Ancient Tidbits.

November 11, 2024

by, R.E. Prindle

4.Let us consider what the earth, the Northern Hemisphere, may have looked like near the end of the ice age in the Age of Leo. The ice cap was immense and after perhaps six thousand years, what?, eighteen to twenty five thousand feet deep. Sound right? All of the mountains under glaciers of immense size. Now, the water to create all that ice and snow had to come from somewhere, and it came from the oceans. Water converted to snow meant the ocean levels dropped to provide. Estimates run a retreat from five hundred to fifty feet hundred feet. Thus all land over that was exposed. All the evidence points to the fact that it was inhabited.

Two choice bits of exposed land were the Mediterranean and the valley of the Persian gulf with the Tigris-Euphrates running the entire length into the Indian ocean. Thus we have the two civilizations, the one that became Egypt and the one that became Mesopotamian. Let us first consider the latter. The Persian Gulf today is only three hundred feet deep so that it was well above sea level and wouldn’t be affected for some time as the waters rose. This requires some conjecture.

The Sumerians and later speak with some reverence and awe of Ethiopians, while the Jews say that Eden was to the East, that is toward India, down in the valley, India, at that time, was occupied by a Black race. Whence the Black race? When India split off from Africa way back when and beyond the flora and fauna went with it. The animals are much the same, some evolution involved, and the human population was apparently black, but not necessarily Negro. These are the Ethiopians the Sumerians were talking about. They must have been the civilizers represented by Oannes who rose from the flooded gulf to educate them. Throughout history the civilizers seem to come by sea.

Why was the gulf a paradise? An aside: When I was in the Navy we visited Pago Pago in American Samoa. Weather wise this was a paradise. Samoa is on the equator and so should have been blistering. Pago Pago, a mere settlement, no city, was located at the bottom of a mountain on the sea shore. A wind blew constantly down the mountain cooling the temperature as it came so that Pago Pago was a constant 70 degrees. Delightful. I conjecture that that was the case with the Gulf valley. Couldn’t ask for more.

Of course, as the waters continued to rise the Ethiopians were flushed out of the Valley moving into the hills upstream. There they came into contact with the less developed back country people bringing their civilization with them. Thus the post flood civilization began. Well, that’s a tough one. How rapidly did the waters rise?

Perhaps the entire Age of Leo were rising waters, coastal settlement having to be abandoned regularly. There is some evidence of human presence in the Age of Cancer with greater development in the Age of Gemini increasing in the Age of Taurus until blossoming in the Age of Ares inro Pisces. By then the ocean levels were close to ours. They say the level is still slowly rising so that may go on until the Big Freeze comes around again. On to Egypt. (Cont.)

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Facebook

Bill Hillman  · 

Century Society Notes 8/25/2023

by

R.E. Prindle

This session we will take a break from the Aries/Pisces cusp to investigate the Pisces/Aquarius cusp of the present day.

To clarify the Zodiacal position of the Great Year: the last Ice Age ended in the Age of Leo according to the Sumerian records and that resulted in the Great Flood as the frozen waters were released beginning the rise of the sea levels.

Let me take a moment here to put the Biblical accounts of the flood with which we are all familiar into perspective.  The Hebrews or Jews had no memory of the flood.  They came into existence only at the cusp of Taurus and Aries hence all biblical accounts are adapted from original records for Jewish purposes.  For a more accurate representation of Genesis one has to go to Taurian accounts of the Mesopotamian peoples.  For these peoples the Zodiac was basic to their religion.  The Jews rejected the tenets of that religion.

Thus the Flood had nothing to do with forty days of rain etc.  While the cause of the Flood was not known it was remembered.

With the bursting of the glacial flood the waters rose quickly obliterating the existing civilization of the lowlands and valleys such as the Persian Gulf.  This became the Eden of Mesopotamian and hence Jewish lore.

The Age of Leo therefor represents the beginning of Spring of the Great Year and  the rise of sea levels from approximately -500 feet to our present level.  Leo, Cancer and Gemini are therefor the first quarter of the Great Year.  Taurus, Aries and Pisces represent the second quarter or the Summer of the Great Year.  Aquarius, Capricorn and Sagittarius represent the third quarter or Autumn of the Great Year and Scorpio, Libra and Virgo represent the Winter or Ice Age of the Great Year. 

So, we are at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, that is the tail end of the Summer of the Great Year, naturally we are in the hottest part of the Great Year, or the equivalent of August of the annual year.

An Age is twenty-one and some years of centuries.  Our well being depends on how we plan for the coming twenty-one centuries.  The high point of humanity’a lives have been the Ages of Aries and Pisces.  Whether we survive Aquarius is problematical.  Consider the history of mankind over the last twenty-one hundred years of Pisces and try to imagine humanity’s journey through the twenty-one hundred years of Aquarius.  The first quarter of the Age will be warmer than the last quarter and cooler than it is now.  We will then enter Global Cooling and can put Global Warming to rest.  Sea levels will stabilize or possibly begin lower toward levels which will again be -500 feet from today.

The Ages of Aries and Pisces allowed mankind to prosper.  Those conditions were ideal, or as ideal as they will ever be.  As conditions became amenable and mankind’s mental abilities improved so did living conditions, but it was slow work.

The Age of Pisces began for mankind as an era of religious superstition and ended as scientific knowledge even though religious superstition was still prevalent.  However science and its attendant technological advantages got out of hand and destructive in its maturity so that the environment if not already destroyed is on the edge of destruction so that humanity itself will not survive in its current configuration.

The population of the world is eight billion plus while showing no evidence of pausing in its growth so that within the first quarter of Aquarius, probably early in the quarter the planet will not be able to support its human population while the animal population will be eliminated except for scavengers  like rats and other small rodents.  So, addressing the population explosion should take first priority.  There are no solutions that are palatable to the human psyche.  That involves a genocide on a massive scale.  Obviously the reduction of the population from eight billion to one billion or less is the desired result.  I leave it to you to ponder that reality.

Science and technology have created a situation in which all the resources, including water are being rapidly consumed, shamefully wasted, even sent into space.  One cannot imagine more than one hundred years into Aquarius before everything has been consumed.  Now Society is based on absolute mobility both short and long.  In other words one is able to almost immediately cross town in automobiles in a matter of minutes.  Without automobiles it might be a day trip

In every day matters such as hospitals and grocery stores I can reach a superb hospital within ten minutes.  Without a car this mere five miles to that hospital might be a morning walk.  Therefor I would be dead before I reached the hospital,  if I could even attempt it.

Grocery shopping would be a day’s effort while being incredibly difficult as I would have to push or pull a wagon.  In my case that would mean pushing or pulling the cart up a steep hill.  Out of the question.  Thus society would have to be transfigured from its current sprawl into compact units much as existed before 1950.

At present untold numbers of people are able by buying an airplane ticket to transfer themselves immense distances of four, eight, ten or fifteen thousand miles to points of the globe in a few to fifteen hours.  One can go from Seattle to London for instance and back in one day.  That will all cease probably in the first fifty years of Aquarius, if not sooner.  Thus, it will be said:  There’s no place like home.

One sees that the Aries-Pisces  Cusp that brought on immense changes will be nil compared to the Pisces/Aquarius Cusp.  Our discussions at the Society age getting more lively with every passing day.

The present and its future are very exciting.

Welcome to the Age of Aquarius.

Puzzling Out The Nature Of Jesus

by

R.E. Prindle

Perhaps the most difficult and significant religious problem in religion is the nature of Jesus.  That nature can be divided into two parts: one is his role as the avatar of the Age of Pisces and the other is his role as the Savior,  the ‘historical’ Jesus.  The ancient basal astronomical religion represented by the Zodiac is the pavement under all Western religions.

There will perhaps be objections to my introducing the role of the Zodiac into the problem; however the Zodiac played a large role in the religious life in ancient history.  The Zodiac is both a religious symbol and a calendar or time keeping devise. The transition points between the Ages is fraught with danger.  One only has to examine the transition points between Taurus and Aires and from Aires to Pisces to see great points of conflict.  That between Pisces and Aquarius is shaping up to be worse than the former two..

The ancients well before the current Great Year had worked out the astronomical fact of the Great Year.  While they might not yet have had the ability to work out the whys and wherefores with their limited knowledge, they understood that a Great Year of 25,900 years or so corresponded with the wobble of the earth caused by the Plane of the Ecliptic as we now understand.  Just as the annual year was divided  into twelve months, on the principle of as above, so below, the Great Year was divided into twelve Ages of 2100 and some odd years.

To identify the Ages of the Great Year they organized great star constellations ordered around the earth.  Thus, as the wobble progressed the sun rose in the stars of each Age.  As a religious symbol each Age was ruled by a male and female avatar.  Thus, in the Ages crucial to our history are those of Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries, Pisces and now Aquarius.  Six Ages add up to a half year, thus as Leo begins the Spring of the Great Year so Aquarius begins the Fall.  Many see the Zodiac as a fortune telling device but the ancients used it differently so that to understand the problem we have to view it in their context.

So there were twelve pairs of gods to reign over the twelve signs.  Twelve thus became a sacred number as in twelve tribes of Israel, twelve gods of Greece posited by Homer and so on.  The Greek avatars of Taurus and Aries are quite clear and the avatar of Gemini is faintly visible.  The three represent six thousand three hundred plus years

The avatar for Gemini was Uranus, for Taurus Cronus and for Aires Zeus, for the coming Piscean Age, Dionysus was scheduled.

The world problem down to our times was at the transit from Taurus to Aires.  The Age of Aires Is actually the period of the rise of mankind.

As it was supposed, the transit was to a new sky and a new earth.  In other words the stars of the constellation of Aries were different than the stars of the constellation of Taurus, thus a new sky.

It was then expected that as the constellations changed above so people would adopt the new avatars as their gods.  As the stars represent the primordial universal religion of mankind all peoples did,own  except one splinter group of Asians, the proto-Jews.  They maintained that Saturn, the avatar of Taurus was an eternal unchanging god.  They continued to worship Saturn thus cutting themselves off from mankind.

It took a millennium  for the name Jews to be affixed to these people who were known then as Hebrews.  This people was known as a peculiar people and they have remained so through the Ages.  Taurus, Aries, Pisces and as we transit to the New Age, Aquarius.

Prior to Aries the Jews were of the great tribe of Semites from all the Semites occupying Mesopotamia, happy as clams of the Age of Saturn, Taurus.  The Jews were however obstinate they were demanding and not giving.  What was the solution to the problem?  Quite simply expulsion.  The Jews were driven out.  Problem solved, right?  Not quite.  The stage was merely set for the next act.

Now things get really difficult to explain.

The Jews were now hurt in their amour propre.  How to explain their rejection to themselves.  Not so difficult.  They were simply correct and the majority was wrong.  Four thousand years later this is still their position.  They believe themselves incredibly intelligent and the rest of the world irredeemably stupid.  They were the master people, not the subordinate.  But, not content with just believing that, they had to dominate.

The ancients had colleges of priests to maintain  nearly timeless memories. The priests remembered Astronomical things such as the Zodiac and passed the information down generation to generation.  The Jews became in their own imagination ‘a nation of priests.’  They realized that they were a small minority so that a plan of action was necessary.  They needed to be a large nation so the plan was to go forth and multiply, in modern terms, to weaponize their population..  As an example by the time of the Roman Empire they may have been the largest nation by number in existence, because they had gone forth and multiplied.  They were present throughout all of the cities of the Roman Empire.  They had a very large presence in Rome itself,  millions in Egypt, hundreds of thousands in Anatolia and the Perian Empire.

The priests had devised methods to keep the satellite settlements unassimilable so that the that the nation remained loyal.  It would be silly to believe that the settlements were undifferentiated from each other just as in the US today New York Jews are different from LA Jews, etc., but they remained united.  They were all Jews. But we are time traveling here a little; matters have to progress from their expulsion from Ur of the Chaldees.  It was a long haul down the Age of Aries, twenty-one hundred years.  Just as now we are looking at twenty-one hundred down the Age of Aquarius and not planning very well.

Their career did progress as it had begun. Next they had a layover at Padan Aram, another great religious center.  Here they were caught swindling their masters with some absurd, impossible scheme.  Expelled again.  The pattern develops.

