The Ancient Evil: Diana And The Goddess Tradition

October 13, 2012

The Ancient Evil:

Diana And The Goddess Tradition

by

R.E. Prindle

A problem that has been perplexing me for some time is the role of the Goddess Diana as the female archetype for the last half of the Age of Pisces.  The adoption of the goddess Diana or Artemis as she was known in Greece signifies a resurgence of the Matriarchy.  This is a rather remarkable comeback as the Matriarchy was virtually unknown in the nineteenth century, all but forgotten.

I’m sure the interpretation of Diana’s history and her relationship to Astrology will be met with some dismay as these subjects are not properly understood.  Essentially the problem is one of memory; in this case historical and racial memory.  Memory on one level is a desire to retain and understand the past whether on a personal or historical level.  From the past the future may be predicted.  What has gone before will likely happen again.  It was this knowledge that made the calendar a necessity.  If one has a starting point, such as the shortest day of the year the return of flora and fauna may be roughly known.  To make the year more manageable it was divided into seasons and months to mark more easily the passage of the days of the year.  This knowledge led to a whole cycle of gods, goddesses and myths.  Thus a terrestrial zodiac was derived denoted by symbols appropriate to the seasons.  As it was assumed that what happened on earth was a reflection of what happened in the skies the terrestrial zodiac was translated to the stars and thus we have the Astrological Zodiac in which the twelve signs reflect the weather pattern on earth.

Just as there are twelve months in the year so the skies were divided into twelve portions called Ages.  The length of the Ages was determined by the Great Year that was of some twenty-five thousand years plus duration.  The Great year was determined by the rotation of the earth on its axis as evidenced by the stars of the North Pole.

The Great Year

Each Age has it male and female archetypes.  In Greece the Arien Age was presided over by Zeus and Hera.  Thus each set of archetypes has a lifetime of two thousand plus years and then they make the long slide to Far Tartary and back again.

The Piscean Age which has become universal began with the male archetype of Jesus of Nazareth while in mid-Age the archetypes where transferred to the female side- Diana in the North of Europe and Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the South of Europe.

While the mechanism used to achieve this is fairly clear the exact process can only be surmised.

While it may be difficult to believe the Astrological Zodiac must have begun development about a hundred thousand years ago being in the fourth cycle at the time of the dawn of the Age of Pisces.  Thus as a method of timekeeping the Zodiac has a long history.

One may question the hundred thousand years and yet the Mesopotamian myths mention a past of at least that long.  One usually doesn’t credit the ancients with actual knowledge but I think it is time to take them more seriously.

For much of that hundred thousand years during the long Ice Age the level of the Mediterranean was much lower probably being a long valley with a succession of large lakes fed by the Nile and the Propontis while the outflow was at the Pillars of Hercules.  As the Med Valley was habitable it must have been inhabited.  Undoubtedly a civilization developed that was fairly sophisticated.  One needn’t look for extraterrestrials for human development.

Thus when the Ice Age ended returning the accumulated waters to the oceans the waters rose forcing the Valley’s inhabitants to seek higher ground until the sea level became static.  While denizens fled to all sides of the Med the civilization bearers occupied Lower Egypt, the emerging Nile Delta.  A second area in which civilization  in some form must have survived was the island of Crete.

Nile Delta. 10,000 years ago the Delta would have been smaller as the silting would not have progressed so far.

It was on this island that the religious formula that became a basis of Europe was formed.  The basis was provided by the Hellenic Greek tribes that began their invasion of the Greek peninsula c. -1700.

The Greek penisula was occupied by an ancient people called Pelasgians.  They like the Cretans were descendants  of the Med Valley peoples as were the Cretans and Lower Egypt.  The Pelasgian religion closely resembled that of the Cretans.  The conquering Hellenes imposed their Greek language on them while setting about solving the religious differences into one unifed religion.  This was done following a usual pattern.

Crete, The Aegean Islands and the Greek Mainland, The Core Of The Thalassocracy

The Hellenes followed an Aryan Patriarchal model while the Pelasgians and Cretans followed a Matriarchal type.

How much religious development took place between 8000 BC when the waters rose and 2000 BC when things had settled must have been very large.  An important thing to remember is that the human mind is continually handling information.  Problems of memory have been continually remedied with new storage technologies.  They have been continually developed to today’s immense ability to be able to very nearly store entire reality.  Every phone call in the world 24/7 can be stored and retrieved at will so that totally inconsequential information is on record but will never be read.

The time lapse between improvements in storage and retrieval were immense in the early days increasing rapidly to the present.  The earliest known city, the remains of which date not coincidentally to c. 8000 BC is located at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia which would have been a rural backwater to the Med civilization, but a high degree of communal organization is evident.  One imagines the Cretan civilization was similar but more highly developed.  There is every evidence that the Great Mother religion was fairly highly developed at the time the waters rose.

The Cretans certainly brought the religion to a degree of perfection.  Obviously there is no agreement as to the degree while the substance of religion can be only guessed at.

The Goddess Angry

Presently the Goddess advocates picture the Matriarchy as some kind of golden age of

The Loving Goddess

peace love and happiness.  This is not the case.  The Matriarchates lived in a period of very primitive mentality.  Nor is the female of the species any less bloody minded than the male.  The memory of the matriarchate was still strong enough for later males to dismiss the matriarchate as a period that was not too kind to men.  Indeed, if one bears in mind that the sacrificial bulls were substitutes for men and that bulls were often sacrificed in holocausts which means a hundred bulls or more then it follows that at one time a hundred men or more were sacrificed to the Great Mother.  Obviously this would leave rueful memories in the minds of men.

This memory may have been played out in the tale of Iphigenia At Aulis.

Shall we examine the participants in this drama, Agamemnon, Clytmnestra, Iphigenia and Diana?

Zeus in the apparition of a swan had intercourse with Leda who then lay two eggs.  Both bore twins.  From one egg Castor and Pollux emerged.  These two represent the soltices, Castor, winter and Pollux summer.  From the other egg Helen and Clytemnestra emerged.  These two represent the equinoxes, Helen the Spring, Clytemnestra the Fall.  One might compare Helen to the Cretan Loving Goddess with the erect snakes held hip high and Clytemnestra to the Angry Goddess brandishing the two writhing snakes.  Thus the two goddesses are representatives of Diana.

Zeus Impregnating Leda

Now Agamemnon was punished by Diana for killing a deer and then boasting that he was a better hunter than she.  Agamemnon and the Greeks were assembled at Aulis but unable to sail for lack of wind.  A sacrifice was deemed necessary to allay the winds.  Ordinarily a male would have been the sacrifice to Diana.  Instead Agamemnon sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter probably in vengeance for his punishment by Diana and the slaughter of all those males during the Matriarchy.

Clytemnestra herself was a representative of the Matriarchy so the story is involved.

While my interpretation might be controversial I think it clear that the Cretan goddess became Artemis/Diana.  At any rate it was the Argive (from Argos) mainland goddess Hera who would be chosen as the wife of Zeus.  Therefore the Cretan goddess would have lost her consort and been a loose cannon.

Zeus himself was of Cretan origin probably intended to be the annual consort of the Goddess.  As religion evolved the characters of the Gods and Goddesses changed so that while there is continuity the attributes and characters change enough so that the religious figures have to be located in time and place.

When the Hellenes, or Greeks, began to arrive the Cretans had already created a political organization known as a thalossocracy, a sea based empire.  The islands and at least the coasts from Aegean to Italy were under Cretan rule.  The Greeks then challenged the power of the Cretans as well as seeking to impose the Patriarchal religion on the Matriarchy.

This method of taking control was the same as that of all religions replacing another.  As in such situations the overcome religion submits to greater power but continues a more or less clandestine existence.  Thus the Aryan Greeks converted religious sites such as Delphi to Patriarchal shrines.  Where the necessisity existed in Matriarchal strongholds, they apparently attempted to exterminate the Matriarchates.  Persecute them out of existence, perhaps, as happened to the Lollards of England.

In this case, Perseus’ assault on the Gorgon Medusa could have signified an all out assault on the Matriarchal stronghold as was the story of the Iliad in which the Patriarchal Greeks waged a ten year war to exterminate Matriarchal Troy.  Whether factual or not it is true that when the post-Troy dark age ended the Greeks were in possession of the Anatolian littoral.

Of course the preferred method was by stealth and intermarriage.  Intermarriage may have required the extermination of the males to acquire the women which was commonly done.  Thus, Zeus’ frequent rapes of women may commemorate such takeovers.

As the assimilated gods appear to have been indigenous the Greeks must have taken over the pre-existing gods while changing them to Patriarchal from Matriarchal.  Thus, while Zeus is clearly a Cretan god, probable annual consort of the Great Mother, he was transported to mainland Argos where as a woodpecker he raped the Argive goddess Hera becoming her lord and master, or her husband.

The consort of Hera was Heracles, a sun god.  When Zeus took Hera from him as his wife this left Heracles at loose ends without a purpose.  The Greeks gave him a new lineage and the role of the champion of the Patriarchy and punisher of the Matriarchy.

In this case Zeus seduces Alcmene in the disguise of her husband Amphitryon impregnating her with Hercules.  Just as Heracles was a loose cannon after the marriage of Zeus and Hera the Cretan Great Goddess was without a consort when Zeus left Crete.  The problem is what identity was she assigned?  When Heracles was born two snakes were sent by the Matriarchy to kill him.  The baby Heracles strangled both, one in each hand.  Symbolically then the Cretan religion was imagined to be destroyed and possibly its Great Mother murdered.

A great problem however that remains hidden from me is the origin of the Peloponnesian Lady Of The Lake.  As the Cretan Great Mother was also a Mistress Of The Animals it is quite possible that she was taken to the mainland from Crete where she became an Artemis and possibly the Lady Of The Lake.

At some later time the Cretan priesthood would be carried from Crete and installed as the priesthood of Apollo at the premier Greek shrine of Delphi.  So, how much of the Greek religion was of Aryan origin and how much of the ancient Med Valley religion through its Cretan development isn’t clear but the two must have been extensively intermingled making the Cretan Great Mother a probable Artemis/Diana and the Lady Of The Lake.

I have found no references in Greek mythology to the Lady Of The Lake but the Lady as Vivian turns up in the Arthurian epics of +1000-1300 when they were formulated.  In those she is referred back to ancient Peloponnesian times.  I haven’t found the sources of the medieval writers but they must have been in possession of some mythological sources that no longer exist.

I would now like to examine the transition from the male archetype of Jesus in mid-Piscean Age to Diana in Northern Europe and Mary, the Mother of God in the South.

Before leaving the Ancients however let me say that having organized a pantheon the Greeks then removed the various gods from their home locales  and established their residence on Mt. Olympus deep in the more densely Aryan populations of the North of Greece.

II.

The religion of no one Age is secure because the transition to the next Age is always looming.  Just as Zeus had replaced Cronus of the Taurean Age so the Greek male archetype of the Piscean Age, Dionysus, was maturing as Zeus’ replacement.

However, in the long war between Europe and Asia the balance of power was to shift toward the Asians.  Dionysus was discarded to be replaced by the Semitic Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.  The Jews had quietly been infiltrating Western society while actually contending for pre-eminence in the East and Egypt.  This would erupt into the Roman-Jewish wars of the first two centuries AD.

As the early Christians were a purely Jewish sect it is no wonder that when Paul of Tarsus turned the Jewish cult into a universal religion that that religion reflected Judaism to a large extent.  Judaism being an intolerant religion that intolerance was replicated in both  the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Churches.  The result was that any competing religious views were viciously suppressed.  After the fourth century the old Creco-Cretan religion was anathematized on the pain of death.

As would happen in the fifteenth century when the Ottoman Moslems conquered Constantinople and the Greek scholars fled East to India and West to the Roman successor States numbers of the Olympian priesthood undoubtedly fled into the German lands to the North.  Just as the Arian priests fled North to escape Catholic oppression where they converted the German tribes  so the Olympian priests sowed their beliefs among the Germans.  That’s one reason so many Olympian beliefs are found in German folk tales as collected by the Grimms.

As the Lady Of The Lake is a Matriarchal myth it follows that the Cretan priesthood of Delphi sowed Matriarchal ideas among the Germans.  It can be little wonder that Vivian, The Lady Of The Lake, appeared in the French chivalric myths created from the eleventh though fourteenth centuries.

Not only that but Vivian represents the Matriarchal resurgence against Catholic Patriarchalism.  Vivian of course was none other than Artemis/Diana.  It was thus that Diana became the female archetype of Northern Europe in the second half of the Piscean Age.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the Olympian gods died quiet deaths or deaths at all.  It is one thing to outlaw a belief system and another to erase it from the memories of those who had used that belief system for two thousand years.  The Christians were at best a conquering horde no different from the Patriarchal Greeks who attempted to destroy the Cretan religion.  The Catholic Church was no more able to contain the Olympians than the Greeks were able to contain Cretan religion.  Just as the Greeks had had to accommodate the Cretans by installing them at Delphi so the Catholic Church had to accommodate Olympians while the struggle never ceased.

Just as the Iliad was part of an immense mythological cycle detailing the struggle between the Matriarchy and the Patriarchy so the Arthurian epics detailing the Matriarchal, Patriarchal and Church as Aryans sects was even more immense and sprawling.  The huge corpus of the Vulgate-Lancelot may just be the largest literary work in the world while being only part of the story.

So Arthur being installed at Camelot as the wise and benevolent Patriarchal monarch, Vivian had her home beneath a northern French lake.  The problem for her was how to subvert Camelot and restore the Matriarchy.  After all the court of Arthur was guided by and protected by the magic of the great magician Merlin.    So long as Merlin was on the job Arthur was invulnerable.  Vivian’s first task was to eliminate Merlin.

Bear in mind that an ages old system that these participants can have had no knowledge of is being satisfactorily worked out according to the principles of that system.  One can understand how active minds could penetrate this arcane system but the miracle is that naïve minds could understand what was intended and how to further it.  But then I am participating here in furthering events into the Aquarian Age and am no member of any priesthood; I was just a guy standing on the corner watching the girls go by while reading the odd volume.  Do I know what I say I know?  I can’t even guess but at the same time I can’t keep from writing as though I do.  Blame it on the muse.

Vivian was a cute girl; Merlin was a half daft old man susceptible to a young beauty’s charms even though he knew better.  Vivian smiled at him and the wisest dope in the world fell for it.  But, isn’t that the way the sisterhood always works.  If you’ve got a job to do, keep it zipped up.

Enamored of Vivian Merlin took her into his confidence.  He was reluctant to share his magic with her but she coaxed and he caved.  Once the wiliest of womanhood had obtained the old wizard’s knowledge she turned on him entombing him in the matriarchal symbol, Mother Earth, where he remains today muttering useless spells in an effort to remove the stone.

Vivian Enchants Merlin

Part one of her effort was now achieved.  Arthur was unprotected and vulnerable.  It was only necessary to find the means and the agent.  Vivian already knew the means.  Arthur would marry the beautiful but flighty Guenivere.  Arthur was old sobersides as he had a kingdom to rule so Guenivere was on the lookout for the dark romantic lead.  It just so happened that Vivian had a boy in training who was now about to emerge into lusty young manhood.  He was the most perfect knight in the world save one, who was yet unborn and to be his son.

When this lad was a young boy Vivian had lured him down to the lake from whose shores she abducted him taking him to her submarine palace for training. Lancelot became a fairy prince.  Now, this is important: Vivian although a virgin was an alpha mother .  All those bundles of genes out there who yell and stomp thinking that makes them alpha males aren’t. It’s not in the genes its in the mothering.  Look for the alpha female.  So, Lancelot was the alphaest of all living males.

As an emblem of her authority Vivian dressed Lancelot as well as  the horse he rode out on in shining white velvet.  Guenivere’s prince had come.

This Dandy, Lancelot, then went to Camelot and was deputized by Arthur to fetch his bride from her father and thus began a liaison with the Queen that would disrupt the famous Round Table resulting in a war between Patriarchal Arthur and Matriarchal Lancelot that brought the kingdom to its knees.

Arthur’s original sword drawn from the stone had been stolen and replaced by Excalibur a sword given to him by Vivian.  Thus Arthur originally armed by the Patriarchy was now defended by the power of the Matriarchy or Diana.  When Arthur died the sword was returned to the Lady Of The Lake and Arthur was taken to her bourne, Avalon to be tended by the fairie maidens.  Symbolically England had passed from the Patriarchy to the Matriarchy; what began two thousand years earlier between the Cretans and the Greeks was now resolved in England in favor of the Matriarchy.

In the South of Europe the female archetype of the Piscean Age was Mary who delivered Jesus to the world in Virgin birth somewhat like Vivian giving virgin birth to Lancelot.  At the same time that Diana assumed authority in the North Mary began to be worshipped in a form known as Mariolatry in the South and assumed pre-eminence over Jesus, the male.  The contest then shifted to one between the Dianites of the North and the Marionites of the South.

If one assumes that the sexual battle was over by 1300, then the battle of the female archetypes began. That began to resolve itself when Henry VIII separated England from the Papacy rejecting Mary, the Mother of God.  Luther did the same for the Germans.  This conflict resulted in the horrific Thirty Years War that nearly destroyed the German people.  At war’s end Protestants, that is the Dianites, were in control of the North while the Marionites held the South.

Dissension in the North and South was still rife until the Enlightenment broke the power of the Church releasing all kinds of repressed religious views of which the religion of Diana  was merely one.  One wonders how much of the women’s movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was influenced by the concept of Diana  The movement today is heavily influenced by a goddess cult, not Mary, but Diana and probably the Egyptian Isis.  One imagines that there must be some continuity.

The interest in both Greek mythology and the Arthurian epics did not wane during the nineteenth century, if anything increasing.  Tennyson’s Idylls of  the King was a major retelling of the story while the quest for the Holy Grail is an ongoing theme.

The Matriarchy was all but forgotten in the conscious memory of Europe that had become patriarchal on the surface.  In mid-century against stiff resistance the Swiss mythologist, J. J. Bachofen uncovered the Matriarchy reintroducing it into intellectual history.  The concept was stoutly resisted but a reevaluation of the evidence over the succeeding hundred years has reestablished the knowledge of its existence.

On the popular level the great English novelist H. Rider Haggard toyed with the idea in several significant, even great, novels that have been slighted through a lack of understanding.  The most significant of that set of novels, the She saga, has become one of the world’s great classics.

She, or Ayesha, her actual name, means Life  was definitely not a mother goddess, as far as we know she had been chaste for two thousand years.  Life might be interpreted in the sense of Mistress Of The Animals, so it wouldn’t be unfair to associate Ayesha with Diana.  Haggard was no mean mythologist.

He associated with the well known mythologist Andrew Lang with whom he also collaborated on The World’s Desire.  He was very well read in mythology, Greek, Egyptian and Israelite.  The year after Haggard wrote She in 1888 he followed up with Cleopatra, a very good Egyptian novel.  He followed that with the astonishing interpretation of the Helen myth in The World’s Desire of 1890.  Within the compass of these three novels he unraveled the meaning of the Hermes/Mercury staff- the Caduceus.

The Caduceus Of Mercury/Hermes

In She Ayesha wore a golden belt composed of two snakes whose heads opposed each other at her waist.  They represented the combat between good and evil in Ayesha’s mind.  Both natures of the Cretan goddess were united in Ayesha.

By the time Haggard wrote The World’s Desire two years later he had separated the two impulses into two persons.  The evil aspect of the goddess was the ruling aspect of the Egyptian princess Meriamun while the pure loving aspect of the goddess belonged to the spirit of Helen whose character was the world’s desire.

Thus the rod of Mercury’s staff represents the spine while the two snakes entwining the rod represent the good and evil impulses who facing each other are at war with each other.  In modern psychological terms it could be said the snakes represent the Anima and Animus- the left and right halves of the brain or, in other words, the ovate strand of DNA and the  spermatic strand.  The wings mean that the whole apparatus is sheltered under the wings of the goddess.  It is also quite probable that the points of the chakras are intended by the twining.  See my full explication here:  https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/a-review-part-iv-she-by-h-rider-haggard/

Hermes/Mercury was one of the old Matriarchal gods who was reborn as a Patriarchal god so that the Patriarchal Mercury bears the Matriarchal emblem of the Caduceus before him thus representing both religious outlooks.

Haggard was the rock on which his near disciple, Edgar Rice Burroughs, built his church.  Without saying that Burroughs was an expert Greco-Roman mythologist he began reading mythology at a very early age while his Junior High years were spent at the Harvard Latin school of Chicago where he was placed under a heavy classical regimen.  He also continued to read Greek mythology throughout his life while also being interested in anthropology.  Thus, while he might not have had the scholarly background of Haggard he must have known enough to follow Haggard’s argument, if not consciously at least in his subconscious memory.

When Burroughs created his fantasy lost city of Opar its goddess, or high priestess, was even named  La which is French for She.  Whether he was aware he was working with a vision of Diana isn’t relevant as the notion of She/Diana was engraved in what Jung would call the collective unconscious and hence his own.

Ever the Patriarch, Burroughs turned the tables on the Diana/Vivian Merlin story and made La submissive to Tarzan while Tarzan was unmoved by either her beauty or her love.

A sort of version was also told by the very good but now nearly forgotten novelist Robert Hichens in his novel of 1905, The Garden Of Allah.  This story in turn influenced Burroughs as well as the much more conscious mythologist Edith Maude Hull who wrote The Sheik in 1921.  Today Mrs. Hull’s reputation, such as it is, rests on The Sheik and The Sheik’s reputation on the movie represention of Rudolph Valentino.  In point of fact Mrs. Hull’s novel was a study of Diana, the name of her heroine, that follows to some extent the version of Burroughs. (See my full review of The Sheik here https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/12/a-review-1921s-the-sheik-by-em-hull/)

1920s English Devotee Of Diana

That Mrs. Hull was a part od some sort of Diana cultish interest is evidenced by this 1920s photo of woman posing as Diana.  The collective memory and/or unconscious has kept the vision of Diana/Great Mother alive for a minimum of three thousand years.  The Ancient Evil had been transmuted into Freudian psychology.

Today the worship of the Goddess has been revived in the Feminist Movement and is thriving.  Indeed, a Matriarchal Revolution has been in progress since perhaps the 1850s and now seems to be rapidly approaching fruition, at least among the Aryans of Europe and America.

Time will tell whither the Ancient Evil will triumph.

Posted in Anima, Animus, Apollo, Christians, Civilization, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, Greek Mythology, H. Rider Haggard, Heracles, Hermes, Holy Grail, Homer, J.J. Bachofen, Jesus, Jews, King Arthur, Matriarchy, Mythology, Patriarchy, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Tarzan, Zeus | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A Review: Psychoanalyzing Captain America

August 10, 2011

A Review

Psychoanalyzing Captain America

by

R.E. Prindle

From Out Of The Depths

 Must we be responsible for our own dreams?

 –Sigmund Freud

     In answer to the above question by Herr Doktor Professor Freud in his dream book, The Interpretation Of Dreams. published in the year 1900 Prof. Freud said that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious.  He then proceeded to suppress the conscious will releasing the unconscious will to dominate the personality.

     Of course in 1900 movies, TV and comic books were in the future and unforeseen by the Professor.  It is through those media that the unconscious visualizes itself.  The Dream is manifested, the unconscious becomes realized.

     In the case of the movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, first came the dream then came the comic book, then with movie technology undreamed of  in 1940 when Joe Simon and Jack Kirby conceived the character, brought to the screen today.  Comic books and movies are true projections of the unconscious.    As might be seen by anyone with a ticket Capt. America is less a story than a dream, a dream that Sigmund Freud defined as wish fulfillment.  So, one must examine the movie as a wish from the subconscious fulfilled as a visualization on the screen.  What does the dream-wish fulfill?

     First off we have a powerless wimp being knocked about by the big bad bully.  We have a brief anti-bully list and then move on.  However in this Cain and Abel story the rolls of bully and bullied are clear.  The wimp then wishes to join the army to fight Hitler and is rejected on several counts of inferiority.  But, never fear, the last shall be first.

