seller influencing the Mauve Decade of the Nineties to its roots. His villain Svengali is still widely used to describe a person who seems to control another under the influence of hypnotism. Du Maurier died as his last novel, The Martian, was published. It is a lovely book. I like it, but it does not have the concentration of the first two. However it’s proto-sci-fi fantasy theme is very interesting for the right minds, overall the three are a great trilogy. A fourth was projected dealing with politics but the Grim Reaper came between it and Du Maurier.
George might be considered the arch-typical neo-Romantic. His influence is probably greater than realized. His themes have been reopened by writers like the great American novelist, Richard Matheson.
For Du Maurier memory was everything, and in his mind, that necessitated life after death or as he thought, what good was having accumulated them. His novels are monuments to memory. Born in 1834 he spent his childhood in France a childhood he turned into a fairyland; he was removed to England as a youth and the two national characters lived side by side in him as two almost distinct personalities. The writers of the first Romantic period fueled his memories, most notably the English poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron and the Frenchman Charles Nodier.
Nodier was the composer of the interesting short novel Trilby. In the 1890s Du Maurier would rewrite the story in his novel of the same name. In Nodier’s novel Trilby was male fairy who visited the girl Jeannie in Scotland. As Nodier was writing in the Romantic period that was a revival, a last gasp itself, as fairies had been disproven by science. So Jeannie having revealed the visits of the fairy Trilby to her, she was treated as deluded and compelled to give up her friend Trilby. Then she sickened and died.
In Du Maurier’s novel, Trilby, his middle or second novel, he reverses the sexes of the duo making Trilby a young woman and turning Trilby into the evil hypnotist, the Jewish Svengali.
The story is placed in Paris in the 1850s where Du Maurier was an artist living the Bohemian life in the classic age of Bohemianism. Du Maurier portrays an ideal beautiful fantasy life with boon companions and a carefree Bohemian existence. Trilby is a grisette or what might have been called a ‘hippie chick’ in our own 1960s, an artist’s model or whatever but virtuous unlike the other grisettes.
She and the Little Billee character of Du Maurier fall in love. Little Billee is modeled after his namesake in Thackeray’s poem of the same name. The romance is scotched when Little Billee’s aristocratic mother visits him and rejects Trilby as a daughter-in-law.
Another regular visitor to the atelier was a beteljew named Svengali. He was also a musician and musical theorist who played piano well. He noted that Trilby’s oral cavity was perfect for a great singer however Trilby couldn’t carry a tune and could scarcely hit a note. After her rejection by Billee’s mother, the gang breaks up with Billee and his friends returning to England.
A few vicissitudes find Trilby at the hypnotist Svengali’s door. Her oral cavity now belongs to him. Returning to his native precincts in Poland Svengali after hypnotizing Trilby makes her sing like a bird. To shorten the story, in a Jenny Lind like career, Trilby and Svengali take Europe by storm.
While visiting Paris Billee and friends reuniting for the moment, watch Trilby and Svengali’s triumphant entry into Paris. Svengali spots them watching and gives Little Billee a hard look. The shows were sold out so the trio missed them but were first in line for the London shows in the first box. Trilby could only sing while making eye contact with Svengali. He made the mistake of looking up to see Billee. A jealous rage overcame him, his eyes popped, he went apoplectic, croaking on the spot. Without eye contact Trilby returned to herself and could only croak off key and out of tune. The audience was merciless.
Trilby became sick and withered away. Her dying words were Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.
Thus, Nodier’s story was reversed and told in the most charming manner, neo-Romantically.
In the telling Du Maurier wove a lifetime of memories, musical and literary, reincorporated Bohemian Paris at its peak, a Jenny Lind type story at the end and the then current fascination with hypnotism. A thoroughly pleasing mix. He transfigures his life into a fairy tale.
Nearly the same fairy tale he used in his first book, Peter Ibbetson. I’m not sure I could call Ibbetson a great book but the three novels together are a sui generis. Events fit into a sci-fi context but yet are more ethereal, other worldly. Du Maurier’s inventions are really quite daring as he seeks to relate to reality yet evades it as much as he can, blending the inner with outer world in a tantalizing manner. Memory, always memory but a memory made immediate.