If I am correct this last expulsion coincided with the volcanic eruption of the island of Thera in the Aegean Sea.  This was the defining event of the Age of Aries.  The eruption was immense wearing the majorityof a fairly gigantic volcano down below sea level.  The ash distribution was wide and immense and it went on for a long time.  The winds  must have been the Western Zephyr, if in Summer, or the Boreal blast if in winter.  Ash was delivered in large quantities over the cities of the Near East and probably in some quantity over Egypt.

It is very likely at this time that the Jews escaped from Padan Aram.  As they progressed down through what would become Palestine crops buried in ash created a great famine so that the Jews continued on down to Egypt.  So in about 1600 BC they entered Egypt and stayed for about 400 years down to 1200 BC

How to characterize their presence in Egypt.  The end result of their behavior matched their beginning and that or Padon Aram and  would be repeated in their expulsion from Spain in mid Pisces.  Remember that their expulsion from Ur of the Chaldees was caused by the inability to accept the authority  of the priestly castes of which they undoubtedly had members  and this intransigeance was probably abetted by violent behavior.  Throughout the Arien Age the Jews in all their various locations were noted for tearing down other religions altars backed by a belligerent attitude.

In Egypt also they disdained Egyptian religious practices.  The Egyptians had large classes of sacred animals  which were protected from killing.  The Jews scoffed at the idea of sacred animals and refused to honor the practice killing them at will.  This offence was added to all their other refusals to honor Egyptian customs.  They mocked Egyptian skills claiming theirs were better.  If you have a Christian background you will remember the contest between Moses and the Egyptian magicians for instance in which according to the Jews they won hands down.  The Egyptian side of the contest hasn’t surfaced yet.

They put themselves in competition with the Egyptians in such a manner according to them that the Pharaoh noticing that their population was growing so inordinately fast that they might outnumber his own people while bring greatly  superior took action.  Thus, he declared the Slaughter of the Innocents.  He decreed the slaughter of all new born Jewish  boy children.  This, of course, incensed the Jews who were not slow to develop defensive measures.

I interject a passage from Rabbi Louis Ginzberg’s amazing compilation, ‘The Legends of the Jews’  pp.207-208.  This is longish but amazing:

Quote:

The king then spoke to Job, and said:  “What sayest thou, Job, and what is thy advice respecting the Hebrews?”  Job replied: “Behold, all the inhabitants of the land are in thy power:  Let the king do as seemeth good in his eyes.”

Balaam was the last to speak at the behest of the king, and he said:  “From all that the king may devise against the Hebrews, they will be delivered.  If thou thinkest to diminish them by the flaming fire, thou wilt not prevail over them, for their god delivered Abraham their father from the furnace in which the Chaldeans cast him.  Perhaps thou thinkest to destroy them with a sword, but their father Isaac was delivered from being slaughtered by the sword.  And if thou thinkest  to reduce them through hard and rigorous labor, thou wilt also not prevail. For their father Joseph served Laban in all manner of hard and rigorous labor, and yet he prospered.  If it please the king, let him order all the male children that shall be born in Israel this day forward to be thrown into the water.  Thereby canst thou wipe out their name, for neither any of them nor any of their fathers was tried in this way.’

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

Balaam’s advice was accepted by Pharaoh and the Egyptians.  They knew that God pays measure for measure, therefore they believed that the drowning of the men children would be the safest means of exterminating the Hebrews, without incurring harm themselves, for the Lord said unto Noah to never again destroy the world by water.  Thus, they assumed, they would be exempt from punishment, where in they were wrong, however.  In the first place, though the Lord had sworn not to bring a flood upon men, there was nothing in the way of bringing men into a flood.  Furthermore, the oath of God applied to the whole of mankind, not to a single nation. The end of the Egyptians was that they met their death in the billows of the Red Sea.  “Measure for measure”—as they had drowned the men children of the Israelites, so they were drowned.

Pharaoh now took steps to the faithful execution of his decree.  He sent the bailiffs into the houses of the Israelites, to discover all new born children, wherever they might be.  To make sure that the Hebrews should not succeed in keeping the children hidden, the Egyptians hatched a devilish plan.  Their women were to take their little ones to the houses of the Israelitish women that were suspected of having infants.  When the Egyptian children began to cry or coo, the Hebrew children kept in hiding would join in, after the manner of babies  and betray their presence, where upon the Egyptians would seize them and bear them off.

Furthermore Pharoah commanded that the Israelitish women employ none but  Egyptian midwives, who were to secure precise information as to the time of their delivery, and were to exercise great care, and let no male child escape their vigilance alive.  If there should be parents that evaded  the command and preserved a new-Born boy in secret, they and all belonging to them were to be killed.

Is it to be wondered at then, that many of the Hebrews kept themselves away from their wives?  Nevertheless those who put their trust in God were not forsaken by Him.  The women who remained united to their husbands would go out into the field when their time of delivery arrived, and give birth to their children and leave them there, while they themselves returned home.  The Lord who had sworn unto their ancestors to multiply them, sent one of His angels to wash the babes, anoint them, stretch their limbs and swathe them.  Then he would give them two small pebbles, from one of which they sucked milk, and from the other honey.  And God caused the hair of the infants to grow down to their knees and serve them as a protective garment, and then he ordered the earth to receive the babes, that they be sheltered therein until their time of growing up, when it would open its mouth and vomit forth the children, and they would sprout up like the herb of the field and the grass of the forest.  Thereafter each would return to his family and the house of his father.

When the Egyptians saw this, they went forth every man to his field, with his yoke of oxen, and they ploughed up the earth, as one plows it at seed time.  Yet they were unable to do harm to the infants of the children of Israel that had been swallowed and lay in the bosom of the earth.  Thus the people of Israel increased and waxed exceedingly.  And Pharaoh ordered his officers to go to Goshen, to look for the male babes of the children of Israel and when they discovered one, they tore him from his  mother’s breast by force and thrust him into the river.  But no one is so valiant  as to be able to foil God’s purposes, though he contrive ten thousand subtle devices unto that end.  The child foretold by Pharaoh’s  dreams and by his astrologers was brought up and kept concealed from the king’s spies. It came to pass after the following manner.

Unquote.

That was the prequel to the birth of Moses. So Moses is more than likely a fictional character and an impossible one.  Who was Moses supposed to  be?  Let’s follow his story through.

He’s a proscribed baby boy, so was Zeus.  He was buried in mother earth.  He was given stones of milk and honey to suck on for sustenance for eighteen to twenty one years.

  Zeus was proscribed and born in a cave with goddesses as nursemaids.

Moses was dug up, miraculously finding his way to parents he had never seen as with their house.

An alternate version says that the Egyptians found him as a baby and thrust him into the river to be rescued by an Egyptian Princess, thus  becoming an Egyptian Prince.  Sargon of Mesopotamia followed this prescription also.

Having  been received by Mother Earth Moses was subsequently raised to the highest level on a mountain top much like the Greek Zeus where he was greeted by God, talked to him, gazed on his face and given twin tablets that he dropped on the way down the mountain so that he had to go back for two replacements.  These contained innocuous commandments that were common everywhere and certainly in Egypt in which the Jews had been living for 400 years, and remember Moses was reared by Egyptians thus knowing little of Jewish customs.  He was as a stranger to them.

At the time of death on the brink of the promised land he disappeared no one knew where.  With his association to  the Zodiac through Zeus, the Greek avatar of Aires, I would project that he was intended to be the ‘eternal’ god Saturn who didn’t die on the cusp of Aires but lived in the Jewish mind and who would soon be replaced by Jesus on the cusp of Pisces.  While Saturn failed to displace Zeus in Aires, Jesus/Saturn would replace Zeus’ intended successor Dionysus/Osiris combined into one entity.  Two vegetation gods.  Thus Jesus/Saturn the Jewish candidate displaced the vegetation god of the Hellenic/Egyptian candidates.  Thus, the Jews proved to their satisfaction that Saturn was eternal over three signs and we’ll see what happens in the Age of Aquarius.

Now, at the time of Moses in Rabbi Ginzberg’s styling, who says he has examined all existing Jewish texts to compile his rather magnificent ‘The Legends of the Jews’, the Jews were in full revolt against Pharaoh.  Pharaoh,  exasperated, drove the Jews out of Egypt.

That may be true, but this scene in the life of the Jews took place c. 1200 BC when the Middle East was in turmoil and Egypt was beleaguered in the Delta and by invading Asians by land.  I coordinate these events to have taken place after the Greek destruction of the holy city of Troy.  Thus fleeing Trojan bands might easily have ejected various locations driving the peoples into Egypt as it were creating mass chaos. The Greek leader,  Menelaus, is said to have taken his troops down to Egypt rather than going home.  Thus it is possible that in the chaos the Jews were simply ejected over the overland route as part of the general warfare.  But, once again the Jews suffered expulsion adding to their ferocity.  The record is lengthening.

Remember that we are dealing with immense swatches of time.  In a rather bloodthirsty entry of the Jews into Palestine involving various genocides and total destruction they established themselves from c. 1200 Bc to 486 BC..  In 486 in a war with Babylon Jerusalem was leveled and the population trekked off to captivity. Woe, but another expulsion.  Babylon fell to the Persians about 436 B.C. and any Israelis who wished could return to Jerusalem, a smattering of people did while the majority chose to remain with the fleshpots of Babylon which were substantial.  Thus over the remainder of Aires of four hundred years the Jews formed a very large population in the Persian Empire quite independent of those in, shall we now call it, Israel?  Actually the term Israel is applied to the Jewish people, while the land of Israel is so named aftter its people.  At the time the land would have been  called Judaea.

Don’t get too comfortable in your seat because change is ever the law in the world and we’ve got a lot of changes coming up.

After Alexander of Macedon conquered the Eastern end of the Mediterranean and extended his conquest to the Aryan settlements of India he had achieved the near universal State of the ancient world.  The Hellenic world was united but only temporarily for Alexander died on his return, the Empire was divided among his generals.  The General Seleucus took all lands that lay above Egypt including Israel.  His bad luck.

The conquest introduced the Greek style of civilization to the Eastern Med where it was warmly received by everyone including a large portion of Israelites called the Sadducees.  The Jewish reactionary party was called the Pharisees.   The Seleucid overseers had too much on their plate losing their control to the Jewish Maccabean revolutionaries.  Israel thus briefly became an independent State of golden memory.

Egypt had been allotted to General Ptolemy.  The Ptolemaic empire prospered for three hundred years before falling to Rome.  Now things are beginning to take shape.

With only three hundred years left in the Arien Age it was time for planning the accession of Pisces.  One must assume that the priestly colleges began to organize their agenda to create the event.  Bear in mind that a Jew, Jesus the God will be chosen the avatar who is neither Jesus of Nazareth nor Jesus the Christ while Jesus the Christ is Judeo/Greco/Egyptian and no longer wholly Jewish.

The End of the Age of Aries is quite different than the beginning.  The Hellenes have become totally dominant at all points in the culture.  Egyptian dominance has retreated although the priestly college of Memphis is powerful backed by the Greco-Egyptian Library of Alexandria; Rome has completed the universal State begun by Alexander of Macedon.  The Jews coming into existence at the beginning of Aries have survived all the vicissitudes of Aires to become a major influence at the end.  A sliver off the Semites at the beginning they have now become one of the most numerous people at the end.  While only the smaller people of Israel is today considered, at the time Egypt contained at least two million,  the Persian Empire millions more while every city in the Empire had a large colony and  Rome’s population itself probably equaled that of Alexandria.  Throw in the population of the islands and you have perhaps what could amount to a mighty nation and under Paul that dispersed population essentially subverted the Empire, becoming the Empire’s successor as the spiritual Roman Catholic Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, two Jews.  Of course the Empire went to hell as a result.  The loss of 70 was avenged.

THE DAWNING OF THE AGE OF PISCES

We are concerned here with the religious development of Aries and Pisces. The small unrelated kingdoms of early Aries were now coalesced into a universal State under the aegis of Rome.  Such a universal State required a universal religion.  In the new state of affairs the field was open. Any universal religion might aspire to become primary. It would have been impossible to organize all the old Hellenic religions under one god. The only existing religion with possibilities was the Jewish national religion which had an invisible god that could be adapted to all peoples as Paul ultimately was able to do, but. In the final quarter of Aries Godt was inflexibly bound to the Jewish people.

