Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lew Sweetser And The Sword Of Theosophy
November 16, 2022
Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Lew Sweetser And The Sword Of
Theosophy
by
R.E. Prndle
Originally published in Bill and Sue-On Hillman’s Erbzine
One of the more interesting subjects broached by the Bibliophiles in the recent past is the influence of Esoterica on the writing of ERB. The positive side of the argument has been taken up by Dale Broadhurst and David Adams while being strenuously opposed by Robert Barrett. I have to side with the former two.
Mr. Broadhurst in his series of essays on the ERBzine- The Sword Of Theosophy- proposed that ERB was rather strongly influenced by Mormonism among other esoteric religious thought systems. This took me back a little as my th9ughts hadn’t wandered in that direction. But as I began searching for contacts the idea became more probable.
As so often when we’re looking for sources or influences we sometimes go too far afield. I had an accession of older Borroughs Bulletins just before Christmas from a kindly gentleman and genuine benefactor of mankind. I edit his name out as I’m sure he wishes to remain anonymous.
Among the copies was #19 Summer 1994 which contained an article by the astute Burroughs scholar, Philip R. Burger titled: “Sweetser And The Burroughs Boys.” While looking far afield for esoteric and psychological sources there was a very important one right under my nose. Sweetser was one od those guys who should have gone far. He actually rose fairly high but just couldn’t grasp the handle. From a couple good starts in life he ran downhill until he died lonely and broke in Los Angeles lamenting the disappearance of the frontier. Well, those were the good old days.
Sweetser and Burroughs brother Harry were the real friends while brother George T, Jr. joined up. After the gold dredging and cattle ranching went smash Sweetser put his hand to as many jobs as ERB is credited with.
What caught my eye was that in the twenties Sweetser was a lecturer on esoteric subjects heavily tinged with psychology. He had stage show. On page 19 Burger quotes Sweetser: “Everyone of us has a subconscious mind and it is through suggestion to this subconscious mind, either by ourselves or by others, that our destinies are controlled.” There he had psychology in a nutshell which he had apparently imparted to a young, impressionable Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Sweetser’s act was billed as a hypnotist aided by a trained psychic. A complete course in the esoteric.
When a young and impressionable ERB went West for the first time in 1889, in addition to the sensory overload of life on the range, he came into contact with Lew Sweetser fresh from Yale where one assumes he must have taken a psychology course or two thus combining a scientific approach with esoteric ideas. I should like to have heard his lectures.
As there was no television or radio to blot out conversation the only entertainment on those long cold evenings was each other. All one could do was shoot the breeze. In the same issue on page 29 is a picture of the assembled families on the houseboat. They were gathered for an evening of talk. Of interest, out there in the wilds of Idaho, they are all dressed as for a night out. Hair up, nice clothes. Apparently the Burroughses were not going to sacrifice genteel Yale manners to frontier exigencies. If you have a copy note the Yale banner on the right wall. They also named their town Yale.
A young Sweetser and Harry Burroughs bubbling over with ideas acquired at college would not be shy discussing them with young ERB. As they were living in Mormonland with Salt Lake City not too far distant one imagines that the bizarre doctrines of Joseph Smith and his followers would be a constant topic of conversation. After all it hadn’t been too long before that Brigham Young had brought the folk to the shores of the Great Salt Lake and asked them: “What do you think?”
Congress was passing a law banning polygamy thus restricting the practice of the Morman religion.
Now, the area of New York from which Joseph Smith began his Western migration was a hotbed of esoteric discussion. I avoid the word occult because od its associations with Satanism. Occult merely means hidden or secret. The esoteric thinkers are occult but have no more association with satanism than the exoteric churches.
When the Rhineland Germans emigrated to the United States they were devotees of the esotericists Jacob Boehm and Meister Eckhart. There was a lot of Rosicrucianism and Paracelsus doctrine in their beliefs. As they settled in Pennsylvania and became the Pennsylvania Dutch they and their doctrines spread up into New York.
Thus Joseph Smith learned a lot of this alternative religious blather. This was the same sort of speculation that Madam Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophic movement, incorporated into her doctrines. The first volume of her book, Isis Unveiled, is concerned with rapping and table turning. This sort of mediumship arose in the same area from which Joseph Smith migrated
Thus ERB would have been reasonably well informed on these doctrines at a young age. His interest already piqued, it is to be expected that he would leave an attentive ear open for additional information. There was a copy of a book by the leading Theosophist, William Q. Judge, who died in 1896, in ERB’s library.
Then in 1898 on his second sojourn, now a man with a man’s mind, his contact with Sweetser and brother Harry were renewed. In August of 1898, now 23 years old, Burroughs took a trip to the Mormon capital ostensibly for business purposes but perhaps to see the temple and discuss things with Mormons on their home turf.
Who knows what weird stories he imbibed as Mr.. Broadhurst suggests.
Then, once again at the end of his third Idaho sojourn, this time n company with his wife Emma, he spent several months in the capital of Mormonism.
So that, regardless of whether he actually read Maame B. I think it obvious that he was fairly conversant with esoteric doctrines of one sort or another while through Lew Sweetser his interest in hypnotism, the subconscious and psychology was aroused.
As these interests were expressed in his writing before Sweetser began lecturing about them, of which ERB must have known nothing, it is more than probable that his first theosophical information was acquired at the feet of Lew Sweetser and brother Harry quite early in life.
Thanks to Philip R. Burger, Dale Broadhurst and David Adams who approach this subject with open minds; with a little effort we may make that theosophical or esoteric connection clear. I’ll do my bit.
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.
The Remarkable Case Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Eyes
November 24, 2017
The Remarkable Case Of
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Eyes
by
Dr. Anton Polarion
Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest…in order that the creations of our mind should be a blessing and not a curse for mankind.
–Albert Einstein
In 1953 a sci-fi novel was published by Arthur C. Clarke which he entitled ‘Childhood’s End.’ I read it only a couple years ago and while I don’t believe I got his point the story has haunted my imagination since then. In the novel he depicts a situation in which the first phase of evolution has flowered, and a second phase is about to begin out of the blown flower or the seed of the first.
Just after the end of WWII Clarke may well have believed than an old order of evolution had matured and a new one was beginning. His symbolism notwithstanding it is clear the evolution was not beginning a new phase, unless he knew something he wasn’t telling, but it is possible to view the post-war period as a culminating point in the historical continuum.
Writers are frequently more sensitive to such shifts than other people. Assuming that the historical continuum had at least transited its first phase, as I do, and was in fact beginning a new phase, which I only postulate, then it is possible to review the historical evolution of mankind and its various sub-special components as completed units. I intend to place Edgar Rice Burroughs in his place in that historical continuum.
Now let us by a feat of Wells/Einsteinian legerdemain roll the paper into a cylinder and step across the seam into that earlier phase of the historical continuum.
For tens of thousands of years the flow of the historical continuum appeared to be nearly as even and uninterrupted as the flow of the mighty Congo from the immense distance of Stanley Falls to the Stanley Pool.
Change there was but so slow as to cause barely a ripple until the accumulated changes resulted in the disruption of human consciousness that occurred in the Victorian Period.
Since then the historical continuum has been as turbulent as the series of rapids on the Congo below Stanley Pool.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in file.
–Vachel Lindsay, The Congo
The French Revolution was important but that was mainly a political transition from the late feudal to the early modern. What we’re really concerned with is the challenge it gave to the psychology of man, that time when the Congo and the Jungle became a symbol of Man’s conscious and unconscious mind and his conscious mind cut through the darkness like a golden track. To put a convenient date on the psychological transition let’s put it at 1859 when Darwin’s
Origin of Species’ was published; nothing challenged the ancient mentality of Mankind more. It was then that the Congo crept North of the Equator to flow through the Euroamerican mind.
Darwin’s theories rent the mind of most men in two. Some like Edgar Rice Burroughs understood instantly but most resisted for decades while a hundred fifty years later the howl of disbelief can still be heard. The Semitic vision of the origin of man and the world as portrayed in Genesis became impossible for any reflective Westerner to believe. The hold of the ancient Semitic system of belief was so strong that exoteric scholars could not express their evolutionary views openly for fear of losing their jobs while having their lives ruined in what might risibly be termed ‘premature McCarthyism.’
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
–Vachel Lindsay -The Congo
Nevertheless the brief period from 1859 to 1914 was one of the most exciting and productive periods of history. The past had been or was being made intelligible to Western Man’s inquiring mind. As unpleasant as the fact may be to some people, modern understanding is solely the product of the mind of Western Man or Homo Sapiens III. Neither the African of HIS nor the sterile Semites nor the various sterile Mongolid races contributed one iota of understanding in this period, very little since and that only under the influence of the West.
While the Semitic Freud was delving into personal psychology his great rival, CG Jung, was exploring the development of human consciousness to open a psychological understanding of the mind of mankind in which the individual might be included and explained. In other words, he was placing the individual in the historical continuum. An esotericist of some note, it is to Jung and the school he founded that we are indebted for our understanding of all the phases of consciousness, their development and evolution.
At the same time that our increasing awareness allowed us to see clearly into the past for the first time, the pace of change was becoming so rapid that it was possible to project current trends into the near future. In conjunction with the rapid increase in scientific discoveries a futuristic or science fiction became possible.
In the popular mind the foundations for futuristic fiction were laid by the vastly underrated H.G. Wells.
Understanding the past, projections into the future and tremendous technological achievement, lent this period such great self-confidence that it was thought that anything was possible to the mind of man. The attitude was abruptly brought to an end in 1912; not by the First World War but rather by the unthinkable fact that Man’s mind had erred in thinking that it could build an unsinkable ship. When that great ship, the Titanic went down it took the pride of Western, which is to say human mind down with it.
The period of 1859 to 1914 was also one in which the absolute superiority of the ‘White race’ seemed not only apparent but real in fluorescent colors. In fact, White, or HSIII, superiority was acknowledged by all the people of the Earth, who were overawed by Western achievements. It was only after 1914 when the confidence of HSIII was shaken that the counter-attack became possible and success plausible. Even then this was an internal schism between the right people of the West and the wrong people of the Reds.
I have studied the notion of evolution of Dugald Warbaby in his essays ‘Tarzan Over Africa’ and ‘Tarzan Meets Mohammed.’ Based on his notion I would like to explain how the various sub-species are to be characterized during this first historical continuum.
The character of a sub-species is fixed from the moment of its mutation. Everything that it will ever be able to do it can envision at its inception; there is no evolution of ability within a sub-species its abilities unfold to its limits as its development progresses.
In you believe in Darwin’s concept of natural selection then you must believe that the various sub-species segregated themselves from the other sub-species on the basis of likeness. Further, following Darwin’s theory of natural selection so did various races form within a sub-species. Each race within a sub-species will by natural selection exclude all others who are not true to type until the race is uniform in appearance and psychology.
