The Sixties: A Comic Book Heaven

The Sixties: A Comic Book Heaven
by
R.E. Prindle

Of course, everyone is, and always has been, slightly mad. Still, repressing the unreasonable side of his nature man in the Western world has, since the eighteenth century, built a civilization based on scientific reason and classic Aristotelian logic- the heritage of the Enlightenment. And the result, especially in this country [US] during the past fifty years [article dated 1970], has been a rational society that has made one technological break through after another, from the invention of the pop-up toaster to the ability to land men on the moon. Here, until recently, two plus two had inevitably equaled four, not five, as Eastern mystics suggest, and no one other than J.D. Salinger had been able to imagine the sound of one hand clapping.

–Thomas Meehan- Horizon Magazine, Spring 1970.

Comic books were first sold in 1933-34. Thus the first two comic book generations coincide with those too young to serve in WWII while many of the first generation was obliged to serve in the Korean war while the second generation missed both.

How deeply the mind of the first generation of comic book readers was formed is problematical. Comic books didn’t take their classic form until 1938 when the character of Superman was formed. The number of comic characters proliferated during WWII but as these, i.e. Capt. America, were war specific they fell out of favor after WWII.

The first generation of potential comic book readers, those born from 1933-34 formed the substratum for the sixties when they created rock and roll and the base for 60s pop culture during the 50s. That was Presley, Sanford Clark, Cash, Vincent, Nelson et al.

Following the war those born in 1937-38 and subsequently through about 1943-44 had their minds formed by comic books although not all to the same degree. A significant percentage of them were forbidden to read comics by their parents, perhaps wisely. There were some who indulged themselves indiscriminately. I was one of those. I read them all, avidly. The question is how were we affected?

There was a terrific reaction against comic books. Angry parents fought to have them banned. In perhaps the only, certainly of a very few, successful efforts of censorship, comics were banned in 1954. The survivor, of course, was Mad Magazine published by the worst offender, William C. Gaines. All of the comic book readers plus many of those formerly excluded shifted to Mad thus further polluting our brains. While I never gave up reading the comic books till their banning I did abandon Mad for political reasons after a year or so.

Now, with the exception of Capt. Marvel, and that may only be partial, the comics were exclusively of Jewish origins. Thus we in the US, Britain was excluded, were shown the Jewish point of view without our knowing.

One of the key themes was the all male group of do-gooders. These were some of my favorites. The tops, perhaps, was the very influential Blackhawks comics. The Blackhawks were a group of five ex-WWII pilots who each owned his P-38 fighter and flew around the world, Third World mainly, if I remember correctly, righting wrongs they recognized more quickly and efficiently, that is vigilante style, than organized government could or would. I remember the Blackhawks as terrific, I loved them. The fellowship of the pilots, each with a different character, each loyal to the others was something that I and I suppose every reader wished to emulate, especially the notion of a bonded group of five like minded guys.

Another was called the Daredevil. He had a red and blue set of body tights upper right and lower left red and vice versa for the blue. Weird but that’s the way he was. Daredevil was a surrogate father figure to five orphan boys, same character makeup as the Blackhawks, who righted wrongs in their neighborhood and lived in the same clubhouse. The later musical group The Monkees was probably based on them. The Monkees were short one, being four, which lessened their impact. If they’d had that fifth member I would have been an avid fan although older by then.

Thus in 1954 the origins of Top 40 began on radio. Twenty four hours round the clock seven days a week full time music. An innovation created by the arrival of television. The first generation of rockers were solo artists. Some came attached with a band such Bill Haley And The Comets or Gene Vincent And The Blue Caps who were proto-Blackhawk type groups but mainly they were solo artists with a band not a group. Presley, Sanford Clark and that curious mixture of both, Ricky Nelson.

The societal maturation process was continuing and then in the mid-sixties the Charlatans came down from the hills of Virginia City dressed in movie style cowboy outfits to home base San Francisco and the first group of costumed crusaders a la the Blackhawks burst forth in full flower.

2.

In Britain the situation was somewhat different although coeval with the US. While the US escaped devastation in WWII the South of England was bombarded mercilessly destroying millions of buildings. A good representation of the situation may be found in John Boorman’s I suppose accurate, I wasn’t there, movie, The Hope And The Glory. As Boorman, who was there, portrays it, acres and acres of rubble stretched in every direction. The kids who scavenged and roamed the area are portrayed as little savages. An interesting education for the age cohort that came of age in the fifties.

Those born in the early forties, the core of the second generation of rockers, themselves played in this same although shrinking devastation. But rations were short in hard hit Britain, restrictions were not lifted until 1954. How their psychology was impaired isn’t so clear, although in the mid-sixties a wild party time called Swinging London appeared. Gay abandon one might say.

The group situation there may have been the result of the generation’s discovery of American slave music- Rhythm And Blues. R&B as a new entry to the British music scene met with resistance so that the devotees were possibly forced to form small groups who recognized each other, many wanting to play the music so they naturally formed groups, two guitars, drums, bass and a singer.

At any rate the British invasion of the US consisted of these four and five man groups coinciding with the comic book groups of the US.

3.

Other formative influences other than comics and radio were films and TV. Those all involved a specific point of view repeated ad nauseum or lessons from a know-it-all crusader cum super hero.

Of course we all grew up with Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry among others during the forties but with the fifties came the fantastic science fiction movies. One of the most important was The Day The Earth Stood Still with its famous characters Klaatu and Gort. The premise was preposterous but no one got it. Klaatu is an alien landing a saucer in the US. He is here to vet Earthlings to see if the they are ready to enter the intergalactic community in which peace reigns. Alas, Earthlings, you and me, are hopelessly primitively addicted to violence. Klaatu boards his saucer with a sign of benediction delivering a long sermon about shaping up and saying he’ll be back if we ever sort things out. Alright.

Movie after movie repeated the same message until today people actually believe that extra-terrestrials are all peaceful and Earth is the only rogue planet in the universe. Ask anyone. Flying Saucers were portrayed as hovering out there where the communications satellites would soon be. There they carefully studied mankind for any sign of the diminution of violence. Boy, I bet they think they’ve been wasting their time. Imagine circling Earth for seventy years waiting for indications of peacefulness. Obviously they’ve been sadly disappointed while being joined by the Negro Mother Wheel that appeared some time in the seventies to keep them company Hello, Earth calling Mother Wheel.

These movies established the idea that the whole universe except for Earth is highly developed and pacific along with the idea that Earthlings are worthless, hence most people accepted as fact we were being watched by superior beings and found wanting. We were inferior.

The movies established the notion that there were millions of inhabited worlds out there inhabited by superior beings who could travel billions of light years and get to home base in time for dinner. ‘Honey, I’m home.’

Now, at the same time, pulp magazines existed. Monthly editions of Amazing Stories, Astounding Tales and other poured out endless reams of the most astonishing stuff imaginable. Thus, all three, comics, pulps and movies, sci-fi and movies were rushing through our minds, forming expectations. Of course, the number of us who read sci-fi, almost as despised by parents as the comics, was small, but then as TV developed, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Star Trek came along both of which mined the sci-fi stories of the fifties while spreading the notions throughout the entire population. This reduced the intellectual discrimination of the people whose minds were prepared to accept anything.

4.

These years of the fifties were very crowded with the most exciting new developments. TV was perhaps at the top of the list. Bear in mind that cable didn’t exist. There weren’t even three channels in most places including a major market like the San Francisco Bay Area. People didn’t think TV would be profitable. The channels didn’t even broadcast until noon and shut down at ten o’clock prime time. There was no 24/7 TV.

There wasn’t even enough original programming to fill a ten hour day so they ran old movies and almost anything anyone could think up. Arthur Godfrey’s show ran for hours every day.

One of those odd things they chose to fill time was a character called Crusader Rabbit. I don’t know how well remembered the Rabbit is today but he had a profound effect in forming the minds of the 60s generation. Crusader Rabbit was a distant relative of the Blackhawks. While they flew around the world able to determine who were the good guys and who the bad, Crusader Rabbit was a self-righteous little bastard of a vigilante squad who instilled certain little minds with his self-righteousness and made them think they should impose their vision of reality on the world by mounting ‘crusades.’ Hawkeye of the later TV series Mash combined Crusader Rabbit with the Blackhawks.

Now, all this was happening in a short six years from 1950 to 1956. In many ways this was a major intellectual/psychological revolution preceding those revolutions of the sixties.

Equally, if not more important, was what was happening in the classrooms of our schools.

5.

If an astonishing variety of educations was going on outside the classrooms what was going on inside was no less astonishing. I don’t know if everyone saw it the way I did but I had a tough time assimilating what I heard. Of course American superiority and the inferiority of Europeans was standard staple. At the same time we were warned to be humble as bearers of these great gifts and to share them with our inferiors who after all couldn’t help it that they weren’t born Americans. True enough I suppose.

And, because of the success of our own American revolution, barring any negative thoughts caused by the French and Bolshevik revolutions, we were taught, indeed, indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that revolution per se was good, indeed, a blessing. Ignoring whatever may have been going on in the world we were taught to revere the South American George Washington, Simon Bolivar, who flitted from country to country on the whole continent until he came to end of it in Venezuela tossing the Spanish aside like so much chaff. Viva Bolivar, hey? Well, Viva Zapata next.

Well, I came from the orphanage and I had a different idea of right and wrong. Heroes were much scarcer for me than for the kids from normal homes.

By the time we got to high school, 1953-56, teachers were preaching revolution, revolution, revolution full bore. Revolution was everywhere. Minute changes in processed breakfast cereals were described as revolutions. Crusader Rabbit was a revo. Who wasn’t?

The reverence for revolution continued in college too. Another four years of revo, rah, rah, rah followed in college which ended for my class in 1960. Portentous year, what? That was the year our limp President, John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corp. We were eager to share our wonderful achievement so recent college graduates with absolutely no knowledge of the world and inadequate educations sallied forth to tell the world how to do it right. OK? How’s that for arrogance?

Now, there were plenty of revolutions in progress in 1960 and all those graduates from say, 1954 to 1959, were primed for revo. Lived for it, breathed for it. They didn’t even have to be recruited; they went searching for it. Give us revolution, they screamed.

These were years of the magnificent march of progress too. Years of change and hope, revolutions one might say, in all areas of endeavor. The people born from 1938 to 1945 leaped in with both feet and arms flailing. The sixties belonged to us, it was a world that we would make ourselves.

The next age cohort born from ‘46-’53 would be instrumental in forming the seventies, the eighties going to the next age cohort. Of course these cohorts created nothing merely extending the ethic of the 60s’ cohort. The interesting thing is that there was a fairly complete break between us and The Greatest Generation as our fathers have been styled.

Those revolutionary minded teachers of our were mostly born c. 1890 so they were at the tail end of the post-Civil War corps, lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. Our fathers born somewhere around 1918 caught the Depression and WWII while witnessing the Korean War. We younger ones, in the US, avoided that while TV, Top 40 and other assorted wonders made us rather distinct, nothing alike in outlook. Our fathers didn’t really like, couldn’t trust us, and certainly were not going to accord us the dignity of adulthood and the authority that goes with it. So we grew distant from them not really thinking an awful lot of them or giving them our trust. Fuck, they couldn’t even deal with the Mafia.

Politically they kept control during the sixties while culturally and socially we managed affairs. As it was a new beginning of sorts the succeeding age cohorts respected us and what may be called our achievements, sex, drugs and rock and roll, but still maintaining that sense of breakfast cereal revo.

To make the break even sharper, in 1960 the real old guard headed by Eisenhower checked out and an Irish upstart son of a bootlegger, Jack Kennedy, leader of the Celtish Camelot and a guy who could twist the night away even with a bad back, attempted to lead the way.

His best wasn’t very good and he caught a piece of flying lead allowing that pale Texan reincarnation of FDR to see how badly he could muff it. He did a good job of muffing it too.

So, there we were on the brink of 1960 raring to show the world what we could do. Really revo the whole machine? We’ll see.

6.

The psychological background of the sixties as exhibited by the second rock generation from 1938 to 1945 is a major manifestation of an effort begun back in the WWII days. It is the realization of the theologico-metaphysical notion of what Sigmund Freud dubbed the Unconscious. As the quote opening this essay indicates the sixties was the undoing of the several hundred year effort to realize the conscious. We thought we’d seen enough of the unconscious to last much more than a millennium. As the effort was begun before the awareness of the nature of the Un or subconscious the effort was achieved as Mr. Meehan states by the repression of sub-conscious motives not their elimination.

Freud quickly discerned this and he understood the function of dreams that he called the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’ Thus the motto he appended to his volume The Interpretation Of Dreams published appropriately in 1900 is ‘Flectare si nequeo, Superos, Acheronta movebo.” which translated means ‘If I cannot deflect the will of heaven I shall move hell.’

Freud interpreting the conscious mind as heaven chose to deemphasize consciousness in favor of his vision of the unconscious that he interpreted as Hell. Thus, you will find almost nothing in Freudian psychology referring to the conscious mind while he enthrones his Unconscious as the moderator of the human mind. He actually believed that the Unconscious was an agency separate from the body. In theological terms it had a supernatural existence. Thus, he has negated consciousness, or Science, in favor of Religion. As he has rejected God or Heaven then it follows that he embraced Satan and Hell.

As the sixties progressed the generation abandoned consciousness embracing unconsciousness. Time Magazine proclaimed in 1966 ‘God Is Dead’ while Satanism came alive, indeed according to Ira Levin in his novel, Rosemary’s Baby, Satan’s son, Andy, was born in 1966 just as God died. Levin continued his story in 1999’s Son Of Rosemary. Interesting.

It is no coincidence that Freud was both a druggie and a homosexual. Now, the royal road to free the mind of consciousness or Heaven is an obsession with sex and the free indulgence of drugs especially Freud’s favorite, cocaine backed with a pounding jungle beat. Eh voila- the sixties.

Sex, drugs and the hypnotic jungle beat of Rock and Roll. The sex was facilitated by the introduction of the birth control pill and anti-biotics; the amusing Shel Silverstein sang of Penicillin Penny who always had VD. If the girls took the pill both they and their boys were freed from the fear of pregnancies while the ga-ga types had no fear of Venereal disease because the cure was quick and easy by a regimen of anti-biotic pills. Almost paradise here and now and on Earth. For less than a buck you could get a nice big piece of pie too.

Freud had achieved his goal; he had overturned Aryan society.

Freud essentially by fraud allowed us to indulge forbidden appetites and responsibility from forbidden acts, for after all as the conscious mind had no authority and the will of the unconscious was unresistible we had no responsibility for our acts- If it felt good, we did it, as the mantra was. Hence by 1966 we had Richard Speck killing all those nurses in Chicago and Charlie Whitman up his clock tower at UT blowing away his fellow students. Guns aren’t the problem; Freud is the problem.

Hell, Dick and Charlie just wanted to be free. Indeed, freedom in the freest of all societies became a problem to the generation.

Sally Banks in her Greenwich Village 1963, Chapter 5, appropriately titled, Dreaming Freedom, explains her views on what being free actually meant to her and a very large part of the age cohort. She is writing from New York City.

Quote:

In 1963 freedom was a vital political issue charged with artistic consequences for both the mainstream and avant-garde. Part of the avant-garde’s utopian vision was that liberty could be found within community. But, in fact, the very concept of freedom sets autonomy and the notion of individualism in conflict with the bondedness of community. For social life is a potent source of restraint [suppression of freedom], yet, paradoxically, total freedom would mean the humanly unrealizable (and unbearable) state of complete isolation. Thus there is a deep ambivalence in Western culture toward freedom and social life. The dream of community, itself, may be incompatible with the dream of freedom, a contradiction the avant-garde sought to discover.

The Sixties artists’ constructed an art that re-imagined daily life in terms of achieving both liberation and community. If such a situation proved illusory, in 1963 it seemed necessary- and it still seemed possible given the booming economic infrastructure- to find a model that would make these imaginings concrete.

Unquote.

Yes, people wanted total freedom- that is a disconnect from the reality of having to deal with unpleasant facts- free from all restraints including gravity and mostly free from themselves. The drugs seemed to serve as those releases. Under the influence people could imagine themselves as someone else who ‘really had their shit together‘, miracle men and women able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, move mountains with the wave of a hand, fly through the air like a host of angels but they inevitably came back down where if they were anywhere near a mirror they could watch their bodies disintegrate.

Freedom from reality has its price.

So, the sixties that began with such ‘High Hopes’ to realize ‘The Impossible Dream’ of Camelot began to crash in 1966 just as like a flash of lightning in the sky the realization of those dreams seemed to dawn. As Lewis Carroll said, be careful that your Snark is not a boojum, for you see….

7.
The Truth Is No Defense

The sixties, then, was when the impasse between the Scientific Method came into its latter day conflict with the Theologico-Metaphysical mindset. The T-M system is merely a mental state that not only does not require objective validation but positively rejects it in favor of subjectiveness; what Freud called inner wishful thinking.

While the sciences of sociology and anthropology and biology produced irrefutable, by logical methods, results that ran counter to the inner wishful T-M thinking, as there were no means to refute the scientific results the T-M people merely denied them and forced scientists to suppress their accurate but uncongenial truths.

To ensure that the truths were suppressed and remained suppressed the T-M partisans passed laws making it criminal to express these truths. These laws called ‘hate’ laws were then applied to any who spoke these truths. As the truths were undeniable T-M partisans corrupted the law, common sense, and, one might say, the will of God to declare in a court of law by the judges that ‘the truth is not a defense.’

The truth is not a defense! Think about it. Such a rule of law is the triumph of absolute criminality and ignorance. And this happened during the watch of an age cohort that claimed to love freedom and revolution. Well, it was a revolution, one that enslaves the mind.

Now, in a position to punish those who disagreed with them the beneficiaries of the T-M mentality were able to enshrine their will as the law of the land. As the law was no longer concerned with the judgment of facts as evidence but the religious beliefs of the T-Ms the US at that point turned into a theocracy. The religious left became an established religion running counter to the old dispensation of the Constitution in favor of something not yet codified and something not approved by the former electorate that now became passive and an ineffective annoyance to the new slave masters.

8.

The ruling social ethos in the US when the sixties dawned was the theory of the Melting Pot formulated by the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill c. 1900. According to that theory that had nearly the effect of a law all the disparate social elements forming the population of the US would fuse into one people of uniform American belief.

In 1960 or thereabouts the new theory of multi-culturalism was introduced which stated that each culture should have an autonomous existence. This was the dream, wishful thinking, of the wannabe Jewish Autonomous people. Nothing new, it was their age old dream. Thus the body politic of the US as a matter of principle was fractured into many warring cultures.

While the Melting Pot had always been a fantasy having no real existence in fact multi-culturalism was alive and real and exacerbated in 1965 when the immigration act was reformed allowing unlimited immigration to all the peoples of the world. And if they didn’t come willingly members of the T-M mentality went into the actual jungles of Africa, dragged the natives out, put them on a plane, free fare, and flew them to the US.

What can one say to such zaniness.

The whole notion of freedom advocated by the age cohort was thus negated. Dozens of laws were passed giving these ‘immigrants’ precedence over the rights of the native population, depriving the natives of equal rights. This is a true story. Incredible but true.

9.

And lastly, for this essay we come to the complete overturn of reason in favor of a comic book utopia and the installation of an age of inner wishful thinking caused by the introduction of drugs as a mass phenomenon.

Drugs in the sixties were nothing new. Drugs begin to show up in literature during the nineteenth century Romantic period. Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions Of An English Opium Eater is the first famous confession or novel on the topic. Opium was much used in Victorian England as an ingredient in Laudanum which was given to infants to make them stop crying.

Opium was further reduced to morphine and then heroin. Freud is famous as the promoter of the joys of cocaine, synthesized from the coca plant. As chemistry developed, synthetic chemical drugs such as amphetamine began making their appearance at the end of the century.

Drug labs were busy and soon creating drugs that attacked any area of the brain. LSD was discovered in 1938 and popularized after 1943. Drugs like Miltown and other tranquilizers began filling women’s purses after 1950. Pot and hash had been simmering below the Hot 100 for some time but moved up the charts after 1960. So the whole pharmacopeia was available as the decade began. New formulas would be discovered in the following decades as drugs became part of the entertainment industry.

Drugs of course suppress the conscious mind exposing the raw wiring of the user. They also lower resistance to hypnotic influence. Hypnosis is merely a heightened sensitivity to suggestion. A drugged out population can be swayed by propaganda as no other, which is merely suggestion by another name, in any direction. They can be swayed but you mist control the means to do so. The mass media was the means, namely TV, Movies and records, and it was in the control of Jews with their special agenda.

Thus Movies, TV and Records propagandized a pro Jewish revolution agenda along with its subordinate Negro revolution agenda.

It is strange how all trends worked to favor the Negro/Jewish agenda. Of course, Jews had been instrumental in breaking down Aryan resistance to Negro music. Jewish DJs such as Alan Freed and Cousin Brucie along with Jewish song writers such as the hugely influential Leiber and Stoller and Goffin-King led the assault.

The songs they wrote were performed by Negro artists. While the Jewish song writers were not so familiar with Aryan culture as is supposed it was enough to bridge the Aryan-Negro gap making the Negro performances potable while paving the way for Barry Gordy’s Motown label.