The Hellenic Empire with its pantheon probably seemed appropriate to be the winner, especially united with Egyptian religion. The great priestly college of Memphis  had the ways and means.  The college was not reactionary; it saw the problem clearly and was not inactive.  It therefore designed a new religion and put it into execution.  This was the religion of Serapis.  It was a beautifully designed universal religion.  It also had the perfect means of dissemination through the second city of the Empire, Alexandria.  Alexandria was perhaps the first seaport of the Empire.  Egypt was the breadbasket of the Empire shipping wheat to every city.  All ships came to Alexandria so that the crews could be proselytized there and carry the seeds of the Serapian religion to every port in the Empire.  Those boys in Memphis were not sitting on their hands.

The religion was doing very well.  So well, that it terrified the Jews who determined to scuttle it.  The Jews comprised nearly half of Alexandria’s two million people while they were not averse to the judicious use of violence: tearing down altars, burning churches, good old fashioned terrorism,  slander, the works.  The universal church was one thing, the other was capturing the avatar of the Age of Pisces.

The avatar’a period of rule is, of course, limited to the sun passing through a sign to twenty-one hundred and some odd years. After that period he is off to far tartary, the other side of the Zodiac, a forgotten entity.  Thus the time of Zeus was nearing its end.  The transitions were quite stormy in human terms and this one, the period of the Jewish-Roman wars would be as bloody as they come.  It appears that the Greek candidate for avatar of Pisces  was Dionysus, who, if you can think this way was recognizably being groomed to replace Zeus, while the Egyptian candidate was their vegetation god, Osiris.  The priesthoods were busy at work backing their candidate.

Now, the birth story of Jesus is pure astronomical myth.  It never happened.  Nothing close to it ever happened,  There are at least three different visions of Jesus, he of the mythical birth, the historical or quasi-historical Jesus and the consensual Jesus the Christ, that is Jesus-Dionysus-Osiris.  The whole process took hundreds of years to work through.

Let us examine the preposterous birth story.  The story is all magical, that is impossible.  There is no possible way for the divine baby to have been found and recognized.  According to the myth three kings of the orient, that is the East, one of which was Persia, other two unknowns got wind that the avatar of Pisces was to be born in Samaria, if they had ever heard of the place and knew where to find it.  Their significance was that their countries Arien avatars were doing obeisance to the Jewish and/or Greco-Egyptian avatar.  Thus the known world would be in united under one avatar who was Jewish, or, at least, Samaritan.

The Jews would have and did usurp the role away from the Mesopotamians, thus avenging their expulsion over Aries.  Pisces belonged to them and, yea, verily, it came to pass.  The charade of the manger in the barn may mean that the three mighty kings were compelled to come to ‘little’ Israel bearing extremely valuable gifts thus humbling themselves.

Nobody can actually follow a star- being led by it.  So the symbolism there is that they were following the star or stars of Pisces announcing the New Age.  Rather odd that such an astonishing event passed with so little notice isn’t it?  Rather than gathering their new found riches together, hiring a few asses to bear them along with the new mother and babe and returning home the new parents slipped away unnoticed where they resumed their old life in apparent poverty.  Odd, but no more so than Mary’s strange pregnancy.  Supposedly the spirit of God entered Mary’s ear, left or right isn’t known, and impregnated with the spirit of God.  It follows then that Jesus himself was a god as he would have to have been if he was avatar of Pisces.

THE HISTORICAL JESUS.

The later Roman Empire was god obsessed.  Through the deification of the Roman Emperors who first were deified after death, then living gods on earth and finally through the Christian any human being was promised eternal life in heaven, that is godhood.  The success of the Christian movement more than anything else was based on the promise of everlasting life.  The great masses were persuaded to forego happiness on earth by the hope of going to heaven

In a world of gods, the notion of monotheism is one of the great jokes in history.  While the Jews claim to have invented monotheism they have never practiced it.  I’m sure the heavenly hosts, many people just like you and me are having a good laugh at our expense.   So innumerable gods existed and just like any other community there must have been a king or president thus there was great competition amongst the peoples for the honor of providing the most high god.  None of the existing gods could hope to attain that distinction.  The Jewish conception of the invisible god, ostensibly resembling no particular people was best fitted for the role and would succeed in the Christian dispensation but only be forfeiting his Jewishness.  Catholic means universal.  A universal god could not favor any one people, and especially not the Jews.  The Jews then disqualified themselves from universal leadership.  They were already abhorred even as Pisces dawned.

The priesthoods were laboring away to come up with a universally successful god.  The priests of Memphis,  Egyptians knew religion,  came up with an excellent conception in the Serapian religion and they had the perfect distribution point for sending out disciples. Unless I’m mistaken the established seminaries in Alexandria meant  to train missionaries.  It is impossible that the priests didn’t recognize what the Jews had done in establishing religious colonies through out the Roman Empire.  Thus the plan was laid out for them.

However one thing in which they erred was to create a magical idol to represent Serapis.  The Jews were nearly half the population of Alexandria which had to have been the center of the religion.  When it comes to being tricksters the Jews are second to none so that they easily penetrated and exposed the fraud of Serapis.  Before they did cadres of missionaries had been dispersed throughout the Empire including Israel to which a lad named Jesus was sent.

I think it highly probable that Jesus was not Jewish but a gentile Serapian missionary. As part of his education he was sent to various places to be indoctrinated.  The middle east was a hive of religious speculation from which the national Jewish religion was excluded because of their intense exclusiveness.  It is perfectly obvious that the man called Jesus had been initiated into the Greek cult of Eleusis to which everyone in the Empire aspired.  Eternal life was one of the promises of Eleusis.  Thus in the Last Supper Jesus gave away the secret of Eleusis.

For the rest Jesus’ magic was so much blather.  Nobody multiplies loaves and fishes or turns water into wine.  His wisdom was organized in Memphis and all the Serapion missionaries would have been repeating the same stuff.  You may ask how I know this.  Psychology.  The human mind is limited and always works in the same way.  What is had to be done.  Nothing is spontaneous.  Look at the way our minds are being manipulated today.  Same thing but with better electronic devices.

A universal god was required.  The Jewish national god could not be universal.  ‘For God so loved the Jews that he made them His own special people to whom all honors were due.  Jesus is said to have said:  ‘For God so loved the world that he favored no single people.  That negated Judaism.  Jesus was therefore a revolutionary.  Besides the Jews would have known that the formula came straight out of Alexandria and was part of the Serapion religion.  Give the ancients some credit; there were as many spies then as there are today.  Read the ancient texts with open eyes; it’s all right there plain for open eyes to see.

So Jesus was a spy in Jewish eyes, got caught and paid the price.  That would have been the end of it except for Paul.

The Deification of Jesus:  Jesus Becomes The Christ and Turns Into A God

The past, history, turns people into stick people, ossifies them, as the personalities are stripped from the living.  It Is therefore important to restore them to a living milieu.  The fact is that there was who ever that saw Jesus of Nazareth.  There are no eye witnesses reporting.  Here is Jesus then claiming to b a supreme magician who can multiply loaves and fishes, walk on water and turn water to wine.  It never happened, ever, by anyone.  Israel and Egypt were filled with magicians.  The priestly colleges studied to come up with magical tricks to fool the rubes.

In Egypt where they had apparently discovered the laws of magnetism the Serapion temple had an iron idol that was suspended in mid-air through magnetism.  Apparent real magic displaying the power of the god.  It was a fraud.  The Egyptian priests knew it.  Jewish priests knew it even if they hadn’t discovered the how.

The great nineteenth century French magician Robert Houdin, as fraudulent as magicians come, knew of electricity,  He contrived a trick in which an iron was placed on an iron board, the board activated by an electric switch.  He called from the audience for the strongest man to come forward to attempt to lift the magnetized  iron on the board, then Houdin hit the switch magnetizing the iron to the board, the strong man huffed and puffed but couldn’t lift the iron.  He was dismissed and Houdin called a little girl forward, flipped the electricity off and lo and behold the little girl lifted the iron up.  Great trick but it was a fraud.  No one in the audience knew anything of either electricity or magnetism.

If Jesus actually claimed to have performed his feats the Jewish magicians saw through the tricks as tricks.  Simon Magus was so impressed that he offered to buy the secrets of the tricks from Jesus.  It wasn’t probity that prevented Jesus from taking Simon Magus up, it was that he didn’t have anything to sell.  The elders then were watching this guy, Jesus,  with suspicious eyes.  And then Jesus committed the ultimate revolutionary act.  This must have sealed his fate.

On the porch of the Temple the usurers set up their tables and conducted their business on the high holy days.  Now, consider this:  the usurers were making a lot of money in priestly territory.  That means that the priesthood was getting their cut.  It follows from human nature, no documentation is needed.  So Jesus walks up and overturns the usurers tables scattering money every which way, declaring the practice is an abomination.  That is a revolutionary act disturbing the equilibrium of the State.  Is it any wonder that he was arrested and had to be condemned to death?  It was done.  The Roman governors were merely tools in the hands of the Jewish judges who condemned Him.

The rumblings of the Jewish revolt against Rome were already under way when Jesus was executed, if that part of the story is true.  The Jews were already refusing to pay their Roman taxes.  Now, put this into context. The Jews were double taxed; first by themselves throughout all their colonies in the way of tithes, next by the Romans.  A steady annual flow of gold from all over the Empire flowed into Jerusalem every year.  The Jews had no government to support so that the gold was accumulating at a great clip while gold was being drained from the Empire.  Thus we have a tactic of asymmetrical warfare.  Had the Jews been a little more patient they might have been able to win the war.

At any rate the war broke out in 66 and by 70 the Jews were crushed.  Meanwhile a cult had grown up around Jesus, a purely Jewish cult.  It can’t be emphasized too heavily that the Jesus cult began as an entirely Jewish affair.  Initially Paul was talking to exclusively Jewish colonies in the various cities of the Empire.  The appeal to non-Jews was only achieved by jettisoning Jewish customs that had no appeal to non-Jews.  Even then the Minian religion, a it was called then grew slowly.

The early Roman Catholic church must have been mainly for Jews who organized it.  Many of the early popes must have been Jewish  When Constantine made Christianity the official sole State religion that must have opened the Church to majority non-Jews.

That development took hundreds of years.

Jesus only became the Christ after the issue of the avatar of the Piscean Age was settled.  Greek and Egyptian claims had to be accommodated so that the avatar combined the nominally Jewish Jesus, the Greek Dionysus and the Egyptian Osiris.  The three were combined into the Greek term The Christ.  Thus he became a sort of non-Jewish Jesus of Nazareth and a universal Jesus the Christ.

Now, as part of the deal,  I’m elaborating the psychologist, C.G. Jung here,  Jesus was the dominant avatar for only the first half of Pisces.  The second half was consigned to the female avatar that was a combination of the Egyptian Isis and the putative mother of Jesus, Mary, wife of Joseph.  As events turned out Isis/Mary only served for Southern Europe. She was repugnant to Norther Europe that preferred the divine huntress, Artemis of the Greeks passing under her Roman name of Diana.  Unless I’m mistaken the Diana cult continues until today although it is time for the Aquarius avatars to take over.

That will happen unless the Jews capture the Astronomical Religion and succeed in discarding it in favor of their vision of the eternal god Saturn.  I have heard some squeakings in that direction and from an unlikely quarter.

The ancient priesthoods may be gone but their role undoubtedly has been passed on to another college that is still functioning.

George W.M. Reynolds In France

by

R.E. Prindle

I think that too little attention has been paid to Reynolds sojourn in France and its influence on his intellectual development.  His future was essentially formed there. He was transformed into an Anglo-French person heavily influencing his writing style.  He was a malleable sixteen year old at the time fresh out of military school.  In his first novel written after two years residence in France at the age of eighteen, he says he was educated at the Sandhurst military academy.  He was there for a mere three years from thirteen to sixteen so it must have been a solid period of learning.  Of course in that novel, ‘The Youthful Imposter’ he shows off his knowledge repeatedly either quoting, to me now, obscure authors or referring to them.

In that same two years that he wrote his novel he met and married his wife, Susannah Pierson.  The marriage was apparently one of those perfect marriages producing several children and dozens of novels, some written by Susannah on her own.  He apparently met her father first as his tutor as a Man of the World, who was a man named Pearson as recorded in his ‘The Youthful Impostor.  Unless I’m mistaken Reynolds based his character, the Gendarme Dumont of Pickwick abroad on his father-in-law.

The five years of his sojourn covered the most impressionable years from sixteen to twenty-one, and they were spent productively.  While there he was intimately involved in the literary scene.  As evidence, in 1839 he published his review of  the literary scene titled. The Modern Literature of France involving reviews of eighteen different authors and dozens of book.  Along with the rest of his life this must have been a prodigious workload, and that couldn’t have been his entire workload.

