A Review: Captain America: The First Avenger Movie.
August 8, 2011
A-Head Vs. The Hydra
A Review of Captain America,
The First Avenger
by
R.E. Prindle
Weinstein, Rabbi Simcha: Up, Up And Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture And Values Shaped The Comic book Superhero, 2006, Leviathan Press.
Must a man be held responsible for his own dreams?
–Sigmund Freud
PLEASE NOTE. THIS REVIEW WAS APPARENTLY SO OBJECTIONABLE TO THE JEWS THAT THEY HAVE TRUNCATED IT BELOW THE INTRODUCTION HAVING HACKED MY MACHINE TO DO SO. IS THE TRUTH SO REPELLENT TO THE JEWS THAT THEY HAVE NO MORALITY?
I will have to rewrite it.
Rabbi Weinstein
I set foot inside a theatre for the first time in twenty years lured by the comic book character of Captain America. Capt. America was about the least favorite of the superheroes for the post-war generation of kids. My primary years for comic books were 1947-50. I was revolted by the jingoism of the strip as well as the stupid costume
While Rabbi Weinstein touts the Jewish superheroes as seminal I should point out that our favorites and the best selling superhero during and after the war was the goy Captain Marvel, much more popular than even Superman. Further while superhero comics declined in sales after WWII I would suggest that it wasn’t loss of interest in the characters so much as a lack of interest in the material. If the comics had shifted from anti-Nazi to anti-Communist the sales might have become inflated. Of course such a shift was impossible as Communists were more or less in cultural control
This movie did nothing to refresh my memories pleasantly. And, further it turns out per Rabbi Weinstein that Captain America was 100% Jewish. Capt. America was the creation of two Jewish young men, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, assumed names of course. In keeping with that Kirby and Simon had their character socking Hitler on the jaw long before ‘America’ entered the war while being obsessed with Nazis so we may conclude along with the Rabbi that the Capt. was indeed Jewish.
The movie purportedly takes place sometime during WWII. In this movie Hitler has been demoted to a minor threat as the super Nazi, The Hydra, has usurped his place while being immortal so that the Nazi threat can never die. In that case the Hydra must be on Steroids as Hitler was only fueled by amphetamines. Perhaps the A on America’s helmet stands for amphetamines and the Capt. was an a-head. Actually Capt. America’s striped mask or helmet has an A cut in the forehead which the Hydra slyly suggests stands for American arrogance. American arrogance came up two or three times.
So, essentially we have the Jewish Capt. America versus the arch-anti-Semite, the Hydra. It doesn’t stop there though as Hydra appears to be an alter-ego of the Jews. America, as they like to think of themselves and Hydra as they often behave. If you were to read Rabbi Weinstein before you saw the movie it would take on a whole different aspect and signficance.
The story itself is trite with no attempt at believability, after all this is a comic book. It is actually quite camped up. All action with a lot of slap bang stuff, stock characters and horrendous noise effects at a mind numbing volume.
Even though Capt. America crashes Hydra’s flying wing into an ice field at the North Pole Capt. America wakes up seventy years later in a New York CIA facility. Well, Christ, it is a comic book, I had already insulted my own intelligence by buying a ticket. Still, I think Stan Lee should be more than a little ashamed of himself.
Two stars if you’re mentally alert; four stars if you like noise and fireworks, five stars if this is your kind of movie. Pretty dumb in my book.
A Review: Pt. 6, Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 5, 2011
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 6
Threads And Strands Of The Web
For I must speak what wisdom would conceal,
And truth, invidious to the great, reveal.
–Homer
More than likely it is a coincidence that Burroughs wrote a fictional account of time and space weaving a web at this time, for Fate was bringing together threads and strands of the web of his own life in a picture of unparalleled opportunity and deadly peril. The decisions Burroughs would make would determine the outcome. His life could have gone another way. Or, perhaps, Burroughs sensed the impending crises and fictioned them in an attempt to deal with them.
We are already aware of the conflicts with the Judaeo-Communists. It seems clear that they were the original aggressors and that Burroughs was in reaction to them, in other words, on the defensive. Thus these first two Tarzan novels of the thirties are direct attacks on both aggressors. If Burroughs expected counter attacks there seems to be no evidence that he prepared for them. He never seems to have sat down to coolly analyze the problem in order to have a plan.
In fact, there seems to be little evidence that he ever actually realized the consequences of his success or how to handle it. While he had incorporated himself he made no effort to corporately structure his writing enterprise. In point of fact as a creative artist he was fundamentally incapable of running a structured business. Doing so would have interfered with his creative function. In fact, I am convinced that he dissipated his creative energies by becoming involved in business decisions to the extent he did.
Developing an organization is very difficult. While he should have done this, without a very fortuitous combination of circumstances it is very doubtful he could have. Hollywood was full of sharpers ready to take advantage of creative talent and in this case and nearly all others they did.
On the positive side, from 1911 to, say, 1928 ERB had created an unparalleled intellectual property in Tarzan. One in a zillion chance. As the twenties developed unparalleled opportunities to exploit the property evolved.
Apart from publishing, the three key profit centers were comics, movies and radio. All three strands came to fruition as the thirties began. Each required a slightly different approach. Each required thinking out with an intellectual departure from the past.
At this crucial moment ERB’s past arose to drag him down from behind. He was unable to make the emotional transition from what was essentially an emotionally battered youth to a successful, affluent man in control of his destiny. He remained psychologically attached to his personal relationship to Tarzan as an aspect of his personality rather than objectifying the character as a psychological projection for the world. He had prepared the way to make Tarzan a savior man-god but then couldn’t separate him from his own personality. If Fate had thrown the right people in his way they could have done this for him.
Thus rather than maximize his financial returns he essentially shot his feet off. He carped at the various media companies to the point where he was viewed as troublesome, an undesirable actually. Thus while he expected great financial returns including the means to buy a yacht, he sabotaged his own efforts to obtain them.
He belittled the returns of the comic strip for instance, bemoaning that it only returned thirty dollars a day. Well, that was eleven thousand dollars a year, every year. He could count on it. His MGM contract for Tarzan, The Ape Man provided him the exact same return. Twenty-two thousand divided by two years is eleven thousand a year.
At the time ERB signed the MGM contract he had a very valuable intellectual property already fully developed but he had developed a reputation among the Studios. The Studios had already had extensive dealings with him from the silent era. ERB, without a plan to market Tarzan had accepted whatever money came his way. Two of his titles had been sold in 1921 although production of them had been shelved. In 1927 FBO Studios decided to film Tarzan And The Golden Lion. While this film was lost for decades a print of the film was discovered which was issued on DVD in 2006 so that it can now be viewed.
In my opinion FBO did handsomely by ERB. A good clear scenario was written by William Wing that remained true to the spirit of Burroughs’ work; perhaps more than it ought to have in a movie sense. The filming, the photography is terrific; it has never been done better, not by MGM, not by RKO. It is true that Wing invented a sister for Tarzan but this is a minor point.
I find it difficult to undertand what ERB was disgruntled about except that another writer was handling his alter ego. The difference between a movie scenario and a book is very distinct. There would have been no way to get the entire convoluted story of Golden Lion on the screen so Wing wisely chose to develop a variation on the story of the Valley of Diamonds. Even so he threw in an earthquake scene a la Jewels Of Opar and Tarzan’s jumping the gap in the tunnel.
If anything his attempt to write as closely to Burroughs as he did lessened the impact of the film with some needless clutter. If, in 1935’s New Adventures Of Tarzan for which Burroughs provided the story idea, Dearholt attempted to tell the story more or less as Burroughs wrote, then the result was a hopeless mish mash. The movie was no truer to Burroughs’ Tarzan than FBO’s film, while lacking the clarity and force of the latter. Burroughs should have been grateful to FBO for an excellent movie. My idea of the best of the lot even though silent.
Had I been associated with FBO I would have found ERB’s criticisms nitpicking and offensive. After all FBO broke the boycott ERB had been under since 1922. The FBO movie triggered a response from Universal which held the rights to Jungle Tales and Jewels Of Opar. These titles were released as Tarzan The Mighty and Tarzan The Tiger starring Frank Merrill. At present there is no print of Tarzan The Mighty while as of December 5, 2006 I am still awaiting the release of Tarzan The Tiger. ERB once again was unhappy with these films, voicing loud complaints. All this carping could have done little for his reputation among the Studios. Before the long hiatus of Tarzan movies from 1921 to 1927 he had been run off the lot during the filming.
According to the ERBzine Timeline for the ’30s ERB approached MGM in 1930 asking $75,000 for a movie and was rebuffed. If this is true, $22,000 in 1931 was quite a comedown. MGM solved ERB’s querulousness by obtaining the rights to do with the character as they wished. They promptly disdained Burrughs’ storylines for their own while changing the character of Tarzan from that of an international sophisticate to that of a feral boy.
As the first full sound Tarzan, MGM hit the jackpot with the victory cry of the bull ape. The Tarzan yell would be the trademark of the charcter, although hardly a blood chilling fearsome holler. Burroughs himself couldn’t do better as Herman Brix in New Adventures merely growls out a long drawn Tar-man-gan-eee with the last sylable in falsetto. More laughable than fearsome.
In between these two films Sol Lesser released a monstrosity starring Buster Crabbe. Lesser never got the handle on Tarzan on his own, instead borrowing the MGM Characterization when he acquired the rights from them.
Lesser and his brother Irving were independent producers of some substance. Sol was born in 1890 in Spokane, Washington, dying at 90 in 1980. There is even a biography of his life. Not easy to find and not available on any site when I looked. If anybody knows where one is or having one could make a copy for me it would be much appreciated.
Lesser’s father who was in the nickelodeon business died in 1907 in San Francisco leaving the business to Sol and brother Irving. Sol got involved in distribution in 1910 eventually forming the Golden Gate Film Exchange in 1915.
In that year San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast was shuttered. Before the closure Lesser filmed the area, selling the movie. It would be interesting if the film was still around.
He made the right moves. After distribution he became a producer for First National and then formed a chain of movie theatres. After an aborted retirement he reentered production forming his own independent studio called either Principle or Principal Pictures. David Fury spells the name Principal in his Kings Of The Jungle and that sounds right. This was apparently Sol’s status when he acquired the rights to Tarzan from a third party in 1928 and when he made the Crabbe abortion in 1933.
Lesser was influential in Hollywood. He made it a point to know and be known. In the early thirties it was he who was responsible for introducing Disney to Joseph Schench (pronounced Skenk) and facilitating Disney’s move from Columbia to United Artists.
One can’t be sure of his politics from the sources cited but according to the New York Times:
…Lesser forsook production for distribution again, returning to the creative end of moviemaking in 1931 when, through is friendshlip with writer Upton Sinclair, he became involved with the Sergei Eisenstein project, Thunder Over Mexico.
Thunder Over Mexico was undoubtedly a Communist diatribe. Sol Lesser while involved with consevatives like Disney and Burroughs, also played the other side of the street with the likes of Upton Sinclair and the Jewish film maker, Sergei Eisenstein of Battleship Potemkin fame.
It would seem probable that he at least knew such luminaries as Louis B. Mayer and possibly Irving Thalberg. Even though he could have foiled both Burroughs and MGM with his prior rights to Tarzan, he characteristically stepped aside, for remuneration of course, to let their films play through. It would be interesting to know how and why he obtained his rights from a third party and how they had obtained theirs.
One doesn’t know what his relationship to Mayer and MGM was at this time but it is noteworthy that he acquired exclusive rights to Tarzan when MGM abandoned the profitable series. Under Lesser the movies continued to gross two to three million a picture.
Sound movies should have been a gold mine for Burroughs if he had handled himself properly. Instead through his impulsiveness and vanity there were at least four competing Tarzans on the screens from 1930 to 1935. This must have created confusion in the public’s mind, while injuring Burroughs’ financial returns.
At the time sound brought the potential of immense movie profits to Burroughs the thread of radio also came to maturity about 1930. While the evangelists were quick to capitalize on the potential of radio, Burroughs wasn’t far behind. Perhaps the success of Aimee Semple Mcpherson showed him the way.
As the decade dawned, his eye turned in radio’s direction. By 1932 he was successful in launching a show. Once again ERB failed to analyze the difference between books and a new medium. Radio was for him the most lucrative of all his ventures. His revenues from radio equaled his income from all other sources combined. This income stream could have continued unabated through the thirties but, once again, ERB interfered with the show rather than contributed. Undoubtedly because of his constant carping the first series was not renewed. A second series was launched which was also discontinued. From 1935 until his death he was unable to get on radio again. After his death in 1950 a new series was launched.
Thus, between publishing, comics, movies and radio ERB was provided opportunities to exploit his great labor in creating the ultimate intellectual property of the twentieth century and blew it. The personality forming psychology of his youth popped up to prevent his realizing his most cherished dreams in this sphere of his life as it did in his relationship to women.
b.
If ERB had read his Homer at some earlier time, or possibly, earlier times in his life, it seems evident that he reread the Odyssey, for sure, at this time. The evidence is prominent in these five novels, especially Triumphant and City Of Gold. A text in all five novels is the struggle between the La aspect of his Anima and that of Jane. Subconsciously he had steered his love life to this critical juncture where he would have to choose one and reject the other.
There may have been a fortuitousness in his choosing to concentrate on his own Odyssey at this time. He was able to capitalize on a number of good story ideas, while on the other hand a major story line of the Odyssey is the examination of a man’s control of his sexual desires. A key story of this aspect is the story of the seductress Circe. By inducing all men to abandon themselves to unbridled sexual desire she turns them all into pigs. A lesson for contemporary times. Odysseus avoids this by having a pocketful of Moly. Moly is some sort of charm that allows him to resist Circe’s seductions.
Thus Odysseus retains his manly integrity while securing the release of his crew. The Sirens, Calypso and the other women are all temptations for Odysseus to abandon his manhood for the luxuries of sex or in other word, the Matriarchy. He resists them all to return home to Penelope in Ithaca where she sits lonely endlessly weaving her web.
One can’t know directly how Burroughs read the story or even if the above details registered with him; nevertheless these five novels are about a man’s relationships with women and more specifically they concern the details of ERB’s relationships with women. The story as told by him is a troubled one.
It would appear that his cherished Anima image of the previous forty years or so, La of Opar, no longer answered his needs, so at the end of Invincible Tarzan abandons La of Opar. She and Opar disappear from the oeuvre never to be mentioned again.
In real life perhaps La has been replaced by Florence who now figures as the Golden Girl. With the appearance of Jezebel in Triumphant the Golden Girl makes her first appearance to dominate the stage until Lion Man and the end of this five novel series.
In Triumphant the Jane aspect which has been missing for the last couple novels parachutes back into ERB’s life. He marries her off to the stable aspect of his Animus while pairing the Golden Girl with the low life aspect of his Animus.
Emma had always said ERB was a low brow so perhaps he found it too unpleasant aping high brow manners giving up the fight to indulge that aspect of his Animus more comfortable to him.
In this struggle Florence had been removed from the scene. Back during the writing of this novel Burroughs quickly opted to join his low life aspect with his sexual desire for the Golden Girl. His Moly gave out on him. Thus Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick is transformed into Old Timer of Leopard Man while Jezebel becomes the platinum blonde, Kali Bwana.
Having made the decision to take the Golden Girl he has to eliminate the Jane aspect which he does in City Of Gold. Perhaps wavering a trifle in Lion Man he seems to have created a type of middle Tarzan Anima figure in Rhonda Terry. While he rejects Naomi/Jane he seems to have misgivings about Balza/Florence as the Golden Girl.
But, by this time the die had been cast so that in real life he does leave Emma to begin his life with Florence as a born again sex hound. As Old Timer in Leopard Men he says he was entitled to some pleasure in life and by God he was going to take it.
So, in both his business life and his personal life his past rose up and bit him in the behind destroying any chance he had to realize his true desires. I’m afraid I have to look at the remainder of his life as a failure as he was unable to eliminate the psychological impediments placed in his way by his early life. Not that he didn’t try. He appears to have studied psychology trying to find a way through to the other side of the maze of consciousness. Thus we have the subterranean passages too dark for anyone to find their way, yet his characters do. As he searches for a way out, the past rises up in the shape of deformed monsters like the Oparians beneath the Sacred City.
Or the round about way Tarzan and La found their way out of the lion cage in Invincible to be betrayed by the Old Man who professed to be true to La. Who was the Old Man? The shade of the past? David Adams has brought emphasis to this scene in his review of “The Ancient Dead of the City of Horz,” itself a dead city on the shores of a dead sea in Burroughs Bulletin #68.
By the writing of The Ancient Dead, ERB no longer had any hope to escape his past, while at the same time it was too late.
So, as the matter turned out, this period from 1930 to 1934 was the final crucial period in ERB’s life where he could have taken control of his destiny. He apparently sensed that the threads and strands of the web of his life were being brought together by Fate.
I neither condemn nor advise, unlike the literary fashion of today. I assume no superior airs, nor do I have a right to do so, but the fact is that had he been able to control his sexuality while restraining his impulsiveness, Fate might have been kinder to him at this juncture. As he was unable to order his psychology Fate, as it were, laid him low.
The critical junctures were the impetuous signing with MGM, his abandonment of Emma and his mismanagement of his radio affairs.
I have now covered four of the five Tarzan novels of this period. The last, The City City Of Gold deals with his ferocious sexual needs that destroyed his chances for success.
A Review: Pt. 4 Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs
August 2, 2011
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 4
The Born Again Lafe Smith
The time has come the Walrus said
to speak of many things;
Of shoes and ship and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings.
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings.
Lewis Carrol
The learned nonsense of Lewis Carrol was never far from Burroughs’ mind. In the long list of influences Carroll ranks fairly high although more disguised than others. Both adventures of Alice as well as The Hunting Of The Snark formed the backbone of Burroughs’ ideology. Thus the entrance to the Land Of Midian in many ways resembles Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole. The sexual implications of the rabbit hole should be self-evident as is the the entry into the Land of Midian.
The Lafayette of Smith’s name refers of course to the revolutionary Marquis de Lafayette who fought against the monarchy in the American Revolution. Recently General Pershing had repaid the debt when, as he stepped ashore in France he grandly proclaimed: Lafayette, we are here. A famous utterance then and now so that it appears that Burroughs is associating freedom and liberation to his alter ego. He might exclaim as he stepped through the hole: I am Lafayette and I am here.
Smith is studying the geology of the area when he discovers a cleft in the mountain which he enters. In some ways Burroughs old life ended when the Reds invaded Opar. La was forced out into the the real world when her people rebelled because of La’s fixation on Tarzan. The Big Bwana restored her to her throne having destroyed the rebel chiefs. We are led to believe that La reigned happily ever after even though her manifestation as well as Opar disappear from ERB’s dream world. With the death of his old dream world ERB seeks to find another; one which other people cannot enter. Jungle Girl written shortly after this novel provided one such place in the ancient Khmer kingdoms of Cambodia and Thailand.
