I, Dynamo

From the minutes of the Century Society, 3/17/2023

Today we look at the consequences of the Roman deportation of the Jews from Palestine to Spain.  One must know that there were already Jewish colonies in Spain as there were in every other part of the Empire.  The stress from this total warfare with the Jews had helped to breakdown the integrity of the Empire.  Admisistrative controls were seriously damaged.

With the breakdown of the Empire, the peoples of the pale outside the Roman borders, taking advantage of Roman weakness, the decay of the central authority, began to take advantage crossing the border into the Roman provinces.

This may be compared to the US today when the central authority has deteriorated so that the ‘barbarians’ to the South of the US are flooding in without opposition.

In Spain the Vandals first and then the Visigoths succeeding took possession of Spain.  One must remember that by human conceptions of time the period of the Vandal and Visigoth possession was a matter of hundreds of years, to get the feel that’s like 1600 to the present. Before the invasion of the Moors in 711  brought across the straits  by the Jews who threw open the gates of the cities.  The Visigoths were driven out and the period known as the three religions began.

The Jews had a ‘sweet deal’ with the Visigoths as one member put it.  What he meant was that the Visigothic kings were having difficulties collecting taxes by their own countrymen.  The Jews stepped up saying ‘Tell us how much you need and we’ll get for you pronto and keep anything over your needs.’ 

That solved the Monarch’s problem but destroyed the lives of his subjects.   Given a license to steal you can believe the Jews made use of it.

Backed by the authority of the crown they descended on the subjects like the locusts of legend.  They took everything the people had down to the seeds required for the next crop.

When planting time came up the tax collectors sold their seed back to them along with the confiscated equipment charging the subjects exorbitant rates of interest.  Thus the Visigoth subjects were enslaved by the Jews.  Over time the subjects rebelled and attacked the Jew who retreated into their enclaves and demanded protection from the King.  The kink took their side and attacked his own subjects.

The method had been used by Joseph in Egypt during the seven fat and lean years.  The Egyptian people were free and prosperous before the Jews and slaves after.  Compare that to the period of the Jud Suss, Joseph Oppenheimer,  in Germany.  As the viceroy of Duke Alexander of the German State of Wurttemburg in the eighteenth century  the Wurttemburgers were free and prosperous but while the Duke was defending the State against the French, Suss, using his powers as the viceroy destroyed the freedom of the people reducing them to the equivalent of slaves.

The US was free and prosperous before the Jewish colonists arrived in the nineteenth century  while today through usurious interest collected from credit cards half the country is in debt slavery while freedom is eroded more every day.

Thus over millennia  the Jewish method remains the same.  Any setback is only temporary, they only come back stronger than ever.

Just as the Romans tried to solve the problem by dispersing the Jews (and these were only the Palestinian Jews, not the colonies or Mesopotamia) and forbidding them to occupy Palestine.

In the crucial years of 290 to say 1492 the Europeans tried to solve the problem by expelling the Jews for their lands.  Finally, under the threat of extermination by the Jews themselves, the Germans responded by trying to exterminate their professed enemies.

Our next meeting will backtrack a little again.

Minutes of the Oxford Society 3/17/2023. R.E. Prinde Sec’y.

Bob Dylan And the C Lawsuit

by

R.E. Prindle

Here of late I’ve become a little troubled about the recent lawsuit filed against Bob Dylan by a complainant identified only as C by her lawyers.  The charge is that Bob Dylan imprisoned her for six weeks in New York City’s Chelsea Hotel for sexual reasons. 

The charge aroused a large denunciation from Dylan’s ardent fans, one might say disciples.   I know not if the charges are true but, at the same time, something was happening at the Chelsea.  Bob did have rooms there, that’ a fact, although unknown to the general public.  Nineteen sixty-five when this was alleged to have happened, was one of the strangest years of the Sixties Era.  Mind baffling stuff was taking place.  Many strange and weird movies were being screened, ground breaking in their audacity 

I am going to construct a scenario about the alleged Chelsea  incident within the context of the time.  While I can come to no definite conclusion, I think there is a good film at least in the account.

The mores of our time are largely shaped by the movies we see.  We begin, then with the 1963 movie of John Fowles novel, ‘The Collector.’  This was a very influential film, replicated many times in real life in subsequent times expressed in the sexual mores of Britain and the US.

Incredibly the movie was made and released in the same year the book was published.  So the script was either written before the book was published or the day the book was released and rushed into production.  The film astonished us all.  It came across as a blueprint to be followed.

The idea was that a young man took a fancy to a young twelve year old girl who attended a London school.  He abducted her coming  from school and placed her in an underground wine cellar on his estate.  He didn’t molest her as he hoped that she would learn to love him and settle in with him.  She refused and the movie continued as one might expect.  I’m speculating that Dylan saw the movie and it made an indelible impression on him as it did us all.

In her autobiography, Dandelion, Catherine James says she was introduced to Dylan as a thirteen year in 1963.  Devoting a few pages to Bob she says that it was a sparkling romance, although ‘platonic,’ if that is believable.

Now we shift to New York City in 1964.  The social scene in NYC was vibrant.  Drugs, amphetamine, ruled the scene. The city was saturated with amphetamines.  Dylan was a partaker.  Andy Warhol and his crowd lived on amphetamines.  And had captured the attention of the art world by using the image of a Cambell’s soup can as a topic, one might say a portrait.  That fact might not have become general knowledge but for Time Magazine seizing on Warhol and the Pop Art phenomenon promoting it aggressively for years.

Time Magazine at the time was the trend setter of American magazine publishing.  One might say that Time was instrumental in creating this period.  Warhol, the Beatles and Dylan formed a large part of the entertainment section of the magazine.  Thus in 1965 Dylan, Edie Sedgwick and Any Warhol were the center of notoriety.  Within NYC Edie was famous, if not more famous than Dylan himself.  Within the Bohemian community the two people were the talk.  Outside the bohemian community they were probably unknown, still their lives were and would be influential.

Dylan had met Edie Sedgwick, who was the talk of the town, when his sidekick, Bobby Neuwirth virtually snatched Edie off the street and brought her to the venue at which Dylan was performing in December 1964.  Neuwirth introduced Edie, who was a lovely if totally insecure girl to Bob and the two hit it off.  Dylan was smitten by her.  The romance developed quickly into January at which time Dylan was booked into his fabled folk tour of England.

He persuaded Edie to say she would wait for him until he returned in May.  Of course she promised but as soon as Bob’s plane was airborne she changed her allegiance to Andy Warhol thereby setting off a serious feud between Dylan and himself.  Andy wooed Edie by promising her movie roles in his worthless films.  The movies well received in what was then known as the counter-culture but were rejected by general society.

Now, up to this point in his career Dylan had been a political folksinger.  He was the darling of the civil rights crowd.  He performed solo with his guitar and harmonica dressed in his vision of an Okie farm laborer and singing with a hokey invented accent.

So far, so good.

Up to this point in his career Dylan had sung and written politically correct songs.  He was actually revitalizing a dormant crowd of folkies.  Folk music was on a solid downward trend until he came along.  The catch was that he wanted to be a rock and roll singer.  The folk scene was just a shuck with an easy entry into recording.  Thus unknown to anyone he had signed a rock band to back him up with electric instruments for the tour.

In England he played his opening set as expected solo with his guitar and harmonica and was adoringly received.  For the second set he brought out his electric band.  There are videos of this on the internet and viewed from a musical sense it was just a noisy, uncoordinated, raucous scarcely understandable set.

His audience was shocked and offended feeling betrayed as, actually, they were.  Dylan by this time was nearly a cult figure to core, almost worshipful, followers.  They began to boo loudly and continuously. And audiences kept booing all around England.  When booed as vociferously as they were the usual reaction is to get off stage or stop what you’re doing.  Dylan plowed straight ahead ignoring the response.  There’s video of the next bit available too.  Someone in the audience shouted ‘Judas!’ which gives evidence of their solemnity.  Judas of course is the disciple who betrayed Jesus.  Bob shouted back ‘You’re a liar.’  And kept on going.

There are videos of this so that you can see the whole thing.  You can see Dylan going into shock.  Now, this is important, Dylan suffered psychological damage from this booing.  One of the band members quit the band because he couldn’t stand the constant booing.  Neither could Dylan actually although he wasn’t deterred.  And then he returned to the US with shattered nerves.  He had to have.  He perhaps returned with expectations of taking up where he left off with Edie.  If you’ve had a bad love affair you still can’t imagine the effect this likely had on his shattered self-esteem from the booing.  He could still conjure it up.

It was this time in early June when Bob attended a Warhol party and he and Edie went into a corner to discuss what he considered her betrayal.  Now, these were all very young people doing a lot of drugs, mainly amphetamines, where fidelity was not thought highly of.  The theme song was:  If you’re not with the  one you love,  love the one you’re with.  That phrase was thought to be really clever.  Bob had not been faithful to Edie while overseas.  So…

Did Bob really expect a young psychologically  unsettled woman who he had just met to sit around and wait for him for five months.  A woman who was the talk of the town.  Did he think no one would make a move on the belle of the town?  Apparently he did.

Andy Warhol wasted no time.  He had moved in:  ‘Hello Baby, want to be in the movies?’  Edie did and she went with the Warhols.  Now she was attempting to explain this to Bob perhaps per John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonfuls song:    Have you ever had to make up your mind, pick up on one and leave the other one behind; it’s not often easy and not always kind.  Did you ever have to make up your mind?  Bob should have but with the booing ringing through his mind he was enraged by this rejection.

He went home and raged  for a couple weeks then sat down and vomited up his disappointment in the crazily raging song ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’  The rolling stone was perhaps Edie who rolled from him to Andy.  And then a month later Dylan in a hate filled screed called ‘Positively Fourth Street’ blasted Andy Warhol.

Keep in mind now that I don’t say what follows happened, nevertheless fifty some years later a woman appears and claims that when she was a teenager Bob coaxed her into his rooms at the Chelsea Hotel where he kept her for his sexual amusement for six weeks.  The woman’s lawyers refused to reveal her name other than the initial C.  Obviously she expected Bob to understand who had filed the suit, the C being the giveaway.  We don’t know, but perhaps the intent was merely a shakedown, if indeed Bob was guilty of something.  After a few weeks the suit was withdrawn.

A fact is that Bob did have rooms at the Chelsea.  The door to his room was recently sold along with other doors when the Chelsea remodeled.

So, we have the Collector movie of 1963 that Bob had undoubtedly seen, we have the unnerving booing, and it is a fact because it is on film even when a fan called out ‘Judas’ and Bob answered ‘You’re a liar.’ Then we have Bob’s disappointed sexual expectations disappointed when he felt rejected by Edie, we have his violent emotional outbreaks that were broadcast nationwide, even internationally  in his songs ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘Positively Fourth Street’.  The songs indicate a distressed mind and Bob didn’t care who knew it.   In fact, he wanted to unburden his mind to the whole, wide, entire world.  And…he had the means to do it.

We don’t have a confirmed identity for C.  Remember Catherine James?  C. could stand for Catherine.  Bob’s mind would definitely have to turn that way because if he knew Catherine as well as she says he did, and if so in the circumstances she says he knew her than I find it hard to believe that he didn’t seduce the thirteen year old Catherine James.

I have had slight contact with Catherine after publishing my review of her autobiography Dandelion.   I questioned her Dylan stories but she assured me that she does not lie.  She had some amazing contacts as a groupie, including as a live in with Mick Jagger that sounds like a stretcher but I have validated that and all those other claims and they are true.  Pamela Des Barres could also confirm them in her auto-biography ‘I’m With The Band’.  Catherine doesn’t lie as she emailed me but that doesn’t mean she can keep her dates straight.

Yet I can find no record of Bob having been in California for an extended stay in 1963.  Catherine was in NYC in 1964-65 as a fifteen year old.  She also has connections to Connecticut, in which State the suit was filed.  She does record running into Bob in NYC but he fluffed her off as though he didn’t know her.  Whether he might have looked her up after he knew she was in NYC is possible.  Catherine may not lie but she doesn’t have to tell all.

Connecticut lawyers took C’s. case and publicly announced it, nobody had to dig it out.  Later they retracted it.  A couple things could have happened if Bob realized that there was a basis for the suit.  One, C. could have chickened out.  Two, Bob could have bought C off to avoid adverse publicity.

At any rate he is said to have put his future wife Sara up at the Chelsea. The war between he and Warhol continued on through 1966.  As Edie went with Andy because of the movie offers, Dylan through 1965 tried to woo Edie back with a promise of a starring role in a movie he and his manager Albert Grossman said they were going to make, and that kept Edie on tenterhooks wavering between he and Warhol.  In November of 1965 it was announced to Edie that Bob had secretly, or at least quickly, married Sara.

Edie was devastated, crushed and destroyed.  Then rubbing salt into Edie’s wounds as a final blast he set down and vomited out his song Sooner or Later (One Of Us Must Know)  Once again blaring it to the world.  Then, he turned Edie over to his sidekick Bobby Neuwirth.  From Bobby she went on to debasement after debasement released finally by death.

The identity of C remains a mystery, she appeared suddenly and just as suddenly disappeared.  Strange that no sleuth has detected her identity.  I do believe that there may been a basis for the lawsuit however.  Bob always was careless with women.

Texts:

Des Barres, Pamela:  I’m With The Band

Fowles, John: The Collector, book 1963, movie 1963

James, Catherine: Dandelion (Memoir Of A Free Spirit) 2007

Prindle, R.E. A Review: Catherine James: Famous Groupies Of The Sixties | I, Dynamo (idynamo.blog)

Shelton, Robert:  No Direction Home, 1986

Shelton, Robert: No Direction Home. The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan (Revised and Updated Edition by Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries,)  2011

Stein, Jean:  Edie, An American Biography, 1982

Warhol, Andy & Pat Hackett:  Popism, The Warhol Sixties.

George W. M. Reynold’s Pickwick Abroad

Reconsidered

by

R.E. Prindle

The art of reading is more intensive than one would expect.  To be a good reader is a refined skill.  The end result of the endeavor is to get the author to speak directly to yourself; hold a one way conversation, as it were, one great long monologue.  That is a marvelous experience when it is achieved. 