As of 1960 there was virtually no one who listened to or was familiar with Negro Blues. The Blues was brought forward by the British Invasion who apparently listened to that crap. I am always astonished by White Blues artists citing Robert Johnson as a source. There was nothing available by Robert Johnson until 1960 when CBS released its first collection that virtually no one bought. The second collection was released in ‘62 with the same result.

I first heard of Robert Johnson in 1968 when I owned a record store. Many people talked about the Blues but when I started a first rate Blues section the records remained untouched and unsold. I doubt that I ever had a Robert Johnson sale.

I was in a university town and when such Blues artists as Lightning Hopkins were brought to town the ‘séances’ were held in someone’s living room with maybe fifteen people attending, ten of which were girls worshipping blackness. Nevertheless White Blues was popularized by the British, spreading to American performers.

I should point out that White performers of the forties and early fifties such as the Singing Cowboy Gene Autry sang may Blues based songs. Autry’s song The Yellow Rose Of Texas that is of course about a Negro woman.

By decades end the cohort’s fascination with exaggerated notions of freedom and revolution had turned into drug addiction and violence. By the late sixties looney tunes like Bomber Billy Ayers and his female side kick Bernardine Dohrn with their Weatherman organization and the Jewish Defense League and its offshoot the Jewish Defense Organization were killing and bombing at will and furthermore they would get away with it. ‘Free as a bird and guilty as Hell.’ as Bomber Billy Ayers would put it.

So by the end of decade ending with the Caped Crusader, Mick Jagger, at Altamont a comic book vision of reality had triumphed over the real thing. Who can forget Mick Jagger mounted on a giant inflatable cock on stage before sixty thousand people. Now, there was a comic book fantasy. Two and two added up to any number you wanted.

Chaps 3,4,5: Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

by

R.E. Prindle

Chaps. 3, 4,5

Chapter 3

Of all the performers of the Rock era Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney have been the most successful while I would give the nod of most successful to Jagger. One must admire the way he learned the ropes and then used them to strangle others as he had been strangled. Mick in his own way was the Midnight Rambler and the Street Fighting Man. Don’t think I blame him; you either rule or are ruled. But, one does have to live with the reputation one creates.

Mick began cultivating his image from the beginning. As this story concerns Mick’s relationship to Marianne I will concentrate on aspects of their sexuality. Andrew Loog Oldham made a movie of the Stones’ January 1905 Irish tour. Unfortunately he sold the rights to it along with the Stones 1963-70 master recordings to Allen Klein along with, by the way, the first Marianne Faithfull masters. Klein then became the Stones’ manager.

The movie di8sappeared into Klein’s archives to surface in November 2012 when the Klein estate released it to DVD. It can now be purchased as I did. The DVD features both the Abkco edit and Oldham’s original Director’s Cut.

Mainly a concert film it also features group member interviews and Richards and Jagger cutting up. While they were horsing around they appear to improvise a song with the lyric: I’d rather be with the boys than here with a stupid girl like you.

While Jagger has always cultivated an ambiguous image he has also announced a record of having had sex with four thousand or more different girls. That’s only eighty per annum over fifty years so I imagine that shows an admirable restraint. Yet, at the same time Mick has always been misogynistic while always seeking to emasculate or squash his closer women under his thumb. In fact Mick probably has a domination or emasculation complex. He may have rather been with the boys but in his competition with them he sought to emasculate or squash them too. One of favorite forms of emasculation and domination is to take other men’s women from them.

Thus when he took Jerry Hall from Bryan Ferry he quipped he had to do it to save her from going through life as Jerry Ferry. One winces when one reads of Eric Clapton begging Mick not to take Carla Bruni from him. Mick even took one of Eric’s temps, Catherine James from him.

Mick And Chrissie

When Mick first enters the scene for Andrew Oldham he is in an alley fighting it out with Chrissie Shrimpton, the mode. Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister. If one reads more deeply into that situation it shows a very cruel sadistic streak in Mick, quite shameful in a celebrity of Mick’s first magnitude of brightness.

Chrissie began the relationship as a strong willed girl battered by and battering Mick. In that day before the change in sexual mores girls weren’t quite so sexually open so Chrissie didn’t want her parents to know she was shacking up with Mick. They insisted to Mick that they not. As a humiliation tactic to break the girl down he let it be known to her parents that in his eyes she was little more than a common whore and she and they should see it that way too as he was in fact shacking with her.

Gradually the monster beat her down completely destroying her self-respect then, more than publicly, he broadcast his triumph on records and over the radio with such songs as Stupid Girl and Under My Thumb while their whole circle knew referred to her. Dylan would later use the same tactic against Edie Sedgwick when he wrote Like A Rolling Stone to break her down.

Both Chrissie and her parents believed Mick and she were to marry but laving crushed her beneath his thumb, as it were, with a toss of his curly locks Mick sneeringly walked away adding insult to injury. Cruel in this instance it became psychotic with repeated use.

Years after world got back to Mick that Chrissie had a bundle of his letters, and, now this is unforgivable, without a word to her he immediately set his attorneys on her threatening an expensive law suit while demanding she return his letters. Even though Chrissie had not intended to publish them, still shaking this long after Mick’s brutal treatment, Chrissie without delay forwarded her letters from Mick to him. Shameful.

Mick And Marianne

Mick then turned his attentions to the Guinevere, the Ophelia, the Faerie Queene of pop music, our Marianne. While I’m sure Mick was somewhat enamored with Marianne I’m also sure he had a couple ulterior motives. Marianne was married to John Dunbar at the time while living with Mick so Mick had the pleasure of emasculating and humiliating Dunbar.

At the same time I’m sure he was envious of Marianne’s fame which was probably greater than his at the time. No room in the spotlight for two. He couldn’t stand that Marianne was getting even more press than himself. Thus he undertook to destroy her career. In the process he emasculated her and humiliated her to an astounding degree.

Marianne and Mick were playing with psychologies in a very destructive manner. The events I am going to describe did incalculable damage to their psyches while altering the direction of their subsequent lives dramatically, especially Marianne’s. Of course, few people seem to realize they have a psychology or how it was formed, what expectations they devised. Those hopes and dreams were more especially dashed when they turned to drugs. That was certainly the case with Marianne.

I don’t know how seriously Marianne took here Medieval interest and reading but she was influenced by her Arthurian studies. Like the most or possibly rest of the generation she was also influenced quite heavily by Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan, probably both books and movies.

The key for the generation in Peter Pan was his refusal to grow up or accept adulthood. It was quite fashionable at the time to pretend that you would always be young, keep in contact with your ‘inner child.’ I was a victim of the psychosis myself.

At any ratge Marianne was influenced by all three. Thus, when she and Mick met she quizzed him extensively on his knowledge of King Arthur to see how much he knew as though that litmus test would seal his fate. Mick passed and Marianne moved in still married to John Dunbar. Thus her life clashed with her Catholic upbringing. At first Marianne had royalties coming in from her records enabling her to maintain a certain independence but gradually the royalty checks decreased making Marianne financially dependent on Mick.

At the same time Mick was under no obligations to Marianne and observed none. How this clashed with Marianne’s Arthurian expectations in an atmosphere of Peter Pan and Alice she doesn’t go into but there must have been a severe disappointment as Mick treated her as a mere possession.

While in California he was the object of desire for all the groupies including the doyenne Miss Pamela- Pamela Des Barres nee Miller- of Frank Zappa’s girl group the GTOs (Girls Totally Ornery or else in reference to the hottest car of the period, the GTO). Miss Pamela as well as the rest of the California groupies studied to come up with better and better more outrageous sexual thrills with which to astonish the boys in the band which easily surpassed the imaginations of the boys in the band including Mick.

Mick returned home and demanded of Marianne that she perform these tricks which astonished Marianne no less than Mick had been astonished. However she believed the tricks degrading. Marianne quite rightly refused to perform them.

But the repertoire of the boys in the band kept expanding so that the home girls were led to view new horizons. Group sex and that sort of thing became the norm.

As with all loosely knit movements or phenomena this sort of reputation brought more and more of the sado-masochistic libertine drug oriented element gradually forcing out the less inclined to sexual erotica just as bad money drives out good money. Rock and Roll became progressively more degenerate from 1964-65 on until it was disgraceful to be associated with it.

Mick and the Stones were leaders of this degeneration whether the Stones embraced sexual sado-masochism personally their public persona was based on it making them leading corruptors of youth and society in general. They did as much or more to change the sexual mores of the present than anyone. Their LP cover for Black and Blue was the apex of this very sado-masochistic misogynistic persona. The cover caused me all kinds of trouble in running my record store.

As one presents oneself so must one be.

Chapter 4

The Redlands Bust.

Many psychologically devastating events happened to Marianne in the years from 1967-70. It is very difficult from this perspective to evaluate some of them. One can’t tell how Marianne’s renunciation of her career affected her mind. After all in 1964-65 and 66 she went from just another teenager to superb success far beyond her expectations financially, while becoming the female idol of the England and a phenom in the US- ultimately the Faerie Queen of rock and roll. That’s really only two short years until the Redlands bust.

In those two years she passed through several sexual transmogrifications. She went from virgin to the most outre of sexual practices. Its all very well to say that this was her decision but as Paul McCartney said of his own experience in Miles’ biography it was impossible for him to resist peer pressure, especially in the use of drugs. He was ‘forced’ to try heroin even though he was dead set against.

So peer pressure on Marianne and any young girl to be sexual ‘free spirits’ was impossible unless you were prepared to accept group rejection. The same with drugs that couldn’t be resisted so that when depression set in she ended up addicted to the greatest depression drug available- heroin. It was up to Mick to give what protection he could. Regardless of current sexual nonsense it us up to the man to guide his woman.

Now, the era began in relatively clean-cut innocence . It was never quite so white bread as it is depicted, trying to escape the sleaziness, even then, was no easy matter. Then as the decade wore on it all got worse, then it got disgusting. First pot, pills and amphetamines, then LSD that came on like a hurricane. LSD more than anything else conditioned you for cocaine that in at the end of the decade, at least on the West Coast where I was. Remember that was no national consensus in the US
In 1964 or so when the ‘counter-culture’ hit in the Bay Area it was a very local manifestation not shared by the East Coast the Mid-West or even for that matter LA. LA was never hip in the way the Bay Area was. While the Beatles are credited with introducing long hair, when the Charlatans came down from Virginia City they had hair and they must have been growing it long before the Mop Tops showed up.

The West Coast could not tolerate New York groups. Mafia outfits like the Rascals nee Young Rascals and Vanilla Fudge made the West Coast puke. There really wasn’t any place for The Velvet Underground either. Of course the British groups that had their own sound that really couldn’t compete with that of say, The Doors, an LA group. The LA groups being more commercially oriented pretty much shoved the Bay Area groups aside, although were a couple of real successes. I don’t include freak groups like the Grateful Dead commercial successes. Cults are cults.

But to the point, boy, LSD. Owsley Stanley kept the West supplied and how. By the time of Altamont and Stonewall the atmosphere was really foul. And then it got worse still.

About the time of the Redlands bust society and the police were losing their patience. Kesey and Leary had them terrified. The drug thing kept growing. When one says that marijuana was generational it is true only to the extent that a significant minority of the generation smoked it. The hippies were only a small and despised part of the generation but they, we, made a lot of noise and got a lot of notice. Without the radio, rock and corrupt record companies the Movement probably wouldn’t have broken the bounds of Bohemia. But, the time was ripe for the Bohemian conquest of America. That was led from New York, principally by Andy Warhol.j

The records made the Bohemian life seem very glamorous. Thus the cops focused on groups where actually the greatest drug activity was located and the propaganda the strongest. As the groups began to make good and even big, very big, money they were the natural prey of the drug dealers. And don’t underestimate the role of LSD. The groups also chose to flaunt their drug use- ‘I’ve got to be free to put anything into my body and life I want to’, disdaining the law, the police and actually common decency. This was the case with the Stones and it’s the flaunting, not the use, that got them in trouble.

In 1967 they naturally were set up. Brian Jones in an interview, barroom chat actually, with News Of The World reporters boasted of his drug use. The journalists then attributed the statements to Mick, whether from ignorance or design I leave to your imagination.

When Mick read the article he was indignant. As I said, while Mick and the rockers thought they were big because of records, radio and TV they were actually socially marginal and not particularly appreciated. Musicians get no respect outside their own circle.

Rather than evaluate his situation, considered that he was doing drugs and everyone knew it thus making him an obvious target, he foolishly brought suit against the newspaper. You don’t have to be brilliant to know News Of The World wasn’t going to let that one fly. Hey! Hey! What’d I say! Mick was sleeping or dreaming.

The police wanted to get England’s bad boys anyway. There may or may not have been collusion between the News Of The World and the police but the way the raid was conducted indicates there was.

Shortly before the bust some guy named Schneiderman drops from the sky with a barief case reportedly filled withy whatever you required. Mick, Marianne and Keith and a couple others, I will mention in the next section, were having an LSD weekend at Keith’s house, the Redlands. Schneiderman insinuated himself into the party with his briefcase while probably being in the employ of the News informed them and they in turn notified the police.

For Schneiderman allegedly having a briefcase full of drugs there were remarkably few drugs in evidence at the bust. Jagger was booked only for possession of four pep pills bought legally in Italy, while Keith had no drug charges at all except for being charged with ‘knowingly’ providing a place where pot was smoked. Robert Fraser actually had heroin jacks of his own on him but Schneiderman produced nothing from his briefcase and indeed no drugs were visible in it when the police required him to open it. No drugs were seen only packaging that were assumed to contain drugs by the Bohemians. In any event he hopped the first flight to elsewhere.

While Marianne had no drugs concealed on her person her situation was the most tragic of all. The Faerie Queen would lose her official status.

When the cops came calling the crowd was of course flipped out on LSD but then that was always the danger; the cops would come calling when you’re least prepared to deal with them. Come on, this was just one of the hazards of using illegal substances. And naturally, you tend to be flippant, wise cracking and mocking. Very bad behavior in such a situation when maximum seriousness is the order of the moment. It’s not like everyone didn’t live in fear of being busted. They used to call it deep paranoia.

Marianne whose clothes had become wet from walking in the rain laid them out to dry dressing in nothing more than some sort of rug wrapped around her. Well, what is one to think of a nude woman amongst a bunch of men; what is this Dejeuner Sur L’herbe redux? Even if two thirds of them were screaming fairies as they were, how is one to know that and what to think?

It was said that Marianne let her wrap slip giving the coppers an eyeful. Of course the cops were square and the gang was hip but squares outnumber hips by a very large margin while as Roger Miller sings: Squares make the world go round. And a good thing too. Roger said that hips have too much water for their land; this was a gathering of pretty watery people. Oh, OK, my people, but folks you have to be realistic. That’s what hip means in my book.

And then someone probably at News Of The World concocted the story that Marianne had a Mars bar slipped between her legs and that Mick was grazing away at it. Preposterous, wouldn’t you think? Boy, now that was a blow that will getcha and you’ll be down for a long time too. As might be expected Marianne was devastated. Boy, that opened a lot of anfractuosities in her brain. A hit like two trains running in opposite directions at top speed on the same tracks over a two hundred foot high trestle. That’s a big crash and a long way to tumble, buddy.

It ended any hope Marianne may have had of appearing on a stage. Can you imagine stepping up to the microphone and being showered with Mars bars. Oh no, no,no, better to board a rocket ship for…oops…Mars.

Marianne and Mick may have thought they were handling it well but the bile and psycho-somatic reactions entering the sub-conscious aren’t so easily dismissed. This horror was merely added to their childhood fixations.

In the turmoil of the months succeeding this mind wrenching event fixations would only worsen. Of course the intent of the establishment was not so much to succeed in jailing them but making an example of them while hopefully destroying their careers. The bust should have been career destroying but for the generational gap. When a teacher chastises a student the other students smirk but don’t disown him. After busting Mick and Keith the establishment then went after the more fragile Brian Jones, the guy who got this whole thing rolling by shooting off his mouth. If the three could have been jailed they wouldn’t subsequently have been allowed to enter the US or so it seemed. No one could have forecast the incredible changes that were about to occur that essentially placed the Stones above the law.

Chapter 5

Enter Donald Cammell And His Movie Performance

One reads many amusing reasons for the incredible social disintegration of the sixties. One of the most preposterous to come to my attention is the notion that it was caused by lead poisoning.. There’s a hobby horse for you. While I couldn’t rule it out I think lead poisoning would be among the most obscure of reasons. No, the sixties was no more an aberration than was Hitler’s Germany; like the latter it was the result of long historical development, a part of psychological history.

If one reads a good deal with the purpose of understanding the historical background of the sixties things begin to take form. Then if one tries to make one’s intellect rise and float over the information gleaned from that reading patterns will form, a map of the past will appear. Then of course one notes nodes and axons, connections that require further reading and rereading what’s already been read so that a fair approximation of what happened can be more or less confidently stated. Much of it will be subterranean history that doesn’t make it to the history books.

Such is the psycho-sexual mind set that began to develop oh, say, about from 1890 on which a key node from 1900 to 1920. Western understanding of the human mind developed fairly rapidly from the mid-eighteenth century rapidly gaining momentum after say 1860 and the spectacular doing at Paris’ Salpetriere mental hospital under the tutelage of the amazing Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.

While his investigations were of a psycho-sexual nature they were not perceived as such except perhaps by a transient student by the name of Sigmund Freud. Sometime after Charcot’s studies toward the nineties people calling themselves sexologists, sex therapists and sex magicians began to appear.

Along with Freud who might be called a sex therapist two leading figures slightly earlier than he were the German Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) and the Englishman Havelock Ellis (1859-1939). In the academic scientific or pseudo-scientific manner all three made their contributions although Freud managed to incorporate their discoveries or understandings into his system acquiring preeminence in the field.

Goerg Groddeck and Wilhelm Reich, two of Freud’s disciples also gained prominence in the sex therapist field.

On the religious or supernatural side the most prominent and influential of the sex magicians was the so-called Magus Aleister Crowley and his organization of the Golden Dawn.

With the exception of Krafft-Ebing all were out to overturn European sexual mores, designated disparagingly as Victorian. Of course there was never a time when men and women didn’t behave sexually because…well, how could they? The real goal then was to disturb prevailing sexual mores and replace them with sexual license. This essentially came to fruition in the 1960s when the influence of Freud and Crowley were at their peak. The two principal cultural nodes of the US, New York and Los Angeles, were flooded with European Jewish émigrés of the Freudian school while Aleister Crowley had established himself and his Golden Dawn in Los Angeles.

The corrosive sexual mores of Freud and Crowley were aided and abetted by the rise of the equally corrosive drug use and, of course, ‘lead poisoning.’

Our next object then is to discover who Donald Cammel might be.

Searching For Donald

Cammell is the central figure in this little drama so we will begin with him although even though the Stones biographers don’t delve into these other characters they are integral to the social scene of Mick, Marianne and Keith. It appears that Brian Jones, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts served a peripherals to Mick primarily and Mick and Keith secondarily. Oldham tried to make himself a third but apparently was incompatible or other interests pulled him in a different direction. By ‘67 he would be out of the picture.

In Marianne’s biography she makes it sound like Cammell was a stranger to the group while actually he was well known to Bob Fraser, and Chrissie Gibbs who were at the Redlands bust and quite familiar with Mick, Keith and Marianne. They all knew each other before the movie began to be filmed.

Cammell was older than the three being contemporary with the first generations of rockers; he was born in 1934 in Scotland. He came from a well to do family immersed in the occult; his father actually knew Aleister Crowley and wrote a biography of him. One may then assume that his father was something of a sex magician as Marianne’s father was a sexologist. It was impossible to escape Freudian influences from at least 1920 through the fifties. So some reference to repression and the unconscious is inevitable.

Cammell’s father was likely familiar with Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis with its emphasis on psychotic sexual practices. All the sexologists and magician immersed themselves in bizarre sexual practices. If a reader counters that all sex is legitimate it shows how perverted he or she is. No argument from me, we know where each other stands.

As Cammell was born in ‘34, in ‘44 he would have been 10 and 20 in 1954. Thus he would have been aware of the war between the ages of 4, 5, 6, or so and 10 but perhaps in a muddled and uncomprehending manner but in ‘44 and ‘45 he would have been aware enough to partially comprehend. Certainly when the Big Baby turned Hiroshima to ashes in August of ‘45 something would have registered affecting his mind and outlook.

I was 7 in ‘45 and while I have a clear remembrance of VE Day I don’t have any recollection at all of the Bomb or if I do it had little or no significance to me. I have never had a horror of the A-bomb.

Obviously something other than lead poisoning affected the psyches of the crop of kids from ‘33-’34 to 1942-43. It may have had something to do with the total destruction of the world capped by the Bomb. What a terrific exclamation mark to the end of hostilities. What Cammell’s reaction to this destruction was isn’t clear to me while it probably wasn’t clear to himself.

After the war he experienced rationing during the whole of his teen years. He was probably less affected than others as he became prosperous in his teens on his own as a painter. He was successful as a portrait painter. From the pictures I’ve seen he was more than talented while possibly possessing genius. His mind already exhibited an extreme darkness with sexual confusion easily perceived.

Much of the following information comes from web sites such as the fabulous Another Nickel In The Machine that records the history of London, Sam Umland’s 60X50 and many others. I have not read Umland’s biography of Cammell as yet.

Cammell divorced his first wife and then married a very successful model, the American Deborah Dixon, moving to Paris where they both lived. Cammell apparently was supported by his wife.