     Now, in 1940 the US was not at war with anybody while the America First Committee was determined to keep the country that way.  But a powerful coalition led by the Jews had determined the European conflict  was a ‘just’ war while it was morally compulsory for the US to butt in somewhat like Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and a few other places today.  Unlike Viet Nam the usual suspects who opposed that war endorse all the current wars.  The voice of dissent is unheard throughout the land.

     So, bearing Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams in mind that demonstrates the connection between dreams and the unconscious, Captain America is a daydream or psychological projection of Jack Kirby’s ne Jacob Kurtzberg and Joe Simon’s of Brooklyn N.Y.  The relationship of these comic book writers to Judaism is explained by Rabbi Simcha Weinstein in his book Up, Up, And Oy Vey!:  How Jewish History, Culture, And Values Shaped The Comic Book Superhero.  This quote explains the real life origin of Capt. America:

     Growing up in poverty, Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) dreamed of being an artist but was forced to drop out of Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute after only one day because of financial hardship.  Instead Kirby worked on newspaper comic strips under gentile-sounding pseudonyms such as Jack Curtis, Curt Davis, and Lance Kirby until he finally settled on the name Jack Kirby.

     Kirby and his partner, Joe Simon, worked at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, where the mostly Jewish staff openly despised Hitler.  When Goodman saw the preliminary sketches for Captain America, he immediately give Kirby and Simon their own comic book.  The character was an instant hit, selling almost one million copies an issue.  “The U.S. hadn’t yet entered the war when Jack and I did Captain America, so maybe he was our way of lashing out against the Nazi menace.  Evidently, Captain America symbolized the American people’s sentiments.  When we were producing Captain America we were outselling Batman, Superman and all the others.”  Simon later commented.

     Well, not quite all the others, as Whiz Comics Captain Marvel was the best selling comic of both the war years and the later forties.  Certainly my favorite.

     As in the years before the War The America First Committee enjoyed overwhelming popularity amongst Americans I would question Simon’s notion that Captain America overwhelmingly represented American opinion.  As there were six million Jews in the country I might suggest the response from that quarter of ‘Americans’ was more overwhelming than elsewhere.  Jews might easily have accounted for sixty to eighty percent of sales.

     It is also probable that no real American would ever have invented a corny jingoistic persona like Captain American.  The image was certainly repulsive to me as a child.   My prime comic reading years were from 1947 to 1950 and I and my entire generation rejected Captain America while embracing Captain Marvel.  Even then Superman was a distant competitor to Captain Marvel which is why DC comics sued Whiz for copyright violation.

     We disliked the hokey repulsive jingoism of Captain America as well as his dumb outfit and the stupid shield.  (I’m speaking as a nine year old here.)  Of course we knew from nothing about Judaism and almost less about any other religious sects but there was something othery about Capt. America and Superman although we embraced the equally Jewish Batman.

     The origins of Captain America then emanated from the Jewish dream subconscious of Jack Kirby which was quite different from ours.  He, therefor, as all writers must, made Capt. America in his real existence and from his dream fantasies.  Thus, giving his creation the goy name of Steve Rogers he nevertheless gave him a Brooklyn Jewish origin.  As Rabbi Weinstein also a Brooklyn Jew explains Jews had a sort of dual identity as powerless Jews posing as goys in a powerful goy world.  Thus the sickly ineffective Rogers undergoes a scientific experiment that turns him essentially from a 98 lb. Jewish weakling into an all powerful goy Charles Atlas.  I’m sure Kirby saw those ads while growing up.

     Rogers having now been turned into a Superman had to have a name.  Superman being taken Super Jew was out for obvious reasons or even Super Hebrew, there was no Israel at the time, so Kirby settled on Captain America.  Rabbi Weinstein again:

     Of course a more literal reading of the costume is that it is the American flag brought to life.  Captain America’s star is, after all, five-pointed, not six pointed like the Star of David.  The flag-as-costume notion reinforces the ideal of assimilation [Jews ‘becoming’ Americans].  By literally cloaking their character in patriotism, Kirby and Simon became true Americans.

     In 1940 there was a desperate struggle going on between the Jews and America First who the Jews styled as American Fascists, i.e. actual Hitlerites.  By that line of reasoning  the Jews became the true Americans, creators and protector of genuine American Democracy while Anglo-Americans or Native Americans or America Firsters were out to destroy the great American Dream the Jews had discovered.  This is the theme of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America backdated to this period.  The movie Captain America could easily be subtitled The Plot Against America Foiled.

     Rabbi Weinstein once again:

Weinstein's Book     Despite the patriotic appearance, Captain America’s costume also denotes deeply rooted [Jewish] tradition.  Along with other Jewish-penned superheroes, Captain America was in part an allusion to the golem, the legendary creature said to have been constructed by the sixteenth century mystic Rabbi Judah Loew to defend the Jews of medieval Prague.  “The golem was pretty much the precursor of the superhero in that in every society there is a need for mythological chracters, wish fulfillment.  And the wish fulfillment in the Jewish case of the hero would be someone who could protect us.  This kind of storytelling seems to dominate in Jewish culture,” commented Will Eisner.

      According to tradition a golem is sustained by inscribing the Hebrew word emet (truth) upon its forehead.  When the first letter is removed, leaving the word met (death) the golem will be destroyed.  Emet is spelled with the letters aleph, rem and tav.  The first letter, aleph, is also the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the equivalent of the letter A.  Captain America wears a mask with a white A on his forehead- the very letter needed to empower the golem.

     So, you and I thought the A stood for America but it is actually a symbol of Judaism.  Captain America then is an unconscious dream projection of the Jewish subconscious following Freud’s thought in his Interpretation of Dreams.  Now we know who and what the  Captain America or The First Avenger is.

2.

     Like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America the movie is backdated to 1940 although as the US is already in the war perhaps 1942-43 although in Kirby and Simon’s dream vision they could have already employed the usurped power of America in 1940.  However the movie writers, are writing today so assume different interpretations and aspects.

     In point of fact Hitler no longer exists except in the Jewish mind so the relevance of the movie is hampered.  Goys are not reliving the Hitler experience on a daily basis.  To correct this and bring the Nazi threat forward Hitler is relegated to an inept showman while the real brain behind Nazism is the Hydra.

      The Hydra in Greek mythology was a matriarchal year deity with seven heads and one neck,  Six of the heads prepresented the last six months of the year while the seventh head and neck represented the recurring and indestructible year.  Everytime a head was cut off it grew back as time does march on.

      When the Patriarchy was displacing the Matriarchy the story changed somewhat.  Hercules was sent to fight the Hydra and everytime he cut off a head three grew back.  Thus the Hydra is represented in the movie as a Red Octopus with eight arms thus embracing the world.  Ils sont partout. Obviously Hydra is a dream projection of anti-Semitism the arch fiend of the Jewish unconscious.

     The Jewish Doctor Erskine, Reinstein in the comic, playing God botches his first attempt at creating the superman, Hydra/Cain, but finds perfection in Capt. America/Abel.  Thus Cain is blighted while Abel is God’s favorite.  While Captain America begins as a song and dance man belittling Hitler on stage, when the fighting starts Hitler is relegated offstage while the super-Hitler, Hydra, steps front and center.

     While the Americans that Rogers as Capt. America have nothing like the incredible weapons and organization of Hydra they are nevertheless with their bare hands able to defeat him.  He is however immortal like all dream fears so that as Arnold said:  He’ll be back.

     The action is standard comic book action fare and needs no further comment.  You could have written it yourself.  Pretty clicheed but if you like this stuff you’ll find it very satisfying.

     However Captain America remains a Jewish hero in American drag with a purloined identity.

Cartoon Jack Kirby

Posted in Adolf Hitler, America, Consciousness, Dreams, Freud, Golem, Greek Mythology, Heracles, HUAC, Israel, Jews, Matriarchy, Mythology, Patriarchy, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Reviews, Semites, Sigmund Freud, Subconscious, The Plot Against America, Unconsciousness, Writing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Who Is The Mysterious John Carter?

December 23, 2010

Who Is The Mysterious John Carter?

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs- The Man With The Plan

http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/wnu1.htm#ARTICLES

 

There are nine wise men who control the destiny of the world and I am on a first name basis with each of them.  Sworn to secrecy I cannot reveal the names of these Unknown Masters.  No Wiki-leaks here.  Due to the upcoming movie concerning doings under the moons of Mars first revealed by the adept Edgar Rice Burroughs beginning in 1912 I have been advised that it is thought expedient to reveal who John Carter really is.

Elipsis being the favored mode of action of the Nine rather than just give the info straight out I have been given a list of web sites, articles and books from which Carter’s identity may be deduced leaving some room for error on my part from which Carter’s identity may be deduced.  Given the nature of the material, much of which I had already read that I have always thought rather fanciful I can’t guarantee that I have succeeded in determining J.C.’s true identity.  If I have failed in this great trust placed in me by the Nine I lay the blame at their feet for having made an erroneus choice but it is possible that, as a result of such a possible failure, I may not be heard from again.

Burroughs, who seems to have known the true identity of Carter, whose books were part of the package given to me, as if I hadn’t already read them many times, gives us a clue in that Carter was at least one thousand years old and had enjoyed many identities over the centuries.  Actually with a little invention I may be able to whiff this past the Nine.

Amongst the papers entrusted to me was the web address of the French Wold Newton Universe which I abbreviate FWNU.  As this site intelligently summarizes a thousand years of history I found it an invaluable resource but just because I’m relying on the FWNU doesn’t mean I’m lazy; I’ve already read the other stuff:  the Greek myths, Homer, Grave’s White Goddess, the Bible, De Santillana, Eco and a host of others, besides which I have to use the sources the Nine supplied.

It will be necessary to begin our search with the Knights Templar and the Crusades.  It is quite possible that J.C. by whatever identity he may have been known is co-existent with the First Hominid Predecessor.  For all we know he was present at the creation, among the artists  who painted the caves at Lascaux or he may even have had an intimate acquaintance with the Via Dolorosa; but, that might merely be relying on the coincidence of initials.  We have no reliable or even quasi-reliable records that far back.

We will have to content ourselves with beginning at the Crusades.  The historical figure who claims an ancient pedigree is the Count de St. Germain.  He makes his appearance under that name in revolutionary France.  As the name he uses then is demonstrably French we have to assume that over the centuries he has been known under many, many names, many guises, many roles as the concept French is of fairly recent origin.  He was perhaps one of the nine who formed the Knights Templar, a very secretive group.  The Crusades changed the course of European society just as the Templars were the first catalysts of that change.  While Templar history is in the hands of those sympathetic to them who find them wholly admirable I who should be among those sympathsizers have a lurking suspicion that the Order was wholly sinister.  Who else, I ask you, would recruit in taverns haunted by criminals and excommunicants?  What building material was this?

The Templars ostensible purpose, good reason as opposed to real reason, for existence was that they were to protect pilgrims to the so-called Holy Land but, once created, they lost interest in such a worthy cause.  Perhaps they were created for a much more subversive and less worthy purpose.  The Templars are frequently linked with another band of ‘holy’ soldiers, the Assassins of Alamut in Persia.  Who were the Assassins?  The FWNU:  Will There Be Light Tomorrow, Part I:

The word “assassins” is usually linked to hashish, and the name of the group is sometimes spelled “hashishins,” because of their alleged use of the drug to keep their fearsome warriors properly motivated…What is not widely known is that, in fact, the name “Assassins” derives from the word “Assass,” meaning “Guardians,” or “Protectors,” for the Assassins were in reality the Islamic Soldier Monks in charge of the protection of the Holy Land.  “Assassins” in Arabic signifies “quardians,” and some commentators have considered this the true origin of the word: “Guardians of the secrets'” – Arkan Daraul, Secret Societies.

If the Assassins had secrets to protect and/or disseminate then they might easily have swayed the minds of a group of simple unsophisticated Nordic warriors.  Once swayed then their role would have been to form a fifth column in Europe in alliance with the Assassins to subvert the Church and State which is exactly what the Templars were doing.  Thus though the Moslems had been defeated and thrust back by Charles Martel the Templars would be internal allies to achieve the Moslem conquest not unlike the Liberal undermining in favor of the Moslems in the West today.    Wheels within wheels, plans within plans.  There undoubtedly was constant communication between the two groups for well over a hundred years until the Mongols of Ghengis Khan stormed Alamut putting an end to the Assassins c. +1260.  An unforseen event.  It was then only a few decades later that Philip Lebel of France terminated the career of the Templars launching Europe on the period of confusion that terminated with the murder of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

From the wreckage of the Templars, for they were only wrecked not destroyed, came great criminal organizations such as the Commora, the Carbonara and the Mafia.  All these elements combined to create the revolution in France during which the Compte de St. Germain  and the extra sinister Caligliostro, who might have been the same,  appeared and who in all possiblility emigrated to America to become…John Carter.

Names and dates in this underworld milieu can never be taken as certain.  As the FWNU points out it is clear that Cagliostro left for America after 1795 or at about the same time Edgar Allan Poe was handed the mysterious manuscript detailing the adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym.  We’re slipping into the realm of pure fiction here but suppose that Poe did get the story from someone and suppose that someone was merely posing as Cagliostro or St. Germain, probably the same person in two identities.  Still fantistic but not impossible.

However contrary to Man’s desire nobody lives forever so at some point Cagliostro has to die but before he does he finds the Virginian John Carter and instructs him in this pious fraud to keep the tradition going.  Now, it is clear that whether or not someone gave Burroughs a manuscript which he at least claimed happened in the case of John Clayton he writes of John Carter in the tradition of the Great Conspiracy that had its roots in the Crusades.

Burroughs may very well have been self-indoctrinated in the Traditions as many of us are, however Burroughs was learned in several matters not least of which was psychology by his brothers’ partner, Lew Sweetser.

Sweetser along with the Burroughs Boys was graduated from Yale University which we know is the home of the prominent occult organization the Skull and Bones Club.  The Skull and Bones takes its emblem from the pirates of the Caribbean.  Their banner was a corruption of the black and white Beauceant banner of the Templars.  It is generally thought that the excaping French Templars, or a portion of them, fled to Scotland.  After 1492 when the Spanish gold fleets of his Most Catholic Majesty, the Defender of the Faith, the King of Spain began their runs, the Templars set sail for the New World to prey on the treasure fleets to avenge themselves on Church and Throne.

I have seen no record that Lew Sweetser was in the Skull and Bones but if he was or aspired to, if the Skull and Bones have any secrets which they obviously do, Sweetser may have become privy to some and whether intentionally or inadvertantly he probably imparted some to young Burroughs.  At the very least, in educating young Burroughs as he obviously did he would have given him his outlook or point of view.  Young Burroughs was at an impressionable age.

 

This point of view was reinforced by all of Burroughs’ reading.  That reading was more heavily occult and revolutionary than is usually supposed.  By 1912 when he began writing ERB was fully versed in the underground French literature in translation of the day.  There doesn’t seem to be a reference to Balzac although he must have read something but maybe not.  He did read Eugene Sue, one of the early nineteenth century writers, a veritable mad man.  Sue’s The Mysteries Of Paris was in his library while I’m relatively certain he read Sue’s Wandering Jew also.  Between

A Boy Named Sue

those two books his mind would have been ripped apart and reassembled as was mine for instance.  He read Dumas, Three Musketeers and Count Of Monte Cristo for sure and probably The Man In The Iron Mask.  He plowed through Victor Hugo’s sewer epic, Les Miserables.  He devoured whatever was translated of Jules Verne.  Verne’s works were firmly implanted in his mind: From Earth To The Moon and Mysterious Island absolutely filled his mind.  Paul Feval and

E.A. Poe, obviously under mental stress

Emile Gaboriau weren’t translated as yet so these very important crime/revolutionary writers missed him.  They write much more directly at what Sue, Dumas, Hugo and Verne imply.  But, all four of those guys are powerful writers dealing with life in a very direct way.  Edgar Allan Poe, another prime influence of Burroughs, 1808-1849 seems to have been influenced by the early bunch of French writers, probably Balzac and some writers less well known but earlier than Feval and the rest.  Poe may be the most astounding writer of all in the French school although its hard to top Sue.  I shudder while I write his name.    And then it is impossible to know what magazine and newspaer articles about such topics Burroughs may have read.  His age was a magazine and newspaper age.

 

Cagliostro

And, of course, Burroughs read a full slate of English and American writers not least the detective stories of Conan Doyle and many others.  One should not overlook George W.M. Reynolds incredible ten volume novel The Mysteries Of The Court Of London which is found in ERB’s library.  An amazing 5000 page novel.

All of this reading seemed to come together in the John Carter Martian Trilogy.  Burroughs never again wrote anything quite like it.  One could remember that one doesn’t have to be fully conscious of what one is writing.  One is caught up in the sweep of intellectual currents developing themes whose antecedents began long before so that one is merely developing the themes.

Thus Burroughs was part of the breaking up of the Semito-Aryan mythology of say -2000 to +1000 which was accentuated by the first of the three major blows to Man’s self-confidence picked out by Freud- the place of the Earth in the Universe.  Once it was understood that Earth was merely one lone planet spinning in a Universe that if not thought boundless in his time was understood to be more extensive than mythological heaven.  The old mythology crubled to the ground, the old gods of the Semitic religions had their teeth pulled, their knees crushed, in other words, they lost their power to command.

Jules Verne

Now, it is often asserted that there is no mythology to replace the old mythology, that science has destroyed the concept.  This is not true.  The Templars began a new mythology, while Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler forwarded it when they discovered or revealed  that the Earth was a point in a surrounding universe.   Thus, if the Earth is not the center of the universe with God in his heaven above it then Man can penetrate this boundless space.  This is where John Carter enters the mythology of the Scientific Era.

The idea of traveling in space according to the FWNU was almost immediately written in a story by Kepler himself.  While this is a sort of change of venue travel in the upper spheres has a long history predating Kepler.  To cite only two examples there is Jacob’s Ladder on which Jacob was said to ascend to the heavens or, in other words, space.  Mohammed is said to have mounted his horse and risen to the Seventh Heaven, way up there in the ideas of the time,  where he conversed face to face with God, or in Moslem terms,  Allah.  So, now that space became open it isn’t unusual that Kepler immediately translated the old mythology into scientific terms.  So while a magic carpet may have served Gullivar Jones if fails as science.

Thus from Kepler to Burroughs the tales of space travel and the complexity of methods increases.

Camille Flammarion

With the development of astronomy, that is space, the concept of Time developed apace.  The Earthly year had already been adequately measured so now the conquest of the Earth day, hour, minute and seconds- eventually nanoseconds- began.  Thus Time and Space became one word, timeandspace.  Along with rocketry came the fantasy of the Time Machine, the time traveler.  As we know Burroughs was an expert on both, having some very well developed ideas about Time.  Rather than being a merely frivolous romanticist then it can be seen that Burroughs was trying to work out the central problems of his times.  to a very large extent, he did.  In a literary sense, then, Burroughs is the equal of Freud and Einstein.  Hence his writing style is odd.  He is trying to convey ideas he is struggling to understand, not unlike Freud and Einstein.  While Freud is considered a literary stylist I find him barely comprehensible, not at all clear.

As the FWNU points out, while John Carter takes his place in space travel in the 1860s his amanuensis, Burroughs, only published Carter’s exploits from 1912 to 1914.

Burroughs himself completely distorts the facts as he claims he himself was born c. 1855 in the Trilogy while we know he was actually born twenty years later in 1875.  He could not possibly have known Carter as a child and been his ‘favorite nephew.’  Why he would tell such a transparent falsehood isn’t clear.  Even when Carter made his second vanishing in 1888 Burroughs would have been entering his teen years while being in Illinois rather than living on the Hudson in the State of New York.  Does he think we’re stupid?  Perhaps he is concealing his real sources.

Even though the issue is somewhat clouded because of the lapse of time between the historical events and Burroughs’ publication of them only in 1912, one thing is clear, John Carter is the Lord Of Time And Space.  As Burroughs recounts Carter’s words claimed to be to him in the prologue to the Gods Of Mars:

I have learned the secret, nephew, and I may traverse the trackless void at my will, coming and going between the countless planets as I list…

Carter’s achievement is of great import because it means that he has become one with the gods.  he has joined the heavenly pantheon with the added advantage that he can move equally freely between the spiritual and the temporal.  Not even the Great Gods can do that.  Although he has the secret he doesn’t choose to divulge it to his ‘favorite nephew’ who we know did not possess this occult secret.

It is interesting in light of Carter’s achievement to pay some attention to the Urania Book that was received by another Chicagoan.  Why Chicago was selected to be the center of revelation at this time isn’t known.  The book of Urania is a massive volume giving the details of the celestial organization of the gods dispersed throughout the universe of which Carter must have been familiar although he didn’t impart that knowledge to his nephew.  Fortunately that vast organization was related by the Uranians.

As Burroughs was left more or less on his own on that score by Carter it is evident that Burroughs must have fleshed out Carter’s bare announcement of having discovered the ‘secret’ of traversing interstellar space by hints from the famed French explorer of space Camille Flammarion.  That author discusses outer space in several profound works chief of which are The Plurality Of Inhabited Worlds, The Inhabitants Of Other Worlds, Imaginary And Real Worlds and Lands In The Sky.  It is to be noted also that rather than taking his information on the nature of Mars from the American Percival Lowell Burroughs took it from the Frenchman, Camille Flammarion.  Lowell and Flammarion were in close communication so it is probable that Lowell’s inspiration was taken from Flammarion.  Burroughs speaks of Flammarion many times even going so far as to say he formed his early ideas on him but he never mentions Lowell.  Unfortunately Flammarion’s information on Mars turned out to be more inspired than factual.  Let us hope his ideas on interplanetary space are more sound.  But then he is a pioneer and the lay of the land always looks different to the first comers than the settlers who become familiar with it.  Cartographers so to speak.  Geographers, that sort of thing.

At any rate the transition from the old astrology to the new astronomy, from myth to science, was achieved through the medium of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  There should a BB and AB, before and after Burroughs.  Thus with the publication of A Princess of Mars in 1912 world history entered a new phase.  The centuries after Keplers’ space epic culminated with Burroughs in 1912 when he more or less perfected the new mythology as far as the heavens were concerned.

Nor was Burroughs finished when Carter using the ‘secret’ transported himself to Mars the second time.  One is inclined to believe that Carter stumbled on the secret before the cave in Arizona or else was selected by the Celestial Organization to receive it.  The latter would have been impossible for a naive earthling like Burroughs to understand so Carter probably chose to say he discovered the secret.

Burroughs himself who was undoubtedly chosen as the conduit to the New Mythology was immediately recognized as the avatar of the New Mythology as nearly all other mythographers began to develop the ideas in Burroughs framework.  His knowledge which was itself almost miraculous seems as though it must have been divinely imparted.  Perhaps the two concusssions he received before 1900 rearranged his synapses so that he could intellectually go where no man had gone before.  He celebrates the memory of these two concussions by beating a steady tattoo on the skull of Tarzan.

Having organized the way in which inter-stellar planetary travel was to be perceived Burroughs set out to create the man-god of the New Age on earth, the second aspect of the trinity, John Clayton otherwise known as Tarzan Of The Apes.  Burroughs retained the JC initials linking Jesus Christ, John Carter and John Clayton as so many have noted although those three are not the Trinity in question- the three in one, one in three.  One must beware of the so-called revolutionaries who with their inability to understand common sense deride the triple aspect of mankind as faulty arithmetic.  In the course of evolution it would seem that  they failed to acquire the advanced intelligence gene.

Three of Burroughs’ most formative years were spent at Harvard Latin School in Chicago where he developed his classical knowledge and fell in love with classical mythology.

Thus, as the mythological god of heaven was Zeus to whom John Carter corresponds, John Clayton, or Tarzan corresponds to the terrestrial god, Poseidon or, perhaps more accurately to the son of Zeus, the great man-god Heracles.  Burroughs often refers to Tarzan as the Heracles of the jungle so perhaps he shoved Poseidon aside in favor of the son of Zeus.  This leaves only the realm of the underworld ruled by Pluto or Hades in Classical Mythology which Burroughs renamed Pelucidar and placed at the center of the Earth.  He doesn’t seem to have felt the need for a ruler of that particular realm.  Thus while the three realms exist in his mythology the trinity seems to be curiously truncated by one but perhaps I’m missing something.

