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: Pt. II, The Prague Cemetery By Umberto Eco

A Review

The Prague Cemetery

Part II

by

Umberto Eco

Review by:

R.E. Prindle

Umberto Eco

Part II

Tracing The Racial Memory

     For what is history but the attempt to remember or reconstruct the racial past and therefore one’s own pre-history.  For as the ancients said:  The unexamined life is not worth living.  Where better to begin than with the origins of life.

The key fact of existence on earth is that the planet is a huge dynamo generating an electro-magnetic field.  In other words the core of the planet is moving at a different rate of speed than the outer layers.  There could be no life without this fact.  The movement of the core also generates  a combination of the elements hydrogen and oxygen we humans call water which is extruded to the surface creating the oceans.

Isaac Asimov describes the human body as big sack of water where H2O comprises  very nearly the whole body.  So, in contradiction to the ignorant Semitic model ‘dirt’ has no part in the composition of the body.

It is said that the early atmosphere was 100% hydrogen.  Thus the extrusion of water and its evaporation must have freed oxygen atoms.  As air is 21% oxygen, that fixes the origin of life at the time when oxygen displaced hydrogen in the atmosphere to the extent of 21% at which level it remains today.  That also means that if the percentage varied by very much life as now constituted could not survive.

All matter can be deconstructed into its constituent chemical atoms, primarily four gases.  While hydrogen and oxygen are the bases of life forms, a dozen or so other trace elements are used in the amounts that were in the sea when life began.    All were therefore dissolved in water.  It therefore follows by a chain of those atoms proto-life was formed.  As life is activated by electricity it follows  that electricity was imparted from the electro-magnetic field, the sun or possibly activated by an electrical charge from lightning in conjunction with the electro-magnetic field.

Thus life, a single cell, was formed in the ocean waters which as everyone knows is salty.  Hence human are salty.  From then in some mysterious process not yet discovered the single cell evolved into all the myriad forms of life that have been and are.  At some point ocean forms evolved into land forms which became increasingly complex until one has the human form the most evolved and complex of all.  Just because the process can’t be described in full as yet doesn’t mean that Evolution isn’t a reality.

The Thought Original World Island

The World Island, Pangaea, is said to have to have begun breaking up 250 million years ago.  The planet is said to be about four billion years old so in all probability the land mass was not the same for that entire time period.  Pangaea was an intermediate period.  As the planet is essentially a top spinning freely in space all the rules of physics pertaining to tops apply.

If you have a water filled top with solid bits in it when you spin the top the solid bits will be drawn to the upper hemisphere.  This is what happened to the land mass of the earth.  The rotational stresses were such that the surface cracked into large plates that began drifting North.  Hence today the land mass forms a circle around the North Pole.  Above Russia and Siberia  long transverse islands have pulled away from the main mass to gravitate further toward the Pole.

The Disintegration Of Pangaea

Africa occupies the central position of Pangaea so that as the continents moved they were essentially split off from Africa.  Asia moved up and curved around the Pole.  The Atlantic Rift separated North and South America moving them to the North and West.  India split off moving East and North to collide with Asia forcing the great transverse mountain range of the Himalayas up.  And of course Indonesia and Australia trailed out across the ocean to their current stations.  Antarctica was drawn South to form that Pole.

As the parcels separated whatever life there was must have traveled on their respective parcels.  Thus, even though it may be said the life began in Africa the various life forms must have evolved separately on their land masses.

Full Displacement

There have been several mass extinctions not least of all that which occurred  at the end of the last ice age when, for instance, many life forms including horses, mastodons, saber tooth tigers and possibly humans disappeared from the Americas.  Huge death rate.  The remains of least tens of thousands of mammoths were killed and in Siberia and the American North frozen quickly enough and permanently enough to preserve their flesh which was still edible, although gamey, when the bodies were unearthed in recent times.

As this disaster occurred as recently as probably ten thousand years ago it must have left a memory trace in the traditions of humans

We are told that Homo Sapiens came into existence about 150- 200 thousand years ago in Africa.  This may possibly or probably be true but it cannot be stated positively.  What can be known is that the earliest remains of  Homo Sapiens have been found in Africa.  At any rate at the beginning of the Age Of Leo dawned, Ages are how the ancients kept track of immense reaches of time, every part of the Earth bore some human population.  These populations were in different evolutionary states.  The least evolved human species was in Africa.  The East of Asia was populated by Mongols who are evidently a sterile branch of the human species.  Europe had a population but not a large one of Neanderthals and various human races while the population flooded out of the previously exposed Mediterranean Basin gathered around the shores of the sea, most notably at the effluence of the Nile.

Now, the ancestors of the Folk of which Eugene Sue speaks were centered somewhere in Central Asia probably around the Aral Sea.  This was the great hive from which the Aryans were to spread across the World.

There are many, many legends of these distant times such as Atlantis, the land of Mu and Shambala., the last of which was located in Central Asia.  These legends must have some basis in fact; the imagination of man is incapable of creating anything out of whole cloth; whatever man believes must have been suggested to it by actual circumstances.

While little is known of the actual origins of the Aryans that can be ascertained as fact is that beginning around the year 2000 BC the Aryans began to move out of their hive lands.  We know that they moved West into the Middle East and South into India.  There is no reason not to believe that bands or hordes didn’t also move East into China.

The first migrations into India and the West did so with a fully developed religious system or world view, a Weltanschauung.  This means that the system and view were well developed in the Hivelands before the Aryans began their migrations.  Thus the similarities between the Hindu religion and the Homeric religion were probably deviations from the old time Hive religion adapted to their specific new conditions.

It is possible that there was cross fertilization  between India and Greece but since the entire North from Greece to Northern Europe to Iran/Persia and India were invaded and dominated by the Aryans I think it is just as likely that the core beliefs were common to all the Aryans shifting forms to adapt to religions established in the occupied areas.

Thus while I can offer no proof, I think it probable that Shambala did exist and that it was the Aryan home citadel.  In legend Shambala was on an island in the middle of a lake in what is now the Gobi Desert.  At the end of the ice age both the Caspian and Aral seas were much more extensive than they are while the Gobi may have been wet also.  It seems more probable that a temple city may have been on an island of either of those two more expansive seas.  Still the legend is the legend.  Increasing desiccation would in any event have forced population dislocations in Central Asia.  In any event about the year –2000 the Aryans began to move.  However they were located, whether strung out from the Himalayas to the Caspian or whatever, one branch crossed the Hindu Kush down into India.  Wherever the Aryans went they wrote these huge long Weltanschauungs, at least after writing reached them which they don’t seem to have had on their own.

Because the Indian books were written in Sanskrit and because Sanskrit was determined to be the most ancient Aryan language words common to the Aryan languages were said to be derived from Sanskrit.  This needn’t be the case.  I think it more likely that  since all Aryans derive from the same stock the language was their common inheritance from the Hivelands.  Thus while there may have been contacts between Greek and Indian the similarity more likely reflects the common religious heritage of both peoples.  Thus, the Indian Aryans wrote their huge corpus while at about the same time the Greeks were composing their own version of the national epic in Greece and Troy.

Over the centuries the various hordes descended into Persia and Anatolia while when the Scyths appeared in Southern Russia they were then nomadic rather than settlers.  Assuming that the Aryans of the Shambala period were sedentary it follows then that climatic conditions forced the Folk into a different economic niche.  That the Scyths were of the same Aryan stock as the Greeks is evident from their metal working.

Scythic Goldsmithing

After the Scyths we have the Celtic migrations many of whom ended up at the End of the World in Ireland.  Along the way they caused havoc in Anatolia where they were known as the Galatians, harassed the Greeks, gave the Romans the willies from their settlements on the Po and finally became the Gauls of what would become France then came the German tribes who would establish themselves in Northern Europe.

When the Aryans migrated into more populous areas they lost their identity.  Probably mere hordes, those who reached China were completely absorbed just as later Jewish migrants to China being few in relation the Chinese were also absorbed.  Depending on the size of the Indian contingent they were able to shape the mores of the India with its huge Black population  but were absorbed racially.  The caste system came into existence as a result of the Aryan’s desperate attempt to maintain racial purity.

Even in the Middle East the Aryan influence has been diluted and all but extinguished.  The Aryans of Iran are now adherents to the alien Semitic religion of the Arabs.

Over several centuries the Aryan tribes were able to conquer the Romans but in the process destroyed the Roman Civilization bringing about the long social reorganization of society known as the Dark or Middle Ages.  It is here in the German or Frankish conquest of France that Eugene Sue must begin his novel of The Mysteries Of The Folk.

It’s a pity the novel has never been translated into English because Sue must cover the whole of European history including the period of the Crusades.  The Indian and Greek epics had long been written when the now European Aryans began the third great national epic, the story of Chivalry of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.  This is one huge story.  The Vulgate-Lancelot alone runs to several thousand pages with numerous very long branches.

Now, the roots of the Arthurian epic still date back to the Homeric epic while receiving input from myths and legends from the Aryan Hivelands.  There is then continuity from the very beginning, so to speak.

The Arthurian epic is a curious European recreation of the Indian books and the Homeric cycle with a Semitic add layer of course.  In addition to curious crises at the intra changeover of the Piscean Age.  We are not talking of the personal astrology of the newspapers here.  Astrology was once a serious part of astronomy. We are talking of the great Astrological religious system that began development eons ago.  If you wish to believe Sumerian mythology or sources it has vague memories of tens of thousands of years previously.  I have no reason to question the veracity of these Sumerian sages.  An age, of course, is one twelfth segment of the Great Year of 25 thousand something years.  Thus after the cycle of twelve ages Pisces will once again return.  The symbol of Pisces is of two connected fish swimming in opposite directions, perhaps indicating Dionysian androgyny.  Thus halfway through the age the archetype of the age changed from the male domination of Jesus to the female archetype of Mary in Southern Europe and Diana in Northern Europe.   This actually happened.

In the South Mariolatry emerged while in the North Diana replaced Merlin in Pagan circles.  According to the legend Vivian (Diana, Artemis) The Lady Of The Lake, charmed Merlin into revealing all his magic to her.  Once she obtained it she threw a hex on Merlin entombing him either under a rock or in a tree.  Thus Diana replaced Merlin as the pagan archetype of the Piscean Age.  Artemis in Greek, Diana in Latin and Vivian with the Norse, the Virgin Huntress, Mistress Of the Animals and The Lady Of The Lake who abhorred the company of men, became Northern Europe’s ruling archetype or Anima while the Virgin Mother became that of the South.

Having eliminated Merlin, Vivian then kidnapped Lancelot as a boy (because she was the Virgin Huntress and couldn’t bear her own son) taking him to her enchanted palace beneath the lake where as the Alpha female she taught him to be a preeminent knight or the Alpha male in Arthur’s court.  Arthur was a creature of Merlin but lost the use of the latter’s magic when he was entombed.  Thus Arthur was unprotected against Vivian’s purloined magic.

As Lancelot was Vivian’s or Diana’s  creature there had to be conflict between the two halves of the Piscean Age.  That was naturally caused by a woman, Arthur’s flirtatious wife, Guinevere.  As a result the golden age of the Round Table came to an end.

The Arthurians were acquainted with some Homeric traditions that I have not found in the mythological sources.  Thus the Arthurian cycle was a continuation in the mold of the Homeric cycle.  Vivian or Artemis in Greek, was traced back to the Greek Peloponnese or Lacedaemon.  Lacedaemon means the Demon or Lady Of The Lake.  So Diana, in Roman Myth or The Lady as she appears in Dumas’ Three Musketeers.  But, I can’t find any extant record of the myth.