Bored with painting, not unlike Andy Warhol, he began to take an interest in film. There is nothing like a movie to exhibit one’s sexual fantasies in real life; indeed a movie is a record of the unconscious. Cammell and Dixon were sexually compatible taking an interest in anything remotely copulatory. Cammell’s first few attempts at filmmaking were not successful or, at least, lacked box office magic.

Along with his lack of interest in painting and his attraction to the movies Cammell gravitated toward the pop world of rock and roll seeking out Jagger. Where was a sexual degenerate to turn? The bad boys of Rock, the Rolling Stones, Mick, Keith and Marianne at least. He found Mick and Marianne’s talked about sexual escapades irresistible. He was undoubtedly attracted by Mick’s dope legend also. Mick claims not to have been an excessive user of drugs, which may be true but I doubt there was anyone at the time who didn’t think he was a heroin addict and druggie par excellence.

As an artist Cammell was acquainted with Bob Fraser and that pop art crowd. Both he and Fraser were known to the infamous crime lords, the Kray Brothers. The Krays, of course, were homosexuals as was Fraser and Gibbs. Mick’s legend is that he is bi-sexual, at least, so there is no reason that he wasn’t sexually involved with the bunch in some manner.

Cammell and Fraser also knew the Satanist and sex magician, The American experimental film maker, Kenneth Anger, as did Mick and Marianne. Fraser introduced Anger to the underground film crowd.

In addition Anita Pallenberg knew Cammell from her pre-Brian Jones, Keith Richard days. She was shown the script in the south of France the year before filming began. So, unless I have seriously misread Marianne’s first auto-biography, Cammell didn’t just show up one day with a movie proposal; it was actually old home week.

Cammell did go on to make an additional three or four movies of which I have seen two, Demon Seed and Wild Side. The last movie has escaped my vigilance so far. Wild Side is a virtual remake or variation of Performance. Demon Seed that I will review in an addendum to Chapter 5 is actually a great movie handling a major sci-fi them to perfection.

Just prior to the beginning of filming in 1968 Mick impregnated Marianne. This is 1968 and if Marianne hadn’t been on the Pill she would have had a number of children now in addition to Nicholas her child by John Dunbar. The question then is why she allowed herself to get pregnant at this time. He was still married to Dunbar so one must think he must have suffered humiliation and emasculation to have another man impregnate his wife. Perhaps Mick’s emasculation genes or maybe just a drug haze.

At any rate Marianne was exiled to Ireland while filming was going on. One can only imagine the anxiety she felt separated from her lover in her condition. One doesn’t have to imagine; she suffered a miscarriage.

Point Blank
The Movie

In 1967 the English director John Boorman had filmed a movie that took
Cammell’s mind by storm. The movie was Point Blank starring Lee Marvin as the protagonist Walker. Cammell recommended that all the cast see the move and bear it in mind. It might be advantageous to review the movie here.

Point Blank was only Boorman’s second effort. Unsuccessful on release it has apparently become a cult classic. His movie is obviously a dream sequence or nightmare. Nothing is real. This indicated by the hero’s name of Walker. He has only one name, no first. No one even knows what his first name could be. The name seemed significant to me but I hadn’t a clue as to what it could mean. Well, you know, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. While writing this piece I was also reading Denis Machail’s 1941 biography of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. There on page 190 was the explanation of Walker. Barrie had written a play titled Walker, London. That was a telegraphic address.

Quote:

Two impudent jokes in one the second even more mysterious then as it is now. For the word ‘Walker’ is still in the dictionary- “interjection (slang) expressing incredulity and suspicion of being hoaxed” but when was it last used? Not during the present century, one would say; net before that there was a time when it was the very crystalization of Cockney humor. “Walker!” you said, to show that you could never be caught with chaff. It was the standard answer to the attempted leg pull. It was also one of those blessed with with which any comedian could bring down the house.

Unquote.

So now the viewer knows he is being hoaxed and suspend belief. The plot involves Lee Marvin as Walker who takes part in a heist then is shot by partner who runs off with Walker’s share or 93,000 and adding insult to injury Walker’s wife. The rest of the story involves Walker trying to retrieve his money forget the wife. The story is told through a series of frustrations to a paranoid Walker. So, we have a dream study of a frustrated paranoid.

The opening and closing settings are the same. The walking or exercise area inside Alcatraz prison. The joke seemingly being that one walks around and around, never getting anywhere while returning to the same place. Cry “Walker” and then start laughing like a Cockney at the joke.

Alcatraz, the Rock, is of course a small island in the middle of San Francisco Bay between the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge. Established in 1934 it was closed in 1963, so the filming was done in a closed facility and before the Indians occupied the island claiming it as their heritage. The filming was done, then, in vacated premises.

As a dream story it concerns the psychic life of Walker. It’s all going on inside his head. The prison, castle or house represents the psychic the self so that Walker lives a bleak, barren, paranoid inner life.

A helicopter lands in the enclosure, picks up a package and leaves a bundle of money. Walker and his pal Mall (mal, French for bad) kill the messenger while robbing him. Walker is then examining an empty cell signifying his empty life when Mal with Walker’s wife looking on puts a couple bullets in him leaving him for dead while appropriating Walker’s share of the money and his wife. Thus we have some basic paranoia that, of course, might possibly be true. As his wife would say later, Walker just kind of left her cold.

Left for dead Walker somehow recovers while being compelled to take the only way off the island available to him- swim for it. Another grim joke as legend has it that no one who tried ever succeeded.

The rest of the story concerns surmounting treachery and double crosses Walker encounters in trying to recover his money. He finds his wife, abandons her and takes up with her sister. While he seems a little obsessive-compulsive in the matter, the money in fact represents his lost identity, purpose in life or masculinity. The recovery of the money is central to his personality.

As in the Cockney joke whenever he shows up people exclaim “Walker!” If you’re in on the joke it might be funny. Angie Dickenson makes up the sex interest as Chris as there is no love interest. Just a four letter word in this movie. The three kingpins Walker must knock down are Carter, Brewster and Fairfax. Ironically Carter and Brewster are disposed of by their own team when Walker’s paranoia protects him while the others take the hit meant for him.

The actual climax takes place in Brewster’s house when Walker and Chris have spent the night together, the only consummated sex in the movie. As Walker is walking out the door Chris asks what her last name is. Walker doesn’t know and neither do we. Walker counters, seemingly weakly, does she know his first name. Either check mate or an uproarious joke to Cockneys. But as Walker in joke is a hoax or a put on then it doesn’t matter anyway. Dreams are like that, they follow a different logic than the waking mind.

The denouement returns to the opening at Alcatraz but now Walker is more canny staying out if sight. The drop is made, Brewster calls to him to come get the money. But, as when Walker was supposed to get the money from Carter, after he survived the assassination attempt, the bundle proved to be waste paper, Walker’s paranoia saves him again. A shot rings out and Brewster takes a long off a short pier never to return again. Now enter Fairfax who is the head man and the assassin who shot Carter and Brewster and would have shot Walker. Fairfax shouts Walker several times that in another century would have brought the house down.

Walker’s paranoia prevents him form taking what might be money in the bundle but is probably waste paper so that as the bundle of funny paper represents his ego he is left stranded in the haunted empty house of Alcatraz representing his mind for one presumes the rest of his life.

The movie was a box office failure, except for the few like Cammell but holds up well as a psychological thriller. That is what Cammell saw. So, now, he’s basing his own movie ‘Performance’ directly on Point Blank.

Performance

He gathers together essentially the ‘gang’ to make his movie. Even Deborah Dixon took part. He already knew and was friends with James Fox as was apparently Mick, cast as the criminal Chas. Cammell had known Anita Pallenberg in Paris where it is said she formed a brief menage a trois with Cammel and Deborah. Chrissie Gibbs was the set designer…Mick was an old friend, a few outsiders and he had his movie.

Mick sent Marianne to Ireland for the duration. Keith who was shacking with Anita was so unhappy about Cammell’s pairing of Anita with Mick that he found it impossible to visit the set. Instead he brooded outside in his car sending Bob Fraser in to keep tabs until Cammell banned him from the set.

I can’t be sure that Cammell understood the Cockney meaning of Walker but he so admired the character that he based Mick’s role on Walker giving Mick the single name of Turner. No first. Turner is also meant to be significant. A turner is a sort of acrobat. The word could also be used in the sense of changeling, or perhaps in the homosexual sense or turning a man gay. Turner does turn Chas. from a tough guy to a passive fairy, his sort of changeling. Turner changes the tough hoods into faggots. Probably then that is the meaning of the name. So maybe Cammell was in on the Walker joke.

As the movie is permeated by sex magic and sex as a sort of therapy the influence of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Freud and especially Aleister Crowley is very apparent. Kenneth Anger was around at the time while being known to all the participants thus reinforcing the Crowley connection.

All the sex therapists were concerned with aberrant sexual practices that the movie concentrates on. Cammell elaborates the sexual implications of Boorman’s Point Blank, while the decaying mansion obviously represent Cammell’s mind. In the end the sex therapy or magick doesn’t seem to work as Turner turns suicidal obsessed with a death wish.

Boorman’s crime angle comes in through Chas. In order for Fox to appear authentic Cammell actually required him to live the criminal life under the tutelage of a mobster, even to the extent of taking part in actual crimes. Of course, madness is theme of the movie but even madness can go too far.

Chas. has offended the criminal chief, based on the Kray Bros., who has commanded a man hunt to track Chas. down. When he is located he is summoned to his execution. Turner says: Don’t leave me, take me where you’re going. Chas. says ‘You don’t want to go where I’m going. Turner: Yes I do. Chas. then blows Turner’s head off, gets into the car and the car drives off as he looks out the window we see Turners face. Thus the turning or change is complete as each becomes the other.

The version now available for purchase or rental is apparently much different from the original. While even the available version is violent and pornographic the original must have anticipated the current pornographic output of Hollywood . While I wouldn’t call Performance tame almost every movie you see today is as or more explicit. At any rate the movie has no redeeming moral value. If you want porn plain and simple, there it is.

The legend has it that the movie changed the lives of the participants. Perhaps so, but perhaps not. Michele Breton was already a lost child and stayed lost. Anita, no stranger to drugs moved into intense familiarity. James Fox, who was criminally mistreated by Cammell, gave up movies for ten years but he says he was already fed up with the seedy side of movie making so perhaps Performance just capped it. Keith, god, what can you say? Who was going to keep him from drugs? If cammell was already inclined toward suicide he topped himself off in 1996 finally taking Keith’s advice.

But, now, Mick and Marianne. Mick was advised to play himself but Marianne wisely overruled that advice perhaps saving Mick’s sanity but still leaving him off balance. Marianne advised him to adopt some of the fey characteristics of Brian Jones character along with some of Keith’s tough stance. Not too difficult as that is the Mick already appeared but it permanently shifted his personality in that skew. Nevertheless Mick has always remained supremely functional.

As to Marianne, how did she relate to Mick’s rejection of her by sending her to Ireland and the subsequent miscarriage of her child. That is a lot of psychological battering. I think that it is certain that as 1968 progressed she was already in a depression and sinking rapidly. While she was able to hold on for another year or so, by 1969 she would be spinning out of control as further events tested the strength of her mind.

Pt. I: Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality

Edgar Rice Burroughs

And

The Accreted Personality

Part I

by

R.E. Prindle

Dr. Pinel Unchaining The Inmates

 

The post-French Revolution period begins the rapid development of the Aryan mind. The Enlightenment laid the foundation of that development. Shortly after mid-nineteenth century the French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, was able to announce that Astronomy and Psychology would be the key disciplines of the future. The break with the religious consciousness of the past ten thousand years or so would be fraught with immense dangers, dangers which we are still combating.

The social ideology of the present asserts that all people are of the same stage of mental development. This is, of course, absolute nonsense. There are still hundreds of millions if not a billion or two who still maintain a stone age view of the world. Nor are all of them in other parts of the world, a vast number are here in the Americas and Europe. In addition there are billions still enmeshed in a religious consciousness while only perhaps a hundred million or two have actually evolved into the scientific consciousness. Hence we have the terrifically repressive  attempted subversion of science by the Semitic religions.

So, it should be clear at first glance that not all people are equally developed or endowed nor are all cultures of the same value.

The French scientist and neo-romantic novelist Camille Flammarion noted mid-nineteenth century that the two most important intellectual disciplines for the future would be Astronomy and Psychology. I think that has proven true.

A major discovery of the century was the notion of the split or multiple personality. A term currently in use is Dissociation. Neither is accurate. I advance the term Accretive Personality. That is one’s personality is made up of many personality variations as a result of growth and experience. In periods of stress it is quite easy to escape oppressive reality by slipping into what is essentially an alternate reality or a parallel personality, if you will.

The Salpetriere

This was not a new phenomenon, merely the shock of recognition. In Greek mythology, for instance, when the stress of the mid life crisis hit, the hero went through a period of madness, that is to say he adopted a parallel personality until he was able to reorganize his mental attitude to new realities.

In Europe, under the stress of an insane quasi-Semitic religion in which Satan took a prominent role, it was common for the stressed to become ‘possessed’ by demons or, in other words, to split the personality. That is the person showed a parallel personality. The transition point to the beginning of secular understanding came when Dr. Anton Mesmer matched his secular method of exorcism against the ecclesiastical method of exorcism and won. So one might say that modern psychology derived from the problem of the dual personality- the Jekyll and Hyde effect. However dual or multiple personality was not recognized as such until announced in Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinic at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris in the mid-eighties.

Charcot studied hysterics. Hysterics are dealing with a lot of stress, hence escape through an alternate personality would be an easy choice. Charcot and the Salpetriere aren’t exactly household words so let’s take a moment to explain the situation in which modern psychology was born.

It is also necessary to bear in mind changes in scale. What is good for one stage of growth is not good for another. As the scale of things progresses from tiny to small to medium to large to huge to gigantic new forms have to be adopted to suit the new circumstances. These transition points are difficult to adjust to but once adjusted to are considered so normal that those who resisted the old change are equally resistant to adapt to the next level. Of course the young of each scale is born into it and has no adaptation to make although they will at the next change of scale.

Thus the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era masked to a very large degree a major change of scale so that after Waterloo a seemingly complete break with the past had taken place. It was a new world in the morning. So in the years leading up to the Great War another change of scale had taken place that masked the new world that popped into place in the twenties. I picked up the concept from that astute observer, H.G. Wells, who noted the emerging change in scale at the turn of the century. That great ship, the Titanic, that went down in ‘12 may be considered as representative of that change.

Thus with the change of consciousness that actually took place in 1795 the new consciousness became clear after Waterloo. Gone was the religious notion of ‘possession by evil spirits’ to be replaced soon by the concept of multiple personality. Thus whereas in the past the insane had been treated as raving beasts, chained to walls and whatever a Dr. Pinel at Paris’ Salpetriere began a more humane treatment with an attempt to understand the causes of insanity. The approach was parodied amusingly by Edgar Allen Poe in his story The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether in which the inmates revolted and took over the asylum.

The Salpetriere was a large compound of several acres with thousands of residents, mainly women from whom the subjects who became the hysterics that the great Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot began to study as a neurologist, as the early psychiatrists were known. The field of Psychology is divided in two. On the one side psychiatrists who must be MDs and who believe mental ailments are biologically derived and hence to be treated medically with drugs or, one shudders to think of it, operations like pre-frontal lobotomy or electric or insulin shock ‘therapy.’ Psychologists, who are PhDs with little or no medical training treat neuroses and psychoses as malfunctions of reason caused by experiential traumas.

Charcot as an MD originally sought biological causes for the hysteria he studied although he was coming around to a psychological viewpoint just before he died in 1893. Thus from being chained before Dr. Pinel released them these women, hysterics, while being confined to the Salpetriere were given freedom of movement within the hospital with its flowers and walkways making for a much more pleasant environment for them and one unobtainable to them on the outside.

Now, the great Dr. Anton Mesmer introduced hypnotism to Europe as a discipline in the years just before the Revolution. Naturally something so new and seemingly revelatory did not find immediate acceptance, indeed, it was treated as nonsense. Nevertheless people of learning, doctors, persisted in experimenting with it. Thus, when Charcot came to be the director of the Salpetriere, to the dismay of his profession he introduced the practice in his treatment of his hysterics and thus legitimized its use. Hypnosis, too, was new and little understood.

Pierre Janet

The essence of hypnosis is suggestion and Charcot did not understand suggestion. The rival hypnosis school led by Auguste Liebeault and Hippolyte Bernstein at Nancy to the East of Paris was aware of the effect of suggestion but not necessarily the nature of what it was. Actually suggestion is whatever enters the mind and is accepted. If one wakes to a beautiful sunny morning it is suggested to oneself that the day will be a good day. Acting on that suggestion, post-hypnotic one might say, one will try to make the day a great one to hang onto that feeling. The mind is naturally open to suggestion as it must be; in an active mind one can discriminate to some extent as to what suggestions will be accepted and which rejected. Under hypnosis in which the mind has been put into a passive state the ability to discriminate and reject has been greatly reduced so that a hypnotist can plant a suggestion that then becomes what Charcot’s associate, Pierre Janet, called an idee fixe, or in other words, a fixation that will remain in your mind until executed. This notion may be imparted by a human agent, books, movies, radio or any medium that is capable of influencing the mind. One must be aware of this. It isn’t necessary to have a hypnotist standing in front of you saying ‘look into my eyes.’

As I say, Charcot was convinced that hysteria was biological, that is to say caused by a lesion to the brain, so that while he hypnotized his female subjects at the Salpetriere he wasn’t aware of the nature of suggestion.

Marie Corelli

Now, the eighteen seventies and eighties were terrifically exciting at all levels. They did things differently then. As has been said: The past is another country; they do things differently there. The past is never to be judged by current standards although the latter are useful for comparison. Thus when Lister suggested that antiseptics ought to be used in the operating room his suggestion was stoutly resisted although true and nearly universally accepted today. On the other hand Evolution although true is more stoutly resisted today in a religious reaction than it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century so don’t feel all that superior.

While Charcot was arguing with himself as to whether hysteria was biological or mental, in the mid-eighties two of his associates easily grasped that hysteria was a mental problem. These two were Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet.

Freud at that time, 1886, was making the transition to psychology from medicine. He was an MD. Charcot was not alone in dealing with mental matters. The understanding of dreams for instance was developing rapidly. When Freud published his Interpretation Of Dreams in 1900 he cited dozens of competent researchers dating as far back as the 1860s. In 1886 alone two novels dealing with the subconscious and split personality were published, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and Marie Corelli’s Wormwood. Corelli cites Charcot as an influence so she very likely had attended his semi-public presentations of hysterics under hypnosis at his hospital.

Sigmund Freud

Going back further, Freud, a German Jew, was undoubtedly familiar with the psychological work of the German romantics. At any rate he spent about four months at the Salpetriere studying Charcot’s work and methods. It is likely that the foundation of his psychoanalysis was laid there. While Charcot was struggling to determine whether hysteria was biological or mental, Freud, himself a neurologist, was able to perceive that, as he later put it, hysterics were suffering from reminiscences. In other words they fixated on past experiences which dominated their minds and behavior.

Pierre Janet, Charcot’s student and associate, came to the same conclusion probably at the same time. He expressed the problem more accurately when he determined that hysterics suffered from one or more idee fixes, that is a fixed idea or, in other words, a fixation centered around a specific past event or events.

Indeed, all the women at the Salpetriere had been battered and brutalized by life with no means of self-assertion or resistance. Unable to express their own will they retreated into ineffective hysterics finally ending up as semi-insane in Charcot’s hospital.

Now, split or multiple personality. No one, especially these women, have the personality they are born with. Over the course of our lives circumstances require us to respond in different ways, sometimes a personality is overwhelmed with a consequent personality adaptation or change and in extreme cases, insanity.

All very well, but what happens to the original and/or various personalities that were submerged. It is impossible for them to vanish from the mind so they must live on submerged by a more powerful personality impulse. Depending on the individual then, everybody must have at least one alternate personality. Stevenson and Corelli were demonstrating this in their novels.

The good Dr. Jekyll had had a wild streak in his youth that he forcefully repressed to become the totally respectable man of medicine. But, he longed for his rough and rowdy days so in Stevenson’s story he invents a potion, I’m sure whisky would have been just as effective, that allows him to free his original personality. In the course of his experiment the earlier personality suppresses the later one assuming control of Jekyll’s mind. Much the same thing happens in Corelli’s novel. Thus we have personality accretion.

Charcot’s hysterics, because of the side show atmosphere the Good Doctor created, became world famous, a sort of show people. Charcot even took them on the road for demonstrations and, heaven forbid, loaned them to other doctors for experimentation.

It was during one such loan in 1888 that Jules Janet, Pierre’s brother, made a startling discovery. He was experimenting on Blanche Wittman, the Queen of Hysterics, when having hypnotized her into what Charcot called the first state, instead of progressing to the second state, he decided to put her into a deeper trance. At that point Blanche was able to dissociate her personality from her normal state to what I assume was her original personality. She turned into a happy effervescent bubbly girl. In other words she had stripped every accreted personality adjustment to return to the period before society violated her womanhood.

One might ask where this personality came from? It is not necessary to assume either the supernatural or the paranormal. The personality did not come from outside her but was merely an early personality that had been submerged and denied existence by repeated abuse. If Jules Janet had pressed on he might have found three, four or more variations of Blanche Wittman. Indeed, when Charcot died in 1893 Blanche ceased having hysterical attacks and became quite normal assuming yet another personality although it was not recognized as such. She then took responsible employment at the hospital until she died under tragic circumstances.