Thus Burroughs updated the Trinity.  It might be coincidence or maybe it was destiny but Burroughs was chosen to transit the bases of the New Mythology at the first glimmer of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  Was he conscious of his role as the Man of Destiny?  While he could never be sure he undoubtedly hoped the Light was shining on him.

Although obscure this move shows a very astute religious understanding.  If one wishes to supplant a religion the wise idea is to appropriate the forms of symbols, shrines and ideas and replace their content with your own.  Catholicism did this with Greek and German sites and Jewish and Moslem religions are attempting the same with Christian and or Western sites, symbols and ideas now.  There is an eternal religious war.  For instance Jews have instituted the new Jewish holiday Hannukah in opposition to the Western Christmas which in itself contains the superposition of the Christian religion on pagan sites.  While shining the light on their Hannukah they make vicious attacks on Christmas trying to have it outlawed.  Christmas celebrants are thus being nudged to embrace Hannukah at which time they will be left in peace to celebrate their Christmas under the guise of Hannukah.  In the time honored manner Christianity will have been superseded, in this case by a lesser religious faith.  Undoubtedly they will be happy with an eight day celebration rather than a one.   A little bribery works well.

Thus Burroughs makes John Carter the Master of Time and Space in place of Jahweh or Allah.  When the scientific British conquered India and scoffed at the Hindu notion that the world rested on the back of the elephant as an impossibility the Hindu priests withdrew, worked it over in their minds and countered:  OK.  The world rests on the back of the tortoise.  The Hindus could not accept the negation of their religious beliefs.

So science made clear to Christians, Jews and and Moslems that there was no god and that instead of the earth nestling in an egg of seven heavens with god in the seventh and highest balanced by seven layers of hell beneath the flat earth and that space was in fact boundless and the earth occupied an infinitessimally small space in the universe, the Christians, Jews and Moslems retired to consider the problem then each gave a new solution based on God in heaven much as the Hindus switched from an elephant to a tortoise.  It is impossible to just switch the human mind from one system to another.  As Voltaire said:  No one ever willed himself an athiest.

Science is abstract while religion is visceral. so even those working in science retain their religious views.  The Christians said:  Alright then, if God didn’t create mankind what happened is that a comet brought life to Earth.  You see, Evolution or Creation must come from outside.  It is more comfortable to think that.  Thus nothing changed, life came from ‘above.’  As the space idea developed one had the spectacular Uranian religion develop where the entire universe becomes one huge revival camp while ‘visitors’ from outer space landed handing knowledge to dumb ox earthlings.   Knowledge wasn’t acquired bit by bit by humble earthlings but was given by superior aliens, i.e. God.  The Aliens then began to hover over Earth in flying saucers to monitor our activities until we were ‘ready’ to enter the congress of planets in a peaceful manner.  Like God they don’t interfere in our affairs.

Thus John Carter the man-god can replace both God in his heaven and space aliens and God will still be in his heaven and all right with the world.  Only the symbols will change which is as it must be.  As above, so below.  Following that religious formula Burroughs placed the avatar of primitiveness and sophistication, Tarzan, as overlord of Africa.  Tarzan remains a savage but is sometimes dressed in a tuxedo, even in the jungle.

How aware is this?  Currently certain groups are going into the very heart of darkness to haul Negroes out of the jungle, put them on airplanes which they may only have seen flying high above them and transporting them to the United States where these groups expect these primitives to get a job, eat frozen food, and flush the toilet none of which the primitives have any knowledge.  As is well known feral humans are incapable of transiting to human society.  The brain can only absorb so much and at such a rate.  This inability cannot be accelerated or changed.   Even well educated, supposedly sophisticated humans can’t make the transition from a magical religious mindset to a rational scientific one so what is to become of primitives?  Scientific thought has had no part in Chinese or Asian thought until very recently so how can these peoples be expected to abandon their essentially mythopoeic thought processes for a scientific  one?

So, while Burroughs was attempting to lead the way to an Aquarian scientific conception of the coming New Age he was wisely attempting to do the impossibhle:  Putting new wine in old bottles without bursting the bottles.  It may be impossible yet it has to be done.   The issue has now been complicated, probably irreparably, by the introduction of hundreds of millions of people into Western society for which the transition is a complete impossibility.  The enlightened Westerner will be swamped by those incapable of understanding whether it be their natural limitations or not.

In this global society the Aquarian religion must displace several antiquated thought systems.  The truth is obvious.  A palatable religion has to be packaged for the masses that will make them psychologically comfortable and an elite and priesthood who hopefully understand the issues who can keep society moving forward on an even keel.  Is this possible?  Even Burroughs could solve the problem only by continuing the institution of slavery.  Slavery permeates his entire work.

In our situation it is important to keep the religious warfare confined to the warring elites and away from the masses.

That means of course that the egalitarian character of the last two hundred years has come to an end.  Of course, the Semites put a period to that on 9/11.

The question then is who will wear the crown?  Burroughsian religious ideas must triumph.  The Carter-Clayton ideas must be put into action driving the three Semitic religions off the field as well as conquering the minds of the Asians and Africans.

Not as difficult as it may seem but it takes a steely determination so far shown only by the Jews and Moslems.  You have to know who you are, what you want and be prepared to deal with any obstacles as these two groups obviously are an do.  Know who you are and the superiority of your beliefs.  There is no longer any room for tolerance as with them.  Everything else out there is inferior, nothing can successfully slander our beliefs unless we permit it.

 

Beam Me Up, Scotty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Chicago, Christians, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, Heracles, Jews, Moslems, Muslims, Mythology, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Science, Scientific Consciousness, Tarzan, The Revolution, Uncategorized, Zeus | Leave a Comment »

A Review: Pt. III The Myth Of The Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg

November 5, 2008

 

A Review

The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

by

Alfred Rosenberg

Part III

Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, Noontide Press, 1982

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/hello-world/

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/men-like-gods-tarzan-pays-homage-to-heracles/

 

     In contrasting the spiritual and intellectual attributes of the Semites and Nordics Rosenberg seems to confuse tenacity with will.  The Semites pursue their goal so tenaciously because they don’t have the intellgence to compare different intellectual and spiritual views.  There is really no intellectual progression of evaluation in the Semitic psyche.

     Contrast for instance the approach taken by the Hebrew predecessors of the jews with the Greeks in this primary problem of the evolution of society and the human psyche;  that of the change from human sacrifice to that of animal and then vegetable sacrifice.   The Semitic Bible tells the story under the title of Cain and Abel.

     At one time we are led to believe the standard approach to appeasing the gods was human sacrifice. If the Cain and Abel story had been written down c. -2000 to -1000 the content would have been about human sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice.  By c. -500 to -400 when the story was written human sacrifice, except under extraordinary circumstances had been abandoned.  Animal sacrifice was still retained by the Abelites while the Cainites had abandoned animal sacrifice for an offering of the fruits of the earth.

     As the Bible tells it the Abelites offered animal sacrifice to the god Shamash,  while the Cainites offered vegetable produce.  As the Abelites are telling the story their god being as conservative as the Abelites preferred the flesh sacrifice to the vegetable rewarding the Abelites and rejecting the Cainites.  The Abelites then lorded it over the Cainites who retaliated by killing the Abelites.

     In the Greek version as recounted by the late nineteenth century A.B. Cook in his magnum opus, Zeus, the story is told quite differently.  It doesn’t appear that Cook understood the Greek story to be their version of Cain and Abel or, in other words, the evolution of sacrifice to the gods.

     Zeus was always known as the god of the sky.  In this story he is called Zeus Lykaios thus seemingly associated with the wolf; as Cook supposes, a wolf god.

     I don’t think this is the case.  I think the tale should be something like Zeus vs. Human Sacrifice or Zeus against the wolfish practice of man eating that might be supposed a habit of wolves.  In the myth a tribesman as scapegoat is singled out, stripped naked, compelled to swim across a body of water then live for ten years in this primitive or wolfish condition.  If he passes the ten years without eating human flesh he is allowed back into the community.  One may assume that during this probationary period the community itself is forbidden human sacrifice thus ending the practice. 

     An offering is then made to the gods of a wheaten wafer.

     One can compare that story to that of the Christ who offers a glass of wine in substituion of his blood and a wafer for his body but is still a human sacrifice on the cross.

     The messages seem quite clear.  Zeus disapproves of human sacrifice and cannibalism of the human sacrifice.  The above way is the Greek way of demonstrating disapproval of the practice while the acceptance of the wafer is an example of what is considered appropriate. Semitic development is halted at animal sacrifice.

     Thus one is able to compare and contrast the psychological attitudes of the Semites and the Aryans.  Ye shall be judged by your acts.  On the one hand the Semitic story is extrememly dogmatic while the Aryan story shows more science and intelligence.

     The two attitudes remain constant down through history.

     Thus the unyielding dogmatic or bigoted approach has the advantage over a more yeilding or understanding attitude.  It is the former attitude to which Rosenberg is actually objecting.

     When developed in the religious sphere the hatred of the opposing point of view is translated into an inquisition in which the holders of the opposing viewpoint are tortured to death or burned at the stake.  Put on the cross.  The temporal authorities are called in as in the cases of the Waldenses, Cathars, and Huguenots to exterminate the entire body of the dissidents.  Whether done by Catholics, Jews or Moslems extermination of unbelievers is the inevitable result whether a single individual, tens of thousands or in the case of the current crusade, a billion of Whites.

     In Rosenberg’s case his scientific Nordics have nothing like the insane Semitic god.  Thus in the religious sphere the Whites have never had an alternative to the Semitic god hence being at a disadvantage.

     A certain type of mind prefers a storming Yahweh figure to an intelligent Zeus.  No intelligent person can accept the notion of a supernatural diety whether Yahweh or Zeus.  Thus, to some extent Hitler himself was ofered a a version of a man-god.  As no flesh and blood man can successfully pose as a god what was and is needed is an idealized man-god not as a supernatural person but as an ideal toward which one can strive.

     Perhaps it is time to create one.  Actually this has already been done.  The American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs of the first half of the twentieth century created the only acceptable version of the ideal man-god, Tarzan Of The Apes.

     Burroughs is seldom taken seriously and yet a careful reading in any  of the novels of the Tarzan series is seen to be drenched with explorations on religious themes.  Not the least important position is the need to abandon supernatural deities for a realistic man-god.

     This is not to say that any living man should be accorded the status of a god but that a god like ideal would replace the supernatural psychological projections.  After all any notion of god is merely an intellectual projection of a given people in their own image.  Thus the Greek pantheon is a reflection of the Greek psyche, Yahweh is the projection of the Jewish psyche and its god.  So with Buddha, he is merely the aspirations of the Indian psyche.

     Tarzan, it follows is a projection of Burroughs’ psyche and one might add satisfactory to millions around the world as a god like projection.  The Tarzan religion is already in place.  It remains only to develop and codify it.  Further as an ideal he is attainable to the dedicated aspirant.  When Burroughs wrote the ability to build bodies of ideal proportions  was in its infancy but has been perfected over the years to such magnificent specimens as Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their primes. These two men realized the physical perfection of Tarzan.  My essay Men Like Gods looks into this aspect more closely.

     Psychological perfection can be attanined but may be more restricted than physical perfection and take longer to achieve but refined methods may be able to break the crust sooner.  As Burroughs portrays Tarzan he seems to have the essential integrated personality; that is his conscious and subconscious minds are unified.  To achieve this goal one must have an accurate idea of how the subconscious functions in relation to the conscious.  Freud’s notion of the ‘unconscious’ is completely erroneous.  I examine that problem and offer a solution in my essay on Freud a link for which is provided at the head of this essay that for some reason is titled Hello World.

     And finally in the area of intelligence we have the means to prepare the mind with accurate scientific knowledge.  Because of varying intellectual capacities that are unavoidable success in education will depend on the innate intelligence of the individual.

     Yet with the proper guidance and the ideal of the man-god before him the youth will be ale to see that to which he is to strive.  Of course, the physical is the most easily attained by nearly all healthy men; psychology and education will depend on the individual.

     The old gods are dead; they are no longer viable.  Each represented a stage in the psychology of human evolution.  It is now time to evolve into scientific man and leave the religious mind behind.

     If Rosenberg didn’t explcitly state the goal it was implied.  Edgar Rice Burroughs did state the goal and gave an example of the ideal.  The time has come for the man-god.  It remains only to set up the ideal as a beacon to draw people to it.

     In so doing an acceptable and soul satisfying ideal can be supplied to heal and anneal the troubled soul of man that so disturbed Rosenberg, troubled Burroughs and plagues the world.

     The old gods, almost dead, must go.

  Part IV to follow.

 

    

 

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A Review: Tarzan And The City Of Gold Part 2

August 18, 2008

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#16 Tarzan And The City Of Gold

Part 2

by

R. E. Prindle

 

     The City Of Gold itself, which is a white and gold city, evokes the image of the red and gold ruin of Opar and the Forbidden City of the same title, as well as The White City of the Columbian Exposition.  As Burroughs was writing construction was going on for Chicago’s second great exposition on the fortieth anniversary of the first.  Chicago, incorporated in 1833, was about to present its Century Of Progress expo of 1933-34.  So Burroughs would have had his mind redirected to the scenes of his childhood.

     What I am going to suggest may seem far fetched to many but having gained some idea of the way Burroughs’ mind worked I think the suggestion plausible.  Emmett Dedmon tells the following story about the Great Sandow at the ’93 Expo.  If anyone doesn’t know Sandow by now he was the first great bodybuilder who also performed at the Expo.  As Florenz Zeigfeld was representing Sandow there is a no reason to think of the story as other than a publicity stunt, but I leave the judgment to you. (Emmett Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago, 1953, NY, p. 235)

     Amy Leslie, the drama critic for the News, described Sandow as a  fascinating mixture of brute force and poetic sentimentality.  On a walk through the Wooded Island…Sandow snipped a tiny cup from a stock of snapdragon.  “now, when we were little in Germany,” Sandow told the astonished Miss Leslie, “we took these blossoms and pressed them so, and if the flower mouth opened, why that was a sign they were calling us home.”  As Amy reported it, “he touched the tinted bud and its rosy lips parted in a perfumed smile.”  Just as Sandow finished his sentence, a Columbian guard shouted that he had violated the rule against picking flowers.  To emphasize the reprimand the guard seized Sandow by the elbow and attempted to push him away.  At this effrontery Sandow lifted the surprised guard off the ground and held him at arm’s length, examining him as though he were a curious discovery.  Miss Leslie, more conscious of the dignity of the law, persuaded Sandow to put the guard down, which the strong man did with an ouburst of German expletives and an explanation (in English) to Miss Leslie that he did not think much of humans as guards.  “I prefer nice well-bred dogs,” he said.

     This made a great story that made the rounds of the fair.  The question is did 17 year old Burroughs hear it and did it make an impression  on him?  Strangely enough we can definitely answer that question in the affirmative.  Nearly twenty years later Burroughs borrowed the incident for his first Tarzan novel.  Not only that but he has Tarzan play the part of Sandow.  So, Sandow, Tarzan; Tarzan, Phobeg.

     At the end of Tarzan Of The Apes Burroughs replicates the Sandow scene on the Wooded Island when he terrorizes Robert Canler holding him at arms length with one hand.  Thus in this novel Tarzan not only holds Sandow/Phobeg at arm’s length but raises him above his head throwing him into the stands.  Burroughs usually has his characters going their models one better as Tarzan does here.

     As Sandow was strolling through the Wooded Island  with Miss Leslie so Tarzan strolls through town with Gemnon.  Instead of picking a flower Tarzan notices a lion eating a human while no one takes any notice.  Cosmopolitan Tarzan inquires for an explanation.  Gemnon calmly explains the quaint custom just as Sandow so pleasantly explained his snapdragon story.  Dragons, lions, all the same thing.  Burroughs does a neat parody and makes his joke but the original was such a great story he can’t let it go.

     Indeed, Tarzan’s habit of picking men up and tossing them around can probably be traced back to this one arm trick of Sandow’s.  Like I said, you’ll probably think it’s a stretcher but I think it both plausible and probable.  Can’t be absolutely proven of course, but we can and have proven that the incident left an indelible imprint of ERB’s memory.

     That said and moving along to 1920-24 there is also a flavor of H.G. Wells’ utopian novel Men Like Gods to be found here.  Once again Burroughs turns Wells’ utopia around a bit but the tour of Cathne with Gemnon seems to be a paraody of a similar tour in Men Like Gods.  ERB was still in the thick of his literary duel with Wells at the time.

     The plot involving Nemone is slightly more complex and better worked out than is usual for ERB.  Tomos, Erot, M’Duze and Nemone reflect other influences.  The plot has the feel of French overtones.  Of course we know that ERB read Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries Of Paris, Dumas’ Three Musketeers and The Count Of Monte Criisto, while the prisoner behind the golden door points in the direction of The Man In The Iron Mask.  We also know that ERB had read Victoy Hugo’s Les Miserables.

     All these may have provided some inspiration.  However more directly influential I believe are two other books found in ERB’s library as listed on ERBzine. ( www.erbzine.com )  They are Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche and Stanley J. Weyman’s Under The Red Robe.  Never heard of Stan Weyman?  Me neither but, believe it or not, there is a Stanley J. Weyman Society on the internet that you may join if so inclined.

     Both books were hugely influential in Hollywood, each being filmed several times with at least one version getting very good reviews.  Let’s start with Sabatini.  While Weyman, one would believe is all but forgotten, Sabatini enjoyed an excellent reputation down to at least my graduation from high school.  Probably not so much lately although my copy of Scaramouche is the Common Reader edition published in 1999 so  there must be fans out there.

     Sabatini was Burroughs exact contemporary- 1875-1950.  Like Burroughs he had to defend himself against charges of plagiarism.  His stuff all reads like you’ve read it somewhere before, so in Scaramouche he presents an extended defense of himself.

     Nevertheless he writes in a simple direct style that is ‘easy to uderstand’ but cleverly presented.  Sabatini was obviously one of the first to understand that stories written like movie scenarios had a better chance of selling to the movies.

     Like Burroughs he has his point of view which is admirably presented.  Also like Burroughs he was intellectually unsympathetic to Communism.  His reaction was less emotional that ERB.  Although Scaramouche is about the opening years of the French Revolution Sabatini gives it only a slanting attention as he concentrates on people who are caught up in the flood much against their wishes.  In that sense there is very little politics in the novel.  The participants are merely caught up in the political events.

     Scaramouche is a country lawyer unsympathetic to revolutionary ideology but he becomes a revolutionary fugitive when his Red friend is murdered by a reactionary nobleman.  The story is well developed and an exciting one with a lot of swordplay.  In fact Scarmouche become the fastest swordsman of France.  You can see what drew ERB’s attention to the novel.

     Of more importance for ERB and an undeveloped subplot of City Of Gold is one that involves Scaramouche’s ancestry.  Bearing in mind that ERB became a voluntary orphan when he was sent to the MMA I think Burroughs found the mystery of Scaramouche’s ancestry compelling.  Scaramouch is named after the clown of the Italian Comedia Del Arte which also nests neatly with the clown aspect of ERB’s psychology.

     It is thought that Scaramouche was the illigetimate son of a village nobleman.  The fact that the boy was well looked after by this man seemed proof.  In fact, as we learn later in the book Scaramouche is the bastard son of his foster father’s sister, the noblewoman, Madame de Plougastel.  She bore Scaramouche illegimately then trusted him to her brother.  Thus on one side Scaramouche was of noble birth.  An orphan or pretended orphan’s dream.  His father remains a mystery for the moment. 

     Scaramouche’s friend had been murdered by the nobeman Le Tour d’Azyr.  Scaramouche had sworn an eternal enmity to him.  At a crucial moment in the story Scaramouche learns that this same La Tour d’Azyr is his father.  I should have seen it coming from a long way off but I didn’t.  It is possible that ERB was surprised too.  Sabatini handles it well.  Thus Scaramouche the illegitimate child is a nobleman by birth on both sides but the Revolution invalidates this advantage. 

     It would have been normal for Burroughs to have concocted a fantasy in which his parents now dead to him were not his real parents but some mysterious others.  In fact he did concoct two fantasies: the one of John Carter who has been alive forever but can remember no parents and Tarzan whose parents were killed with the result that he was raised by ape foster parents.  Not exactly noble people in the ordinary sense but his deceased parents were.  One imagines the impact this really good story had on him although he first read it in the early twenties.

     In any event he attempts to weave in a subplot providing mysterious parentage for Nemone and her brother Alextar.  The subplot isn’t very well developed.  On the one hand we are asked to suspect that Nemone was the child of the old king and a Black M’duze who in her youth was tall and beautiful while on the other hand it is insinuated that Nemone is the child of Tomos and M’duze.  The latter through her machinations has placed Nemone on the throne and imprisoned Alextar.  So Burroughs throws in some misceganation which has always been the most excing literary topic of America, then as now.

     Not convincingly done by ERB he had nevertheless carried the story of Scaramouche around in his head for a decade waiting for the opportunity to employ it.

     Another book in ERB’s library which is influential here is Stanley J. Weyman’s Under The Red Robe.  Like Scaramouche this story was very well thought of in Hollywood being filmed more than once.  It seems a fact that ERB saw the 1923 silent film.  He was so impressed that he went out and bought the 1923 Grosset and Dunlap Photoplay Edition.  I obtained an identical copy so as to to have read the same text and viewed the same plates.

     I think I’ll have to include a few of Burroughs’ experiences at the MMA to bring this all together.  It would seem that Sabatini considered himself a psychological orphan also.  The man was born in Italy to an Italian father and an English mother.  As they were traveling actors, not unlike what Scaramouche becomes at one point in his story, they sent young Rafael back to England to live with relatives.  As Sabatini’s stories often concern orphans it follows that his reaction to being put away from his parents was that he considered himself an orphan.

     Burroughs was also put away by his father.  Three times.  He was sent to Idaho, Massachusetts and Michigan.  Thus he too was put away by his parents.  As his reaction was to play the clown developing an off beat sense of humor we know that he reacted negatively to all this shuffling about.  His exile to the Michigan Military Academy was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  He rebelled, running away.  The incident is treated rather uncomprehendingly by Porges in his biography which of course is my authority. 

     From ERB’s point of view the MMA was an elite reformatory school where bad rich boys were offloaded by their parents.  Thus the boy was declassed and slgihtly criminalized in his own mind.  As he treated his own sons and the Gilbert boy the same way it is easy to see how seriously he was affected by the experience.  ERB was cast adrift with no direction home which happened so many times to characters in his stories, most notably in the original short version of The Lad And The Lion.  ERBzine should publish the magazine version of this novel

     Having run away from the MMA he was promptly escorted back by his father becoming in his own mind an orphan as in Tarzan’s case and a motherless child as in John Carter’s.  Like the race horse Stewball of musical fame, Carter just blew down in a storm.  Another standard orphan’s solution to being forced outside society.

     Stanley J. Weyman’s (1855-1929) novel also meshes with this persona.  As a result of his mistreatment Burroughs developed a very negative self-conception.  He became, in fact, a ne’er-do-well.  Much to his father’s satisfaction I might add.  This self-conception would explain his eccentric behavior from the time he left the MMA in 1896 through 1903 if not for the rest of his life.  The man was conflicted.  On the one hand he knew he was very capable and on the other he felt worthless so he sought failure.

     A fact easily glided over is his quarterbacking and captaincy of the MMA football team.  One’s team members don’t elect one captain unless they have confidence in you.  One also cannot be quarterback without their confidence while quarterbacking requires organizational and executive abilities.  In fact the Burroughs led team defeated all comers in their class and while yet high schoolers they played the varsity teams of Michigan and Notre Dame.  The Burroughs led MMA fought the U of M to a tie.

     As a result he was offered a football scholarship to the University.  He might well have become a football hero having an entirely different kind of life.  ERB inexplicably declined the U of M offer.  He offered some lame excuse that both his brothers had attended Yale and it was Yale or nothing for him.  Possible but hardly probable.  Most likely he felt comforatable leading the juvenile delinquents of MMA while he didn’t feel respectable enought to lead the Wolverines.

     Leaving for the Army as an enlisted man instead he and a few other ne’er-do-wells formed a group calling themselves The Might Have Seen Better Days Club.  You don’t have to be a Freudian to figure that one out.  So I think his history in these years can be explained by his negative orphan self-image.

