Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

The Chessmen Of Mars

Part IV

by

R.E. Prindle

The Taxidermist Of Mars

Part I

     While reading through the autobiography of Ian Whitcomb (see my review) who himself was depressed I came across an explanation of the cause of depresseion that explains much of ERB and actually world history, here on Earth and up on the Mars of ERB.

     Whitcomb quotes a psychologist whose name I can’t rembember who explained the cause of depression as the result of the failure of expectations to meet reality.  So, let’s talk about depresseion for a little while.  We’ll feel better for it.

     Somewhere in the first decade of the twentieth century ERB remarked of his life:  It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  How was it supposed to be?  Well, one of three favorite books of ERB was the Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain.  ERB read it six or seven times by the time he wrote this book.  Twain was himself depressed as is apparent from any of his writings, not least being Huckleberry Finn.  In a wonderful description of failed expectations Twain gave an acurate analysis in his great story Puddinhead Wilson.  Wilson’s life was blasted by one bad joke.  ERB read that story too which made a lasting impression.

     In Prince, of course, the young Prince exchanges places with a Pauper then has a very difficult time reclaiming his place in society.  ERB obviously felt that this too was his story.  He was born into a life of comparative luxury being coddled by his brothers if not his parents then being displaced, probably when his father removed him from Brown School in the sixth grade setting him on an unsettled course of many schools.

     A cardinal sign of  his depression was when on his way to Idaho in 1898 he met an old army buddy in Denver.  The pair got drunk, hired a band and marched behind it down the main street of Denver, a desperate attempt at aggrandizement.   Thus figuratively the Pauper posed as the Prince.  Then in the throes of poverty a few years later in a cri de coeur ERB exclaimed:  It wasn’t meant to be like this.

     Perhaps at that time he hit a low deciding he had better do something about it.  If so, his writing career began to unfold.  Here ERB was a raging success- of sorts.  That is to say that he was a commercial success but a critical failure.  Thus, in a manner of speaking he received the monetary rewards of his success but not the critical substance he craved.

     He was a somebody yet if everyone didn’t shun him neither would they accept him at his own valuation.

     Then, as if to realize his wildest fantasies he migrated to Los Angeles where he bought a fantastic estate- the dream of a lifetime.  It might seem that his expectations had become reality.  Not so easy.  He had bit off more than he could chew.  Tarzana was not only an estate but a country at least the size of San Marino.  Anyone who has collected stamps will recognize that one.  ERB even got it its own post office.  Didn’t issue any Tarzana stamps though.

     Just as through his own mismanagement he was losing the dream of Tarzana he suffered cruel critical rejection because of The Chessmen Of Mars.  Thus all his expectations were crumpled by the juggernaut of reality.  Enough to throw anyone into a deep hole.  And so having abandoned the land of Bantoom Gahan, a Burroughs Animus substitute, Tara, an Anima surrogate and Ghek the Kaldane arrive at the gates of another lost city, that of Manator.

     This novel is essentially a tale of two cities- Bantoom and Manator.  Is it possible that Bantoom represents Chicago and Manator L.A.?  It’s a thought.

     Perhaps Ghek, the all-brain, represents the ERB who uses his brain to become a writer while the Rykor of Ghek represents ERB’s idyllic physical life on the ranch.  This aspect or character as of 1921 properly belongs to Chicago where his writing career began and flowered.  Arriving at Mantor or LA ERB begins another career but as yet his further writing is a thing of the future so it can’t figure into this story, hence Ghek ceases to be a leading character and becomes subsidiary comic relief, something like Nigger Jim in Twains’ Huckleberry Finn.

     ERB might easily have made Ghek a much more central character in this half of the book with his ability to roam Manator at will unseen and unnoticed.  After having created the network of paths leading from the pits to every room in Manator, curiously ERB fails to exploit the opportunities.

     The key to the Manator story becomes I-Gos as would Ras Thavas, The Mastermind O f Mars, another mad scientist figure who would be created in 1925.  Just as Ras Thavas would deal with the living, I-Gos lives among the dead.  Excellent depression image.  What an opportunity ERB missed by not calling the Taxidermist I-Gor.  He would have captured the very essence and reality of the B movie for all time except for one letter.

     I-Gos clearly designates Chessmen a novel of depression.  What a terrible job.  Who wouldn’t be depressed?  I-Gos even works in the lowest depths of the pits of Manator.  So far down that he’s lost in the structural psychology of the brain stem.  The brain stem is where all those horrible fixations reside, that unconscious of Freud that directs and misdirects our conscious acts; that overwhelms our conscious  will and negates our best intentions.

     Now, amazingly, this is just how ERB portrays his story.  It isn’t necessary for ERB to be conscious here of what he is actually portraying.  One can sense a condition without consciously understanding it.  One’s fixations are upper most in our minds and we talk of them constantly not being aware of what we are actually talking about.

     ERB describes the results of his encounter with John the Bully on the street corner on the way to school at the moment when Gahan and Tara are standing in the the lowest protion of the pits with I-Gos surrounded by the corpses the Great Taxidermist is working on.  In memory all is dead among the walking the shadows of the past.

     At this point Anima and Animus, Psyche and Eros, are together.  I-Gos tells Gahan that he wants him to get something from a storeroom.  He lures Gahan into the room then slams the door locking Gahan away.  Psychologically this means that one has been isolated from the rest of the world in one’s fixation.  I-Gos then goes back to violate Tara, or the Anima,  of ERB.  She’s a real tigress in ERB’s dreams unlike in real life.  She slips a little steel between I-Gos’ ribs.  Then fleeing she is captured by the Jeddak O-Tar’s men, that’s Rat spelled backward, and carried off.

      At this point Gahan/ERB is isolated, trapped and out of sight of man and god so to speak.  In other words ERB was psychologically cut off from society.  He could no longer interact with his fellows.  So what choice is left for ERB?  He must break out of his isolation.

     Gahan/ERB finds a heavy axe with which to attack the door made of heavy skeel wood.  Working like a berserker Gahan attacks the door.  Resting frequently to recruit his strength he finally makes an opening only big enough to just squeeze through.  Having done so he finds I-Gos lying on the floor as though dead with no sign of Tara.  So how are we to interpret this?

     Based on the evidence it would appear that in his confrontation with John the Bully something like this may have happened although in real life his Anima had abandoned him passively.  ERB doesn’t relate all the details just the key one’s for his conscious mind.  It can’t be proven that he was with Emma at the time but suppose he was.  We know for a fact that he was confronted by a young Irish thug of twelve who terrorized him.  Three years younger at nine ERB may have been transfixed by terror but Emma kept on walking leaving him to his fate.  Hence he, the Animus was separated from his Anima now represented by Emma with whom he developed a love hate relationship.  This would accoount for his fixation on Emma and possibly hers on him.  This would also give a firm basis for his love-hate relationship that expressed itself as total hatred for her upon her death.

     ERB always writes about his experiences.  So taking my exposition a little out of sequence Gahan is separated from Tara for a period of time.  This might represent the period from sixth grade until ERB and Emma’s marriage.  So now, O-Tar near the end of the novel is enamored of Tara/Emma and proposes to force himself on her.  Thus O-Tar is equivalent to Frank Martin.  Gahan as in real life ERB with Emma, gets Tara/Emma away from O-Tar/Martin and marries Tara/Emma himself.

     So, once again ERB tells the story of A. John the Bully and B. His struggle for Emma with Frank Martin.  Thus ERB’s depression is linked with his marriage.

     ERB terminates the story at this point, his winning of the girl; the reuniting of Pyche and Eros.

     But back in the pits of Manator Gahan/ERB has to struggle with his depression and try to overturn his confrontation with John the Bully.

     So, let us now backtrack and survey the setting of Manator as Gahan, Tara and Ghek land and Gahan enters the city.  At this point the story may represent ERB’s own reception in Los Angeles.

 

A Review

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

The Chessmen Of Mars

Post II

Part I

The Dance Of Barsoom

See Post I for Intro.

 

     The twenties were a difficult financial period for ERB, indeed, as was the rest of his life to be.  The substantial sums he had made in Chicago were spent before he left.  ERB had saved nothing.  He arrived in LA with no other resources than his current income.  That income was very substantial by any measure but unequal to ERB’s massive spending capabilities so that at the time he wrote Chessmen he was already strapped for cash and headed for deep debt.

     Always envious of the fabulous sums paid Zane Grey by the slick magazines ERB wanted to sell this story for ten thousand dollars to one of the big slicks.  There were no takers so that the story went to the pulps for thirty-five hundred.  Adding insult to injury he was told that the stories were too preposterous to be considered.

     Part of ERB’s literary problem was that genre categories were not yet well developed.  H.G. Wells’ early sci-fi efforts were labeled Fantasias, a term that could be understood by the literary arbiters, while still considered what we would call today, literary fiction.  Even George Du Maurier’s  trilogy of essentially science fiction novels- Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian have never been considered anything but literary fiction.  They are three terrific stories of psychological dissociation  while it would seem certain that Burroughs read them and was probably influenced by them.  I can heartily recommend them.  Very choice.

     So the genres were taking shape at the period but had not yet evolved as they would during the thirties, forties and fifties until today fantasy, horror and sci-fi dominate the fiction best seller lists.  If Chessmen was thought preposterous in 1920 one wonders what his critics would have thought of such movies as The Exterminator or The Predator.  God, those people were so awkward and unevolved.  Well, it’s the price you pay for being an innovator.  Remember what the Pope told Galileo.