He was apparently familiar enough with the scene so that when returning to England in 1836 he was immediately appointed the editor of the oldline Monthly Review at the age of only twenty-one.  And he made a success of his appointment.  He wasn’t exactly off and running but was building a solid resume as he immediately began writing novels also.

His reason for returning to England was that he was swindled of money in a literary scam.  He told Susannah that he would have to return to England to establish a literary career which he couldn’t do in France as he only spoke French but wasn’t familiar enough in it to write.  It appears that Susannah considered herself French but she readily agreed  to leave and follow her husband.  Their bodies were in England but their hearts were in France.

Thus the couple participated in both the English and French literary scenes.  In which they, indeed played a prominent role being the most popular novelist of the period in England, while doing very well in the United States as well as on the continent.  He was instrumental in introducing current French literature to the English reader.

Back in England in 1939 he wrote his introduction to the modern literature of France under that title.  He was still only twenty-five.

Two of the writers who influenced him most had not yet broken through.  They were Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue.  Dumas is still widely read today and deservedly so while Sue is somewhat neglected, undeservedly.  Both were very prolific.  The two would write novels that would nearly form the basis of Reynolds corpus.

Although Reynolds had made several fictional attempts since his return they were not well received; then, Eugene Sue broke through with his sensational ‘Mysteries of Paris’.  The work was so sensational in France that George Stiff, a publisher, approached Reynolds, perhaps because of his French background, as well as his appropriation of Dickens sensational ’Pickwick Papers’, to write a companion novel, ‘The Mysteries of London.’  Reynolds accepted and hit the groove so accurately that the novel, published serially over four years was equally sensational in England and possibly successful in France also.

Following the ‘Mysteries of Paris’ almost in a burst of creativity, Sue published his equally sensational work, ‘The Wandering Jew’.  His book has nothing to do has nothing to do with the Wandering Jew or Jews. The reference is merely a framing device. Perhaps the legend of ‘The Wandering Jew’ was in vogue so Sue was trying to cash in on it.  ‘Mysteries of London’ would be a sensational title.

As both the Mysteries of Paris and the Wandering Jew were issued before ‘The Mysteries of London’ ‘The Wandering Jew’  was as influential as the ‘Mysteries of Paris’.  Reynolds would continue to follow Sue so that the later biographical novels of Sue were also reflected in Reynolds following biographical novels.

A surprising influence from his French days was Alexandre Dumas.  I think that influence has slipped through commentary until now.  In 1839-40 Dumas abandoned his theatrical career to begin that as a novelist.  His first effort was the collection known as ‘Celebrated Crimes’ in eight volumes.  While the crimes are based on actual events very closely yet Dumas tells very good stories, but the crimes well known on their own, Dumas is pretty much historical fiction  They range over French history from about the year 1300 to Dumas’ present with the story of Ali Pasha.  A collection of eighteen tales almost resembling paintings.  The collection is overwhelming, even today.

The accounts are so penetrating, so acute, so psychologically developed as to be a work of genius.

Looking at Reynolds in this light the influence penetrates several novels over the two decades of Reynolds activity as a novelist.  My attention was first drawn to ‘The Crimes of Lady Saxondale’.  The title is a direct giveaway.   

At the time Reynolds read ‘Crimes’, as I suppose, as issued,  he was deeply involved in the Temperance Society that he saw as an economic opportunity.  Indeed, having achieved a substantial success with his Pickwick Abroad of 1839 which some say old one for one against the Dickens original he had money to spare.  Unfortunately for him the Temperance Society rejected monetization so that Reynolds found himself in bankruptcy court in 1840.

Thus Reynolds was in straitened circumstances until Stiff tapped him to write the ‘Mysteries of London’ beginning in 1844.

The reading of the set must have hit Reynolds with irresistible force, burning into his memory but overwhelming to the point of leaving him breathless, virtually paralyzed.  Finally the spell was broken when Stiff commissioned him to write the ‘Mysteries of London.’  Looking at ‘Mysteries’ through new eyes having just discovered ‘Celebrated Crimes’ myself, influences are readily apparent.  Looked at in this light ‘Mysteries’ too is a collection of crimes arranged sequentially and held together more or less by the presence of the Resurrection Man, Anthony Tidkins. 

An equally forceful effect was also produced when George read  the two works of the Marquis De Sade ‘Justine’ and ‘Juliette.’  Those two works celebrated the triumph of vice over virtue.  George was offended by the idea so ‘Mysterie;s’ is also intended as a refutation of De Sade.

‘Mysteries’ is centered around the twin figures of Richard and Eugene Markham.  Richard takes the role of Justine, or Virtue while Eugene steps into Juliette’s shoes.  By the end of the book Richard triumphs becoming a benign monarch in an area close to Naples called Castelcicala that he converts from Vice to Virtue.  Vice to Virtue is a major theme of Reynolds.

George then followed up in 1845 and 46 with Faust and Wagner the Wehr Wolf which leans heavily on the Dumas influence; in 1847 he wrote ‘The Coral Island’, titled ‘Mysteries of Naples’ in the US; that is unabashedly influenced by Dumas.  ‘The Bronze Statue or the Virgin’s Kiss’ of 1848 rounds out the direct Dumas phase.

There are probably other Dumas references but I would have to reread the corpus with Dumas in mind.

Let me say that of this terrific explosion of the literary 30s, 40s and 50s Reynolds was a significant part.  One might call it the Big Four, Dumas, Sue, Reynolds and Hugo.  They read each other; one could say that they almost competed. I had better stop here and curb my enthusiasm before I go too far.  This literary period is a deep well

Cowboy Buddy Meets The Blues

A Short Story

by

R.E. Prindle

The United States us usually spoken of as one country while it is not; the US isn’t even uniformity of culture within each State.  The country is a diversity.  The races have different agendas, the nationalities can barely speak to each other knowingly.  Class divisions while denied are one of the most prominent features of the US. 

To take only one State as an example, Michigan, In Michigan its metropolis is Detroit which has nothing in common with upstate, or the Upper Peninsula , the East Side or the West side of the State.  Indeed, at one time the dividing line between Eastern Standard Time and Central Standard Time ran right through the middle od the State.  One foot could exist at 10:00 o’ clock and the other foot at 9:00.

Saginaw the key city of the Saginaw Bay has nothing in common with Grand Rapids of the West.  My head was in Michigan and my feet were in Del Rio Texas and my belly button in Waterloo Iowa where the great country radio stations were..  I was a son of Dixie though I had never been below the Mason-Dixon line.

California is an entirely different country, once briefly one, to any other State in the Union, it includes Oregon to the North and Arizona to it’s East, all enclosing Nevada.

The populations themselves were diverse and unrelated to each other as different as Black and White.  Religions are so different that they can’t speak to each other.  Even the climates are total contradictions, deserts and swamps, hot and cold.  Cold. And that brings us to our story.

Minnesota, contains the northern most point of the Lower Forty-Eight, and if not the coldest there can only be a miniscule difference from second place.  The winters in Minnesota are cold and brutal while seemingly interminable.  Up there a few miles from the Canadian border is the little town of Hibbing.  Sixteen thousand people strong.   It sits at the center of the 110 mile long Mesabi Iron Range.

The Mesabi is the greatest open pit range in the world. When it became too difficult to follow the subterranean ore veins they just ripped the top off and dug it up wholesale.  A pit train runs up and down the range a couple hundred feet down into the bowels of the earth.  Then in the fifties of the twentieth the high grade ore was depleted. This is the time this story takes place  They took most of it to Europe for the big wars and blew it up.

The pit yawns empty but the rains are slowiy filling this great gash in the earth.  It may one day be the smallest of the great lakes.

It was there in Hibbing in 1941 that a child was born, a boy child. As he lay there in the cradle he was christened Shmuelly Sabbatai Goldenbargain, a little Jewish lad.  He would not remain Shmuelly all his life but a different name under which he would become of world renown, from this little place in the wilds of Minnesota that barely merited a name, Hibbing, Minnesota.  Ask someone to find that place on the map.

Shmuelly’s people in the 1950s numbered about four hundred, but they ran the town which was mainly Scandinavian and Christian.  Shmuelly’s family owned the businesses from movie theaters to heavy equipment.  His father operated the town’s grocery store that, as a monopoly did very well, unfortunately his father’s three brothers were partner’s so the profits were divided four ways, but Shmuelly’s father managed the money.

Enough of this background.

I think you have the scene sitting pretty well in your mind, except for one thing, the main drag through town was a hundred yards wide, nearly as big as a four lane highway giving it a kind of ‘High Noon’ quality.

If it’s alright we’ll call Shmuelly by the name he would take for his career as a musician.  I’ll start calling his Buddy, his ‘real’ name, that which he would legally adopt was Cowboy Buddy Wright, but I’ll drop the Cowboy part of his moniker until it’s time.

Hibbing is a school town, education is very important.  The magnificent high school, you’d have to see it to believe it,  contained all grades from kindergarten through twelfth.  That building is a real monument, as glorious as a castle, so Buddy knew his whole class for twelve years while many of us changed our schools several times.  There were never any fresh faces for Buddy.

Buddy’s father was an Orthodox Jew even though the synagogue was Reformed.  His father led the Anti-Defamation League in town.  He ruled with an iron hand.  His dad’s name was really Abram but he was known as Jack at both the synagogue and the lodge.  He was the leading member of the congregation, made frequent trips to New York City, that is Brooklyn, while his mother lived downstate  in the St. Louis Park suburb of Minneapolis that Buddy often visited, sometimes for relatively lengthy stays when things heated up between Jack and Ester.

Buddy was one of the kids who didn’t fit in it and wasn’t just because he was Jewish, he was also intellectually from a different planet, or living on a different plane.  I put no negative meaning to his being Jewish but his family and people maintained a strict distance from the town folk.  They cherished their separateness.  And they owned the town.  Everyone acknowledged that and they quietly resented it because the family shut out all competition. As a result Buddy was a shy little lad and developed a forlorn expression.   The boys all laughed at him and the girls too.  Could give a kid a complex and it did Buddy.  It’s not easy to be forced to the outside where life’s greatest tragedy awaited him.

I’ll skip the description and get to the tragedy with maybe a couple of back flashes.  All Buddy’s friends, meaning few, were outsiders like him, even his girl friend Sweet Sue.  Sue’s father was a handyman, possible rum runner at one time there on the border, for certain adventures over the state border in Superior, Wisconsin, a city infected by the mob, as his family lived above their visible means.  The means were slight but noticeable, so above doesn’t mean much.

But Sue’s father was the righteous sort, he had a fabulous Country and Western record collection, LPs, and they didn’t come from Buddy’s cousin’s record store, he must have gotten them downstate.

So, let’s skip a decade.  We’re now in late 1958, late meaning that every thing but the air was frozen solid and you had to spoon that into your nostrils.  It was in the midnight hour.  Buddy and Sue were meandering down that wide main street, she holding his hand in her coat pocket when they drifted over to the Masonic Temple.  Stepping into the recessed doorway to get to get out of the wind, Buddy mused that they had a nice grand piano inside that he had always wanted to play.

‘Why don’t we in and do it Shmuelly, I’ll dance.’ Said Sweet Sue.

‘But the door’s locked, Honey.’  Buddy pointed out.

‘Oh, that’s no problem.’  Sue said, pulling a jackknife from her pocket while in a deft move she inserted the tip of the blade and popped the lock.  I did say she was an outsider, didn’t I?  Buddy gaped but it was like magic.  When his eyes focused next he was standing in front of the piano, Little Richard style.  Now for the heartbreaking part; this is where Buddy’s life took a left turn.  He slid into ecstasy  hardly knowing what he was doing.  He hammered the keys and began to play.

Buddy had been a Little Richard fan from day one when Little Richard’s scream rent the air from the radio:  Oop Bop a luna…it rattled your brain and shook your nerves, a new person was born in that instant. Little Richard had burst on the scene like Jack from his box. 

That entry into society was alone a life changing event.  The circus had come to town.  Even today if you were there the memory will still slay you.  People who didn’t grow up with the music won’t understand.

Buddy put his hand on the keys and hammered them as hard as he could then began screaming Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti as loud as he could.  Sweet Sue shrilled jumping on the piano to do a go go dance.  This went on for ten minutes until Buddy and Sue simultaneously focusing their eyes saw two gentlemen in blue standing there with grim looks on their faces.