     There is one very crucial event, the shame of which never left him, that figures into the Nemone story.  That was when in Idaho he gambled away his and Emma’s last forty dollars.  Certainly this was a turning point in his life.

     In Weyman’s Under The Red Robe the hero is a ne’er-do-well who has exhausted all his chances but one.  Named de Berrault the story opens when he is accused of using marked cards in a French game of the early seventeenth century.  “Marked Cards!’ are the opening words of Weyman’s novel.

     Indeed it would seem certain that Burroughs felt he had been cheated of his forty dollars.  In my experience of card games I’m certain he was.  De Berrault insists he didn’t use marked cards but that he used the mirror behind the player.  Perhaps Burroughs said to himself when reading this:  Yeah.  that must have been it.  At any rate thirty years later the incident was green in his mind and Why Not?

     While The City Of Gold is crtical of Nemone/Emma ERB could never forget that he had done Emma wrong in gambling away those forty dollars.  Perhaps as much as anything his shame required a separation.  Perhaps he thought Emma was too good for a ne’er-do-well like himself.

     And then there is this very interesting passage in Under The Red Robe  p. 208:

     I stood a moment speechless and disordered; stunned by her words, by my thoughts- so I have seen a man stand when he has lost all, his last at the table.  Then I turned to her, and for an instant I thought that my tale was told already.  I thought she had pierced my disguise, for her face was aghast, stricken with sudden fear.  Then I saw that she was not looking at me but beyond me, and I turned quickly and saw a servant hurrying from the house to us.

     Just as I admired ERB’s version of this device of looking past the intermediate person so he admired Weyman’s.

     The line ‘I stood there speechless and disordered, stunned by her words, by my thoughts- when I have seen a man stand when he has lost his all, his last, at the table…’ must have resonated with ERB from the time he had experienced the same emotion in 1903 as Emma waited for him upstairs.

     It becomes seen how ERB wove his various influences into his writing.  At this point I would like to bring up another very long novel that formed a backdrop to ERB’s writing in general.  the novel is the ten volume, five thousand page work of George W.M. Reynolds entitledThe Mysteries Of  London or alternatively, The Mysteries Of The Court Of London.  Modeled after The Mysteries Of Paris Reynolds lacks the lunacy of Eugene Sue but maintains a fantastic level of excitement all the way through.  ‘The Master Of Adventure’ may very well have learned his own mastery from the pages of Reynolds.

     The further one gets into ERB library the more clear things become but to really understand the man I highly recommend the reading of the Mysteries of Paris and London.

     Another almost irrelevant theme ERB takes up in this novel is the theme of the Grand Hunt or the Man Hunt.  The idea is no way original to ERB; he seems to be in reaction to it, repelled by it.  I can’t pretend to trace the story back to its origins but the theme has been used repeatedly in movies and on television.  The story is attributed to Richard Edward Connell who is credited with writing the original short story in 1924 for which he received the O. Henry Prize for that year, entitled The Most Dangerous Game.  Perhaps the story was original to him but it doesn’t seem likely.

     The story was made into a movie starring Joel McCrea in 1932.  Whether this movie was released early enough in the year to influence City Of Gold I don’t know, or, perhaps Burroughs saw an advance screening.  At any rate ERB gives the idea an extended treatment and prominent place in his novel, actually using it twice.

     If Connell did indeed orginate the story in 1924 which seems unlikely than Buroughs treatment comes as close to plagiarism or, perhaps, appropriation as any story could.  That he is in raction to the story condemning its implications is obvious.

     In his version Tarzan defeats the aims of the hunters by carrying their intended victim to safety while adding the filup that he too was an intended victim.  At the very least the Man Hunt is one of the least disguised influences in the corpus.  Extraordinary in that no ruckus was raised by his appropriation of the story.  Either ERB was not taken seriously or he led a charmed life.

b.

Should I stay, Or Should I Go?

     The crux of the story is Tarzan’s relationship with Nemone or, in other words, ERb’s relationship with Emma.  If the oeuvre is a guide ERB had already decided to throw his lot with Florence.  That seems clear from Tarzan And The Leopard Men.  City Of Gold then is mere procrastination.  One imagines that Florence was pestering him to break the news to Emma.  He would only muster the courage to do this at the end of 1933.  For now he seems torn and indecisive.

     The appearance is that Tarzan and Nemone would have gotten together but for two things.  The first was M’duze who seemed to exert some sort of hypnotic control over Nemone and the other was her pet lion, Belthar.

     M’duze was determined to maintain control over Nemone while Tarzan just left a bad taste in Belthar’s mouth.  It were well that Tarzan kept his distance.

     In point of fact Tarzan was a prisoner on parole.  He could easily have escaped or walked away but for two things: one was his fascination with Nemone and the other was that he was bound by oath to Gemnon to not escape.  In those days people had a sense of honor.

     ERB had constructed an interesting psychological situation in the female image of Nemone.  ERB has been really successful in portraying the Xy male construction of the Anima and Animus throughout the corpus but this is his first attempt as far as I know of constructing the XX of the female.

     This is always the qustion of whether he knew what he was doing.  This is a difficult question to answer but the enidence in the writing seems to imply he did.  The situation seems too perfect to be accidental.  As I’ve noted elsewhere when the chromosomal  division took place and sexual identities came into existence of the four possibilities, XXX and y, the male received an X and the y with the y making him male.  You can’t be male without the y, you can’t be female with it.  Boys are boys and girls are girls.  Now, this is not an ‘oh wow,  isn’t that interesting’ type of fact; the fact has consequences.

      For instance the whole burden of child bearing became the female’s portion.  I am not interested in all the different possibilites of how young are fertilized, incubated and born, yes, there are myriad possibilities but none of them apply to human beings but this one.  The method for human beings is impregnation in the womb, a nine month incubation period and then birth followed by a very long period of helpless development outside the womb.

     These simple facts determined the post partum relationship of the role of the male and the female.  When paternity was unknown the result was close knit communities held together by the offspring.  It was a question of interdependence whether Freud thought so or not.

     Physiologically  the male required the female for sexual release while the female was attracted by the y chromosome of the male, the penis envy for which Freud was castigated for uttering.  He wasn’t always right but he was right on this.

     While the female is XX chromosomally still one X is received from the mother which is of the passive ovum; the other X is received from the father’s mother through him in the form of an active X sperm.  The two Xes while both X are not identical.  If both were passive the female would be virtually immobile.

     Thus ERB posits the ovate X as M’duze who dominates Nemone’s Anima, which would be correct, while the male lion Belthar provides the activity of the X of the Animus.  Whether Burroughs thought this out or not, it works out.  Could be accidental, I suppose.

     Lacking the y chromosome which she formerly enjoyed during the sexless period the female has an uncontrollable  longing for the male or penis.  Thus Nemone and her desire for Tarzan.  Now, this is classic, no matter how indifferent or rude Tarzan is to her Nemone continues to have an intense longing, or love, for the Big Guy.

     This may or may not reflect Emma’s attitude toward Burroughs but Tarzan’s attitude toward Nemone certainly reflects Burroughs attitude toward Emma.  In point of fact, Emma’s fidelity is nothing short of marvelous.

     Also in Weyman’s Under The Red Robe which is an influence on City a subplot concerns the relations between a Mademoiselle de Cocheforet and the protagonist, de Berrault.  The lady distrusts the gentleman, as well she might as Cardinal Richelieu has suborned de Berrault to surreptitiously arrest her brother as a Huguenot.  De Berrault conceals his intentions but is found out when he arrests Mademoiselle’s brother.  Construing the arrest as a betrayal of her trust, which it wasn’t de Berrault forfeits the lady’s trust.

     Thus the novel combines the fateful card game with the forfeiture of Emma’s trust.  Having lost her trust ERB was never able to gain it back even though Emma continued with him loving, one supposes, the man despite his faults.  Quite possibly the situation between Tarzan and Nemone portrays the actual relationship between ERB and Emma in which as they were about to unite the past comes between them.

     Thus in Tarzan and Nemone’s first encounter Tarzan has fallen under Nemone’s spell being about to succumb when M’duze, or Nemone’s Anima, appears as though from the past, taps the floor with her staff breaking the spell while ordering Nemone from the room.  Belthar, Nemone’s Animus, rears up on his chains roaring and clawing the air at Tarzan.

     Thus both the Anima as represented by M’duze and the Animus as represented by Belthar interfere in Nemone’s attempt to realize her desire for Tarzan.

     The scene is repeated in reverse later in the novel as Nemone is about to succumb to Tarzan’s spell M’duze appears once again to disrupt the relationship.  Thus as in real life neither Burroughs nor Emma could get past that fatal card game.

     In the end then Tarzan presumes on Nemone’s desire too much.  She turns on him in the fury we all saw coming making him the object of the Grand Hunt.  One sees the influence of The Most Dangerous Game in ERB’s mind.  He is given a head start and then Belthar is released to pursue him.  Thus he is about to be destroyed by Nemone’s Animus.  ERB probably felt this way about Emma in real life.

     We have never seen the resourceful ape-man so defenceless and helpless before but now without his father’s knife to murder virtually defenseless lions Tarzan calmly awaits death after a game attempt to outrun Belthar.  He should have played dead;  we all know that story by now.

     Not to worry.  All during the novel a mysterious lion has been tracking the Big Bwana appearing at intervals in the story.  Perhaps some people were mystified as to who this lion was but not this writer, no sirree, Bob.  I knew it was Jad-Bal-Ja all along.  I was just surprised the Golden Lion hadn’t brought Nkima with him.

     Now just as Belthar rears to cut the Big Guy down to size Jad-Bal-Ja flashes past Tarzan to destroy Nemone’s lion.  As ERB says, Jad-Bal-Ja won because he was bigger.  Does that mean that ERB’s ego was bigger than Emma’s?

     The oeuvre needs a complete analysis of Tarzan and his relationship to animals for on one hand he is a beast.  The lion situation is complicated by the fact that originally there were to have been both lions and tigers in the series.  That would have changed the complexion of the stories.

     However after the magazine publication of Tarzan Of The Apes the readers created an uproar about the fact that there were no tigers in geographical Africa so Burroughs was forced to change tigers to lions for book publication.  I am unaware whether changes were made to the newspaper serialization of the story.

     The appearance is that Burroughs intended tigers to be villainous while lions were intended to be noble, as witness Jad-Bal-Ja.  In that situation most, if not all, the lions Tarzan killed would have been tigers.  Thus while as David Adams points out Tarzan kills a lion to put a seal on a sexual situation the very likely killing would have been a tiger.

     So the psychological aspect of the story gets skewed.  Just as Burroughs has insisted that Tarzan killed deer while there are no deer in Africa so his readers forced him to change Bara the deer to Bara the antelope by Tarzan The invincible.

     The climax of the story returns us again to the problem of lions in Burroughs.  As David Adams points our Tarzan kills a lion to put a seal on a sexual situation.   In this instance Tarzan is helpless but Jad-Bal-Ja his Anima substitute comes to his rescue which is the same as Tarzan killing Belthar.  Thus the killing of Belthar seals off Tarzan’s relationship to Nemone and ERB’s to Emma.

     I’m sure David Adams would take exception with me but I see Jad-Bal-Ja as an Anima figure of Tarzan/Burroughs while I see Belthar as the Anumus figure of Emma/Nemone.  I know both lions are males but the lion male or female is associatied with the goddess or Anima in Greek mythology.  A case can be made that the six gods and six goddesses are generalized archetypes  of the character types.

     Now, Jad-Bal-Ja came into the oeuvre at a critical time in the lives of ERB and Emma and at a critical juncture.  It is known that ERB walked out on Emma several times in the course of their marriage.  These instances are not well documented at this time.  It would appear that a very serious conflict in the marriage began at the time of Tarzan The Untamed through the period leading up to the writing of Tarzan And The Golden Lion.

     As Golden Lion opens Tarzan, Jane and Jack are returning from Pal-Ul-Don  from whence Tarzan has retrieved Jane.

     As I read the story there seems to be a certain coolness and distance between Tarzan and Jane on Tarzan’s part.  At this point the lion cub who will become Jad-Bal-Ja makes his appearance standing in the middle of the trail.  David’s sexual seal of the killed lion would be the cub’s mother who was accidentally killed by a Native who stumbled on the lioness and cub.  As a defense mechanism against Emme/Jane Tarzan/Burroughs adopts the cub as an Anima surrogate.

     In an email to me of 1/23/07 David makes these comments:

       Through the first nine Tarzan novels the hero gradually establishes the lion symbol as his own until in Tarzan And The Golden Lion he is completely aligned with his source of power in the merging of lion symbol and self/Jad-Bal-Ja.  Even though Jad is described as a glorified dog, this is only his personal devotion to the ape-man being explained in easy terms.  Tarzan himself always respects Jad, saying “A lion is always a lion.”  he is far from the domesticated ones in Cathne in purpose and spirit.

     My thinking is that David is right in that the lion symbol and self are united but not within the ego but separately as the Anima and Animus.  So what we have  is Anima/Jad-Bal-Ja and Animus/Tarzan. Tarzan is sort of doubly armed with two masculine sides with Jad-Bal-Ja being associated with the goddess and partaking in some way of her femininity.

     There wouldn’t be too much of a conflict between the female Anima and the Male Anima figure as ERB’s Anima was subsumed by the male fencing master Jules de Vac of The Outlaw Of Torn.   De Vac killed ERB/Norman’s Anima figure Maud and then assuming female attire lived with Norman in the attic of a house over the Thames for a fairly long period of time thus becoming a substitute Anima.

     Thus the anomaly of a male lion Anima is easily explained.  As a  symbol of the goddess Jad-Bal-Ja is, as it were, clothed in female attire as was De Vac.  Further Jad-Bal-Ja is always indifferent to Jane/Emma.  Jane has no real relationship with the Golden Lion.

     David once again:

     The mad queen of Cathne, Nemone, is an example of negative Anima, a feminine power corrupt and dangerous.  Her lion Belthar is the dark shadow opposite of Tarzan and Jad who are symbols of power and light and sun.  Her lion is treated as a dark god and is linked to Nemone’s own dark soul.  When Jad kills Belthar, Nemone kills herself because the source of her power is gone.  It is an archetypal case of light overcoming darkness.  The masculine power of light overcoming a dark feminine anima.

     In the general sense I have no problem with David’s analysis although I would argue that Belthar is Nemone’s Animus.  Nemone is playing the part of Circe in the myth of Odysseus while that story is the triumph of the male ego in freeing itself from matriarchal sexual thralldom.  This whole series of novels is related to the Odyssey.  So that, in that sense Tarzan is imprisoned by the charms of Nemone/Circe.  He is being emasculated, deprived of his will, by the feminine will by one might say, the maneater, Nemone.

     In fact Nemone as ruler of Cathne has emasculated the leonine male power.  As David Adams sagely observes:

     In Cathne lions are employed as domesticated animals for the purpose of pulling chariots, hunting and racing.  This is a reduction of the power of the lion symbol to the mundane, even to the point of being ridiculous.  It is a degradation and humiliaton of ERB’s ultimate symbol of power and virility.

     Yes, and that would be in keeping with the story of Circe who turned Odysseus’ crew into swine and would have Odysseus except that he had a pocketful of Moly, a charm to set Circe at naught.  Likewise the queen of the City of Gold of the Legends Of Charlemagne who enchanted the paladins of that king, except for one who then freed the others.

     So, Nemone had Tarzan at her mercy except for the strange situation of the lion of ERB’s Anima defeating the lion of Nemone’s Animus.

     Once this was done the charm of Nemone/Circe/Queen of the City of Gold was destroyed with the City of Gold being restored to male supremacy and Alextar restored to his rightful throne.  Things were then returned to their rightful order as in the domains of Circe and the Queen.  We are led to believe that a Utopian age begins.  This may be a slap at Wells and his Men Like Gods. 

Conclusion

     This review completes this very important series of five novels.  Obviously I consider the key novels to be Tarzan The Invincible, Tarzan And The Leopard Men and Tarzan And The Lion Man.  These novels are more directly concerned with ERB’s political and religious opinions.  A trilogy concerning ERB’s sexual problems could be made up of  Tarzan Triumphant, Leopard Men and City Of Gold bracketed by Invincible and Lion Man but Triumphant and City Of Gold appear to me to be more minor key than the other three.

     Nevertheless these five novels usually treated as the least significant of the series are the most crucial to the understanding of Burroughs while being very good stories in themselves.

     Excluding Tarzan And The Foreign Legion that is outside Burroughs’ psychological development, although a good story, ERB published only another three Tarzan novels in his lifetime and they were all decidedly inferior to that which preceded them, still good stories, but ERB’s concentration had been broken.  Tarzan’s Quest is the best of the last three but just as Lion Man ends with Burroughs’ dreams going up in flames so does Quest.  Perhaps eccentric best describes Tarzan And The Forbidden City.  The title says it all.  He was never to find salvation; the doors of the Sacred City remained closed to him.  Tarzan The Magnificent while having exciting episodes just doesn’t come together.

     Magnificent less Foreign Legion concluded the oeuvre until Castaways and Madman were discovered twenty years later.  However Burroughs himself chose not to publish those books so they must be an addendum to the series.  The two posthumous novels complete ERB’s psychological development being important in that respect for the student.

     Further his psychological development was brought to a head during the writing of these five novels.  In this tremendous struggle between ERB, the Communists and the Jews ERB was routed by the time he wrote Tarzan And The Lion Man.  He didn’t think his tactics and strategy through to the end.

     Thus ERB’s whole life was a prelude to the Gotterdamerung that ended as Tarzan fled the City of God.

     ERB’s whole life is a magnificent adventure that in itself would make a tremendous movie with the right and unfettered treatment.  It could the grandest of grand opera worhty of Mozart.  I’d like to see it; even better i’d like to write it.

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A Review: Tarzan And The City Of Gold Pt. 1

August 16, 2008

 

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs #16

Tarzan And The City Of Gold

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Tall, magnificently proportioned, muscled more like Apollo than Hercules,

Garbed only in a narrow G-string of lion skin

With a lion’s tail depending before and behind,

He presented a splendid figure of  primitive manhood

That suggested more, perhaps, the demigod

Of the forest than it did man.

E.R. Burroughs

     This novel follows Tarzan And The Leopard Men in the sequence in which the novels were written.  Ballantine lists it as number sixteen while placing Leopard Men in eighteen in the sequence in which they were published.  In order to understand Burroughs’ psychological development however Leopard Men should be read before City Of Gold.

     The amazing use of symbolism in Leopard Men is continued in City Of Gold.  I am convinced that at this

The Swami

The Swami

time Burroughs was investigating the Indian religion of Vedantism.  Swami Prabhavananda had established a temple in Hollywood at the beginning of the decade which quickly took hold.  The symbolism would be employed by the Vedantists while Burroughs’ interest in symbolism itself was piqued.  Shortly after this novel ERB purchased a 1932 volume entitled The Scientific Dream Book And Dictionary Of Dream Symbols by one Johnathan B. Westerfield.  Thus ERB was investigating the psychological origin of his dreams.  The man was trying hard.

     It is clear that this sequence of novels is heavily influenced by Homer, especially by his Odyssey.  Homeric motifs run all through these five novels while as Doctor Hermes and David Adams have pointed out Burroughs uses the Athenian monetary unit, the drachma, as the currency of Cathne.

     A third probable source would be from the Legends Of Charlemagne volume of Bulfinch’s Mythology.  In the last Bulfinch tells of a City Of Gold in which an enchantress keeps the paladins of Charlemagne captive.  That story seems to be based on Homer’s story of Circe and Odysseus, or Ulysses in the Roman telling, so Burroughs combines both stories in his own enchantress, Nemone, of his City Of Gold.  One may take the City Of Gold to be the Sacred City of the Iliad.

     The rival kingdoms of Cathne and Athne- my spell check just pointed out to me that Athne respelled is Athen which is very close to Athene or Athens- have Greek sounding names reinforcing the Homeric connection.

     While the sexual symbolism of Leopard Men is dark and brooding placed in a swamp not unlike the Lernean Swamp of Greek mythology in which Heracles fought the furious female Hydra, The City Of Gold is much brighter and airier, more intellectual than the darker urges of the subconscious.

     Having now read many of the Tarzan novels four-five and even six times I am astonished at how well they maintain their freshness from reading to reading.  Rather than weary me, each reading is a fresh experience that opens a whole new vista of possibilities.  The more I seem to understand of what I’m reading the more signficance the words have as the story seems to rise from the page to form concrete living images, as it were.

     In this novel expecially I am impressed by the pacing, the effort put into preparing the scenes and the masterly execution in which each word assumes its independent value almost as though ERB had put as much care into word selection as, say, the poet Tennyson.  Of course we all know ERB read Tennyson as well as other verse and poetry while also being familiar with song lyrics.  Thus while writing prose he is able to maintain a poetic intensity.

     The opening scene is an excellent example of his skill.  Tarzan is out hunting when he is spotted by some shiftas.  He’s in Ethiopia at the end of the rainy season.  We aren’t told why he is there but he has commanded Nkima and Jad-Bal-Ja to stay home.  As a corollary, just before he leaves Emma two years later he will take a solo vacation to the mountains of Arizona.  The spatial arrangement conveyed in this scene is that of Tarzan between the shiftas and the prey he is hunting.  While he is silently stalking the prey the shiftas are more noisily stalking him.  The movement of the shiftas which can be seen by the prey but not by Tarzan who has his back to them is caught by the prey who looks past Tarzan to the shiftas.  Tarzan noticing the prey looking beyond him also looks back to spot the shiftas stalking him.

     The spatial concepts involved are astonishing while three views of time are also evident.  I only picked up on this aspect with my fifth reading.  My interest was thus piqued and heightened so that the novel took on an entirely new aspect.  The scene as written is so well paced and spaced that it made a vignette I’m sure I shall never forget, while I now long to duplicate such a scene in my own writing.

     The patient lulling slow pace of Tarzan’s hunt was now broken.  As Tarzan’s quarry fled, the action between Tarzan and the shiftas became fast, furious and frenzied, while the sexual symbolism bursts into one’s consciousness.

     As the shiftas bear down upon him Tarzan realizes that he cannot escape by running.  If he could have he would have because as Burrughs never tires of noting there is no disgrace in running from a force majeure.  Instead Tarzan shot arrows among the the shiftas.  Than as a shifta bore down on him lance leveled:

There could be no retreat for Tarzan; there could be no sidestepping to avoid the thrust, for a step to either side would have carried him in front of one of the other horsemen.  He had but a slender hope for survival, and that hope forlorn though it appeared, he seized upon with the celerity, strength and agility that make Tarzan Tarzan.  Slipping his bow string about his neck after his final shot, he struck up the point of the menacing weapon of his antagonist, and grasping the man’s arm swung himself to the horse’s back behind the rider.

     Abilities like that make Tarzan Tarzan and I’m sure such a feat could be done in reality as in the imagination although possibly not if Tarzan had had the bunchy muscles of the professional strongman.  Smooth ones flowing beneath the skin like molten metal are undoubtedly a prerequisite.

     Dispatching the shifta Tarzan is now symbolically seated on a horse.  The horse directly plunges into a river to swim to the other side.  In mid-stream the horse and rider are attacked by a crocodile that Tarzan kills or disables.  Emerging from the river Tarzan gallops into a forest where he abandons the horse for the security of the trees.

     There in a short passage we have a wealth of symbolism that tells in a few paragraphs what ERB could have developed in many chapter if told in straight prose.

     The horse is a symbol of the female.  Thus Tarzan as Animus is symbolically united with his Anima.  the horse plunges into the river which is also a female symbol representing the waters of the unconscious.  Still mounted Tarzan is in the conscious sphere above water while the horse is submerged in the subconscious.  The crocodile also a female symbol representing the greedy, devouring, emasculating aspect of the female attacks.  The horse turns upstream in an attempt to flee the croc.  Tarzan strings his bow firing an arrow, as a masculine symbol, into the  crocodile’s mouth disabling it thus escaping the disabling aspect of the feminine while with strange violence sending the arrow down the throat.  One has to think about these things.

     The horse scrambles up on the opposite bank signifying a change in life, then gallaps into the forst of the subconscious where one goes in search of oneself.  The forest here is the same as all those underground mazes in Burrough’s corpus.