To use the African model: If one race is flat nosed and thick lipped then those characteristics will be valued. Any who do not conform to the ideal will be ejected from the race or killed.
If nearby thin lipped people with a bridged nose exist those two peoples will come into conflict with each other. The ensuing war between the physical and psychological types will be to the knife. In a word: genocide. Undisturbed by outside forces the battle will continue until either one race is exterminated or one or the other moves from the vicinity. This is what natural selection means. This is the history of Man. The notion of natural selection was also put into the words: survival of the fittest.
Thus HSI claimed sub-Saharan Africa for itself expelling the mutated HSII and possibly the Semites if they mutated at the same time . HSII migrated from the Mediterranean Basin and on into Western Europe. The Semites separated from HSI and HSII or were driven away migrating into the Arabian Peninsula, a backwater. HSIII when it mutated was either expelled from HSII or separated themselves to occupy the area near the Caspian Sea.
The English geneticist Bryan Sykes believes that the various Mongolid races mutated from HSIII a mere ten thousand years ago although this seems unlikely. The Mongolids like the Semites are also a sterile offshoot. They migrated across the steppes to the Eastern seaboard of Asia. Thus, following Darwin’s theory of natural selection when the traceable historical continuum becomes apparent one has HSI in Africa, HSII in Western Europe and HSIII in the Caspian area of Central Asia, the Semites occupying Arabia and the Mongolids in Eastern Asia.
The first confrontation between the sub-species in historical times came when a people of HS III derivation migrated to Mesopotamia. There they created a civilization which may have been influenced by an HSII population already in possession. Either HSIII alone or together with HSII, this people created the Sumerian Civilization.
From Sumer To The World Trade Center
In the present struggle in Eastern Europe the element of religious antagonism is the most important factor in the problem. The question originally one of race and government has become to a great extent one of religion. …Muslims…use the Sheriat, or law embracing or based upon the Cor-an and its commentaries, and this is declared by many persons in Western Europe to be utterly inapplicable to Christian subjects. Here, then, is the real difficulty; is Mohammedanism so plastic as to be adapted to the reforms which it is universally admitted…are required, or must it be eliminated altogether from Europe? If an affirmative answer be given to the latter proposition…there is no solution of the difficulty but a religious war, and such a war as the world has never yet seen.
–Mohammed and Mohammedanism.
Anonymous reviewer in the
Quarterly Review, January 1877
The answer has proven to be that Moslemism is not so plastic as to be adjusted to rational or Western psychology. Moslemism is an expression of the Semitic psychology. That psychology is particular to the Semitic sub-species. In the Darwinian sense it is part and parcel of natural selection. HSIII and the Semites are psychologically incompatible. That cannot be changed.
Now, the Semites could never have created a civilization on their own but the glitter of the HSIII Sumerian civilization drew them from their desert haunts much as the glitter of Western civilization has drawn the Semites from their desert oil fields today. Bear in mind that the Semitic character was set a hundred thousand years before Sumer and that no matter how circumstances may change their character cannot. Its stern limits are set by genetic evolution.
It is to be assumed that just as the Semites first infiltrated Western civilization then attacked and destroyed the symbol of Western supremacy, the World Trade Center in the Western capital of New York City, that they committed a similar outrage against Sumer five thousand years ago. Character, methods and tactics in a sub-species do not change; as it is it was and ever shall be.
If one analyzes Semitic methods and ethos which will have remained unchanged for the five thousand years of recorded history it will be readily seen what transpired in Sumer and why the Sumerian civilization was obliterated.
The main body of Semites undoubtedly blamed a militant minority for whatever crime was perpetrated against the Sumerians. The Semitic story of Cain and Abel may point the way to the nature of the dispute, just as the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu may present the Sumerian version of the quarrel. Believing they were dealing with an honorable people, rather than driving the Semites away, the Sumerians believed that the Semites were sincere and that they could get along with them. Thus, while palavering endlessly the Semites continued to infiltrate Sumer until they had sufficient numbers within and sufficient military power without to displace the Sumerians in their own land. ‘Ye shall live in houses that ye never built.’ As the Bible says.
Not having inherent scientific ability the Semites gradually replaced the scientific basis of Sumerian society with their own brand of fanatical ignorant religion.
Thus, the Semites appropriated Mesopotamia and Syria occupying the coasts of the Mediterranean while retaining Arabia. The deadly pall of Semitic ignorance settled over the Near East, or Western Asia, however you look at it. Contemporary Egyptians styled them ‘vile Asiatics.’
Over the centuries the Semites came into direct conflict with the Egyptians who, if I am right in the origins of the Libyans of Lower Egypt, were an HS II people. As empires grew larger and came into direct contact the Semitic empire of Assyria was able to conquer the HSIIs of Egypt in the seventh century BC. Thus, in the Darwinian struggle for supremacy the Egyptians were eliminated as a people. They have never recovered being now a remnant after a genocidal persecution of centuries. Their place has been taken by Semites.
As in Sumer the Semitic character immediately began to attack the scientific religious culture of Egypt in an attempt to destroy it while superimposing their own fanatical religious culture, the culture of ignorance.
The HSIII Persians ousted the Semitic Assyrians being in turn ousted by the HSIII Greeks who were replaced by the HSIII or possibly HSII Romans.
Now, following their sub-special manner a group or race of Semites, known in history as Jews, who had been displaced in an intra-sub-special conflict with the Assyrians in 586 BC, had been infiltrating the various kingdoms of the Mediterranean from Gaul to Egypt and Libya much as their ancestors had infiltrated Sumer. They followed the intolerant Semitic impulse by combating the religion of their host countries. They aggressively over turned altars and insulted the religion of these nations.
Unwilling and unable to assimilate themselves, as in the prototype of Sumer, they sought first to infiltrate and then to conquer. In the Roman case, much as in the Semitic attack on the World Trade Center, they made their move prematurely and had insufficiently infiltrated the enemy territory while having no military force without to complete conquest. In the resulting wars known to history as the Jewish Wars the Romans all but exterminated the Palestinian Jews while the Jews within the empire stood by helplessly.
In the ensuing syncretistic Semito-Christian religion the Semites acquired a disproportionate influence over the Greek scientific thought completely suppressing it. In keeping with the Semitic Sumerian tradition the Semito-Christians attacked all science and learning in an attempt to stultify the Greek or scientific influence in their attempt to impose the ignorance which was in keeping with their native intellect. The result in the West was what is know as the Dark Ages.
Then, in the seventh century AD an Arabian Semite by the name of Mohammed re-evaluated the situation to come up with a new and more determined attempt to impose Semitism on the world.
After Sumer, in the Jewish attempt of the conquest of HSII and HSIII, the Jews were so cranked out that in their pride they excluded all from their religion but their own small race of Semites. This created a situation which in a direct confrontation with the majority must always lose. Mohammed realized the error of exclusiveness rewriting the rules so that even forcible proselytization to his new Semitic religion was preferred.
Thus, by enrolling potentially unlimited auxiliaries under a religious banner he was able to augment the numbers of Semites so that there was a chance of conquering the world under the banner of ignorance.
Mohammed also undoubtedly realized that even though the Semites had gained a preponderant influence in the Semito-Christian religion that eventually the majority would reject the foreign Semitic influence. It was necessary then to impose Semitism on the majority by physical force. He thus organized the Semites into a military force capable of attacking the world.
The Arabs quickly overran North Africa while their converts the Moors entered Spain quickly conquering that nation. Without a pause they swept through the Pyrenees to penetrate deep into Europe where they stopped nearly at the gates of Paris from which they were driven back into Spain. The Spaniards then began the Reconquista which took them nearly a millennium to accomplish. Thus Europe barely escaped being impaled on the lance of ignorance.
Although it is generally believed that at the beginning of the Arab conquest a brilliant scientific civilization was created this notion is completely false. The Moslems rode over an existing HSIII Greek scientific culture which they immediately assaulted in much the same manner as that of the Semito-Christians. It took them about three hundred years to suppress the Greek scientific culture until today there is not one shred of scientific learning in Moslem lands. Instead they dynamite anything that challenges the ignorant bigoted Moslem view of religion.
From that first impulse to the present day the Semites have never ceased their worldwide attack on both the West and the East. What the Assyrians failed to do in Egypt, Mohammed’s fanatical Moslems have accomplished. With ceaseless tireless energy and will Moslems have sought to impose their ignorance on the world.
The situation in 1877 when the Russians, Poles and Austrians were driving the Moslems out of Central and Eastern Europe was essentially that of today. Whether you like it or not Milosevic was continuing and winning the war referred to by the prefacing quote in 1877. The reviewer in the Quarterly Review realized that one must drive the Moslems out or accept the stultification of the HSIII species. That is what Milosevic was doing.
There was some surcease for the West when the Slavs and Austrians succeeded in driving the Moslem power back into Asia at the end of the nineteenth century. However Moslems remained successfully active in Africa, India and the Far East.
It was only Western Science that provided the means to temporarily crush the Moslems and put them in their place. That is where matters stood when the first historical continuum ended in 1945.
Regaining courage and strength from their oil reserves the Semites once again following in their five thousand years practice began to infiltrate every country in the world while consolidating themselves in their core areas.
Whether the attack on the West in New York was premature or not remains to be seen in the response the West makes. If it follows the Sumerian model of toleration then it must lose this five thousand year battle with the forces of ignorance. If it follows the Roman model and destroys Mecca and Medina as the Romans were compelled to destroy Jerusalem, while either exterminating or confining the Moslems then civilization will survive at whatever cost. The Hitlerian solution is so extreme as to cause revulsion. However if we are truly a scientific people both in physics and psychology we do have the means although we probably lack the will to conquer. Perhaps that was the Sumerian problem, too much prosperity and comfort to imperil. Like them we will probably be too supine to assert our superiority. We should be able to manage pretty well if we assume the will the defeat the enemy. This battle will be fought as a test of wills. This is a colder war than the war with Communism.
This same sort of analysis can be applied to every sub-species on the planet; the potentialities and possibilities of each has become an established fact, their future actions can be forecast from their past history. I do not intend to go into each, but it should be clear that the former Chinese leader, Mao Ze Dong, was true to the Chinese sub-special type. No matter what the Chinese may say, Mao bared the Chinese soul.
Edgar Rice Burroughs Strides Into The Scene
The life of Edgar Rice Burroughs straddled the great 1914 division of this both terminal and seminal period from 1859 to 1945. His youth was lived in the shadow of the Little Big Horn where Custer died for our sins in 1876 the year after Burroughs was born. The Plains Indians were still being overrun in his youth while he himself participated in the last Indian battles against the Apaches in the Southwest. Even as the Indians were being defeated he saw the success of man’s attempt to fly, the introduction of the telephone and movies. Henry Ford introduced the Model T making a mass market auto industry a reality almost at the same time Burroughs sat down to begin his Tarzan stories. And then the Titanic sank.