E.T.A. Hoffman’s introduction to his tale ‘A New Year’s Adventure’ explains the feeling better than I can:
Quote:
The Travelling Enthusiast from whole journals we are presenting another “fancy flight in the manner of Jacques Callot ,” apparently not separated the events of his inner life from those of the outside world; in fact we cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. But even if you cannot see the boundary very clearly, dear reader, the Geisterseher may beckon you to his side, and before you are even aware of it, you will be in a strange magical realm where figures of fantasy step right into your own life, and are as cordial with you as your oldest friends.
Unquote.
Du Maurier captures that feeling perfectly and if you enter into his fabulous story of memory and reality co-existing together seamlessly you will be carried along to a supreme adventure. E.T.A. Hoffman himself was from the first Romantic era, one of its stellar authors. The divine muses, Calliope and Clio, not only sat on his shoulders whispering, but entered his head and dictated his stories. I have no idea whether Du Maurier read Hoffman but Hoffmann was in the same time frame as Charles Nodier who wrote the first version of Trilby.
Du Maurier was familiar with the Romantic oeuvre. As with many nineteenth century writers Du Maurier was fascinated with the poems of Byron. He makes frequent references to the Giaour, one of Byron’s tales. The poem seems to be a central fixation guiding Du Maurier’s pen.
Peter Ibbetson tells the story of Ibbetson’s crime, his incarceration, his descent into madness and removal from prison to the Colny Hatch, where he lives his life out. In France Ibbetson grew up with a little girl named Seraskier. He loved her greatly and the separation from her when he was taken to England was quite painful to him. And then, as if by magic, as a grown man living with his cruel uncle he attends a ball to discover Seraskier as a grown woman, the Duchess of Towers. Of course, a married woman, she is unobtainable but they begin a platonic love affair.
But then, Peter’s nasty uncle raises Peter’s ire and in a fit of anger Peter bludgeons him to death. He himself is condemned to be hanged but through the efforts of the Duchess of Towers and her powerful friends his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. It is in prison that he loses control being transferred to the insane asylum.
It is while there that he discovers that he can enter the Duchess’s dreams and she can enter his, and this is done on real terms and not imagination. They actually physically interact. He now lives to sleep and enter the alternate reality of his dreams shared with the Duchess. In a carefully elaborated system the two can travel anywhere they know having been there or do anything they have done in the outside world in the past. Thus memory is everything. The inner and outer worlds become one.
She is still married so that the relationship is platonic until her husband dies, and Peter and the Duchess can be lovers. Happy in his insane asylum where his sanest dreams are realized. Peter is supremely happy but then one night as he snuggles into bed drifting off to dreamland a terrible thing happens, as he reaches the portal from his dream to hers he finds it blocked, boarded up. With a cold shiver he realizes the truth, the Duchess has died.
Having completely entered this world of Du Maurier’s I broke down in tears along with Peter. Of course his sanity or insanity is jarred and he collapses. But whatever gods may be had pity on Peter. As in ancient days they let the Duchess return to Peter’s dream to console him and promise him that they would be together eternally. One assumes then that in death Peter found the happiness that had eluded him in life.
Today the theme has been explored in many variations, notably in Richard Matheson’s Somewhere In Time and also his What Dreams May Come. I have no idea whether Matheson read Du Maurier but it is not improbable. Time has passed now and Victorian literature no longer holds the place it then did but Matheson was born well before me and for my age cohort there was no literature taught written after 1914 so there’s no reason Matheson wouldn’t have been familiar with a range of Victorian authors unread today.
Du Maurier’s story at the time was as original as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written a few years before. While The Martian, the last of the trilogy, is perhaps the weakest of the three it too is very innovative in a proto-sci-manner. It too is a memory capsule centered around the loss of vision in one of George’s eyes. The loss seems to have been the result of a torn retina. Given the knowledge of the time there was no hope to save the eye but even then he fell in with a medical quack.
But, just as Ibbetson went to prison and the asylum and in the process discovered how to meld dreams with the Duchess of Towers, in this story he is contacted by a little fairy from Mars, the Martian of the story also named Martia. She attaches herself to the protagonist Barty Josselin. She is sort of a female Wandering Jew (another great European legend) who for centuries has been attaching herself to men as a sort succubus.
Her term as a Wandering Fairy is up. She is intensely in love with Barty so she arranges to become his next child who is a little girl he names Marty. At a young age Marty dies and Barty dies both souls are released at the same time so that together with Barty’s memories they continue the journey after death to the heart of the sun.
