Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7: Into The Lost Land
July 6, 2008
Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7:
Into The Lost Land
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Dylan, Bob, Chronicles Vol. I, Simon And Schuster, 2004
Prindle, R.E. Exhuming Bob, VIII The Walls Of Red Wing, idynamo,wordpress.com 2008
Thompson, Toby, Positively Main Street, U. Minnesota, 2008, reprint from 1971
http://www.hibbing.org/dylan1/story.html Life In Hibbing: Hibbing Chamber Of Commerce
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/85-dec.htm Bob Dylan Is Not Like A Rolling Stone Interview, Spin Magazine, Volume One, Number Eight, December 1985
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan 1978
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan February 1966
1940
Abe And Beattie
In attempting to put together a reasonable facsimile of Bob’s life in Hibbing and Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City as he mythologized it in his chapter of Chronicles, The Lost Land, I have come to the following tentative conclusions.
Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota on 5/24/41. In 1943 he was taken to Hibbing where he lived from then until graduation from high school in the Spring of 1959.
Within the concept of normal Bob had a fairly advantaged childhood. His parents were indulgent buying him anything he wanted while providing adequate pocket cash. Bob’s family was one of the more important in town both within the Jewish community and the town at large. In what appears to have been a tight small town social scene Bob either excluded himself or was excluded from the dominant social groups within which he had a right to be included.
Perhaps Bob’s conception of the Hibbing period could be best interpreted from his favorite movie, Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. Bob is said to have seen the movie several times. This was unusual as few people ever saw a movie more than once. He would have been a very impressionable fifteen at the time. Most of us didn’t have the money while quite frankly few movies, if any, were worth watching twice including Rebel Without A Cause. I was seventeen when I saw it and while I was in awe I wasn’t submerged. Of course Bob’s relatives owned the theatres so he got in for free.
As he set up a Dean shrine in his basement which greatly offended Father Abe we may be justified in assuming that Dean was a controlling influence in his life from the time he saw the movie. It is of interest that Abe was to remove the Dean shrine from the basement after Bob left replacing it with a shrine to his own son Bob Dylan ne Zimmerman.
Abe Zimmerman (1911-1968) worked for Standard Oil in Duluth when Bob was born. According to the C of C he lost his job in 1943 moving to Hibbing where his wife’s family, the Stones, could help the young couple. Why Standard Oil should lay Abe off in the middle of the war during a manpower shortage seems to pose a question. As can be seen from the photograph of Abe and Beattie above borrowed from the Flickr photostream of <drineevar> he was a well set up handsome man. He appears to be exceptionally self-possessed, sound in the eyes. Beattie appears to be a haughty high fashion queen which would accord with later facts.
Abram Zimmerman, for such was his name. Usually called Abraham, the name on his tombstone is Abram, and his two brothers Maurice and Paul bought the Micka Electric Company in 1943 changing the name to Zimmerman Appliance. In 1968 Paul Zimmerman told Thompson that they had been in business for twenty-five years which would mean 1943 although the date seems odd.
According to the C of C Abe came down with polio in 1946 requiring a lengthy convalescence. The C of C says that the Zimmermans bought Micka’s after his convalescence but if Paul Zimmerman is accurate it would have to have been 1943. There would be no record of what Abe did for a living then from 1943 to 1946. As Bob says both his uncles served in the Army it would seem that they bought Micka’s going into the Army shortly thereafter leaving Abe to tend the business.
Maurice and Paul became President and Vice-President of the corporation while Abe siginficantly assumed the controlling post of Secretary-Treasurer. Managed the money, paid the bills.
During the fifties at least Abe spent a fair amount of money on both Bob and Beattie. Angel Marolt whose family bought the Zimmerman residence after Abe’s death was trying to tell him of Beattie’s several fur coats, diamonds and Cadillac but Thompson says he wasn’t paying attention.
Thompson quotes Echo Helstrom as saying that the Zimmermans had stores in both Hibbing and Duluth. Having a customer base of approx. 250,000 makes more sense when one considers the amounts of Abe’s expenditures and the fact that the profits had to be split three ways.
The C of C describes Abe as a ‘big man’ in town partial to those big thick long cigars.
The Dylan Home
The couple had enough money on arrival to buy the large nine room house that Bob grew up in so Abe must have been well paid at Standard Oil before he was laid off. Both he and Beattie are well dressed in the picture while Beattie is actually overdressed.
Bob was entrolled at Alice School for his kindergarten year in 1946 at five years of age. The status of Alice School is unclear. Perhaps it was closed the following year or consolidated with the Hibbing High complex as Bob was transferred. Hibbing High housed kindergarten through twelve as well as the Jr. College. Thompson describes it as a huge and rambling building.
So from first grade to graduation Bob was with the same group of students. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to move into town in tenth grade and try to break into that one. While he wouldn’t have known them all well he must have known the entire student population on sight. This presents the problem then of why Bob, who was the son of the Big Man in town, wasn’t included in the top social cliques. Those cliques undoubtedly formed early persisting through graduation. If Bob was in one he was either forced out early or found it uncongenial to remain for whatever reason. Perhaps he thought his Jewishness excluded him. So if something happened we don’t know what it was and won’t; unless Bob tells it’s going to be difficult to trace.
Growing up in a small town anyone with any ambition looks around and sees very limited opportunities. Working for his father wasn’t a viable option. Not everyone wants to be a doctor or lawyer either. Nuclear Science is OK but a lot of those guys are out of a job now too. My next door neighbor when I was a kid for one.
Bob’s mind turned early to music and then to Rock and Roll. While Rn’R went on to conquer the world and become as respectable as such a spectacle could it was definitely considered discreditible and low class almost volunteer outlawry in the fifties. At the very least it was ‘pimple’ music. It took a certain amount of courage to say you liked Elvis Presley. Pat Boone was set up as his rival and you had better say you liked ol’ White Bucks. If you don’t think Elvis was considered a social criminal check out a couple of his movie roles like King Creole or Jailhouse Rock. What was the Colonel thinking? Clown roles, that’s all Elvis ever got.
And then Bob chose as his hero and model Little Richard. People looked at you funny if you said you
Young Bob On Harley
liked Little Richard! I mean, Bill Doggett was a respectable Negro with music you could understand, Fats Domino was as lovable as a chubby ten year old but Little Richard! They hadn’t even created the ghetto he could come out of. His band might have passed but then he opened his mouth. If there was ever a direct challenge to middle class sensibilities Tutti-Frutti was it. Not only was the song incomprehensible it was about queers. Nobody ever quoted the lyrics correctly, while I’m walking around saying ‘Tutti Frutti, I want Rudy?’ What does that mean? I hope no one overheard me. So when Bob gets up, ignoring Pat Boone entirely, and launches into some screaming vision like Rip It Up or She’s Got It or God only knows what, was the crowd taken aback? Chuckle, chuckle.
So Bob having opted for the lifestyle was forced to associate with the hoody crowd or have become a loner. Besides Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider had appeared in 1956 that began a cult of The Loner that peopled the early sixties. These guys, who were by no means rebels but deep thoughtful guys who had a line on the truth denied anyone else and that penetrated sham and hypocrisy sat alone ever ready to resolve a situation setting things right were highly romanticized fellows. There were as many Loners in those days as there were Hawkeyes a couple generations later. So Bob wouldn’t necessarily have been thought of as weird, strange but a Loner. A Loner was next door to weird and strange. Thin line if you get my meaning.
On the other hand the C of C describes the L&B Cafe as a regular jumping Bop Street right there in the heart of Hibbing, Minnesota. Bands set up and played continuously. They knew how to party in Hibbing. The C of C even says there was a radio station in town playing Bob’s kind of music thereby contradicting every other source even Bob. He says he had to go to Shreveport on the radio waves to get his kind of music. In this case I’m betting on Bob.
The C of C tells of Bob’s musical debut like this putting the best possible face on it:
Described by fellow students as polite, easy to talk with, and somewhat introspective, it was a total shock when he pushed back the piano bench and stood up to pound the first notes of a song into the auditorium, electrifying the student body. Kids jumped up, stared at each other open mouthed not knowing what the reaction would be.
Well, yes, they were electried but did they like it?
Rockin' Bobby Zimmerman
According to the C of C, looking back fondly, Bob went over real well with his fellow students. If you like this version don’t check the other sources as this is at variance with every other known account but then this is the Chamber Of Commerce speaking. Up to this point in the C of C account there is no reason for Bob to be as bitter as he is about Hibbing at all.
A note of interest is the reoccurence of Fourth Street in Hibbing, Minneapolis and New York City. Quite a coincidence, I knew there had to be some association with Fourth St. in Hibbing. So far we learn that Bob attended Jewish shule there. Whether the synagogue was also located there isn’t clear. The synagogue Bob attended is no longer anywhere at any rate. Tore it down. It was in the way. Had to go. Even though Bob’s father was the most prominent Jew in town, the President of B’nai B’rith and ADL as well as his business interests, and even though Bob had a mega Bar Mitzvah with four hundred people in attendance some say at the most prominent spot in town, the Androy Hotel, some say at the synagogue, he wished to conceal he was Jewish. This attitude may have contributed to his renouncing the Jewish fraternity house to which he pledged at UM while also hiding his religion in New York. The attitude was strange since he seemed to prefer Jewish musicians around him to the exclusion of goys.
Bob’s father Abe, was quite frankly a marvelous provider, spending very large sums of money on son Bob, wife Beattie and his second son, David. When he died in 1968 the house on 7th Ave., now Bob Dylan Ave. was sold. The owners at the time of Thompson’s visit were the Marolts. Angel Marolt who was at home when Thompson called offered to show him around. One thing he learned was that Bob had a clause in the sale’s contract that allowed him to stay in his old room in the Marolt’s house whenever he was in town. Too weird.
What quirk in Bob’s mind compelled him to live in other people’s houses? Perhaps Rebbe Maier back in 1954 impressed on Bob that Biblical scripture presribes that Jews would live in houses they never built. As an article of religion that injuction is a mind boggler. One can’t predict how anyone’s mind will interpret instruction. Bob who functions out of his subconscious very heavily must have accepted such teachings in literal ways. Rebbe Maier was a definite turning point in Bob’s life. Imagine getting out of school, going upstairs at a Rn’R cafe to sit before the only bearded man you may ever have seen, dressed completely in black with a black yarmulke perched on the back of his crown intoning things like: The Jews shall live in houses they never built and then go downstairs to boogie. Pretty spooky, don’t you think? And then as Bob says, he disappeared like a ghost. Let that roll around your brain for little while and see what you come up with.
Mrs. Marolt was trying to tell Thompson something about Mrs. Zimmerman’s multiple furs, heaps of diamonds, I’m sure all the latest fashions and her own Cadillac.
Bob was indulged to the extent of apparently more than one motorcycle, a car, lots of amplifiers and electronic gear for his bands, whatever he wanted plus free movie admissions and plenty of pocket cash. He must have had a large record collection for a kid as he spent his spare time at Crippas record store ordering the odd title. You can bet Crippas didn’t discount either, charging full bore. At the time (after 1958) stereo was 5.98 and mono was 4.98.
As the profits from a sole Hibbing store divided three ways could not have supported this sort of expenditure, having a store in Duluth could account for it. It is significant also tha Abram died in June 1968 and the store closed a few months later. Was the store a losing proposition for the last few years? Did Bob provide the difference so Abe wouldn’t be embarrassed by going banko? Then with his father gone there was no reason to support Uncles Maurice and Paul?
There really is something happening here, isn’t there?
Also as a petty expenditure for Bob (it would have been huge in my life) according to the C of C:
Almost every day Bob came in after school for his regular snack: cherry pie a la mode and coffee (or Coke.)
And then to dinner? No wonder the young Bob had all that baby fat.
If Echo bought those hot dogs for Bob and bought his story that his dad didn’t give him an allowance she was had in more ways than one.
So, Abe was nothing if not a generous father and husband. Beattie as President of Hadassah as well as a Stone must have made the Zimmermans the most powerful Jews in the syngogue while actually giving she and her husband the means to be petty dictators of the town, I saw something like this in Eugene, Oregon in the sixties and seventies, or, as the C of C says a Big Man and big people.
Bob must have a quirk in his mind to misrepresent his childhood so. He was the Fortunate Son John Fogerty only sings about.
In Thompson’s interview with Beattie he quotes her:
How can you know you have a genius in your house, when all my time is spent trying to feed him and keeping his clothes pressed.
In Bob’s story, The Lost Land, Chloe Kiel is shown ironing Bob’s shirts and at the end of the chapter she ‘slaps’ a plate of steak and fried onions in front of him just before he darts out the door to begin the next chapter, A New Morning, just as in the old days when he returned home from school for lunch and was fed by his mother he darted back to school.
Ironing his shirts and providing free steaks was a signal service for bare acquaintances like Ray and Chloe.
Chloe comes across as cold and indifferent and indeed there is a tinge of resentment and anger beneath Beattie’s statement. Motherly, of course, but there. Still, she doesn’t impress me as any Yiddishe Mama of the Mrs. Goldberg variety. Whether Bob was a good boy or not he does have an ambivalent attitude toward his parents. But then he claims that he was really raised by his grandmother, whether Stone or Zimmerman isn’t clear.
I believe the big change came over Bob with his Bar Mitzvah and I’m not talking puberty alone. According to the C of C Bob attended Jewish shule during his young years. This was done after public school hours. Then in 1953-54 when his Bar Mitzvah was approaching Father Abe sent to Brooklyn, New York to have an ultra-orthodox, almost certainly a Lubavitcher Rebbe, sent to Hibbing to indoctrinate Bob in untra-orthodox teachings. It can’t be any surprise that when Bob exhibited his Jewish reverence after his Jesus indoctrination with the Vineyard Fellowship he chose to show himslef as a Lubavitcher. Welcome home, Bob. The C of C tells it this way:
According to a 1985 Spin Magazine interview by Dave Engel, Bob said it was above the (L&B) Cafe that Rabbi Reuben Maier stayed while giving Bob Hebrew lessons in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. The Rabbi and his wife showed up one day and stayed for a year while Bob got ready for his big event . The article quotes Bob as saying he would learn Hebrew after school or in the evening for an hour, then go downstairs and boogie at the L&B. After completing his Bar Mitzvah the Rabbi just disappeared.
In the interview Bob tells it this way:
There weren’t many Jews in Hibbing, Minnesota. Most of them I was related to. The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of the winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs in the cafe, which was the local hangout. It was a rock n’ roll cafe where I used to hang out, too. I used to go there everyday to learn this stuff either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour, or so, I’d come down and boogie. The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after conducting the bar mitzvah, he just disappeared. The people didn’t want him. He didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a rabbi. He was an embarrassment. All the Jews there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturdays. And I never saw him again. It’s like he came and went like a ghost. Later I found out he was Orthodox. Jews separate themselves like that. Christians, too. Baptists, Assembly of God, Methodists, Calvinists. God has no respect for a person’s title. He don’t care what you call yourself.
The C of C knows the Rebbe’s name was Reuben Maier and Bob Dylan doesn’t? There were enough people in Hibbing to have a temple and shule but they didn’t have a Rabbi? The Rebbe Maier showed up in time for Bobby Zimmerman’s Bar Mitzvah but what? it was the first Bar Mitzvah in Hibbing’s Rabbiless history? No wonder four hundred people showed up. The Jews in Hibbing shaved their heads and worked on Saturday’s? I presume Bob means they didn’t wear beards but shaved their faces unlike the Lubavitcher in white beard and one of those funny round hats. I serously doubt there were three hundred or more Jews walking around Hibbing with shaved heads in 1954.
They took one look at Rebbe Reuben’s weird beard and outre attire and told him to get out of town? Now that I can believe. Beards in ’54 were a sign of great eccentricity or a psychotic desire to draw attention to oneself. But why in ’85 the mysterioso act? He just showed up to teach Bobby Zimmerman, a complete unknown with no direction home Lubavitcher tales like this: (actually this is pretty standard esoteric doctrine adapted for Jewish needs)
The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is. This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years. Six thousand years of this where man has his way and 1,000 years when God has his way. Just like the week. Six days work, one day rest. The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age, Messiah will rule.
Essentially what we have here is a variant of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy along with a little Hebrew Theology. If one looks real closely one can see the outline of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
According to Beattie Bob knew, oh, two hundred words of Hebrew. So much for several years of shule and a year of intensive training by Rebbe Reuben.
Whether Bob knows or admits it, it must be true that Father Abram sent for Reuben to instruct Bob in mysteries that Abe thought were essential to his vision of Jewish religion while they were not part of the services of the Hibbing congregation.