Burroughs was a pulp fiction writer. I think it can be argued that the pulp fiction magazine originated with the Strand Magazine in England. Pulp fiction called for a different approach than literary fiction. Literary fiction is designed to appeal to refined, informed or cultured tastes while pulp fiction was designed as popular entertainment for the widest possible audience.
Thus, Literary authors have tended to look down on popular writers. However one result of universal literacy was that ‘common’ tastes prevailed over fine literature. Today almost no one can tell you who the American literary author William Dean Howells was or have even heard of him, yet you may be certain that he and his contemporaries thought his literary immortality was secured.
Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for literature yet I doubt that even one person in a million could identify him. Booth Tarkington won two Pulitzer prizes which no one else has ever done yet the mention of his name draws blank stares. He wrote good stuff too which one hopes won’t be forgotten. ‘Seventeen’ was a real charmer.
Strangely, the great popular fiction writers are known not so much for themselves as for their creations. Thus, everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, but many would be stumped by the name Arthur Conan Doyle. You almost have to be a specialist to know who Bram Stoker was yet Dracula is a piece of furniture in everyone’s mind. Not one in an infinite number can identify Gaston LeRoux but all know the Phantom Of The Opera, his creation. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ name is fairly well known but not everyone can connect him to his universally known creation, Tarzan. Not even in his home town, Tarzana.
Burroughs came at the tail end of that crop of popular writers who have been the staple of twentieth century literature. He was too young to be a part of the Kipling, Wells, Haggard and Doyle scene although circumstances did make him a friend of the OZ creator, L. Frank Baum.
Even thought H.G. Wells was only six years his senior Well’s writing career began in the 1890s. He had been famous nearly twenty years before Burroughs put pen to paper. And yet Burroughs writing connects him to this pre-1914 literary scene as a sort of younger sibling; he belongs to this tradition. Nor is his creation, Tarzan, inferior in reputation to any other literary creation of the time with the exception of the archetype of the twentieth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Even then, many, if not most people don’t realize that there is not only one Tarzan novel but a series of them.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ eyes had seen most of the seminal events of this productive pre-1914 period when he sat down to write. He was able to reflect on them all. Unlike his near contemporaries he did not create the era so much as recapitulate it. From 1914 to 1945 was pretty much a playing out of these earlier developments.
Darwin’s theory of evolution had created a defined racial hierarchy at the bottom of which was the Negro and at the top of which was the EuroAmerican White. In between were the Semites and Mongolids. This notion is reflected in Burroughs’ writing.
While it was believed that this was the order of evolution there was no scientific basis for proving what was apparent to the eyes.
The great disrupting discoveries in physics and psychology had already been made and were becoming popularized. Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and others were leading a sexual revolution; the Feminist Movement was in full tilt while in a few years the unthinkable would occur when Communism seized power in Russia in 1917 which made the post 1914 world so different while people were slow to understand the magnitude of the change. And then there was the introduction of the income tax which disturbed ERB so much in ‘Tarzan And The Ant Men.’
Amazingly Burroughs eyes were so acute he was able to understand and incorporate all these developments in the Tarzan novels without ever mentioning any by name. In his dedication to ‘entertainment’ he was able to write around, below, above and through these developments without letting any of them obtrude didactically into his stories. Therein lies, I think, the secret of his success. While H.G. Wells became a didactic preacher for his causes at the end of his career thereby dating himself; Burroughs sublimated his opinions while yet always coming down on the right side of the question. He cannot be considered a reactionary or even a conservative; he always understood the nature of the question and saw the correct viewpoint. Thus, he remains ‘modern’ or current.
Burroughs has been accused of ‘racism’ for his views on evolution but the accusation misses the point. Bear in mind the consequences of evolution and natural selection. To speculate on the nature of evolution and apply the results is not ‘racism.’ After all, not only did Burroughs have no trouble with evolution but he seems to have a well thought out notion of it which differs little from Darwin’s natural selection and seems to be closer to the more accurate scientific genetic explanation. One might call ERB a speculative evolutionist.
This is a remarkable achievement as in 1912 when he began to write, no academic could openly reject religion in favor of evolution without being expelled from the academic community. Even though they knew better they still proclaimed that evolutionary beliefs did not challenge religious opinions.
Burroughs, courageously one might say, disregards all religious considerations, writing about evolution as though it were an accepted and undeniable fact. Tarzan experiences every phase of evolution in his development. He was reared as a beast, consorted with the Africans, then considered the lowest form of humanity, and went directly to being a civilized EuroAmerican and then backtracked to become the chief of the Black Waziri then becoming the Great White Potentate of all Africa.
The significant point here is that Burroughs apparently considers the Negro as a distinct species. Rokoff, the Russian villain in ‘Son of Tarzan’, tells Jane that as her husband was born a beast so Jack, his son, will be placed amongst an African tribe to be reared in the evolutionary stage of the Negro, that is, between the apes and homo sapiens.
Blacks are also differentiated culturally by Burroughs; he does not deal in rude stereotypes. He is aware of cultural differences between African tribes. His proud Waziri are the crème de la crème of the African tribes in every respect, especially in never having submitted to Arab slavers. American Blacks such as Robert Jones of ‘At The Earth’s Core; who have been subjected to different cultural influences in the United States are portrayed entirely differently from the various African Blacks. ERB has a keen eye for distinctions, in dialect and speech most especially.
He himself was an avid reader. This is no more apparent than in his treatment of his Arab characters. He never traveled outside the United States so his knowledge of Moslemism and Arabs had to be acquired completely from books. As Warbaby pointed out in ‘Tarzan Meets Mohammed’ Burroughs was a keen student of Moslem culture. He perceived the complete lack of Science in Moslem thought nearly predicting 9/11.
It is very true that he has no great liking for his Arab characters. They are uniformly disreputable and bad.
Yet they are not stock characters. There is a great deal of individuality about them. Personally I found Amor Ben Khatour, the abductor of Miriem in ‘Son of Tarzan’ a terrifying and realistic character. I thought the sub-plot between Meriem’s father and Khatour well handled.
That the Arabs are all villains may be attributed less to ‘racism’ than the fact of their occupation. They are all slave traders. The Arabs living in Africa were associated with the slave trade. Being a slave trader in Arab society was something like being a dope dealer in ours. Just because someone want to buy the product doesn’t mean they want to be associated with the dealers. The dealer is usually a disreputable person whether in drugs or slaves. Anyone who has read his Burton and Stanley can form a pretty accurate idea of a slaver’s character.
How then could Burroughs depict his Arabs as any less than brutal, mean, disreputable men. This is what a slaver is; this is what Burroughs understood; there is no racism involved. He doesn’t descend into name calling. Rather Burroughs grapples honestly and accurately with some fairly difficult problems.
Burroughs was cleverly synthesizing the ideas and learning of the 1859-1914 period in a way in which those of us of the post-1945 generation who were at ‘Childhood’s End; could use his opinions and attitudes to build a base of opinion on which to extend our own attitudes into the future as a basis of our own lives.
As evidence that Burroughs succeeded is the fact that his character named Tarzan who no longer has a home in a geographical location called Africa still exists as the Lord of the Jungle in a psychological projection of our subconscious called Africa.
NOW I SEE THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Yes, that terrifying Congo, that symbol of the Heart of Darkness, the savage untutored wildness creeping through the jungle of our nocturnal fears, the psychological malaise that affects us all. How to find that golden track of consciousness that will relieve us of our uncertainties and make the world safe for us, that is the question.
Perhaps Burroughs’ greatest success was that he created a character to represent our conscious minds while reducing the world of subconscious terrors of this jungle of Africa called Life to a manageable form. In this mental Africa by the force of character we can all feel less threatened and more at home as we cruise down our personal Congo in our very own ‘Lady Alice.’
Long live Tarzan and God Bless Edgar Rice Burroughs.
A Review: Atlantida by Pierre Benoit
April 1, 2017
La Maison de la Derniere Cartouche
A Contribution To The ERB
Library Project
A Review: Atlantida
By Pierre Benoit
Review by R.E. Prindle
Pierre Benoit’s excellent novel Atlantida: The Queen Of Atlantis was first published in 1919. Written in French it was translated in 1920 so it is possible that Burroughs read it. There is a possible reference to the book in Tarzan the Invincible, I’ll get to that later. Benoit himself was accused of ‘plagiarizing’ H. Rider Haggard but he defended himself by saying he neither read nor spoke English while Haggard was not translated into French as of 1919.
It matters little as Benoit, Haggard and Burroughs all knew their Greek mythical heritage and all seem to be addressing the male-female conflict from the same intellectual approach derived from that mythology. And they all placed their stories in Africa, a burning question of the day.
The heroine of Benoit’s novel, Antinea, is an irresistible woman along the lines of Haggards She and Homer’s Circe, and Burroughs’ La. All three women rule over lost lands. Antinea lures Aryan men to her to her palace carved from a mountain of the Ahaggar range.
The Ahaggar range, Ahagger is Taureg, the Arabic is Hoggar, is located almost in the middle of the Sahara at what is now the Southern extremity of Algeria. Its highest peak is nearly 10,000 feet in elevation, the whole massif of a half million square kilometers being at the same elavation as Denver, a mile high. Boiling summers and freezing winters and fair moisture.
Antinea having lured the men entrances them and when they no longer amuse her she embalms them alive in a unique metal called Orichalch. Thus, they are preserved forever as they were in life. An advance on all other methods. The question is why does she do this?
The answer is explained by Benoit’s character Mesge:
“Now you know,” he repeated. “You know, but you do not understand.”
Then, very slowly, he said:
“You are as they have been the prisoners of Antinea. And vengeance is due Antinea.”
“Vengeance?” said Morhange…For what, I beg to ask? What have the lieutenant and I done to Atlantis? How have we incurred her hatred?”
It is an old quarrel, a very old quarrel.” The Professor replied gravely. “A quarrel which long antedates you, M. Morhange.”
“Explain yourself, I beg of you, Professor.”
“You are a Man. She is a Woman…the whole matter lies there.”
“Really, sir, I do not see…we do not see.”