Beautiful story, longingly told.
The neo-Romantic period coincided with the apex of European power in history as Europe had conquered the seas and continents of the entire world; all its peoples were its subjects. But, as always happens the moment of triumph begins the descent. Even in the first decade of the twentieth century there were those who knew that European power was in decline and then the Great War cut it short. The passing was commemorated in the American Madison Grant’s great book: The Passing Of The Great Race. Before it did a great literature was written, written in the neo-Romantic style, in a sort of fair land style. The scramble for Africa had brought nearly the whole monstrously huge continent under European control, a blessing and a curse. In European writing it is depicted as a sort of wondrous fairyland.
Europe produced three great epics over its two thousand year span, the sprawling epic of which the Iliad and Odyssey are part, the huge Arthurian cycle and finally the search for the source of the Nile that embraces the discovery of Africa. Why the last should be true isn’t clear.
The real life adventure was looking back at it the incredible search for the source of the Nile. England bent its energies on the search for the exact spot from which the flow of the White Nile trickled. Huge sums were spent and men devoted their very lives in the search and it produced a great literature. The solo adventures of Samuel Baker and his slave, also his wife, purchased in Hungary. The fabulous safaris of Henry Morton Stanley spanning tens of thousand of miles, his books reading like improbable adventure novels even far surpassing them while his own life was stranger than fiction. Perhaps his life is only believable as fiction. Disparaged now because they speak of a far gone time and even more ancient expectations and attitudes.
Kipling wrote of the Indian Raj when a few thousand Englishmen controlled a sub-continent. Joseph Conrad wrote his tales of the daring adventurers who seized Asian kingdoms.
Perhaps the greatest of all were the novels of the English writer H. Rider Haggard. He, the author of two of the greatest neo-Romantic adventure novels, King Solomon’s Mines and single word title She. The title in full: She-who-must-be-obeyed.
The neo-Romantic period also saw the re-emergence of esotericism. It burst into full bloom in Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and her creation of Theosophy. It burst too late to be an influence on Haggard, at least his early career but Haggard seems to be fully conversant with its ideas. The novel She itself is said to be a perfect expression of Theosophy and that from Madame Blavatsky herself.
African romance after African romance rolled out of his pen, all of very high quality. Haggard commemorated the notion of the Elephant’s Graveyard that fascinated generations up until perhaps the 1950s when the legend lapsed into infinity. One doesn’t hear of it anymore.
The Imperial novels of that time while still heard of are definitely out of favor. More people wish it had never existed than care to remember it and explore its remains. More people would rather visit holocaust museums and gaze at the ashes of dead bodies.
However, Romanticism has continued to evolve. Many of the best stories of the pre-WWI era passed into the realm of boys’ stories laying their riches at the feet of a couple three or four generations of lucky boys. Many also were preserved in the nascent talkie film industry, versions preserved on reels of film.
And still the need for the Land of Faerie persisted and Romanticism took a new turn scarcely recognized for what it was. Science had left that empty space that had to be filled. The Land of Faerie had to be reorganized. At first Mars replaced the Land of Faerie, seemingly safe at least 30 million miles distant from Earth and at other time half across the solar system. Martian stories began to make their appearance precisely during the neo-Romantic period. There was still room to speculate as high powered telescopes were still to be perfected. Camille Flammarion and Perceval Lowell could still write of dead seas and canals on Mars. The last of the neo-Romantics, Edgar Rice Burroughs, could still exploit faerie kingdoms on Mars but that could only last until the killer telescopes were developed.
The Universe began to expand rapidly through the twenties and thirties. As late as 1950 it was thought that the Universe was as small as 450,000 light years. But then it exploded through millions and hundreds of millions of light years and on into the billions. Mars was no longer tenable as a Fairy refuge. Ray Bradury wrote his Martian Chronicles and in the last chapter all the fairy tale characters were driven from their last refuge into oblivion.
About this time however Flying Saucers made their appearance. Is there anything more Fairy than Flying Saucers? Think about it. The alien abductions began; we discovered that we were being watched by little green men from distant planets and galaxies. Little green fairies? In the wonderful sci -fi of the Fifties writers worked up incredible scenarios. It was imagined that aliens from perhaps billions of light years away had exhausted their own mineral resources and wished to remove ours to their planets. The most imaginative of the sci-fi writers going by the name of William Tenn even posited that the inhabitants of the star Betelgeuse were building a bridge, a sort of conveyer belt from there to here to convey the resources. The logistics of that were too much for my young mind.