‘We weren’t doing anything.’ Buddy bleated.

‘It’s called breaking and entering.’ The policeman said.  ‘It’s a crime.’

They put the cuffs and Buddy and Sue and marched them to the station which was just around the block.  Sue was dismissed for being a girl although she was the one who actually broke in.  Buddy was marched to a holding cell while his father was notified that his son was downtown in the can.  He was in the jailhouse now.  Shades of James Dean in ‘Rebel Without A Cause.’

So, now, Buddy came hard up against the wall.  Jack and Ethel were aghast.  Certain members of the city smiled a little glow of satisfaction.  They were not only getting one of them, but the chief instigator.  This fly in every ointment.  Buddy who in his real life sometimes had his real name pronounced ‘Smelly’ because Shmuelly was too hard to say and damn hard to spell didn’t have the best reputation.

In fact, he seemed to be known in Duluth where a newspaper reporter called Walter Eldot even wrote an article about the arrest saying that the Iron Range didn’t need characters like Shmuelly.  Of course both Hibbing and Duluth were backwoods towns where the news of Rock and Roll was received with extreme distaste.  Perry Como was much more honored.  And Buddy’s performance of Little Richard at the school assembly had terrified nearly all, the news of which had reached Duluth, ruined Buddy’s reputation forever…and ever.

And there was that one time he ran down that kid when passing down the street on his Harley, but the kid had darted out between two cars so it wasn’t like Shmuelly had been careless.  Still it had cost father Jack four hundred dollars to fix it.  That would have been forty thousand in today’s dollars.

Buddy didn’t dress other that middle class, no black denim trousers, motorcycle boots with a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back.  But he still became a bohemian to the old folks.  Perhaps, Eldot did overstate though.

Jack tried to fix this new charge but not only was the price out of range, the faux pas was unfixable.  What the heck it was a first offence, the alibi was reasonable enough for a couple kids, maybe a couple keys did have to be replaced on the piano but how much did that cost.   Buddy was cold irons bound.  He was sent to Redwing Reformatory School down on Highway 61.  The fabled route from the Canadian border down to the Gulf of Mexico.  Riding downstate  toward Minneapolis in the police cruiser Buddy was in a daze remembering  when he received the sentence that Jack couldn’t fix but was at least limited to his eighteenth year a few months away in May.  Jack was able to arrange things so that Shmuelly could graduate with his class.

Buddy might have been able to handle that but his own father Jack Goldenbargain stood him up and sternly advised that the a son could become so defiled that even his father would reject him but that God in his mercy would redeem him if in his future life he followed the straight and narrow.  And then his mother turned on him.  Lordy, lordy.  Stressed and half dead he got into the police cruiser for the drive down highway 61 to Redwing.  His body was tied in knots, his stomach churning, his brain whirling.  Buddy could remember nothing of the next few days until he woke up one morning to realize that he was in prison.  His soul had died but his body lived on in a miserable second birth.

The next year or so was just a hazy mirage that was never clear in his mind.  The most apt description of this horrible period that I’ve found was recorded in a couple songs by the current recording artist Bob Dylan who was a schoolmate of Buddy’s in Hibbing although they a=had never known each other, unaware that the other existed.  Just as Buddy chose a musical and performing career so did Mr. Dylan, they both went on to great success in what might be called parallel careers they were so similar.

Mr. Dylan captured Buddy’s moment in one song called ‘The Chimes of Freedom’ and the other ‘Highway 61 Revisited’  in which he surely must have had Buddy in mind.  These two songs match Buddy’s experience too closely and so sympathetically that one must believe that Mr. Dylan, the same age and a schoolmate, watched Buddy in his plight carefully, almost putting himself in Buddy’s shoes.  At any rate, in later life, Buddy would play these two songs until the groove’s wore out.  The whole first song stirred Buddy to his chill but most especially this verse:  ‘The Chimes of Freedom’ flashing

.

Starry eyed and laughing as I recall when we were caught

Trapped by no track of hours for they hang suspended

As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look

Spellbound an’ swallowed ‘till the tolling ended.

Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed

For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung out ones an’ worse

An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

An’ we gazed upon the chimes  of freedom flashing.

Yes, Mr. Dylan hit Buddy’s plight on the button.  As Buddy sat shocked, morose and crushed in a bottomless depression he ruminated on those feelings if not in those words to numb even to cry.  He and Sue would never meet again for she was as devastated as he if not more so.  And then stunned when Buddy refused to see her ever again.  Never again, never again, without even a last goodbye.  Just, boom, out of her life.

Of course, Buddy was not yet able  consciously to put his misery into such words as those of Mr. Dylan that might have been some consolation.  His other care even more debilitating than Sweet Sue was what he considered his father’s betrayal.  Buddy conveniently forgot his aggravations to his father including the motorcycle incident of which his arrest capped the climax but his mind was captured by the image of Abraham in the Bible about to sacrifice his son just as God stayed his hand and saved the son.

No god saved Buddy.  A few years later when he heard Mr. Dylan’s line from the song Highway 61 Revisited, ‘And God said kill me a son’, and Abe answered, Where you want this killing done?’, and God said, ‘Out on highway 61.’  There was none to spare poor Buddy.  No.  It was the midnight of his soul.  He died the death.  He now spoke of his former existence.  He had been searching for an identity to relieve him of him of the lesser self of being Shmuelly Goldenbargain and he found it in prison.

He entered Redwing as Shmuelly Goldenbargain and left in a nebulous state of being Cowboy Buddy Wright.  It would look better on the marquee anyway.  All the Jews did it for that reason.

An Incident In Juarez

April 2, 2023

The Incident In Juarez

A Short Story

by

R.E. Prindle

Officer Smith:  Look at this, face down, feet in Mexico and head and torso across the line in the US.

Officer Riley: Ya, on the Bridge of America.

Smith:  Don’t see any wounds.  Is he asleep?

Riley:  I don’t think so.  Probably just knocked out loaded.

Smith:  I wonder who he is.

Riley:  You don’t know who that is?  That’s the folk singer Cowboy Buddy Wright.

Smith:  Who’s that?

Riley:  Never heard of Cowboy Buddy?  C’mon, man, as President Biden would say.

Smith: OK, big deal, I never heard of him.  Who is he?  What next?

Riley:  Well, we’ll pick him up and take into the station house, put him in a cell, and wait till he comes to.

Smith:  Yeah, Ok, but who put him there?

Riley:  I don’t know, but I know someone who might.

Smith:  Miguel?

Riley:  Uh, yup.  Here, I’ll, pick Buddy up, throw him over your shoulder and see if can raise Miguel on my device.

Smith carries Buddy while Riley hefts his phone and pushes a key.  It was a hundred degrees in the shade and there wasn’t any shade on the bridge.  Smith throws Buddy in the back seat as Buddy unconsciously mutters:  I can’t breathe.  Neither can I Smith huffs and puffs in the heat.

Smith:  Get ahold of Miguel?

Riley:  Yes, I did.  And he’s as chipper as ever.

Smith:  Do I care about chipper?  What’s his take on Cowboy Buddy?

Riley:  I don’t know. Mystery wrapped in an enigma.  It seems that Buddy’s presence was required by El Lobo to make a charity concert at the Sisters of Mercy orphanage.  Easter time too.  But they’re not celebrating Jesus but the guys on either side of hm.

Smith:  The place that’s trafficking in the kids.

Riley: The same.  Big to do. Lots of the Epstein crowd making merry and taking their choice.  Buddy seems uncomfortable with the gig but lacks the balls to refuse El Lobo.  Of course, I’m not sure that I would have the balls to refuse El Lobo.  Buddy gets a little intox providing subpar entertainment and offends El Lobo from the stage.

Smith:  From the stage?

Riley:  Yup.  Should have been there.  Buddy says that he has had enough, packs up his guitar and heads for the door, unsteadily.  El Lobo in his quiet way is enraged.   Buddy  leaves, falls down he steps, fortunately not hurting his guitar, stands up and starts yelling for a taxi.  Even if taxis were standing around outside the doors of the orphanage none are in sight.

So Buddy muddled and lost is stumbling down the streets of Juarez looking for a direction home when a car pulls and up and a voice says get in.  Miguel ends his story there, saying that he doesn’t know what happened then.

Our trail ends there Smitty, my lad,  now we’ll hat to prove we’re real detectives, inspector Keene, tracer of lost persons.

Smith: Yeah, like real detectives we’ll get our knowing sidekick Miguel going where no gringo dares to go.  Pay him another c-note and put him on the track.

Riley:  Cynical bastard you Smitty.  Maybe you don’t, but I’ve got a nose for this kind of work.  Jeez the pervs out picking up the kiddies and it’s Eastertime too.

Time passes.  Miguel the bloodhound sniffs, get on the trail and makes his report.

Miguel:  Ah Senores, it went down like this.  Senor Cowboy Buddy Wright of who I’m a big fan and sincerely regret his mistreatment, apparently lives in a different world when he’s one brick from completing the wall, should not have offended El Lobo, not only once but twice in the same evening. 

El Lobo is very tender concerning his orphans, several of which he has apparently made so he thinks Cowboy Buddy must learn a lesson.  Standing in front of the orphanage is a poor choice to hail a taxi,  Buddy appears to have thought his next step was the very dangerous one of walking stoned, alone and in the dark through Juarez to the bridge.

However he doesn’t have to.  A car pulls up, a door opens and Buddy is pulled inside.  Sound familiar.  What happened to Cowboy Buddy, I am not permitted to say but they drive him down to the place called The Rue Morgue, know that club, yes?  Yes, well you know then the trouble our Buddy was in.

Riley:  Oh, you don’t have to say any more Miguel, I’ve got it figured out.  See, Smitty, I told you I’m a master detective.

Smith:  Nevermind the self-applause, it’s disgusting.  So, what’s the story?

Riley: You know the reputation of the Morgue?  Buddy’s up and about now but he did have a couple punction marks. But he’s fine for now.  This is a case of ‘Better dying through chemistry.’  Murder but it will never be traced.  Buddy’s been injected with some chemical delayed action poison.  Very slow acting.  Ten, fifteen years from now Buddy will break out into a terrible rash that intensifies and will kill him.  Not knowing what to call it the Docs will name it Shingles, no one will be the wiser and El Lobo, if he’s still alive, will sit back and smile.  You should never mess with El Lobo he will be thinking that it was a simple twist of fate.

from the minutes of the Century Society 3/192023

The birth of Christianity was not wholly Jewish.  The plethora of gods, goddesses and religions could not be excluded and they weren’t.  A hotbed of religious activity not properly understood is at Alexandria, the second city of the Roman Empire and the first intellectually.  The arrival of the Greeks as conquerors fueled religious speculation while it was obvious that on the cusp of the Airean and Piscean Ages a new Age was beginning. A new sky (Piscean stars) and a new earth,  In the distance from the Taurean Age to the Piscean the mentality of humanity had advanced dramatically.  Change was in the air.

As pointed out previously the universal Roman Empire called out for a universal religion.  The Jews themselves were not susceptible to change reveling in ages old practices.  The belief that God so loved the Jews especially could not stand up.  As the Roman Empire was universal and a universal religion proclaiming that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to proclaim it was I believe developed in Alexandria. 

Now, when as Jewish legends have it the Jews fled Egypt it is ridiculous to think that the entire Jewish population, the Jews having been in Egypt for 400 years, all chose to leave.  The fleshpots of Egypt were much to alluring.

Even fifty years after having been transported to fabulous Babylon when the Jews were given the option of returning to Jerusalem or remaining in Babylon only a small group of cranks preferred to leave.  The main body chose to stay.  It cannot have been otherwise in Egypt.  Thus there were probably more Jews in Alexandria and Egypt than in Palestine.  There were nearly a million in Alexandria.  Mingling with the Greek and Egyptians religionists the main challenge to Jewish beliefs came from those two religions.

Of the three peoples the Greeks were the most internationally minded having conquered the Eastern lands the least stubbornly rooted in old ideas.  One must assume that the idea of a universal religion came from them, possibly even before Alexandria became Roman, certainly so.  Now, Jesus, was a universal religious symbol.  It is recorded that he was sent to Jerusalem to preach the new gospel, which he was in fact preaching.  If he was sent he came from somewhere else.