Thus Midian is a pale reflection of Opar. While the way to Opar was known to the world, indeed, Zveri, Stalin and the Communists as well as many Africans knew of the fabulous wealth of Opar and where the city was located. They didn’t know where the gold was located because in was in Burroughs’ mind.
Having had his dream world violated ERB creates another but this time the location is so remote and the entrance so difficult, although identical to that of Opar, to find that none but his Anima and Animus figures can find it.
Like the great red and gold city of Opar Midian is surrounded by high cliffs but unlike Opar they are unscalable from either side. No casual visitors are going to get in there. Like the actual city of Opar the only entry is through a cleft in the walls. In Opar once through the cleft one climbs a stairway to enter the ruins. Here, led by his interest in geology Smith enters the cleft in the mountain reft by titanic forces ages ago to follow it deep within the mountain wall. To insure that he continues on down the rabbit hole Burroughs sends a lion in after him blocking any exit should he wish to turn back. Thus the lion as Fate is forcing him to his destiny. The role of the lion in the oeuvre remains elusive to me; I fail to grasp the nuances as well as the essence. The lion may be another side of Tarzan, the Lion Man, who is helpful. On the other hand the lion as an expression of Burroughs’ Anima is extremely dangerous and hateful falling beneath Dad’s knife repeatedly, these are usually female. Still a problem for me.
Following the cleft for some way Smith reaches the end which is a very small hole that he can just force his way through. The symbolism of birth is quite clear; the descent from the womb and the breakthrough to the other side through the vagina.
Both aspects of Burroughs’ Anima are already inside Midian. Lady Barbara parachuted there while Jezebel was born there. Thus, it would seem that the La, Jezebel, Balza figure was native to Burroughs’ X chromosome while Jane, Lady Barbara, Rhonda Terry was an acquired image.
Smith will also be joined by the two remaining Animus figures, Gunner Patrick and Tarzan. All five of his Anima/Animus figures that he acknowledges were then functioning in his dream world. This may have represented his brain or the womb or a combination of both. What seems to be clear is that with the destruction and death of his old dream world he is being born again. The resurrection scene will follow.
When Tarzan enters Midian as when he is entering the cleft of Opar it is necessary for him to manipulate his shoulders through by turning them sideways. Thus there is a clear reference to birth.
Perhaps when Burroughs began self-publication he felt as though he were making a break with his past. Leaving McClurg’s and Joe Bray behind, making a new start as it were, he was beginning a new life. That was probably part of it as was the invasion of Opar by his enemies but I’m sure there is personal development involved that isn’t clear to me yet.
Once inside, convinced that the lion is following him although one believes the small hole would have baffled the lion, Smith finds the convenient tree in front of the hole into which he climbs for safety. Then Smith does exactly what Patrick, the dark side of the ego, will do, he goes down to the lake and gorges himself on water. This could be construed as baptism of the born again man; the living water of redemption.
He then meanders in the direction of Midian. As night has fallen the bonfires attract him.
By this time Lady Barbara after a few refreshing skinny dips waiting for her clothes to dry, Burroughs actually writes these strange interludes, finds her way back to Midian. For some strange reason the Midianites pay no attention to her mind boggling miracles, sometimes you can’t buy a thrill, choosing to disregard the apparent will of their god.
She and Jezebel are condemned to be crucified and burned to death. Both have been placed on the crosses with faggots piled round when Smith and his trusty nickel plated .32 burst upon the scene.
Now we have the resurrection of Smith and his Anima figures. The implication is that the trinity have symbolically died and are now resurrected. This is some fancy footwork.
Imagine the scene: Two crosses are erected. The Anima figures are placed on the crosses. As I imagine it there is a space of four to eight feet between the arms. Smith forces a way to a place in fornt of the crosses as he kicks away the burning faggots between the two crosses. Although not on a cross himself he is symbolically so he and Burroughs assume the role of Jesus Christ in the middle while the Anima figures represent the two thieves, one on either side.
Thus we are playing out a reenactment of the Christian crucifixion that will have a different result.
The Christians are pressing in on Smith. This is yet another version of Burroughs’ confrantation with John the Bully on the street corner. Back then he turned and ran. Now Smith is in a quandary. Christ in the same dilemma turned the other cheek saying: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
We have all been taught to revere turning the other cheek. Some even attempt to practice the precept. I’m sure the ploy may work from time to time but in nine times out of ten it won’t. That is more or less the dilemma of the Western world today. it is steadfastly trying to turn the other cheek but every time it does a steel-toed boot gets planted on it.
Thus as Smith is dithering a clear cultured English female voice comes down from the cross saying: You’re going to have to shoot to kill, you know. In other words, turning the other cheek is sure death. Burroughs is especially good at surprise twists like this.
Astonished, perhaps thinking the angel of the Lord had spoken to him Smith complies, firing into the crowd. As the joke is that his aim is so poor he couldn’t hit the side of a barn he is fortunate enough to actually kill someone.
Momentarily stunned by the magical weapon but not overawed the crowd pauses long enough to allow Smith to get Lady Barbara down. Thus Burroughs chooses the older more stately aspect of his Anima rather than the Wild Thing, sex kitten. Perhaps as Florence was out of town ERB temporarily shifted bazck to the Jane Anima aspect. Within a matter of weeks or days he will decide on Jezebel/Balza/Florence when Florence unexpectedly returns and he writes Leopard Men in celebration.
Smith succeeds in lowering Lady Barbara but then Jobab challenges the efficacy of his .32. Smith fires at Jobab point blank missing him. Jobab vindicated rushes Smith knocking the gun out of his hand. Lady Barbara scoops it up, places the muzzle against Jobab’s side where he learns the efficacy of the Colt. Thus the Anima and Animus of Burroughs have now killed a man.
This give the crowd pause once again so that Jezebel is lowered and the Trinity run away. The two Anima aspects and Burroughs’ bright Animus are now whole. The confrontation with John the Bully has been resolved.
They attempt to find the opening but in the process wander into North Midian where they are captured by the fair haired, blue eyed, small nosed but no less superstitious North Midians. They manage to escape.
They capture a kid to eat but in the process the goatherd misses it. What the symbolism of eating the ‘lamb’ is escapes me just now. Smith and lady Barbara are recaptured, taken to the village.
In the meantime Tarzan and Patrick enter the crater. Burroughs now has all five of his Anima and Animus figures in the crater. Tarzan separates from Patrick. The latter comes across Jezebel who had escaped the North Midians. The meeting is apparently love at first sight so the Wild Thing Anima and the killer Animus are united. As they are tired they lay down together. You can draw your conclusions but Jezebel appears to be ready for any ‘beautiful’ man who comes along. Whether a comment on Floence isn’t clear however Burroughs in his mind would be seeing her in his Desperado aspect while she would be his Wild Thing or little Flapper girl.
Perhaps with Smith/Lady B ERB is representing his Dr. Jekyll side, his married status while with Jezebel/Patrick he is representing his Hyde side in his affair with Florence Gilbert.
Jezebel and Patrick leave the crater. On the outside they are spotted by Capietro’s men who bash the Burroughs surrogate on the head leaving him for dead while they carry Jezebel off. This would be the same situation with John the Bully or the bashing in Toronto however it may also represent Ashton Dearholt’s taking Florence out of town for a cooling off period.
Burroughs interjects a comedy routine back in North Midian with a lampoon of religosity over whether Paul had yellow hair or black hair. The upshot is that Smith is to die.
However a pair of eyes are watching the scene. An unknown lurker to the North Midians, Tarzan to us. Tarzan’s own role in this story is his battle with Capietro and Stabutch. Otherwise he functions as a deus ex machina– a God from the machine a common feature of Greek drama to resolve an otherwise unresolvable plot point — to get the Anima figure out of difficulty. He does in this case too.
Then leaving he crater Tarzan escorts the pair to his friend Lord Passmore’s safari leaving them there in safety with the faithful Waziri. Then he goes back to deal with Stabutch and Capietro.
Thus Fate and Burroughs go about weaving their web. The similarity to Penelope of the Odyssey is close with the exception that Burroughs does not unravel the previous day’s work. But one is invited to see this story as a series of pictures woven into the tapestry somewhat like the contest between Athene and Arachnae. One might also compare the novel, in the classical mode, to the Shield of Achilles which is decorated around the edge with a series of pictures portraying the life of the Bronze Age. So Burroughs has woven a series of such pictures into his tapestry. A clever idea and well executed. How many people have ever gotten it except for us is open to question.
So far Burroughs has insulted the Jews and ridiculed religion in general and Christianity specifically. He now turns to the strand of Communism, humiliating them in his dreamworld. It is all well that he should take the attack to them but one is surprised that he either didn’t anticipate a counter attack or didn’t anticipate the direction from which it would come if he was even yet aware that his defenses had been overrun by MGM.
The man was playing with fire without an awareness of real life consequences. It would be amusing to know if a copy of Tarzan Triumphant was rushed off to Stalin. One can be sure that the ADL/AJC/MGM combination had an advance copy perhaps even the chapters as they were being written. It is inconceivable that his enemies had no spy within his organization. That is just the way things are done and had to have been done in this instance. The usual mode is to capture the position of secretary through whom all information passes. That means that ERB’s typist may have been the conduit, Cyril Ralph Rothmund or perhaps even both. I’m betting on Rothmund for sure. I would love to see his finances. He may also have been on the ADL/AJC/MGM payroll was well as Burroughs’. Itr was he who negotiated the contract Burroughs signed giving away the control of Tarzan.
The next picture on the web is the reunion of Jezebel and Patrick followed by the battle of Tarzan and the Communists.
To be continued in Part 5: In The Footsteps Of The Lord
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB The Scholar
Part 2
Lady Barbara Drops In
As always ERB is the consummate multi-culturalist both ethnic and social. Barbara is the daughter of the English Lord Whimsey, Smith is a college professor, Capietro is an Italian Communist renegade, Stabutch is a Russian Communist, the Midianites represent an ancient religious culture derived from the Jewish, Tarzan is Tarzan of Africa and Lord Passmore of England and then we have a cast of animal characters including a tribe of baboons who interact with Tarzan on the cultural level. All are represented as being culturally distinct. ERB is more of a right multi-culturalist than a left.
If a culture is in fact a culture it must be distinct or it couldn’t qualify as a culture. To be of the French culture there must be characteristics that can be identified as specifically French. Else, why call yourself French? The Left multi-culturalists need to define their terms a little better. They come across as rather shabby intellectually.
Then, of the hundreds, probably thousands of cultures, are they all to be considered equal? For instance is it considered desirable to be of the Prison culture? Pedophile culture? No, of course not; not all cultures are equally beneficial. Each culture must be analyzed on its own merits and faults, completely analyzed by objective analysts. No particular culture need be nor can be taken at its own evaluation. Obviously many cultures are to be avoided completely. Others should be isolated or quarantined. Which is which can only be determined by an analysis of its positive contributions. The results of analysis can be unkind; the truth frequently hurts. As the French say: C’est la vie.
In his analysis of group cultures ERB does draw conclusions. There’s no doubt he thinks that the Communist culture is a negative to be avoided. Thus Zveri in Invincible was ignominiously defeated by Tarzan as Stabutch will be in Triumphant.
In almost every case ERB is very hard on religious cultures as he will be in this novel. Is he unjust or is the truth about religion just too hard for devotees to bear? Everyone will have their own opinion while I have made my position abundantly clear: the religious consciousness is outdated, having been surpassed by the vastly superior Scientific Consciousness. I won’t be changing my mind soon.
Lady Barbara Collis is about to parachute into a culture two thousand years in the past. ERB commits a major gaffe here in the opening pages of his novel. Lady Barbara is attempting a non-stop flight of 7500 miles in a 1930 plane, clearly impossible. Rather than taking a direct route up the Nile she is lost several hundreds of miles to the East over Ethiopia and, get this, already running on empty.
Dorothy Sayers
I don’t know who calculated her fuel needs but I should imagine he would be looking for a new occupation. But, that doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the story any more than the donut atmosphere of Poloda in Beyond The Farthest Star. Who knows what goes on beyond the farthest star. They probably even suspend the laws of gravity.
There Lady Barbara is, way up there without the means of propulsion. she does the manly thing: she jumps out. This is real Twilight Zone stuff; little does she know she will leave the twentieth century and land in 80 AD or so. The Land Of Midian has been frozen in time for the last two millennia.
The Midians assembled within the walls of their crater hear the drone of the airplane, which sound they are unable to identify and then to their amazed eyes a little white cloud appears through the mist with a human form dangling below it. To their religiously distorted senses it must be the Angel of the Lord.
Thus we have a nice confrontation between two different cultures. The modern scientific of Lady Barbara and the ancient religious culture of the Midians. The Midians could stand as a metaphor of the religions of Burroughs’ day which, not unlike the Midians, were roooted in a culture two thousand years old and of a different and inferior consciousness. Not only had the Scopes trial recently ended but the sensatinal affair of Aimee Semple Mcpherson was still fairly warm, plus ERB had recently read Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry. That novel did not sit well with ERB nor does it sit well with me. Burt Lancaster’s movie Elmer Gantry, by the way, is totally dissimilar to the Gantry of the book.
According to ERBzine Burroughs took offence at Elmer Gantry, deploring Lewis’ habit of ridiculing
Aimee Semple Mcpherson
and demeaning people rather than presenting the story as entertainment. Lewis does ridicule and belittle every character in his book in a detestable holier than thou manner which is very annoying. Burroughs turns the story around and disparages practices which I suppose makes it entertainment. For instance both the fictional Gantry and the real life Mcpherson are what are known in military slang as ‘Sky Pilots.’ Thus there is a certain amount of humor in Lady Barbara as an angel of the lord sky piloting into the religious Land of Midian.
When the Midianites drown a young woman while dragooning her, Lady Barbara, after the manner of Mcpherson, brings her back to life by ‘a laying on of hands’, that is artificial respiration. Clever of ERB. It will be remembered tha Mcpherson had a roomful of crutches and wheelchairs from people she had supposedly cured by a laying on of hands. I have no idea how many readers might have gotten the joke when the novel was released but there the joke is if you care to look for it.
So we have the Scopes Trial, Aimee Semple Mcpherson and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry all rolled up in a series of jokes ‘highly fictionized.’ There is probably more to be found if one could steep
Sinclair Lewis
oneself in the ephemeral culture of the time.
As mentioned, Lady Barbara parachutes through two thousand years of time to find herself among a Pauline Christian sect that hadn’t changed one iota since c. 80 A.D. The emphais on Pauline Christianity is important. At about this time ERB was becoming involved with the Vedantist mission in Hollywood so discussions of early Christianity may possibly have made an impression on him. Paul was, of course, a Jew who adapted the Jewish Christian sect for dissemination among the Gentiles. The Catholic Church was founded on Sts. Peter and Paul while the medieval Knights Templar based their Christianity on the Gospel of John thus being Johannites. There was a cultural divide between the Church and the Templars which did necessitate action no less than between the Paulites and the Arians. ERB’s emphasis is intended to indicate the Jewish origins of the Midianites.
It will be remembered that Angustus was a Jewish Christian who arrived in company with a Nordic slave girl. So for two thousand years the Midianites have been inbreeding. ERB is considering the results of inbreeding, as a year later he will write Pirate Blood that deals with the famously inbred Jukes family. Pirate Blood is perhaps his most despairing story as his mind tips toward Lamarckian evolution in an apparent attempt to explain to himself why he can’t resolve his psychological problems.
Thus the genetic and Lamarckian traits of Angustus and the slave girl have been passed down through approximately seventy generations. Angustus’ genes have predominated while those of the slave girl appear occasionally in sports.
Angustus was characterized by a huge nose that was an actual deformity, a chinless face and epilepsy. Thus if one imagines this, Lady Barbara is confronted by a group of people with huge noses covering most of their faces with no chins, the throat sweeping back from just under the lips and writhing on the ground in epileptic fits.
There can be no mistaking that ERB is caricaturing the Jews. Angustus was a Jew and he was a Pauline Christian. As a Christian, ERB disguises his Jewish nationality. The leader of hte Midianites, Abraham the son of Abraham certainly puts the Midianites into a Jewish context, as does the fact that they consider themselves the ‘chosen people.’ Ludicrous enough from their physical description.
ERB’s caricature is one that was prevalent when he was a young man, while one that couldn’t be missed by the gentlemen of the ADL/AJC and MGM. They would neither forgive nor forget. In fact Tarzan would be potrayed in The New Adventures Of Tarzan as chinless and with a huge nose. While Herman Brix/Bruce Bennet had neither a bulbous nose nor was chinless the effect was achieved through photographic lighting and shadowing. Either that or the film has deteriorated through time to achieve that effect. (DVD, The New Adventures Of Tarzan, Alpha Home Entertainment, www.oldies.com )
If you think there isn’t a war going on here, look more closely.
Even though of Jewish descent, the Midianites are Christians, but of the most primitive stripe; they make sects like the Nazarenes look liberal. Their minds are uncompromisingly dark. The girl who was dragooned was sentenced to death for smiling. Joy was considered of the devil in Midian. Here ERB characterized a number of Christian sects correctly.
Among the people who greeted Lady Barbara was a genetic sport who harked back physically and mentally to the original slave girl. She is Jezebel. She and Lady Barbara are immediately attracted to each other by their beauty. The attractive and intelligent Midianites were invariably fair haired and blue eyed while the unattractive ones were dark haired, brown eyed and stupid. Little doubt that the AJC/ADL would consider the book ‘racist.’
Jezebel is an interesting character in that she is a little more than light headed. She is governed entirely by surface appearances. As in Lion Man where the hybrids were expelled from Henry’s village, so the more attractive males were exiled to the other side of the crater. Obviously we have an example of eugenics here. They were more warlike than the Midianites occasionally raiding them. Jezebel remarks that they are so good looking she hopes they will capture her. When the Midianites honor ‘the angel’ with her own cave and offering of food, Jezebel is depicted laying back eating grapes like a spoiled young thing with a box of bon-bons. ERB later describes her as a Golden Girl which relates her to Balza of Lion Man and hence to Florence.
Whatever ERB tells himself about Florence in his conscious mind his depiction of her in his unconscious life seems to be quite different.
At first Lady Barbara is treated quite well but familiarity breeds contempt. Abraham Ben Abraham begins to suspect her divinity. Even the miracle of the laying on of hands that restored the girl to life being no less a miracle than the raising of Lazarus cannot dissuade Abe Ben Abe from testing Lady Barbara. Thus she too is dragooned but instead of being dunked three times she is thrown into the lake wrapped in a net with the net weighted. Here is proof positive that ERB read Dumas’ The Count Of Monte Cristo. The scene replicated Dantes being thrown into the sea from the Chateau d’If.