     So, ERB was stuck in the pulps.  Perhaps smarting from this rejection ERB would try to break out of his pulp rate with several realistic novels.  the first was The Girl From Hollywood, a very decent attempt at a literary novel, that ERB’s long time publisher refused to publish.  Following in the burro tracks of Zane Grey ERB wrote a couple of Westerns only one of which he could get published at the time.  I read a lot of Westerns in the fifties while a kid.  I thought ERB’s efforts were as good as what I read then.  They’re all potboilers, even the so-called classics.

     He even attempted a couple of Indian epics that I found so-so but I know other people who liked them a lot.  Not so critical as myself, I guess.  Oh, right, he couldn’t get Marcia Of The Doorstep published either.  So he was type cast as a sci-fi/fantasy writer.  At least he knew he could do that very well.

     Zane Grey wrote some pretty strange Westerns.  He himself was quite a womanizer and his novels pander quite successfully to the distaff side.  He knew women well.  Probably that was why he was paid those great prices by the Saturday Evening Post et al.  Oh heck, ERB was just too outre for the Post.

     In Chessmen ERB gives feminine appeal his best shot.  I would imagine he was trying to reach the ladies when he describes Tara’s fabulous bath.  Either that or he was trying to titillate us boys.  Worked with me.  But let’s assume he was trying to broaden his appeal as the title was offered to the slicks.

     Chessmen was based on his three favorite novels as are all his books- The Viginian, Prince And The Pauper and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

     Thus Tara teases Papa John as her ‘Virginian.’  We are then introduced to Gahan of far Gathol.  ERB presents him first in his princely guise as, indeed, he is a prince of Gathol.  ERB chooses to present him as a fop dressed all in diamonds and platinum.  Tara forms an ill impression of him as she thinks no real fighting man  would dress in such a fashion.  Shortly Gahan will exchange his dress duds for the plain leather gear of the Martian mercenary thus changing from prince to pauper.  Of course he will resume his role of Prince by novel’s end.

     Fauntleroy was born to the manor in England but spent his youth learning what it meant to be a real American boy before reassuming his English title.  Ah, American dreaming.

     Recalling his battle for Emma’s favors with Frank Martin Tara has been betrothed since at least young girlhood to Djor Kantos whose father is friends with the family.  So like ERB Gahan has to overcome this parental resistance.  Speaking of Frank Martin Chessmen is the only novel I can recall in which the hero doesn’t get bashed on the head two or three times.

     At the ball being given Djor Kantos fails to claim Tara in time for the first dance so that Gahan leads Tara in the Dance Of Barsoom.  Some sort of Grand March.  ERB explains that before Barsoomian youths can attend balls they have to first have learned three formal dances- The Dance Of Barsoom, that of their country and that of their city.  After that they can take up stuff like the Martian equivalents of the Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug, Charleston and Black Bottom.  Kids being kids on Barsoom the same as on Jasoom.

     While the concept is quite charming one wonders of the source.  Burroughs himself was no slouch concerning the hit parade.

     I think we can trace the rigamarole back to the patron saint of old timey music, Henry Ford.

     Amongst all his many other enterprises Henry was revolted by the music and dances of the Jazz Age as the twenties are sometimes known.  Even though his very own flivver is billed as being responsible for some new objectionable habits and traditions Henry clung stubbornly to the old.  Thus in full revolt against the Jazz Age Henry was promoting the dances and music of his youthof around, oh say, 1880 or so.

      Ford had begun his publication of the Dearborn Independent in 1920 making him a newspaper man also.  It seems clear from internal references in Marcia Of The Doorstep that ERB was following developments in the Independent.  He would then certainly have learned of the evils of the new music and the virtues of the old.

     Just as Henry Ford was trying to rivive the old dances on Jasoom, on conservative, behind the times Barsoom Jazz has never even been given a chance.  The Dance Of Barsoom is just as fresh and lovely as the first time it was danced millennia before.  Martian kids didn’t mess with tradition so much so Gahan led Tara in that lovely old relic of Mars- The Dance Of Barsoom.

     Pledging his love during the dance Gahan was sternly rebuffed by Tara.

     The preliminaries finished the story begins in earnest.

     The following day Tara is fascinated by a cloudy stormy sky which is such a rare occurrence on Mars that she had never seen one before.  As I mentioned in the intro ERB borrows the next sequence from Baum whose Dorothy was wafted to Oz on a tornado.  Tara ascends into this tornado like storm where her flier is caught by the winds and she is driven before them.  When she lands she had been driven like Dorothy to Oz to a far land that has been all but forgotten if it had ever been thought of.

     The hero and heroine of Chessmen are Tara of Helium and Gahan of far Gathol, or rather, they are the Anima and Animus of ERB.  ERB always writes Anima and Animus novels.  As dreamers will he may have recognized the X chromosome or Anima in the green pastures of his sleep or, it is quite possible that as a Latin scholar at Chicago’s Harvard School he was required to read the myth of Psyche and Eros from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.  I only mention a couple of possibilities.  He may or may not have been familiar with Psyche and Eros but he was certainly familiar with the fairy tales derived from it such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

     While Apuleius is given credit for the story his version is certainly only a redaction of the tale or philosophical speculation dating much further back in history.  The Ancients were well familiar with the concept of both the male and female versions of the Anima and Animus.  In popular mythology the male chromosome is represented by the Goddess as X chromosome and the Bull as the y.  The female is represented by the two snakes as in the pictorial representations of Crete.  It will also be remembered that the Greeks imported Cretan priests to manage the Apollonian shrine at Delphi.

     The myth is that the two aspects were once united then driven apart wandering the world in search of each other.  Duly at long last they do find each other are reconciled and allowed by the Goddess of Love to reunite.  Thus the stories of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty evolved from Psyche and Eros and who knows how many other stories besides those of Burroughs.

     The question is was Burroughs only following a plot line, a pattern he had absorbed or was he consciously aware of what he was doing?  Had he thought the problem out?  Just as Tarzan and Jane were apparently mismatched in Burroughs’ dreamscapes so were ERB and Emma in real life.  In Tarzan And The Golden Lion Tarzan and Jane had no sooner returned home from Pal-ul-don than Tarzan fled to his Anima in far off dreamland Opar leaving Jane/Emma to more or less shift for herself in a very dangerous world.  Misfortune usually hit her too.

     In ERB’s dream couple of John Carter and Dejah Thoris the Anima and Animus seem to be united although we see little of Dejah Thoris in the series and not at all in this novel.  Even their son who may represent ERB is not present at all.  Even with Carter and Dejah Thoris the classic separation and reuniting form a major part of the Martian Trilogy.

     In this dream tale with Tara and Gahan ERB follows the classic formula- separation, the long pursuit and final reconciliation.  He appears to know what he is talking about but since he never discussed his ideas on the subject we can only infer that he did or doubt or deny that he did.  The psychological motifs he expresses throughout Chessmen leads me to believe he did.

     What are dreams and what is a dream story?  Freud originated the rational approach to dream interpretation.  ERB gave some thought to the problem.  Once can’t be sure he had read Freud’s Interpretations Of Dreams although in his short story Tarzan’s First Nightmare ERB used elements contained in Freud’s theory to explain the causes of Tarzan’s nightmare.  At the very least we can say that dreams and nightmares from which ERB suffered all his life were of great interest to him.  In the thirties he would buy at least one book on scientific dream interpretation.

     What is the basis of dreams?  It can only be experiences combined with memory.  That’s it.  Think about it.  You don’t have to look any further.  Nothing mysterious about them.  The basic problem can be expressed in the question of what is the unconscious or subconscious.  Is it some ultra mysterious process of the mind that can’t be penetrated, understood or accurately located?  Is it as Freud believed an organ independent of the body and mind yet which somehow controls the actions of the individual from outside him?  Or, once again, is it merely a combination of experience and memory, a faculty for interpeting the experiences of the day?

     Freud touched on a key concept when he realized that the mind, which never rests, processes the incidents of the previous day in the sleeping and dreaming state.  Burroughs also takes this approach in Tarzan’s nightmare whether he picked it up from Freud, Sweetser or realized it himself.

      In point of fact experience happens to us so rapidly and from so many angles at the same time that it is impossible for the conscious mind to process it all as it is happening.  Can’t be done.  So, it follows that the subconscious or back up mind retains, as it were, photographs of the day’s activities that it reviews in sleep for either discarding, repression or action.  How many times have you awakened with possible solutions to problems facing you?

     The problem with the subconscious mind is that analysis of situations is affected by fixations, more expecially by the central childhood fixation.  Childhood is that perilous time of life when the inexperienced mind is subject to being presented with challenges for which it has no programmed or immediately adequate response.  Defeated in analysis the challenge is encrypted and encysted in the subconscious where it interprets all similar challenges through the lens of the defeated challenge and response.  Thus all those strange compulsive behaviors we have.

     As it chances we know Burroughs’ central childhood fixation.  That was when he was eight or nine and he was challenged on a street corner on the way to school by a twelve year old Irish bully.  Terrified ERB broke and ran apparently thereafter branded as a coward.  Thus the central theme of his work is fight or flight and the state of cowardice.  He examines the matter endlessly throughout the entire body of his work.  These elements are all especially prominent in Chessmen.

     We know that ERB was stressed to the breaking point as he wrote in 1921.  Whenever he was stressed his personality fragmented, splitting at least once.  In Chessmen the Kaldanes are two separate entities, the physical Rykors and the mental Kaldanes.  Tara and Gahan, the ritual Burroughs’ surrogates are driven apart by the terrific storm.

     This is a dream story abounding in dream images.  One can provide an analysis of the storm scene based on the incidents occurring in ERB’s life at the time.