The first author I read that drew me into his existence was a French author, the Duke de Roquelaure of 1630 or so when Louis IV was king.  I was reading in translation of course, so we have to give some credit there.  But the reading was a marvelous experience.  I believed every word he wrote even if only half of what he claimed was true.  Some years later I discovered George W.M. Reynolds.

The writing of George Reynolds intrigued me in his expert use of language and its excellent word placement.  As I read I noticed little tricks that drew me into his intellect and personality, but my appreciation was a little bit low compared to how my appreciation has developed.  Now, having read some books twice and parts of these three or four times an imagined Reynolds has formed a personality in my mind.

His great works, Mysteries of London and Mysteries of the Court of London dominate the horizon.

Strangely a title I slighted at my first reading  is coming to invest my mind.  That would be Reynold’s continuation of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers titled Pickwick Abroad.  I’m quite familiar with the Arthurian Saga in which many authors contribute to the development of the legends over a period of two or three hundred years.  Continuations abounded as writers explored the possibilities.  But, by the nineteenth century, appropriating the characters and world of Dickens’ Pickwick seemed like plagiarism at least.  Presently in the twenty-first century developing genre characters such as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan are taken for granted under the name of pastiches, but buying the right to do so from the copyright holder if any is required.

Reynolds involvement with The Pickwick Paper was not just an expedient appropriation for the nonce but a career long involvement  as was his mental association with Dickens himself.

Dicken’s Pickwick Papers was published as a book in 1837 after serialization and it was a phenomenon not seen since Pierce Egans’ Tom and Jerry sensation of the 1820s.

Reynolds had been in France since 1830 but after having been swindled of his money in 1836 he decided to return to England.  Rather humiliated I should think.  He informed his wife of four years, Susannah, apparently a wonderful woman, that he had lost his money.  He told her his only recourse was to write.  He couldn’t do that in France because although he could speak the language he was not familiar enough with the rules of grammar to write the language hence he had to return to England where he knew the written word.

Susannah offered no objections so they sailed for the home of Pickwick in 1836 just as that gentleman was entering public notice through the pen of Charles Dickens.

Reynolds was only 22 years old at the time; sixteen, a mere boy, when he left England.  In six years, critical years of his youth, he lived a lifetime.  Imagine a boy of sixteen moving to a foreign country on his own knowing no one, having to learn the language, yet being able to shoulder his way through to a form of success.  He came empty handed and left with a secure founding in publishing, editing and journalism in which occupations he was brilliant.  E.F. Bleiler says of him in his preface to Reynolds’Wagner the Wehr Wolf:

Quote:  Among his associates at Calais was Beau Brummell.  Was it from Brummell that he acquired the almost pathological hatred that he later displayed for the Prince Regent?   Some of Reynold’s time may have been spent in high living, but his basic seriousness and organization emerged even at this early date.  He studied the sciences intensively.  He was also a close student of French culture, and by the time he returned to England was a confirmed Francophile, a good political analyst, and almost certainly the Englishman  with the largest knowledge of French letters.

Unquote.

Thus, coming back to England with a maturity far beyond his years and with a literary reputation of some sort, he was immediately hired to be editor of Monthly Magazine then on the skids, as it had once been a premier magazine.  Reynolds quickly turned it around mainly using his own writings, remember he is only 22 years old, a veteran of six hard years experience in France. 

Pickwick had become the sensation of the moment on a par with Pierce Egans’ earlier Tom and Jerry of the 1820s.  As in 1820 when Tom and Jerry imitators sprang from the woodwork, other writers were already taking advantage of the Pickwick rage when Reynolds began his own continuation or pastiche based on his French sojourn titled Pickwick Abroad.  That novel must have been running concurrently with Dickens novel for some of the later installments. Pickwick Abroad was published in book form in 1839, Pickwick in 1837.

The appearance of Pickwick Abroad found an audience. According to E.F Bleiler who wrote the first essay on Reynolds’ life, certainly in the twentieth century, in the Dover edition of Wagner The Wehr Wolf, Pickwick Abroad was a near best seller, hence a success.  Here let me note that Pickwick Abroad was issued twice in1839 so it might easily have been a best seller.  The first, perhaps official edition was published by Tegg, perhaps under the supervision of Reynolds while the second was published from the parts by       .  So the two ‘firsts’ were in competition with each other.

.E.F. Bleiler.

A little discursion here, well a long one..  I have just discovered that Bleiler wrote what may be the very first effort as a biography of Reynolds and that a good one.  E.F.Bleiler was a bibliophile supreme, blessed with great intelligence, deeply versed in English literature of early and middle nineteenth century.  He was also a long-time editor and vice president of the US publisher Dover books.  Dover books is a US publisher, founded in 1941, publishing out of copywrite titles very cheaply. Their eye covered the whole of literature from the occult to literary fiction and many other genres.  It was a treasure chest for readers.  Dover knew what was significant.

In 1975 Bleiler rescued G.W.M. Reynolds from oblivion by publishing a copy of Wagner the Were-Wolf billed as a Victorian Gothic Classic of the Supernatural.  I imagine Bleiler used the words Gothic and Supernatural to stir up attention by mentioning two genres that had current appeal.  The Dover reader may be construed as somewhat, or more than somewhat, bookish.  Wonderful titles.

In the Wagner the Wehr Wolf, which is soft cover, magazine size, he included a fairly extensive biography of Reynolds.  Bleiler was enamored of Reynolds and appears to have collected and read the entire corpus.  Bleiler given his profession and position was in a unique place to discover facts that were, I presume, never before revealed nor was there any need for them to be revealed, no market.  He perhaps gleaned his facts from reading the novels or had sources that have disappeared.   In the quote  above Bleiler states authoritatively that Reynolds associated closely with Beau Brummell from whom he developed his disgust with George IV as Prince Regent.  It is true that Reynolds admire Brummell in reputation, imitating him in dress, and he does say that he had something to do with Brummell in Calais, the French port town, but unless Bleiler was using information that is no longer available one has to question it.  Of course Reynolds did have a violent hatred of George IV that astonishes the reader and it is possible, as Brummell was accessible in Calais that he did furnish Reynolds with stories.  If Reynolds tales of George IV have any validity they must have come from somewhere.

It is at this point I wish to augment the above with Reynolds portrayal of George in the first series of Court Of London. The firsts series takes place in 1795 when George III was king. Reynolds introduces two characters, Tim Meagles and Lady Lade who have the same relationship to George IV that the Beau had.  The Beau had a very intimate relationship with the Regent, having the run of Carlton House, the Regent’s residence in London, much as Tim Meagles does.  Meagles has a love named Lady Lade.  Lade was a real person who lived an unladylike life.  She died in 1825.  Reynolds has her wearing men’s clothes and sporting about like a man. 

While the source for Meagles is clear the only model for Lady Lade I can think of is Susannah Reynolds, thus associating Meagles also with himself.   Susannah gets scant notice by scholars and what I have to say can only be inferred.  Helen Reddy of ‘I Am Woman Hear Me Roar’ fame couldn’t hold a candle to Susannah.  I am convinced that she was an aide to Reynolds in his writing and in his life both inside and outside the household.  He may have written his installments in seven hours but they are too perfect in the remembrance of characters and incidents.

Now, in addition to her duties running the family and household Susannah also wrote novels, and these weren’t short either. I have found only one title, Gretna Green, a useless OCR reprint that is about seven hundred large pages long, three columns a page.   The pages are too chopped up to get no more than a couple pages at a time to read.  Susannah was a real rattler, her husband on steroids, near hysterical, and sexually liberated enough in her writing so that she was criticized as a shameless woman to which Reynolds was obliged to object.

I conjecture that she served as an amanuensis for her husband keeping track of names and sequencing, while he and she discussed the course of the stories between his writing sessions, so that installments were organized, perhaps outlined, so that Reynolds could sit and write without pauses.

In 1854 with her health failing Reynolds removed her from London to the resort town of Margate installing her into a nice house and situation for the remainder of her days that ended in 1858.  It is noticeable that Reynolds production dropped off rapidly after her death quickly dwindling to nothing.  It would seem that her assistance partially enabled his tremendous prolificity.  If so, they made a terrific team.

Whether such a relationship can be proven or not, it had to be.  In any event Susannah was a treasure that he couldn’t have done without.  When she died in 1858 Reynolds abandoned Margate to return to London.

.E.F. Blieler (Cont.)

Blieler also had a cultivated mind so that he could also sympathize with the character of Reynolds.  One might say that Reynolds spoke to him.

Here is a short passage in which he discusses Reynolds association with the Temperence Society.

Quote:

  Reynolds opened the first issue of the Teetotaler with an installment of his novel, The Drunkard’s Tale, the theme of which the reader can easily guess.  He also filled the periodical with sensational fiction showing the evils of alcohol, very competent essays, scientific articles, good book reviews, and temperance news.  The magazine was capably handled.  High points of its short life were Noctes Pickwickianae, a series of conversations between Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller about temperance, and a novel, Pickwick Married, in which Mr. Pickwick is finally trapped.  Reynold’s emphasis on Pickwick is not surprising, since he had already written a near bestseller.

Unquote.

This near, I almost said, obsession with Pickwick makes it seem like Reynolds was walking around in Dickens’ shoes, either an abdication of his own personality or a deep obsession.  His novel The Steam Packet is a variation on Pickwick Papers.  His 1841 book Master Timothy’s Bookcase was a direct lift from Dickens’ own Master Humphreys Clock.  Exact same format but totally different style.  Both Pickwick Abroad and Timothy take place in France ending with a return to England.

Truly Dicken’s was justified in raging about ‘that guy’ who was nearly his double.  This is much stranger than merely writing a continuation of Pickwick.  Reynolds wouldn’t abandon Dickens until he began Mysteries of London, if he did then, and stepped out of Dickens’ shoes into those of the French writer Eugene Sue who wrote The Mysteries of Paris.

This might be the place to comment on Reynolds’ strange career with Pickwick Papers.  PP gave Reynolds the framework to begin writing seriously. Consider it this way, PP was the loom on which Reynolds was able to weave his continuation.  It is remarkable that Reynolds republished the volume just after he finished with The Mysteries of the Court of London thus bracketing both of his Mysteries.  This edition was published by Henry Lea om 1857. He only had three further years as a novelist left, then after he closed his career in 1864 he published the final edition of Pickwick Abroad by Henry Bohn, thus bracketing his entire corpus between the first and last editions of Pickwick Abroad.  It would seem that the spirit of Pickwick informed his entire corpus in some way.

Reynolds not only walked in Dickens shoes but he also wore his hat and coat.  A very strange relationship

Blieler doesn’t say where he got his information but he states positively that:

Quote:

George William MacArthur Reynolds (1814—79) came of a prominent, wealthy family, being the oldest son of Captain George Reynolds, flag officer in the Royal Navy, recipient of knighthood and orders from both the King and foreign powers.  Capt. Reynolds died before G.W.M.R’s majority, leaving his son some 12,000 pounds and a guardianship.  To follow family traditions, young George was sent to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where he stayed for about two and a half years.  But Sandhurst and G.W.M.R. did not agree and in 1830 he was released.

Unquote.

Note Bleiler’s mention of the guardianship.  That is an important detail.  The guardian was his father’s best friend, Duncan McArthur,  The McArthur of Reynolds’ third name.  That’s accurate in the general sense but Bleiler’s facts disagree with what is currently believed.  Today his father is defined as a post-Captain rather than a flag, or line, officer and relatively impoverished.  At the same time current research is that he commanded flag ships and captured several prizes while being stationed on the Isle of Guernsey.  If the Captain captured a few ships, since the reward was a percentage of their value, and the Captain’s percentage was the largest, I see no reason for the Reynolds’s not to be well off and 12,000 pounds left to his son not unreasonable.  It would be nice to  be able to collate Blieler’s sources with current ones.

Bleiler has unrestrained admiration for Reynolds the man and writer.  He understands him.  He says:

Quote:

Yet besides being a vast cosmos of human sensation, The Mysteries of London is many other things.  In a sense it is education for the masses, and it is also propaganda.  Reynolds may spend  a couple of pages explaining quite accurately how dice can be controlled; how beer is adulterated; how rotten meat is disguised and sold to the poor at high prices; exactly how a grave robber works (very differently and more systematically than Baron Frankenstein’s servitors;)  what percentage of prostitutes  comes from various occupational groups; how wealth is distributed in the British Isles; how the various slums are geographically constituted ; how fake auctions work; how prisons fail to train inmates for life outside; and a host of other topics that may well have been very important to the Londoner with a low income, who had to live with his guard up.

Unquote.

Precisely the stuff that makes Reynolds worthwhile to me along with his magnificent descriptions of the varieties of female breasts.  Also, let me point out that Reynolds was deeply impressed with Victor Hugo’s title Notre Dame.  That book is also a biography of Notre Dame and the church is the central figure in the novel.  Reynolds, I believe, using that as his example, uses the great city of London in the same way.

I agree with Bleiler who thought that with a small adjustment to his intellect Reynolds could have had as significant a political career as, say, Benjamin Disraeli. 

Bleiler was a long time Dover vice-president.  He gives no indication of the sources of his research while being inaccurate in a few details but as a VP and editor at Dover he would have been in position to locate details.  As a first effort at biography though, it is not bad.  For those who are unfamiliar with Dover Publications it has always been a sensational publisher since its founding in 1941.  They had an astounding eye for interesting neglected literature, among other genres, as publishing a Reynolds novel in 1975, that the first published Reynolds novel in the previous sixty years, with Bleiler writing an extended essay on Reynolds life, reintroducing him to the public so to speak.

If Pickwick Abroad was a near best seller as Bleiler says then it must have been running neck to neck with the Pickwick Papers of Dickens.  Not only was Dickens furious with Reynolds he must have been tearing his hair out.

I had no idea that Pickwick Abroad did that well, but that would explain its reissue in 1857 by next publisher, Henry Lea.  There may also have been other editions but that remains to be learned.  One is to assume that the Lea edition sold out.

