Exhuming Bob 11:
Bob Dylan And Toby Thompson
A Review
Positively Main Street
Text:
Thompson, Toby: Positively Main Street, U Minnesota Press, 2008 reprint of the 1971 edition.
Forty Miles Of Bad Road Later
Toby Thompson’s self identification with Bob Dylan is an interesting situation. In a way he predated the Elvis impersonators; blazing a new trail. That he recorded his infatuation on the spot and got it into print is even more fascinating.
I suppose people have always identified with important people as the insane asylums full of Napoleon Bonapartes indicate, but when the movies came into existence things changed. Movie actors were designed to appeal to certain character traits making identification with the actors more accessible. That the actors came from social strata much like one’s own with no apparent effort or skills made identification easier. (See the novel Merton Of The Movies by Harry Leon Wilson) When sound was matched to image one could act like and even talk like these heroes.
Older people being formed already were more immune than younger people so that the John Wayne imitators, Bogarts, Jimmie Stewarts or what have you began to surface in numbers beginning in the fifties. Still there was a psychological distance between the people on the screen and oneself while a direct imitation brought ridicule on oneself.
Then in the mid-fifties Presley burst on the scene. Here was a guy who drove truck, we were told, one day and was a major recording star the next. Then, as immediately as it seemed to all of us, more to some of us than others, he parlayed that into becoming a movie star. That was just about every teenagers dream. Now that was something we all could do and a great many of the most venturesome did get at least to the level of recording stars but they all wanted the movies.
Presley was the first who created a legion of impersonators. The movies formed a cadre of amateur impersonators but Presley spawned a full frontal impersonation for a profit; People who became Elvis Presley as a surrogate for themselves. This began fairly early in the Presley career too.
Then as the sixties hit young people were conditioned by phonograph records. Records were the way the generation communicated with each other; They took the place of movies and literature. One could still write books or rarely, like Presley, make it into the movies but anyone with enough ambition, little training during the sixties and none in the seventies, could make a record.
This was no more evident than in the case of Bob Dylan. Quite frankly my own first impression was that here is a talentless guy putting out records. If Dylan could do it, if I wanted to, I could. It then became easy to identify with Dylan. Plus he was a nobody, had never even been to college.
After I and many others had written his early records off he surfaced in a way to seize your attention, however his appeal was limited to a certain psychology. But, now, in the twentieth century via records and radio if there were only a million of any certain type those million could make an artist very, very successful, viz. Janis Joplin.
When Big Brother And The Holding Company with Janis Joplin released its first CBS disc the record went to the top of the charts on the strength of a small minority of the public. The vast, and I mean vast, majority of the public had never heard of the band or Joplin. I was in the record business at that time and was astounded that a relatively few hippies made a group and singer unkown to 9 1/2 out of ten, at the minimum, could send a record to the top. Hippies were not known to take care of their possessions. They trashed that record in a week or two playing it perhaps a hundred times or more then coming back to buy another one after another. Each one of those sales contributed to the accumulation of a million so the entire course of American music was swayed by the success of a record purchased by a very small percentage of the population, and the lunatic fringe at that.
So with Dylan. Dylan provoked a violent split in society. Just as Pat Boone was opposed to Elvis as a role model so Simon and Garfunkle were opposed to Bob Dylan. In 1966-67 the S & G faction was much larger than Dylan’s. Bob got more TV attention however. His cult was as the misunderstood, oppressed genius, the Outsider who was shucking the world. You can see where his fan base came from. So, all of us who were in that category became devoted, almost obsessed, advocates of Bob Dylan. I was one, I’m merely analyzing not being superior. I never went as far as Toby Thompson in my obsession but then I didn’t think of what he did either and I was six years older. I already had a life of my own, such as it was.
The younger people took to the pop stars with ease. We had Jim Morrisons, various Beatles and Stones or whatever as well as Dylans walking around campus, people completely immersed in the various identies. I don’t even have to p[oint out the Deadheads and they were truly legion.
So Thompson’s notion of reliving Bob’s youth in his own person while extreme was not completely imcomprehensible. Still psychotic but borderline as he never completely lost contact with reality. Really interesting because unlike Freud’s Schreiber he was able to write a book about it even as it happened.
Thompson was born in 1944 being three years younger than Bob thus being able to look up to him as a role model. Being three years older than Bob I always looked down on him as a younger sibling who was somehow outshining me. The identification was there nonetheless.
Through 1966 Bob befogged us all. Blonde On Blonde was such a towering effort both musically and lyrically that it was incomprehensible. No one could understand it. Some of it you couldn’t even listen to but you were convinced it was a work of genius. The people who called it mere noise weren’t entirely wrong either. Philistines nonetheless.
I knew that Bob had peaked along those musical lines and there would have to be a model change. But then the word came out that Bob was dead, close to it or paralyzed from the eyes down. He disappeared from the stage for a while but as he wasn’t dead or paralyzed we all stood with out faces turned to Woodstock waiting for news from the East. We all, being those of like psychology.
Then Bob dressed like Billy the Kid or some other Western desperado released John Wesley Harding. the psychology was changed. What had drawn us in for ’64 to ’66 was the muse using Bob Dylan as an instrument and he now had been discarded. I dropped him as did many others.
A year later Toby Thompson conceived the idea of searching out Dylan’s roots in Minnesota. He didn’t go as a mere reporter though. He went as a Bob Dylan impersonator. There was Toby Thompson standing in Bob Dylan’s shoes.
The Thompson that emerges from his telling is a very disturbed young man of twenty-four. His intake of alcohol and marijuana was prodigious. Of course, he’s telling a story, but I can’t recall one day that he wasn’t stone drunk. He keeps a pint in his glove compartment. He gets so drunk he stands on his head in the middle of a dance floor and can’t remember it the next day. The guy must have smelled like a brewery all the time. I’m sure the fumes coming from him when he interviewed Dylan’s mother in the daytime gave her a very negative opinion of him. Robert Shelton, Dylan’s biographer, future biographer at this time, had been out to Minnesota the year before. He was a professional Journalistic persona older than Dylan’s friends. Thompson was three years younger and appears to have been accepted on a personal rather than professional basis. After all he had no journalistic history, he was only going to write.
On that basis he formed an intimate relationship with Dylan’s high school sweetheart, Echo Helstrom. I’m going to concentrate on that aspect of the book for this review. Bear in mind that she is three years older than Thompson.
Thompson’s visit to Hibbing must have had the locals’ heads spinning. Thompson, in his book, doesn’t seem to be aware of the impression he was creating. From his description it seems that he appeared among them as a Bob Dylan impersonator. Bobby Zimmerman left Hibbing ten years earlier, became Bob Dylan, and now ten years later this guy shows up impersonating him. Doing a good job of it too.
One can only imagine what Hibbingites thought.
The idea of this guy pictured below going forth to conquer the world of popular music appears to be absurd. We all have known kids who wanted to do the same. We may even be one of those kids but the odd
Look Out Little Richard
of succeeding were about a million and a half to one. How could anyone even suspect that Bobby Zimmerman, the kid above, from the virtually uninhabited North Country would be the ONE. Everyone in town must have been laughing up their sleeve, like the guy on the right above, when Bobby Zimmerman sallied forth to ‘join Little Richard’ and conquer the world.
Now, this guy Thompson using his own name came posing as a journalist but impersonating Bob shows up. Thompson seems surprised at the reaction of Maurice and Paul Zimmerman, Bob’s uncles, but can you imagine being interviewed by a guy talking and acting like your nephew Bob. It’s kind of crazy. Imagine what Beattie Zimmerman, Bob’s mother, thought sitting across from Toby doing Bob. Maybe that’s what Bob meant when he said ‘This guy Toby Thompson has got some things to learn.’
Nobody knew what was going on there, did they?
When Bob and John Bucklen and Echo Helstrom were kids, like many another group of Musketeers, they swore that if one of them made it he or she would help the others along. Well, Bob made it but he forgot John and Echo. No big deal. Teenage vows even spoken in earnest have no meaning after the fact but the promise lives on in the innocent hearts of those who aren’t pulled through by the successful one. There is a sense of betrayal. Added to that there was romantic ill will on Echo’s part because of Bob’s eleventh and twelfth grade betrayal.
Bob is making it big while Echo just has a job. A young woman trying to make her way has a tougher row to hoe than a guy. But, if she knows how to work it she does have a story that’s worth at least a couple three or four years worth of wages. She doesn’t know how to market it though. Robert Shelton came out to Minneapolis a year before Thompson and paid her a hundred dollars for an interview. She held the hundred up to Toby as hint but he wasn’t thinking that way. She was only going to get screwed by Toby, literally.
If Toby hadn’t been in an alcholic haze he might have realized that the story Positively Main Street was only subsidiary to Absolutely Sweet Echo. The money was with Echo.
Echo When She Knew Bob
As they’re driving up Highway 61 Echo pulls out a hundred dollar bill and says ‘See what Robert Shelton gave me for an interview.’ The light still didn’t go off in Thompson’s head. He reached into the glove compartment for his pint.
I am astonished at the amount of alcohol Thompson consumed on these trips. If he isn’t novelizing the guy was in a virtual stupor the whole time. When he and Echo arrive in Hibbing they go to a bar where Toby becomes blotto on beer, no less. He has no memory of the moment but Echo tells him that he stood on his head in the middle of the dance floor as coins and keys showered out of his pockets.
Echo must have been one tolerant girl or else she was hoping for something to happen. Perhaps a large part of the charm of Positively Main Street is the stunning unconciousness of Thompson. The guy was twenty-four years old at the time, not a kid- exactly. He had been telling Echo he was going to write a book. When he gets the first trip written up he sends her sixty pages. Echo writes back: ‘Sixty pages isn’t enough for a book is it?’ She has reasons to be disappointed. Heck, Toby is using her to attempt to make his fortune and he hasn’t even promised to cut Echo in for a dime. Think about this. The self centered naivete shines through with startling clarity. For that reason it is one of the most interesting books in the the Dylan canon.
Echo When She Knew Toby
Now, in these sixty pages Toby has misunderstood what Echo told him about the time Bob called her on the phone and played Bobby Freeman’s Do You Want To Dance claiming to be singing the song.
In his sixty pages he projects a better story where Bob shows up on Echo’s front porch playing guitar and sings Do You Want To Dance then strutting all through the house singing and playing somewhat like Elvis in the dime store in King Creole.
Echo points out this error. Toby liked his version so much he left it in the way he first wrote it. Then when Echo introduces this Bob Dylan impersonator into his parents home Toby whips out his quitar and reenacts his version of the incident strutting around the house as he plays and sings. The guy was absolutely out of his mind in his alcohol haze. He must have smelled like a brewery the whole time.
One is astonished that he was so well tolerated. Of course maybe everyone was thinking: ‘This is amazing, but it won’t last long’ and let it pass. Waved his car goodbe as he sped away.
One wonders what Echo’s emotional rection to the Bob Dylan impersonator was. Toby must have reactivated dormant affections for Bobby Zimmerman as he came on to her strongly in Bob’s persona. Echo had ten year old memories of Bob and now here he was, his double, coming onto her again. Frightening actually.
Toby left again and never returned. In the book he seems oblivious to the havoc he created in Echo’s life. In the interview at the end of Main Street given many years later he doesn’t seem to be any more aware. In fact he seems to be still posing as Dylan’s double. He mentions that he still contacts Echo, who has moved to LA, occasionally as does Bob but Bob seems to have better success in finding her.
Hurt and mystified that Thompson had no more use for her she wrote a poem for him that she mailed to him in far off Washington D.C.
Hey! Toby!
Where can you be?
Somebody told me
That you went back to
Washing Machine D.C.
How can that be?
You came to town in your Volkswagen
And I’ll tell you we sure had fun!
And now you’re gone!
You played for me on your old guitar,
Took me for a ride in your little car,
Drove me near and drove me far,
We looked at the moon,
And stared at the stars,
You stood on your head in my hometown bar…
How could it be you’ve gone so far?
Hey Toby? Where are you?
– Echo Helstrom
Toby hadn’t gone anywhere. Like Bob he’d just never been there. His fantasy like Bob’s didn’t include anyone else, they were just bit players in his own movie. Toby was no longer thinking of Echo. He was married to the bottle. He was touring bars across the country to get material for his next book. Echo could just consider herself as one of those bars. Once Toby had visited it there was no reason to return.
The tragedy for Echo was that she was betrayed once by Bob in 1958 and then again by a Bob impersonator in 1968. Perhaps a wound was created in her heart that could never heal. One wonders what her later history was after she left Minneapolis and drifted West.
I wonder where you are tonight.
I wonder if you are alright.
I wonder if you think of me
In my lonely misery.
There stands the glass,
Fill it up to the brim,
Till it flows o’er the rim,
It’s my first one today.
-Webb Pierce.
Here’s to old memories. Bottoms up.
Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7: Into The Lost Land
July 6, 2008
Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7:
Into The Lost Land
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Dylan, Bob, Chronicles Vol. I, Simon And Schuster, 2004
Prindle, R.E. Exhuming Bob, VIII The Walls Of Red Wing, idynamo,wordpress.com 2008
Thompson, Toby, Positively Main Street, U. Minnesota, 2008, reprint from 1971
http://www.hibbing.org/dylan1/story.html Life In Hibbing: Hibbing Chamber Of Commerce
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/85-dec.htm Bob Dylan Is Not Like A Rolling Stone Interview, Spin Magazine, Volume One, Number Eight, December 1985
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan 1978
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan February 1966
1940
Abe And Beattie
In attempting to put together a reasonable facsimile of Bob’s life in Hibbing and Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City as he mythologized it in his chapter of Chronicles, The Lost Land, I have come to the following tentative conclusions.
Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota on 5/24/41. In 1943 he was taken to Hibbing where he lived from then until graduation from high school in the Spring of 1959.
Within the concept of normal Bob had a fairly advantaged childhood. His parents were indulgent buying him anything he wanted while providing adequate pocket cash. Bob’s family was one of the more important in town both within the Jewish community and the town at large. In what appears to have been a tight small town social scene Bob either excluded himself or was excluded from the dominant social groups within which he had a right to be included.
Perhaps Bob’s conception of the Hibbing period could be best interpreted from his favorite movie, Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. Bob is said to have seen the movie several times. This was unusual as few people ever saw a movie more than once. He would have been a very impressionable fifteen at the time. Most of us didn’t have the money while quite frankly few movies, if any, were worth watching twice including Rebel Without A Cause. I was seventeen when I saw it and while I was in awe I wasn’t submerged. Of course Bob’s relatives owned the theatres so he got in for free.
As he set up a Dean shrine in his basement which greatly offended Father Abe we may be justified in assuming that Dean was a controlling influence in his life from the time he saw the movie. It is of interest that Abe was to remove the Dean shrine from the basement after Bob left replacing it with a shrine to his own son Bob Dylan ne Zimmerman.
Abe Zimmerman (1911-1968) worked for Standard Oil in Duluth when Bob was born. According to the C of C he lost his job in 1943 moving to Hibbing where his wife’s family, the Stones, could help the young couple. Why Standard Oil should lay Abe off in the middle of the war during a manpower shortage seems to pose a question. As can be seen from the photograph of Abe and Beattie above borrowed from the Flickr photostream of <drineevar> he was a well set up handsome man. He appears to be exceptionally self-possessed, sound in the eyes. Beattie appears to be a haughty high fashion queen which would accord with later facts.
Abram Zimmerman, for such was his name. Usually called Abraham, the name on his tombstone is Abram, and his two brothers Maurice and Paul bought the Micka Electric Company in 1943 changing the name to Zimmerman Appliance. In 1968 Paul Zimmerman told Thompson that they had been in business for twenty-five years which would mean 1943 although the date seems odd.
According to the C of C Abe came down with polio in 1946 requiring a lengthy convalescence. The C of C says that the Zimmermans bought Micka’s after his convalescence but if Paul Zimmerman is accurate it would have to have been 1943. There would be no record of what Abe did for a living then from 1943 to 1946. As Bob says both his uncles served in the Army it would seem that they bought Micka’s going into the Army shortly thereafter leaving Abe to tend the business.
Maurice and Paul became President and Vice-President of the corporation while Abe siginficantly assumed the controlling post of Secretary-Treasurer. Managed the money, paid the bills.
During the fifties at least Abe spent a fair amount of money on both Bob and Beattie. Angel Marolt whose family bought the Zimmerman residence after Abe’s death was trying to tell him of Beattie’s several fur coats, diamonds and Cadillac but Thompson says he wasn’t paying attention.
Thompson quotes Echo Helstrom as saying that the Zimmermans had stores in both Hibbing and Duluth. Having a customer base of approx. 250,000 makes more sense when one considers the amounts of Abe’s expenditures and the fact that the profits had to be split three ways.
The C of C describes Abe as a ‘big man’ in town partial to those big thick long cigars.
The Dylan Home
The couple had enough money on arrival to buy the large nine room house that Bob grew up in so Abe must have been well paid at Standard Oil before he was laid off. Both he and Beattie are well dressed in the picture while Beattie is actually overdressed.
Bob was entrolled at Alice School for his kindergarten year in 1946 at five years of age. The status of Alice School is unclear. Perhaps it was closed the following year or consolidated with the Hibbing High complex as Bob was transferred. Hibbing High housed kindergarten through twelve as well as the Jr. College. Thompson describes it as a huge and rambling building.
So from first grade to graduation Bob was with the same group of students. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to move into town in tenth grade and try to break into that one. While he wouldn’t have known them all well he must have known the entire student population on sight. This presents the problem then of why Bob, who was the son of the Big Man in town, wasn’t included in the top social cliques. Those cliques undoubtedly formed early persisting through graduation. If Bob was in one he was either forced out early or found it uncongenial to remain for whatever reason. Perhaps he thought his Jewishness excluded him. So if something happened we don’t know what it was and won’t; unless Bob tells it’s going to be difficult to trace.
Growing up in a small town anyone with any ambition looks around and sees very limited opportunities. Working for his father wasn’t a viable option. Not everyone wants to be a doctor or lawyer either. Nuclear Science is OK but a lot of those guys are out of a job now too. My next door neighbor when I was a kid for one.
Bob’s mind turned early to music and then to Rock and Roll. While Rn’R went on to conquer the world and become as respectable as such a spectacle could it was definitely considered discreditible and low class almost volunteer outlawry in the fifties. At the very least it was ‘pimple’ music. It took a certain amount of courage to say you liked Elvis Presley. Pat Boone was set up as his rival and you had better say you liked ol’ White Bucks. If you don’t think Elvis was considered a social criminal check out a couple of his movie roles like King Creole or Jailhouse Rock. What was the Colonel thinking? Clown roles, that’s all Elvis ever got.
And then Bob chose as his hero and model Little Richard. People looked at you funny if you said you
Young Bob On Harley
liked Little Richard! I mean, Bill Doggett was a respectable Negro with music you could understand, Fats Domino was as lovable as a chubby ten year old but Little Richard! They hadn’t even created the ghetto he could come out of. His band might have passed but then he opened his mouth. If there was ever a direct challenge to middle class sensibilities Tutti-Frutti was it. Not only was the song incomprehensible it was about queers. Nobody ever quoted the lyrics correctly, while I’m walking around saying ‘Tutti Frutti, I want Rudy?’ What does that mean? I hope no one overheard me. So when Bob gets up, ignoring Pat Boone entirely, and launches into some screaming vision like Rip It Up or She’s Got It or God only knows what, was the crowd taken aback? Chuckle, chuckle.
So Bob having opted for the lifestyle was forced to associate with the hoody crowd or have become a loner. Besides Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider had appeared in 1956 that began a cult of The Loner that peopled the early sixties. These guys, who were by no means rebels but deep thoughtful guys who had a line on the truth denied anyone else and that penetrated sham and hypocrisy sat alone ever ready to resolve a situation setting things right were highly romanticized fellows. There were as many Loners in those days as there were Hawkeyes a couple generations later. So Bob wouldn’t necessarily have been thought of as weird, strange but a Loner. A Loner was next door to weird and strange. Thin line if you get my meaning.
On the other hand the C of C describes the L&B Cafe as a regular jumping Bop Street right there in the heart of Hibbing, Minnesota. Bands set up and played continuously. They knew how to party in Hibbing. The C of C even says there was a radio station in town playing Bob’s kind of music thereby contradicting every other source even Bob. He says he had to go to Shreveport on the radio waves to get his kind of music. In this case I’m betting on Bob.
The C of C tells of Bob’s musical debut like this putting the best possible face on it:
Described by fellow students as polite, easy to talk with, and somewhat introspective, it was a total shock when he pushed back the piano bench and stood up to pound the first notes of a song into the auditorium, electrifying the student body. Kids jumped up, stared at each other open mouthed not knowing what the reaction would be.
Well, yes, they were electried but did they like it?
Rockin' Bobby Zimmerman
According to the C of C, looking back fondly, Bob went over real well with his fellow students. If you like this version don’t check the other sources as this is at variance with every other known account but then this is the Chamber Of Commerce speaking. Up to this point in the C of C account there is no reason for Bob to be as bitter as he is about Hibbing at all.
A note of interest is the reoccurence of Fourth Street in Hibbing, Minneapolis and New York City. Quite a coincidence, I knew there had to be some association with Fourth St. in Hibbing. So far we learn that Bob attended Jewish shule there. Whether the synagogue was also located there isn’t clear. The synagogue Bob attended is no longer anywhere at any rate. Tore it down. It was in the way. Had to go. Even though Bob’s father was the most prominent Jew in town, the President of B’nai B’rith and ADL as well as his business interests, and even though Bob had a mega Bar Mitzvah with four hundred people in attendance some say at the most prominent spot in town, the Androy Hotel, some say at the synagogue, he wished to conceal he was Jewish. This attitude may have contributed to his renouncing the Jewish fraternity house to which he pledged at UM while also hiding his religion in New York. The attitude was strange since he seemed to prefer Jewish musicians around him to the exclusion of goys.
Bob’s father Abe, was quite frankly a marvelous provider, spending very large sums of money on son Bob, wife Beattie and his second son, David. When he died in 1968 the house on 7th Ave., now Bob Dylan Ave. was sold. The owners at the time of Thompson’s visit were the Marolts. Angel Marolt who was at home when Thompson called offered to show him around. One thing he learned was that Bob had a clause in the sale’s contract that allowed him to stay in his old room in the Marolt’s house whenever he was in town. Too weird.
What quirk in Bob’s mind compelled him to live in other people’s houses? Perhaps Rebbe Maier back in 1954 impressed on Bob that Biblical scripture presribes that Jews would live in houses they never built. As an article of religion that injuction is a mind boggler. One can’t predict how anyone’s mind will interpret instruction. Bob who functions out of his subconscious very heavily must have accepted such teachings in literal ways. Rebbe Maier was a definite turning point in Bob’s life. Imagine getting out of school, going upstairs at a Rn’R cafe to sit before the only bearded man you may ever have seen, dressed completely in black with a black yarmulke perched on the back of his crown intoning things like: The Jews shall live in houses they never built and then go downstairs to boogie. Pretty spooky, don’t you think? And then as Bob says, he disappeared like a ghost. Let that roll around your brain for little while and see what you come up with.