Arthur and his characteristics can be traced back into the Caspian and Aral Hivelands of the Aryans so that the three traditions come together in the Arthurian cycle of Europe.  The cycle also combines Gallic legends of Britain bringing in that great Aryan race.

This is the rich stew then that Eugene Sue had to work with in his mysteries of the Folk.  My ancestors and yours.  The Arthurian cycle was active from c. 1060 to 1300.  Malory is a late compilation.  When the Crusades ended  and the Templars were suppressed the period ended.  Thus the second half of the millennium began.

We will skip the intervening history until the great European upheaval of the Enlightenment and French Revolution.

Eugene Sue

2.

The Jews In Europe

     As Eco’s story is centered around the Jews concerning the Protocols of Zion and the Dreyfus case it will be necessary to say a few words concerning their history to set the stage.

I hope I have demonstrated the persistence of the racial memory in my brief tracing of the movements of the Aryans.  Their motif is the scientific explanation of nature which they have pursued with varying success in all their movement from the Hivelands to India and Great Britain and from there to North America and Australia and New Zealand.  The scientific goal has never been lost sight of.

There is no other people on Earth with a stronger racial memory and an inflexible but criminal will than the Jews while at the same time, like the Aryans, they have recorded their goals in print.  They too persist doggedly in the attempt to realize their plan.

Briefly the place and time the tribe came into existence can be pinpointed if their writings are accurate.  That place was Ur of the Chaldees and the time was the transition from the Age of Taurus to the Age of Aries c. 2000 BC.  Their pedigree goes back no further than that.  They are an artificial Semitic creation; they have no roots in antiquity.

Challenging the authority of the Chaldean astronomers the Jews were expelled from Ur for their impertinence.  Thus they were born of disappointed expectations; their future was cast; they were doomed to disappointed expectations.

However they knew how to push their luck to the limit; call it chutzpah.

Skipping over two thousand years of conflict we find the Jews established throughout the Roman Empire challenging the Romans for supremacy.  Defiant of Roman authority even in the capitol Rome, the Jews taxed their fellows sending the gold to Jerusalem which they established as their capitol contra Rome.   Hence the famous Rome-Jerusalem dichotomy.  While their prophet Jesus counseled them to cede temporal authority to Rome- render unto to Caesar that which is his and unto God his own- open rebellion began which was crushed, the people killed or dispersed, Jerusalem leveled with Jews being forbidden to set foot in the city again.  An early version of the final solution.

Briefly, we next find the Jews in Spain.  Here the Roman Catholic Church has established itself and for superstitious reasons granted the Jews an invaluable monopoly, that of loaning money at interest.  A one of a  kind gift.  Wheedling their way into another monopoly, that of being royal tax farmers, they did indeed farm their Spanish cattle, not unlike the Greek and Italian situation today.  This was an intolerable situation that took a long time to culminate but in 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain.  This was a crushing blow for them.

Due to the Spanish expulsion and various other expulsions Jews migrated into the sparsely inhabited area of Eastern Poland which then included Byelorussia  and the Ukraine, later to be called the Pale Of The Settlement.

Then, the worst catastrophe ever hit the tribe.  The Northern Europeans began to assert their birthright of free inquiry while at the same time rejecting the Judaeo-Christian incubus.  It was called the Enlightenment.  Aryan scientific thought asserted itself against the Semitic stultification throwing the Semitic religions- Christianity, Judaism and Moslemism- into an atavistic status of a prior and lower intellectual state.

The Enlightenment would quickly result in the French Revolution which was to change the course of both Jewish and Aryan history.  With the Revolution came the emancipation of the Jews.  They were placed on an ‘equal’ footing with the Europeans.  Emancipation was more quickly achieved  in France while in Central Europe it moved in stages reaching fulfillment after the 1848 revolution.

It was then that Europeans became aware that equality was a one way street; it was not what the Jews were after.  In the reaction about 1875 the German Wilhelm Mars invented the term anti-Semitism and the stage was set for the Protocols of Zion and the Dreyfus Affair.

In the wake of the Revolution Eco’s heroes Eugene Sue and Alexander Dumas were born whose novels filled Eco’s imagination and memories with their fantastic works.

We’ll move in that direction in Part III.

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: Captain America: The First Avenger Movie.

A-Head Vs. The Hydra

A Review of Captain America,

The First Avenger

by

R.E. Prindle

Weinstein, Rabbi Simcha: Up, Up And Oy Vey!:  How Jewish History, Culture And Values Shaped The Comic book Superhero, 2006, Leviathan Press.

Must a man be held responsible for his own dreams?

–Sigmund Freud

Rabbi Weinstein

     I set foot inside a theatre for the first time in twenty years lured by the comic book character of Captain America.  Capt. America was about the least favorite of the superheroes for the post-war generation of kids.  My primary years for comic books were 1947-50.  I was revolted by the jingoism of the strip as well as the stupid costume

     While Rabbi Weinstein touts the Jewish superheroes as seminal I should point out that our favorites and the best selling superhero during and after the war was the goy Captain Marvel, much more popular then even Superman.  Further while superhero comics declined in sales after WWII I would suggest that it wasn’t loss of interest in the characters so much as a lack of interest in the material.  If the comics had shifted from anti-Nazi to anti-Communist the sales might have become inflated.  Of course such a shift was impossible as Communists were more or less in cultural control

     This movie did nothing to refresh my memories pleasantly.  And, further it turns out per Rabbi Weinstein that Captain America was 100% Jewish.  Capt. America was the creation of two Jewish young men, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, assumed names of course.  In keeping with that Kirby and Simon had their character socking Hitler on the jaw long before ‘America’ entered the war while being obsessed with Nazis so we may conclude along with the Rabbi that Capt.  was indeed Jewish.

     The movie purportedly takes place sometime during WWII.  In this movie Hitler has been demoted to a minor threat as the super Nazi, The Hydra, has usurped his place while being immortal so that the Nazi threat can never die.  In that case the Hydra must be on Steroids as Hitler was only fueled by amphetamines.  Perhaps the A on America’s helmet stands for amphetamines and the Capt. was an a-head.  Actually Capt. America’s striped mask  or helmet has an A cut in the forehead which the Hydra slyly suggests stands for American arrogance.  American arrogance came up two or three times.

     So, essentially we have the Jewish Capt. America versus the arch-anti-Semite, the Hydra.  It doesn’t stop there though as Hydra appears to be an alter-ego of the Jews.  America, as they like to think of themselves and Hydra as they often behave.  If you were to read Rabbi Weinstein before  you saw the movie it would take on a whole different aspect and signficance.

     The story itself is trite with no attempt at believability, after all this is a comic book.  It is actually quite camped up.  All action with a lot of slap bang  stuff, stock characters and horrendous noise effects at a mind numbing volume.

     Even though Capt. America crashes Hydra’s flying wing into an ice field at the North Pole Capt. America wakes up seventy years later in a New York CIA facility.  Well, Christ, it is a comic book, I had already insulted my own intelligence by buying a ticket.  Still, I think Stan Lee should be more than a little ashamed of himself.

     Two stars if you’re mentally alert; four stars if you like noise and fireworks, five stars if this is your kind of movie.  Pretty dumb in my book.

A Review: Pt. 6, Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#15  Tarzan Triumphant

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 6

Threads And Strands Of The Web

For I must speak what wisdom would conceal,

And truth, invidious to the great, reveal.

–Homer

     More than likely it is a coincidence that  Burroughs wrote a fictional account of time and space weaving a web at this time, for Fate was bringing together threads and strands of the web of his own life in a picture of unparalleled opportunity and deadly peril.  The decisions Burroughs would make would determine the outcome.  His life could have gone another way.  Or, perhaps, Burroughs sensed the impending crises and fictioned them in an attempt to deal with them.

     We are already aware of the conflicts with the Judaeo-Communists.  It seems clear that they were the original aggressors and that Burroughs was in reaction to them, in other words, on the defensive.  Thus these first two Tarzan novels of the thirties are direct attacks on both aggressors.  If Burroughs expected counter attacks there seems to be no evidence that he prepared for them.  He never seems to have sat down to coolly analyze the problem in order to have a plan.

     In fact, there seems to be little evidence that he ever actually realized the consequences of his success or how to handle it.  While he had incorporated himself he made no effort to corporately structure his writing enterprise.  In point of fact as a creative artist he was fundamentally incapable of running a structured business.  Doing so would have interfered with his creative function.  In fact, I am convinced that he dissipated his creative energies by becoming involved in business decisions to the extent he did.

     Developing an organization is very difficult.  While he should have done this, without a very fortuitous combination of circumstances it is very doubtful he could have.  Hollywood was full of sharpers ready to take advantage of creative talent and in this case and nearly all others they did.

     On the positive side, from 1911 to, say, 1928 ERB had created an unparalleled intellectual property in Tarzan.  One in a zillion chance.  As the twenties developed unparalleled opportunities to exploit the property evolved.

     Apart from publishing, the three key profit centers were comics, movies and radio.  All three strands came to fruition as the thirties began.  Each required a slightly different approach.  Each required thinking out with an intellectual departure from the past.

     At this crucial moment ERB’s past arose to drag him down from behind.  He was unable to make the emotional transition from what was essentially an emotionally battered youth to a successful, affluent man in control of his destiny.  He remained psychologically attached to his personal relationship to Tarzan as an aspect of his personality rather than objectifying the character as a psychological projection for the world.  He had prepared the way to make Tarzan a savior man-god but then couldn’t separate him from his own personality.  If Fate had thrown the right people in his way they could have done this for him.

     Thus rather than maximize his financial returns he essentially shot his feet off.  He carped at the various media companies to the point where he was viewed as troublesome, an undesirable actually.  Thus while he expected great financial returns including the means to buy a yacht, he sabotaged his own efforts to obtain them.

     He belittled the returns of the comic strip for instance, bemoaning that it only returned thirty dollars a day.  Well, that was eleven thousand dollars a year, every year.  He could count on it.  His MGM contract for Tarzan, The Ape Man provided him the exact same return.  Twenty-two thousand divided by two years is eleven thousand a year.

     At the time ERB signed the MGM contract he had a very valuable intellectual property already fully developed but he had developed a reputation among the Studios.  The Studios had already had extensive dealings with him from the silent era.  ERB, without a plan to market Tarzan had accepted whatever money came his way.  Two of his titles had been sold in 1921 although production of them had been shelved.  In 1927 FBO Studios decided to film Tarzan And The Golden Lion.  While this film was lost for decades a print of the film was discovered which was issued on DVD in 2006 so that it can now be viewed.

     In my opinion FBO did handsomely by ERB.  A good clear scenario was written by William Wing that remained true to the spirit of Burroughs’ work; perhaps more than it ought to have in a movie sense.  The filming, the photography is terrific; it has never been done better, not by MGM, not by RKO.  It is true that Wing invented a sister for Tarzan but this is a minor point.

     I find it difficult to undertand what ERB was disgruntled about except that another writer was handling his alter ego.  The difference between a movie scenario and a book is very distinct.  There would have been no way to get the entire convoluted story of Golden Lion on the screen so Wing wisely chose to develop a variation on the story of the Valley of Diamonds.  Even so he threw in an earthquake scene a la Jewels Of Opar and Tarzan’s jumping the gap in the tunnel.

     If anything his attempt to write as closely to Burroughs as he did lessened the impact of the film with some needless clutter.  If, in 1935′s New Adventures Of Tarzan for which Burroughs provided the story idea, Dearholt attempted to tell the story more or less as Burroughs wrote, then the result was a hopeless mish mash.  The movie was no truer to Burroughs’ Tarzan than FBO’s film, while lacking the clarity and force of the latter.  Burroughs should have been grateful to FBO for an excellent movie.  My idea of the best of the lot even though silent.