     The image presented to us is of this very rare Martian storm of very high winds as in a tornado.  Tara although warned against it takes her flier up.  Perhaps ERB was warned against buying Tarzana, I would certainly think that Emma was at the least apprehensive.  Tara navigates well beneath the clouds but wants to be in a cloud where she has never been before, i.e. Burroughs buys Tarzana.  Here she is buffeted about so to escape she rises above the cloud or storm where the winds abate.  But she has to get back down so she must reenter the storm.  She is then taken by the winds tumbled head over heels by their extreme violence arriving half dead in the land of the Kaldanes.

     Now, how does this represnet ERB’s actual situation in dream images.

     ERB left Chicago under one presumes, sunny skies.  His original intent was to buy twenty acres to raise hogs.  Instead he bought over five hundred acres.  He then began a massive building and improvement program with what appears to have been a substantial payroll and a not very well thought out plan.  He overspent his income so that by 1921 his bills must have been greater than his income forcing him to borrow.  He found he had neither the skills nor the talent bo be a ‘Gentleman Farmer’ so that he was forced to auction off most of his tools, implements and livestock in an effort to raise money and cut expenses.  Also at this time his sources of income came under attack as the movies refused to film his intellectual properties while his royalties also came under attack.

     In what I consider a purely defensive move he was forced to incorporate himself assigning all his income, copyrights and what not to the corporation in an effort to secure the means of his livelihood by putting his income beyond the reach of his creditors.  In what I consider a questionable move he subsequently transferred a portion of Tarzana to the corporation.  So, shortly after this storm broke on his head he became merely an employee of his corporation.

     At the time he wrote Chessmen then he was caught in the turbulence of this storm he had created.  Unable to get back down as with Tara he tried to rise above it in some way but was forced back into the problem where he was being blown along head over heels no longer in control of his affairs.

     In the relative calm of 1924 he wrote Marcia Of The Doorstep that chronicles and looks back at this period.

     Tara’s flight then is ERB’s day to day situation presented in dream images.

     The rest of the book deals with past and present in a series of dream images to which  we proceed.

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

The Chessman Of Mars

by

R.E. Prindle

Introduction

 

     Porges speaks quite highly of this story and I think him right.  The story is a quite complex one with many highlights and as many or more undertones.  Burroughs manages to unite his past with his present while mildly projecting a future.

     The story was his only effort of 1921 while falling between Tarzan The Terrible and The Girl From Hollywood the first of two books for 1922. the other being Tarzan And The Golden Lion.  Thus this book falls between the recovery of Jane and their return to the Estate and Tarzan’s subsequent return to Opar.  These two Tarzan novels undoubtedly reflect discord in the marriage of ERB and Emma.

     It would seem that the move to California disrupted ERB’s concentration as the effort to udjust to Tarzana must have consumed his time somewhat in contradiction of his opinion in Tarzan The Invincible that man has been given all the time he can use, no more, no less.  Well, there’s limits to everything, probably even infinity.

     Whether Burroughs’ tremendous building efforts of the first couple years were pinching his finances at this time there does seem to be an element of panic in the story.  The pictures of his new three car garage shows two Packards and a Hudson so that the unbridled spending of Marcus Sackett in Marcia Of The Doorstep of 1924 seems to be directly based on ERB’s own wastrel habits.

     The Hudson is interesting as ERB may have bought his first Hudson in 1914 in emulation of his hero L. Frank Baum who he visited in Hollywood in 1913 and was friendly with again in 1916.  In  that connection the opening of Chessmen is a variation on The Wizard Of Oz in which Dorothy, her house and dog are transported from Kansas to Oz by a tornado.  In Chessmen Tara of Helium is caught in her flier by a furious windstorm that deposits her in the all but forgotten outpost of  the Kaldanes.  So far out that it might in fact have been the Martian Oz.

     Thus in a sense, ERB returns to the scenes of his childhood or, at least, his young manhood.  This is very likely the result of stress, whether from looming financial difficulties or the responsibilities of managing his estate of Tarzana.

     That he was under extreme stress is made evident by the appearance of John Carter who only appears to a stressed out Burroughs.   At such times Burroughs psychologically returns to the comfort and security of Mars where he is beyond the travails of earthly existence.  This in turn connects this story to the trials and tribs ERB was facing when he wrote Tarzan And The Lion Man.  As I hope to show there is more than one similarity to that story.

     This apprearance of Carter is interesting.  Carter appears after sunset while leaving just before sunrise.  ERB cannot be sure whether he was dreaming or the visit was real.  ERB has said that his stories came from his dreams and this story bears all the marks of being a dream story.

     ERB had the remarkable faculty of turning his problems into metaphors and symbols of his daily problems.  While I don’t believe the stories were concocted in REM type dreaming I’m sure tha as he lay dozing weighing his daily problems he was able to weave them into a creditable story that he was able to elaborate when awake.

     Plus, while we can’t be sure how much psychology he knew or how he understood it he had been aware of psychological concepts while still a boy.  He learned much of this at the knee of Lew Sweetser on the Idaho ranch.  One presumes he remembered, considered and developed his psychological ideas over the years.  Sweetser, even as ERB was writing the story was giving public lectures on psychology.  Chessmen is replete with psychological images not least the appearance of Carter himself.

     Whether Carter was quasi real to Burroughs or not he wants us to believe that Carter was real.  It is quite possible that Carter is not actually there but is merely a phantom of himself much as Helen of Troy was said to be a phantom in Rider Haggard’s The World’s Desire.  Just as Carter explains his appearance to the dreaming ERB,  Burroughs admits he was in a dreaming or trance state as he blew smoke at the head of his defeated king when Carter appears.  That’s quite an image.  His king or himself had been defeated on the chess board as perhaps in real life calling up the need for a visit from the omnipotent Carter.

     And now as to your natural question as to what brought me to Earth again and this, to earthly eyes, strange habiliment.  We may thank Kar Kormak, the bowman of Lothar.  It was he who gave me the idea upon which I have been experimenting until at last I have achieved success.  As you know I have long possessed the power to cross the void in spirit, but never before have I been able to impart to inanimate things a similar power.  Now, however, you see me for the first time precisely as my Martian fellows see me- you see the very short sword that has tasted the blood of many a savage foeman; the harness with the devices of Helium and the insignia of my rank; the pistol that was presented to me by Tars Tarkdus, Jeddak of Thark.

     Indeed.  And I do see what Burroughs suggests, one presumes that the reader sees in his own mind’s eye, the habiliment and weapons on which John Carter, the bronze giant, speaks.  We’ve been hypnotized into projecting into our own reality what isn’t there.

     Yes, Carter speaks of Kar Kormak as though he really existed when we, having read the novel Thuvia, Maid Of Mars, know that the fantastic Bowmen Of Lothar were mental projections without substance who hypnotized others into seeing them and making them believe that they were real.

     So what has Burroughs done here?  We know that he is very familiar with the principles of hypnosis.  At this very time many forms of mass hypnosis were being practised or about to be practiced.  Freud was publishing his mass hypnosis lessons; Fritz Lang had or was making the first of his incredible Dr. Mabuse movies- Mabuse, The Gambler, in which mass hypnotism figures so prominently while Hitler, himself a master hypnotist, was making his bid for power.

     Was Burroughs laughing up his sleeve at us as he knew we were actually visualizing in our own way what he suggested to us.  I don’t know whether he was laughing but I’m sure he was confident that he had succeeded.   So, having hypnotized us into believing the strange appearance of Carter who appears only in the same manner as the phantom bowmen of Lothar to Burroughs although as Carter says he has been successful in projecting the appearance of inanimate matter ERB then begins to weave his incredible story arranging the details so that all can be seen as reality to our minds having once accepted the appearance of Carter as reality who then narrates the story in his own voice.

     Another interesting detail is that Carter now addresses ERB as his son.  When ERB created Carter he was the man’s nephew his father being still alive.  Then as he finished The Warlord Of  Mars  his father died thus Carter’s son dominates Thuvia, the next Martian novel.   Now, while under stress, ERB’s father reappears to him to dictate this story to his son.

     Carter, then, must always have been ERB’s projection of his idea of the perfect father.

     Finally in this introduction I would like to note that both the city of Helium and the ruins of Opar were colored red and gold.  ERB’s Hudson automobile then, a bit of memorabilia of Baum, links the Emerand Cityof Oz and the red and gold cities of Helium and Opar.  Both cities are retreats under stress.  As we will see a key strain of Chessmen is ERB’s fond memories of Baum and the Oz series.  Indeed, Tarzana itself was a grander version of Baum’s own Ozcot while being at the same time an attempt to realize a terrestrial Opar and Helium. 

 

 

A Review

Kevin MacDonald:

Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes

by

R.E. Prindle

MacDonald, Kevin: http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-CrewsFreud.html

 

     This is a review or commentary of Kevin MacDonald’s paper of 1996: Freud’s Follies: Psychoanalysis As Religion, Cult And Political Movement.

     The paper has apparently been retitled here as Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes: The Moral And Intellectual Legacy Of A Pseudoscience.

     I don’t know Kevin but I have had some correspondence with him over the internet so I hope he won’t find me presumptuous by referring to him as Kevin.  As a Professor at California State University At Long Beach Kevin MacDonald has a distinguished record adding to the luster of the faculty.

     His book Culture of Critique is a valuable addition to the literature.  Generally speaking I endorse all his conclusions in this paper  with the exception of his condemnation of psychoanalysis.  I do not believe the discipline to be a pseudo-science.  The problem is with Freud and not psychoanalysis.  The investigation of the mind was in its elementary stages at the time Freud entered the picture.  Indeed people had a horror at the very notion of almost any psychological concept and still do.  To my mind Freud’s most valuable contribution was the The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life.  Even the study of simple everyday psychologically revealing traits was derided.  The thought that a ‘Freudian slip’ could give away one’s inner thoughts was too horrifying to contemplate.