Mrs. Marolt was trying to tell Thompson something about Mrs. Zimmerman’s multiple furs, heaps of diamonds, I’m sure all the latest fashions and her own Cadillac.
Bob was indulged to the extent of apparently more than one motorcycle, a car, lots of amplifiers and electronic gear for his bands, whatever he wanted plus free movie admissions and plenty of pocket cash. He must have had a large record collection for a kid as he spent his spare time at Crippas record store ordering the odd title. You can bet Crippas didn’t discount either, charging full bore. At the time (after 1958) stereo was 5.98 and mono was 4.98.
As the profits from a sole Hibbing store divided three ways could not have supported this sort of expenditure, having a store in Duluth could account for it. It is significant also tha Abram died in June 1968 and the store closed a few months later. Was the store a losing proposition for the last few years? Did Bob provide the difference so Abe wouldn’t be embarrassed by going banko? Then with his father gone there was no reason to support Uncles Maurice and Paul?
There really is something happening here, isn’t there?
Also as a petty expenditure for Bob (it would have been huge in my life) according to the C of C:
Almost every day Bob came in after school for his regular snack: cherry pie a la mode and coffee (or Coke.)
And then to dinner? No wonder the young Bob had all that baby fat.
If Echo bought those hot dogs for Bob and bought his story that his dad didn’t give him an allowance she was had in more ways than one.
So, Abe was nothing if not a generous father and husband. Beattie as President of Hadassah as well as a Stone must have made the Zimmermans the most powerful Jews in the syngogue while actually giving she and her husband the means to be petty dictators of the town, I saw something like this in Eugene, Oregon in the sixties and seventies, or, as the C of C says a Big Man and big people.
Bob must have a quirk in his mind to misrepresent his childhood so. He was the Fortunate Son John Fogerty only sings about.
In Thompson’s interview with Beattie he quotes her:
How can you know you have a genius in your house, when all my time is spent trying to feed him and keeping his clothes pressed.
In Bob’s story, The Lost Land, Chloe Kiel is shown ironing Bob’s shirts and at the end of the chapter she ‘slaps’ a plate of steak and fried onions in front of him just before he darts out the door to begin the next chapter, A New Morning, just as in the old days when he returned home from school for lunch and was fed by his mother he darted back to school.
Ironing his shirts and providing free steaks was a signal service for bare acquaintances like Ray and Chloe.
Chloe comes across as cold and indifferent and indeed there is a tinge of resentment and anger beneath Beattie’s statement. Motherly, of course, but there. Still, she doesn’t impress me as any Yiddishe Mama of the Mrs. Goldberg variety. Whether Bob was a good boy or not he does have an ambivalent attitude toward his parents. But then he claims that he was really raised by his grandmother, whether Stone or Zimmerman isn’t clear.
I believe the big change came over Bob with his Bar Mitzvah and I’m not talking puberty alone. According to the C of C Bob attended Jewish shule during his young years. This was done after public school hours. Then in 1953-54 when his Bar Mitzvah was approaching Father Abe sent to Brooklyn, New York to have an ultra-orthodox, almost certainly a Lubavitcher Rebbe, sent to Hibbing to indoctrinate Bob in untra-orthodox teachings. It can’t be any surprise that when Bob exhibited his Jewish reverence after his Jesus indoctrination with the Vineyard Fellowship he chose to show himslef as a Lubavitcher. Welcome home, Bob. The C of C tells it this way:
According to a 1985 Spin Magazine interview by Dave Engel, Bob said it was above the (L&B) Cafe that Rabbi Reuben Maier stayed while giving Bob Hebrew lessons in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. The Rabbi and his wife showed up one day and stayed for a year while Bob got ready for his big event . The article quotes Bob as saying he would learn Hebrew after school or in the evening for an hour, then go downstairs and boogie at the L&B. After completing his Bar Mitzvah the Rabbi just disappeared.
In the interview Bob tells it this way:
There weren’t many Jews in Hibbing, Minnesota. Most of them I was related to. The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of the winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs in the cafe, which was the local hangout. It was a rock n’ roll cafe where I used to hang out, too. I used to go there everyday to learn this stuff either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour, or so, I’d come down and boogie. The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after conducting the bar mitzvah, he just disappeared. The people didn’t want him. He didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a rabbi. He was an embarrassment. All the Jews there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturdays. And I never saw him again. It’s like he came and went like a ghost. Later I found out he was Orthodox. Jews separate themselves like that. Christians, too. Baptists, Assembly of God, Methodists, Calvinists. God has no respect for a person’s title. He don’t care what you call yourself.
The C of C knows the Rebbe’s name was Reuben Maier and Bob Dylan doesn’t? There were enough people in Hibbing to have a temple and shule but they didn’t have a Rabbi? The Rebbe Maier showed up in time for Bobby Zimmerman’s Bar Mitzvah but what? it was the first Bar Mitzvah in Hibbing’s Rabbiless history? No wonder four hundred people showed up. The Jews in Hibbing shaved their heads and worked on Saturday’s? I presume Bob means they didn’t wear beards but shaved their faces unlike the Lubavitcher in white beard and one of those funny round hats. I serously doubt there were three hundred or more Jews walking around Hibbing with shaved heads in 1954.
They took one look at Rebbe Reuben’s weird beard and outre attire and told him to get out of town? Now that I can believe. Beards in ’54 were a sign of great eccentricity or a psychotic desire to draw attention to oneself. But why in ’85 the mysterioso act? He just showed up to teach Bobby Zimmerman, a complete unknown with no direction home Lubavitcher tales like this: (actually this is pretty standard esoteric doctrine adapted for Jewish needs)
The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is. This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years. Six thousand years of this where man has his way and 1,000 years when God has his way. Just like the week. Six days work, one day rest. The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age, Messiah will rule.
Essentially what we have here is a variant of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy along with a little Hebrew Theology. If one looks real closely one can see the outline of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
According to Beattie Bob knew, oh, two hundred words of Hebrew. So much for several years of shule and a year of intensive training by Rebbe Reuben.
Whether Bob knows or admits it, it must be true that Father Abram sent for Reuben to instruct Bob in mysteries that Abe thought were essential to his vision of Jewish religion while they were not part of the services of the Hibbing congregation.
It is possible that Abram brought the Rebbe in on the approval of the congregation who rejected him. The comment by Bob of working Saturdays may be signficant here. The Jewish sabbath begins on Friday sundown and continues to Saturday sundown.
As a Lubavitcher, Rebbe Reuben could not have tolerated working during the sabbath while the congregation found it essential amidst a gentile population. Likewise beards are an integral part of the orthodox religion so that the congregation also refused to stop shaving. The only thing mysterious is why it took Reuben so long to catch on. Or maybe he had a contract for one year and the year was up. Of course Bob did need help on those two hundred words.
So Bob’s upstairs memorizing his two hundred words while the throbbing beat pounds insistently through the floor. The super patient Reuben and his wife never object. Bob shortly joins the revelers with his two hundred Hebrew words rattling round his skull, steps up to the mike and begins screaming: I’ve got a girl and her name is Echo. Hmmm. Quite an image out there in the Lost Land of Bob.
Now indoctrinated in quaint antiquarian rites Bob is bundled off to Webster, Wisconsin and Camp Herzl to steep himself in Israeli style Jewish living. Camp Herzl was conducted as Israel in America so those two hundred Hebrew words came in handy in that surrogate for summer in a kibbutz in the Holy Land.
The summer sojourns must have set Abram back a handsome fee for the times. Six to eight weeks of essentially summer boarding school does have expenses. Abe apparently was deeply religious: in Protestant circles he would have been known as a Fundamentalist nut. He and Mike Huckabee would have gotten along fine. One wonders if younger son David was given the same treatment.
So Bob from 1954 on is definitely the product of two nations. The world of the Three Hanks as the C of C puts it and this world of Adam, Moses and the Messiah. Bob was named after Sabbatai Zevi the last acknowledged Jewish messiah in the seventeenth century, his Jewish name is Sabtai.
As kids we all have a lot to reconcile, begin working out at graduation. Bob had a double load; he had two Bobs to reconcile. Personalities wander and widen in those years, Bob made a clean split. On the one hand he was the twerp Bobby Zimmerman of whom it may be said: There’s no success like failure while on the other he was struggling to be the super successful Bob Dylan in which he failed to assume the mantle so that failure is no success at all. At least he made this split off persona’s name mean something. As a note, it was not generally known Dylan was Jewish until after Blonde On Blonde.
Thus in his movie Renaldo and Clara he is not Bob Dylan. Anybody can be Bob Dylan he says, you can be Bob Dylan. Toby Thompson thought he could be and did a pretty good job of it walking a mile or so in Bob’s shoes. Sounded just like him.
As remarkable as it is that Bob realized his fantasy beyond anything he could have dreamed and became the hugely successful Bob Dylan he created an entire new set of problems whose solution eluded him. Well, you know, there’s something lost and something gained while it’s hard to know whether the gain was worth the loss. However the money has disappeared from the table.
The result then is Bob looking backward from 2004 to create a fantasy of how it was in Ray and Chloe’s place on Vestry Street in NYC. The chapter is approriately titled The Lost Land or possibly Never-Never Land might have been better. The chapter isn’t a complete fabrication but it is fiction. Something like the various incidents might have happened but not exactly the way Bob tells it. The framing story of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel is pure fiction however. They could not possibly have existed.
Bob tells the whole story of the Lost Land within the reference of Ray and Chloe and their fabulous apartment near Vestry below Canal near the Hudson across the street fromt he Cathedral with its bell tower. Thompson got it right.
A troubling aspect of Bob for me is his insistance on bumming other people’s apartments. This seems to be compulsive behavior.
Bob was actually voluntarily homeless from January of ’61 to October or November of the same year when he and ‘roommate’ Suze Rotolo took up digs on Fourth St. I suspect that Father Abe would have been only too happy to supply Bob with funds to live on Vestry Street if he had asked. Bob is simply untrustworthy in any of his stories. As he said of what he learned from folk music: If you told the truth, well and good; if you told the untruth, well and good also, so in Bob’s mind there are no lies, there is only the truth or untruth both having the same value and whichever is more serviceable at the moment. You can’t believe him.
A troubling aspect of Bob’s behavior is his habit of bumming couches in other people’s nests; gaining meaning, as it were, from other people’s lives. Perhaps that was the way he felt of his life in his mother and father’s house. Or perhaps as a Jewish outsider in a goyish land it was his attempt to insinuate himself in the main stream much as he appropriated Woody Guthrie’s persona. Of the houses I have traced they have all been those of goys; he didn’t choose to insinuate himself into the houses of his fellow Jews. His imaginary hosts Gooch and Kiel are obviously goys.
The Lost Land then is a mythologized version of his childhood and first few months in New York City. To my mind Ray Gooch is a combination of Dave Van Ronk, Paul Clayton, Matt Helstrom and his father. Chloe seems simply to be an idealized notion of his mother. (Study her picture for a few moments again.)
As the Gooch frame brackets the period from Bob’s encounter with Gorgeous George to the apartment with Suze Rotolo it must represent a time frame from sometime in ’58 to October ’61. In October Bob Dylan ceased sponging off others to take up his own apartment.
The only one in this time frame he knew who had a large gun collection was Matt Helstrom. The Helmstroms also had a large record collection that Bob listened to. The couch and apartment undoubtedly belonged to Van Ronk while certain exoticisms of Gooch are characteristic of Clayton. The library of Gooch may simply be the New York City Library of which the long narrow room would merely describe the stacks.
The Southern character of Gooch must represent a time after Bob studied the South in the library since there are several references to his Civil War studies. Gooch himself is a Southerner from Virginia gone North which is a symbol in itself. This can be symbolically described as Father Abe being a Jew in Gentile America.
Here then Bob creates or accentuates the more pleasant aspects of his memories in contrast to the very bitter unpleasant memories of the songs. He tells us a great deal about his dream life but little of its realities. At this point I am of the opinion that the party of Camilla ( who Bob says he gets to know quite intimately) is another fabrication of the based on a true story variety.
As Bob would say, folk music taught him that if what you said was true,well and good; if what you said was untrue well and good also. We may probably construe the Lost Land as both true and untrue while a good folk tale. Even the title has a fictive quality a la Edgar Rice Burroughs.
To round off the period back in the C of C milieu of Hibbing: Bob spent his last summer at Camp Herzl in 1957. In the summer of ’58 he was running back and forth between Hibbing and Minneapolis. At that time he would have become familiar with Highway 61.
In his Junior year of ’57-’58 he took up his relationship with Echo Helstrom. They were going steady hence were not supposed to be dating others. As he was in Minneapolis most of the summer he left Echo sitting home alone. She resented this. As the Senior year began she told Thompson, she took a revenge on Bobby returning his token in public in the hall at school. Boy, that hurts.
The feelings must have been much harder than either Bob or Echo portray them. A key problem area is did Bob spend time in Red Wing Reformatory on Highway 61 below Minneapolis and if he did what did he do to receive his sentence: I examine this more fully in Exhuming Bob VIII: The Walls Of Redwing.
He says in Chronicles that he was absent from school from some time at the beginning of April of ’59. He was back at least by the June 5th graduation. His birthday is May 24th. After that date he would have been eighteen and subject to adult sentencing. For what It’s worth he says in his song that no inmate was over seventeen. I’m suggesting that he spent a month of two at Red Wing returning in time for graduation. Certainly a Big Man in town like Abe could have arranged the graduation if he couldn’t get Bob off that time.
The question is what did Bob do? By the middle of this Senior year it appears that he had been in enough scrapes to be known as a troublesome boy; perhaps living out a Rebel Without A Cause persona. Father Abe used his influence up to that time to avoid unpleasant consequences for the lad.
I believe Bob’s song The Chimes Of Freedom tells the story of his crime. Quite simply Echo set him up. She obviously was not quite as complacent as she tells it. See Exhuming Bob VIII: Walls Of Red Wing.
Returning home from Red Wing his parents threw a graduation party for him. Bob was reluctant to attend the party, perhaps with good reason but was persuaded to do so.
This then leaves a very sketchy account of the three or four months of the summer of ’59 for which Bob provides little information. In Walls Of Red Wing I place his stint at Red Wing in August but that is probably wrong. In any event the period from April of ’59 to September of ’59 needs to be explained more fully.
Bob gives some brief details of his stay at Dinkytown but not much. A little bit of the John Pankake episode while avoiding the important details of his theft of Pankake’s records.
Thompson has some good information from Ellen Baker whose father’s folk song collection Bob used extensively.
Then to NYC and his account of The Lost Land segues into his New Morning.
Part 7, Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review
May 20, 2008
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#18, Tarzan And The Lion Man
Part 7 of 10 Parts
by
R.E. Prindle
First published on the ezine, ERBzine
The Storyteller
The City Of God
7 a.
The first to the Falls, Rhonda was then spotted from the plateau by some of the Apes of God.
The Reviewer
Now begins the story within the story. A long short story or novelette that is as fine as anything in Fantasy or Science Fiction. This story is the eighteen caret ruby in the diadem of the Tarzan series. That this story should have gone unrecognized for over seventy years is incredible.
Not only is it objectively stunning but the subjective richness is beyond measure. Just as some background on the number of influences on the story let us begin with two, both of which are interconnected in ERB’s mind.
The novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, had a profound effect on ERB’s mind. He apparently read it early which is to say before 1900. The possibility of creating life had interested him from the beginning of his corpus while references to it are interspersed throughout. One of the greatest of his creations, the great physician and scientist Dr. Ras Thavas, will succeed in creating life five years hence in The Synthetic Men Of Mars but will botch the job terribly.
In this story Burroughs’ character, God, doesn’t create life but he manipulates genes to create a whole new species. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 and in 1931 Universal made the definitive movie. That was two years before Burroughs wrote Lion Man so it is reasonable to assume the movie had an effect on him.
IMDb provides a quote from the movie that may have inspired ERB; I don’t think there is any doubt that he saw this seminal horror film.
Henry Frankenstein: Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive….It’s alive, it’s moving, etc.
Victory Moritz: Henry- in the name of god!
Henry Frankenstein: Oh, in the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!
Frankenstein's Monster
The 1931 Frankenstein is stil an overwhelming experience to watch over seventy years later. For the audiences of 1931 it must have been overpowering. The fabulous castle of Dr. Frankenstein was surely an inspiration for the castle of Burroughs’ God. What Burroughs did with the inspiration is as astonishing as both the Shelley original and the movie.
In the news also at the time for over a period of a decade or more was the spectacular career of John R. ‘Goat Glands’ Brinkley. This is an astonishing story. I rely mainly on two accounts: Vishwas Gatitonde’s excellent article “Magic Men’ in BB New Series #59 and the account in Wlofman Jack’s autobiography. Wolfman Jack’s autobiography slipped by unnoticed but is one of the great autobiographies of the second half of the twentieth century, probably the twentieth century and possibly of all time.
Also see on the internet:
Dr. John R. Brinkley- A Story You Should Know
Grift, Goats and Gonads by Scott McLemee
Kansas State Historical Papers- John R. Brinkley
Border Radio Quackery by Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford
The Goat Gland Doctor by Joe Schwarcz, PH.D
The medical practices of God involve gland transplants along with genetic implanting or splicing. Over the years based on a foundation of Frankenstein ERB had built up a magnificent fantastical scientific edifice of life creation based on Evolution.
There can be no doubt that he read and thought about the subject a great deal. He was very well informed on evolutionary matters. He was a well educated, thoughtful, intelligent man contrary to nearly every opinion about him. His ideas as presented in Lion Man are probably as far as he could take them based on the knowledge of his time. The discovery of DNA was only a little over a decade away, actually made a few years before he died. One wonders what he would have made of it. Even then ERB’s notion of ‘germ cells’ with their indestructability contains the essence of DNA so ERB was on the right track in his thinking. I’m going to handle this out of order as the ideas explain what follows better.
ERB was familiar with the use of cannibalism to ingest certain qualities of slain warriors. Thus it was thought that to eat the brains of especially intelligent people transmitted that intelligence to oneself. To eat the flesh of a brave man made oneself also brave, etc.
From there to cellular therapy is a short step. Even though there was probably no one who believed in the physical benefits of human cannibalism this side of Africa when it came to animals parts intelligent men threw common sense out the window.
Cellular Therapy arose at the end of the nineteenth century. Joe Schwarcz explains:
Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard, a noted French physiologist, had shocked the medical community by injecting himself with the crushed testicles of young dogs and gunea pigs. Afterwards he claimed that he had regained the physical stamina and intellectual vigor of his youth. Many men availed themselves of ‘La Methode Sequardienne’, but once the placebo effect was filtered out little remained. In Vienna physiologist Eugen Steinach proposed that youthful vitality could be restored by increasing levels of testosterone. the easiet way to do this, Steinach said, was through vasectomy. Sperm production wasted testosterone, and if the channel leading from the testes to the ejaculatory duct were tied off, then blood levels of testosterone would rise. Brinkley may also have heard of the work of Serge Vorenoff, a French doctor who was stirring u a storm of controversy with his experimental gland transplants. Vorenof had been a physician in the court of the King of Egypt, and there he had spent a great deal of time treating the court eunuchs, who suffered from a variety of illnesses. He hyposthesized that maintaining active genital glands was the secret of health. As proof, he cited his experiments with an aging ram into which he transplanted the testicles of young lamb. the ram’s wool got thicker, and his sexual vigor returned. Voreneff then went on to transplant bits of monkey testes into aging men; he claimed success, although he could offer no scientific validation of his claim. In America the stage was set for the meteoric rise of J.R. Brinkley.
Brinkley began to transplant goat glands into the testicles of his patients. As he began his career in the early 1920s radio made its appearance as a commercial entity. On the qui vive Brinkley realized its potential to increase his business and spread his gospel. He bought the first radio station in Kansas in 1923, his practice was in Melford, His call leters were KFKB- Kansas First-Kansas Best- as bold a claim as his medical ones. He was actually a fine broadcaster transmitting Country Music, weather, farm reports and other items of interest as well as infomercials for his medical practice. This notoriety brought the AMA and government down on him. By 1930 he had had both his medical and broadcasting licenses revoked.
Now, here’s where the man showed his innovative brilliance. This really got him attention. Nothing daunted he moved down to fabled Del Rio, Texas, Brinkley created the fable, across the Rio Grande from Villa Acuna. His radio station in Kansas was small, a mere 1000 watts, although probably non-directional.
In Mexico without US regulations he was able to build a boombox of 75,000 to 100,000 non-directional watts. This was later incresed, if this is believable, to 500,000 watts and tahen to1,000,000 watts according to Fowler and Crawford who really should know.
Clap For The Wolfman
Alright. When I grew up in Michigan in the 1950s I could clearly pick up the successor Del Rio station after dark when its power was only 250,000 watts. Wolfman Jack who worked the station tells an amusing story of his arrival. Driving through the desert to the transmitter he noted that all the cars parked there had left their headlights on. This mystified him but then he learned that the wattage was so powerful that headlights glowed in consequence. The air crackled around him. At a half million and a million watts people must have levitated.
So, Dr. Brinkley was much in the news all these years so that ERB as Gaitonde suggests couldn’t have missed him. While in our time there is no reason to mention La Methode Sequardienne yet with Brinkley being reviled it is quite possible ERB came across a discussion of cellular therapy in his reading which did mention these earlier experiments.
ERB has God, a formerly handsome Englishman, create a hybrid hominid between a gorilla and a human. God himself has regressed being a hybrid human/gorilla. p. 133:
“What is this strange purpose we are to serve?” asked Rhonda.
“It is purely scientific; but it is a long story and I shall have to start at the beginning,” explained God.
In the beginning. God appears to have been a medical student back in England with a strong interest in biology. p. 134:
“I had always been intrigued by Lamarck’s investigations and later by Darwin’s. They were on the right track, but they did not go far enough; then shortly after my graduation, I was traveling in Austria when I met a priest at Brunn who was working along lines similar to mine. His name was Mendel. We exchanged ideas. He was the only man in the world who could appreciate me, but he couldn’t go all the way with me. I got some help from him; but doubtless, he got more from me; though I never heard anything more about him before I left England.”
ERB gives us a fair amount of information here. He is familiar with the Frenchman Lamarck of the eighteenth century who centered on heridity. A red flag goes up on Darwin because if God left England in 1859 he would have known nothing of Darwin who published that year. In any event while Darwin’s Origin Of Species sheds light on the mechanics of the variations among a species I can’t find any evidence of how species themselves evolve. ERB is also familiar with the genetics of the monk, not priest, Gregor Mendel, who published in 1866 sending a copy to Darwin which the latter dismissed as irrelevant. However, Burroughs through God seems to have taken Darwin less seriously than Mendel.