     Had I been associated with FBO I would have found ERB’s criticisms nitpicking and offensive.  After all FBO broke the boycott ERB had been under since 1922.  The FBO movie triggered a response from Universal which held the rights to Jungle Tales and Jewels Of Opar.  These titles were released as Tarzan The Mighty and Tarzan The Tiger starring Frank Merrill.  At present there is no print of Tarzan The Mighty while as of December 5, 2006 I am still awaiting the release of Tarzan The Tiger.  ERB once again was unhappy with these films, voicing loud complaints.  All this carping could have done little for his reputation among the Studios.  Before the long hiatus of Tarzan movies from 1921 to 1927 he had been run off the lot during the filming.

     According to the ERBzine Timeline for the ’30s ERB approached MGM in 1930 asking $75,000 for a movie and was rebuffed.  If this is true, $22,000 in 1931 was quite a comedown.  MGM solved ERB’s querulousness by obtaining the rights to do with the character as they wished.  They promptly disdained Burrughs’ storylines for their own while changing the character of Tarzan from that of an international sophisticate to that of a feral boy.

     As the first full sound Tarzan, MGM hit the jackpot with the victory cry of the bull ape.  The Tarzan yell would be the trademark of the charcter, although hardly a blood chilling fearsome holler.  Burroughs himself couldn’t do better as Herman Brix in New Adventures merely growls out a long drawn Tar-man-gan-eee with the last sylable in falsetto.  More laughable than fearsome.

     In between these two films Sol Lesser released a monstrosity starring Buster Crabbe.  Lesser never got the handle on Tarzan on his own, instead borrowing the MGM Characterization when he acquired the rights from them.

     Lesser and his brother Irving were independent producers of some substance.  Sol was born in 1890 in Spokane, Washington, dying at 90 in 1980.  There is even a biography of his life.  Not easy to find and not available on any site when I looked.  If anybody knows where one is or having one could make a copy for me it would be much appreciated.

     Lesser’s father who was in the nickelodeon business died in 1907 in San Francisco leaving the business to Sol and brother Irving.  Sol got involved in distribution in 1910 eventually forming the Golden Gate Film Exchange in 1915.

     In that year San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast was shuttered.  Before the closure Lesser filmed the area, selling the movie.  It would be interesting if the film was still around.

     He made the right moves.  After distribution he became a producer for First National and then formed a chain of movie theatres.  After an aborted retirement he reentered production forming his own independent studio called either Principle or Principal Pictures.  David Fury spells the name Principal in his Kings Of The Jungle and that sounds right.  This was apparently Sol’s status when he acquired the rights to Tarzan from a third party in 1928 and when he made the Crabbe abortion in 1933.

     Lesser was influential in Hollywood.  He made it a point to know and be known.  In the early thirties it was he who was responsible for introducing Disney to Joseph Schench (pronounced Skenk) and facilitating Disney’s move from Columbia to United Artists.

     One can’t be sure of his politics from the sources cited but according to the New York Times:

     …Lesser forsook production for distribution again, returning to the creative end of moviemaking in 1931 when, through is friendshlip with writer Upton Sinclair, he became involved with the Sergei Eisenstein project, Thunder Over Mexico.

     Thunder Over Mexico was undoubtedly a Communist diatribe.  Sol Lesser while involved with consevatives like Disney and Burroughs, also played the other side of the street with the likes of Upton Sinclair and the Jewish film maker, Sergei Eisenstein of Battleship Potemkin fame.

     It would seem probable that he at least knew such luminaries as Louis B. Mayer and possibly Irving Thalberg.  Even though he could have foiled both Burroughs and MGM with his prior rights to Tarzan, he characteristically stepped aside, for remuneration of course, to let their films play through.  It would be interesting to know how and why he obtained his rights from a third party and how they had obtained theirs.

     One doesn’t know what his relationship to Mayer and MGM was at this time but it is noteworthy that he acquired exclusive rights to Tarzan when MGM abandoned the profitable series.  Under Lesser the movies continued to gross two to three million a picture.

     Sound movies should have been a gold mine for Burroughs if he had handled himself properly.  Instead through his impulsiveness and vanity there were at least four competing Tarzans on the screens from 1930 to 1935.  This must have created confusion in the public’s mind, while injuring Burroughs’ financial returns.

     At the time sound brought the potential of immense movie profits to Burroughs the thread of radio also came to maturity about 1930.  While the evangelists were quick to capitalize on the potential of radio, Burroughs wasn’t far behind.  Perhaps the success of Aimee Semple Mcpherson showed him the way.

     As the decade dawned, his eye turned in radio’s direction.  By 1932 he was successful in launching a show.   Once again ERB failed to analyze the difference between books and a new medium.  Radio was for him the most lucrative of all his ventures.  His revenues from radio equaled his income from all other sources combined.  This income stream could have continued unabated through the thirties but, once again, ERB interfered with the show rather than contributed.  Undoubtedly because of his constant carping the first series was not renewed.  A second series was launched which was also discontinued.  From 1935 until his death he was unable to get on radio again.  After his death in 1950 a new series was launched.

     Thus, between publishing, comics, movies and radio ERB was provided opportunities to exploit his great labor in creating the ultimate intellectual property of the twentieth century and blew it.  The personality forming psychology of his youth popped up to prevent his realizing his most cherished dreams in this sphere of his life as it did in his relationship to women.

b.

     If ERB had read his Homer at some earlier time, or possibly, earlier times in his life, it seems evident that he reread the Odyssey, for sure, at this time.  The evidence is prominent in these five novels, especially Triumphant and City Of Gold.  A text in all five novels is the struggle between the La aspect of his Anima and that of Jane.  Subconsciously he had steered his love life to this critical juncture where he would have to choose one and reject the other.

     There may have been a fortuitousness in his choosing to concentrate on his own Odyssey at this time.  He was able to capitalize on a number of good story ideas, while on the other hand a major story line of the Odyssey is the examination of a man’s control of his sexual desires.  A key story of this aspect is the story of the seductress Circe.  By inducing all men to abandon themselves to unbridled sexual desire she turns them all into pigs.  A lesson for contemporary times.  Odysseus avoids this by having a pocketful of Moly.  Moly is some sort of charm that allows him to resist Circe’s seductions.

      Thus Odysseus retains his manly integrity while securing the release of his crew.  The Sirens, Calypso and the other women are all temptations for Odysseus to abandon his manhood for the luxuries of sex or in other word, the Matriarchy.  He resists them all to return home to Penelope in Ithaca where she sits lonely endlessly weaving her web.

      One can’t know directly how Burroughs read the story or even if the above details registered with him; nevertheless these five novels are about a man’s relationships with women and more specifically they concern the details of ERB’s relationships with women.  The story as told by him is a troubled one.

     It would appear that his cherished Anima image of the previous forty years or so, La of Opar, no longer answered his needs, so at the end of Invincible Tarzan abandons La of Opar.  She and Opar disappear from the oeuvre never to be mentioned again.

     In real life perhaps La has been replaced by Florence who now figures as the Golden Girl.  With the appearance of Jezebel in Triumphant the Golden Girl makes her first appearance to dominate the stage until Lion Man and the end of this five novel series.

     In Triumphant the Jane aspect which has been missing for the last couple novels parachutes back into ERB’s life.  He marries her off  to the stable aspect of his Animus while pairing the Golden Girl with the low life aspect of his Animus.

     Emma had always said ERB was a low brow so perhaps he found it too unpleasant aping high brow manners giving up the fight to indulge that aspect of his Animus more comfortable to him.

     In this struggle Florence had been removed from the scene.  Back during the writing of this novel Burroughs quickly opted to join his low life aspect with his sexual desire for the Golden Girl.  His Moly gave out on him.  Thus Danny ‘Gunner’ Patrick is transformed into Old Timer of Leopard Man while Jezebel becomes the platinum blonde, Kali Bwana.

     Having made the decision to take the Golden Girl he has to eliminate the Jane aspect which he does in City Of Gold.  Perhaps wavering a trifle in Lion Man he seems to have created a type of middle Tarzan Anima figure in Rhonda Terry.  While he rejects Naomi/Jane he seems to have misgivings about Balza/Florence as the Golden Girl.

     But, by this time the die had been cast so that in real life he does leave Emma to begin his life with Florence as a born again sex hound.  As Old Timer in Leopard Men he says he was entitled to some pleasure in life and by God he was going to take it.

     So, in both his business life and his personal life his past rose up and bit him in the behind destroying any chance he had to realize his true desires.  I’m afraid I have to look at the remainder of his life as a failure as he was unable to eliminate the psychological impediments placed in his way by his early life.  Not that he didn’t try.  He appears to have studied psychology trying to find a way through to the other side of the maze of consciousness.  Thus we have the subterranean passages too dark for anyone to find their way, yet his characters do.  As he searches for a way out, the past rises up in the shape of deformed monsters like the Oparians beneath the Sacred City.

     Or the round about way Tarzan and La found their way out of the lion cage in Invincible to be betrayed by the Old Man who professed to be true to La.  Who was the Old Man?  The shade of the past?  David Adams has brought emphasis to this scene in his review of “The Ancient Dead of the City of Horz,” itself a dead city on the shores of a dead sea in Burroughs Bulletin #68.

     By the writing of The Ancient Dead, ERB no longer had any hope to escape his past, while at the same time it was too late.

     So, as the matter turned out, this period from 1930 to 1934 was the final crucial period in ERB’s life where he could have taken control of his destiny.  He apparently sensed that the threads and strands of the web of his life were being brought together by Fate.

     I neither condemn nor advise, unlike the literary fashion of today.  I assume no superior airs, nor do I have a right to do so, but the fact is that had he been able to control his sexuality while restraining his impulsiveness, Fate might have been kinder to him at this juncture.  As he was unable to order his psychology Fate, as it were, laid him low.

     The critical junctures were the impetuous signing with MGM, his abandonment of Emma and his mismanagement of his radio affairs.

     I have now covered four of the five Tarzan novels of this period.  The last, The City City Of Gold deals with his ferocious sexual needs that destroyed his chances for success.

A Review: Pt. 4 Tarzan Triumphant by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#15 Tarzan Triumphant

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 4

The Born Again Lafe Smith

The time has come the Walrus said

to speak of many things;

Of shoes and ship and sealing wax

Of cabbages and kings.

And why the sea is boiling hot

And whether pigs have wings.

Lewis Carrol

     The learned nonsense of Lewis Carrol was never far from Burroughs’ mind.  In the long list of influences Carroll ranks fairly high although more disguised than others.  Both adventures of Alice as well as The Hunting Of The Snark formed the backbone of Burroughs’ ideology.  Thus the entrance to the Land Of Midian in many ways resembles Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole.  The sexual implications of the rabbit hole should be self-evident as is the the entry into the Land of Midian.

     The Lafayette of Smith’s name refers of course to the revolutionary Marquis de Lafayette who fought against the monarchy in the American Revolution.  Recently General Pershing had repaid the debt when, as he stepped ashore in France he grandly proclaimed:  Lafayette, we are here.  A famous utterance then and now so that it appears that Burroughs is associating freedom and liberation to his alter ego.  He might exclaim as he stepped through the hole: I am Lafayette and I am here.

     Smith is studying the geology of the area when he discovers a cleft in the mountain which he enters.  In some ways Burroughs old life ended when the Reds invaded Opar.  La was forced out into the the real world when her people rebelled because of La’s fixation on Tarzan.  The Big Bwana restored her to her throne having destroyed the rebel chiefs.  We are led to believe that La reigned happily ever after even though her manifestation as well as Opar disappear from ERB’s dream world.  With the death of his old dream world ERB seeks to find another; one which other people cannot enter.  Jungle Girl written shortly after this novel provided one such place in the ancient Khmer kingdoms of Cambodia and Thailand.