It is possible that Abram brought the Rebbe in on the approval of the congregation who rejected him. The comment by Bob of working Saturdays may be signficant here. The Jewish sabbath begins on Friday sundown and continues to Saturday sundown.
As a Lubavitcher, Rebbe Reuben could not have tolerated working during the sabbath while the congregation found it essential amidst a gentile population. Likewise beards are an integral part of the orthodox religion so that the congregation also refused to stop shaving. The only thing mysterious is why it took Reuben so long to catch on. Or maybe he had a contract for one year and the year was up. Of course Bob did need help on those two hundred words.
So Bob’s upstairs memorizing his two hundred words while the throbbing beat pounds insistently through the floor. The super patient Reuben and his wife never object. Bob shortly joins the revelers with his two hundred Hebrew words rattling round his skull, steps up to the mike and begins screaming: I’ve got a girl and her name is Echo. Hmmm. Quite an image out there in the Lost Land of Bob.
Now indoctrinated in quaint antiquarian rites Bob is bundled off to Webster, Wisconsin and Camp Herzl to steep himself in Israeli style Jewish living. Camp Herzl was conducted as Israel in America so those two hundred Hebrew words came in handy in that surrogate for summer in a kibbutz in the Holy Land.
The summer sojourns must have set Abram back a handsome fee for the times. Six to eight weeks of essentially summer boarding school does have expenses. Abe apparently was deeply religious: in Protestant circles he would have been known as a Fundamentalist nut. He and Mike Huckabee would have gotten along fine. One wonders if younger son David was given the same treatment.
So Bob from 1954 on is definitely the product of two nations. The world of the Three Hanks as the C of C puts it and this world of Adam, Moses and the Messiah. Bob was named after Sabbatai Zevi the last acknowledged Jewish messiah in the seventeenth century, his Jewish name is Sabtai.
As kids we all have a lot to reconcile, begin working out at graduation. Bob had a double load; he had two Bobs to reconcile. Personalities wander and widen in those years, Bob made a clean split. On the one hand he was the twerp Bobby Zimmerman of whom it may be said: There’s no success like failure while on the other he was struggling to be the super successful Bob Dylan in which he failed to assume the mantle so that failure is no success at all. At least he made this split off persona’s name mean something. As a note, it was not generally known Dylan was Jewish until after Blonde On Blonde.
Thus in his movie Renaldo and Clara he is not Bob Dylan. Anybody can be Bob Dylan he says, you can be Bob Dylan. Toby Thompson thought he could be and did a pretty good job of it walking a mile or so in Bob’s shoes. Sounded just like him.
As remarkable as it is that Bob realized his fantasy beyond anything he could have dreamed and became the hugely successful Bob Dylan he created an entire new set of problems whose solution eluded him. Well, you know, there’s something lost and something gained while it’s hard to know whether the gain was worth the loss. However the money has disappeared from the table.
The result then is Bob looking backward from 2004 to create a fantasy of how it was in Ray and Chloe’s place on Vestry Street in NYC. The chapter is approriately titled The Lost Land or possibly Never-Never Land might have been better. The chapter isn’t a complete fabrication but it is fiction. Something like the various incidents might have happened but not exactly the way Bob tells it. The framing story of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel is pure fiction however. They could not possibly have existed.
Bob tells the whole story of the Lost Land within the reference of Ray and Chloe and their fabulous apartment near Vestry below Canal near the Hudson across the street fromt he Cathedral with its bell tower. Thompson got it right.
A troubling aspect of Bob for me is his insistance on bumming other people’s apartments. This seems to be compulsive behavior.
Bob was actually voluntarily homeless from January of ’61 to October or November of the same year when he and ‘roommate’ Suze Rotolo took up digs on Fourth St. I suspect that Father Abe would have been only too happy to supply Bob with funds to live on Vestry Street if he had asked. Bob is simply untrustworthy in any of his stories. As he said of what he learned from folk music: If you told the truth, well and good; if you told the untruth, well and good also, so in Bob’s mind there are no lies, there is only the truth or untruth both having the same value and whichever is more serviceable at the moment. You can’t believe him.
A troubling aspect of Bob’s behavior is his habit of bumming couches in other people’s nests; gaining meaning, as it were, from other people’s lives. Perhaps that was the way he felt of his life in his mother and father’s house. Or perhaps as a Jewish outsider in a goyish land it was his attempt to insinuate himself in the main stream much as he appropriated Woody Guthrie’s persona. Of the houses I have traced they have all been those of goys; he didn’t choose to insinuate himself into the houses of his fellow Jews. His imaginary hosts Gooch and Kiel are obviously goys.
The Lost Land then is a mythologized version of his childhood and first few months in New York City. To my mind Ray Gooch is a combination of Dave Van Ronk, Paul Clayton, Matt Helstrom and his father. Chloe seems simply to be an idealized notion of his mother. (Study her picture for a few moments again.)
As the Gooch frame brackets the period from Bob’s encounter with Gorgeous George to the apartment with Suze Rotolo it must represent a time frame from sometime in ’58 to October ’61. In October Bob Dylan ceased sponging off others to take up his own apartment.
The only one in this time frame he knew who had a large gun collection was Matt Helstrom. The Helmstroms also had a large record collection that Bob listened to. The couch and apartment undoubtedly belonged to Van Ronk while certain exoticisms of Gooch are characteristic of Clayton. The library of Gooch may simply be the New York City Library of which the long narrow room would merely describe the stacks.
The Southern character of Gooch must represent a time after Bob studied the South in the library since there are several references to his Civil War studies. Gooch himself is a Southerner from Virginia gone North which is a symbol in itself. This can be symbolically described as Father Abe being a Jew in Gentile America.
Here then Bob creates or accentuates the more pleasant aspects of his memories in contrast to the very bitter unpleasant memories of the songs. He tells us a great deal about his dream life but little of its realities. At this point I am of the opinion that the party of Camilla ( who Bob says he gets to know quite intimately) is another fabrication of the based on a true story variety.
As Bob would say, folk music taught him that if what you said was true,well and good; if what you said was untrue well and good also. We may probably construe the Lost Land as both true and untrue while a good folk tale. Even the title has a fictive quality a la Edgar Rice Burroughs.
To round off the period back in the C of C milieu of Hibbing: Bob spent his last summer at Camp Herzl in 1957. In the summer of ’58 he was running back and forth between Hibbing and Minneapolis. At that time he would have become familiar with Highway 61.
In his Junior year of ’57-’58 he took up his relationship with Echo Helstrom. They were going steady hence were not supposed to be dating others. As he was in Minneapolis most of the summer he left Echo sitting home alone. She resented this. As the Senior year began she told Thompson, she took a revenge on Bobby returning his token in public in the hall at school. Boy, that hurts.
The feelings must have been much harder than either Bob or Echo portray them. A key problem area is did Bob spend time in Red Wing Reformatory on Highway 61 below Minneapolis and if he did what did he do to receive his sentence: I examine this more fully in Exhuming Bob VIII: The Walls Of Redwing.
He says in Chronicles that he was absent from school from some time at the beginning of April of ’59. He was back at least by the June 5th graduation. His birthday is May 24th. After that date he would have been eighteen and subject to adult sentencing. For what It’s worth he says in his song that no inmate was over seventeen. I’m suggesting that he spent a month of two at Red Wing returning in time for graduation. Certainly a Big Man in town like Abe could have arranged the graduation if he couldn’t get Bob off that time.
The question is what did Bob do? By the middle of this Senior year it appears that he had been in enough scrapes to be known as a troublesome boy; perhaps living out a Rebel Without A Cause persona. Father Abe used his influence up to that time to avoid unpleasant consequences for the lad.
I believe Bob’s song The Chimes Of Freedom tells the story of his crime. Quite simply Echo set him up. She obviously was not quite as complacent as she tells it. See Exhuming Bob VIII: Walls Of Red Wing.
Returning home from Red Wing his parents threw a graduation party for him. Bob was reluctant to attend the party, perhaps with good reason but was persuaded to do so.
This then leaves a very sketchy account of the three or four months of the summer of ’59 for which Bob provides little information. In Walls Of Red Wing I place his stint at Red Wing in August but that is probably wrong. In any event the period from April of ’59 to September of ’59 needs to be explained more fully.
Bob gives some brief details of his stay at Dinkytown but not much. A little bit of the John Pankake episode while avoiding the important details of his theft of Pankake’s records.
Thompson has some good information from Ellen Baker whose father’s folk song collection Bob used extensively.
Then to NYC and his account of The Lost Land segues into his New Morning.
Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob
June 25, 2008
Exhuming Bob X:
Lubavitcher Bob
by
R.E. Prindle
There’s something happening here
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?
-Bob Dylan
Bob En Regalia
In 1979 Bob publicly embraced Jesus as his personal savior. This was widely seen as a conversion to Christianity because Bob went to the Vineyard Fellowship of Tarzana for indoctrination into the Christian mysteries. He could hardly have learned Christianity from Jewish circles although the Jewish group of Jews For Jesus was already active. Pharasaic Jews have always despised Jews For Jesus so that may not have been a viable option for Bob.
While non-Jews may be scandalized by the concept of Jews embracing Jesus there is no reason for them to be astounded. After all Jesus was a Jew, preaching to Jews in the Jewish tradition. The early Christian movement was entirely Jewish. They were Jews of the Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Christianity became a universal religion only after Paul reconstructed it shedding the practices most repellent to gentiles while the Hellennic or Greek religion and philosophy was grafted onto the religion which gave it substance and intellectual vigor displacing Semitic stultification.
There should be little wonder then that Jewish Christianity should resurface two thousand years later with Bob as its Messiah.
Bob was uniquely trained for the role. He grew up in a Christian community dominated by the Hillbilly music on the radio with a large and active Jewish congregation. His father thought of himself as a Jewish scholar while heading the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and ADL. His father was covertly ultra-orthodox.
In 1990 Bob wrote a letter to the editor of a publication called Sister2Sister. (Bob’s Unshakeable Monotheism, Part IV, Scott Marshall http://www.jewsweek.com/ ) in which he said:
…until the entire world believes and obeys the same God, there can be no truth or justice or peace for anyone.
What that means in the age old Jewish notion that as God’s chosen people they are destined to bring their vision of God to all the peoples of the Earth at which time they will become a nation of priests, the rulers and overseers of all others. The Supreme People placed between God and humanity as demi-gods.
The notion did not necessarily occur to Bob in 1990 but was placed in his mind at a much earlier date. It would always have been present in the synagogue. Anyone who has ever attended Jewish services will be be struck by the insistence that Jews are to rule the world and all the peoples. It is the duty of every Jew to further that work.
Whether Bob had the Messianic impulse before his Bar Mitzvah is the question. It may have been there in embryo. In 1954 as Bob was about to turn thirteen his father, Abraham, who obviously believed the proper religious education was lacking in Hibbing sent for a Lubavitcher Rebbe from Brooklyn to come to Hibbing specifically to indoctrinate Bob in the more recondite lore of the ultra-orthodox. The intensity of the instruction would be virtual hypnosis. It was at this point, I believe, that the Messianic impulse was fixed in Bob’s mind.
The indoctrination had devastating results for the young boy’s character and personality. He went off the rails becoming wild and dissolute. In searching for a means to spread the message he had received he hit on music and from there it led into folk music. Folk music had a special appeal because it was a pure expression of the dominant culture. If one subverted folk music one subverted the culture.
Thus after being initiated into folk at Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota Bob left for the Big Apple, New York City. The Folk scene of Greenwhich Village in New York was a virtual Jewish enclave or colony. A great many Jews were already doing what Bob set out to do. Disoriented by his conflicts between his Jewish and Christian education Bob nevertheless set about changing Folk music, discarding the content for Jewish themes while retaining the outer forms. The Jewish world organization realizing they had something in Bob gave him maximum publicity actually turning him into a messianic figure through television and magazines.
The stresses of intense fame to his personality and character were terrific almost destroying him. Bob retreated at the height of his fame in 1966 after having established himself with three terrifically influential record albums. His mind was now focused and somewhat cleared. Placing a large Bible in the middle of his living room for easy reference Bob and his band worked and experimented with the Folk and old timey oeuvre of the White Christian hill people. Once again retaining the forms while stripping the material of the content, he infused Jewish Biblical content which was familiar to the Christian culture into the material. The immediate result was John Wesley Harding which is a Jewish religious album in tradtional White Christian dress.
The result is quite remarkable and on that basis is an astounding work of Jewish genius. Unaware of what was being done to them White Americans could offer no defense except rejection. There were quite a few of us who walked away from Bob at that point. I can’t say that I understood what Bob had done but I felt the insult to my sensibilities.
Thus, in retrospect, Bob’s so-called Christian period became inevitable as his strategy slowly unfolded in his mind. There is no conflict with Bob’s intense Jewishness in his combined religious entities, or reclaiming the Jewish Jesus for Judaism. Nothing could be more natural.
The preemption of the goi culture for Judaism is the astonishing achievement of little Bobby Zimmerman. Long after the fact there are still few who get it.
Note: The old Jewsweek format has been discontinuted. The text is no longer available on that site.
Part 5 Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review
May 19, 2008
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man
Part 5
by
R.E. Prindle
First published on the ezine, ERBzine
Tarzan, Obroski And Burroughs
Burroughs has been ridiculing Obroski right along as an arrant coward. Wherever the action is, Stanley isn’t. When it’s over he shows up ready to fight. When a call for the safe job of kitchen help is made after the porters desert Stanley raises his hand.
The cowardice is in contrast to his magnficent physique. Standing 6’8″ or 9″ in his bare feet while his strength is as prodigious as that of Tarzan. No one in the safari has yet seen Tarzan but he and Stanley are as identical twins. When Stanley becomes fever stricken and disappears from the story the movie cast will confuse Tarzan for Obroski providing some amusing moments.
Over the oeuvre Burroughs uses the divice of a Tarzan double a number of time times. Esteban Miranda in Tarzan And The Golden Lion/Ant Men, here as Stanley Obroski and again in Tarzan And The Forbidden City as Brian Gregory stand out. The doubles are quite obviously aspects of Burroughs’ own character. As the doubles are all cowardly, inept or both one has to assume they represent Burroughs as he perceived himself before becoming a success while Tarzan represents Burroughs as a success. There was obviously a constant psychic tug of war between the two Burroughs. This was something ERB was desperately trying to resolve in favor of the Tarzan persona.
The quesiton is, was he ever successful in resolving the problem by psychologically integrating his personality? At several times in the corpus he seems to have succeeded even to the extent of killing off his old persona. But then there are doubts and Brian Gregory appears a few years later.
If I live long enough I will try a comparison of Miranda, Obroski, Gregory and Burroughs. Notiice the progression of the double from Spanish to Slav to Anglo. The Spaniard was the epitome of worthlessness at the turn of the century while the Slav though higher was despised. Gregory as an Anglo would indicate that Burroughs may have reconciled his self-esteem at least.
As a more or less irrelevant aside it is known that Tennessee Williams (1911-83) was a Tarzan fan. He was twenty-three years old when Lion Man was issued while A Streetcar Named Desire was staged in 1947. It may seem tenuous to make the connection between the names of Stanley Obroski and Stanley Kowalski but there it is. There are resemblances between Stanley-Naomi and Stanley-Blanche allowing for the fictionalizing powers of Williams. There is no proof that Williams specifically read Lion Man that I know of but it is neither impossible or improbable given his admiration for the character. Perhaps the germ of Stanley-Blanche was placed in Williams’ mind in 1934-35 germinating away in his subconscious to blossom eleven or twelve years later. I don’t say it’s so but it is worth investigating.
In the construction of this novel the story of Obroski and Tarzan forms Ring Three. The story moves from Ring Two, The Safari and will segue into the inner ring.
In Chaper 8, The Coward, Burroughs devotes six pages to explaining or rather justifying the character of Obroski. In justifying Obroski Burroughs is justifying himself which is why he took such pains with this book.
During the last Bansuto attack in Chapter 8 Obroski panicked. As the Bansuto attacked from one side Obroski ran off in the opposite direction. Unfortunately the Bansuto were on both sides and Obroski ran into their open arms. Now cornered Obroski fought from reflex: pp. 46-47:
Death stared him in the face! Heretofore Obroski’s dangers had been more or less imaginary; now he was faced with a stark reality.
Terror galvanized his mind and his giant muscles into instant action. He seized the black and lifted him above his head; then he hurled him heavily to the ground.