He imples that Mendel was on the right track with his peas but that following the same line of reasoning God went well beyond him which indeed he did. Mendel was disregarded in 1866, his revival beginning in the year 1900. So Burroughs in 1930 is keeping up his reading.
Burroughs then goes on to explain God’s theory of heredity. His theory is not all that bad. It shows Burroughs obviously doing some reading and thinking on the subject. p. 134:
“In 1857 I felt that I had practically solved the myster of heredity, and in that year I published a monograph on the subject. I will explain the essence of my discoveries in as simple language as possible, so that you may understand the purpose you are to serve.
“Briefly, there are two types of cells we inherit from our parents- body cells and germ cells. these cells are composed of chromosomes containing genes- a separate gene for each mental and physical characteristic. The body cells, dividing and multiplying, changing, growing, determine the sort of individual we are to be; the germ cells remaining practically unchanged from our conception, determine what characteristics our progeny will inherit, through us, from our progentors and from us.
“I determined that heredity could be controlled through the transference of these genes from one individual to another. I learned that these genes never die; they are abosolutely indestructible- the basis of life on earth, the promise of immortality through all eternity.
It appears that ERB’s main concern is heredity and indeed genealogy was important to him. While his information is a clumsy account compared to what has been learned since then, given the times ERB was quite advanced. He doesn’t have the handle on DNA which is a decade or so in the future, Watson and Crick published in 1947, but in the germ cells he’s on the track of the right idea. The notion of the body cells is, of course, superfluous.
But now God runs up against a brick wall when he publishes his theory in 1857. Remember Mendel’s discoveries were still eight years in the future while so far ahead of their time that they will be disregarded for thirty-four years.
I don’t know what horror films have been released by this time, Dracula and Frankenstein for sure, but here the plot seems very familiar, possible Burke and Hareish. Unable to proceed in a legal manner because of society’s obtuseness God turns to criminal means, but quite novel crime.
As he has detemined that germ cells are immortal he raids the tombs of Westminster Abbey extracting germ cells from Henry VIII and his court and entourage. Thus he has a little time capsule when he is discovered and flees England to avoid blackmail. He decides to conduct his experiments on gorillas in Africa. He finds the greatest concetration of gorillas in Africa, and hence on earth, in the valleyof diamonds. In something like seventy years he converts pure gorillas into a hybrid of gorillas and humans capable of speech and human cognition. They build his magnificent City of God for him which must have been quite new when Tarzan arrived.
As they are bred from the genes of medieval Englishmen the effects of Lamarckian heredity are evident as they speak a medieval form of English and replicate the City called London after its medieval progenitor. Following Burroughs’ earlier thought in Opar the gorillas accept only beings born in gorilla form with human attributes. Sports and mutations are expelled. the other are, of course, the result of Mendelian genetics that are beings with odd combination of genes.
God was born in 1833, the same year as Burroughs’ father, thus in 1933 he is one hundred one years old. Some forty years back or so as he realized he was aging so he decided to splice in the body cells of young gorillas in a form of cellular therapy to rejuvenate himself. This worked well in preserving his youth but unfortunately the more gorilla body cells he spliced in the more gorilla-like he became, so that when Tarzan and Rhonda meet him he is a grotesque hybrid, more intellignet than the gorilla hybrids, but reverting rapidly to pure gorilla. Serious problem.
God is very pleased to capture two such fine looking human specimens as Tarzan and Rhonda because by splicing in their body cells he will be able to resume his human shape in some style.
So Burroughs has been developing his ideas in a creditable scientific way. While it’s true his actual science is speculative he is employing some fairly sound reasoning on the matter that may not have been too dissimilar from the tack taken by Stalin’s scientists, while creating a human-ape hybrid has apparently been a timeless fascination. It is said that our own scientists have succeeded in actually creating a chimp-human hybrid but that the specimens have been destroyed. I haven’t any confirmed proof that such has been done but rumors are around.
Having given a reasonable scientific explanation of the gorilla hybrids and God’s purpose for Tarzan and Rhonda, Burroughs with his usual ghoulish delight introduces his favorite topic of cannibalism. He informs the two that after satisfying his need for body cells he intends to eat them thus imbibing their characteristics. He also says that he will extract several glands from Rhonda for some special purpose.
I’m not exactly clear on what cannibalism meant to ERB. It seems he associates it with his father who was particulary hard on Burroughs in his youth which ERB may have interpreted as being eaten alive by his father. As we have God, cannibalism and his father associated here his father may be the reason for the recurring reference to cannibalism is his work.
The female glands recur again in Tarzan’s Quest where the Kavuru chief Kavandavanda requires female glands for his immortality pills and Vishwas Gaitonde finds the subject mentioned again in Tarzan The Magnificent.
So when Rhonda arrives at the Falls and is spotted from above by the seeming gorillas, she is actually spotted by a clone of the real fifteenth century Lord Buckingham in his gorilla guise.
Now begins a series of astonishments, jokes and twists such as are found in few novels. As I mentioned, today much of this is old hat, but in 1933 this was startling fresh and new. At this point we are unaware of the hybrid nature of the gorillas. The following passage then was not only startling to Rhonda but to us. p. 94:
(Rhonda) felt very small and alone and tired. With a sigh she sat down on a rounded boulder and leaned against another piled behind it. All her remaining strength seemed to have gone from her. She closed her eyes wearily, and two tears rolled down her cheeks. Perhaps she dozed, but she was startled into wakefulness by a voice speaking near her. At first she thought she was dreaming and did not open her eyes.
“She is alone,” the voice said. “We will take her to God- he will be pleased.”
it was an English voice, or at least the accent was English, but the tones were gruff and deep and guttural. The strange words convinced her she was dreaming. She opened her eyes, and shrank back with a little scream of terror. Standing close to her were two gorillas, or such she thought them to be until one of them opened his mouth and spoke.
“Come with us,” it said; “we are going to take you to God;” then it reached out a mighty, hairy hand and seized her.
There’s a shocking opener to the twilight zone between R2 and R3 as ERB prepares the curiosity of the reader for what is perhaps the most amazing story he ever told.
King Kong
Rhonda, physically and emotionally exhausted by the terrific events of the past few days, slips into a trance in the middle of Africa only to be brought out of it by voices speaking Enalish saying they are taking her to God. What can that possibly mean? When she opens her eyes she sees two gorillas are doing the speaking.
That’s something else, isn’t it? Had they been on the screen could they have competed with King Kong that was released in that year of 1933? Out of King Kong came 1949’s Mighty Joe Young while the public’s fascination with gorillas continued until Planet Of The Apes which, if it doesn’t owe anything to Burroughs’ story, develops the theme ad absurdam. Kong, Young and Planet Of The Apes, Stalin’s experiments all owe their origins to the Tarzan oeuvre.
Burroughs raises the theme to heights that have never been surpassed. Combining the human gorillas with the City of God was incomparable genius.
With the background clear let’s take a leap into the future.
The City Of God
God At Work
7 b.
The whole thing seemed like a hideous and grotesque nightmare,
yet it was so real that she couldn’t know whether or not
she was dreaming.
Lion Man p. 95
In taking the ‘germ cells’ of individuals from the time of Henry VIII, as the cells were cloned with those of the gorillas the hybrids cloned the environment they knew. While clones have no mermory of a previous existence, in the popular imagination they do. Thus in the paranoid classic movie The Boys From Brazil of 1978 the number of clones of Adolf Hitler all exhibited the supposed conditioned responses of the original which they could not have experienced themselves.
At the same time ERB cleverly replicates the political situation between God, Church and Henry VIII. When Rhonda was captured, two gorillas named the Dukes of Buckingham and Suffolk quarrel over whether she is to be taken to Henry VIII or God. As we still have no idea of what is going on we are as mystified as Rhonda.
And then as Rhonda tries to order her bobbled brain she realized she could communicate with these improbably English speaking apes. p. 96:
Now she had an instant in which to think clearly, and with it came the realization that she had the means of communicating with her captors.
‘Who are you?” she damanded. “And why have you made me a prisoner?”
‘The two turned suddenly upon her. She thought their faces denoted surprise.
“She speaks English!” exclained one of them.
There’s a neat turnabout similar to when Tarzan addresses Buckingham in Mangani and the gorilla answers him in English. The gorilla exclaims, “She speaks English.”
Then follows an explanation of God, Henry VIII and Cranmer that only succeeds in confusing Rhonda further as she seems to be in some costume play in which for some inexplicable reason actors clad as gorillas are acting out a play about Henry VIII. She pinches herself to no avail. She is awake. This isn’t theatre, although Hamlet soon would be played in Nazi uniforms which is just about as ridiculous.
The gorillas take her to Henry VIII where we will leave her until she is joined by Tarzan.
While Rhonda escaped theArabs Naomi had been recaptured. In company with the Arabs she is brought to the canyon that leads to an easy ascent of the plateau according to the map. As the ascent becomes steep they leave the horses with Eyad going ahead on foot. Awaiting them at the crest is Stalin’s dream corps. Throughout the oeuvre one is always amazed at the disregard for their own well being the apes exhibit. They charge in story after story with complete disregard for their own well being. Always a signficant portion are left on the field of battle but the survivors never complain while Tarzan complacently accepts their sacrifice as his due.
So here, barehanded against the Arab firearms the gorillas launch a wave attack reminiscent of the Chinese in Korea that doesn’t stop until all the Arabs are dead. No regard at all for casualities. No wonder Stalin thought Burroughs was on to something. While the apes perform as they have always performed in Tarzan stories the difference here is that these are not mere apes but hybrids with human intelligence. If Burroughs was aware of Stalin’s experiments was he laughing at the Great Commissar? Is this battle a reference to Stalin? One can’t be positive of course but I am sure that the character of God-the formerly handsome Englishman- is partially based on H.G. Wells who was associated with Stalin.
Naomi was with the Arabs. She is captured by Buckingham who asks her how she got away from God; she is identical to Rhonda so Buckingham naturally confused her for the latter. The Apes sense of smell was not as developed as Tarzan’s. I’m sure the Big Bwana would have smelled the difference immediately.
ERB is now dealing with his sexual problems. Of the three women involved with the City of God- Naomi, Rhonda and Balza, it is necessary to sort out which woman represents what to ERB. As Naomi is weak and vacillating she obviously represents Emma. Rhonda who is strong and self-willed seems to represent ERB’s Anima ideal or in other words, La of Opar. La disappears from the oeuvre after Tarzan The Invincible of 1930 but as Tarzan and Rhonda in God’s prison replicate Tarzan and La in the Lion’s den of Invincible it seems probable that ERB has transported La from the fantasy world of Opar to the mere imaginary world of the movies. This leaves Balza- The Golden Girl- who probably represents Florence, but we will deal with her in the appropriate place.
ERB has now gotten the two women, the Arabs and Tarzan to the Falls. Orman, West and the safari are assembling at the base of the Falls so, having dissolved his story after the Bansuto attack ERB has now reintegrated it.
After a series of adventures during which Buckingham kills Suffolk, Tarzan appears to rescue Naomi killing Buckingham. At this point in Burroughs’ psychology he assumes the identity of his ordinary self and that of Tarzan into one being. As the movie people have never seen Tarzan they assume that he is Stanley Obroski his identical twin. Tarzan does not correct anyone but allows them to believe he is Stanley.
As I perceive it then ERB has now deluded himself into believing that he is Tarzan. Those who know him still perceive him as Ed Burroughs. He has no choice but to let them believe that because if he attempted to impose his delusion on them he might have been committed. Thus for a period of about five to six years from 1934 to 1939-40 Burroughs perceives himself as Tarzan but capitulates in Tarzan And The Madman giving up his illusion of being the Big Bwana. In Lion Man he describes Tarzan as a madman so the two novels are linked by the concept of madness.
After writing Madman Burroughs left California for Hawaii where he forced Florence away from him. WWII came along which saved him from himself. After the war he went back to LA to die. It is interesting that he didn’t choose to live in Tarzana but bought a house in Encino that backed against the Promised Land. thus like Moses, with whom there was a connection made in Tarzan Of The Apes, ERB was destined to view the Promised Land but not enter it.
In Lion Man he is flush with the hope of being able to live out his fantasy. He is now a few months from abandoning Emma so symbolically he returns Naomi to the safari at the Falls from whence she disappears from the story.
Only Rhonda and Balza will figure in the rest of the story. Emma is no more although Jane will appear again in Quest probably as Emma’s replacement Florence. In Magnificent Florence is mentioned only anonymously as Tarzan’s ‘wife.’ ERB is definitely struggling.
Having delivered Naomi to the safari Tarzan then reascends the plateau in search of Rhonda and the City of God.
The City Of God
7 c.
Every one of us, I believe, is possessed of two characters.
Often time they are so much alike that the duality is not noticeable,
but again there is a divergence so great
That we have the phenomenon of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
in a single individual.
E.R. Burroughs- The Swords Of Mars
Tarzan And the Lion Man was followed at the end of 1933 by the Mars story The Swords Of Mars which features the return of John Carter. ERB had taken a vacation from Emma returning to the scene of his own early adventures- Arizona. Not coincidentally in the White Mountain of Apache country. ERB’s motivations are sometimes obscure. He was in the Army in Arizona in 1896-97 which was before he married Emma. So he took his leave of absence from Emma to a place before he married her. Setting the clock back, so to speak, somewhat reminiscent of The Eternal Lover.
Just as Tarzan and Stanley met in Lion Man so while about to go to sleep, O.B.- The Other Burroughs- hears the door open, the clank of a man in war gear walking across the floor; terrified like an adolescent in a bad dream, O.B. is relieved and pleased when John Carter, back from Mars, greets him. A real Jekyll and Hyde situation. Thus as with Tarzan and Stanley the two Martian aspects of Buroughs are reunited but not melded. John Carter then tells O.B. a bedtime story as though Burroughs were a child again. I’m not that familiar with the Mars stories but there must be a connection to Lion Man and the MGM situation. This must be true because this is the novel in which the opening letters of each chapter spell- TO FLORENCE WITH ALL MY LOVE, ED. One assumes then that although the decision to leave Emma was difficult to make, ERB made the final decision in the Arizona mountains.
So now a few months earlier Tarzan/Stanley makes the journey to the City of God where he will be reunited with his Anima ideal, Rhonda -La of Opar- in prison. Thus his whole person both Anima and Animus are locked up by MGM.
Rhonda had been taken to Henry VIII by Buckingham and Suffolk. The city was called London, the country England and the river The Thames. As ERB jokingly smirks- The English always take a little bit of England with them wherever they go. Pretty funny, actually.
Here the events of Henry’s reign are being reenacted. As the apes are clones of Henry and his court who replicate their times one wonders whether each succeeding generation will be stuck in this one period of history reenacting it over and over until the end of time. Once again I am reminded of The Eternal Lover. ERB seems to be obsessed by the idea of time.
Rhonda was first placed with the wives of Henry, a week later being moved to a cell in God’s castle where Tarzan found her when he too was captured.
For now he was moving through the night until he came up against the ten foot high wall surrounding the City of London and within it the City of God. Here we have the historical confrontation between the spiritual and temporal powers. At the least the story is a very humorous parody of the religious situation of Henry VIII. Once again ERB ridicules religion and this is done so cleverly and with such genius.
But there are many levels of meaning. Earlier I mentioned that the capture of Tarzan may have been meant to replicate ERB;’s capture by MGM. In that sense then the City of God might represent MGM which boasted that it had more stars then Heaven. So there is probably a joke there too.
On the other hand, God is described as a formerly handsome Englishman. The only candidate for that role I can come up with is ERB’s bete noir, H.G. Wells. I think that I have adequately documented the literary feud between Wells and Burroughs. Wells began well with his scientific romances. While not as fresh and stunning as they were at the time of issue they still hold up well today. Even though ERB denied having ever read Wells I think that claim can be dismissed out of hand. ERB, then, would have been as impressed with Wells’ early romances as anyone else. Then when Wells began his campaign of defamation and ridicule which is most clearly represented in his Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island he fell from favor in Burroughs’ eyes, hence the grotesquely deformed ‘formerly handsome Englishman.’
As much as I like Wells he does pontificate. Like all Liberals he has a difficult time distinguishing his opinion from truth, right and wrong, or reality. While he does sometimes make a hit in his prophesying he is mostly wrong. Backing the Worker’s Paradise of Stalin’s USSR was certainly wrong and more than enough to discredit him in the staunch anti-Communist Burroughs’ eyes.
Wells probably shook Burroughs’ faith in the glory of England which had been a keystone of his secular faith fromt he beginning. Thus, combining MGM, Stalin and the USSR and Wells, Burroughs packages all the troublemakers of this perilous time for him into one big box with a bigger bow on top.
As his story could have no effect on his situation let us hope it was at least cathartic for him. When Tarzan ends up in the cage with Rhonda that about epitomizes Burroughs’ situation vis-a-vis MGM, Stalin and Wells. There are so many coincidences here that the brain revolves like a turret. Was it wholly coincidental that Wells showed up in Hollywood at the end of ’35 to visit fellow Red Charlie Chaplin just as Burroughs was completely boxed in because of his Guatemalan adventure?
Isn’t it amazing that Burroughs met his fate in Guatemala, the scene of the adventures of his early hero General Christmas and also the scene of some of the adventures of Ogden McClurg who was killed shortly after this return from the area in 1926? It may be truly coincidental but the further one digs very often the more dirt one turns up.
Burroughs may have felt confident he could write his way out of this box just as he was able to escape by self-publishing in 1930; perhaps he thought he could escape this time by making his own movies. If so, a little analysis would have shown him that the rules had drastically changed. Especially as he had signed the rights to represent his character Tarzan away.
Coincidental with the release of the MGM Tarzan movies which preempted the nature of Tarzan from literature came the decline in Burroughs’ own literary powers. Whereas in 1930 he was able to respond to the challenge with a series of top novels, after Lion Man there is a preciptious decline in the the quality of is work. While the later novels have their charms for Burroughs’ admirers they do lack commercial appeal.
By 1935 also Burroughs had antagonized radio which had become the major source of his income so that that medium was closed to him during his lifetime. With publication revenues declining and the comics by Burroughs’ own admission producing a pittance, ERB had only one major source of income left and that was the moves. MGM had him over a barrel.
MGM might have produced a whole series of Tarzan films along the lines of the Charlie Chan movies as Burroughs reuefully remarked but they chose instead to issue only four movies between 1932 and 1939. Obviously the makret would have borne more. The limited release schedule kept EBB on a short financial tether.
It is said that events cast their shadow before them so that it is possible, if not probable, that Burroughs foresaw the shape of things to come even as he wrote Lion Man.
In 1930 when the Reds invaded his dream land of Opar ERB abandoned that fantasy. The fabled city ceased to exist in his imagination while disappearing from the oeuvre. Now in Lion Man it appears that the enemy had captured the castle while building a ten foot wall around it with Tarzan/Burroughs on the outside. Thus Burroughs’ dream of separating himself from the world by a tne foot wall has been inverted in his imagination. He wasn’t keeping the world out; the world was keeping him out.
In the novel succeeding Lion Man, The Swords Of Mars, when the mad inventor Fal Sivas quails at taking hsi invented spaceship to the Martian moon Thuria the following exchange takes place between he and John Carter:
“But you built this ship to go to Thuria,: Carter cried. “You told me so yourself.”
“It was a dream,” he mumbled; “I am always dreaming, for in dreams nothing bad an happen to me.”
Fal Sivas can be taken as an alter ego of Burroughs. The Sivas probably refers to the Hindu god Shiva or Siva with whom Burroughs had become a devotee or developed a fascination for. Thus while his heroes Tarzan and John Carter are men of action Sivas/Burroughs or any other combination is not.
So in Lion Man Burroughs is desperately trying to become the man of action rather than the dreamer. The problem now is that ERB himself is past the point of no return. He has been walled out from the City of God.
In dreams however Tarzan enters the Heavenly City by a fantastic feat of strength that recalls Burroughs’ 1890-1920 infatuation with the Strong Men such as the Great Sandow.
The wall which Tarzan fancies was built to keep out lions i.e. the Lion Man has sharpened stakes pointing downward. p. 124:
…he leaped for the stakes. His hands closed upon two of them; then he drew himself up slowly until his hips were on a level with his hands, his arms straight at his sides. Leaning forward, he let his body drop slowly forward until it rested on the stakes and the top of the wall.
That seems to be an impossible feat of strength except in dreams, but then by this point Tarzan thinks he is dreaming. This might as well be an MGM movie lot such Burroughs spent five weeks on. Here the dream faces a sort of reality. As though pasing through a movie set as ERB must have done during those five weeks Tarzan comes to the steps leading to the Heaven of God. this Stariway to Heaven, Jacob’s Ladder.
As if to accent the relationship to MGM he passes the Apes of God who are dancing and partying. The scene will be replicated at the foot of the Falls when the movie company duplicates this scene thus strengthening the connection with MGM.
Tarzan begins the long climb up the Stairway to Heaven. The fire flares illuminating him on the steps but the apes below don’t notice- high above on a parapet of Heaven, God does. Note the resemblance to the move castle of Frankenstein. A man of action God quickly prepares a trap.
In real life the trap was probably the promise of the contract and money. ERB blames the movies for being duplicitous, which is definitely true, still, he had had a dozen or more years to work out the conditions prevailing on his own. After all, by 1932 he had proven product to sell. The public had even given a profit to some pretty crummy movies so that had he taken the time, acted on his own conditions, rather than just signing for a few quick bucks he might have retained a position of some control, made himself an equal partner. So, while MGM did betray him he might have been able to manage the situation.
Tarzan enters the castle to be confronted by six doors of which only #3 is open. Depending on how you count them there were six to eight major studios, thus the six doors may represent the Studios of which only MGM was willing to deal with him. Remember he had been blacklisted since 1922, the blacklist having been broken in 1928 by Joseph Kennedy.
Tarzan descends the stairs as heedlessly as Burroughs signed the contract and like Burroughs he finds himself trapped. The nose of noses sniffs the air and detects the delicate scent of a White woman. He has found she whom he sought, Rhonda.
7 d.
The Confrontation With God
Now Tarzan is reunited with his Anima ideal in the person of Rhonda formerly La of Opar. That Rhonda can be associated with La is because this scene is a replication or double of Tarzan and La in the lion’s den of Invincible. There La and Tarzan were imprisoned in a cell beneath Opar. They escaped the cell in a duplication of their escape from this prison. In Invicible there was a runway within which the lion fed. A shaft led upward to a room in a tower. There the old man who betrayed them discovered them.
In this case a breeze passing over the floor indicates an air shaft to Tarzan. This is probably borrowed from Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines although it will soon if not already be a staple of the movie genre. Tarzan locates the shaft in the ceiling in a corner of the cell. He and Rhonda ascend it to the opening in front of which God is talking to some gorillas. Thus the scene virtually duplicates Invincible. La and Rhonda must be associated in ERB’s mind.