“You are going to understand. Have you really forgotten to what an extent the beautiful queens of antiquity had just cause to complain of strangers whom fortune brought to their borders? The poet, Victor Hugo, pictured their detestable acts well enough in his colonial poem called la Fille d’ Otaiti. Wherever we look we see similar examples of fraud and ingratitude. These gentlemen made free use of the beauty and the riches of the lady. Then, one fine morning, they disappeared. She was indeed lucky if her lover, having observed the position carefully did not return with ships and troops of occupation….Think of the cavalier fashion in which Ulysses treated Calypso, Diomedes Callirrhoe. What should I say of Theseus and Ariadne? Jason treated Medea with inconceivable lightness…”
And so on. Thus on page 114 of 229 Benoit explains the nature of his story. Bear in mind that of Circe and Ulysses in which Circe enslaves all the men who approach her and turns them into swine by lust while Ulysses with a pocket full of mole to defend himself resists her charms, maintains his manhood, rescues his sailors and sails away. So, while there are great similarities between Benoit’s, Haggard’s and Burrough’s stories they could easily derive from the same sources; variations on a theme. Of course, Burrough’s La is derived from Haggard’s She. But La is closer to Antinea in method than She. La’s job in Opar is to sacrifice men on the bloody altar. La is also from Atlantis. And all three share the glorious tradition of being too beautiful to resist.
Benoit himself the son of a French diplomat grew up in Tunisia and Algeria where he became acquainted with the desert and its legends. Thus, his story is an authentic addition to the great stories of the African explorers and the fictions of Haggard, Burroughs, Edgar Wallace, Mrs. Hull, P.C. Wren and others.
Benoit charmingly writes his story as current history rather than fiction without any framing story. He includes the Emperor Louis Napoleon and others as well as showing himself familiar with the latest Parisian designers and bon ton retail establishments. He mentions a painting titled La Maison Des Derniers Cartouches which can be found on internet and with which I have headed the review. Translated it means The House of the Last Bullet. I’m sure all his Parisian references are real but they have slipped through the crack of time had have not found a place on the internet.
In this case there is a Captain Avis who is believed to have murdered his fellow, Capt. Morhange and hence is in bad odor. This is the mystery that holds the story together. We learn later how Morhange died. Avit is transferred to a desert post, indeed demanded the transfer, managed by Lieutenant Ferrieres who is about to embark on a mission passing the Ahaggar massif.
Ahaggar Plateau
At the post Saint Avis tells Ferrieres of his strange adventure in the Ahaggar Mountains with Capt. Morhange during which Morhange perishes. The African scenery is different than any of the authors mentioned and the setting is quite spectacular.
Morhange and Avit are caught in a freak storm on the slopes of the Ahaggar, and apparently these are not uncommon on the massif, where they rescued a Taureg from drowning who happens to be the procurer of European men for Antinea. The two soldiers are procured and delivered to the Atlantian Queen.
Somewhat very similar to scenes from Haggard’s She they are conducted to a great room or hall where fifty some embalmed former lovers stand in niches. The truth descends on our sexual warriors.
Morhange who, being the more handsome and impressive of the two, finds favor with the Queen of Atlantis also, not unlike Ulysses and Circe, is proof to her blandishments and beauty. What he had is his pocket isn’t mentioned. His refusal eventually enrages Antinea. Without going into details, Antinea hypnotizes Avit into taking her large silver hammer with which she bangs her gong and giving Morhange such a good bash it cracks the man’s skull to pieces. Thus she solves her problem of being rejected by Morhange.
A digression here. Benoit here shows off is knowledge. Amazingly I was able to get it. In Paris at the time there was a theatre called The Grand Guignol. It was a place of horrors, a sadists delight, at which all kinds of gruesome murders, mutilations and disfigurations were enacted. Apparently the scenes were so realistic that the faint hearted actually fainted and a doctor was kept on the premises to deal with these frequent occurrences. Now, a guignol is something like a puppets booth. Benoit has Avit climb into a guignol in Antinea’s boudoir where he watches the horror of Morhange being dismissed after which Antinea calls his down, hypnotizes him, hands him the silver hammer, directs him to Morhange’s room and watches as Avit cracks his friend’s skull. The horror, the horror. So Benoit demonstrates he is au courant with Paris’ entertainments.
Avit then turns to thoughts of escape. Here Benoit displays a certain genius in moving his story along.
Antinea had a slave girl named Tanit Zerga who became enamored of Avit and also wishes to escape to return to her people. She organizes the escape attempt. As it turns out she is a princess also, of the Trarzan Moors on the North side of the Senegal River. Bear in mind that everything mentioned in the story is real except the story itself. The Trarzan Moors exist to this day and of course the Senegal is one of the great rivers of Africa. The history is within the realm of fact. Only the story and its leading characters are fiction. Benoit does not spare the reader his knowledge. The man has been around.
The pair are assisted by the procurer rescued by Avit in the storm. He is quite willing to help because he tells Avit he will be back, no one who has ever known Antinea can escape her charms. All the victims in the hall had died of love.
Here’s a Burroughs connection indicating he may have read the book. Tanit Zerga resembles Nao, the fourteen year old girl who rescues Wayne Colt in Tarzan the Invincible only to be discarded coldly as were the heroines mentioned. It would be pushing it too far to claim Burroughs did read the book but he often got his scenes and incidents from other authors so I’m about three fourths convinced.
At any rate Tanit Zerga dies in the desert carrying on Benoit’s theme of women making sacrifices for ungrateful men.
The story then returns to the Foreign Legion camp of Ferrieres as he and Saint Avit are to make a trip across the desert passing the Ahaggar massif. As prophesied, to know Antinea is to love her forever, and her lovers all died from love, so he intends to return to the Ahaggar’s and his certain death. Whether Ferrieres will accompany him is left open.
The book was a slow starter but one is gradually swept along almost as a participant as the storm increases. A very exciting conclusion. Benoit’s is a very worthy book for Bibliophiles. If it wasn’t in Burroughs’ library it must have been through neglect or loss. Highly recommended.
Pierre Benoit 1932
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Ben-Day Dots
December 21, 2014
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Ben-Day Dots
by
R.E. Prindle
Over the years I have come to wonder why Tarzan was such an immediate success. The premiss on the face of it is absurd. While fascinating it requires such a huge suspension of disbelief as to be staggering. Perhaps that is why such a significant percentage of his contemporary readers were revolted by ERB’s work. He had to put up with a tremendous amount of abuse although his acceptance was greater than his rejection. Something had to prepare the way for that acceptance nevertheless.
The discovery of the unconscious that became prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century certainly opened the way for the strange and bizarre. It is not a coincidence that spiritualism and the paranormal became prominent at that time. Along with those came the rise of science fiction and fantasy. Tarzan is fantasy fiction while the Mars series of Burroughs is fantasy sci-fi.
Monsters like Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde established themselves in the popular imagination. Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda and the Graustark knock off by George Barr McCutcheon entranced ERB to the point of distraction. Jules Verne, of course, and the Oz stories of L. Frank Baum. When it came to the Mars stories ERB was merely the best exemplar of what by 1911 was an established genre.
The public mind was being softened to accept not only the incredible but the impossible.
Printing improvements made both half tone and color illustration less costly and easier to produce. Is it any wonder that ERB’s period is one of astonishing illustrators. Remember that ERB tried to be a cartoonist himself before he took up writing. His goal was judging from his drawings to be a political cartoonist.
Thus one can only presume he followed book illustrators avidly. Arthur Rackham was knocking them dead while Denslow’s and John R. Neill’s Oz illustrations must have wowed the envious Burroughs. N.C. Wyeth must have blown his mind.
More importantly than the book illustrators though were the emergent four color Sunday Funnies of the newspapers in 1895. They were so exotic and strange even in my childhood but at the time they must have seemed incredible. Of course I had no idea what made them seem exotic. In fact, I had never heard of Ben-Day dots until the fabulous personality posters of the Sixties exploited them.
According to Wikipedia on the subject:
The Ben-Day printing process, named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., is a technique dating from 1879. Depending on the effect, color and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping. Magenta dots, for example, are widely spaced to create pink. Pulp comic books of the 1950s and 1960s used Ben-Day dots in the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to inexpensively create shading and secondary colors such as green, purple, orange and flesh tones.
The Sunday Funnies thus must have had an astonishing effect on contemporary minds. As the comics Bill Hillman has reproduced on his site, ERBzine, indicate ERB was an avid follower of the genre. His earth borer used by David Innes in the Pellucidar series was most likely cadged from a comic strip.
Seeking relief from those long weary job hunting days of the first decade ERB sought relief by hanging around the Chicago Public Library. He was a card carrying member too. Who knows what volumes he borrowed or browsed through on the spot. The Library would have had its racks of the country’s newspapers on display including those of NYC. Thus ERB would have been familiar with the comic strips of Winsor McCay, The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland. Himself an avid dreamer, very familiar with nightmares, ERB must have relished McCay’s work.
As it so happens McCay’s two most famous strips have a prominent place in the history of comics. In fact, just recently the Taschen Publishers issued a one volume complete collection in four color Ben-Day dots of the Little Nemo strip. At a size of 20 x 14 the strips are magnificently displayed. The accompanying 150 page text by Alexander Braun is a wonderful history of the period pointing out many developments that undoubtedly influenced ERB forming a background to his writing. Braun has a touch of genius too. Many strips of the The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend are included in the ancillary volume, some full page.
The Rarebit Fiend strip began a little earlier than the Little Nemo strip of 1905. Thus both strips were running during 1905-09, the period of ERB’s deepest despondency. I will show how both strips are reflected in ERB’s writing.
To take the Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend first. Rarebit refers to the culinary dish Welsh Rarebit frequently referred to as Welsh Rabbit. The dish is simply melted cheese on bread although it can be a fondue. In the strip the dreamer overeats before bedtime producing a nightmare. The dreamers are all different while some of the nightmares are quite astonishing.
Burroughs’ emulation appears in Jungle Tales Of Tarzan in the story Tarzan’s first nightmare in which Tarzan overeats having the subsequent nightmare. My first reaction to the story was that Burroughs had been reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. While he may have been I think McCay’s strip was a stronger or more immediate influence.
The Little Nemo in Slumberland influence appears in ERB’s first serious effort, Minidoka, put in a drawer and not published until 1998 by Dark Horse Comics.
The consensus seems to be that Burroughs wrote this short work c. 1905. The reasoning seems to be that because Burroughs wrote the story on stationery from this period that that proves it was written at that date. However ERB was an inveterate collector, read packrat, until he says he overcame the disease in the early twenties. So he says. So ERB was reluctant to throw anything away. The stationery proves nothing.
I have maintained that ERB wrote Minidoka c. 1908-09 based on internal evidence. We can now add the evidence of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland strip. As the title implies this strip also revolves around dreams. It has a haunting surrealistic feel filled with strange characters and dream effects.
As I say, ERB haunted the Chicago library from 1905 to 1911 when he began writing The Princess of Mars. Thus he would have heard of the strip which was quite famous while following it at least periodically.
Minidoka reflects a Little Nemo quality. Little Nemo would then have been the catalyst that got Burroughs writing as he tried to emulate it in prose. As usual ERB combines a multitude of influences. He even states that the work is written in Ragtime Talk which meshes quite well with McCay.
Minidoka in itself can qualify as surrealistic before surrealism as does Mccay. That would not be extraordinary as the period from, say, 1880-1910 had a unified outlook not unlike the Sixties music scene when all bands played around a central motif.