     Thus Midian is a pale reflection of Opar.  While the way to Opar was known to the world, indeed, Zveri, Stalin and the Communists as well as many Africans knew of the fabulous wealth of Opar and where the city was located.  They didn’t know where the gold was located because in was in Burroughs’ mind.

     Having had his dream world  violated ERB creates another but this time the location is so remote and the entrance so difficult, although identical to that of Opar,  to find that none but his Anima and Animus figures can find it.

     Like the great red and gold city of Opar Midian is surrounded by high cliffs but unlike Opar they are unscalable from either side.  No casual visitors are going to get in there.  Like the actual city of Opar the only entry is through a cleft in the walls.  In Opar once through the cleft one climbs a stairway to enter the ruins.  Here, led by his interest in geology Smith enters the cleft in the mountain reft by titanic forces ages ago to follow it deep within the mountain wall.  To insure that he continues on down the rabbit hole Burroughs sends a lion in after him blocking any exit should he wish to turn back.  Thus the lion as Fate is forcing him to his destiny.  The role of the lion in the oeuvre  remains elusive to me; I fail to grasp the nuances as well as the essence.  The lion may be another side of Tarzan, the Lion Man, who is helpful.  On the other hand the lion as an expression of Burroughs’ Anima is extremely dangerous and hateful falling beneath Dad’s knife repeatedly, these are usually female.  Still a problem for me.

     Following the cleft for some way Smith reaches the end which is a very small hole that he can just force his way through.  The symbolism of birth is quite clear; the descent from the womb and the breakthrough to the other side through the vagina.

     Both aspects of Burroughs’ Anima are already inside Midian.  Lady Barbara parachuted there while Jezebel was born there.  Thus, it would seem that the La, Jezebel, Balza figure was native to Burroughs’ X chromosome while Jane, Lady Barbara, Rhonda Terry was an acquired image.

     Smith will also be joined by the two remaining Animus figures, Gunner Patrick and Tarzan.  All five of his Anima/Animus figures that he acknowledges were then functioning in his dream world.   This may have represented his brain or the womb or a combination of both.  What seems to be clear is that with the destruction and death of his old dream world he is being born again.  The resurrection scene will follow.

     When Tarzan enters Midian as when he is entering the cleft of Opar it is necessary for him to manipulate his shoulders through by turning them sideways.  Thus there is a clear reference to birth.

     Perhaps when Burroughs began self-publication he felt as though he were making a break with his past.  Leaving McClurg’s and Joe Bray behind, making a new start as it were, he was beginning a new life.  That was probably part of it as was the invasion of Opar by his enemies but I’m sure there is personal development involved that isn’t clear to me yet.

     Once inside, convinced that the lion is following him although one believes the small hole would have baffled the lion, Smith finds the convenient tree in front of the hole into which he climbs for safety.  Then Smith does exactly what Patrick, the dark side of the ego, will do, he goes down to the lake and gorges himself on water.  This could be construed as baptism of the born again man; the living water of redemption.

     He then meanders in the direction of Midian.  As night has fallen the bonfires attract him.

     By this time Lady Barbara after a few refreshing skinny dips waiting for her clothes to dry, Burroughs actually writes these strange interludes, finds her way back to Midian.  For some strange reason the Midianites pay no attention to her mind boggling miracles, sometimes you can’t buy a thrill, choosing to disregard the apparent will of their god.

     She and Jezebel are condemned to be crucified and burned to death.  Both have been placed on the crosses with faggots piled round when Smith and his trusty nickel plated .32 burst upon the scene.

     Now we have the resurrection of Smith and his Anima figures.  The implication is that the trinity have symbolically died and are now resurrected.  This is some fancy footwork.

     Imagine the scene:   Two crosses are erected.  The Anima figures are placed on the crosses.  As I imagine it there is a space of four to eight feet between the arms.   Smith forces a way to a place in fornt of the crosses as he kicks away the burning faggots between the two crosses.  Although not on a cross himself he is symbolically so he and Burroughs assume the role of Jesus Christ in the middle while the Anima figures represent the two thieves, one on either side.

     Thus we are playing out a reenactment of the Christian crucifixion that will have a different result.

     The Christians are pressing in on Smith.  This is yet another version of Burroughs’ confrantation with John the Bully on the street corner.  Back then he turned and ran.  Now Smith is in a quandary.  Christ in the same dilemma turned the other cheek saying:  Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

     We have all been taught to revere turning the other cheek.  Some even attempt to practice the precept.    I’m sure the ploy may work from time to time but in nine times out of ten it won’t.  That is more or less the dilemma of the Western world today.  it is steadfastly trying to turn the other cheek but every time it does a steel-toed boot gets planted on it.

     Thus as Smith is dithering a clear cultured English female voice comes down from the cross saying:  You’re going to have to shoot to kill, you know.  In other words, turning the other cheek is sure death.  Burroughs is especially good at surprise twists like this.

     Astonished, perhaps thinking the angel of the Lord had spoken to him Smith complies, firing into the crowd.  As the joke is that his aim is so poor he couldn’t hit the side of a barn he is fortunate enough to actually kill someone.

     Momentarily stunned by the magical weapon but not overawed the crowd pauses long enough to allow Smith to get Lady Barbara down.  Thus Burroughs chooses the older more stately aspect of his Anima rather than the Wild Thing, sex kitten.  Perhaps as Florence was out of town ERB temporarily shifted bazck to the Jane Anima aspect.  Within a matter of weeks or days he will decide on Jezebel/Balza/Florence when Florence unexpectedly returns and he writes Leopard Men in celebration.

     Smith succeeds in lowering Lady Barbara but then Jobab challenges the efficacy of his .32.  Smith fires at Jobab point blank missing him.  Jobab vindicated rushes Smith knocking the gun out of his hand.  Lady Barbara scoops it up, places the muzzle against Jobab’s side where he learns the efficacy of the Colt.  Thus the Anima and Animus of Burroughs have now killed a man.

     This give the crowd pause once again so that Jezebel is lowered and the Trinity run away.  The two Anima aspects and Burroughs’ bright Animus are now whole.  The confrontation with John the Bully has been resolved.

     They attempt to find the opening but in the process wander into North Midian where they are captured by the fair haired, blue eyed, small nosed but no less superstitious North Midians.  They manage to escape.

     They capture a kid to eat but in the process the goatherd misses it.  What the symbolism of eating the ‘lamb’ is escapes me just now.  Smith and lady Barbara are recaptured, taken to the village.

     In the meantime Tarzan and Patrick enter the crater.  Burroughs now has all five of his Anima and Animus figures in the crater.  Tarzan separates from Patrick.  The latter comes across Jezebel who had escaped the North Midians.  The meeting is apparently love at first sight so the Wild Thing Anima and the killer Animus are united.  As they are tired they lay down together.  You can draw your conclusions but Jezebel appears to be ready for any ‘beautiful’ man who comes along.  Whether a comment on Floence isn’t clear however Burroughs in his mind would be seeing her in his Desperado aspect while she would be his Wild Thing or little Flapper girl.

     Perhaps with Smith/Lady B ERB is representing his Dr. Jekyll side, his married status while with Jezebel/Patrick he is representing his Hyde side in his affair with Florence Gilbert.

     Jezebel and Patrick leave the crater.  On the outside they are spotted by Capietro’s men who bash the Burroughs surrogate on the head leaving him for dead while they carry Jezebel off.  This would be the same situation with John the Bully  or the bashing in Toronto however it may also represent Ashton Dearholt’s taking Florence out of town for a cooling off period.

     Burroughs interjects a comedy routine back in North Midian with a lampoon of religosity over whether Paul had yellow hair or black hair.  The upshot is that Smith is to die.

     However a pair of eyes are watching the scene.  An unknown lurker to the North Midians, Tarzan to us.  Tarzan’s own role in this story is his battle with Capietro and Stabutch.  Otherwise he functions as a deus ex machina– a God from the machine a common feature of Greek drama to resolve an otherwise unresolvable plot point — to get the Anima figure out of difficulty.  He does in this case too.

     Then leaving he crater Tarzan escorts the pair to his friend Lord Passmore’s safari leaving them there in safety with the faithful Waziri.  Then he goes back to deal with Stabutch and Capietro.

     Thus Fate and Burroughs go about weaving their web.  The similarity to Penelope of the Odyssey is close with the exception that Burroughs does not unravel the previous day’s work.  But one is invited to see this story as a series of pictures woven into the tapestry somewhat like the contest between Athene and Arachnae.  One might also compare the novel, in the classical mode, to the Shield of Achilles which is decorated around the edge with a series of pictures portraying the life of the Bronze Age.  So Burroughs has woven a series of such pictures into his tapestry.  A clever idea and well executed.  How many people have ever gotten it except for us is open to question.

     So far Burroughs has insulted the Jews and ridiculed religion in general and Christianity specifically.  He now turns to the strand of Communism, humiliating them in his dreamworld.  It is all well that he should take the attack to them but one is surprised that he either didn’t anticipate a counter attack or didn’t anticipate the direction from which it would come if he was even yet aware that his defenses had been overrun by MGM.

     The man was playing with fire without an awareness of real life consequences.  It would be amusing to know if a copy of Tarzan Triumphant was rushed off to Stalin.  One can be sure that the ADL/AJC/MGM combination had an advance copy perhaps even the chapters as they were being written.   It is inconceivable that his enemies had no spy within his organization.  That is just the way things are done and had to have been done in this instance.  The usual mode is to capture the position of secretary through whom all information passes.  That means that ERB’s typist may have been the conduit, Cyril Ralph Rothmund or perhaps even both.  I’m betting on Rothmund for sure.  I would love to see his finances.  He may also have been on the ADL/AJC/MGM payroll was well as Burroughs’.  Itr was he who negotiated the contract Burroughs signed giving away the control of Tarzan.

     The next picture on the web is the reunion of Jezebel and Patrick followed by the battle of Tarzan and the Communists.

To be continued in Part 5:  In The Footsteps Of The Lord

Edgar Rice Burroughs As A Feral Child

Edgar Rice Burroughs As A Feral Child

by

R.E. Prindle

Cronus:

Cronus married his sister Rhea, to whom the oak is sacred, But it was prophesized by Mother Earth and by his dying father Uranus, that one of his own sons would dethrone him.  Every year, therefore, he swallowed the children whom Rhea bore him, first Hestia, then Demeter and Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon~ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

I. The Father As A Cannibal Figure

     Following Poseidon came Zeus.  In place of Zeus Cronus was given a stone which he swallowed instead.  When Zeus grew up he then castrated Cronus, replacing him.

     While on the one hand an astrological myth denoting the precession of the equinoxes from one Astrological Age to another, on a psychological level the myth relates the fear of the Father that as the strength of his sons waxes his own wanes resulting in an eclipse.

     Different human fathers react in different ways.  Some nurture, some castrate or cannibalize their young.  This is a serious problem for the son.  For instance, what Tom Brokaw, a thoroughly castrasted son, is pleased to call The Greatest Generation who were so enamored of their success in WW II, they chose to emasculate a whole generation rather than surrender or even share power.