I think it more probable that Jesus and perhaps a dozen or two others were selected as infants to be raised in the new universal religion, thus they would know nothing else.  A myth was created to associate Jesus. with Judaea, perhaps after the fact of his ministry.  The myth of the three wise men from Persia following a star is one.  The star obviously was the star of Pisces, thus indicating that Jesus was the avatar of Pisces. Trained in Alexandria, he was sent to the  religious capitals of the Empire to assimilate a universal attitude.  Thus he was initiated into the Greek Eleusis religion which was in itself international in scope.  Anyone in the Empire who was any one would be required to be an initiate.

Proof that Jesus was initiated is provided by the Last Supper as indicated at another of our sessions.  At the supper Jesus toasted the members by saying first with a loaf of bread, this is my body, then with a goblet of wine, this is my blood.  The bread from the earth represented the temporal world and wine from sun represented the spiritual, thus uniting the two spheres, the above and the below.  Thus he gave away the secret of the Eleusis ritual which had been a closely guarded secred.

How the ritual of communion developed isn’t clear but surely the Last Supper is a myth.  We will continue this issue at our next session.

From the minutes of the Century Society 3/16/2023

Today the discussion was a back and fill of the minutes of last session.  The defeat of 70AD caused the Jews to reflect but not desist.  Even though the temple was destroyed and the population decimated forty-five years later two of the largest Jewish colonies were convinced to revolt, or perhaps, other colonies preferred to remain quiet. 

The expression of this Jewish revolt was no military action, but rather the Jews rose up and began murdering the non-Jewish population in a sneak attack.  The two colonies affected were the very large settlements of Alexandria, Egypt and the island of Cyprus.  Two hundred fifty thousand Alexadrines and two hundred fifty thousand Cypriots were slaughtered and not just slaughtered; the Jews were said to wear their intestines  as belts and other atrocities. 

So, in real terms not much different from the holocausts of WWII.  The reactions of the Mediterranean world must been to be aghast.  It also must follow that Jews in all parts of the Empire were shunned, distanced and avoided.  The slaughter was horrific.  What the reaction was in attacked Jewish colonies was isn’t recorded but it must have been harsh.  This was a mere forty-five years after the Jewish defeat.  There must have been many people alive who remembered that.

Twenty years later in 135 the Bar Kochba revolt was waged that exasperated the Romans beyond endurance.  The legions descended on Israel slaughtering how many. while masses were deported, mainly to Spain.  Then a manhunt was conducted to kill any militants and planners left alive.

The Romans forbade the Jews to inhabit Israel for all time in hope that without their home of Jerusalem survivors would blend In with the population.  But the colonies and Jews in Mesopotamia still existed.

The result must have been the detestation of Jews everywhere, how could it have been otherwise.  Yet Jewish resistance was not done yet although clandestine.

Meanwhile the Catholic, or Universal Church, for that is what catholic means, was slowly taking form.  The Christians were persecuted from time to time by various Emperors but their numbers were increasing although they remained a minority.

Constantine would win the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, subsequently to make Christianity, as the Catholic Church, the State religion.  All the old gods were not yet finished still being practiced at that time.

This date 3/16/2023, Sec’y R.E. Prindle

G.W.M. Reynolds, Psychology, Pickwick And A Link To Edgar Allan, Poe

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:  Pickwick Abroad, Teggs Edition.1839

The Youthful Impostor, reprint, original 1832, rewritten in 1835.

As I’ve said, I’ve read Pickwick Abroad three times.  I think the book is slighted the first reading because of its appropriation of Charles Dickens’ characters and story idea.  The shock to one’s proprieties is quite strong.  Bedazzled by the daring of Reynolds one tends to be critical of the novel compared to the original.  Time passes, a deeper understanding of Reynolds is acquired and a finer understanding of Pickwick Abroad begins.

Reynolds was quite young when he wrote the book, a mere twenty-three.  Forced out onto the world at the tender age of sixteen, the book fictionalizes his experience in the land of his exile, France.  All the memories are raw from just having been experienced, while his future was very uncertain. 

Reynolds left England in 1830 some few months after the July Revolution in France.  The revolution would have a profound effect on the boy, turning him into what was called a Red Republican, that is one who endorsed the violence of the First French Revolution and the bloody three days of the second, or July Revolution.  He would carry this attitude with him back to England.

At the age of eighteen he married a girl his age by the name of Susannah Pierson. Her death only, in 1858, ended the marriage.  She was apparently the perfect help mate for him, being herself an author of several books their interests meshed.  Little is known of her but if Reynolds remembrance is factual he probably met her father on his arrival in the French port of Calais.  This man unidentified by name opened Reynolds’ perception to the criminal side of human behavior.  He showed young Reynolds how to see the world.  Indicating to him the methods of criminals thus broadening young Reynolds perspectives by double.  Pickwick Abroad thus becomes a history of petty criminals, con men and sponges, that is parasites.  This was recorded in The Youthful Impostor.

Little is directly known of Reynolds’ doings in France other than what he tells us of his explorations.  To see and do what he describes must have occupied the bulk of his time.  Would that we knew more of his associates.  He moved in literary circles acquiring a sound background in editing and publishing that was of use to him on returning to England.  He immersed himself in French culture and history as will begin to be evident later in this essay when he displays his knowledge of activities in psychology and its center at the Salpetriere Asylum in Paris.

Thus he viewed the major attractions in and around Paris becoming familiar with the police and judiciary.  A constant grey presence throughout the length of novel is the gendarme Msieu Dumont.  The presence is beneficial while Reynolds expresses great admiration of him and actually of the police and the gendarmerie.  Here one wonders if the model for Dumont might be the father of Susannah and hence Reynolds’ father in law.  Pickwick met Dumont in Calais and It was in that town that Reynolds had his eyes opened.  Ah, but that might be too convenient.

The chapters of XXXII, XXXIII and XXXIV held special interest to me.  These are Reynolds at his best.  In chapter XXXII Pickwick and his entourage of conmen, spongers and hanger ons along with his club members and the irrepressible Samuel Weller go out for the evening.  They enter what appears to be a restaurant  but as the evening progresses many women at the table d’hote begin acting zany and get madder and madder when a woman jumps up jumps up on the table to do an obscene dance.  The entourage realize that they are in a madhouse.  The proprietor is a Doctor.

This introduces the subject of the Salpetriere. The women’s asylum.  Later in the novel. Reynolds will introduce us to the men’s asylum the Bicetre, another very interesting episode.  This now brings us to the connection of Reynolds and Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe was of course a profound psychologist, much more than Reynolds although in many ways whatever the latter learned in France put him well ahead of anyone in England.  The French themselves were the psychological leaders of Europe.  While Freud preempted them in a shameful way he owed nearly everything to Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and the doctors around Charcot at the Salpetriere.  One might say that without his French connection there would have been no Sigmund Freud.

Of course Charcot was just beginning his career when Reynolds wrote Pickwick Abroad.  We have to know a lot more about what circles Reynolds ran in.  We do know  that he once bought a story from William Makepeace Thackeray and actually paid him.  Most magazines either refused to pay or put it off as long as they could.  Nevertheless Reynolds must have actually visited the Salpetriere and Bicetre as these chapters around the institutions are actually quite intense and heart rending.

The question then is did Reynolds’ story influence Edgar Allan Poe.  Reynolds published in 1839 and Poe in 1845.  Poe was certainly well known in English literary circles by 1845 as Poe more or less took them by storm.  Reynolds was known in the US by 1836 when his rewritten story The Youthful Impostor was published in the US.  It is not unreasonable then to think that Pickwick Abroad was also published in the US shortly after 1839 and that Poe at sometime between say, 1840 and 1844 read the book and was impressed by the named chapters under discussion.  He took the hint and turned it into the brilliant story of The System Of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether.  There may be a clue to Reynolds in the use of the word  ‘system’ by Poe. 

Reynolds has a running joke about his character Hook Walker, Hamas Ambulator as another character translates the name into Latin.   Walker has a system for every thing his systems becoming somewhat a tiring joke.  Actually the name Hook Walker is a joke that would have been funny to many readers.  A book published in 1841, still de riguer for the cognoscenti, Chales Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness Of Crowds, explains the meaning of the name Hook Walker to Renolds.  I quote from the chapter titled Popular Follies Of Great Cities:

Quote.

‘Hookey Walker’ derived from the chorus of a popular ballad, was also in high favor at one time and served like its predecessor ‘Quoz’, to answer all questions.  In the course of time the latter word (Walker) alone became the favorite, and was uttered with a peculiar drawl upon the first syllable, a sharp turn upon the last.  If a lively servant girl was importuned for a kiss by a fellow she did not care about…the probable answer he would receive was, ‘Walker!’  If a dustman asked his friend for the loan of a shilling and his friend was unwilling to accommodate him the probable answer he would receive  was ‘Walker!’

Unquote.

So I suppose the meaning was something like ‘Fat Chance.’

Hookey Walker was a ballad popular some time earlier.   The character of Hook Walker would have provided hilarity throughout PA.  The book itself, which is very comedic, must have been thought hilariously funny, or Reynolds hoped so.

Poe being an honest writer, while he doesn’t directly indicate Reynolds as the source for the idea, Poe’s narrator and a companion are riding down the road discussing insanity and his friend point’s out the famous asylum of Dr. Tarr  The narrator turns off to investigate while his friend rides on.  I interpret that as Poe indicating he got the story idea from Reynolds (or someone as Reynolds isn’t named)  but his own story is quite different being more highly developed.  Poe, then, as I interpret had read PA and borrowed the idea.  Thus Reynolds for at least one story had an influence on Poe.

At the end of chapter XXXII one of the madwomen slips a letter to Pickwick that he pockets.  Carrying on the looniness of the times Reynolds shifts from the ladies to the men in a parody of Craniology in chapter XXXIII.  He portrays a different kind of lunacy, that of Prof. Franz Gall’s Phrenology, or the reading of the contours of the head.  Phrenology was misunderstood at the time and roundly ridiculed, but Gall was vindicated in later times as the functions of the different areas of the brain have been understood.  A number of good horror films from the thirties to today deal with the issue, an excellent one being ‘The Black Death’.  Another mad doctor.  Everybody gets a good laugh at the joke played on the craniologist and then we get on with the story.

Pickwick finds time in his busy schedule to open the letter written by the madwoman that details the descent into madness off herself and her lover and would be husband.

From my point of view Reynolds really turns on the juice to rival Poe in his understanding of psychology.

The psychologist Dr. Jean Martin Charcot working in the sixties, seventies and eighties in the Salpetriere on what was then called hysteria initially believed that hysteria had a physical origin while others contended it was a psychological reaction to a traumatic event or events.  Writing in the late thirties Reynolds was already certain of the latter.  Women during the nineteenth century were treated very badly.   The burdens placed on their psychological well being were horrendous, especially in the lower economic classes.  One would think that this would have been immediately clear to Charcot where he had an asylum full of mistreated women.

Reynolds presents two sides to the problem.  Another point of view was that insanity was inherited, a family characteristic.  I’m not sure which side Reynolds took on this issue, he may have been ambivalent or believed both.

Pickwick’s letter gives the woman’s side of what happened.  This is a very tragic story, detailed in chapters XXXIV and XXXV.  The woman and a man fall in love.  Both are ardent.  The woman’s problem is that she thinks insanity is inherited in her family line.  She therefore believes that she is destined to go insane at some future time while at the same time she doesn’t want to bring any children into the world who will inevitably carry what we would call today,  a gene of insanity.

While she is in love with her future husband she refuses to marry him without saying why; the deeper reason being that her children will have the insanity propensity or gene.  This refusal to marry drives her lover to distraction.  Thus we have a traumatic cause of insanity on both sides without any neurological damages.

Her prospective husband has a reaction to disappointed expectations traversing through depression to insanity. There is a great deal of depth to Reynolds that is easily overlooked by a casual reading.  This first story in Pickwick of the horrors of Madness comes from deep down.  In his five year residence in France with visits to almost all significant sites, the next will be the prison and insane asylum of the Bicetre at which Dr. Pinel worked.  Reynolds seems to have been inside each as well as nearly every prison in France.  And he is going to take all of this profound experience back to England to be digested

George W. M Reynolds, Charles Dickens

And Mr. Pickwick.

by

R.E. Prindle

One is mystified concerning the importance of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Paper in Reynolds’ career.  One almost thinks that he is trying to steal Dickens’ identity.  The significance of the influence does not end with Reynolds continuation of Dickens Pickwick Papers but continues throughout his life.  In fact, Dickens himself adapted his style to that of Reynolds, especially in his novel ‘Our Mutual Friend’.  It’s as though he moved to blend with Reynolds.  Perhaps the title might even refer to the two writers rivalry.