As an aside Burrughs uses a variation of this scenario in The Swords Of Mars when John Carter is imprisoned. There are beams some twenty feet ot so above the floor to which Carter leaps. He takes a position above the door dropping on his keeper when he enters.
At this point in the story Tarzan and Stanley Obroski may be considered to be reunited as one persona. Rhonda, who has never seen Tarzan, addressed the person in Stanley’s guise as Stanley. ERB has a little fun as he has Tarzan play along.
As he says in Swords, he is convinced that every man has a dual Animus, that is two different aspects, sometimes nearly identical but sometimes as different as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Thus at this point his mind is impressed with Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. He had read both novels before 1900 while both stories were released as movies in 1931. So the stories are very fresh in his mind.
Tarzan/Obroski may be considered of the Jekyll/Hyde variety. There is little doubt that Burroughs saw the pair and himself that way. Thus Carter and Fall Sivas in Swords may also be seen as two sides (Jekyll/Hyde) of the same persona. Tarzan does not try to convince Rhonda that he is not Stanley, but in the Jekyll side of the persona he astounds here with Hydelike feats compelling her to reevaluate him.
There are undoubtedly snippets of other horror movies here that ERB has seen also but I can’t remember the titles or dates. There was one about two Scottish body snatchers Burke and Hare which I think I can detect here and another about a mad doctor who operated on the brains of abducted victims that shows up here and in Swords that was called the Black Sleept or somesuch. The latter would have had a castle along these lines as well as Frankenstein. Of course, which of that ilk of movie didn’t? Burroughs is combining an astounding number of influences here both literary and cinematic but both combined.
Thus, having availed himself of ‘such a God given opportunity’ to find Rhonda he is imprisoned with her. The joke was ERB’s. You know, God left the doors open- God given opportunity. I chuckled softly to myself as I read.
After an exchange of repartee between Stanley/Tarzan and Rhonda God makes his appearance. Not exactly what one would expect God to look like. In fact it is almost amazing that the fundamentalist Christians didn’t create an uproar. After all according to the Old Testament man was created in God’s image. There’s a laugh. Here’s the image. p. 128:
It had the face of a man, but its skin was black like that of a gorilla. Its grinning lips revealed the heavy fangs of an anthropoid. Scant black hair covered those portions of its body that an open shirt and a loin cloth revealed. The skin of the body, arms, and legs was black with large patches of white. The bare feet were the feet of a man; the hands were black and hairy and wrinkled, with long, curved claws; the eyes were the sunken eyes of an old man- a very old man.
The Scopes Monkey Trial had only been about seven years before. So here Burroughs is making sport of God with a sort of reverse evolution. God is a cross between a man and a gorilla. Yet ERB led such a charmed life that his mockery or parody of God created no comment. If he wanted to start a ruckus to promote his book sales he failed miserably.
God might have been half ape but he had a whole hearted sense of;humor. Overhearing Tarzan say that he had come for Rhonda his opening comments are mock injury. p. 128:
“So you are acquainted?” He said. “How interesting! And you came to get her, did you? I thought that you had come to call on me. Of course it is not quite the proper thing for a stranger to come by night without an invitation- and by stealth.
“It was just by the merest chance that I learned of your coming. I have Henry to thank for that. Had he not been staging a dance I should not have known, and thus I should have been denied the pleasure of receiving you, as I have.
“You see, I was looking down from my castle into the courtyard of Henry’s palace when his bonfire flared up and lighted the Holy Stairs- and there you were!
Burroughs is justly criticized for the occasional bit of wooden dialogue but I find the confrontation with God very well written. The constantly mocking tone of God is carried off very well. Tarzan’s indignation is very well executed. The influence of Shelley, Stevenson and the various movies is seamlessly blended into a very tightly executed scene.
All this is done in a very few pages while it is a remarkable bit of writing.
God hints at his motives for their use for him. p. 129:
“…I shall keep you for a while for the pleasure of conversing with rational human beings.
“I have not seen any for a long time, a long, long time. Of course I hate them nonentheless, but I must admit that I shall find pleasure in this companionship for a short time. You are both very good looking too. That will make it all the more pleasant, just as it increases your value for the purpose which I intend you- the final purpose, you understand. I am particularly pleased that the girl is so beautiful. I always did have a fondness for blonds. Were I not already engaged along some other lines of research, and were it possible, I should like nothing better than to conduct a scientific investigation to determine the biologial or psychological explanation of the profound attraction the blond female has for the male of all races.”
Burroughs doesn’t tell us how blonde Rhonda and Naomi are, whether they are platinum blondes like Kali Bwana or merely blondes. Of course today ERB would be censored for his handling of the sexual and racial preferences for blondes but it is a recurrent theme in his writing and one worth studying.
Having piqued our curiosity as to his purpose for the couple God leaves to check up on Henry. p. 130:
“Come back here!” (Tarzan) commanded. “Either let us out of this hole or tell us why you are holding us- what you intend doing with us.”
The creature wheeled suddenly, its expression transformed by a hideous snarl. “You dare issue orders to me!” It screamed.
“And why not?” demanded the ape-man. “Who are you?”
The creature took a step nearer the bars and tapped its hairy chest with a thorny talon. “I am God.” it cried.
There you go. The cat’s out of the bag.
The scene is dramatically successful while the reader is now left to guess the model for God. We are told that he was a formerly handsome Englishman now deformed as a hybrid ape-human. The city is London, the territory is England and the river is the Thames. A reasonable place to look would be among the English. Who among the English is bedeviling ERB? H.G. Wells is the only one I can think of. Regardless of whether Wells considered himself a Communist or not he is sailing his craft so close to the wind that it is impossible to distniguish between the two. At the very least Wells is throughly subversive. If anything he resents not being in Stalin’s place. So Burroughs must consider him Communist.
To my mind then, Burroughs is mocking Wells much as Wells mocked Burroughs in ‘Blettsworthy.’ God has delusions of grandeur and so does the highly pontificating Wells. My vote for the model is Wells.
One also notes that in the last of the MGM Tarzan movies, 1942’s Tarzan’s New York Adventure, Tarzan is captured by the circus roustabouts and thrown into a mobile cage. The camera then pans around to front which identifies the cage as a lion cage. One thus has the joke of the Lion Man in a lion’s cage. A final thumbing of the nose at Burroughs exiled in Hawaii. MGM then dropped what had been a very lucrative series. Strange behavior indeed.
God then returns to give his history as detailed earlier in the essay. While for some reason everyone, fans and detractors alike, wants to think of Burroughs as a semi-literate boob who is coincidentally a ‘master of adventure’ yet both in content and exposition, God presents his story in a masterly way. In 1930 there may have been few of his readers who had ever heard of Mendel and possibly Lamarck, although one hopes all had heard of Darwin. So it is possible that a reader might have been puzzled by the inclusion of Darwin while dismissing Larmarck and Mendel as fictitious. Of course if you’re reading strictly for fast-paced adventure you may not notice the details even though they are far from concealed.
God also clears up the mystery of the map. Surprisingly the map is not a stage prop but authentic. In fact, God made it about seventy years previously. It seems that he had been in love with a women back in England but she preferred wealth to being the wife of an impoverished scientist.
This may be a coincidence but that is the premise of the plot of H.G. Wells’ In The Days Of The Comet. Perhaps it was a message to Wells in case he hasn’t gotten it yet. But then God discovered the immense number of diamonds in the valley so he wrote the girl promising her riches beyond imagination. He had employed a native runner to take the letter to the coast to mail it but since he had never had a reply he wondered if it had ever been received. Now it came back to him. A simple but inventive twist.
When God leaves this time Tarzan sets to work to escape. Following the draft across the floor he finds the air shaft. Just as in Invincible he sends La up first now he sends Rhonda up first. As in the earlier story they are trapped at the top.
Looking through the entrance to the shaft they spy God and some gorillas in front of it. Their escape is spoiled. Now begins the Gotterdamerung.
The City of God
7 e.
The Gotterdamerung
Burroughs now has both aspects of his Animus with his Anima trapped in the tower unable to go foward or backward. God and his gorillas stand in anticipation before the opening. Burroughs has been stalemated. At this point one aspect of God must be MGM and its contract.
ERB has spun out his fantasy in a plausible way to this point, but now he has to find a way to resolve his dilemma. As he is daydreaming and this is a mad dream, as Fal Sivas says in Swords, in dreams nothing bad can happen to you. In this bind something bad can happen to ERB. He can lose his grip on reality. In that way he becomes mad or insane which is what the story is about.
In speaking of Henry God might also be speaking of ERB. p. 143:
“You all forget,” (God) cried, “that it was I who created you; it is I who can destroy you. First I shall make Henry mad, and then I shall crush him. That is the kind of gods humans like- it is the only kind they can understand. Because they are jealous and cruel and vindictive they have to have a jealous, cruel and vindictive god.”
There’s a lot information in that quote. It refers to the ancient Greek saying: Those who the gods would destroy they first make mad. So we have an excellent joke here. The incredible mind of Burroughs can conceive humor in the midst of the blackest despair.
He is talking of the Yahweh of the Old Testament while he quite soundly understands that god is a psychological projection of the mind of his creator. In a masterly grasp of Freudian group psychology, whether he knew it or not, he realized tha the people have created a god in their own image and not vice versa. Trapped in the tower this is a real agonized cry of despair before losing his grip on reality.
I don’t mean to say that ERB went stark raving mad but he edged into a fantasy world at least once removed from the fantasy he had been living since 1912. For the period of his marriage to Florence he can only be described as spaced out. Bear in mind that it’s going to get worse as he gets trapped into his movie production experience.
The Masenas in The Swords Of Mars make the threatening moves on John Carter who keeps backing away. Only too late he realized he had maneuvered himself where they wanted him. The Masenas were cat-men, i.e. lions who had two mouths. In a sly way Burroughs is caricaturing the Jews of MGM and their mascot Leo the Lion. The upper mouth which is sort of pursy and purring to seduce one, is above a lower mouth that is all teeth and no lips to rend one. So he is saying that he is dealing with two-faced people. While the upper mouth is assuring, the lower rending mouth is ever ready to destroy you.
Tarzan realizes that he has no choices left but to stay put or rush God and the gorillas. Alone he would have had a chance of success but with Rhonda in tow he is lost. This is an interesting reflection on the relationship of the Animus to the Anima. I’m at a bit of a loss to explain this.
God had sent for Rhonda to be told that she was not in the cell. Knowing that Tarzan was in the air shaft it followed that Rhonda was too as neither could have escaped the cell otherwise. He orders smudge pots to be lighted to smoke them out. Thus Burroughs acknowledges that his own situation is untenable while he has no solution. The only one left is the Samson like effort of pulling the temple down on his own head destroying both himself and his enemies.
God’s plan backfires as he sets his own castle afire. Unable to stand the smoke any longer Tarzan rushes out to be felled by a blow from one of the apes. At this precise point ERB goes mad or loses his mental balance. I don’t believe there is a Tarzan novel in which the Big Bwana isn’t knocked on the head at least once. In this case when he gets up he won’t have lost his memory but he will be a different man, another round of emasculation.
Once again he is separated from his Anima. Rhonda is spirited off to Henry. God and Tarzan are trapped on the patio as the castle becomes engulfed in flames.
This chapter is appropriately titled ‘The Holocaust.’ In its way everything that ERB had hoped and dreamed goes up in flames with God’s castle. Heaven is reduced to ashes.
Tarzan has his trusty rope so he can escape over the parapet to the roof of a lower level. God begs him to save him which Tarzan reluctantly does.
Tarzan, one has difficulty in styling him the Big Bwana in this emasculated state, reverses the actual situation between Burroughs and MGM by placing the rope around God’s neck putting him on a short tether. Henry is now in full revolt. Tarzan agrees to help God in exchange for his help in recovering Rhonda and letting them leave. Perhaps Burroughs was asking MGM for a release from his contract. Let by Tarzan the forces of God defeat Henry.
I’m not clear who Henry represents or if he is meant to represent a real individual. Aware of his defeat Henry abandons his wives for the blonde White woman, Rhonda. He has a secret subterranean escape route. Thus Burroughs, who through Tarzan stormed the gates of Heaven, the heights of consciousness, has first returned to earth and now slips back into the subconscious. In all probability then, his attempt to integrate his personality had failed while coming so close.
Henry had followed his tunnel to emerge into the valley of diamonds and mutants. Here he encounters a lion. Throwing Rhonda down he runs from the lion which we all know is the exact wrong thing to do. Rhonda then escapes.
Tarzan emerges from the tunnel just as the lion is rending Henry. So Henry perishes. Tarzan sets off into the valley of diamonds in pursuit of Rhonda or, in another word, his Anima.
The City Of God
7 f.
The Golden Girl
While one is astonished that there was no uproar because of ERB’s treatment of God, Heaven and the gorillas, one is even more astonished that at no time since 1912 was ERB ever under attack for his views on evolution. The oeuvre is a veritable compendium on the various possible results of evolution yet no one ever said a word nor has to this day.
In LIon Man which treats of evolution in perhaps his most daring way yet, his effort is met with stony silence. God, in his creation of the hybrid gorillas according to the logic of Gregor Mendel, had a large number of sports and variations. The ‘normal’ hybrid apes refused to accept these either killing them or driving them from their society.
God laments that the tendency to exclusivity, or like to like, was such a strong characteristic of the new species that he could do nothing to break the hybrid’s attitude. This must be a wry comment on those who wished to break down racial and special barriers.
Apart from the role of White women in racial politics, which ERB through God has already commented on, there is not, nor will there ever be, inclusivity of different races on the pshysiological level nor even on the intellectual level of religion.
Thus the theme of separation in this spurious London, England was a variation on Opar where normal males were killed producing the ape-like male Oparians, while only the beautiful females were preserved. In this case the rejected hybrids, who bear some resemblance to the Hormads created by Ras Thavas, have taken up residence across the Thames. Among them, as one might suppose, Mendelian genetics predicts, were two human looking specimens. The male who was perfectly human in form had a gorilla mind; the female although rumored to have a gorilla mind in fact was a perfect human in mind while also possessing a normal human form.
She is the mate of the human looking male as kind mates with kind. Tarzan, having recovered Rhonda, finds Balza, which means Golden Girl, being abused by her mate. He rescues her but the trio is set upon by the whole tribe of mutants.
Balza explains to Tarzan that having defeated her former mate Tarzan has claimed her for his own. She is his, will-he or nil he. She then becomes hostile to the Anima figure of Rhonda.
So now we have a difficult psychological situation. Burroughs, who believes that every man is of a dual personality, has first united the two Lion Men and has now killed off one half of the duality leaving Tarzan as a single psychological unit. Not integrated but half a man so to speak. This is in violation of his stated belief which he has clarified no further. At the same time Balza seems to be driving his old Anima figure of La/Rhonda away, replacing her. Thus this Wild Thing becomes both Burroughs’ Anima ideal and human woman. We have single with single, or half with half. Now we have a single Animus, the Lion Man, Tarzan and Wild Thing as his Anima and woman. This is quite a combination. That would certainly explain the nature of the next several years of ERB’s life when he seems to run completely off the rails.
He expresses this in his work of the thirties in different ways. The Venus series is born out of this conflict in the second half of 1932 subsequent to the release of the movie Tarzan, The Ape Man. John Carter does reappear at the end of 1933 in The Swords Of Mars but Burroughs in the Venus series creates a much lesser man than either Carter or Tarzan; Napier is a pale shadow reflecting Burroughs neo-emasculated state.
In the first venus volume Napier heads for Mars in his rocket ship. Mars or the Greek Ares is the manly planet. But now suffering from his further emasculation Burroughs no longer feels capable of competing with men on Mars. Thus Napier has miscalculated the influence of the Moon, or female influence, which bends his trajectory sending him to the female planet Venus instead. In terms of classical mythology with which Burroughs was very familiar the Moon represents the feminine principle, while Venus, the Roman form of the Greek Aphrodite, represents the force of Love. Thus in symbolical terms ERB/Napier is diverted from the Manly principle of Mars by the female principle of the Moon and sent to the planet representing domination by the feminine principle of Love. Napier is not a warrior.
In Lion Man, written a few months after The Pirates Of Venus Tarzan follows his female Anima principle, Rhonda, into the valley of diamonds, where he is attached to The Golden Girl, Balza. In Burroughs’ terminology diamonds represent the realization of his sexual hopes. So Rhonda in this instance can be taken to represent Napier’s moon who leads him to Balza, the planet Venus or Florence. Burroughs is now severely handicapped in his conflict with MGM. In this chapter of Lion Man when he catches up with Rhonda comes across Balza being beaten by her man, the sport with the human appearance and gorilla brain. Balza had been misrepresented earlier, actually having a human brain. She now attaches herself to the emasculated Tarzan.
In their flight from the mutants- Tarzan running away again- they discover a pit full of diamonds. Presaging Tarzan And The Forbidden City in which the father of diamonds is a piece of coal, the huge pile of diamonds has lost any value to him. Thus Burroughs senses in 1933 that love is going to be a serious disappointment.
As a matter of fact in his psychological malaise Balza/Florence seems to have lost any value to him. He leads the women to the foot of the Falls where they rejoin the movie company who are living riotously. Their dance is a double of the Dum Dum like dance of the gorillas. Not a favorable comparison, perhaps indicating that man has not advanced much from the apes. Leaving Balza to become a movie star Tarzan returns to the jungle to find Stanley dead, thus the dead Stanley is rather unaccountably accepted by the movie company who return to LA. The whole story becomes a sort of mirage which, while we know it did happen, never happened.
ERB as a writer has now completed Ring 2. He completes his Ring construction by returning to the site of Ring Left 1, Hollywood as Ring Right 1. As Holtsmark notes he has followed the classical mode of Homer. He has not only done that but written his most perfect example. I find Lion Man masterly on all levels, in fact, ERB’s Magnum Opus.
A year after the movie company returned to the US Tarzan himself undertakes a visit to the film colony of Hollywood.
Go To Part 8, More Stars Than There Are In Heaven
Part 6, Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review
May 19, 2008
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man
Part 6
by
R.E. Prindle
First published on the ezine, ERBzine
The Center Of The Circle
Burroughs does a remarkable thing in this ring that clearly shows the Greek classical influence per Erling Holtsmark in his Tarzan And Tradition. ERB disolves his story and cast of characters after the last Bansuto attack. The cast is dispersed in several directions but ERB will deliver them all to Omwamwi Falls as he begins the three right hand rings: 3-2-1
In fact this does follow the Homeric tradition. The story of the Trojan Wars was actually a massive story of which only three parts survive, the Iliad, which concerns the central part of the epic and th two Returns, The Odyssey and The Oresteia. All the rest has been lost or survives only in fragments such as ‘The Judgement Of Paris.” Originally the epic was thousands of pages long. There were undoubtedly few scholars who had ever read the story in its entirety and fewer still who understood it.
It seems incredible that a very young ERB could have grasped the structure so completely while seeming to understand it so thoroughly. Holtsmark quotes ERB as saying that he was rereading Plutarch’s Lives in 1923 when he discovered that Numa was the name of a Roman emperor, actually one of the Republican kings, To that point he had believed that he had made up the name.
Thus we learn that ERB did some rereading and his subconscious supplied material. He could have, it is plausible, read the Iliad and Odyssey a number of times over his life. Along with other classical reading the basic method was established in his subconscious which he was able to consciously manipulate.
The Trojan War was the first of the three great sprawling European epics, unmatched in any other literatrue. The second was the Arthurian Saga also huge, sprawling through many thousands of pages and many different variations. The story has its roots in Greek mythology as well as in the Christian ethos. The Lancelot-Grail alone is several thousand pages. Burroughs doesn’t seem to have been much concerned with it. Indeed, most of it would have been untranslated in his time thus being unavailable to him.
The third great cycle was the strange nineteenth century English pursuit of the Grail in the search for the source of the Nile. In my estimation a rather peculiar obsession. This story too occupies several thousands of pages as all the participants recorded their efforts in copious detail. Livingston, Stanley, Burton, Baker and Speke have written magnficent narratives. Speke walking the Nile North after just having discovered the source actually ran into Baker following the Nile South. A remarkable accidental encounter that goes unnoticed. The best overview and history of the quest is Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile of 1960. He provides an adequate background for these modern knights in seach of an unlikely Grail. The Tarzan oeuvre might be indluded as a fourth cycle based on cycles one and three.
The first and third epics then involved ERB intimately. The Tarzan series is based on the Africa of the Nile Quest while framed in the literary construction of the first.
Burroughs then dissolves his story after the Bansuto attack then telling the story of the several participants on the way to Omwamwi Falls in the manner of the Homeric Returns. He then reassembles them less Obroski at the Omwamwi or Murchison Falls on the Nile. Thus the river cascading from the plateau is actually the Nile. What he calls the Thames on the plateau of the City of God must be indeed a substantial stream.
We have already dealt with the fate of Stanley Obroski and Tarzan. After the last Bansuto attack the Arabs agreed to take the midnight to six watch. During the night they folded their tents and silently stole away taking Rhonda, Naomi and the map with them.
Orman decides to go off in pursuit of them alone. Bill West convinces him to take himself along so the two abandon the safari to pursue the girls and Arabs.
Tarzan neutralizes the Bansuto by having them promise to be kind to Whites so the remaining safari members are able to somehow get their trucks and equpment to the Falls unmolested, that leaves the girls, the Arabs and Orman and West.
After leaving Obroski shivering with fright in a tree Tarzan comes upon Orman and West as they are being attacked by a lion. Plummeting from the convenient tree Tarzan dispatches the lion, immediately disappearing back into his tree. This is the first incident of the cast mistaking Tarzan for Obroski. I happen to think Burroughs handles this confusion extremely well. After all, Burroughs has firmly established Obroski’s cowardice with the safari members.
Orman and West’s astonishment at the seeming Obroski feat is very genuine. Later when Tarzan supplies them with a buck while translating Arabic from Atewy their astonishment can’t be more complete. Very effectively handled. Having supplied them with food Tarzan points them in the right direction and gets them started with a swift kick so that leaves the Arabs and the girls to account for. This also begins the comparison of the qualities of Rhonda and Naomi.
The Arabs have the map to the valley of diamonds that they believe is genuine and indeed it is. Unable to read English, the language of the map, they make promises of freedom to gain the cooperation of the girls. Rhonda scoffs at the genuineness of the map believing it a movie prop. However they can locate their position according to the landmarks provided by the map. Astonishingly they are able to locate all the landmarks which lead them to the Omwamwi Falls.
Naomi accepts her captivity while Rhonda plans escape. She effects this by saddling a couple ponies at night while driving the rest of the herd off. This episode is also well handled and quite believable given that this is a fantasy novel. The net result is that Naomi is recaptured while Rhonda makes it to the falls where the story is forwarded by her capture by the Apes of God. Another little joke, I presume.