The last edition we know about is that of 1864 published by Henry G. Bohn. As that edition has been easy to find either Bohn over estimated demand or its time was past.  Then the book sold over a period of twenty five years, not bad.

Dicken’s Pickwick Papers began slow and was almost dropped but then Dickens added the comical character Sam Weller and the serial took off becoming the sensation of the day.  Dickens put a period to the Pickwick character ending the book with no idea of a sequel.  The character of Samuel Pickwick and his club was too attractive to drop.

Reynolds who always needed a matrix to base his own novels on, apparently on reading several installments of Dickens lighted up with a sequel almost completed in mind.  He could turn his French adventures to good use and so Pickwick Abroad formed almost spontaneously in his mind.

Many writers tried to cash in by purloining  Dickens’ characters as well as Reynolds.  The rest failed but Reynolds hit the main vein while having abundant talent to exploit it.  Correctly named Pickwick Abroad, a perfect logical extension of The Pickwick Papers.  His novel may very well have been perceived as a sequel to the Papers by readers. Many might not even have noticed that the author’s name had been changed from Dickens to Reynolds.

In any event Reynolds thought he had hooked a whale.  He began his novel while editing Monthly Magazine.  He even imitated Dickens by planning the work for twenty parts issued monthly. That was a steady income for a period of nearly two years followed by becoming a near best seller.  At twenty-two Reynolds seemed to be off on a good start.  The book when issued at 628 page was not a triple decker but a single volume, but in leather.  But, as I have just learned, 12/28/22, the book had two first editions.  I now have four different editions of Pickwick Abroad.  The new addition is from the publisher Tegg that Bleiler mentions while also being published in 1839. It has apparently been reset in new type.  On the title page of mu copy of the alternate first someone has written in pencil ‘First Edition, bound from monthly parts.’  The public then had a choice of first editions.  The situation must have been somewhat confusing.  Not only to the public but Reynolds himself.  Obviously further research is needed and other printings or editions may yet be found.

Reynolds writes different justifications for his pastiche in his different editions.   In the parts edition he includes endorsements from reviewers that while looking askance at the pastiche applaud the book as the work of a talented author who has written an amusing work.

In the Lea edition of 1857 he says this:

Quote:

The immortal “Boz” has done so much to render the public familiar with the characters and adventures of some of the most remarkable men of the present day—viz., Mr. Pickwick and his followers—that it is only with extreme diffidence a new historian has ventured to continue the lives of those extraordinary individuals.  But short and to the purpose be the introduction to these Memoirs.

Unquote.

In the 1864 Bohn edition Reynolds repeats a variation on the comments of the reviewers.  How many editions there were has yet to be established.  To justify the costs of the four edition I’ve mentioned the book must have been not only a near best seller but a bona fide best seller.

Swayed by the audacity of Reynolds’ appropriation of Dickens’ work I was somewhat dismissive of Pickwick Abroad yet attracted by the difference in approach to the subject matter. Another writer, I believe it was Thomas Carlyle in his Past And Present said that Dickens wrote like a boy while Tobias Smollett wrote like a man.  I think the difference between Dickens and Reynolds is much the same.  There is a seriousness in Reynolds that Dickens lacks.  But Dickens has the  sentimentalism that both Smollett and Reynolds lack that attracts a more enduring audience as Dickens continues to sell while Smollett and Reynolds don’t

The Ancient Evil:

Diana And The Goddess Tradition

by

R.E. Prindle

Part The First

Setting The Stage

In order to make sense of ancient history it is necessary to suppose a pre-history that makes history possible.  For instance it is said that Egyptian history burst in flower upon the world four thousand years B.C.  that is, in the Age of Gemini in the fourth Great Year.  A reader might say that any history before then can’t be proven.  Perhaps not but it can be proven that mankind didn’t burst from the forehead of a god as did the maiden Athena from the forehead of Zeus four thousand years ago.

As proof, on the one hand is that we have all those primitive female figurines and some arrow heads that show a primitive culture.  Yes, but all that evidence is received from a European backwater where evolution was not at its highest.  Various other specimens of humankind had existed for perhaps several hundred thousands of years as is said of the Neanderthals.  But if the Neanderthals had existed for that long still they must have evolved from a predecessor and so on.  We don’t know how many different human species existed and obviously more than one at the same time.

Nor does the planet configuration remain the same over each Great Year.   Each Great Year, like the annual year is composed of four seasons.  This is caused by different things.  The first to consider is the course around the sun of the planet.  The planet does not circle the sun but revolves in an ellipse.  That means that at the aphelion the planet is much further from the sun that at the perihelion, thus the winter, or ice age takes place at the aphelion which endure for two to three ages or six thousand plus terrestrial years while the summer when the planet is closer to the sun it takes place at the perihelion.  During the aphelion when the planet’s water is frozen in icecaps in the Western Hemisphere, the mountain ranges and high places, the water level of oceans drops, as much as five hundred feet or so.  During the perihelion, as the planet warms, the water is released and the oceans rise as they are today.  This is a natural process and cannot be obviated.  At the present time, the Age of Aquarius, the planet’s Great Year position is at about the annual year of August in its progress as it heads for the Autumn of the Great Year when the waters will begin to recede as the Winter of the Great Year approaches.  Then will be revealed the hidden ancestry of civilization.

While the nature of that ancestry is unknown it does exist in certain memory traces of mankind.  The chief of the memory traces is the existence of Atlantis.  Not everyone will agree, but I am convinced that the memory traces are accurate and that as something must have preceded the arrival of the refugees from the rising waters in Lower Egypt it must have been the destruction of Atlantis.  Of course, as that civilization broke apart and a long dark age ensued the cultural losses that had to be rebuilt would have been enormous.  A long dark age began so that the refugees retained that which they considered most valuable, that is language, the written means to express it.

Remember that the two Egypts are two different peoples.  Upper Egyptians were different racially than Lower Egyptians.  Thus a war raged over how long a period we don’t know until the Upper Egyptians were successful in conquering the Lower Egyptian who most probably were related to the Libyan people to their West.  Certainly there was no influx of unusual peoples from some unknown area.

The key point here is when did the waters rise and what was the configuration of the landmass at the time.  At the bottom of the ice age the sea level was five hundred feet lower.  The entire continental shelves would have been exposed on the both sides of the Atlantic while vast areas, say for instance the North Atlantic fishing grounds might have been exposed but if not they were very shallow waters. The ocean glaciers would have extended far out to sea so that the Atlantic would have been a fairly small and placid body of water.  Navigation would have been easy.

Both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf would have been above water  and fertile.  The Tigris-Euphrates river and valley would have been extended to the Indian Ocean.  A civilization would have existed in the Persian Gulf.  It is said that as the Ice Age waned water would have seeped down into the ice cap creating a vast ocean within the ice.  The water eventually burst through the edges disgorging trillions of gallons of ice in torrents.  Evidence of this in the state of Washington demonstrates the violence of the outflow.

In the Atlantic the torrents would have created a gigantic tidal wave as they rushed southward inundating land as it went and perhaps completely washing away islands.  Any life on the exposed continental shelves would have been just swept away. The Northwest fisheries would have immediately been deepened to hundreds of feet.  If Atlantis was on a large island, now the Azore remnants, before the Straits of Gibraltar where the flow of water would have been compressed by the narrowing of the channel  at the same time rushing through the Straits of Gibraltar, the force would have been incredible, the strength of the flow might have been enough to erode a hundred feet or more.  The flow into the Mediterranean would have been very fast and without warning.

As mankind prefers to live by the sea and its naval infrastructure, all   would have been submerged within days or a couple weeks.  The flow would not only have been on the surface but extending down to the bottom of the ocean perhaps undermining the base of the island so that huge sections would have collapsed adding to the corrosion of the surface flow.  The Azores, place of Atlantis, rest on the volcanic Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the point that three faults are joined.

The release of the weight of the ice cap may have caused the area depressed by the weight of the cap to have set the faults in action thus adding to the mayhem.  In the rush to save their lives the culture of the Atlantis civilization would have been nearly extinguished.  Within the Straits of Gibraltar the carnage would have been tremendous as the Med Basin filled although the population would have had a better chance of saving their lives as they raced up the hills and highland to the rear of their settlements.  Thus a semblance of order would have disappeared within the Straits but Atlantis would have been a total loss except for the tops of the mountains and those were probably active volcanoes.  Atlantis became no more than a legend that survived among the Egyptian survivors.  My own thought is that there is no reason to doubt their memory.  Forget any supposed visitors from outer space.

We moderns tend to create an illusion as to the nature of the Atlantean civilization.  I can’t believe aliens from space imparted special knowledge to them, nor did they have exceptional scientific knowledge.  Egyptian knowledge, I believe that the remnant settled on the Nile Delta, very like at Memphis where the pyramids were built.  The ancient Lower Egyptians were undoubtedly Atlantean survivors.  The knowledge the Egyptianx had is probably representative of the knowledge of the Atlanteans and that is considerable.

The Sumerians of the Tigris-Euphrates valley have their legends about how the survivors of Persian Gulf taught them civilization but they needent concern us here.  All this happened during the Age of Leo.  We can’t know at what level the waters settled temporarily but as the Great Flood occurred twelve thousand years ago the continued warming and melting of ice fields and glaciers must have risen substantially over the Ages of Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries and Pisces and into the Age of Aquarius that we are entering now.  If you’re attentive you can scent the coming of Autumn now.

.Part the First, b.

As the great flood took place during Leo of the fourth Ice Age and it lived in legend through the Ages of Leo, Cancer, Gemini and Taurus, still a very important memory in Aries, as Aries was fifth king (read Age) from the flood it follows that people existed before Leo and they were intelligent.  The intelligent survivors preserved the memory of that truly memorable flood.  Of course there were the Neanderthals living in the least amenable areas in the frozen North.  Did they always live in the Nort?.  I doubt it.  They were probably dislocated form more amenable southern zones by further evolved species.  Not all human species are at the same stage of evolution.  Some are more advanced than others today as then.  During those Ages of Frost, Virgo and Libra and part of Scorpio. the best lands would have been closer to the equator and down by the sea.

Humans have always preferred to live by the sea.  Those people are always more sophisticated than those living in the hinterlands.  Therefore it means that the exposed continental shelves and any large islands were populated.  Those in the Western Mediterranean were more accomplished than those further East.  We can only infer what their understanding of the world, their imaginative life was like.  The main source for this inference is Egypt as Egypt, that is Lower Egypt which is where the main priestly body must have settled. 

We know that the Atlanteans must have been accomplished astronomers.  While many may dispute this it seems clear to me that the Zodiac is of extreme age.  It could only have been devised by long observation.  Who knows what the various ice ages and intermediate periods were like.  If the last Ice Age reshaped the configuration of the earth when did the previous two do?  There must have been intelligent life existing then.  Mesopotamian records, or myths, refer to hundreds of thousands of years in the past.  Of course moderns dismissed those figures, those legends or myths, as so much wild  imaginings of ignorant primitive peoples.  But do primitive ignorant peoples have those imaginings which even intelligent moderns dismissed?  I don’t think so.

One does not have to go wild in attributing knowledge superior to ours that has been lost but on the other hand intelligent ancients had nothing to do but study the stars, study plants for their properties and amuse themselves in speculations.  And that’s exactly what the ancient Egyptians knew and in a fairly scientific manner.  Look at the remains of their civilization preserved in stone and writing.  They did things that we moderns can’t explain.  The pyramids for instance.  No other of the ancients were comparable to them.  The Egyptians were miles ahead of them.  Nearing the end of the Age of Aries, Alexandria was still the leading intellectual center of the Roman Empire. And apart from the Asiatic influence still the most scientific in outlook.

There is another mystery indicating the presence of an anterior civilization such as Atlantis and one that may throw some light on their intellectual thought.  There must have been a settlement within the Straits of Gibraltar on the seashore below what would have been the Falls of the Rio Tinto.  The Tinto gets its name because the water flows through a large area of mineral beds, deposits of copper and other metals that have obviously been mined for thousands of years.  There are stairways leading into the sea and down the slopes of the ancient river bed.

Today, under Seville are the remains of an ancient temple of the Sun that were in existence at least during the Age of Taurus.  This was during the period of the Matriarchy.  A Heracles was the male consort of the Goddess.  Now, when the Hellenes entered Greece  Hera was the Goddess of Argos, the main city of the Argive, her consort was also named Heracles.  Thus Heracles was a god at the time.  When the Hellenes  entered Greece the Patriarchy challenged the Matriarchy for pre-eminence.  Thus Zeus, a Cretan god, was pitted against Heracles for the possession of Hera, a mainland goddess.  Heracles thus challenged was required to journey to Seville to acquire the Cattle of the Sun from the Sevillian Heracles to defeat Zeus.  The Greek Heracles did travel to Seville and was successful in acquiring the Cattle of the Sun.  However as he was driving the cattle back to Argos he was diverted in Italy to the arch of the boot where in some manner he lost the cattle to another deity.

Zeus then married Hera taking her to the central location of Olympus to become the universal goddess of the Helenes.  Heracles was reduced to a mere human and compelled to accept a number of tasks destroying the remains of the power of the Matriarchy.  When he died he was restored to semi-godhood and became the Gatekeeper of Olympus to be succeeded by St. Peter as the gatekeeper of Heaven.

The Age of Aries is very important in the development of human history.  The Aryans migrating out of Central Asia, probably from the Taklamakan Desert area, upturned  the Eastern Med.  Perhaps the most important event of Aries was the eruption of Mt. Thera at the entrance of the Aegean Sea.  The whole volcano was destroyed down to sea level and below.  The ash plume was huge while the eruption apparently went on for weeks terrifying the populace of the entire Easton Med.

People must have thought it was the end of the world.  Now, it was at this time c. -1600 and some odd that Egypt was invaded by Asiatics and the so-called Sea peoples.  As the ash is thought to have reached Egypt which is not improbable while blanketing the East Med littoral possibly causing the famine that sent the Hebrews scurrying to Egypt while causing terrified nations fleeing their homelands, or portions of the people.  Egypt, the Delta, was therefore deluged with migrants who took over the region causing a time of troubles for the Egyptians.  It was about -1600 that the proto-Jews settled in Goshen on the Delta where they remained for about four hundred years.  One gets settled in four hundred years.  During all that time the Egyptians were working to expel the migrants.  So from the eruption of Thera the whole history of Eastern Med was formed during the lower Arien Age.