Dickens began publishing his Pickwick in March of 1836 in serial magazine form that ended after twenty numbers; actually nineteen as the last two installments sold as a unit, perhaps to publish the book while the title was hot.  Each installment sold for a shilling.  Twenty shillings makes up a pound.  The book was then published in 1837.

George Reynolds who had exiled himself to France at the end of 1830 returned to England in 1836.  He was then twenty-two.  Dickens was twenty-four, both very young..  Reynolds who had earned a literary reputation in France was quickly employed as the editor of The Monthly Magazine where he watched the amazing success of the Pickwick Papers.  He itched to be such a successful author.  He had everything but a format. 

Reynolds had matured far beyond his years in France.  He was only sixteen when he left England on his own, thus as a mere youth he had to grope his way through the Parisian jungle.

He had a capacious mind while being very ambitious.  He succeeded until he was swindled of his money.  Along the way he assumed, or tried to assume the character of a Man of the World.  Interestingly Dickens admired and assumed the role of a Man of Feeling; it was the direct opposite of The Man of the World.

While Reynolds would turn out to be an astonishing author with the hard edge of a Man of the World he needed a framework or model to portray his own work.  In this case he chose the Pickwick Papers.  In 1844 and the Mysteries of London he would model his novel on the Frenchman Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. 

In a rather breathtaking way he appropriated Dickens’ characters and method.  Having just returned from Paris with a satchel full of impressions he placed Pickwick in France and called his work Pickwick Abroad.  Apart from the fact that the two novels had two different authors the continuation was quite seamless and logical; they might as well have been vol. one and two.

Dickens’ novel was published in 1837 and Reynolds in 1839.  Sort of the proper distance for the sequel to be published.  Thus Reynolds was riding Dickens’ coattails very closely.  As it turns out, according to E.F. Bleiler of Dover Books, Abroad was a near best seller, perhaps rivalling PP.  That implies at least several thousand copies, perhaps into ten digits.

Dickens’ serial was selling forty thousand copies an issue near the end so the numbers may be even higher.  Remember half or better of the England’s population was illiterate at the time.  Naturally Dickens was enraged, despising Reynolds the rest of his life, although ‘Our Mutual Friend’ may acknowledge recognition of their influence on each other.

Reynolds’ work had, at least, four different editions over time; not printings but separate editions.  The first two were in 1839, the second in 1857, and the last in 1864.  Each date is significant.  It’s possible that there were others but I am unacquainted with them if there are. 

What is considered the first edition was printed for the publisher Thomas Tegg, Cheapside, R. Griffen and Co., Glasgow, and Tegg and Co., Dublin and also S.A. Tegg, Sydney and Hobart Town.

The second first of 1839 was published by Greenwood, Gilbert and Piper, Paternoster Row.  Both were 600+ pages, single volume.  Both as deluxe editions bound in leather.  As Greenwood was a name assumed by Eugene, Richard’s brother of Mysteries of Paris, there may be something fishy about this edition.  Both had forty-one full page illustrations and 33 woodcuts.

Two first editions in the same year is somewhat unusual, and perhaps unique.  I have no information on which came first while Greenwood, Gilbert and Piper may be relatively unknown.  How the sales were divided between the two I couldn’t guess.

The Teggs edition would imply that the book was placed on sale simultaneously in England, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand.  Perhaps inflamed by Dickens’ success the twenty-two year old aspiring Man of the World envisioned the most enormous of successes sparing no expense and effort.

The books had  forty-one full page inserted illustrations and thirty-three woodcuts. As Reynolds said the pictures ran the cost of publishing up so he must have been expecting really marvelous results.  As he closely followed Dickens publishing methods also publishing twenty installments at a shilling each, as the book was well received being a near best seller, according to Bleiler I think it fair to assume that Reynolds repaired his financial position, especially as Bleiler says that in his personal financing publishing with the Temperance Society a year or two later he lost money heavily.  If he had the money to lose it would have had to have come from Pickwick Abroad.

The next edition in time, that of Henry Lea of Paternoster Row by the author of “Robert Macaire In England, etc. etc”. Now, the 1857 edition was published outside the partnership of Reynolds and John Dicks therefore it seems probable that Reynolds didn’t cut Dicks in on any profits.  So Reynolds considered Pickwick Abroad as his own separate property.  This would hold true of the 1864 edition also.  Whether that caused any problems between Reynolds and Dicks isn’t known.

The copyrights for The Mysteries of Paris published earlier were also held outside the partnership by Stiff and Vickers the original publishers .  Now this gets interesting.  In 1856 Reynolds completed his novels Mysteries of London and Mysteries of the Court of London that he considered one work. These two books were a monumental work extending from 1844 to 1856, that is twelve years.  That must have been very exhausting.

My question is why did he cap his masterwork with a new edition of Pickwick Abroad?  How do they relate to Dickens?  I speculate that  it is not improbable that Pickwick formed some sort of psychological  connection to Dickens, the Man of Feeling,  himself, while Dickens, who was not all that prolific was increasingly drawn into the same psychological  connection with Reynolds as is seen by his adoption of Reynolds methods and style specially as seen in his novel ‘Our Mutual Friend.’

There is a significant psychological difference between the two authors which might explain their seeming magnetic attraction to each other.  Dickens in a list of eighteenth century authors that influenced him named a writer named Henry MacKenzie.  That was a new name to me.  Upon checking I learned that he wrote a 1771 novelette titled ‘The Man of Feeling’, following it by a novelette titled ‘The Man of the World’.

Dickens wrote sentimental novels as The Man of Feeling while Reynolds wrote hard edged realism as the Man of the World that he longed to be.  Each supplied what the other lacked.  Just a thought.  Both men were top sellers although Dickens sentimentalism has survived two centuries and continuing while Reynolds’ hard edged man of the world stuff was buried by 1914 although the American author Edgar Rice Burroughs had read The Mysteries of the Court of London somewhen before 1914 as a reference shows up in his ‘Outlaw of Torn’.  But until E.F. Bleilers resuscitation of ‘Wagner the Werwolf’ in 1975 Reynolds had been out of print.

At any rate Dickens Pickwick Papers is a monument to sentimentalism or feeling while Reynolds comes down heavy on fairly brutal realism.  The contrast as well as similarities between the two is quite striking.  Between the two of them they definitely dominated middle century literature.

One might note, however, that of the two brothers of Mysteries of London Eugene is a man of the world while Richard is a man of feeling.  Once again, a strong contrast.  The story of Richard and Castelcicala might even be called a fairy tale.  Reynolds then republished Pickwick Abroad after he finished his major work.  This raises the question of what is the relationship of Abroad to the long Mysteries novels?  Those two novels are bracketed by Abroad indicating enclosure.  Thus Abroad and the Mysteries are one unit.

So, we have the two first editions of 1839, 1857, and finally the last edition of 1864 after Reynolds had laid down his novelistic pen. Thus we have the end of the novels and the first and last editions of Pickwick Abroad enclosing the whole of Reynolds production.  Is it all one unit resolving Reynolds’ psychology?  He sold his copyrights to John Dicks so he dumped his whole life from 1839 to 1864.  He was free from it. 

Was that his intent?

Of course his beloved wife Susannah had died in 1858 and that most definitely  took the spunk out of the man. He didn’t remarry and possibly didn’t even look for another wife.  Things very probably just emptied out.

If there are other editions of Pickwick Abroad I haven’t found them.

Dickens, Charles, Pickwick Papers, 1837

Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend, 1865

McKenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, 1781

McKenzie, Henry, The Man of the World

Reynolds, George W. M., Pickwick Abroad, Tegg & Co., 1839

Reynolds, George W. M. Pickwick Abroad, Sherwood, Gilbert & Piper, 1839

Reynolds, Pickwick Abroad, Henry Lea, 1857

George W. M Reynolds, Charles Dickens

And Mr. Pickwick.

by

R.E. Prindle

One is mystified concerning the importance of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Paper in Reynolds’ career.  One almost thinks that he is trying to steal Dickens’ identity.  The significance of the influence does not end with Reynolds continuation of Dickens Pickwick Papers but continues throughout his life.  In fact, Dickens himself adapted his style to that of Reynolds, especially in his novel ‘Our Mutual Friend’.  It’s as though he moved to blend with Reynolds.  Perhaps the title might even refer to the two writers rivalry.

Dickens began publishing his Pickwick in March of 1836 in serial magazine form that ended after twenty numbers; actually nineteen as the last two installments sold as a unit, perhaps to publish the book while the title was hot.  Each installment sold for a shilling.  Twenty shillings makes up a pound.  The book was then published in 1837.

George Reynolds who had exiled himself to France at the end of 1830 returned to England in 1836.  He was then twenty-two.  Dickens was twenty-four, both very young..  Reynolds who had earned a literary reputation in France was quickly employed as the editor of The Monthly Magazine where he watched the amazing success of the Pickwick Papers.  He itched to be such a successful author.  He had everything but a format. 

Reynolds had matured far beyond his years in France.  He was only sixteen when he left England on his own, thus as a mere youth he had to grope his way through the Parisian jungle.

He had a capacious mind while being very ambitious.  He succeeded until he was swindled of his money.  Along the way he assumed, or tried to assume the character of a Man of the World.  Interestingly Dickens admired and assumed the role of a Man of Feeling; it was the direct opposite of The Man of the World.

While Reynolds would turn out to be an astonishing author with the hard edge of a Man of the World he needed a framework or model to portray his own work.  In this case he chose the Pickwick Papers.  In 1844 and the Mysteries of London he would model his novel on the Frenchman Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. 

In a rather breathtaking way he appropriated Dickens’ characters and method.  Having just returned from Paris with a satchel full of impressions he placed Pickwick in France and called his work Pickwick Abroad.  Apart from the fact that the two novels had two different authors the continuation was quite seamless and logical; they might as well have been vol. one and two.

Dickens’ novel was published in 1837 and Reynolds in 1839.  Sort of the proper distance for the sequel to be published.  Thus Reynolds was riding Dickens’ coattails very closely.  As it turns out, according to E.F. Bleiler of Dover Books, Abroad was a near best seller, perhaps rivalling PP.  That implies at least several thousand copies, perhaps into ten digits.

Dickens’ serial was selling forty thousand copies an issue near the end so the numbers may be even higher.  Remember half or better of the England’s population was illiterate at the time.  Naturally Dickens was enraged, despising Reynolds the rest of his life, although ‘Our Mutual Friend’ may acknowledge recognition of their influence on each other.

Reynolds’ work had, at least, four different editions over time; not printings but separate editions.  The first two were in 1839, the second in 1857, and the last in 1864.  Each date is significant.  It’s possible that there were others but I am unacquainted with them if there are. 

What is considered the first edition was printed for the publisher Thomas Tegg, Cheapside, R. Griffen and Co., Glasgow, and Tegg and Co., Dublin and also S.A. Tegg, Sydney and Hobart Town.

The second first of 1839 was published by Greenwood, Gilbert and Piper, Paternoster Row.  Both were 600+ pages, single volume.  Both as deluxe editions bound in leather.  As Greenwood was a name assumed by Eugene, Richard’s brother of Mysteries of Paris, there may be something fishy about this edition.  Both had forty-one full page illustrations and 33 woodcuts.

Two first editions in the same year is somewhat unusual, and perhaps unique.  I have no information on which came first while Greenwood, Gilbert and Piper may be relatively unknown.  How the sales were divided between the two I couldn’t guess.

The Teggs edition would imply that the book was placed on sale simultaneously in England, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand.  Perhaps inflamed by Dickens’ success the twenty-two year old aspiring Man of the World envisioned the most enormous of successes sparing no expense and effort.

The books had  forty-one full page inserted illustrations and thirty-three woodcuts. As Reynolds said the pictures ran the cost of publishing up so he must have been expecting really marvelous results.  As he closely followed Dickens publishing methods also publishing twenty installments at a shilling each, as the book was well received being a near best seller, according to Bleiler I think it fair to assume that Reynolds repaired his financial position, especially as Bleiler says that in his personal financing publishing with the Temperance Society a year or two later he lost money heavily.  If he had the money to lose it would have had to have come from Pickwick Abroad.