     Once in the forest Tarzan abandons the horse, or Anima for the security of the trees where he is above it all.  Apparently there is a deep cleavage between his Animus and Anima.  Now begins a very strange encounter.  Burroughs apparently felt he left something of himself on the other side of the river so he goes back for it.

     Coming upon the camp of the shiftas he notices that they have a bound captive.  As this appears to be what he returned for one can only speculate that the bound captive is an aspect of himself.  Perhaps the captive represents his marriage to Emma in which he is in the bonds of matrimony wishing to escape them.  Tarzan takes action.  At this point Burroughs offers this rather remarkable passage describing the Ape-Man.  p. 15:

It was difficult for Tarzan to think of himself as a man, and his psychology was more often that of the wild beast than the human, nor was he particularly proud of his species.  While he appreciated the intellectual superiority of man over other creatures, he harbored contempt for him because he had wasted the greater part of his inheritance.  To Tarzan, as to many other created things, contentment is the highest ultimate goal of achievement, health and culture the principal avenues along which man may approach this goal.  With scorn the ape-man viewed the overwhelming majority of mankind which was wanting in one essential or the other, when not wanting in both.  He saw the greed, the selfishness, the cowardice, and the cruelty of man; and, in view of man’s vaunted mentality, he knew that these characteristics  placed man upon a lower spiritual scale than the beasts, while barring him eternally from the goal of contentment.

     In the above quote ERB outlines the central problem of mankind.  In the evolution of mankind from beast to homo sapiens the much vaunted mentality of HS has failed to make the transition from the pure mentality of the beast to that of, essentially, the god.  In orther words his origins are dragging him back as he tries to make the leap to the next stage of evolution and development.

     While having a godlike intelligence rather than using it to elevate himself above primal desires as the direction of the nineteenth century was going, in the early twentieth century Freud undercut the drive to perfection dragging mankind back down to primal desires.  This is Freud’s great crime for which he should be burned in his effigy of Satan once a year in a great world wide holiday.  Thus as Man uses his intelligence to get at the root of things, and I think we’re very close to understanding all, Man’s primal desires lapsing back into the ‘unconscious’ of Freud, and make no mistake the current conception of the unconscious is of Freuds’ personal devising, devise even more fiendish ways of evil as that knowledge increases.  Thus rather than aspiring toward a spiritual contentment Man chooses to give in to desires that lower him beneath the hyena.

     Thus Tarzan, who has attained spiritual contentment, and become godlike, looks with scorn and contempt on the humanity of his fellows preferring to think of himself as a ‘spiritually pure’ beast.

     While this attitude is a theme throughout the oeuvre and the corpus as a whole perhaps this rant was sharpened by the developing difficulties at MGM.  Shortly after this was written Tarzan, The Ape Man hit the screens scrambling ERB’s vision of Tarzan forever.  The screen Tarzan has no intellect.  In the movie Tarzan’s Desert Adventure Boy even has to read Jane’s letter to him.

     On his way to the shifta camp the ever present Numa is between him and the desperadoes.  Taking to the trees of the forest to pass over Numa he spots a strangely garbed man in the shifta camp.  Still smarting because he lost his quarry and operating on the primitive logic that since the shiftas had deprived him of dinner it would only be right to deprive them of something they wanted, he decides to free the captive.

     He was about to fail in his attempt when the ever present Numa saves his skin by attacking the shifta camp.  In the confusion Tarzan and the prisoner escape.  The man turns out to be an Athnean named Valthor.  Having escaped they must put up for the night.  Sheeta the panther is abroad.  As David Adams is wont to point out, for Burrough Sheeta is a sexual symbol, so the next scene has strong homoerotic overtones.

     The question is who does Valthor represent.  He is curiously vague in personality.  As Burroughs was obsessed with the Jekyll and Hyde notion at this time I suspect that Valthor is an aspect of Burroughs’ own personality with some sort of relation to Tarzan as Jekyll to Hyde.  Valthor’s life is saved as Sheeta leaps for him so that one feels he may be related in some way to Stanley Obroski, another alter ego of Tarzan, who will actually die in the succeeding novel, Tarzan And The Lion Man.

     In this novel, in putting up for the night, Tarzan with his superior junglecraft, finds a tree where two horizontal branches fork.  He cuts some smaller limbs to form a pallet for himself for the night.  He had eaten but he is unconcerned whether the able bodied Valthor has eaten or not.  Tarzan does not hunt for other men.  If he hadn’t already eaten he would have made a kill and shared the abundance.

     Valthor lies down on the ground.  Sheeta is watching silently.  So silently even Tarzan does not hear him breathe, until readying himself to springs, he quietly brushed a leaf or two.  Tarzan hears for his ears are not as yours or mine.  As Sheeta launches himself on Valthor Tarzan shouts a warning while rolling from the pallet to descend on Sheeta’s back.

     Now, this scene replicates a similar scene in Beasts Of Tarzan when Tarzan leaps on Sheeta’s back in midair as she was about to leap on the ape, Akut.  I hadn’t thought of homoerotic overtones between Akut and Tarzan but they may be there.  It may be signficant that Akut later became the mentor of young Jack Clayton otherwise known as Korak The Killer.

     In the instance of Akut, the ape became sort of a vassal of Tarzan, while in this story Tarzan and Valthor become fast friends although the relationship is one of superior to inferior- Batman to Robin.  After killing Sheeta, Tarzan takes a more motherly attitude toward Valthor, making a bed for him in the tree because he knew Numa was prowling the forest.  That undoubtedly he knew that before was he leaving Valthor for Numa?

     They awoke in the morning.  p. 26:

Nearby, the other man sat up and looked about him.  His eyes met Tarzan’s and he smiled and nodded.  For the first time the ape-man had an opportunity to examine his new acquaintance by daylight.  The man had removed his single garment for the night, covering himself with leaves and branches.  Now as he arose, his only garment was a G-string and Tarzan saw six feet of well muscled, well proportioned body topped by a head that seemed to bespeak breeding and intelligence.  The wild beast in Tarzan looked into the brown eyes of the stranger and was staisfied that here was one who might be trusted.

     Not exactly a description of love at first sight but a definite tinge of homoeroticism.  Brown eyes.  In fact Tarzan and Valthor become fast friends.  Quickly learning each other’s language by the point and name system, or at least, Tarzan learning Valthor’s language, they are soon chatting away amiably.

     Valthor comes from the mountains but after they wander around for a week he admits he is lost.  Tarzan gets the general direction then setting out in a bee line.  Their goal is the huge extinct volcano, Xarator, which they soon locate.  Just as Leopard Men was cast in the erotic swamps of the feminine as Old Timer lusted and panted after Kali Bwana so The City Of Gold  is located in a valley high in the mountains where heaven and earth meet and the cold incisive intellect works best.  Tarzan is not going to lust; like brave Ulysses he is going to resist the sexual blandishments of his Circe, Nemone.

     Both City Of Gold and Tarzan Triumphant take place near or in volcanos so the volcano must link the two stories.  The extent of emotion involved in this one is indicated by the atmospheric conditions as the two men enter the valley.  Compare this scene with that of Tarzan The Invincible when Tarzan and La leave Opar.  the symbolism is ferocious.

     The scene is set in the mountains of Ethiopa.  The rainy season is about to end but the last and most furious storm of the season bursts on the two.  It seems certain here that Valthor is another aspect of Burroughs’ Animus in the Jekyll-Hyde sense.  In this case the two are not so widely divergent as Jekyll and Hyde but are closer in aspects .  Tarzan is still definitely superior and Valthor inferior.

     Athne and Cathne are twin cities in the valley but they have to pass through Cathne- The City Of Gold which is to say perfection- to get to Athne.  Athneans are Elephant men while Cathneans are Lion Men.  As the two begin to cross the valley the great storm breaks.  The storm no doubt symbolizes that storm feared by Burroughs of actually separating himself from Emma, certainly one of the most difficult thing he would ever have to do.

     The separation must have been terrific internal trauma so that ERB kept putting it off rather than face it.  One imagines that as in a situation like this Florence was continually asking him when he was going to tell Emma.  It would be another two years before he could force himself to make the break.  It is significant that just before he left he took a leave of absence from Emma returning to Arizona where, as here, he stayed in the mountains, the White Mountains of the Apaches.  Thus his time in the Army must have had more significance for him than we credit.  He must have thought, as miserable as he appeared to be, that those were the happiest days of his life.

     In Cathne the rains came down.  This was the mother of all storms.  Between the thunder, lightning and literal sheets of rain the two were severed from all reality.  They were walking ankle deep along the road.  Once again they have to cross a stream.  ERB has seen such a stream in Arizona, so this whole situation seems to be recalled by his Army days.  Actually the nine months he spent in Arizona was a fairly rainy period of fourteen inches.  In February 1897, I believe, four and half inches fell probably in one stormy period.  ERB records a stream that became a raging torrent in his last Western novel.  To some extent then he was writing from experience but already thinking of the good old days before he married.

     As hard as it was raining in Cathne the river should have been unfordable but art has its demands.

     Valthor knowing the ford begins to lead Tarzan across.  He gets too far ahead.  Tarzan in his uncertainty misses a step being swept away by the flood.  He is now in the possession of the waters of the feminine, that is, his female problems, just barely able to get his breath.  He is swept from side to side by the violent action of the waters, tumbled head over heels, but he keeps his mental presence.  There is a great waterfall ahead of him which threatens certain death.  The symbolism should be clear.  In a last ditch effort Tarzan catches a rock hauling himself from the water, if I am correct, on the same side of the river, in other words, Emma.  He doesn’t cross which is symbolically important.  Refer that back to the earlier crossing in which he actually crosses but then returns.

     Gathering his senses about him he sees some lights, going to investgate.  He unwittingly stumbles into Nemone’s garden.  Out of the frying pan, into the fire so to speak.

     Brave Ulysses has found his Circe.

B1

     The scent of the big cats fills this book.  Already Sheeta and Numa have had nearly equal billing with Tarzan and Valthor; now lions are given prominence.  Now Tarzan emerges from the flood, which symbolizes a major life change, into the land of lions and lion worship.  the ownership of lions is a mark of distinction in Cathne, Cahtnean chariots are even drawn by lions which brings to mind the chariots of goddesses like Cybele, Harmonia and Cadmus.  Nemone will promise to reward Tarzan with three hundred lions, apparently an incredible number making him the top Lion Man.  Remember the next novel Tarzan And The Lion Man will continue the theme.

     Continuing an old theme from Tarzan And The Golden Lion a lion is even the god of Cathne.  The symbol of Nemone’s Animus is a great black maned male lion named Belthar.  The novel will devolve into a battle between Nemone’s lion, Belthar, and Tarzan’s lion, Jad-Bal-Ja.  Also continuing an old device employed in Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar by the jewels and in Tarzan And The Ant Men by Tarzan’s locket this story is unified by the image of a great lion drawing ever nearer to Tarzan.  So amid all these lions is the true Lion Man, Tarzan’s personal lion.  His own guardian animal.

     It does seem clear that ERB associates the big cats with sexuality.

     ERB is building this story very carefully with great attention to spacing and pacing.  Captured by the

Gordon Scott As Tarzan

Gordon Scott As Tarzan

Cathneans ERB takes care to ingratiate the Big Bwana with the troops.  He has Tarzan and the Cathnean soldiers enter into a spirit of camaraderie as he introduces them to and instructs them in the use of the bow.  Nemone is instroduced but seems to take little notice of the Big Guy condemning him to fight in the arena.

     Taken to a prison cell he and we are introduced at some length and in some detail to a character named Phobeg.  Phobeg is billed as the strongest man in Cathne.

     ERB devotes an amazing amount of space to his confrontation between Phobeg and Tarzan.  His development of such a minor character is unusual.  I think what we have here is a confrontation between Tarzan and the actual man who inspired Burroughs to create Tarzan, the man who was the physical basis of the Lion Man.  Phobeg can be no other than the first important body builder in the world- The Great Sandow.  Just as in Tarzan The Magnificent Burroughs takes care to indicate that Tarzan has now replaced H.M. Stanley as the symbol of Africa, so here he puts down ‘the strongest man in the world’ in favor of his hero.

     Sandow (1867-1925) had died a few years earlier.  While other muscle men had replaced Sandow, most notably Charles Atlas, Burroughs was still obsessed by the man he had seen at the Columbian Expo of 1893.  It would seem certain that ERB occasionally picked up a copy of Physical Culture Magazine to keep up on the latest builds.  He couldn’t have missed the memorial copy devoted to Sandow, the greatest and still the greatest of the body builders.  The award given to Mr. Olympia is called the Sandow.

     While bowled over by the strongman, and strongmen, ERB was always offended by the bunchy muscles created by body building.  he repeatedly makes allusions to strongmen throughout the corpus while Tarzan himself is both the antithesis and the perfection of the strongman.  That is why Tarzan has smooth muscles flowing like molten metal beneath his skin while in this case Phobeg as a Sandow surrogate has the knotted muscles of the body builder.

     If Burroughs found Sandow’s build offensive he would have gone apoplectic at the most recent champions who seems to have developed musculature as far as it can go.  Unlike builders like Charles Atlas, Gordon Scott or Arnold Schwarzenegger who aspired to the Apolline figure, Ronnie Coleman and his successor Jay Cutler have opted for muscle upon muscle until there  is nothing but muscle with no attention to a human shape.  As an example check out Jay Cutler the current Mr. Olympia and holder of the Sandow at www.emusclemag.com.  This guy is only 5’9″ but bulks up at 320 lbs., paring down to 275 for performance.  And that is literally all muscle.  One look at Cutler and ERB would have been foaming at the mouth

     Just as Sandow was billed as the strongest man in the world, so Phobeg is billed as the strongest man in

Jay Cutler In Full Pump

Jay Cutler In Full Pump

Cathne.  ERB makes him a braggart in relation to Tarzan but if he was the strongest man in Cathne he had little reason to respect Tarzan’s physique which was more like ‘Apollo than Hercules.’  Tarzan’s strength though greater than Phobeg’s was disguised.

     At they are to fight each other to the death in the arena this allows Burroughs to introduce another of his interests which may be related, that of professional wrestling.  Burroughs had Tarzan jokingly suggest that they stage the fight much as professional wrestlers.  Burroughs who still attended the matches was disgusted becasue the matches were pure entertainment, something he should have applauded.  Then as now the professional wrestling matches were staged.  Professional wrestling then as now has more to do with entertainment than sport.  Either you can get caught up in the fun and drama or you can’t.  ERB obviously did although as he still thought of the shows as wrestling he felt put upon.

     After several pages of Phobeg’s bragging and Tarzan’s false humility the ‘really big shoo’ begins.  Tarzan and Phobeg are the last act on the program and they would have been a difficult act to follow.

     ERB must have loved this part as the lenghty description of the gambling taking place is many times more detailed that he usually is.  Whether the gambling aspect went on at the wrestling matches he attended or not, I don’t know.  The odds naturally are for Phobeg, whose Cathnean reputation is immense and accurate as concerns the past.  Everyone expects the inveterate gambler Nemone to bet on the sure thing as was her custom.  They hedged their bets when they could at fantastic odds.  Nemone then surprised them by betting on Tarzan.  Nearly bankrupted the whole coterie of Lion Men.

     Tarzan wins of course but refusing to kill Phobeg he instead does his trademark thing lifting Phobeg above his head and tossing him into the stands at Nemone’s feet.  Now that is one hard act to follow.

     Having now won his liberty, a lion man named Gemnon is assigned custodian of Tarzan taking him under his wing.  Up to this point there seems to be no reference to contemporary affairs except for Sandow and wrestling.  At this point ERB displays a numerous and surprising set of literary references.

Go To Tarzan And The City Of Gold part two. 

 

Posted in Anima, Animus, Bernarr Macfadden, Columbian Expo, Consciousness, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, Freud, Greek Mythology, H.M. Stanley, Heracles, Homer, Louis B. Mayer, MGM, Mythology, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Sigmund Freud, Subconscious, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Unconsciousness, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Men Like Gods: Tarzan Pays Homage To Heracles

July 9, 2008

 

Men Like Gods

Tarzan Pays Homage To Heracles

by

R.E. Prindle

First published in the online Magazine: ERBzine

Cover of The Mighty Atom

Cover of The Mighty Atom

 

The Golden Age of Strongmen had captured the imagination of the world between 1890 and 1910….Into the 1920s the strongman continued as a living wonder and inspiring vision that could be had for the modest price of admission

-Ed Spielman: The Mighty Atom:

The Life And Times Of Joseph L. Greenstein

 

     When I was a child and youth in the 1940s and ’50s the legendary strongmen of the turn of the twentieth century were, if no longer living, living legends.  At least one, Bernarr Madfadden, the father of American bodybuilding, was still going strong.

     The most legendary of the strongmen was Frederick Mueller who was known professionally as the Great Sandow.

     In his heyday Sandow was so strong that he was capable of ‘exploding’ or breaking the ‘Test Your Strength’ machines in the arcades of Vienna, Austria.  There were so many broken machines that it was thought a vandal was destroying them but when apprehended it was discovered that Sandow was not only testing his own strength but the strength of the machines.  He flippantly suggested that they be made of better materials.

     On stage as Spielman relates, Sandow, who was trained as a turner, could do a back somersault over a chair with a thirty-five pound dumbbell in each hand.  He could do a one arm chin-up with the grip of any of his fingers of either hand, including his thumbs.

     He could…wait a minute!  I’ve heard something like that before.  Oh yea, I remember now.  In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan And The Lion Man he has Tarzan leap up to seize stakes pointing down from a ten foot high wall, then draw himself straight up until his torso was above the stakes, then roll over the top defeating the purpose of the stakes.  Was he thinking of the Great Sandow when he wrote that?

     I think he was.

     Burroughs was a fan of boxing and a great admirer of the strongmen of the Golden Age, although he didn’t like the bulky physiques.  He repeatedly denounces the physical build of the Strongmen in preference for Tarzan’s ‘smooth rippling muscles.’  In my day the bodybuilders were ridiculed as being ‘muscle bound.’  But the ladies panted when they said it.  Tarzan is as strong or stronger than the strongmen but sleek.

     Next one asks is there any place that it can be shown that Burroughs ever saw Sandow?  yes, and where else?  The Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893.  The Expo was a life changing experience for 17 year-old Ed Burroughs.  Bill Hillman of ERBzine has written a wonderful series on the influence of the Fair on young Burroughs.

     The influence of the Fair was as moving for the rest of America and the World as it was on Our Man.  There apparently has never been so influential a World’s Fair as that of Chicago of 1893.

     One of the best attended features of the Fair was put on by the Great Sandow.  Bodybuilding had already gotten started in England.  Sandow was a student of the innovative Professor Attila in London.  He came to the attention of Florenz Ziegfeld while performing in New York.  Ziegfeld brought him to Chicago for the Expo.  Sandow was a sensation.

The Great Sandow

The Great Sandow

     He created quite a stir at the fair.  Not only did Burroughs see him there but so did a man named Bernarr Macfadden.  At the time he was known as Bernard McFadden but he chose Bernarr because it sounded more like a lion’s roar and Macfadden because he thought it looked more distinguished in print.  As a result of seeing Sandow Macfadden became the father of bodybuilding and the health movement in the United States.  John Dos Passos spoofs him in Vol. III, The Big Money, of the his USA Trilogy.

     Macfadden was the discoverer of isometric exercises, which his student, Charles Atlas, renamed Dynamic Tension and made a fortune.

     Unless I’m mistaken Macfadden would cross ERB’s path sometime between 1908 to 1912.

     Sandow made bodybuilding a rage after the Fair while Macfadden organized the sport around his magazine ‘Physical Culture’ which he began publishing in the wake of the Fair.  Sandow also opened the way for a number of strongmen to build careers on their physiques.

     They all passed through Chicago.  How many of them ERB paid the modest price of admissio to see we can’t know, but as he always speaks of the strongmen in the plural one assumes that he saw several.

     Anyone who has watched the Strongest Men In The World competition on cable TV will understand how impressive both the feats and the physiques of these men were.

     In ERB’s day a man called Warren Travis Lincoln could lift a platform that held twenty-five men with his back.  That was a weight of about 4200 pounds.

     G.W. Rolandow could stack three decks of playing cards and tear them in two.  One assumes that was before they were plastic coated.

     Emil Knaucke who weighed in at five hundred pounds, a spectacle in itself, could hold a car above his head with one hand.  Spielman doesn’t specify make or model.

     Louis Cyr, one of the most famous strongmen, could restrain a team of horses on either side at the same time.  Really spectacular stuff.

Bent Press Arthur Saxon

Bent Press Arthur Saxon

     A man like Arthur Saxon of the Saxons was considered to be the strongest man in the world.  He could do a bent press of nearly five hundred pounds.  As in the photo, in the bent press a lifter raised a barbell above his head with one hand in a bent posture then raised another weight with his other hand.

     Eighteen ninety to nineteen-ten were formative years for ERB.  He would have from fifteen to thirty-five so that when he saw Sandow in ’93 at seventeen he was at a most impressionable age.

     ERB turned 40 in 1915 and 50 in 1925.

     By the twenties vitamins and food supplements had been discovered and were being developed for commercial use.  Vitamins were still novel when I was kid in the late forties.  Not everyone knew of their value as late as then.

     The Great Sandow, Louis Cyr, and a trio of German strongmen called the Saxons were all naturally strong but by the 20s it was possible to build muscular Adonae from the scratch of a 98 lb. weakling.  With vitamins, food supplements and a rigorous regimen for bodybuilding a normal body could be turned into as mammoth a specimen as Tarzan, as witness Arnold Schwarzenegger and his contemporaries who emerged from New York City gyms in the 1960s.

     In point of fact you didn’t even need all that gym equipment.  If you followed the body building plan of the most famous Adonis of the 40s and 50s, Charles Atlas, all you needed were your own opposed muscles.

     Atlas took Macfadden’s isometric exercises and called them the more commercial sounding Dynamic Tension.  By pitting one muscle against its opposite fantastic results could be achieved.

     Charles Atlas, who changed his name from Angelo Siciliano, was voted the world’s most perfectly developed man in 1922 by his mentor, Macfadden and Physical Culture magazine.

     Angelo, born in 1894 in Acri, Sicily came to the US in 1904, thus he would have been 18 in 1922, 18 in 1912.

     Siciliano actually had been a 98 lb. weaking who had sand kicked in his face by a bully.  His girl friend actually did walk away from him.  Siciliano then built himself up into what I’ve always considered to be the image of Tarzan and changed his name to Charles Atlas.

    I was not as successful with the Dynamic Tension plan Chuck sold me in the 50s but then I didn’t try that hard and I couldn’t afford the food supplements which are indispensable.  Nevertheless it had become possible to turn out ‘Men Like Gods’ on an assembly line basis.

     It is more than likely that Burroughs was very familiar with the bodybuilding or fitness program of Macfadden.  That photo of him flexing his muscles on the dock at Coldwater is that of a man who has been working out.  I can’t beleive that a man who was interested in magazines as Burroughs was couldn’t be familiar with Physical Culture Magazine.  Not only would he have the living memory of the Great Sandow in his mind from the Expo but Bernarr Macfadden had moved his headquarters from Battle Creek to Chicago in 1908.  He had a very prosperous looking facility.

     During these years from 1899 when ERB was bashed in the head in Toronto to 1910 at least, he complainedof excruciating headaches that began when he got up in the morning and lasted through half the day.  These would have been very enervating affecting his ability to work.  In The Girl From Farris’s he has his hero Ogden Secor suffering from the same headaches going from doctor to doctor ‘tinkering with his skull’ in hopes of finding relief.  The doctors could do nothing for Secor so he undertook a fitness regime which eased his situation.  So must have ERB.

     Once again, the picture of ERB standing with his legs apart flexing his muscles on the dock at Coldwater in 1916 shows that he was either proud of a moderate physique or he was trying to develop those ‘rippling’ muscles like Tarzan and Charles Atlas.

     At fifty in 1925 ERB probably thought himself beyond the age when he could develop his physique into a semblance of his creation, Tarzan.  Ten or twenty years younger and you might have seen Burroughs as another Charles Atlas or Tarzan.

     There is every reason to believe that sometime between 1908 and 1912 he developed an interest in Macfadden’s program.