The black, fearful for his life, started to rise. Obroski fearful for his own, lifted him high overhead and again cast him down. As he did so a half dozen blacks, closed upon him from the tall surrounding grasses and bore him to earth.
His mind half numb with terror, Obroski fought like a cornered rat. The blacks were no match for his great muscles. He seized them and tossed them aside, then he turned to run. But the black he had first hurled to the ground reached out and seized him by an ankle, gripping him; then the others were upon him again and more came to their assistance…In all his life Stanley Obroski had never fought before. A good disposition and his strange complex had prevented him from seeking trouble and his great size and strength had deterred others from picking quarrels with him.
So, while Obroski was a coward when he had time to consider, in the grip of terror he was quite capable of using his great strength and size to fight back.
His cowardice was not his fault or part of his nature. Burroughs reflects further. p. 45:
We are either the victims or beneficiaries of heredity or environment.
Obroski was obviously the result of nurture. Thus we have no responsibility for what we are and can take no credit as we are either victims or beneficiaries. This is a fairly serious position statement.
Stanley Obroski (Burroughs) was one of the victims. Heredity had given him a mighty physique, a noble bearing and a handsome face. Environment had sheltered and protected him throughout his life. Also everyone with whom he had come in contact had admired his great strength and attributed to him courage commensurate with it.
Never until the past few days had Obroski been confronted by an emergency that might test his courage, and so all his life had been wondering if his courage would measure up to what was expected of it when the emergency developed.
He had given the matter far more thought than does the man of ordinary physique because he knew so much more was expected of him than of the ordinary man. It had become an obsession together with the fear that he might not live up to the expectations of his admirers. And finally he became afraid- afraid of being afraid.
It is a failing of nearly all large men to be keenly affected by ridicule. It was the fear of ridicule, should he show fear, rather than the fear of physical suffering, that Obroski shrank from, though perhaps he did not realize this. It was a psyche far too complex for easy analysis.
It is impossible to know for certain at this time what psychology texts Burroughs had been studying but ‘a psyche far too complex for easy analysis’ points in the direction of Freud, Jung or both. ERB seems to have been involved in Depth Psychology of some sort. David Adams finds traces of Jung. I am not prepared to concede so much at present but David may be much more sensitive on that score than myself. I don’t rule it out although I would lean more to Freud as the better known. Still, as I find ERB to be a very inquisitive guy there is no reason he couldn’t have known of both. Either would likely have been mentioned in his varied reading and we know he was an omnivorous reader.
At any rate it seems clear that Obroski’s heredity was overridden by the conditioning of environment. Unable to overcome the conditioning or hypnotic suggestion he became as we find him.
There seems little doubt that here ERB is explaining himself. Obroski and Tarzan are identical in stature and abilities but in order to realize his Tarzanic potential he must overcome his environmental conditionings and assume his proper being.
Whether the emergency Tarzan/Burroughs is facing in his difficulty with MGM or something else it seems likely MGM as the struggle is placed in the context of the MGM/BO Studios filming Trader Horn/Tarzan, The Ape Man.
So Obroski is captured by the Bansuto and made prisoner in their village. Here he encounters Kwamudi, captain of the safari Blacks and a couple porters who had been captured after deserting. Obroski learns that the Bansuto are cannibals and that he will be the man who came to dinner.
Burroughs gets in some sly humor here. Bound and starved Obroski complains about his treatment. p. 51:
“This is no way to treat people you’re going to eat.” grumbled Obroski. “You ought to get ’em fat, not starve ’em thin.”
ERB has already given notice that he is in psychological mode. He says that Obroski’s psyche is too complex for easy analysis, whatever that might be. That’s what we all say and it’s bosh. When I was younger I thought my psyche so unique and complex I wanted to offer myself to science as a specimen. As my own self-psychoanalysis evolved I realized the only thing that made it so complex was the resistance involved in facing the fixations. So with Burroughs. In a few pages he lays out out completely the problem he is facing in symbolical or dream imagery. Only resistance anf fear prevent him from breaking on through.
A psychoanalyst could lay your whole problem before you but if you weren’t ready to deal with it, in other words, overcome the resistance, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You’d think he was talking about someone else. So here ERB lays out his whole problem before you but if you weren’t ready to deal with it, in other words, over come the resistance, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You’d think he was talking about someone else. So here ERB lays out his whole problem. Whether he resolved it is a matter of debate. David Adams thinks not while I have not yet made up my mind.
The problem he is dealing with is his central childhood fixation of John The Bully. I have already gone into this in Doubles and Insanity but it won’t hurt to give a variant interpretation as this very key incident meets with a lot of resistance from Bibliophiles on its own.
As has been noted Burroughs was plagued by dreams of appearing naked in public. Nakedness is a significant theme in the oeuvre. Tarzan himself runs around naked except for a skimpy g-string; so Tarzan’s natural condition and Burroughs dream fears mesh. He has made a virtue of necessity.
In psychological terms John The Bully so emasculated Burroughs that he lost his offensive and defensive armor which is to say to the civilized man his clothes. Burroughs always says of Tarzan that his veneer of civilization went no deeper than his clothes. Nothing could be clearer than the relationship to ERB’s situation on the corner. ERB explains the nature of nakedness to the civilized man. p. 58:
“He says for you to take off your clothers, Bwana.” said Kwamudi, “he wants them.”
“All of them?” inquired Obroski.
“All of them, Bwana.”
(Note the excruciating deliberateness as ERB painfully drags this scene out.)
Exhausted by sleeplessness, discomfort, and terror, (Here ERB makes excuses for himself.) Obroski had felt that nothing but torture and death could add to his misery, but now the thought of nakedness awoke him to new horrors. To the civlilized man clothing imports a confidence that is stripped away with his garments.
So, in real life, Burroughs had been psychologically stripped naked by John having lost his self-confidence. This is an accurate understanding. When he constructed his alter ego, Tarzan, he made him naked in his uncivilized state, hence full of self-confidence though naked, but then clothed him handsomely in his civilized state in which he was uncomfortable. Thus ERB attempted to resolve the problem.
Now when John bullied ERB he forced a split in his personality. while his physical self was humiliated his psychological self split off symbolically taking to the trees for refuge. Hence Tarzan’s fabulous arboreal exploits while he views so many scenes from above in a tree.
Now comes the very interesting scene in Rungula’s village where Tarzan suffers the shock of recognition as he looks down on his own replica from the tree to the ground.
Tarzan is in no rush to visit Rungula’s village, perhaps indicating resistance. Here’s how ERB describes it. p.61:
Tarzan of the Apes was ranging a district new to him, and with the keen alertness of the wild creature he was alive to all that was strange or unusual. Upon the range of his knowledge depended his ability to cope with the emergencies of an unaccustomed environment. Nothing was so trivial that it did not require investigation: and already, in certain matters concerning the haunts and habits of game, both large and small, he knew quite as much if not more than many creatures that had been born here.
For three nights he had heard the almost continuous booming of tom-toms, faintly, from afar; and during the day following the third night he had drifted slowly in his hunting in the direction from which the sounds had come.
Surely an old jungle baby like Tarzan could understand the language of the drums? That is called procrastination.
And so on the third day ‘He was arisen.’ Hmmm. In Tarzan Of The Apes the birth of Tarzan replicated that of Moses and now Obroski is to die while a new Tarzan arises a la Jesus.
I had my attention called to this Moses part while visiting a Jewish site. The writer was marveling that Superman was Jewish and that his birth replicated that of Moses which it does. I had always thought that the two teenage Jewish boys who created Superman were replicating Tarzan’s birth and that may be equally true.
In the Moses story he is born to a Jewish woman who places him in an ark then puts it in the Nile on which he floats downstream to be rescued by an Egyptian princess who rears him among a different people. This story presupposes that heredity overcomes environment which is nonsense. One is not born a Jew one is educated into the identity.
Superman is born a Kryptonite, placed in a rocket ship that crashes into this goyish earth couple’s backyard. They then rear the Kryptonite child as their own who then has a double identity as an ineffective Earthman while retaining his Kryptonite powers. Thus the Jew represents himself as superior to the goy.
Tarzan too is born to a human mother who dies. He is lying in his cradle when the ape, Kala, snatches him up rearing him as her own. The different people Tarzan grows up with are apes. Thus he too has a double identity.
All three stories are identical while Moses is first, Tarzan second and Superman third. Thus in his first incarnation Tarzan appears to be a Moses figure.
In Lion Man Tarzan apperas to be born again when he absorbs his other split off half- Obroski. Thus on the third day Tarzan assumes a Christ like identity.
Many have noted that the intitials of John Carter and John Clayton are JC and they call attention to the fact that they are the same initials as Jesus Christ.
So, here we have Tarzan, a walking dead man so to speak, who after three nights -Good Friday to Easter Sunday- looks down on the other half of his split personality and recognizes himself. The two halves then begin a process of amalgamation becoming one again. So Tarzan/Burroughs is born again or arises from the dead.
Tarzan then unites the Old and New Testaments being at one and the same time both Moses and Jesus Christ. The old Adam and the new Adam. Fairly astonishing stuff. What does it mean?
Tarzan then hauls Rungula up into his tree i.e. John the Bully is brought up to Burroughs split off personality where Tarzan demands that he release Obroski i.e. John restore Burroughs other half to himself while at the same time making him promise to be always kind to Whites.
Obroski then leaves Rungula/John’s village where he joins Tarzan. Thus Burroughs symbolically reunites his split personality or in other words appears to integrate his personality. At least he makes the attempt.
At the very least he has analyzed himself to the threshold of integration. Whether he actually stepped over the threshold is open to doubt. As a comparison let us examine Feodor Dostoievsky’s great nineteenth century novel Crime And Punishment. There is no direct evidence that Burroughs might have read the book but the possibility exists that his curiosity led him to this very famous 1866 novel. If so, Dostoievsky’s analysis of Raskolnikov might have influenced ERB on the unconscious level. I had to read the novel three times to get a conscious grasp of it.
The novel concerns the character’s dependence on women. Raskolnikov is dependent on his mother and sister who make tremendous sacrifices of their own well being to put him through law school. Raskolnikov resents his dependence yet can’t tear himself from it even when offered a simple and easy opportunity to do so. His solution to his psychological problem bypasses analysis for an impossible external one. He decides to symbolically kill his mother and sister hoping thus to free himself. Psychologically this is not a viable method.
As his victim he selects an old female pawnbroker. This woman has large assets stored in her apartment. Thus Raskolnikov takes valuables from her in lieu of the money he is receiving from his mother. In the process he kills the old woman and when her daughter appears he kills her too. Thus he has killed surrogates of his own women. The pawn broker’s body lies before him. To free himself, according to Dostoievsky it is necessary for him to step over the body thus completing the crime. Raskolnikov cannot do this, walking around the body instead thus negating the benefits of his murder.
In Burroughs’ case his imaginary alter ego, Tarzan, convinces Rungula/John to release Obroski/Burroughs from custody. In other words, exorcise the fixation. However, psychologically Rungula/John cannot do this. It is necessary for Burroughs to confront his fixation and recognize it thus negating the hypnotic suggestion that made it his fixation that he is a coward thus freeing himself. That is the only way it can be done. Thus as Raskolnikov did not step over the pawnbroker’s body so Burroughs does not cross over the threshold of integration at this time.
Instead his imaginary self, Tarzan, attempts to teach his temporal self, Obroski, to be brave and fearless. Hence, in what might be seen as high comedy, Tarzan introduces the Faux Lion Man to the real lion. However Tarzan advises Obroski to be careful around Jad-Bal-Ja’s new love of whom Tarzan has no experience.
As soon as Tarzan disappears Obroski/Burroughs who had been freed by John scurries for the security of the lower terrace where he cowers until the Big Bwana’s return. Subsequently he catches fever not unlike Raskolnikov, if Burroughs read Crime And Punishment. Tarzan entrusts the unconscious Obroski to a native chief to nurse. From that point on Tarzan assumes both identities as the movie company who have never seen him and are unaware that he and Obroski are twinlike mistake him for Obroski which Tarzan lets them do. Obroski then dies.
If Burroughs thought he had solved his problem by wishing himself into the role of Tarzan he had to be mistaken. As Jung pointed out in Mysterium Coniunctionis one cannot will one’s fixations away. No matter what temporary success you may enjoy the fixation will out.
In the role of Tarzan Burroughs set himself an impossible task to perform. Tarzan is an ideal to hold before oneself for emulation’s sake but an impossible role to fill. Burroughs admitted this in his posthumously published novel Tarzan And The Madman in which in the end he simply gets into a plane and flies off into the sunset.
The story of the two Lion Men forms the third ring in the story. We will now examine the inner ring, the center of the storm, and then the other side of ring three, the parellel story of the two female lookalikes, Naomi and Rhonda.
Advance to Part 6: The Center Of The Circle
Something Of Value Book II Part 3
February 5, 2008
Book II
Something Of Value
Part 3
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3
Bad Motorcycle With The Devil In The Seat
Don’t go out tonight,
They’re sure to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.
-John Fogerty
(a.) The Evolution Of Religion 0-1875
Prior to, say, -800 the approximate date of Homer’s Iliad, religion was comprosed of all three facets of learning: Religion, Philosophy and Science. The reason for the Priesthood was intact. Then beginning with Homer in the Greek world, who was reverenced with good reason, learning became gradually secularized as the Pre-Socratics developed Philosophy and Science independently of the Priesthood. In the West this was the real deathblow to religion; in the Semitic East no such development took place. The Semites are incapable of either Philosophy or Science.
About this time also, Astronomy as a science developed, which doomed Astrology to insignificance although its traditions linger on as the world prepares for the Age of Aquarius. It will really happen too. Don’t ask me how, but it will, it is happening. If you want to read an excellent analysis of aspects of the Age of Pisces check out C.G. Jung. The amazing thing is that there is little to indicate a system for perpetuating this design of ancient times, no evidence of a secret society forwarding Astrological designs. The ancients having set the plan in motion apparently knew it would be self-perpetuating as individuals like myself, and I have no interest in Astrology per se would penetrate the workings of the design moving it forward whether advertently or inadvertently. But you have to look at it to see it. My interest was aroused when I detected a constant presence. I myself have no prejudices, I don’t dismiss phenomena out of hand. The Tarot has its significance also. You don’t have to believe it, you study its historical development.
Astrology was still a very active force as the Age of Pisces dawned. The Semitic Jewish reaction was based on the dawning of a new Age, the Piscean. When this mistaken adventure ended in 135 AD, when it became clear that the New Age meant little in concrete terms, although defeated militarily and dispersed from Palestine the Jews still had that old ace in the hole. Religion.
There was still the spiritual world. While the Rabbis censured Jesus of Nazareth as an imposter a cult of Jewish followers developed after the death of Jesus. The Jews in those days or just previous to the Jewish Wars had been active proselytizers. Large Jewish communities existed in all the cities of the Roman Empire including Rome itself. For various reasons these facts have been downplayed. Any serious historical study of the role of the Jews in the Roman Empire is severely discountenanced, at least in American Universities.
As orthodoxy required circumcision and following the ridiculous Jewish dietary laws, I mean, what makes wine kosher or not is whether it has been touched by non-Jewish hands somewhere in the winemaking process, the limits of conversion may have been reached. A lot of folks might think such a condition mere bigotry but I decline to comment. Paul realized this, thus he wisely discarded circumcision and the dietary laws in his version of Christianity. This at least made it possible to convert the Gentile although without bigotry Christianity could never have succeeded in being more than a prevalent religion. Persuasion can only go so far. A religion can’t get anywhere without bigotry.
After Constantine made Christianity the official religion, empowered, the Catholic Church went to work to suppress all other forms of thought, religious, philosophical or scientific. The academy of Plato was shut down while the library at Alexandria was burned to the ground.
Thus the Semito-Roman Catholic Church solidified its position as the official representative of Christ on Earth.
Now, after Jesus was crucified the remaining disciples and adherents were run to earth where possible and killed. It became expedient to flee into hiding. From this dispersal has arisen the tradition of the Holy Grail. This fabulous literary repository has come down to us attached to the exploits of King Arthur. Known to most through the collation of Mallory, the original documents run to tens of thousands of pages. The Vulgate-Lancelot alone is close to ten thousand 350-400 word pages.
The legends which begin with the crucifixion represent a secret history of Europe. There is much interesting investigation being forwarded on the topic currently by Laurence Gardner and his series of books, he can be accessed at his Mediaquest site on the web, and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in two interesting books: Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy. There are others but these two series are most direct. There’s a lot more actually but much of it is very speculative. Worth looking into though by the right minds.