     But there it was in bold relief- the subconscious, or unconscious as Freud called it.  Freud neither invented nor discovered the unconscious as many people still believe.  The unconscious had been a topic of investigation for some time.  It was a mystery then, a mystery to most now, many people disbelieved the concept then, many still do.

     The trouble with Freud’s vision of the unconscious is that he believed it was inherently evil, uncontrollable and actually a separate entity of the mind but connected somehow.

     His error was pointed out to him at the time but as Kevin points out Freud had insulated his vision of psychoanalysis by making an Order of it.  He thus separated his thoughts from scientific criticism building a wall around them just as his Jews built a wall around Torah.  As Kevin points out:

     The apex of the authoritarian, anti-scientific institutional structure was the Secret Committee of hand-picked loyalsits sworn to uphold psychoanalytic orthodoxy, described by Phyllis Grosskurth in ‘The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle And The Politics of Pyschoanalysis.  By insisting the Committee must be absolutely secret, Freud enshrined the principle of confidentiality.  The various psychoanalytic societies that emerged from the Committee were like Communist cells, in which the members vowed eternal obedience to their leader.  Psycholanalysis became institutionalized by the founding of journals and the training of candidates; in short an extraordinarly effective political society.

     Thus Freud was able to separate his doctrine from scientific scrutiny while creating a terrific mystique about himself and his ‘science.’

     In fact while his doctrine was based on sound, for the state of learning at the time, factual research he fashioned the facts into a tool or weapon for a specific purpose for which any changes to the doctrine would weaken its effectiveness.  It was essential that it stay the same.

     As Kevin points out Freud was a politician first, researcher secondly and a scientist thirdly.  While more scientific outsiders were critical Freud’s fellow Jewish insiders picked up the ball and ran with it.

     Freud was a member of the International Order of B’nai B’rith.  He attended meetings regularly in Vienna while lecturing on psychological matters frequently.  Can it be a coincidence that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was created in the United States in 1913?  Does anyone believe that the subtle psychological methods weren’t worked out in Vienna?

     When the Frankfurt School Of Social Research was organized in Germany in 1923 incorporating Freudian psychology does anyone believe that was a coincidence?  The Marxists embraced a Freudian agenda.  You may be sure that Franz Boas applied Freudian doctrines to Anthropology.

     There was a good deal of natural reisistance to Freudian doctrines in Europe but the Nazi disaster played into Freudian hands completely.  After Hitler’s election in 1933 droves of Freudian analysts and the whole Frankfurt School fled Germany most choosing to settle in the United States in the cultural capitols of NYC and Hollywood.

     While psychoanalysis was all the rage through the fifties the reaction set in during the sixties.  There was much to disagree with in what was essentially an unchanging doctrine that was hostile to the non-Jewish world.  Freud’s reputation has gradually been demolished among the goyim since the sixties.  However this is irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter what the goyim think.  The tool, the wapon is in the hands of Freud’s fellow Jews where it has been and is being wielded effectively.

     So, while Kevin MacDonald’s critque and condemnation is accurate and effective among the goyim it is of no consquence to the effective application of the doctrine by Freud’s fellow Jews.  It’s like Machiavelli.  Just because you’re appalled by his doctrines doesn’t mean they don’t work and aren’t being used.

     One would do better to educate people to defend themselves against this pernicious doctrine than to merely condemn it.

     While I agree with Kevin’s analysis I do disagree with his condemnation of the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic approach.

     The key to Freud’s  misuse of psychological analysis is his description of the unconscious.  As a scientist it is diffiicult for me to believe that he actually perceived the unconscious in such a way.  I have to believe that his private understanding was quite different then his public description.  It is possible that his understanding is purely religious based on Kabbalah and Talmud and having nothing to do with science.  The notion that the unconscious exists independently of both mind and body is absurd on the face of it.

     One thing to bear in mind is that Freud was well informed on the subject of hypnosis.  He studied (for a couple months) under the Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot who associated hypnotism quite correctly with hysteria.  Freud also visited Bernstein of the Nancy hypnotic school.  He must have had a reasonable understanding of hypnosis and its active agent, suggestion.

     When he says that he abandoned hypnosis for subliminal recall which he says he found just as effective he is betraying a profound knowledge of the relationship of the un- or subconscious mind and conscious actions.  He actually discovered that he no longer needed to put people into a trance to obtain the same results.  Contrary to his statement I’m sure he was very effective as a hypnotist.

     In point of fact in the interchange between the conscious and the unconscious he had discovered the true nature of the subconscious.  That is what the interior dialogue is- a discussion between the clear conscious mind and the fixated subconscious which distorts reality to conform with its mistaken understanding.

     Further, I would be surprised if Freud didn’t understand that fixation was merely hypnotic suggestion.  By suggestion I dont limit the notion of spoken suggestions by others but to suggestion by circumstances.  For instance if one is defeated at a game by another this may suggest a lack of manliness on one’s own part.  In retreating into a hypnoid state the suggestion of unmanliness may be translated into a fixation of emasculation that renders one effeminate in relation to other men.  This is done unawares to oneself but the fixation controls all future responses  unless exorcised.  It is possible that an exorcism may occur spontaneously in relation to another event later in life but otherwise the fixation has to be recognized and rectified by analysis.

     The inadequacy is a diminution of ego.  Such a diminution of ego always takes a response of a sexual nature.

     In fact, Freud’s work centers on hypnosis and suggestion, emasculation and sex.  He himself was severely emasculated and sexually repressed.  So there you have the core of Freudian psychology.  This understanding is then used to further the Jewish cause in the warfare with European ‘Christian’ society.  I exclude America because Freud was too European to extend his interest further.

     Freud then devised a plan to mass hypnotize, confuse and psychologically conquer Europe and by extension the West.  Running his special knowledge as an Order, as Kevin indicates, he was under no compunction to share his knowledge in a scientific manner.  In other words he sought to control his knowledge uninfluenced by outside contributions that would render his intent ineffective.  Even inside the Order as Kevin points out Freud strictly controlled psychoanalysis by the use of his Secret Committee and strict disciplining of what he considered deviant thought.

     Both facets were absolutely necessary if his plan of subversion was to work.  So far the plan has functioned perfectly.

     There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water however.

     Freud and Freud’s doctrine should be repudiated.

     Psychoanalysis however is a valid psychological approach.  However administration of it take great skill.  Once a correct understanding of suggestion and hypnosis is adopted as the basis of psychology and its relationship to fixation in  a subconscious having an active relationship with the conscious, fixations can be located and exorcised freeing the mind from compulsive behavior.

     The individual with a proper understanding can then be put on guard to prevent new fixations.  I think it may require a certain amount of intelligence.

     Freud’s system completely negates the role of intelligence and the conscious mind in favor of compulsive behavior.  Thus by emphasizing the individual’s ability to control both his conscious and subconscious minds he will be able to master his own will and act without interference from fixations.

     Those are the key factors.  While I second Kevin MacDonald in his analysis of Freud and Freudianism I affirm the scientific nature of psychoanalysis itself.  Just because Freud used his knowledge dishonestly doesn’t mean he wasn’t onto something.

 

Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconcious

Redefining A False Vision

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition,  Orig. Issued 1965, Dover edition of 2004

Movie:  The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, 1932, Fritz Lang, auteur.

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/something-of-value-i-2/

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     Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see above for link) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition.  Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah, which I haven’t read or studied; nor do I intend to unless I exhaust my other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely.  You never know though.

     However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its antecedents?  Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere?  Bakan seems to believe that the Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu.  I don’t believe this to be true.  The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian traditions as is a great deal of ancient Jewish culture.  Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD.  This is probably true.

     The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Cabala took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted.  Hemeticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth.  The Zohar and Cabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs.  The whole can be traced back to Alexandria.  It will be remembered that there was a large colony of Jews in Alexandria from long before the first century AD.

     The Zohar is a mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Bar Yohai, and it was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain in the sixteenth century.  Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century Jewish messiah, Sabbatai, Zevi.

     According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse.  While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.

     Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific method acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order.  While Freud himself was at war with European civilization, the international Jewish organizations of which he was a member extended his field of influence to the United States and Canada.  Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.

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     A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to be the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur.  Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on all Europeans.

     Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life.  He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.

     However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans.  As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church.  Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism.  This experience had a great effect on young Freud.  In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation.  From Bakan:

     …that my ‘primary originator; (of neuroses) was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.

     On October 15, 1897 he quotes his mother speaking about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young:

     “Of  course,” she said, “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed.  She was always taking you to church.  When you came home you used to preach and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.”

     His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation it was.  He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hating her.  When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds she was dishonored and actually sent to jail.  Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her.  But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge.  If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred of her to Jung.

     Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship with Jung.  As Freud would have known, the compulsion toward repitition would have been a component in his relationship with Jung through his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this.  So much for his self-analysis.  He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the love of the child Freud.  Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.

     A third situation occured late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism.  Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian.  This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity.  Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys.  A neat job of transference.   Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of facts.

     Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century, it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him.  He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations.  No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.

3.

     Like most people Freud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood and his true ambitions by a freud-5circuitous route.

     The editor’s note to 1927’s The Future Of An Illusion says this:

     In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his  Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘signficant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade.  “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.”

     He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter.  As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the personal meanings behind the general meaning of his words.  Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.

     As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah.  Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew.  Or else atheism has a more specific meaning for him.

     I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915.  My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the coming Jewish Revolution  until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895.  That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches.  Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution.  At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoananlysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence.  Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind.  As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore the facts if favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’

     Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’  That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism.  Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing.  Then, sometime between 1913, the year of the beginning of the Jewish revolution, and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies.’  In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Psychology.

