Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells
And The
Wold Newton Mythology
by
R.E. Prindle
It Came From Outer Space
For some decades now I have been struggling with the problem of a new mythology for the scientific consciousness. When the old mythopoeic mythology was invalidated by science it left sort of a void in the human psyche. In the Arthurian sense we had entered the Wasteland of disappointed expectations, otherwise known as depression.
Over the last twenty years of unremitting labor I have been either trying to discover or create such an existing scientific mythology. Perhaps my efforts have been rewarded. I modestly offer the following for your approval.
When The Student Is Ready…
Unlike the internet where I get most of what passes for news by current standards, this day I was reading the newspaper. I hadn’t come to that, it was just lying handy and I had the idle moment. owever I read that our giant combined new and used Pulsar Book Store had laid off a couple dozen employees, or workers as they are sometimes amusingly described, because of declining in store sales. I further read that sixty percent of Pulsar’s sales were over the internet.
I’ve been doing all my book buying over the internet and hadn’t been in the Pulsar store for years. Casting about for a reason for a decline in sales, apart from a growing illiteracy in the body politic, it occurred to me that on line electronic transmission of books was cutting into book sales deeply. I mean, Amazon offers oodles of older books free, many of which you will never see in books stores but are offered by Print On Demand publishers over the internet. Ask yourself when you last saw a Charles King? Lots of them for free on Amazon. That has to hurt sales. I then reasoned that Pulsar’s shelves must be groaning. I might be able to find a superb selecion at good prices, and I was right.
I was rewarded with an armful of books at my first stop in the Bs. I picked an armful of hard to find Balzac titles dirt cheap, thousand page nineteenth century omnibus volumes for six dollars and ninety-five cents each, Good God Almighty. As close to heaven as you can get without taking the chance of dieing.
Then I bethought myself to check the H.G. Wells section. I have a complete collection of Wells’ fiction but I’m still missing a few titles of the non-fiction. The Wells shelf was loaded and with cream, titles that I had had trouble finding over the year were now there in profusion. I had to laugh to see nearly a whole shelf loaded down with copies of Wells’ Seven Science Fiction Novels in many editions. I bought my copy of that at sixteen when it became the foundation of my psychic reality. There were a number of editions I had never seen before. In a fit of curiosity and affection I pulled a copy out just to fondle it. As I did a small slim volume concealed between thetwo larger ones tumbled out and fell to the floor.
I picked the paperback up. It was by one Garrett P. Serviss titled Edison’s Conquest Of Mars and sub-titled as the Original 1898 Sequel To The War Of The Worlds. I laughed at what seemed ludicrous and slid it back on the shelf. I must not have been adept because it fell out on the floor again.
I stood looking at it for a few seconds then decided that a mysterious power was bidding me to read it. I know how ridiculous that sounds but it happens to me often and always with an important book for me to read. Call it serendipitous, call it destiny, I follow my star. They wanted nine-ninety nine for a paperback of two hundred pages. I had an armful of thousand page, hundred year old, hard backs on really good paper for six ninety-five each. I wavered. But then I rememberd the mysterious way it had been concealed between two books destiny knew I would look at. I thought of the old esoteric adage, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. This same thing had happened to me many times before. Often when my mind had been prepared a book had suggested itself. Here it was, deja vu all over again. Was I going to let a little literary bigotry stand between me and my obvious destiny? Not I. I begrudged the ten dollars but when I got home and examined the tiny volume I saw that I had discovered the missing link. I can now make a case for a new scientific mythology.
When It All Comes Down, I Hope It Lands On Me
The search for a new mythology goes on apace. Perhaps the catalyst in the organization of the search was a sci-fi writer named Philip Jose Farmer. Back in 1972 he formulated a scheme in his fantasy novel Tarzan Alive called the Wold Newton Universe. He provides a very rigorous framework for the search. Farmer posited that a meteorite fell to Earth near Wold Newton in the North of England in 1795, which is true, a meteorite did come down. He further posits following the lead of H.G. Wells novel In The Days Of The Comet that this 1795 comet produced a change in men’s minds, and in point of fact there was a change of consciousness that occurred at this exact time.
Several years ago, decades now, I bought a collection of the British magazine The Monthly Review, a run from 1781 to 1795. Isn’t this spooky? These volumes reflect a late medieval consciousness. As an example the volumes use f for s internally in a word- paf try for pastry for instance while beginning and ending esses are the convention letter s. After 1800 this form disappears. I wondered at what precise time The Monthly Review changed its orthography. Through the wonders of the internet I was able to determine that precise date. It was at the beginning of 1796, the volume following the last I own. Thus 1795 is, in fact, a very good date for the change to the modern consciousness.
After 1795 then Euroamerica looked at reality with different and fresh eyes. Also a new literary style arose that led into the genre literatures of the present. A magic generation of writers then arose with one foot in the medieval world and the other in its successor, with modern orthography of course. Shelley and Byron, Peacock and the greatest of all, the father of modern fiction, Walter Scott. Scott has lost nearly all his glamor now but he was the presiding genius of nineteenth century fiction. I mention only the great French Bohemians Honore De Balzac and Alexandre Dumas. Toss in Edgar Allan Poe.
Searching For The Thread
Thus in Tarzan Alive Philip Jose Farmer began a classification system for the new approach to mythology. Currently there are two Wold Newton systems- The French Wold Newton Universe and the Anglo-American. Generally speaking a Wold Newton author’s whole work, or the major part of it, is a series of novels, a roman a fleuve, built around a character or a theme, thus Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Baums Oz stories or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and John Carter/Mars stories. All the Wold Newton novels develop the new scientific mythology. Some themes are developed by several hands such as the Vampire corpus or that of Frankenstein/artificial life.
A major writer falling somewhere between literary and Wold Newton fiction is H.G. Wells. He neither created a great fictional character nor works that fit easily into nor works that are exactly genre literature. Still, Wells is at the center of the Wold Newton mythology.
There are three novels of Wells that I think can fit into and define the Wold Newton Universe. These are The War Of The Worlds, When The Sleeper Wakes and Tono Bungay. With the exception of the Seven Science Fiction novels, of which only four have made an indelible impact, the rest of Wells’ novelistic corpus is today disregarded having apparently no relevance to the modern world.
Of course I like Wells and I have read the entire fiction corpus. There are a few novels that I think merit attention but in the hundred years since they first began appearing the body of fiction that has been written obscures all but the brightest stars of novels so that vas amounts of meritorious fiction is only read by the specialist or literary enthusiast exploring the past.
War Of The Worlds is what got me started on this investigation, isn’t it? I’ve read War Of The Worlds three or four times now and each time it’s a new book and not the one portrayed on the screen or what I perceived from my childhood reading. I’ve come to the conclusion that the book isn’t really all that good although it has set the world on its ear. It must have played into the fears of a society desperately grappling with a sea change in history. Every conventional way of viewing the world was falling into the dust as the old mythology vaporized as before the Martian tripods and a new mythology was as invisible as Griffin in Wells’ Invisible Man. When you removed the wrappings of Griffin there was nothing there but the invisible power of the past.
Perhaps Wells’ Martians symbolized the all too visible power of the new scientific reality destroying the old magical religious vision of reality. At any rate the book was received with startling avidity at its publication in 1898. An nowhere was this book seized upon with such voracity as in America. The effect has also been enduring including the radio broadcast of Orson Wells in 1938 and a number of movie treatments. We often think Wells created this genre but not so.
In fact the space opera centered on Mars was an exciting new genre that developed rapidly during the nineties and the first decade of the new century. Burroughs with his great Martian Trilogy was merely taking advantage of an established theme which he epitomized so well that his books are a culmination of Martian writing to that point. His were the apex of the nineteenth century Martian theme, a new starting point for the future.
He was apparently well read in the genre although apart from a few obvious titles one can’t be sure how deeply he had read.
Robert Godwin explains in the introduction to Edison’s Conquest Of Mars:
Late in 1897 the great H.G. Wells struck gold when he submitted for publication- in Pearson’s Magazine of London- the future-war story to end all future-war stories, The War Of The Worlds. It was not the first story of aliens coming to Earth, Edgar Allan Poe had done that sixty years earlier. It was not even the first to involve humans fighting Martians, that had been done by Percy Greg in 1880, while German author Kurd Lasswitz had brought Martians to Earth to wage war with the British earlier that year. It was Wells who brought this novel idea home with star realism. The War Of The Worlds has little dialogue and few characters but is literally dripping with paranoia. His invading Martians were completely alien and they had the technology to rampage right across the capitol city of the most powerful nation on Earth. The War Of The Worlds soon appeared in America through the pages of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Will This Nightmare Never End?
Perhaps the dripping in paranoia was the key to Wells’ American success. America is a very paranoid ountry and the paranoia is shared equally by both the Right and the Left. If War Of The Worlds dripped with paranoia it was as nothing compared to Wells’ next book, When The Sleeper Wakes. Sleeper is all bombs, sirens and searchlights playing across the dark night skies. Sleeper is the masterpiece of paranoia. I just love it. Wells must hav been going through a period of deep anxiety when he wrote it. Sleeper is one great long anxiety attack wich he translated into a fear of being buried alive. The hero, Graham, is actually buried alive although above ground. He’s placed in a glass case where he sleeps for a couple hundred years until one day he awakes to find himself in possession of all the wealth in the world. His money had been in trust gathering interest for all these centuries until his estate equalled the world’s wealth. Of course he is more dangerous awake than asleep so he begins running scared.
But that fear or paranois also characterized The War Of The Worlds which is one long flight from danger. Godwin continues:
Cosmopolitan was not cheap and so it would not be until the following January that the impressionable and imaginative young inventor Robert Goddard would first encounter Wells’ Martian war machines. Copyright laws in America were still somewhat tenuous and newspapers were at liberty to do as they pleased. Obtaining permission was often the last thing a newspaper editor would worry about and this modus operandi was especially prevalent in the smaller newspapers such as the New York Evening Journal, The Milwaukee Sentinel and the Boston Post. Many of these newspapers decided to jump on Wells’ bandwagon.
In the Boston Post, a Sunday, January 9th 1898, an entirely revised version of The War Of The Worlds appeared under the title Fighters From Mars- or, The Terrible War Of The Worlds, as it Was Waged in or Near Boston in the year 1900. What is particularly remarkable about this is that the story is completely transposed from London to Boston. All of the familiar scenes which take place in south London are suddenly taking place in Concord Masschusetts. The Boston Post was fairly well circulated in the New England area and Robert Goddard soon learned of the remarkable serial. The Post certainly did their part to stoke the fires of enthusiasm, they repeated the first chapter the next day in Monday’s newspaper and then not a day went by for the next few weeks without another installment appearing. On the 3rd of February the serialization was complete and Wells’ great story was soon destined to appear in America as a full fledged book.
Then something altogether unexpected happened. The editors of the Boston Post revealed that they had acquired a “sequel” to Wells’ story, the advert in the Post read. “Edison’s Conquest Of Mars- A Sequel To ‘Fighters From Mars’… written in collaboration with Edison by Garrett P. Serviss the well known astronomical author.”
A truly astounding development. Here was immediate impact to be followed forty years later by the even more astonishing reaction to Orson Wells radio script of the novel which was accepted as fact, real by the radio listeners who grabbed their shotguns and ran into the streets to repel the Martian invaders. Obviously the novel answered a deep seated psychological need of Americans which would be reflected in a series of movies such as The Day The Earth Stood Still with Gort an Klaatu as well as such later developments as Roswell, New Mexico and Area 51. Aliens and space were united to the New Mythology. Of course such aliens are only God thinly disguised. After all such characters as Klaatu are always preaching to us to mend our misbegotten ways or else. Religion or no religion.
A Giant Leap For Americans
The remarkable thing is that the Boston Post or one or more of its editors got a British copy in their hands, or the Cosmopolitan reprint, read it had his mind transformed on the spot immediately beginnning the transposition from London to Boston while at the same time beginning he process to create a sequel that was ready to begin publishing as soon as the original finished. Plus Edison had to be immediately amenable to the idea so as to give his permission to use his name.
Now, all this is transpiring during the Spanish-American war and the insurrection in the Philippines. Also as if one phenomenon weren’t enough this was also the moment that Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden appeared. Kipling’s poem was, of course, a commentary on the Philippine insurrection.
Serviss then had probably no more than a month to draft his sequel. Serviss himself had a scientific background which he fully employs in his sequel. He was up to date on Martian theory. As incredible as it may seem the book could have been a pilot for Star Trek. He got it all in one book. The Boston Post serialization ran and then the story disappeared. It never made book form at the time. In 1947 it was unearthed and published in a truncated form so unless by a miracle the Post episodes were seen by Edgar Rice Burroughs they had no influence on him although it seems like they could have. However Percival Lowell the astronomer who is often mentioned as an influence on Burroughs was from Boston. By 1899 he had already established his observatory in Flagstaff and written the first of his three Martian books, ‘Mars.’ He might then have had an influence on Serviss. Lowell’s other two Martian books Mars And The Canals and Mars As The Abode Of Life written in 1906 and 1908 respectively might have been influenced by Serviss. As a budding Mars expert it is likely that he might have had his attention called to both Wells’ and Serviss’ efforts. If Burroughs read Lowell he would have been indirectly influenced by Serviss. Anyway Serviss has a full discussion of how the water imagined to be on Mars flowed from the South to the North because the South Pole was thought to be elevated over the North and water, of course, flows down hill. Serviss doesn’t explain how the water gets back to the South Pole.