     I correspond with David Adams from time to time while doing my writing from whom I sometimes receive valuable input.  I had come to the conclusion that ERB’s father, George T, was a problem for ERB, especially as represented by ‘God’ in Tarzan And The Lion Man.  The new year opened with Hillman publishing Dodds’ feral child collection which clicked in my mind.  The week before ERBzine published my Part III, Two Peas And A Pod of the Tarzan Triumphant review.  David Adams commented favorably on my comments about the Jungian Old Man archetype.  He said in an email to me:

     I agree with your interpretation that “characters like Tarzan and John Carter serve in the capacity of Old Man/Jekyll figures while the actual Old Man figures who are betrayers serve perhaps as Hydelike figures as represented by the father.” (David quoting me.) Those old man figures, early and late, are also cannibals who are hell-bent on eating him up while then spreading the bones across some desert for the hyenas to chew.  Who was that old cannibal with the cancerous face followed by a pair of African wolves? (Jungle Tales of Kipling)

     As can be seen I picked up on the Father figure but adding the cannibal detail adds the needed dimension for full comprehension.

     George T. had been bothering me for some time.  The love-hate relationship ERB had with him is quite obvious, but then it occurred to me that the other sons had the same relationship to their father while George T. appeared to program them all for failure- that is they not surpass him in their lifetime somewhat like Cronus of Greek mythology.  He made them all dependent on him.  The supplicating tone of the letters from college of sons George and Harry is all too obvious.  George T. sending the boys to Yale without the means to support a position would have had the effect of emasculating them relative to their fellow students thus subordinating them.

     Then on graduation he took them into his battery business.  As a businessman in Chicago it wouldn’t be unreasonable to believe that George T. had some relatively influential contacts in town who might have been able to place Yale graduates advantageously but he chose to keep the boys with him and subordinate to him.

     The battery factory proved dangerous for his son Harry who developed respiratory problems from the battery chemicals plus perhaps in psychological reaction to suppression by his father.  He went West to join fellow Yalie, Lew Sweetser, in Idaho.  Son George, who had had enough of working for his father, also fled to Idaho to join Harry and Sweetser.

     None of the three knew enough about the cattle business to survive so that by 1913 when George T. had his basket pulled up all the sons were back in Chicago in various degrees of failure or, at least, lack of success.  As of that date it would appear that like Cronus George T. had swallowed or cannibalized his sons.

     There was a Zeus figure in the bunch who didn’t want to be swallowed and that Zeus figure was ERB.  Like Zeus ERB was the youngest son.  ERB developed independently of his brothers who were approximately ten years older than he.  Thus when they were at Yale ERB was attending grade school.

     As I pointed out in my Books, Burroughs and Religion George T. was especially rigorous in the attempt to emasculate his youngest son.  His effort culminated when he sent ERB to military school.  This was a form of dislocation and rejection that ERB could not bear.  He tried to escape but his father sternly returned him to the Michigan Military Academy.

     The effects of this were that ERB was declassed as he considered the MMA a rich kid’s reform school.  Thus to some extent he was criminalized in his own mind.  His reaction was also seminal in the formation of his two principal characters John Carter and Tarzan.

     His hurt was so strong, his separation from his parents and home so complete that he became psychologically orphaned.  His parents died to him the day he was returned to the MMA.  He adopted the drunken Commandant, Charles King, as his mentor or surrogate father.  While betrayed by his father ERB apparently thought he found a friend in King.  In that capacity King became the model for Lt. Paul D’Arnot of the French Navy.  D’Arnot was the man who tamed the feral boy that was Tarzan introducing him to civilization much as King taught Burroughs how to survive and prosper at MMA.  Or Burroughs remembered it in that manner.  There may also be a literary connection to D’Artagnan of Dumas’ Three Musketeers.

     This makes the period between the arrival of Jane and her party and the arrival of D’Arnot in Tarzan Of The Apes of special interest.  I’m not sure what the period represents in Burroughs’ own life.

     As his creation Tarzan is a feral child it follows that ERB considered himself alone and on his own as a feral child himself.  A romantic notion but one no less real to him.  Thus just as Tarzan’s parent’s died with the baby becoming a member of an ape tribe so Burroughs began a wild and difficult period as his parents died for him.

     These events occurred just as Rider Haggard was becoming famous for his great African trilogy of King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain which ERB undoubtedly read at this time.  Conan Doyle began his Sherlock Holmes mysteries and H.M. Stanley disappeared into an unknown Congo in pursuit of Emin Pasha.  The West to East transit of the Congo impressed ERB greatly as his own heroes later crossed Africa in the same direction.

     Being a complex individual ERB no longer wished to even acknowledge that he had ever had parents; thus his first creation- John Carter.  As Carter only came into existence when ERB was 36 the writer had plenty of time to knock around learning the odd legend here and there.  John Carter then is a version of the Great Historical Bum- the hundred thousand year old man of folklore.

     John Carter could not remember his parents.  In his memory he had always been the same age he was.  In the words of one of my famorite songs, Stewball, he didn’t say he was born at all, just blew down in a storm.  Certainly Burroughs had heard of the Comte de St. Germain who flourished at the time of the French Revolution.  As esoterical cult figure today, St. Germain’s  legend would have been more prominent from 1875 to 1911 than today.  Like Carter St. Germain claimed to have been alive forever.  In Revolutionary Europe he got away with it.  Calgiostro was another Revolutionary charlatan claiming mysterious antecedents who would have intrigued ERB’s imagination.  It seems certain the two would have been topics of conversation in the time before radio, TV and movies so it wouldn’t have been necessary  for ERB to have read anything.

     I doubt if he had read any of the books on Dodds’ list although one never knows but the list goes to show that the feral child would have been a popular topic of conversation.  In my opinion then ERB’s literary future was cast when his cannibal father returned him to MMA.

     He graduated from the MMA in ’95 but either couldn’t or wouldn’t return home staying on as an instructor.  In ’96, just before the summer break which might have necessitated a return home he joined the Army being sent directly to Arizona with passing through Chicago.  Was he avoiding returning home?  One can’t say as in ’97 having found Army life not to his liking he received an early discharge.  He could have kept going, of course, as many of us in his boots did, to LA, San Francisco or wherever but he chose at that time to return to Chicago.  Of course, Emma was calling.

     From ’97 to ’03 or so he worked for his father which he found as difficult as his brothers had.  Fleeing Chicago to Idaho in 1903, when he came back a year and a few months later to do anything (that word anything has some meaning in this context)  rather  than work with his father.  He became one of the poet Robert Service’s ‘men who don’t fit in.’  He had a very difficult few years from 1905 to 1913 bumping along the bottom.

     But then in 1911 he began his rise via his intellect.  He began to write becoming an immediate literary success of sorts.  By 1913 when he was about to become a financial success through his intellectual efforts thus escaping his father’s curse, his father died.  The young Zeus thus never got to castrate his father Cronus.

     One can’t know what would have happened to his psychology had ERB been able to present his father with evidence of his success.  I’m reasonably certain George T. would have belittled  or rejected his success as like Cronus his youngest would have replaced him.  He wouldn’t have liked that.

II.  A Hand From The Grave

     Had that happened and ERB been able to prove himself a greater than his father it is interesting to speculate as to what effect that might have had on ERB’s psychological development.  As it was, a few months after his father’s death he packed up family and belongings and got out of town as far as he could go to San Diego, California and stayed away nine months.  Time enough to be reborn.

     There are numerous examples of betrayers who are cannibals in his corpus, in fact there is so much betraying and cannibalism in Burroughs’ work I find it slightly offensive.  Rather than work up a list, which for the time being I leave to David, I’d rather concentrate on the most spectacular cannibalistic betrayer of the oeuvre, God of Lion Man.

     I know I just wrote about Lion Man but with David’s interpretation of cannibalism I can present a much more cogent image.  David’s much more into Jungian synchronicity than I am but the scene with God presents a remarkable occurrence of synchronicity.  The scene is very complex.

     George T. was born in 1833 so the book was written on his 100th birthday.  Chicago was incorporated in 1833 while it was celebrating its Century Of Progress forty years after the Columbian Expo at the same time.  Both events occurred just at the time that Burroughs realized he had lost control of his ’meal ticket’ to MGM.

     MGM was undoubtedly a component of God, the Father, being combined with the Chicago that fathered him and George T., his actual father, in his mind.  From these components ERB then creates the magnificent apparition of God as man and beast.  God has the mind of divine power such as had Zeus but is still a Cronus, is, in fact, the ultimate cannibal.

     Tarzan and Rhonda  represent Burroughs’ Anima and Animus so that God has the whole man in his power in its component parts- the X and y chromosomes.  God tells the pair that he is going to use them to rejuvenate himself by cannibalizing them.  The Father’s desire and the Son’s fear.

     If God represents George T. on one side, MGM on another and organized religion on a third then even though ERB thought he escaped his father in 1913 by his intellectual efforts the father reaches up from the grave on his 100th anniversay to claim his son again.

     At this time Burroughs also wrote Pirates Of Venus and Pirate Blood.  Both would refer to the idea that MGM pirated his creation from him while the very despondent Pirate Blood is almost terrifying in its manic depression as the balloon rises and sinks being almost submerged in the ocean or the waters of oblivion, the subconscious mind, insanity, that I believe we can see it as the insanity of despair.  At the end of that story the hero pairs up with a desperate woman who I believe we can read as Florence.  All very transparent really.

     So there Tarzan/Rhonda/Burroughs is trapped in a prison.  He attempts his earlier escape of rising through his intellectual powers, that is, he ascends through a shaft in the roof.  Unlike the first time when he surprised and astonished the world with John Carter and Tarzan, God, the Father, is waiting for him preventing his use of his intellect.  In point of fact Tarzan And The Lion Man was a dismal sales failure thought by Burroughs to be caused by MGM.

     If his previous four previous Tarzans under the Burroughs imprint had been successes it seems strange that the truly excellent Tarzan And The Lion Man should have failed.  Failing proof of sabotage on the part of, say, MGM, one can only say the public taste is fickle or perhaps the innovative dust jacket didn’t look like the usual Tarzan dust jacket and fans just passed it by.  It is also true that the book was a put down of MGM.

     Tarzan/Burroughs sallies forth from his hiding place against superior forces.  He is knocked unconscious.  A sure sign that Burroughs is under supreme stress.  Meanwhile God’s castle, in other words the literary structure of the last twenty years is going up in flames.  The MGM pirates have lifted ERB’s life work.

     He has to finish the story so he turns the tables on God taking him captive and making him do his bidding.  Tarzan helps God recapture his City then abandons him disappearing down the hole of the subconscious to a lower level from when he emerges to be claimed by the Wild Thing- Balza, the Golden Girl, or Florence.

     In a thinly disguised scene Tarzan, unwittingly it seems, wins Balza from her former husband much as Burroughs took Florence from Ashton Dearholt.  The important thing here is that a transition has been effected from one world to another.  The intellectual City of God has been abandoned in favor of a world of the senses.

     It is at this point ERB abandons his own feral boy persona of horses, puttees and other symbols to become a sort of effeminate Dandy.  He now affects tightly fitted fashionable suits almost effeminate in appearance.  He turn into a party animal and if he had been a moderate drinker during his teens, twenties and early thirthies he now becomes almost a lush.

     So, in the end, ERB was probably devoured by the Father in Cronus fashion.  In the Myth Zeus forced Cronus to vomit up his brothers and sisters and he castrated him.  In real life ERB was castrated and swallowed down.

     He put up one heck of a fight that arouses the warmest admiration of him.  One wonders, that if when all is said and done anyone can escape the imprint of those formative years.  Is one’s whole horoscope cast in the womb and those few short months after birth?  Sure hope not.