     Just as Freud learned that there were screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways.  Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key.  In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot.  Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly without the uninitiated understanding, while only those with the key can twig it.  Ya dig?

     The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter.  Freud then, in attempting to diguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’  while secretly admiring it because of his nurse who gave him an inflated opinion of his importance, and his desire to avenge his father and hence all Jews through his Moses fixation, developed his program.  Thus he acted in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.

     Freud was very seriusly conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan.  Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into a cocked hat in the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe.  Compare Freud to Rebbe Schneerson in America.

     Thus, the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans.  In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’

     Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possibly a degree of insanity.  In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind.  Indeed, Fritz Lang’s movie The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career.  Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed the movie.

     Lang also had a hand in the making of The Cabinet Of  Dr. Caligari from which film he was dismissed.  Lang’s departure from Caligari changed the ending of that movie to the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane.  Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud.  Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane.  Although the problem appeared to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from Mubuse’s cell, now occupied by Dr. Baum who has assumed Dr. Mabuse’s identity, looms like a spectre over the denouement.

     While Freud was never incarcerated as he sould have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva which held such fascination for Freud.  It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief of Gradiva’s heel on which the story of Gradiva was based that the displayed prominently in his office.  The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.

     Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture.  He makes a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism.  At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs  are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory.  One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.

     As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.

     His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse.   Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations.  This would have been an expression of a repetition compulsion.  Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicated the situation with Jung.  His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity.  His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly through a Jewish projection of possibilities.  He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.

     From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamerica and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization.  His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there.  In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US.  While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted on an international scale.  Act locally, think globally.  Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there.  This is really an incredible repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner.  Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.

     At this point I think it mght be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail.  While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referrred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scientific researchers for a hundred years Freud has been given the credit for discovering it.  The exact nature had not been determined before Freud nor does Freud determine it.  His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.

4.

      In David Bakan’s view Freud made a compact with ‘Satan.’

     Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any freud-1moral precepts, to achieve fame.  Bakan points out the supercription to Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams a quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo, superos, Acheronta movebo.  Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, than I’ll move all hell.  Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamated the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality.  Since Freud has been successful in altering both Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satanic’ criminal doctrines it is imperatvie to debunk his personal projection of the ‘unconscious.’

     As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil.  This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.

     He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious.  He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven.  The notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be.  There is no possibility that the function of the subconscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious.  If you actually think abut it for a moment you wil realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.

     Now, nature is not flawless.  The order that the religious seem to find is not there.  Nature functions in a much more imperfect or haphazard way.  It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.

     However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrupted especially in the early years of the organism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it.  The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but functions through the conscious and subconscious minds.

     The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference.  Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference.  The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for the appropriate response.  When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say, the personality is integrated, the system works properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations.  This is very easy to see in Freud.

     However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points.  If an appropriate response is made there is no problem.  If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience may be in variance, the earlier response which has become fixated will over rule the current response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response.  Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.

     The inappropriate response will usually result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, one’s sexual identity.  In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.

     The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit.  Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experience providing responses.  None of this, of course takes in intelligence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.

     Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as the Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality al la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi.  Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war.  While this infusion may not have reached down through the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas were thoroughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the International Jew.

     The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War.  Men, money and munitions flowed in a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia.  Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations.  If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews.  Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent or unresisting.  To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freudian/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspecting Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form.  This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details.  The literature exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious.  In other words, history has been denied and censored so that the crimes can’t be known.  Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these books concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by.  All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.

     In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly.  Don’t ever think that historical memories are short.  Remember the Amalikites.

     Freud sat confortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred.  If, as believed, the tenor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924.  By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution in Russia was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civlilation when he published The Future Of An Illusion.  By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished.  The Rome of the Popes should have fallen.

     In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes.  Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.

     David Bakan closes his volume with these words:

     …under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests.  In this respect, however, just as Freud may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah.  Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between Jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah not only for Jewish culture but for Western culture as well.

     Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western ‘culture’.  Language as a screen.

     Bakan’s is a hefty statement.  Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans.  Truly in this scenario good comes from evil in the Jewish mind, assuming that the Messiah is good.  In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming.  Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture.  Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.

     By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated to the unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored.  The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism has been obliterated, hence the revival of religion happening today.  Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freud’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.

     The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings.  He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as a fact.  As always there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strict limits imposed by science.  Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible.  The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels.  Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock.  Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.

     Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientific but it isn’t.  there are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence.  Like the rest or Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up.  As always he notes only the negative societal destructive effects.  He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it.  But as Fritz Lang points out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psychologist of the asylum, the objective scientist himself, Dr. Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell of Mabuse to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did.  Indeed, as the West has.  Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution.  The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible otherwise.  Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire psychotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties.  Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.

     To return to 1919.

freud-4

 

A Review

The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

by

Alfred Rosenberg

Part III

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     The two attitudes remain constant down through history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     The old gods, almost dead, must go.

  Part IV to follow.

 

    

 

 

Exhuming Bob 13

Fit 5:

Bob As Messiah

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Are you that Man Of Constant Sorrow

Of whom the authors write-

Grief comes with every morrow

And wretchedness at night?

Anon.

 

     Source of quotes:  Scott Marshall, Bob Dylan’s Unshakeable Monotheism- downloaded from Jewseek.com dsc09906but no longer available.  The site is no longer functioning.  Roughly the same material can be found in Scott M. Marshall with Marion Ford, Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey Of Bob Dylan, Relevant Media, 2004.  No longer in print new copies may still be obtained for under three dollars at Alibris.com for any who are interested.

 

     In the dead of winter in 1961 Bob Dylan, ne Bobby Zimmerman, left Minnesota to try his chances in New York City.  At this point he must have realized that his better chances lay with Folk Music than Rock n’ Roll.  Indeed, upon his arrival in New York he realized that Tin Pan Alley had the recording world sewn up except for the ‘race’ musics of Country And Western and R&B, and the Alley was already fairly tight with R&B.  He quickly and astutely realized that whatever he intended to do would find no home on the Great White Way.

     While Bob traveled light as far as material possessions went he brought a lot of psychological and religious baggage with him.  The kind of stuff you can’t leave in a locker at the bus station.  As his whole career has been an unfolding of this religious impulse it would behoove us to examine it somewhat closely.

     Bob received intense religious indoctrination in his youth until the time he left home in the Summer of 1959.  This religious education was of an intense Orthodox Jewish kind.  He recieved this from his family, both parents were deeply religious in the Orthodox mode, although the Hibbing syngogue was more often without a Rabbi of any kind than not.  Perhaps of premier importance was his Bar Mitzvah indoctrination in 1954 from a Lubavitcher Orthodox Rabbi direct from Brooklyn.  That combined with four years of extended stays at the Zionist summer camp, Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin.

     In speaking to Paul Vitello of the Kansas City Times after announcing his call to Jesus/God, Bob told him:

I believe in the Bible, literally.  Everything in it, I believe, was written by the hand of God.

     That is the statement of a religious fundamentalist and one without much sense or discernment.  If Bob doesn’t know the the ‘hand of God’ has written nothing then he can be written off as a rational human being.  Bob in the same interview went further:

     Everything that’s happening in the news today is prophesied in the scriptures.  It’s all in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelations.

     For myself, I begin to run when I hear some Christian fundamentalist bring up the Book of Revelations.  It has the same effect on me as anti-Semite has for the Jew.

     We can assume therefore that upon his arrival in New York in 1961 Bob was a card carrying Biblical devotee.  This religious baggage for the time being took a back seat to Bob’s psychological baggage but was absorbed into it.   Hence the Biblical sounding ranting of Like A Rolling Stone.

     At the same time as with most young people Bob was in rebellion against his upbringing.  That is to say he was trying to find his own place in life while reconciling his upbringing to the emerging realities presented to him by life.  As his line from his song My Back Pages would seem to indicate:  I become my own enemy when I begin to preach. he realized that his religious beliefs would alienate any listeners and abort the possibility of establishing his career and reaching them later.

     Indeed, the sixties, and expecially the New york fold crowd was intensely anti-religious.  It was about this time that Bob read a headline on a Time Magazine cover asking the rhetorical quesiton:  ‘Is God dead?’  Bob was extremely offended by it dating the decline of Western Civilization from that headline.

     From 1961 to 1966 then Bob wrote mainly of his psychological problems and frustrations.  His dream life, which is to say, subconscious, received a lot of attention during this period as well as later in his career.

     It was precisely the speaking from his subconscious to the subconscious of his audience that drew this specific type of person to him.

     Phil Ochs, a contemporary Folkie of Dylan, recognized what he was doing in stirring up deeply held resentment and thought he was brewing trouble for himself.  However Dylan, while hating, did not necessarily stir up emotions that would lead to violent actions.  Instead his hate was characterized by self-pity and resentment that would be satisfied by showing people how wrong people were in their judgement of him.  Thus he would accentuate his God as a god of judgement.  He left the actual judgemental punishment of them up to his god.  Thus those of us in his audience who linked up were also characterized by self-pity and resentment but not violent.

     For instance, in a 1983 interview with Martin keller he was quoted:

     My so-called Jewish roots are in Egypt.  They went down there with Joseph, and they came back out with Moses- you know, the guy that killed the Egyptian, married an Ethiopian girl, and brought the Law down from the mountain.  The same Moses whose staff turned into a serpent.  The same person who killed 3,000 Hebrews for getting down, stripping off their clothes, and dancing around a golden calf.  These are my roots. (My italics.)  Jacob had four wives and thirteen children, who fathered thirteen chiidren, who fathered an entire people.  These are my roots, too.  Gideon with a small army, defeating an army of thousands.  Deborah, the prophetess; Esther the Queen, and many Canaanite women, Reuben slipping into his father’s bed when his father wasn’t home. These are my roots. 