Serviss and undoubtedly Lowell have the water flowing on the surface so Burroughs has it flowing underground somehow.
At the time Edison’s reputation was at its zenith as a technologist. He was the epitome of the American can do attitude. Serviss was pretty fair at this first attempt at sci-fi. One has to assume that all the scientific ideas were in the air but Serviss skillfully blends them together in that can do attitude within virtually days.
Edison creates a fleet of anti-gravity ships within thirty days. The anti-gravity ship is a plausible way of inter-planetary travel while the ships are designed in the projectile shape of current rockets. The disintegrator guns Edison designs, also within thirty days, eliminate the bonds between atoms also in a plausible manner thus scattering the stricken entity to the winds.
Thus a few years before the Wrights not only does Edison have heavier than air craft but the Martians have huge air fleets along the line of Burroughs. So, as I say, Burroughs was stepping into an established genre not originating anything.
Serviss merely makes the Martians giants so we essentially have a Gullivar and the Lilliputians story reversed. It’s a reasonably good story while being a very proper scientific novel. There is nothing really for future writers to add, just rearrange the details. And that was in 1899.
The Boston response to the invasion from Mars was to ‘organize’ its own invasion of Mars and annihilate them as a psychological projection. Very interesting.
From One Dark Spot To Another
I have found no response from Wells to this rewrite of War Of The Worlds and its sequel. H.G. got busy writing another fantastic futuristic sci fi effort title, When The Sleeper Wakes. This book can actually be bundled with 1909’s Tono Bungay. Both wonderful paranoid books. These two books plus War Of The Worlds form the core of my psyche and if the truth were known probably a large part of the psyche of Edgar Rice Burroughs; most especially he was influenced by Tono Bungay which can be readily traced.
Sleeper is a wonderfully paranoid tone poem. By 1898-99 Wells was realizing his ambition of rising above his origins while his Anima-Animus problem was becoming paramount. Wells was born into the lower social level of society with almost no hope of realizing his considerable potential. He was seemingly condemned to a life as a Draper’s Assistant which was little above servitude or even slavery. On his own efforts he rebelled seeking a way out through education. He achieved this after enduring several years on the razor’s edge uncertain as to what his future would be. Combining his scientific background with his literary skills he began to rise above his origins financially although he was never to escape the psychological stigma of his lower class origins.
Thus through his short stories which were sensational at the time and some still are he got a foothold in the literary scene. Wells wrote at least two or three masterpieces. His The Time Machine put him in the writer’s top notch class. War Of The Worlds and When The Sleeper Wakes, close to a diptich, written out of acute anxiety as to his future put him over the top. He was a force to be reckoned with.
Thus both novels pit his heroes against overwhelming forces that they must defeat. In the War Of The Worlds the enemies fade away through natural causes. In Sleeper, Graham the Sleeper, awakes to find himself the richest man in the world only to discover that all is to be taken away from him. This is normal anxiety for someone on the rise. The new man is always resented and his way made difficult. He is to be prevented if possible. Hence the intense fear and paranoia of Sleeper. In the denouement Graham takes to the air in the last remaining airship to single handedly drive back the Negro police summoned from Africa. Prescient really. The Sleeper’s plane spirals into a crash but then Wells takes the copout that it is only a dream. At any rate in real life he wakes up to find that he is now a guru. His non-fiction Anticipations- a guide to the future- published two years later in 1901 established him irrevocably as a ‘futurist’. All he had do then was write passable books.
Both of his masterpieces Worlds and Sleeper also dealt with Wells’ troubled sexuality. As in the life of all men his Anima became estranged from his Animus which Wells was never able to reconcile as he developed a rather bizarre sex life as he searched for a way to recover his Anima.
In WOW as the populace was fleeing the Martians his hero was driving a cart along with his Anima figure. The two became separated when a crowd came between them and she was lost. In Sleeper Graham finds his Anma but once gain events separate them and he is about to crash his plane alone.
And then ten years later Wells crowned his work with the very wonderful Tono Bungay. Not close to the finest story ever told it is nevertheless one of the world’s great novels. The book had a profound influence on me. I first read it when I was twenty while I have subsequently read the book three times. I cherish my first reading because I projected myself into the story so much that I rewrote the book in my imagination to suit my own needs. Tono Bungay was an entirely new book in my last reading. I hope to show that the book had a profound influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs as his and Wells lives touched as the 1930s arrived. It’s always a strange world.
Wells seems to have been interested in the patent medicine businss in the US during the first decade of the century. Strangely it is not impossible that the story refers to the situation of a Dr. Stace of Chicago. I’m just guessing now. Stace’s partner was a young man named Edgar Rice Burroughs. So it may be coincidence that Edward Ponderevo, the inventor of the tonic Tono Bungay, and George Ponderevo his nephew, may have been based in part on Stace and Burroughs. I mean, the patent medicine stories are identical. Probably a coincidence though but I’m just guessing.
During the first decade of the twentieth century the patent medicine business had developed in the United States to magnificent proportions. As great national magazines arose the potential of the business rose accordingly. The active ingredient in the patents was usually alcohol although drugs, which were unregulated were frequently used. It is well known, for instance, that the Coca in Coca Cola referred to the cocaine with which the drink was laced. Coke was a real pick me up back then. Amphetamines were isolated in 1897 so imagine Methedrine Cola. Quite an idea.
The US government saw the dangers of these patent medicines, not a few of which used the opium based laudanum. I mean, these were loose times, they used to give infants opium based laudamun to keep them quiet. Better than TV. So, during the teens the government was forced to conduct a campaign against patent medicines. First they came for the patent medicines then they came for the alcohol and then they came for the cigarettes. Now they’re working on sugar and salt and caffeine. You’re next, you miserable user you. Wells was watching this fascinating activity from Britain. In one instance Edward Ponderevo remarks that six or seven go-getter Americans would wake England up. Then he invented Tono Bungay, the patent medicine par excellence.
Strangely, leading the anti-patent medicine campaign in the US was Samuel Hopkins Adams who would affect Stace-Burroughs then and sixteen years or so later would upset Burroughs’ life when he published his very successful novel, Flaming Youth. Strangely, strangely how many people who have never met can be so influential on others. Almost paranormal.
So, Burroughs took up with Stace in the sale of patent medicines just as the government was cracking down on them, putting them out of business, filing legal complaints, doing the double nasty. Stace and Burroughs developed a close relationship, almost as close as father and son or, uncle and nephew. Even after the two were put out of business they continued in another line of business before parting. Erwin Porges in his biograpy of ERB doesn’t go into a lot of detail over this relationship, maybe from a mistaken sense of delicacy, but this was a big event in Burroughs’ life perhaps straining his marriage with Emma. I believe it was here that he gained his personal experience of sheriffs and grand juries.
Stace may have been a big enough operator to come to Wells’ attention so that he was captivated by this story of the older man and his younger acolyte.
At any rate Edward Ponderevo goes bust in a provincial town through his aggressive business practices removing to London where he develops the idea of Tono Bungay. Wells then diverges from the patent medicine story as Ponderevo, who was a real go-getter, develops an empire based on legitimate products, like soap, so that Tono Bungay takes a back seat in his success story.
Interestingly Ponderevo buys a huge estate not unlike Tarzana around which he begins to build a ten foot high wall some eleven miles in length. Then, of course, he overextends himself and goes bust.
In reading this story, as I’m sure Burroughs did, he must have really related to the patent medicine story while probably rewriting the story in his mind to suit his circumstances. In this story too, Wells finds his perfect soul mate or Anima who once again he loses.
If by chance Wells was aware of the Stace story and did know he had a junior partner, Burroughs, he undoubtely forgot about him and the patent medicine business in the turmoil of the years to come.
The story of Ponderevo, his large estate and the eleven mile ten foot high wall must have stuck in Burroughs’ mind. The story may have been instrumental in his decision to buy Tarzana while it appears spectacularly in 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man.
Let me say that this whole group of writers who would nearly all find a place in the Wold Newton Universe read each other. While Kipling, Haggard, Wells and Doyle were reading Burroughs after he became famous as well. Indeed, Wells in Sleeper mentions three stories that had a profound effect on all these writers: Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and Henry James’ The Madonna Of The Future. Writers appearing after ERB’s fame appear to have been universally influenced by his, too. Haggard and Kipling’s Love Eternal was a response to ERB’s The Eternal Lover and unless I’m oversensitive they talked to him in it, too.
In a way then this was a form of telepathy, so controversial a topic at the time- true long distance communication and this would continue through the thirties if you’ve read enough and thought about it.
Anyway Burroughs read extensively incorporating almost everything that impressed him into his stories one way and sometime or other. I’m sure he was unconscious of using most of the sources. Thus the story of Tono Bungay, Ponderevo and the ten foot fence entered his subconscious.
In 1919 he left Chicago for LA for good. His intent was to buy twenty acres or so to raise hogs. This he could easily have afforded avoiding all the subsequent economic pain. However Harrisons Gray Otis, the publisher of the LA Times had died in 1917 and his 540 acre estate, Rancho Del Cabrillo, was on the market. ERB made an abrupt about face and bought it. I’ve often wondered why, what was the impetus? If one reads of Ponderevo’s estate in England one has a pretty good match of Tarzana. Burroughs has been quoted as saying he would have liked to have a large estate that he could build a ten foot high wall around. Of course he had the estate and lost it. But the Ponderevo estate seems to have been on his mind.
This may sound completely conjectural but let’s move ahead to 1933 when ERB penned what I consider his magnum opus, Tarzan And The Lion Man. He includes a novella in the story that might be entitled, Tarzan And The City Of God. This is a pretty good story. By 1933 the talkies had been in existence for five years. Many of the more magnificent early horror stories had already been filmed. I may be a sucker for these early horror films but given the limitations of the industry at the time they have never been equaled. So, in addition to all the books stored in ERB’s mind, fifteen years or so of silent films, he now added a full catalog of talkies. Himself a virtual father of all B movies with his own catalog of novels all these B horror films reinforced his imagination. Even though he had little to do with the filming of his own movie starring Herman Brix as Tarzan, The New Adventures Of Tarzan, the movie was nevertheless perfect of the B genre. Sort of an a correction and example to MGM.
Tarzan And The City Of God is perfect in the Pulp genre which is the literary counterpart of the B movie but now ERB seamlessly joins the Pulp to the B genre.
Tarzan And The Lion Man mocks the making of MGM’s film, Trader Horn. As I have pointed out in other reviews in 1931 ERB signed a contract with MGM that removed the Tarzan character in the movies from his control to MGM. MGM then proceeded to mock the Tarzan character on the screen in an attempt to destroy ERB’s creation. Of course, the mockery failed, Tarzan going on to greater glory and an immortality he might not have attained otherwise.
At the same time ERB was locked in a battle with Joseph Stalin and, at the risk of seeming preposterous, the Soviet Union. This war was brought to the surface n 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible. Now, Stalin and the Communists of all countries were attempting to discredit all pre-Revolutionary writers who rejected the Communist program. ERB was one of these while, oddly, Tarzan was one of Stalin’s favorite characters, especially in the MGM movies.
H.G. Wells who accepted the Revolution in substitution for God in about 1920 was one of Stalin’s literary hatchet men. During this period Stalin assigned State prostitutes to service certain Western literary men to report back to him on their doings. Moura Budberg had been assigned to H.G. Wells. Amazingly Wells fell deeply in love with her although he had to have known that he was her job. One of Wells’ targets was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Thus beginning in the twenties Wells began parodying and vilifying Burroughs in various books to which Burroughs replied in other of his own books. Thus, in a sense, there was telepathic communication.
In 1933 the combined attack of MGM, one imagines Louis B. Mayer, Wells and Stalin had overwhelmed Burroughs.
In 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible Burroughs had been forced to abandon the valley of Opar and La to Wellsian and Soviet interference. The Communists invaded Opar destroying ERB’s imagined paradise. So now, in a masterful creation he attacks Wells, MGM and the Communists in the City of God, London, England transposed to the Mutia Escarpment in Africa The Mutia Escarpment was MGM’s imaginary location for the Tarzan movies named after an African actor who appeared in Trader Horn. We do have telepathic communication here if you’ve got your radio turned on and tuned in. So there is layer after layer of mockeries in what is actually a titanic combat involving film and literature carried on right before the eyes of an unseeing world. Stalin, Burroughs, Wells and L.B. Mayer knew but virtually no one else. I might never have caught on but for the internet and the availability of films on DVD and flat screen TVs programmed through my wireless computer network. I have a complete collection of ERB’s novels, nearly all of Wells, and a nearly complete collection of Tarzan DVD’s. There’s always one or two that elude you. So I can read and watch at will. Rather amazing really. All one’s intellectual influences on one shelf while every library and film archive is only a click away. Isn’t God good to us?
So, Tarzan scales the Mutia Escarpment which at his point of attack is a sheer wall of granite. this probably indicates the difficulties ERB was facing. As usual there is an easier ascent for the ladies but Tarzan knows nothing of it. In real life, the location of Van Dyke’s Trader Horn was Murchison Falls on the Nile and the plateau would have been the land around Lake Victoria.
On the plateau Tarzan approaches the City of God/London which is surrounded by a, guess what, ten foot high wall. The circumference must have been at least eleven miles. Thus we have a replica of Ponderevo’s estate as imagined by H.G. Wells of London, England. Instead of Ponderevo’s modern ‘castle’ we have a replica of what might be Frankenstein’s castle or some othe horror film castle with the requisite village at its base.