Chap. 13: Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Edie Sedgwick

Maid Of Constant Sorrow

by

R.E. Prindle

http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/exhuming-bob-xxviii-visions-of-johanna-decoded/

http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/exhuming-bob-xxvi-bob-and-edie-sooner-or-later-everyone-must-know/

Chapter 13

Blonde On Blonde

Her Fogs, Her Amphetamines And Her Pearls

     One can only guess at Edie’s feelings when Dylan dismissed her so brutally  from the lines of One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later).  She must have intuited if not known that her short and glorious career as the toast of New York was going nowhere.  She came to New York with a handsome inheritance that she squandered in a trice, her parents disapproved of her conduct to the the point that they cut her off from support leaving her as Dylan had sneered in Like A Rolling Stone, a poor little rich girl ‘who had never lived out on the streets but now she was going to have to get used to it.’  Screamingly in pain from amphetamines one can only imagine her bewilderment with no way to rectify the situation.  Whatever golden opportunities she may have had were now gone forever.  Frome here to her death in 1971 would be one long wailing ‘horrorous’ nosedive that is terrifying to relive as a writer even.  My stomach quakes as I try to organize the course of events.

     Chuck Wein, one of the Harvard homosexuals she had associated with and who had come to New York with her was her evil genius, some say Svengali, who had guided her to Warhol and the

The Poet

Factory and then presided over her self-destruction.    Then for that brief glorious summer of ’65 she had set New York on its ear as a companion to Andy Warhol.  Made her feel giddy and indestructible.  Andy was apparently in love with her but as a self-centered homosexual was too flaky to work out a relationship that would give her dignity while he was unable to support her more than extravagant tastes.

     Behind Warhol was Dylan competing for Edie’s favors which he won in December of ’65 and then discarded her like an old shoe.  He recorded the course of his relationship with Edie in various songs from mid-1965 to the completion of Blonde On Blonde in the Spring of ’66.  His own career course was changed dramatically in July of ’66 when he had his motorcycle accident.

     It might be well to review the songs that comprise Blonde On Blonde now.  The song list of Blonde On Blonde is as follows:

1.  Rainy Day Women #12 And 35

2.  Pledging My Time

3.  Visions Of Johanna

4.    One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)

5.  I Want You

6.  Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again

7.  Leopard Sking Pillbox Hat

8.  Just Like A Woman

9.  Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine

10.  Temporary Like Achilles

11. Absolutely Sweet Marie

12.  Fourth Time Around

13.  Obviously Five Believers

14.  Sad Eyed Lady Of The Low Lands

     With a knowledge of the lyrics the titles themselves read consecutively tell story while the lyrics confirm the tale.  The story hinges on who the two women are.  One is Dylan’s mother who blasted herson’s psyche when at about the age of twelve she told him in so many words that he had ruined her life by being born.  Apparently it was more than Dylan could handle because it was then that his lifelong misogyny began.  It is forbidden for a son to revenge himself on his mother so his only recourse was to take it out on another woman or women.  Dylan has been a serial misogynist.

     One of the women he chose to vent his spleen on was Edie Sedgwick.  Thus the two rainy day women most likely are his mother and Edie.  All the time Dylan was bedeviling Edie he was courting Sara Lowndes who he eventually married in November of ’65.  It was a quiet wedding that didn’t became known for several months and not widely known until later than that.  He married just before he succeeded in abstracting Edie from Andy’s entourage so there is no doubt that he was only toying with Edie as a surrogate for his mother.

     He may actually have cherished her vulnerability from drugs, inexperience in the world and low self-esteem.  She would have been as helpless as a baby, almost like shot gunning fish in a barrel.  Sara was his Madonna, Edie his whore.  He waits to the very end of Blonde On Blonde to mention Sara and then he wrote Sad Eyed Lady Of The Low Lands for her.  Of course, this was all very mysterious  for us back in ’66 because we knew nothing of what was happening in New York.  None of us had even heard of Sara Lowndes until she showed up as Dylan’s wife

     As blogger Jim De Rogatis says, when he sat down to listen to Blonde:  What I discovered was an artist who sneered and snarled with more venom and conviction than Johnny Rotten, and

The Artist

finally it dawned on me:  Dylan was a punk…

     Jim wasn’t there at the creation as I was, he is a younger man.  I guess my soul was so canchred at the time that I welcomed the sneering and snarling as an expression of my own trauma while today I find the venom is so grating that I can no longer listen to Dylan’s records.  Besides he borrows nearly everything.

     The album opens on a note of forced sardonic merriment as though in a house of ill fame and ends with the dirge dedicated to his wife, Sara.  I leave the interpretation of that up to you.  I can’t pretend at this date to understand the lyrics to Sad Eyed Lady.  One would have to know more of her and Dylan’s courtship.  Dylan thought she was supposed to be impressed that he wrote a song for her with a title that sounds like another of his caustic insults.

     To take the songs in order:  Rainy Day Women is a raucous, very noisy mocking song along the lines of Like A Rolling Stone with its refrain of ‘How does it feel?’  On release the song was so noisy it was nearly unlistenable, certainly objectionable and barely music.  Time has conditioned our ears.  The refrain here:  Everyboyd must get stoned, has layers of possible meaning.  While the allegory of stoned meaning pelted with rocks is present, stoned can also have a secondary meaning of smoking marijuana.  I don’t think the meaning has anything to do with getting ‘stoned’ from dope.  I think it’s a combination of the first meaning and what was perceived by Dylan as a devastating insult from his mother.

     The refrain must refer on one hand to his mothers perceived ‘stoning’ of Dylan by her announcement to him that he had been basically unwanted.  That stoning is turned around to apply to his ‘stoning’ of Edie in vengeance.  He then gleefully taunts and mocks her with the refrain:  Do not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned (How does it feel?) which refers back to his earlier song about Edie, Like A Rolling Stone.

     In order to make ‘poetry’ of his taunt, our incipient ‘Shakespeare’ gives several poetic references that have nothing to do with rocks or joints.  For instance the line ‘They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car’ must refer to radio DJs pitching products.  Thus stoning is meant as a verbal assault.  One can compare that line with the Rolling Stone’s Mick Jagger’s lyrics to his song Satisfaction:

When I’m drivin’ in my car

And that man comes on the radio

The Singer

He’s tellin’ me more and more

About some useless information

Supposed to fire my imagination

I can’t get no, Oh, no, no, no

Hey, hey, hey, that’ what I say

I can’t get no

Satisfaction

     So Dylan’s use of ‘stoning’ is giving or getting unpleasant information.

     Song #2, Pledging My Time merely means he is obsessed with  his mother’s ‘information’ that he was unwanted which is reflected in song #3, Visions Of Johanna when he sings:  These visions of Johanna have conquered my mind.  Johanna being his mother.  Then there is discussion about Andy and Edie.  (see my essay at     http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/exhuming-bob-xxviii-visions-of-johanna-decoded/    for a full discussion.)

     Song#4 Sooner Or Later mocks Edie who he ‘really did try to get close to’ as he dismisses here as he would have like to have dismissed his mother.   Song #5 is self-explanatory.

http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/exhuming-bob-xxvi-bob-and-edie-sooner-or-later-everyone-must-know/

     Song #6, Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again awhile the lyrics are unclear must refer back to I Want You on one hand and forward to Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat and Just Like A Woman on the other.  He’s stuck inside of Mobile, i.e. he wants his mother with the Memphis Blues, i.e. he want his vengeance on Edie is a possible interpretation.  At any rate it is placed between I Want You and the two Edie songs so it must be related to all three.

     Then come two really unnecessarily vicious songs that everyone agrees are about Edie- Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat and Just Like A Woman.  There are no obvious reasons for Dylan to express such vehement, disfiguring hatred of the poor girl unless he’s visiting his repressed hatred of his mother on her.

     Song #10 Temporary Like Achilles involves Edie and Andy and himself.  I doubt if Dylan had any understanding of the Iliad, if he had even read it, so apart from Achilles short life and the seven month interruption of his relationship with Edie by Warhol an interpretation is somewhat of a hazard.

     Songs 11, 12, 13, Absolutely Sweet Marie, Fourth Time Around, and Obviously 5 Believers seem to wander off topic.  I have read one interpretation in which the blogger thought Obviously 5 Believers was a response to the Beatles Norwegian Wood.  Or possibly they lead into song #14 Sad Eyed Lady Of The Low Lands that Dylan says he wrote about Sara Loundes.  The lyrics of this ‘poem’ are incomprehensible but if I had been Sara I wouldn’t have taken the title as a compliment, especially not after being locked out of a discussion about Dylan, Edie and his mother.  After all, this is a married man lashing out at Edie.

     After completing the LP Dylan left for his 1966 tour of England in which there was such a violent reaction to his electric backup band.  I don’t remember their being a violent reaction made on the West Coast.  For myself I welcome it.  I never did like that faux folk crap he did anyway.  Apparently Dylan didn’t either.  A new expanded edition, lots of new material. of Robert Shelton’s biography, No Direction Home, just released by Omnibus Press is available, speaking in 1965 Shelton quotes Dylan thusly:  ‘There never was any change.  No instrument will ever change love, death in any soul.  My music is my music.  Folk music was such a shuck.  I never recorded a folk song.’  He did however call himself a folk singer.

     So, whoever shouted Judas at the Manchester concert knew what he was talking about.  I never listened to those nauseous early Dylan records anyway.  Blonde On Blonde was released in June of 1966 while Dylan was thrown by his ‘chrome horse’ on 7/29/66 thus putting an end to the first phase of his career.

     I don’t know what Edie thought wen she heard the record that summer but one supposes she would have recognized herself as the topic of the conversation.  Warhol certainly did and he was not amused.  Knew something about motorcycles too.

     Both Edie and Dylan were so heavily into amphetamines that they probably were not responsible for their actions.  Drugs tend to put one into an internal state in which the outside world assumes a subordinate position, almost irrelevant, to one’s interior reality.  A person functions in his own mind as a sort of magician who can comman the world to his own world.  A certain type of insanity I suppose.  Right and wrong are merely expressions of one’s own subconscious will.  As Dylan confused Edie with his mother who he subconsciously wished to punish he transferred those feelings, that resentment, that hatret onto Edie as his surrogate mother thus gaining his revenge.  How much satisfaction he got isn’t known and he’s not telling.

     Edie herself was so far gone into amphetamines as to be oblivious to what was happening in her life.  As far as she could dissociate her life from reality she could obviously make black white and vice versa.

   Having dealt with Dylan’s relationship with Edie, let us return to January of ’66 to take up again the story from there.

Chap. 14 has been posted as of 6/23/11

A Review: Urania by Camille Flammarion

A Contribution To The Erbzine

ERB Library Project

A Review

URANIA

by

Camille Flammarion

http://books.google.com/books?id=J8ZRMfzbHJoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Review by R.E. Prindle

Looking For Reality

The sources of ERB’s work are always so rich that one is at a loss as to where to begin.  This is certainly the case with Camille Flammarion.  While little known today he had great influence in ERB’s early years.  He incarnated in 1842 and disincarnated  in 1925.  That may be a fancy way to say born and died but appropiate to Flammarion’s way of thinking.  He had very nearly established a superior reputation in his early twenties when his writings first began to appear.  Indeed, the narrator of Urania seems to have been Flammarion himself as he is named Camille while the narrator is already very famous in his mid- twenties.  Flammarion was a fabulous combination of the scientist and neo-Romantic.  A perfect balance to my mind and a balance that I believe Burroughs sought to emulate.

ERB acknowledged that he based his vision of Mars on that of Flammarion.  The question of when he read his available translated works probably can’t be answered but one would have to believe that Flammarion was fresh on his mind when he began writing in 1911.  He had also been pondering Mars for some time as the trilogy of Under The Moons Of Mars is especially well thought out.  Apart from his desperate situation one searches for the nudge that got him started.