Lady Barbara has her handy jackknife so that she is able to cut her way free. Thus we leave her here crawling gaspingly ashore while we check in on Lafayette Smith and Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick.
The Big Bwana
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#15 Tarzan Triumphant
by
R.E. Prindle
Preface
Over many years I have searched for the point where myth and science join. It was clear to me for a long time that the origins of science had their deep roots in a particular myth, that of invariance. The Greeks as early as the 7th century B.C. spoke of the quest of their first sages as the problem of the One and the Many, sometimes describing the wild fecundity of nature as the way in which the Many could be educed from the One, sometimes seeing the Many as the unsubstantial variations being played on the One. The oracular sayings of Heraclitus the Obscure do nothing but illustrate with shimmering paradoxes the illusory quality of “things” in flux as they were wrung from the central intuition of society.
Before him Anaximander had announced also oracularly, that the cause of things being born and perishing is their injustice to each other in the order of time, “as they meet,” he said, for they are bound to atone forever for their mutual injustices. This was enough to make of Anaximander the acknowledged father of physical science, for the accent is on the “Many.” But it was true science after a fashion.
Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigaing The Origins Of Human
Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth, p. viii,
Giorgio de Santillana, 1969
Giorgio de Santillana
1.
The five Tarzan novels from Invincible to Lion Man form a unique quintet within the oeuvre. Together they are just shy of twenty-five percent of the twenty-one Tarzan novels published during Burroughs’ lifetime. If one excludes the late and unrelated Foreign Legion they are a fourth of the series. Twenty-five percent within four years. One might well ask what was going on in Burroughs’ life during these momentous four years.
With the possible exception of City Of Gold all the novels deal openly with recognizable current events. Invincible deals with the Soviet Communist menace which is continued as one of the themes of Triumphant. The mainspring of Triumphant is Cecil Rhodes’ old dream of a Cape to Cairo route. In this instance realized, as improbable as it might have seemed to Rhodes, as an air route. The hope of the air route was first explored in 1918 and was about to be realized shortly after Burroughs wrote this book.
ERB also throws in a bit about Chicago hoodlumism with a tip of the hat to Al Capone.
Tarzan And The Leopard Men deals with the African Leopard Cult that was in the news at the time. City of Gold is about ERB’s marital problems while Tarzan And The Lion Man concerns the recent and sensational MGM expedition to Africa to film Trader Horn. Both before and after these novels Burroughs wrote pure, well, almost pure fantasy.
The reason for the change isn’t clear; however, the thirties mark another change in novelistic styles so Burroughs may have been adapting to new circumstances. If so it was the third stylistic change he was successfully meeting although it would be his last. He had melded a turn-of-the-century style of the teens when he began writing, then adapting his style to that of the Jazz Age of the twenties. After a good start in the thirties the ground slipped from beneath his feet with his style becoming somewhat dated. By the forties he was finished although Foreign Legion makes a game shot at a stylistic evolution.
Perhaps more importantly, ERB changed because he wanted to be taken as a serious writer. He was simply tired of being known as an ignorant boob writing from the seat of his pants. For all the seeming frivolity of his fantasy themes they are based on very solid scientific and knowledgeable themes. They are imbued with an intense mythological acumen, while presenting a new mythology for the current age. They do deal with classical themes such as the One and the Many. Burroughs tried to organize experience into a new mthological structure which was desperately needed then and no less today.
2.
Consider Giorgio de Santillana again:
Today’s children, that impassive posterity to whom all reverence is due, know where to look for myths, in animal life in the Jungle Books. In the stories of Lassie and Flipper, where innocence is unassailable, in Western adventures arranged by grown ups for the protection of law and order. Much of the rest sedulously built up by mass media is modern prejudice and delusion, like the glamour of royalty, or the perfection of super detergents and cosmetics; super-stitio, leftovers. So one might be tempted to say. Actually however, no particle of myth is left over, and we have to do only with a deliberate lie about the human condition. Tolkien’s efforts at reviving the genre, whatever talent employed, carry as much conviction as the traditional three dollar bill.
Quite right. Burroughs had the handle on true mythology while being able to create the governing myth of the Aquarian Age. Triumphant is laden with myth. In truth Burroughs is not the light-headed, simple-minded writer that even his most devoted fans and admirers want to think him. He doesn’t want to parade his knowledge or get involved in abstruse discussions; he is writing seeming pure action novels, The Master Of Adventure, as his fans like to say, for a pulp magazine audience that primarily wanted to be thrilled. One may criticize Burroughs for it but he is never short on thrills or spectacular effects. One may guffaw at some of his heroes’ exploits as I surely do but your eyes are still popping. There’s a lot more under the seeming simplicity. Much of it would have been recognized at the time giving the ‘knowing’ reader the satisfaction of being in on what ERB was really talking about but as the topicality faded away the succeeding generations of readers could see only the action.
The first sentence of the preceding novel, Invincible, explains ERB’s approach:
I am no historian or chronicler of facts, and furthermore, I hold a very definite conviction that there are certain subjects which fiction writers should leave alone, foremost of which are politics and religion. However, it seems to me not unethical to pirate an idea occasionally from one or the other, provided that the subject be handled in such a way as to impart a definite impression of fictionizing.
In this series of five novels in a bid to be taken seriously, perhaps rather than conceal his knowledge by a ‘definite impression of fictionizing’ he was making a bid for intellectual recognition by ‘exposing’ his serious interests to some extent.
The background of Triumphant is solidly based historically and in current events. ERB was always seriously interested in aviation. Indeed, his life as an adult would span the first lift off at Kitty Hawk to supersonic jet flight over a period of a mere forty years. That might do something to your mind. the concept of speed changed in his lifetime from Barney ‘A mile a minute’ Oldfield to a fifteen mile a minute jet fighter plane.
Commercial flight as we know it today was non-existent in 1930. The DC3 was still five years distant. A flight from Cairo to Capetown involved several layovers and even train trips if air connections were not established between certain points. Yet, such a route was a major advance while being exciting news. Ya gotta remember making a crystal radio set at home was still a substantial achievement marking one as an electrical wizard. At the same time television was on the horizon, nearly a reality. In such a flight Burroughs had a sure fire topic.
He combines elements of an earlier 1918 attempt and the establishment of an air route at the time of writing. In 1918 shortly after the War ended the British got right on realizing the hope of a Cape to Cairo dream. Great Britain had acquired the German African colonies as part of the Versailles Treaty so that they were then in control of a continguous corridor through East Africa. The acquisition of Tanganyika (Tanzania) filled the gap.
3.
Four separate pilots set out from Cairo for the Cape. The attempt was not entirely successful, but by 1932 it was. Burroughs then selects as his imaginary pilot Lady Barbara Collis, an English aviatrix on a solo flight. she seems to be somewhat off her course flying over Ethiopia but then that might be expected.
The way Burroughs’ mind worked he usually has real models for these roles if you can figure them out. In this case I think Lady Barbara incorporates three different women. The only significan aviatrix I can locate is Amelia Earhart. She became in 1928 the first woman to fly the Atlantic. She was part of a three-man crew but gained notoriety. In 1930-31 she was preparing for a solo Atlantic flight a la Charles Lindbergh from Labrador to Paris. She did cross the Atlantic but was forced down in an Irish cow pasture not reaching Paris. That was after the book was written so ERB would be relying on her 1928 flight and preparations for the solo flight.
A second personality conflated with Lady Barbara may have been the famous evangelist and founder of the Four Square Church, Aimee Semple McPherson. I have a framed picture of McPherson in my collection. Evangelism may also have been on Burroughs’ mind from his recent reading of Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis. According to ERBzine Burroughs objected to Lewis’ forcing his atheism on the reader. Here one of his purposes may have been to show Lewis how it’s done.
Aimee Semple McPherson hit LA at about the same time as Burroughs.
By 1923 she was so popular she opened her 5000 seat Angelus Temple while beginning to broadcast over KSFG-K Four Square Gospel. And then a the height of her fame on May 18, 1926 she vanished after swimming in the Pacific. This and the following events during which several people died created a sensation no one in the country, and certainly LA, could miss. Not an ERB who was passionately interested in religion anyway. One wonders if he visited the Angelus Temple for Sunday services.
Aimee turned up in Mexico where she said she had been held captive after being abducted. But, apparently the pressures of success had been too much for her and she attempted escape into sex and a love tryst, which is a normal psychological reaction to unbearable stress as ERB himself was discovering. The disappearance and subseqauent events had continued into 1927 and 1928 so that ERB’s capacious mind was filled with the wonder of it all. Thus Lady Barbara disappears during the flight onto the mystery escarpment to reappear months later on the arm of Lafayette Smith. Same story. I think it likely ERB was thinking of both women while a third influence is almost certainly Dorothy Sayers, the mystery writer and creator of Lord Peter Whimsey. Burroughs hits at it by mentioning that the story does not concern Lord Wimsey but does concern his daughter, Barbara Collis. This probably refers to Dorothy Sayers and her creation, Peter Wimsey. When ERB admired a writer he wrote them into the story somehow. He was generous that way.
And then there is Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick of the Chicago Underworld. His name indicates he is Irish so he may be supposed to be associated with Dion O’ Bannion’s gang rather than Capone and the incipient Outfit. ERB privides an intriguing if overly sympathetic portrait of the gangster. One wonders if he had met models at this time.
In connection with Patrick, which begins an interest in organized crime that extends through Swords Of Mars and the its Guild of Assassins, Murder Inc. was established at this time so that by the date of 1933 it would seem that ERB brought Murder Inc. into the corpus.
Then there is LaFayette Smith himself. Named after General Lafayette of Revolutionary War fame and recently brought to mind by General Patton who said, as he stepped foot on French soil, ‘Lafayette, we are here.’ The young geology professor may be be taken as an alter ego of Burroughs himself as he taught geology at the MMA. Sort of the man Burroughs might have been had he the self-discipline to have gone to college. ERB apparently sincerely regretted he had not gotten a degree as a number of his alter egos are college graduates, such as the Old Timer of Leopard Men who graduated from his brothers’ alma mater, Yale.
4.
As noted Burroughs had taught geology as an instructor at the Michigan Military Academy. He was still following the subject closely as he grouses that geologists had as many opinions each about as accurate as the weather forecasters. Still, knowledge was developing at a break neck pace that would lead to our substantailly complete knowledge of today. It’s too bad that ERB couldn’t have held on to 1965 or so. A man of his intellect would have seen things.
Burroughs not only combines all these threads and strands but in his prologue he reaches for his most daring concept yet. It’s only a page so let’s look at it closely. The opening sentences:
Time is a warp of the tapestry which is life. It is eternal, constant, unchanging. But the woof is gathered from the four corners of the earth and the twenty-eight seas and out of the air and the minds of men by that master artist, Fate, as she weaves the design that is never finished.
A thread here, a thread from there, another from out of the past that has waited years for the companion thread without which the picture must be incomplete.
But Fate is patient. She waits a hundred or a thousand years to bring together two strands of thread whose union is essential to the fabrication of her tapestry, to the composition of the design that was without beginning and is without end.
That attitude informs all of Burroughs’ work; a study of the One and Many, and is the reason I am such an admirer. Given Burroughs Classical background that apparently made such a profound impression on him one is reminded of Penelope at her web as well as the three Greek mythological Fates themselves- the three daughters of Night– Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.
Clotho the spinner, Lachesis the apportioner, Atropos who cuts the string that ends the web and life.
And then Burroughs begins to indicate how events occurring thousands of years previously would provide the strands of time to bring his story together into a recognizable pattern, the warp of the web, while th woof is the improbable bringing together of such disparate persons as Tarzan, Gunner Patrick, Lafe Smith, Lady Barbara and Jezebel, ERB’s prophetically named first Golden Girl. Florence is into the picture.
The ancient protagonist is a disciple of Paul of Tarsus, Angustus of Israel. At the death of Paul in Rome the paranoid Angustus decides to flee into the Heart of Darkness, Africa. Along the way he picks up a Nordic slave girl who will bring in ERB’s evolutionary theme. Then up the Nile into the Heart of Darkness.
In this story, all roads lead to Midian in the crater of an extinct Ethiopian volcano. In his way ERB who speaks frequently of coincidence denies the concept in favor of Fate the Inexorable. As Freud would say, there is no coincidence– one thing leads to another. Once set in motion the ball may be deflected but it cannot be stopped except by the cessation of Time– the non-existent but all controlling element.
Part two follows.
Who Is The Mysterious John Carter?
December 23, 2010
Who Is The Mysterious John Carter?
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs- The Man With The Plan
http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/wnu1.htm#ARTICLES
There are nine wise men who control the destiny of the world and I am on a first name basis with each of them. Sworn to secrecy I cannot reveal the names of these Unknown Masters. No Wiki-leaks here. Due to the upcoming movie concerning doings under the moons of Mars first revealed by the adept Edgar Rice Burroughs beginning in 1912 I have been advised that it is thought expedient to reveal who John Carter really is.
Elipsis being the favored mode of action of the Nine rather than just give the info straight out I have been given a list of web sites, articles and books from which Carter’s identity may be deduced leaving some room for error on my part from which Carter’s identity may be deduced. Given the nature of the material, much of which I had already read that I have always thought rather fanciful I can’t guarantee that I have succeeded in determining J.C.’s true identity. If I have failed in this great trust placed in me by the Nine I lay the blame at their feet for having made an erroneus choice but it is possible that, as a result of such a possible failure, I may not be heard from again.
Burroughs, who seems to have known the true identity of Carter, whose books were part of the package given to me, as if I hadn’t already read them many times, gives us a clue in that Carter was at least one thousand years old and had enjoyed many identities over the centuries. Actually with a little invention I may be able to whiff this past the Nine.
Amongst the papers entrusted to me was the web address of the French Wold Newton Universe which I abbreviate FWNU. As this site intelligently summarizes a thousand years of history I found it an invaluable resource but just because I’m relying on the FWNU doesn’t mean I’m lazy; I’ve already read the other stuff: the Greek myths, Homer, Grave’s White Goddess, the Bible, De Santillana, Eco and a host of others, besides which I have to use the sources the Nine supplied.
It will be necessary to begin our search with the Knights Templar and the Crusades. It is quite possible that J.C. by whatever identity he may have been known is co-existent with the First Hominid Predecessor. For all we know he was present at the creation, among the artists who painted the caves at Lascaux or he may even have had an intimate acquaintance with the Via Dolorosa; but, that might merely be relying on the coincidence of initials. We have no reliable or even quasi-reliable records that far back.
We will have to content ourselves with beginning at the Crusades. The historical figure who claims an ancient pedigree is the Count de St. Germain. He makes his appearance under that name in revolutionary France. As the name he uses then is demonstrably French we have to assume that over the centuries he has been known under many, many names, many guises, many roles as the concept French is of fairly recent origin. He was perhaps one of the nine who formed the Knights Templar, a very secretive group. The Crusades changed the course of European society just as the Templars were the first catalysts of that change. While Templar history is in the hands of those sympathetic to them who find them wholly admirable I who should be among those sympathsizers have a lurking suspicion that the Order was wholly sinister. Who else, I ask you, would recruit in taverns haunted by criminals and excommunicants? What building material was this?
The Templars ostensible purpose, good reason as opposed to real reason, for existence was that they were to protect pilgrims to the so-called Holy Land but, once created, they lost interest in such a worthy cause. Perhaps they were created for a much more subversive and less worthy purpose. The Templars are frequently linked with another band of ‘holy’ soldiers, the Assassins of Alamut in Persia. Who were the Assassins? The FWNU: Will There Be Light Tomorrow, Part I:
The word “assassins” is usually linked to hashish, and the name of the group is sometimes spelled “hashishins,” because of their alleged use of the drug to keep their fearsome warriors properly motivated…What is not widely known is that, in fact, the name “Assassins” derives from the word “Assass,” meaning “Guardians,” or “Protectors,” for the Assassins were in reality the Islamic Soldier Monks in charge of the protection of the Holy Land. “Assassins” in Arabic signifies “quardians,” and some commentators have considered this the true origin of the word: “Guardians of the secrets'” – Arkan Daraul, Secret Societies.
If the Assassins had secrets to protect and/or disseminate then they might easily have swayed the minds of a group of simple unsophisticated Nordic warriors. Once swayed then their role would have been to form a fifth column in Europe in alliance with the Assassins to subvert the Church and State which is exactly what the Templars were doing. Thus though the Moslems had been defeated and thrust back by Charles Martel the Templars would be internal allies to achieve the Moslem conquest not unlike the Liberal undermining in favor of the Moslems in the West today. Wheels within wheels, plans within plans. There undoubtedly was constant communication between the two groups for well over a hundred years until the Mongols of Ghengis Khan stormed Alamut putting an end to the Assassins c. +1260. An unforseen event. It was then only a few decades later that Philip Lebel of France terminated the career of the Templars launching Europe on the period of confusion that terminated with the murder of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
From the wreckage of the Templars, for they were only wrecked not destroyed, came great criminal organizations such as the Commora, the Carbonara and the Mafia. All these elements combined to create the revolution in France during which the Compte de St. Germain and the extra sinister Caligliostro, who might have been the same, appeared and who in all possiblility emigrated to America to become…John Carter.
Names and dates in this underworld milieu can never be taken as certain. As the FWNU points out it is clear that Cagliostro left for America after 1795 or at about the same time Edgar Allan Poe was handed the mysterious manuscript detailing the adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym. We’re slipping into the realm of pure fiction here but suppose that Poe did get the story from someone and suppose that someone was merely posing as Cagliostro or St. Germain, probably the same person in two identities. Still fantistic but not impossible.
However contrary to Man’s desire nobody lives forever so at some point Cagliostro has to die but before he does he finds the Virginian John Carter and instructs him in this pious fraud to keep the tradition going. Now, it is clear that whether or not someone gave Burroughs a manuscript which he at least claimed happened in the case of John Clayton he writes of John Carter in the tradition of the Great Conspiracy that had its roots in the Crusades.
Burroughs may very well have been self-indoctrinated in the Traditions as many of us are, however Burroughs was learned in several matters not least of which was psychology by his brothers’ partner, Lew Sweetser.
Sweetser along with the Burroughs Boys was graduated from Yale University which we know is the home of the prominent occult organization the Skull and Bones Club. The Skull and Bones takes its emblem from the pirates of the Caribbean. Their banner was a corruption of the black and white Beauceant banner of the Templars. It is generally thought that the excaping French Templars, or a portion of them, fled to Scotland. After 1492 when the Spanish gold fleets of his Most Catholic Majesty, the Defender of the Faith, the King of Spain began their runs, the Templars set sail for the New World to prey on the treasure fleets to avenge themselves on Church and Throne.