At the other end of the Age of Aries and the beginning of Pisces we have another terrible war to begin the Age between Rome and Jerusalem that matches that of Cronus and the Titans.

Part the Second

Was Jesus A Historical Figure And Was He Jewish?

I’ll answer my own question straight out, probably not on either count, doubtful.  Let us consider the Jesus story from a point of view of the Zodiac and the developing imaginative concept of Man’s place on the planet.  I would say universe but I’m not sure people were comprehending such a thing as yet.

It is necessary to compare the accounts of Cronus, Zeus, Dionysus and Jesus.  These four gods are the male archetypes of the Ages of Aries and Pisces.  The Ancients thought in these terms and not in modern lithographic terms.  To understand the period one must think in Zodiacal terms.  These avatars.  These avatars of the two Ages also represent the clash of the Hellenic Greek cultures and that of the Jews as represented by the Judahites.

Now, at the end of the Age of Taurus (c. 2000 BC) The avatar of the Age of Taurus Cronus, had been advised that he would be replaced by one of his children.  To insure he wouldn’t be he ate all of them one by one as they were born, that is, he tucked them away where they couldn’t do him harm.  In cannibalistic terms he put them in the prison of his stomach.  However, when his son, the anointed one, Zeus, was about to be born, certain goddesses conspired to preserve the sweet baby Zeus, sound familiar?  Using female wiles they secreted him in a cave on Mount Ida of Crete, the lad survived to challenge Cronus and his Titams and assumed his role as the avatar of Aries.

Now let us shoot ahead two thousand years to the dawning of the Age of Pisces.  The new Age required a new male archetype.  Two thousand years have passed since Zeus’ ascension so baby eating gods were simple unbelievable.  Human understanding had evolved.  Something new had to be used.  Thus the notion was devised of a god descending to produce a god baby through a human female.

This is and was believable as hundreds of millions believe to this very day.  As a god couldn’t have messy intercourse with a human lady an immaculate conception had to be devised.  Thus the god descends on a woman and impregnates her through her ear.  That’s pretty wild.

In the previous two thousand years that the Patriarchy was busy displacing the Matriarchy so that men no longer believed that the female was responsible for conception butthat was the role of the male; the female was only a passive incubator of the male’s child.  Thus no human was involved in the conception of the man god, Jesus.  Jesus was, pure and simple, a god; the word made flesh  Word.  Made flesh, ponder that a little.  The baby was the Savior.

Just as the transition to the Age of Aries was a time of troubles between the old and the new ages so was Pisces.  Now the baby also was not Jewish in that no Jews had part of the insemination, God inseminated Mary, nor in its education.  It is not impossible that the birth of the baby ended the story of the birth of the god and there was no human baby. The avatar was a god.  However, in the creation of the Age of Pisces a propagator of the New Age philosophy was still needed.  In fact several propagators for the different peoples was needed.  Remember Jesus the man was sent to be the apostle to the Jews and teach them the New Era.  One can’t be sure and there may or may not be any proof but since the baby Jesus was sent to Egypt immediately in order to prevent his murder by King Herod (read Cronus) perhaps as a fictional transition to associate him with Egypt.  In Alexandria there was an academy perhaps of a dozen or two young males being indoctrinated and trained in the New Dispensation to be sent out to preach the new gospel to various parts of the world.  If that were true then Jesus could have been parented by any nationality or combination of two nationalities, given to the academy, and brought up as a Man of the World rather than any nationality.  It is not necessary for him to have been born in Judea.

So, at the age of thirty or so, having traveled world to study the variation of religions,  Jesus shows up in Israel to preach the new One World, One People doctrine.  ‘For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son.’  Thus this strange man with no Jewish customs or upbringing strode revolutionizing into Judea.  No wonder he was killed.  That’s the fate of such a person.

Just as Cronus ingested his offspring, as in heaven, so on earth, Jesus the god was on earth to reconcile the Romans and the Jews and just like Zeus his arrival was a threat to the established order.

When the news reached Herod, King of the Jews, according to legend he issued a ukase to find this baby and kill it, and further, kill all new born male babies to insure his rival was eliminated.  Thus the baby Jesus was hustled away to Egypt, in legend, to be brought up there and like Zeus emerge in manhood to begin his reign. 

Thus, between Zeus of -2000 and Jesus of year #1 with a couple thousand to go are identical Astrological tales.  The time of Jesus is now over and the search for his successor for the Age of Aries is underway.

At this point then there was no historical Jesus and the historical Jesus was neither Jew nor any other nationality.  He was the Age of Pisces incarnate.

In the Tibetan religion when the Grand Lama dies it is said that his soul migrates to a new baby and the search for that baby begins.  He is found and removed from his parents to be indoctrinated and conditioned to be the Grand Lama.  He has no other past hence is unaffected by any other influences.  So with Jesus. A child was found and brought up in Egypt to play the role of the Redeemer.  Here than we have the possibility that a historical Jesus existed.  He was indoctrinated in his role as the Son of Man, the soul of the world.  However this was not -2000 BC. What worked then didn’t work in the Age of Pisces.  Jesus tried to overturn the established government but failed and was executed.  The Jewish-Roman war then broke out continuing for a hundred years until they were nearly exterminated in Judea by the Romans. The Mesopatian, Egyptan and diaspora Jews were not affected.

Jesus is not the whole story of the times and must be integrated into the story of the Romans and Alexandrines of Egypt.  When the Hellenes or Greeks as they are popularly known conquered Asia under Alexander the Great a whole new idea of civilization arrived for the Asiatics and the Greek civilization was far superior to those of Asia.  Asia was not only militarily conquered but also ‘spiritually’.  Even Judea, or Israel, was half conquered as the Sadducees accepted the new situation as a great new thing, but the reactionary or conservative Pharisees did not.

When the Romans succeeded the Hellenes that only exacerbated the problem.   While Jesus the God is not a historical figure who was?  We can’t know.  What we do know is that he came out of Egypt.  If there was no baby in the manger who was spirited out of Judea to Alexandria, because the manger scene is obviously mythological, then he was adopted by New Dispensationists in Egypt as explained above and his parentage isn’t known.  Then he must have been groomed in Egypt for his role as a savior.  Alexandria is the place to look for the nature of Jesus.  It is the teaching there that formed him.

Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great three hundred and some years before the Age of Pisces.  It became the greatest city of the Mediterranean world surpassing even Rome or Jerusalem.  If Rome was the governing capital Alexandria was the intellectual capital, a true university city.  The Library of Alexandria was the center of learning and intellectual activity, founded on Greek philosophy and learning.  It was the genius that Jerusalem could not surpass or even meet.

Now, this learning was secular on a proto-scientific basis, objective as opposed to the subjective Jewish theorizing.  Apart from the Judea-Roman political conflict there was also the problem of reconciling the Greek/Judean intellectual conflict.  This is where Jesus of Nazareth comes in.  (The Son of Man.)

The leading Jewish scholar, based in Alexandra,  was Philo Judaeus, whose life span is guessed at 20Bc to about 40 AD, so he would have been instrumental  in working with the Alexandrian scholars to fashion the New Dispensation of a universal god rather than the parochial national god of the Jews.  However that national god was useful because he was not anthropomorphic but invisible.  As invisible he could be worshipped by all people, without national characteristics interfering..

When Jesus of Nazareth, or someone just like him,, was schooled and prepared in Alexandria he was sent to Judea to propagate the New Dispensation to the Jews of a universal god.  The implication here is that there was a cadre of groomed students sent into other posts in the Empire.  This is not too different from the activities of Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter in the US of the twentieth century.  They groomed cadres of students in the law school of Harvard University to rush into Washington to seize the government and turn it socialist which is what occurred when their figure head Franklin Delano Roosevelt was installed as president in 1932.  It’s the same thing.

Now we have three distinct identities of Jesus.  Jeus the Zodiac God,  Jesus of Nazareth   and Jesus the Christ, or Jesus Christ.  Jesus there fore is a syncretistic religious figure designed to unite the world under one god.

If there was an historic Jesus, then he came from the New School at Alexandria.  Only later some decades after his death did he become Jesus Christ thus uniting the Jewish and Greek sides as the Christ, or expected one,  a term of the Greek religion.

During the latter years of the Age of Aries the Greek god Dionysus was being groomed as the successor to Zeus in the Piscean Age.  Thus the apparent Jewishness of Jesus was diluted while giving him a place in the New Age of Pisces while making Jesus more accessible to the Gentiles.

B.R. Taylor in his volume, The Metaphysics of WWII has this interpretation to which I owe much, although I deny that Jesus was a Jew or that he was familiar with Judea until he arrived for his mission.

P. 108:  (Jesus was a Jew who was at the forefront of the new Age of Pisces, teaching the world about the optimistic energies associated with Jupiter/Zeus.  He transformed himself from a Saturnite Jew into a Jupitarian Christian, essentially going from Jew to Zeus, hence the name Jewzeus. 

Unquote.

B. R. Talyor doesn’t question how or why Jesus learned those unJudaic ideas but he has the Judaic-Greek  conflict right, along with the ingrained Saturnite ideology of the Age of Taurus in which the Jewish mind was formed.  In any event, you can clearly see why Jesus failed and why he was executed for his crime.

Part The Third

We aren’t finished with the Piscean Age yet though.  It gets more interesting.  The Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung in his very interesting discussion of the sign of the two fishes as it evolved.  In its present form it is one of two fishes swimming in opposite directions connected by an umbilical cord.  Just as a sign has its male avatar it also has its female avatar, Zeus and Hera in Aries and in Pisces a sort of Mary/Isis but then a funny thing happens at mid-Age.  The female avatar becomes dominant reducing Jesus to a subordinate role. In the Catholic South of Europe the Virgin Mary becomes dominant shedding her association with Isis; in the North, less affected by the whole biblical apparatus, Diana becomes the female avatar without displacing God or Jesus.  Further Diana comes from Greco-Roman mythology while the Virgin Mary is biblical, thus distancing the North from the South.  The Age began with the Patriarchy in firm control, comes mid-Age and the Matriarchy begins to resume its dominance until today the Matriarchy has returned in full force.  This is also the end of Pisces and we are into the Age of Aquarius where new avatars will have to be assumed. 

If we follow the Greek form the avatar should be the other half of Dionysus, the Green Man.  However the Jews have very nearly reversed the Roman/Jewish power structure of Aries to one of Jewish/Roman or the West.  It’s a new world  and a new sky.

A perplexing problem is the evolution of man’s imagination during the Age.  I intend to examine certain aspects of  its evolution.  A problem that has been perplexing me for some time is the role of the goddess Diana as the female archetype for the last half of the Age of Pisces in the North.

 The adoption of the goddess Diana or Artemis as she was known in Greece signifies a resurgence of the Matriarchy.  This is a rather remarkable comeback as the Matriarchy was virtually unknown in the nineteenth century, all but forgotten, the memory actually only really emerged after 1950 but the Diana cult has survived all along underground..

I’m sure the interpretation of Diana’s history and her relationship to the Zodiac will be met with some dismay as these subjects are not properly understood.  Essentially the problem is one of memory; in this case historical and racial memory.  Memory on one level is a desire to retain and understand the past whether on a personal and/or historical basis.  From the past the future may be predicted.  What has once happened before will likely happen again although is a different configuration.  It was this knowledge that made the calendar a necessity.  It had to be invented.

If one has a starting point, such as the shortest day of the year, the return of flora and fauna may be fairly accurately predicted. 

To make the year more manageable it was divided into seasons and months to mark more easily the passage of the days of the year.  This knowledge led to a whole cycle of gods, goddesses and myths.  Thus a terrestrial zodiac was derived denoted by symbols appropriate to the seasons.  As it was assumed that what happened on earth was a reflection of what happened in the skies, the terrestrial zodiac was translated to stars in twelve constellations; thus we have the Astrological Zodiac in which the twelve signs reflect the weather patterns on earth.

Just as there were twelve months in the year so the skies were divided into twelve portions called Ages.  The length of the Ages was determined by the Great Year that was of some twenty-six thousand years duration   A year is the time that the earth rotates around the sun;  the Great Year is the time that accomplishes a complete ellipse around the sun.  The orbit is not round but elliptical.

The Great Year was marked by the rotation of the earth on its axis as evidenced by the pole stars Polaris at the perihelion of the ellipse and the aphelion at Vega. Each Age has its male and female archetypes.  In Greece the Age of Aries was presided over by Zeus and Hera. Thus each set of archetypes has a lifetime of two thousand years plus and then they make the long slide to Far Tartary and back again.

The Piscean Age which has become universal began with the male archetype of Jesus of Nazareth which was a Jewish identity that combined with the Christ that reestablished the Greek association, while in mid-Age the archetypes were transferred to the female side- Diana in the North of Europe and Mary, the mother of Jesus, or God as she is sometimes fancied, in the South of Europe.  While the mechanism used to achieve this is fairly clear the exact process can only be surmised.

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

One may question the hundred thousand years and yet the Mesopotamian myths mention a past at least that long.  The ancients haven’t been given the credit of knowing what they’re talking about, they, in fact, knew a great deal more than moderns give them credit for.  Consciousness has developed for hundreds of thousands of years, moderns didn’t just discover it.

For much of thar hundred thousand years during the long ice ages the level of the Mediterranean was much lower probably being a long valley with a succession of large lakes fed by the Nile and the Propontis while the outflow was at the Pillars of Hercules,  As the Med Valley was habitable it must have been inhabited.  Undoubtedly a civilization developed that was fairly sophisticated.  One needn’t look for extraterrestrials for human development.  Now, since there have been at least four cycles there must be four ice ages and four interglacial ages meaning that the waters of the earth have been imprisoned in ice and melted back into the ocean several times.