As the work couldn’t have been written without McCay influence that places its probable composition date firmly in the 1908-10 range.
I heartily recommend the Taschen Little Nemo as an example of the current bookmaker’s art as well as for the astounding work of Winsor McCay. This rather astonishing video is available demonstrating McCay’s drawing expertise while showing him as the film creator of animation. He not only influenced Burroughs but Walt Disney said his own work would not have been possible without McCay.
A 1998 Japanese made movie called Little Nemo’s Adventures In Slumberland is available on Netflix. Ray Bradbury, no less, provided the story line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcSp2ej2S00 There are numerous other videos too.
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
January 12, 2013
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
A Review Of
Lothrop Stoddard’s Eponymous Title
by
R.E. Prindle
Stoddard, Lothrop: The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman, 1922, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, First Edition.
In the name of our To-morrow we will burn Rafael
Destroy museums, crush the flowers of art,
Maidens in the radiant kingdom of the Future
Will be more beautiful than Venus de Milo.
Quoted by Stoddard p. 202
A perennial problem in Burroughs’ studies is what did he believe? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Was he an irredeemable bigot? Shall we just say he was not of a contemporary Liberal frame of mind. If you listen to Richard Slotkin author of Gunfighter Nation and a professor at Case Western Reserve at the time he wrote his book a couple decades ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs was an evil man responsible for all the evil in the US from 1912 to the present. Slotkin even sees him responsible for the My Lai massacre of Viet Nam.
Himself a Communist Slotkin can overlook all the crimes of the Soviet Union in which tens of millions were exterminated to find the ultimate evil in the killing of a few dozen people in Viet Nam.
Slotkin, who rampages through his history disparaging any non-Liberal writers as atavistic bigots firmly attaches Burroughs’ name to two scholars, Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his historical studies of the twenties. He considers the two hardly less evil than Burroughs. To someone less excitable, perhaps, or lessLiberal, the two writers have written responsible and astute studies. I certainly think they have.
When I first read Slotkin I rejected the notion that Burroughs had been influenced by either. Ten years on I have to retract that opinion. It is now clear that Burroughs read both while being heavily influenced by Lothrop Stoddard, especially his 1922 volume, The Revolt Against Civilization. While the studies of both Grant and Stoddard would at best supplement Burroughs already developed opinions The Revolt can easily be seen as a template for Burroughs’ writing after he read it. While the study complemented his own developed social and political opinions I am sure that Stoddard’s explication of the history provided Burroughs with many new facts. Based on its opinions that appeared in ERB’s novels I would place the reading somewhere about 1926 or 1927.
Contrary to what some admirers want to make him ERB was what today would be considered a very conservative man, today’s Liberals would be anathema to him. He was decidedly anti-Communist, a Eugenicist, while not bigoted he was not a Negrophile or Semitophile. He was essentially a man with a social and historical outlook that was formed before 1900, a pre-immigration outlook formed while the Indian wars were still in progress. In short he was a man of his times.
Thomas Dixon Jr. to whom he is often compared was one of the most successful writers of the period who carefully examined both the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as the growing Socialist/Communist movement. He was not a bigot as he is always construed but a man of his own people. Burroughs was influenced by his work and thought well of him. He did not abhor him. ERB read many of Dixon’s novels and admired the movie based on his books, The Birth Of A Nation. He sympathized with Henry Ford in his struggle for the welfare of America and read the Dearborn Independent, Ford’s newspaper. In short, Burroughs was a stand up guy.
Now, what evidence is there he read The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman? Let’s begin with this quote, p. 34 et seq.
Quote:
Down to that time the exact nature of the life process remained a mystery. The mystery has now been cleared up. The researches of [August] Weisman and other modern biologists have revealed the fact that all living beings are due to a continuous stream of germ plasm which has existed ever since life first appeared on earth and which will continue to exist as long as any life remains. This germ-plasm consists of minute germ cells which have the power of developing into human living beings. All human beings spring from the union of a male sperm-cell and a female egg-cell. Right here, however, occurs the basic feature of the life process. The new individual consists, from the start, of two sorts of plasm. Almost the whole of him is body plasm – the ever multiplying cells which differentiate into the organs of the body. But he also contains germ- plasm. At his very conception a tiny bit of the life stuff from which he springs is set aside or carefully isolated from the body-plasm, and forms a course of development entirely its own. In fact, the germ-plasm is not really part of the individual; he is merely its bearer, destined to pass it on to other bearers of the life chain.
Now all this was not only unknown but even unsuspected down to a short time ago. Its discovery was in fact dependent upon modern scientific methods. Certainly, it was not likely to suggest itself to even the most philosophic mind. Thus, down to a generation ago, the life stuff was supposed to be a product of the body, not differing essentially in character from other body products. This assumption had two important consequences. In the first place, it tended to obscure the very concept of heredity, and led men to think of environment as virtually all important; in the second place, even where the importance of heredity was dimly perceived the role of the individual was misunderstood, and he was conceived as a creator rather than a mere transmitter. This was the reason for the false theory of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” formulated by Lamarck and upheld by most scientists until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, Lamarckianism was merely a modification of the traditional ‘environmentalist’ attitude: it admitted that heredity possessed some importance, but it maintained environment as the basic feature.
Unquote.
Now there you have the argument of God in Tarzan And The Lion Man of 1933 nearly word for word. I hink it unlikely that ERB actually read Weisman who published following 1900 and who ERB may never have heard of, so his source was in all probability Stoddard.
Stoddard’s presentation nicely straddles the change of consciousness from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It sounds a trifle naïve to our ears but was cutting edge at the time. Weisman’s theories were a big step in the direction of the discovery of DNA a short 26 years after Stoddard’s study.
It is important though to remember that more than fifty percent of the US population today rejects the concept of evolution while being more Lamarckian in outlook than might be supposed. We are as a whole not quite as advanced as we think we are.
As a quick affirmation of the influence of Stoddard on ERB on pages 95-96 he gives an account of the famous Jukes family of degenerates that appeared in ERB’s 1932 novelette, Pirate Blood.
Stoddard was well aware of what was happening historically and presently and one can see that he passed that understanding on to ERB. Almost as though writing today, on page 237 Stoddard writes:
Quote:
Stressful transition is the key-note of our times. Unless all signs be faulty, we stand at one of those momentous crises in history when mankind moves from one well-marked epoch to another of widely different character.
Unquote.
Extremely prescient observation in 1922 while his study has been borne out in detail. The chapter titles give a clear outline of the contents:
1. The Burden Of Civilization
2. The Iron Law Of Equality
3. The Nemesis Of The Inferior
4. The Lure Of The Primitive
5. The Ground Swell Of Revolt
6. The Rebellion Of The Underman
7. The War Against Chaos
8. Neo-Aristocracy
As can be easily seen novelists such as Rider Haggard, ERB, Edgar Wallace as well as many others from 1890 to the 20s were grappling with the problems indicated by the chapter titles.
The natural tendency in humans is to be rather lax in mental activity. Precision calls for an active mentality and concentration. Not everyone is capable of this, yet, beginning in the nineteenth century such mental qualities were increasingly necessary. Such disciplines as Chemistry and Physics didn’t allow for personal vagaries or individual style. One couldn’t bend the disciplines to one’s own desires, precise measurements were necessary requiring mental concentration. A little bit off and who knows what might happen. In a way then the Overman and Underman were created. Either you could or you couldn’t and if you couldn’t you slipped beneath- an Underman. Higher civilization was impossible for you.
Burroughs addressed this problem continually. In his character Tarzan he resolved the problem giving his creation a split personality, in a loin cloth he was one man, in a tuxedo he was another. Two separate gorillas in one and always a beast. In real life society split into two possibilities- the Over and Underman.
Worse still scientific methods were able to measure the ineffable, the unseen. In chemistry sub-tiny atoms were able to be detected and their sub-miniscule weights actually measured. Measurement is the bane of the Underman. A Mole contains 6,022 x 10 to the 23rd power of atoms, an incredible incomprehensible number that still might weigh 12 grams or less. Astonishing. Beyond the comprehension hence belief of the Underman. As the process can’t be seen it can’t be believed.
In human intelligence the Englishman Francis Galton began to devise measuring devices of intelligence in 1865 shortly after Darwin announced Evolution in 1959. Thus uncertainty about mental capacity was eliminated. As Stoddard calls it, The Iron Law Of Inferiority. Biology and measuring excluded something like eighty-five percent of the population from the ranks of the most intelligent. Without that high measurement of intelligence 85% of the population was automatically excluded from the possibility of higher attainment while at the same time being prejudged.
Big strapping fellows, all man, were relegated to manual labor while wimps like perhaps, John D. Rockefeller, became billionaires. Not right, the big strapping fellows said, but not measuring up in intelligence, which they couldn’t see, they were condemned to the shovel for life.
Intelligence measuring tests were improved between 1865 and 1920 although not as accurate as could be desired. Men entering the armed forces in WWI were an excellent testing group. Of 1,700,000 tested intelligence levels were fairly accurately determined. It was then discovered that only four and a half percent were very bright with another seven or eight percent bright, while the huge bulk were C+ to C- descending from there.
One imagines Burroughs read this with extreme thoughtfulness.
So, now as the bulk of the good things were going to those who could do, what were those who couldn’t do about it? The great issue since 1789 has been equality; the Underman demanded equality as a first condition. He could organize. He could sabotage. He could rage. And that is what the Underman has done.
The Communist Party was formed. And what was their chief demand? Equality. Absolute equality. As they couldn’t rise to a natural equality then the only other feasible solution was to bring the Superior intelligences down to their level. Thus they raged against that great equalizer, education. Screw science, screw physics, screw chemistry, screw biology. Who needed what you couldn’t see and that especially included intelligence measuring?
One of ERB’s bete noires was the I.W.W.- The Industrial Workers Of The World, syndicalists. Imagine his reaction when he read this:
Quote:
Viewed in the abstract, technical sense, Syndicalism does not seem to present any specially startling innovations. It is when we examine the Syndicalists’ animating spirit, their general philosophy of life, and the manner which they propose to obtain their ends, that we realize we are in the presence of an ominous novelty,- the mature philosophy of the Under Man. This philosophy of the Under-Man is today called Bolshevism. Before the Russian Revolution it was known as Syndicalism. But Bolshevism and Syndicalism are basically one and the same thing. Soviet Russia has really invented nothing. It is merely practicing what others had been preaching for years- with such adaptation as normally attend the putting of theory into practice.