I have seen no record that Lew Sweetser was in the Skull and Bones but if he was or aspired to, if the Skull and Bones have any secrets which they obviously do, Sweetser may have become privy to some and whether intentionally or inadvertantly he probably imparted some to young Burroughs. At the very least, in educating young Burroughs as he obviously did he would have given him his outlook or point of view. Young Burroughs was at an impressionable age.
This point of view was reinforced by all of Burroughs’ reading. That reading was more heavily occult and revolutionary than is usually supposed. By 1912 when he began writing ERB was fully versed in the underground French literature in translation of the day. There doesn’t seem to be a reference to Balzac although he must have read something but maybe not. He did read Eugene Sue, one of the early nineteenth century writers, a veritable mad man. Sue’s The Mysteries Of Paris was in his library while I’m relatively certain he read Sue’s Wandering Jew also. Between
A Boy Named Sue
those two books his mind would have been ripped apart and reassembled as was mine for instance. He read Dumas, Three Musketeers and Count Of Monte Cristo for sure and probably The Man In The Iron Mask. He plowed through Victor Hugo’s sewer epic, Les Miserables. He devoured whatever was translated of Jules Verne. Verne’s works were firmly implanted in his mind: From Earth To The Moon and Mysterious Island absolutely filled his mind. Paul Feval and
E.A. Poe, obviously under mental stress
Emile Gaboriau weren’t translated as yet so these very important crime/revolutionary writers missed him. They write much more directly at what Sue, Dumas, Hugo and Verne imply. But, all four of those guys are powerful writers dealing with life in a very direct way. Edgar Allan Poe, another prime influence of Burroughs, 1808-1849 seems to have been influenced by the early bunch of French writers, probably Balzac and some writers less well known but earlier than Feval and the rest. Poe may be the most astounding writer of all in the French school although its hard to top Sue. I shudder while I write his name. And then it is impossible to know what magazine and newspaer articles about such topics Burroughs may have read. His age was a magazine and newspaper age.
Cagliostro
And, of course, Burroughs read a full slate of English and American writers not least the detective stories of Conan Doyle and many others. One should not overlook George W.M. Reynolds incredible ten volume novel The Mysteries Of The Court Of London which is found in ERB’s library. An amazing 5000 page novel.
All of this reading seemed to come together in the John Carter Martian Trilogy. Burroughs never again wrote anything quite like it. One could remember that one doesn’t have to be fully conscious of what one is writing. One is caught up in the sweep of intellectual currents developing themes whose antecedents began long before so that one is merely developing the themes.
Thus Burroughs was part of the breaking up of the Semito-Aryan mythology of say -2000 to +1000 which was accentuated by the first of the three major blows to Man’s self-confidence picked out by Freud- the place of the Earth in the Universe. Once it was understood that Earth was merely one lone planet spinning in a Universe that if not thought boundless in his time was understood to be more extensive than mythological heaven. The old mythology crubled to the ground, the old gods of the Semitic religions had their teeth pulled, their knees crushed, in other words, they lost their power to command.
Jules Verne
Now, it is often asserted that there is no mythology to replace the old mythology, that science has destroyed the concept. This is not true. The Templars began a new mythology, while Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler forwarded it when they discovered or revealed that the Earth was a point in a surrounding universe. Thus, if the Earth is not the center of the universe with God in his heaven above it then Man can penetrate this boundless space. This is where John Carter enters the mythology of the Scientific Era.
The idea of traveling in space according to the FWNU was almost immediately written in a story by Kepler himself. While this is a sort of change of venue travel in the upper spheres has a long history predating Kepler. To cite only two examples there is Jacob’s Ladder on which Jacob was said to ascend to the heavens or, in other words, space. Mohammed is said to have mounted his horse and risen to the Seventh Heaven, way up there in the ideas of the time, where he conversed face to face with God, or in Moslem terms, Allah. So, now that space became open it isn’t unusual that Kepler immediately translated the old mythology into scientific terms. So while a magic carpet may have served Gullivar Jones if fails as science.
Thus from Kepler to Burroughs the tales of space travel and the complexity of methods increases.
Camille Flammarion
With the development of astronomy, that is space, the concept of Time developed apace. The Earthly year had already been adequately measured so now the conquest of the Earth day, hour, minute and seconds- eventually nanoseconds- began. Thus Time and Space became one word, timeandspace. Along with rocketry came the fantasy of the Time Machine, the time traveler. As we know Burroughs was an expert on both, having some very well developed ideas about Time. Rather than being a merely frivolous romanticist then it can be seen that Burroughs was trying to work out the central problems of his times. to a very large extent, he did. In a literary sense, then, Burroughs is the equal of Freud and Einstein. Hence his writing style is odd. He is trying to convey ideas he is struggling to understand, not unlike Freud and Einstein. While Freud is considered a literary stylist I find him barely comprehensible, not at all clear.
As the FWNU points out, while John Carter takes his place in space travel in the 1860s his amanuensis, Burroughs, only published Carter’s exploits from 1912 to 1914.
Burroughs himself completely distorts the facts as he claims he himself was born c. 1855 in the Trilogy while we know he was actually born twenty years later in 1875. He could not possibly have known Carter as a child and been his ‘favorite nephew.’ Why he would tell such a transparent falsehood isn’t clear. Even when Carter made his second vanishing in 1888 Burroughs would have been entering his teen years while being in Illinois rather than living on the Hudson in the State of New York. Does he think we’re stupid? Perhaps he is concealing his real sources.
Even though the issue is somewhat clouded because of the lapse of time between the historical events and Burroughs’ publication of them only in 1912, one thing is clear, John Carter is the Lord Of Time And Space. As Burroughs recounts Carter’s words claimed to be to him in the prologue to the Gods Of Mars:
I have learned the secret, nephew, and I may traverse the trackless void at my will, coming and going between the countless planets as I list…
Carter’s achievement is of great import because it means that he has become one with the gods. he has joined the heavenly pantheon with the added advantage that he can move equally freely between the spiritual and the temporal. Not even the Great Gods can do that. Although he has the secret he doesn’t choose to divulge it to his ‘favorite nephew’ who we know did not possess this occult secret.
It is interesting in light of Carter’s achievement to pay some attention to the Urania Book that was received by another Chicagoan. Why Chicago was selected to be the center of revelation at this time isn’t known. The book of Urania is a massive volume giving the details of the celestial organization of the gods dispersed throughout the universe of which Carter must have been familiar although he didn’t impart that knowledge to his nephew. Fortunately that vast organization was related by the Uranians.
As Burroughs was left more or less on his own on that score by Carter it is evident that Burroughs must have fleshed out Carter’s bare announcement of having discovered the ‘secret’ of traversing interstellar space by hints from the famed French explorer of space Camille Flammarion. That author discusses outer space in several profound works chief of which are The Plurality Of Inhabited Worlds, The Inhabitants Of Other Worlds, Imaginary And Real Worlds and Lands In The Sky. It is to be noted also that rather than taking his information on the nature of Mars from the American Percival Lowell Burroughs took it from the Frenchman, Camille Flammarion. Lowell and Flammarion were in close communication so it is probable that Lowell’s inspiration was taken from Flammarion. Burroughs speaks of Flammarion many times even going so far as to say he formed his early ideas on him but he never mentions Lowell. Unfortunately Flammarion’s information on Mars turned out to be more inspired than factual. Let us hope his ideas on interplanetary space are more sound. But then he is a pioneer and the lay of the land always looks different to the first comers than the settlers who become familiar with it. Cartographers so to speak. Geographers, that sort of thing.
At any rate the transition from the old astrology to the new astronomy, from myth to science, was achieved through the medium of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There should a BB and AB, before and after Burroughs. Thus with the publication of A Princess of Mars in 1912 world history entered a new phase. The centuries after Keplers’ space epic culminated with Burroughs in 1912 when he more or less perfected the new mythology as far as the heavens were concerned.
Nor was Burroughs finished when Carter using the ‘secret’ transported himself to Mars the second time. One is inclined to believe that Carter stumbled on the secret before the cave in Arizona or else was selected by the Celestial Organization to receive it. The latter would have been impossible for a naive earthling like Burroughs to understand so Carter probably chose to say he discovered the secret.
Burroughs himself who was undoubtedly chosen as the conduit to the New Mythology was immediately recognized as the avatar of the New Mythology as nearly all other mythographers began to develop the ideas in Burroughs framework. His knowledge which was itself almost miraculous seems as though it must have been divinely imparted. Perhaps the two concusssions he received before 1900 rearranged his synapses so that he could intellectually go where no man had gone before. He celebrates the memory of these two concussions by beating a steady tattoo on the skull of Tarzan.
Having organized the way in which inter-stellar planetary travel was to be perceived Burroughs set out to create the man-god of the New Age on earth, the second aspect of the trinity, John Clayton otherwise known as Tarzan Of The Apes. Burroughs retained the JC initials linking Jesus Christ, John Carter and John Clayton as so many have noted although those three are not the Trinity in question- the three in one, one in three. One must beware of the so-called revolutionaries who with their inability to understand common sense deride the triple aspect of mankind as faulty arithmetic. In the course of evolution it would seem that they failed to acquire the advanced intelligence gene.
Three of Burroughs’ most formative years were spent at Harvard Latin School in Chicago where he developed his classical knowledge and fell in love with classical mythology.
Thus, as the mythological god of heaven was Zeus to whom John Carter corresponds, John Clayton, or Tarzan corresponds to the terrestrial god, Poseidon or, perhaps more accurately to the son of Zeus, the great man-god Heracles. Burroughs often refers to Tarzan as the Heracles of the jungle so perhaps he shoved Poseidon aside in favor of the son of Zeus. This leaves only the realm of the underworld ruled by Pluto or Hades in Classical Mythology which Burroughs renamed Pelucidar and placed at the center of the Earth. He doesn’t seem to have felt the need for a ruler of that particular realm. Thus while the three realms exist in his mythology the trinity seems to be curiously truncated by one but perhaps I’m missing something.
Thus Burroughs updated the Trinity. It might be coincidence or maybe it was destiny but Burroughs was chosen to transit the bases of the New Mythology at the first glimmer of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Was he conscious of his role as the Man of Destiny? While he could never be sure he undoubtedly hoped the Light was shining on him.
Although obscure this move shows a very astute religious understanding. If one wishes to supplant a religion the wise idea is to appropriate the forms of symbols, shrines and ideas and replace their content with your own. Catholicism did this with Greek and German sites and Jewish and Moslem religions are attempting the same with Christian and or Western sites, symbols and ideas now. There is an eternal religious war. For instance Jews have instituted the new Jewish holiday Hannukah in opposition to the Western Christmas which in itself contains the superposition of the Christian religion on pagan sites. While shining the light on their Hannukah they make vicious attacks on Christmas trying to have it outlawed. Christmas celebrants are thus being nudged to embrace Hannukah at which time they will be left in peace to celebrate their Christmas under the guise of Hannukah. In the time honored manner Christianity will have been superseded, in this case by a lesser religious faith. Undoubtedly they will be happy with an eight day celebration rather than a one. A little bribery works well.
Thus Burroughs makes John Carter the Master of Time and Space in place of Jahweh or Allah. When the scientific British conquered India and scoffed at the Hindu notion that the world rested on the back of the elephant as an impossibility the Hindu priests withdrew, worked it over in their minds and countered: OK. The world rests on the back of the tortoise. The Hindus could not accept the negation of their religious beliefs.
So science made clear to Christians, Jews and and Moslems that there was no god and that instead of the earth nestling in an egg of seven heavens with god in the seventh and highest balanced by seven layers of hell beneath the flat earth and that space was in fact boundless and the earth occupied an infinitessimally small space in the universe, the Christians, Jews and Moslems retired to consider the problem then each gave a new solution based on God in heaven much as the Hindus switched from an elephant to a tortoise. It is impossible to just switch the human mind from one system to another. As Voltaire said: No one ever willed himself an athiest.
Science is abstract while religion is visceral. so even those working in science retain their religious views. The Christians said: Alright then, if God didn’t create mankind what happened is that a comet brought life to Earth. You see, Evolution or Creation must come from outside. It is more comfortable to think that. Thus nothing changed, life came from ‘above.’ As the space idea developed one had the spectacular Uranian religion develop where the entire universe becomes one huge revival camp while ‘visitors’ from outer space landed handing knowledge to dumb ox earthlings. Knowledge wasn’t acquired bit by bit by humble earthlings but was given by superior aliens, i.e. God. The Aliens then began to hover over Earth in flying saucers to monitor our activities until we were ‘ready’ to enter the congress of planets in a peaceful manner. Like God they don’t interfere in our affairs.
Thus John Carter the man-god can replace both God in his heaven and space aliens and God will still be in his heaven and all right with the world. Only the symbols will change which is as it must be. As above, so below. Following that religious formula Burroughs placed the avatar of primitiveness and sophistication, Tarzan, as overlord of Africa. Tarzan remains a savage but is sometimes dressed in a tuxedo, even in the jungle.
How aware is this? Currently certain groups are going into the very heart of darkness to haul Negroes out of the jungle, put them on airplanes which they may only have seen flying high above them and transporting them to the United States where these groups expect these primitives to get a job, eat frozen food, and flush the toilet none of which the primitives have any knowledge. As is well known feral humans are incapable of transiting to human society. The brain can only absorb so much and at such a rate. This inability cannot be accelerated or changed. Even well educated, supposedly sophisticated humans can’t make the transition from a magical religious mindset to a rational scientific one so what is to become of primitives? Scientific thought has had no part in Chinese or Asian thought until very recently so how can these peoples be expected to abandon their essentially mythopoeic thought processes for a scientific one?
So, while Burroughs was attempting to lead the way to an Aquarian scientific conception of the coming New Age he was wisely attempting to do the impossibhle: Putting new wine in old bottles without bursting the bottles. It may be impossible yet it has to be done. The issue has now been complicated, probably irreparably, by the introduction of hundreds of millions of people into Western society for which the transition is a complete impossibility. The enlightened Westerner will be swamped by those incapable of understanding whether it be their natural limitations or not.
In this global society the Aquarian religion must displace several antiquated thought systems. The truth is obvious. A palatable religion has to be packaged for the masses that will make them psychologically comfortable and an elite and priesthood who hopefully understand the issues who can keep society moving forward on an even keel. Is this possible? Even Burroughs could solve the problem only by continuing the institution of slavery. Slavery permeates his entire work.
In our situation it is important to keep the religious warfare confined to the warring elites and away from the masses.
That means of course that the egalitarian character of the last two hundred years has come to an end. Of course, the Semites put a period to that on 9/11.
The question then is who will wear the crown? Burroughsian religious ideas must triumph. The Carter-Clayton ideas must be put into action driving the three Semitic religions off the field as well as conquering the minds of the Asians and Africans.
Not as difficult as it may seem but it takes a steely determination so far shown only by the Jews and Moslems. You have to know who you are, what you want and be prepared to deal with any obstacles as these two groups obviously are an do. Know who you are and the superiority of your beliefs. There is no longer any room for tolerance as with them. Everything else out there is inferior, nothing can successfully slander our beliefs unless we permit it.
Beam Me Up, Scotty
Understanding The Myth And Music Of Bob Dylan
December 1, 2010
Understanding The Myth And Music Of Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
Stephen Hazan Arnoff: www.forward.com/articles/133344/
Bob Blowin' Smoke
Stephen Hazan Arnoff comes back among us to talk around Sean Wilentz’ Bob Dylan In America and Greil Marcus’ Bob Dylan: Writing 1968-2000 by which is meant Marcus’ writings on Dylan, more specifically reviews of songs and LPs. I have read and reviewed Wilentz while having bought Marcus I flipped through it determining it was more for possible reference than reading, definitely not literature per se.
Startlingly Arnoff is able to compare the Dylan portrayed to both Homer and God.
In “Odysseus’ Scar,’ the first chapter of his study “Mimesis: The Representation of
Stephen Hazan Arnoff
Reality in Western Literature” (1953), Eric Auerbach presents the history of Western literature as a choice between two creative paths. “It would be difficult” he writes, “to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts.” The first epic mode is that of Homer, a realm where the narrator shines an overwhelmingly bright light on the characters and situations of his story. There are no gaps in the Homeric narrative. No details of circumstance or motivations of characters are left unexplained.
The second mode is biblical. Here, Auerbach finds a storytelling tradition depending on gaps and fragments “fraught with background.” For biblical literature and its narrative decendants, motivation and detail are purposely obscured so that a life of interpretation and commentary thrives continually. While biblical scribes and their rabbinic heirs cluster around laconic narratives that leave the burden of imagination to interpreters, the Homeric mode prefers richly detailed depictions of reality in which the responsibility for imagination lies with the storyteller.
In other words the Bible, like Dylan’s lyrics, is just words. I suppose Homer’s ‘overwhelmingly bright light’ is why the Iliad is the least understood of the world’s great literature while as much commentary on it exists as on the Bible. Mr. Arnoff is sometimes difficult to follow.
One reason that Homer writes so will with relative clarity is that he is the prototype of Western scientific thought in which the purpose is to make things clear with an overwhelmingly bright light while the murky mythopoeic thinking associated with Semitic thought is based on supernatural hocus pocus that defies rational explanation.
Much the same as the latter can Dylan’s approach to ‘literature’ be explained. Dylan’s movie Masked And Anonymous written by himself has his character Penelope explaining Dylan’s lyric approach to his other character Pope John-Paul II thusly as she makes little boxes with her fingers: “I like Jack Fate’s songs because they don’t have definite sense. They don’t mean anything except what you want them to mean. I like that.” (or words to that effect.)
Well, Bob is Jewish as are Wilentz, Marcus, Arnoff and Auerbach so I suppose there is no reason that they wouldn’t reject precise science in favor of biblical gobbledegook. I wouldn’t brag about it though.
Of course one can see any artist’s work through any lens one wants but one always leaves oneself open to ridicule whether just or not. Certainly Arnoff is ridiculous as he goes on:
Christopher Rick’s “Dylan’s Visions Of Sin (Ecco, 2004) and Dylan’s own memoirs, “Chronicles, Volume One (Simon and Schuster, 2004), now share the title of “Brilliant Studies Of Dylan’s Work” because they model how Dylan- a combination of market-savvy rocker, Homeric bard and biblical seer- has carved out a place in popular culture for art “fraught with background.”
I just can’t see Dylan as more than a ‘market-savvy rocker.’ He is in no manner a Homeric bard while he definitely poses as a biblical seer. No matter what his past he is now a mediocre country and western singer in the pattern of 50s artists like Slim Whitman and Hank Snow, who he even imitates, in Masked And Anonymous. His band might be competent, good or, even, excellent but they aren’t playing anything out of the ordinary.