According to these writers Mary Magdalen fled Palestine for Marseilles in southern France where she bore a son of Jesus. This son became the progenitor of the Merovingian line of kings of France. These in turn presented a challenge to the authority of the Semito-Roman Catholic Church. Thus the Church encouraged the usurpation of the throne by the line that would be known as Carolingian which when the Church succeeded in crowning Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor it gained the right to invest the royal houses of Europe. The Merovingians were thus dispossessed.
With the right to make or break kings in a quasi-theological empire the success of the Church was more of less assured although in a still very difficult political situation. Still, all Europe West of what became Russia was brought within its sway, hence the recent Polish pope.
Not content with leaving well enough alone the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged the recovery of Palestine from the Moslems. Contact in the East introduced two heresies which were to have a decisive and devisive impact on subsequent history down to the present day.
The Europeans chose to invade Palestine during the heyday of the chief of the assassin cult, Hassan i Sabbah. Thus while having only a limited military success, still a Christian presence was maintained for over two hundred years which is about as long as the United States had been in existence, the crusaders were infected with a heresy. At the same time the Cathar heresy was introduced into Europe from the East. The Cathars also known as the Albigensians, and the Knights Templar presented the Semito-Catholic Church with a soul destroying problem. This is where the Church met its Waterloo although it would be difficult to understand what else they could have done.
Westerners don’t seem to understand that if you’re going to interfere in other people’s lives you have to go all the way or suffer the consequences. The assassins of Hassan i Sabbah introduced a very potent brand of heresy into Europe in vengeance for the invasion of Palestine. Both examples have proven very pernicious and ought to have been suppressed.
The watchword of the Cathars is given expression in the Rabelasian phrase: Do What Thou Wilt. I haven’t read Nietsche but he gave a different formulation in ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’
Thus the Moslems through the Assassins were able to corrupt the morality of the West. Thus Cathars prospered across Southern France where the aurthority of the Semito-Catholic Church was challenged. If the Cathar heresy, really an error, grew the Church would find itself displaced.
The rule of the Church is that the Church cannot shed blood, which is why heretics were burnt, but they could get others to do it for them. Establishing the Inquisition to smell out heretics the Church called on the French crown to crusade against the Albigensians. What do you do with people who will believe differently than you do? As Victor Hugo said, you have to kill them so that a new world may arise. As Lenin and Stalin believed, you have to exterminate the recalcitrants. As Hitler said, there is the final solution. Well, that’s what they did to the Albigensians. The soldiers asked how they were to determine whether one was or wasn’t a Cathar, they were told to kill them all, God would know his own.
The devastation if not total was a very serious attempt.
Here you have one of those insuperable problems, what are you going to do? If you do nothing you lose, if you let God sort out his own, you lose. The Cathars would have been enough trouble but then the Church was faced with the Templar heresy. Same solution, same results.
The only consolation the Semito-Catholics had was that at about this same time the troops of Genghis Khan swept over the Middle East rooting the Assassins out of their ‘impregnable’ mountain fastness.
The result of the Church’s action and that of their royal accomplices was a seething hatred of both by the survivors who after all, believed nothing was true and everything was permitted. Dangerous people with dangerous ideas. Several subversive organizations arose, the Free Spirits, Beghards and Beguines who eventually came together as the Libertines in pre-Revolutionary France.
The Church demonized the survivors, according to Laurence Gardner as witches, hence the witch hunts. I’m not sure it is true but it does make sense, provides a rational motive for the persecutions. With the inquisition in place Europe was made a hell on Earth. Nevertheless learning wiggled out from under the suppression of the Church to flower forth as the Enlightenment. Thus after the Cathars and Templars Science presented a challenge to the Church which has been the knock out blow. Both the Semito-Catholic Church and the Semitic Jews were presented with a very difficult problem which no amount of persecution could resolve.
The Church has stubbornly clung to its authority giving up only a minimum to reason. The Inquisition itself was only discontinued in mid-nineteenth century. The Jews, on the other hand, were thrown into complete disarray by the Enlightenment at least in the West. The great bloc of Judaism in the Pale of Eastern Europe responded much more slowly but then very large numbers of that group emigrated to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the religion faced even more serious challenges.
The Western Jews ran through a whole series of experimental forms before, under the influence of the Eastern Jews, the compromise of Zionism was evolved.
Along the way Marx, Einstein and Freud evolved political, physical and psychological pseudo-scientific ideas which had the effect of confusing the West.
Aiding the emergence of Science and the freeing of speculative religion from the suppression of the Church was the French Revolution of 1789. The Revolution was as epochal an event in the Piscean Age as the crucifixion of Christ. The Revolutionists restarted their calendar at year one which was probably symbolically correct.
It is probably signficant that Jean Baptiste de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck, was appointed professor of invertebrate zoology at the Paris Museum of Natural History in the critical year of 1793. As an evolutionist Lamarck preceded Charles Darwin. In his Tarzan And The Lion Man Burroughs mentions Lamarck along with Gregor Mendel and Darwin as well as the proposer of the germ theory of evolution, August Weismann, who Burroughs did not mention by name. While Burroughs played with evolution in many fantastic ways his playfulness was informed by a thorough grounding in the learning of his day.
One has to be very alert and attentive to see just how playful he is.
In Tarzan The Terrible the primitive species, mistakenly called races in most discussions, had tails. When Tarzan wishes to disguise himself he affixes a severed tail to his posterior. Now, there was a legend of a tailed people in the Congo Basin. The legend was based on the fact that this tribe affixed animal tails on their posteriors much as Tarzan does. Thus Burroughs combines evoltuionary speculation with historical legend and fact in a humorous episode. It’s possible he may have been waiting a hudred years anyone to get that joke. He picked up his information from H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.
The Revolution itself was not as spontaneous as it is often depicted nor is the wanton destruction the result of a frustrated peasantry. The Revolution was planned and coordinated by the descendants of those very Albigensians and Templars Church and Crown had crushed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Albigenian and Templar heresies and error were thus released on the world in a more concentrated form than previously. The disorder in society today is caused by the followers of those errors.
Burroughs was born a short 70 some odd years after the failure of the Revolution. Sixteen years after Darwin released his Origin Of Species on the world. In between incredible advances were made. Champollion broke the hieroglyphic alphabet of Egypt opening the ancient world to us. The ancient civilizations of the Middle East were unearthed. Surely all those ruins Burroughs speaks of were influenced by those discoveries. Babylonians, Sumerians, Hittites, Cretans and other discoveries such as Schliemann’s unearthing of Troy and Mycenae. The Church was delivered one blow after another as the authority of its Holy Scriptures crumbled into falsehood.
At the same time a plethora of suppressed religious speculation burst the bonds of repression. Esotericists stumbled all over themselves to formulate doctrines. The Spiritualist movement sprang up fully formed like Athene from the forehead of Zeus. The greatest of the great, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, ransacked the religious speculative literature of the ages to reassemble it into a spectacular tour de force she called Theosophy. Just as religion, Philosophy and Science had diverged c. -800 she now tried to reunite them under one head. She couldn’t do it but her work is a magnificent effort none the less.
If you’ve got the time and patience The Book Of Urantia is an equally stunning tour de force. Great science fiction if nothing else.
Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into this incredible religious, intellectual and scientific ferment. Learning had become so vast that no one mind could grasp all the details, but like Madame B, it were better to fail gloriously than never to make the attempt. Underneath all the foolery and fantasy of his fiction ERB went at with a will.
(b.) Relations Of The Sub-species 0-1875.
At the risk of being repetitious it might be appropriate here to quote Darwin again to keep the thought fresh in our minds:
Quote:
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera.
Unquote.
So, when the Semites erupted from the desert the modern phase of competition between the Homo-Sapiens sub-species began. The populations had now expanded so that there was not room for all. One sub-species must drive out all the others. Thus the outer reality, or world of appearances, will and must triumph over the inner world of wishful thinking. So the world turns.
Darwin again:
Quote:
We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congenor. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species, and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature, but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species had been victorious over another in the great battle of life.’
Unquote.
Let us never forget that there is a great battle for life while with Homo Sapiens we can precisely say why one species will be victorious. I cannot show the victory but I can show, for my purposes here, how the struggle progressed to 1875. The next section following will take us to 1950, the next after that to 9/11 and than a fictional effort will end with a possible scenario of the end of civilization as we know it.
The method followed by Homo Sapiens is easily learned, you just have to condition yourself to accept the facts, the outer reality rather than the inner world of wishful thinking. In encounters before this period the method was simple. A band of invaders conquered the indigenous folk, slew all the males, kept the females for themselves. In an evolutionary sense this is the natural method.
Amongst, lions for instance, a male is only allowed to enjoy his Pride for a limited time. Then a couple males gang up on him, driving him away. One of the new males then acquires the lionesses killing the former lion’s offspring at the same time. The complacent females then go into heat producing a new group of offspring for the new male. Simple. Why the simp lion helps his fellow for no reward is beyond me but it works the same way among Homo Sapiens.
So when the Saxons drove the Britons out of England into Brittany where the Britons conquered the natives, the Britons not only massacred the males but they cut the tongues out of the women so that the language wouldn’t be corrupted. Very offensive to our professed standards but completely within the range of normality. I mean, you know, get real. This sort of thing can and will happen again. Nazi Germany wasn’t any aberration. The Jews of today are calling for the extermination of one billion White people. This is a fact. Google Noel Ignatiev and see for yourself. Your problem will be that you just won’t take him seriously although the evidence is clearly before your eyes.
In this great struggle of life all sub-species of Homo Sapiens are more or less physically equal. Mental genetics have given HSII and III the edge in scientific intelligence. Along with the intelligence comes the ability to see farther and clearer so that lacking tunnel vision the will is blunted. Rather than following the ancient methods and disposing of indigenous peoples, which they could easily have done at the time, the HSIIs and IIIs created a legacy of ill will through their misguided benignity which at the end of this period began to come back to haunt them.
From the period of Mohammed the sub-species began to be moved around in earnest.
A legacy of the Semitic Moslem triumph was that the West was cut off from all intercourse with the East. The Moslems blocked all the formerly active trade routes. The legacy remains today when otherwise well educated historians know nothing of Africa and many points of the Near East.
Having conquered the Mediterranean littoral of North Africa the Semites began the penetration of sub-Saharan Africa. Superior in both intellignece and will to the First Born the Semites treated them as though they were mere animals, intelligent Apes. If the African slave trade hadn’t existed before, it began then. It was brutal.
Many Africans converted to Moslemism because it gained them immunity from being enslaved. They in turn captured non-Moslem Africans to sell to the Arabic Semites. This Moslem African slave trade began c. +700 and continues to the present day although the Semites will deny it.
North of Arabia the Moslems captured part of the Byzantine Asian lands while occupying Persia, central Asia and parts of India plus a fair penetration into China. Today if one includes Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as a unit the Indian subcontinent is predominantly Moslem.
In the West the Moslems were slowly driven from Spain which was accomplished just as the Ottoman Turks who had invaded the Middle East from Central Asia destroyed the last vestiges of the Roman or Byzantine Empire.
The Ottomans then began the conquest of the Balkans moving into the Ukraine, Romania and Hungary to the very Gates of Vienna before the combined forces of Austria, Poland and Russia drove them back to the present borders just as Edgar Rice Burroughs was being born. An incredibly long struggle that was just a pause in hostilities. After that defeat the Ottomans were known as ‘the sick man of Europe.’
During this entire period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fifteenth century Europe was in turmoil as society reformed from a congeries of Germanic tribes into a semblance of the modern nation states.
In 1492 a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus changed the direction of European society. Cut off from the East by the Moslems who took advantage of straddling the trade routes to charge exorbitant prices for Easter luxuries, Portugal led European exploration of the world circumnavigating Africa finding an ocean route to the Orient thereby bypassing the Arabs eclipsing their prosperity sending them into complete stagnation. Maybe this is what Bernard Lewis means by ‘something went wrong.’
Columbus found the islands of the Caribbean Sea occupied by the Caribs. Here we can see clearly Darwin’s dilemma resolved. Between the introduction of virulent diseases to which the Caribs were unacclimated and brutal treatment the Europeans like the Asian cockroack drove their predecessors before them. What had been a Carib lake became a European lake and would soon become an African lake.
The islands were perfect for the labor intensive sugar industry but the Europeans didn’t want to do the intensive labor themselves. They in turn went to the great slave capitol of the world which the Semites had not yet exhausted to bring large numbers of the First Born out of Africa. Like all ruling classes the HSIIs and IIIs having displaced the native Caribs, were now displaced by the First Born who at present have possession of the Caribbean Islands.
So now if Darwin were alive he could see how it works. Caribs>HSIIs & IIIs>First Born. Simple.
The Spaniards also overran Mexico, Central America and South America. Here their numbers were few in comparison with the indigenes who were apparently of a hardier stock than the Caribs. The Spaniards were able to maintain their dominance over the indigenes of the area. Even today the President of Mexico is of obvious European descent while the peons are Indios.
Following Columbus’ lead the English and French invaded further North in lands that became the United States and Canada.
Once again here we can plainly see how one species of Homo Sapiens displaces another just as one species of swallow did to its great congenor.
The new invaders from Europe displaced the native Homo Sapiens along the seaboard then as their population steadily increased they rolled the aboriginals back before their advance. There was no attempt at extermination although there was callous disregard for life in the human sense. In the evolutionary sense there was no consideration of aboriginal rights.
At the same time the First Born were removed from Africa to serve as laborers in the English colonies of North America. The First Born would never have left Africa had they not been removed by the Semites and HSII and III. The First Born secured no presence in the Middle East with whatever implications that holds, but from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States First Born territories were extended greatly.
The orginal HSIII population which originally controlled Central Asia was either driven from the area by invading Mongolid tribes or exhausted their numbers migrating West. As numerous HSIII populations have existed in the Caucasus and in other pockets of central Asia the latter is unlikely. The HSIIs were undoubtedly driven before the Mongolids in the Darwinian sense. the Mongolids first made their appearance in the West with the fifth century Huns. They swept all before them until defeated in what amounts to a last ditch stand by the French. From the Huns forward Central Asia belonged to the Mongolids.
Then in the thirteenth century on the heels of the Western Crusades Genghis Khan organized the Central Asians to conquer both the Chinese Mongolids in the East as well as sweeping West to overrun Russia and Eastern Europe to the North before retiring back into the Steppes from which they exercised hegemony over Russia for hundreds of years.
To the South the Mongolids rolled over the Moslems before being defeated in Mesopotamia then, again, retiring back into the Steppes.
The russians eventually threw the Mongolid yoke off, then by running gunboats on the Volga they were able to prevent the Mongolid hordes from crossing. Thus Central Asia was brought under control.
The French and English quickly followed the Portuguese into the East. By then the Spanish had already seized the Philippines. European religious interference caused the Japanese to close their borders to both ingress and egress. From the early seventeenth century to nearly the birth of ERB Japan was isolated taking no part in world history.
With either superior luck or organization the English branch of HSII and III was able to be the most influenctial branch in the East. All of India was brought under their control, both Hindus and Moslems. Southeast Asia acknowledged at least the hegemony of England. The Dutch seized Indonesia while the French annexed Indo-China.
England, France and Germany were in the process of annexing China itself when they were interfered with by the United States. As usual the United States with so-called good intentions produced the opposite result. John Hay of the United States announced his Open Door Policy in regard to China forcing the European branches to back down from their concept of spheres of interest. America has been a very destructive force in world politics.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lacking sufficient colonists of their own, England began moving Indians and Chinese from their homelands into their colonies. Thus these peoples who up to that point had been quite content to remain where they were realized the advantages of colonization themselves. Before too long they would in their turn be colonizing Europe and the Americas.
Although Chinese and Japanese migrations will fall mainly in the period after ERB’s birth, well before mid-nineteenth century the Chinese had begun a substantial migration to the West Coasts of the Americas. In 1849, the time of the California gold rush, they represented a very substantial percentage of the West Coast population. It was because of the Chinese that Dennis Kearney announced that California was White Man’s Country.
Fearful of being overrun by the Chinese, which was a very well founded fear, Kearney led the effort for a congressional law excluding Chinese from immigration. This law was secured in 1882. It was repealed or superseded by the 1965 revision of the immigration act which was promoted by the Semitic Jews.
Americans concentrate only on what happens in this country but in fact once stirred up by the British the Chinese began to emigrate to all parts of the world as circumstance allowed. Americans refuse to allow volition to any other people assuming the role of world directors is some sort of perversion of Manifest Destiny
End Of Part III. Go to Part IV.