Following both the map and Rhonda the Arabs and Naomi arrive at the Falls. The action then finishes the parallel story to Tarzan and Obroski of the girls and begins the right second ring story of The City Of God. This is a magnificent story full of many twists and surprises. In our day this stuff has been used over and over so that the imaginative feat is diluted or lost. If one places one’s imagination back in 1933 one can marvel at Burroughs; ingenuity while seeing how disappointed ERB was that the novel fell flat. Such is life.
Part 5 Tarzan And The Lion Man: A Review
May 19, 2008
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man
Part 5
by
R.E. Prindle
First published on the ezine, ERBzine
Tarzan, Obroski And Burroughs
Burroughs has been ridiculing Obroski right along as an arrant coward. Wherever the action is, Stanley isn’t. When it’s over he shows up ready to fight. When a call for the safe job of kitchen help is made after the porters desert Stanley raises his hand.
The cowardice is in contrast to his magnficent physique. Standing 6’8″ or 9″ in his bare feet while his strength is as prodigious as that of Tarzan. No one in the safari has yet seen Tarzan but he and Stanley are as identical twins. When Stanley becomes fever stricken and disappears from the story the movie cast will confuse Tarzan for Obroski providing some amusing moments.
Over the oeuvre Burroughs uses the divice of a Tarzan double a number of time times. Esteban Miranda in Tarzan And The Golden Lion/Ant Men, here as Stanley Obroski and again in Tarzan And The Forbidden City as Brian Gregory stand out. The doubles are quite obviously aspects of Burroughs’ own character. As the doubles are all cowardly, inept or both one has to assume they represent Burroughs as he perceived himself before becoming a success while Tarzan represents Burroughs as a success. There was obviously a constant psychic tug of war between the two Burroughs. This was something ERB was desperately trying to resolve in favor of the Tarzan persona.
The quesiton is, was he ever successful in resolving the problem by psychologically integrating his personality? At several times in the corpus he seems to have succeeded even to the extent of killing off his old persona. But then there are doubts and Brian Gregory appears a few years later.
If I live long enough I will try a comparison of Miranda, Obroski, Gregory and Burroughs. Notiice the progression of the double from Spanish to Slav to Anglo. The Spaniard was the epitome of worthlessness at the turn of the century while the Slav though higher was despised. Gregory as an Anglo would indicate that Burroughs may have reconciled his self-esteem at least.
As a more or less irrelevant aside it is known that Tennessee Williams (1911-83) was a Tarzan fan. He was twenty-three years old when Lion Man was issued while A Streetcar Named Desire was staged in 1947. It may seem tenuous to make the connection between the names of Stanley Obroski and Stanley Kowalski but there it is. There are resemblances between Stanley-Naomi and Stanley-Blanche allowing for the fictionalizing powers of Williams. There is no proof that Williams specifically read Lion Man that I know of but it is neither impossible or improbable given his admiration for the character. Perhaps the germ of Stanley-Blanche was placed in Williams’ mind in 1934-35 germinating away in his subconscious to blossom eleven or twelve years later. I don’t say it’s so but it is worth investigating.
In the construction of this novel the story of Obroski and Tarzan forms Ring Three. The story moves from Ring Two, The Safari and will segue into the inner ring.
In Chaper 8, The Coward, Burroughs devotes six pages to explaining or rather justifying the character of Obroski. In justifying Obroski Burroughs is justifying himself which is why he took such pains with this book.
During the last Bansuto attack in Chapter 8 Obroski panicked. As the Bansuto attacked from one side Obroski ran off in the opposite direction. Unfortunately the Bansuto were on both sides and Obroski ran into their open arms. Now cornered Obroski fought from reflex: pp. 46-47:
Death stared him in the face! Heretofore Obroski’s dangers had been more or less imaginary; now he was faced with a stark reality.
Terror galvanized his mind and his giant muscles into instant action. He seized the black and lifted him above his head; then he hurled him heavily to the ground.
The black, fearful for his life, started to rise. Obroski fearful for his own, lifted him high overhead and again cast him down. As he did so a half dozen blacks, closed upon him from the tall surrounding grasses and bore him to earth.
His mind half numb with terror, Obroski fought like a cornered rat. The blacks were no match for his great muscles. He seized them and tossed them aside, then he turned to run. But the black he had first hurled to the ground reached out and seized him by an ankle, gripping him; then the others were upon him again and more came to their assistance…In all his life Stanley Obroski had never fought before. A good disposition and his strange complex had prevented him from seeking trouble and his great size and strength had deterred others from picking quarrels with him.
So, while Obroski was a coward when he had time to consider, in the grip of terror he was quite capable of using his great strength and size to fight back.
His cowardice was not his fault or part of his nature. Burroughs reflects further. p. 45:
We are either the victims or beneficiaries of heredity or environment.
Obroski was obviously the result of nurture. Thus we have no responsibility for what we are and can take no credit as we are either victims or beneficiaries. This is a fairly serious position statement.
Stanley Obroski (Burroughs) was one of the victims. Heredity had given him a mighty physique, a noble bearing and a handsome face. Environment had sheltered and protected him throughout his life. Also everyone with whom he had come in contact had admired his great strength and attributed to him courage commensurate with it.
Never until the past few days had Obroski been confronted by an emergency that might test his courage, and so all his life had been wondering if his courage would measure up to what was expected of it when the emergency developed.
He had given the matter far more thought than does the man of ordinary physique because he knew so much more was expected of him than of the ordinary man. It had become an obsession together with the fear that he might not live up to the expectations of his admirers. And finally he became afraid- afraid of being afraid.
It is a failing of nearly all large men to be keenly affected by ridicule. It was the fear of ridicule, should he show fear, rather than the fear of physical suffering, that Obroski shrank from, though perhaps he did not realize this. It was a psyche far too complex for easy analysis.
It is impossible to know for certain at this time what psychology texts Burroughs had been studying but ‘a psyche far too complex for easy analysis’ points in the direction of Freud, Jung or both. ERB seems to have been involved in Depth Psychology of some sort. David Adams finds traces of Jung. I am not prepared to concede so much at present but David may be much more sensitive on that score than myself. I don’t rule it out although I would lean more to Freud as the better known. Still, as I find ERB to be a very inquisitive guy there is no reason he couldn’t have known of both. Either would likely have been mentioned in his varied reading and we know he was an omnivorous reader.
At any rate it seems clear that Obroski’s heredity was overridden by the conditioning of environment. Unable to overcome the conditioning or hypnotic suggestion he became as we find him.
There seems little doubt that here ERB is explaining himself. Obroski and Tarzan are identical in stature and abilities but in order to realize his Tarzanic potential he must overcome his environmental conditionings and assume his proper being.
Whether the emergency Tarzan/Burroughs is facing in his difficulty with MGM or something else it seems likely MGM as the struggle is placed in the context of the MGM/BO Studios filming Trader Horn/Tarzan, The Ape Man.
So Obroski is captured by the Bansuto and made prisoner in their village. Here he encounters Kwamudi, captain of the safari Blacks and a couple porters who had been captured after deserting. Obroski learns that the Bansuto are cannibals and that he will be the man who came to dinner.
Burroughs gets in some sly humor here. Bound and starved Obroski complains about his treatment. p. 51:
“This is no way to treat people you’re going to eat.” grumbled Obroski. “You ought to get ’em fat, not starve ’em thin.”
ERB has already given notice that he is in psychological mode. He says that Obroski’s psyche is too complex for easy analysis, whatever that might be. That’s what we all say and it’s bosh. When I was younger I thought my psyche so unique and complex I wanted to offer myself to science as a specimen. As my own self-psychoanalysis evolved I realized the only thing that made it so complex was the resistance involved in facing the fixations. So with Burroughs. In a few pages he lays out out completely the problem he is facing in symbolical or dream imagery. Only resistance anf fear prevent him from breaking on through.
A psychoanalyst could lay your whole problem before you but if you weren’t ready to deal with it, in other words, overcome the resistance, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You’d think he was talking about someone else. So here ERB lays out his whole problem before you but if you weren’t ready to deal with it, in other words, over come the resistance, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You’d think he was talking about someone else. So here ERB lays out his whole problem. Whether he resolved it is a matter of debate. David Adams thinks not while I have not yet made up my mind.
The problem he is dealing with is his central childhood fixation of John The Bully. I have already gone into this in Doubles and Insanity but it won’t hurt to give a variant interpretation as this very key incident meets with a lot of resistance from Bibliophiles on its own.
As has been noted Burroughs was plagued by dreams of appearing naked in public. Nakedness is a significant theme in the oeuvre. Tarzan himself runs around naked except for a skimpy g-string; so Tarzan’s natural condition and Burroughs dream fears mesh. He has made a virtue of necessity.
In psychological terms John The Bully so emasculated Burroughs that he lost his offensive and defensive armor which is to say to the civilized man his clothes. Burroughs always says of Tarzan that his veneer of civilization went no deeper than his clothes. Nothing could be clearer than the relationship to ERB’s situation on the corner. ERB explains the nature of nakedness to the civilized man. p. 58:
“He says for you to take off your clothers, Bwana.” said Kwamudi, “he wants them.”
“All of them?” inquired Obroski.
“All of them, Bwana.”
(Note the excruciating deliberateness as ERB painfully drags this scene out.)
Exhausted by sleeplessness, discomfort, and terror, (Here ERB makes excuses for himself.) Obroski had felt that nothing but torture and death could add to his misery, but now the thought of nakedness awoke him to new horrors. To the civlilized man clothing imports a confidence that is stripped away with his garments.
So, in real life, Burroughs had been psychologically stripped naked by John having lost his self-confidence. This is an accurate understanding. When he constructed his alter ego, Tarzan, he made him naked in his uncivilized state, hence full of self-confidence though naked, but then clothed him handsomely in his civilized state in which he was uncomfortable. Thus ERB attempted to resolve the problem.
Now when John bullied ERB he forced a split in his personality. while his physical self was humiliated his psychological self split off symbolically taking to the trees for refuge. Hence Tarzan’s fabulous arboreal exploits while he views so many scenes from above in a tree.
Now comes the very interesting scene in Rungula’s village where Tarzan suffers the shock of recognition as he looks down on his own replica from the tree to the ground.
Tarzan is in no rush to visit Rungula’s village, perhaps indicating resistance. Here’s how ERB describes it. p.61:
Tarzan of the Apes was ranging a district new to him, and with the keen alertness of the wild creature he was alive to all that was strange or unusual. Upon the range of his knowledge depended his ability to cope with the emergencies of an unaccustomed environment. Nothing was so trivial that it did not require investigation: and already, in certain matters concerning the haunts and habits of game, both large and small, he knew quite as much if not more than many creatures that had been born here.
For three nights he had heard the almost continuous booming of tom-toms, faintly, from afar; and during the day following the third night he had drifted slowly in his hunting in the direction from which the sounds had come.
Surely an old jungle baby like Tarzan could understand the language of the drums? That is called procrastination.
And so on the third day ‘He was arisen.’ Hmmm. In Tarzan Of The Apes the birth of Tarzan replicated that of Moses and now Obroski is to die while a new Tarzan arises a la Jesus.
I had my attention called to this Moses part while visiting a Jewish site. The writer was marveling that Superman was Jewish and that his birth replicated that of Moses which it does. I had always thought that the two teenage Jewish boys who created Superman were replicating Tarzan’s birth and that may be equally true.
In the Moses story he is born to a Jewish woman who places him in an ark then puts it in the Nile on which he floats downstream to be rescued by an Egyptian princess who rears him among a different people. This story presupposes that heredity overcomes environment which is nonsense. One is not born a Jew one is educated into the identity.
Superman is born a Kryptonite, placed in a rocket ship that crashes into this goyish earth couple’s backyard. They then rear the Kryptonite child as their own who then has a double identity as an ineffective Earthman while retaining his Kryptonite powers. Thus the Jew represents himself as superior to the goy.
Tarzan too is born to a human mother who dies. He is lying in his cradle when the ape, Kala, snatches him up rearing him as her own. The different people Tarzan grows up with are apes. Thus he too has a double identity.
All three stories are identical while Moses is first, Tarzan second and Superman third. Thus in his first incarnation Tarzan appears to be a Moses figure.
In Lion Man Tarzan apperas to be born again when he absorbs his other split off half- Obroski. Thus on the third day Tarzan assumes a Christ like identity.
Many have noted that the intitials of John Carter and John Clayton are JC and they call attention to the fact that they are the same initials as Jesus Christ.
So, here we have Tarzan, a walking dead man so to speak, who after three nights -Good Friday to Easter Sunday- looks down on the other half of his split personality and recognizes himself. The two halves then begin a process of amalgamation becoming one again. So Tarzan/Burroughs is born again or arises from the dead.
Tarzan then unites the Old and New Testaments being at one and the same time both Moses and Jesus Christ. The old Adam and the new Adam. Fairly astonishing stuff. What does it mean?
Tarzan then hauls Rungula up into his tree i.e. John the Bully is brought up to Burroughs split off personality where Tarzan demands that he release Obroski i.e. John restore Burroughs other half to himself while at the same time making him promise to be always kind to Whites.
Obroski then leaves Rungula/John’s village where he joins Tarzan. Thus Burroughs symbolically reunites his split personality or in other words appears to integrate his personality. At least he makes the attempt.
At the very least he has analyzed himself to the threshold of integration. Whether he actually stepped over the threshold is open to doubt. As a comparison let us examine Feodor Dostoievsky’s great nineteenth century novel Crime And Punishment. There is no direct evidence that Burroughs might have read the book but the possibility exists that his curiosity led him to this very famous 1866 novel. If so, Dostoievsky’s analysis of Raskolnikov might have influenced ERB on the unconscious level. I had to read the novel three times to get a conscious grasp of it.
The novel concerns the character’s dependence on women. Raskolnikov is dependent on his mother and sister who make tremendous sacrifices of their own well being to put him through law school. Raskolnikov resents his dependence yet can’t tear himself from it even when offered a simple and easy opportunity to do so. His solution to his psychological problem bypasses analysis for an impossible external one. He decides to symbolically kill his mother and sister hoping thus to free himself. Psychologically this is not a viable method.
As his victim he selects an old female pawnbroker. This woman has large assets stored in her apartment. Thus Raskolnikov takes valuables from her in lieu of the money he is receiving from his mother. In the process he kills the old woman and when her daughter appears he kills her too. Thus he has killed surrogates of his own women. The pawn broker’s body lies before him. To free himself, according to Dostoievsky it is necessary for him to step over the body thus completing the crime. Raskolnikov cannot do this, walking around the body instead thus negating the benefits of his murder.
In Burroughs’ case his imaginary alter ego, Tarzan, convinces Rungula/John to release Obroski/Burroughs from custody. In other words, exorcise the fixation. However, psychologically Rungula/John cannot do this. It is necessary for Burroughs to confront his fixation and recognize it thus negating the hypnotic suggestion that made it his fixation that he is a coward thus freeing himself. That is the only way it can be done. Thus as Raskolnikov did not step over the pawnbroker’s body so Burroughs does not cross over the threshold of integration at this time.
Instead his imaginary self, Tarzan, attempts to teach his temporal self, Obroski, to be brave and fearless. Hence, in what might be seen as high comedy, Tarzan introduces the Faux Lion Man to the real lion. However Tarzan advises Obroski to be careful around Jad-Bal-Ja’s new love of whom Tarzan has no experience.
As soon as Tarzan disappears Obroski/Burroughs who had been freed by John scurries for the security of the lower terrace where he cowers until the Big Bwana’s return. Subsequently he catches fever not unlike Raskolnikov, if Burroughs read Crime And Punishment. Tarzan entrusts the unconscious Obroski to a native chief to nurse. From that point on Tarzan assumes both identities as the movie company who have never seen him and are unaware that he and Obroski are twinlike mistake him for Obroski which Tarzan lets them do. Obroski then dies.
If Burroughs thought he had solved his problem by wishing himself into the role of Tarzan he had to be mistaken. As Jung pointed out in Mysterium Coniunctionis one cannot will one’s fixations away. No matter what temporary success you may enjoy the fixation will out.
In the role of Tarzan Burroughs set himself an impossible task to perform. Tarzan is an ideal to hold before oneself for emulation’s sake but an impossible role to fill. Burroughs admitted this in his posthumously published novel Tarzan And The Madman in which in the end he simply gets into a plane and flies off into the sunset.
The story of the two Lion Men forms the third ring in the story. We will now examine the inner ring, the center of the storm, and then the other side of ring three, the parellel story of the two female lookalikes, Naomi and Rhonda.
Advance to Part 6: The Center Of The Circle
Book II-2 Something Of Value
January 11, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II-2
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
Your world is out of step in the planetary procession.
– Book Of Urantia
The melting of the ice caps threw the evolutionary world out of equilibrium. As the peoples fled, who can now be called Libyans, they bumped into populations settled in what were formerly the highlands. In Egypt this caused a confrontation with the Upper Egyptians that may have lasted a couple millennia or more until the Libyans of Lower Egypt were conquered by the Upper Egyptians uniting the Two Lands.
No one knows what took place on Crete which may already have been part of the Basin civilization while it is possible that the Cretans spread the Basin civilization to Pelasgia on the mainland.
Probably North Africa including Egypt and Crete received the bulk of the emigrants. Smaller numbers unable to hold their own obviously settled in the Levant and adjacent areas. The wonderful temples of Catul Huyuk dated to 6500 B.C. must have been built by the fleeing Libyans. These settlements may have later been overwhelmed by their savage neighbors. A group may have reached present day Hungary since this area seems to have been a hotbed of intelligence. Laurence Gardner in his interesting series of books believes writing originated there from whence migrants carried the knowledge to Sumer about- -4000. Might be true, timeframe is possible.
We tend to see such occurrences as History outside Darwinian evolution. Viewed from a perspective of Darwinian evolution what we have here is a clash of sub-species. Darwin poses this problem in his ‘Origin of Species.’
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species; and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.
With Homo Sapiens we will be able to see precisely why. The discussion I make will not be based on morality but on the exigencies of the battle of life. The sub-species of Homo Sapiens are part of the natural order engaged in the struggle for survival and not outside it. Altruistic ideas about the brotherhood of man are all very well but such ideas can be interpreted in different ways. For instance one might argue that we will all be brothers when all are Moslems; or, we will all be brothers when under Chinese hegemony. But it is doubtful that very many but the totally naive believe we are all brothers as things stand.
Many peoples who have existed no longer have an existence and it is certain that in the not too distant future many others are going to become as extinct as the legendary Dodo bird. That’s why people talk about being dumb as a Dodo, you Dodo, etc. So no sentimentality here.
The initial clash came between the Semites and the Sumerians. While the origin of the Sumerians is in doubt, as they had a proto-scientific civilization they were not Semites. However as they built up their civilization creating something from, as it were, nothing, envy will draw attention. The Semites of the desert attracted by this glittering something which far exceeded their own thinking began to infiltrate Sumeria.
As Darwin put it: How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another… The Sumerians chose to be tolerant with a people who are by nature intolerant. By the year -2000 or the beginning of the Age Of Aries the Semites had overrun and displaced the Sumerians. Sumerian institutions which had great allure for the Semites were not abandoned or destroyed but the Semites gutted the forms of their scientific content replacing it with their own brand of stasis.
At the Dawning of Aries according to Genesis a conflict arose between the Terachites and the Mesopotamians over the nature of God. It will be remembered that the transition of the Ages between Taurus and Aries in Greece saw the replacement of Cronus by Zeus. In Greek mythology this was represented as the battle between Zeus and the Titans. In Sumerian mythology it was represented by the killing of the Bull of Heaven by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Having succeeded in their heroic task the haunch of Taurus was made a constellation over the North Pole. In other words a remnant of the previous Age.
The Lugal Banda assumed the reins from the fourth king after the Flood. Now, we are led to believe that the Terachites under their Astrological genius Abram objected to the notion of Ages. Abram insisted that there was one god who was eternal. As the Old Order would not give on this point we are told that the overriding genius Abram and the Terachites were caused to flee for their lives. They wisely did, however they kept this idea alive for two thousand years becoming an ever greater cause of disturbance during the transit from Aries to Pisces.
Thus, one may say the battle was joined between the Astrological Religion and Semitic religious ideas. This battle is central to understanding world history. We will see a refinement of the Jewish position when Mohammed formulated his own even sillier religion.
Let us take a moment to examine the Semitic position. The question is not one of Jews and Arabs as the two are parts of the same stock, but that of Semites. The religions of Judaism and the Moslemism that Mohammed formulated are quite close. They both give their people preeminence amongst the peoples of the world and they both take an adamant position against change. The Jews wish to make their god sole and eternal while the Moslems hope to stop time and change by declaring Mohammed the last prophet and his word the last word. Vain hopes!
Now, in the seventh century the Moslems burst from the desert overrunning large areas of North Africa and Asia forcing their religion on the subject peoples. Some people, Bernard Lewis for one, fancy that this rule was liberal but that something went wrong a couple centuries later. Nothing went wrong from the Semitic point of view, everything went right. It merely took them that long to suppress the scientific and intellectual vitality of the subject peoples. The story was the same as in Sumer. Once in control they suppressed science and knowledge in favor of their projection of Allah or his early formulation as the god of stasis.
Edgar Rice Burroughs recognized this in a passage of Tarzan Of The Apes that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Archimedes Q. Porter and Mr. Philander are walking down the beach apparently discussing the Alhambra and the Moors in Spain. Philander’s was a stock argument still current in my childhood and apparently still current with scholars of the stripe of Bernard Lewis.
Samuel T. Philander is speaking:
‘But, my dear professor,’ he was saying, ‘I still maintain that but for the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella over the fifteenth century Moors in Spain the world would be to-day a thousand years in advance of where we now find ourselves.’
‘The Moors were essentially a tolerant, broad minded, liberal race of agriculturists, artisans and merchants- the very type of people that has made possible such civilization as we find in America and Europe- while the Spaniards-‘
‘Tut, tut, Mr. Philander,’ interrupted Professor Porter, ‘their religion positively precluded the possibilities you suggest. Moslemism was, is, and always will be a blight on that scientific progress which has marked…
Before 9/11 a reader might have skimmed over that passage without a remark but the Twin Towers have given it a new significance. Burroughs presciently put his finger on the Moslem problem that is its antipathy to science; to that knowledge that contradicts the word of Allah as imparted to Mohammed sitting on a rock baking in the hot desert sun.
Mr. Philander voices the received wisdom of society as it existed down to my childhood while if Mr. Bernard Lewis and his ‘something went wrong’ is representative of the present is still current today.
Burroughs through the mouth of Professor Porter boldly contradicts the almost universal opinion. Furthermore he is right as events have amply proven. ‘Moslemism was, is and always will be a blight on…scientific progress.’