      When he sat down to begin his Tarzan series at the end of 1911, Burroughs’ mind must have been filled with the feats of Sandow and the other strongmen.  Anent this, Tarzan’s leopard skin loin cloth was borrowed from the strongmen.  Leopard skin shorts were de riguer for the bodybuilding crowd.

     Of course the role models for these strongmen were Samson and Heracles.  The latter is better known in his Roman usage as Hercules.  For the purposes of this essay I will refer to him as Heracles in hs Greek manifestation.

     Especially in his original manifestation Heracles was a Sun god as the companion of the Earth Mother, Hera.  When the Patriarchal system was imposed on the Matriarchy Hera was wed to Zeus while her former consort, Heracles- The Glory Of Hera- was demoted to the role of Holy Fool and the strngest man in the world.

     ERB often refers to Tarzan as a Jungle God and a latter day Hercules.  Burroughs had a good Greek and Latin education so one might asume that he had some familiarity with the cycle of myths devoted to the feats and tribulations of that ancient type of all strongmen, Heracles.

     In fact, without stretching the point unduly, one can posit a relationship between the Pelasgian Sun God, Heracles and the Flaming God of Opar and through them to Tarzan; they can be construed as one.

     Whether ERB was conscious of what he had done in conflating the three cannot be determined for sure but as he was manipulating valid historical data why shouldn’t he have been conscious of what he was doing?  The Aztec ritual of tearing the heart out to offer to the sun god is implicit in scenes where Tarzan lies across the sacrificial block, pardon me, altar.  The annual sacrifice of the queen’s consort is implicit once again as La raises the sacrificial knife.  A blatant resemblance to Cybele and Attis.

     While the subconsious is always important it is the conscious mind that organizes, plots and writes.  As a writer I may have subconscious motives which may emerge but assembling and organizing my material is a conscious intellectual act.  It is axiomatic that one cannot write what one does not know.

     One of the great mysteries of mythological studies has been the relationship of Heracles to his namesake the former Matriarchal Earth Goddess, Hera.    I noted just previously, during the matriarchy as the Sun, Heracles would have been appropriately called ‘The Glory Of Hera’ or of the Earth.  The same notion can be applied to Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology.  For instance, as David Adams points out somewhere, the lion is a symbol of both the sun and the matriarchy.  It is a fact that the body of the Sphinx at Memphis is older than the head.  The head of the original has been replaced by that of a man.  It therefore follows that the Sphinx was carved during the Matriarchy having either a lion’s or a woman’s head.  After the succession of the Patriarchy the head was changed to reflect the New Order.

     In the Greek Oedipus myth the Theban Sphinx was still represented as the original matriarchal symbol of a lion with a woman’s head.  Woman-lion/sun/Heracles.  The answer to her riddle after which she committed suicide was ‘man’ which denied the Matriarchy, hence she had to kill herself as the Patriarchy thus symbolically replaced the Matriarchy.  Apply that to the Egyptian Sphinx and the change of heads.

Theban Sphinx

Theban Sphinx

     Now, the original Egyptian Sphinx was exactly the same as the Theban Sphinx: a woman’s head on a lion’s body.  the Sphinx is positioned to be looking due East at sunrise in the Age Of Leo.  Thus, perhap, the secret of the Sphinx is simply that as Mother Earth she sat waiting for her consort Heracles (or his Egypian counterpart) to appear on the horizon each morning.

     The notion has simplicity to recommend it.

     As we all know, Oparians were a group of Atlanteans isolated from the main body when mythical Atlantis broke apart and sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.  The worship of the Flaming God was inherited from the parent civilization by Opar.

     Thus whether Burroughs knew what he was doing or not he always gets the sequence of events right.

     Without getting into any discussion of if, where or when Atlantis may have existed, let me say, neverttheless, that all the evidence points to a predecessor civilization anterior to Crete, Pelasgian Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia in much the same way Atlantis preceded Opar.

     The predecessor civilization must have existed in the Mediterranean Basin during the last ice age when ocean levels, scientists tell us, were several hundred feet lower than they are today.  There are evidences of quarrying several hundred feet below sea level on the flanks of the island of Malta for instance.  Given this as a fact, then when the ice melted and the waters rose during the Great Flood to their present levels any society or civilization that existed in the Mediterranean Basin was forced to move to higher ground which is to say above the present sea level.

     One thing is certain, if the Basin was habitable it was inhabited.

     The disruption caused a long dark age from which mankind only slowly recovered.  At the same time these relatively highly developed people moving into less developed savage societies had a fertilizing influence introducing more sophisticated ideas and methods such as agriculture.

     Lower Egypt, one of Two Lands, was obviously settled by the displaced Libyan dynasty.  After centuries of warfare the Upper Egyptians succeeded in conquering Lower Egypt uniting the Two Lands.  The Third Dynasty was a Libyan Dynasty so that the warfare was translated from an external one to an internal one in which the Libyans defeated the Upper Egyptians.  During the Libyan Dynasty the great pyramids were built reflecting in some way the the flooded predecessor civilization.

     So Crete and Pelasgian Greece received survivors also.  The Sumerians of Mesopotamia attribute their civilization to the advice of Oannes, John in English, who came from the sea.

     Often ignored by classical scholars but obviously part of this great Mediterranean culture is ancient Spain.  Now, Spain has one of the great traditions of the worship of Heracles as a Sun god.  This tradition preceded and was uninfluenced by any Patriarchal tradition from Greece.  In point of fact the Patriarchal Heracles went West to annex the Spanish traditions to the Patriarchal cause.  In the process he rounded up the cattle of the Sun i.e. the Matriarachal Heracles to bring back to Greece.  Throughout history, including modern Africa, lifting another man’s cattle transferred his authority to oneself.  See the great cattle raid of Cooley in Irish mythology.  It therefore follows that the Greek Patriarchal myths of Heracles are built on an earlier Matriarchal mythological cycle while being perverted or converted to Patriarchal needs.

     Heracles was originally a sun god.  He was the original of the Flaming God.  I can’t say Burroughs knew this either consciously or subconsciously, however as we will see there is substantial evidence to indicate that he was consciously manipulating the material.

     The city of Seville in Spain is built over a Sun Temple in which Heracles was the sun deity.  This site beneath Seville can still be vistited today.  Assuming that the history of the Spanish Heracles developed independently of the Greek Heracles which after all is a Greek interpretation of a Pelasgian god then it follows that the two traditions must have come from a common source.  That source cannot have been other than the ante-deluvian civilization of the Mediterranean Basin.

     It follows then that whatever names they were known by in this anterior civilization Hera was the Great Mother Goddess while her ‘Glory’ Heracles must be no other than the Flaming God, the Sun.  What else could the ‘Glory’ of the Earth Mother be?

     Thus when the Great Flood, which must be the same as that spoken of by the Sumerians who would have gotten the story from Oannes, destroyed the civilization of the Mediterranean Basin the inhabitants fled to the former highlands surrounding them taking their traditions with them.  The Spanish Heracles was yet identical to the Pelasgian and Cretan models which later became variant.

     When the Greeks entered Pelasgia at the beginning of the Arien Age, the Zodiac dates back to the anterior civilization, they found this remnant of the ante-deluvian civilization with immemorial religious traditions occupying the land.  As the Arien Age began a great shift in the mental and social organization of man progressed in its evoltuion.  The shift was from a Matriarchal consciousness to a Patriarchal consciousness.  In other words, the God replaced the Goddess as the most important sex.  Fecundation became more important than actual reproduction.

     This meant that all the divine myths had to have all the sexual relationships reversed so that the God took precedence over the goddess.  Hera could no longer be allowed to have a male god as her subordinate ‘Glory’, the roles had to be reversed. Hera would have to become the dependent of Zeus.

     Homer’s Iliad is one key in the story of this reversal.

     As Hera was unwillingly made subordinate to her Lord and Master, Zeus, Heracles had to be appropriated by the God.  The Patriarchy then turned Heracles into a scourge of Hera and she his enemy in ridicule of the previous dispensation.  Kind of a Burroughsian style sly joke.

     The meaning of the name Heracles as the glory of Hera was thus lost.  Heracles lost his identification with the Sun becoming a buffoon as the greatest of men; a physical giant of somewhat dim intelligence.  Hera’s glory was turned into a laughing stock but still a good sort of fellow who could aspire to godhood at death.

     In the Patriarchal myths Heracles destroyed various Matriarchal cult centers such as the Hydra at Lerna, the Stymphalian Swamps, the Stag of Artemis, the Nemean Lion and others.  His cycle of adventures was involved in replacing the Matriarchal with the Patriarchal sarcastic ‘Glory’ of Hera.

     To make a feeble Patriarchal attempt at accounting for the meaning of Heracles’ name Homer tells the following story in book XIX of the Iliad.  Zeus, influenced by the goddess Folly, announced to the assembled Gods on Olympus that before the day was out a descendant of his lineage would be born to a mortal woman who would be the greatest man in the world.

     Hera, who hated the infidelities of Zeus, heard his proclamation with scorn.  She knew her husband but too well.  She knew he referred to Alcmene who was bearing Heracles but she also knew that a son was to be born to the wife of Sthenelus who was only seven months pregnant.  Sthenelus was of the lineage of Zeus.

     Hera rushed off to visit Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, to ask her to hasten the birth of Eurytheus while delaying that of Heracles.  The former having been born first became the greatest monarch of the age after the Patriarchal fashion but by Matriarchal means.

     Hastening back to Alcmene Eileithyia uncrossed her legs allowing Heracles to be the younger son of Zeus born on that day.  While Heracles was the bravest and strongest of men he was nevertheless compelled by Hera’s resourcefulness and prompt action to be subservient to Eurystheus.  Thus the will of Zeus which could not be averted was perverted by Hera to thwart the Big Guy’s will.

     Heracles was still the strongest man alive but he was subordinate to the will of Hera through Eurystheus, portrayed as one of th weakest and most cowardly men of his time hiding behind his mother’s skirts but by the grace of Hera and the matriarchy, the greatest ruler.

     Zeus, appalled by his lapse of judgment threw Folly off Olympus from which she is still banned.

     In that sardonic manner Homer explained the meaning of Heracles as the glory of Hera.  She had used him to Ace Zeus.  Heracles had been stripped of his role as the glorious Sun companion of Hera.  He comes down to us as the strongest man who ever lived.  In the Roman nomenclature of Hercules he became the role model of every strong man who ever lifted a dumbbell.  Yet they all wore leopard skin shorts, the leopard being a symbol of the Matriarchy.  You can’t fool Mother Nature.

     To Burroughs who was a student of Greek mythology the great strongmen of the Golden Age must have appeared as men like gods.  Their feats of strength, their marvelous physiques, were so far beyond the abilities of ordinary men that they must have seemed to be in a class by themselves far above mortal men.

     In that sense Tarzan is the greatest of the strongmen, above Sandow, Arthur Saxon and even Heracles.

     Heracles himself had been demoted to a mere mortal although his legend was so great that he was allowed immortality by the Patriarchy after his mortal death.  Unwilling to grant him too much credit he was allowed to be the doorman of Olympus.  He held this position throughout the Arien Age being replaced by St. Peter in the New Dispensation of the Piscean Age.

     Burroughs, familiar with the mythic cycle of Heracles, however he understood it, plays with both identities of Heracles in the person of Tarzan at Opar.  He also brings in a number of elements from H. Rider Haggard’s novel She.  There can be no doubt of the influence of Haggard.  Burroughs even names his heroine La which is what ‘She’ is designated as in French translations of Haggard’s novel.  The palance of Opar is also based to some extent on the labyrinthine caves of She.

     There are many literary influences for the creation of Tarzan not least of which are the real life H.M. Stanley and Haggard’s fictional heroes Sir Henry Curtis and Allan Quatermain.  I would now like to direct attention to a third, that of the heor of She, Leo Vincey.

     If one closely examines Vincey it will be discovered that he too was a Sun King whose death had been caused in an earlier incarnation by She.  The cartouche which contains the name of Leo’s distant Egyptian ancestor was translated as ‘The Royal Son Of Ra’ or son of the Sun as in Egyptian mythology Ra is the sun.

     Leo also translates from the Latin as Lion so we have the Son of the Sun who also is a Lion Man which is how Burroughs refers to Tarzan in ‘The Invincible’ and undoubtedly as how he always thought of his creation.

     Haggard translates Vincey as the Avenger.  Tarzan is the ‘Avenger’ or guard of Africa.  Haggard describes Vincey as almost inhumanly beautiful while Tarzan is the most handsome man in the world not unlike Charles Atlas.

     Haggard’s She is indescribably old kept forever youthful by having bathed in the fire of eternal youth.  Hera was also eternally youthful and a virgin queen.  She restored her youth and virginity by bathing annually in a holy spring.  Hera’s bath obviously refers to the Spring rains which inundated Mother Earth just prior to vegetation springing forth in virgin birth.  After the summer heat the vegetation dies down and Earthy Hera becomes barren once more to await her bath and return to virginity.

Mr. Dynamic Tension- Charles Atlas

Mr. Dynamic Tension- Charles Atlas

     So a connection can be made between Sun>Heracles>Vincey>Tarzan and Mother Nature>Hera>She>La.

     Burroughs La was neither ancient nor immortal in the personal sense although she was the latest in an immortal line of Priestesses.  She is a priestess of the Sun or Ra, The Flaming God.

     Haggard’s Leo Vincey was the direct descendant of Kallikrates She’s great love of two millennia past.  She, or Alyesha, to use her name, had killed Kallicrates in a rage.  Kallikrate’s descendants were sworn to avenge the murder.  Thus Vincey travels from England to far off Africa to locate this fabulous woman.

     Kallikrates was the love of Alyesha’s very long life.  When she recognizes Leo Vincey as her lost lost love she saves his life while offering him eternal youth if he will only bathe in the flames of eternal life.  He hesitates to do so.  To encourage him Alyesha steps once again into the flames which was a serious miscalculation.  She crumbled to dust.  Thus while Leo Vincey doesn’t actually avenge the death of Kallikrates she is nevertheless his victim.

     Tarzan while actually born in Africa was conceived in England so he made the trip to Opar from England although he is ignorant of La.  When Tarzan is captured in Opar he is laid on the altar of the Flaming God, La with the sacrifical knife raised, looks down on this Jungle God, this man like a god, and falls in love.  Thus we have a replay of the She-Kallikrates situation.

     Unable to take Tarzan’s life, La releases him begging him for his love.  Alyesha’s full title was She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed in the Matriarchal sense.  The old conflict arises, Tarzan is more on the Patriarchal side, he has his moly in the waistband of his loin cloth, monagamous we are led to believe, happily married, so the Lion Man Sun King declines the honor of being mated to La>Hera.  He asserts his Patriarchal prerogative to disobey although he always has a soft spot in his heart for La.

     In a fairly masterful way ERB conflates the legend of Heracles, the fiction of H. Rider Haggard and the incredible strongmen of the Golden Age and his own little bit to write a charming and beautiful story which is fairly simple on the surface but one which becomes immensely rich with a deeper understanding of the sources.

     Ernest Hemmingway once said that before one sat down to write one should have ten time the information in your possession as you put on paper else the story will seem shallow and contrived.  It would seem that the sources upon which Burroughs was drawing, from the bodybuilding strongmen of his day to the legendary cycle of Heracles to the adventures of H.M. Stanley and the fiction of H. Rider Haggard might well fulfill Hemingway’s dictum.

     When one searches for the sources of Burroughs one finds layer after layer of golden riches while discovering that in fact ERB did indeed create a man like a god- Tarzan The Magnificent.

Addendum

      This is a quote taken from Bonzo Dog’s song Mr. Apollo.  I don’t know whether the reader is familiar with the Bonzos but they were one of my favorites.  Several glorious LPs.  Neil Innes came from them as well as the great but tragic Viv Stanshall.  Leave those drugs alone, boys.

Follow Mr. Apollo,

Everybody knows a healthy body

Makes a healthy mind.

Follow Mr. Apollo,

He’s the strongest man the world has ever seen.

If you take his courses

He’ll make you big and rough.

And you can kick the sand right back in their faces.

 

 

A few years ago I was a four stone apology-

Today, I am two separate…Gorillas.

Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

Long may they wave.

Posted in Bernarr Macfadden, Columbian Expo, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, Eurystheus, Girl From Farris's, Greek Mythology, H. Rider Haggard, H.M. Stanley, Hera, Heracles, Homer, Mother Archetype, Mythology, Patriarchy, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Part 2 Tarzan And The Lion Man A Review

May 16, 2008

« A Review: The Sonderman Constellation By D.A. Adams
A Review

Part 2 Tarzan And The Lion Man

 

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man

Part 2 of 10 parts

by R.E. Prindle

Doubles And Insanity

First published on the ezine- ERBzine

 

Sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming.

-Tarzan

Penguin Dictionary Of Symbols p. 306

Doubles:  In every culture artists have depicted double-headed creatures, SERPENTS, DRAGONS, BIRDS, LIONS, BEARS and so on.  This is due neither to mere love of ornamentation nor to some Manichean influence, the creatures so depicted all have a bipolarity, both benign and malign, and this is described in their individual entries in this dictionary.  It is very likely that it is this double aspect of the live creature which is suggested by its depiction with two heads. For example, the lions strength symboizes both sovereign power and a consuming lust, whether it be for justice, or for the exercise of absolute authroity in a bloodthirsty tyrant.  Similarly, ribbons or wreaths depicted round a person’s head may symbolize, if they form a CLOSED circle, confinement in difficulty and misfortune, but if broken, release.

Sometimes duplication serves merely to re enforce and redouble the meaning attached to one of the POLES of the symbol.

Traditonal religions generally thought of the soul as being the double of the living owner, able to leave the body at death, in dreams or through magical practices, and to return to the same or some other body.  Mankind thus provided its own self-portrait in duplicate.  In any case, instances of hysterical or schizophrenic duplication of personality are well known to psychotherapy.

German Romanticism endowed this notion of a person’s double (Doppelganger)  with tragic and fatal overtones….It may sometimes be our complement, but it is more often the foe with whom we are lured to fight….In some ancient traditons, meeting one’s double is an unlucky occurrence, and is sometimes even a presage of death.

—————

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lion Man is overwhelmingly a novel of doubles or duplicity.  The number of things doubled is bewildering.  I deal only with the most obvious here.  The reason Burroughs concentrates on doubling, I believe is because he discovered the double meaning of the terms of the contract he signed with MGM.  He was stunned by the duplicity.

On p. 154 Burroughs comments on duplicity such as he found at MGM.  Remember he names them BO or Stinky studios in the novel.

Tarzan was suspicious.  He saw a trap, he saw duplicity in every thing conceived by the mind of man.

Thus having been betrayed Burroughs is now alert seeing doubling or duplicitness everywhere.

St. John, the illustrator of the book also picked up on the aspect of doubling.  This novel was so extremely important to Burroughs, he even issued it on his birthday, September 1st, 1934, that he asked St. John for something different for a jacket illustration.  St. John concentrated on the Obraoski/Tarzan doubling, producing a Janus like cameo of Tarzan/Obroski facing in opposte directions.  As in the Penguin definition representing both characters of the Lion Men Tarzan and Obroski.

In this case the two faces represent the earlier cowardly Bureroughs who has to die and the strong masterly Tarzan figure Burroughs wishes to be.

Thus, before considering the story it would be fruitful to examine ERB’s use of doubling and confusion of reality, or in other words craziness, madness or insanity.

It is obvious that when ERB is passing rhough a period of extreme stress Tarzan loses his memory and/or doubles- that is to say splits his personality in a hysterical or schizophrenic way.  At this point in his life Burroughs is enduring the stress of sexual conflict – the change in affections from Emma to Florence- as well as the extreme stress of having lost control of his creation and actual alter ego to MGM as representatives of his Judaeo-Communist enemies.  In point of fact, as Burroughs may have realized, the battle, even the war, was lost.  As MGM’s 1936 movie Tarzan Escapes, indicates Tarzan/Burroughs had been captured.  Hence the tenuous grasp on sanity in this book.

In Burroughs’ mind and in fact he had been trapped by duplicity, itself a form of doubling.  When Tarzan, having climbed the Stairway To Heaven finds the front door standing open he scents a trap but as his intention was to enter anyway he enters.  He is now only in the antechamber of fate, he could still back out.  He notices six doors of which Door #3 is standing open.  He does try the other five doors but they are locked.  Entering Door #3 he begins the descent down a dark stairwell.  He encounters another door.  Rather than checking the door first he merely enters to have the door click shut behind him.  The wall is smooth, there is now no way out.

This scene may well be a fictionalized account of his negotiations with MGM.  The Studio, perhaps representing Door #3 was offering him a contract which no other studio, doors 1,2,4,,5,6 was willing to do.  Granted not everyone can spot a sterling opportunity that is staring them in the face but it does seem odd that no other studio was interested in a proven character.  After all Twentieth Century-Fox was working Charlie Chan movies hard and doing well.  But all doors were closed to Burroughs/Tarzan except Door #3, MGM.  Not a bad thing on the surface of it as MGM was far and away the best studio in Hollywood.

So Burroughs entered into negotiations with MGM in the same manner as Tarzan descended the dark staircase in which he couldn’t see very well, i.e. Burroughs didn’t understand the clauses.  Like Tarzan ERB didn’t exercise caution and while the door snapped shut trapping Tarzan so Burroughs signed the contract which he represented as the prison Tarzan found himself in.

The reader may find the above farfetched but remember the first third of the story is an account of MGM’s Trader Horn expedition that he ridicules.  This book is about MGM.

Before dealing with the main doubles of the story let’s consider the story within the story- a form of doubling itself.  We have God on Earth doubling God in Heaven.  This becomes the source of many jokes.  Stress or no stress Burroughs doesn’t lose his sense of humor.  God’s castle is known as Heaven thus doubling Heaven.  The Stairway to Heaven doubles Jacob’s Ladder thus calling to mind the biblical story.  Tarzan then doubles Jacob.  That’s just part of sly old Burroughs’s humor.

God himself has created a parallel universe doubling England, London and the Thames.  Thus the gorilla plateau is called England while they live in London on the Thames River.  Thus a doubling of Africa and an island off the coast of Europe.

Just as God in Heaven in the biblical story created Man so God in this story has hybridized gorillas into a new species of gorilla men.  The hybrid gorillas are doubles of both gorillas and men while God is a double of man and Gorilla.

In this dizzying array of doubles the gorillas are not just a doubling of men but a doubling of the fifteenth century court of Henry VIII of England.  They have been altered by the use of deathless genes  or, atually, DNA, which was unknown to Burroughs at the time but the nature of which he dimly perceives.  The DNA has been inserted or spliced into the genes of the gorillas, thus the gorilla Henry VIII is actually, Henry VIII.  The Fifteenth century is doubled in the twentieth century while the political scene of the twentieth duplicates that of the fifteenth.  ERB may here be influenced by Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stanger with his notion of ascending and descending staircases of time.

During this phase of the story within the story Tarzan is actually himself while posing as, or doubling, Stanley Obroski thus actually being self contained twins; in other words the personality formerly split between he and Stanley Obroski is reunited with Tarzan dominant.  Thus Tarzan redeems Burroughs’ former shamed self.  At this moment Stanley is dying of fever and when he does the double disappears leaving Tarzan or Burroughs then undivided.  The dead body of Obroski is shipped back to the States while Tarzan remains in the jungle.

The story within the story is a stunning achievement whose genius has gone unrecognized.

b.

The most obvious examples of doubling is in the main characters.  As incredible as it may seem not only are Tarzan and Stanley Obroski so close they can’t be told apart but so are the female leads Naomi Madison and Rhonda Terry.

I’m sure there are doubles I’m missing here but even Tom Orman, the Dirctor, is a double of himself when he’s under the influence of alcohol.  Drunk he becomes a different Tom Orman than when sober.  Obroski himself is two people.  An errant coward when he has time to think he become ferociously brave when his back is against the wall and there is no time for reflection.

Naomi Madison who has become a prima donna or an artiste was at one time a waitress in a cheap restaurant which role she is forced to assume again which is another form of doubling.  In this joke Naomi is an insult to Irving Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, whose early career is duplicated.