Thus, when the last Ice Age ended returning the accumulated waters to the oceans the waters rose forcing low lying settlements to seek higher ground until the sea level became almost static.  While denizens fled to all sides of the Med the civilization bearers from Atlantis occupied lower Egypt, the emerging Nile Delta.  A second area in which civilization in some form must have survived is the island of Crete and mainland Greece .  In Greece Heracles and Hera ruled during the Age of Taurus in Argos, Heracles displaced by Zeus of Aries who then married Hera.

It was on this island that the religious formula that became a basis of Europe was formed.  The next step was provided by the Hellenic Greek tribes that began their invasion of the Greek peninsula c. -2000-1700, or even earlier.

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

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

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

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

The Cretans certainly  brought the religion to a degree of perfection.  Obviously there is no agreement as to the degree while the substance of religion can be only guessed at.  Presently the Goddess advocates picture the Matriarchy as some kind of golden age of love, peace and happiness.  This is not the case.  The Matriarchate lived in a period of very primitive consciousness.  Nor is the female of the species any less bloody minded than the male.  The memory of the matriarchate was still strong enough for later males to characterize it as a condition that was very hard on men.  Indeed, if one bears in mind that the sacrificial bulls were substitutes for men and that Bulls often were sacrificed in holocausts which means a hundred bulls or more then it follows that at one time a hundred men or more at a time were sacrificed to the Great Mother.  Obviously  this would leave rueful memories in the minds of men.

This memory may have been played out in the tale of Iphigenia at Aulus.

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

Zeus in the apparition of a swan had intercourse with Leda who then lay two eggs.  Both bore twins.  From one egg Castor and Pollux emerged.  These two represent the solstices: Castor, Winter and Pollux, Summer.  From the other egg Helen and Clytemnestra emerged.  One might compare Helen to the Cretan Loving Goddess with the erect snakes held hip high and Clytemnestra with the Angry Goddess brandishing the two writhing snakes held over her head.   Helen also represents the Spring Equinox and Clytemnestra the Autumn Equinox balancing out Castor and Pollux, the four cardinal points of the compass.

Thus the two goddesses  are representatives of Diana, or the Greek Artemis.

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

Clytemnestra herself was the harsh representative of the Matriarchy and the coming of winter; Helen was the easy loving woman of the Matriarchy and the soft western Zephyr.

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

Zeus himself was of Cretan origin probably intended to be the annual consort of the Goddess, but in the change from the Matriarchy to the Patriarchy he remained for more than one season while becoming the master of the goddess.  As religion evolved the characters of the gods and goddesses changed  so that while there is continuity  the attributes and characters change enough so that the religious figures have to be located in time and place.

When the Hellenes, or Greeks, began to arrive sometime after the beginning of the Age of Aries the Cretans had already created a political organization known as a thalassocracy, a sea based empire, perhaps based on that of Atlantis.  The islands and at least the coasts from the Aegean to Italy were under Cretan rule.  The Greeks then challenged the power of the Cretans as well as seeking to impose Patriarchy on the Matriarchy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A great problem hidden from me is the origin of the Peloponnesian Lady of the Lake.  As the Cretan Great Mother was also he Mistress of the Animals it is quite possible that she was taken to the mainland from Crete where she became the virgin goddess Artemis and possibly the Lady of the Lake but still without a consort.

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

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

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

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

.Part 3b.

The religion of one Age is secure but the looming transition to the next Age is always hinted at.  Just as Zeus had replaced Cronus of the Taurean Age, that is four thousand years ago,  so the Greek male archetype of the Piscean Age, Dionysus, was maturing as Zeus’ replacement.

However, in the long war between Europe and Asia the balance of power was to shift toward the Asians.  Dionysus was discarded to be replaced by the seeming Jewish archetype, Jesus of Nazareth.  The Jews had been quietly infiltrating European society while actually contending for preeminence in Asia and Egypt.  This would erupt into the Roman-Jewish wars of the first two centuries AD.  This is not unlike the Jewish-European thirty years war of 1914-1945.

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

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

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

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

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

Just as the Iliad was part of an immense mythological cycle detailing the struggle between the Matriarchy and Patriarchy so the Arthurian epics detailing the religious clash between the Catholics, Pagan Europeans and the Faerie religions was even more immense and sprawling.  The huge corpus of the Vulgate-Lancelot may just be the largest literary work in the world while being only part of the story.

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

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

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

Enamored of Vivian Merlin took her into his confidence, he was reluctant to share his magic with her but she coaxed and he caved.  Once the wiliest of womanhood had obtained the old wizard’s knowledge she turned on him entombing him in the Matriarchal symbol, Mother Earth, where he remains today muttering useless spells in an effort to roll away the stone.  At that moment the ruling archetype of Pisces became a fenale.

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

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

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

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

Arthur’s original sword drawn from the stone had been stolen and was replaced by Excalibur by Vivian, the Lady of the Lake.  Remember that the Lady of the Lake existed in Ancient Greece and therefore can be traced back to Crete, if not before, and hence Artemis/Diana.  Thus Arthur originally armed by the Patriarchy  was now defended by the power of the Matriarchy ruled by Vivian/Diana.  When Arthur died the sword was returned to the Lady of the Lake and Arthur was taken to her bourne. Avalon, to be tended by Faerie maidens.  Symbolically England had passed from the Patriarchy to Matriarchy: what began two thousand years earlier between the Cretans and the Hellenes was now resolved in England in favor of the Matriarchy.  England belongs to Diana.  Reynolds captured the spirit in his characters Meagles and Lady Lade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus the rod of Mercury staff represents the spine while the two snakes entwining the rod represent the good and evil impulses who are at war with each other.  In modern psychological terms it could be said the snakes represent the Anima and Animus- the left and right halves of the brain, or in other words, the ovate strand of DNA and the spermatic strand.  The wings mean that the whole apparatus is sheltered under the wings of the goddess.  It is also quite probable that the points of the chakras are intended by the twining.  See my full explication here:

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/a-review-part-iv-she-by-h-rider-haggard/

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

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

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

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

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

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/12/a-review-1921s-the-sheik-by-em-hull/ 

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

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

Time will tell whether the Ancient Evil will triumph.

A Review:  Dylan And Me, 50 Years of Adventure by Louis Kemp

Review by R.E. Prindle

In Dylan and Me, Louis has faithfully and unconsciously written nothing less than a historical work, a modern day version of Tom Sawyer’s adventures with Huckleberry Finn….These uniquely American escapades, both before and after, Bobby became Bob, make fun, entertaining and very enlightening reading.

Kinky Friedman

From the forward.

To understand Louis Kemp’s memoir Dylan And Me  I think it necessary to put the immigrant generation of Bobby Zimmerman into the context of immigration.  Robert Zimmerman is of course Bob Dylan’s family name that he changed to Bob Dylan to make it in the entertainment world.

Bob Dylan is third generation immigrant, his grandparents arriving in the US near the turn of the twentieth century.  They chose to settle in the Great North of Minnesota for some peculiar reason; Bob’s mother and father were born in Duluth, second generation.  The family is of course Jewish.

Immigration is usually told from the point of view of the immigrants, the natives being shoved aside as bigots.  A key text of the twentieth century was Gustavus Myers, ‘The History of Bigotry In The United States’ that portrayed natives as bigots persecuting immigrants, especially Jewish immigrants.  Myers book was published in 1943 just as the Jewish holocaust was beginning although unknown in the US at the time.  The consequences of both the book and the extermination begin in the 1950s just as Bob was passing through puberty.

The Jews wherever they were have always considered themselves  a separate people living among strangers, hence their manners and customs bear little resemblance to those of their neighbors.  Oppressed in their home countries they celebrated America as the land of freedom which they immediately set about to subvert.  In the US, certainly up to the twentieth century there had been few Jews so there was no tradition of inter-group relations but the power of the native culture was overwhelming. Thus all immigrant groups seeking the ‘freedom’ they cherished were expected to meld into American culture leaving their oppressive past and customs behind on Ellis Island.

That was the expectation, but the reality was that it takes more than one generation to become acclimatized.  Bob’s second generation parents began the process.  They, their generation, as Myer’s book demonstrates, believed themselves to be discriminated against.  They sort of cowered, especially in the years following the end of the Jewish-German War in Europe.

Then, when the news of the extermination camps became known they were terrified seeking to hide their identity as Jews because they believed that the holocaust would soon begin in the US.  This was a quite serious reaction to European events.  William Paley of CBS- Columbia Broadcasting System-  and his associates, in a panic set up, a plan to ensure that Jewish entertainers might survive the imagined coming holocaust.

Now, television  became a commercial reality after the war.  The radio networks, CBS and NBC were Jewish owned so that the industry belonged to the Jews simply adding TV.  They began to systematically give shows to prominent Jewish entertainers such as Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny and many others.  That is why all these Jewish showbiz types, mostly vaudeville performers owned the airwaves for a couple decades.

The post war Jewish generation then entered more closely into American manners and customs but the distance remained to the point that the Jewish kids appeared to be imitating Americans while retaining their Jewish identity.   In you follow this evolution from immigration to imitation and observe the third generation Jews attentively you can readily see the gap between the two cultures.

This gap and its consequences is readily apparent in Louis Kemp’s memoir.  Hibbing was a mélange in immigrant cultures.  The town had a population of about sixteen thousand of which about three or four hundred were Jewish.  They maintained a separate identity within the community.  Whether Bob was excluded from mingling or whether he excluded himself the exclusion is clear causing him serious social problems.  His hatred of Hibbing may now have been somewhat blunted but it was very strong in his younger days.

At the same time Bob to some extent became assimilated through country and western music which he knows thoroughly.  Hence he adopted a false country persona for his stage presence.  This was altered a great deal when he arrived in NYC and had to familiarize himself with Negro Culture, but that is later.

The Jews in Hibbing attended the Theodor Herzl Summer Camp in Wisconsin and it was at the summer camp that Dylan and Kemp cemented their friendship along with that of Larry Kegan.  The Herzl camp kept the area’s Jews within the Jewish atmosphere emphasizing the separaton.

Bob was enraptured by the actor James Dean and his performance in ‘Rebel Without A Cause which forms much of his pesona; in addition he was swept up in the rock and roll craze that was a universal American experience with a small Jewish presence at first.  Bob himself was swept up by the astonishing music of the great Little Richard, a Negro entertainer whose career at the time changed the direction of the universe.  He, along with Elvis epitomized the decade and Bob was enamored of both.  He wanted to be a rock and roll star, imitating Little Richard in his high school bands.  Little Richard was a little beyond his reach so he turned to folk music adopting Woody Guthrie as his musical role model.  However he never lost the desire to be a rock star.  His 1961 song ‘Mixed Up Confusion’  was an attempt to blend folk and Little Richard that failed.

Bob never did find a rock and roll groove.  He was able to create contemporary sound that was neither rock nor folk, something almost unique for the times.  It didn’t conquer American but became essential to a particular sub-culture.  A Bohemian culture.  Bohemia became Beat and then Hippie with a strong Negro influence.  Bob was home.

To some extent Bob maintained a relationship with Kemp and Kegan.  Busy with his own affairs in New York he slowly became a phenomenon.

At the same time Louis was busy working on his own success that was quite remarkable, he developed a major fish business.  Two boys from Hibbing making it big.  Having made it the relationship was renewed.  The third member of triumvirate, Larry Kegan’s life took a tragic turn.  While in Florida  during high school he was in Florida and made the mistake of diving into shallow water thereby breaking his neck and becoming a quadriplegic.  But Bob drew him back into the relationship even taking him on stage a time or two to sing along.

Time passes, Bob’s career has some ups and downs but he remains the voice of his generation or part of it and they stick with him whether they buy his records or not.  Then in 1976, Bob having become a  legend in his own time, during a low point in his career, he came up with a rather strange idea, that of the Rolling Thunder Review.  Here we come back to the immigrant integration theme.

Notice that Kinky Friedman in the introduction to ‘Dylan And Me’ attempts to pre-empt the ultimate American Tom Sawyer and replace him with Dylan and Kemp thus blending the two cultures.  Bob and Kemp were dressed in the clothes that Tom Sawyer once wore; he had to change their faces and give them brand new names, to paraphrase Bob.

.2.

Because of the Jewish holocaust by White people the Jews were given incredible moral power which was transformed into hatred for the United States.  The US went from the being the world saving moral arbiter to the most bigoted society the world had ever seen within the space of fifteen years according to the Jews. White was equated with Fascist.  Israel was established in 1948 and the 1956 Arab-Israeli war blew Jewish confidence up. 

In 1976 the US celebrated its two hundredth anniversary as the Viet Nam war was ending.  The Rolling Thunder revue was named after the last major US campaign in Viet Nam.  Rolling Thunder referred to the incessant bombing of that campaign.  Thus, the Revue was a negative criticism of the US by The Conscience of the Generation, Bob Dylan.

From another angle it was Bob and Louie’s revenge on Hibbing Minnesota.  The Revue, or possibly campaign, began at the site of the landing of the Puritans in Massachusetts, Plymouth Rock.  There with much mocking of the landing, Jack Eliot climbed the mast of the Mayflower replica, the campaign began.  It represented a new beginning.

The target audience of the Revue was the hippie counter-culture.  I suppose the Revue might be considered the harbinger of a second American Revolution.  That is corny but the answer might be found blowing in the wind.

The Revue was stellar.  Major talent in the persons of Bob, Joan Baez, Joanie Mitchell, Roger McGuinn and quite a few others.  The notion was that it was a band of wandering minstrels doing impromptu shows across New England and into Canada.  There was no real itinerary, the Revue drifted into town, put up some posters announcing the date and location.  There were no advance tickets, fans just showed up at the gate.  According to reports the concerts sold out as fans dropped everything and paid their fare.

I wasn’t there, I can only report impressions from video clips.  It was noisy and unprofessional.   Mocking the Pilgrims Bob often donned White Face, referencing the Black Face minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. They used burnt cork, Bob used white grease paint.

As might be expected the shows employed a disorganized, chaotic approach attempting to appear impromptu.  Just a bunch of wild and crazy boys and girls spreading joy throughout the land at a price.  Nothing is free.