The next edition in time, that of Henry Lea of Paternoster Row by the author of “Robert Macaire In England, etc. etc”. Now, the 1857 edition was published outside the partnership of Reynolds and John Dicks therefore it seems probable that Reynolds didn’t cut Dicks in on any profits.  So Reynolds considered Pickwick Abroad as his own separate property.  This would hold true of the 1864 edition also.  Whether that caused any problems between Reynolds and Dicks isn’t known.

The copyrights for The Mysteries of Paris published earlier were also held outside the partnership by Stiff and Vickers the original publishers .  Now this gets interesting.  In 1856 Reynolds completed his novels Mysteries of London and Mysteries of the Court of London that he considered one work. These two books were a monumental work extending from 1844 to 1856, that is twelve years.  That must have been very exhausting.

My question is why did he cap his masterwork with a new edition of Pickwick Abroad?  How do they relate to Dickens?  I speculate that  it is not improbable that Pickwick formed some sort of psychological  connection to Dickens, the Man of Feeling,  himself, while Dickens, who was not all that prolific was increasingly drawn into the same psychological  connection with Reynolds as is seen by his adoption of Reynolds methods and style specially as seen in his novel ‘Our Mutual Friend.’

There is a significant psychological difference between the two authors which might explain their seeming magnetic attraction to each other.  Dickens in a list of eighteenth century authors that influenced him named a writer named Henry MacKenzie.  That was a new name to me.  Upon checking I learned that he wrote a 1771 novelette titled ‘The Man of Feeling’, following it by a novelette titled ‘The Man of the World’.

Dickens wrote sentimental novels as The Man of Feeling while Reynolds wrote hard edged realism as the Man of the World that he longed to be.  Each supplied what the other lacked.  Just a thought.  Both men were top sellers although Dickens sentimentalism has survived two centuries and continuing while Reynolds’ hard edged man of the world stuff was buried by 1914 although the American author Edgar Rice Burroughs had read The Mysteries of the Court of London somewhen before 1914 as a reference shows up in his ‘Outlaw of Torn’.  But until E.F. Bleilers resuscitation of ‘Wagner the Werwolf’ in 1975 Reynolds had been out of print.

At any rate Dickens Pickwick Papers is a monument to sentimentalism or feeling while Reynolds comes down heavy on fairly brutal realism.  The contrast as well as similarities between the two is quite striking.  Between the two of them they definitely dominated middle century literature.

One might note, however, that of the two brothers of Mysteries of London Eugene is a man of the world while Richard is a man of feeling.  Once again, a strong contrast.  The story of Richard and Castelcicala might even be called a fairy tale.  Reynolds then republished Pickwick Abroad after he finished his major work.  This raises the question of what is the relationship of Abroad to the long Mysteries novels?  Those two novels are bracketed by Abroad indicating enclosure.  Thus Abroad and the Mysteries are one unit.

So, we have the two first editions of 1839, 1857, and finally the last edition of 1864 after Reynolds had laid down his novelistic pen. Thus we have the end of the novels and the first and last editions of Pickwick Abroad enclosing the whole of Reynolds production.  Is it all one unit resolving Reynolds’ psychology?  He sold his copyrights to John Dicks so he dumped his whole life from 1839 to 1864.  He was free from it. 

Was that his intent?

Of course his beloved wife Susannah had died in 1858 and that most definitely  took the spunk out of the man. He didn’t remarry and possibly didn’t even look for another wife.  Things very probably just emptied out.

If there are other editions of Pickwick Abroad I haven’t found them.

Dickens, Charles, Pickwick Papers, 1837

Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend, 1865

McKenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, 1781

McKenzie, Henry, The Man of the World

Reynolds, George W. M., Pickwick Abroad, Tegg & Co., 1839

Reynolds, George W. M. Pickwick Abroad, Sherwood, Gilbert & Piper, 1839

Reynolds, Pickwick Abroad, Henry Lea, 1857

Reynolds, Pickwick Abroad. Henry G. Bohn, 1864 Reynolds, Wagner the Werwolf, forward by E.F. Bleiler, Dover Books,

George W. M Reynolds, Charles Dickens

And Mr. Pickwick.

by

R.E. Prindle

One is mystified concerning the importance of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Paper in Reynolds’ career.  One almost thinks that he is trying to steal Dickens’ identity.  The significance of the influence does not end with Reynolds continuation of Dickens Pickwick Papers but continues throughout his life.  In fact, Dickens himself adapted his style to that of Reynolds, especially in his novel ‘Our Mutual Friend’.  It’s as though he moved to blend with Reynolds.  Perhaps the title might even refer to the two writers rivalry.

Dickens began publishing his Pickwick in March of 1836 in serial magazine form that ended after twenty numbers; actually nineteen as the last two installments sold as a unit, perhaps to publish the book while the title was hot.  Each installment sold for a shilling.  Twenty shillings makes up a pound.  The book was then published in 1837.

George Reynolds who had exiled himself to France at the end of 1830 returned to England in 1836.  He was then twenty-two.  Dickens was twenty-four, both very young..  Reynolds who had earned a literary reputation in France was quickly employed as the editor of The Monthly Magazine where he watched the amazing success of the Pickwick Papers.  He itched to be such a successful author.  He had everything but a format. 

Reynolds had matured far beyond his years in France.  He was only sixteen when he left England on his own, thus as a mere youth he had to grope his way through the Parisian jungle.

He had a capacious mind while being very ambitious.  He succeeded until he was swindled of his money.  Along the way he assumed, or tried to assume the character of a Man of the World.  Interestingly Dickens admired and assumed the role of a Man of Feeling; it was the direct opposite of The Man of the World.

While Reynolds would turn out to be an astonishing author with the hard edge of a Man of the World he needed a framework or model to portray his own work.  In this case he chose the Pickwick Papers.  In 1844 and the Mysteries of London he would model his novel on the Frenchman Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. 

In a rather breathtaking way he appropriated Dickens’ characters and method.  Having just returned from Paris with a satchel full of impressions he placed Pickwick in France and called his work Pickwick Abroad.  Apart from the fact that the two novels had two different authors the continuation was quite seamless and logical; they might as well have been vol. one and two.

Dickens’ novel was published in 1837 and Reynolds in 1839.  Sort of the proper distance for the sequel to be published.  Thus Reynolds was riding Dickens’ coattails very closely.  As it turns out, according to E.F. Bleiler of Dover Books, Abroad was a near best seller, perhaps rivalling PP.  That implies at least several thousand copies, perhaps into ten digits.

Dickens’ serial was selling forty thousand copies an issue near the end so the numbers may be even higher.  Remember half or better of the England’s population was illiterate at the time.  Naturally Dickens was enraged, despising Reynolds the rest of his life, although ‘Our Mutual Friend’ may acknowledge recognition of their influence on each other.

Reynolds’ work had, at least, four different editions over time; not printings but separate editions.  The first two were in 1839, the second in 1857, and the last in 1864.  Each date is significant.  It’s possible that there were others but I am unacquainted with them if there are. 

What is considered the first edition was printed for the publisher Thomas Tegg, Cheapside, R. Griffen and Co., Glasgow, and Tegg and Co., Dublin and also S.A. Tegg, Sydney and Hobart Town.

The second first of 1839 was published by Greenwood, Gilbert and Piper, Paternoster Row.  Both were 600+ pages, single volume.  Both as deluxe editions bound in leather.  As Greenwood was a name assumed by Eugene, Richard’s brother of Mysteries of Paris, there may be something fishy about this edition.  Both had forty-one full page illustrations and 33 woodcuts.

Two first editions in the same year is somewhat unusual, and perhaps unique.  I have no information on which came first while Greenwood, Gilbert and Piper may be relatively unknown.  How the sales were divided between the two I couldn’t guess.

The Teggs edition would imply that the book was placed on sale simultaneously in England, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand.  Perhaps inflamed by Dickens’ success the twenty-two year old aspiring Man of the World envisioned the most enormous of successes sparing no expense and effort.

The books had  forty-one full page inserted illustrations and thirty-three woodcuts. As Reynolds said the pictures ran the cost of publishing up so he must have been expecting really marvelous results.  As he closely followed Dickens publishing methods also publishing twenty installments at a shilling each, as the book was well received being a near best seller, according to Bleiler I think it fair to assume that Reynolds repaired his financial position, especially as Bleiler says that in his personal financing publishing with the Temperance Society a year or two later he lost money heavily.  If he had the money to lose it would have had to have come from Pickwick Abroad.

The next edition in time, that of Henry Lea of Paternoster Row by the author of “Robert Macaire In England, etc. etc”. Now, the 1857 edition was published outside the partnership of Reynolds and John Dicks therefore it seems probable that Reynolds didn’t cut Dicks in on any profits.  So Reynolds considered Pickwick Abroad as his own separate property.  This would hold true of the 1864 edition also.  Whether that caused any problems between Reynolds and Dicks isn’t known.

The copyrights for The Mysteries of Paris published earlier were also held outside the partnership by Stiff and Vickers the original publishers .  Now this gets interesting.  In 1856 Reynolds completed his novels Mysteries of London and Mysteries of the Court of London that he considered one work. These two books were a monumental work extending from 1844 to 1856, that is twelve years.  That must have been very exhausting.

My question is why did he cap his masterwork with a new edition of Pickwick Abroad?  How do they relate to Dickens?  I speculate that  it is not improbable that Pickwick formed some sort of psychological  connection to Dickens, the Man of Feeling,  himself, while Dickens, who was not all that prolific was increasingly drawn into the same psychological  connection with Reynolds as is seen by his adoption of Reynolds methods and style specially as seen in his novel ‘Our Mutual Friend.’

There is a significant psychological difference between the two authors which might explain their seeming magnetic attraction to each other.  Dickens in a list of eighteenth century authors that influenced him named a writer named Henry MacKenzie.  That was a new name to me.  Upon checking I learned that he wrote a 1771 novelette titled ‘The Man of Feeling’, following it by a novelette titled ‘The Man of the World’.

Dickens wrote sentimental novels as The Man of Feeling while Reynolds wrote hard edged realism as the Man of the World that he longed to be.  Each supplied what the other lacked.  Just a thought.  Both men were top sellers although Dickens sentimentalism has survived two centuries and continuing while Reynolds’ hard edged man of the world stuff was buried by 1914 although the American author Edgar Rice Burroughs had read The Mysteries of the Court of London somewhen before 1914 as a reference shows up in his ‘Outlaw of Torn’.  But until E.F. Bleilers resuscitation of ‘Wagner the Werwolf’ in 1975 Reynolds had been out of print.

At any rate Dickens Pickwick Papers is a monument to sentimentalism or feeling while Reynolds comes down heavy on fairly brutal realism.  The contrast as well as similarities between the two is quite striking.  Between the two of them they definitely dominated middle century literature.

One might note, however, that of the two brothers of Mysteries of London Eugene is a man of the world while Richard is a man of feeling.  Once again, a strong contrast.  The story of Richard and Castelcicala might even be called a fairy tale.  Reynolds then republished Pickwick Abroad after he finished his major work.  This raises the question of what is the relationship of Abroad to the long Mysteries novels?  Those two novels are bracketed by Abroad indicating enclosure.  Thus Abroad and the Mysteries are one unit.

So, we have the two first editions of 1839, 1857, and finally the last edition of 1864 after Reynolds had laid down his novelistic pen. Thus we have the end of the novels and the first and last editions of Pickwick Abroad enclosing the whole of Reynolds production.  Is it all one unit resolving Reynolds’ psychology?  He sold his copyrights to John Dicks so he dumped his whole life from 1839 to 1864.  He was free from it. 

Was that his intent?

Of course his beloved wife Susannah had died in 1858 and that most definitely  took the spunk out of the man. He didn’t remarry and possibly didn’t even look for another wife.  Things very probably just emptied out.

If there are other editions of Pickwick Abroad I haven’t found them.

Dickens, Charles, Pickwick Papers, 1837

Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend, 1865

McKenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, 1781

McKenzie, Henry, The Man of the World

Reynolds, George W. M., Pickwick Abroad, Tegg & Co., 1839

Reynolds, George W. M. Pickwick Abroad, Sherwood, Gilbert & Piper, 1839

Reynolds, Pickwick Abroad, Henry Lea, 1857

Reynolds, Pickwick Abroad. Henry G. Bohn, 1864 Reynolds, Wagner the Werwolf, forward by E.F. Bleiler, Dover Books,

Reynolds, Pickwick Abroad. Henry G. Bohn, 1864 Reynolds, Wagner the Werwolf, forward by E.F. Bleiler, Dover Books,