At that time also, the first few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki radio active fall out was creating all kinds of monsters, human and otherwise, Giant Crabs came forth, fifty foot men, even the greatest of them all, matching Frankenstein, The Creature From The Black Lagoon. After Bikini and Eniwetok anything was possible.
Aliens landed, as in The Day The Earth Stood Still, to check out Earth’s suitability to join the Intergalactic Peace League. This was shortly after WWII and during the Korean War so naturally the savage earth people were found wanting and not needed to disturb the peace prevailing throughout the intergalactic League. So, aliens, in this case Klaatu and Gort, hopped back in their Saucer leaving us with the admonition that they would check back in a few thousands of years to see if we had evolved.
Meanwhile, perhaps hundreds of saucers hovered over Earth from near space carefully observing us, occasionally crashing, once near Roswell, New Mexico where the search for the wreckage still goes on. Abductions continued.
A parallel development that was as influential as the space operas was the development of the super heroes. Perhaps the first of the super heroes were creations of the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs with his creations of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Carter coming from the heavier gravity and atmosphere of Earth had actual super powers on Mars while if Tarzan didn’t actually have super powers he could certainly do what no other human beings could do.
But, Time does not have a stop, or even stand still. Science and technology were rapidly moving ahead, especially in the print medium. Comic strips in the newspapers had been around from the 1890s but in the early thirties some genius invented what would become the graphic novel today, that is comic books. The comics were turned into illustrated four color folders at a dime a piece. How the comic book would have developed isn’t clear. Since super heroes such as the Shadow and the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage had arisen to compete with the like of John Carter and Tarzan something extra was needed for the comic books, fortunately for the idiom a man named Adolf Hitler had assumed he governance of Germany. Adolf Hitler was a bete noir of the Jews and he stimulated their imagination in the US so that in 1938 the first issue of Superman (original title Action Comics) was released and the super hero with truly upper human powers and the very latest scientific gadgets came into existence. Batman, Capt. America and a host of others followed on the heels of Superman while WWII which started supplied prime grist for the comic book mill. The comics were a Jewish enterprise and the super heroes were therefore Jewish. And under the care of the very Jewish Stan Lee have remained so down to this day.
Aiding the super hero phenomenon since translated to film was the emergence of more science in the form of CGI (Computer Generated Images). With that addition the impossible could be made visible so that the human mind no longer had to grapple with mere reality. It conquered reality. Neo-Reality had arrived. Perhaps Faerieland had won after all.
Put all the above together and a new alternate reality or Land of Faerie had been created to fill he void left when Science had destroyed the possibility of the old Land of Faerie, even on Mars. The Universe was huge and there was no way to either prove or disprove the universe of Star Trek, a place where no man had gone before or was likely to go in the future. So, that fairyland is secure.
The Land of Faerie was only one imagined realm that had to be dealt with, there was also the imagined kingdom of God or the gods that was challenged out of existence. That in Part 2b to follow.
Magic, The Land Of Faerie And The Liberal Mind
April 4, 2018
Magic, The Land Of Faerie
And The Liberal Mind
The March-April Issue Of Foreign Affairs:
A Discussion
by
R.E. Prindle
-1-
The March-April issue of Foreign Affairs arrived and once again it is dedicated to the denunciation of President Trump. As is well known Foreign Affairs is the propaganda arm of the Council On Foreign Relations. The CFR is not merely an informational service, it is also a potent influence within the government of the United States. Many members have even served as President of the United States. In fact, the last four presidents covering twenty-four consecutive years, that is Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama and had Hillary Clinton been placed a full twenty-eight, possible thirty-two years. Time enough to indoctrinate two and half generations.
Thus it was a bitter disappointment for them when Donald Trump made a run around end to win the White House. His mere candidacy had unleashed an unceasing barrage of hatred and since he has been under siege defending himself against innumerable CFR sappers. The March-April issue continues the assault. The five themed articles under the heading Letting Go are: Trump’s Lucky Year, Why the Chaos Can’t Last, The World After Trump, How The System Can Endure, The Rise Of Illiberal Hegemony: Trump’s Surprising Grand Strategy, The Post-American World Economy: Globalization In The Trump Era and Giving Up The High Ground: America’s Retreat On Human Rights.