Bob reinforced his reputation as the conscience of his generation by injecting racial politics into the mix when he began campaigning to have Hurricane Carter released from jail.  Carter was a Black boxer arrested and convicted on a murder charge.  On slim, if any, evidence Bob claimed that Carter was innocent.  Innocent or not, the hoopla Bob created secured Carter’s release.  With that the Revue ended on a successful note.

A Southern tour was scheduled for the next year, 1977, but it didn’t come off.  Enthusiasm faded, one hopes, when the ridiculousness of the venture became apparent.

The Revue was the highlight of Louie’s memoir.  There isn’t really much more than that.  Still, a contribution to the Dylan saga.  Unless you’re a real, a devoted fan, save your money.

A Review:

Bob Dylan: On A Couch And Fifty Cents A Day

By Peter McKenzie

With An Assist From Dylan’s Chronicles

Review by R.E. Prindle

As an addition to the Dylan library this year brings us a valuable memoir by Peter McKenzie who has intimate knowledge of the Bob in 1961 as he was threading his way through anonymity to fame.  To this point in time the Mckenzie family seems to have escaped the scrutiny of all biographers.  And yet they are an important missing piece of the Dylan puzzle.

In May of ’61 Bob moved in on the McKenzie family that included a fifteen-year-old by the name of Peter, or Pete, McKenzie.  Pete in his memoir relates a lot of details that clarify many misrepresented or inaccurate accounts.  Bob’s arrival in New York in the January of ’61 is one of them.  The chronology  from then until Albert Grossman becomes his manager can be now put in order.

Dylan left Minneapolis, he says, hitchhiking in a frozen Minnesota winter.  Daring enough.  His ride took him into Madison Wisconsin where the university is located.  The stay in Madison is as confused as well as his journey down to and stay in Chicago.  Pete clears that up.  In an almost miraculous manner Bob hooks up with a kid one year younger than himself named Kevin Krown.  Until reading Pete’s memoir I had never heard of Kevin Krown but now he appears to have been a key figure in Bob’s success.  Mr. Krown is amazing.  On the streets of Chicago he  recognizes Bob’s immense potential as a folk singer, it seems with a single look, deciding then and there to become his advocate.  Remember Kevin is only eighteen at this point.  Takes Bob around Chicago and even gets him a couple gigs.  Then he, Bob and Kevin’s friend Mark Eastman get in a car and drive to New York City.  So Bob didn’t catch a ride with strangers as his biographers would have it but two simpatico new friends.

In NYC it will turn out that Kevin comes from a wealthy family living in the Hamptons on Long Island.  Pete doesn’t explain Kevin’s situation in Chicago or even in New York.  His hooking with Bob can only be described as incredibly fortuitous.  A dream. 

The ride to NYC is usually represented as Bob being picked up as a hitchhiker, while using his later developed singing voice he howls from the back seat driving his companions silly who dump him off in NYC thankfully.  Actually Bob’s natural singing voice is quite pleasant, or was, and smooth.  I once saw a clip on the internet in which he and Joan Baez were running through some tunes and Bob was an excellent singer.

Thus a slightly different chronology emerges from Bob’s arrival through his signing by Albert Grossman, his manager in August of ’62.  According to Bob himself, from his arrival in NYC to his emergence in Greenwich Village in February of ’61, he spent the time scoping out the scene, apparently working out his persona, voice and plan of attack.  This occurred in four stages:  establishing credibility by visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital in New Jesey, sponging off Dave Van Ronk, transferring to the McKenzies  and then living with Suze Rotolo in their own apartment on Fourth Street.

If you’re reading this I presume you know the cast of characters but, if you don’t, I’ll give short explanations.  Woody Guthrie was the major folk figure from the Depression through the fifties.  He contracted  Huntingdon’s disease and lay dying in ’61 when Bob paid him several visits.

Dave Van Ronk who earned the sobriquet The Mayor of Greenwich Village was a leading folky of the fifties and early sixties.  He was an accomplished singer, arranger and guitar player.  These were the reasons Bob swooped down on him, forced his presence on him, and moved into his apartment, sleeping on his couch for a while until he had the milk the cow could give.  This behavior became Bob’s modus operandi.  He says he  stayed on many couches perhaps for a night or two or perhaps several days  in his memoir of 2004, Chronicles.  Bob was a lad from the Canadian border town of Duluth, then moving a few miles away to Hibbing, Minnesota on the Iron Range.  That’s way up North for those who aren’t keen on geography.

Hibbing was very small town, the transition from Hibbing through Minneapolis to NYC required some serious adjusting on his part.  He solved that problem by pretending to be an Okie from Muskogee in imitation of Woody Guthrie, at nineteen he pretended that he had been working in the circus for a while.  Untruthful but rather clever.  He was walking a mile in Woody’s shoes.  He had developed  a faux Okie dialect which he used for his singing voice.

Thus having completed the first stage of his entry by visiting Woody for some creds he next moved to the second stage, his association with Dave Van Ronk and his wife.  Dave was important because of his high status in the Village, his guitar playing and arranging skills.  His voice was worse than Bob’s.  For my tastes Dave’s voice makes some hard listening but the talent is there.

With Dave, Bob improved his technique while learning a lot of songs from him while developing his top creds further.  First Woody, then Dave.  Dave had an extra fillip, he was the main attraction at the Gaslight Club.  The Gaslight Club was the premier club of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in the Village.  Dave and about five other singers monopolized the Gaslight as a closed circle.  Bob says in his memoir he used Dave to break into that circle.  Cultivating Dave he mooched a guest appearance, quickly becoming a regular.  That would have been a paying gig.

The Van Ronk episode covers the time from late February through the first part of May.  In May Bob transferred from Dave’s couch to that of the McKenzies.  In that same May he met Suze Rotolo.

Bob successfully maintained his pose as a penniless drifter, or maybe grifter, even baffled Suze until, after they had taken their apartment, returning from a party, he drunkenly dropped his ID that Suze picked up and learned his real name, Robert Zimmerman.

In point of fact Bob was never hard up for cash.  As he says he could pick up a few dollars at the basket houses and even a as much as twenty dollars busking on the streets.  This was a different America as you may surmise, while at the time 50 cents was still money putting a little distance between your situation and absolute poverty.  In addition, Bob was on a short leash with his parents.  He had committed that he would have a year to try to make it as a singer and if not to return to school to learn a regular manner of living.  He phoned home several times a month and received money from home.

Thus his pose as a penniless busker was pure fraud.  His imposition on the McKenzies was fraudulent although Pete didn’t know it and still doesn’t.   The question here is why the move on the McKenzies?  Woody and Dave are easy to see but the McKenzies are a surmise on my part.  The second Chapter of Dylan’s memoir is titled The Lost Land.  The lost land apparently begins with the McKenzies as indeed we get a brief introduction before moving on.  Bib is never a plain speaker so he creates a couple named Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel instead of Howard and Eve McKenzie.  Pete gets written out of the part.  Howard and Eve seem to be enclosed in Ray and Chloe, although Dylan does mention the McKenzies in this way, p.66:

Quote:

These guys at Camilla’s place weren’t like that, though they looked more like tugboat captains or baggy pantsed outfielders or roustabouts.  Mack Mackenze had been an organizer on the Brooklyn waterfront.  I met him and his wife Eve who was an ex- Martha Graham dancer.  The lived on [W.] 28^th St. Later on I’d be their houseguest, too…sleep on their living room couch.

Unquote.

That’s all Bob has to say about the McKenzies, unless you include his comments on Gooch and Kiel, although according to son Pete McKenzie Bob was there for a four month stay in 1961, Spring, all of Summer into September and that leaves no room for Gooch and Kiel in the time frame.

The period was very important, even essential, to a young fifteen year old  hero worshipping Pete.  Dylan being then twenty  hero worship was inevitable.  Bob let him wear a shirt or two of his, play his guitar and gives him a pair of worn out boots, those Bob is wearing on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album. 

Eve, who Bob mentions correctly, became a surrogate mother to him which he acknowledges in his memoir.  Howard McKenzie must have been somewhat a legend in the Village.  He was an important labor organizer, a founding member of the NMU and officer.  NMU=National Maritime Union.  ‘During WWII,’ Pete writes, ‘my father was on the National War Labor Board under Eleanor Roosevelt.’ And he was Chief negotiator  for all labor contracts.’

So once again Bob is establishing creds.  In addition Howard had the fabulous library Bob attributes to Ray Gooch.  Gooch is problematic because there seems to be no record of him except in Bob’s mind.  For me, Gooch and Howard are one as are Eve and Chloe.

Now, following Bob to the McKenzies were Bob’s two companions on the drive to NYC, Kevin Krown and Mark Eastman.  Kevin’s parents lived out in the Hamptons and were rich.  Eastman plays a minor role.  Kevin is quite the character at eighteen years of age.  Himself Jewish he is chutzpah on a stick.  Bob certainly has chutzpah but he is a dwarf beside Kevin on that score.

Why Kevin took such an interest in Bob isn’t clear.  He appears to be acting as an agent of some sort.  Following Pete’s description he actually bullies Bob as though Bob was his charge.

Pete does partially clear up one mystery, that of Robert Shelton’s laudatory review in the NYTimes of which Shelton was the music reviewer.  Bob had scarcely established himself as a character around the Village while building somewhat of a reputation as a performer.  At this time in his career you either got him or you didn’t.  The talent was not so obvious.

Many wrote him off.  Howard McKenzie in an attempt to move Bob’s career along wrote to famous leftist talent agent Harald Leventhal, enclosing a tape for his consideration.  Howard was playing on an old relationship.  Harald, who should have been able to recognize talent, listened and returned the tape politely wishing Bob luck but not then. So Shelton’s rave review contrasts sharply with that of Leventhal.

I, myself, having heard the first three albums, had no use for Dylan until he went electric.  I couldn’t get the first three then and I can’t now.

Thus, before Shelton his career needed a boost.  Kevin Krown was there and at eighteen he either knew what to do or someone was guiding him.  Notice Shelton, Dylan, Krown, Eastman and later Albert Grossman are all Jews.  Kevin began making phone calls to Shelton.  At first he was blocked by Shelton’s secretary but, he was so persistent, calling dozens of times a day, that she finally put him through.  That’s what’s called chutzpah.

Given Shelton’s ear Kevin was unstoppable. He dogged Shelton, pitched and pitched.  Finally bob obtained a commitment at Gerde’s Folk City, the club of clubs in the Village.  The date was 9/26/61.  Kevin turned up the heat, bullying Shelton to make an appearance and write a review.  Shelton was there on 9/26 and his review appeared in the Times of 9/29/61 lauding Bob.  He had three days to think about it and here’s a quote:

“A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerdes Folk City.  Although only twenty years old, Bob Dylan is one o the most distinctive stylists to play a Manhattan cabaret in months.  [remember, this is September, Dylan arrived in January, call it February.]

Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a huck Finn black corduroy cap.  His clothes may need a bit of tailoring but when he wails his guitar, harmonica or piano or composes new songs faster than he can remember them there is no  doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty.

Unquote.

The review put Bob on his feet and running.  The astonishingly positive review amazed everyone.  While in retrospect, after Dylan’s also astonishing career, the review may not seem out of place, at the time however Dylan was no universal favorite, many could not see the talent, performing talent that is, although Bob’s song writing was in a different class.  People were walking around in a daze asking how that happened.

While there are still some unresolved questions it is possible that the record producer John Hammond was also in the audience, plus he would probably have read the Shelton review, he may then have viewed Dylan differently.  At any rate, within a month he had signed Bob to a recording contract.

This astonished the people at Columbia records, especially after Dylan’s first record laid an absolute egg.  He become known as Hammond’s folly around Columbia.  Once again time alters all attitudes but Bob’s first record found no listeners.  He did not burst upon the scene.  Nor did he with his second.

More importantly, his future manager, Albert Grossman, may have had his attention directed to Dylan, I suspect not for his performances but for the fact that he was a budding song writer, writing them ‘faster than  he could remember them.’  Grossman, a fellow Jew, was blessed with lots of chutzpah, he was at that time organizing  his soon to be successful folk super group Peter, Paul and Mary.  While two of the members were actually named Peter and Mary there was no Paul.  Grossman was seeking a singer to change his name to Paul.  Dylan says that he was among the people offered the role of Paul which he declined if for no other reason that he would he would have to be billed as Paul Dylan.

A Village habitue by the name of Noel Stookey accepted the offer and became Paul Stookey.

At the same time Pete Seeger, the doyen of Village folkdom might also have had his opinion reshaped.  Seeger was a Leftist who had been blacklisted back in the fifties.  Dylan at the time was writing songs that appealed to leftist tendencies so that Seeger believed that Dylan was sincere and represented the New Wave of Leftism.  Dylan then was spotlighted at the Newport Folk Festivals.

During his time with the Mckenzies Bob began to mature as a song writer, coming up with the sensation of the moment, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind.’  When Grossman realized that Bob was going to be a good songwriter, the man fitted perfectly with Grossman’s plans.  Dylan boomed as a song writer while his performance career dragged along.

Grossman signed him in August of ’62.  Peter, Paul and Mary recorded the song in their, or Grossman’s, pop folk style so that Blowin’ In The Wind was a big radio hit.  Now Bob was the lead horse in the race.  In fact there was no folkie who could touch him.

I don’t think it widely known but the big money is not in the performance or even touring when you become known.  The big money is in the writer’s royalties because many artists could cover songs, include them on their albums, adding perhaps millions or more sales.  Grossman, who knew the ropes didn’t miss a beat.

Now watch this.

In point of fact, Dylan would have been a blip on the national folk scene without Grossman’s masterful promotion.  Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary, has stated that without Albert Grossman there not only would have been no PP&M but also no Bob Dylan.  That’s how important Grossman was to Bob’s career.

As Bob’s manager, Grossman took a commission of 25% and that was considered high at the time when 10% was normal but Grossman was worth it as Dylan agrees. Consider Elvis’ manager Colonel Parker. It appears that he took everything and more while giving Elvis only what he had to.  Fifty percent in Bob’s case would have been fair.  But here’s the catch, playing on Bob’s trust and innocence, Albert wrote in the contract that he got 75% of the publishing royalties to Bob’s 25%.  Dylan was naturally outraged when he found out.