     Delilah tempting Samson, killing him softly with her song.  The mighty King David was an outlaw before he was king, you know.  He had to hide in caves and get his meals at back doors.  The wonderful King Saul had a warrant out on him- a ‘no knock’ search warrant.  They wanted to cut his head off.  John the Baptist could tell you more about it.  [That’s a joke in this standup routine, Son.]  Roots, man- we’re talking Jewish roots, you want to know more?  Check up on Elijah the prophet.  He could make rain.  Isaiah the prophet, even Jeremiah, see if their brethren didn’t want to bust their brains for telling it right like it is.  Yeah, these are my roots, I suppose.

     Now, those are extremely violent, murderous roots but they form the staples of Bob’s conscious and unconscious minds.  The selected examples,  all from the Old Testament, are revealing in the Freudian sense.  Vengeance dominates.

     Nor are these ‘Jewish’ roots in any exlusive sense.  These actors were Hebrews and not Jews.  I know all this bullroar from Christian (Methodist) services.  I was repelled at once and rejected this crap when I escaped the stultifying influence of my childhood.  This crap is unworthy stuffing for human minds. 

     This mean spirit is felt throughout the whole of Bob’s corpus from 1961 to 1966, more especially in that most puerile of all his songs:  Masters Of War.

     Significantly Bob mentions nothing about Jesus or the New Testament; his roots are all Old Testament.  This raises the question of whether his embracing of Jesus in 1979 was calculated or not.  There is in fact little differentiation  between his conception of jesus and the Jewish Yahweh.  Indeed the idiot church I attended as a youth seemed to accentuate the Old Testament Yahweh over the New Testament Jesus.  I have a much stronger conception of Yahwey over Jesus so one might say I share ‘Jewish roots’ as much as Bob does.  I am as much a dual citizen as Bob is except more American/Ancient Hebrew rather than Israeli/American.

     As of 1964 Bob Dylan wasn’t really going anywhere.  True, his manager Albert Grossman was busy promoting his songs to others whose recordings then inflated Bob’s reputation but that didn’t necessarily translate into big sales for his own albums.

     Then in 1964 Bob had a stroke of luck, the Beatles came to America.  There had been a massive promotion along the lines- The Beatles Are Coming, The Beatles Are Coming.  No one had ever heard of them but when they appeared on Ed Sullivan everyone was tuned in to see what the fuss was about.  After it was over, other than the screaming girls in the audience, that, I might add, was a new phenomenon, few of us still knew what the fuss was about.

     Nevertheless it seemed that from that point on the Beatles were on the news nearly every night.  This was unprecedented attention for a mere ‘pimple’ music pop group which is all the Beatles were at that time.

     Why the Beatles received this attention has never been clear to me.  However these were four goi musicians although their manager Brian Epstein was Jewish.  In the inter-cultural competition a Jewish super-star was now required.  After all the first of the superstars Elvis Presley was an all-American hillbilly.  Fabian the last before the Beatles was Italian.  These four English kids then came up and so a Jewish kid was required to keep up the Jewish image.  The only real alternative was Bob Dylan although few or any of us knew, or even suspected he was Jewish.  Bob had sure worked hard to keep that a secret.  Even his girlfriend Suze Rotolo was slow to find out.

     Bob then was given the big media buildup also being on the news frequently, also being given the star treatment in the big national magazines.  While the Beatles handled their fame with chipper aplomb Bob approached it with negative depression.  But, it worked just as well.  The pressure was enormous, plus Albert Grossman was pushing him too hard, working the kid to death.  Literally according to Bob.

     Whether there really was a motorcycle accident or Bob had a nervous breakdown from contemplating the next killer tour his manager had arranged may never be known for sure.  After completing Blonde On Blonde that filled out his core oeuvre Bob went into seclusion for a period.

     He put this seclusion to good use.  Although his premier creative period was over, his golden age so to speak, he succeeded in a magnificent Silver Age.  He and the members of his backup band, later known simply as The Band, created a huge and significant body of work.  Dozens of songs, some of them really good while most of them were good.  It was here that Bob perfected the technique of clothing his religious thoughts in Amerian indigenous Folk forms.  This ability was exhibited on his next LP, John Wesley Harding, that was released not that long after Blonde On Blonde.

     In one of this period’s songs, You Ain’t Going Nowhere, Bob had this to say:  ‘Find ourself a tree with roots.’  Thus the cover of the Harding album showed Bob standing next to a tree with roots dressed in Jesse James era Western foul weather gear.  Now, Bob had also sung:  ‘I may look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James.’  This guy looked like the Minnesota Northfield raid while the tree with roots reprsented his Jewish affiliation.

     Now Bob was on track for his Jewish liaison and subsequent demonstration of his Jewish Lubavitcher roots.  Those who follow Bob’s religious odyssey, and there have been several books written on this topic, all call attention to the close relation of Biblical topics to his lyrics from 1961 to the present.  If you have the backgound and take both a broad and narrow approach to looking for them you will find that they abound.  The method becomes second nature for Bob so that he may not ever be aware of many of the references himself until they’re pointed out to him; or he may be conscious of them all.

     What is clear is that Bob views his career as a religious calling; that is to say a messianic mission to bring the word of God to as many people as he can.  In May 1980 he told interviewer Karen Hughes:

     He was disarmingly honest with Hughes about his sense of God’s call:  “I guess He’s always been calling me.  Of course, how would I have ever known that, that it was Jesus calling me….

     So now we have the anomaly of God calling to a Jew through Jesus.  While both Christians and Jews who now view Jesus as a Western and not a Jewish figure had trouble accepting the fact that a Jew could accept Jesus and remain a Jew nothing is more reasonable.  That Bob, a Jew living in a Christian country, could amalgamate Judaism and Jesus wasn’t even all that odd.

     Jesus himself was a Jew while the early Christians were all Jews who accepted every Jewish rite including circumcision and the dietary laws.  It was only when Saint Paul separated Christianity from these Judaic laws that Christianity succeeded.

     As Marshall’s interviewees point out, the New Testament is a Jewish novel in which 25 out 27 books were written by Jews. John and Revelations being the exceptions.  Even as Bob embraced Jesus, the Jews for Jesus, based in San Francisco, who themselves did not convert to Christianity were active.  Just as the Jews persecuted the early Jewish Christians even to death so they put the screws to Jews For Jesus and have at least destroyed their effectiveness.

     Thus in 1983 the Lubavitchers re-entered Bob’s life when as they thought they attempted ot reconvert him.  As Bob had never left the faith, he has said in effect, I am a Jew of the Jews, I suppose he played along until they were satisfied then went along his way as a Jewish Christian.  Makes perfect sense to me, I don’t have a problem with the manner in which Bob expresses his religiosity. 

     I have a problem in that he expresses it at all.  I find it incredible in this this day and age of scientific reallty that anyone can make the statement that the Bible is the actual word of Yahweh or any other god. 

     Goodness gracious, Bob, shape up before it’s too late.  We’re almost down to that last grain of sand.  The lights are beginning to dim.  It is getting dark.

     :

 

 

    

    

 

Exhuming Bob 13

Fit 4:

Bob As Messiah

by

R.E. Prindle

 

The most difficult thing on earth is to believe in something that is palpably untrue.  “We must respect the other fellow’s religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we do his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

– H.L. Mencken

I become my own enemy the moment that I preach.

– Bob Dylan

dylan-gospel1 

     Religion is palpably untrue whether it be Christianity, Judaism or Moslemism.  The fundamentalist religious attitude is the enemy of reason and hence the mental development of mankind.  Such an attitude no longer has any place in society.  Nevertheless its influence lingers on like some spectre from the crypt of human consciousness.

     Part and parcel of religious fundamentalism is the notion of an external redeemer or messiah.  As the Piscean Age began society fixed itself on the notion that since individuals could not alter their behavior a redeemer or messiah would arise who would redeem their errant behavior.  While the notion was endemic in the ancient world at this change from the Arien to Piscean ages it found its purest expression among the Jews.

     While the Jews did not fix on any one exemplar as the Messiah the Western world did.  Thus Jesus became the  sole exemplar of a Messiah for them as they expectantly awaited his second coming.

     Christianity is at its bottom an offshoot of Judaism as is the later Arab edition of the Semitic religious group, Moslemism.  Both Judaism and Moslemism have a rather fluid notion of messianism.  Anyone may declare himself a messiah in Judaism as in Moslemism.  In Moslemism the messiah goes by the name of the Mahdi or Expected One.

     Over the centuries innumerable messiahs and mahdis have appeared, failed and disappeared while the Christian world of the West patiently awaited the return of its Jesus.  It’s been a long wait and it probably won’t end too soon.

     The appeal of messianism is very strong for the individual.  I would imagine that every boy with a Christian or Jewish upbringing has wondered whether he might be the embodiment of Jesus as the second coming or the Messiah to redeem the people.  As always Jewish claimants proliferate.  If he is not disabused of the notion by adolescence he could probably be found wandering around the insane asylum with the many other imitations of Christ.

     In the Eastern world such is not the case.   While weak personalities go under strong personalities may very well impress their fantasy on society although invariably with disastrous results.  Bob’s Jewish namesake, Sabbatai Zevi, was one of these who flourished in the seventeenth century.  Sigmund Freud was one in the last century.

     Naturally in the conflict between imagined anointment and actual realities a dual personality must come into existence, thus we have, for instance, Bobby Zimmerman and his alter ego Bob Dylan.  Beginning in the nineteenth century when science began to challenge societal religious fantasies dual personalities became more common or, at least, became more prominent in literature.