Exhuming Bob 5: Texas Bob Dylan
January 27, 2008
Exhuming Bob 5: Texas Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
While much is made of Bob’s Blues interests and his Folk career the truth is that Bob’s big musical influences were Country & Western. He apparently embraced Robert Johnson after 1961 attempting to make him a major influence while giving himself Black roots and credentials that were then needed. But when he talks of the pre-1959 period he invariably invokes the great C&W artists of the late forties and early fifties.
Hence in this photo in what may be his last persona he has returned to his true C&W roots. This is probably the Bob Bob has always wanted to be. As you can see he has abandoned any Jewish identity in favor of a forties and fifties Western recording star. Not so much the Hillbilly or Country aspect as that of the singing Cowboy. Perhaps he is also recalling his early sixties adulation of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
Here he emulates Slim Whitman- the mustache- Elton Britt, Ernest Tubb the Texas Troubadour, Hank Williams or any number of artists before the Nudie Suit Of Lights came into fasion in the fifties.
Note the attention he has taken to remolding his face in the attempt to eliminate Jewish characteristics. The tight thin lips, the steely eyes. A remarkable and successful effort at becoming what he has always, apparently, wanted to be.
The photo is taken from the Rolling Stone issue of May 3-17 2007 without permission. If they object I’ll have to remove the post.
Exhuming Bob 4: Boulevards Of Broken Dreams
January 26, 2008
Exhuming Bob 4:
The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
by
R.E. Prindle
…the confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse…
I got mixed up confusion
Man, it’s killing me.
Bob Dylan
I walk the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams…
You laugh tonight and cry tomorrow
When you behold your shattered dreams…
Here is where you’ll always find me
Always walking up and down
But I left my soul behind me…
Harry Warren
The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
With each day of waiting
I love to pretend
One more tomorrow
And my waiting will end.
I’m waiting and watching
for ships that never come in,
I wonder where they can be.
after Jack Yellen
I’m Waiting For Ships That Never Come In
Everything’s Broken Down
Larry Hosford
I received a couple comments on With One Hand Waving Free from R.M. that brought some thoughts I have into focus. RM has a good understanding so I will incorporate some of her thoughts into this essay.
First, let’s deal with ‘multi-culturalism.’ Multi-culturalism is merely twenty-first century racism. If a separate cultural identity is being jealously maintained then this is done in oppostion to all other cultures; it is a form of exclusivity. Yet such cultural exclusivity is considered a sin if not a crime in the West. How to reconcile such an obvious contradiction?
The first law of ‘culture’ is that two or more cultures cannot occupy the same territory at the same time. Race and culture can be made synonymous for this purpose. The less or least tolerant culture will eventually drive the more or most tolerant culture out. This is a law. Thus to be tolerant is a one way ticket to oblivion.
In that sense tolerance will be made to seem to be intolerance. Thus for the last few centuries until very recently England had been praised for its extreme tolerance. Jews, Huguenots and whatever found a refuge there that delivered them from persecution. That was when the immigrants were relatively few and the English culture dominant. In the last few decades England has been all but swamped by Negroes, Moslems, Jews and whatever. The Moslems although coming from different countries and races are culturally united through the intolerant Moslem religion. Now that the immigrants are numerically strong enough to bully the ‘tolerant’ English the English are now described as intolerant monsters. Quite a change in the perception of them even though the English themselves have not changed. They do insist on the Common Law, their cultural norm, rather than adopting Moslem Sharia law as the Moslems insist. The grossly intolerant Moslems then will subject the tolerance of the English and Moslemism will prevail in England. Thus two cultures cannot coexist in the same space, one must eliminate the other.
The Moslem method of subjection is the same today as it was in the year seven hundred when they subjugated a large part of the world. The congeries of nations they thus created forced a temporary ‘tolerance’ on the Moslems. They had to ‘tolerate’ other cultures to maintain order. But they relentlessly forced intolerance in their dominions gradually imposing a culturally sterile Moslem uniformity on society that succeeded in quelling ‘diversity’ by the thirteenth century or so when a certain idiot maintains that ‘something went wrong.’ Nothing went wrong. The Moslem religion finally achieved its goal.
Now multi-culturalism is being forced on the West. There is no multi-culturalism in the East. China and Japan are as homogeneous as you can get and likely to remain so. There is little change in South-East Asia and apart from the continuing Hindu-Moslem conflict in India, none there. Africa is being occupied by the Chinese so that Africans in Africa will be all but eliminated.
So, this is the nature of multi-culturalism; a form of racism by which the tolerant will be exterminated by the intolerant. One may be view the process as a declared but non-shooting war.
The intolerant are being aided by Western ‘Liberals’ who are deliberately and legally disarming the less tolerant Westerners in favor of the intolerant. Liberals have actually passed laws making it a criminal offence for Westerners to defend or propagate their own culture or criticize anyone else’s.
This process has gone much further in Europe and the British dominions including Canada. The US is still protected by its Constitution but that is under attack. Thus in the Multi-Cultural Wonderland dissent is still possible. I do dissent. And I will speak my mind. I will not be tolerant of my own destruction or those of the West.
As an All-American Boy I have grown up sharing in all these cultures as my own while not being a part of any of them. I am as Jewish as a Jew, as Black as an African-American. As Rebel as any Southener and as Puritan as any New Englander. They are all my cultures. I can mix and match any symbols and being a free American boy, America means freedom, I can say and do as I please. I do and will.
In point of fact I was excluded from all cultures by being in an orphanage. I am probably closest to the Puritan heritage but neither it nor any other has any special meaning for me. I am outside them all as an observer. So, I’d appreciate it if you weren’t defensive about your own cultural hangups. That’s the way it is friends: If you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror. I am a camera.
In her first comment RM gives a general discussion of the record business. As it happens I was in the record business for fifteen years between 1967 and 1982. I know something about records and musicians. Musicians are at the bottom of the entertainment hierachy. They have no, or little, status. During the sixties and seventies they broke the bounds of the records labels and were able to dictate terms to the labels. This was an anomaly and it didn’t last too long before the labels regained control.
Musicians are generally considered offensive by movie and TV people. They aren’t invited to many genteel parties. To a very large extent this opinion is merited. Witness all those stories about rock and rollers busting up hotels and being just generally rude and offensive. Sad but true. Just study those movies of Dylan and his entourage in London’s prestigious Savoy Hotel. Bob should be embarrassed.
Musicians are the ‘abused, confused, misused’ type of person Bob so unerringly identifies in his songs. Bob was one too. Consider his first rock song: Mixed Up Confusion. Relate it to The Chimes Of Freedom a couple years later. I do not exclude myself from this group so don’t get hostile.
The record industry above all others draws the type to it. There is something about the direct mental connection between the sound on the disc, in the grooves, and the mind that allows the listener to incorporate the lyrics into his identity. All the lyrics heading this essay are part and parcel of my mental makeup also. Some of the type have talent and skills but most don’t. Bob obviously was highly talented by no less psychotic for all that.
For myself I owned and operated a medium sized record store chain from 1967 to 1982. Until about 1979 I listened to everything issued. I suppose I heard thousands of LPs at least once. Some dozens of times. I occasionally met various artists. I was familiar with the record scene in LA and San Francisco. I dealt with tens of thousand of customers. I think I know the dreamy record type.
Without exception they have a broken down psychology. Consider songs like Broken down, second hand Rose, Here Comes The Rain, It’s Raining In My Heart, the talented but overlooked Larry Hosford’s Everything’s Broken Down. In my experience with record store employees their attitude was: If it ain’t broke, break it. And they did. I spent fifteen years dealing with broken people and I didn’t like it.
Bob was broken, probably still is. The part of his songs I identified with from 1964-66 was the broken down images of his ‘greatest’ work. All those put down songs were answered in my soul as I walked up and down the street of broken dreams. He spoke my own frustration and rage. I thought at the time the vicious put downs of Positively Fourth Street was Dylan at his best and I still do but I can’t bear to sing along anymore. The instrumentals he devised were pure genius. In fact I would give him higher marks as a composer than I would as a lyricist.
It scarcely needs pointing out but after Blonde On Blonde his pure rage was spent. He had apparently put down everyone he wanted to put down. His direction changed.
So what I am interested in here is the cause of his breaking down and subsequent rage. His biographers give scant clues when they assess his childhood. For the present we are compelled to guess from various clues scattered throughout his lyrics directed at unknown people and his comments.
In my estimation his put down songs are directed at people from Hibbing who he obviously feels put him down. Bob projects that rejection onto his New York scene.
One must rely on reports but it seems that everyone in New York was unusually supportive of this stranger from Minnesota. People seem to have gone out of their way to be supportive. They fed him didn’t they? They offered their couches, they let him play their records, read their books. In fact, they educated him to Bohemian standards. Bob didn’t get there by himself. Bob couldn’t have written those songs without that education that they gave him for free, from the goodness of their hearts.
A complete greenhorn when he arrived, within the very short space of two years he was a star. Nothing at 19, by 21 he was on his way. Life wasn’t that good to me and yet Bob sees no reason to be thankful for his good fortune. To my taste the music that gave him his start is detestable yet Robert Shelton, a very influential music critic for the NYTimes, the most influential newspaper in NYC and America, gave Bob a glittering review that his fellow folk singers wondered about at the time while being no less a source of wonder today.
John Hammond at CBS, one of the three largest labels in the US, a very experienced judge of talent, apparently saw something in the caterwauling Dylan that I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen, signing Bob to a recording contract. Any contract young Bob got would have been a wonderful contract even if he had worked gratis. Once again as with Shelton, Hammond’s associates were set wondering. Hammond’s Folly they called it.
So what exactly did Bob have to complain of about his reception in NYC. Nothing that I can see. From what I gather from his biographers his hero Woody Guthrie even accepted him. Why then all those bitter diatribes against his fellow folksingers in NYC? Quite simply, Bob was projecting. He’s not talking about the present, he’s talking about the past although he puts his lyrics in the present. We have to go back to Hibbing. He’d only been absent from Hibbing a little over a year when he hit the Big Apple so all his antecedents were very fresh in his memory. If RM is correct it was exactly at this time that he wrote his song The Walls Of Red Wing. The shock of his incarceration was searing his mind.
In Hibbing we have two influential formative processes. One, the interaction between Bob and his classmates and the other between Bob and his father. The latter is especially important. I am weak on being able to judge father-son relationships because I never had a father. From I’ve seen of father-son relationships I have absoltutely no cause for regret. I consider it a psychological trap I miraculously escaped.
One thing is clear from the biographers, Bob did not run with the In Crowd of his high school class. He obviously suffered rejection thus he visits rejection on everyone in his songs from ’64-’66. All those songs are meant to show that he’s the one and they ain’t. ‘Sooner Or Later One Of Us Must Know’, ‘There’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you?’ Sour grapes. Even when they know they don’t care. You’re still you and they’re still them and they’re still in control of the social structure. You’re still on the outside and nothing’s changed except, of course, you’re famous.
Those of us who learn, learn the hard way. Unfortunately that is the only way. If you don’t know let me tell you. What’s done is done.
As the Persian poet, Omar Khayam put it:
The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it.
Here’s the hard part- that’s just the way it is and the way it must stay. If you can’t deal with that, too bad. Bang your head against the wall until you die. Who cares? Hard and mean, but true. What did they used to say? You’ve got to be cruel to be kind? It’s all over now, Baby Blue. Don’t forget it; learn from it. But don’t you grieve no more. However it may go on raining in your heart.
One can’t know what happened to Bob but I suspect it happened early, probably before Junior High. When his biographers discuss his childhood he is always in the company of outsiders. So Bob became broken down at an early age.
Probably in an effort to win his classmates approval he chose to become a rock and roll musician. It worked so well when he was four performing Accentuate The Positive for his family why wouldn’t it work at sixteen with his classmates? Well, it didn’t. What he wanted to play they didn’t want to hear and what they might have wanted to hear he wouldn’t play. It was his way or no way. They booed him roundly but he didn’t care. Strangely Bob recreated the exact same scenario on his world tour. He was not only booed in the metropolis of Hibbing but he was booed around the world. Didn’t care, but how many people can say that? Very unusual personality.
Undismayed back in Hibbing he was undismayed around the world. I can understand his continued playing against the boos but that doesn’t mean it didn’t break his heart. The miracle is Bob Zimmerman went on to become Bob Dylan. You can listen to him turn into Bob Dylan on Another Side. Before that he’s Bob Zimmerman trying on the name Bob Dylan.
So, I think we can assign all those put down songs to his rejection back in Hibbing even though he’s singing Positively Fourth Street to his NYC coterie.
Probably Bob thought that whatever form the initial reaction took to his rejection back in Hibbing was that he had been a victim of a form of theft. Something valuable had been stolen from his personality, his self-respect. This is completely understandable. But as something was stolen from him, in vengeance he became the thief. Thus, if Bob wants an answer to his question: Why must I always be the thief: the compulsion can be found in whatever this childhood incident was.
I suspect Bob began small pilfering from that age, whatever year it may have been. As he was definitely sentenced to a Reformatory for a crime commited in the twelfth grade I have to believe he was caught stealing items of sufficient value for him to have been brought before a court where he was convicted and received a sentence.
It seems unlikely that as a first offender he would have been given time in a reformatory therefore it seems likely that he must have been arrested a couple times before and let off with a warning. That’s the way it was back then before they put you in jail for first offence jay-walking.
That Bob was not averse to breaking into other’s property is made clear by Howard Sounes story of Echo Helstrom’s jimmying the lock of the Moose Lodge. That Bob was not particularly careful is evident by the fact that having broken in Bob banged away at the piano and sang. After making an unauthorized entry that would seem foolhardy. Bob wasn’t just a kid either. That occurred sometime in the eleventh grade.
I suspect these earlier crimes were all thefts. As he was not a good thief, seemingly always being caught, he must have wanted his thefts to be discovered much as he himself was aware that something of value had been stolen from him. The last theft for which the judge thought he had no choice but to give Bob time must have been a good one, perhaps a burlary or store break-in. The crime may have been committed weeks or a couple months before graduation so Bob was allowed to finish school before serving his sentence in the Summer of ’59. Worst summer of Bob’s young life. Worse than church camp. This much is certain, he was in a reformatory for a couple months in the Summer of ’59. The question is where, and how does Father Abraham fit in?
Bob seems to have had a difficult relationship with his father. When that began and whether it had anything to do with his Judaism is the question. There most certainly is a conflict in Bob’s mind between his Gentile cultural identity growing up in Hibbing amongst Gentiles and his Jewish cultural identity imposed on him by his family and probably most especially by his father. Thus in later life Bob would first become a born again Christian, then revert to Judaism, and a fundamental Judaism at that, then form a compr0mise between the two that he is evidently following today. His autobiography, Chronicles Vol. I, wasn’t involved with religion that I remember. I’ll have to read it again.
As I read the biographies Bob was relatively ignorant of the tenets of Judaism as of his Bar Mitzvah at 13. In a situation that I would consider extraordinary a Rabbi was flown in especially for him just prior to his Bar Mitzvah to indoctrinate him and then returned to wherever he came from shortly after. I don’t know, seems like Abraham was really concerned that Bob understand his relationship to Judaism. They would have had to pay the Rabbi. It would be interesting to know Bob’s reaction to this event.
For myself I was forced to attend church through Junior and Senior High which I deeply resented, even hated. I can control myself if I am forced to enter a religious edifice today, that mainly because I am a real trooper who does his duty, but there wouldn’t be any need for anyone to push it too hard. I could break out cursing. Oddly I’ve been in everthing from Catholic Churches to Jewish synagogues over the years. What did I ever do to anybody?
Also in subsequent years Bob attended a religious summer camp called Camp Herzl. Whether he was compelled to or not I don’t know but in my case I was compelled to attend those accursed church camps. If there is anything in my religious background I care to take back it is those few weeks spent there. Absolutely hated it. It would be interesting to know how Bob enjoyed the experience.
Now, Bob tells us that his father Abraham at one time told him that it was possible for a son to become so defiled himself that his father and mother would disown him. Bob doesn’t tell us when or under what circumstances his father told him this. Was it a sort of admonition Abe thought every father should tell his son at, say, ten, or possibly at his Bar Mitzvah, or was it something Abe told Bob just before the authorities took Bob away for his sojourn at the reformatory- possibly even, probably Red Wing? Certainly his departure would have been as horrific an occasion for his father as it was for Bob.