But, and there’s always a but, Albert was a maniac after those dollars.  Without his songwriting Bob was a noisy nobody.  His record sales were never that high, he had a specific audience of misfits not unlike himself.  He churned out songs and Albert got them recorded by everybody.  If you were there at the time you were astonished at how ubiquitous Dylan’s songs were.  Albert had everyone recording his stuff. And I mean everybody, he had actors reading the lyrics on thirty-three and a third RPMs.  Many of the records were hits so that publishing proceeds rolled in and because his of his publishing Bob’s own record sales responded but cut back because of his raucous voice.  Many, many people could not tolerate Bob’s voice.

Toward the end of his sponging off the McKenzies Bob was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

He created quite a scene at the McKenzies according to Pete McKenzie  while by end of Bob’s mooch, the fifteen year old hero worshipper had stars in his eyes.  Bob had linked up with Suze Rotolo in May and he introduced her into his circle at the Mckenzie where she was beloved.

Suze was a very attractive seventeen year old and no girl is ever more attractive than at seventeen.   She also apparently had a lovely personality so that everyone loved Suze.  Young Pete especially.

When Dylan checked out with the McKenzies it was to move in with Suze beginning the fourth phase of establishing himself.  All of a sudden Bob had enough money to pay rent and spend, for a fellow without a job, fair amounts of money.

As Pete describes it he played the poverty role with the McKenzies pretending to be fundless.  Eve especially took a maternal interest in the lad.  In the first place, Bob was living in a comparatively luxurious apartment, was fed, and accepted charity from the McKenzies of 50 cents a day, hence the fifty cents of the title. In  today’s  inflated dollars that 50 cents might be five or ten dollars, possibly even a twenty, and he was given that gratis every single day.

Dylan was not broke.  He received money from home while at the same time scrounging money as a busker, playing the basket houses, and also playing paid performances.  It would be difficult to estimate his income but I don’t think a hundred or two a week would be an excessive guess.  That’s four to eight hundred a month when three hundred and fifty a month was a pretty good wage.  Thus he treated the McKenzies rather fraudulently.  He could have paid rent for his spot on the couch.

Dylan, to touch on another side was ravenous for education.  I believe that that is where Howard McKenzie came in.  Pete has a chapter titled ‘A History Lesson.’  Bob was a bourgeoning history buff.  Much of his time at this period was spent at the New York public library.  He had an interest in the life in the Southern States at about 1855 to 1865.  He went right to the source reading newspapers of the time and he came away with a pretty solid idea of how it really may have been.

Howard McKenzie was also a history major who had lived long enough in tough circumstances to put history into perspective while becoming very well read but mainly probably in general historical literature although his library was well stocked in biographies, and an eclectic collection.  Bob picked Howard’s mind.  He profited mightily by his stay.

For those who care, Bob’s creds began with his visits to the dying Woody Guthrie, having been taken under the wing and having slept on the couch of the most respectable of the folk musicians, the mayor of Greenwich Village, Dave Van Ronk.

Bob slept on many couches during his sponging period as he boasts in his memoir and each couch was a notch on his belt placing himself above them.  Then to actually have been admitted to the family of Howard Mckenzie, adopted by Howard’s wife Eve, gave him incredible creds bolstered by the unheard of laudatory review of the reviewer of reviewers, Robert Shelton of the newspaper of newspapers, the New York Times, and then signed to the then top label, Columbia Records by the top talent finder, John Hammond, why Bob Dylan was royalty, the prince of Greenwich Village.

What a disappointment it must have been to sell only a few copies of his first record and a second.  Even his Village subjects rejected him, just a slight he took on the road to glory from Fourth Street.

From the McKenzies, Bob set up his own household with the first Slum Goddess of Greenwich Village, Suze Rotolo.  Not too bad for a boy from the unknown pits of the Iron Range.

But, this is Pete’s story.  Bob’s story with his family was quite brief although of the most intense duration, for young Pete idolized Bob in only the way a fifteen year old could idolize his adopted older brother.  Pete includes Bob’s stay in his memoir as well as every other incident that Bob figures in his life.

Interestingly during his stay Bob left behind numerous mementoes of his stay in the form of hand written lyrics, drawings he made and even several tapes of him performing for the family.  His faithful amanuenses, Pete, recorded all and kept the slips of paper all of which in Bob’s fame became valuable.

Later, along life’s highway, Howard died and Pete’s mother, Eve’s, health failing required funding.  Then Bob’s mementoes became a little treasure.  By that time Bob’s canoe was far down stream and his early odyssey was long forgotten, the inglorious past was not needed.

Pete, who realized that the mementoes could be turned into fairly substantial cash, not wanting to take advantage of Bob, who had taken advantage of Pete’s own family, notified Bob to advise him that he wanted to sell the items.  Cruelly and insultingly given his earlier relationship Bob said to Pete like this:  ‘Now, look Pete, now that I’m famous and rich I have a lot of people, relations and whatever always trying to sponge on me, you see…’ A couch and fifty cents a day, purloining Howard’s reputation and Eve’s good will, along with Pete’s idolization now meant nothing to Bob.  Pete was crushed.  But, if you want to learn the rest of the story, Pete’s memoir is worth the slight expense of a few dollars, perhaps one of those fifty cent pieces inflated, might even be a gift for Dylanophiles

Wandering And Wanderers

Through The Ages Part One

by

R.E. Prindle

This essay will be about the concept of wandering and the wanderer.  We will begin about the year -2000 and end up in nineteenth century England.  Wandering  excludes the nomad who migrates between summer and winter locations on an annual basis.  The need to wander as such is a mental ailment, a compulsion, an effort to escape oneself.  One leaves an unsatisfactory environment hoping to find satisfaction elsewhere, at least on a temporary basis but one is always drawn back to the home base.

Our first example is the Egyptian Pharoah Sesostris I who flourished c. -2000.  At some point in his reign he felt the need to wander, gathering up an army, quite an extensive entourage, he decided to wander through Asia toward the East end of the Black Sea in what is now called Georgia.  Of course there is no agreement as to why he decided to wander.  Why would the Pharoah of Egypt pull up stakes and wander away.  Remember he and his army were on foot, walking over a thousand miles one way. 

This involves, one imagines, several thousand soldiers with animals and camp followers setting up camp at night and breaking camp every morning, marching perhaps only fifteen or twenty miles per day.  Egypt would be missing its Pharoah for a minimum of two years, perhaps as much as five.  A lot of water passes down the Nile in five years.  As you can see this would be quite a story.

Put yourself back in the time when the skies were crystal clear and you could see clearly.  Mountains seventy miles away would appear would appear much nearer.  Imagine Sistrostris amazement as he and his army reached the western end of Anatolia and there right before him was the gorgeous sight of Mount There a couple years before the revolution.  Imagine Aegean sea and blue and twinking in the sun, dolphins hopping around everywhere.  See the amazing hundreds of islands dotting the expanse.  Four thousand years ago the sea levels were much lower creeping up to today’s level.

Some speculate Sesostris wanted to conquer the world but he wouldn’t have known what the world was or even how extensive Asia was or how many troops he needed.  No. My opinion is that the need to wander took over his mind.  Sesostris was essentially an explorer.  At the time saffron was a very desirable dye substance, the color of royalty only suitable for Pharaohs.  No else was allowed to use it.  The supply was irregular and uncertain back in Egypt.  It was known that it came from far away at the end of an immense sea.

As improbable as it may seem such a frivolous reason may very well have been the reason for his wander as well as his need to explore, to see for himself.  In any event his trek ended in Colchis in whatis now Georgia.  Hopefully he acquired an adequate supply of saffron.  He then turned around and marched back the way he came.

It is said that there are Egyptian genetic markers common in Georgia today.  If so it is probably true that one day Sesostris and his army came marching into town.  Having reached his goal it is likely Sesostris set up camp to recuperate for a few months.  His soldiers would certainly have set about seducing the Colchian maidens dropping a few markers as they did.

Saffron is derived from the stamens of the Saffron crocus.  Two or three little reddish strands growing from the center.  It takes a thousand three hundred strands to form an ounce, consequently a couple tens of thousands to make a pound.  The Egyptians would have needed a little instruction on how to grow and harvest the plants.  One assumes that Sesostris bargained for the plants and a few pounds of stamens preferable to stealing them as the Greeks did.

Returning then to Egypt after perhaps five years one wonders what state of affairs Sesostris found.  Remember what Agamemnon found when he returned to Sparta after being gone for ten years.

.2.

The Egyptian foray of Sesostris was performed at the beginning of Age of Aries .  While the stuff of legend, his wandering must have been absorbed as the triumphs and disasters of Egypt pre-empted its memory.  A series of invasions and conquests between Sesostris’ time and the conquest by Alexander, that greatest of wanderers, may have erased the legend from the minds of the Egyptians except for one scholar crawling around the shelves of the library of Alexander.

As the empire of Alexander dissolved after his death and the Hellenic general Ptolemy took Egypt as his part of the spoils of Alexander’s wandering, about -300, the Ptolemaic reign that ended with Cleopatra and the coming of the Romans at the dawning of the Age of Pisces, the city of Alexandria on the Nile Delta was the academic capitol of the Age with its Library and scholars.  Perhaps searching through the stacks a scholar name Apollodorus of Rhodes may have come upon a record of Sesostris and his journey.   Perhaps he read the account or accounts with great interest and the idea of translating it into a Greek myth occurred to him.  At any rate he did compose one of the more famous Greek myths, that Jason and the Argonauts in pursuit of the Golden Fleece.

The myth was unknown before Apollonius while the myth lacks the genuine feel of Homer’s Iliad or the other Greek myths.  It has more of a novelistic feel.  Let us assume that the myth was an original creation of Apollodorus.  Thus with the account of Sesostris before him he begins to write the story except with Greek heroes.

Instead of the desire to obtain the Saffron crocus he changes the story to read that a Golden Fleece is involved.   Gold for the color of saffron, a fleece for the wool that saffron would dye golden.  Then he has the Fleece stolen from the Greeks by the Colchians.  To retrieve the Fleece he concocts the story of the Argonauts and their talking ship, the Argo.  He assembles a crew of mythological heroes including Heracles (Roman Hercules).  We’re beyond a genuine myth here, this is now fiction.  Jason then commands the Argonauts as they begin their perilous row to Colchis.  On the way they endure a series of preposterous adventures that bear little or no relation to reality.  Arriving at Colchis they learn that the Fleece is placed on the top of a tree heavily guarded as, apparently, there have been numerous attempts to steal it.  They steal it while Jason seduces the king’s daughter Medea and takes her along too.  Medea is a major figure in Greek mythology, he later story is terrifying.

The Argonauts do not return directly home but trace a long geographic circle across the northern shore of the Black Sea, up the Danube to the land of Boreas, the North Wind, in the Alps, down the Adriatic to Libya and back to Greece.  This journey represents the geographical claims of the Greeks.

This is my idea of a story and not a myth.  Apollonius was just an antiquarian scholar writing a novel.  Thus Sesostris’ wander survived the two thousand years of the Arien Age and today as we are entering the Aquarian Age the story has survived the entire Piscean Age, not as a novel, but as a genuine myth with a large scholarly following.  Endless  editions of the novel have been published over he Piscean Age.

.3.

Keeping within the context of the Arien Age the following will take place mid-Age, that is thirty-six hundred years ago. Today the discussion is all about global warming.  The mean temperature of the earth is controlled by the sun and the plane of the ecliptic, that is the tilt of the planet.  The last ice age ended sometime in the Age of Leo as the planet turned from cooling to warming.  While today the glaciers are all but melted thirty-six hundred years ago they were enormous compared to today’s remnants.  Let us bear that in mind.  The earth was cooler then.  The winter’s were ferocious.

At the same time today we believe that sea levels are rising because of the snow melt.  If that be true then it is clear that sea levels were probably substantially lower thirty-six hundred years ago, perhaps by several feet or even a couple dozen or so.  But, they were lower.  It follows that shorelines extended further out to sea.

Aries was the defining Age of the following millennia and centuries.

The concept of history begins in the fifth century BC in the writings of the Greek historian, Herodotus.  Of the time we will be discussing, mid-Age Aries there was no means to record history as history.  There was only the human memory that turned memories into mythology.  The only records are enshrined in mythology.  Natural events can, of course, be historically dated.  The major natural event in the Age of Aries is the eruption of the volcano Thera.  The eruption is all important.

At the transition from the Age of Taurus to Aries the Aryans began their move from Central Asia.  From my understanding I place them living in the now Taklamakan Desert on the Northern slopes of the Himalayas.  It is my understanding that that existence is enshrined in the myth, or memory trace, of Shambala.  As the Aryans came West they passed the North Coast of the Black Sea then turned South into the Greek peninsula gradually making it and the prevailing Minoan Thalassocracy their own.  Thus the ancients believed they came from the North rather than the East.

By the -seventeen hundreds their occupation of Greece was well in progress while the Asians, or Semites, of the Mediterranean coast noted their intrusion.   In myth then a Phoenician king by the name of Agenor decided to pre-empt their invasion while taking care of the competing Minoans at the same time.  Naturally the cause of the war had to placed on the victims.  So a story was invented that the Minoans envied their religion so that they appropriated it.  Mythologically this was told as the Minoan god Zeus disguised as a bull swimming to Phoenicia and seducing the lovely woman Europa, representing the religion, luring her to take a ride on his back which when she did he plunged into the sea and carried her to Crete.  This was Agenor’s casus belli.  In mythology he had threes sons Sarpedon, Cadmus and Cilix.  That is three armies.  He sent Sarpedon to Crete, Cadmus to Greek Boeotia and Cilix north to what became Cilicia.  Sarpedon was defeated by the Cretans fleeing to Cilicia to join his brother.  Cadmus, by a ruse, set the Greeks and native Pelasgians to fighting.  When they exhausted themselves in battle he picked up the pieces and ruled them in harmony according to the myth.