     Literature is full of dual personalities from the Dupin and the narrator of Poe through the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and a much longer list.  One of the more amazing examples is Bobby Zimmerman/Bob Dylan the little Jewish kid and the quasi-Cowboy pop star.  Throughout his career Bob has wavered between the two, now one, now the other.  In the late seventies and early eighties he appeared to embrace Christianity for a few years and then abruptly returned to that of the Orthodox Lubavitcher Jew.  Just recently he passed through a Cowboy phase and now, as per this recent picture he has re-emerged as a Hebrew prophet complete with peyos and a vaguely demented look like some ancient Ezekiel or Jeremiah. (go to touchingtheelephant.wordpress.com Bob Dylan Marchin’ To The City)

     Disquisitions such as this will disturb the equanimity of religious fundamentalists.

     Will Bob now regale us with Jeremiads as he preached to us in 1980?  To find that answer one must go back to the now ancient past in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing up on the Iron Range.

     Bob’s memories of the North Country are as dualistic as his personality.  He speaks of bittler cold winters, so cold that one slept in multiple layers of clothes and summers so swelteringly hot and humid as to be in the Great Dismal Swamp.

     And then he was Jewish in what has been characterized as a predominantly Catholic town.  A small Jewish island in a sea of foreign culture.  In those postwar days when his Jews lived in trembling fear of an impossible American Nazi holocaust.   Jews hid their origins and culture as much as possible denying their religion and seeking to blend in as seamlessly as chameleons.  Thus it was as young Bobby Zimmerman entered high school.  Then in 1956 as he approached the massive front doors of his high school the Jews of the eight year old State of Israel fought a lightning war with the surrounding Arabs.  Instead of being driven into the sea sas the Arabs propesied they themselves were humiliated and driven back.  How now?  The Jews became assertive in their identity emerging to challenge the dominant culture for supremacy.  They ceased to be humble, hence, the sixties.

     Already masters of Hibbing’s retail district one imagines they began to flex their muscles without fear of gas chambers.  Foremost among them, the President of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and the ADL, was little Bobby Zimmerman’s own father, Abram.  Abram took to smoking huge black cigars, a sure sign of aggressive manhood.

     Years later when Bob Dylan had immured Bobby Zimmerman behind walls like in Poe’s Cask of Amontillado, Bob Dylan would return to Hibbing and combine the two images of his childhood of the two Zimmermans as he sat on a motorcycle on a corner smoking an immense black cigar.  What vision of vengeance was this?  As one of his cowboy heroes, Hank Snow, sang:  I’ve got a troubled mind.

     Bob’s father Abram viewed himself as something of a Jewish scholar.  He had a bent toward the Orthodox even toward the Lubavitcher.  In 1954 as his son’s Bar Mitzvah approached he sent for a Lubavitcher Rabbi to instruct his son in the puerilities of the Lubavitcher approach to Judaism.  The Rabbi, one Reuben Maier, was undoubtedly brought to Hibbing on a one year trial contract.  When the year was up and the congregation had rejected him he left.

     In telling of his Bar Mitzvah indoctrination Bob dramtizes Rabbi Maier’s arrival as a mystery with himself as the messianic center of the mystery.  As he tells it one day a Greyhound bus ground to a stop at the Hibbing terminal; the Rabbi stepped off and said:  Where’s Bobby Zimmerman, I’m here to indoctrinate him into the Lubavitcher mysteries.  I exaggerate for effect of course but true to the spirit.  Then having taught Bobby what he was supposed to learn he reboarded the bus and disappeared down Highway 61 as mysteriously as he arrived.  It could have seemed that way to a thirteen year old.  The key point is that Bobby learned what the Rabbi had to teach.  As Bob said he taught him what he had to know.

     If the accounts are correct Bobby Zimmerman’s was the first Bar Mitzvah in town for several years and it was huge.  Four hundred or more people were in attendance.  One assumes that the loot collected was beyond the avarice of the average thirteen year old.  Bob boasted of the Bar Mitzvah for years.

     But of more importance for us is what information Rabbi Reuben imparted to Bob.  I have pointed out in Fit 2 that Rabbi Maier was associated with Rabbi Schneerson in Brooklyn, New York.  Schneerson had strong notions of the superiority of the Jew to all other peoples while having a strong notion of the messianic nature of Judaism in bringing the word of the Jewish god to the peoples.  This is absolutely undeniable and calling someone who tells the truth to you an anti-Semite will not change the truth.  Such an accusation only makes the accuser look an ignoramus.

     It would seem to follow then that Rabbi Maier could teach his young disciple nothing other than the prevailing Lubavitcher doctrines of Rabbi Schneerson.

     Indeed in later life Bob Dylan would write the symbolical song Quinn The Eskimo while after his Christian stint say words to the effect:  ‘You know what?  Things are going to fall apart and all peoples are going to run to the Jews to save them.  But, guess what,  the Jews won’t be able to do it because they haven’t lived according to the Law.’   Sounds just like the Protocols, doesn’t it, Sean?

     Now, where do you suppose Bob would pick up an idea like that?

     Enduring heavy Jewish indoctrination during his high school years Bob was also conflicted by his immersion in the dominant culture thus contributing to his dual personality.  Thus we have Cowboy Bob who listened to endless hours of Country and Western and we have Rabbi Bob using his pulpit to preach Jewish tenets, whether in Christian form or not, to what passed for his faithful.

     Starting from a low base Bob was actually to gather a following of millions as of this date.  Many if not most of them see him as either a Christian savior or a Jewish messiah.

     Young Bobby Zimmerman left Hibbing in a state of Mixed Up Confusion that it would take him decades to order as much as he ever has.

     I hope I haven’t unduly offended anyone but the fanatics to this point.  They will always scream anti-Semite at anyone who challenges their cherished fantasies.  They are religious fundamentalists and are to be scorned by any intelligent people.  Disrgard them.  Laugh at them.  If the reader will find the story anti-Semitic then all I can say is that he or she find the truth anti-Semitic.

Owls- they whinny down the night;

Bats go zigzag by.

Ambushed in shadow beyond sight

The outlaws lie.

 

Old gods, tamed to silence, there

In the wet woods they lurk,

Greedy of human stuff to snare

in nets of murk.

 

Look up, else your eye will drown

In a moving sea of black;

Between the tree-tops, upside down,

Goes the sky-track.

 

Look up, else your feet will stray

Into that ambuscade

Where spider-like they trap their prey

With webs of shade.

 

For though creeds whirl away in dust,

Faith dies and men forget,

These aged gods of power and lust

Cling to life yet-

 

Old gods almost dead, malign,

Starving for unpaid dues;

Incense and fire, salt, blood and wine

And a drumming muse,

 

Banished to woods and a sickly moon,

Shrunk to mere bogey things,

Who spoke with thunder once at noon

To prostrate kings:

 

With thunder from an open sky

To warrior, virgin, priest,

Bowing in fear with a dazzled eye

Toward the dreaded East-

 

Proud gods, humbled, sunk so low,

Living with ghosts, and ghouls,

And ghosts of ghosts, and last year’s snow

And Dead Toadstools.

Outlaws by Robert Graves.

Fit 5 follows in another post.

     Bob

 

Exhuming Bob 13

Fit 3;

Bob As Messiah

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     What was really an innocent exploration of Bob’s religious development is being given a sinsiter cast by various elements with an apparent axe to grind.

     The latest to join the fray is something called Mick Hartley: Politics and Culture.  It goes on this way:

     As David T. at Harry’s Place publicises a forthcoming conference at Goldsmith’s, University of London, on Jews and anti-semitism, it’s interesting to note the odd places where you find anti-semitism cropping up nowadays.  Expecting Rain as anyone who follows Bob Dylan’s career will know, is a website which provides daily links to all things Bob: concert and record reviews, articles, whatever.  There is, of course, no presumption that every article they link to is something they agree with or aprove of, but, as RightWingBob notes, it was nevertheless extremely odd to see them linking last Thursday to this piece, “Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob.”

     One would have to obsessed with anti-Semitism to find it in my scholarly essay.  Coded in the above quote is the notion that Andersen’s site, an aggregator, Expecting Rain, and my site, I, Dynamo, colluded to publish this ‘anti-Semitic’ essay on the first day of the Jewish New Year, or Yom Kippur in Jewish parlance.  This notion was put forward by Sean Curwyn and his alter ego Dov Kerner on his RightWingBob site.  This is what is known as a paranoid delusion in psycho-analytical circles.

     Curwyn and Kerner note that my essay was written in June and they think cleverly withheld until Yom Kipper when apparently as they believe as some sort of insult to the Jews Expecting Rain and I, Dynamo in collusion published it.  Karl Andersen who runs his site and I mine don’t even know each other and have never communicated about anything except contributions and that in the most perfunctory manner.

     While it is true that I wrote the essay in June it was only in October that I suggested the link to Expecting Rain.  I only became familiar with the aggregator a couple months ago after I wrote the essay.  Since then I have been a regular contributor to the site.

     So, this October I decided to suggest the link to ER as I thought it a very thoughtful essay on Bob’s religious attitude.  As Monday through Thursday have the heaviest traffic on ER I waited until Monday afternoon to submit the link.  As it happened Monday was a heavy newsday for ER which listed 30 links therefore excluding mine as a late submission.  ER carried it over using it on Tuesday which was a slow newsday.

     I doubt very seriously whether Karl Andersen was aware of when Yom Kippur was and I sure as heck didn’t know so if the essay was published on Yom Kippur there was no conspiracy to do so.  But as conspiracy theorists have no trouble making non-existent connections Messers Kerner, Curwyn and Hartley see the ugly head of anti-Semitism looming above the horizon like Fantomas over Paris.