So here’s the crux of the father problem. RM in her comment described Abraham a ‘passive-aggressive’ but clearly abusive father. RM says that an old girlfriend said that Bob seemed quite afraid of his father but she didn’t know if he hit him or not. RM seems to think Abe did but I’m not so sure but as we’ll see there is evidence that points to the fact that he may have.
A statement like ‘I’m not so sure the truth will set you free’ may sound innocuous enough but who knows how many lectures lay behind it or how they pertained to it. Enigmatic at best, what religious truth was Abraham trying to convey to young Bob? Not so clear to me. I’ve known some pretty nutty religious types in my time, just because Abraham was Jewish doesn’t mean he wasn’t a nutty religious type, and some of them were quite terrifying. I mean, de Lawd gave them verbal instructions and they heard it. A statement like a boy may become so defiled his parents would reject him is enough to set any boy shaking especially as Bob had already been rejected by his classmates. If a kid isn’t secure in his parents estimation who is he secure with? To me that statement was a terrific threat.
Defiled? Defiled? Bob might ask himself, I must be defiled but am I that defiled yet? I mean, why tell me Dad? I mean, do you want me to leave now? Crap like that going on for seventeen years or so would make you afraid of any parent. I could learn to hate a guy like that.
Judging from appearances Bob’s subsequent life seems to have been to determine how defiled he could be before everyone would turn away from him. What kind of test would it be? Getting drunk at midday and collapsing in your own vomit in the middle of the Minnesota campus? Was that enough? No. Bonnie Beecher didn’t deny him; she showed her love. The question there is how it is Bob collapsed where Bonnie would likely be? Coincidence? Nah. It wouldn’t taken too much to know her class assignments and be in the the appropriate place. Maybe planned, maybe not. We won’t know unless Bob tells us.
Bob’s whole career from that point on seems to consist of tests to see how much others will endure before they disown him. I mean, think about it. What kind of character does it take to offend his fans with noise you know beyond doubt they don’t want to hear, to go on doing it when you know they are going to go on booing you unmercifully? Bob did this around the world and was booed round the world. Amazingly his fans didn’t desert him but continued to show up if for no other reason than to boo him. Bob wasn’t too defiled for his fans, was he? They continued to accept anything he did.
Of course he lost a few of these contests. Suze Rotolo for instance. Bob was just too much for her mother and sister if not Suze herself. Otherwise the boy forced the world to take him on his own terms. Defilement was the issue between him and his dad. Bob seems to have won that particular defilement issue too.
Did he do time at Red Wing or not? RM and I both think he did. I agree with RM that the lyrics to Walls Of Redwing sound like authentic although very generalized experience. The Minnesota DOC (Department Of Corrections) says on one of their websites that Bob Dylan was never incarcerated at Red Wing. Maybe not. But if Bob Dylan wasn’t how about Robert Zimmerman? There is not doubt however that he was incarcerated somewhere. Wherever that was records must exist.
I believe that if one has the key all Bob’s lyrics ’64-66 will be found to be autobiographical. Why should Bob be different than any other writer? All writers are autobiographical. What else can they be? Thus in relation to Red Wing if RM doesn’t have the right slant the song has to relate to Bob’s life in some way, and some way that goes back to before he left Hibbing. The title Highway 61 Revisited has to have that exact meaning. Bob is revisiting Highway 61 whatever meaning the phrase has for him. RM’s understanding of the following lyrics seems brilliant to me whether it turns out Bob did his time at Red Wing or not. Remember it is certain that he did time somewhere, that is not the question. If the song does not physically describe Red Wing then the ‘country club’ in Philadelphia must.
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man you must be puttin’ me on.”
God say. “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”
RM goes on: Red Wing is DIRECTLY on Highway 61 separated only by a barbed wire fence. Thus, Bob may have experienced his incarceration as a form of psychological death for which he held his father, Abe, responsible. Highway 61 as I see it has no signficance otherwise. The Civil Rights stuff going on in the South couldn’t possibly have figured largely in Bob’s imagination besides it had nothing to do with killing a son.
Consider also these lines from Chimes of Freedom:
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking track
For the lonesome hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
As we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Starry eyed and laughing, as I recall, when we were caught…
I think those lines can be related back to Highway 61 and the crime for which the ‘unharmful gentle soul’ Bob paid. The last line would imply that he and Echo? were caught together. That sounds like a burglary or break-in.
Another word on possible influences for Highway 61.
While both Folk and Pop music were important to the era, equally as important, possibly more so, were the Comedy records. The late fifties and early sixties were the golden age of comedy LPs. The three most important were Bob Newhart, The Smothers Brothers and Shelley Berman. These three were huge. Trailing behind them were Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Allan Sherman, Jose Jimenez and a couple others.
Newhart and the Smothers would have have had the most direct influence on Bob at this time. Both artists did monologues or dialogues of an historical nature. The Smothers Brothers were, of course, a comedy Folk act. Overwhelming in their appeal. We were all blown out of the saddle by these comedy records that seemed so nouveau and groundbreaking that they could easily be seen as the Chimes of Freedom flashing. Thus the first verse of Highway 61 can be seen as a comedic takeoff on God, Abraham, and Isaac a la Newhart or the Smothers.
After the first and obviously key verse that deals with the Son and father, Abe, Bob cobbles some historical verses together. Mack the Finger (Knife) and Louie (XIV) the king. Verse two deals with Jesse James:
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down Highway 61.
As we all know Bob Ford was the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard, the name Jesse James was living under at the time. I think we can chalk Highway 61 up as an attempt to emulate the Smothers and Newhart along with Bob’s other needs. Think about Desolation Row as a comedy routine.
If one does want to really understand the early sixties it is essential to be familiar with Newhart, the Smothers and Shelley Berman. Still good stuff too.
Bob would have been released from the reformatory just in time to leave for U. Minnesota. One can only imagine his state of mind as he left for Minnesota as the defiled son. He began by testing everyone. As a nobody there were few who would put up with his antics. We can’t be sure how far he would go with his antics or exactly what he would have done. If the scene with Bonnie Beecher is any indication he had pretty wide parameters to work within. He claimed that in New York he hustled, that is sold his behind as a male prostitute. Did he? I don’t know but having consciously established himself as a liar or teller of tall tales he could tell any preposterous truth and not be taken seriously. Thus he would be able to get such things off his chest while being disbelieved. Hustling would probably be a form of defilement that would offend his father. He told the journalist Al Aronowitz that he had done time in Red Wing. Why would anyone tell stories that were reputation destroyers?
Testing people is one thing, of course, but would a guy who puked all over himself and lay down in the middle of campus balk at hustling in NYC? You tell me.
Through ’66 Bob exhibited all the characteristics of the man walking up and down the boulevard of broken dreams. Everything in his life was broken down. He was apparently filthy and unkempt. Many people refer to his complete lack of hygiene. They use such emphatic terms as Bob must have been avoiding soap and water. Hygiene, he didn’t have any.
Except for the brief honeymoon period with Sara after his acident he always affected a bum or hobo like character. He even called his recording studio, Rundown Studios. The pain lived on in his heart as a steady downpour. He made his environment reflect the shambles in his mind. He had mixed up confusion and man it was killing him. He built a multi-million dollar house and then made it look like a junkyard.
He made one attempt to escape the Boulevard. There is some question as to the seriousness of the motorcycle accident. There seems to be evidence that he wasn’t seriously hurt if hurt at all. I think that after Blonde On Blonde his initial torment was spent. At best Grossman was working him so hard, setting up the next grueling tour that as Bob said if he had gone on it would have been the death of him so he opted out, took some much needed time off to recover.
During the brief period of recuperation he seems to have calmed down somewhat. If the photos of Elliot Landy are accurate evidence,
http://www.landyvision.com he seems to have cleaned up his act trying to be the good country squire for Sara. The photos look as though he were bathing and wearing clean clothes. It couldn’t last. His inner devastated compulsion urged him on. At some point he must have decided how much defilement Sara would take before he could drive her away.
Lord, how he tried that woman’s soul. Bob was shameless beyond belief. She finally threw in the towel when she came to breakfast to find Bob eating with another woman.
In the divorce proceedings she claimed she was in fear of her physical well being, that Bob had offered her physical violence. It is quite possible that after years of drug and alcohol abuse Bob’s decency was so lowered that he did offer her violence. Perhaps he was then visiting the violence on her that RM thinks his father dealt him. Perhaps he was only trying to see exactly how much defilement she would take before checking out. Perhaps Bob merely wanted Sara to be as defiled as himself so that they would be equals.
Bob cruelly shattered the poor woman’s life. After standing by him through terrific emotional abuse Bob had the audacity to remonstrate ‘But people in my family just don’t get divorced. Chutzpah on a stick. Didn’t he even care what the effect on his children would be? Hard to feel sorry for ya, Bob.
Bob punished himself to the tune of many millions of dollars. It must have hurt so good. Balm for a wounded soul. Not satisfied Bob had another brief marriage bestowing additional millions on that wife. These sexual adventures compelled him to work non-stop to support his various establishments. It isn’t cheap being Bob Dylan. A life style was forced on him that required vast sums, perhaps millions a year to maintain.
Thus Bob laughed tonight and cried tomorrow when he beheld his shattered dreams, but no matter how defiled Bob was he was holding his own in the war. Everything was still broken down, rundown, second hand Rose but then for the psychological type, Only A Hobo, there’s a certain pleasure in that.
End.
e
Book II-2 Something Of Value
January 11, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II-2
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
Your world is out of step in the planetary procession.
– Book Of Urantia
The melting of the ice caps threw the evolutionary world out of equilibrium. As the peoples fled, who can now be called Libyans, they bumped into populations settled in what were formerly the highlands. In Egypt this caused a confrontation with the Upper Egyptians that may have lasted a couple millennia or more until the Libyans of Lower Egypt were conquered by the Upper Egyptians uniting the Two Lands.
No one knows what took place on Crete which may already have been part of the Basin civilization while it is possible that the Cretans spread the Basin civilization to Pelasgia on the mainland.
Probably North Africa including Egypt and Crete received the bulk of the emigrants. Smaller numbers unable to hold their own obviously settled in the Levant and adjacent areas. The wonderful temples of Catul Huyuk dated to 6500 B.C. must have been built by the fleeing Libyans. These settlements may have later been overwhelmed by their savage neighbors. A group may have reached present day Hungary since this area seems to have been a hotbed of intelligence. Laurence Gardner in his interesting series of books believes writing originated there from whence migrants carried the knowledge to Sumer about- -4000. Might be true, timeframe is possible.
We tend to see such occurrences as History outside Darwinian evolution. Viewed from a perspective of Darwinian evolution what we have here is a clash of sub-species. Darwin poses this problem in his ‘Origin of Species.’
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species; and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.
With Homo Sapiens we will be able to see precisely why. The discussion I make will not be based on morality but on the exigencies of the battle of life. The sub-species of Homo Sapiens are part of the natural order engaged in the struggle for survival and not outside it. Altruistic ideas about the brotherhood of man are all very well but such ideas can be interpreted in different ways. For instance one might argue that we will all be brothers when all are Moslems; or, we will all be brothers when under Chinese hegemony. But it is doubtful that very many but the totally naive believe we are all brothers as things stand.
Many peoples who have existed no longer have an existence and it is certain that in the not too distant future many others are going to become as extinct as the legendary Dodo bird. That’s why people talk about being dumb as a Dodo, you Dodo, etc. So no sentimentality here.
The initial clash came between the Semites and the Sumerians. While the origin of the Sumerians is in doubt, as they had a proto-scientific civilization they were not Semites. However as they built up their civilization creating something from, as it were, nothing, envy will draw attention. The Semites of the desert attracted by this glittering something which far exceeded their own thinking began to infiltrate Sumeria.
As Darwin put it: How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another… The Sumerians chose to be tolerant with a people who are by nature intolerant. By the year -2000 or the beginning of the Age Of Aries the Semites had overrun and displaced the Sumerians. Sumerian institutions which had great allure for the Semites were not abandoned or destroyed but the Semites gutted the forms of their scientific content replacing it with their own brand of stasis.
At the Dawning of Aries according to Genesis a conflict arose between the Terachites and the Mesopotamians over the nature of God. It will be remembered that the transition of the Ages between Taurus and Aries in Greece saw the replacement of Cronus by Zeus. In Greek mythology this was represented as the battle between Zeus and the Titans. In Sumerian mythology it was represented by the killing of the Bull of Heaven by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Having succeeded in their heroic task the haunch of Taurus was made a constellation over the North Pole. In other words a remnant of the previous Age.
The Lugal Banda assumed the reins from the fourth king after the Flood. Now, we are led to believe that the Terachites under their Astrological genius Abram objected to the notion of Ages. Abram insisted that there was one god who was eternal. As the Old Order would not give on this point we are told that the overriding genius Abram and the Terachites were caused to flee for their lives. They wisely did, however they kept this idea alive for two thousand years becoming an ever greater cause of disturbance during the transit from Aries to Pisces.
Thus, one may say the battle was joined between the Astrological Religion and Semitic religious ideas. This battle is central to understanding world history. We will see a refinement of the Jewish position when Mohammed formulated his own even sillier religion.
Let us take a moment to examine the Semitic position. The question is not one of Jews and Arabs as the two are parts of the same stock, but that of Semites. The religions of Judaism and the Moslemism that Mohammed formulated are quite close. They both give their people preeminence amongst the peoples of the world and they both take an adamant position against change. The Jews wish to make their god sole and eternal while the Moslems hope to stop time and change by declaring Mohammed the last prophet and his word the last word. Vain hopes!
Now, in the seventh century the Moslems burst from the desert overrunning large areas of North Africa and Asia forcing their religion on the subject peoples. Some people, Bernard Lewis for one, fancy that this rule was liberal but that something went wrong a couple centuries later. Nothing went wrong from the Semitic point of view, everything went right. It merely took them that long to suppress the scientific and intellectual vitality of the subject peoples. The story was the same as in Sumer. Once in control they suppressed science and knowledge in favor of their projection of Allah or his early formulation as the god of stasis.
Edgar Rice Burroughs recognized this in a passage of Tarzan Of The Apes that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Archimedes Q. Porter and Mr. Philander are walking down the beach apparently discussing the Alhambra and the Moors in Spain. Philander’s was a stock argument still current in my childhood and apparently still current with scholars of the stripe of Bernard Lewis.
Samuel T. Philander is speaking:
‘But, my dear professor,’ he was saying, ‘I still maintain that but for the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella over the fifteenth century Moors in Spain the world would be to-day a thousand years in advance of where we now find ourselves.’
‘The Moors were essentially a tolerant, broad minded, liberal race of agriculturists, artisans and merchants- the very type of people that has made possible such civilization as we find in America and Europe- while the Spaniards-‘
‘Tut, tut, Mr. Philander,’ interrupted Professor Porter, ‘their religion positively precluded the possibilities you suggest. Moslemism was, is, and always will be a blight on that scientific progress which has marked…
Before 9/11 a reader might have skimmed over that passage without a remark but the Twin Towers have given it a new significance. Burroughs presciently put his finger on the Moslem problem that is its antipathy to science; to that knowledge that contradicts the word of Allah as imparted to Mohammed sitting on a rock baking in the hot desert sun.
Mr. Philander voices the received wisdom of society as it existed down to my childhood while if Mr. Bernard Lewis and his ‘something went wrong’ is representative of the present is still current today.
Burroughs through the mouth of Professor Porter boldly contradicts the almost universal opinion. Furthermore he is right as events have amply proven. ‘Moslemism was, is and always will be a blight on…scientific progress.’
Moslemism per se is a tool of the Semites in their bid for universal dominion as per Darwin. The Semite ever was and always will be opposed to any science that denies him that role. The Science of Bruce Lahn and genetics have driven that last nail in the Semitic coffin.
The Semite then as now seeks to arrest the development of knowledge and intelligence keeping things perpetually in stasis.
When Sigmund Freud gave us Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego the coupling of the two states means that there is a group ego and that it can be analyzed. A group, any group, has its objectives and goals for which it creates an agenda it follows. The Semites as a whole, both Jews, Arabs and others form a psychological group with objectives and goals. Therefore their group psychology can be analyzed.
Their methods and ways and means can be analyzed. As Freud indicates, such an analysis does not constitute bigotry or ‘hate.’ It is just scholarship. I didn’t mean to interrupt my narrative but I felt it was time to clear the air on that issue especially in light of what is happening to Mr. Le Pen in France.