Now, ‘God’ who was a ‘formerly handsome Englishman’ had come to this country in 1859. This is now 1933 so 74 years previously. As God will tell Tarzan shortly he was a biological scientist experimenting in evolution and creating artificial life a la Frankenstein, when his studies involving corpses brought the authorities down on him forcing him to flee England but not before he had removed, essentially DNA, which ERB calls ‘germs’, from the corpses of Henry VIII and his court buried in Westminster Abbey. In London, Africa God had forced the evolution of a tribe of gorillas turning them into barbaric replicas of Henry VIII and his court. Still having the appearance of gorillas they have more or less human minds speaking and acting as archaic Englishmen.
Tarzan having scaled the impossible cliffs of the plateau is now faced with a ten foot wall with sharply pointed wooden stakes pointing downward making a leap and hoist impossible. ERB has left out the overarching tree in this instance so Tarzan does his strongman act. The body builders are never far from ERB’s imagination. Tarzan pulls off an impossible stunt. Leaping up he grabs a couple stakes lifting himself over his wrists until he was above the wall then rolled forward. Only time that trick’s ever been performed. Thus ERB enters that ‘sacred city.’ The sort of Troy that refused Achilles.
The scaling of the cliffs, the clearing of the wall might have been suggested to ERB by his struggle to achieve success which he had done for one brief moment. Lifting himself by his bootstraps, as it were, he had gained entry into that sacred city. His success was to be shortlived and almost as tragic as Tarzan’s visit to the City of God or ERB’s Tarzana or Ponderevo’s estate.
While Wells was born to poverty ERB’s course in life had been different; he was a Golden Child with the highest expectations. And then in his teens it was all taken from him as he was plunged into poverty although not as abject as he makes it out to be. Thuse he had a different personal myth than that of Wells. He identified with Mark Twain’s Prince And The Pauper in which the Prince changes places with his impoverished doppelganger, then regains his position. His other favorite book of this type was Little Lord Fauntleroy in which a British heir lives a normal life in America until he inherits his English title. Thus these two books combined with Tono Bungay suggested a course to his life that he actually realized and as the three titles suggest lived his life in a boom and bust fashion. as though compelled to gain and lose, lose and gain his fortunes until he died in bed a comparatively well off man. ERB was a very suggestible guy. At this point in his life he was heading into a major bust part of the cycle and this story tells of it.
Once inside the walls there sits the castle, The City of God, the City on the Hill, the sacred city of Achilles, his goal. Tarzan mounts a very long flight of steep stairs as ‘God high above on the castle ramparts watches with grim satisfaction. the fly has come to the spider. Just like L.B. Mayer and MGM he’s got his man all but trapped.
Having just been trapped by his enemies ERB belatedly has it all figured out. Tarzan enters a oyer faced by three doors. At this point all decisions are Tarzan’s. He can go back or he can go forward. He elects to go on. Two of the doors are locked while one is ajar. This scene of Tarzan and the doors is repeated several times in the corpus. I’ve tried to figure it out. The nearest I can come is a short story of 1898 by Frank Stockton titled The Lady Or The Tiger.
Since this was a very famous story I, for myself, have no doubt that ERB read it and was suitably impressed. This is arbitrary, I know, however there is a great deal of similarity between this story and the story of Queen Nemone and Tarzan in the arena from Tarzan And The City Of Gold. Now, in the Lady Or The Tiger the story hinges on two doors, behind one of which is a tiger and the other a gorgeous lady. This is the trial by ordeal that Stockton’s king has chosen to decide his criminal cases. In his story a young lowly man has dared to love the king’s daughter. She is inn attendance but displeased because the lover will possible marry another. She indicates to him to take the right hand door. The question is left unanswered whether the lady or the tiger was behind the door by Stockton leaving it to the reader whether the one or the other was the man’s fate.
In the city of God, of course, the choice has been made for Tarzan as the middle door is left unlatched. Tarzan enters descends some steps, passes through another door that latches behind him to find himself facing…the lady. Well,I don’tknow, could be unrelated to Stockton’s story, but then, again….
At any rate it relates to ERB’s obsessions with tigers. As we all know the magazine story of Tarzan Of The Apes had both tigers and lions that public opinion forced Tarzan to change as the literalists pointed out that there were no tigers in Africa. ERB changed the tiger to a lioness he called Sabor so that female lions can be thought of as tigers. I think most of the lions Tarzan kills are females. If tigers and ladies are associated in ERB’s mind then in City of God Tarzan got both the symbol and the real thing, who was his preferred Anima figure Rhonda. I’m pretty sure that’s how ERB’s mind worked.
Speaking of tigers, for those lovers of the Pulp and B movie genres, a perfect of its kind, the grande finale of the genre so to speak is Fritz Lang’s Indian diptich The tiger Of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb of 1959. Set in India but pure Burroughs with plenty of tigers, as there are no lions in India as everyone knows. Stunning color and the perfect pulp story of the twenties and thirties. Three or four hours of bliss.
So Tarzan/ERB is in a cage with his other half, his Anima. He’s been in tight spots before but this is it, the real thing, the place that’s a leap too far. Rider Haggard all over again. While the Big Guy and Rhonda are talking things over their captor, ‘God’, makes his appearance. A jolly fellow, a formerly handsome Englishman, now piebald, who might go by the name of H.G. Wells.
As I said Wells is one of my favorites and when I was younger and slightly more obtuse Wells struck me as he probably did ERB as a stunning writer. Later as I learned of Wells’ politics and other failings he lost much of his gitter but the glory pretty much remains although resented. Burroughs had much more reason to consider Wells a ‘formerly handsome Englishman’. Thus he takes a certain malicious pleasure in making his God character half black, half white, half ape and half human. There’s a lot more to analyze in the character of God but I’m working this side of the track right now.
The reason God is half and half is because as he aged he took germ cells from the apes to rejuvenate himself thus slowly adopting ape characteristis, regressing as it were in an evolutionary sense and making a fine joke on the Stokes Trial in Tennessee of a few years earlier. God is delighted to have captured two such fine White DNA specimens as he hopes their germ cells may restore him to his former splendor.
We’ll never know now because while God absents himself, in the best pulp/B movie fashion Tarzan feels a breeze stirring. This leads to what is hopefully an escape oute but merely tuns into an avenue leading to Tarzan’s Gotterdamerung. A fire starts rising up through the flue Tarzan found and ascended so that the whole City of God on the hill perishes in flames.
While Burroughs may have said back in the teens that he had never read Wells, that may be dismissed. Actually when one delves behind the obvious facts one finds a fairly intimate connection with their careers contacting on the psychological level, that is to say ‘telepathically’, several times. Between Wells and Burroughs almost continuously from, say, 1908 to the thirties.
If one assumes that Wells was aware of the Stace-Burroughs situation, which is only a possibility, then Wells formed part of Burroughs subconscious with his Tono Bungay. That influence probably surfaced when Burroughs purchased Tarzana and then became continuous through the twenties and thirties when Wells became Stalin’s literary hatchet man.
Wells eludes the Wold Newton because he never created a mythic character or series of novels although the psychological situations of the seven science fiction novels and Tono Bungay along with many of his short stories give him a significant place in the Wold Newton mythos. The WNU is of course a state of mind giving mythological form to history since 1795 when the meteor landed altering consciousness.
A Review
Thuvia, Maid Of Mars
by
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Part III-C
Review by R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Civilization And Its Malcontents
Let us say that for the fifty years or so before the 1920s there was a growing sense of societal malaise. This malaise was reflected most notably in the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ psychological projection, Tarzan Of The Apes. One has to account for the immediate acceptation by society of such an absurdity. Tarzan, in fact, completely rejected civilization for the life of the romantic ‘unrestrained freedom’ of the jungle. The noble savage in fact.
Thus in a metaphor Burroughs reflected the malaise of his time so brilliantly that his creation was accepted as virtually a real person. Writers like Grant and Stoddard put the same theme into more scholarly terms. As noted, contrary to Richard Slotkin’s idea, Grant had little or no influence on Burroughs while the slightly later Lothrop Stoddard whose three relevant works appeared only from 1920 to 1922 could have had no influence on Burroughs’ formative years. It seems probable that Burroughs did read Stoddard and was influenced by his work but only after his ideas were fully formed. Even then The Revolt Against Civilization appeared after Burroughs had examined some of the same problems in his rejected manuscript, Under The Red Flag of 1919.
The problem of the malcontents and their war on civilization was examined by a number of writers during the twenties and thirties so why Slotkin singled out Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard isn’t as clear as it might be. Postwar German cinema was intensely concerned with the matter as why should it not? Germany was under asault by what Stoddard called the Underman. Nor need Slotkin think Stoddard was alone. I’m sure there were dozens of forgotten books prophesying the end of the world by one means or another including the Undermen of Communism.
The Underman, or the Communist, was not even a term unique to Stoddard. Gustave Le Bon, the French scholar on whose work Sigmund Freud based his study Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego wrote prolifically on the psychological foundations of the Underman. Freud based his book on Le Bon’s 1895 study The Psychology Of Crowds. Unless I’m mistaken he based his 1930 study Civilization And Its Discontents on Le Bon’s 1921 book The World In Revolt: A Psychological Study Of Our Times.
On the cinematic side the problem was examined in the great silent films The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler. Lang would follow that ten years later with the sound film The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse.
Even though Buroughs’ Under The Red Flag was rejected in 1919 he persisted, rewriting and extending the text into the 1926 story, The Moon Maid. This story reflects a possible reading of The Revolt Against Civilization but such a reading was much more evident in 1934’s Tarzan And The Lion Man.
The development of the problem was evident to all these writers which it seems to have escaped Slotkin who attributes the recognition of societal evolution to mere ‘racism’ in the writers. One thinks that perhaps Slotkin is too involved in his own agenda.
Rider Haggard enunciated the problem quite clearly in his 1888 novel Allan Quatermain in which Quatermain grouses about the ‘strict limits’ of civilization compared to the ‘natural’ life of the African Zulus. It might almost seem that the idea of Tarzan arose in Burroughs’ mind from that observation. In fact science was undermining all the comforting beliefs that mankind had been settled in for a hundred thousand years. During that long period characterized by the mental mode of what is called mythopoeic thinking man’s mind devoid of true knowledge projected a vision of reality that resulted in the notion of God. Thus reasoning from insufficient knowledge man’s mind came up with an erroneous result. You can’t get out of a mind what isn’t in it; all education is suggestion.
As Freud was to say, man’s settled view of reality received its three great shocks when Galileo disproved the geocentric notion of the universe, Darwin disproved the uniqueness of man’s position in the animal kingdom and he, Freud, displaced the conscious mind with his vision of the unconscious mind. Once again Le Bon was there ahead of him.
Thus as the nineteenth century opened and progressed the bases of mankind’s notions of reality were shattered leaving him emotionally and intellectually bereft of foundations of belief. Adrift without an anchor.
As if that were not bad enough the great cataclysm that ushered in the modern era, The French Revolution, was based on the the absolute notion that not only were all men created equal but remained equal in all aspects of their existence. The advance of civilization would toss this certainty into the trash can of history also.
As civilization placed greater and greater demands on the intelligence and self-discipline of men and women the incontestable gap between those less intelligent and those more intelligent became more and more obvious. Thus as the century progressed the notion of the Overman and the Underman began to become clear.
At the same time the first tentative efforts at measuring the intellectual potential of the individual began to become possible. Of course the basic inequality of men and women in its physical aspect had always been apparent. Some men were naturally stronger and better muscled than others. But, even that was changing. The science of physical culture was making it possible for the 98 lb. weakling to develop himself into a man mountain. Thus artifically developed srongmen like the Great Sandow ushered in the golden age of the strong man topped off by Charles Atlas who guaranteed he could turn you into a man mountain if you followed his program.
There was the promise that you could dethrone that bully and kick sand back in his face. On the other side Francis Galton was originating the first primitive tests to measure intelligence potential. Burroughs would have seen both proponents during his miraculous summer of 1893 at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. I mean to say that both facts entered his mind where they could be digested and emerge later. Nothing can come out of your mind that didn’t go in it.
And then after the turn of the century Binet devised he first actual IQ test. Thus, just as Sandow and Atlas could measure the size of muscles, the psychologists became able to measure the intelligence potential. Those with high IQs were set up; those with low IQs were cooked. The upshot was that all men were not created equal nor could they ever attain intellectual equality.
To a very large extent what became the Communist Party recognized the inequality while demanding equality against reason. Recognizing subconsciously, perhaps, that men could never be intellectual equals rather than try the futile task of raising the less fortunate they sought to destroy education which brings out the inequality but doesn’t create it. No matter what happens there are always going to be the more intelligent just as there will always be the physically stronger. As Le Bon points out, if you needed to hear it, nature don’t know from equality.
Thus the Communist Party devised the well sounding slogan- From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Good plan for the needy, slavery for the able. The needy were organized beginning their struggle to achieve superiority by collective action. This was accomplished in Russia in 1917. The battle was joined.
Just as individuals are created with different capabilities so are peoples and races. Some can achieve and some can’t. Slotkin who must be a Communist thus takes offence at what he perceives to be, and is, an attitude of White Supremacy in Burroughs, Grant and Stoddard. While I am aware there are those who will disagree with White superiority it is nevertheless not an attitude but an evolutionary fact. That is the reason Communists have Darwin under attack. While Darwin doesn’t say it, it is the inevitable result of his studies. Just as it was necessary for the Undermen to destroy education in the hopes of creating intellectual equality so it became necessary to destroy White achievement of the last five hundred years. The whites must be demonized and made to feel evil and inferior morally. That is the import of Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation.