     My compassion and pity goes out to them.  I hope they get well soon.  It is too bad Mr. Hartley who read psychology at Oxford (in England not Mississippi) became disillusioned with the discipline; all three need it badly.  Should they enter an analyst’s office the term they should employ in seeking help is…paranoid delusion.

Fit 4 will follow in another posting.

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Wrestles With Time

by

R.E. Prindle

When the student is ready the teacher will appear.

Gnostic Wisdom

 

     There are two major themes in Burroughs that present significant difficulties.  One is his preoccupation with slavery.  Slavery pervades the corpus.  I haven’t begun to guess at Burroughs’ notions on slavery.  The second is the wrestle Burroughs has with the concept of Time.  Time is a major preoccupation  of scientific thinkers.

     My ideas on Burroughs ideas on Time were jelled by the following quote from ‘Understanding Media’ by Marshall McLuhan that I came across while rereading the book recently:

     As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern.  Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience.  The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanical universe.  It was in the world of the medieval monasteries, with their need for a rule and for synchronized order to guide communal life, that the clock started on its modern developments.  Time measured not by the uniqueness of private experience but by abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense life, much as does the technology of writing and printing.  Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs.  As the pattern of arbitrary and uniform measurement of time extended itself across society, even clothing began to undergo annual alteration in a way convenient for industry.  At that point, of course, mechanical measurement of time as a principle of applied knowledge joined forces with printing and asembly line as means of uniform fragmentation of processes.

          While Burroughs never states his position succinctly McLuhan might have abstracted the above quote from Burroughs’ novels.

     The Pellucidar series is centered on the problem of Time while Burroughs persistently dwells on the problem throughout the corpus.  Mars itself is a contrast between the orbits of Earth and Mars with its two different durations of time.  The lost cities of Africa are a contrast in time periods as they all exist within the present while products of a distant past,  most notably the lost city of Opar that dates back to Atlantis nearly unchanged.

     Tied to the concept of Time are Burroughs’ notions on evolution.  The most notable novel in that line being The Land That Time Forgot.  Time forgot.  Time didn’t so much forget it as encapsulate a series of time periods that exist side by side.

     Usually Burroughs’ ruminations are thoroughly disguised as ‘entertainment.’  If you are merely entertaining yourself by reading Burroughs you probably won’t consciously recognize the underlying examinations but you probably will be affected subconsciously.  A hypnotic suggestion so to speak.  After all, the stories themselves are fairly slight and yet the attention of readers from teenagers to college professors over a century now are riveted by the author.

     I don’t intend to be exhaustive in this essay but I would like to concentrate on two novelistic examinations by Burroughs.  The largest examination and most obvious is that of ‘Tarzan At The Earth’s Core’ and its successor ‘Tarzan The Invincible.’  The other hidden example is ‘Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid’ also known by its published title: ‘The Oakdale Affair.’  I will begin with the latter.

     I’ve written on ‘Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid’ a couple times, one major essay being on the ezine, ERBzine, Only The Strong Survive.  http://erbzine.com/mag14/1483.html .  There is a great deal going on in this wonderful story that isn’t so obvious.  I didn’t have that good a handle on the story although Lord knows I tried hard enough.

     I was mystified by the course taken by Bridge, the Kid, the Bear, the Gypsy Girl and Hetty Penning from the Squibb Farm to the destination warehouse.  There is probably a great deal of symbolism I’m still not getting but as it appears to me now Burroughs is contrasting two different kinds of time.

     The journey takes a day and a night to complete by which I do not mean to say twenty-four hours of mechanical time but a physical day and night of experiential time.  In other words according to McLuhan Time measured by the uniqueness of personal experience on one hand and time measured by abstract uniform units on the other.

     Both the origin of the journey and its end are based on experiential time where the sun not the clock governs the actions.  As darkness falls the journey through time is bisected by the passage through a town.  Here experiential time is contrasted to mechanical time.  That mechanical time is precisely measured according to the precepts of the efficiency expert Frederick Taylor. Indeed, within a year or so Burroughs would pen a book on the same theme entitled ‘The Efficiency Expert.’

     In this book, Willie Case, a little farm boy who Gail Prim posing as a hobo had bummed from him came to town.  The story involves several criminal acts and a major detective so Willie is hot to solve the case.  Willie comes to town which is run by the clock.  Willie has a dollar to spend.  ERB accounts for each and every penny as it is spent.  In a very humorous scene Willie goes into a restaurent at dinner time by the clock.  In a Frederick Taylor efficient manner Willie arranges his dinner plates so that he makes the minimum moves in a most timely manner shoveling the food into his mouth in minimum time.  Very efficient if ridiculous dining.

     He then goes to the movies.  Movies are run on a time schedule by the clock, so various aspects of rigid mechanical time are represented.  As Willie leaves the theatre he spots the hobo troupe weaving through town on experiential time.  No straight lines.  Here the two modes of time intersect.  Very cleverly done on ERB’s part.  The troupe then weaves on to their destination while Willie calls the cops on a pay phone.

     While one is not conscious of the two modes of time that ERB represents yet subconsciously a deepening interest is added to the story.  While mystified by the action I would never have guessed the significance of the time comparisons if I hadn’t read the McLuhan passage that put things into perspective.

     Also at this time ERB wrote two other investigations of Time:  ‘The Efficiency Expert’ and ‘The Land That Time Forgot.’

     I think his two most explicit investigations were ‘Tarzan At The Earth’s Core’ and its successor ‘Tarzan The Invincible.’

     Burroughs through Tarzan seems to reject civilization.  He seems to prefer experiential time to mechanical time.  In Invincible he says:

     Time is the essence of many things to civilized man.  He fumes and frets, and reduces his mental and physical efficiency if he is not accomplishing something concrete during the passage of every minute of that medium which seems to him like a flowing river, the waters of which are utterly wasted if they are not utilized as they pass by.

     His Pellucidar series creates a model to investigate the nature of Time.  Pellucidar is a model of a reversed Time and Space system.  The earth is essentially turned outside in replicating the exterior in a closed universe.  He posits a sun suspended in the interior that is perpetually shining.   While the outer earth rotates on its axis only half the surface is in light facing the sun while the other half is in darkness facing away.  Thus the appearance of change which is time is obvious.  In Pellucidar as the earth turns no portion of the inner world is in darkness although the perpetual shadow from the interior moon must have described a circular path.

     As there is no experiential time, there is no night and day, the beings of Pellucidar have no notion of the passing of Time indeed there is no passing of Time; Time as a reality does not exist.  Time is not necessary for existence; a person or thing is merely invested with a certain amount of energy.  When that energy is expended the person or thing ceases to exist.

     Thus, for example, when one winds a top it is invested with a certain amount of energy.  At peak energy it rotates rapidly gradually slowing down into a wobble and when its energy is expended it falls over and attains perpetual rest.  No time is involved although using man made mechanical means the duration of the spin can be measured.

     So, in the universe at large.  It is quite clear that Burroughs has Einstein in mind.  In Invincible he says:

…but though Time and space go on forever, whether in curves or straight lines…

     One can’t mention curved space without being familiar with Einstein.  He is thus offering an alternative to Einstein’s notion of the fabric of Time and Space.  There can be no fabric of time and space as time has no objective existence.  It is a contruct to serve the needs of man.  The sun, for instance, came into existence with a certain amount of potential energy.  Barring accidents, that energy will be expended at a certain rate just like the top and when that energy is fully expended the sun will follow whatever course the death of suns follow.  There is no time involved, hence no time-space continuum and no fabric of time and space.

     McLuhan says essentially the same thing.

     So, ‘Tarzan At The Earth’s Core’ is a demonstration of the fallacy of Einstein’s notion.

     Moving on to ‘Tarzan The Invicible’ Burroughs then has Tarzan dealing with the notion of terrestrial time.  As McLuhan notes, the notion of a time to eat arose with clocks; Tarzan dispenses with the notion of a time to eat eating only when he is hungry.  There are no clocks in Tarzan’s Africa.  As Burroughs says an individual has all the time in the world.

     Of all the vast resources that Nature had placed at their disposal, she had been most profligate with Time, since she had awarded to each all that he coud use during his lifetime, no matter how extravagant of it he might be.  So great was the supply of it that it could not be wasted, since there is always more, even up to the moment of death, after which it ceased, with all things, to be essential to the individual.  Tantor and Tarzan were therefore wasting no time as they communed together in silent meditation.

     One has all the time one needs until the day one dies then one no longer has need of time.  In other words, the organism’s energy has been expended and the husk falls to earth.

     So Tarzan is active when necessary, such as hunting for food or fighting and lazes around when activity is unnecessary.  Perfectly balanced and happy according to Burroughs.  OK for the jungle, I suppose, but I’ve got things to do such as writing stuff like this but then that is only how I dispose of the energy left in my organism during the time remaining.  With other media such as electric lights I am not bound by the diurnial cycle being freed from that experiential limitation.  One only has to sleep when one is tired.  Time means nothing to me either.  With stores open around the clock I can even buy groceries when the mood hits me.  Other items can be purchased on the internet at any time of day.  So, technology has freed us from many of the restraints of what civilization is pleased to call time.

     So, when reading Burroughs one should always bear in mind what time means to him and how various notions of time relate to the story.  Obviously in Invincible while Tarzan is attempting to live on experiential time the Revolutionaries are living by the clock and calendar.  Thus the story is also the tale of the clock or two time systems.

     I knew there are reasons I like Burroughs other than interesting stories; complexities like the nature of time are one of the extras if one can only discover and realize them.  Now, I really have to work on the nature of slavery in the Corpus.