Moslemism per se is a tool of the Semites in their bid for universal dominion as per Darwin. The Semite ever was and always will be opposed to any science that denies him that role. The Science of Bruce Lahn and genetics have driven that last nail in the Semitic coffin.
The Semite then as now seeks to arrest the development of knowledge and intelligence keeping things perpetually in stasis.
When Sigmund Freud gave us Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego the coupling of the two states means that there is a group ego and that it can be analyzed. A group, any group, has its objectives and goals for which it creates an agenda it follows. The Semites as a whole, both Jews, Arabs and others form a psychological group with objectives and goals. Therefore their group psychology can be analyzed.
Their methods and ways and means can be analyzed. As Freud indicates, such an analysis does not constitute bigotry or ‘hate.’ It is just scholarship. I didn’t mean to interrupt my narrative but I felt it was time to clear the air on that issue especially in light of what is happening to Mr. Le Pen in France.
Now, the Semite has a fear of being overwhelmed by numbers and being relegated to the dust bin of history. They wish preeminence. They realize wishful thinking won’t obtain it for them. It takes action. The year -2000 is when that action began in earnest.
First the Semites overran Sumer subordinating the people and its culture to Semitic ideals of Stasis.
I personally do not believe the Jewish account in Genesis. I believe that the Hebrews, as their Northwest Semitic dialect indicates, were located far to the West and North before they descended on Palestine. The whole of the first eleven books of Genesis must have been concocted from Mesopotamian records studied during the captivity after -586.
So I will not consider a Jewish influence before the final invasion of Palestine c. -1200.
After the investing of Sumer and the acquisition of Mesopotamia conflicts between the sub-species became more frequent. In the Darwinian sense the sub-special contest for dominance had begun. As Darwin stated: ‘We can see…why competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature…’
First Pharaoh toured the East disturbing the peoples, then the Hittites and Greeks entered civilization. The Asians countered by invading the Delta which was a long occupation before they were driven out.
The contest between the Semites and Egyptians was between HSII and the Semites. That of the Hittites was between the Semites and HS III. That of the Greeks between HSII and HS III and then as the Greeks and Semites clashed moving in the opposite direction between HS III and Semites.
As Greek legend tells it, the Semitic king, Agenor, had three sons (read surplus population) which he sent to populate new areas. One went to Cilicia in Asia Minor, another went to Crete while the third, Cadmus settled at Thebes in mainland Greece. This provoked a major war to eject them. Just before the assault on Troy the Argives waged a two generation war to eject the Semites, or sub-species competitors, that was commemorated in the legend of the Seven Against Thebes. Sarpedon, the son of Agenor, was also expelled from Crete returning to the mainland.
Subsequent to Troy the Greeks invaded and occupied the Anatolian littoral also occupying Crete and Cypress. The Aegean became an HSIII lake.
The Semites meanwhile threw out colonies from Phoenicia from whence came Agenor. The most famous was the Semitic power of Carthage which was to come into conflict with both Greeks and HSII Romans. The Semitic Assyrians who had become the paramount power in Asia found the strength to smash Egypt which terminated that ancient HSII nation as a power. The Assyrians and Babylonians were in their turn brought low by the HSIII Persians who seemed to have been or were assimilated by the Semitic culture.
Then the Macedonians organized a terrific military campaign under Alexander and his HSIII Greeks and Macedonians overran the entire Eastern Mediterranean. Alexander died at the end of the conquest which broke theEast into three Hellenic kingdoms. A Macedonian, a Greek kingdom, the kingdom of the Seleucids in Asia and the kingdom of Ptolemy in Egypt. For the moment than the HSIII were dominant.
The Hellenic culture was so attractive that the majority had no problem adapting to it. The Semites seemed pleased to act HSIII. Then, as Bernard Lewis might say, ‘Something went wrong.’ As might be expected there were Semitic dissenters.
Chief among these were the Jews. The Jews since their alleged expulsion from Ur had been active. Colonies of Jews had been established in all the major cities which transferred the struggle from the military to the religious sphere. Unlike today, at that time the Jews were active proselytizers.
They set themselves up as a quasi-empire in Jerusalem not unlike the later Roman Catholic Church based in Rome, in fact as the Roman Catholic Church is quasi-Semitic, Jerusalem probably served as the model. Tithes flowed from every part of the Mediterranean into the coffers at Jerusalem just as they later would to Medieval Rome.
The Jews fought the Seleucids to a standstill but then the really Big Boys entered the picture. The Romans had already disposed of the Semitic Carthaginians but now the Semitic Jews established colonies everywhere in the Empire including Rome itself. The chief authority for this period is the Jewish traitor Josephus. Burroughs had a copy of the works in his library.
So as the Age of Aries drew to a close the Mediterranean was under the military domination of the HSII Romans while the cultural and religious sphere was dominated by HSIII Greeks and Semitic Jews.
Just as the transition from the Taurean Age to the Arien Age was fraught with wars so now the transition from Aries to Pisces was blighted by a major conflict between HSII, HSIII and the Semites. As you may note the transition between Pisces and Aquarius is being fraught with a major war between the Semites and the rest of the world.
Much of the nonsense of the Jewish War can be explained by the notion that the Astrological Age change was the literal end of the world. When Jesus spoke of the end times he wasn’t being vague, he meant right then. The Jews on Masada could never have killed themselves if they hadn’t believed that they were going to rise up within the next few days and come into their inheritance. Poor deluded people, their successors probably won’t make that mistake again.
The terrific war with unbelievable bloodshed continued from 66 BC to 135 AD when with the defeat of Bar Kochba the Jews threw in the towel. Peace is just war conducted by other means as the famous General said.
2.
The Semitic Jews were defeated decisively in 135 AD. However the Kingdom of Heaven remained unconquered. The Jews had been proselytizing the Mediterranean world for centuries and not without success but it was slow work while having its limits. For too many people circumcision and the absurd dietary laws were an insuperable obstacle. Enter Saul/Paul to the rescue. There is no reason to take any of the legend of Paul too seriously. Stories like his are mere hagiography.
Suffice it to say that he discovered a way to turn the discredited Jewish messiah to account. Rather than making him the savior of the Jews he made him the savior of the world discarding the objectionable circumcision and the laughable dietary laws. Paul may have been a bigot but he wasn’t stupid.
What the Jews couldn’t accomplish on their own the hybrid Gentile-Jewish religion of Christianity did. The Semitic mentality was grafted unto the Gentile. Christianity was therefore repressive and bigoted. It is no accident that Freud made repression a centerpiece of his dogma.
Within only a couple centuries ‘something went wrong’ as Bernard Lewis would put it. Absolute Catholic orthodoxy was imposed which allowed for no further discussion or speculation. Anyone who questioned the central authority was run to earth and murdered, ‘exposed’ as a heretic and discountenanced in every way. It is interesting that Hitler is condemned for bookburning when these Semito-Catholics destroyed the greatest repository of ancient learning in a magnificent bonfire at the library in Alexandria. I doubt if any greater crime has ever been committed and that includes the so-called holocaust.
Thus just as in Sumer, when learning was crushed, everything was going right for the Semites. If Bernard Lewis weren’t a Semite he might see things somewhat differently.
The Semito-Catholics were still wrestling with stubborn dissidents when the ‘last of the prophets’ sat down on his rock amidst the burning sands to dictate his little notes and thoughts. Mohammed could neither read nor write. He still thought he could talk to God. God most have thought it was an amusing conversation. He’s probably still laughing.
The ‘brotherhood of man’ sure as heck isn’t.
I’m sure that Mohammed surveyed the scene, listened to the talk in the cafes, Semites complaining of how the nasty Gentiles prevented them from realizing the sovereignty of the world and how they had almost captured the whole ball of wax when by some dirty tricks they were defeated by the Romans. With a level playing field, you know, they would have won.
Undoubtedly they laughed because the stupid goyim were actually practicing Semitic religion and didn’t know it.
Judging from the results Mohammed thought that what the Jews lacked to realize the Semitic dream was a sufficient military arm to convert the goyim by force. The man did create an ideological force that when joined to the Arab military force was able to overrun North Africa, Persia and the Asian interior as well as parts of Asian Byzantium. By the end of the +eighth century the Moorish auxiliaries of the Arabs occupied Spain. So as this period ended the Semite sub-species in the Darwinian sense had imposed themselves on much of HSII, part of HSIII and large goegraphic areas controlled by the Mongolids. They were doing as well as those swallows would in the United States.
3.
Brief Interlude
…presumptuous attempts to conquer the outer world of appearances by the inner world of wishful thinking.
-S. Freud. Letter to Arnold Zweig 5/8/32 as quoted by Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying.
Time now for a little recapitulation, reflection and analysis. Regardless of that endlessly repeated dogma that no system of thought is better than another, everything is relative; noting is good or bad but thinking makes it so, etc. there are some signal differences between the Astrological Religion and the Semitic Religion; the latter stultifies while the former liberates into a glorious freedom. Which would you rather be, a stupid slave or an intelligent free man? Judging from all the chat about freedom we hear I’m going to assume your answer rather than wait for it. Free and intelligent, right?
Freud hit the nail on the head in the above quote. The Astrological Religion accepts the world of appearances and attempts to adjust to them, hence it has a scientific outlook. Astrology is based on a mistaken apprehension of reality which is why on the intellectual level it is no longer taken seriously. However the Astrolgical theory is based on a great many correct astronomical facts. Astro in both words refers to the stars. I’m sure the ancients would have expressed their hard won knowledge differently if they had had more accurate facts. It is all very well to sneer at Astrology as stupid but Astrology is not stupid. It is merely mistaken. Determining the Great Year is a tremendous discovery made by people who couldn’t read while having mastered the barest rudiments of language. Do not sneer at your ancestors; they can still tell you a thing or two.
Furthermore by dividing the Great Year into Ages they left room for the evolution of intelligence. If you study the transits carefully you will see that at each transit a revolution was necessary for the new age to come into existence. Thus our genius ancestors made certain that mankind would never stultify itself by being unable to grow.
Now compare this freedom loving program with that of the Semites with whom we are now contending for supremacy or, in Darwinian terms, survival as a species.
Beginning with the failed Semito-Jewish revolt at the beginning of the Age of Aries the Semitic doctrine has been opposed to any change. Their god is ‘eternal’ and unchanging. The Jews created a psychological projection based on their ‘inner world of wishful thinking’ as defined by their compatriot Sigmund Freud. Thus the Semitic religion is closed to innovation. There is no consideration of the world of appearances. The Jewish god, Yahvey must be offensive to any thinking person. Nor can the Jews dismiss criticism as ‘oh, that’s anti-Semitism.’ That’s one interpretation, another is why should anyone be stultified by a religion that promises nothing to anyone who is not by blood a Semite?
Think that over now, fellas.
The same is true of the Arab god, Allah. Allah is not even a projection of the Arab people being only the psychological projection of the inner world of wishful thinking of a demented Mohammed.
My god, man.
As with the Jews and their Eternal Yahvey Mohammed creates his own eternal god to supplant that of the Jews and then declares himself the final prophet beyond whom no further speculation is permitted. Mohammed wants to stop history in its tracks. Mohammed had probably never heard of science. As Edgar Rice Burroughs pointed out science never shows up in Mohammed’s doctrine.
Mohammed was able to stultify his own people and a very large percentage of mankind. Bernard Lewis is mystified about ‘what went wrong?’ I’m mystified by Bernard Lewis.
Religious speculation did go on in the West while Moslem children bobbed and weaved ‘studying’ the worthless psychological projecton of Mohammed’s called the Koran. Here’s a guy who learned to fool all the people all the time.
The West produced a wonderful succession of speculators working against the ever vigilant Semito-Catholic Church. Paracelsus, Meister Eckehardt, Jacob Boehm, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the nineteenth century Spiritualists including the incredible Madame Helena Blavatsky. Arising from all these is an astounding organization dating from 1955 in Chicago called Urantia.
Check this out: The Book Of Urantia claims his paper was presented by:
…a divine counselor, a member of the group of celestial personalities assigned by the Ancient of Days on Uversa, the headquarters of the seventh superuniverse, to supervise those portions of these forthcoming revelations which have to do with affairs beyond the borders of the local universe of Nebadon. I am commissioned to announce these papers portraying the nature and attributes of God because I represent the highest source of information available for such a purpose on any inhabited world. I have served as a Divine Counselor in all seven of the superuniverses and have long resided at the Paradise center of all things. Many times have I enjoyed the supreme pleasure of a sojourn in the immediate personal presence of the Universal Father. I portray the reality and truth of the Father’s nature and attributes with unchallengable authority; I know whereof I speak.
The writer wisely pefers anonymity to revealing his ‘earthly’ identity. Makes you smile doesn’t it? Yet that writer in his Book of Urantia is intelligent and well read. Much more so than Moses or Mohammed but you refuse to believe his claims and rightly so. But then why do you give credence to the equally laughable Moses and Mohammed. Just because they lived a couple thousand years ago?
How can you accept the psychological projections of Yahveh and Allah as ‘real’ when you would laugh at anyone who believed Bran Stoker’s psychological projection of Dracula was real. Or, if you think Yahveh and Allah are real why should you not think that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ psychological projection of Tarzan the Jungle God is not real?
Tarzan has as much reason to claim to be an extension of Dionysus as Jesus of nazareth. Now that the Age of Aquarius is dawning why shouldn’t this exemplar of Dionysus be the religious archetype of the Age of Aquarius and Edgar Rice Burroughs his prophet?
Tarzan’s world is based on scientific conceptions and their developments thus there is room to grow. Rather than being reserved for the so-called elect of God which excludes those of us who are not Semites any of us can aspire to be as Tarzan- a healthy mind in a healthy body. If you want to be a hulk, with application you can turn yourself into one. We can be men like gods if we elect or we can be stultified cretins if we follow the Semitic path.
The Age of Aquarius will be ruled by the more free masculine side of Dionysus as the Age of Pisces was ruled by the gentle, loving feminine side of Dionysus. Tarzan as a psychological projection for us all is a perfect specimen; he is master of both his conscious and sub-conscious minds as well as master of his environment. Thus he moves freely in the world of appearances while being in control of his inner world of wishful thinking.
Tarzan is God and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet. Move over Mohammed.
Is that any less believable than Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet?
Think about it.
The next section should take us to the marriage of Burroughs and Emma.
Addendum To Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
November 16, 2007
Addendum To Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
An Analysis Of Chap. I, Tarzan The Untamed
By
R.E. Prindle
I hope I will be excused for submitting an analysis of only the first Chapter of Tarzan The Untamed. It seems to be very significant while justice couldn’t be done to its remarkable content within a full book review.
Tarzan The Untamed is unusual in that it took ERB a little over a year to write. A very long time for him. The book is also one of the longest Tarzan volumes.
The book was begun three months before Armistice Day on November 11, 1918. This was a tremendously busy period for Burroughs as in January of 1919 he severed his lifelong ties with Chicago forever, moving to Los Angeles. The evidence of the first chapter undoubtedly written by him in August of ‘18 is that this was an especially traumatic period of life for him.
He said he walked out on Emma several times during their marriage. The external evidence of Tarzan The Untamed, Tarzan The Terrible and Tarzan And The Golden Lion is that this period was one of them. At the very least this was a very stormy period for him in his marriage.
The Chapter in question can be divided into three episodes: The killing of Jane and Tarzans discovery of the deed, his reversion to a ‘great white ape’, and the confrontation with the panther. As David Adams has pointed out, whenever a leopard or panther is involved Burroughs is dealing with his sexual problems.
Writing in 1918-19 Burroughs antedates the story to the Fall of 1914 just after the Great War began. He seems to have been particularly aroused by the War. Much to the amazement of his publisher he wanted to become a war correspondent. He was unable to find a place. His writing during this period is replete with references to the War.
It seems possible to relate the death of Jane in the Fall of 1914 to Emma and the Mad King which was written between 9/26 and 11/2 in the Fall of 1914 when the Great War was in progress as reflected in ERB’s story. In the earlier story, ‘Barney Custer of Beatrice’, Barney had performed great services for the Princess Emma, done everything he could do to win her love and trust but she remained distant and distrustful. As the Princess Emma’s attitude refects that of Emma Burroughs this refusal to trust him must have infuriated ERB who at the time must have felt that he done everything a woman could expect of a man. He, in the character of Waldo in 1913’s Cave Girl Part I, actually tells Nadara, who had the same attitude as Princess Emma, that.
ERB’s and Emma’s relationship must have been strained over the intervening four years perhaps reaching a crisis at this time as ERB appears to have walked out at some time in this period although with the turmoil of moving and resettling it is difficult to tell when.
At any rate the brutal murder of Jane burned beyond all recognition except significantly her jewelry indicates the depth of ERB’s emotions. The jewelry may be especially significant in that ERB lamented that in his impoverished days he had to pawn Emma’s jewelry. That time or those times may have been especially bitter for him.
While it is true that he was persuaded to change the story bringing Jane back to life there seems little possibility for the reader to believe anything but that Jane was actually killed. The implication then is that Emma was dead to ERB. He had always regretted marrying Emma, or marrying at all, even going to the extent of saying that Tarzan should never have married which is to say himself. One wonders why, if he felt so strongly he didn’t seek a divorce at this time.
That is how ERB resolves that sexual problem of his wife. ERB then inserts a long paragraph explaining that now that Jane is dead Tarzan reverts to his original identity of the ‘great White ape’ or pure beast. It is explained that he never felt comfortable in his thin veneer of civilization. He assumed it merely because it pleased Jane and now that she is dead he no longer has any use for the guise. Hence as he stalks through the jungle in pursuit of the Germans he does so as a stalking beast no different than a lion or tiger. But more intelligent. He may revert to the beast but he doesn’t abandon the intellectual trappings of the veneer of civilization. Still got Daddy’s knife at his side.
Then in the last third of the chapter having resolved his heterosexual problem he turns to another serious aspect of his sexuality, that of his feeling of emasculation. That aroused homosexual feelings in him that he stoutly rejected.
ERB gave voice to this part of his psychology in Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid, or otherwise, The Oakdale Affair of 1917, the previous year. Whether there are indications of homosexual feeling between Bridge and Billy Byrne in ‘Out There Somewhere’ is not clear to me at this time. I would have to read it again with that object in mind but they are probably there. As there are abundant indications of the sexual malaise in his subsequent writings it would seem clear that having solved one sexual problem by having others kill it he then turned to the emasculation problem that he had to deal with by himself alone, killing it.
In all other instances where the leopard or panther symbol appears women are involved except in one instance involving the male ape, Akut, in Beasts of Tarzan. There are definite homosexual overtones in that episode. As Tarzan confronts the male panther in this instance alone the beast must refer to Burroughs own sexual ambivalence. Especially as in this instance ERB combines the Panther motif with the terrific storm and extreme darkness.
The theme of storm and leopard is most dramatically portrayed in Tarzan And The Leopard Men of 1931 that opens with leopard men slashing victims, is followed by a terrific storm and succeeds to the confrontation between Old Timer/ERB and Kali Bwana/Florence.
Tarzan the Invincible of 1930 has the terrific storm as Tarzan and La come close to sexual consummation.
So, in this story almost separate from the rest of the novel, the story opens with the brutal murder of Jane followed by Tarzan’s confrontation with Sheeta in the terrific storm.
In this story we learn that Tarzan has some favorite trees. I can’t think of another instance in the oeuvre where Tarzan returns to a tree. In every other instance he merely selects a new tree for the night. In this instance having discovered the murdered Jane he goes to a tree he has often used. I don’t know what that means sexually. Perhaps if he had walked out on her before this he had some place he favored until reconciled.
Goro plays a prominent role. Unlike Greek mythology with which ERB was familiar where the moon is feminine in Burroughs mind the moon is masculine.
Thus it is night with the moon shining although a storm is building. Tarzan climbs the giant bole of the tree to find Sheeta sleeping on his mat in the crotch of the great limb. Thus the emasculation lurking in Burroughs’ subconscious haunts his nighttime bed. At this point the storm begins to break with gale force winds. Clouds obscure the moon and it gets dark, very dark, as dark, one might say as the tomb. It is a peculiarity of Burroughs’ heroes that they can see or find their way in the dark where you or I couldn’t. This is a very potent subconscious symbol. I’m not yet clear on Burroughs’ use of the symbol of darkness.
The Panther in this instance is a male as Burroughs refers to it as ‘he’. Thus in the night in his bed Tarzan comes upon a male sexual symbol. A quote:
Quote:
It was very dark now, darker even than it had ever been before, (see, we’re getting very serious) for almost the entire sky was overcast by thick black clouds.
Presently the man-beast paused, his sensitive nostrils dilating as he sniffed the air about him. Then with the swiftness and agility of a cat, he leaped far outward upon a swaying branch, sprang upward through the darkness, caught another, swung himself upon it and then to one still higher. What could so suddenly have transformed this matter-of-fact ascent (matter-of-fact ascent? What does that mean?) of the giant bole to the swift and wary action of his detour among the branches? You or I could have seen nothing- not even the little platform that an instant before had been just above him and which now was immediately below- but as he swung above it we should have heard an ominous growl; and then as the moon was momentarily uncovered , we should have seen both the platform dimly, and a dark mass that lay stretched upon it- A dark mass that presently, as our eyes became accustomed to the lesser darkness, would take the form of Sheeta, the panther.
Unquote.
As this is obviously a dream or subconscious sequence we don’t have to take into account improbabilities such as the moon breaking through the thick black clouds so conveniently.
Security for Tarzan is always being above things so that once his sensitive nostrils pick out Sheeta on his platform by a series of amazing acrobatics among the waving boughs in the rising gale Tarzan finds a secure place on a branch above the platform. He is now in a position to manage Sheeta. Tarzan always deals with Sheeta by descending upon him or leaping on his back.
In ‘Beasts’ he saves Akut by falling on Sheeta’s back as Sheeta descends from a tree on Akut. At the end of Leopard Men he does a standing leap onto Sheeta’s back. In this instance in a driving rain storm amidst lightening and thunder, on a whipping branch in a gale he does a somersault over Sheeta’s snout onto his back. These are acrobatics I would like to witness.
Now, in 1913’s Cave girl Part I Waldo killed the panther when it fell onto his upright spear. Spear equals penis as symbol. That pelt was given to Nadara after Waldo had worn it himself for some time. If the pelt is associated with both a homo and hetero sexuality homo in the sense of emasculation then there is a real sexual ambivalence indicated. In the case of Cave Girl Waldo assumed the masculinity of the Panther thus augmenting his own to its former state then having regained his masculinity he was able to invest Nadara with his love.