Thus during one’s life one assumes many variations as one’s personal circumstances dictate. And one expresses them in many different ways. As an example of personality accretion I am going to use the history of the American fantasy and science fiction writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He has especial value as his biography is well developed and he has talked voluminously about his mental states through his large body of fiction which is all autobiographical in nature.

Dr. Jean Martin Charcot Demonstrating Hypnosis And Hysteria

Part II follows.

A Review: Isidor Sadger Recollects Freud: Emasculating Freudian Theory

A Review

ISIDOR SADGER RECOLLECTS FREUD

Emasculating Freudian Theory

By

R.E. Prindle

     …Jung had been infected with Aryan blood from his family.

Deep in his heart,

he was anything from a philosemite.

Now, however, he encountered Judaism

in its most highly gifted embodiment

Of Jewish knowledge shining in front of him.

Was it any wonder that he began by being blinded

With the feeling that never before had he stood before

The countenance of a greater genius?

But his lineage was not to be denied.

One day he sat down and carried out scholarly studies for months

Which resulted in his finding his way back

Through the Mithraic cult to primitive Christianity.

In practical terms

This may be seen that as a Christian prophet,

He fully stripped the libido of its sexual character

And reduced it to merely spiritual energy.

This was, so to speak, the decontamination

Of the poisonous Freudian teachings

Through Christianization and total cleansing.

But since the master could not easily go along

With the desexualization of his teaching,

Which went to the foundation of his theories,

He saw with a heavy heart

That he needed to cut the cord between him and the clinic.  (Bergholzi)

Isidor Sadger, Recollecting Freud pp. 71-72

Sigmund Freud: Smoke Rings

Sadger, Isidor: Recollecting Freud, 1930, first published 2005, UWisconsin

It is very difficult to know where to start in analyzing the above quote from Isidor Sadger.  First it might be pertinent to identify Isidor Sadger.  He had a history with Freud from 1895 into the 1930s.  He attended with two others Freud’s first psychoanalytic lecture.  He was a founding member of Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.  In 1930 he published this little volume of biographical notes on his relationship with Freud.

Freud’s circle did not take kindly to the publication of these memoirs doing everything they could to suppress them.  In this they were successful.  The book was never distributed and only rumored to be in print until this publication in 2005 by Alan Dundes and UWisconsin.  Even acquiring a copy of the book by Dundes was nearly impossible.  He relates pp. xlii-xliii:

Recollecting Freud

When I looked up Sadger on my computer data base, I found not only the article (Sadger had written) in question but the title of a book:  Sigmund Freud: Personliche Erwinnerunger.  As I was not familiar with that work, I decided to send for it via interlibrary loan….In due course, the latter arrived but the effort to procure a copy of the former proved unsuccessful.  I was informed that there was no known copy in the United States available for borrowing.  Since I knew the book had been published in Vienna, I asked if we could try to locate a copy in Europe and the obliging staff in interlibrary loan agreed to do so.  A few weeks later, I learned that there was no known copy in any European library available for borrowing.

I was told, however, that there was one, just one, copy listed that might be utilized and that copy was located in the library of Keio University in Japan.  Again, inter library loan made a request on my behalf and this time with some partial success….I next asked interlibrary loan to request a photocopy of the entire book…The Keio University Mata Media Center informed (me) that it was unable to comply with my request….

…One of my anthropology doctoral students…was returning to Japan.  I asked him to do me a favor and get me a photocopy…

Which he did and almost by a miracle the text was recovered to be published for human consumption some seventy-five years on.  As Freud claimed to be a scientist one is amazed that supposed scientists would go so far as to deny publication of Sadger’s memoirs.  But, so it was.

In tackling the quote from Sadger let me approach it from the point of view of ‘Jewish knowledge shining in front of him.’

One must ask the question of what is Jewish knowledge and how is it special to their culture?  This is important not only from past implications but also in light of today’s Barbara Spectre and her Paideia organization whose intent is to place ‘Jewish knowledge’ on a par with Aryan knowledge or what Sadger calls Christian knowledge.

While Freud may have been a Jew working in the scientific field of psychology and psychiatry and while he may have made some important discoveries in the  field that had been developed by Aryans his own contributions  arose from that body of accumulated Aryan learning.  Since Dr. Anton Mesmer in the mid-eighteenth century until Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams Aryans had been slowly accumulating the knowledge on which Freud built his theories.  That knowledge had no racial identity per se nor did that which Freud added to it.  As Freud claimed that he was a scientist then his contributions were scientific, not Jewish, and the common property of mankind.  He may have been Jewish but the scientific field he was contributing to had no ethnic identity but Science, which is to say, none at all.

Sadger himself is taking a bigoted view in attempting to sequester Freud’s theories to the Jews.  In fact, as Sadger indicates Freud did not want his theories to be studied and furthered by anyone else.  When C.G. Jung, who Freud tried to make his disciple attempted to examine Freud’s concept of the libido and came to perhaps a more correct understanding of the concept, which after all was scientifically unproven, Freud broke off his relationship with him and the Bergholzli Clinic of Switzerland.  He, in fact, severed any Aryan connections.  He became interested only in Jewish contributions which then became Jewish knowledge in Sadger’s mind.

Sadger who had been Freud’s earliest disciple deeply coveted the role of being Freud’s pet or ‘favorite son.’  Freud for whom ambivalence was central to his character, even though he hated Aryans as a homosexual he was attracted to the ‘great blond beast’; hence, while carefully concealing his motive he selected Jung who had the requisite scientific qualification to be not his ‘son’ but a necessarily platonic lover.  Sadger could never qualify.

Now, what was Jung’s sin that brought about his rejection by Freud:

     One day (Jung) sat down and carried out scholarly studies for months which resulted in his finding his way back through the Mithraic cult to primeval Christianity…this may be seen as a Christian prophet, he fully stripped the libido of its sexual character and reduced it to merely spiritual energy.

Unquote.

So, having committed to Freud although ‘infected with Aryan blood from his family’ that he would abandon certain anti-Semitic understandings that he had.  In what seems an obvious betrayal of his pledge to Sadger Jung ‘carried out scholarly studies for months; which resulted in his coming up with a different perception of the libido that downplayed the rutty sexual projection of Freud’s Jewish psyche for what Sadger terms Christian spirituality.  To Sadger’s mind Jung had betrayed his pseudo-Judaism pledge to return to Christianity.

This raises several problems.  Is anti-Semitism a mere prejudice or is it based on observations of how Semitism functions and its rejection on that basis?  In other words, based on observed actions Semitism is rejected and not on prejudicial grounds but for accurate scientific reasons.

Further, in dogmatically insisting on his own interpretation of his creation, the libido, Freud was definitely unscientific.  At the same time his topography of the mind was completely off base.  In point of fact the libido is neither sexual nor spiritual, it doesn’t exist.  While Freud had a good working hypothesis his ideas were merely that based on the scientific, not Jewish,  knowledge of his time.  Freud became dogmatic at a time when he knew, or should have known,  what he didn’t know.  There was a lot of physiology to be yet discovered that would uncover the biology of life.

This biology would be clarified in 1947 when Crick and Watson discovered the genetic code of DNA.

Freud in his rutty, close to pornographic, interest in sex, by which he meant sexual intercourse made the absurd statement that the more frequently a man ejaculated the better person he would be.  Is it any wonder that Jung was turned away from Freud in disgust?  While Freud may have thought he was severing ties with the Bergholzli; the reverse would seem to be true.

With the discovery of DNA the biology became clear making it possible to elucidate the psychological basis of sex based on that biology.

Freud frequently had the right idea but he seldom thought the application through being infected with his own need for greatness by creating a science of his very own and his Judaism to whose Weltanschauung he was totally committed as Sadger indicates.

To take the psychology first:  Freud correctly differentiates between the individuals inner wishful thinking and his confrontation with outer reality.  Or, in other words, religious superstition versus a scientific understanding of  objective reality.

Thus, when the child is expelled from the womb he comes into contact with the outer world.  Whatever conception of reality he had in the womb bears no relationship to the reality of the world beyond the womb.  In the Freudian sense then the child’s mind is all Id with at best a nascent Ego.  As Freud’s desideratum is Ego shall displace Id the child has some serious adjusting to do.

This adjustment is called experience and education.  In the absence of education the child would grow up to be ignorant savage with an improper understanding of reality causing him to give all the wrong reasons for the phenomena he encounters.   This being mankind’s original condition over the millennia this ignorance was replaced by religious speculation based solely on inner wishful thinking.  Nor was not adequately understood.  As people might, for instance, decide that they are the chosen people of their god, make that god a universal deity and then weave their notions of external reality around that projection.  That was the condition of  Freud and his Jewish people.

The conflict for Freud and his Jews became acute when the Aryans with a different Weltanschauung sought to understand external reality on its own terms and adjusted their inner world of wishful thinking to reflect as much as possible objective reality.  When Freud mentions the science of Kepler and Darwin  as being shocks to the human mind, he meant Jewish mind which was now faced with the irreconcilable fact that their Arien Age Weltanschauung being based on false data was obsolete.  While Freud considered the organization of the mind the third great shock it was one that could be manipulated for his own ends, unlike Astronomy and Biology, and perverted to serve those ends.  Hence his dogmatic and ridiculous view of the unconscious and sex.

Now let us look at the nature of the human sexual function.  DNA with its double helix, one strand from each contributor, each remaining separate but combining information through bridges, visibly demonstrates how the entity is constructed.  The spermatic strand contributed by the male forms the stronger, more active, and slightly larger right side of the body and left side of the brain; the ovate strand contributed by the female forms the weaker, more passive, slightly smaller left side of the body and right side of the brain.

This means that the Xy chromosome of the male carries a male version and a female version, thus there is a female component to the male.  This was picked up the psychoanalysts as bi-sexuality in the carnal sense.  This is not true.  A man is not by nature available for sex by either sex.  Hormones reaffirm the sexual identity.

As should be easy to see all activity is controlled by the brain.  Information is communicated up and down the spinal cords which emanate from the brain.  One cord for each chromosome.  Thus, there is a nerve connection from each side of the brain to the commensurate testicle or ovary.  Sperm is manufactured according to the dictates of the autonomic system.  After one reaches puberty the seminal fluid builds up.  Without any other release the fluid will discharge automatically whether one wills it or not; these are usually termed nocturnal emissions.  These alone are all that is necessary to relieve the over supply.

As the only biological function of sex is reproduction the male is always ready to penetrate the female.  In a normal psychological function a comfort level can be maintained by one or two ejaculations a day or even less.  That Freud could make the absurd statement that the more ejaculations a day the better the person means that as a homosexual he had a psychic need or that the was merely trying to pervert Aryan society.

Now, the spinal cords run down the length of the body from the brain to the testicles where they terminate, making the brain and testicles a unit.  Nerves run from the spine to the various organs. There we have the basis for psychosomatic reactions.  While the cords are grounded at the testicles I believe they have more free play at the brain level.  The bi-sexuality the psychoanalysts noted is caused by the Xy and XX chromosome combinations.  Both Freud and Jung given the biology of their day had differently accounts for the apparent bi-sexuality thus they called the spermatic brain ending the Ego while Jung claimed that the male had an Anima and the female an Animus.  In actuality both males and females have an Anima and an Animus or, in Freudian terms, a Libido and Ego.

Freud also discovered the concept of Emasculation.  When the Ego or Animus, male or female, is given an affront or insult to which it cannot properly respond this creates a reaction or hypnotic suggestion that forms a fixation.  This fixation will have a psychic or physical or both affect.  Fixations are of different intensities  and qualities; the most severe is the central childhood fixation, also with psychosomatic affects an example of which each fixation creates.

In the case of the homosexual the affront is give by the male who thus creates a severe psychosomatic reaction which is what homosexuality is.  In the attempt to negate the reaction the homosexual then seeks to visit his fixations on other males while being compelled to seek multiple ejaculations many times a day which he equates with masculinity.

Thus a normal male can be satisfied with a normal schedule of ejaculation or relieving the pressure of the sperm build up, while a fixated person is compelled to more frequent ejaculation.  Thus Freud completely misunderstood sex erring on the side of homosexual emasculation.  Thus he was transferring his sexual neurosis or psychosis to Aryan society.   Probably in vengeance as he undoubtedly believed his own emasculation was caused by Aryans.

So, Freud’s whole conception of sex is skewed and should be rejected, replaced by a more accurate and balanced interpretation.  Jung had good reason to reject the libido or sexual theory of Freud that Sadger and the Psychoanalytic Society was required to embrace because Freud, their master, had spoken.  Freud must, or should have known, the limits of the biological knowledge of his time while understanding that great advances would come that might invalidate or require adjustments to his theory.  Therefore his attempt to dogmatize his first thoughts was unscientific to the extreme.

Contrary to Sadger’s orthodoxy Jung was quite right to pursue the libido theory further.  In desexualizing it, in Sadger’s term, Jung was on the right track as Freud’s interpretation was absurd on the face of it.  While Jung was certainly ‘infected’ with a Christian based view, as a scientist he was trying to give a scientific basis to sex rather than ‘Christianizing’ it as Sadger thought.  But then, Sadger was definitely intellectually limited by his Judaism.

In using such terms Sadger gives away the intense Jewish separation of Jewish and Aryan Kulturs.  There can be no specific Aryan or Jewish knowledge; there can only be one knowledge and that is Scientific truth.  If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.

While Freud built his theories on Aryan scientific psychological investigations he then infused the knowledge with Jewish superstition and goals which bent the science of psychology back toward a religious application which Freud undoubtedly hoped would negate the Astronomical and Biological shocks to the foundations of Judaism or Semitism.

Not only had Freud and his followers buried the reputation of the great French psychologist, Pierre Janet, from whom they borrowed or stole so much but in their successful attempt to freeze psychoanalytic investigation  into the Freudian framework they brutally slandered Jung while discrediting his own scientific work.  It was not until the sixties of the twentieth century that Jung began to be understood and credited for his contributions which were certainly equal to and mainly independent of Freud.

Thus we have the persistence of Alan Dundes pursuit of Sadger’s little volume to thank for casting a few rays of light on this thorny problem of psychoanalysis.

A Review: Psychoanalyzing Captain America

A Review

Psychoanalyzing Captain America

by

R.E. Prindle

From Out Of The Depths

 Must we be responsible for our own dreams?

 –Sigmund Freud

     In answer to the above question by Herr Doktor Professor Freud in his dream book, The Interpretation Of Dreams. published in the year 1900 Prof. Freud said that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious.  He then proceeded to suppress the conscious will releasing the unconscious will to dominate the personality.

     Of course in 1900 movies, TV and comic books were in the future and unforeseen by the Professor.  It is through those media that the unconscious visualizes itself.  The Dream is manifested, the unconscious becomes realized.

     In the case of the movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, first came the dream then came the comic book, then with movie technology undreamed of  in 1940 when Joe Simon and Jack Kirby conceived the character, brought to the screen today.  Comic books and movies are true projections of the unconscious.    As might be seen by anyone with a ticket Capt. America is less a story than a dream, a dream that Sigmund Freud defined as wish fulfillment.  So, one must examine the movie as a wish from the subconscious fulfilled as a visualization on the screen.  What does the dream-wish fulfill?

     First off we have a powerless wimp being knocked about by the big bad bully.  We have a brief anti-bully list and then move on.  However in this Cain and Abel story the rolls of bully and bullied are clear.  The wimp then wishes to join the army to fight Hitler and is rejected on several counts of inferiority.  But, never fear, the last shall be first.

     Now, in 1940 the US was not at war with anybody while the America First Committee was determined to keep the country that way.  But a powerful coalition led by the Jews had determined the European conflict  was a ‘just’ war while it was morally compulsory for the US to butt in somewhat like Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and a few other places today.  Unlike Viet Nam the usual suspects who opposed that war endorse all the current wars.  The voice of dissent is unheard throughout the land.

     So, bearing Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams in mind that demonstrates the connection between dreams and the unconscious, Captain America is a daydream or psychological projection of Jack Kirby’s ne Jacob Kurtzberg and Joe Simon’s of Brooklyn N.Y.  The relationship of these comic book writers to Judaism is explained by Rabbi Simcha Weinstein in his book Up, Up, And Oy Vey!:  How Jewish History, Culture, And Values Shaped The Comic Book Superhero.  This quote explains the real life origin of Capt. America:

     Growing up in poverty, Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) dreamed of being an artist but was forced to drop out of Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute after only one day because of financial hardship.  Instead Kirby worked on newspaper comic strips under gentile-sounding pseudonyms such as Jack Curtis, Curt Davis, and Lance Kirby until he finally settled on the name Jack Kirby.

     Kirby and his partner, Joe Simon, worked at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, where the mostly Jewish staff openly despised Hitler.  When Goodman saw the preliminary sketches for Captain America, he immediately give Kirby and Simon their own comic book.  The character was an instant hit, selling almost one million copies an issue.  “The U.S. hadn’t yet entered the war when Jack and I did Captain America, so maybe he was our way of lashing out against the Nazi menace.  Evidently, Captain America symbolized the American people’s sentiments.  When we were producing Captain America we were outselling Batman, Superman and all the others.”  Simon later commented.

     Well, not quite all the others, as Whiz Comics Captain Marvel was the best selling comic of both the war years and the later forties.  Certainly my favorite.

     As in the years before the War The America First Committee enjoyed overwhelming popularity amongst Americans I would question Simon’s notion that Captain America overwhelmingly represented American opinion.  As there were six million Jews in the country I might suggest the response from that quarter of ’Americans’ was more overwhelming than elsewhere.  Jews might easily have accounted for sixty to eighty percent of sales.

     It is also probable that no real American would ever have invented a corny jingoistic persona like Captain American.  The image was certainly repulsive to me as a child.   My prime comic reading years were from 1947 to 1950 and I and my entire generation rejected Captain America while embracing Captain Marvel.  Even then Superman was a distant competitor to Captain Marvel which is why DC comics sued Whiz for copyright violation.

     We disliked the hokey repulsive jingoism of Captain America as well as his dumb outfit and the stupid shield.  (I’m speaking as a nine year old here.)  Of course we knew from nothing about Judaism and almost less about any other religious sects but there was something othery about Capt. America and Superman although we embraced the equally Jewish Batman.

     The origins of Captain America then emanated from the Jewish dream subconscious of Jack Kirby which was quite different from ours.  He, therefor, as all writers must, made Capt. America in his real existence and from his dream fantasies.  Thus, giving his creation the goy name of Steve Rogers he nevertheless gave him a Brooklyn Jewish origin.  As Rabbi Weinstein also a Brooklyn Jew explains Jews had a sort of dual identity as powerless Jews posing as goys in a powerful goy world.  Thus the sickly ineffective Rogers undergoes a scientific experiment that turns him essentially from a 98 lb. Jewish weakling into an all powerful goy Charles Atlas.  I’m sure Kirby saw those ads while growing up.

     Rogers having now been turned into a Superman had to have a name.  Superman being taken Super Jew was out for obvious reasons or even Super Hebrew, there was no Israel at the time, so Kirby settled on Captain America.  Rabbi Weinstein again:

     Of course a more literal reading of the costume is that it is the American flag brought to life.  Captain America’s star is, after all, five-pointed, not six pointed like the Star of David.  The flag-as-costume notion reinforces the ideal of assimilation [Jews 'becoming' Americans].  By literally cloaking their character in patriotism, Kirby and Simon became true Americans.

     In 1940 there was a desperate struggle going on between the Jews and America First who the Jews styled as American Fascists, i.e. actual Hitlerites.  By that line of reasoning  the Jews became the true Americans, creators and protector of genuine American Democracy while Anglo-Americans or Native Americans or America Firsters were out to destroy the great American Dream the Jews had discovered.  This is the theme of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America backdated to this period.  The movie Captain America could easily be subtitled The Plot Against America Foiled.

     Rabbi Weinstein once again:

     Despite the patriotic appearance, Captain America’s costume also denotes deeply rooted [Jewish] tradition.  Along with other Jewish-penned superheroes, Captain America was in part an allusion to the golem, the legendary creature said to have been constructed by the sixteenth century mystic Rabbi Judah Loew to defend the Jews of medieval Prague.  “The golem was pretty much the precursor of the superhero in that in every society there is a need for mythological chracters, wish fulfillment.  And the wish fulfillment in the Jewish case of the hero would be someone who could protect us.  This kind of storytelling seems to dominate in Jewish culture,” commented Will Eisner.

      According to tradition a golem is sustained by inscribing the Hebrew word emet (truth) upon its forehead.  When the first letter is removed, leaving the word met (death) the golem will be destroyed.  Emet is spelled with the letters aleph, rem and tav.  The first letter, aleph, is also the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the equivalent of the letter A.  Captain America wears a mask with a white A on his forehead- the very letter needed to empower the golem.

     So, you and I thought the A stood for America but it is actually a symbol of Judaism.  Captain America then is an unconscious dream projection of the Jewish subconscious following Freud’s thought in his Interpretation of Dreams.  Now we know who and what the  Captain America or The First Avenger is.

2.

     Like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America the movie is backdated to 1940 although as the US is already in the war perhaps 1942-43 although in Kirby and Simon’s dream vision they could have already employed the usurped power of America in 1940.  However the movie writers, are writing today so assume different interpretations and aspects.