As is evident the Liberal ‘system’ that the CFR presidents were putting in place and which would have been completed by the election of Hillary Clinton has been disrupted by the election of Donald Trump who is, in fact, dismantling the whole Liberal CFR system. Hence, an article on how the system can endure, one imagines, behind the scene: the so-called Dark Government.
This raises the question of what beyond specific goals as outlined in Foreign Affairs is the Liberal mind set. In the larger scope of human history to what psychological reality, Weltanschauung motivates the Liberal mind.
Many theories have been advanced about the motivating forces that direct human activity. The Hegelian/Marxist view is of course based on economics. But underlying theories such as Marxism is the fundamental dichotomy of the spiritual vs. the material. The fantasy of life vs. the reality. The Liberal utopian based ‘spirituality’ vs. the Conservative naturalistic based view of reality. The soft-headed vs. the hard-headed.
In many ways the Liberal mind is magical in nature. The Liberal desires and magically creates a reality that assumes that the desire is fact.
Thus Adam S. Posen who wrote the article The Post-American World Economy: Globalization in the Trump Era projects on the one hand the desire of the Liberal post-WWII system while on the other unconsciously contrasts the reality. The very title The Post-American World Economy contradicts the assumption that the Post-WWII US world order is still in operation. So, possibly, Trump is merely destroying the Liberal mental fantasy. Negating the magic. Post-American posits an end to the US domination and, indeed, under Obama the CFR destroyed the dominant role of the US with the result that a number of more or less equals are now jockeying for position.
Mr. Posen begins his article with the illusory view of this so-called seventy year post-war Liberal world order.
In the aftermath of World War II the United States set about building a global, rules base economic order. At the heart of the order it put the Liberal values of free trade backed up by U.S. power and bolstered by its growing legitimacy among other countries, prevented most economic disputes from escalating into mutually destructive trade wars, let alone military conflict. That allowed even the smallest and poorest countries to develop their social and economic potential without having to worry about predation by strange neighbors. By taking much of the fear out of the global economy, the U.S. led order allowed market decisions to be driven by business not bullying.
Adam S. Posen, The Post-American World
Economy: Globalization in the Trump
Era, pp 28-38
Having been present at the creation and having lived through the whole period in varying degrees of cognizance, I can tell you that the above view of the seventy years is contradicted fully by my own experience and understanding.
The problems of our times have become more difficult. The fantasy of the American Century has passed. It is no longer about ‘things’ but one of attitudes of which most that are held are not realistic. There is at the base of the matter still the conflict between the ‘spiritual’ and the materialist views; that is, the longing for the magical supernatural Land of Faerie vs. Science , or the reality of matter, or put another way religion vs. science. Let us review the evolution of human consciousness.
-2-
One must assume that early man was as unconscious as are wild animals today. In other words, early man had no rational explanation for external reality. And this extends back into hundreds of thousands, millions, of years of pre-Homo Sapiens existence. Presumably the more recent nomenclature homo sapiens, wise or knowledgeable man, indicates the beginning of consciousness of the world outside the mind. As it took until the twentieth century before psychologists began to significantly understand the working of the human mind it can be easily seen that the learning process was long and slow. Man was barely conscious of either his own mind or the world outside his mind, working with very little true knowledge he came up with some pretty bizarre explanations of how things functioned.
He invested all animate and inanimate objects with life and sensation. Thus he created the supernatural and the natural. The world was filled with invisible beings both good and bad. Gods and Devils, Faeries, Elves, Gnomes, Elementals. The air was packed with demons and angels and what have you. This was true down to and including the beginning of history and well beyond, even into the nineteenth century. Gods came and went, old gods died, gods who failed in their duties were discarded or transformed. Each people had their own gods. In the clash of peoples and therefore gods, peoples went under and with them their gods.
In this mental context I would like to examine the period in European history from 1100 to 1300, a very critical and rich period in Europe and the Middle East that would eventually affect the world when the European diaspora took place from c. 1400 to the beginning of the twentieth century.