Now, the Semite has a fear of being overwhelmed by numbers and being relegated to the dust bin of history. They wish preeminence. They realize wishful thinking won’t obtain it for them. It takes action. The year -2000 is when that action began in earnest.
First the Semites overran Sumer subordinating the people and its culture to Semitic ideals of Stasis.
I personally do not believe the Jewish account in Genesis. I believe that the Hebrews, as their Northwest Semitic dialect indicates, were located far to the West and North before they descended on Palestine. The whole of the first eleven books of Genesis must have been concocted from Mesopotamian records studied during the captivity after -586.
So I will not consider a Jewish influence before the final invasion of Palestine c. -1200.
After the investing of Sumer and the acquisition of Mesopotamia conflicts between the sub-species became more frequent. In the Darwinian sense the sub-special contest for dominance had begun. As Darwin stated: ‘We can see…why competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature…’
First Pharaoh toured the East disturbing the peoples, then the Hittites and Greeks entered civilization. The Asians countered by invading the Delta which was a long occupation before they were driven out.
The contest between the Semites and Egyptians was between HSII and the Semites. That of the Hittites was between the Semites and HS III. That of the Greeks between HSII and HS III and then as the Greeks and Semites clashed moving in the opposite direction between HS III and Semites.
As Greek legend tells it, the Semitic king, Agenor, had three sons (read surplus population) which he sent to populate new areas. One went to Cilicia in Asia Minor, another went to Crete while the third, Cadmus settled at Thebes in mainland Greece. This provoked a major war to eject them. Just before the assault on Troy the Argives waged a two generation war to eject the Semites, or sub-species competitors, that was commemorated in the legend of the Seven Against Thebes. Sarpedon, the son of Agenor, was also expelled from Crete returning to the mainland.
Subsequent to Troy the Greeks invaded and occupied the Anatolian littoral also occupying Crete and Cypress. The Aegean became an HSIII lake.
The Semites meanwhile threw out colonies from Phoenicia from whence came Agenor. The most famous was the Semitic power of Carthage which was to come into conflict with both Greeks and HSII Romans. The Semitic Assyrians who had become the paramount power in Asia found the strength to smash Egypt which terminated that ancient HSII nation as a power. The Assyrians and Babylonians were in their turn brought low by the HSIII Persians who seemed to have been or were assimilated by the Semitic culture.
Then the Macedonians organized a terrific military campaign under Alexander and his HSIII Greeks and Macedonians overran the entire Eastern Mediterranean. Alexander died at the end of the conquest which broke theEast into three Hellenic kingdoms. A Macedonian, a Greek kingdom, the kingdom of the Seleucids in Asia and the kingdom of Ptolemy in Egypt. For the moment than the HSIII were dominant.
The Hellenic culture was so attractive that the majority had no problem adapting to it. The Semites seemed pleased to act HSIII. Then, as Bernard Lewis might say, ‘Something went wrong.’ As might be expected there were Semitic dissenters.
Chief among these were the Jews. The Jews since their alleged expulsion from Ur had been active. Colonies of Jews had been established in all the major cities which transferred the struggle from the military to the religious sphere. Unlike today, at that time the Jews were active proselytizers.
They set themselves up as a quasi-empire in Jerusalem not unlike the later Roman Catholic Church based in Rome, in fact as the Roman Catholic Church is quasi-Semitic, Jerusalem probably served as the model. Tithes flowed from every part of the Mediterranean into the coffers at Jerusalem just as they later would to Medieval Rome.
The Jews fought the Seleucids to a standstill but then the really Big Boys entered the picture. The Romans had already disposed of the Semitic Carthaginians but now the Semitic Jews established colonies everywhere in the Empire including Rome itself. The chief authority for this period is the Jewish traitor Josephus. Burroughs had a copy of the works in his library.
So as the Age of Aries drew to a close the Mediterranean was under the military domination of the HSII Romans while the cultural and religious sphere was dominated by HSIII Greeks and Semitic Jews.
Just as the transition from the Taurean Age to the Arien Age was fraught with wars so now the transition from Aries to Pisces was blighted by a major conflict between HSII, HSIII and the Semites. As you may note the transition between Pisces and Aquarius is being fraught with a major war between the Semites and the rest of the world.
Much of the nonsense of the Jewish War can be explained by the notion that the Astrological Age change was the literal end of the world. When Jesus spoke of the end times he wasn’t being vague, he meant right then. The Jews on Masada could never have killed themselves if they hadn’t believed that they were going to rise up within the next few days and come into their inheritance. Poor deluded people, their successors probably won’t make that mistake again.
The terrific war with unbelievable bloodshed continued from 66 BC to 135 AD when with the defeat of Bar Kochba the Jews threw in the towel. Peace is just war conducted by other means as the famous General said.
2.
The Semitic Jews were defeated decisively in 135 AD. However the Kingdom of Heaven remained unconquered. The Jews had been proselytizing the Mediterranean world for centuries and not without success but it was slow work while having its limits. For too many people circumcision and the absurd dietary laws were an insuperable obstacle. Enter Saul/Paul to the rescue. There is no reason to take any of the legend of Paul too seriously. Stories like his are mere hagiography.
Suffice it to say that he discovered a way to turn the discredited Jewish messiah to account. Rather than making him the savior of the Jews he made him the savior of the world discarding the objectionable circumcision and the laughable dietary laws. Paul may have been a bigot but he wasn’t stupid.
What the Jews couldn’t accomplish on their own the hybrid Gentile-Jewish religion of Christianity did. The Semitic mentality was grafted unto the Gentile. Christianity was therefore repressive and bigoted. It is no accident that Freud made repression a centerpiece of his dogma.
Within only a couple centuries ‘something went wrong’ as Bernard Lewis would put it. Absolute Catholic orthodoxy was imposed which allowed for no further discussion or speculation. Anyone who questioned the central authority was run to earth and murdered, ‘exposed’ as a heretic and discountenanced in every way. It is interesting that Hitler is condemned for bookburning when these Semito-Catholics destroyed the greatest repository of ancient learning in a magnificent bonfire at the library in Alexandria. I doubt if any greater crime has ever been committed and that includes the so-called holocaust.
Thus just as in Sumer, when learning was crushed, everything was going right for the Semites. If Bernard Lewis weren’t a Semite he might see things somewhat differently.
The Semito-Catholics were still wrestling with stubborn dissidents when the ‘last of the prophets’ sat down on his rock amidst the burning sands to dictate his little notes and thoughts. Mohammed could neither read nor write. He still thought he could talk to God. God most have thought it was an amusing conversation. He’s probably still laughing.
The ‘brotherhood of man’ sure as heck isn’t.
I’m sure that Mohammed surveyed the scene, listened to the talk in the cafes, Semites complaining of how the nasty Gentiles prevented them from realizing the sovereignty of the world and how they had almost captured the whole ball of wax when by some dirty tricks they were defeated by the Romans. With a level playing field, you know, they would have won.
Undoubtedly they laughed because the stupid goyim were actually practicing Semitic religion and didn’t know it.
Judging from the results Mohammed thought that what the Jews lacked to realize the Semitic dream was a sufficient military arm to convert the goyim by force. The man did create an ideological force that when joined to the Arab military force was able to overrun North Africa, Persia and the Asian interior as well as parts of Asian Byzantium. By the end of the +eighth century the Moorish auxiliaries of the Arabs occupied Spain. So as this period ended the Semite sub-species in the Darwinian sense had imposed themselves on much of HSII, part of HSIII and large goegraphic areas controlled by the Mongolids. They were doing as well as those swallows would in the United States.
3.
Brief Interlude
…presumptuous attempts to conquer the outer world of appearances by the inner world of wishful thinking.
-S. Freud. Letter to Arnold Zweig 5/8/32 as quoted by Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying.
Time now for a little recapitulation, reflection and analysis. Regardless of that endlessly repeated dogma that no system of thought is better than another, everything is relative; noting is good or bad but thinking makes it so, etc. there are some signal differences between the Astrological Religion and the Semitic Religion; the latter stultifies while the former liberates into a glorious freedom. Which would you rather be, a stupid slave or an intelligent free man? Judging from all the chat about freedom we hear I’m going to assume your answer rather than wait for it. Free and intelligent, right?
Freud hit the nail on the head in the above quote. The Astrological Religion accepts the world of appearances and attempts to adjust to them, hence it has a scientific outlook. Astrology is based on a mistaken apprehension of reality which is why on the intellectual level it is no longer taken seriously. However the Astrolgical theory is based on a great many correct astronomical facts. Astro in both words refers to the stars. I’m sure the ancients would have expressed their hard won knowledge differently if they had had more accurate facts. It is all very well to sneer at Astrology as stupid but Astrology is not stupid. It is merely mistaken. Determining the Great Year is a tremendous discovery made by people who couldn’t read while having mastered the barest rudiments of language. Do not sneer at your ancestors; they can still tell you a thing or two.
Furthermore by dividing the Great Year into Ages they left room for the evolution of intelligence. If you study the transits carefully you will see that at each transit a revolution was necessary for the new age to come into existence. Thus our genius ancestors made certain that mankind would never stultify itself by being unable to grow.
Now compare this freedom loving program with that of the Semites with whom we are now contending for supremacy or, in Darwinian terms, survival as a species.
Beginning with the failed Semito-Jewish revolt at the beginning of the Age of Aries the Semitic doctrine has been opposed to any change. Their god is ‘eternal’ and unchanging. The Jews created a psychological projection based on their ‘inner world of wishful thinking’ as defined by their compatriot Sigmund Freud. Thus the Semitic religion is closed to innovation. There is no consideration of the world of appearances. The Jewish god, Yahvey must be offensive to any thinking person. Nor can the Jews dismiss criticism as ‘oh, that’s anti-Semitism.’ That’s one interpretation, another is why should anyone be stultified by a religion that promises nothing to anyone who is not by blood a Semite?
Think that over now, fellas.
The same is true of the Arab god, Allah. Allah is not even a projection of the Arab people being only the psychological projection of the inner world of wishful thinking of a demented Mohammed.
My god, man.
As with the Jews and their Eternal Yahvey Mohammed creates his own eternal god to supplant that of the Jews and then declares himself the final prophet beyond whom no further speculation is permitted. Mohammed wants to stop history in its tracks. Mohammed had probably never heard of science. As Edgar Rice Burroughs pointed out science never shows up in Mohammed’s doctrine.
Mohammed was able to stultify his own people and a very large percentage of mankind. Bernard Lewis is mystified about ‘what went wrong?’ I’m mystified by Bernard Lewis.
Religious speculation did go on in the West while Moslem children bobbed and weaved ‘studying’ the worthless psychological projecton of Mohammed’s called the Koran. Here’s a guy who learned to fool all the people all the time.
The West produced a wonderful succession of speculators working against the ever vigilant Semito-Catholic Church. Paracelsus, Meister Eckehardt, Jacob Boehm, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the nineteenth century Spiritualists including the incredible Madame Helena Blavatsky. Arising from all these is an astounding organization dating from 1955 in Chicago called Urantia.
Check this out: The Book Of Urantia claims his paper was presented by:
…a divine counselor, a member of the group of celestial personalities assigned by the Ancient of Days on Uversa, the headquarters of the seventh superuniverse, to supervise those portions of these forthcoming revelations which have to do with affairs beyond the borders of the local universe of Nebadon. I am commissioned to announce these papers portraying the nature and attributes of God because I represent the highest source of information available for such a purpose on any inhabited world. I have served as a Divine Counselor in all seven of the superuniverses and have long resided at the Paradise center of all things. Many times have I enjoyed the supreme pleasure of a sojourn in the immediate personal presence of the Universal Father. I portray the reality and truth of the Father’s nature and attributes with unchallengable authority; I know whereof I speak.
The writer wisely pefers anonymity to revealing his ‘earthly’ identity. Makes you smile doesn’t it? Yet that writer in his Book of Urantia is intelligent and well read. Much more so than Moses or Mohammed but you refuse to believe his claims and rightly so. But then why do you give credence to the equally laughable Moses and Mohammed. Just because they lived a couple thousand years ago?
How can you accept the psychological projections of Yahveh and Allah as ‘real’ when you would laugh at anyone who believed Bran Stoker’s psychological projection of Dracula was real. Or, if you think Yahveh and Allah are real why should you not think that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ psychological projection of Tarzan the Jungle God is not real?
Tarzan has as much reason to claim to be an extension of Dionysus as Jesus of nazareth. Now that the Age of Aquarius is dawning why shouldn’t this exemplar of Dionysus be the religious archetype of the Age of Aquarius and Edgar Rice Burroughs his prophet?
Tarzan’s world is based on scientific conceptions and their developments thus there is room to grow. Rather than being reserved for the so-called elect of God which excludes those of us who are not Semites any of us can aspire to be as Tarzan- a healthy mind in a healthy body. If you want to be a hulk, with application you can turn yourself into one. We can be men like gods if we elect or we can be stultified cretins if we follow the Semitic path.
The Age of Aquarius will be ruled by the more free masculine side of Dionysus as the Age of Pisces was ruled by the gentle, loving feminine side of Dionysus. Tarzan as a psychological projection for us all is a perfect specimen; he is master of both his conscious and sub-conscious minds as well as master of his environment. Thus he moves freely in the world of appearances while being in control of his inner world of wishful thinking.
Tarzan is God and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet. Move over Mohammed.
Is that any less believable than Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet?
Think about it.
The next section should take us to the marriage of Burroughs and Emma.
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
The Deconstruction of
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America
by
R.E. Prindle
Part III
Organizing The Revolution
Deeds white and black, for minds are clean or foul.
Is the mind clean? Then earth and sky are clean.
Is the mind foul? Then earth and sky are foul.
For it is upon the mind that all depends.
Tibetan Proverb
I quote Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade
Hale quotes Charles Bell, who quotes…
This essay is an investigation of cultures and cultural beliefs especially as they apply to the United States. The above Tibetan proverb as can readily be seen is pre-scientific. It takes no account of the objective world but supposes only that world is a projection of the mind good or bad as the mind is clean or foul.
It tacitly states that all religions are products of the mind or minds that conceived them. As projections they comment on the cleanness or foulness of the projectors.
As my own ideas of psychology are passes through a Freudian lens my argument is based on the scientific aspects Freud assembled while rejecting his religious projection. It should be clear to any thinking person that no religion has been transmitted to man from any god. Such a notion is inconceivable as is the very notion of God which to the Western mind means the Yahweh of the Old Testament. God therefore is the projection of the mind on nature. This concept is clearly brought out in Johann Sebastian Bach’s musical piece; Jehu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring. Man desires redemption in the form of Jesus but the divine Jesus is only a projection of Man’s desiring.
The nature of the fantasy is that God has chosen a certain people to be the bearers and disseminators of his word to all the peoples of the world. The originators of this notion were the Jews who believed and believe themselves to be the elected Ones. After the death of Jesus the English believe that the scepter of empire was passed to them while Anglians in the United States forming the Liberal religion believe the scepter has passed to them as in the adage: Westward the course of Empire.
page 1.
As the notion is based only on desire or wishful thinking its believers were doomed to be disappointed. Thus a defense mechanism must be projected on top of the projection of a chosen people. One then invents the notion of a redeemer- the Messiah, the Mahdi, the Christ. In Christan theology there can be only one Messiah, the Christ, whose mission on Earth was aborted by the crucifixion. Christians await the RETURN of the Christ in a supernatural manner.
For Jews and Moslems the messiah can be any human who so proclaims himself. David Bakan thinks that Freud was the Messiah for instance. Both religions have a surfeit of messiahs all naturally having failed to produce the desired results.
The history of the Jews since their defeat and scattering by the Romans in 70AD has been a succession of failed messiahs. Failure has not daunted this belief but the Jews have changed tactics and strategies. The last Jewish messiah to step forth and be recognized as such, unless like Bakan you include Freud, was the seventeenth century Sabbatai Zevi. (Spelled several different ways so don’t take me to task for my spelling.)
It is significant that a seventeenth century claimant was the last because the European Enlightenment blossomed at nearly the same time. The Enlightenment means Science. Science points out the absurdity of religious projections. Thus all religions have been shown to be based on false premises.
The meaning in terms of Human Consciousness was the consciousness of the mind had now evolved beyond a predecessor Religious Consciousness. Merely because a better method has been found doesn’t mean everyone will embrace it. There are many people and institutions who have a vested interest in the old way and don’t mean to give it up. Moreover they don’t mean for the advance in consciousness to exist.