Bob Dylan is a legend only in Stephen Hazan Arnoff’s mind and those of Dylan’s die hard fans which, while numerous, are not universal. He is the product of incessant drum beating by people like Arnoff, Marcus and his house shill, Sean Wilentz.
We are not talking Shakespeare, Homer or even the Bible. We are talking about a market savvy ‘rocker’ who writes meaningless lyrics subject to whatever the hearer chooses to project on them. He admits that his lyrics mean nothing. That is neither poetry or literature.
If a ‘market savvy rocker’ can make hundreds of millions of dollars on this basis I suppose that does make him a legend for his time. However, Mr. Arnoff, spare us the comparison with Homer.
A Review, Pt. 10: Tarzan The Invincible by Edgar Rice Burroughs
November 21, 2010
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#14 Tarzan The Invincible
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 10
The Prohpet- Edgar Rice Burroughs
Religion: Standing On The Promises
Even though at the beginning of the novel Burroughs says he does not consider Politics and Religion suitable topics for fiction- unless highly fictionalized- the two topics seem to constitute a major portion of his work.
The Great One does not feel called upon to exhibit a foolish consistency. In Invincible the first sentence is: I am no historian. In Tarzan Triumphant he says: ‘Being merely a simple historian and no prophet…’ So in the few months between Invincible and Triumphant he has gone from no historian to a mere simple one while hinting that while he is no prophet he may become one. We can’t be certain what the future holds in store for him. I’ve already sensed that he is a prophet. Tarzan is the god and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet. So much for Mohammed being the end of the prophetic line.
Under cover of fiction Triumphant will deal extensively with the Jewish and Christian religions so this might be an appropriate place to review some aspects of the history and nature of religion.
Evolution occurs on many levels other than the biological. The biological naturally controls all other forms of evolution. The species has developed from a time of pre-hominid ancestors that must at some time have diverged from that of the other anthropoids as unpleasant as that may be for a certain type of mind although, for the life of me, I can’t imagine why. One of the more significant areas of evolution has been that of the brain. Nothing should be clearer than that the brain of HSIII is superior to the brain of the first Homo Sapiens and species which evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor. I mean gorillas must have a relatively primitive brain.
There is no reason for this not to be so. The brain of the infant Homo Sapiens continues to develop outside the womb until at least the early twenties. At each stage the ability of the brain to function increases. As above, so below; as in the macro so in the micro.
Thus as in each stage of evolution from the first Homo Sapiens to the present most highly evolved specimen Homo Sapiens III, abilities to think and function have increased. Thus HS’s understanding of the world and universe are immeasurably different from the first Homo Sapiens model. I can’t imagine anyone who would dissent from that conclusion.
Now, except for the intermingling of human species certain human species would still be unacquainted with the approximately true nature of the world and universe that we have attained. I don’t see how this can be disputed. Without European influence the rest of the world would still think the earth was flat. These are facts whether one likes them or not. Indeed, even among the most advanced human species there are very large numbers who resist the scientific explanation of nature. These people still prefer the atavistic, antiquated religious Semitic explanation of natural phenomena. These people can barely accept the notion of a heliocentric solar system, many don’t. Why should anyone pay attention to them?
If one accepts that Homo Sapiens is 150K to 200K years old then it seems to me impossible that all human intellectual development has occurred in the last ten thousand years. Weapons of some sort have been in existence for many tens of thousands of years if not from the beginning of Homo Sapiens having been evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor. It seems evident to me that a highly developed civilization existed in the Med Basin beginning c. 100K years ago. That doesn’t mean they had advanced Science it merely means that they had an organized society with relatively sophisticated thought processes and tools. Religion is basically an attempt to understand and make order of the world. All interpretations of the natural order must be based on that order.
Hence the North Polar stars which never set are the basis of religion. The Polar stars rotate about the Pole over a period of some 25K odd years forming what is called a Great Year. The Great year was made to conform to the terrestrial year of twelve months therefore being divided into twelve periods called Ages.
The Great Year with it twelve Ages formed the basis of religion. We will call that religion the Astrological Religion. Thus the religion goes back for tens of thousands of years as Sumerian records indicate. These Ancients did not make up their lives or talk through the backs of their necks.
Each Age of the Astrological Religion had its male and female religious archetypes. These are, perhaps most easily traced as far back as four ages, possibly five, in the Greco-Cretan mythology. The historical ages are the Taurian, Arien, Piscean and the next, the Aquarian. I am not a New Ager although I see no reason to disparage them and I am in sympathy with the outlook. One may say that I am of the Astrological religious tradition as we will see, I think, was Edgar Rice Burroughs.
In ancient days the Hom Sapiens species were separated each having distinct territories so that in the Darwinian sense they were not yet in conflict. When the last Ice Age came to an end flooding the Med Basin- this is not speculation, but fact- the civilization of the Basin was forced to higher ground bringing them into contact with the highland savages from West to East. Thus civilization as we now know it began.
The first settlers of Mesopotamia brought the Astrological Religion with them or, according to Mesopotamian mythology a man-god named Oannes- the name Oannes evolved into Johannes or John- appeared from the sea to teach them the rudiments of civilization and the Astrological Religion. Immense amounts of lore must have been lost, that is forgotten, so perhaps that is where the legend of the Lost Word comes in.
Now, off to the East on the Arabian Peninsula a different species lived. These were called the Semites or would be after the later Hebrews so named them after their mythical ancestor, Shem. Mere desert dwellers the Semites were attracted to the glitter of the Astrological Religion. There is no evidence that the Semites had a civilization or anything that could be called an actual culture of their own. They merely mimicked the existing culture infiltrating it much as Europe and America are being infiltrated today by their descendants. Eventually they will succeed the European civilization just as their ancestors did the Sumerian.
The evidence is that they had no religious forms of their own so that they attempted to take over both the physical and cultural edifices of their predecessor civilization, the Sumerian.
The Semites did not have the same mental organization or capabilities as their predecessors so they could maintain neither the civilization nor the religion. The major conflict came at the transition from the Age of Taurus to the Age of Aries. Here is where the real conflict between the Semites and Indo-Europeans or the Semites and HSII & III begins to take its historical form.
When the Astrological Age changes the religious archetypes change. For instance Cronus had been succeeded by Zeus at the transition from Taurus to Aries. Zeus himself was succeeded by Jesus the Christ at the transition from Aries to Pisces. Zeus would have been succeeded by Dionysus but the Semites either had to be accommodated or they forced Jesus of Nazareth on the Age which was later combined with the Kyrios Christos to form the composite deity the Semitic Jesus and Hellenic Christ. The role of Paul was very important in forcing Jesus of Nazareth on the goyim as Burroughs attests in Triumphant.
As we are now about to transit from Pisces to Aquarius a new set of archetypes will emerge representing the current intellectual and psychological development of Homo Sapiens.
This raises the question of whether Burroughs was merely a simple historian or was he also a prophet. Is Tarzan his offering for the role of the male archetype for the Aquarian Age? I think he is. For those who scoff at such an idea it would be wise to examine Burroughs relation to Mormonism during his stay in Salt Lake City. If it was possible for Joseph Smith to befuddle the minds of intelligent Westerners with his nonsense in the middle of the nineteenth century, or Mohammed to impose his twaddle even in the seventh, then I see no reson to be amazed that Burroughs would attempt the same thing in the twentieth century. I mean, look at this stuff for what it is.
Also, believe it or not, I read recently where someone thinks Oprah Winfrey could be the female archetype for the Aquarian Age. Get out of here. I don’t whether to laugh or barf. So, the notion of religious archetypes for the new age is a fairly active one. Any such discussions are in conflict with Semitism. So, we’re back to that problem.
Semitism took identifiable form at the transit from Taurus to Aries.
The record of such happenings is, of course, much more recent than the transition from Taurus to Aries. It could have been made up during the Babylonian captivity. The Old Testament record was only recorded, perhaps even formulated, after the Captivity which began in 586 BC lasting for only fifty years although rather than return to the pleasure of the temple most Jews remained behind by the waters of Babylon just as their ancestors yearned for the fleshpots of Egypt.
To clarify the nature of human species according to Jewish sources: The Jews argue that all mankind is derived from Jewish or Hebrew stock. The only survivors of the great flood were Jews- Noah and his family. The ancient Hebrews while knowing many cultures knew of only three species or stocks. They acccordingly named them Hamites, Shemites and Japhetites after sons of Noah. In their conversations with De Great Lawd which were frequently carried on in public He apparently dispensed information on a need to know basis so he withheld the info on the Mongolids and West African Negroes as no account of them is taken in the descendants of Noah. A little gap in the perfect knowledge of the Old Testament.
Thus the Old Testament acknowledges the differences between the Semites, the Europeans or Japhetites and the Hamites are more than merely racial, which is to say Cosmetic. Such an idea is of course in line with genetic learning.
The Med People or HSII devised a fluid religious system that allowed for the development or evolution of the human mind. In other words they not only accepted but embraced change. This is a quality of mind not shared by HSI, the Semites or the Mongolids.
Depending on what time period the Semites began the infiltration of Mesopotamia which may have overlapped the Geminian and Taurian Ages or perhaps fell completely within the Taurian Age there would have been no conflict with the Semitic need for stasis and the Astrological allowance for development, evolution or growth. However, by the time of the transit from Taurus to Aries the Semites had gained political control of Mesopotamia while the religious control was still in the hands of the Aryan priesthood.
Following Astrological precedents the ancient Aryan priesthood wanted to change to the Arien archetypes. In European Greece where the Semitic influence was lower the transit from Cronus to Zeus was made with only the usual warfare hence the legends of the Cronian Titans and the Olympians.
In Mesopotamia where the Semites were in the ascendant, according to Jewish myhthology, the Terahites, under the tutelage of Abram, disputed the succession with the ancient priesthood. According to Jewish mythology Abram and the Terahites argued that the religious archetypes were eternal and there was no Astrological tradition. Thus in the ancient world the Jews were believed to worship Saturn. If Saturn were the Taurian archetype then this was very likely true as Saturn would then be the basis for the Eternal which the Jews do acknowledge worshipping.
In the Semitic manner, then, the Semitic mind being incapable of accepting change, having been fully developed before they emerged from the desert, went into opposition to the Astrological Religion. Thus the conflict changed from a termporal one to a ‘spiritual’ one. At that point then diaspora was possible without the laws of national identity. As a spiritual entity, Judaism was born. The notion of Semitism developed along with its opposite anti-Semitism. Christ = Anti-Christ. Thus the explanation of the origin of this so-called anti-Semitism is simply explained. In reality Semitism was in conflict with the Astrological Religion and hence was anti-Astrological. Any other religion must perforce be anti-Semitism. The struggle then became a struggle for the souls of men as well as their bodies.
Once again in direct conflict Europe and Asia began a long theological dispute. As the Piscean transition progressed the Semites began their attempt to convert the Astrological religion to Semitism. They were effective in shutting down intellectual inquiry which is the motive force for change. We will see this again in the nineteenth century efforts of Marx, Freud and Einstein.
As the ancient world ended, its religious legatees were the Catholic Church and Judaism. All other ancient religions disappeared from the face of the earth except in ineffective remnants or underground movements.
It is interesting that fourteen hundred years after being forbidden the Arien Age worship of Zeus has been made lawful again in Greece. There’s really no place in the Aquarian Age for the Olympian pantheon but it is an interesting atavistic attempt reviving as it were the struggle between the Arien Age religions of Olympia and Israel.
Gradually the Egyptian and Anatolian elements of the Christian manifestation of the Piscean archetypes have been displaced in favor of the Semitic models. The Catholic Church was able to contain the Semitic influence in Europe from the end of the Western Roman Empire to the Age of the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment let Simitism loose on the world again.
While the Roman Empire militarily defeated the political entity of Jerusalem from 66 AD to 135 AD the battle weakened the Empire allowing in Asiatic influences like the Emperor Heliogabalus. Then in the seventh century AD the present form of the struggle between Europe and Asia took form when the prophet Mohammed formed the Moslem Religion based largely on its predecessor religion, Judaism.
The Moslems stormed across North Africa into Spain and France where they were stopped at Tours by Charles The Hammer. It took nearly one thousand years to drive the Moslems from France and Spain which result was finally obtained in 1492.
As the Moors were driven from Europe by Ferdinand and Isabella they also expelled the Semitic Jews. In the evolutionary sense this was the other correct response to an invasion of a competing species. The other, of course, would have been extermination. Thus at this stage of European history they were responding in an evolutionarily correct manner. England had expelled the Jews in 1190 and France in 1307. The various small German States fluctuated in their attitude sometimes expelling sometimes readmitting. There were always German States that allowed Semites. Otherwise the great mass of European Semites lived in the no-mans land between Russia and Germany that would after Russian annexation be called the Pale of the Settlement meaning this area was roped off for Jewish residence.
While these actions may have been evolutionarily correct and probably even politically correct the defensive party seldom thinks in such grand terms as evolutionary inevitability. So, really, in evolutionary terms the only correct response is extermination. The Shona of Zimbabwe fully understand this principle. I say this to show I am not springing anything new or unusual on you. These natural responses are going on today in Zimbabawe, South Africa, South and West Sudan, Indonesia, in former Yugoslavia where Moslems are exterminating non-Moslems. If you don’t believe these things, open your eyes, open your eyes.
Now, wars do not end after seeming victory. The expelled Moslems of Spain continued the war establishing the Barbary Pirates who then preyed on Europe for the next three hundred years plundering and enslaving Europeans. The actual invasion of North Africa first by Spain and then by France was an attempt to end this savage warfare.
Burroughs would have been brought up on the legend of millions for defense but not one cent for tribute as was my generation. Until recently I believed that Americans had ended Barbary piracy. This was just something we were told in the fourth grade. Actually the Barbary pirates were put down only in 1830 when France conquered and annexed Algeria.
France at that time ought to have either exterminated or driven out the Moslems. Having once expelled them, if they had had the power, they should have swept across North Africa, as the Moslems had done, driving the Moslems before them until they had reached Suez.
Thus Africa would have been reclaimed for Europe. First it was held by the HSII survivors of the Med Basin flooding, then the Semitic-Carthaginians, then HSII Romans and back again to the Semitic Arabs. So such a preemption was certainly historically justified. The Moslems make a great noise about the Crusades but the modern problem was their offense of the Eruption From The Desert. Get straight.
At the same time the Jewish and Arab Semitic struggles were going on the yeast of the suppressed religions of the Middle East and philosophies of Greece were converting the Europeans from Semitic stasis to Aryan intellectual activity. The Eastern Roman Empire fell at the time of the expulsion of the Jews and Moslems from Spain. Scholars flooded out of the East. These Egyptian, Greek and Syrian influences burst forth in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as the Enlightenment. Previously the discussion had been between the Semitic reigions of Judaism, Moslemism and Christianity. The level of human consciousness between the three was nearly equal although still retaining some measure of the Astrological Religion. This is a very serious subject for study. Christianity, such as it was, was intellectually superior. Remember, however, that Catholicism was so imbued with the limited Semitic intellect that the Pope made Galileo deny the notion of a heliocentric system.
The release of the Scientific Consciousness after the long suppression of several hundreds of years put the inferior religious consciousnesses on the defensive. The Semitic counterattack going on today is the culmination of the Jewish response to the Enlightenment. It is imperative that a Scientific offensive be made against this anterior and surpassed form of the evolution of human consciousness. As in the past a victory cannot be achieved without a perhaps bloody and costly struggle. Such as is going on now.
We, you readers, Burroughs and I, are concerned with the middle of the Englightenment period here, say from 1890 to 1935. I think we will see that Edgar Rice Burroughs is deeply and constructively involved in this struggle between the Religious and Scientific Consciousnesses.
As I’ve noted before, the Christian response to the scientific challenge was to declare either the Pope or the Bible infallible. Protestants didn’t have a Pope so they declared the Bible infallible. Same thing. American Liberals who evolved from the Puritan/Abolitionist nexus essentially became secular religionists. It is to be remembered that the Puritans the Liberals evolved from considered themselves neo-Hebrews hence the new Chosen People. According to John Adams as Neo-Hebrews they even rejected the celebration of Christmas. Thus Liberals tend to give science a religious spin rejecting Christianity.
The Jews on the other hand confronted by a hard edged Science that could not be bent to Semitic ideas decided to co-opt Science perverting it so that it resembles their religion. All these responses have been taking place since the French Revolution of 1789 which emancipated the Jews removing them from Roman Catholic control.
As I pointed out in an earlier essay there was a brilliant episode on the TV show Twilight Zone in which monks had captured and imprisoned Satan. They made the mistake of allowing a lost traveler to stay the night in the monestery. The monks warned the visitor to pay no attention to the entreaties of the prisoner to release him. The traveler did not heed the warning and prisoner who was Satan was released again in the world. A little allegory.
Thus the Revolution and Napoleon emancipated the Jews who immediately began the conquest of Europe. France was the first to fall. Karl Marx then hi-jacked Socialism in the name of Communism. Communism negates change in favor of stasis. Its story is all regulation and control, no different than Judaism. An elite administers to the ‘masses’ as the Chosen People administers to the goys.
Just as the Moslems are called to prayer five times a day and the Jews are expected to apply their 613 commands to every action before they take it, so Communism coopts the individual into the collectivity and regulates his every action.
Using Socialism as its cutting edge the way was paved for Communism in Europe.
Burroughs first encountered Socialism on the streets of Chicago as Socialists marched along under their waving red banners. The scene made an indelible impression on the young boy resulting after the Russian Revolution in his book, Under The Red Flag. Thus the Semites coopted the political ideology of the next one hundred years.
Science unfolded very quickly in the years following Darwin’s Origin Of Species. Particularly great progress was made in the scientific understanding of the mind. Psychology then was coopted by the Jew, Sigmund Freud. It is rather difficult to understand why all research seems to have been channeled through Freudianism. A rather fecund area of research seems to have been enveloped into one train of thought.
Freud quickly established his version of the static ‘unconscious’ as the sole vision of the mind. He demoted the conscious mnd to a position of irrelvance. His intention is quite clear. The conscious mind is the engine of change. By emphasizing the static unconscious combined with is vision of sex, which is to say only sexual intercourse, he was attempting to disarm the conscious mind and hence stop change or in other words establish stasis. Success in such a course is not instantaneous so naturally science continues to progress as the pall of the unconscious spreads. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why scientists are male and white. Once you have established the fact that scientists will be male and white it becomes necessary to stultify and emasculate white males, thereby establishing stasis. One would have to be blind not to see that that is exactly what is happening.