Jane is dead here so that it appears that Tarzan/Burroughs, still troubled by ambivalence as is also evidenced in 1917’s Bridge And The Kid where the Kid is a woman dressed as a man very ambivalently. In that story Bridge/Burroughs is very relieved to discover this boy he has fallen in love with is really a girl. Using his spear, a symbol of the penis, to goad Sheeta to an attack Tarzan retreats in gale force winds to the extremity of a large limb followed by the cat. Had the limb broken one assumes that ERB may have succumbed to his emasculation or latent homosexuality as he plunged back to earth. On earth he has to deal with realities. This is reminiscent of Heracles. Tarzan is a jungle Heracles. Having gotten Sheeta far out on the limb where his footing is insecure, it is at this point in the violence of the storm and wind that he somersaults onto Sheeta’s back.
Sheeta then loses his balance falling from the safety of the trees to earth with Tarzan on his back. Landing splay footed he is smashed to the ground by Tarzan’s weight. Unable to rise in time he is stabbed to death by Tarzan using his father’s knife.
Thus it would appear that so long as Tarzan is in the trees or his imagination he doesn’t really have to deal with earthly problems. But, once on the earth he has to deal with problems directly. As he has killed Sheeta on the earth one is to assume that he believes he has solved the problem of his sexual ambivalence. However the storm rages for a full twenty-four hours with whatever meaning that may have.
Thus in this traumatic day and night Tarzan/ERB’s heterosexual relationship is ended while we are led to believe he slays his emasculated homosexual ambivalence.
Having killed Sheeta Tarzan gathers an armful of fronds that in no way hinder his climbing the giant bole of the tree.
Quote:
Laying a few of the fronds upon the poles he lay down and covered himself against the rain with the others and despite the wailing of the wind and the crashing of thunder, immediately fell asleep.
Unquote.
Good thing the gale didn’t blow the fronds that covered him away. But this is a dream sequence, why would they?
Remember that these scenes of the killing of Jane and ERB’s dealing with his senseof emasculation are occurring in the Fall of 1914 at the time he was in fact writing the sequel to The Mad King, Barney Custer.
In that case Maenck was killing Barney’s alter ego Leopold while Emma/Emma stood round indecisively pondering whether to accept Barney/ERB in his new role as King. In other words ERB’s old loser self was dead while he was permanently assuming his new role as the successful ERB. In Untamed Jane/Emma is killed while Tarzan/ERB slays another troublesome alter ego or sexual problem.
In point of fact Emma Burroughs was quite right to insist that Jane not be killed. Had ERB let the death stand there would have been a gross inconsistency in the oeuvre as he already had Jane playing a prominent role in Jewels of Opar in 1915. Such a glaring inconsistency might have seriously compromised the on going story, actually a roman-a-fleuve, perhaps endangering its continuing success.
The Untamed in the title undoubtedly refers to ERB who is proclaiming his independence from Emma and the bonds of marriage. This theme too was explored in 1913’s Cave Girl which was concerned with the issue of marriage and free love.
Waldo in that story insisted upon waiting to consummate the love between he and Nadara until a minister was handy while she was puzzled as to why there was a need to wait when they were obviously meant for each other.
Untamed begun in Chicago would be finished in Los Angeles under very different circumstances than Burroughs’ life in the Windy City. As the story finished he would be the proud possessor of his own empire- Tarzana.
Burroughs just keeps getting more and more complex.
Pt. 4 Something Of Value I
October 30, 2007
Something Of Value I
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 4
A minor mythographer who emerged at the same time as Burroughs and his Tarzan was the famous character Dr. Fu Manchu of the Irishman Arthur H.S. Ward writing under the name of Sax Rohmer. While his subject is in disrepute at the present time, Rohmer was aware that the times were one of a world sea change. He sensed, along with a few others, now equally in disrepute, that the EuroAmerican tide had crested; its flow was now out.
Rohmer running counter to Western trends made careful ethnic identities even to the point of identifying Irish and Anglo sub-groups although some of the characteristics he attributed to them seem mistaken to my eye.
Nevertheless he sensed the world was entering a period of Mfecane, to use the African term, or a time of troubles to use the Western term.
The African Mfecane which occured among the Bantu tribes of South Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century, and recorded so ably by Burroughs’ major influence, Rider Haggard, was a time when rapdily expanding population pressed on available resources. This was the time when the Zulu chief Chaka organized the Zulu impis or military battalions so excitingly described by Haggard. They were used, in the Zulu phrase to ‘stamp the ememy flat’ which is to say, exterminate them.
Numerous Bantu tribes were either exterminated or driven out to find new lands which is to say stamp non-Zulu tribes flat or drive them off good lands into the desert. Such is the historical process which operates without respect to race. Now, historically all peoples consider themselves the true men while all others are an emasculated inferior sort. This was and is true of the Semites. We all know the legend of diabolical Jewish cleverness. As is well known the Jews consider themselves the Chosen People of not only their tribal god but they have made of their god a universal god that has been accepted by an astonishingly large number of people. The Chinese peoples, which Dr. Fu Manchu represented, consider themselves of the Celestial Empire or Middle Kingdom to which all must bend the knee. The Arab Semites pray: Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation…Guide us in the right path, the path of those whom you have favored.
Thus both leading Semitic peoples believe they are Chosen peoples which explains that conflict. In the United States, of course, we believe we have god on our side. We are naturally right being unable to be wrong. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Strangely enough the contemporary world believes it is living outside the historical process, that evolution has ended leaving all species in stasis whereas nothing could be further from the truth. A mythographer like Sax Rohmer is in possession of the truth. This was made apparent with the success of the Bolshevik Revolution when Mfecane took definite shape.
In this long wave action by the Jewish people that began with the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666 it seemed momentarily that the messianic years of 1913-28 would be crowned with success, that the Jews would achieve world domination by 1928. The Bolshevik Revolution created a storm of anti-Jewish reaction.
This period from the Revolution of 1917-24 when Lenin died was one of intense apprehensive literature about worldwide Jewish intentions. Not counting the new Nazi reaction in Germany there was a burst of literature criticizing the Jews. In the United States, usually so placid, a reaction was led by Henry Ford then at the crest of his reputation as an auto maker. He had his reasons.
Ford thought he was dealing with an intellectual problem. He wasn’t aware that he had involved himself in an emascualtion contest, or pissing match as they are vulgarly called. The Jews, of course, never let the problem be examined on its merits but immediately raised the spectre of anti-Semitism. Ford was accordingly branded an anti-Semite. Why he or anyone else shoud favor the manhood of Jews over his own is, or should be, open to conjecture but no one can withstand the charge of anti-Semitism and remain respectable in his community. Ford lost the fight on the grounds of anti-Semitism, not the facts, while the Jews now confess to his accusations.
Disregarding all the benefits Ford conferred on civilization, which are very, very many, his fellows deserted him and he has no reputation today.
Thus, as of 1924, it seemed to the Jews as though the millennium had come but then Lenin died. Stalin seized the reins of Soviet government while Hitler’s star was in the ascendance in Germany.
The pall of Freud’s vision of the unconscious spread over the world. All other interpretations of the unconscious had been suppressed. Men like Jean Genet were coming into their own. Then, a year before the messianic years ended when things didn’t look quite so rosy Freud wrote another book, calling this one the Future Of An Illusion. This is a difficult book to understand. To merely condemn religion in the abstract seems redundant, even puerile. Freud appears to be responding to the defeat of the Jewish revolution in the Soviet Union. This must be the illusion whose future concerns him. While Hitler had not yet crushed the Judaeo-Communist revolution in Germany matters were in hand.
Stalin was neutralizing, if not yet eliminating, the cadre that executed the Revolution. It would be another two years before Freud realized that his instructions in 1917 had been in vain. In fact his releasing of his negative vision of the subconscious was about to backfire on him in the hands of Stalin and Hitler in a spectacular way.
I think that it is also signficant that, in these later years of his life, the Castration Complex became more signficant in his thinking, almost displacing the Oedipus Complex in importance. His concentration on it has the sound of an hysterical shriek as the failure of the millennium would be a type of group castration.
For the mythographers, the Burroughs of 1911-17 had been a plateau. Burroughs had brought all the mythological strands together. Like the arrow shot in the air to land one knew not where now one knew where Burroughs’ writing had been leading. It was his turn to inseminate many minds. Those minds no longer had only books to disseminate their views but they had even more potent forms of communication. The nickelodeon of the eighteen nineties had evolved into movies shown in palaces. Looking back, the early movie theatres were a temporary but spectacular moment. In my hometown the chif theatre was appropriately called: The Temple.
The movie makers seized on the psychological projections of the mythographers which could be interpreted and manipulated quite independently of the intentions of the authors. This brought a number of projections which might have been overlooked into the forefront of world consciousness. The exploration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula began in earnest, soon bearing little relation to Stoker’s book. Another stunning projection that would have gone unnoticed except for the movies was Gaston Le Roux’s Phantom Of The Opera. While not a particularly good book, although arresting, the character was coopted by a Hollywood producer while the book was being serialized in a New York paper. Strangely, the Phantom has become a counterpart of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean among the Red/Liberals.
Radio had come along in 1920 to be a force from the thirties on.
Movies and radio appealed directly to the subconscious in the brain stem through the eyes and ears which are connected to the brain stem more or less bypassing the conscious mind. With the movies there is too much content to consciously assimilate while the speed with which it passes leaves no room for consideration. Books on the other hand are read into the brain stem but are immediately evaluated by the conscious mind.
At least until the emergence of video tapes beginning in the 1970s movies were an ephemeral form of entertainment. Memories of movies are extremely unreliable as the subconscious manipulates the material for its own uses. Today one can review this ephemera which had such an influence on you, understanding and correcting any misconceptions.
Even more ephemeral and now lost forever was the radio show. One that left the most indelible impression was influenced by Burrough’s work. That most mortal but penetrating pyschological projection was The Shadow.
Today he can live only in the minds of those who were there although abut 350 pulp novels were written about the Shadow of which 280 were written by one man, if you can believe it. He was Walter Gibson. One believed that the Shadow stepped through the creaking door of the Inner Sanctum.
I have never seen the pulp novels but, as Gibson was in charge of both the show and the novels, the results must be the same. The stories were unimportant, as indeed all stories are, the important thing was and is the attitude, the myth. What mythographers call the truth. Thus if you hear only the literal story you have missed the real story. All good writing is done in keys.
The shows could only have been written post-Freud as well as post-Burroughs. the images do not appeal to the conscious mind.
The Shadow had learned ‘the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him.’ (p. 608 On The Air: The Encyclopedia Of Old Time Radio, John Dunning, Oxford 1998) This may sound like so much hocus pocus, yet if one reads Freud’s Group Psychology carefully one will see that what Freud is proposing is hypnotizing groups to achieve one’s ends unnoticed.
If you watch the movies of Hitler working up a crowd you are watching a master hypnotist at work. Perhaps he also had read Le Bon. He comes quietly to the fore after his introduction, stands quietly watching and listening, his hand drops down to manipulate some items on the table. The audience, in their thousands, sit waiting in anticipation. Hitler begins to speak, quietly, indifferently; then his pace picks up, his intensity increases, passion flows from his voice while he gestures wildly, dramatically bringing his huge audience into a trance which he is able to satisfy completely before terminating the seance in a wild orgy of screaming indignation and wildly flailing gesticulation. It may not look impressive viewing it with cool dispassion on film but he’s good, even an artist.
Watch him. You don’t even have to understand German. He was terrific.
Freud also, merely through the force of his personality and reputation was able, through his writing, to influence large numbers of influential people, through them the masses, just by telling them in abstruse terms what they wanted to hear. To wit: Let your unconscious rule, the more sex you have the better a person you will be, do not allow any fancy you may have to be repressed. It’s bad for you. The unconscious, sex and free expression of the libido are good. You like that don’t you? If you act on it you may as well consider yourself hypnotized.
The Shadow in the Freudian sense and the Burroughsian sense was a man of many identities. One becomes a personality of many facets in the unconscious, one might almost say multiple personalities. Indeed, the Shadow lived in the everyday world under a borrowed identity not even his own. “To two persons only is the Shadow’s true identity known- that of Kent Allard, internationally known aviator- and those persons are Xinca Indians, servants picked up by Allard during a stay among their tribe in Central America. A guise often used by the Shadow is that of Lamont Cranston, world renowned big game hunter and traveler, when Cranston is away on his travels. This is by leave of the real Cranston, a man of deep understanding.” (The Pulps: Fifty Years Of American Pop Culture, compiled by Tony Goodstone, Bonanza 1970, p. 228)
Cranston must indeed have been a man of deep understanding while Kent Allard was freed from responsibility for his acts. Nice situation if you can get it. Like all the psychological projections the Shadow was a man of many identities. Most of the projections were experts of disguise, being able to imitate a vast variety of human conditions perfectly from street sweeper to nuclear scientist. Real Urban Spacemen. In Burroughs’ case he created a number of alter egos including John Carter, John Clayton also known as Tarzan, Lord Passmore and other identities, David Innes and Normal Bean. Unlike Freudian/Liberals they were and are more aligned with a firm grip on morality. Jekyll to the core. As the Shadow said: Crime must go! He gave his mocking laugh and said: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.’ Purge your hearts f0r there is no escaping the Shadow.
There was a lot of evil lurking in the hearts of men during the thirties. A very large part of it was centered in Germany and the Soviet union where the epic struggle between good and evil was taking shape that was to end in that catastrophic war. I know you will think that the evil was represented by Adolf Hitler and the good by Judaeo-Communism.
Hitler has been represented as the nadir of evil. He was certainly one of the bad boys of history but then his Freudian style subconscious had been released. Besides, as I have pointed out he was the antagonist and not the protagonist; in other words he could not have existed without Judaeo-Communism, possibly not without Freud: he was acting in self-defense.
Hitler was not outside history as some would have it. It is time to integrate him into the historical process so the period can be understood. The period from 1913 to 1945 was one in which the great goddess Kali danced merrily around the world while Shiva played the pipes. Death is the eternal dance of life in the deepest mythological sense. Nor do Shiva and Kali care how many or who die. Many go, many more come. Since 1913 mankind, not Hitler, but mankind has murdered its hundreds of millions but Nature has replaced the dead with billions. After the human destruction of seven decades the world population has grown to life stifling levels. If the world population is twelve billion by 2050 as has been predicted, mankind will see Kali dance more wildly than ever before while Shiva plays faster, faster and more madly still. Hitler an arch demon? What? Grow up.
From the point of view of Religious Consciousness and this holds true for Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism anything and everything that happens, is merely the will of god. God works in mysterious way his wonders to perform while his mind is beyond the ken of man. I mean…if you believe this religious stuff then you have to accept all of it or else. This is religious fact! Thus Hitler was merely peforming the will of god as he had no other choice. God had created set and setting. From the Religious point of view Hitler must therefore be blameless while god is accountable for all that transpired.
From the scientific Darwinian evolutionary point of view the great wars were inevitable. The wars were the inevitable consequence of natural selection. I know that the general consensus is that not only do we live outside the historical process but that all the evolutionary rules have been set aside in our case. To those people I say believe as you will. In point of fact the struggle for human special existence goes on today as it did in the thirties and forties. One species will triumph over the others if society as we know it is not ended by natural causes by c. 2050.
The period under consideration was a confllict between Slavs, Germans and Jews. It occurred adjacent to and was partially caused by Jewish millennial ideas. Germans and Slavs had been contending for centuries both along the Slavic German border as well as in Courland which ran around the southern and eastern Baltic and within Russian itself.
During the nineteenth century the Czars encouraged Germans to colonize the Ukraine as farmers. A large German colony was established at the mouth of the Volga River. An alien Semitic people, the Jews, resided in Germany and Russia. While the Jews claim to have been loyal German and Russian subjects this notion is nonsense which will not bear up to historical analysis. They were part of the international Jewish community residing in their respective States. Just as the Germans and Slavs wished them to accept their national identities, as Semites the Jews wished to impose their world view on them. Hence one has a classic example of Natural Selection, varieties and species in conflict. In addition Hitler and the Germans were suffering from Emasculation as a result of the Great War while in the new USSR the State was being administered by Emasculated formerly subject peoples.
While one may say this contributed to the savagery of the period from 1913 to 1945 what we have here is a classic Mfecane or Time of Troubles that is still developing. The only solution was to ‘stamp flat’ or exterminate rival combatants. This was merely a part of the historical and evolutionary process. A harsh reality but true. Kali don’t mind, Krishna plays on.
Had the Jews been powerful enough they would have stamped flat both the Germans and Russians just as they began to do with with the Crimeans and as they would do with the Palestinians if let loose today. As it was, both Hitler and Stalin set about exterminating the Semitic Jews. Stalin would have completed the job in 1954 but Kali beckoned to him first.
The Jews always preferred German culture so that in the nineteenth century when the Russians compelled them to take surnames a great many Jews resident in Russia chose German names. As Judaeo-Communists they moved back and forth between Germany and Russia creating the illusion from 1917 to 1945 of German collaboration with Russia. To have called them Jews would have opened one to the charge of anti-Semitism. Who needs that?
If the Czars had attempted to Russify the subject peoples it was as nothing compared to the effort of the USSR under Stalin. Nationality was outlawed under the Communists. Stalin made the resident Germans a special target. Unable to dent the Volga colony’s nationalism he merely exterminated them after WWII.
You could watch Kali dance and Shiva pipe.
Reverting to the Religious Consciousness what purpose of God’s will did Hitler serve? I’m sure His mind is too deep for me, but if you’re religious this point has to be considered. Well, at the time the Popular Front governments in 1936 that were all Red, Judaeo-Communism seemed on the verge of world conquest from China to the USA. Except for Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan Reds were in the ascendant. Even Germany and Italy had adopted variants of Red socialism.
While it may not appear to be so at first glance Hitler smashed the Red economy. The USSR never truly recovered from the war, limping along until its economic collapse during Reagan’s administration in the US.
The war also gave the democratic forces of the US time to organize their resistance to the Red Menace. Unfocussed and in disarray before the war the Scientific element seized control of the State Department and the armed forces so that with the death of the Popular Front president, Roosevelt, the United States actually assumed the role of Hitler and his Nazis as the bulwark against Communism forcing the Jews in the United States to reconsider their position vis-a-vis Communism. It was really at this point that many Jews became anti-Communist in the United States. Hence the Jews assumed their traditional good cop/bad cop role. The US position against Communism gave rise to Jewish charges of Fascism in their bad cop role.
If from a religious point of view everything that occurs is the will of god then god must have been a Red baiter. Today’s Reds take note.
Nevertheless as the mythographers to a man were opposed to Red totalitarianism they all came under attack from the Red/Liberal forces. Every attempt was made to abort established careers while stifling new ones.
If you remember a while back I described a scene in which Commissars were reading Tarzan to employees of the Worker’s Paradise. That fact made Edgar Rice Burroughs a marked man. A concerted effort was begun to interfere with his career. Unfortunately for the Reds this effort resulted in a dozen of the best novels of Burroughs’ career supplying him with a fresh batch of material.
At the same time publishing became more difficult for him while his editors at the pulps became hypercritical of material they had once begged for. Also at this critical time Burroughs changed secretaries. His new secretary, who became his business manager and de facto head of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. was a man named Ralph Rothmund. Rothmund claimed to be Scotch although I’m sure the sept of Rothmund must have been lacking its own Tartan.
The name translates from the German to Red World. It may be coincidence or it may be a joke. Certainly when an organization is being infiltrated the most sought after post is that of secretary. All information passes through the secretary’s hands. Rasputin, for instance, not surprisingly had a Jewish secretary which led to the charges of his complicity with the Germans. You may be sure that Rasputin was not complicit while you may be equally sure that his secretary was. At least with the German Jews.
There hasn’t been much work done on Rothmund by Burroughsians nor do I have any new information to report but let us examine Rothmund’s record as secretary and business manager. What was the result of his twenty-five years of work? Was Burroughs further ahead or further behind when Rothmund went to his greater reward?
The man nearly brought the business to a halt.
He disrupted all relations with the publishers of Burroughs’ early novels, bringing the flow of royalties to a halt in 1946, they had been miniscule even laughable since 1940. Nor did he actively pursue the publication of titles owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. The lucrative radio show was discontinued in 1936. In what some fancy as a coup Rothmund sold the movie rights to Tarzan to MGM for a flat fifty thousand a picture, no residuals. By 1940 Burroughs was so broke, or told he was by his business manager, that Rothmund advised him to leave the country for Hawaii where the great creator of Tarzan lived on the meager $250.00 a month that Rothmund allotted him. What was Rothmund’s salary at this time? How much was the corporation earning?
In addition this supposed business manager allowed Burroughs’ copyrights to lapse, never renewing them. By 1945 the most popular titles of Burroughs were available to whoever wanted to publish them. Amazingly no one did while Burroughs’ long time reprint publishers, who knew the copyrights were lapsed, Grossett and Dunlap, honored argreements they were under no obligation to do.
Burroughs’ bacon was pulled from the fire by an earlier more lucrtive movie deal he had nogotiated with a producer named Sol Lesser. When MGM tired of the Tarzan series they let Lesser assume the rights. The revenues from Lesser’s productions defeated Rothmund’s apparent purpose.
Still, after Burroughs died in 1950 Rothmund made no attempt to keep any Burroughs’ titles in print. From 1950 until 1963 at which later date publishers discovered that the copyrights had never been renewed, nothing was available but a few titles from Grossett and Dunlap.
Even then, Burroughs’ most famous book, Tarzan Of The Apes, had been out of print for twenty years or more. Some business manager.
Thus, as is probably true, as a Red infiltrator Rothmund had destroyed the career of the arch Americanist, Edgar Rice Burroughs. the greatest of the mythographers was almost silenced.
While Rothmund worked to silence the Master, the Freud/Hitler/Stalin confrontation in Europe broke out into the most destructive war the world had ever seen. Unlike the previous wars there were no rational minds seeking to ameliorate the damage. Freud had unleashed the Hyde-like destructive subconscious of the West. Hitler, who had always said if the Jews involved Europe in another disaster like the Great War, they would pay the price, meant it. He was no empty boaster. He had the will, he had the ways and means. In the coldest, most scientific way imaginable he systematically rounded the Jews up deeding them to the flames Wow! Not since the great Roman manhunt of 135. Here was new meaning to the Jewish concept of passing the enemy through the fires. Wow!
Hitler raged East and West but he raged beyond his power. As must have inevitably happened before the first shot was fired, after the initial surprise German forces were driven back on all fronts. Driven into isolation by his enemies there was no possibility for a negotiated terminus to the war. In the struggle between the revolution and counter-revolution the only end could be unconditional surrender. That sick madman in Washington, crippled in body and mind, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, working from his subconscious no less than Hitler, insanely persisted in the demand for unconditional surrender. What a different world it would have been if the West had accepted Germany’s surrender before the Russians entered Poland. Heck, Roosevelt wouldn’t have had to honor any deal he made with the Germans any more than his mentor Wilson did in the Great War. What kind of man was Roosevelt anyway?
So here we have a man emasculated by disease, a seriously emasculated man by circumstance and a politically emasculated man directing the affairs of the three most powerful States in the world. Wow!