At that level all three writers are guilty. As has been stated in Canadian courts- Truth is not a defense. So there’s nothing to discuss. Might is right and whoever has the might will prevail.
It is a fact that all three writers were anti-Communists so it may be assumed that whatever Communists believe, they didn’t. And why should they? Might may be right but it can still be nonsense. Communism is a flawed ideology based on a false premiss. It always fails wherever it is introduced. Failure is not evidence of a bad plan in Communist eyes. One just continues to shovel sand against the tide and pray. So succeed or fail they always think they can succeed by the same flawed ideology. The fault for failure lies elsewhere.
In that sense Burroughs was wasting his time assailing this religion of failure with his Under The Red Flag and its successor The Moon Maid. The only people who would applaud his effort would be we non-Communists but he could never convince anyone with Communist leanings. Of course that wasn’t well understood at the time.
If Burroughs were accused of not believing in equality that would be true. Not only are John Carter and Tarzan superior to any contemporaries on two worlds but Burroughs has a whole hierarchy of value. John Carter is the Warlord of Mars ruling from the top city of Mars, Helium. The races of Mars pretty much reflect those of Earth and their relative stations. The main exception is the ruling Red race. As Whites do and have existed on Mars in Burroughs stories while at one time being the dominant race perhaps the Red race is some sort of amalgam of the various Eropean immigrants of the United States. I believe the Green Men represent the American Indian. Both roam the great plains while being essentially savages.
Tarzan though always spoken of as being White is described as a bronze giant. Bronze is a fairly dark metal so that Tarzan and the Red men of Mars may be more or less identical in color.
Tarzan is the man-god so there are none superior or even equal to him. Below him come the English who are the cream of mankind. Perhaps slightly below the English are the French and then the rest of the Whites. Tarzan himself is psychologically an animal having been raised by the Apes. Not your ordinary gorilla or Chimp but a species intermediate between Gorilla and the Negro. Slotkin hasn’t read enough Burroughs to make an intelligent comment but the undeniable attitude of Burroughs is enough for Slotkin to condemn him as an unregenerate bigot. The reader may believe as he likes. I have stated my opinion eslewhere and that is enough. Whether any of these opinions of Burroughs influenced American soldiers at My Lai is open to question. The burden of proof is on Slotkin and he hasn’t provided it.
Along with the Undermen however, speaking through Tarzan, Burroughs is heartily discontented with civilization.
The spectacle of Chicago of the 1890s as a dirty unpleasant place haunts Burroughs. In contrast to the great White City of the Columbian Expo was what was afterwards known as the Black City of everyday Chicago. The contrast was so strong and so offensive to the Undermen that within a year of the Expo’s closing the entire White City was burned to the ground with the exception of one building. Hence perhaps the decayed crimson and gold ruins of Opar and the crimson and gold twin cities of Helium. One wonders what effect the sight of the ruin of the White City had on Burroughs when he revisited the site sometime after his miraculous summer of ’93. The mind creates nothing from nothing so there must have been models of the great cities of ERB’s imagination.
There are points at which Burroughs and Communism have quite similar views. It will be remembered that Burroughs only reluctantly married and throughout his life expressed discontent with the institution. To some extent or other ERB must have been an advocate of free love. Communists would have heartily approved of ERB’s women who went nude except for certain ‘adornments.’ Communists of course want women to be accesible to any man who wants them at any time while they have always advocated bare breasts.
In many ways when the Communists appropriated Tarzan for the MGM movies it took but slight changes to make Tarzan conform to their ideals. The MGM Tarzan and Jane were not married. While Burroughs’ Tarzan was a highly educated on-again off-again sophisticate the MGM Tarzan was a stupid illiterate oaf and one who rejected the attributes of civilization high up there in the Cloud Cuckoo Land of the Mutia Plateau.
On the essentials though Burroughs rejected the demands of the Underman as The Moon Maid clearly shows. There was very little in Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization that Burroughs would have disagreed with. At the same time there was probably very little he didn’t already believe although he had never codified his information as Stoddard had. Slotkin’s contention that Burroughs was influenced by either Grant or Stoddard is surely wrong. ERB had already taken hs positions before either men had begun to write.
Each writer was, in his own way, an advocate of White Supremacy. It now become clear that White Supremacy has nothing to do with a fringe element in Liberal ideology. All Whites are White Supremacists in that ideology unless they reject ‘White skin privilege’ whatever that is. Ayers and Dorhn explain in their recent Race Course In White Supremacy. Interestingly constructed title. Nor as Slotkin would have it is the attitude based on mere racial pride and bigotry but on a solid record of achievement unattained by any other people. The quesiton is not was it right for some people to rule or be supreme because in the nature of things some people will rule and be supreme but which of the peoples are most qualified to be supreme.
All people have had equal opportunity so that one can only conclude that the race has gone to the most qualified participant. In the contest the Whites unified the other peoples against them as must inevitably be the consequence of being the top people. As they say, getting there is the easy part; staying there is the hard part.
Slotkin merely represents the envious losers, the Undermen. who clutch at any firebrand to burn the White House down. Who is most to be admired and emulated? Builders or destroyers?
Finis of Thuvia, Maid Of Mars Review
Thuvia, Maid Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Review
March 14, 2009
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
A Review
Thuvia, Maid Of Mars
by
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Part I
Review by R.E. Prindle
This very interesting sdtory was written shortly after ERB returned to Chicago from his first San Diego excursion. It was placed between the Girl From Fariss’s, the last story written in San Diego and The Cave Man.
The material deals almost exclusively with suggestion and hypnosis. Although hypnosis is a recurring theme in Burroughs one is startled by his concentration on the subject and his seemingly informed ideas of it, especially the role of suggestion.
One wonders why his interest surfaced at this time and where ERB learned or developed this information. He was just back from San Diego and I’m going to suggest he picked it up from his hero, L. Frank Baum. As Baum was such a significant influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs perhaps it may be worthwhile to attempt an assessment on Baum’s role in literature and history. There can be no question but that the OZ series of Baum took a central place in the American psyche and a place in the European psyche. Baum’s books have been in demand since 1900 when he began writing them to the present. Baum put Kansas on the map. The Wizard, Dorothy and Toto are household names. Baum’s play from the Wizard was a box office success while MGM’s movie is certainly in the top ten of influential movies, perhaps even in a tie for first with Gone With The Wind. Even American Negroes made their own Black version called The Wiz. The list goes on.
I’m going to suggest that Fritz Lang, the movie Director, was highly influenced by Baum as reflected in his important film, The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lang was also very familiar with Burroughs.
Baum himself was a committed Theosophist. Introduced to the religion by his mother-in-law Baum picked up his card in 1893. By 1913 when he met Burroughs he had been a practicing member for twenty years. When he left Chicago he first went to Coronado across the Bay from San Diego. Katherine Tingley had established her Theosophical organization on Point Loma near that city. Baum must have been an important member of that congregation. Perhaps he had a falling out with Tingley but he did remove himself to Hollywood in 1910. In Hollywood he undoubtedly connected with the Pasadena Theosophical Society that at present is the mother organization.
As a Theosophist Baum would have had to have been familiar with the works of Madame Helena Blavatsky. Her great works are Isis Unveiled and The Secrect Doctrine. Theosophy of course is on a par with the Semitic religions of Judaism and Christianity. While Madame B is often referred to as nonsense she is in fact very learned in the ancient religious doctrines of the human mind that went to form all Middle Eastern religious expressions. Hence while Madame B’s works are metaphysical in nature they are no less relevant to the development of the human intellect than say, St. Augustine or others of the metaphysical ilk.
Madame B had some strong opinions on hypnotism. Hypnotism had come to the fore of Euroamerican consciousness in the years preceding the French Revolution through the efforts of Dr. Franz Mesmer. Though discredited as as a charlatan he was dealing with the real thing as subsequent history shows. He originally called hypnotism Animal Magnetism. That was changed to Mesmerism and then to Hypnotism. As far as possible influences on Burroughs it will be remembered that Edgar Allan Poe wrote Mesmeric Revelation in 1844 and The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar in 1845. There are clear indications that ERB was familiar with the Valdemar story.
Now, the essence of hypnotism is the suggestion. Suggestion is perhaps the most important intellectual or psychological phenomenon. Suggestion isperhaps the basis of intellect, intelligence and psychology. C.G. Jung in his investigations of symbols was dealing with the nature of universal suggestion from nature. Freud early learned to separate suggestion from the hypnotic trance. Artfully used suggestion obviates the need for trancelike states. Thus people don’t understand that and how they are hypnotized by movies and TV.
The art of successful literature is merely to suggest scenes and situations and have the reader visualize them in his own mind. Once accepted the suggestion becomes part of the intellect of the reader. He may be able to reject it later but that is a separate volitional act. The great writers realize this. Freud understood perfectly, while Baum developed the art of the concrete image to a remarkable degree. His works are a series of remarkable images. If Freud had had Baum’s skill, and he wasn’t far short, he would have been even more effective than he has been.
The prescient Fritz Lang picked up on Freud, Baum and hypnotism in his remarkable Dr. Mabuse series of movies. The first story, Dr. Mabuse The Gambler of 1922, concerns a Freudlike megalomaniac named Dr. Mabuse. Freud’s activities during the Great War and after would be known to the cognoscenti. It would be foolish to think that Adolf Hitler and other Volkish leaders wouldn’t have been aware of what Freud was up to. Mabuse is into all kinds of criminal activities to undermine society and the State, as was Freud. He is also a master hypnotist as was Freud. In a scene reminiscent of the scene in Thuvia where Jav says ‘You want to see them? Then, look.’ The scene of ancient bustling Lothar then appears to Carthoris and Thuvia’s wondering hypnotized eyes. As well as mine, certainly. I had no trouble seeing what Burroughs wanted me to see. So Dr. Mabuse in his role of stage hypnotizer, the man wore many hats, makes a parade appear before the wondering eyes of his audience. It can be done. I saw a man make Diamond Head disappear before the whole world on TV. Pretty amazing.
At the end of the movie Mabuse is captured and conveniently tucked away in an insane asylum. He goes catatonic until 1930 or so when Lang made the sequel The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse. The Dr. emerging from his catatonic state makes signs that he wants pen and paper which the head of the asylum, one Dr. Baum, provides.
Mabuse then turns out page after endless page of instructions to destroy civilization not unlike what Herr Dr. Freud was doing from his study in Vienna. The writing had an hypnotic effect on Dr. Baum who executes the plans of the cell bound Dr. Mabuse.
The use of the name Baum could be a coincidence but Dr. Baum like the Wizard Of Oz is an unseen superior. He issues orders but is otherwise an unknown to those he directs. In issuing his orders we are led to believe that he sits behind a curtain unseen while giving his directions. Then, just as Dorothy did, the hero dares to pull back the curtain and he finds…a phonograph player. Unlike Dorothy who finds a tubby timid little imposter, there is no one there. Surely this is a parody of Dorothy’s famous scene which makes the name Dr. Baum less of a coincidence.
So it would seem that L. Frank Baum’s influence extended to Germany and an originator of film noir. Not so unlike as Baum’s stories are much darker than they might appear at first reading. At any rate his literary images make long remembered illusions of reality not unlike that of Dr. Baum while being of a suggestive hypnotic nature. I can still visualize Dorothy pulling the curtain back exposing the mild mannered Big Brother sixty years after. I can remember the image I formed.
So, my suggestion is that L. Frank Baum was the direct inspiration for Thuvia of Mars. As noted ERB was probably familiar with Poe’s stories of hypnotism while I am certain that he had read George Du Maurier’s Trilby concerning the hypnotist Svengali and probably also Du Maurier’s other two novels, Peter Ibbetson, and The Martian both related to unusual psychological states. Len Carter believes that ERB read William Morris who also uses some hypnotic themes in his fantasy novels. Lew Sweetser, ERB’s mentor in Idaho via Yale, might also have given him some information on hypnotism while ERB was still a boy. Plus I’m sure hypnotism was a hot topic of popular discussions.
ERB’s emphasis on suggestion as the operative means of hypnotism points to some more direct instruction. Most think that ERB first met Baum in 1916 which means the two formed a fast friendship immediately. I think it more likely that they met in 1913 renewing the acquanitance in 1916. Whether Baum had read any of Burroughs’ stories in 1913 which seems would be paying pretty close atention to literary trends in pulp magazines he may have heard of Tarzan. Probably aware of this ERB may have brought along a magazine or two to show Baum. If Baum then read the proffered stories he certainly would have seen his influence in the Mars stories if ERB didn’t actually point them out to him hoping for the Zeusian nod of approval from the master.
Probably flattered Baum would have encouraed the relationship. Assuming that to be true the two men having similar interests would certainly engage in conversations on Theosophy, hypnotism, writing techniques and whatever.
Certainly Burroughs writing style which while always colorful was a little heavy on the narrative side seems to open up to a more allusive suggestive style blossoming significantly in 1915’s Tarzan And The Jewels of Opar.
I can’t find a more immediate source for ERB’s sudden interest in hypnotism. But, on to the story.
A Review: The Chessmen Of Mars By Edgar Rice Burroughs
January 7, 2009
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
A Review
The Chessman Of Mars
by
R.E. Prindle
Introduction
Porges speaks quite highly of this story and I think him right. The story is a quite complex one with many highlights and as many or more undertones. Burroughs manages to unite his past with his present while mildly projecting a future.
The story was his only effort of 1921 while falling between Tarzan The Terrible and The Girl From Hollywood the first of two books for 1922. the other being Tarzan And The Golden Lion. Thus this book falls between the recovery of Jane and their return to the Estate and Tarzan’s subsequent return to Opar. These two Tarzan novels undoubtedly reflect discord in the marriage of ERB and Emma.