The seduction of Europa by Zeus places the event sometime in early Aries, possibly in the early -nineteenth  century, sometime in the -eighteenth century or late -seventeenth because Zeus was born at the cusp of Taurus and Aries but before the eruption Mount Thera c. -1640.

As mentioned Cilix succeeded in placing Cilicia under his rule with the country named after hm.  Cilicia was in Southern Anatolia, today’s Turkey as the coast bends sharply to the South.  In close association with the Greeks the Cilician Semites adopted the structure of the Aryan religion while retaining a Northwest Semitic, or Hebrew, dialect.  NB, note the Northwest Semitic or Hebrew dialect.

Now, sometime close to the early part of the -seventeenth century, just to give it a date, say 1630, the volcano Thera blew.  While we associate volcanic activity with lava flows, volcanoes differ.  Mt. Etna, in Sicily for instance, emits lava flows.  Mt. St. Helens in Washington State, USA, blew the top off in a northerly direction, then emitted gas and ash for several days.  Thera s that type of volcano but its eruption is believed to have been of a much greater magnitude than St. Helens.  St. Helens was somewhat over 9000 feet when it blew, the gases and ash emission wearing away three thousand feet of the mountain so that St. Helens is 6000 feet today.

Thera may have been a 15,000 foot volcano.  The eruption continued below sea level creating a lagoon surrounded by remants.  Today the highest and largest remnant is at an elevation of approximately 2000 feet.  At that age, mid-Aries Thera would have been snow capped year round, perhaps as much as the upper five thousand feet.  The island which would have been relatively large would have been idyllic, tempering from the heat is summer while in the winter the South side would have been protected from the ferocious North wind, or Bodreas as the Greeks called it.  The mountain would have luxuriated with streams and lakes, home to varied wild life as well as human cities, one of which has been excavated.

As the southern most island in the Aegean Sea it would have dominated the entrance, a real monitor.  The major island of Crete, home to the Minoan civilization. Lay only seventy miles to the South,  with the Greek mainland and the Anatolian mainland about a hundred miles distant on either side.

  Thera would have been part of the Minoan thalassocracy.  The island must have been a beautiful sight from Crete and the mainlands.

Placed midway between the Greek mainland and Anatolia not to mention the various inhabited islands of the Aegean sea the day Thera blew would definitely have been a notable day.  The explosion must have approximated a sonic boom calling everyone’s attention to the mountain.  At the same time a huge black column of ash would have risen from the top of the mountain rising quickly out of sight in the stratosphere, with a deafening roar.  Within seconds as the ash pushed up, ash would come pouring down.

Let me point out that I do have some experience with an eruption of this sort.  I lived, and live, in Portland Oregon about seventy miles from St. Helens so I witnessed that memorable event.  Fortunately for Portland when the mountain blew the wind was due East thus heading out  over Yakima toward Spokane and Idaho.  A few days later the wind shifted bringing ash to Portland. 

The city of Yakima due East of the volcano received eighteen inches of ash while Spokane two hundred some miles further East received six inches.  We waited for colorful sunsets but didn’t get them.

The city of Portland had a mere dusting, a quarter of an inch yet it brought the city to a standstill and the ash was so fine that it remained in rain gutters, for instance, for years.  In the case of Thera the ash fell to a thickness of two hundred feet.  Places as distant as Cilicia may have had several feet.  Of course, in the twentieth century we had accurate information about the eruption while in mid-Aries people must have been out of their minds with fear, especially as the ash rained down for as much as two weeks or more until the mountain was worn down below sea level.

Naturally as the upward pressure of the subterranean gas was expended the land subsided somewhat.  I have found no information on how deep the lagoon the eruption formed is but shortly after the gas was expended two little spires erupted.  They may not have broken water at the time but later eruptions sent them above lagoon level.

The same happened at St. Helens when a spire rose in the caldera.  Another example is the caldera of Mount Mazama in Southern Oregon that contains the famous Crater Lake.  It too has the afterthought spire.

Herodotus had not yet put pen to paper so there was no history of the event.  There was no paper. Writing had not yet penetrated Greece so that the only method of reporting the event was a through a myth.  The myth could only have been preserved in the memories of bards.  It would be interesting to know how it was first composed and imparted to the bards.

The myth went something like this:  The eruption was a war between the Earth Goddess Gaia and Zeus.  As females are the weaker sex Gaia needed a male champion and she surely got one in the character of the fearsome dragon Typhon.  It’s interesting that an anagram of Typhon is Python or, the great snake.  Snakes being an attribute of the Earth goddess.

As the volcano roared and blotted out the sky and sun so Typhon’s assault on Zeus blotted out the sun as it tried to destroy the sky god.  Typhon was not someone you wanted after you.  He succeeded in destroying Zeus, that is he dismembered Zeus and put the remains in a sack in a cave.  This implies that the humans watching this great battle though they were goners.

As the eruption diminished and it appeared that Zeus was defeating or had defeated Gaia and Typhon a happy ending was required so the gods Hermes (Mercury in Roman mythology) and Apollo searched out the cave, entered and put Zeus back together again.  Things had returned to normal.

.4.

In order to understand the nature of the eruption of Thera let us take a time trip back three thousand six hundred years in the history of the planet.  The time period of the event was formerly assigned to fifteen hundred years before the transition from the Age of Aries to the Age of Pisces.  More recent analyses move the date back  to about -1600.  The more or less exact time can be determined from the history of the Hittites who were located in the middle of Anatolia.  Having heard of the eruption of Thera and its obliterating ash the king of the Hittites announced that he wanted to go to the coast to see the damage.  I imagine he was talking about Cilicia.

This bit tells a couple things:  one, the eruption had been going on long enough so that word got to Central Anatolia, probably by refugees, a journey of a week or two.  More importantly the sky over Central Anatolia was clear so that the ash was not spreading North even though it was blowing East.

Geographically Thera (today known as Santorin or Santorini) is midway between the Greek mainland and Anatolia (today known as Turkey.)  The Southeasterly direction might have impacted Egypt but by then the heavier parts would have been deposited.  I know nothing of the possible direction of the wind currents.

Seventy miles to the South of Thera lay the major island of Crete; the irruption must have been an imposing sight with that amazing whirling column of ash rising nearly out of sight.  Thera must have been a largish island rising in all probability to about fifteen thousand feet above sea level.  The Aegean Sea is about ten thousand feet deep in the area so we are talking about an enormous foundation perhaps twenty-five thousand feet from foundation to the top.  Today the eastern face of the island is a sheer cliff rising near two thousand feet.  That can’t be the shape of the island mid-Aries.  It must have sloped down to beaches perhaps several miles away.  Some sudden submarine subsidence must have sheared from the cliff face probably causing a tidal wave.  It must have seemed like the end of the world.

Previous to this event the island would have abounded in streams and lakes with abundant flora and fauna.

Bear in mind this is thirty-six hundred years ago.  The ice age proper ended sometime in the Age of Leo six thousand years earlier.  The South side of the island was shielded from the North wind coming down from the Alps while the ice cap of the island tempered the heat of the summers.  The island must have been a paradise.

As the ash blew East and South there was probably a Zephyr or southwest wind blowing as ash apparently fell on Palestine.  Hence the eruption probably occurred in Summer.

Standing on Crete, seventy miles away no lava was present as there was no flow.  Cretans going about their business would have heard the equivalent of a sonic boom when she blew.  Looking up they would have seen a massive black column  growing in width that rose straight up into the stratosphere,  if they knew what the stratosphere was, probably called it heaven.  The eruption was on.

The eruption of St. Helens in Washington State was big enough but relatively small compared to Thera.  The subterranean gaseous pressure  mut have been beyond comprehension.  You have to see it to believe it.  St. Helens only erupted for four days while Thera went of for at least two weeks.  St. Helens only eroded three thousand feet of the mountain lowering its height from approx. nine thousand to six thousand feet.

Thera eroded away fifteen thousand feet of mountain to below sea level.  This is really astonishing.  The whole mountain except for the Eastern slope and a few northern and western islets just disappeared. 

As the ash column reached the stratosphere it should have flattened out so that ash in lessened amounts would have fallen on the mainland of Greece and the island of Crete.  Remember that eighteen inches fell on the city of Yakima from St. Helen’s with no special ill effects.

The area mainly affected was the Anatolian mainland  extending through Cilicia.  Probably two or three feet or several feet may have fallen in the eastern direction but apparently on the coast as the Hittite areas were unaffected.  The Cilicians may very well have thought it was the end of the world fleeing North and South.

There was no historian in mid-Aries to record the eruption.  Herodotus was in the distant future.  Even Homer was down the road aways and he worked from traditional memory.  But there must have been mythmakers around because an amazing myth exists.

It is important to consider the set and setting as the people at this time were intellectually less evolved while being 99.9 per cent illiterate.  They had the same intelligence but less knowledge, no geology, no meteorology, little geographical understanding, no psychology as we know it.  That being the case the event had to be explained in religious, or mythological terms.  Here is how they did it.

Aries witnessed the transition from the Matriarchal religious system to the Patriarchal so the myth was cast into a war of the sexes. The Matriarchal was chthonic or earth based while the Patriarchal was astronomical or heavenly.  The former was that of the Pelasgian or ‘native’ population and the latter the religion of the invading Aryans.  Therefore, the gods must have been angry as they fought to the death.

The earth, or chthonic, goddess, Gaia employed her agent Typhon, as physically weaker women need a champion, while the astronomical opponent was the great sky god, Zeus.  The monster Typhon being of the earth was probably some great snakelike beast.  Perhaps coincidentally Typhon is an anagram of Python.

Typhon begins the attack when he and Gaia hurl great columns of earth into the sky attacking Zeus on his throne, that is, blotting out the sun and the beautiful cerulean sky.  Zeus fights back valiantly but for a couple of weeks, at least, the sun and sky are obliterated.  It looks really bad for Zeus.

Zeus himself is said to have had the muscles and tendons disconnected and put In a sack and the sack hidden in a cave on the Anatolian mainland.  Thus, the main ash fall was toward the East.

All seemed lost until the sky gods Hermes (in Roman mythology, Mercury) and Apollo discovered the cave, emptied the sack and restored Zeus to virility again.  By the time that was done the volcano had expended its energy, Zeus reigned again in a clear blue sky and a beaming benevolent sun.  It was a close one though.

Nor was the Matriarchal/Patriarchal situation resolved.  The earth religion governed by the goddess Demeter continued as a secondary religion throughout ancient Greek history while Zeus was perpetually troubled by his consort Hera.  At one time Hera led another revolt against Zeus but without a champion like Typhon, Zeus literally hung her out to dry.

There must have been consequences to the Theran eruption, especially in Cilicia that took a major hit.  Remember that the Cilicians spoke a Northwest Semitic or Hebrew dialect but had assumed the forms of the Aryan religion.  In the terror of the eruption bands of them had packed up heading South for a breath of fresh air.

While the Aryans externalized their religion emphasizing the outside world, that his developed a scientific mindset, the Semitic Cilicians internalized their religion adopting a magical subjective format.

Just as some people were ready to flee Portland to escape the falling ash of St. Helens, at least one or more bands did flee Cilicia.  As the Levant was then is a disturbed state there were other wandering bands styled Hebrews roaming about.  One had fled Ur of the Chaldees according to Jewish mythology, put up in Padam-Aram for a couple hundred years, left, and were now wandering around trying to find a place.

There were other bands about so that the tribes began to agglomerate until twelve bands came together in a loose confederation.  This would have been a troublesome disruptive force in Palestine so that to rid themselves of these troublemakers the settled peoples drove them out, that is, there was a ‘famine’, so the tribes drifted South into Egypt which was in turmoil, probably from other peoples displaced by Thera, thus becoming wanderers.

All of the proto-Jewish tribes didn’t have to arrive in Egypt at the same time.  In fact, the Josephites are said to have arrived first, opening the door for the other tribes to enter Egypt.  The Hebrews settled in and were apparently comfortable and happy for nearly four hundred years until an unhappy, troubled Egyptian noble gathered the tribes around him and suggested they head out for greener pastures.  In their enthusiasm the tribes fled Egypt but, oh, how they regretted those fat times and the fleshpots of Egypt.  The time is now about -1200 in Aries.

Now began one of the most incredible stories in the history of the world.  The wandering Jews in search of their destiny.

.5.

The story continues in part two following.

An Open Letter To The Anti-Defamation League

Attn: Johnathan Greenblatt, Pres.

Greetings and regards:

Let me introduce myself:  I am R.E. Prindle an historian and blogger who has come to some attention by your organization.  Your org. has defamed me as an anti-Semite.  The charge is completely erroneous and malicious.  I am an historian, but not your sycophant.

In my studies I have found it necessary to study the history of the Jews because of their undeniable impact on world affairs during all times and Ages. Like all peoples they have positive and negative points.  Your organization obviously doesn’t wish to have attention called to the negative points.  However, to fully integrate history it is necessary to include a key player, namely, the Jews.  They cannot be omitted without stultifying and falsifying history.  Nor can I stultify myself by excluding the negative facts.

Your organization’s methods have been to act as a vigilante group on a search and destroy mission.  Actual manhunts.  As vigilantes your organization has been judge, jury and executioner, that is, your organization has lynched, that is discredited your victims. solely on your own whim without defense.

Recently our President, Joseph Biden has passed an anti-lynching law and that changes the situation.  That is, your org.’s method of character assassination, equivalent to lynching, is now illegal, a crime, and a crime of some magnitude.  Quite frankly, the ADL is now a criminal organization.

I consider myself to have been lynched by the ADL.  There is nothing in my historical writings that isn’t factual.  That the history of Jewish activities may be unpalatable to the Jewish intellect, history without those negative facts you wish to excise is incomplete inaccurate and defamatory.  This cannot stand.

While an apology is small compensation for what you have done to me, I expect at least that compensation for myself.  To prevent further crimes your org. should reevaluate your methods and change them.  There can be no exception for your organization to continue its vigilantism and intimidation, indeed, terrorism, while lynching, or character assassination, has now been confirmed as a crime with criminal consequences.

Hoping for the best,

Sincerely,

R.E. Prindle