By1300 the Catholic, that is the Universal, Church was the dominant supernaturally based force in Europe and the ME- Middle East. In order to confirm its position it had to eliminate all other supernatural belief systems. This was no easy task as other supernatural beliefs systems had the same credibility as the Christian and the Catholic Church was never completely successful. This was a wonderful period and I hope I can successfully display it with some justice.
There were many competing supernatural belief systems competing at this time, many remnants of old decayed and dying gods as well as their successors trying to establish themselves against the dominant Catholic Church.
The old Greco-Roman systems still survived in out the way places and pockets and even in the popular mind. The old Egyptian systems had been mutating since the Assyrian invasions of the seventh century BC. No longer with a national State to support the religion it had infiltrated Christianity to a degree and went on mutating over the centuries but was still a potent force as an element of the Catholic faith.
Of course the backbone of Catholicism came from the Jewish religious system through Christianity. The Catholic Church took over Jewish religious sites wholesale. Thus the erstwhile Jewish capital of Jerusalem became the holiest site of Christianity in Europe. With the founding of the Mohammedan religion of Arabia the so-called Holy City fell into non-Jewish-Christian hands.
As Europe reorganized and became somewhat unified under the Carolingian kings of France, the idea of the Holy City in Moslem hands became intolerable in Church eyes and so just prior to 1100 the Church instigated the idea of liberating Jerusalem giving the period under consideration the name of the Crusades.
This was done for supernatural reasons. On the European side one was under God and on the Moslem side one was under their deity who went by the name of Allah. Thus one had the War of the Gods.
The ME had always been a hotbed of competing supernatural religious ideas. Innumerable Gods and Goddesses. Some intriguing mental projections in the bargain. Generally speaking few if any had completely disappeared. If the actual religion has been suppressed the guiding ideas lived on.
The human mind has continued to evolve, that is consciousness, so that the internal unconscious mind has been enlightened toward a correct appreciation of the external world. That is, as Freud expressed it, the personality or mind is integrated when consciousness has illuminated the unconscious. The period under consideration was an important period in the evolution of consciousness. It should be remembered that any of these imaginary beings had equal validity in the consciousness of people of the times. God or Faerie, same thing.
The Aryan Land of Faerie has as much a claim to reality as did the God of the Jews, Isis of the Egyptians, Cybele, the God of the Christians, however as Jews and Christians were dominant the other imaginary deities were not disproved but ridiculed and suppressed. Thus, in this tremendous period of the Christian crusades to recapture the religious capital of Jerusalem there were many unintended consequences. The Crusades opened the gates to admit ideas from the other suppressed belief systems. Thus, the Cathar religion of Manichean sympathies had migrated West from Iran through the Balkans to gain a firm foothold in Southern France, also known as the Occitan.
This was a large trans-Alpine area including the Aquitaine. This area fostered the romances of King Arthur and the Round Table which was a Faerie kingdom. A land of magic and enchantment both anathema to Judeo-Christianity. The wonderful romances, far outshining the dull Jewish bible, were developed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Thus the Catholic Church was confronted by a number of competing belief systems. The Cathar problem was solved in the midst of the Middle Eastern crusades by a crusade against the Cathars. A genocidal war against the unfortunate Cathars was conducted by the French at the instigation of the Church. This involved an actual man hunt to destroy the Cathars root and branch. Apparently the Church remembered the Amalekites.
That solution was really easy for the Church but the Arthurian romances that involved England, France, Germany and associated peoples could not be dealt with so easily. Indeed, when the main assault came against the Church it would come from the three countries mentioned. They required boring from within, co-opting the ideology. Catholic writers thus chose to change the direction of the romances from a warrior cult to one of a quest for spiritual perfection. This was achieved through the introduction of the character of Galahad, the son of the nearly perfect but flawed knight, Lancelot of the Lake.
At the same time a French series of works called the Chansons de Geste- Songs of Adventure- were written to discredit the Land of Faerie. A key text along this line was an amazing story titled Huon of Bordeaux. Bordeaux was a key Cathar city, sort of the Faerie capital, bordering the the key Cathar stronghold of Mont Segur. Galahad ascended to heaven from that stronghold along with the Holy Grail to lay the Arthurian threat to rest.
Huon of Bordeaux introduces the king of the Faerie Land, Oberon. Oberon and God are in a contest to see which would most successfully aid Huon in his quest to exonerate himself from a punishment imposed by the ninth century king of France, Charlemagne. Bear in mind this was a contest between two imaginarily real gods, God and Oberon, king of the Faeries.