Syndicalism, as an organized movement, is primarily the work of two Frenchmen, Fernand Pelloutier and Georges Sorel. Of course, just as there were Socialist before Marx, so there were Syndicalists before Sorel. Syndicalism’s intellectual progenitor was Proudhon, who in his writings had closely sketched out the Syndicalist theory. As for Syndicalism’s savage, violent, uncompromising spirit, it is clearly Anarchist in origin., drawing its inspiration not only from Proudhon but also from Bakunin, [Johann] Most, and all the rest of that furious company of revolt.
“Revolt!” This is the essence of Syndicalism: a revolt, not merely against modern society but against Marxian Socialism as well. And the revolt was well timed. When, at the very end of the nineteenth century, Georges Sorel lifted the red banner of Syndicalism, the hour awaited the man. The proletarian world was full of discordant and disillusionment at the long dormant Marxian philosophy. Half a century had passed since Marx first preached his gospel, and the revolutionary millennium was nowhere in sight. Society had not become a world of billionaires and beggars. The great capitalists had not swallowed all. The middle classes still survived and prospered. Worst of all, from the revolutionary viewpoint, the upper grades of the working classes had prospered, too. The skilled workers were, in fact, becoming an aristocracy of labor. They were acquiring property and thus growing capitalistic; they were raising their living standards and thus growing bourgeois. Society seemed endowed with a strange vitality! It was even reforming many of the abuses which Marx had pronounced incurable. When, then, was the proletariat to inherit the earth?
The Proletariat! That was the key word. The van, and even the main body of society, might be fairly on the march, but behind lagged a rear guard. Here, were, first of all, the lower working class strata- the “manual” laborers in the narrower sense, relatively ill paid and often grievously exploited. Behind these again came a motley crew, the rejects and misfits of society. “Casuals” and “unemployables”, “down-and-outs” and declasses, victims of social evils, victims of bad heredity and their own vices, paupers, defectives, degenerates, and criminals- they were all there. They were there for many reasons, but they were all miserable, and they were all bound together by a certain solidarity- a sullen hatred of the civilization from which they had little to hope. To these people evolutionary, “reformist” socialism was cold comfort. Then came the Syndicalists promising, not evolution but revolution; not in the dim future but the here and now; not a bloodless “taking over” by “the workers” hypothetically stretched to include virtually the whole community, but the bloody “dictatorship” of The Proletariat in its narrow revolutionary sense.
Here, at last, was living hope- hope, and the prospect of revenge! Is it then strange that a few short years should have seen revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, all the anti-social forces of the whole world grouped under the banner of Georges Sorel? For a time they went under different names syndicalists in France, Bolshevists in Russia, I.W.W.s in America but in reality they formed one army, enlisted in a single war.
Now, what was this war? It was, first of all, a war for the conquest of Socialism as a preliminary to the conquest of society. Everywhere the orthodox Socialist parties were fiercely assailed. And these Socialist assaults were formidable, because the orthodox Socialists possessed no moral line of defense. Their arms were palsied by the virus of their revolutionary tradition. For however evolutionary and non-militant the Socialists might have been in practice, in theory they had remained revolutionary their ethics continuing to be those of the “class war”, the destruction of the “possessing classes” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The American economist, Carver, will describe the ethics of socialism in the following lines: “Marxian Socialism has nothing in common with idealistic Socialism. It rests not on persuasion, but on force. It does not profess to believe, as did the old idealists, that if socialism be lifted up it will draw all men to it. In fact, it has no ideals; it is materialistic and militant. Being materialistic and atheistic, it makes no use of such terms as right and justice, unless it be to quiet the consciences of those who still harbor such superstitions. It insists that these terms are mere conventionalities; the concepts mere bugaboos invented by the ruling caste to keep the masses under control. Except in a conventional sense, from this crude materialistic view there is neither a right or wrong, justice nor injustice, good or bad. Until people who still believe in such silly notions divest their minds of them they will never understand the first principles of Marxian socialism.
“Who creates our ideas of right and wrong?” asks the Socialist. “The ruling class. Why? To insure their domination over the masses by depriving them of the power to think for themselves. We, the proletarians, when we get into power, will dominate the situation; we shall be the ruling class; we shall determine who is right and wrong. Do you ask us if what we propose is just? What do you mean by justice? Do you ask if it is right? What do you mean by right? It will be good for us. That is all that right and justice ever did or ever can mean!
Unquote.
People ask what Burroughs believed? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Well, Burroughs’ beliefs can be extrapolated from the above quote as well as Stoddard’s whole book. If Burroughs could have expressed himself concisely he would have written The Revolt Against Civilization. You don’t have to look any further.
There could be no more ardent anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-IWW than ERB. The book was published five years after the Russian Revolution, a mere three years after the narrow quelling of the Communist disturbances of 1919 while in 1922 the Harding administration was putting the finishing touches on the suppression of that Communist revolution in the US. Make no mistake the crimes of 1919 were part of an American Bolshevik revolution. Things would not return to what Harding called normalcy but it would be a reasonable facsimile that would endure until the engineered great crash of 1929 opening the way for the Communist revolution of FDR in the US.
These were perilous times ERB was living in no less than those of today. One can’t be sure when Burroughs read Revolt but many of the same themes almost in quotation were employed in his 1926 novel The Moon Maiden. And from the Moon Maiden he went to the more sophisticated approaches of his great political novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man.
As Stoddard thinks the Underman breeds at a very fast rate while the Overman limits his family the obvious consequence is that people of intelligence decrease rapidly in relation to the Underman. Of course Stoddard has all kinds of tables and charts to prove his point. As this was published in 1922 the results are heavily skewed to prove the English are the top of the heap; a result not uncongenial to Burroughs’ sensibilities.
One imagines that as of induction time in 1917-18 a great many of the recent immigrants at least had underdeveloped English language skills that affected the results but at this point it no longer matters; the general idea has been proved sound.
As we have a war between the Underman and the Overman and make no mistake, as far as Sorel and the Syndicalist/Bolshevik ideology goes it is a war to the knife, it may be asked what Stoddard’s formula for the Overman’s success might be.
This returns us to the Underman’s great fear that science, that is objective analysis supported by an array of facts will condemn him to the virtual condition of servitude. It might be surmised that this is an intolerable but inescapable conclusion unless education and science are destroyed reducing the more intelligent to the masses.
Stoddard then relying on Darwinian and Weismanian evolution and the notion of Eugenics introduced by Francis Galton resolves the problem by ending the reproduction of the ‘defective’ classes, that is, forced sterilization. Forced sterilization was actually employed. It is interesting that he never brings in the issue of race thus on the surface his book is neither racist for anti-Semitic. However as the book assumes that the superior intelligences are English or Nordic the text qualifies as anti-Semitic in Jewish eyes and hence has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Forbidden Literature.
One may be horrified at the Eugenic solution to the intelligence problem but one must be equally horrified at the Underman solution to their Overman problem. Liquidation is more horrifying than sterilization and Liquidation was employed by the Underman in Russia and will be employed again if they can consolidate their gains in the US and Europe today.
The problem is that while being founded in reality it is impossible in execution. The human mind is too subjective to be trusted with such a great responsibility. Many statues were placed on the books commanding forced sterilization and many such were executed.
Schools classes were organized based on supposed mental aptitudes. How objectively I will demonstrate by my own example. Until Jr. High in my home town schools did not systematically differentiate based on mental capacity, however at the end of the ninth grade just before I.Q. testing in the tenth there were three options, Trade School for those deemed not of academic ability, in other words destined for the labor force, and once in high school a division between business, that is white collar, and college prep. This was still a process of self-selection thus I signed up for high school however someone changed my papers to trade school.
Thus when I showed for classes at high school, I was told I was enrolled at trade school. Now, this was the fight of my life, and for it. I was told I was in trade school and to get out. I said I wasn’t leaving and sat down where I waited for four days for the situation to resolve itself. My argument was that the law required that I be given an education and it wouldn’t be at trade school. Whatever the behind the scenes machinations were I was reluctantly allowed to enter but they then insisted it would be business level while I demanded college prep. With an unexplained prescience I was told that I would never go to college so I should be in business. Nevertheless I won that struggle too.
I am sure that if enforced sterilization had been possible at the time I would have been compelled to undergo it.
Now, here’s the kicker. Came time for I.Q. tests and I placed in the upper four percent. I have no idea what the reaction to that was although my critics had to tone down their act. So human passions invalidated the whole Eugenic idea.
In other words there is no equable solution to this terrible human dilemma.
In that sense the solution offered by Aldus Huxley in his famous comic novel Brave New World is of some interest. In Huxley’s story he enlists science, chemistry, to produce different levels of mental competence. The zygote is nurtured in test tubes while at certain levels of development certain chemicals are introduced limiting the development of the fetus. Thus the labor problem is solved by creating classes only capable of menial tasks. The upper classes are bred like race horses to various degrees of excellence. Huxley was tongue in cheek to be sure but, actually the only solution to this otherwise insoluble problem.
Stoddard didn’t introduce any ideas to which Burroughs wasn’t already familiar and in agreement. At best Stoddard’s superb research and explication clarified ERB’s understanding for him. I don’t know how familiar he was with Georges Sorel. Today Sorel is unknown except to specialists although I am beginning to see his name pop up so with the Communist regime of Barack Obama perhaps the way is being prepared for Sorel’s extreme measures of exterminating the Overman.
At any rate I have come to the opinion that Richard Slotkin is correct in thinking the Burroughs had read and was in accord with both Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. However Slotkin evaluates their work through the distortion of his own Communistic lens which is only valid to those of his point of view.
His view does not make Burroughs a racist or anti-Semite. It makes him an objective and accurate observer and analyst of the situation of his time. As indicated above Burroughs absorbed Stoddard’s information, that point of view and used it to create his wonderful works of the late twenties and first half of the thirties. If one bears Stoddard’s book in mind while reading those novels it will make them make great sense while presenting his view of the political and social situation
Of course the novels are not confined solely to dealing with these issues; Burroughs had a much more far ranging mind, both subjectively and objectively.
Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization is a major study as relevant today as the day it was written. The last ninety years have only borne out his theses. The Revolt Against Civilization is well worth a read, perhaps two. At any rate you will have an accurate idea of Burroughs’ social and political beliefs.
Chap. 6: Marianne Faithfull, Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
January 1, 2013
Chap. 6, Marianne Faithfull: Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
by
R.E. Prindle
Chapter 6
Orders From Headquarters
This chapter will center around the Global Communist Cultural Revolution phase kicked off in 1968 while being managed by Mao Tse Tung who replaced the Russians as managing director.
The purpose of the CR was to destroy the Bourgeois past replacing it with itself. Hence Ira Levin who wrote Rosemary’s Baby in which Satan’s child is named Andy posited 1966 as the Year One much as the failed new dating of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘89 was the Year One of that Revolutionary calendar. Perhaps in preparation for the CR in 1965 in the US new immigration reform was pushed through Congress that opened the gates of the US to the world, especially Africa, Mexico and the East. By 1968 West and East Asians were flooding into the country. As seems obvious now this was with the intent to subvert and destroy the Aryan hold on the US.