It would seem that the move to California disrupted ERB’s concentration as the effort to udjust to Tarzana must have consumed his time somewhat in contradiction of his opinion in Tarzan The Invincible that man has been given all the time he can use, no more, no less. Well, there’s limits to everything, probably even infinity.
Whether Burroughs’ tremendous building efforts of the first couple years were pinching his finances at this time there does seem to be an element of panic in the story. The pictures of his new three car garage shows two Packards and a Hudson so that the unbridled spending of Marcus Sackett in Marcia Of The Doorstep of 1924 seems to be directly based on ERB’s own wastrel habits.
The Hudson is interesting as ERB may have bought his first Hudson in 1914 in emulation of his hero L. Frank Baum who he visited in Hollywood in 1913 and was friendly with again in 1916. In that connection the opening of Chessmen is a variation on The Wizard Of Oz in which Dorothy, her house and dog are transported from Kansas to Oz by a tornado. In Chessmen Tara of Helium is caught in her flier by a furious windstorm that deposits her in the all but forgotten outpost of the Kaldanes. So far out that it might in fact have been the Martian Oz.
Thus in a sense, ERB returns to the scenes of his childhood or, at least, his young manhood. This is very likely the result of stress, whether from looming financial difficulties or the responsibilities of managing his estate of Tarzana.
That he was under extreme stress is made evident by the appearance of John Carter who only appears to a stressed out Burroughs. At such times Burroughs psychologically returns to the comfort and security of Mars where he is beyond the travails of earthly existence. This in turn connects this story to the trials and tribs ERB was facing when he wrote Tarzan And The Lion Man. As I hope to show there is more than one similarity to that story.
This apprearance of Carter is interesting. Carter appears after sunset while leaving just before sunrise. ERB cannot be sure whether he was dreaming or the visit was real. ERB has said that his stories came from his dreams and this story bears all the marks of being a dream story.
ERB had the remarkable faculty of turning his problems into metaphors and symbols of his daily problems. While I don’t believe the stories were concocted in REM type dreaming I’m sure tha as he lay dozing weighing his daily problems he was able to weave them into a creditable story that he was able to elaborate when awake.
Plus, while we can’t be sure how much psychology he knew or how he understood it he had been aware of psychological concepts while still a boy. He learned much of this at the knee of Lew Sweetser on the Idaho ranch. One presumes he remembered, considered and developed his psychological ideas over the years. Sweetser, even as ERB was writing the story was giving public lectures on psychology. Chessmen is replete with psychological images not least the appearance of Carter himself.
Whether Carter was quasi real to Burroughs or not he wants us to believe that Carter was real. It is quite possible that Carter is not actually there but is merely a phantom of himself much as Helen of Troy was said to be a phantom in Rider Haggard’s The World’s Desire. Just as Carter explains his appearance to the dreaming ERB, Burroughs admits he was in a dreaming or trance state as he blew smoke at the head of his defeated king when Carter appears. That’s quite an image. His king or himself had been defeated on the chess board as perhaps in real life calling up the need for a visit from the omnipotent Carter.
And now as to your natural question as to what brought me to Earth again and this, to earthly eyes, strange habiliment. We may thank Kar Kormak, the bowman of Lothar. It was he who gave me the idea upon which I have been experimenting until at last I have achieved success. As you know I have long possessed the power to cross the void in spirit, but never before have I been able to impart to inanimate things a similar power. Now, however, you see me for the first time precisely as my Martian fellows see me- you see the very short sword that has tasted the blood of many a savage foeman; the harness with the devices of Helium and the insignia of my rank; the pistol that was presented to me by Tars Tarkdus, Jeddak of Thark.
Indeed. And I do see what Burroughs suggests, one presumes that the reader sees in his own mind’s eye, the habiliment and weapons on which John Carter, the bronze giant, speaks. We’ve been hypnotized into projecting into our own reality what isn’t there.
Yes, Carter speaks of Kar Kormak as though he really existed when we, having read the novel Thuvia, Maid Of Mars, know that the fantastic Bowmen Of Lothar were mental projections without substance who hypnotized others into seeing them and making them believe that they were real.
So what has Burroughs done here? We know that he is very familiar with the principles of hypnosis. At this very time many forms of mass hypnosis were being practised or about to be practiced. Freud was publishing his mass hypnosis lessons; Fritz Lang had or was making the first of his incredible Dr. Mabuse movies- Mabuse, The Gambler, in which mass hypnotism figures so prominently while Hitler, himself a master hypnotist, was making his bid for power.
Was Burroughs laughing up his sleeve at us as he knew we were actually visualizing in our own way what he suggested to us. I don’t know whether he was laughing but I’m sure he was confident that he had succeeded. So, having hypnotized us into believing the strange appearance of Carter who appears only in the same manner as the phantom bowmen of Lothar to Burroughs although as Carter says he has been successful in projecting the appearance of inanimate matter ERB then begins to weave his incredible story arranging the details so that all can be seen as reality to our minds having once accepted the appearance of Carter as reality who then narrates the story in his own voice.
Another interesting detail is that Carter now addresses ERB as his son. When ERB created Carter he was the man’s nephew his father being still alive. Then as he finished The Warlord Of Mars his father died thus Carter’s son dominates Thuvia, the next Martian novel. Now, while under stress, ERB’s father reappears to him to dictate this story to his son.
Carter, then, must always have been ERB’s projection of his idea of the perfect father.
Finally in this introduction I would like to note that both the city of Helium and the ruins of Opar were colored red and gold. ERB’s Hudson automobile then, a bit of memorabilia of Baum, links the Emerand Cityof Oz and the red and gold cities of Helium and Opar. Both cities are retreats under stress. As we will see a key strain of Chessmen is ERB’s fond memories of Baum and the Oz series. Indeed, Tarzana itself was a grander version of Baum’s own Ozcot while being at the same time an attempt to realize a terrestrial Opar and Helium.
Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconscious
November 22, 2008
Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconcious
Redefining A False Vision
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition, Orig. Issued 1965, Dover edition of 2004
Movie: The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, 1932, Fritz Lang, auteur.
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/something-of-value-i-2/
Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see above for link) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition. Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah, which I haven’t read or studied; nor do I intend to unless I exhaust my other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely. You never know though.
However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its antecedents? Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere? Bakan seems to believe that the Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu. I don’t believe this to be true. The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian traditions as is a great deal of ancient Jewish culture. Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD. This is probably true.
The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Cabala took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted. Hemeticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth. The Zohar and Cabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs. The whole can be traced back to Alexandria. It will be remembered that there was a large colony of Jews in Alexandria from long before the first century AD.
The Zohar is a mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Bar Yohai, and it was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain in the sixteenth century. Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century Jewish messiah, Sabbatai, Zevi.
According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah. I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse. While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.
Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific method acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order. While Freud himself was at war with European civilization, the international Jewish organizations of which he was a member extended his field of influence to the United States and Canada. Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.
2.
A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to be the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur. Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on all Europeans.
Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life. He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.
However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans. As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church. Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism. This experience had a great effect on young Freud. In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation. From Bakan:
…that my ‘primary originator; (of neuroses) was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.
On October 15, 1897 he quotes his mother speaking about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young:
“Of course,” she said, “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed. She was always taking you to church. When you came home you used to preach and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.”
His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation it was. He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hating her. When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds she was dishonored and actually sent to jail. Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her. But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge. If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred of her to Jung.
Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship with Jung. As Freud would have known, the compulsion toward repitition would have been a component in his relationship with Jung through his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this. So much for his self-analysis. He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the love of the child Freud. Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.
A third situation occured late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism. Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian. This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity. Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys. A neat job of transference. Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of facts.
Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century, it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him. He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations. No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.
3.
Like most people Freud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood and his true ambitions by a 
circuitous route.
The editor’s note to 1927’s The Future Of An Illusion says this:
In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘signficant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade. “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.”
He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter. As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the personal meanings behind the general meaning of his words. Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.
As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah. Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew. Or else atheism has a more specific meaning for him.
I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915. My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the coming Jewish Revolution until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895. That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches. Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution. At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoananlysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah. I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence. Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind. As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore the facts if favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’
Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’ That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism. Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing. Then, sometime between 1913, the year of the beginning of the Jewish revolution, and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies.’ In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Psychology.
Just as Freud learned that there were screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways. Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key. In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot. Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly without the uninitiated understanding, while only those with the key can twig it. Ya dig?
The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter. Freud then, in attempting to diguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’ while secretly admiring it because of his nurse who gave him an inflated opinion of his importance, and his desire to avenge his father and hence all Jews through his Moses fixation, developed his program. Thus he acted in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.
Freud was very seriusly conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan. Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into a cocked hat in the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe. Compare Freud to Rebbe Schneerson in America.
Thus, the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans. In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’
Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possibly a degree of insanity. In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind. Indeed, Fritz Lang’s movie The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career. Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed the movie.
Lang also had a hand in the making of The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari from which film he was dismissed. Lang’s departure from Caligari changed the ending of that movie to the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane. Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud. Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane. Although the problem appeared to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from Mubuse’s cell, now occupied by Dr. Baum who has assumed Dr. Mabuse’s identity, looms like a spectre over the denouement.
While Freud was never incarcerated as he sould have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva which held such fascination for Freud. It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief of Gradiva’s heel on which the story of Gradiva was based that the displayed prominently in his office. The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.
Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture. He makes a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism. At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory. One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.
As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.
His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse. Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations. This would have been an expression of a repetition compulsion. Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicated the situation with Jung. His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity. His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly through a Jewish projection of possibilities. He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.
From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamerica and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization. His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there. In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US. While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted on an international scale. Act locally, think globally. Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there. This is really an incredible repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner. Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.
At this point I think it mght be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail. While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referrred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scientific researchers for a hundred years Freud has been given the credit for discovering it. The exact nature had not been determined before Freud nor does Freud determine it. His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.
4.
In David Bakan’s view Freud made a compact with ‘Satan.’
Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any 
moral precepts, to achieve fame. Bakan points out the supercription to Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams a quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo, superos, Acheronta movebo. Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, than I’ll move all hell. Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamated the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality. Since Freud has been successful in altering both Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satanic’ criminal doctrines it is imperatvie to debunk his personal projection of the ‘unconscious.’
As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil. This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.
He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious. He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven. The notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be. There is no possibility that the function of the subconscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious. If you actually think abut it for a moment you wil realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.
Now, nature is not flawless. The order that the religious seem to find is not there. Nature functions in a much more imperfect or haphazard way. It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.
However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrupted especially in the early years of the organism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it. The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but functions through the conscious and subconscious minds.
The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference. Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference. The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for the appropriate response. When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say, the personality is integrated, the system works properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations. This is very easy to see in Freud.
However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points. If an appropriate response is made there is no problem. If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience may be in variance, the earlier response which has become fixated will over rule the current response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response. Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.
The inappropriate response will usually result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, one’s sexual identity. In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.
The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit. Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experience providing responses. None of this, of course takes in intelligence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.
Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as the Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality al la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi. Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war. While this infusion may not have reached down through the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas were thoroughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the International Jew.
The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War. Men, money and munitions flowed in a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia. Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations. If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews. Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent or unresisting. To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freudian/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspecting Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form. This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details. The literature exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious. In other words, history has been denied and censored so that the crimes can’t be known. Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these books concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by. All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.
In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly. Don’t ever think that historical memories are short. Remember the Amalikites.
Freud sat confortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred. If, as believed, the tenor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924. By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution in Russia was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civlilation when he published The Future Of An Illusion. By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished. The Rome of the Popes should have fallen.
In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes. Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.
David Bakan closes his volume with these words:
…under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests. In this respect, however, just as Freud may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah. Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between Jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah not only for Jewish culture but for Western culture as well.
Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western ‘culture’. Language as a screen.
Bakan’s is a hefty statement. Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans. Truly in this scenario good comes from evil in the Jewish mind, assuming that the Messiah is good. In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming. Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture. Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.
By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated to the unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored. The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism has been obliterated, hence the revival of religion happening today. Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freud’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.
The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings. He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as a fact. As always there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strict limits imposed by science. Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible. The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels. Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock. Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.
Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientific but it isn’t. there are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence. Like the rest or Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up. As always he notes only the negative societal destructive effects. He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it. But as Fritz Lang points out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psychologist of the asylum, the objective scientist himself, Dr. Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell of Mabuse to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did. Indeed, as the West has. Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution. The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible otherwise. Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire psychotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties. Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.
To return to 1919.
Lipstick Traces
A Review
Greil Marcus:
A Few Back Pages
by R.E. Prindle
The Man Who Shook The World
For even if they should say something true, one who loves the Truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true things are the Truth nor should that truth which seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true Truth- that according to faith.
–Clement Of Alexandria
Clement was a man defending orthodox Christianity against not only the Pagans but competing Christian sects. Here he enunciates the credo of the true believer- it is True because we believe it, any other opinion even if true, or truer, must be considered false according to the faith.
In the twentieth century the Jewish comedian Woody Allen has a scene in one of his movies where some Jewish men are discussing things at a seder. Allen has one say that he would take God over the Truth. Or, like Clement he would sacrifice reason to the Faith or, in other words, Superstition.