Huon, had violated chivalric protocol by successfully defending himself against Charlemagne’s evil son, killing him in the process. Charlemagne then banishes Huon, allowing him back only if he succeeds in a number of seemingly impossible feats in the Holy Land against a Moslem king. Huon doesn’t have a prayer, however passing through a forbidden forest in the Holy Land he is confronted by Oberon, king of the Faeries. This is equivalent to running into the Catholic God. Oberon, after extracting a number of vows, gives Huon a horn which if blown in dire straits Oberon will appear with a hundred thousand troops to rescue him. Huon is cautioned to never use it unless his situation is beyond redemption otherwise.
Huon is the light-headed sort so he blows the horn to test it. Oberon appears with his 100K troops but is miffed because Huon didn’t follow instructions. In any event Huon through Oberon’s aid performs the impossible tasks Charlemagne set him and returns to Bordeaux before returning to Paris and the king’s court as instructed. Another boo-boo in a long string of boo-boos. Huon could have been the prototype of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan.
While absent from his home his brother Gerard had usurped his role and now refuses to give it up. Further adventures intervene but Charlemagne in the end comes to Bordeaux to receive evidences of Huon’s successes. Huon is unable to produce them as his brother has stolen them from him. At this time Oberon appears and magically exonerates Huon. As God had done nothing to help Huon one would think Oberon to be judged the greater than God but Huon irrationally chooses the ineffective God over Oberon even after Huon abdicates his kingship, and renounces Faerieland appointing Huon his successor. Right. Even though now King of Faerie Land Huon chooses to live happily ever after in his domain of Bordeaux while God is declared he victor in the contest with Oberon.
Meanwhile the Church was capturing the Arthurian Faerie Land so that as the fourteenth century began the Cathars, Faeries and the real life Knights Templar who had been associated with the Cathars had been disposed of. The Jews were suppressed and the Church and God were seemingly in control. However in the fifteenth century Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, was to fall to the Moslems releasing even more heretical ideas against the Catholic ideology that would result in the Enlightenment during which the European mind matured to the point where the scientific assumed prominence and scientific investigation began to reveal the true state of Nature. This development destroyed the basis of supernatural thinking placing all forms of the fantastic into defensive positions or beyond into fiction.
The Jews abandoned the idea of God, the Catholics refused to accept reality and Europeans who cherished the Faerie forced to blend the Faerie with science. That is to say, turn Faerie lands into fiction. Thus the Romantic Age took form in
Science continued to remove the Veil of Isis revealing nature to the human mind. The next big test was Darwin’s formulation of Evolution. The concept had been discussed for a hundred years previously but Darwin wrote the words that condensed evolutionary theory into fact. Romantics who had been holding on were now forced to adapt further. This adaptation produced the Second or Neo-Romantic who struggled in the face of scientific realities.
An interesting development occurred. Mankind refused to give up the supernatural. It would appear that the terrors of the real world required an imaginary refuge in which things could be controlled. Thus a transition from an imagined heaven or Faerie land began a conversion to an other world (parallel universe) that while equally unrealizable was equally comforting. The Pre-Raphaelites reached back into the past to idealize the world before the artist Raphael. From that beginning it blossomed into late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels. Among many others were the reactionary works of William Morris and the futuristic novels of the near great George Du Maurier. Du Maurier brought forward the Faerie projected into the future in a sort of science fiction.
In the US, L. Frank Baum created a modern fairy tale in his Land of Oz stories. This also meshed with the English Ruritanian novels of Anthony Hope and the US interpreter George Barr McCutcheon.
All these threads including Rider Haggard’s romantic African fantasies were brought together in the novels of the American Edgar Rice Burroughs. While not thought of as a Neo-Romantic, Burroughs was probably the greatest of the lot.
As a result of a brain injury as a young man Burroughs was capable of disappearing into his brain world to create amazing fictional realities.
His scientific background and romantic projections are nearly perfect blends. In his Tarzan series he employs Africa as a geographic reality but then transforms it into a romantic fairyland that could never exist. In his own way Burroughs character Tarzan is a reinvention of Oberon. This confused a lot of readers who insisted that the real Africa differed from Burroughs’ imaginary Africa. No contest.