Also this movie Tarzan is a doubling of the literary Tarzan so both Obroski and Tarzan are doubles of Johnny Weissmuller who played the MGM Tarzan.  As Burroughs suggests in this novel he was half out of his mind from the terrific stresses.  The stress did produce however a terrific novel.

It would seem that Burroughs was Tarzan and Obroski as twin aspects of his own Animus while Naomi and Rhonda represented the twin aspects of his Anima.  Naomi obviously represents Emma while Rhonda is an extension of La of Opar combined with Florence.  Naomi disappears from the story apparently replaced by Balza, The Golden Girl, while Burroughs marries Rhonda to Orman.

As regards the doubling of Tarzan who is actually a double of Burroughs himself, Bibliophile David Adams has emphasized that Tarzan usually views from above so that it might be the time to look into this aspect of the character.  In Lion Man Obroski is captured and held prisoner by Rungula, chief of the Bansuto.  this whole scene of Obroski with the Bansuto is one of the numerous variations of the theme of Burroughs humiliation by John the Bully.

Burroughs was plagued with the dream, as he notes the dream frequent among dreamers, of going naked in public.  It is a frequent dream because multitudes of people have suffered similar humiliation as his.

ERB has Obroski stand before Rungula who demands his clothes, in other words his defensive and offensive armor, that without which Obroski is exposed defenseless to the world, he loses his ‘front.’  John had symbolically stripped young ERB.  Burrughs describes his humiliation in excruciating detail as Obroski does a virtual striptease.  First his shirt on down until Burroughs makes a joke of his gaily printed boxer shorts.  While the Bansuto would not have understood the signficance of the shorts ERB takes a certain pleasure in humiliating himself further.  To cover rhis nakedness Obroski pleads for the proverbial fig leaf and is given a skimpy dirty g-string.  Thus when he is led out for torture he fights the Bansuto naked but in a Tarzan guise.  Heck, Tarzan, who is not civilized in the jungle, walks around naked anyway.  Although the natives themselves are naked Obroski is civilized while they are savages.  Having been subdued Obroski is lain before Rungula.  By this time Tarzan is in a tree, apparently planted there for his convenience.  He looks down on Obroski in amazement to see a replica of himself.  p. 104:

In the light of a new day Tarzan of the Apes stood looking down upon the man who resembled him so closely that the ape-man experienced the uncanny sensation of standing apart, like a disembodied spirit, viewing his corporeal self.

What Burroughs is describing here is the splitting of the personality.  He may have the correct psychologically sequence, first the stripping of the armor- i.e. emasculation, and then the disembodiment, the dissociation of the mind and body.  The mind unable to deal with the reality seems to leave the body rising above and looking down on the humiliation of his poor self.  This theme runs all through Burroughs work although this is his most exact and detailed description.

Obroski has been led out to be tortured to death and eaten by Rungula the cannibal chief.  Usually Tarzan is placed in an arena to fight one or more wild beasts.  In a normal confrontation Obroski is a coward which is to say he is unable to defend himself.  In other words his subconscious mind has been conditioned to accept the dominance and authority of hte oppressor.  In still other words in a state of terror his subconscious had been accessed to accept certain hypnotic suggestions.  But, with his back to the wall his instinct of self-preservation overrules the hypnotic suggestion and he fights like the proverbial cornered rat.

In this instance he used his full potential to fell a whole battalion of Rungula’s men, performing authentic Tarzanic feats like lifting men above his head casting them among his foes.  At the time Tarzan is looking down at him he has finally been subdued lying at Rungula’s feet.

You know whre I’m going , don’t you?  Right.  that street corner in Chicago where John the Bully confronted young ERB.  Burroughs didn’t fight like a berserker though, he ran.  (Chief Run-gu-la?) But that was when he split his personality being able to look down on his corporeal self like a disembodied spirit.

As the Penguin Dictionary says:  Instances of hysterical or schizophrenic duplication of personality are well know to psychotherpy.  There are many examples of this phenomenon.  Here are a couple to show how it works.

When a person is enduring an unbearable situation in which he is powerless to resist, rather than believe the situation is happening to him he does split off a psychological projection of himself as a disembodied spirit who sympathetically views his now alter ego’s humiliation.

For instance when Jean Genet, the author and playwright was at the Mettray Reformatory he was caught out by a gang of homosexuals and gang raped.  As the rape progressed, escape being impossible while becoming so unbearable for him, to retain his sanity he split off a projection, a disembodied spirit, if you will, that floated above the scene.  Thus Genet was able to actually observe his rape without participating in it.  As he watched he muttered ‘Poor Jean, poor poor Jean.’  Thus the mind provides a somewhat feeble defense but one that allows one to keep one’s sanity after a fashion.  Of course the hypnotic suggestion  from this terrifically shameful event caused him to relinquish his will to the oppressor, part of the deal to keep one’s sanity.  Genet’s character was changed for life; he became a homosexual who had no will to resist that of men while becoming an active agent in his future degradation.  He was always able to rationalize his actions so that they seemed right.

I will use my own experience as a second example.  In kindergarten the elite group forced a confrontation with me in which they lost and looked bad.  Circumstances removed me to a different school before they had a chance to relaliate on me.   But then in second grade I was returned to that school.  At that point they were waiting for me.  This situation is more analogous to Burroughs than Genet but all three involve a rape of the mind which is what emasculation is.

The general conclusion is that my and Burroughs situations are normal, they happen to everyone.  Perhaps.  And everyone reacts in their individual way but everyone reacts.  A few years later and I would have been able to handle this situation without a problem as would have been true with Burroughs.  Remember with Burroughs however that while John the Bully only threatened him in 1884-85 fifteen years later in a similar to identical situation he had his head broken thus reinforcing the original situation.

In my case the situation formed my central childhood fixation as did Burroughs’.  My subconscious was opened to admit certain hypnotic suggestions which were fixed in my subconscious.  It then closed but refused to allow me to remember which of course is why the situation became a fixation, or suggestion I could not refuse to observe.

At recess in the second grade a group of, shall we say, twelve formed a semi-circle around me.  Like Burroughs I am compelled to make excuses for myself.  For the previous year I had been shuttled between foster homes and thus I had no support or defense.  I was alone.  In kindergarten the boy, the leaderof the pack, had ordered two new kids, the first Negroes in the school, to sit on the sandbox and not move during recess.  I took the Blacks’ side offering to fight the leader.  He, standing at point, declined combat stepping back into the support of his crowd gathered behind him.  That was his mistake.  He and his crowd had realized this.  Now in the second grade the boy still refused to challenge me individually.  Now they formed a semi-circle around me while their leader stood at keystone, still enveloped by his gang so that, I presume, they could fall on me if I resisted.

They all beamed hatred and contempt at me.  I was unable to resist the projected hatred of the boys and girls while at this date having only the vaguest or no notion of what I was guilty of, I was ordered to take a step forward which to my eternal shame I did.  In midstep I was ordered to stop and stay in that suspended step throughout recess.  To my shame, I did.  He said:  You’re going to have to be our nigger now.  The shame killed my personality, my identity, my ego.  I assumed the role of ‘nigger.’  Terror opened the way to the subconscious and the suggestion, you are a nigger, among others was entered.  Like Jean Genet a projection of myself arose above to say something like:  Poor kid, poor poor kid.’

The suggestion was so horrific to me that I immediately forgot it or, perhaps since that ego died the incident was not part of the life of the survivor.  The memory was accepted and encysted in my subconscious what Freud and Jung would call the unconscious.  I not only forgot the situation but I forgot the faces and names of the kids involved.  I could not remember them from that day forward although I could talk to them as though I did know them.

The consequence was that I had to do what I was told to do by nearly anyone.  Much the same as Burroughs who wrote a medieval story, of which he knew nothing, at the suggestion or command of Metcalf and wrote Son Of Tarzan which he later regretted, and Tarzan And The Ant Men at the suggestion or command of Bob Davis.  Buroughs became a variation of the dependent personality as did I.

On the one hand my conscious mind understood the proper means of defense but as I began to do so my subconscious mind overruled or shoved my conscious mind aside and obsequiously obeyed.

This plight was only changed when I succeeded in integrating my personality in the year of around forty-two.  That is to say the subconscious contents of my mind centered around the cyst of my central childhood fixation was made manifest to my conscious mind allowing the subconscious to be integrated into consciousness.  Where the ‘Id’ was ‘Ego’ shall be, as Freud put it.

Burroughs in  Lion Man at fifty-eight is describing the same situation as that experienced by Genet and myself but in a different way.  Like myself and Genet he would have been easy to direct.  So at that age he had not yet exorcised that particular demon.  As ERB kills Obroski off in this novel assuming both identities while discarding that of Obroski, returning the corpse to Hollywood, becoming solely Tarzan of the Apes one wonders if he succeeded in integraing his personality at that point.  That is what he is describing.

His experiences with John The Bully, the splitting of his personality explains why Tarzan observes from above rather than as a participant on the ground. In Lion Man perhaps agitated by the movie duplicate of the literary Tarzan he brought the situation of John the Bully to consciousness. Rungula the Bansuto taking John’s place while the aspect of Tarzan or his split off alter ego watches from above while Obroski fought like a berserker on the ground but was overcome by numbers or in the John situation, size.

Thus Tarzan spies on the safari from the trees by day while walking rhough the camp at night.  Having dealt with his humiliation in some way in Rungula’s village, when Orman and West are threatened by a lion Tarzan plummets from his tree to kill the lion on the ground then without a word vaults back into the tree.  Orman and West mistake him for his lookalike Obroski.  Thus we have the beginning of the reuniting of the split personality which will continue in the Heaven of the gorilla god.

Burroughs was under such extreme stress from both his sexual desires and the MGM betrayal that he must have felt half mad.  While he and Rhonda are captive in Heaven he says:  Sometimes I think I must be dreaming.  A statement that seems to be out of character for the Big Bwana.  The scene might be interpreted as ERB’s Anima and Animus being imprisoned while on one level God might represent MGM.

Tarzan comes into contact with Stanley Obroski which Tarzan finds amusing and lets them do.  Both women pinch tmeselves to see if they are dreaming or mad as well they might.  Tarzan rejects Naomi which must have confused her as she and Obroski were in love with each other.  Having ditched Naomi Tarzan/Obroski goes back for the wise cracking Rhonda.

Then too Burroughs actually describes Tarzan as a madman at one point.  This would be tantamount to describing himself as mad.  Indeed the whole novel centers on mad or insane happenings.

The madness or insanity would be an aspect of Tarzan’s viewing from above as a disembodied spirit.  The splitting off of the aspect from his and ERB’s personality would be the result of the extreme stress of the moment that produced the feeling of dizzying  madness.

Burroughs handling of the stress in what I consider a very extraordinary novel is abolutely masterly.  I can’t think of a finer science fiction story that the story within the story of God’s in his Heaven and all’s wrong with the world.

ADDENDUM

David Adams who had an advance copy of this piece brought up the point that perhaps Tom Orman in his drunken state was a comment on Emma’s drinking problem.  A scenario instantly suggested itself.

Imagine Orman in his drunken state as a personification of John Barleycorn.  Imagine sweet sober Naomi as Emma in her sober state and Obroski as Burroughs in his non-Tarzan, actually Obroski state.

John Barleycorn claimed Emma as his own as Orman claimed Naomi.  Barleycorn is a jealous man and won’t tolerate Burroughs as a lover of Emma.  So the couple have to sneak a moment or two when John Barleycorn isn’t around.  In other words, when Emma is sober.

As Burroughs fictionally represents the situation Obroski/Burroughs is visiting Naomi/Emma in her tent.  they appear to be in love and accord.  Orman is drunk in his tent and isn’t expected to be abroad.  Then Obroski hears the drunken Orman approaching the tent.  Unable to stand up to Orman Obroski obsequiously flees.

So in real life Burroughs and Emma are getting along fine until Emma hits the bottle conjuring up John Barleycorn.  ERB can’t compete with the bottle while Emma becomes verbally abusive under the influence just as Orman used the lash on bearers while drunk.  ERB can’t take it so like the bearers he vanishes into the night.

I think it may be a viable scenario although obviously ERB’s version of the truth.

End of Part II.  Part III, The Source follows.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Anima, Animus, Consciousness, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, H.M. Stanley, Heracles, Louis B. Mayer, MGM, Mythology, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Structural Psychology, Subconscious, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Part 2 Tarzan And The Lion Man A Review

Book II Something Of Value 1

December 31, 2007

 Something Of Value

Book II, Part 1

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion

by

R.E. Prindle

 

God is not a cosmic accident;

Neither is he a universe experimenter;

The Universe Sovereigns may engage in adventure:

The Constellation Fathers may experiment:

The system heads may practice;

But the Universal Father

Sees the end from the beginning…

-The Book Of Urantia

Preface

 

     While understood as a lightweight fantasy author Edgar Rice Burroughs tackled most, if not all, of the burning questions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  One of those questions was the nature of Time.  H.G. Wells excited the world’s mind with his short novel, The Time Machine, in 1895.  This was still an astonishing story when I was a kid; for all I know it still is.  In his own way Wells hinted at possible universes.  Then in 1905 Albert Einstein astonished the world with his Special Theory Of  Relativity that posited certain ideas about Time and Space.  Einstein undoubtedly owed a great deal to H.G. Wells.  Einstein’s theory is posited on the objective existence of Time.  In his Pellucidar novels beginning in 1913 Edgar Rice Burroughs denied the objective existence of Time.  He said that Time didn’t exist as an objective reality. 

     I am in agreement with Burroughs.  He examines the problem at great length not only in the Pellucidar series but in Tarzan At The Earth’s Core and Tarzan The Invincible.

     He examines the problem of violence and war in detail with numerous examples including his final statement in Beyond The Farthest Star.  

     It shouldn’t be surprising that Burroughs dovetailed these questions into the really big questions of Evolution and Religion.  He doesn’t argue Evolution he just takes it for granted.  If you read only Burroughs you would have no idea that Evolution was a very controversial subject.  He just assumes that his views are the norm and proceeds accordingly.  Very daring for his time period.

     On Religion his surface opinions which are conventionally anti-Priestcraft are more polemical in nature but, as Burroughs scholar Dale R. Broadhurst points out in his Gods Of Edgar Rice Burroughs series on the ERBzine magazine site, http://www.erbzine.com when you examine certain religious systems such as that of Opar closely Burroughs reveals some very subtle distinctions.  He had read widely while the religious milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was particularly strong.  For the first time society tolerated men like Robert W. Ingersoll who openly denounced religion and the very idea of God.  Helena P. Blavatsky who presented a religion opposed to Christianity was also allowed to live.  The price was that they were demonized in every way; but they were allowed to live.

     The great archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Greece, Crete and Mesopotamia were seriously undermining the validity of the Jewish Old Testament.  To the doubting or perceptive the scriptures were found to be based on much earlier texts as well on a much longer time line going back millions of years rather than a mere five thousand.

     So, in this essay I would like to examine the evolution of the species and religion with an idea of how Burroughs understood them.  It is important to remember that the state of knowledge in Burroughs’ time was much developed  developed relative to the beginning of eighteenth century but primitive to what has been learned since 1950.

     In his time and well into mid-century it was possible to seriously argue the question of canals on Mars for instance.  We have now seen that there are no canals on Mars or anything approximating them.  Since 1950 everything that was valid speculation in Burroughs’ time has now been shown in its true light, or at least, 90% or so.

     The science of Biology has laid bare the progress of Evolution although it hasn’t explained it.  Even so, no doubt fully 50% of Americans still denies the possibility, bound instead by the puerilities of ‘sacred scripture.’

     Make no mistake, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a daring, ground breaking, forward thinking writer who put his fast ball over the plate waist high so hard that few people saw it.

1.

     Scientists nearly universally believe that the genus Homo Sapiens originated in Africa.  Most put a moral spin on this but if true it is merely a fact.  Certain genetic markers point to this fact.  Indeed, in Gods Of Mars, in itself a subtle examination of evolution, ERB describes his Black race as the First Born.  He himself picked up the idea from the nineteenth century missionary David Livingstone from his book Missionary Travels In South Africa.

     In Livingstone’s book in a conversation with a Bushman the Bushman tells Livingstone that God created the Black man first, then the White man.

     Thinking in a Darwinian way Burroughs reasoned that first came the anthropoids then the Blacks and then the Whites.  Thus, of the Homo Sapiens species the Blacks were the First Born.  If the current scientific information is accurate then this is true.  Burroughs was on solid evolutionary ground.

     Current science teaches us that Homo Sapiens evolved from less mentally developed stock about a hundred fifty thousand years ago.  As the most highly evolved hominid Homo Sapiens has displaced all other lines of development.  The Neanderthal who existed as a separate hominid species until perhaps ten thousand years ago is now gone.  As a distinct species it is generally now acknowledged that there was no inbreeding with Homo Sapiens.

     In Africa all the predecessors of Homo Sapiens have also disappeared without a trace.  As nature does not make great leaps but acts in small increments it is reasonable to believe that at one time several sub-species of hominids existed when Homo Sapiens first evolved one hundred fifty thousand years ago.  Indeed, it is neither impossible nor improbable that the Bushman is the immediate predecessor of the First Born.  If examined carefully and without prejudice it is possible that two or three sub-species of hominid predecessors are still alive.

     Had the White man not interfered it is quite possible that the invading Bantus would have exterminated these peoples who had already been expelled from the rest of Africa into its Southern tip.  An analogy would be the Gorillas who once surely roamed a greater range but are now pushed into the least habitable areas of the rain forest.

     Even today the surviving species of anthropoids are finally being exterminated, much as the Neanderthal probably was, as the burgeoning population of Homo Sapiens cuts and burns over their jungle habitat.  Except for zoos the great anthropoids are a thing of the past.

     If the African was the first born then it follows that Whites, Semites and Mongolids evolved from the African.  This raises a testy problem.  Evolution means the development from a less developed organism to a more highly developed organism.  As physically Homo Sapiens is developed to perfection being the most versatile of all species the only place development can take place is in the area of intelligence.

     The development of the brain is what gives the Homo Sapiens the advantage over the anthropoids and all other beasts.  A gorilla with human intelligence would be one formidable beast.  Some argue that the brain began developing in response to challenges presented to it.  This argument doesn’t explain why the Chimpanzees presented with the same or slightly different variations of the same problems, didn’t increase in brain capacity.

     The above account assumes that evolution occurs for environmental reasons.  This is patently impossible.  When life was originated it was from internal reasons.  As we all know life is dependent on water.  Contrary to the Semitic account in the Bible man was not made from mud.  It’s water.  How life came into existence can be easily explained but probably not universally agreed with.  The body has been described as a sack of water with a few elements dissolved into it.  This is true so it is only necessary to determine how it happened.  That too is not difficult to conjecture.  Homo Sapiens and all life is built of the same universal elements of the universe.  Most of a body is of six elements, Hydrogen and Oxygen being the most prominent followed by Nitrogen, Carbon, Phosphorus and Sulphur and a smattering of other elements.

     It is impossible that water should have been introduced to earth from outer space.  Forget outer space.  Water was extruded from the core.

When a sufficient amount of water was formed on the surface rich with the above mentioned dissolved nutrients exposed to the sun for photosynthetic development it would seem obvious the atoms jostled against each other exchanging protons and bonding into molecules that in turn formed larger units and thus became animated.  These single celled organisms than began to evolve in a number of directions.  For millions of years life was confined to the seas of the world.  Then in what seems as it though must be a programmed manner life left the water and began its existence on land.  In what manner a program of evolution is encoded is beyond my understanding.

     Rather than in response to the environment, evolutionary steps occur when a number of genetic mutations take place finally accumulating to the point where the next development takes place.  Thus the number of pre-Homo Sapiens hominids ran through a long series of sub-species before Homo Sapiens emerged, as our scientists tell us, as the African First Born.

     Now, most people assume that evolution ceased with the emergence of the First Born.  The differences between the First Born, the Semites, Mongolids and the Whites are said to be merely cosmetic.  The First Born bleach out in cold climates is their argument.

     However it is quite obvious that evolution is still going on and that in Homo Sapiens.  Very recently scientists have penetrated the chromosomal structure being able to identify the individual genes that compose each chromosome.  While new studies of the functions of the various genes are very likely to be subject to revision nevertheless on 12/29/04 the Chicago Tribune published a report on studies conducted by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago.

     Quote:

     Reporting in the cover article in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Cell, Lahn and his colleagues, Eric Vollender and Steve Dorus, found that 17 brain building genes mutated at a tremedously rapid rate in humans, compared with the brains of champanzees, macaque monkeys, rats and mice….Once started, the selection of brain building genes snowballed, resulting in thousands of changes to thousands of genes in a relatively short period, Lahn explained….Lahn, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the U. of C., argues that the evolutionary forces that led to the big brain continue to act on humans today and are likely to produce bigger and better brains in the future.

     Unquote.

      Sign me up for a transplant when they’re available.  Rapidly means over a few million years.  Needless to say Lahn was forced to recant within weeks of  his announcment declaring his findings null and void as the anti-Science creationists sprang into action.  Just recently of course James Watson was forced to recant over similar comments regarding Africans.  Watson was fired from his job; so far as I know Lahn was allowed to keep his.  Thus bigots censor the truth.

     The question is whether the same brain development is shared by all five species of Homo Sapiens or does the next evolutionary step surpass the abilities of the last.  I’m afraid the latter must be true or there would be no reasonn to distinguish Homo Sapiens from its hominid predecessors. The latter would still be among us fully able to compete otherwise.  Logic must prevail against Liberal bigots.

     While many argue that the First Born left Africa to populate the world I do not find the opinion credible.  If certain genetic markers indicate that the other four species evolved from the First Born that should explain the genetic markers.

     What very likely happened is that the proto-Europeans who, let us call Homo Sapiens II- HSII- having evolved were either driven from or chose to leave Africa.  Whether the Semites and Mongolids evolved from the First Born or whether they later evolved from HSII isn’t clear but I suspect the former in the case of the Semites and the latter in the case of the Mongolids.

     It would seem that a sub-species once evolved has its set of attributes that can be developed within limitations but are incapable of change.  Thus there were genetic changes to the brain of those evolved from the First Born while the First Born must remain mentally constituted as he was when he evolved one hundred fifty thousand years ago.

     Nevertheless he was the first state of Homo Sapiens, the Main Evolutionary Stem.  Obviously in the evolution of a genus there can be and have been many dead ends such as the Neanderthal of which we know but there were probably many dead end offshoots from the Main Stem over the twenty-five million year course of brain building.

     While the Semite and Mongolid are more developed than the First Born they must be dead end evolutionary shoots.  The main Stem of Evolutionary development was passed to the people who settled the Mediterranean Basin as it lay exposed during the last Ice Age.  When they evolved isn’t clear but I imagine it may have been perhaps fifty thousand years after the First Born, say, one hundred thousand years ago.

     With them the capacity for Civilization began.  The First Born never created a civilization.  Aided by additional genetic brain development the Meds approached life with an early scientific vision.  Sometime later, perhaps another fifty thousand years, a further improvement in brain capacity created HSIII.  Thus as the Neanderthal still roamed Europe with Homo Erectus still living in the East, and there is a problem there, the First Born occupied sub-Saharan Africa, the Semites the Arabian Peninsula, the Mongolids East Asia, HSII the Med Basin, and as groups will not tolerate other groups HSIII was driven away from HSII to occupy the area between the Caspian and Aral seas or perhaps the Central Asia steppes cheek by jowl with the Mongolids.  That might seem to indicate that HSIII and the Mongolids are fairly closely related.

     Van Daniken and others like to posit the notion that civilization began when extra-terrestrial  visitors having landed and been greeted cordially, which is very unlikely,  in a most friendly fashion instructed the rude savages who had no understanding into a very high civilization nearly overnight.  Nice fantasy, although before you condemn this school remember accredited scientists believe both water and life arrived on Earth as extra-terrestrial hitchhikers on meteors.

     I believe neither account.  HSII began a long laborious effort to rise from ingnorance to knowledge the old fashioned way, hard work.  Nor do I think it took that long for them to begin.  Most scholars think that discovering the shortest day of the year took ninety-five thousand years for HSII to do.  HSII could never have been that stupid.  Building the tools to pass on the knowledge was a slow laborious process but certain men recognized the possibilities immediately and began to act on them.