In point of fact the unconscious does not have an objective existence. Its apparent existence is merely a mind in an arrested state of development. The stasis is caused by fixations from challenges too stressful for the conscious mind to handle. Once the fixations are dealt with and disappear, which is included in Freud’s understanding of the mind, the mind or personality is allowed to integrate, the Freudian unconscious disappearing.
Freud never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his ‘unconscious’ so it is possible he didn’t understand the integration of the personality although his disciple, Jung, did.
However in Freud’s hands the unconscious became a weapon in the Semitic attempt to subjugate mankind. This subjugation is not religious or moral but a matter of one species seeking dominance over the others. Thus as Marx perverted the science of politics so Freud perverted the science of the mind. The third perversion of Science was the conquest of physics by Einstein. As Marx and Freud had interjected Semitic religious concepts into Politics and Psychology so Einstein did the same in Physics. It matters little that there is some scientific content in the the theories of these men. Their intent is to subordinate science to religion just as they had done vis-a-vis the Astrological Religion to the Semitic Religion when the Religious Consciousness was supreme.
That Einsten has been able to befog the minds of very intelligent men with his nonsense about the ‘fabric’ of space and time is nothing short of incredible. Yet, by the second decade of the twentieth century the perverted notions of these three men were directing the course of research in these three essential disciplines.
Thus cored from within the Aryans were made susceptible to the rising time of Wahabi Moslemism that Lothrop Stoddard noted and warned against but which warning was defused due to the machinations of Jewish Semites within Western Civilization.
Running concurrently in the background contra to the Semitic stream was the evolving Astrological Religion. Just as the evolution of the Dionysiac Archetype of the Age of Pisces developed for hundreds of years within the Arien dispensation of Zeus so the formation of the Aquarian has been taking place in the Age of Pisces.
The Enlightenment with its advance in the development of scientific consciousness was undoubtedly the opening salvo. Unlike Semitic development the Astrological evolution was not institutionalized. It is an idea that once set in motion is maintained by volunteers who get the idea and keep it perpetuating.
The principle is known. For instance the notion that America is a land of immigrants has been allowed to develop to the point of self-destruction. Of course that notion is constantly forwarded by the Liberal Coalition. Even though it is obvious to the feeblest intelligence that the land is capable of supporting only a finite number of humans the madness has now reached the point where it is beleived that the whole world can be imported ‘to share what we have.’ One of the most, if not the most, bizarre notions in all history. Such insanity is difficult to understand.
If one assumes, as one must, that human consciousness has been developing over the 150K years since humans evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor then this transition to the Aquarian Age is the most dramatic development of history. All previous stages of evolution have involved the progression from one stage of supernatural religion to another. In this transition, for the first time, it has been proclaimed that ‘God is dead.’ That is to say a supernatural being who guide’s our destiny.
With the age of Science mankind realizes the true nature of appearances or Nature itself. The concept of Evolution destroyed the basis of the Semitic religion. There is no God, no Yahweh, no Allah, no stasis. Oh, Lord, crikey Massa, don’t put me jail for saying that! People who still believe in such non-existent deities have not been relegated to the dustbin of history.
Burroughs, and I consider this fairly remarkable, seems to have accepted the New Order of Science upon his first contact with Darwin and Evolution. To say that ‘God is dead’ creates a vacuum in human consciousness such as the integration of the personality changes one’s mental structure leaving an aching vacancy between the vacation of the old personality and its replacement by the new. Thus for the last hundred years or so mankind has been seaching for a metaphysical sucessor to the supernatural concept of God.
Just as the Enlightenment may have opened the way to the transition to the new consciousness so men have appeared to direct consciousness into constructive channels. One of these writing as Burroughs writhed through the years between his marriage and the epiphany that produced his writing career and Tarzan was a man called Levi Dowling writing under the name of Levi. His effort, I’m certain what he considered his gift to the world, was a work called The Aquarian Gospel Of Jesus The Christ.
I doubt Burroughs read this book although one never knows. Chicago in the period before Los Angeles was the American hotbed of religious speculation. One should never overlook that. Burroughs lived in a welter of religious speculation. Added to that Burroughs was heavily influenced by Lew Sweetser who was particularly interested and well informed on such topics. Plus Burroughs lived in Mormonland for a decent period of time making a special visit ot the Mormon capital in 1898, while living in Salt Lake City for several months in 1903-04. It would be hard to believe that he wasn’t learning of the Mormon doctrines especially how a noodle brain like Joseph Smith was able in the nineteenth century to impose his religious will on thousands of people.
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, came from an area highly influenced by the fantastic religious notions of the Rhineland Pietistic Germans who became known as the Pennsylvania Dutch in America. Magazines would have been full of this stuff while the Chicago papers must have covered these religious speculations in detail. There is no reason to believe that Burroughs’ mind wasn’t filled with these speculations. Such ideas spill out all over the pages of his books.
Many writers have noted that the initials of John Carter and John Clayton are JC the same as Jesus the Christ. No Freudian believes in coincidence so there must be an intellectual connection. Burroughs repeatedly says that the next deity must be a man-god and that is explicitly what Tarzan is.
There is nothing supernatural about Tarzan. He is completely a man of science. The most highly involved specimen of humanity ever. If like Jesus the Christ he doesn’t have a magical birth he certainly has a miraculous upbringing from the age of one. Unlike Sargon and Moses who were fished from rivers in baskets thus breaking continuity with human predecessors Tarzan was taken from the cradle by an ape thus breaking continuity with human predecessors while establishing a new human paradigm. He in fact unites nature with civilization or, at least, a thin veneer of it. Now, this is completely in keeping with the Dionysiac paradigm.
Dionysus has two sides. The soft feminine side which has characterized the Piscean Age and the wild natural side which is meant to characterize the Aquarian Age. The undisciplined natural side of human consciousness that the Patriarachy tried to suppress in favor of the strictly rational as characterized by Apollo wouldn’t be suppressed. As mythology relates it, women could not be rational thus they embraced the Dionysiac religion imposing its ecstasies on society. The Dionysiac ethos was so strong that it forced itself on the Delphic Oracle in partnership with Apollo. Thus Delphi came to represent both the rational and irrational sides of consciousness. The conscious and unconscious if you will.
Thus as the Piscean Age dawned and the religious archetypes changed from Zeus and Hera to Dionysus and Isis the struggle was to keep consciousness or the rational uppermost. Of course, Dionysus and Isis were supplanted by the Semitic ideals Jesus and his mother, Mary who later became the Mother of God. Later the Dionysiac Kyrios Christos was grafted onto Jesus of Nazareth and he became Jesus the Christ as Levi Dowling correctly notes.
One can’t be certain how learned Burroughs was in this lore. He most probably was somewhat read in it while brilliantly intuiting the direction the evolution of consciousness must take. One can never be sure although there is little in the surviving library to indicate he read deeply in such lore. But then, so much of his knowledge he does evidence can’t be found in the library either. Suffice it to say that such knowledge seems to be apparent in his stories.
Needless to say the idea of Tarzan expanded and developed over his career. The Tarzan of the teens is quite different from the Tarzan of the thirties. There are a couple of passages in Tarzan Triumphant that make you do a double take. To wit: p. 12
…Tarzan with knitted brows, looked down upon the black kneeling at his feet.
“Rise!” he commanded, and then; “Who are you and why have you sought Tarzan Of The Apes?”
“I am Kabarega, O Great Bwana,” replied the black. “I am chief of the Bangalo people of Bungalo. I come to the Great Bwana because my people suffer much sorrow and great fear and our neighbors, who are related to the Gallas, have told us that you are the friend of those who suffer wrongs at the hands of bad men.”
So here Tarzan as become a Sultan, a King, an Emperor, a great judge and dispenser of justice; shall we say a god? Certainly the Lord Of The Jungle. He also seems to have lost perspective but then, perhaps a god must keep up appearances. We do have a new imperious Tarzan here who was not in any books before Invincible.
And then in Chapter 13, p. 98 in the Bowlderized Ballantine edition:
The “Gunner” was waiting for him upon the summit of the cliff directly behind the village, and for the second time these strangely dissimilar men met- dissimilar and yet, in some respects alike. Each was ordinarily quiet to taciturnity, each was self-reliant, each was a law unto himself in his own environment; but there their similarity ceased for the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes (opposites) as remotely separated as the poles.
The ape-man had been reared amidst scenes of eternal beauty and grandeur, his associates the beast of the jungle, savage perhaps, but devoid of avarice, petty jealousy, treachery, meanness, and intentional cruelty; while the “Gunner” had known naught but the squalid aspects of scenery defiled by man, of horizons grotesque with screaming atrocities of architecture, of an earth hidden by concrete and asphaltum and littered with tin cans and garbage, his associates, in all walks of life activated by grand and petty meannesses unknown to any but mankind.
“A machine gun has its possibilities,” said the ape-man, with the flicker of a smile.
The last near hundred years has been characterized by the attempt to overturn the Scientific Consciousness in the name of two Arien Age Semitic religions, Judaism and Moslemism. Indeed the ‘hand of God’ moves in mysterious ways. Let’s look at one called ‘The Iron Law Of Wages.’ When you read in the Old Testament that ‘the poor shall be always with us’ you probably didn’t notice the arrogance of the remark nor that it is an actual ‘eternal’ tenet of Semitic religious belief. The remark put into academic terms might be that the price of labor is the lowest price that a man can be gotten to do a job and that they may be worked to death like slaves thereby insuring that the poor shall always be with us.
The religious theory was formulated in scientific terms by David Ricardo in 1817. Described as a British economist Ricardo was actually a Sephardic Jew. That is to say his people fled Spain c.1492 in this case first to Holland and then to England which was undoubtedly done illegally after a period of Dutch acculturation. It will be easily seen that Ricardo is adapting the ancient Semitic belief that the poor will always be with us to British conditions. Indeed, as his formulation became the bedrock of employment practices it may be said he created poverty as the industrial age took shape until Henry Ford disproved this ancient historical bunk in 1914. At that time he ‘unilaterally’ doubled the wages of unskilled labor to begin to create the prosperity that characterized American society until the reemergence of Semitic beliefs in the twenty-first century.
I personally deplore unionism but I also see its necessity. Ford’s action raised the price of labor across the board. Unionism was successfully fought by managers until unionism gained the backing of the government under FDR. Backed by the government support unions made excessive and ridiculous demands until their momentum was stopped when Ronald Reagan sent the Air Controllers back to work which put unionism on the defensive.
Ricardo’s Iron Law Of Wages was not re-instituted at that time. Fordism still prevailed. Then jobs were exported wholesale to ‘multi-cultural’ areas of low wages. This was a crucial mistake for the world. Even this did not break the back of labor.
The next strategic move was simply to open the borders allowing millions of immigrants who would work for lower wages under distressing conditions. While immigration makes no sense on any other level it does put the Biblical managers in control of labor once again. President Bush himself was a primitive religionist unacquainted even with the twentieth century who had surrounded himself with even more primitive Jewish religionists. The war of religion against Science goes on.
Thus the Semitic counterattack against Science goes on. Both major races of Semites, the Jews and Arabs, are waging war on the most primitive basis. The issue is not the issue. Immigration, the ostensible issue, is simply a Red Herring to disguise the true issue which is to defeat Fordism and re-institute Ricardo’s Iron Law Of Wages to ensure that the poor will always be with us. The streets are now filled with the homeless.
This is the real reason Ford is called an anti-Semite and on that basis he certainly was. God bless his memory.
So, the unsuspecting young Burroughs thrust himself into this melee. Just as Ford was in actuality a religious prophet with a new industrial dispensation so Burroughs, judging from results set himself the task of creating an archetype for the Aquarian Age. Something of value for one to aspire to. One can trace the development of Tarzan from the miraculous babe to the finished archetype as the man-god.
As H.G. Wells noted in his First And Last Things there is a necessity for metaphysics. Man does not live by bread alone. While Science reduced everything to its material basis it destroyed the means of ‘spiritual’ or psychological comfort. With God dead mankind lost its identity and sense of direction. As the old psychological projection of its identity had failed a new one was required that would be based on scientific material realities.
Levi Dowling’s vision of an Aquarian Jesus is unsatisfactory. Burroughs vision of the competent Tarzan satisfies on several different levels. Burroughs seems to have caught the essence of the Astrological Religion although there is difficulty in understanding how he came by his knowledge. The rudiments can be clearly seen so the answer must be in his personal digestion of the ideas. Lew Sweetser is obvious while perhaps Burroughs loyalty to a medical charlatan like Dr. Stace may possibly be explained by the man’s esoteric knowledge. Such knowledge frequently goes hand in hand with special diets and medical nostrums. There is no reason to believe that Stace didn’t sincerly believe in his nostums just because science couldn’t find a reason for them to be effective. Men have misled themselves to a much greater degree than that. Nevertheless I am convinced that Burroughs acquired his New Age beliefs as evidenced by Tarzan more from his associates’ conversation than reading.
The idea of Tarzan as the man-god culminates in Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant. With these two novels he is a fully functioning psychological projection of the Aquarian Age. The ‘spritual’ basis for Western man to regain its psychological balance destroyed by the ‘death’ of God.
He is what stands between the immolation of Euroamerican men on the altars of Semitism and the triumph of the scientific Aquarian Age.
Mankind, or at least Euroamerican mankind, must make the great leap for mankind into the Scientific Consciousness, into evolution to the next level. The old Religious Consciousness must be rejected. One cannot tolerate primitive belief systems any more than there can be no tolerance of the intolerant whatever that may mean.
Burroughs has given us an avatar of the future. It is up to us only to accept him and make use of the gifts he brought us.
Tarzan The Invincible Pt. 9: by Edgar Rice Burroughs
November 1, 2010
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#14, Tarzan The Invincible
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 9: Politics
The Entertainer
The Big Bwana
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
–L.P. Hartley- The Go Between
I would like to take a moment to organize the content and direction of the Tarzan oeuvre within the context of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.
It is close onto a century now since Edgar Rice Burroughs burst onto the international literary scene. He was not literarily well regarded by the intelligentsia. In the language of the time he wrote adventure novels. They were thought of as sub-literary. In our times after literature has evolved from Burroughs’ time into its various genres that didn’t exist as such back then he would more properly be designated as a fantasy or sci-fi writer.
Even though very great minds wrote ‘adventure’ stories their efforts are usually classified as sub-literary, relegated to the teen section. There has certainly never been a more profound writer than H. Rider Haggard nor is his literary style inferior in any way to the pretensions of literary fiction. Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs all had a great deal to offer. If it is necessary to say so their work has remained popular while most literary heavyweights of the past are unknown and unread in non-specialist circles today.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is not usually accorded the dignity of being ranked with even the above adventure writers. It pains me to say it but I think the literary consensus is that Burroughs is a semi-literate lightweight trash writer with no other value than ‘entertainment’ or a diversion for men and women who haven’t quite grown up yet. I receive sniggers and raised eyebrows whenever I am forced to admit I write what I hope are scholarly essays on Edgar Rice Burroughs. I have to scramble to find any scrap that will give me a little dignity. But that’s not the way I see it myself. The way I see it is that there are two groups of people who do take Burroughs seriously. The small group of which I am a member that sees something of value lying like a huge diamond in the tall grass and a much larger group of Left-Liberals who quite correctly see Burroughs as a threat to everything they wish to believe.
Burroughs’ publishing career has not been well researched or examined. The research I have done leads me to believe that ERB was exploited while his career was sabotaged by McClurg’s from the start. Although MClurg’s seem to have had no intent to promote his work from the beginning they nevertheless tied him up with a contract that went on forever. Compare it with MGM’s contract twenty years later.
Ten years after ERB’s death with the firm of McClurg’s on the edge of bankruptcy ERB, Inc. had to buy out the contract. This is all so contradictory it boggles the mind. Rather than attempting to maximize sales and therefore profits McClurg’s took the opposite approach of minimizing sales while reducing profits both for themselves and ERB to the lowest possible level. If it hadn’t been for the movies Burroughs’ benefits from his efforts would have been minimal, a fraction of what they should have been.
From 1914 to 1919 politics do not seem to have been involved; there is some other reason for McClurg’s behavior. Then from 1919 to 1924 ERB’s relationship to the Liberal Coalition took form. His Under The Red Flag of 1919 let the Reds know where he stood politically. Also in 1919 he was felt out by the American Jewish Committee for his stance on Semitism. He failed this test by taking an insubordinate stance. So from 1919 to 1924 he seems to have been under attack from the Left. He remained defiant through his Marcia Of The Doorstep with its very reasonable criticism of Semitism but then he seems to have been ovewhelmed by economic pressures that were exacerbated by his own poor decisions.
While McClurg’s should have been supportive of their, or what should have been their walking gold mine, they strangely continued to get in his way.
Burroughs wanted his reissues to be sold at a dollar but G&D and McClurg’s adamantly insisted on 50 cents which gave ERB a very small return. Why McClurg’s should have resisted higher prices that would have doubled their own income must remain a mystery. A dollar doesn’t seem unreasonable to me but there seems to have been the intent to restrict Burroughs’ income as far as possible.
By the late twenties the Liberal Coalition was also actively interfering in Burroughs’ career. There seems to have been a blacklist against making Tarzan movies from 1922 to 1928. As Hollywood was controlled by the Coalition it was possible to restrict Burroughs’ income from movies to zero.
The blacklist was broken in 1927 when Joseph Kennedy’s FBO Studios made a Tarzan film. ERB also began searching for another publishing arrangement. Not finding anything satisfactory he took the last ditch recourse of self-publishing. He established the Burroughs imprint. As this act was taken just as the stock market crash took place the move was fraught with dangers.
Now freed from publishing restraints does it seem like a coincidence that the first title under the Burroughs imprint was Tarzan The Invincible? Or, with its success it was followed by Tarzan Triumphant? Perhaps taking vengeance for 1919’s snub of Under The Red Flag, Tarzan The Invincible is a full scale attack on the Communism in general and Uncle Joe Stalin in particular.
Perhaps also responding to 1924’s rejection of Marcia Of The Doorstep the succeeding novel, Tarzan Triumphant parodies the Jewish religion while making some not so subtle comments about big noses and receding chins. Either book would be difficult for the Liberal Coalition to misunderstand.
While Burroughs would publicly proclaim that he undertook self-publication because he was too greedy for high royalties, certainly tongue in cheek, privately he complained that McClurg’s refused to promote his books, turning them over immediately to reissue houses depriving him of his just royalties. I’m sure the industry understood the irony of his first reason while the second is true.
Tarzan The Invincible is both a defense and a counterattack. Burroughs himself said that defensive wars could never be won. One must take the offensive. With Invincible he was doing just that in what was in fact a literary and cultural war.