The nudge may possible be found in a Chicago Tribune article of August 9, 1908 republished here on ERBzine by Bill Hillman.  The article is entitled Are All The Planets Inhabited?  The unnamed writer is essentially reviewing the thought of Camille Flammarion which he or she acknowledges.  Flammarion wrote a number of sci-fi volumes about Mars many of which were apparently translated but which are unavailable now.  There are a great many titles available from Print On Demand publishers in French but few in English.  I have only three titles although they seem to contain the information in the Tribune article.  It’s not impossible that ERB read only the books I have but it seems from the description I have of it he might also have read an 1864 title, supposedly translated, called Real And Imaginary Worlds.

Worlds In Profusion

Over all Flammarion wrote over fifty titles including what the English called Scientific Romances or proto-Sci-fi as well as popular astronomy titles and volumes based on psychic research.  While he was not a member of the Society For Psychic Research he was aware of it and was in frequent contact with Arthur Conan Doyle who was a member.  Doyle for a period of time visited him at his private observatory at his home at Juvisy near Paris.  Flammarion considered psychic research a science.  Spiritualism pervades the romances I have of him so once again it is unquestionable that ERB was conversant in spiritualism although he apparently rejected it.

Apart from Astronomy For Amateurs the volumes I have are titled Lumen and Urania: A Romance.  I’ve already mentioned Lumen in my Edgar Rice Burroughs, Camille Flammarion and Theodore Flournoy essay here on ERBzine so I’ll concentrate on a review of Urania.  She, Urania, as one of the nine muses of Greek Mythology, was the muse of astronomy and the head of the Muses.  I have a POD facsimile reprint.   Based on that I would have to say the original was a beautiful volume.  The book was published in France in 1889, translated into English and published in 1891.  ERB would have had plenty of time to have read it.  The translation is by Augusta Rice Stetson.  Between the original and the translation it is a stunningly well written book in the Romantic tradition.  It reads as well as Charles Nodier’s Trilby, De La Motte Fouque or E.T.A. Hoffman, all great writers from the first Romantic period.

Urania seems to have been a major influence, perhaps a catalyst on the terrific neo-Romantic novels of George Du Maurier which I have also reviewed on ERBzine.  Du Maurier was, of course, an ERB influence also.  The tone of Urania is also similar to William Morris’ novels who, Lin Carter believes, as do I, was an influence on Burroughs.  So a very strong romantic psychical infuence is operating in Burroughs’ imagination.

In addition to the wonderful translation of Urania by Miss Stetson the work was illustrated by no less than three artists with beautifully distinct styles.  I think it’s worth picking up a copy just for the illustrations, or download the book at the link above.  Really, reading the book was an ethereal experience.  The first chapter is even entitled:  A Dream Of Youth.

The book is divided into three parts.  The first is an imaginary voyage through the universe, the second the love story that sets up the third part which is a wonderful discussion of Mars and its view of Earth.  ERB toys with the this while it is very clear where he got his ideas.

Infinite Variety

Part One

All Across The Universe

Flammarion tells a charming story of an astronomy student who became fascinated by his professor’s clock which has a figure of Urania on it.  Urania is the muse of astronomy in Greek Mythology.  Pygmalion like this figure comes to life and the beautiful Urania conducts Camille on a tour of the universe.  Thus the Romantic or Faerie World melds into the scientific.  Very satisfying pyschologically.

Urania is apparently capable of traveling a few thousand times the speed of light because she take Camille to the edge of this universe where they behold other universes across immense stretches of empty space.  Flammarion is demonstrating the concept of infinity.

Bearing in mind that he is writing in 1889, the concepts he is demonstrating would have been unthought by his readers, certainly unthought by Edgar Rice Burroughs as so much of this was adapted in his own writing virtually unaltered.  John Carter’s translation to Mars can be compared to Urania’s trip across the universe.  Indeed, on the way out she reaches Mars then gives a wonderful description  of how Earth would look from that planet.  Flammarion’s version is remakably close to how the Earth really does look from space as we now know from actual pictures.

Flammarion is convinced that life exists on all planets divising a concept of infinite variation of life forms.  This is reflected in ERB’s depiction of animal and plant life in his Valley Dor on Mars, or Barsoom in his lexicon.

Flammarion, who studied double stars at his observatory at Juvisy has some spectacular descriptions of stellar phenomena which, once again, are fairly accurately corroborated by the fabulous photography of the Hubble telescope.

Now, having illustrated the concept of infinity, on the way back Urania demonstrates the meaning of eternal.  According to Camille’s ideas light emanating from a source is a continual snapshot of that moment of that source.  Thus at the speed of light one can intercept the wave at specific times in a source’s history, in this case, Earth.  At the proper distance then one can observe, say, the Battle of Thermopolae, Waterloo or whatever one might choose enacted eternally, thus once created these images always exist in that light wave and wherever the wave touches at whatever distance the scene could be perceived, hence each moment is time is eternal.

In fact, no accurate view of the universe is possible because the light arrives from billions of light years distant.  The light we see is so old that the stars may no longer exist.  The configuration of that place in space is now probably entirely different from what we see.  Flammarion is writing pure science fiction.  While he is seldom credited with being one of the originators of science fiction it would appear that rather than there being a, or one father of science fiction there are several and Flammarion is one.  I think the Scientific Romances of Hinton also qualify as well as Abbott’s Flatland.  These years leading up to the twentieth century are very, very rich in absolutely wonderful lore if you approach it in the right frame of mind.

I am no believer in parapsychology and yet if you approach it from the point of view of these late Victorians as possible science then the period begins to glow in irridescent colors, flouresces before your eyes.  Flammarion’s merging of romanticism and science is just stunningly beautiful.

So, having shown his character back to Earth Flammarion in an expert and entrancing way introduces the character of the second section, George Spero.  I’m sure that Du Maurier found the catalyst that began his writing in Urania and Spero.  The feel, the similarities are remarkable.  Du Maurier read French so he could easily have read Urania in 1889 so the time frame is right.  His books even look like Urania.

Another View Of Reality

Part II

George Spero

…to live like idiots if we do not think,

live like fools if we do.

-Camille Flammarion

This chapter sets up the denouement on Mars.  As such it it concerns the love affair and death of Spero and his love, Iclea.  Flammarion sets the scene, time and place in such a charming way I feel constrained to quote it.  Part Second, Chapter One:

An intense evening glow floated in the atmosphere like a wondrous golden radience.   From the heights of Passy the view extended over the whole of the great city, which at that time, more than ever before, was not a city, but a world.  The Universal Exhibition of 1867 had lavished all the attractions and delights of the century on imperial Paris.  The flowers of civilization were blooming in their most brilliant tints, wasting themselves away by the very ardour of their perfume- fading, dying in the full fervor of youth.  The crowned heads of Europe had just heard a deafening trumpet-blast there, which was the last of the monarchy; science, arts, industry had sown their newest creations broadcast, with an inexhaustible prodigality.  It was a general delirium of men and things.  Regiments were marching, with music at their heads; swifty-rolling vehicles crossed each other from all directions, thousands of people were moving about, in the dust of the avenues, quais and boulevards; but as the very dust, gilded by the rays of the setting sun, crowned the splendid city like an aureole.  The tall buildings, towers, and steeples were ablaze with reflection from the fiery orb; tones from a distant orchestra, mingled with a confused murmur of other sounds- the brilliant fit ending of a dazzling summer day- poured into the soul an undefined feeling of contentment, happiness, and satisfaction. There was a kind of symbolical summing up about it of the evidences of the vitality of a great people in the youth of its life and fortune.

Exhilarating what?  The sense of discovery, the feeling of perfection just around the corner, the expectation of fulfillment when science- astronomy and psychology leading Flammarion’s way- reveals the blessed secret.  The progression to perfection which existed in Flammarion’s paeon still cast a shadow in my childhood.  I was raised on it but now I look in vain for evidence of it.

With that sense of the pursuit of the absolute, the squaring of the circle, George and Iclea prepare to step into the brave new world of their dreams.

Actual Martian Landscape

The couple’s meeting is one of the loveliest I’ve read.  Iclea, in Norway was standing on a hillock when she saw her reflection in the sky greatly enlarged and in full detail.  George standing a little away but out of sight was also projected into Iclea’s celestial image.  At that time he chose to lift his hat to the sinking sun which appeared to Iclea that he was greeting her, so she saw his features and gestures but he didn’t see hers or her.

What was a mytery to Iclea George could have explained as a natural phenomenon called an anthelion.  Then the next day as they were boarding a ship to leave Norway, Camille, noticed Iclea staring fixedly at George as she recognized him as the figure in the sky.  Then moving away he out of sight of Iclea but she within sight of him he repeated his previous gesture as a salute to Norway.  Iclea once again mistook his gesture.  Thus when they did meet in Paris it was a dream come true for the girl.

The courtship is charmingly described, as with the anthelion Flammarion faultlessly blends science with the faerie, the romantic as a mind exalting anthem.  Quite astonishing, really.  One of the central problems that Camille dealt with in the clash between the magical and the scientific world views was the question of immortality.   The over riding fear of the scientific view was the elimination of life after death.  Man can’t accept that he is materialistic, living for the moment and completely ceasing to exist upon death, even though that is so, thus Flammarion seeks a plausible reason for immortality.   That quest is the real reason for the ‘science’ of the Society For Psychic Research which is merely a search for the proof of life after death.  Just beautifully written though.

Thus George and Iclea have to die tragically to prove life after death ‘scientifically.’  The couple return to Norway where George is going to attempt to discover the height of the aurora borealis by a balloon ascent.

Sparing the details they rise to the height of fifteen thousand feet when the valve controlling the hydrogen gas bursts and the balloon begins to descend.  They chuck everything overboard to slow the descent to no avail.  Approaching free fall Iclea gives George one last kiss and then sacrificing herself to love she leaps out of the basket at several hundred feet.  George bobs up to three thousand feet then he too throws himself out a la Romeo and Juliette to join his beloved in the great beyond.  Whew!

Another Martian Landscape

We next see George’s friend and narrator, Camille, at a hypnotic seance in the university town of Nancy.  Nancy was one of the two great hypnosis research centers in France.  Jean-Martin Charcot presided at the Salpetriere in Paris while Hippolyte Bernstein and Auguste Liebault held court at Nancy.  The seance  is within the realm of then science but oh so romantic.  There, Camille gains concrete evidence that life does exist after death.  I transcribe the passage, this is good:

I do not recall how, but it happened that my conversation with him turned on the planet Mars.  After describing to me a country situated on the shores of a sea known to astronomers under the name of Kepler’s Ocean, and a solitary island lying in the bosom of this sea; after telling me about the picturesque landscapes and reddish vegetation which adorned the shores, the wave-washed cliffs, and the sandy beaches where the billows break and die away- the subject, who was very sensitive, suddenly grew pale, and raised his hand to his head; his eyes closed, his eyebrows contracted; he seemed desirous of grasping some fugitive idea which obstinatley eluded him.  ‘See!’ said Dr. B (ernstein?), standing before him with irresistable command; ‘see! I wish it.’

‘You have friends there,’  he said to me.

‘I am surprised at that,’  I said laughing; ‘I have done enough to deserve them.’

‘Two friends,’ he went on, ‘who are talking about you, this very minute.’

‘Ah, ha!  Persons who know me?’

‘Yes.’

‘How is that?’

‘They have known you here.’

‘Here?’

‘Here- on the earth.’

‘How long ago was it?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Have they lived on Mars long?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Are they young?’

‘Yes; they are lovers, who adore each other.’

Then the beloved image of my lamented friends rose distinctly in my mind; but I had no sooner seen them than the subject explained-

‘Yes, it is they!’