     Knowledge is a dangerous thing especially when that knowledge contradicts perceived reality as Bruce Lahn’s and James Watson’s treatment shows us to this very day.  Thus, whatever the avant garde learned that the masses couldn’t accept had to be kept secret.  In order for the work to go forward colleges of cognoscenti had to be formed.  In order to protect them they had to be made inviolable or sacred.  Hence Religion and the Priesthood arose.

     The Priesthood was originally meant to develop and protect these acquisitions of knowledge.  This function would endure until the differentiation of knowledge became noticeable in eighth century Greece.  From that point on knowledge and thought take on a role independent of religion.  From that point on the Priesthood had outlasted its function.  Instead of encouraging the growth of knowledge it chose to suppress it.

     Thus the tradition of denigrating the Priesthood arose.  Edgar Rice Burroughs took this stance throughout his work.  ‘Religion’ per se is imagined to be OK but the Priesthood had corrupted it.  Burroughs and others imagined a time when a ‘pure religion’ a ‘natural religion’ existed.  The differentiation of Religion into its three components or, in other words, the increase of knowledge was the culprit.

     The Theosophist Helena Blavatsky sought to reconcile the three parts into one whole as it had once been.  In point of fact Science was subsuming the other two.

     Given a few thousand years of observation, if indeed, it took that long, a method for determining the shortest day of the year is relatively easy.  Certainly the big brained HSII could tackle that problem.

     The means of proof are indirect of course, but I believe shortly after leaving Africa for the Mediterranean Basin HSII did discover how to determine the Winter Solstice.  With that discovery the worship of the Sun began.  This would then evolve over the next ninety-eight thousand years into the religion of the Unconquerable Sun as practiced by the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and not just coincidentally in the religion of the Christ.  The Christ is a Sun King.  I say the Christ and not Jesus Christ because the latter name is a title affixed to the discredited Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth.  More on that later.

     Having once determined the length of the year it soon became obvious that by counting forward, the length of a sun cycle was approximately three hundred and sixty-five days.  This is not a difficult task although it may have taken a few decades or even hundreds of years to get it right especially as that extra quarter day every year would have been a real clinker.

     Once having determined the length of the year the college of Priests could then determine the time of the recurrence of natural events during the seasons.  When we speak of ‘Time’ this was when time was born.  Then gradually, in however crude a form the concept of the months came into existence.  These divisions which numbered twelve became known as the Zodiac.

     This was the beginning of the Astrological Religion of which Pisces or Christianity is only one Age.  As we know the Zodiac only as the band of astral constellations surrouding the planet the divisions of the Zodiac make no sense.

     First let me explain the terrestrial meaning of the signs then I will explain how and why they were translated to the heavens.

2.

The Zodiac

     It is best to begin with the Winter Solstice which is when the Unconquerable Sun triumphant once again begins to wax toward the Summer Solstice when the forces of evil triumph driving Sol ever backward until once again with the Winter Solstice the Sun conquers yet once more beginning to wax.  This is the central myth of the Mediterranean.

     I can only apply the modern Zodiacal symbols which in themselves are of Cretan-Greek origin dating back to at least -2000.  One may assume that over the millennia the symbols were modified but the meanings remained the same.

     At the beginning of the year we have Sagittarius the Archer who is half horse half man.  The horse corresponds to the first half of the year while the Archer facing the new year shoots his arrow into the air.  The destination of the arrow is the Summer Solstice when I imagine it strikes Sol Invictus in the heel, much as Cancer the Crab seized Heracles by the heel dragging him toward the waters in symbol of the Sun’s decline.

     After Sagittarius is Capricorn, half goat half fish.  The fish probably denotes the beginning of the Spring rains while I am unsure of what the goat signifies, perhaps pointing to the rutting season.

     Up next is a very important sign.  Soon to be the prevailing age is that of Aquarius.  In the Greek Zodiac this sign is governed by Hera.  Indeed, the male god Aquarius is pouring out water onto Hera as the symbol of the Earth.  The male fertilizes Hera in her capacity as Virgo the Virgin.  Soon the Earth will sprout up into Virgin Birth.

     Next is Pisces which denotes the rainy season followed by Aries the Ram.  The Spring equinox occurs on March 21st in Aries.  Equinox as I’m sure everyone knows means an equal day and night.  Thus on March 21st the new year begins in earnest.  Christ is risen.  The Ram may be thought of as butting the new growth from the ground much as in the Greek illustration where Persephone is rising from the ground aided by Hermes and Apollo who chip the earth away to make her rise easier.

     Taurus the Bull is just that, a figure representing the exuberant vitality of the new growth.

     Gemini or the Twins passes the now nearly waxed year on to Cancer when Sol Invictus once again temporarily meets his match.  Cancer is represented as a crab because the crab having captured a victim moves sideways or backwards indicating the shortening days.  Thus while the period after the Winter Solstice seems to fly by as represented by the arrow the summer months seem to slowly recede.  I don’t know about you but the second half of the year seems to be about twice as long as the first half to me.

     Cancer is followed by Leo the Lion when the sun is at its seeming strongest.  While the warmth of the sun has made everything grow and prosper the blazing heat of the sun of July causes growth to wither and die.  Thus Virgo the Virgin succeeds Leo.  This may be a little hard to follow but the Earth becomes barren once again or virgin.  After the bath of rain virgin growth will begin again.  Thus Hera who is both virgin and matron governs Aquarius who provides the showers in the Greek Zodiac.

     Then follows Libra with her scales.  the Autumn Equinox begins this period.  Once again the night and day are equal hence Libra’s scales tip toward winter at this point.

      Rounding out the year then is Scorpio the Scorpion.  Its significance possibly is that it kills the old year by biting it on the heel.  Sagittarius rises once again to shoot an arrow as the Unconquerable Sun marches on to victory.

     It’s a pretty story.

     Now, all the time the colleges of Priests were organizing this calendar they were watching the heavens.  Much later the Hermetics would be given credit for the formula ‘As above, so below’ and vice versa.  It is absolutely ridiculous to attribute the origin of the slogan to such late times.  The roots of almost everything can be projected back to very early times.  Actually everything can.

     Having watched the skies while having developed the Zodiac as an annual terrestrial cycle, these ancients then transposed the Zodiac into the heavens.  While watching the sky they noticed without knowing the reason the declination of the planet, that the North Pole because of the resultant wobble described a circle taking about 25,000 years to do so.  They designated this phenomenon the Great Year.

     Using the formula as above, so below it became clear that the Great Year must have twelve divisions just as the lesser terrestrial year does.  So they merely transposed the Zodiac with the same twelve divisions and the same signs onto a belt of stars on the horizon which they organized into constellations that seemed to correspond to the signs.

     As each sign corresponded to something over two thousand years in duration these periods were designated Ages with the corresponding qualities of the signs.  Hence, when you haven’t seen someone in an age you literally mean two thousand some odd years ago.

     How long it took the Ancients to discover the Great Year is beyond me but as I believe the discovery was made by observations rather than mathematics I assume a full cycle to a cycle and a half, perhaps a full fifty thousand years.

     There wasn’t any hurry as a lot of other details had to be worked out first.  Technology always has to catch up with imagination.

     It’s all very well to say this but if true there must be historical evidence to verify its possibility, right?  I’ll do my best.  In the first place nothing was ever discovered, invented or developed over night.  The times for things to come into existence are immense.

     Even the transmission of this knowledge from generation to generation is an immense problem.  The Priesthood must have spent great effort to first indoctrinate novices then drill them in the essentials so that they could in turn pass on the information.

     One is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 when the art of printing had been lost so that cadres of priests walked around memorizing the great books to pass on to the novices so that the works wouldn’t be lost.

     Things were developing nicely when disaster struck destroying this first effort at civilization lock, stock and barrel.  Having moved into the Basin during the last ice age, that ice age now ended.  The waters began rising and continued to rise for several hundred feet.  This must be the Great Flood which has come down to us from Mesopotamian records.  There can be no other of this magnitude.

     When the waters stopped rising the Mediterranean had assumed its present form.  Some scientists say the waters rose very rapidly but still they couldn’t have risen so rapidly that the people couldn’t flee.  Naturally they fled to the high places.  This was the littoral of Africa, especially the best watered location, the effluence of the Nile and Crete, Pelasgian Greece and Phoenicia in the East and Spain and Sicily in the West.  Apprently a group made their way into Sumer.  Some say all civilization from West to East was the result of this disaster.  I believe that it is so.

     One asks do the civilizations have anything in common that would indicate a common origin?  Yes, they do.  For my purposes here a thing in common they all have is the Zodiac.  They all share a form of the Astrological Religion.

     The material aspects of the civilization perished beneath the waters.  The more important intellectual heritage  was preserved as the colleges of Priests fled to different locations.  Egypt appears to have gotten the Mother Lode with Crete and Sumer next.  Spain and Italy received little which probably indicates that the Metropolis was the on the South Side of the Basin.  I suspect it was opposite the islands of Malta.

     Crete may have indoctrinated Pelasgia or possibly a college reached the mainland.  This much is certain, when the Greeks arrived in Pelasgia c. -1700 they brought no knowledge of the Zodiac or the Astrological Religion with them.  The whole of Greek civilization was based on this earlier knowledge which must therefore have been highly develoed before -2000.  Thus no Greek in +- 100 sat down and by a brilliant stroke of cogitation developed the astrology in a moment.

     To begin with Mesopotamia.  In their myth the fifth king after the Flood was the Lugal Banda.  He comes into power as the Age of Aries begins.  Therefore the Sumerians believed the Flood took place four kings or Ages previously.  That would place the Flood either at the transition from the Age of Virgo to the Age 0f Leo or perhaps into the Age of Leo.  That would amount to eight thousand years or so before 2000 BC.  Are we on track for the ending of the ice age?  Yes, we are.

     Going to Egypt, the Sphinx which was originally a lion with a woman’s head, was probably shaped at approximately the same time.  It is placed beside the Place Of The First Time over which the Great Pyramid is built.  The Place Of The First Time is a mound or hillock which was believed to be the first place to emerge from the Flood.  This also fits the time frame.

     Now let us go to Crete and Hellenic Greece.  Crete was a very ancient civilization when the Hellenes or Greeks first arrived.

     The Greeks were a people who had formerly lived in today’s Armenia at the Eastern edge of the Black Sea.  It is believed that a pharaoh made an expedition to the area about -1900.  I believe it probable.  Soon after this date the Hittites dropped down into Anatolia, modern Turkey, where they became a power relative to both Mesopotamia and Egypt.

     The Greeks began a migration around the Euxine, now the Black Sea, dropping down into Pelasgia from the North.  They apparently brought little or no religion with them, taking over the religious structure of the various Aegean peoples.  Zeus was a Cretan god and not Greek.  Hera was indigenous to the Argive area being Pelasgian in origin.

     At some point after the Greeks had captured the Oracle at Delphi they brought Cretan priests from the island to staff it.  Hence Hellenic religion is a reflection of the original Astrological Religion.

     Zeus who succeeded his father Cronus became the religious icon along with Hera of the Arien Age in Greece.  His father Cronus was the male archetype of the preceeding Taurean Age.  Cronus’ father Saturn was the archetype of the Geminian Age.  So Greek Astrological Religion can be traced back to at least -6000.  Further investigation will probably uncover at least the Cancerian and Leonine Ages.

     Now, if the Astrological Religion was operative in the Age of Leo then its origin must also have been Ages before.  Thus while it may be uncertain exactly when or in detail how the religion originated it must have been inherited from a previous civilization that existed in the Mediterranean Basis.  Call it Atlantis or what you will.

     As Zeus was the archetype of the Arien Age who had succeeded his father who was not killed but emasculated and banished to far Tartarus, which is to say 180 degrees due West of sunrise in the Zodiac it was augured that Zeus would have a son who would replace him.  Of course.  At the transition from Aries to Pisces.  The son was Dionysus.  However when the Age of Pisces rose the intellectual and racial situation was so confused that a Semitic prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, was given the mantle while the Greek cult of Kyrios Christos, based on Dionysus, was attached to him so that he became Jesus the Christ or Jesus Christ.  Dionysus in a Semitic form

     Now let us look a the evolution of the relationships of the sub-species of Homo Sapiens as they then stood.

 Continued in Part Something Of Value II-2

Posted in Biology, Christ, Civilization, Consciousness, Greek Mythology, Hera, Heracles, Hermes, Jesus, Messiah, Mythology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Science, Uncategorized, Writing, Zeus | 2 Comments »

Addendum To Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

November 16, 2007

Addendum To Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

An Analysis Of Chap. I, Tarzan The Untamed

By

R.E. Prindle

 

 

I hope I will be excused for submitting an analysis of only the first Chapter of Tarzan The Untamed. It seems to be very significant while justice couldn’t be done to its remarkable content within a full book review.

Tarzan The Untamed is unusual in that it took ERB a little over a year to write. A very long time for him. The book is also one of the longest Tarzan volumes.

The book was begun three months before Armistice Day on November 11, 1918. This was a tremendously busy period for Burroughs as in January of 1919 he severed his lifelong ties with Chicago forever, moving to Los Angeles. The evidence of the first chapter undoubtedly written by him in August of ‘18 is that this was an especially traumatic period of life for him.

He said he walked out on Emma several times during their marriage. The external evidence of Tarzan The Untamed, Tarzan The Terrible and Tarzan And The Golden Lion is that this period was one of them. At the very least this was a very stormy period for him in his marriage.

The Chapter in question can be divided into three episodes: The killing of Jane and Tarzans discovery of the deed, his reversion to a ‘great white ape’, and the confrontation with the panther. As David Adams has pointed out, whenever a leopard or panther is involved Burroughs is dealing with his sexual problems.

Writing in 1918-19 Burroughs antedates the story to the Fall of 1914 just after the Great War began. He seems to have been particularly aroused by the War. Much to the amazement of his publisher he wanted to become a war correspondent. He was unable to find a place. His writing during this period is replete with references to the War.

It seems possible to relate the death of Jane in the Fall of 1914 to Emma and the Mad King which was written between 9/26 and 11/2 in the Fall of 1914 when the Great War was in progress as reflected in ERB’s story. In the earlier story, ‘Barney Custer of Beatrice’, Barney had performed great services for the Princess Emma, done everything he could do to win her love and trust but she remained distant and distrustful. As the Princess Emma’s attitude refects that of Emma Burroughs this refusal to trust him must have infuriated ERB who at the time must have felt that he done everything a woman could expect of a man. He, in the character of Waldo in 1913’s Cave Girl Part I, actually tells Nadara, who had the same attitude as Princess Emma, that.

ERB’s and Emma’s relationship must have been strained over the intervening four years perhaps reaching a crisis at this time as ERB appears to have walked out at some time in this period although with the turmoil of moving and resettling it is difficult to tell when.

At any rate the brutal murder of Jane burned beyond all recognition except significantly her jewelry indicates the depth of ERB’s emotions. The jewelry may be especially significant in that ERB lamented that in his impoverished days he had to pawn Emma’s jewelry. That time or those times may have been especially bitter for him.

While it is true that he was persuaded to change the story bringing Jane back to life there seems little possibility for the reader to believe anything but that Jane was actually killed. The implication then is that Emma was dead to ERB. He had always regretted marrying Emma, or marrying at all, even going to the extent of saying that Tarzan should never have married which is to say himself. One wonders why, if he felt so strongly he didn’t seek a divorce at this time.

That is how ERB resolves that sexual problem of his wife. ERB then inserts a long paragraph explaining that now that Jane is dead Tarzan reverts to his original identity of the ‘great White ape’ or pure beast. It is explained that he never felt comfortable in his thin veneer of civilization. He assumed it merely because it pleased Jane and now that she is dead he no longer has any use for the guise. Hence as he stalks through the jungle in pursuit of the Germans he does so as a stalking beast no different than a lion or tiger. But more intelligent. He may revert to the beast but he doesn’t abandon the intellectual trappings of the veneer of civilization. Still got Daddy’s knife at his side.

Then in the last third of the chapter having resolved his heterosexual problem he turns to another serious aspect of his sexuality, that of his feeling of emasculation. That aroused homosexual feelings in him that he stoutly rejected.

ERB gave voice to this part of his psychology in Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid, or otherwise, The Oakdale Affair of 1917, the previous year. Whether there are indications of homosexual feeling between Bridge and Billy Byrne in ‘Out There Somewhere’ is not clear to me at this time. I would have to read it again with that object in mind but they are probably there. As there are abundant indications of the sexual malaise in his subsequent writings it would seem clear that having solved one sexual problem by having others kill it he then turned to the emasculation problem that he had to deal with by himself alone, killing it.

In all other instances where the leopard or panther symbol appears women are involved except in one instance involving the male ape, Akut, in Beasts of Tarzan. There are definite homosexual overtones in that episode. As Tarzan confronts the male panther in this instance alone the beast must refer to Burroughs own sexual ambivalence. Especially as in this instance ERB combines the Panther motif with the terrific storm and extreme darkness.

The theme of storm and leopard is most dramatically portrayed in Tarzan And The Leopard Men of 1931 that opens with leopard men slashing victims, is followed by a terrific storm and succeeds to the confrontation between Old Timer/ERB and Kali Bwana/Florence.

Tarzan the Invincible of 1930 has the terrific storm as Tarzan and La come close to sexual consummation.

So, in this story almost separate from the rest of the novel, the story opens with the brutal murder of Jane followed by Tarzan’s confrontation with Sheeta in the terrific storm.

In this story we learn that Tarzan has some favorite trees. I can’t think of another instance in the oeuvre where Tarzan returns to a tree. In every other instance he merely selects a new tree for the night. In this instance having discovered the murdered Jane he goes to a tree he has often used. I don’t know what that means sexually.  Perhaps if he had walked out on her before this he had some place he favored until reconciled.

Goro plays a prominent role. Unlike Greek mythology with which ERB was familiar where the moon is feminine in Burroughs mind the moon is masculine.

Thus it is night with the moon shining although a storm is building. Tarzan climbs the giant bole of the tree to find Sheeta sleeping on his mat in the crotch of the great limb. Thus the emasculation lurking in Burroughs’ subconscious haunts his nighttime bed. At this point the storm begins to break with gale force winds. Clouds obscure the moon and it gets dark, very dark, as dark, one might say as the tomb. It is a peculiarity of Burroughs’ heroes that they can see or find their way in the dark where you or I couldn’t. This is a very potent subconscious symbol. I’m not yet clear on Burroughs’ use of the symbol of darkness.

The Panther in this instance is a male as Burroughs refers to it as ‘he’. Thus in the night in his bed Tarzan comes upon a male sexual symbol. A quote:

Quote:

It was very dark now, darker even than it had ever been before, (see, we’re getting very serious) for almost the entire sky was overcast by thick black clouds.

Presently the man-beast paused, his sensitive nostrils dilating as he sniffed the air about him. Then with the swiftness and agility of a cat, he leaped far outward upon a swaying branch, sprang upward through the darkness, caught another, swung himself upon it and then to one still higher. What could so suddenly have transformed this matter-of-fact ascent (matter-of-fact ascent? What does that mean?) of the giant bole to the swift and wary action of his detour among the branches? You or I could have seen nothing- not even the little platform that an instant before had been just above him and which now was immediately below- but as he swung above it we should have heard an ominous growl; and then as the moon was momentarily uncovered , we should have seen both the platform dimly, and a dark mass that lay stretched upon it- A dark mass that presently, as our eyes became accustomed to the lesser darkness, would take the form of Sheeta, the panther.

Unquote.

As this is obviously a dream or subconscious sequence we don’t have to take into account improbabilities such as the moon breaking through the thick black clouds so conveniently.

Security for Tarzan is always being above things so that once his sensitive nostrils pick out Sheeta on his platform by a series of amazing acrobatics among the waving boughs in the rising gale Tarzan finds a secure place on a branch above the platform. He is now in a position to manage Sheeta. Tarzan always deals with Sheeta by descending upon him or leaping on his back.

In ‘Beasts’ he saves Akut by falling on Sheeta’s back as Sheeta descends from a tree on Akut. At the end of Leopard Men he does a standing leap onto Sheeta’s back. In this instance in a driving rain storm amidst lightening and thunder, on a whipping branch in a gale he does a somersault over Sheeta’s snout onto his back. These are acrobatics I would like to witness.

Now, in 1913’s Cave girl Part I Waldo killed the panther when it fell onto his upright spear. Spear equals penis as symbol. That pelt was given to Nadara after Waldo had worn it himself for some time. If the pelt is associated with both a homo and hetero sexuality homo in the sense of emasculation then there is a real sexual ambivalence indicated. In the case of Cave Girl Waldo assumed the masculinity of the Panther thus augmenting his own to its former state then having regained his masculinity he was able to invest Nadara with his love.

Jane is dead here so that it appears that Tarzan/Burroughs, still troubled by ambivalence as is also evidenced in 1917’s Bridge And The Kid where the Kid is a woman dressed as a man very ambivalently. In that story Bridge/Burroughs is very relieved to discover this boy he has fallen in love with is really a girl. Using his spear, a symbol of the penis, to goad Sheeta to an attack Tarzan retreats in gale force winds to the extremity of a large limb followed by the cat. Had the limb broken one assumes that ERB may have succumbed to his emasculation or latent homosexuality as he plunged back to earth. On earth he has to deal with realities. This is reminiscent of Heracles. Tarzan is a jungle Heracles. Having gotten Sheeta far out on the limb where his footing is insecure, it is at this point in the violence of the storm and wind that he somersaults onto Sheeta’s back.

Sheeta then loses his balance falling from the safety of the trees to earth with Tarzan on his back. Landing splay footed he is smashed to the ground by Tarzan’s weight. Unable to rise in time he is stabbed to death by Tarzan using his father’s knife.

Thus it would appear that so long as Tarzan is in the trees or his imagination he doesn’t really have to deal with earthly problems. But, once on the earth he has to deal with problems directly. As he has killed Sheeta on the earth one is to assume that he believes he has solved the problem of his sexual ambivalence. However the storm rages for a full twenty-four hours with whatever meaning that may have.

Thus in this traumatic day and night Tarzan/ERB’s heterosexual relationship is ended while we are led to believe he slays his emasculated homosexual ambivalence.

Having killed Sheeta Tarzan gathers an armful of fronds that in no way hinder his climbing the giant bole of the tree.

Quote:

Laying a few of the fronds upon the poles he lay down and covered himself against the rain with the others and despite the wailing of the wind and the crashing of thunder, immediately fell asleep.

Unquote.

Good thing the gale didn’t blow the fronds that covered him away. But this is a dream sequence, why would they?

Remember that these scenes of the killing of Jane and ERB’s dealing with his senseof emasculation are occurring in the Fall of 1914 at the time he was in fact writing the sequel to The Mad King, Barney Custer.

In that case Maenck was killing Barney’s alter ego Leopold while Emma/Emma stood round indecisively pondering whether to accept Barney/ERB in his new role as King. In other words ERB’s old loser self was dead while he was permanently assuming his new role as the successful ERB. In Untamed Jane/Emma is killed while Tarzan/ERB slays another troublesome alter ego or sexual problem.

In point of fact Emma Burroughs was quite right to insist that Jane not be killed. Had ERB let the death stand there would have been a gross inconsistency in the oeuvre as he already had Jane playing a prominent role in Jewels of Opar in 1915. Such a glaring inconsistency might have seriously compromised the on going story, actually a roman-a-fleuve, perhaps endangering its continuing success.

The Untamed in the title undoubtedly refers to ERB who is proclaiming his independence from Emma and the bonds of marriage. This theme too was explored in 1913’s Cave Girl which was concerned with the issue of marriage and free love.

Waldo in that story insisted upon waiting to consummate the love between he and Nadara until a minister was handy while she was puzzled as to why there was a need to wait when they were obviously meant for each other.

Untamed begun in Chicago would be finished in Los Angeles under very different circumstances than Burroughs’ life in the Windy City. As the story finished he would be the proud possessor of his own empire- Tarzana.

Burroughs just keeps getting more and more complex.

Posted in 1913, 1917, 1919, Cave Girl, Chicago, Civilization, Doppelganger, Dreams, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Emasculation, Heracles, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Subconscious, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Unconsciousness, Writing | Leave a Comment »
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