The power arrayed against him was terrifying. The Reds could prevent the publication of his books through regular channels. I believe they did. ERB publicly said he took up self-publication in the relentless pursuit of the dollar. What else could he say? One doesn’t go around saying people are out to get you. That’s giving your enemies ammunition.
Ask, is it a coincidence that the first novel under the Burroughs imprint is a direct attack on Liberal Communism? A work that almost certainly would not have been published by any mainstream publisher, including McClurg’s. There isn’t a Freudian in the world who believes in coincidence. I sure don’t. Burroughs launched his publishing effort in 1930 the year after the depression began in 1929. The guy was either crazy or knew something other publishers didn’t wish to acknowledge.
When he met his former publisher, Joe Bray, of McClurg’s afer the crash he sneeringly told Bray who was complaining about business that he was doing very well with the Burroughs imprint and he was. In the height of the depression Burroughs’ books turned a profit. That was a profit no publisher seemed to want. McClurg’s certainly never exploited this literary gold mine.
Was it political? Well, Burroughs’ first publishing venture certainly was. And remember that Tarzan The Invicincible must have caused a reaction. The Reds had to say among themselves omething like ‘Don’t worry we’ll get that bastard yet.’ It had to be, nor did his even more sneering Tarzan Triumphant smooth anything over. Think about this for a moment; let it sink in, this is open warfare. There must have been a retaliation. What was it? The Reds did not cease their campaign of vilification during his lifetime nor have they ceased to this very day nor will they cease until either the Reds or Tarzan is triumphant.
I have discussed Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation several times previously. Slotkin in his book tries to pin responsibility for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam on Burroughs. He uses nearly seven hundred pages of fine print to try to prove that My Lai was the inevitable result of Burroughs’ writing. The guy’s got a job at a prestigious university too.
While one can discount the hysteria of Liberal academics heavily no one necessarily attacks someone they do not consider a threat. So what Bibliophiles have to ask themselves is whether there is a basis for the Liberal reaction or not?
I think my analyses of Tarzan books so far shows that Burroughs had a much more serious political intent than is commonly thought. Underneath the buck and wing, the old soft shoe of the entertainer is some very serious thought and reflection. Also his means of expression itself is the very antithesis of Liberalism.
Joseph P. Kennedy
Burroughs’ writing does reflect the sea change in world history noted by such academic analysts as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Whether ERB ever read these thinkers or not there is no conflict between their conclusions and his own. ERB is of the same mindset so on that basis Slotkin is correct. None of the three writers is eiher wrong or evil it’s just that Liberals think any opinion but their own is inherently evil in intent and ought to be censored. I say censor the censors.
Liberalism is a religious reaction to the Scientific Consciousness. Their core constituent, Judaism’s sole purpose is to defeat Science and reimpose the religious yoke of absolute conformity to its religious ideal. As I’ve noted, American Liberalism which evolved from the quasi-Hebrew sect of Puritanism is in complete accord. Combined of fundamentalist Christians, who pursue an Old Testament program not much different from the Liberal agenda and the insurgent Moslem fundamentalists, the challenge to Science and all that Burroughs represented is formidable.
The determined effort to plow the concept of Evolution under is a supreme threat to the whole Scientific Consciousness. Of course, the Liberals talk peace, while as the Old Testament proclaims, peace, peace, everyone talks peace but there is no peace. There is no peace anywhere on earth and there never will be.
Burroughs realized that war was inevitable. He decried the disarmement movement and applauded preparedness. In Triumphant he makes the wry comment that the Chicago underworld gunner, Danny Patrick, and his fellow criminals believed in pareparedness, always having a gun with them.
Burroughs was brought into a world of conflict, nor so far has the world disappointed his expectations. As he says the only good defense is a terrific offense. Defensive wars cannot be won. I believe he has been proven right there too. Whether you’re looking at John Carter, Tarzan or any of his protagonists you will see that they never barricade themselves. They are always on the offensive, nor do they hesitate to kill as part of that offense. My god, Tarzan ripped a man’s head off in Ant Men. His Beyond The Farthest Star posits a world of never-ending war. Prefigures the Cold War in its way. Any concept of ‘peace’ is merely a temporary cessation of hostilities; war by other means. The Liberal, Slotkin, may lament such a reality but being a man of ‘peace’ making endless appeasements and concessions to belligerents can end only in disaster to oneself. There aren’t any Americas left to bail civilization out; that possiblility ended with WWII.
I think it fair to say that in today’s war situation versus the Moslem and Mexican invasions ERB would take the aggressive position of throwing them out. As the Shona state explicitly, and believe me the Mexicans and Moslems are no different from them, if you need to hear it from an African there are those who dominate and those who are dominated, which is another way of saying perpetual conflict. Either Americans will dominate Mexicans and Moslems or they will be subservient to them. Need anyone go further than to look at the condition of both Matabele and European in Shonaland? It is a given that Burroughs would rather dominate as Tarzan does at the end of Invincible. If you’ve got to fight you might as well win.
Let us never forget that Burroughs participated in the opening of the frontier and he saw its closing. He lived through the two most devastating wars in history. One must fight or die was the lesson he learned. Tarzan still lives.
And then we must deal with the persistent charge of racism brought against ERB. One finds it difficult to understand what Liberals mean by the term ‘racism.’ There is nothing more inherent in human nature than pride in one’s own kind. In that sense all peoples are racist. What then? Racism is the natural state of affairs. Certainly Liberal heroes like Robert Mugabe and the Shona are as racist as could possibly be, yet, he and they are Liberal heroes. There must be something else going on.
Liberals themselves are responsible for passing racial laws that would have staggered the imagination of Adolf Hitler. Someone who they say they despise. Whereas Hitler called his laws what they were, Liberals are more adept at disguising their intent, still they appropriately call their laws ‘hate’ laws which is exactly what they are. The unspoken assumption behind them is that ‘White’ males ‘hate’ everyone who is neither White nor male, excluding homosexuals, and that they therefore have to be socially isolated and denied.
The apparent belief is that only White males are capable of ‘hating’ while the rest of the world is a loving brother and sisterhood. Of course such a notion leaves the Moslem attack on the Twin Towers unexplainable as well as the Shona extermination of Black brothers like the Matabele.
Hey fellas, it’s the exception, even multiple exception that proves the rule, isn’t it?
I have no doubt that ERB would have been opposed to such ridiculous racial laws no matter what language was used to disguise them. He does seem to have been aware of the dangers of the evolutionary collision of the human species. ERB was an evolutionist. His novels explore evolutionary possiblities in enormous variety and detail. While much of his speculations and jokes seem ridiculous in the light of current knowledge, at the time of composition most if not all of the speculations would have appeared to be not that far fetched, even possible.
At the least Burroughs was on the side of Science at that time when the controversy really raged, while even today over fifty percent of Americans reject evolution in favor of religious explanations, that’s one hundred fifty years after Darwin, while the Moslem invasion of the world is rapidly spreading the slime of superstition over scientific knowledge. As I understand it, it has progressed so far that I could be put in jail in France, Germany or Austria for blaspheming the prophet and Allah by referring to their atavistic religion as ‘the slime of superstition.’
Within just a very few years since 9/11 an intolerant superstition like Moslemsism has overturned the scientific attitude of the Enlightenment. May Georges Chirac burn in hell forever and a day. If President Obama doesn’t back off, him too. Don’t any of these guys listen to what people are saying about them?
As I have noted, by the second decade of the twentieth century more sensitive minds perceived the sea change in the relationship of the various human species. Among these, in fiction, were Sax Rohmer with his Fu Manchu stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Prominent in non-fiction were Madison Grant with his Passing Of The Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard ‘s Rising Tide Of Color.
At the risk of repeating myself, I flatter myself that at least some Bibliophiles have been reading my stuff for the last few years, let me place a quote from Darwin here that clearly explains what happens when similar species compete for the same territory on the same economic basis. Darwin: On The Origin Of Species, Chap. III, Para. Struggle For Existence- Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species:
As species of the same genus have usually, but by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other, than between species of distinct 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 itx great congenor. One species of Charlock will supplant another, 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.
As we are certain that Burroughs read the Origin Of Species we can be sure that he read the above passage. If it struck him as forcibly as it strikes me then we share the same basic outlook on life and the passage shaped his way of looking at the intra-genus conflict between Homo Sapiens species.
As most agree that Homo Sapiens has an African history of 150K to 200K years, most assume, and this is only an assumption, that the First Born of Homo Sapiens were black because the indigenes of Africa today are black. This may or may not be true, we have no way of knowing, but let us assume it is. There are no people in Africa today who can absolutely trace their descent unbroken from the Last Hominid Predecessor or the first specimen of Homo Sapiens. No one knows what the individual looked like or what his mental constitution was compared to the various African races of today.
It therefore follows that over that course of a very long history peoples have been exterminated to make way for others innumerable times. One wave of rats, one wave of cockroaches after another have succeeded for a moment only to be replaced by another in due time. This is how evolution and nature work. Homo Sapiens is not outside either history or nature and it is foolish to act as though it were. One must understand the natural process and adjust one’s actions to it.
To use the Shona example. The Shona are not indigenous to the soil. At one time they must have exterminated and displaced a predecessor people in what they now consider ‘their’ territory. Beginning about 1830 the Ndebele Zulu as an incoming wave of new people began to exterminate and displace them. There is no difference between this Ndebele invasion of Shonaland and the Moslem and Mexican invasion of the United States. Nature is red in tooth and claw. What can one say?
Had the Matabele, to use the Ndebele’s other name, not been interrupted by another wave of incoming people, the Europeans, (color and race have no real bearing on this issue of Nature and evolution) the Zulus, (the Matabele were Zulus) would have completed the process and today the Shona would be at best a memory. But the succeeding wave of Europeans did come crowding after the Matabele. So far Darwin’s thesis is correct. One species of rat drives out another. Had the Europeans behaved normally they would have exterminated their predecessors and driven them before them.
But then evolution throws in a clinker. The Europeans were evolutionarily more advanced than the Blacks. While the fact that the evolution of the human species is continuing is clear from the visual physical evidence, scientific research has proven it beyond any quibble. So, even though those at the turn of the century lacked the evidence to prove their case they were right. The most obvious evolution is taking place in the brain and it is not taking place in all human species. Only one species is evolving while the others are now sterile. Hard thing to accept but it’s true. Thus Europeans had developed consciences that prevented them from doing what Nature commanded them to do. Instead they set themselves up as a parasite class believing they could control the Blacks without special intermixture forever.
As Burroughs would have noted this put them on the defensive and no defense outlasts a good offense as the Shona have proven. Thus the Shona having been given a breathing space reorganized, regained the initiative and won the dominant position. They are now doing the natural thing exterminating or driving out both the Ndebele Zulu and the Europeans. If you won’t fight or can’t, you lose everything.
So, you have the Darwinian struggle for existence presented to you in plain terms in a human context that cannot be misunderstood. No rats or cockroaches as necessary examples. One must be intolerant of other species. One must be a ‘bigot’ as the Shona are or go under.
Now, not having the will and perhaps no longer having the power to do as Nature commands Europeans attempted to retreat, to withdraw within their own territories. As anyone knows they all come out at the first sign of weakness. One would have to be stupid or utopian not to realize that. As a sonsequence Europe and America are being invaded by the other human species in the Darwinian sense. I mean, folks, they call evolution science. Science means knowing. Anyone who does not act on certain knowledge is foolish or, perhaps, too religious.
However in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Liberal ideology was formed by the weakest and lamest members of Western civilization. Not understanding actual differences between the human species, even denying them on religious grounds, they used conscience as a weapon to first emasculate themselves, and I mean this in the literal sense, and then they shamed those who knew better into silence.
Among those silenced were Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs. Although all these men were initially very influential telling Americans the nature of evolution and its consequences their reputations were dismantled. By the beginning of WWII Grant and Stoddard were regarded as mere ‘racist’ cranks.
It is time to debunk the debunkers. The wheel has turned. Bunk is bunk and shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone.
Burroughs who hadn’t left himself quite so open was provoked into acts of defiance so that sanctions could be applied against him as much as had been done to Henry Ford. Ford is another whose reputation should be rehabilitated much as Khruschev rehabilitated the reputations of various Communists after the death of Stalin. The tool preferred by the Liberal Coalition to discredit someone was the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’, a religious charge be it noted.
The most potent weapon in the Liberal religious armament is the term ‘anti-Semite.’ It is used liberally usually combined with Fascist to defame and control an opponent. Oddly enough they couldn ‘t make it stick on Burroughs. Even Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation only hints that ERB might have anti-Semitic tendencies.
I know it is unpleasant to discuss the Semitic issue but I think the time has come to discuss the issue head on especially as Burroughs was and is involved to a much more serious degree than might be apparent at first blush. The problem of Asia, from whence the Semites come, and Europe has roots in prehistory. Indeed it is a tale of two species. This is one of those eternal conflicts that will not be settled until one side annihilates the other much as the Shona are doing in Zimbabwe to their competitors.
In ancient days both the European Greeks and the Mediterranean Egyptians were in a constant conflict with what the Egyptians referred to as ‘vile Asiatics’, the Greeks as ‘barbarians.’ The Asiatics were vile not on the basis of race but because of the differing view of life of the two species. As regards the Egyptians and the Semites one or the other had to be exterminated. If you know anything of Egyptian history you will know that few true Egyptians still survive. The Semites have exterminated the true Egyptians.
Thus the related species of HSII, the Egyptians and HSIII, the Europeans found the Semitic species unassimilable. We are back to Darwin’s competing species of rats and cockroaches. In the religious terms in which the problem is usually stated one says the animosity is racial or in other words, moral; in scientific terms one says that it is genetic or special. In other words, the problem is much deeper than mere surface appearances. It extends to the genetic development of the brain. The Semite cannot understand as any other human species understands and vice versa.
Thus the current problem in the Sudan between Negroes and Semites which is genetic or biological can only be resolved by the extermination or expulsion of the other. The whole course of this new African conflict can be projected historically and scientifically. It may be delayed but it cannot be stopped. Compare it with the Shona in Zimbabwe. There is no question as to what course the conflict will take.
Why Liberals choose to make an issue of Darfur while they ignore the South Sudan and Zimbabwe and South Africa where genocide is also going on is known only to themselves. It is absolutely necessary to analyze the matter in scientific rather than emotional or religious terms. These are not matters of race but species. The mental capabilities of the Negro, the Semite and the European are different and irreconcilable. An unpleasant fact, perhaps, but true.
The conflict between Europe and Asia or the Semites and Indo-Europeans began according to legend with the Semitic abduction of the European woman Io from Argos. The history of the Mediterranean in ancient times was the perpetual warfare between Europeans and Asiatics or Semites. At one time the Semites seemed to be besting Europeans and then turn about. For the long Hellenic and Roman period the Europeans seemed to have won. But, and this is a big but, they failed to exterminate or drive the Semites out. A very bad mistake.
Two things happened. The Jewish Semites began a peaceful infiltration into Europe which came to a head in the long Jewish Wars that lasted from 66 AD to 135 AD. The Jewish Semites were militarily defeated in their homeland but came to spiritually dominate Europeans through the Judaeo-Catholic religion.
None of this struggle went unobserved by the Semitic peoples of the Arabian penenisula. In the seventh century the Arab or Ishamelite, to use the Jewish term, branch of the Semitic peoples led by Moslem ideology which had its base in Jewish ideology overran North Africa, large parts of the Eastern Mediterranean into the steppes of Asia and over the Hindu Kush into India. More or less following the path of Alexander. The Indo-European Persians, now known as Iranians, were Islamized or Semitized which they remain today. They were stultified hence their ridiculous position today.
The southerly Egyptians, the native Copts, are on the verge of extinction or what the modern world fondly describes as genocide. There are few surviving true Egyptians today.
Thus the Hellenic-Roman hegemony was reversed.
The Semitic Arab incursion into Europe which was a continuation of the multi-thousand year conflict between Europeans and Semites was defeated by Charles the Hammer at Tours in the heart of Europe. Over the next nearly thousand years the Moslems were expelled from Western Europe but they advanced in Eastern Europe.
From the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 the southern Med if not the Med itself was controlled by the Barbary pirates. During that period Europeans supinely submitted to a slave trade that greatly resembled that of sub-Saharan Africa. Even as Negroes were being transported to the Americas countless Europeans were captured on European soil, transported to Africa and enslaved. So, the Africans have no cause to complain of Europeans. Some people whine some people don’t.
No one European State was strong enough or determined enough to clear the seas of the Moslems while they were unable to concert a united attack. The piracy and enslavement continued until France annexed Algeria in 1830. Rightfully so.
In Darwinian terms it is quite clear that the struggle was one of the replacement of one population by another. Thus when France conquered Algeria it behove them to either exterminate or drive out the existing population replacing it with Europeans. They ought to have relentlessly warred on every North African people until North Africa was once again European.
The attempt to coexist was a defensive war that could only end in defeat. The defeat was adjudicated by General De Gaulle in the nineteen sixties. The French stupidly and erroneously thought the war was over, but in reality the momentum shifted once again to the Semites.
As noted by Lothrop Stoddard the Wahabi Moslems went onto the offensive. No longer able to comptete militarily with Europeans they resorted to guerilla warfare, something the West now chooses to call terrorism, combined with an infiltration of Europe using their reproductive capabilities as a weapon. The situation now is a replica of the 3000 BC infiltration of Sumer. Hence the balance of power of the age old war between the Semites of Asia and Europeans has once again shifted toward the Asiatics.
As the Libyan, Moamar Qadaffi gloated in May 2006 there are fifty million Moslems in Europe. Europeans have the option of fighting or submitting. He knows whereof he speaks. As the war will now be conducted on European soil with the certain loss of the entire cultural superstructure of the last two thousand years there seems little chance of any European resistance. Notre Dame will be renamed and become a mosque.
If there is resistance then Burroughs’ prophecy of a flattened Europe turned Black over the centuries is a distinct, nay, certain probability. In addition to their submission to the Wahabi Arabs, Europeans seem incapable of resisting the Black Moselm invasion from sub-Saharan Africa. Thus once Blacks and Moslems have the strength they will undoubtedly follow the ancient plan of killing the men and keeping the women. Need I point to Haiti after the slave rebellion as an example? Within three or four generations both Arabs and Europeans will be absorbed into Black Africa.
Any discussion of the problem is now impossible in Europe as the blackest censorship has been imposed on dissent. Astonishing that the enlightenment could disappear just like that, isn’t it? Anyone who dissents from the Semitic program is liable to imporisonment, heavy fines or both. The term Semite includes both the Jewish and Arab branches.
Once the Moslem are powerful enough to direct the European military it will mean the end of Israel as that State will be completely encircled by Moslem powers with irresistable might and control of all land, sea, air and satellite communications.