There we have the crux of the matter. To criticize Jews is to criticize God in the Jewish mind. The inevitable result for those who do not accept the true Truth is to be labelled as anti-Semites. Thereon hangs the whole of Jewish history, past, present and future. It is to be devoutly hoped that the following discussion will not be defamed as Semites vs. anti-Semites but approved as Reason vs. Superstition. After all in the age of Science one would hope that Superstition is a thing of the past.
The argument will center on the ideas and career of Sigmund Freud- the man who shook the world. But first the world will have to be placed in the context of competing viewpoints within a Jewish context.
For many millennia the role of Science was given a subsidiary position below that of Religion. The truths of Science were denied because they conflicted with the true Truth of Religion.
In this environment the Jews were advantageously placed to dispute with Roman Catholics. After all Catholicism used the Jewish texts as its holy scripture. Thus in debating contests with Catholicism the Jews almost always came out the victors. This gave them great pride as being superior to the Gentiles. Their very high opinion of themselves seemed justified.
Had things remained a matter of faith the Jewish opinion of themselves would probably still be unchallengeable. However Science which had been treated by the Church more roughly than the Jews refused to be suppressed. Actually a higher percentage of Scientists were persecuted to death by the Church than Jews but this fact has to my knowledge never been considered.
The rise of Science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only shook the faith of the religious to its roots but actually cast the Semitic faiths into the dust bin of history. With the rise of Science Judaism became irrelevant. It could not win any debates with Science.
In the many crises of the Jewish soul this was a very significant one. It caused the breakup of medieval Judaism. For the first time the Jews left their ghettos and attempted to enter the mainstream of European life.
The Talmud which the Jews had always considered the repository of all true wisdom and knowledge now appeared to enlightened Jews to be the collection of nonsense the goys had always claimed it was.
As the Jews, then, began to enter the mainstream of European society they did so consciously as inferiors trying to impose themselves with their old dignity on superiors. The raison d’ etre of Judaism had to be replaced or the faith would just fade away.
The Talmud was useless to them in argument; they could only embrace the alien ideology of Science and try to excel the European originators of it.
Bearing in mind their desire to avenge themselves on the Europeans by befuddling them because of their expulsion from Spain they campaigned both politically and intellectually.
The first major attempt at establishing a science was that of Karl Marx who espoused ‘scientific’ socialism which was superior to ‘utopian’ socialism. Thus a Jewish social system supposedly scientifically constructed was placed in opposition to a European social system.
In the realm of Physics Einstein managed what seemed to be a more accurate description of reality. So in politics and physics the Jews had established a seeming scientific superiority.
At the same time as Einstein Sigmund Freud coalesced a theory of psychology that was superior to the fragmented state of psychology.
All three men then tried to turn their achievements to the benefit of the Jewish culture. As much as anything this was the cause of the two European wars as Hitler so accurately recognized.
As a little aside it is interesting to note the career of Immanuel Velikovsky. Like Einstein Velikovsky was a very competent Scientist, that is to say, working within an European intellectual milieu. But whereas Einstein stopped short at attempting to prove the veracity of Genesis and Exodus Velikovsky plowed straight ahead. Using his scientific skills to attempt to validate the literal accuracy of every fable he broke on the rock of superstition. Still, he wrote some very entertaining books, somewhat along Marcusian lines.
2.
The influence of Sigmund Freud on psychology has been immense while that influence has been almost entirely of a negative character. The increase in crime can be attributed to the implementation of his theories. Certainly the self-centered attitude of the homosexuals aboard the Teufelsdreck is about to lead to crimes and thwarted crimes which can be laid to Freud’s teachings. Let us review Freud’s ideas in the light of his milieu.
3.
One of Freud’s discoveries was the neurotic need to repeat. In other words, the subject repeatedly acts out the encysted subconscious fixation in an attempt to exorcise or realize the fixation. This phenomenon applies to cultures as well as individuals as Freud taught. In cultures it is called the ‘national character.’ In other words, a people must always act out its characteristic view of reality, the true Truth of the faith vs. the actual scientific state of things.
The Jews by and large have been a Stateless people since their origins. If one takes Genesis as fact, and it is psychological fact for sure, the Jews enter history ‘On The Road’ having been expelled from Ur of the Chaldees seventy-five years after having come into existence as a people. The theme of expulsion is a repeated figure in Jewish history. They are never tolerated for long. This is a fact, a truth, but in variance with the true Truth of the faith.
If we take the Jewish historian, Josephus, at face value they were expelled from Ur because of the jealousy of the Chaldean astronomers who were angry at Abram’s superior skills. The Chaldeans were known as the foremost astronomers of the ancient world so the Jewish ego must excel them at their own game.
The Jews then went to Egypt which was the home of the greatest magicians. After having outperformed Pharaoh’s magicians at feats of magic they take to the road again, fleeing Egypt.
Thus the main tenets of the Jewish character are fixed. They see themselves as an invasive people who are naturally superior to any people whose territory they invade and then they leave. These two themes repeat and repeat.
Thus in the nineteenth century when the Jews move West out of the Pale of Settlement into Vienna the migration must be seen as an invasion of a hostile culture intent on taking over the State as in Ur or Egypt.
A historical characteristic of Jewish invasions is that they are not usually militaristic but infiltratory. Like the military invasion of Hungary by the Magyars the Jewish invasion of Vienna was no less belligerent and exhibited the same needs to impose its culture.
In the biblical account of the invasion of Palestine the Jews put entire peoples to the sword to make living space for themselves. Thus they committed genocide several times over. There is no reason to believe they wouldn’t have done the same in Vienna given time and opportunity.
The bulk of the Jewish people after 1700 had been collected in Eastern Europe in what became known as the Pale of Settlement. This was mainly in Eastern Poland and Western Russia. When Poland was partitioned between Russia, Austria and Germany in the eighteenth century Austria acquired a large Jewish population in Galicia and its other Eastern provinces.
The Western Jews had already realized that the great challenge to their sense of superiority came from Science. What is called the Emancipation of the Jews was done by the French Revolution c. 1789-93. The Emancipation allowed the Jews to begin participation in European society. The work of the Church was undone. Thus the Jewish intellect came into conflict with the European intellect. In Germany this created a reaction known as the Kulturkampf. What the Germans had done was to give their intellect a name. They opposed German Kultur to Jewish Semitism. Semitism is the Jewish name for their intellect. Hence both anti-Semitism and anti-Kulturism came into existence.
Once within the Austrian Empire the Jews began to migrate toward its capitol, Vienna.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was already an unwieldy amalgam of disputing nationalities and races. Its German governors had their hands full. Austria was sort of an early version of the United States.
Unable to destroy the Germans by the sword the Jews made a cultural assault on the institutions of the Empire. They pitted the Jewish intellect, Semitism, against the German intellect, Kultur. Freud who fully understood the meaning of Kultur wrote a book denouncing it- Civilization And Its Discontents.
Now, Jews are not smarter than anyone else although the mythology of the West so asserts. In fact, Jews are not under the same constraints as the indigenous peoples. Thus, the Jews are always a free, if circumscribed, people. The indigenous peoples were seldom as free. Medieval Europe had been a caste society in which only certain castes had freedom of movement. The Russian Serfs were both unfree and circumscribed until 1861 when they were at least nominally freed although not allowed to freely participate in society. They and other European peasants had a role akin to the American Negro of 1900 in the South who were supposed to know their place and keep it.
Thus a university education was beyond the aspirations of the indigenous lower classes but open to Jews of any class. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that social advancement is much facilitated by a solid education. The Jews accordingly flooded European universities in greatly disproportionate numbers to the population. Any Jew could thus place himself above the majority of the indigenous population.
It was inevitable that they be disproportionately represented in law, the judiciary, medicine, education, the arts and all prestigious occupations. As Semitism was unassimilable to Kultur it was inevitable that if the invasion was not resisted that Semitism would replace Kultur. This left the Germans in a difficult situation. They must either discriminate against the invaders, kill them, or go under.
Given more freedom of movement than the indigenous population and possessing a universal language, Yiddish, the Jews could form the international business corps of any community unrestrained by the business mores of the indigenous people. They could make their own rules, upsetting established traditions and customs as in Egypt and Chaldea.
This too is an established Jewish custom. Things don’t absolutely have to be done in the manner in which they are being done. When the Jews invaded Egypt they began to slaughter the sacred animals which the Egyptians had protected for millennia. The Jews saw no reason for the custom so they rudely pushed Egyptian mores aside. This habit is repeated in every country they invade. The peoples can learn to do it the Jewish way like it or not. They feel they speak with the authority of the true Truth of God.
By 1899 they were over 10% of the population of Vienna which is where critical mass begins. Muscling into the cultural life of the city they acquired a disproportionate number of seats in the symphony orchestras. As in Chaldea and Egypt they assumed that the Semitist style of playing was superior to that of Kultur. As music in Germania occupied an analogous position to astronomy in Chaldea and magic in Egypt the Jews naturally assumed they were better musicians than the Germans although music had never played a large part in their culture before.
As the scientific demands of music are greater than ancient astronomy and magic the Jews were never able to muster a composer of the first rank although their instrumentalists dominated the stage. But then all the empresarios were Jewish so they would necessarily hear with the Jewish intellect. Even today the Jews believe that without the Semitic intellect the orchestras of Europe sound nowhere as good as before the Holocaust.
They established their own newspapers and publishing houses. They used them to defame anyone who dissented from their program.
Without physical resources they had to resort to psychological means to disarm their opponents. They had to ‘psyche’ them out. Anyone who opposed or criticized them was branded as an anti-Semite and his own people were instructed by the Jews to ostracize him. Thus German nationalists became, if not criminals, at least, pariahs in their own land. The Austrian reaction to Jewish nationalism was extremely violent giving expression to itself only after the Anschluss.
These German defense forces were active and powerful during the period from approx. 1890-1914. After 1918 resistance to the Jewish invasion crumpled everywhere. The Millennial Revolution had gone swimmingly. Jews assumed the top positions or became dominantly influential in nearly all governments including the United States. The Jewish Invasion was for all practical purposes a success.
Two men were born into this Viennese environment that would have a profound impact on world history, Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler.
4.
Freud’s main desire was to become a great man. This idea was planted in his intellect by his Christian nurse as a child. He succeeded in realizing this in the field of psychology. Freud was himself an immoral man nor does he advocate morality for others. He advocates an unbridled self-indulgence. Like he says: Life is short. To succeed in one’s aims it is permissable to take immoral shortcuts even to use criminal means. The Mafia believes the same thing.
As a young man he was schooled in the tradition of Anton Mesmer from whom modern psychology descends. He was heavily indebted to the teaching of the French psychologist Jean Martin Charcot as well as to the school of Nancy. His own approach was an adaptation of their methods. He at first used Mesmerism or hypnotism as did the schools of Paris and Nancy but later abandoned it in favor of a form of self-hypnotism that he called free association. Hypnotism as a result went into a period of disfavor although applications are being found for it once again.
He got his real start by insinuating himself into the good graces of Josef Breuer whose work he very nearly appropriated. Having plundered Breuer he broke off with him never speaking to him for the rest of Breuer’s life. Thus does conscience make villains of us all.
Unable to admit his indebtedness to his teachers he repudiated their influence acting as though he had evolved his theories out of whole cloth. As an aspect of his character he was unable to suffer any criticism or advancement on his own ideas by others. He eventually acrimoniously broke with any of his associates with intellegence and independence.
Freud was a Jew which is to say devoutly so. He did not consider himself Austrian or German but an ethnic Jew. He believed in the supremacy of the Jewish people.
The most revealing anecdote concerning him was that as a child he was walking with his father who told him how when a young man he was wearing a new hat when a Gentile knocked it off his head into the street.
‘What did you do?’ Freud asked breathlessly expecting the answer to be that his father knocked the Gentile down.
‘I went out into the street and picked it up.’ His father replied.
Freud then lost all respect for his father which troubled him greatly for he wrote: ‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father protector.’ His dad wasn’t it.
So Freud’s own psychic needs distorted his approach from one of science as Jung claimed to one based on his personal needs. He falsely maintained that the father figure is the most important in a man’s life. When his disciple Otto Rank had the courage to correctly insist that the mother was the most important, Freud drummed him out of the ranks.
Disappointed by his own father he took as a surrogate father figure Hamilcar Barca, the father of Hannibal. Hamilcar Barca having suffered an injury at the hands of the Romans made his son swear on his sword, which is only a substitute for the ‘thigh’ or penis, that he would avenge him on the Romans. Clearly Freud would have promised his dad to avenge him on the Europeans if he had asked. Maybe he did.
Curiously Freud doesn’t carry Hannibal’s story through to its conclusion. The Romans exterminated the Carthaginians and razed their city.
Freud’s lapses in the application of his psychology are very peculiar. Having discovered the psychological compulsion to repeat he applied it neither to an analysis of himself or of his culture and people. He might have saved the Jews much suffering if he had. In his desire to avenge his father he became a central figure in the millennial period of 1913-28 which ended in yet another attempt to exterminate the Jews.
Post exilic history for the Jews began rather favorably. They returned to Palestine just as the Middle Eastern Empires were entering a time of troubles. The succeeding Hellenistic period left them more or less independent until in 186 BC the Seleucids interfered in their internal affairs. Under the Maccabbees the Jews were able to defeat the relatively weak Seleucid Emperors who were besieged on all sides. The victory gave them a feeling in invincibility.
The feeling was shattered by the Romans.
The Jews tried again and failed in seventeenth century Europe.
Their third repeated attempt was in 1913-28 which can be extended to the present.