     In point of fact Hitler no longer exists except in the Jewish mind so the relevance of the movie is hampered.  Goys are not reliving the Hitler experience on a daily basis.  To correct this and bring the Nazi threat forward Hitler is relegated to an inept showman while the real brain behind Nazism is the Hydra.

      The Hydra in Greek mythology was a matriarchal year deity with seven heads and one neck,  Six of the heads prepresented the last six months of the year while the seventh head and neck represented the recurring and indestructible year.  Everytime a head was cut off it grew back as time does march on.

      When the Patriarchy was displacing the Matriarchy the story changed somewhat.  Hercules was sent to fight the Hydra and everytime he cut off a head three grew back.  Thus the Hydra is represented in the movie as a Red Octopus with eight arms thus embracing the world.  Ils sont partout. Obviously Hydra is a dream projection of anti-Semitism the arch fiend of the Jewish unconscious.

     The Jewish Doctor Erskine, Reinstein in the comic, playing God botches his first attempt at creating the superman, Hydra/Cain, but finds perfection in Capt. America/Abel.  Thus Cain is blighted while Abel is God’s favorite.  While Captain America begins as a song and dance man belittling Hitler on stage, when the fighting starts Hitler is relegated offstage while the super-Hitler, Hydra, steps front and center.

     While the Americans that Rogers as Capt. America have nothing like the incredible weapons and organization of Hydra they are nevertheless with their bare hands able to defeat him.  He is however immortal like all dream fears so that as Arnold said:  He’ll be back.

     The action is standard comic book action fare and needs no further comment.  You could have written it yourself.  Pretty clicheed but if you like this stuff you’ll find it very satisfying.

     However Captain America remains a Jewish hero in American drag with a purloined identity.

Cartoon Jack Kirby

A Review: Pt. 3, Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#15 Tarzan Triumphant

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 3:

Two Peas And The Pod.

     The ease with which ERB shifts from one complicated subject to another is truly remarkable; no less so in the facility he has for organizing these matters into a few lines or paragraphs.  No one can do this without a firm grasp of his subject matter.  ERB is simply one of the best informed writers of his era.

     In a little less than a page ERB summarizes the Torrio-Capone years in Chicago from the beginning of Prohibition in 1920 while incorporating a fictional history of his character, Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick.  Patrick as his name indicates is Irish.  He was part of the Dion O’ Bannion gang led bhy Bugs Moran after O’Bannion’s demise in 1924.  According to Burroughs Patrick took part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.

     …but Danny Patrick was ambitions.  For years he had been the right hand of a Big Shot.  He had seen his patron grow rich– “lousy rich” according to Danny’s notion– and he had become envious.

     So Danny double crossed the Big Shot, went over to the other side, which, incidentally, boasted a bigger and better Big Shot, (Al Capone) and was a party to the hijacking of several truck loads of booze belonging to his former employer.

—————-

     Many of the Big Shot’s enemies and several of his friends, had Danny taken for a ride.  He knew the power of the Big Shot, and feared him.  Danny did not want to go for a ride himself, but he knew that if he remained in dear old Chi he would go the way of all good gunmen much to soon to suit his plans.

     Patrick is not not a nice guy, he is definitely not a nice guy.  For my tastes ERB is much too tolerant of a man he describes as a psychopathic killer.  “many of the Big Shot’s enemies, and several of his friends’ implies that Patrick has many, perhaps dozens, of murders to his credit yet Burroughs is going to have Tarzan befriend this guy.

     While O’ Bannion was done in in 1924 by the Capone gang, being succeeded by Moran, ERB seems to telescope the years reversing things so that O’Banion is still alive after the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre– ‘The Day Chicago Died.’  ERB is clearly following and thinking about the situation in Chicago as he says, p. 27:

     (Patrick) knew that sooner or later, the Big Shot woud have a grand funeral with truck loads of flowers and, at least, a ten thousand dollar casket.

     Underworld funrals were prodigious affairs.  There is a certain irony in the fact that Dion O’ Banion ran a flower shop.  As a big crime figure it would be expected that the flowers for those expensive funerals would come from his shop.  Is it any wonder Patrick was taking so many people for a ride.  O’ Banion had a good racket going there.

     Not wanting to be taken for a ride himself Patrick had opted for an extended vacation taking his typewriter with him.  A Chicago typewriter, of course, was a Thompson machine gun.  Tommy gun.  The Chicago underworld qauickly adopted the Tommy gun which was new at the time.  The Tommy made those Dick Tracy comic strips so thrilling.  Although one has come to accept the Chicago hoodlum story as a commonplace if one actually thinks about it the open war between the underworld and legitamate society is so startling that one should be appalled.  ERB  like the rest of his contemporaries seems to have taken the fact in stride even, in his case, making Patrick a hero.

     It is almost as though he made Patrick the dark side of the mild mannered Geology professor, Lafayette Smith.  Or, in other words, himself.  In this series of books from Invincible to Lion Man ERB explores the split or dual personality as examined in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.  Convinced as ERB is that the Animus is represented by two archetypes, whith which I find no difficulty other than it can be three, four or more, in this story as usual he divides the two aspects of the personality between two characters.  Although Lord Passmore who is Tarzan in disguise has a decidedly homosexual feel, which would make four  personalities.

     Lafe Smith is clearly an alter ego of Burroughs. Borrowing from ERB’s own experience he says of Smith, p. 11:

     …Lafayette Smith, A.M., Ph.D., Sc.D, professor of geology at the Phil Sheridan Military Academy.

——————-

     For a school year now, he had been an instructor in an inconspicuous western military academy.

     Here we have ERB as he would like to have been with a string of degrees after his name.  First in this dream life he is a professor of Geoplogy athe Phil Sheridan Military Academy which sounds pretty impressive but then he is mysteriously down graded from a professor to a mere instructor (which ERB was in fact) for a schoolyear, nine months, at an inconspicuous military academy.  Thus fantasy collides with reality.

     Another fantasy, now Smithe was on his way to achieve another cherished ambition, that of going to Africa to study the Great Rift Valley perhaps as ERB himself might have liked to have done but which he never did.

     So ERB has his ego ideals, his Jekyll and Hyde sides going as pals to Africa.  As Tarzan is also an ego ideal we have an actual trinity.  Jekyll and Hyde and what?  God?  David Adams who is a pretty thorough Jungian is mystified by the lack of the benevolent old man in Burroughs’ work who according to Jungian theory should have been there.  This is more htan likely a very involved question but I am going to sugest that possibly characters like Tarzan and John Carter seve in that capacity of Old Man/Jekyll figures while the actual Old Man figures who are betrayers serve perhaps as the Hydelike figures representing his father.

     In real life Burroughs ‘old man’, his father, was a betrayer who had little good to say about his son even to the extent of defaming him to all and sundry.  So, it is possible that ERB split the Jungian benevolent Old Man figure into Jekyll like Tarzan and John Carter and his father into the Hydelike Old Man character.  As he was conflicted with a love/hate relationship with his father it would be easier for him not to mention his father by name.  I offer this interpretation only as a suggestion and do not insist n it, still it is a possible solution to the problem perhaps leading to a full solution.

     You can take the boy out of Chicago but you can’t take Chicago out of the boy.  ERB was always fascinated by slang.  Gunner Patrick gives him the opportunity for extensive and amusing word play.  The criminal culture from which patrick comes has what amounts to a patois.  At one point ERB calls it by the French term of argot.  Even though he is pronouncing English words that the English speaking characters can recognize the meanings of  the meaning he attaches to the words  are beyond the comprehension of his auditors.  Thus one has the intersting effect of the cultural clash between two examples of what should be the same culture but is not.

     Of course ERB is in full command of not only both these cultures but seemingly all cultures.  In his zany multi-cultural world he is the Master of Cultures.  I pretend to the succession of ERB.

     Thus disembarking from a ship the bright and dark sides of ERB tramp across Africa in the direction of the Great Rift Valley.  Perhaps like Kitchener they came down the Nile to Khartoum and cut up the Blue Nile to Ethiopia like Samual Baker.  Now Burroughs has to integrate his master alter ego, Tarzan, into the Jekyll and Hyde pair.

     A psychological interpretation is that Tarzan must accept the Hyde of Burroughs’ personality as well as the Jekyll.  Indeed, Tarzan seems to respect the Hyde side much more than he does the clown like but educated Jekyll side.

     As the story is told Tarzan hears the sound of a machine gun and goes to investigate.  Patrick had fired into the bush hoping to hit a lion nosing about the safari camp.  He succeeds in temporarily scaring it away, giving Tarzan time to locate the camp.

     The lion returns.  Imagine this scene.  Patrick with this Tommy gun is standing under the convenient tree, while Smith stands behind him with his nickel paltged .32 that he doesn’t even know how to aim.  Here ERB’s dark side is in command while his incompetent but intelligent bright side is subordinate to the dark.  What does this mean in real life?

     As Patrick fires on the lion the Tommy gun jams leaving both sides of Burroughs’ alter-ego defenseless.  At this time the Master alter ego falls on the lion from the tree killing him and saving the lives of the subordinate alter egos, Patrick and Smith.  Patrick is Irish and the more aggressive while one presumes Smith is English and more passive.  Thus a major theme of Irish and English which runs throughout the corus is here erepresented.  While ERB claimed to be ‘pur’ English he was actually only English on his father’s side while Bennsylvania Dutch, in other words, Rhineland German, and Irish on his Mother’s side.  the Irish surfaces not only here but in the following year when he assumed his Irish ancestral name of John McCulloch to write Pirate Blood.  Also as David Adams points out the killing of the lion puts the seal on the relationship between Tarzan, Smth and Patrick.

     In the same period of time he wrote Pirates Of Venus and Pirate Blood.  Although pirates had figured in his early writing as the Black Pirates of Barsoom and the pirates of Pellucidar unless I’m mistaken this sudden efflorescence of interest in pirates has to do with the ‘pirating’ of Tarzan by MGM.

     While not introducing himself Tarzan peremptorily gives the pair some instruction on how to comport themselves in the jungle then disappers up his tree.

     The next time Tarzan and Patrick meet is a bonding session in which Tarzan accepts Burroughs’ dark side, Patrick.

     Tarzan is squatting on the edge of the cliff observing Capietro and Stabutch in their camp below.  the ground gives way precipitating Tarzan over the edge.  He attempts to save himself by grabbing the chance tree growing out of the cliff face- the chance tree- even here Burroughs equates trees with safety- but the tree gives way.  Tarzan falls through the grass roof of a hut landing safely.  He is imediately engulfed by the goons of Capietro.

     Now, having lunch under another tree not too far away, yards actually, is Gunner Patrick.  HIs attention called to the Ape-man who he had previously not noticed he gets up to investigae.  Aiding Tarzan he lets loose with a blast from the Thompson.  He succeeds in dispersing the crowd as well as Capietro and Stabutch.  this is almost commical:  Tarzan shouts to Patraick to not go away, he’ll be right up.  Good as his word he appears above.

     Now come this very interesting bonding session in which Tarzan accepts Patrick. P. 98:

     The “Gunner” was waiting for him upon the summit of the cliff directly behind the village, and for the second time these strangely dissimilar men met- dissimilar and yet, in some respects, alike.  Each was ordinarily  quiet to taciturnity, each was self-reliant, each was a law unto himself in his own environment; but there the similairty ceased for the extremes of environment  had produced psychological extremes as remotely separated as the poles.

     The ape-man had been reared amidst scenes of eternal beauty and grandeur, his associates the beasts of the jungle, savage perhaps, but devoid of coarse, petty jealousy, treachery, meanness and intentional cruelty; while the “Gunner” had known naught but the squalid aspects of scenery defiled by man, of horizons grotesque with the screaming atrocities of architecture, of an earth hidden by concrete ans asphaltum and littered with tin cans and garbage, his associeates in all walks of life activated by grand and petty meannesses unknown to any but mankind.

Now, Burroughs signed his contract with MGM on April tenth of 1931 while he didn’t finish Triumphant until May twentieth so had forty days in which to realize his mistake.  If he did realize his error so quickly it might acount for some of the misanthropic bitterness in the above passage and elsewhere.  Filching his character would certainly be considered a grand meanness.  On the other hand his misanthropic interpretation was a continuation of his longstanding dislike of mankind and civilization.

It is of interest that both Patrick and Tarzaqn have killed many men.  Some of Tarzan’s kills, quite frankly, verge on the psychopathic.  I can’t get over how he literally ripped a man’s head off his shoulders in Ant Men.  Of course, he may have merely underestimated his strength being a fourth his size but having his full sized strength.

Nevertheless both are laws unto themselves in their own domains so  theoretically they do as they please.  Still, and I don’t know how to interpret this, ‘the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes as remotely separated as the poles.’  I’m clear on Patrick’s extreme but I’m not sure which extreme Tarzan represents.

These extremes were caused by the differences in the environments of the two men.  Tarzan was raised amongst beauty , while Patrick was raised amongst squaor.  As Burroughs roamed over Chicago, and it seems certain he searched out nooks and crannies, he was appalled byh the ‘screaming atrocities of architecture’.  Chicagoans have been quite proud of their architects and architectures so Burroughs critique is quite different.  The paving over of the environment bothered him as much as it does me.  We no longer see the tin cans and bottles but the dumping of garbage wherever by certain people still goes on.

Tarzan was raised among the ’noble’ beasts while Patrick was raised essentially among thieves and cheats.

Still, invironment aside both men had many kills or murders to their credit.  Seems like a double standard to absolve Tarzan while condemning Patrik especially since each is obviously a product of their environment while neither therefore is inherently good regardless of their environment.

Perhaps Tarzan kills only for just reasons, of his own reckoning as he is a law unto himself, while patgrick kills for gain is where the difference lies.   Perhaps that is the difference between constituted society and the criminal world.  There are times when the most mild mannered and best of men and women must kill, whether in the individual or collective sensel.  Burroughs brings this out when Lafe Smith attempts to liberate Lady Barbara and Jezebel from the Midianites.  As he faces the Midianites with his .32 a cultured English voice comes down from the cross telling him that he is goint to have to kill someone if he and women wish to survive.

Perhaps this scene isn’t just entertainment but Burroughs relating a hard fact of life.  No matter how good you may be a situation in life will appear when you will have to do that which goes against evrything you believe if you wish to survive.l  Such is the West’s situation in the world today; commit suicide yourself or shoot to kill.  Sometimes it comes down to that; left multi-culturalism or no.

This scene may be a very important psychological moment for ERB.  There is wry truth in Tarzan’s next utterance to Patrick:  “‘ A machine gun has its possibilites,’ the ape-man said with the flicker of a smile.’”

Perhaps ERB is in some midlife evaluation.  The scene with his alter-ego Smith’s entry into Midian is laden with symbolism also.  Let’s see how Burroughs handles that as he and Fate continue to weave the warp and woof of this remarkable tapestry to bring out the pattern.

Continued in Part 4: Lafe Smith, Born Again.

A Review, Pt. 10: Tarzan The Invincible by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#14  Tarzan The Invincible

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 10

The Prohpet- Edgar Rice Burroughs

Religion: Standing On The Promises

Even though at the beginning of the novel Burroughs says he does not consider Politics and Religion suitable topics for fiction- unless highly fictionalized- the two topics seem to constitute a major portion of his work.

The Great One does not feel called upon to exhibit a foolish consistency.   In Invincible the first sentence is:  I am no historian.  In Tarzan Triumphant he says: ‘Being merely a simple historian and no prophet…’   So in the few months between Invincible and Triumphant he has gone from no historian to a mere simple one while hinting that while he is no prophet he may become one.  We can’t be certain what the future holds in store for him.  I’ve already sensed that he is a prophet.  Tarzan is the god and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet.  So much for Mohammed being the end of the prophetic line.

Under cover of fiction Triumphant will deal extensively with the Jewish and Christian religions so this might be an appropriate place to review some aspects of the history and nature of religion.

Evolution occurs on many levels other than the biological.  The biological naturally controls all other forms of evolution.  The species has developed from a time of pre-hominid ancestors that must at some time have diverged from that of the other anthropoids as unpleasant as that may be for a certain type of mind although, for the life of me, I can’t imagine why.  One of the more significant areas of evolution has been that of the brain.  Nothing should be clearer than that the brain of HSIII is superior to the brain of the first Homo Sapiens and species which evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor.  I mean gorillas must have a relatively primitive brain.

There is no reason for this not to be so.  The brain of the infant Homo Sapiens continues to develop outside the womb until at least the early twenties.  At each stage the ability of the brain to function increases.  As above, so below; as in the macro so in the micro.

Thus as in each stage of evolution from the first Homo Sapiens to the present most highly evolved specimen Homo Sapiens III, abilities to think and function have increased.  Thus HS’s understanding of the world and universe are immeasurably different from the first Homo Sapiens model.  I can’t imagine anyone who would dissent from that conclusion.

Now, except for the intermingling of human species certain human species would still be unacquainted with the approximately true nature of the world and universe that we have attained.  I don’t see how this can be disputed.  Without European influence the rest of the world would still think the earth was flat.  These are facts whether one likes them or not.  Indeed, even among the most advanced human species there are very large numbers who resist the scientific explanation of nature. These people still prefer the atavistic, antiquated religious Semitic explanation of natural phenomena.  These people can barely accept the notion of a heliocentric solar system, many don’t.  Why should anyone pay attention to them?

If one accepts that Homo Sapiens is 150K to 200K years old then it seems to me impossible that all human  intellectual development has occurred in the last ten thousand years.  Weapons of some sort have been in existence for many tens of thousands of years if not from the beginning of Homo Sapiens having been evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor.  It seems evident to me that a highly developed civilization existed in the Med Basin beginning c. 100K years ago.  That doesn’t mean they had advanced Science it merely means that they had an organized society with relatively sophisticated thought processes and tools.  Religion is basically an attempt to understand and make order of the world.  All interpretations of the natural order must be based on that order.

Hence the North Polar stars which never set are the basis of religion.  The Polar stars rotate about the Pole over a period of some 25K odd years forming what is called a Great Year.  The Great year was made to conform to the terrestrial year of twelve months therefore being divided into twelve periods called Ages.

The Great Year with it twelve Ages formed the basis of religion.  We will call that religion the Astrological Religion.  Thus the religion goes back for tens of thousands of years as Sumerian records indicate.  These Ancients did not make up their lives or talk through the backs of their necks.

Each Age of the Astrological Religion had its male and female religious archetypes.  These are, perhaps most easily traced as far back as four ages, possibly five, in the Greco-Cretan mythology.  The historical ages are the Taurian, Arien, Piscean and the next, the Aquarian.  I am not a New Ager although I see no reason to disparage them and I am in sympathy with the outlook.  One may say that I am of the Astrological religious tradition as we will see, I think, was Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In ancient days the Hom Sapiens species were separated each having distinct territories so that in the Darwinian sense they were not yet in conflict.  When the last Ice Age came to an end flooding the Med Basin- this is not speculation, but fact- the civilization of the Basin was forced to higher ground bringing them into contact with the highland savages from West to East.  Thus civilization as we now know it began.

The first settlers of Mesopotamia brought the Astrological Religion with them or, according to Mesopotamian mythology a man-god named Oannes- the name Oannes evolved into Johannes or John- appeared from the sea to teach them the rudiments of civilization and the Astrological Religion.  Immense amounts of lore must have been lost, that is forgotten,  so perhaps that is where the legend of the Lost Word comes in.

Now, off to the East on the Arabian Peninsula a different species lived.  These were called the Semites or would be after the later Hebrews so named them after their mythical ancestor, Shem.  Mere desert dwellers the Semites were attracted to the glitter of the Astrological Religion.  There is no evidence that the Semites had a civilization or anything that could be called an actual culture of their own.  They merely mimicked the existing culture infiltrating it much as Europe and America are being infiltrated today by their descendants.  Eventually they will succeed the European civilization just as their ancestors did the Sumerian.

The evidence is that they had no religious forms of their own so that they attempted to take over both the physical and cultural edifices of their predecessor civilization, the Sumerian.

The Semites did not have the same mental organization or capabilities as their predecessors so they could maintain neither the civilization nor the religion.  The major conflict came at the transition from the Age of Taurus to the Age of Aries.  Here is where the real conflict between the Semites and Indo-Europeans or  the Semites and HSII & III begins to take its historical form.

When the Astrological Age changes the religious archetypes change.  For instance Cronus had been succeeded by Zeus at the transition from Taurus to Aries.  Zeus himself was succeeded by Jesus the Christ at the transition from Aries to Pisces.  Zeus would have been succeeded by Dionysus but the Semites either had to be accommodated or they forced Jesus of Nazareth on the Age which was later combined with the Kyrios Christos to form the composite deity the Semitic Jesus and Hellenic Christ.  The role of Paul was very important in forcing Jesus of Nazareth on the goyim as Burroughs attests in Triumphant.

As we are now about to transit from Pisces to Aquarius a new set of archetypes will emerge representing the current intellectual and psychological development of Homo Sapiens.

This raises the question of whether Burroughs was merely a simple historian or was he also a prophet.  Is Tarzan his offering for the role of the male archetype for the Aquarian Age?  I think he is.  For those who scoff at such an idea it would be wise to examine Burroughs relation to Mormonism during his stay in Salt Lake City.  If it was possible for Joseph Smith to befuddle the minds of intelligent Westerners with his nonsense in the middle of the nineteenth century, or Mohammed to impose his twaddle even in the seventh, then I see no reson to be amazed that Burroughs would attempt the same thing in the twentieth century.  I mean, look at this stuff for what it is.