With European technological war materiel at their disposal the Moslems will be able to isolate the United States by depriving it of oil or with the huge and growing population in the US sabotage any war effort if threatened. Let’s have a round of applause for the brilliant leadership of Chirac, Blair, Bush and Obama not to mention the morons of the US Senate.
Burroughs foresaw the results of the West’s waffling before the Communists, the Moslems and perhaps the Africans but he was prevented from examining the problems too openly for fear of bringing the Liberal Coalition with its charges of anti-Semitism down on his head. Both he and Henry Ford were having a tough fight for survival. W.R. Hearst.
Burroughs had already called attention to himself by questioning a survey sent him by the American Jewish Committee in 1919. It seems apparent the survey drew his attention to Jewish matters which he had ignored up till that time. This resulted in the character of Bluber in Tarzan And The Golden Lion as well as several characters in 1924’s Marcia Of The Doorstep. As the AJC would have considered these characterizations ‘anti-Semitic’ the publication of the book was prohibited. Censored as it were.
Probably as a result of questioning the AJC survey he was put under surveillance. While a number of movies had been made from his books, in 1921 movie making from his novels ceased reducing his income potential drastically at a very critical time in his finances. For whatever reason there was a hiatus in the production of Tarzan films that lasted until 1928. It is only fair to assume that Tarzan had not lost his box office appeal which is the usual Hollywood cover for blacklisting. One also imagines that Burroughs would have leapt at any movie money. Indeed, in 1922 the Stern Bros. and Louis Jacobs, a trio of Jewish movie makers, tied up the rights to Jungle Tales Of Tarzan and Jewels of Opar for $40,000. This was a very decent sum to spend yet the movie makers made no effort make the movies, they were content to tie up the titles. Whether Burroughs was being disciplined for being ‘anti-Semitic’ or not can’t be determined for certain at this time.
Richard Slotkin
Hollywood was notorious for being a Jewish industry. W.R. Hearst was one of the few goys making movies. D.W. Griffith was being increasingly marginalized. In the interim then, the noted ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president John F. Kennedy, formed or bought FBO Studios. The story of this multi-cultural struggle for dominance has never been adequately researched for obvious reasons, but what with the Ford conflict with the Semitic Jewish culture flaring in the foreground it is not unlikely that there was a great deal of maneuvering in the background. It will be noted that when RKO was formed which incorporated FBO Studios the R for Radio came from RCA and KO for Keith Orpheum were retained while FBO was deleted. The R and KO were Jewish concerns while FBO had been a great goyish disrupter.
Nevertheless, as Burroughs was blacklisted by Hollywood which the Hollywood historian Neal Gabler describes as a Jewish empire, it is noteworthy that an ‘anti-Semite’ broke the blacklist making Tarzan movies again. It would have been the equivalent of Dalton Trumbo being allowed to script movies under his own name again in the 1960s.
The blacklist broken, the Stern Bros. and Jacobs then decided in 1928 to exercise their rights to the two Tarzan novels to release Tarzan The Tiger and Tarzan The Mighty. Calling Tarzan a tiger may have been a slam at Burroughs who erroneously introduced tigers into Africa in the magazine version of Tarzan Of The Apes.
The silent era of movies over, MGM produced the first talkie of Tarzan in 1932. Watch the dates.
Now, in both Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant Burroughs takes undisguised hits at Communism, pointing fingers and naming names; in Triumphant he continues his open attack on Communism and covertly ridicules the Jews in his portrayal of Midians with their enormous noses and receding chins. Both attributes are well known caricatures of Jews. Was this a gratuitous insult or was he responding to insults to himself?
If he had been given courage by the presence of Joseph Kennedy and FBO Studios then he might have relaxed his vigilance a little. However his open and blatant attack would not have been unresented by Judaeo-Communists. While Hollywood had always been run by Jews, by 1930 Communists had also made much more serious inroads than is usually admitted. In other words, ERB’s well being in this multi-cultural war zone depended on his sworn enemies. As both a goy and counter-revolutionary ERB was an odd man out. It could not possibly be any other way.
There can be no question that he would have to be gotten for what could only be seen as egregious insults to both Communists and Jews. In fact, the two were nearly one. The question then was how best to get Burroughs short of outright assassination. The blacklist had already been broken by Kennedy but possible a movie could be made to make ERB’s great creation ridiculous. Destroy him in that way, you see.
Thanks to technological marvels like DVDs it is now possible to study old movies at will. I have a sets of most of the films. I have viewed Tarzan Of The Apes a number of times.
Bearing in mind that Burroughs was in a struggle with both Communists and Semites as exemplified in 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible and 1931’s Tarzan Triumphant while being surreptitiously listed as an anti-Semite by the American Jewish Committee, I think it worthwhile to speculate on the intent of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg’s productions.
Having watched the movie a number of times while bearing books Invincible and Triumphant in mind I have come to the conclusion that the movie’s ulterior motive was an attempt to ridicule the Big Bwana into oblivion. We all know that ridicule is a most effective weapon, especially when it can’t be answered. It was undoubtedly thought Tarzan could be destroyed in this manner.
MGM did not negotiate to obtain rights to any particular story but, and this is important, they bought the right to use the characters as they thought fit. Thus as the movie poster picture in Bibliophile David Fury’s book Kings Of The Jungle on p.63 published by McFarland, it is stated that the movie is ‘based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.’ In other words, this is not the Tarzan of Invincible and Triumphant. Oh no, no. This is Tarzan The Defeated, Tarzan The Buffoon.
The vision is no longer Tarzan Of The Apes but Tarzan, The Ape Man. A subtle but important shift in emphasis. Tarzan is no longer a man raised among apes he is a man who is an ape. The fabulous brain of Tarzan which allowed him to master reading and writing with the aid of only a picture book, that allowed him to learn new languages instantly has now been replaced by an inarticulate moron who does five minutes of ‘me Tarzan, you Jane.’
This was free love in the jungle between a hunk and a babe. Apparently it slipped by unnoticed at the time until it was picked up thirty years later by an astute librarian. Tarzan and Jane are no longer married in the movies, Jane just began cohabiting with Tarzan because he was such a handsome hunk. Fortunately she, he, or both were infertile. Thus Tarzan was subtly defamed, his universality removed. His audience constricted by that much.
Having slipped this bit past the censors, as incredible as it may seem, in the next movie, Tarzan And His Mate, not wife but mate, you know, a live in, MGM included the famous nude swimming scene that did not get past the censors.
Both these items would have had the effect of defaming Tarzan and constricting his audience. A certain type of viewer would be offended by these items and refuse to see the movies while another type would gratified by such items and drawn to the movies but lower the quality of the audience moving Tarzan toward porn. Thus by degrees Tarzan movies would gain the reputation as porn flicks. Porn is porn even if it is Tarzan so you aren’t going to let your kids eat popcorn in front of dirty movies nor are legitimate first run theatres going to show them. At least, not then.
Thus MGM was well on their way to making Tarzan porn before the censors forced a change in plan. There was nothing Burroughs could have done about this as he, or rather his office manager signed away all his rights to his character.
The MGM poster then portrays Tarzan as a criminal freak:
Mothered by an ape- He knew only the law of the jungle- to seize what he wanted.
The ‘to seize’ is in attention grabbing italics.
Mothered by an ape is ambiguous and meant to be repulsive. It could mean that Tarzan was fathered by a human on an ape or it could be so obscure as to be meaningless. If you were familiar with the books you could probably guess what was intended but if you weren’t who knows what it could mean to you. Remember the first volume, Tarzan Of The Apes, was no longer in print even in 1930 so the original story couldn’t even be bought. The later volumes don’t recapitulate his birth and raising so there may have been actually few who knew the whole story. We are led to believe that the MGM Tarzan is completely lacking in morality. If he wants something he just steals it. Not the Tarzan I would want to emulate.
The director was W.S. Van Dyke who had just had a major success with his Trader Horn, another African picture. That one had been phenomenally successful and Tarzan is billed as “Another Miracle Picture directed by W.S. Van Dyke, Creator Of “Trader Horn.” Van Dyke was certainly not the creator of Trader Horn as the movie was adapted from the book by Trader horn, there was such a man, thus in a way Tarzan, The Ape Man is subordinated to W.S. Van Dyke and Trader Horn.
What is called ‘the adaptation’ is done by someone called Cyril Hume. As the dialogue was written by Ivor Novello I presume that both the storyline and the alterations to Tarzan’s character can possibly be attributed to Hume.
There is little on Hume on the internet but a New York Times review that was cribbed from All Movie Guide. It says ‘…During the 1920s, Hume proved a worthy rival of Fitzgerald with such lost generation novels as Wife Of The Centaur and Cruel Fellowship.’ An interesting couple of titles in relation to this Tarzan movie. The review then goes on to say ‘…During the 1930s , he was the principal writer of MGM’s “Tarzan ” films, bringing prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect…’ That’s one man’s opinion anyway.
As we all know the attributed movie writer frequently has very little to do with the finished script so we will assume that Hume’s script went through many revisions by many minds with perhaps different agendas than his. One wonders why Ivor Novello, who was a well known playwright of the time was broght in to do dialogue. Apart from the Tarzan yell, with which Novello is given no connection, that seems to be the major portion of the dialogue along with the famous ‘Tarzan-Jane’ sequence, there seems to be little dialog that an amateur couldn’t have written.
The net result is a movie that seriously demeans Tarzan as conceived and portrayed over fifteen novels. In order for their ridicule to be successful MGM did have to produce a movie that someone would go see. They were apparently successful beyond their wildest hopes or fears as the movie was described as a ‘surprise’ hit and an enormous grosser. Now MGM was stuck with the character.
If it was a surprise hit then one can discount the publicity that the movie cost a million dollars to produce. There are no well-known stars in the movie, while much of it is footage left over from Trader Horn which had already been amortized with the rest being shot on lot. If the movie cost MGM a quarter million I would still be astonished.
In their attempt to ridicule Tarzan they were too clever by half. The character of Tarzan may not have that of the books but audiences still found it satisfying, especially the yell.
Those of us who have read the books have always been uneasy with those MGM movies although Johnny Weismuller was perfectly cast in the role of the Ape Man.
So, while the NYT reviewer may believe Cyril Hume brought ‘prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect’ there are dissenting opinions other than mine.
Another interpretation was that of the first movie Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, who commented to ERB “the house seemed to think it was a comedy. Why do they portray Tarzan without dignity?…with the right treatment and portrayal, Tarzan could a romantic, thrilling character, and still have the sympathy of his audience…I don’t like to see him treated as a clown…”
Elmo Lincoln and I both see the MGM version in the same light, while I have to question the interpretation of the NYTimes writer. I think Lincoln was right, the movie was a comedic effort meant to defame the persona of ERB’s great creation and thus destroy Edgar Rice Burroughs. After all ERB, Inc.’s publishing arm was dependent on sales of Tarzan’s.
By 1932 the troublesome ERB had learned which side his bread was buttered on so he publicly endorsed the MGM movies, after all this was big money, bigger than any other souces of income combined. It may be said then that just as Henry Ford recanted and apologized for offending the Jewish Cultural entity in the ongoing culture wars so Burroughs bent the knee to Liberal suzerainty.
As ERBzine reports, privately Burroughs had other thoughts:
Daughter Joan Burroughs revealed: “Dad found it hard to reconcile himself to the movie versions of the Tarzan stories and never did understand the movie Tarzan. He wanted Tarzan to speak like an educated Englishman instead of grunting. One time we saw a movie together and after it was over, although the audience seemed enthusiastic, my father remained in his seat and kept shaking his head sadly.”
So Burroughs and Lincoln both resented the screen adaptation based on the Tarzan ERB had created.
There was nothing Burroughs could do about it. His rights had been signed away by his agent Ralph Rothmund. Rothmund must have been aware of the tension between Burroughs, Communists and Jews, yet he essentially gave the courthouse away. He placed Burroughs in the hands of his enemies. He gave Tarzan to MGM stripping Burroughs of his only weapon and asset. Why? Did he contact MGM or did MGM contact him? Why did he negotiate behind Burroughs’ back presenting him with a fait accompli? Why not tell his employer, ‘I’ve got this deal worked out with MGM. Do you want to take it?’
Presented instead with a check, Our Man seduced by vain desires went out and bought five Packard automobiles. Ah, ERB…
Did he repent of this deal? I believe so. Trapped by the contract his only way of retaliation was a futile one through his novels.
Louis B. Mayer
Can it be a coincidence that Tarzan And The Lion Man written over February to May of 1933, published by ERB, Inc. in book form on September 1, 1934 (Septimus Favonius BB#55 p. 34) ridiculed MGM, Irving Thalberg and Trader Horn. The second MGM movie Tarzan And His Mate was released on April 16, 1934. Bear these two dates in mind, the movie was released five months before the book leaving time for a revision of the book text.
Certainly severely wounded by the MGM adaptation of Tarzan Burroughs had been beaten. He had lost the culture war between himself, the Communists and the Jews. Having lost control of his character in the vital field of movies his only recourse was to lampoon MGM in a book which he did in Tarzan And The Lion Man. Strangely his illustrator St. John chose this book to experiment with an unrepresentative cover that was believed to have killed sales. Thus this magnficent achievement was undersold.
Lion Man recounts W.S. Van Dyke’s movie making in Africa, telling it in a ridiculing manner. MGM’s version of Tarzan is portrayed by a character named Stanley Obroski, perhaps a takeoff on Johnny Weismuller, who is a pale imitation of the real Tarzan. Burroughs makes a careful comparison showing what a joke the MGM Tarzan was. In a fit of pique he kills the fake Lion Man off.
One of the more interesting characters is Balza- The Golden Girl. After escaping from the Valley of Diamonds she joins the movie company where she cavorts about in the nude. This scene has baffled me but if one remembers that in Tarzan And His Mate Maureen O’ Sullivan is stripped by Tarzan followed by the nude swimming scene, the novel makes sense. ERB had seen the movie in April of 1934 possibly an earlier studio screening and incorporated the changes in his text for the 9/1/34 release date.
So his retort against MGM while ineffective made for what must rank as one of his very best efforts.
Just as an aside note that while this struggle was going on in Hollywood Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January of 1933; Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States in March of ’33.
One of FDR’s first deeds was to recogtnize the USSR regime of Joseph Stalin. In late 1933 a chubby little ex-draper’s assistant acted as a go-between for Stalin and Roosevelt. Having first visited Stalin, H.G. Wells carried his messages to Roosevelt. Thus under the very eyes of the world some very important communications were passed back and forth. Nineteen thirty-three was also the year the former draper’s assistant wrote his Shape Of Things To Come.
These things can’t be stated with absolute certainty but the character of God– the formerly handsome Englishman in Lion Man, is certainly based on the pompous little H.G. Wells.
Thus while I at first objected to Slotkin’s accusations against ERB, barring the My Lai stuff, I think I am beginning to see ERB’s relation to the cultural wars between Communists, Jews, Liberals and Conservatives. there is more going on here than meets the eye.
But let us look at some of the religous aspects of this interesting situation. The religious war between Semitism and the Astrological Religion as represented by Tarzan Of The Apes.
Weissmuller As Tarzan
A Review: Part III Tarzan And The Madman by Edgar Rice Burroughs
October 13, 2010
The Aquarian Archetype
The Renowned Arab Traveler- Mohammed Ibn Batuta
Writing in the fourteenth century Ibn Batuta had visited the East African coast trodding the soil of Kilwa Island on the southern border of Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Zanzibar replaced Kilwa as the Moslem trading entropot on the East Coast. Haggard apparently had done the same as he mentions ruins that dated back to before the tenth century. So, we have established commercial activity in Southern Africa before the arrival of the Shona people in Zimbabwe.
Ruiz stood behind a low, stone altar which appeared to have been painted a rusty brown red.For a long time Ruiz the high priest held the center of the stage. The rites where evidently of a religious nature that went on interminably. Three times Ruiz burned powder upon the altar. From the awful stench Sandra judged the powder must have consisted mostly of hair. The assemblage intoned a chant to the weird accompaniment of heathenish tom toms. The high priest occasionally made the sign of the cross, but it seemed obvious to Sandra that she had become the goddess of a bastard religion which bore no relationship to Christianity beyond the symbolism of the cross, which was evidently quite meaningless to the high priest and his followers.She heard mentioned several times Kibuka, the war god; and Walumbe the god of death, was often supplicated, while Mizimo departed spirits, held a prominent place in the chant and the progress. It was evidently a very primitive form of heathenish worship from which voodooism is derived.
Looking up, she saw a dozen naked dancing girls enter the apartment, and behind them two soldiers dragging a screaming Negro girl of about thirteen. Now the audience was alert, necks craned and every eye centered upon the child. The tom-toms beat out a wild cadence. The dancers, leaping, bending, whirling, approached the altar; and while they danced the soldiers lifted the still screaming girl and held her face up, upon its stained brown surface.The high priest made passes with his hands above the victim, the while he intoned some senseless gibberish. The child’s screams had been reduced to moaning sobs, as Ruiz drew a knife from beneath his robe. Sandra leaned forward in her throne-chair, clutching the arms, her wide eyes straining at the horrid sight below her.A deathly stillness fell upon the room broken only by the choking sobs of the girl. Ruiz’s knife flashed for an instant above his victim; and then the point was punged into her heart. Quickly he cut the throat and dabbing his hands in the spurting blood sprinkled it upon the audience, which surged forward to receive it…
“Well, what of it?’ demanded da Gama. “I am king. Do I not sit on a level with God and his goddess? I am as holy as they. I am a god as well as a king; and the gods can do no wrong.”“Rubbish!” exclaime the high priest. “You know a well as I do that the man is not a god, and the woman no goddess. Fate sent the man down from the skies- I don’t know how; but I’m sure he’s as mortal as you or I; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the church, for you know that who controls the church controls the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you conceived the idea of having a goddess, too, which you thought might double your power. Well, you have them; but they’re going to be just as useful to me as they are to you. Already, the people believe in them, and if I should go to them and say that you had harmed the god, they would tear you to pieces…”
“…you don’t stand any too well with the people, Chris, anyway; and there are plenty of them who think da Serra would make a better king.”“Sh-h-h,” cautioned da Gama. “Don’t talk so loud. Somebody may overhear you. But let’s not quarrel, Pedro. Our interests are identical. If Osorio da Serra becomes king of Alemtejo, Pedro Ruiz will die mysteriously; and Quesada the priest will become high priest. He might become high priest while I am king.”
“You should know,” he said. “You are a woman.”“I am not a mortal woman. I am a goddess.” She grasped at a straw.Rateng laughed at her. “There is no god but Allah.”“If you harm me you will die.” she threatened.“You are an infidel,” said Rateng, “and for every infidel I kill, I shall have greater honor in heaven.”
I, Dynamo 