In his song Bob Dylan would sing: In the museums infinity goes up on trial, in an opening blast on destroying past culture as displayed in museums. In China Mao was less timorous as huge gangs of the Red Guards coursed through museums smashing irreplaceable cultural artefacts. They even invaded peoples homes ransacking the houses destroying anything of value. Culture bearers such as college professors or any educated persons were rounded up and sent out to reeducation camps to work at manual labor; tens of millions were murdered outright. Regular people were called before neighborhood re-education cells to confess their bourgeois faults and pledge to Communists faults.
Outside of China local agents were recruited from Communist ranks; college campuses suddenly sprouted Chinese Communist stores selling Mao’s Little Red Book and those pretty little pins sporting a
gold Mao against a red enameled background. Nice work and cheap too. Any campus that hadn’t been disrupted by ‘Free Speech Movements’ now came under attack by the Cultural Revolution. The end result would be Kent State.
As no one knew what was going on the Cultural Revolutionists seized the institutions beginning to establish the tone, the matrix with which opinions would be considered. This was established in subtle ways that few noticed and even they hadn’t a clue as to who or why. The Revolutionists had seized the cultural venues of movies, TV, newspapers, magazines and music, or, recordings. One of the key units in recorded music was the Rolling Stones. Mick was a Communist, at least since his London School of Economics days.
Even before the Redlands Bust he had been bleating that victory was his side’s because ‘they had the kids’ in the palm of their hands. The bust had been a cold douche that rankled Mick to his core. The revolutionists were of the mind set that they were going to fight and win and never lose. Thus the mild reprimand of the bust struck Mick as foul play, an unforgivable insult and injury.
Many people in the US were brought up short when their outrages were tried and sentences passed. I know people who went to prison for their outrageous criminal acts. They were considered martyrs. They couldn’t comprehend what they had done wrong anyway. Of course, by their own revolutionary lights what they had done was right; unfortunately the law, the authorities and the people, who Nixon called the Silent Majority were not of the same mind.
Mick found this out to his chagrin although he vowed revenge. Like Sigmund Freud and many another if he couldn’t move the higher powers he would enlist the aid of the lower. Thus after escaping his prison sentence the Stones metamorphosed into Satanic sorcerers for the cover of their Dec. 1968 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Mick After A Lifetime Walking Down The Long And Winding Road
The title itself was a play on the Queen’s request on British passports for the visited countries to allow the visitor to pass. Thus in the Freudian sense Mick elevated himself to a competing royal status with the crown as their Satanic enemy. One presumes that being a Stones’ fan was the entre into Satanic circles.
Mick was not new to Satanic ideas. He ran with Bob Fraser and Chris Gibbs while having at least met the US Satanist Kenneth Anger who was associated with the West Coast big daddy of Satanists, Anton La Vey. In addition he was probably already known to Donald Cammell who would star Mick in his film Performance and Marianne in his Lucifer Rising.
In June of ‘68 Mick would be recording his song Sympathy For The Devil in studio while being filmed by Jean Luc Godard for his revolutionary film One+One, retitled Sympathy For The Devil. Sympathy was inspired by Satanic Russian novel titled: The Master And Margarita. The novel had been given to him to read by Marianne.
The Master And Margarita
For the promoters of The Master And Margarita the novel is an astounding mind blower. Maybe if you’re Russian and haven’t been exposed to the stunning variety of truly astonishing unending mind blowing fiction and movies of the US. The cultural scene in Russia was primitive compared to the unbroken line of development in the West where very few limitations, none actually, were placed on expression. Bulgakov has his Satanic girls running around without clothes as though that were something not routine in the West. I mean, beginning in the sixties there was a pornographic explosion. Movies were made that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush. That poor guy was egregiously defamed according to current standards. De Sade’s puerile novels were thrown into the shade. By 1972 a movie like Deep Throat was being shown in legitimate theaters to the general public. How’s that for a cultural revolution?
Before the wars we had Edgar Rice Burroughs whose female characters on both Earth and Mars ran around robust except for a few ornaments. Woo woo Bulkagov.
My god, we had the Shadow and Doc Savage and then in the thirties comic books were invented. Superman was born the same year I was in 1938 but he grew up faster and already had a job by 1948 while I was sitting in the orphanage as a kid. Superman, Batman, Capt. America came in a flood of characters that was unceasing. There were marvels presented every month that exceeded anything Bulgakov can come up with. And then…and then…William C. Gaines at EC Comics (Educational Comics, and what an education it was) came out with Tales From The Crypt with its copycats. You want to talk about mind blowing!!! There I was a ten year old kid permeated with terrific pornographic images, sadistic violence and mayhem that even I said, reading on, they shouldn’t let ten year old kids see this. I don’t know what kind of brain damage they did but I feel OK. But they did and I read every single story. Now that was mind expanding.
Of course the parents of America did catch up with Gaines forcing him to withdraw the comics. Then as if to thumb his nose at the United Parents of America he created the aptly named Mad Magazine. Boy oh boy, those were the days. Never see those again.
And then the science fiction through the fifties. My god. There was school and there was school and the best school was the sci-fi. Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos and its two movies The Village Of The Damned and the sequel Children Of The Damned. I mean, Jack Schaefer and William Tenn. Try to top those two. The movie Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Christ! And for God’s sake the stunning James Bond movies. I could go on an on. The clearly Satanic Bus Stop TV series. Jesus Christ! All the scripts could have been written by Charlie Starkweather. All that and more. Much, much more before 1967 when M&M was published. Since then, I mean, have you seen the TV shows Dexter or Breaking Bad? Hell on wheels, guys, hell on wheels. All men to their battle stations. It’s not that M&M isn’t decent sci-fi/fantasy/horror, but that’s all it is. Doesn’t even compare with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But, then, maybe I’m over educated. Still, I think of myself as an average All American Boy.
Hey, have you seen A Giant Crab Come Forth? I have. Have you seen a single octopus tentacle demolish the city of San Francisco? I have. Have you seen the eggplant that ate Chicago…I could go on.
I don’t know how deeply or extensively the Russian author Mikhail Bugakov’s novel has penetrated the Western mind. It was certainly unknown in the sixties except to the initiated. Definitely not a best seller. I can’t remember ever hearing of it until the turn of the century when references to it as a literary marvel began popping up in my reading. In 2010 the book was published as a selection of the Folio Society of which I have been a long time member and so I acquired a copy. I have read it twice and while I recognize its purpose I am unimpressed with it as a novel.
Essentially a manual of social deconstruction the book is being heavily promoted in Communist circles. In Russia the book has been turned into a TV series, at least a couple movies and several stage plays for Western consumption.
In addition to the book I have acquired a three disc set of Vladimir Bercko’s film version and the TV series. The blurb on the back cover gives some idea of what the book means to its promoters:
Quote:
…An imagined world where one’s consciousness actually perceives and experiences sorcery. The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the novel on which this film is based, is a rare, mind-expanding pleasure, a journey whenever one takes and reads. The book is about the great, burning, perennial areas of the human predicament, story of the Christ, seen by Matthew, Judas and Pilate; the tale of Faust’s pact with the devil; the confrontation between individual genius and the demands of an ideologically driven State; the meaning of entertainment in society; and the love of man and woman. Bulgakov is an early precursor of the literary genre of magic realism exemplified by the South American writers Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Unquote.
The above seems somewhat overblown to me; about the only thing I would agree to unequivocally is that it is of the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre. Its actual purpose is as a manual for disrupting society, of cultural upending; in other words, of furthering the Cultural Revolution.
After the novel was finished , in a long post-climax, this passage is inserted into the novel.
Quote:
…the two blackguards marched down the asphalt path under the lindens straight to the veranda of the unsuspecting restaurant.
A pale and bored citizeness in white socks and a white beret with a nib sat on a Viennese chair at the corner entrance to the veranda, where amid the greenery of the trellis an opening for the entrance had been made. In front of her on simple kitchen table lay a fat book of the ledger variety, in which the citizeness for unknown reasons wrote down all those who entered the restaurant. It was precisely this citizeness who stopped Koroviev and Behemoth.
‘Your identification cards?’ She was gazing in amazement at Koroviev’s pince nez, and also at Behemoth’s primus and Behemoth’s torn elbow.
‘A thousand pardons, but what identification cards?’ asked Koroviev in surprise.
‘You’re writers?’ The citizeness asked in her turn.
‘Unquestionably,’ Koroviev answered with dignity.
‘My sweetie…’ Koroviev began tenderly.
‘I’m no sweetie,’ interrupted the citizeness.
‘More’s the pity,’ Koroviev said disappointedly and went on: ‘Well, so, if you don’t want to be a sweetie, which would be quite pleasant, you don’t have to be. So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of novels and you’ll be convinced, without any identification card that you’re dealing with a writer? And I don’t think he even had an identification card, what do you think?’
‘…You’re not Dostoevsky,’ said the citizeness who was getting muddled by Koroviev.
‘Well, who knows, who knows,’ he replied.
‘Dostoevsky’s dead.’ Said the citizeness…
‘I protest!’ Behemoth exclaimed hotly. ‘Dostoevsky is immortal!’
‘Your identification cards, citizens,’ said the citizeness.
Unquote.
This passage served as a blueprint for obstructionists. Passing into common use by the late seventies Village Fucks of this variety harassed innocent clerks to distraction. As an instruction manual how then did the book fit into the continuum of the proto-Cultural Revolution from the end of WWI to the present, for there is a question of authorship found here.
The passage concerning Koroviev and Behemoth might well have been written by the Dadaists of the Café Voltaire in Zurich. Their efforts were meant to disorient European culture, knock it off center. Themselves Jewish they were followed by the establishment of the Jewish Critical Theory school in Germany. Critical Theory meant that European customs, ideas and politics were to be denigrated whether virtues or vices as though by superior beings viewing from above and apart. This led to the debunking school of the twenties in the US by which all American heroes were attacked turning their virtues into vices and vices as evidence of ghastly criminality. Eventually the Critical Theorists would leave Germany migrating to the US en masse along with the entire Freudian psycho-analytic establishment. How this must have cheered Hitler.
One then begins to see the similarities between The Master And Margarita and this Jewish continuum. The protagonist of the novel was Satan going by the name of Woland (Woe to the Land) who was a master hypnotist dealing in counterfeiting.
Woland is almost a duplicate of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse who was also a counterfeiter and a master hypnotist. He also was out to destroy European society. Lang’s first effort was the silent flick Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler of 1922 which it is possible Bulgakov might seen but the events of the Russian Civil War make that improbable. There is no chance that Bulgakov could have seen Lang’s talkie sequel of 1933 The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse in which Dr. Mabuse having been placed in an insane asylum in 1922 has hypnotized his analyst, Dr. Baum, through his writing, into carrying out his subversive schemes. While Bulgakov couldn’t have been influenced by Lang the similarities are so close one may posit a central organization directing the publication of books and movies of this sort. This becomes more evident when one looks for similarities in the US.