Freud made the incredible and mind boggling statement on the eve of the Bolshevik, or Jewish Revolution in Russia: We tell ourselves that anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality even though the standard of morality may differ in some respects from that which is customary in society. He then goes on to say especially since the existing standards of morality are beneath contempt.
Thus he advocates that a private, personal, obviously self-serving morality is superior to an ideal morality that has evolved over millennia extending those millennia anterior to the Old Testament.
What could Freud, knowing the imperfect nature of man, have found so objectionable about the existing morality? I don’t experience it as he did. It can only have been that it was based on European traditions and not Freud’s Jewish heritage.
The birth of modern Judaism was caused by the rise of the European Scientific attitude. Science was the sole creation of Europeans with which the Jews had nothing to do. Prior to the Enlightenment in their argument with Roman Catholicism the Jews had not only been equals but superiors. As the creator of the corpus followed by the Church the Jews were in a better position to understand and interpret it through the repository of the Talmud.
When as a result of the Enlightenment, scientific Europeans left the puerile biblical debates behind the Jews were hopelessly medieval. The Talmud, so effective against the bible, was worthless against science. The more intelligent or, perhaps, less traditional Jews began to reorganize Judaism to meet the Scientific times. This left them second rate beneath the Europeans, a serious affront to their amour propre.
The real challenge then was to regain their superiority. This could only be done by excelling in Science as they could invent nothing superior to it. The true Truth of religion broke on the rock of reality. If they merely excelled in Science they merely excelled in an European milieu. They were clearly then no longer the Chosen People; they became lost in the ruck. Freud at one time says that he saw no reason why the ‘wisdom’ of the Talmud couldn’t be raised to a level with Science thus bringing the Jews level with the Europeans in their dreams.
Strangely he didn’t understand that the entry into full consciousness caused by the understanding of the workings of the psyche obviated all forms of consciousness that went before including the so-called wisdom of the Talmud.
So, to whom was Freud speaking about educating himself against the danger of immorality? By Freud’s own admission his fellow Jews.
Freud’s vision of psychoanalysis is personal, dealing exclusively with the subjective workings of the subject’s mind. He doesn’t even seem to grasp that the fixations are caused by external forces. He seems to think the mind functions independently of the outside world. Input does not seem important to him.
To Jung and others Man’s relationship to his world is based more on a Challenge and Response system. In other words, the intellect, which Freud denies, plays a very important part.
Freud’s own intellect cast against his ideas places them in a different light. The man was born in 1856 in a Central European Jewish milieu. It will be remembered that the Hasidic religious movement grew out of psychological trauma that occurred in 1648. Founded c. 1700 the Hasidic movement was only about a hundred fifty years old at his birth thus retaining much of its original vitality.
Also arising out of the Jewish disappointments caused by the failed Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, in 1666 a movement was led by a follower of Zevi by the name of Jacob Frank. This movement also took shape in the first half of the eighteenth century and was still flourishing during Freud’s young manhood.
As a consequence of Zevi’s failure Frank believed that man was inherently evil thus God would never redeem him until the evil was spent. The only way to expel evil was to commit enough crimes to get it out of one’s system. Novel pyschology to say the least. Thus he taught to a large and attentive Jewish audience that one must commit evil for evil’s sake and that good will come of it. So, in a manner of speaking, one is doing good by doing evil.
Now, one can trace the spread of this idea in various forms and guises through space and time. One very interesting advocate who deserves more study is an eighteenth century English Jew by the name of Samuel Falk. Another is a twentieth century American Jew by the name of Arnold Rothstein. And of course, Marx and Freud.
Freud does not go into the external influences that formed his outlook or life or personal Weltanschauung but this emphasis on a personal morality that is superior to prevailing morality seems a sublimation of Jacob Frank and his evil for evil’s sake.
Now, to whom was Freud speaking and why? Certainly Freud considered himself a prophet of the Jewish people amidst the dawning millennium. He had an intense desire to avenge his people on the goyim. Did this Hannibal in that role have anything to do with organizing or directing the Jewish Revolution of the dawning millennium?
There is no question that his statement that anyone who has educated himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality (and hence a guilty conscience) could be construed as advance absolution for any acts of the Bolsheviks that would be considered crime by ‘conventional morality.’
Freud’s statement and role resembles those a great deal of Simeon Bar Yochai, a second century rabbi of the Roman Wars. The Roman-Jewish war of 66-135 AD was perhaps the first of the Holy Wars. Its rationale and leadership was provided by the religious leaders of Judaism.
Simeon Bar Yochai was a leading architect of that war, probably its guiding light. After Bar Kochba’s defeat in 135 AD Yochai was compelled to go into hiding in a cave from which he daren’t move for many years until the Romans gave up the search. As a tribute to his influence in the war his obituary at his death said that he was the man who shook the world to its foundations.
Just before the bloodbath of 116 when the Jews rose up to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Gentiles a moral quandary arose in the Jewish community. They wondered whether it was permissable to kill ‘good’ Gentiles as well as the ‘bad.’ The rabbis without a moments hesitation replied that it was permissable to kill any and all Gentiles.
In 1666 with the expected advent of the millennium heralded by the messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, the Jews had been prepared on the strength of ‘God’s promise’ to rise up and murder Europeans much as they had done in the Roman War.
The third repeat of the Jewish Revolution of which the millennial date was 1913-28 had come to a slow boil with the Communist Manifesto of 1847.
It will be remembered that following Marx’ manifesto all the national Communist parties were over half Jewish. The non-Jew, Kropotkin, as leader of the anarchists had been discredited and the anarchists disenfranchised from the Communist Movement. The Jews than held all the leading positions.
Thus four Jews led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia- Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky. All the abortive revolutions of Central Europe were led by Jews. They actually repeated the massacres of the Roman Wars in Russia and Hungary and were prepared to do so throughout the world as the Revolution rolled on to success.
In Russia slaughterhouses were established in which Jewish murderers ‘worked’ all day long slaughtering Gentiles until they stood ankle deep in blood and gore. Were they able to do this because Freud and made known to them truths about themselves that prevented them from committing immoral acts? Were they absolved of their crimes in advance as were the Jews of the Roman Wars? They must have been or they couldn’t have performed their ‘work.’ As it was numbers of them had nervous breakdowns as a result.
The atrocities in Hungary and the projected total annihilation in the Crimea have already been mentioned. The similarities between the Roman and European slaughters are quite pronounced in their ferocity. Of course all the details of the former had been recorded in that epistle of ‘science’, the Talmud.
Did the Jews go to Freud to justify their atrocities as they had to Simeon Bar Yochai two thousand years earlier? There is the compulsion to repeat. The Jews were very well organized before, during and after the Great War. Agents of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee swarmed over Central and Eastern Europe after the War in an attempt to rehabilitate their brethren first so they could assume control. The AJC and B’nai B’rith were the leading components of the ‘Joint.’ Freud had been a member of B’nai B’rith since 1895. He lectured to them in Austria on a consistent basis for years, even decades. As a psychoanalyst what was he telling them? His intellect deserves closer examination for what else can ‘anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to a few truths about himself is permanently defended against immorality’ mean except a license to kill. If a Jewish supremacy arose out of that evil wouldn’t good have come out of it in Jewish eyes? Yochai, Frank, Freud, there is a succession.
Placed in that context one must reevaluate the whole period as well as the careers of Hitler and Stalin, for as Freud wrote openly in a universal idiom his rationale can be appropriated by any individual for his personal morality.
The invasion of Vienna was preceded by and coincident with the rise of Jews in France. At the time of the Russian Revolution a document became prominent called the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion. The document outlines a method for creating discord in society so that a junta can easily assume control. It was said that this document was a Jewish blueprint for world dominion. The provenance of the Protocols has never been established for certain. The Jews say it is a ‘forgery’ while their opponents say it is authentic.
Over the years the Jews have managed to discredit the document and have its study suppressed. This is a great disservice because whoever wrote it its precepts are currently being followed by several groups. Have you ever looked at Homeland Security carefully? It behooves every person interested in current affairs to be conversant with the Protocols of Zion.
In point of fact the Protocols are of Jewish provenance.
One thing all disputants agree on is that the Protocols were based on an earlier document of Franco-Jewish provenance called in English: Dialogues Between Montesquiou And Machiavelli In Hell. The Dialogues are of Jewish provenance so whether the Protocols are or not is a moot point.
The Dialogues were attributed to a French Jew by the name of Maurice Joly but internal evidence indicates several hands including that of the ‘Gibbon’ or Jewish historians, Heinrich Graetz.
The creation of the Dialogues was coordinated by a French Jew by the name of Adolph Cremieux. Little known outside Jewish circles but extremely important to a number of situations Cremieux also deserves further study. He was a lawyer and politico deeply involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. If one takes the Jewish ‘Gibbon’ Graetz at his word both revolutions were the result of Jewish machinations. On this point Graetz and Hitler are in accord.
Cremieux was responsible during the annexation of Algeria in 1830 under cover of that year’s revolution for obtaining French citizenship for the Algerian Jews. Thus with the annexation the barbarous medieval Jews of Algeria became full French citizens gaining precedence over the native Algerians in one fell swoop. Clever move for the Jews bad move for France.
As Jewish affairs were consolidating nicely in France twelve years after the 1848 revolution a Jewish central governing body called the Alliance Israelite Universelle was founded by Cremieux in 1860. The Dialogues were supposed to have appeared in 1862. The name means The International Alliance of Jewry or in a slightly different translation: The International Jewish Conspiracy. Actually the Alliance was the seat of the Jewish government until c. 1900 when the seat was transferred to the United States under the guidance of the financier, Jacob Schiff.
Thus the Protocols arose out of the Dialogues in direct succession sometime during the 1880s. It should be noted that the Dialogues was never seen in bookstores. The whole printing was confiscated by Napoleon III according to report against whom they were supposedly directed. It follows that the only people who could have known of the book and provided a copy as a model for the Protocols were its producers the Jews of France.
Nevertheless, as masters of misinformation, disinformation and misdirection the Jewish government was able to shame the liberal parties into rejecting Jewish provenance of the Protocols. The Liberals then condemned any Gentiles who persisted in saying so as anti-Semitic cranks. That is actually the nature of the ‘proof’ that the Protocols aren’t of Jewish provenance.
Jacob Schiff himself was a very effective Prime Minister. He was able to engineer the First Russian Revolution of 1903-05 by funding the Japanese war machine from America while he and European financiers prevented funding to the Russians.
Schiff was able to disrupt American and Russian diplomacy for the benefit of the Jews from 1900 to 1913 when he succeeded in persuading the US to break off diplomatic relations completely. Immediately with the Bolshevik succession he rushed huge loans of American dollars to their coffers even during the Great War to shore up the regime.
Thus absolved by Freud of guilt and supported by world resources from 1917 to 1924 it looked as though the Jews were on the eve of success in their millennial pursuit. With the possible exceptions of Mussolini and Ford it looked at though there were no fences facing.
However Hitler and Stalin sensed the danger. Hitler himself was always hostile to Freudian beliefs; it may be assumed that Hitler read at least some Freud. He was hostile to Freud for much the same reasons that Freud was hostile to Kultur. Living in the Vienna under the governance of the ‘anti-Semitic’ Mayor Lueger Hitler was self-educated. He spent years in the libraries organizing his view of the world.
In Freudian terms both he and Stalin certainly knew truths about themselves which prevented them from committing ‘immoral’ acts. Freud’s dictum could be construed as also authorizing their crimes.
Coming to maturity in the Red Terror of 1917-24 Hitler had a good understanding of the course of events in Central and Eastern Europe. It is silly to think that he acted solely from his own impulses. There was a civil war going on between Reds and Whites from 1918-33 in Germany. Judeo-Communist atrocities were daily before his eyes. As he said, he knew his head would roll in the sand if he lost. That was not mere rhetoric.
Hitler’s experience in Vienna convinced him of the nature of the war between Jews and Gentiles. The evidence is clear that the Viennese shared his views. Once given the upper hand over their invaders the Austrians were much more obdurate than the Germans. Never forget that an Austrian, Hitler, directed the fate of the German nation.
Hitler’s book burning in 1933 might be construed as nothing more than a vindictive censorship of ideas he didn’t like. But the books burned were those of Jewish writers, expecially Freud, it should probably be seen as an attempt to eject Semitism from Kultur. In other words the triumph of Kultur over Semitism. In the end the Germans chose to kill the Jews rather than discriminate against them or go under. You may be sure the Jews would have done the same.
As Stalin usurped power from the Jews in Russia a strange thing happened. Psychoanalytic methods assumed great importance. Spectacular show trials ensued.
When Freud’s disciple Otto Rank defected from the ranks of Freudian pyschoanalysts he was excommunicated. The validity of his views was not examined; even if true they were not the true Truth of the faith. Hence Rank was compelled to submit to criticism, confess his faults and beg for acceptance back into the faith.
The Show Trials of 1936 were conducted in the exact same manner except that the sinners were given the death sentence. The method surfaced again in Red China in 1966 when the Red Guards and Cultural Revolutionaries of Mao Ze Dong overturned that society. The accused were criticized in mass meetings, compelled to confess their ‘faults’ and beg to be allowed to rehabilitate themselves through hard labor.
Thus Marxist and Freudian ideas converged in an orgy of evil to destroy the oldest continuous civilization in the world.
The notion prevails in Politically Correct circles in the US today. Thus Freudianism has had a profound if unsuspected impact on the world.
Freud remained confident through 1928, began to waver in 1930 and by 1938 the horror of the impending destruction of the Jews as a repeat of the Roman War was before his eyes as fled Austria for England. In Moses and Monotheism he pitifully whines that the Jews had given up those notions of world dominion long ago. Or, in other words, I’m sorry.