In defeat Hitler acted in the self-destructive way of the emasculated. He knew he had to die so he wanted nothing left standing in Europe when he was gone. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were nothing loath to help him.
Hitler ordered Paris wired for total destruction. The city was to be blown off the earth in the face of the advancing allies. Wow! However, with the intellectual superstructure of the City of Light destroyed it would have collapsed into the Sewers of Paris, that would have remained intact. Freud had destroyed Morality as D.H. Lawrence had feared:
Quote:
With dilated hearts we watched Freud disappearing into the cavern of darkness….He was making to the origins. We watched his ideal candle falter and go small. Then we waited as men do wait, always expecting the wonder of wonders. He came back with dreams to sell.
But sweet heaven, what merchandise!….What was there in the case?….Nothing but a huge slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and myriad repulsive little horrors spawned between sex and excrement.
Unquote.
Wow!
Double Wow!
Yes, Freud hd destroyed the conscious mind and morality and reaped the Sewers of Paris. As the payback for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain the Jews had stultified Europe. What came out of the sewers as intellectual Paris burned?
Jean Genet!
Of course any right thinking person is appalled by the course of history from 1913 to 1945 (or from year one to the present not excluding what went before) but for every right thinking person there are at least two who aren’t. The Third Reich was a paradise for a significant minority. Jean Genet was one of those. Check out a French movie titled ‘Dr. Petiot’ if you want to see another. (The Varieties of Sexual Experience) Genet enjoyed the period. He was a man come into his own. As he has been quoted previously, he delighted in the union of the criminal mind with authority. Why wouldn’t he?
But just as the French Revolution allowed the Marquis de Sade scope for his personality, Napoleon, when he assumed the reins of government clapped de Sade into the insane asylum at Charenton. So the Post-war Fourth Republic sentenced the petty thief Jean Genet to life imprisonment.
Genet might very well have died in prison but for the fact that he, while lying in his bunk smelling his farts, composed the novel entitled: Our Lady Of The Flowers. (What scents are these?) While respectable non-Communist writers were being hounded out of literature this criminal, homosexual, severely emasculated creep found a publisher. Saint, indeed!
Not only that, he found a friend. Jean Paul Sartre had surfaced in 1936 with his novel: Nausea. From this novel he developed what was known in the post-war world as existentialism. This notion was supposedly philosophy. I have been called an existentialist by people who should know what it is but I have to say that I have never understood what Sartre means by it. I’ve even read his trilogy, Roads to Freedom. Still don’t know what he’s talking about; I deny all charges.
Nevertheless by war’s end he had a tremendous reputation within France and without. For some reason he and other literati felt that any criminal who can write a book shouldn’t be in prison, as though Genet had been sentenced for the crime of never having written a book. So they sprung Genet. He could now steal with impunity. Ain’t life just too funny for words. Sartre later wrote a book of some six hundred odd pages about this petty thief entitled: St. Genet: Thief and Martyr. The two must go together. Sort of Geminis perhaps.
Genet had Sartre’s numbers. He dedicated his autobiography, The Thief’s Journal to Sartre: a Sartre au Castor. To Sartre as Castor. If Sartre was Castor then his twin brother Genet, was Polydeukes. As we all know Castor was the mortal twin while Polydeukes was the immortal. Genet was prescient as well as mocking. Today his myth lives on while Sartre and his existentialism is all but forgotten.
The point is that Genet was instrumental in creating the cult of the homosexual. It was through him that the homosexual was allied to the post-war Red coalition. In this union of Emasculates that seized control of US culture, if not always the government, the criminal mores of the homosexual as taught by Genet formed the basis of Red morality, or immorality, as you would have it. Freud was wrong in thinking men can live without the notion of a moral code.
The great mythographers who had attempted to give mankind a positive approach to morality by a union of the conscious and subconscious minds with consciousness preeminent were driven underground as the Red/Liberals seized control of the media preventing any view but their own being expressed.
Freudian visions seem to have triumphed, still, though Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 his great psychological projection Tarzan lived on. He still lives.
To recapitulate: In the course of evolution a new type of man came into being in mid-nineteenth century who required a new vision of psychology. Society, for our purposes here, was thereby split into two divisions. One of Scientific man and two factions of Religious man. One of the latter was the reaction of Christianity which refused to make any accommodation with the new reality while its fellow the Red/Liberal faction while in as violent a reaction as the Christians adopted pseudo-scientific modes while seeking to subvert the Scientific Consciousness.
On the literary level the cudgel of Science was taken up by a group of neo-mythographers who treated psychology and evolution according to the tenets of science.
The Red/Liberal faction developed a revolutionary program guided by the religious conception of science led on the literary level by Sigmund Freud.
Taking the various concepts of the unconscious developed at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries Freud twisted them to his purposes to envision the unconscious as a bale of evil impulses; he then convinced the West to release their impulses under the rubric of liberating the unconscious. The immediate result was an orgy of hate, sadism and murder that lasted, for our purposes from 1917 until 1945 at which time the old order collapsed.
The mythographers who had been less assertive were eclipsed by the Red/Liberals who now led the post-war era. They continued their campaign to sabotage the Scientific Consciousness by instigating a subtle reign of terror from the released unconscious.
Having now completed a survey of the first hundred years centered on the concepts of psychology I will now consider the same period from the point of view of evolution as reflected in the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the final part I will entwine both the psychological and evolutionary strands in a survey of society from 1945 to the present.
I dreamed I saw Ed Burroughs
As live as live could be.
‘Ah, but Ed, you’re dead.’ Says I.
‘I never died.’ Says he.
‘I never died.’ Says he.
As he stood smiling at me he had Something Of Value in his hand which he gave to me. It was a copy of Tarzan. I became as a pillar of smoke leading the people through the desert to freedom.
End of Something of Value I
Something Of Value II follows.
Part 3 Something Of Value I
October 24, 2007
SOMETHING OF VALUE I, PART III
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3 of Vol. I.
Freud was severely emasculated in both personal ego and in his group ego. He was in fact a practicing homosexual. His relationship with Fliess was homosexual in nature which Freud confessed vowing never to do it again. His group, the Jews, were and are a severely emasculated people. They have been since they walked away from Ur. But on with Freud.
Freud was fond of telling the story of his father and his hat, it seems that Mr. Freud related a story to Sigmund, or Sigismund as he was known then, (His Hebrew name significantly was Solomon) of how when he was a young man walking down the street proudly wearing his new hat, a gentile knocked the hat from his head into the gutter, snarling: ‘Go get your hat, Jew.’
When Sigmund asked breathlessly what his father did, expecting an heroic response, the old gentleman replied: ‘I stepped into the gutter and picked up my hat.’ severely disappointing the young boy.
Since Freud told and retold this story we may be forgiven for believing it had a profound effect on his young conscious and subconscious minds and possibly his ‘unconscious’ too. On the one hand he may have been so ashamed of his father’s very reasonable reaction that he shared his emasculation encapsulating it in his subconscious as a fixation. It is possible that this story either made or contributed to his homosexuality. On the other hand we know for a fact that it inflamed his group ego with an ardent desire for revenge against the gentiles.
As a result of the story he made the Carthaginian Semite, Hannibal, his alter ego. When Hannibal’s father was defeated by the Romans he had his son swear that the would never cease waging war on the Romans until he died. Obviously Freud made his vow against the Europeans although his father didn’t demand it.
It is no coincidence that both Freud and Hannibal were Semites and that the Romans and Europeans were gentiles. Nor is it a coincidence that both Hannibal and Freud were defeated after seemingly winning the war and that rather than fighting the enemy to the end both fled. Now, it therefore follows that Freud never ceased waging war against the Europeans.
You say: How? Come along. I can’t take you into the Inner Sanctum, which way you will have to find on your own, but I can show you some of the records I have been allowed to abstract from the files.
This will involve the secret history of the human race but don’t be alarmed. If you don’t want to believe it you don’t have to. It still is a rousing good story. Besides, if you should ever come around the archives you’ll find it is true.
Freud himself made an attempt to explain a little of the origins of the Jewish psyche in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and Moses And Monotheism. The earlier millennia don’t concern us here. The Jews throughout history in their egotism have felt much put upon. This sense of grievance grew until with the expulsion from Spain after the Reconquest their sense of injustice burst into open flames. The group swore revenge on Europe. It must be remembered that at the end of the thirteenth century they were expelled from England, at the beginning of the fourteenth from France and for the duration, well, they were really welcome nowhere.
They swore to stultify Europe. Judaism is the history of messianism.
Sabbatai Zevi.
Zevi- The Last Of The Messiahs
This man was the last great messianic imposter. In 1666, the number of the beast plus a thousand, the Jews of Europe awaited the word from Sabbatai, then at the Ottoman Court to begin the slaughter. But Zevi apostatized to Moslemism instead. The uprising never came off. Hung fire. Fizzled.
Hope beats eternal. The learned Rabbis vowed never to place their hopes on a single individual again. They now concocted a plan for the group to rise as one man in rebellion. The date selected for the revolution was the period 1913-28. You want to give yourself a little leeway there. Born in 1856, in 1913 Sigmund Freud was fifty-seven years old. Although none of his biographers say much about his his Jewish background it is quite clear that he was read in Jewish lore. You may say that he wasn’t a religious Jew but he nevertheless was devoutly Jewish.
Freud quite consciously hated the gentiles for personal reasons that meshed quite well into those of his group identity.
During 1913-17 Freud’s reputation was immense both within and without the Jewish community. It was true his heir apparent, C.J. Jung had broken with him perhaps for this very reason but he and Psychoanalytic Movement had suffered no damage.
In psychoanalyis Freud had the means to instruct his group and control the gentiles. It is said that he gave up hypnotism when he turned to psychoanalysis but as a perusal of ‘Group Psychology’ will show he was preparing for a breathtaking attempt at hypnotizing the entire Western world not unlike that of Burroughs’ Lotharians against their invaders.
Freud lived in Vienna where for years, even decades before 1913, emigrating Jews had flowed through from the entry port into Austria from the East of Brody on their way to America via the North German ports. The prosperity of the whole German shipping lines was built on steerage passengers. Nor were the decisions to emigrate necessarily individual; it may have begun that way but to emigrate was soon organized and directed by the international Jewish community. Check the career of Baron Maurice Hirsch.
The Jewish establishments of both Europe and America provided funding. At about this time provisions were made to transport the entire Jewish population of the Pale, from Lithuania to Romania, to the United States Of America. At the time the international Jewish goverment led by Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall was located in the United States, New York City. The decks were being cleared so as to remove resistance in America. So as not to call too much attention to the fact by having hordes disembark entirely in New York and Boston, for there would be resistance however feeble, the ports of New Orleans and Galveston were organized to deal with millions of immigrants.
This plan was aborted by the Great War. The Jews had already been at war with Russia, or the Czar as they personalized it, for a hundred years. The international Jewish community had engineered the Russo-Japanese war almost pulling off a revolution in its wake in 1905.
Activities were now intensified. At the time and for about the next sixty years the Jews threw a veil of obfuscation over their activities always denying involvement in Communist or Revolutionary matters. In recent years Jewish scholars, for whatever reason, have now found it expedient to admit that which they were accused of but always denied. They now admit that every national subversive Communist part was over fifty percent Jewish. Those of Russia and Germany were considerably higher. Freud had been involved in Jewish subversive organizations like the B’nai B’rith for many years. As the master psychologist, an expert in the unconscious, he prepared the Jewish mind for the great task of the millennial years in Central and Eastern Europe, which would require much bloodshed, while formulating his psychological plan of conquest not dissimilar from the military plans of his hero, Hannibal.
Freud himself was centered in Vienna. A lieutenant, Abraham, was his man in Berlin while Frerenczi was posted to Budapest in Hungary. The three crucial central European points were covered. Jung in Zurich had split off shortly before this. It is interesting that the Jewish psychoanalytic extablishment spitefully denounced him as a Nazi.
The Jewish millennial years began in 1913. The Great War began in 1914. The Bolshevik Revolution occurred in 1917. Freud’s Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis appeared in 1917 also, even though there must have been an extreme paper shortage; it is not a short book. Freud encoded last minute instructions to the Revolutionists in the book.
At this point in 1917 Freud released the inhibitions of millions of Mr. Hydes in Russia, Hungary and Germany. The Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war signing a seemingly humiliating peace treat at Brest-Litovsk. As Lenin said the peace treaty was meaningless because it was his intent to stab Germany in the back.
Germany had a huge Communist Party which it is now admitted was around sixty percent Jewish. Now with the United States in the war, Germany debilitated internally and crippled psychologically, thousands of Jewish revolutionaries intent on the realization of the millennium flowed back into Germany from Russia in hopes of achieving the Revolution there, giddy with the hopes of thereby annexing Central and Eastern Europe. That they didn’t was because of the efforts of the German Volkish groups such as Hitler and his Nazi Party.
The unconscious psychoses of the Jewish people who it will be remembered as a group were suffering from severe emasculation were erupting. Emasculation of the Ego is always expressed in a sexual manner frequently sadistic. Freud had been preaching the practice of unrestrained sexual activity for years. Murder is a sexual act. He was against ‘repression’ you remember.
When Russia began its program of expansion under the Romanovs it annexed an enormous number of nationalities. The Russians then tried to impose their language and manners on the conquered peoples in an attempt to form an homogeneous State. In so doing they emasculated the subject peoples. Those same subject peoples were now the masters of the Russians with permission to indulge their ‘unconscious.’
Jews, Letts, Poles and others let loose. Stalin himself was a Georgian.
Jacob Schiff- PM of the International Jewish Government at this time.
As Jean Genet correctly saw of the Nazi State, in Russia a criminal intellect was now joined to the political and legal apparatus of the State. The criminal code was changed from an objective one to a subjective one; one of vengeance. For a period of years law was suspended in Russia. Amidst the chaos International Jewish organizations including those of the United States operated openly to coordinate their hopes for the millennium.
Bela Kun- Communist Psychopath
What I’m about to say has been denied and suppressed but the example was before both Hitler and Stalin. In Hungary Freud had his man Ferenczi to coordinate the Hungarian Jews. The Jewish Bela Kun (Cohn) seized the government beginning a reign of terror against the gentiles during which thousands of non-Jews were murdered in a horrible sadistic manner commensurate with a severely emasculated Ego.
For some time the Jews had been clamoring for a State of their own. Taking advantage of the chaos in Russia the Jewish American Joint Distribution Committee under the leadership of Schiff and Marshall decided to appropriate the Crimea. Bela Kun who had escaped Hungary during the inevitable reaction, going to Moscow, was sent down to the Crimea to exterminate the population to make lebensraum for the Jews. He was in the process when Lenin died. Stalin then recalled him to Moscow where he was subsequently shot.
All these activities were obscured and suppressed. It is forbidden in American universities to study the subject to this day.
Still, Europe was so horrified that they declined to discuss it or even acknowledge it. But Hitler and Stalin remembered.
The Communists in Moscow being composed solely of emasculated peoples functioning from Freud’s vision of the unconscious like so many Hydes conducted a criminal homosexual style State that would have delighted Genet had he been there. The author the The Thief’s Journal would have gasped at the warehouses full of stolen furs, diamonds and other jewels, art objects and whatever of value that the poor emasculated wretches had stolen from their murdered victims. It was the triumph of the Common Man.
As soon as Stalin gained power he began to discredit and remove Jews from influential positions. Trotsky was sent to a malarial swamp in Siberia to die but from which he escaped to be killed by Stalin’s assasins later. As Stalin consolidated his power he acted more directly until he held the famous show trials of 1936. He then began the systematic elimination of Jews which resulted by the end of 1945 in the death of millions.
Adolf Hitler
Joseph Stalin
Thus Hitler, an emasculated man leading an emasculated people had the Judaeo-Communist example before him. As an avid anti-Communist and open anti-Semite he was virtually isolated by the world that by 1936 was under the control of Judaeo-Communists. He was the antagonist not the protagonist.
While Stalin who had religious training was clever enough to seemingly work through the system openly followed legal controlled methods although the law had been subordinated to his ends. Hitler acted as a homosexual with an ax in his hand. Stalin’s officers dispatched prisoners hidden in the depths of the Lubyanka with a bullet in the back of the head, which method, by the way, was favored by Jewish and Italian members of Organized Crdime in America of the time, while the Nazis brutally beat prisoners, finally shooting them in the back while escaping.
Stalin, Hitler, Freud, which was worse? Freud enabled, Stalin and Hitler executed. They were all the same.
In Russia during the first year or so of Lenin some Russian workers were being read to as they worked. Were they being read the works of Marx or Lenin? No. They were being read the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burrougs. This infuriated the Politburo. The State was trying to impose a collectivist unconscious psychology on the Russians while Burroughs and his great psychological projection were individualist and responsible. In fact, Burroughs offered a concept of the unconscious which was directly opposed to that of Freud. One might say that Burroughs was Dr. Jekyll to Freud’s Mr. Hyde.
Burroughs himself had been severely emasculated at the age of nine. The situation seems to be this: Burroughs came from a prosperous Chicago family. His parents were very proud of their English ancestry. If you’re unwilling to understand national and racial prejudices that were very pronounced at the time then you probably won’t be able to understand. There were strong feelings between the Anglo-Saxon and Celt or English and Irish. The Anglos considered the Celts if not inferior at least eccentric. The Burroughses employed two Irish girls as servants. In all probability Young Burroughs assumed an attitude of superiority which the girls resented. They then concocted a plan to cut young Burroughs down to size.
They had a friend or relative by the name of John who was aged twelve to Burroughs’ nine. Being much larger and tougher than Burroughs he stopped the younger boy on the way to school one day where he thoroughly intimidated and terrified him. It is quite possible that Burroughs messed his pants. In any event, he suffered severe emasculation that was to haunt him all his life. He does not seem to have ever practiced homosexuality although he was haunted by a feeling of sexual ambiguity.
The incident with John the Bully not only played havoc with Burroughs personal psychlogy in the narrow sense of creating a psychosis but there was also an effect in what Freud’s erstwhile associate, C. J. Jung called the collective unconscious. The individual is limited by his very humanity to a small number of general responses.
Thus Burroughs was given a cast of mind which the Hindus denoted as Shivaistic. This is a general outlook or philosophy of life, if you wish, which one adopts unconsciously as the consequence of one’s experience. I share it although it took me nearly a lifetime to recognize and accept it.
Edgar Allan Poe- The Father Of Modern Literature
Burroughs himself was aware of the fact by at least 1931 when he wrote Tarzan And The Leopard Men. In one key or on one level the story is one of Shiva and Kali his consort. Burroughs names his heroine Kali while she is selected to be the White Goddess of the Leopard Men as part of their death cult.
As can be seen by their complete disregard for life Freud, Hitler and Stalin were also Shivaites.
Shiva and Kali are the Hindu representation of Life and Death. Shiva plays unconcernedly on the pipes while the carnage of life and death goes on around him. The song goes on. Kali, his consort, the goddess of death and regeneration dances on the bodies of the dead to Shiva’s music while wearing a necklace of skulls. Death means nothing because she as the eternal mother has the means to multiply unendingly. Do multitudes die? Why then, multitudes die. Not to worry. Life goes on.
Burroughs also developed an interest in psychology in his attempt to free his mind of the fixation given him by John the Bully. As his psychological notions were well formed by 1911 when he began to write in his attempt to expiate his guilt it follows that he acquired his knowledge during his early married years from 1900 to 1911. He married at 24. He had little opportunity to do his reading before then as the major works were only appearing in the late ’90s.
His main concern was the subconscious mind. While his evolutionary ideas are easier to trace he has left no mention of his psychological reading. It seems certain that he was familiar with FWH Myers who, as noticed, first defined the notion of the unconscious in 1886. He must have read James while Freud’s notions would have been discussed, if not yet translated; thus DH Lawrence had highly developed ideas on the Freudian unconscious in his 1911 Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious while I doubt Burroughs had read Freud in the German.
Also it seems probable that Burroughs had read Le Bon.
Burroughs’ idea of the unconscious differed greatly from Freud’s while being more soundly based in the actual functioning of the mind. While Burroughs’ hero Tarzan seems to function with an integrated personality from his creation in 1911-12 Burroughs himself came very close to integrating his own from 1913 to ’17 or may have although he always had trouble with his Animus and Anima.
Even though Freud advertised the fact that he had taken a year off (golly, a whole year) for self-analysis, whatever the results may have been he never succeeded in integrating his personality or, apparently, realized he should have. He was severely conflicted all his life. Just take a look at his photo where you can see that huge welt running from his lover right cheek across his nose into his forehead. That was caused either by excessive cocaine use or mental conflict in the brain stem, probably both.
As did all mythographers, Burroughs had read his Poe, like them he was concerned with the conscious and subconscious minds. While Stevenson’s Jekyll lost his conscious mind in his subconscious mind, Burroughs cencentrated on the concept of the beast within the man, the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious. In Chapter 3 of The Return Of Tarzan, in what appears to be a plagiarization of the murder scene of Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue, Burroughs has Tarzan act out the parts of both the Sailor and the Orang.
Lured up to the apartment on the pretext of helping a young woman, Tarzan is set upon by her accomplices. Discarding the trappings of his recently acquired civilization Tarzan reverts to his anthropoid education of the Jungle becoming Poe’s Orang, yet always retaining the restraints of his humanity or the Sailor.
When the police come he leaps out the window to a telephone pole which one imagines were more common in Chicago than Paris. (Burroughs had never been to Paris so he replicated the urban scene he knew.) While still in his ape guise he has the sense to look down where he sees a policeman below so he climbs up leaping to a rooftop.
Racing across the rooftops of Paris he climbs down another pole. Then in a Hyde-like transformation back to Jekyll he shakes himself from his ape self back into his human self, without the aid of drugs, enters a restaurant to clean up in the rest room then saunter jauntily down the street as though nothing had happened.
Thus the plagiarization of not only Poe but Stevenson was merely an attempt to give a better solution by using the mythological symbols.
Return was written at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913.
Burroughs’ own self-analysis would continue through his astonishing output of 1911-17 when he finally integrated his personality with the final volume of his Mucker Trilogy published as the Oakdale Affair but alternately titled Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid which is the better title. At that time he had exorcised his major fixations which should have integrated his personality.
In understanding that the disintegration of the personality was caused by an affront or affronts to the Ego or Animus that resulted in the creation of fixations that festered in the subconscious that in turn manufactured affects that evidenced themselves in various physical and psychological ways he realized that the same could be exorcised returning the Ego to a whole state.
Unfortunately he strung his theory on through a couple dozen works of fiction disguised as incident. A very few would read all the novels while the only possible interpreters could be those who had read them all not only with a psychological background but an open, inquisitive mind. We’re a very small minority.
If I hadn’t been through the same process on my own I probably never would have recognized it. However as his theories were embodied in his hero Tarzan as mythology they passed into the unconscious of his readers of which, as a teenager, I was one, so shall we say, my mind was prepared.
I, Dynamo 