For instance, Burroughs wanted to have tigers in Africa so he wrote them in to his Faerie Land. The magazine version of Tarzan of the Apes had tigers and made the story truly fabulous. However readers, being literal when their imaginations failed to embrace the flights of Burroughs’ fancy forced the writer to change the tigers to lions thereby wrecking the Faerie land Africa, this alternate reality that Burroughs wished to create. Burroughs himself was heavily influenced by the fairy tales of L. Frank Baum, with whom he became great friends, so that if you’ve read Baum and keep Oz in mind while reading Burroughs the stories take on an added dimension.
Burroughs didn’t stop with Tarzan and Africa but out of the same mind during the same period created another fairly land on Mars and another at the Earth’s core honoring the fabulous hollow Earth notion. Thus three complete Faerie lands.
Of course, there was already a fairly large body of Mars and space travel stories in existence but they took a fairly clumsy approach and turned it into a whole something else, sensational, perhaps, for the moment but without enduring appeal.
At the same time, early teens of the twentieth century, a man named Hugo Gernbach was taking science fiction to a whole new level beyond Burroughs that would result in the fantastic blossoming of sci-fi in the nineteen-fifties.
This was truly a romantic recreation of Faerie Land. Worlds beyond comprehension; the transformation of the Little Folk into space aliens of every description with their human counterparts. The true nature of sci-fi has been little appreciated.
The neo-Romantics of the second period also created the horror and fantasy genres that would dominate literature along with sci-fi. The two greatest and most enduring creations were the Frankenstein of Mary Bysshe Shelley of the first Romantic period and the greatest of the monsters, Bram Stoker’s vampire Dracula. Vampire stories had been around since Shelley’s friend Dr. Polidori wrote his short vampire piece. Varney the Vampire had made his appearance in mid-century England, attributed to Rymer but Stoker’s sensational novel formed the template for all future vampire stories including those of Anne Rice who was or is totally obsessed by the genre. Thus the supernatural transformed into quasi-scientific reality has survived to the present.
The Liberal mind evolved out of the Judeo-Catholic religious sphere, more specifically influenced by the Jewish aspects of the Old Testament, most especially by the notion of a people elected by god to rule mankind in his name. The notion is essentially amoral.
As the Jews are supposed to be creating God’s will on Earth, bringing his rule to all people they believe that means by any means necessary. That notion includes the elimination of whole peoples who may stand in the way of that realization. Thus the great Liberal novelist Victor Hugo would explain in his novel 1793 the advent of the new perfect Liberal world can never be achieved so long as ‘obstructionists’ live so that Liberals are justified in killing tens or hundreds of million or even a billion in what would be a vain attempt to eliminate differences of opinion.
Thus, today, we have the Liberals hoping, praying for the deaths of ‘old’ people who they fancy stand in the way of the realization of their utopia, while they imagine all people under say fifty are guided one mindedly by their utopian ideal.
On the other hand, Jews, Negroes and others believe that the whole White population of a billion people must be eliminated before their dreams can be realized. It was believed by them that their dream was approaching realization in this 2016 election.
This hope was upset by the maverick Donald Trump. Trump’s election set the Liberals off on a disappointed frenzy. Hence, Foreign Affairs issue Volume 97 no. 2 is devoted to expressing their disappointment by denouncing now President Trump.
Thus of the five articles under the collective Letting Go, three are definitely written by Jews, Eliot A. Cohen, Barry R. Posen and Adam S. Posen. The female contributor Sarah Margon is also Jewish. The only possible non-Jewish contributor is Jacob Sullivan, possibly of Irish derivation. As these articles are all assigned, that is written on hire, Sullivan may be assumed to be compliant.
It is evident therefore that the Jews are behind the extreme anti-Trump movement. While Trump seems to be obligated and subservient to the Jews for financial reasons their extreme opposition can only be based on the fact that Trump has taken a course independent of Jewish hopes and dreams.
The Jews, then, forming the core beliefs and fantasies of the Liberals give full and open access to the Liberal mind. The Liberals consider themselves to be justified sinners, the elect chosen by god to bring his heaven, his perfection to Earth as in heaven. There is no dissuading them, no ameliorating their extreme beliefs. They can only be quarantined or suppressed much as they hope to murder all opposition.
There is no room for discussion or compromises. Either they win or non-believers win. There is no other option.
I, Dynamo 