Also, believe it or not, I read recently where someone thinks Oprah Winfrey could be the female archetype for the Aquarian Age.  Get out of here.  I don’t whether to laugh or barf.  So, the notion of religious archetypes for the new age is a fairly active one.  Any such discussions are in conflict with Semitism.  So, we’re back to that problem.

Semitism took identifiable form at the transit from Taurus to Aries.

The record of such happenings is, of course, much more recent than the transition from Taurus to Aries.  It could have been made up during the Babylonian captivity.  The Old Testament record was only recorded, perhaps even formulated, after the Captivity which began in 586 BC lasting for only fifty years although rather than return to the pleasure of the temple most Jews remained behind by the waters of Babylon just as their ancestors yearned for the fleshpots of Egypt.

To clarify the nature of human species according to Jewish sources:  The Jews argue that all mankind is derived from Jewish or Hebrew stock.  The only survivors of the great flood were Jews- Noah and his family.  The ancient Hebrews while knowing many cultures knew of only three species or stocks.  They acccordingly named them Hamites, Shemites and Japhetites after sons of Noah.  In their conversations with De Great Lawd which were frequently carried on in public He apparently dispensed information on a need to know basis so he withheld the info on the Mongolids and West African Negroes as no account of them is taken in the descendants of Noah.  A little gap in the perfect knowledge of the Old Testament.

Thus the Old Testament acknowledges the differences between the Semites, the Europeans or Japhetites and the Hamites are more than merely racial, which is to say Cosmetic.  Such an idea is of course in line with genetic learning.

The Med People or HSII devised a fluid religious system that allowed for the development or evolution of the human mind.  In other words they not only accepted but embraced change.  This is a quality of mind not shared by HSI, the Semites or the Mongolids.

Depending on what time period the Semites began the infiltration of Mesopotamia which may have overlapped the Geminian and Taurian Ages or perhaps fell completely within the Taurian Age there would have been no conflict with the Semitic need for stasis and the Astrological allowance for development, evolution or growth.  However, by the time of the transit from Taurus to Aries the Semites had gained political control of Mesopotamia while the religious control was still in the hands of the Aryan priesthood.

Following Astrological precedents the ancient Aryan priesthood wanted to change to the Arien archetypes.  In European Greece where the Semitic influence was lower the transit from Cronus to Zeus was made with only the usual warfare hence the legends of the Cronian Titans and the Olympians.

In Mesopotamia where the Semites were in the ascendant, according to Jewish myhthology, the Terahites, under the tutelage of Abram, disputed the succession with the ancient priesthood.  According to Jewish mythology Abram and the Terahites argued that the religious archetypes were eternal and there was no Astrological tradition.  Thus in the ancient world the Jews were believed to worship Saturn.  If Saturn were the Taurian archetype then this was very likely true as Saturn would then be the basis for the Eternal which the Jews do acknowledge worshipping.

In the Semitic manner, then, the Semitic mind being incapable of  accepting change, having been fully developed before they emerged from the desert, went into opposition to the Astrological Religion.   Thus the conflict changed from a termporal one to a ‘spiritual’ one.  At that point then diaspora was possible without the laws of national identity.  As a spiritual entity, Judaism was born.  The notion of Semitism developed along with  its opposite anti-Semitism.  Christ = Anti-Christ.  Thus the explanation of the origin of this so-called anti-Semitism is simply explained.  In reality Semitism was in conflict with the Astrological Religion and hence was anti-Astrological.  Any other religion must perforce be anti-Semitism.  The struggle then became a struggle for the souls of men as well as their bodies.

Once again in direct conflict Europe and Asia began a long theological dispute.  As the Piscean transition progressed the Semites began their attempt to convert the Astrological religion to Semitism.  They were effective in shutting down intellectual inquiry which is the motive force for change.  We will see this again in the nineteenth century efforts of Marx, Freud and Einstein.

As the ancient world ended, its religious legatees were the Catholic Church and Judaism.  All other ancient religions disappeared from the face of the earth except in ineffective remnants or underground movements.

It is interesting that fourteen hundred years after being forbidden the Arien Age worship of Zeus has been made lawful again in Greece.  There’s really no place in the Aquarian Age for the Olympian pantheon but it is an interesting atavistic attempt reviving as it were the struggle between the Arien Age religions of Olympia and Israel.

Gradually the Egyptian and Anatolian elements of the Christian manifestation of the Piscean archetypes have been displaced in favor of the Semitic models.  The Catholic Church was able to contain the Semitic influence in Europe from the end of the Western Roman Empire to the Age of the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The Enlightenment let Simitism loose on the world again.

While the Roman Empire militarily defeated the political entity of Jerusalem from 66 AD to 135 AD the battle weakened the Empire allowing in Asiatic influences like the Emperor Heliogabalus.  Then in the seventh century AD the present form of the struggle between Europe and Asia took form when the prophet Mohammed formed the Moslem Religion based largely on its predecessor religion, Judaism.

The Moslems stormed across North Africa into Spain and France where they were stopped at Tours by Charles The Hammer.  It took nearly one thousand years to drive the Moslems from France and Spain which result was finally obtained in 1492.

As the Moors were driven from Europe by Ferdinand and Isabella they also expelled the Semitic Jews.  In the evolutionary sense this was the other correct response to an invasion of a competing species.  The other, of course, would have been extermination.  Thus at this stage of European history they were responding in an evolutionarily correct manner.  England had expelled the Jews in 1190 and France in 1307.  The various small German States fluctuated in their attitude sometimes expelling sometimes readmitting.  There were always German States that allowed Semites.  Otherwise the great mass of European Semites lived in the no-mans land between Russia and Germany that would after Russian annexation be called the Pale of the Settlement meaning this area was roped off for Jewish residence.

While these actions may have been evolutionarily correct and probably even politically correct the defensive party seldom thinks in such grand terms as evolutionary inevitability.  So, really, in evolutionary terms the only correct response is extermination.  The Shona of Zimbabwe fully understand this principle.  I say this to show I am not springing anything new or unusual on you.  These natural responses are going on today in Zimbabawe, South Africa, South and West Sudan, Indonesia, in former Yugoslavia where Moslems are exterminating non-Moslems.  If you don’t believe these things, open your eyes, open your eyes.

Now, wars do not end after seeming victory.  The expelled Moslems of Spain continued the war establishing the Barbary Pirates who then preyed on Europe for the next three hundred years plundering and enslaving Europeans.  The actual invasion of North Africa first by Spain and then by France was an attempt to end this savage warfare.

Burroughs would have been brought up on the legend of millions for defense but not one cent for tribute as was my generation.  Until recently I believed that Americans had ended Barbary piracy.  This was just something we were told in the fourth grade.  Actually the Barbary pirates were put down only in 1830 when France conquered and annexed Algeria.

France at that time ought to have either exterminated or driven out the Moslems.  Having once expelled them, if they had had the power, they should have swept across North Africa, as the Moslems had done, driving the Moslems before them until they had reached Suez.

Thus Africa would have been reclaimed for Europe.  First it was held by the HSII survivors of the Med Basin flooding, then the Semitic-Carthaginians, then HSII Romans and back again to the Semitic Arabs.  So such a preemption was certainly historically justified.  The Moslems make a great noise about the Crusades but the modern problem was their offense of the Eruption From The Desert.  Get straight.

At the same time the Jewish and Arab Semitic struggles were going on  the yeast of the suppressed religions of the Middle East and philosophies of Greece were converting the Europeans from Semitic stasis to Aryan intellectual activity.  The Eastern Roman Empire fell at the time of the expulsion of the Jews and Moslems from Spain.  Scholars flooded out of the East.  These Egyptian, Greek and Syrian influences burst forth in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as the Enlightenment.  Previously the discussion had been between the Semitic reigions of Judaism, Moslemism and Christianity.  The level of human consciousness between the three was nearly equal although still retaining some measure of the Astrological Religion.  This is a very serious subject for study.  Christianity, such as it was, was intellectually superior.  Remember, however, that Catholicism was so imbued with the limited Semitic intellect that the Pope made Galileo deny the notion of a heliocentric system.

The release of the Scientific Consciousness after the long suppression of several hundreds of years put the inferior religious consciousnesses on the defensive.  The Semitic counterattack going on today is the culmination of the Jewish response to the Enlightenment.  It is imperative that a Scientific offensive be made against this anterior and surpassed form of the evolution of human consciousness.  As in the past a victory cannot be achieved without a perhaps bloody and costly struggle.  Such as is going on now.

We, you readers, Burroughs and I, are concerned with the middle of the Englightenment period here, say from 1890 to 1935.  I think we will see that Edgar Rice Burroughs is deeply and constructively involved in this struggle between the Religious and Scientific Consciousnesses.

As I’ve noted before, the Christian response to the scientific challenge was to declare either the Pope or the Bible infallible. Protestants didn’t have a Pope so they declared the Bible infallible.  Same thing.  American Liberals who evolved from the Puritan/Abolitionist nexus essentially became secular religionists.  It is to be remembered that the Puritans the Liberals evolved from considered themselves neo-Hebrews hence the new Chosen People.  According to John Adams as Neo-Hebrews they even rejected the celebration of Christmas.  Thus Liberals tend to give science  a religious spin rejecting Christianity.

The Jews on the other hand confronted by a hard edged Science that could not be bent to Semitic ideas decided to co-opt Science perverting it so that it resembles their religion.  All these responses have been taking place since the French Revolution of 1789 which emancipated the Jews removing them from Roman Catholic control.

As I pointed out in an earlier essay there was a brilliant episode on the TV show Twilight Zone in which monks had captured and imprisoned Satan.  They made the mistake of allowing a lost traveler to stay the night in the monestery.  The monks warned the visitor to pay no attention to the entreaties of the prisoner to release him.  The traveler did not heed the warning and prisoner who was Satan was released again in the world.  A little allegory.

Thus the Revolution and Napoleon emancipated the Jews who immediately began the conquest of Europe.  France was the first to fall.  Karl Marx then hi-jacked Socialism in the name of Communism.  Communism negates change in favor of stasis.  Its story is all regulation and control, no different than Judaism.  An elite administers to the ‘masses’ as the Chosen People administers to the goys.

Just as the Moslems are called to prayer five times a day and the Jews are expected to apply their 613 commands to every action before they take it, so Communism coopts the individual into the collectivity and regulates his every action.

Using Socialism as its cutting edge the way was paved for Communism in Europe.

Burroughs first encountered Socialism on the streets of Chicago as Socialists marched along under their waving red banners.  The scene made an indelible impression on the young boy resulting after the Russian Revolution in his book, Under The Red Flag.  Thus the Semites coopted the political ideology of the next one hundred years.

Science unfolded very quickly in the years following Darwin’s Origin Of Species.  Particularly great progress was made in the scientific understanding of the mind.  Psychology then was coopted by the Jew, Sigmund Freud.  It is rather difficult to understand why all research seems to have been channeled through Freudianism.  A rather fecund area of research seems to have been enveloped into one train of thought.

Freud quickly established his version of the static ‘unconscious’ as the sole vision of the mind.  He demoted the conscious mnd to a position of irrelvance.  His intention is quite clear.  The conscious mind is the engine of change.  By emphasizing the static unconscious combined with is vision of sex, which is to say only sexual intercourse, he was attempting to disarm the conscious mind and hence stop change or in other words establish stasis.  Success in such a course is not instantaneous so naturally science continues to progress as the pall of the unconscious spreads.  It doesn’t take a genius to understand why scientists are male and white.  Once you have established the fact that scientists will be male and white it becomes necessary to stultify and emasculate white males, thereby establishing stasis.    One would have to be blind not to see that that is exactly what is happening.

In point of fact the unconscious does not have an objective existence.  Its apparent existence is merely a mind in an arrested state of development.  The stasis is caused by fixations from challenges too stressful for the conscious mind to handle.  Once the fixations are dealt with and disappear, which is included in Freud’s understanding of the mind, the mind or personality is allowed to integrate, the Freudian unconscious disappearing.

Freud never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his ‘unconscious’ so it is possible he didn’t understand the integration of the personality although his disciple, Jung, did.

However in Freud’s hands the unconscious became a weapon in the Semitic attempt to subjugate mankind.  This subjugation is not religious or moral but a matter of one species seeking dominance over the others.  Thus as Marx perverted the science of politics so Freud perverted the science of the mind.  The third perversion of Science was the conquest of physics by Einstein.  As Marx and Freud had interjected Semitic religious concepts into Politics and Psychology so Einstein did the same in Physics.  It matters little that there is some scientific content in the the theories of these men.  Their intent is to subordinate science to religion just as they had done vis-a-vis the Astrological Religion to the Semitic Religion when the Religious Consciousness was supreme.

That Einsten has been able to befog the minds of very intelligent men with his nonsense about the ‘fabric’ of space and time is nothing short of incredible.  Yet, by the second decade of the twentieth century the perverted notions of these three men were directing the course of research in these three essential disciplines.

Thus cored from within the Aryans were made susceptible to the rising time of Wahabi Moslemism that Lothrop Stoddard noted and warned against but which warning was defused due to the machinations of Jewish Semites within Western Civilization.

Running concurrently in the background contra to the Semitic stream was the evolving Astrological Religion.  Just as the evolution of the Dionysiac Archetype of the Age of Pisces developed for hundreds of years within the Arien dispensation of Zeus so the formation of the Aquarian has been taking place in the Age of Pisces.

The Enlightenment with its advance in the development of scientific consciousness was undoubtedly the opening salvo.  Unlike Semitic development the Astrological evolution was not institutionalized.  It is an idea that once set in motion is maintained by volunteers who get the idea and keep it perpetuating.

The principle is known.  For instance the notion that America is a land of immigrants has been allowed to develop to the point of self-destruction.  Of course that notion is constantly forwarded by the Liberal Coalition.  Even though it is obvious to the feeblest intelligence that the land is capable of supporting only a finite number of humans the madness has now reached the point where it is beleived that the whole world can be imported ‘to share what we have.’  One of the most, if not the most, bizarre notions in all history.  Such insanity is difficult to understand.

If one assumes, as one must, that human consciousness has been developing over the 150K years since humans evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor then this transition to the Aquarian Age is the most dramatic development of history.  All previous stages of evolution have involved the progression from one stage of supernatural religion to another.  In this transition, for the first time, it has been proclaimed that ‘God is dead.’  That is to say a supernatural being who guide’s our destiny.

With the age of Science mankind realizes the true nature of appearances or Nature itself.  The concept of Evolution destroyed the basis of the Semitic religion.  There is no God, no Yahweh, no Allah, no stasis.  Oh, Lord, crikey Massa, don’t put me jail for saying that!  People who still believe in such non-existent deities have not been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Burroughs, and I consider this fairly remarkable, seems to have accepted the New Order of Science upon his first contact with Darwin and Evolution.  To say that ‘God is dead’ creates a vacuum in human consciousness such as the integration of the personality changes one’s mental structure leaving an aching vacancy between the vacation of the old personality and its replacement by the new.  Thus for the last hundred years or so mankind has been seaching for a metaphysical sucessor to the supernatural concept of God.

Just as the Enlightenment may have opened the way to the transition to the new consciousness so men have appeared to direct consciousness into constructive channels.  One of these writing as Burroughs writhed through the years between his marriage and the epiphany that produced his writing career and Tarzan was a man called Levi Dowling writing under the name of Levi.  His effort, I’m certain what he considered his gift to the world, was a work called The Aquarian Gospel Of Jesus The Christ.

I doubt Burroughs read this book although one never knows.  Chicago in the period before Los Angeles was the American hotbed of religious speculation.  One should never overlook that.  Burroughs lived in a welter of religious speculation.  Added to that Burroughs was heavily influenced by Lew Sweetser who was particularly interested and well informed on such topics.  Plus Burroughs lived in Mormonland for a decent period of time making a special visit ot the Mormon capital in 1898, while living in Salt Lake City for several months in 1903-04.  It would be hard to believe that he wasn’t learning of the Mormon doctrines especially how a noodle brain like Joseph Smith was able in the nineteenth century to impose his religious will on thousands of people.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, came from an area highly influenced by the fantastic religious notions of the Rhineland Pietistic Germans who became known as the Pennsylvania Dutch in America.  Magazines would have been full of this stuff while the Chicago papers must have covered these religious speculations in detail.  There is no reason to believe that Burroughs’ mind wasn’t filled with these speculations.  Such ideas spill out all over the pages of his books.

Many writers have noted that the initials of John Carter and John Clayton are JC the same as Jesus the Christ.  No Freudian believes in coincidence so there must be an intellectual connection.  Burroughs repeatedly says that the next deity must be a man-god and that is explicitly what Tarzan is.

There is nothing supernatural about Tarzan.  He is completely a man of science.  The most highly involved specimen of humanity ever.  If like Jesus the Christ he doesn’t have a magical birth he certainly has a miraculous upbringing from the age of one.  Unlike Sargon and Moses who were fished from rivers in baskets thus breaking continuity with human predecessors Tarzan was taken from the cradle by an ape thus breaking continuity with human predecessors while establishing a new human paradigm.  He in fact unites nature with civilization or, at least, a thin veneer of it.  Now, this is completely in keeping with the Dionysiac paradigm.

Dionysus has two sides.  The soft feminine side which has characterized the Piscean Age and the wild natural side which is meant to characterize the Aquarian Age.  The undisciplined natural side of human consciousness that the Patriarachy tried to suppress in favor of the strictly rational as characterized by Apollo wouldn’t be suppressed.  As mythology relates it, women could not be rational thus they embraced the Dionysiac religion imposing its ecstasies on society.  The Dionysiac ethos was so strong that it forced itself on the Delphic Oracle in partnership with Apollo.  Thus Delphi came to represent both the rational and irrational sides of consciousness.  The conscious and unconscious if you will.

Thus as the Piscean Age dawned and the religious archetypes changed from Zeus and Hera to Dionysus and Isis the struggle was to keep consciousness or the rational uppermost.  Of course, Dionysus and Isis were supplanted by the Semitic ideals Jesus and his mother, Mary who later became the Mother of God.  Later the Dionysiac Kyrios Christos was grafted onto Jesus of Nazareth and he became Jesus the Christ as Levi Dowling correctly notes.

One can’t be certain how learned Burroughs was in this lore.  He most probably was somewhat read in it while brilliantly intuiting the direction the evolution of consciousness must take.  One can never be sure although there is little in the surviving library to indicate he read deeply in such lore.  But then, so much of his knowledge he does evidence can’t be found in the library either.  Suffice it to say that such knowledge seems to be apparent in his stories.

Needless to say the idea of Tarzan expanded and developed over his career.  The Tarzan of the teens is quite different from the Tarzan of the thirties.  There are a couple of passages in Tarzan Triumphant that make you do a double take.  To wit:  p. 12

…Tarzan with knitted brows, looked down upon the black kneeling at his feet.

“Rise!” he commanded, and then; “Who are you and why have you sought Tarzan Of The Apes?”

“I am Kabarega, O Great Bwana,” replied the black.  “I am chief of the Bangalo people of Bungalo.  I come to the Great Bwana because my people suffer much sorrow and great fear and our neighbors, who are related to the Gallas, have told us that you are the friend of those who suffer wrongs at the hands of bad men.”

So here Tarzan as become a Sultan, a King, an Emperor, a great judge and dispenser of justice; shall we say a god?  Certainly the Lord Of The Jungle.  He also seems to have lost perspective but then, perhaps a god must keep up appearances.  We do have a new imperious Tarzan here who was not in any books before Invincible.

And then in Chapter 13, p. 98 in the Bowlderized Ballantine edition:

The “Gunner” was waiting for him upon the summit of the cliff directly behind the village, and for the second time these strangely dissimilar men met- dissimilar and yet, in some respects alike.  Each was ordinarily quiet to taciturnity, each was self-reliant, each was a law unto himself in his own environment; but there their similarity ceased for the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes (opposites) as remotely separated as the poles.

The ape-man had been reared amidst scenes of eternal beauty and grandeur, his associates the beast of the jungle, savage perhaps, but devoid of avarice, petty jealousy, treachery, meanness, and intentional cruelty; while the “Gunner” had known naught but the squalid aspects of scenery defiled by man, of horizons grotesque with screaming atrocities of architecture, of an earth hidden by concrete and asphaltum and littered with tin cans and garbage, his associates, in all walks of life activated by grand and petty meannesses unknown to any but mankind.

“A machine gun has its possibilities,” said the ape-man, with the flicker of a smile.

The last near hundred years has been characterized by the attempt to overturn the Scientific  Consciousness in the name of two Arien Age Semitic religions, Judaism and Moslemism.  Indeed the ‘hand of God’ moves in mysterious ways.  Let’s look at one called ‘The Iron Law Of Wages.’  When you read in the Old Testament that ‘the poor shall be always with us’ you probably didn’t notice the arrogance of the remark nor that it is an actual ‘eternal’ tenet of Semitic religious belief.  The remark put into academic terms might be that the price of labor is the lowest price that a man can be gotten to do a job and that they may be worked to death like slaves thereby insuring that the poor shall always be with us.