In the US a coordinating agency had been founded in 1906 called the American Jewish Committee, the AJC, under the direction of Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall. Those are two names that don’t mean much outside of Jewish circles but they should. Louis Marshall’s collected correspondence is very interesting.
Now, the Great War of 1914-18 devastated Europe to be following by the greater devastation of WWII from approximately 1938 to 1945. At the same time in the Far East Japan opened hostilities that engulfed and unsettled that area beginning in the 1930s also through 1945. Hostilities continued in China through 1950 between the Communists and the Nationalists aided and abetted by massive shipments of US arms which even though granted to the Nationalists passed directly into Communist hands and then the Korean conflict began that ran through 1953.
In contrast the US and North America were not directly affected by these wars allowing permitting a unique uninterrupted culture to develop.
This period also coincided with astonishing technological advances that only the US was able to take full advantage. Thus radio became a reality beginning in the twenties although it didn’t become commercially effective until the early thirties. Perhaps even more significant was the introduction of sound to movies. The talkies made movies the most effective propaganda tool available until the emergence of television in the fifties.
As is probably not all that well known TV was commercially feasible in the late thirties but WWII postponed its introduction into homes until after the war.
Significantly the first successful talkie was the Jewish themed The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. Following that would be the series of films featuring the Marx Bros. Their movies would mesh with the Dada attack in art and the emerging Critical Theory school riding over a bed of Freudian psychology. All were direct attacks on Aryan Culture. As Joseph Goebbels told Fritz Lang when he denied a license to show The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse: No government could withstand propaganda if its kind. The truth of Goebbels statement was proven in 2008 with the US election of the Communist Barack Obama. After decades of the most vitriolic criticism and denunciation of US politics and society by the Left, all of a sudden such criticism was denied the opposition who were described as Domestic Terrorists and denied access to the media with the exception of the internet.
So, from 1930 to 1954 the Marx Bros. systematically mocked and vilified as many social institutions and Aryan mores as they could. In Germany before the wars this was called the Kultur kampf or culture wars, an early version of the Cultural Revolution. And of course the same program was carried on in films in general. Naturally it was all denied but now looking at those same films through the new spectacles provided post 9/11 it all seems clear and apparent. One sees with new eyes. Thus there are great similarities between the techniques of the Marx Bros. and The Master And Margarita.

What I consider the greatest of the Marx Bros. movies, although the Marx Bros. didn’t appear in it, was the movie of the Year One, 1966, A Funny Think Happened On The Way To The Forum starring the very Jewish Zero Mostel. The movie was the ultimate instruction manual for the demolition of society that The Master And Margarita follows very closely. Forum appeared in 1966 in the US while M&M was discovered in Russia the very same year #1. A succession of similarly themed movies followed of which the most significant perhaps was the movie Cabaret.
The question of the provenance of The Master And Margarita remains. Its similarities to the cultural trend of the previous decades is too strong to be coincidental. It is possible that in old religious terms the book could be called a pious fraud, something along the lines of The Protocols of Zion.
The provenance is certainly somewhat suspect. According to the legend that is impossible to adequately check, the novel was labored over for ten years by Bulgakov at which time he realized that Stalin would take the novel as a personal affront insuring that it would never be published while he would end up in the infamous Lubyanka Prison where in all likelihood he would receive a bullet to the base of his skull. No, better to put it in a drawer and forget about it until a better day should a better day ever come.
So who was Mikhail Bulgakov? He was apparently a novelist and a playwright. As improbable as it may seem, during the Russian civil war between the Communist Reds and the Royalist Whites after the Great War ended he was on the side of the Whites. In Revolutionary terminology white referred to the white cockade of the French royalists and not the color or their skin. Nevertheless according to legend he was a favorite of Stalin who actually favored this enemy of the State. Wouldn’t let his stuff be published but still thought him a fine fellow worth preserving. Bulgakov survived all the purges so common to the era.
Time passes, WWII, the rape of the German women, the Atom Bomb, the Korean War, the death of Stalin in 1953 while the precious manuscript sits quietly yellowing in its drawer. I might add that five hundred hand written pages fills a good sized drawer.
Beria and Khruschev follow Stalin followed in turn by Leonid Brezhnev and then this astonishing twist of fate happened. From the Orlando Figes Folio introduction:
Quote:
After Bulgakov’s death in 1940, the manuscript was hidden in a drawer by Elena Sergeevna until 1966, when, by one of the most ironic twists in Russian literary history, unknown until recently, it was prepared for publication by Konstantin Simonov, one of Stalin’s henchmen in the Writers’ Union who had taken part in the persecution of many writers before the Khruschev thaw. In 1956 Simonov had been made the chairman of the commission in charge of Bulgakov’s literary estate by the writer’s widow, who was an old acquaintance of Simonov’s mother, Alexandra Ivanisheva. (nee Princess Obolenskaya). Simonov then gave the manuscript ..to his ex-wife Evgenia Laskina, who was the working at Moskva (Magazine)…
Unquote.
To make a long story short, Moskva was a failing magazine and as there was great doubt in Simonov’s mind as to whether it would pass the censorship of now premier Leonid Brezhnev’s stringent rule he, I guess, decided to let his ex-wife take the fall if it didn’t pass. Better her than him and a subtle revenge indeed. But, why even take the chance against apparently insuperable odds.
Well, golly, the book did get past some very stupid or traitorous censors and the rest, as they say, is history, although the time line is very tight.
Moskva published Part One in its November 1967 issue doubling its subscriber list Moscow was so bowled over, and Part Two in January 1968. Now, Marianne received a copy of the translation of the American Grove Press imprint, read it, got it to Mick who by the June recording sessions for Sympathy For The Devil had read and digested it. Not much time in there for the Russian publication, translation into English and publication and distribution by the Grove Press, shipment to England and acquisition by Marianne. I mean, what was the big rush for something that might not sell? Therefore I believe something else must have been uppermost in certain minds. As I said earlier this book reeks of a fraud or forgery. Its happened before. The Donation Of Constantine as an egregious example.
The 1997 Hollywood movie Wag The Dog demonstrated exactly how it is done. In Wag The Dog the President of the US asks a Hollywood producer to stage a phony war to shore up his flagging popularity. The producer does this but as Shakespeare wrote: What a tangled web we weave when first we deceive. As the variables unfold in unforeseen manner the producer’s ingenuity is strained but equal to the task. He creates a war hero who while on the way to the ceremony dies. Consequently he manufacturers a sentimental story about Schumacher, the dead would be hero, who they dub Old Shoe.
The producer contacts a couple songwriters, explains his needs and they come up with an old timey 20s-30s type country cum folk ditty. The performance is doctored to sound like a scratchy old 78RPM.
Now, here’s the key point. It is arranged to place a copy of this forgery in the appropriate thirties archive location in The Library Of Congress. Miracle of miracles the forgery is ‘discovered’ becoming a hit generating a worshipful attitude for ‘Old Shoe.’ Old Shoe is buried in Arlington Cemetery, full military honors and mission accomplished.
There you have it- that was a forgery no different than, say, The Donation of Constantine or The Protocols of Zion.
The question then is why did The Master And Margarita surface in Year One in 1966 in time for the Cultural Revolution already begun actually but not announced by Mao until 1968, Year Three.
Quite simply it was necessary to place an instruction manual into the hands of certain key people and agitators. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter is an example of a lesson. Mick received his copy through Marianne and understood. How then did this unknown Russian novel immediately find its way into Marianne’s hands upon publication of the English translation of Grove Press?
I mean, how did the Jewish translator, Mirra Ginsburg, receive a copy immediately after the Russian book publication. I imagine she didn’t. The window of opportunity between January 1968 and end of May 1968 is too narrow. She must have been involved either immediately after the Moskva publication of Part One or possibly even before. Therefore that indicates a plan by somebody.
We know for a fact that the novel as published was not as written by Bulgakov. We are told that several hands altered the text including various censors. A full sixty pages were deleted in Mirra Ginsburg’s translation to be restored thirty years later…to reflect what?
There is plenty of reason then to believe the book was a put up job or, indeed, intended as a disguised instruction manual for easier distribution to interested parties…like Mick.
Mick when he received his copy immediately began to write or conceive the lyrics for Sympathy For The Devil. Satan the key figure in the novel is a master magician and hypnotist. He hypnotizes virtually the entire city of Moscow. As a refresher on continuity lets remember that Dr. Sigmund Freud was a master hypnotist seeking the destruction of European civilization and so was Lang’s Dr. Mabuse who was based on Freud.
We know that Bulgakov couldn’t have been aware of Lang’s Mabuse and I doubt that Bulgakov was much of a Freudian so that leaves forgery as the most probable explanation. As a point of fact the AJC, American Jewish Committee, has employed a stable of writers in the US since at least the thirties to churn out plausibly academic diatribes condemning those they consider anti-Semites. The AJC was global in scope having been active in European politics from its beginning so it would be easy enough to concoct The Master And Margarita either in toto or possibly a revision and claim to have discovered it in a drawer in 1966 The Year One by one Simon-ov in much the same manner that the fictional ‘Old Shoe’ was discovered in the Library Of Congress.
In an interview Mick said that the Master and Margarita influenced the writing of Sympathy For The Devil. In the furtherance of the Cultural Revolution Jean Luc Godard of the French Nouvelle Vague school of film makers made his revolutionary movie One+One, reissued as Sympathy For The Devil filming the Stones recording the song. So the Stones are placed in the heart of The Cultural Revolution.
Mick was fully aware of hypnosis as, actually, were a very great many of the rockers, so that he and Keith set the piece to a Samba rhythm. As Mick said in the interview the Samba is a very hypnotic rhythm. Thus, by creating a hypnotic mode everyone would receive the lyrics as suggestion. The suggestion being that the devil is a good fellow and one should have sympathy for him discarding one’s prejudices. There was actually a strong effort to rehabilitate Satan in the years following Year One. It will be remembered that both Mick and Marianne were tight with the Satanist Kenneth Anger who had a huge LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Marianne would later perform in Anger’s Lucifer Rising while Mick performed a soundtrack for another of Anger’s offerings.
Mick beginning shortly after Year Three would turn his act into performance art of a highly suggestive nature accompanied by an intentional hypnotic beat with stun gun volume, flashing lights and the stimulated hysteria of the crowd reaction. A proper atmosphere for hypnotic suggestion.
Mick’s vengeance for the drug bust then was to play the Pied Piper to lead the ‘kids’ to their destruction.
Marianne would be a casualty of his mania as she sank into the deepest of depression.

Chapter 7 follows.