Like Hannibal, his attempt to avenge his father resulted in the destruction of his people. As in the Roman War the Nazis conducted a manhunt to find every single Jew and kill him. Not only had Bar Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi failed the Jews as messiahs; so had the Revolution. The Jews failed in this third attempt to take over the world but the legacy of Sigmund Freud lives on in the ambiguous words of his corpus. His immediate political aims failed but his undermining of European society was much more successful.
Apart from his political intent Freud had uncovered a great scientific area of study.
5.
The Shirt Of Nessus
While Freud’s short term political goals ended in disaster for his people, as did those of his role model, Hannibal, Freud’s long term goal of destroying the social foundations of the Gentiles has succeeded quite well.
As an innovator Freud cannot be expected to have had a complete and final idea. Much of the information that became available after 1950 was undeveloped in Freud’s time, such as the Matriarchal and Hetairic periods, so he cannot be held accountable for not knowing them. Physiology has made tremendous strides since his day.
Freud’s errors do not so much lay in areas of knowledge but in the areas of intent or motive. He was unable to separate his own psychology of hatred from that of his scientific discipline. Hence his mistaken emphasis on the importance of the father figure and his misbegotten notions of the Oedipus Complex. Then too, he projected his hatred of the Gentiles into his views of religion and sexuality.
The only thing of value Freud had to offer, that of the formation of neuroses, has been rejected by the lay and medical communities alike.
Strangely his nonsense is revered as great revelations of truth, largely because they fit in with prevailing prejudices. In his attack on the Christian religion Freud was curiously unaware that the Scientific Consciousness displaced the anterior consciousnesses of Hetaira, Matriarchy and Patriarchy. Thus the people who were dependent on Religion as the basis of the mentality were people whose beliefs could not be dislodged. On the one hand were the various esoteric religions whose beliefs do not depend on the divinity of Jesus and the Fundamentalists whose belief is so secure that nothing can shake it. For those who need a supernatural agency in their lives New Age people using science as a tool have created alien intelligence from beyond the solar system to serve as their ‘God.’
If Freud thought dispelling Christianity as a religious belief would bring the Gentiles down he was mistaken. The ‘illusion’ had already been replaced by a ‘reality.’ The futility of trying to dispel religious beliefs should have been clear to Freud. The exposure of the illusion or, even delusion, of the compact between the Jewish people and their god had no effect on them; they continue to believe the compact exists and that Palestine was given to them by their tribal god inalienably.
The most potent dissolvent in Freud’s arsenal was his sexual theory. He was quite severely criticised for his sexual beliefs then and they should be rejected now.
Everything Freud believed on the subject was wrong. Basic to his misunderstanding was the physical structure of the human organism.
He quite correctly picked up the ovate and spermatic halves of the psyche but since he didn’t associate them with physical origins he mistakenly thought that men were part woman and vice versa. This was a critical misconception as it opened the door to much erroneous speculation on homosexuality.
There may be rare cases of sexual ambiguity caused by birth defects in the physical apparatus or defective hormonal systems but any other expression of ambiguity is a perversion that is not part of the most perfect specimens but comes about only when the ovate is fixated and spermatic repressed or, in other words when the organism is mentally disturbed. Psychological perversion has nothing to do with the physical organization.
Since Freud misunderstood the physical organism he equated sexuality not with the Power Train itself but only with sexual intercourse. Freud actually equated fucking with mental health. Because psychic discomfort is reflected in sexual urges he actually believed that the more fucking one did the better person one would be. Such nonsense has not only passed unchallenged for eighty years but is actually embraced today as the Gospel of Fuck.
Freud did not believe in the intellect or the effectiveness of intelligence. While he made the grandiose pronouncement: Where Id is, Ego shall be, he failed to explain how this would come about. For whatever reason he considered the intellect nonexistent and intelligence ineffective and unimportant. In keeping with his times he believed in the hereditary transmission of mental traits.
More importantly he invented a whole category of affects he identified as self-sufficient ‘instincts.’ Like the Unconscious instincts do not exist. There are no instincts, not a single one, all is a matter of learning and education.
Even eating is not an instinct but taught at the mother’s breast. Hunger may be a physical reality but it is not an instinct. Assuaging hunger must be learnt and that literally at the mother’s breast. The first lesson an infant is taught is when the mother inserts the nipple in his mouth. His mouth is blocked he has no choice but to resist by sucking. Imagine his surprise when the liquid emitted seems delicious and when he swallows it because he can’t spit it out the physical reaction is terrific. It feels good. Having learnt to eat he wants more. Being a quick learner, from that point on the infant will demand to be fed. But without that first infusion he would die hungry not knowing what the desire to eat meant.
Because Freud wanted to project his own psychic vision he gave instincts precedence over all other psychic functions. He professed that the individual was incapable of resisting or controlling what the Ancients characterized as the Raging Bull and what he called the Ego.
Both the Church and Esoteric religions have devised rigors to control or domesticate this Bull or Ego/instincts by using intelligence. Freud thought that to use your intelligence to control your ‘instincts’ was to incur damaging inhibitions and repressions. Hence he was opposed to European morality. Freud imagined this did irreparable damage to the psyche especially sexual inhibitions and repressions hence the Gospel of Fuck.
If fucking actually made a person better, then the logical conclusion is that libertines and homosexuals would be the best people in the world. Fucking dominates the libertine and homosexual mind. It is not unusual for them to commit thirty or forty sex acts a day for as many days as they can sustain it.
As the only thing that counts in this view of sexual activity is the climax it follows that if machines were placed in prominent places to masturbate the individual on an hourly basis or less that society would be darn near perfect. I don’t know why people are leery of buying the Brooklyn Bridge when they have bought the myth of sexual intercourse.
The fact is that libertines and homosexuals are the worst people in the world so the basis of Freud’s argument is very limp.
The West has generally embraced Freud’s misguided sexual theory. The United States is actually fucked. Freud’s sexual theory was picked up by the lame third rate novelist Henry Miller who actually formulated the Gospel of Fuck during the twenties and thirties in the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Henry Miller was gaining respectability during the fifties with psychotic fringe groups in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere. By the sixties he would have a profound impact on society with the reverence given his two volumes of the Tropics.
As Freud was interpreted in the common mind repression and inhibition were the causes of psychic discomfort. The common mind had no idea how inhibitions and repressions were caused except by not being allowed to do whatever you wanted to do. Through the forties and fifties children of innumerable families were encouraged to indulge their whims and fancies regardless of who they might hurt. They were given no instruction or correction lest they become inhibited and repressed. It was thought that when they grew up they would naturally gravitate to the intelligent choice.
The so-called ‘Me’ generation of the sixties and seventies lacked proper instruction in managing their ‘instincts.’ The pervading influence of past mores prevented them from expressing themselves with true lack of ‘inhibition’ or repression. The wave of high school shootouts of the later century when the succeeding generation had moved out from the shadow of earlier mores were committed by the offspring of the ‘Me’ generation. They are the logical progression of Freudian sexual theory.
Employing metal detectors and other ‘inhibitory’ or ‘repressive’ systems will not solve the problem. Freud has to be amended.
Freud’s thesis was advanced by the Jewish monologist Lenny Bruce as well as furthered by Jewish interests in Hollywood who produced innumerable ‘action’ films in which the uninhibited and unrepressed protagonist attempts to solve his problems from the barrel of a gun rather than reason them out.
So, this brings us up to Greil Marcus and the present. Greil Marcus is himself a Jew so the question is how does Greil Marcus and his writing fit into this Jewish cultural scheme of things. On my first reading of the book I had no idea what Mr. Marcus was talking about. I had heard of the Situationist International but knew nothing about it. Reading the blurbs I was under the impression that Mr. Marcus was going to explain the SI. Not very clearly anyway. As I turned the last page I had no idea what the book was all about.
Second reading same as the first. Then I read his 2006 effort The Shape Of Things To Come. I gathered from that that Mr. Marcus considered himself in direct descent from the Old Testament Hebrew prophets and that he had conflated Israel and the United States. Armed with that understanding I had the thin edge of the wedge. I went back to a third reading of Lipstick Traces. Pay dirt! I think.
I gather from the third reading that Mr. Marcus considers himself also a direct lineal descendent of Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, in other words The Frankfurt School or alternatively The Institute For Social Research or alternatively still The New School For Social Research. Now we’re getting somewhere. In addition his intellectual romance with fellow Jew Guy Debord who was the Situationist International seemed that in much the same way Dr. Baum assumed the soul of Dr. Mabuse in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse I gather that Mr. Marcus may feel that like some Buddhist Lama the soul of the dead Debord has passed into himself and he is the new leader of the Situationist International. So as I perceive it Mr. Marcus views himself as an ancient Hebrew prophet, a critic in the mold of the Frankfurt School and the leader of the Situationist International.
For some in depth background on the Frankfurt School the interested reader might try Kevin MacDonald’s ‘The Culture Of Critique.’
Following the above notion of who Greil Marcus might think he is and what he thinks he’s doing I will attempt an interpretation of Lipstick Traces. Mr. Marcus as the leader of the Situationist International seems to have compiled his book which is as much a stream of consciousness impressionistic novel as anything else as a number of situations.
I will deal with each situation as a separate entity which indeed a situation is. Rather than begin with the first situation which as I see it should be last I will begin with the second situation, part of Version Two- A Secret History Of A Time That Passed- Legends Of Freedom.
The theme of the book as a whole seems to be the saying of Karl Marx that Mr. Marcus refers to repeatedly:
I am nothing and I should be everything.
End of Part II.
David Kalat’s The Strange Case Of Dr. Mabuse: A Review
July 19, 2007
A Review
The Strange Case Of Dr. Mabuse
by
David Kalat
by R.E. Prindle
Fritz
The message and the medium are the same. For those who like obscure but important issues a book appeared in 2001, of all years, by David Kalat entitled ‘The Strange Case Of Dr. Mabuse published by McFarland, the publishers of obscure studies par excellence.
For those unfamiliar with Dr. Mabuse, for this study may indeed be obscure, Dr. Mabuse was a film character created by the movie auteur, Fritz Lang, in 1922 when he filmed Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler. Kalat chronicles the whole series of twelve films and some related titles extending from 1922 to the present. However my concern will be primarily Lang’s The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse of 1933.
There are great similarities in Lang’s film to The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari because Lang was also involved in that film. Mabuse may be the logical extension of it.
The premise of the series is the undemining and destruction of society to be replaced by the anarchy and chaos of a Mabusian Empire Of Crime. As you can see, if you look around you, Mabuse’s goal has been all but realized.
Dr. Mabuse himself went insane at the end of The Gambler having been confined to an insane asylum administered by one Dr. Baum. Catatonic for quite some time, Mabuse began moving his hand and fingers in a gesture of writing. Baum provided Mabuse with pen and paper which Mabuse used to begin writing non-stop until he died. He wrote his criminal manifesto for destroying society as we know it. He was a master hypnotist apparently hypnotizing Baum through his writings. His soul or spirit thus entered Baum so that he, posing as the incapacitated Dr. Mabuse set in motion a whole series of crimes meant to destabilize society.
In the end Baum too went insane after becoming in actuality Dr. Mabuse himself, recently deceased.
Mabuse, in the Rosicrucian tradition, was an ‘unknown superior’ who directs the society of criminals anonymously. Baum too was one. Was Fritz Lang another? Was the film his method of transmitting instructions to all the malcontents of the world who mesmerized from the screen rather than the printed page became agents in the establishment of the Empire Of Crime? I rather suspect so.
Mabuse is very sillily supposed to represent Hitler and the Nazis but nothing could be further from the intent and nature of the Empire Of Crime. The excellent DVD of ‘Testament’ includes an interview with Fritz Lang. Lang gives an account of his interview with Joseph Goebbels just before he fled Nazi Germany.
Even though an evil Nazi Goebbels was no fool. He easily saw through the equally evil Lang’s intent and purpose. As he told Lang there was no State that could not be undermined by such methods which, once again, look around and you will find it is true. Blair, Chirac, and Bush act like brain washed zombies aiding the Mabuse program. Their acts are so contrary to reason, elementary reason, that one wonders if, indeed, they have not been hypnotized, coerced in some strange way to act against society’s and their own best interest. Manchurian Candidates every one.
So Goebbels banned the film confiscating the prints. However the canny and evil Lang had been one step ahead of him. He had concurrently reshot the whole movie in French which he had smuggled out of Germany. The French in turn smuggled the movie out of Nazi occupied France to the United States where the film was shown beginning in 1943 thus perpetuating the legacy of Dr. Mabuse which might otherwise have been lost.
As Mabuse, although based on a novel by Norbert Jacques, essentially sprang from the mind of Fritz Lang being commited to celluloid, the inescapable conclusion is that he himself was one of the many faces of Dr. Mabuse as Joseph Goebbels had no trouble realizing.
The above goes well beyond Kalat’s text. His book is a good description of the Mabuse phenomenon while providing good biographies of Lang and the German, French and Spanish movie people who perpetuated the program willingly or not. For those not familiar with the European movie scene, or part of it, of which I am one, the book is also an excellent introduction.
If you are Mabusian, whether you know it or not, you will find Kalat’s book indispensable. If, like myself, you opposed to Mabusianism the book will provide essential background. Kalat’s All Day Entertainment site has a good bargain on a combo book and movie offer. If nothing else you will be able to entertain yourself all day in the grand manner.
End Of Dr. Mabuse Review
I, Dynamo 