The religious theory was formulated in scientific terms by David Ricardo in 1817.  Described as a British economist Ricardo was actually a Sephardic Jew.  That is to say his people fled Spain c.1492 in this case first to Holland and then to England which was undoubtedly done illegally after a period of Dutch acculturation.  It will be easily seen that Ricardo is adapting the ancient Semitic belief that the poor will always be with us to British conditions.  Indeed, as his formulation became the bedrock of employment practices it may be said he created poverty as the industrial age took shape until Henry Ford disproved this ancient historical bunk in 1914.  At that time he ‘unilaterally’ doubled the wages of unskilled labor to begin to create the prosperity that characterized American society until the reemergence of Semitic beliefs in the twenty-first century.

I personally deplore unionism but I also see its necessity.  Ford’s action raised the price of labor across the board.  Unionism was successfully fought by managers until unionism gained the backing of the government under FDR.  Backed by the government support unions made excessive and ridiculous demands until their momentum was stopped when Ronald Reagan sent the Air Controllers back to work which put unionism on the defensive.

Ricardo’s Iron Law Of Wages was not re-instituted at that time.  Fordism still prevailed.  Then jobs were exported wholesale to ‘multi-cultural’ areas of  low wages.  This was a crucial mistake for the world.  Even this did not break the back of labor.

The next strategic move was simply to open the borders allowing millions of immigrants who would work for lower wages under distressing conditions.  While immigration makes no sense on any other level it does put the Biblical managers in control of labor once again.  President Bush himself was a primitive religionist unacquainted even with the twentieth century who had surrounded himself with even more primitive Jewish religionists.  The war of religion against Science goes on.

Thus the Semitic counterattack against Science goes on.  Both major races of Semites, the Jews and Arabs, are waging war on the most primitive basis.  The issue is not the issue.  Immigration, the ostensible issue, is simply a Red Herring to disguise the true issue which is to defeat Fordism and re-institute Ricardo’s Iron Law Of Wages to ensure that the poor will always be with us.  The streets are now filled with the homeless.

This is the real reason Ford is called an anti-Semite and on that basis he certainly was.  God bless his memory.

So, the unsuspecting young Burroughs thrust himself into this melee.  Just as Ford was in actuality a religious prophet with a new industrial dispensation so Burroughs, judging from results set himself the task of creating an archetype for the Aquarian Age.  Something of value for one to aspire to.  One can trace the development of Tarzan from the miraculous babe to the finished archetype as the man-god.

As H.G. Wells noted in his First And Last Things there is a necessity for metaphysics.  Man does not live by bread alone.  While Science reduced everything to its material basis it destroyed the means of  ‘spiritual’ or psychological comfort.  With God dead mankind lost its identity and sense of direction.  As the old psychological projection of its identity had failed a new one was required that would be based on scientific material realities.

Levi Dowling’s vision of an Aquarian Jesus is unsatisfactory.  Burroughs vision of the competent Tarzan satisfies on several different levels.  Burroughs seems to have caught the essence of the Astrological Religion although there is difficulty in understanding how he came by his knowledge.  The rudiments can be clearly seen so the answer must be in his personal digestion of the ideas.  Lew Sweetser is obvious while perhaps Burroughs loyalty to a medical charlatan like Dr. Stace may possibly be explained by the man’s esoteric knowledge.  Such knowledge frequently goes hand in hand with special diets and medical nostrums.  There is no reason to believe that Stace didn’t sincerly believe in his nostums just because science couldn’t find a reason for them to be effective.  Men have misled themselves to a much greater degree than that.  Nevertheless I am convinced that Burroughs acquired his New Age beliefs as evidenced by Tarzan more from his associates’ conversation than reading.

The idea of Tarzan as the man-god culminates in Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.  With these two novels he is a fully functioning psychological projection of the Aquarian Age.  The ‘spritual’ basis for Western man to regain its psychological balance destroyed by the ‘death’ of God.

He is what stands between the immolation of Euroamerican men on the altars of Semitism and the triumph of the scientific Aquarian Age.

Mankind, or at least Euroamerican mankind, must make the great leap for mankind into the Scientific Consciousness, into evolution to the next level.  The old Religious Consciousness must be rejected.  One cannot tolerate primitive belief systems any more than there can be no tolerance of the intolerant whatever that may mean.

Burroughs has given us an avatar of the future.  It is up to us only to accept him and make use of the gifts he brought us.

Pt. IV: H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

 

H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs

And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

Part IV

by

R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Contribution

The Artist Fidus, 1893 Illustration

 

     That Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the, if not the most, influential  writers, America has produced goes without saying.  The only question is in how many different ways did he do it and was an attitude toward sexual mores one of them.  I think it can be shown that that is true.  Was Burroughs an ideologue in sexual matters.  At this point I can’t say yes or no although his attitudes seem consistent throughout his career.

     A first hurdle we have to get over is whether Burroughs was some sort of idiot savant who just had the knack for writing adventure stories  or was he an auto-didact who educated himself in exemplary fashion.  The consensus is more along the idiot savant line which I hope I have shown in my by now voluminous writings that ERB was very well read, had a sound if not spectacular education while being an intelligent man with at least a 120-130 IQ.  

 

Greeks At Play

    I think I have shown that he was a full participant in the intellectual culture of 1875-1920 which influenced the first phase of his writing career.  We know he was well read because he references  hundreds of books that he read in his own pages.  He tells us he read Gibbon’s  Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire which is an essential for a liberal education.  He tells us he read and reread Plutarch’s Parallel Lives which also is no mean achievement.  Those may be isolated instances or, as I think, they are the tip of the iceberg.  He was near expert on Evolution while being deeply read in esoteric and exoteric religion.  The guy was a virtual marvel.  His learning shows up in his writings although in a fantastic manner for enterainment purposes.

  

Apollo

   For our purposes here we can begin when his father placed him in the Harvard Latin School of Chicago.  He was to spend what we would call his Junior High years there.  It was there he learned Latin and possibly some Greek.  He was to complain later that he learned Latin before he learned to write in English which he thought affected his style and it may have as some of his writing reads like he was translating from Latin.  While he may not have qualified as a Latin scholar I’m sure that for the rest of his life he could find his way through an extensive Latin quotation.  When I was in school that was considered an achievement of a high order.  So ERB had a pretty decent founding in the Classics.

     Now, there has been a pretty fair controvercy on ERBzine recently over how nude Martians were.  I don’t think there is any question but that both men and women hang out, that is ventral and dorsal nudity.  One might therefore infer that in Burroughs’ vision of an utopia the style was to be au naturel.

     Was this original or did ERB, as usual, borrow from the culture, have his sources?

     Let’s start at Harvard Latin School.  At the time the Patriarchy was in full control of the culture.  There were grumblings from both the Matriarchy and the Hetaerarchy but those were in the beginning stages of the revolt.  As late as the 1960s when I was an Ancient History major you would have been thrown out of school for challenging the Patriarchal version of Ancient History, that is to say Greek and Roman.  ERB then couldn’t have been given less than a 110% Patriarchal education.

     Any illustrations of Greek statues he would have seen showed the genitals fully exposed unless a fig leaf had been placed over them.  The Greek vases he may have seen would have shown Greek men at play or leisure with fully exposed genitals, any weapons belted on would look exactly like his Martians.  They might have a wrap thrown over the shoulder for protection from inclement weather.

     The phallicism, the pride in manhood, runs all through Greek art and literature.  At the time men were liberating themselves from the Matriarchy with its cruel attitude toward the males.  It had been discovered that the male inseminated the female so men claimed the child as theirs while the women were mere incubators or storehouses rather than the fecund goddesses of creation.  Man was the creator.  That was the answer the riddle posed by the Theban sphinx to Oedipus was, Man.  So the psychological reaction must have been if you’ve got one, show it.  Meanwhile as the man was the progenitor of a woman’s offspring, a man’s wife had to be secluded so that another man couldn’t impregnate her.  Whereas in the past women were more or less commonly available to the certified they now became the exclusive possession of one man, except for prostitutes or hetaerists.   The children were his.

     How much, if any, of this ERB understood he at least saw a society where the men went fully nude.  As the Martian children were hatched from eggs incubated in the Martian sun it sounds as though he had read Plato where Socrates expatiated on the old days when men and women were hatched from eggs.  Indeed, Leda impregnated by Zeus in the form of a swan hatched two eggs that produced Castor and Pollux and Helen and Clytemnestra as two sets of twins.  It’s not too far from there to Mars, don’t you think?

     Around the turn of the century the Nudist movement took form in German.  We tend to think of these earlier times as staid when in reality the modern world was in its birth throes.  The nudity thing since the French Revolution had been slowly growing.  For the Medieval Free Spirits and Anabatists nudity was a key point as it was for the Libertines and as it was adopted by the Communist offshoots of the Revolution.  Men want to look at the female nude.

Early Nudists

     In Germany at the turn of the century the nudity movement jelled, an actual movement taking shape in conjunction with the Wandervogel movement.  This is turn led to the development of the Nature movement resulting in the incredible Nature Boy scene in the US of the thirties and forties which in turn evolved into the Beat/Hippie phenomenon of the fifties, sixties and seventies and into today.

 

Eden Ahbez- Writer of Nature Boy

     Burroughs would have been aware of this whole phenomenon up to 1950 endorsing it enthusiastically.  Tarzan was the ultimate Nature Boy and Burroughs developed the character with that in mind.  The ideal.  I have no douts that Burroughs intended him as the exemplar of this growing movement.  Hence the development of the Nature movement was aided, abetted and intentionally forwarded by ERB clearly linking him to the scene in Bohemian NY of the sixties and the whole Beat/Hippie scene.

     So Burroughs’ writings actually promote nudism and the Nature movement throughout his career.  John Carter arrives, born again, nude on Mars where he would have been unnoticeable on that account, completely blending in.  Indeed, the only difference was that he was white instead of red which was a curiosity.  Thus, as soon as he leaves Earth he become a nudist in what was a sort of utopian society to Burroughs.

     Tarzan necessarily practiced nudity for his first twenty years, only donning his ‘fig leaf’ or G-string  when he came in contact with civilization.

      Burroughs always refers to Tarzan’s ‘adornment’ as a G-string in the early novels.  A G-string only cover the genitals with a flap and not the rear so Tarzan was essentially nude in the jungle.  He was a Nature Boy and that is the way most of his readers have perceived him.

  

Maxmillian- Star Nature Boy c. 1948

    The MGM Tarzan is the exemplar of the Nature Boy living on fruit and nuts.  The MGM movies regularly show bowls of fruits and nuts while Tarzan, unless memory fails, is never shown squatting over a haunch eating the flesh raw as in Burroughs’ novels.  As with Burroughs and the Nature Boys Tarzan rejects all the appurtenances  of civilization except for some mechanical engineering at which Tarzan was apparently a genius.  Might even have been a Nuclear Physicist even though he could barely grunt in the MGM movies.

     It seems clear that there was vitually no one who hadn’t heard of Tarzan or Burroughs.  Nearly everyone was influenced by the two.  It therefore seems probable that the Nature Boys, the nudists took Tarzan as an avatar.

     Certainly John Derek directed his movie, Tarzan, The Ape Man of the 1980s, concentrating on the sexual and nature aspects of the image.  No argument there, I hope.

     Now, the Bohemian scene in NYC was among other things a return to the primitive.  The crowd surrounding Andy Warhol in his Factory was a bunch of savages stripped of all but the rudiments of civilization.  They were the Tarzans of the asphalt jungle.  The more affluent savages, the Haute Boheme lived a life of sexual abandon that Burroughs, Wells and Freud could only have dreamed of, and they did dream of it.

     Once the attitude was institutionalized at Studio 54 the world Burroughs, Wells and Freud longed for was realized.  It was Hetaerism and Matriarchialism on wheels, a complete overthrow of Patriarchalism.  Our three musketeers would have gained easy admitance and found each in his own particular utopia.  From 1880 to 1980 was only a hundred years.  A short time indeed to overturn civilization.

     Burroughs was a leading figure in this revolution.

 

Pt. II: H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

 

H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs

And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

by

R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs And His Tiger

     To put our three protagonists into perspective:  Sigmund Freud The eldest of the three was born in 1856, Wells in 1866 and Burroughs, the youngest in 1875.  All three were heavily influenced by Charles Darwin and the various theories of Evolution.  While today Darwin is touted as the sole source of evolution he was in fact one of many voices as the theory of evolution developed.  Thus all three spent their formative years in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  Freud was 44 as the century turned in 1900, Wells 34 and Burroughs 25 each neatly spaced 10 years from his predecessor.

     Wells was the first to make the leap into prominence followed by Freud and then Burroughs.  All three men were desperate to find fame and fortune.  Freud even advtertised he’d sell his soul to do it.

     Wells came from close to the bottom of the social ladder.  His parents eked out a living as shopkeepers without commercial abilities on the edge of London.  Wells’ father was an able cricket player who gained his self-esteem from that sport.  The parents split up.  His mother went into domestic service.  She placed young Wells as a Draper’s assistant- a clerk in a dry goods shop.  As one might well believe Wells rebelled at this dead end destiny in life.  Possessing a good brain Wells began a series of educational maneuvers that led to his being a student of T.H. Huxley, an apostle of  Evolution.  A science career seemed to be opening for Wells but he was led away by his sexual needs.  He married a cousin with whom he was a boarder in her mother’s house only to discover her Victorian notions of male-female sexual relations differed widely from his.  He divorced her taking up with a fellow student.  She was an able financial manager so he put her in charge and began chasing skirts.  It didn’t seem to bother his wife Catharine who he renamed Jane.  After a series of hairy but educational employments Wells began to find success in journalism and writing.  With his story The Time Machine he broke into the bigtime giving Jane some real work to do.   Quickly following The Time Machine up with his succession of sci-fi novels by 1900 he was assured of a lifetime income.

    

Bertie Wells

     It was well because his work after 1906 while prolific was unlucrative except for 1922′s Outline Of History. There was a winner.  The Outline was his second great break setting him up for the rest of his life along with the science fiction.  Ah, those Seven Science Fiction Novels.  And, of course, his close to amazing collection of short stories.  There was another gold mine.  Jane raked in the cash and Bertie, for that was how he wished to be called, spent it.

     He associated himself with the socialist Fabian Society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with their ‘advanced’ sexual notions.   Why the old Hetaerist notion of promiscuity is considered ‘advanced’ is beyond me.  At the same time Bertie claimed to be a Feminist.  The women’s Matriarchal movement was very active from mid-century on.  His Feminism, however, was concerned only with eliminating chastity thereby allowing any man access to any woman at any time, anywhere.  Purely Hetaeric, although Wells wouldn’t have understood his ancient roots in that manner.

     It was when Wells turned to his sex novels that he put his reputation in jeopardy.  After his intial spate of sci-fi his reputation slid, the only bright spot being The Outline Of History.  While his later novels, tend toward the tedious and require a certain determination to read through they are almost always redeemed by the social context.  I like Wells and don’t mind the stuff too much but I can’t recommend it very strongly.  It’s a matter of taste, either you like Wells or you don’t.

     Wells major themes are outlined in the last of the Seven Sci-Fi Novels- In The Days Of The Comet- when he shades into the sex novel.  In my estimation this is a very fine book as utopian novels go.  After Tono-Bungay and When the Sleeper Wakes it may be my favorite.  The turn of the century was a hey day of the utopian novel with the dystopian novel being introduced.  If you like the genre many fine ones were written:  News From Nowhere by William Morris.  I came to Morris late in life but if you like the mystical utopian or quasi-utopian novel Morris has a lot to recommend himself including several utopian forays.  I’m sure he influenced both Wells and Burroughs; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is another fine example of the period.  They’re all bushwa but fun to read.  Utopian novels are usually a projection of the author’s own needs and desires into which all humanity is to conform.  Usually by some miracle all humanity becomes reconciled to living in universal harmony with no unseemly disturbances of the temper.  Museums and lecture halls flourish while dance halls and crime atrophy.  Culture is much more elevated.  To the most casual observor such an utopia is impossible without an alteration of the human brain.  Only one utopianist I have read has addressed that problem and that one is H.G., our Bertie.

     In The Days Of The Comet was published in 1906 at the time that Halley’s Comet was due to make its scheduled seventy-five year fly-by in 1910.  It was projected to pass very close to the earth which it did unlike its 1985 appearance when you had to know where to look for it.   Indeed, the comet came with trails of glory so bright you could read newsprint by it at night.

     Thus Wells uses the comet as his agent to change the physical structure of the human brain.  Wells fails to mention any change to the brains of the lesser animals and insects.  Perhaps the lion really did lie down with the lamb.  Before the comet, or the Big Change as the passing was referred to, people’s brains were as ours are now; after the Change they all resembled that of H.G.  I am in sympathy with Wells; I fancy that one morning I will sally forth, flick my finger tips a couple times, say abracadabra and the people of the world will be tranformed into clones of myself.  What’s holding me back is that I don’t know which will be the Big Morning and I don’t wish to be seen as an eccentric or worse who failed to take his medicine by repeatedly trying and failing.  You know, out there flicking my finger tips into the empty air.

      But, Wells had it worked out.  The comet came trailing this tail of green gas.  As the comet passed the gas enveloped the earth much like a magnetar, I suppose, knocking people out for several hours while the gas did its work.  When England came to the world was changed and everyone thought like Wells.  Sort of the same thing that was thought would happen when Obama was elected.  The Magic Negro would save us all.

     Actually the Comet reflected a change in Wells own circumstances.  In 1898 when Wells published The War Of The Worlds he was balanced between hope and despair.  He was close to financial independence but not quite there.  Thus in WOW the tone is  between hope and despair.   The world is invaded by Martians who destroy everything in their path, themselves being destroyed by a virus taken in through their beastly habit of drinking human blood.  One neglected detail is that the projectiles they arrived in trailed some green clouds.  The last projectile had a larger one so that perhaps Wells was going to develop the notion but then couldn’t work it in.  He did have the Martians project a black gas that killed people though.

     By 1906 his success was assured, he was shooting his pistol off around London having several sexual affairs so his outlook was brighter and, hence, that of the planet, so the novel describes the transition from the evil old world to the brave new one  In other words, Wells had passed from poverty to affluence.

      Sex is the issue here.

     Before the Comet Willie, the hero, was courting his childhood sweetheart Nettie from whom he expected to be her sole sexual companion.  In the weird old world sex was exclusive.  They had committed themselves to each other as children which remained a claim in Willie’s mind.

     However Willie is a poor boy with no prospects.  Nettie is courted by the rich guy’s son, Verrall with whom she runs off.  Willie treks 16 miles to see her only to find she has abandoned her parents’ home in company with Verrall.  Well, Willie’s not going to endure such treatment from Nettie or take that from Verrall so he steals some money, buys a revolver and a train ticket to track them down and shoot them dead.  You see, in the days before The Big Change that was the way things were done.

     In the meantime the Comet is getting closer, C-hour is near, and war breaks out between England and Germany, this is eight years before 1914 so Bertie exhibits his prescience.    The details are well handled so we have the increasing color of the green cloud and the flash and boom of the big navel guns as the climax takes place by the seashore.  This was really nicely handled.

     Willie tracks the couple down to a Bohemian enclave on the East Anglian coast.  Nettie and Verrall had gotten married so it seems rather odd that they searched out a Bohemian enclave.   So, as the battle rages and the green cloud descends on the earth Willie is chasing the couple down the beach firing his pistol wildly.  This is the moment of the Big Change.  Everybody gets gassed for a few hours then arise, born again, in a new heaven and a new earth.  Utopia!

      The same device is used a few decades later in the great movie The Village Of The Damned.  A good device.  It won’t go stale.

      In the new world, new rules and reasonings apply.  Nettie no longer has to choose between Willie and Verrall.  She can have both…and more.

     As Willie comes to he hears groaning.  The groaning is coming from a prominent politician who was out bicycling at two in the morning when the green fog descended and  fell off his bike as he conked breaking his ankle.  Thus Willie makes a connection changing the direction of his life allowing him to become prominent in the establishment of this brave new world.  Thus he later meets Nettie and Verrall on equal terms.

     Nettie informs Verrall that she wants a menage a trois with Willie to which, in this best of all impossible worlds, Verrall compliantly agrees.  Later Willie marries making the arrangment a menage a quatre.  Neato!  Was this all?  No…

     In the frame for the story it turns out that the story teller is Willie.  In the Frame Wells comes upon this white haired old dude, Willie,  writing this memoir.  He has pages clipped in fascicles of fifty that Willie allows the editor, H.G., to read.

      Finishing the last fascicle the author asks if Nettie had sexual relations with others.  The white haired dude replies somethng like this:  ‘Oh, heavens, yes.  Hundreds.  You don’t think a beautiful girl like Nettie wouldn’t attract numerous suitors do you?’

     So there you have it.  In the brave new world the woman of Wells’ dreams is a mere sex object who spends her life being pawed by, shall we say, all comers.  A Hetaerist’s dream.  This is Wells’ sexual program.  At this point he began to lose readers.  Too avant garde; you don’t want to get too far out in front of the pack.  In addition to the sexual proselytizing of his novels he carried his didacticism to extremes advancing educational theories for instance.  For over a hundred years we’ve been told our educational system is faulty.  New systems have succeeded new systems.   After over a century of tinkering are people better schooled?  No.  They’re worse.  There’s only one way to learn and that’s the drudgery of study.  Not every mind is prepared to do that, somebody’s going to be left behind.  Wells’ notions as everyone else’s is what they think they would have liked.  No study.  Lots of play.