For our purposes here we are discussing Christianity and Judaism: The West and Judaism. There had been many changes before in the evolution of religious beliefs, most notably the transition from Matriarchy to Patriarchy and they had all involved long and bloody wars. The transition from Religion to Science can be no different. If you haven’t noticed, the reactionary Semitic religions have instigated increasing wars and bloodshed from 1914 to the present Second Irruption From The Desert of the stultified reactionary Moslems.
Vis-a-vis the Roman Catholics and the Protestants the Jews had always been able to hold their own on a theological basis. After all, their religion is the basis of Christianity. The Jews had no chance against Science which acknowledges none of their claims.
The Jews would therefore have to devise new tactics and strategies to defend their atavistic belief system. There was no religious argument they or any other religion could devise to defeat this intelligence; their only alternative was to corrupt it and destroy it from within, thus supplanting Science in the minds of men with their stultifying religion once again. Difficult perhaps, but possible given a shameless exploitation of the good will of Euroamericans.
Now, when the failure of Sabbatai Zevi occurred and the Scientific spirit arose against which religious argument was ineffective, the wisemen of Judaism put thier heads together to devise a strategy. They decided to never again acknowledge a human messiah but to place their hopes in their whole people in the form of a revolution based on the French Revolution.
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From the French Revolution the modern form of Communism emerged. The Jacobins of Robespierre were proto-Communists. The banner was picked up by a man named Babeuf and the Communist assault on society led through the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The French Revolution took place at the beginning of the so-called Industrial Revolution so that all the miseries inherent in the transition from one system to another were visited on ‘Labor.’ Labor was subsumed into the Communist agenda. Early socialism was divided between the Utopian Socialists and the Communists. The cleavage was permanent as Socialists and Communists despised each other’s methods.
Now, the Jews were emancipated by the generous feelings of the Revolutionaries. Up to this point the Roman Catholic Church had more or less contained Judaism. That is they isolated the Jews from the body politic much as a computer virus is isolated by a security system. A psychological allegory of this was put into a short story by Charles Beaumont in 1959. The short story was entitled, The Howling Man. In the story monks had imprisoned the Devil. A chance traveler was admitted to the monastery but advised to pay no attention to a captive man, the Devil in disguise, who howled for release. Naturally the traveler listened to the well sounding pleas of the howling man releasing him. Thus evil was set loose on the world.
This is somewhat the situation between the Church, the Revolutionaries and the Jews. Negating the efforts of the Church the released Jews began to subvert society and science. When one says Science in regard to the post-Revolution one is saying actually Science in embryo. Every science and scientific thinking were in the beginning stages of development. Early theories, absurd by today’s understanding, cannot be judged by today’s knowledge. They were the beginning steps. Like everything else Science would evolve. As it had with the Jews, the Revolution released Science from the control of the Church allowing it to develop, but positively, not negatively.
The Jews realized the threat to their religious mental projection understanding that Science was the true danger that had to be subverted. Unlike Catholicism and Protestantism which were based in Judaism and could therefore be defeated in argument there was no religious argument effective against Science. A different approach would have to be taken. That approach was to appropriate a science with mumbo jumbo then slowly eviscerate the science of its content while supposedly making it moral or in other words subservient to Jewish religious beliefs. This required both bold assertions while suppressing discussion or channeling it so that it could be controlled.
The first attempt and the most developed ‘science’ was politics. Thus Karl Marx began to appropriate the Communist Movement giving it a definite shape and direction. Seizing on the discontent of Labor Marx made that the cornerstone of ‘Scientific’ Socialism. Thus from 1789 to 1913 Communism struggled against the established order with minimal result. A mere one hundred twenty-five years after 1789 Communism established itself in Russia while being on a parity with the establishment in Western Europe.
The other Sciences progressed accordingly. Biology assumed its modern form in 1859 when Darwin published his Origin Of Species. Biology remained one science for which no Jewish claimant arose. The study of the mind or psychology was a different story. The study of psychology in a mythopoeic manner goes back as far as can be traced and further. The ancient Egyptians already had a good working model of the mind.
The scientific study, groping as it were, was undertaken by numerous people in the early nineteenth century. There was no organized theory, just investigation in numerous areas. The most noteworthy investigator for our purposes here was Jean Martin Charcot and his investigations into hysteria at the Salpetriere in Paris.
It appears that the basis of psychological malfunctioning is caused by a variety of hypnosis. That is a suggestion is made in a hypnoid state which enters the subconscious as post-hypnotic suggestion directing the individual against his conscious will, as it were.
The modern recognition of hypnosis was made by the Austrian Anton Mesmer who called it ‘animal magnetism.’ After Mesmer hypnotism was in disrepute for about fifty years although subject to serious investigation by responsible scholars.
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Charcot made hypnotism scientifically respectable again when he discovered its use in dealing with his hysterics. At the same time a man named Auguste Liebeault working with hypnotism in nearby Nancy was discovering the effect of suggestion.
In Vienna a restless Sigmund Freud was casting about for an emerging discipline to appropriate to make his mark. He had been trained as a biologist but despaired of making his name in that discipline. Under the influence of his fellow religionist, Joseph Breuer, he drifted over into psychology.
Freud was of the Jewish culture and he was militantly Jewish. He hated Europeans and the European culture. There is no question but that he intended to replace it with the Jewish culture. At what point he decided to manipulate the emerging science isn’t clear but probably by the time he began attending B’nai B’rith meetings in 1895.
Freud had a Moses Complex, not too dissimilar in effect than Christians with a Jesus complex. He undoubtedly chose psychology as a wide open field with many areas of exciting research possibilities and the opportunity to gratify his Moses Complex by leading his followers out of the psychological wilderness he found Europe to be. Thus as Moses rescued the Jews from Egypt Freud would rescue them from Europe.
Vienna as part of the polyglot Austrian Empire was the original Melting Pot from which Israel Zangwill took his idea. A relatively small German minority governed a multi-cultural empire embracing dozens of cultures and numerous religions. Thus the model for Freud’s conquest by culture was already suggested to him by the rising influence of Jewish culture within the Austrian Empire especially polyglot Vienna.
Having begun his association with Breuer and having heard of Charcot, Freud left for Paris in 1882 to visit what he derogatively would call the Great Man, himself. While Freud resented the ‘Master’ it would seem that Charcot’s influence on his own approach was seminal. There would have been no Freud without Charcot.
During this period of his life Freud was impoverished. He could only wander around Paris without the means to sample the delights of the city. This embittered him. Freud would have us believe that he became a favorite of Charcot, even petted by him. In all likelihood this is a gross exaggeration. Although Charcot may have taken some notice of him it would be characteristic of the Jewish culture to exploit any relationship out of its true proportion. In reading Freud his observations of Charcot are always made from the outside as a seeming voyeur, never as an intimate.
It is clear from the sardonic, belittling tone in which Freud always refers to Charcot that he was profoundly indebted to him. It must have been humiliating to a man with a psychotic attachment to Moses to submit to a man he considered his lesser. In dealing with hysterics Charcot brought hypnosis into respectability. Freud’s understanding of hypnosis was subtle. In Freud’s own psychoanalytic theory he abandoned hypnosis per se choosing a variant he called free association in which the patient was lulled into a hypnoid state so that a form of hypnosis remained the basis of psychoanalysis. Nor did Freud’s researches into hypnosis stop there. After the Great War hypnosis would form the basis of his ideas of Group Psychology. He developed subtler forms of hypnosis.
After returning to Vienna he once again went back to France in 1889 to visit with Liebeault and his disciple or leech, Hippolyte Bernheim. Liebeault had been working with hypnosis for some time. While Charcot failed to understand the signficance of suggestion, the key element of hypnosis, Liebeault did. His researches attracted the attention of Bernheim who like Freud was a Jew on the make. Bernheim succeeded in displacing Liebeault much in the same way as Freud would displace Charcot and his school.
While Liebeault and Bernheim apparently did not understand the relationship of suggestion to the creation of the neurosis or psychosis they had actually discovered that hysteria was caused by a form of suggestion. Ignoring the original suggestion while the patient was hypnotized they tried to use counter-suggestion to remove the affects of the original suggestion or fixation but with limited or temporary success. Since the original suggestion or fixation wasn’t obviated it shortly reestablished its primacy over the counter-suggestion.
While Freud said he rejected the clumsy ineffectiveness of the counter-suggestion he understood suggestion well enough to make it the cornerstone of his version of Group or cultural psychology.,
There is a common misconception that Freud invented psychology, that before him there was no psychology. The notion is completely untrue. Before and after Charcot psychological research was diverse and plentiful throughout Europe and America. There were many theories of the subconscious, for instance, but no one had undeertaken to systematize the various strands. Freud was able to do this while at the same time supplanting all other theories with his own. He actually succeeded in closing off investigation along other lines channeling psychology into his own somewhat flawed system.
All Freud did was to cull the best opinion and put his name on it while shouldering the originators aside as ‘anti-Semites’. For instance, another student of Charcot, Pierre Janet, working from the same teaching came to the same conclusion, namely that ‘neuroses’ are fixed in the subconscious. Whereas Freud named his version of the process ‘repression’ Janet named the result as an ‘idee fixe.’ Both terms mean approximately the same thing, although in my opinion Janet’s is more accurate. My own term is ‘an encysted fixation’. I came to my term independently, or at least I think I did, this is Freudianism you know, but the term I use means, I think, what Janet’s idee fixe means. Freud’s term ‘repression’ may describe the process but doesn’t deal with the result.
As I see it repression implies a voluntary act of will but such is not the case, repression is involuntary functioning independently of the conscious will. This is where Freud’s theory of sex goes wrong. The ‘repression’ is part of a defense mechanism. When the ego or Animus is offered an insult for which it has no defence the response is to repress the insult into an encysted fixation or idee fixe in an effort to control it. In other words, the mind tries to pretend that the insult didn’t occur. As the sexual apparatus is the physical portion of the psychic Animus the expression of the fixation will ivariably be a sexual affect although of differing manifestations from masochism to sadism. Thus the insult is converted into a suggestion of inadequacy of some form.
Thus the use of the sexual apparatus is merely an attempt to massage or exorcise the fixation. Freud actually believed that frequency of ejaculation would make a healthier person or in other words sexual intercourse would cure the ‘neurosis’ or in my and possibly Janet’s term eliminate the fixation. Clearly an impossible method.
One may compare the fixation to a virus on your computer. Once the virus is introduced it must be isolated and removed or it will control or shut down the computer. The virus may be equated with the suggestion that resulted in the fixation. One must eliminate the suggestion or fixation from mind as with the virus from your computer’s memory.
This is where the ‘talking cure’ is effective. Once the fixation is identified if the afflicted person can make the fixation conscious it will disappear or in another word be exorcised. If Freud realized this, which he ought to have, he never published his knowledge.
His use of the unconscious indicates that he at least understood the negative effects of fixations as expressed through their affects or in his terms neuroses and psychoses.
So Freud defamed Janet while organizing psychoanalysis to exclude any opinion but his own no matter how inaccurate. He organized and controlled the magazines and publishing houses, while he controlled and convened the international congresses. Following the Jewish Cultural model, no dissent was allowed, there is no freedom of expression in the Jewish Culture; if you refuse discipline you are merely excommunicated. Once expelled you are defamed and rendered inconsequential. Marginalized in today’s terms. The only analyst to survive this treatment was C.G. Jung who had an awful lot going for him. I can’t think of another dissident who has survived to the present.
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Thus having evolved an understanding of emasculation to add to the mix this was how Freud’s psychological matters stood in 1915 when his idea of psychoanalysis was essentially complete. He now applied his psychological knowledge to political matters. At this point whatever scientific basis Freud possessed was subsumed to Jewish religious requirements.
Historically the Jews have been a migratory people. When the going get tough the Jews get moving. Wherever the action is that’s where they want to be. Thus when the Promised Land of America became accessible to mass migration, that is reliable steamships had replaced unreliable sail, the People began a mass migration to America. The intent was to move the entire Eastern European population to America. The plan failed only because of the outbreak of the Great War for which signficant scholarship can show the Jewish guiding hand. So, in one way the Jews defeated their own plan.
The important thing to remember is that Jewish activities are backed by an inviolable ideology, tight orgzanization and fairly precise coordination and excecution. There is nothing haphazard in the culture’s activities. This has been true for two millennia with increasing precision. As noted when the messiahship of Sabattai Zevi failed, the plan was formed for the whole people to foment a revolution. The date of the revolution was set for 1913 to 1928. Hence if you study Jewish history you can see the preparations unfold leading to this historical knot.
Since Marx the culture had been in control of the Labor movement of the Socialists so that a significant portion of the whole population was involved not just the minority culture. The more timid or moderate such as the Wilsonites and other ‘parlor pinks’, fellow travelers and whatnot, Liberals, were distributed throughout society where they could exercise control without revealing themselves in their true guise.
While I had sifted the information out except for the dates of the messiahship of the culture all I really had to do was read one book. That book was by the Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver who plainly stated the plan and its objectives giving the years.
This revolutionary schedule could not have been unknown to Freud. Thus his schedule from 1895 on must have been coordinated with it as best he could and that best was very good indeed. By 1910 he had his theories in close to final form. From 1915 on, especially after 1917 he was no longer developing his ideas but organizing them for use by the Revolution.
For years he had been attending weekly meeting of B’nai B’rith, the international Jewish brotherhood. He lectured them on psychology on a regular basis. It would be interesting to know how the lectures differed from his published work.
Now for a moment let us consider some aspects of Freudian doctrine. Freud insisted that the was a scientist but the grounds for such a claim seem tenuous at best, rather Freud was a religionist who used what he learned for the furtherance of the Jewish Revolution. Thus his concepts of the unconscious and sex were tailored to upset the morality of European civilization. His promulgated notions were meant to confuse and obfuscate. When one combines Freud’s interpretation of the unconscious, sex and emasculation, all of which were worked out by 1915, one has in fact a potent weapon of psychological warfare. They called it brainwashing during the Korean War. Combined with conditioning and indoctrination trusting Euroamericans who did consider Freud a disinterested scientist abandoned all defenses.
The really noteworthy fact about Freud is that he offered only negative analyses but nothing positive such as how to reconcile the unconscious and conscious minds or how to understand and improve the conscious mind. Freud discussed the nature of projection and perception very little. The nature of the ‘science’ Freud professed to embrace is the negation of perception and projection without which there can be no science. At least he chose not to address consciousness in any positive manner.
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He did issue the enigmatic statement that where Id was Ego shall be. He also said that the Id was a species of something around which the Ego ensheated itself. That’s a tough one. As Ego is presentative of consciousness and Id unconsciousness it sounds as though Freud was referring to the integration of the personality. He doesn’t explain how he invented or discovered the nature of the relationship of Ego and Id or give any indication of how it actually worked. He never develops the idea.
We feel that he perhaps knew more than he chose to reveal through his analysis of Wilhelm Jensen’s novelette Gradiva that he titled Delusion and Dream In Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. By delusion I presume he means projection. That is what Jensen’s character is doing; he is imposing his inner projection on society which makes actions appear irreal. It is only as the story develops that the character’s projection dissolves as reality intrudes itself more and more. At the end of this short piece the character emerges into a true or truer perception of the world. He no longer casts his projection on reality.
Thus what Freud denotes delusion I would call projection. Ridding onself of a mistaken perception of reality to realize as nearly as possible the actual state of affairs is the goal of mental health.
While what Freud has to say about the unconscious is itself a religious projection it does bear some relationship to the reality. Since Freud wished to and did impose a psychological system on the science of psychology it behooved him to deal with the whole mind and not just half. The question is whether he was dishonest or incapable; I opt for dishonest and criminal.
Freud is as guilty of criminal misconduct as the Sudanese Mahdi at Omdurman who offered his followers the religious projection that the bullets of the massed British machine guns facing them would turn to water at Allah’s will. If the Mahdi had so little scientific knowledge and so much religious fervor then there was no difference between his religion and insanity. The Mahdi at least had the excuse that he was far from the centers of scientific research. Freud didn’t.
By the advent of the Russian Revolution then, through his association with B’nai B’rith Freud had prepared the Jewish cadres for some particularly dirty work.
As the Russian Revolution marked the first great success of the Jewish Revolution Freud now began to manipulate his scientific knowledge of hypnotism and psychology to confuse and obfuscate the minds of the Euroamerican cultures while keeping his culture’s mind focused on the work ahead.
Everything was in order; the tools were developed. Freud had cleverly monopolized the study of the mind if not psychology. Further study would be conducted on his terms. It was only necessary now to skillfully use the tools he developed.
End of Part III. Go to Part IV.
I, Dynamo 