     At any rate carrying all these utopian notions Wells passed through the horrific war years to have all his expectations disappointed.  Not surprisingly his mind broke and he went into a deep depression.   First he tried the God trip and when that failed he embraced the Communist Revolution in Russia.  He essentially became an agent of Moscow.  As a very prominent writer he was a desirable acquistion for the Revolution.  As a major theorist and propagandist he had an entree first to Lenin and then after 1924 when Lenin died, Stalin.

     In 1921 he interviewed Lenin and received his instructions.  the Soviets had a system of State prostitution.  These women were assigned as agents to service writers while spying on them for Moscow.  In 1921 he met Moura Budberg for whom he fell.  At that time she had been assigned to manage a consular agent, Bruce Lockhart, who along with the agency was in process of being expelled.  Wells became intensely jealous of Lockhart because of this connection badmouthing him from then on.  In any case Moura Budberg was assigned to Maxim Gorky then living in exile in Italy with whom she stayed until Gorky was enticed back to the USSR at which time she was reassigned to shepherd Wells.

     Now Wells became a Soviet literary hatchet man.  It was his job to interfere and discredit writers who refused to propagate the Party line.  Among these was Edgar Rice Burroughs who had proclaimed his anti-Communism with a tract or study titled Under The Red Flag of 1919.   Publishers refused the piece.  Wells anti-Burroughs campaign was so discreet that my discovery of it three or four years ago was the first mention of it.  I repeat the story here for those who have not read my earlier essays.

     In the first place all these writers read each other.  Kipling and Haggard for instance read each other as well as writers like Wells and Burroughs and vice versa.  They could pass disguised messages in their novels.  As Burroughs was the last of these writers to begin writing and that in US pulp magazines in 1912 that may never have reached Europe while his book titles only reached print in 1914 after the Great War began and were only the Tarzan titles until the end of the decade Wells may not have read Burroughs until 1918 or slightly after.  Nevertheless Burroughs influence shows in Wells’ 1923 effort Men Like Gods.  This book also ridicules Burroughs.

     Men Like Gods takes place in a parallel universe.  There is some resemblance to the Eloi of The Time Machine.  For the first time Wells’ characters are nearly nude.  This was the only time he ever did this so he was probably under the influence of Burroughs whose characters never wore clothes or only minimally.

     Burroughs apparently picked up the references or had them pointed out to him.  In any event in 1926 he wrote The Moon Maid in answer to Wells, The First Men In The Moon.  Wells’ book was pretty clumsycompared to that of Burroughs who demonstrated his imaginative superiority by running circles around Wells.  The second part of the story was a rewrite of Under The Red Flag that was a direct challenge to the Soviets.  By 1926 of course Stalin was directing the USSR.

     Wells then countered with an undisguised attack that portrayed Burroughs as insane.  This was Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island.  Here Wells parodied a pulp magazine story not yet in book form, The Lad And The Lion, and the last third of The Land That Time Forgot.  Burroughs returned the fire with Tarzan At The Earth’s Core and Tarzan The Invincible that featured Stalin himself as a character.

Moura Budberg Young

     At about this time Moura Budberg was assigned to Wells as a concubine as Gorky had returned to the USSR.  This was to cause a falling out between Wells and Stalin while perhaps leading to Stalin’s assassination in 1953.

     Burroughs’ entire series of novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man deals with Wells and the Reds.  The Communists attacked unrelentingly on several fronts probably robbing Burroughs blind in royalties while trying to squeeze off his sales.  His British publishers did just that.  Although it appears that they refused or were reluctant to keep his titles in print Alan Hodge and Robert Graves in their history of the twenties and thirties, The Long Weekend, twice refer to Burroughs’ great popularity, once in the twenties and once in the thirties.

     In Germany the Communists attacked ERB for his anti-German comments in books written during the war

Moura Budberg Old

years thereby destroying that lucrative market.  The Soviets never paid royalties anyway so there was no monetary effect from that market.  In the US Burroughs had troubles with his publishers McClurg’s and Grossett & Dunlap who seem quite hostile  to in the correspondence in the archives at ULouisville.  ERB left McClurg in the late twenties going through two more publishers before winning the battle by publishing under his own imprint. Thus by 1930′s Tarzan The Invincible, note the title, he seemed to have won the battle if not the war.

     However sound had come to the movies in 1927-28 which rearranged the playing field.  Rather than just being ‘flickers’ they were now more on a par with literature while being even more influential.  With sound the movie version of a story took pecedence over the book, heck, it took precedence over history.  Thus the movie version took precedence as the canon over the book, the latter became an adjunct that few read in comparison to those who saw and heard the movie.   As the movies paid in one lump sum what it might take years to dribble in as royalties authors were willing to give the devil a cut to have their novels produced.  Books could be issued in their thousands of titles a year but there were only a couple hundred movies released in a year.  The number of producers had been consolidated from many to a few after the shakeout of the twenties, hence combines like Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer, Radio-Keith-Orpheum- RKO- and the combine of Twentieth Century Pictures and William Fox.

     MGM was of course top dog by far.  There was no vacuum there but the Commies moved in anyway soon taking over de facto control.  When Burroughs published his own books, quite profitably, he had slipped the noose but only temporarily.  As a strategist he did poorly.  In 1931, because Burroughs didn’t ever bother to dread his contracts, MGM finessed his meal ticket, Tarzan, from him thereby making him financially dependent on them.  Even though they might have exploited the Tarzan character by making two or three movies a year and zillions of dollars they chose to make only six movies between 1931 and 1940 thereby keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease while depriving him of hundreds of thousands of dollars in income.  Remember that at the same time Roosevelt after 1933 drove the income tax rate as high as 90% so there was some difficulty forcing a grin in those trying times.

     This is a good story and I covered it in some detail in my ten part review of Tarzan And The Lion Man, expecially parts 6-10 to which I refer you if you’re interested.  Wells and Burroughs bickered back and forth although it appears that Burroughs lost heart after Tarzan And The Lion Man.  By that time he knew he had been had.  He did concede defeat in the issuance of a book version of  The Lad And The Lion in 1935; a notice to both Wells and Stalin.   The story was a short one so while leaving the old story as  a notice to Wells who had mocked him and the story in his Blettsworthy novel, Burroughs interpolated chapters with a story mocking the Communist Revolution in Russia.  Then he retired from the field.

     However he gives Wells a grand slam in the story of  ’God’ in the middle of Lion Man.  That is a great story within the story however I wasn’t clear on its relation to Wells at the time so I will give a modified version here.

     Now, Burroughs had a remarkable mind.  He was able to carry the story lines of hundreds of books he had read in his head retrieving details whenever they suited his needs.  He was always conscious of what he was doing but he wrote pastiches anyway.

     The story of Tarzan and God mocks Wells’ The Island Of Dr. Moreau.  Burroughs had already used Moreau in his 1913 novel The Monster Men plus he wrote around the theme repeatedly.  Moreau itself plays around with the Frankenstein theme which also figures prominently in Burroughs’ literary antecedents.

     Remember that Burroughs is able to combine numerous details of other books into one composite figure so that Wells is only one source for the character of ‘God’ in Lion Man.  For our purposes one may assume that when Tarzan talks to God (smirk) it is equivalent to Burroughs talking to Wells.  Gone is the transcendant confidence of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.  However the coup of the capture of Tarzan in 1931 when Burroughs signed away his rights to the movie representation of Tarzan to MGM had stripped Burroughs of all defences and he himself was now trapped in a cage at the mercy of MGM, Wells and Stalin.  During Tarzan’s movie history dating back to the late teens Burroughs had always complained, making a nuisance of himself because the studios weren’t following his stories closely.  Now, he had given MGM the right to create their own stories.  ERB was dissatisfied with the representation of Tarzan but the character was so good that even though MGM tried they couldn’t destroy it.

     Nevertheless they were in a position to substitute the movie Tarzan for the literary Tarzan in the public mind and they did.  For me and many others the discovery that there was a literary Tarzan came long after we had been viewing Tarzan movies.  We invariably found the literary Tarzan superior.  For now Tarzan/ERB was imprisoned in a cell.  The best ERB can do is to come up with a better Moreau story than Wells.

     So, ERB creates a mock London, England in the wilds of Africa with a replica of the court of Henry VIII peopled by mutated gorillas.  By 1930 when this story was written ERB was probably as well informed about evolution as anyone.  He had kept up his reading becoming as knowledgeable concerning genetics as any but researchers.  Thus while thirty years earlier Moreau had been clumsily experimenting with vivisection ‘God’ had used the lastest genetic techniques that ERB can devize to convert gorillas into a cross between apes and human beings.  The apes of God are human in all but appearance.  There are many jokes concealed in this episode, apes of God perhaps being one.  Wyndham Lewis used the term apes of God as a synonym for writers so he may be calling Wells as God and writer an ape.  ‘God’ himself who has exchanged ape genes with himself is now half ape.  See, a joke.  Whether Wells recognized his portrait isn’t known.

     Tarzan sets about to escape but as there is no escape from his real life situation ERB merely burns God’s castle down disrupting one supposes the USSR.  Perhaps gratifying to the imagination but futile for changing his situation.  No longer in control of his creation Burroughs creative powers begin to atrophy.

Uncle Joe As FDR Would Say

     Thus Stalin triumphed over his literary adversary.  Perhaps Stalin despised writers for he set out to humiliate Wells after the defeat of Burroughs.  As noted the State prostitute Moura Budberg had formerly serviced Maxim Gorky while after his return Budberg was assigned to Wells.  H.G. had fallen hard for Budberg apparently seriously in love with her.  Stalin called Wells to Moscow in 1936 when Gorky was on his last legs, about to die.  Budberg was also in Moscow but when Wells asked to see her she told him she was called out of town.  In a rather malicious ploy Stalin arranged for Wells to see Gorky and Budberg together as, of course, she wasn’t out of town.

     Wells was completely destroyed unable to penetrate Stalin’s duplicity, or at least believe it, at the time.  However when it finally sank in  he had no  more means to retaliate  than Burroughs so he wrote a book too- The Holy Terror.  In that book, the ruffian leader of the revolution, or Stalin in real life,  has lost the ability to lead the revolution and has to be discreetly removed.  A conspiracy is set afoot.  A doctor’s plot in which the leader is artfully removed by medical means.  I am unaware of how much influence Wells may have had to incite others to achieve his result.  At any rate the War intervened making it inexpedient to dispatch Stalin while Wells died in 1946 before he could reactivate the plan.

     It may be coincidence but Stalin discovered a doctor’s plot in the early fifties that he was able to foil.  However Khruschev and Beria and others poisoned Stalin at a dinner in 1953 thus removing this singularly successful but troublesome dictator.

     The turmoil of the thirties may have derailed Wells sexual program somewhat but sexual matters were still moving in his desired direction.  Sexual matters had been loosened a great deal but there were still miles to go.

Sex And The Psyche

 

     In Part III I will deal with the key mover in sexual matters, Sigmund Freud who was the second of the three to reach prominence.  Thus Burroughs the third to arrive on the scene and the last to leave will be saved for the last part.

 

 

Pt.I: H.G.Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

 

H. G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs

And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes

by

R.E. Prindle

Part I

     Certainly it is to be hoped that (the) naturalistic school of writing will never take firm root in England, for it is an accursed thing.  It is impossible to help wondering if its followers ever reflect on the mischief that they must do, and, reflecting do not shrink from the responsiblility to look at the matter from one point of view only, Society has made a rule for the benefit of the whole community, individuals must keep their passions within certain fixed limits, and our system is so arranged that any transgression of this rule produces mischief of one sort or another, if not actual ruin, to the transgressor.  Especially is this so is she be a woman.  Now, as it is, human nature is continually fretting against these artificial bounds, and especially among young people it requires considerable fortitude and self-restraint to keep the feet from wandering.  We all know too, how much this sort of indulgence depends upon the imagination, and we all know how easy it is for a powerful writer to excite it in that direction.  Indeed, there could be nothing more easy to a writer of any strength or vision, especially if he spoke with an air of evil knowledge and intimate authority.  There are probably several men in England at this moment who, if they turned their talents to this end, could equal, if not outdo, Zola himself, with results that would shortly show themselves among the population.  Sexual passion is the most powerful lever with which to stir the mind of man, for it lies at the root of all things human; and it is impossible to over-estimate the damage that could be worked by a single English or American writer of genius, if he grasped it with a will.

–H. Rider Haggard

Appendix to the Broadview

Edition Of  She

Edgar Rice Burroughs

           For a long time now I’ve put off writing about Edgar Rice Burroughs in relation to H.G. Wells.  Wells has been difficult to get a handle on, a point of entry.  But the Woodrow Nichols’ article on nudity in Burroughs on ERBzine pointed in the direction of changing sexual attitudes in the twentieth century.  Coupled with reading the above quote of Rider Haggard I realized that Wells and Burroughs were two of those powerful writers capable of unleashing those sexual passions.  They, coupled with Sigmund Freud, did change sexual attitudes in the twentieth century.

     That is not to say they were alone but of all of the hundreds of writers between then and now all their books remain in print continuing their work.

     The sexual problem is central to civilization while it has been handled differently in the development of civilization.  For some time it seemed that the Patriarchal model would be permanent.  J.J. Bachofen, the great Swiss mythologist of the mid-nineteenth century, was the first to challenge the Patriarchal model.  In his studies of mythologies he perceived that behind the Patriarchy first came a Matriarchy while at the beginning was a Hetaeric period.  All three had different sexual approaches while all three attitudes have survived into the current age competing for dominance.

     In the first Hetaeric stage of development Bachofen believed men used women, and woman, indiscriminately whether with force of persuasion when the sexual urge hit him.  A good picturalization of this can be found in the movie, In Quest Of Fire.  As there was no knowledge of how offspring were conceived the women of the horde merely accepted the inevitable bumper crop of children.

     Being a sexual object puts an unbearable burden on the female of the species no matter how natural.  Since most females began bearing at twelve or thirteen with the  onset of puberty they were worn out at twenty with few probably surviving to thirty.  Indeed, a huge percentage must have died in child birth from twelve to twenty.  One imagines a surplus of males in the horde not unlike affairs in the nineteenth century when men frequently went through two or three wives or more as the women died young in childbirth.

J.J. Bachofen- One Of The Greats

     While conception or paternity wasn’t recognized there was no mistaking motherhood.  By some process of refinement the sexual mores of hordes evolved into Matriarchy which acknowledged female parentage while giving women some sort of sexual control, preference if you will.  The change from the Hetaeric to the Matriarchal inevitably left behind a reactionary or conservative group who saw no reason for change or giving up their sexual prerogatives.  Thus conflicts between the two attitudes, perhaps warfare.

     The Matriarchy was still thriving when history began to be recorded.  Thus Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey concern the Patriarchal revolution against the Matriarchy amongst the Europeans.  By now paternity had been discovered by which the male discovered that he impregnated the female which he now considered the most important part of the process and one which involved the exclusive use of the female as he had no wish to care for another man’s children.  Hence Patriarchalism- the primacy of the father-  evolved putting the three systems into conflict and competition.  This is a main theme of Greek mythology.

     Concessions had to be made to the Hetaerists who were irate at the loss of their prerogatives.  Hence temple prostitution undoubtedly evolved in which all the young females were kept in a temple compound until they had sex with any man who demanded it.  Civilization being civilization, of course, there was a fee, hence protitution.  Upon completion of the duty the female was released.

     The Patriarchal revolt was a long slow drawn out process with many setbacks and compromises such as the above.  Indeed, the Patriarchal god, Apollo, wrested Delphi from the Matriarchy but in the Matriarchal reaction he was forced to share the shrine with the effiminate Matriarchal hybrid god, Dionysus who, himself was destined to replace Zeus as the avatar of the Piscean Age.  He assumed both male and female characteristics in the attempt to arrange the sexual conflict.  That’s why the Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth, who substituted for  him in yet another compromise is so effiminate.  With the admixture of the Semitic influence in European religion with its uncompromising Patriarchalism the evolving Catholic Church was all but able to extinguish the Matriarchal Dionysian influence as well as the Hetaeric.  Chastity, celibacy and monogamy became not only dominant but exclusive.

     Just as the Matriarchy, while suppressed, has never disappeared or admitted defeat so also the Hetaerists have survived assuming different disguises while waging continued war with the Patriarchy and the Scientific view which is say Western Science and the Roman Catholic Church.

     Reviled by the Church and persecuted sometimes to death the various sects fought back often posing as Catholics to become priests, even occasionally a Pope, and bore from within.  Thus arose the Free Spirit sect which demanded the right of access to any woman at any time in any place.  Thus John Sinclair in 1960s and 70s demanding the right to ‘fuck in the streets.’  An irrational request by any other standard.   The Free Spirits delighted in debauching nuns when they had sufficient numbers to seize a place.

     The spirit surfaced among the Anabaptists, for instance, who were not only suppressed but destroyed root and branch.  With the Enlightenment when the Hetaerists surfaced as the Libertines we hear of them forwarding the French Revolution while their ideals were absorbed by the nascent Communist political movement.  The Libertines per se seem to have transmogrifed into La Vie Boheme after the Napoleonic Empire, Bohemianism reaching down to our time.

      La Vie Boheme as depicted by the French novelist Henri Murger evolved in the early nineteenth century along with their more overtly criminal cousins, the Mohicans of Paris as the novelist Alexandre Dumas styled them and known as Apaches by the end of the century.  In the US fifties the Apaches were represented on TV with a mystifyingly violent effect as Apache dancers from France.  I suppose the Apache style was transmogrified into the New York Bohemian style also.  So this quasi-criminal Bohemian Apache style pervaded Euroamerican civilization through the nineteenth century and in diluted form into the twentieth and present day.  The Fall 2010 Nordstrom catalog for instance celebrates the New York Haut Boheme.

 

H.G. Wells

    I was trying to relate this latter day form of Behemianism to Burroughs in my three part series on Presley, Lennon and Yoko Ono that Bill Hillman courageously published in ERBzine but over some very strenuous objections.  I presume I lost the Bibliophiles on that issue.

     That Burroughs was fascinated by the Bohemian style while actually furthering the Hetaeric sexual program is fairly obvious.  He said that he wrote his first unpublished work, Minidoka, in Ragtime speech, that is to say the Bohemian mode.  In other words ERB considered himself plenty hep, at least a closet Bohemian.  Some may find that disturbing but, it is so.  In ’60s NYC terminology ERB would hve been of the  Haut Boheme.  Along with those sympathies went a set of Hetaeric sexual mores that Burroughs advocated.

     I have already examined the Bohemian influence of George Du Maurier on Burroughs with his novels Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian.  Du Maurier was also of the Haut Boheme.  A photograph of ERB behind the camera in  Idaho in 1899 shows ERB dressed in full artistic Boho mode.  He had just emerged from a short stay at the Chicago Art Institute where he would have immersed himself in Boho mores as artists then and now were virtually all Boho, at least in outlook.  Writers too.

      It seems quite extraordinary that Libertinism was discouraged and contained between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.  Perhaps the answer can be found in the transition from aristocratic society to bourgeois society.   Perhaps the Bourgeois requiring a different sexual morality than the aristocracy  succeeded in imposing their version of sexual mores by sheer numbers.

     Libertinism did regain prominence amongst the wealthy Haut Boheme of NYC thence spreading throughout society as a Bohemian sensibility began to displace the Bourgeois.

     A book I have reviewed on ERBzine, found in ERB’s library which he read, GWM Reynolds’ The Mysteries Of The Court Of London scrupulously records the libertine activities in a fictional form of Prince George, later King George IV, whose career of seduction ended only in the 1820s.  Certainly Reynolds’ depiction of the libertine actiities of George and his circle out Zolaed Zola by more than somewhat.

     The whole libertine attitude was nowhere more prominently displayed than in NYC’s Haut Boheme nightclub, Studio 54.  So the suppression of the libertine spirit during and since the reign of Queen Victoria was short.  Perhaps Haggard’s novel She echoes the memories of the Libertinage of the eighteenth century  Hellfire Club in some obscure way.

     Haggard had no reason to put on airs because as I pointed out in my review of his King Solomon’s Mines that novel is smutty from top to bottom while ‘She’ has some very salacious passages.  As Horace stands watching the scene of She and the dead body of Kallicrates for instance one is more than excited.  She had murdered her former lover Kallicrates for running off with another woman.  Immediately remorseful she kept the body preserved in perfect condition for two thousand years.  She could even psychically animate the body so that it stood although still insensate.  The necrotic effect is hypnotizing,  making the reader a voyeuristic accomplice of Horace.   As he and we watch the bodice of She’s  dress slips to her waist exposing her magnificent charms according to your imagination.  As we watch she then raises her arms above her head lifting and pointing the golden orbs.  She does this not once but twice so it is clear Haggard was exciting and taunting his readers.  If one imagines Ursula Andress who played She in one of the movies the effect is exhilarating indeed.

Ursula Andres As She

     Haggard aside, as he says there were writers in England and America who were champing at the bit to alter the course of sexual history.  Chief among these was H.G. Wells in England and our own Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Both would make significant contributions to the ‘change’ but the most effective writer of them all was the secret sexual pervert, the undisputed master of them all, Sigmund Freud.  But to go first to H.G. Wells and take things in order.

The Mad Herr Doktor Professor

 

 

The Last Sane Man Left Alive

 http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/pt-ii-h-g-wells-sigmund-freud-edgar-rice-burroughs-and-the-development-of-contemporary-sexual-attitudes/