‘How do you know?’

‘I see,- they are the same souls, same colors.’

‘What do you mean by the “same colors”?

‘Yes, the souls are suffused with light.’

A few instants afterwards he added, ‘And yet there is a difference.’

Then he was silent, his forehead frowning in his effort to find out.  But his face regained all its calmness and serenity as he added-

‘He has become the woman, she is now the man- and they love each other more than ever.’

The Red Planet

Wow!  There’s a twist.  You really can kiss yourself.  So, you see there were things going on on Mars.  Perhaps the scene is reflected in Dr. Ras Thavas, the Mastermind Of Mars who could switch minds and bodies.  As Burroughs let his mind, his imagination play, flickering across these details that he couldn’t replicate exactly he invented variations to amaze and stun us.  Note the similarities of the balloon disaster to the balloon flight in ERB’s Pirate Blood.

The third part of Flammarion’s story Heaven And Earth deals with life on Mars.  Let Urania seize your mind, lift it and transport it instantaneously through the void to the Red Planet.

Only A World Away

Part III

Heaven And Earth

The magnetic seance at Nancy had left a strong impression on my mind.  I often thought of my departed friend, and his investigations in the unexplored domains of nature and life, of his sincere  and original analytical researches on the mysterious problem of immortality; but I could not think of him now without associating him with the idea of a possible reincarnation in the planet Mars.

-Camille Flammarion, Urania

If one looks at John Carter’s first translation to Mars one will remember that he disincarnated before the Arizona cave and reincarnated on Mars, that is he left his old body behind.  It was sort of like dragging and dropping on your computer.  You somehow magically create a doppelganger of the original.   Carter was born again as a full grown man but naked came he.  This is exactly the same situation as with George Spero and Iclea.  They disincarnated on earth and reincarnated on Mars.

We wonder by what method Carter was transported.  Flammarion has possible explanations:

This idea seemed to me to be bold, rash, purely imaginary if you like, but not absurd.  The distance from here to Mars is zero for the transmission of attraction; [By this he means the gravitation attraction between the two planets.]  it is almost insignificant for that of light, since a few minutes are enough for a luminous undulation to travel millions of leagues.  I thought of the telegraph, [action at a distance] the telephone, and the phonograph; of the influence a hypnotizer’s will has on his subject many kilometers distant; [a mistaken idea of hypnotism] and I wondered if some marvelous advance in science might not throw a celestial bridge between our world and others of its kind in infinity.

Alright.  ‘Transmission of attraction’ and celestial bridges.’  What kind of argument can one make against that.  Transmission of attraction is gravity and as Flammarion explains when Mars and Earth are in alignment the two planets act on each other disturbing their orbits in a measurable degree.  I want to be in on that next session with Dr. B.  Anyway one or more of the above explanations must have worked for Burroughs although we’re sure that Carter didn’t use a celestial bridge.   The distnace was zero by transmission of attraction which required only a short hop so J.C. just stepped from Jasoom to Barsoom shedding his drawers in the process.  Right on!

Camille does admit though:  …the fantastic ideas flitting through my brain prevented me from making a truly scientific observation.  A caveat, no doubt, but then, …It is not this hypothesis which is absurd, it is the simplicity of the pedants.  Ah, ha, the bases are covered.

Now after several pages of rumination on the possiblility of telepathy Camille is translated to Mars as in a dream.  As a prelude he says, somewhat sagely:

…astronomy and psychology are most closely united to each other since, the psychic universe has the material world for its habitat, while astronomy has for its subject the study of regions of eternal life, and we could form no idea of these regions if we did not know them astronomically.  In fact, whether we know it or not, we are living now, at this moment in heavenly regions, and all beings, whatever they may be, are eternally citizens of heaven.  It was not without a secret divination of things that antiquity made Urania the muse of all sciences.

While I imagine not many have read the Book Of Urantia, a contemporary astronomical religious text, written during Burroughs time, that text seems directly inspired by Flammarion’s text also.  Then in a hot summer ramble Flammarion rests beneath a tree and seems to fall asleep:

I was strangely surprised on waking up after a few minutes’ nap at no longer recognizing the landscape or the trees, nor the river flowing at the foot of the hill, nor the undulating meadows  which stretched far away to the distant horizon.  The setting sun was smaller than we are accustomed to see it, the air thrilled with harmonious sounds unknown to Earth, and insects as large as birds were fluttering about the leafless trees, which were covered with gigantic red flowers.  Astonishment made me spring up with so energetic a bound that I found myhself on my feet feeling singularly light and bouyant.  I had taken but a few steps before it seemed to me that more than half the weight of my body had evaporated during my sleep.

Earth From Mars

Compare that to Carter’s arrival in the Valley Dor of his second translation to Mars.  As we know from Burroughs, citizens of Mars are able to communicate telepathically.  No one on Earth does it but is there a possibility future evolvement might enable us to do so.  On Mars Camille has a character say ‘our body is impregnated with the solar electricity that puts all Nature in vibration.’

Electricity is indeed the stuff of life.  Let us see how life and evolution began on Earth.  Life on Earth is essentially H2O, hydrogen and oxygen.  Therefor it is evident that life began in a primordial ocean of water and certain dissolved chemicals whose elements are known.  Over millennium it is evident these eventually combined in permutations and floated inert in the ocean until in some way Earth’s magnetic field, electricity, activated the chemicals making life on Earth and beginning the evolution resulting in life as we know it.

There is little doubt that man’s brain while being only superficially different to other mammals is superior to all beasts including apes.  It is obviously superior and more highly evolved than any hominid predecessor although they had a certain something that separated them from the anthropoids.  So if telepathy is possible then it must travel on electrical currents, radio waves.  That means that one mind must act as a transmitter and another as a receiver.  Presently our current is too low to allow transmission even if a mind was tuned to our frequency as a receiver.  That’s the key problem for telepathy although technically it seems possible.

Camille having been translated to Mars and returned the next occurrence is even more startling.  George Spero returns to Earth not as a woman but as a man.   This stuff comes from an unusual mind.  Remember that on Mars George and Iclea had switiched sexes so on Mars George left a female body behind but he appears here on Earth in his male form.  so you can sort that out as you will with the following:

Shortly after the accident on Lake Tyrinfiorden he had felt like a man who awakes from a long and heavy sleep….He was alone in midnight darkness on the border of a lake; he knew that he was living, but could neither see nor feel himself.  The air did not affect him; he was not only light but imponderable.  Apparently what remained of him was solely a thinking faculty.  His first idea on trying to remember was that he had awakened from the fall by the Norwegian lake; but when day broke he saw he was in another world.   The two moons revolving rapidly in the sky in opposite directions made him surmise that he was upon our neighbor,  Mars.  He lived there for a while in the spirit state, and recognized there the presence of a very beautiful humanity, in which the feminine sex reigns supreme, from an acknowledged superiority over the masculine sex.  These organisms are light and delicate, their density of body very slight, their weight slighter still.  On the surface of this world natural force plays a secondary part in nature; delicacy of sensation checks everything.  There is a large number of animal species, and several human races.  In these species and races the feminine sex is stronger and handsomer (the strength consisting in the superiority of sensation; than the masculine sex, and it is she who rules the world.

Sunset On Mars

Flammarion was obviously a feminist.

His great desire to know the life before him induced him not to remain long as an unlooker in the spirit state, but to come to life again under a corporeal form, and knowing the organic condition of the planet, in a feminine form.

Right.  Be on the dominant side.  Iclea apparently wishing to remain dependent to George chose the male sex.  The two then unite into one being.  It’s not clear what the status of a unisex was on Mars.  Naturally Martians are much more advanced than Earthlings as are all extra-terrestrials in our imaginations.  Of course they have to know more than we to get from where they were to where we are as the reverse is impossible for us.  Like all extraterrestrials Martians know a lot.

They have invented , among other things, a kind of telegraphic apparatus, in which a roll of stuff [film?] constantly receives a picture of our world, and it is impressed by it, unalterably, as it unrolls.  An immense museum devoted expressly to the planets of the solar system, preserves all these phtographic pictures, fixed forever in chronolgical order.

George Du Maurier calls these little bags of memory which he is fearful of losing on death.  There’s a collecting mania that beats Andy Warhol all to pieces.  George reveals that it was he on Mars who spoke to Camille in the form of a beautiful maiden extending his arms to George.  Wow!  There’s some implications there.  As sci-fi this is very advanced.

‘But then,’ I cried, ‘if you are that Martial maiden, how can you appear to me in Spero’s form, when he no longer exists?’

‘I do not act upon your retina or your optic nerve,’ he replied, ‘but on your mental being and your brain.  I am in communication with you now; I influence directly the cerebral seat of your sensations.’

I think I bought that bridge once, but excellent sales job here, certainly the reverse of what you see is what you get.

It is the same, too in conditions of hypnotic somnambulism.  You see me and hear me, you feel me, too, by your brain, which is under influence; but I am no more in the form, which you see than the rainbow exists in the presence of the eyes that look at it.’

Isn’t that good?  Flammarion is a genius even though he is a little off track, not his fault not that much was known then, especially the nature of hypnotism and its actions on the mind.  Then here’s the clincher that proves ERB read and was influenced by this book:

‘I must confess,’ I answered, ‘that I cannot understand your Martial beings as having six limbs.’

And then when Flammarion looked away and looked back the apparition had disappeared.  The watchman returned and the Martian story ends.

Thus begins the final chapter of the story The Fixed Point In The Universe in which Flammarion tries to tie up the Faerie and Science aspects of his story- the entwining of the Romantic and the Scientific.  While it  isn’t quite as noticeable in Burroughs, at least in the first burst of stories from 1911 to 1914, that is exactly what Burroughs tries to do, enclose the Faerie within the scientific.  Ray Bradbury would try the same thing in his The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles.

Martian Horizon

Flammarion establishes the scientific aspect in a magnificent summation of man’s progress toward understanding the place of the Earth in the universe.  I quote it because it is a superb understanding that I don’t believe is universally understood:

The Earth is not what it seems to be.  Nature is not what we think….

The natural and direct impression given by the observation of Nature is that we inhabit a solid, stable Earth, fixed in the centre of the universe.  It took long centuries of study and a great deal of boldness to free ourselves from that natural conviction, and to realize that the world we are on is isolated in space, without any support whatever, in rapid motion on itself and around the Sun.  But to the ages before scientific analysis, to primitive peoples, and even today to three quarters of the human race, our feet are resting on a solid Earth which is fixed at the base of the universe, and whose foundations are supposed to extend into the depths of the infinite.

And yet from the time when it was first realized that it is the Sun which rises and sets every day; that it is the same Moon, the same stars, the same constellations which revolve about us, those very facts forced one to admit with absolute certainty that there must be empty space underneath the Earth, to let the stars of the firmament pass from their setting to their rising.  This first recognition was a turning-point.  The admission of the Earth’s isolation in space was astronomy’s first triumph.  It was the first step, and indeed the most difficult one.  Think of it!  To give up the foundations of the Earth!  Such an idea would never have sprung from any brain without the study of the stars, or indeed without the transparency of the atmosphere.  Under a perpetually cloudy sky, human thoughts would have remained fixed on terrestrial ground like the oyster to the rock.

The Earth once isolated in space, the first step was taken.  Before this revelation, whose philosophical bearing equals its scientific value, all manner of shapes had been imagined for our sublunary dwelling place.  In the first place, the Earth was thought to be an island emerging from a boundless ocean, the island having infinite roots.  Then the Earth, with its seas, was supposed to be a flat, circular disc, all around on which rested the vault of the firmament.  Later, cubic, cylindrical, polyhedric forms, etc., were imagine.  But still the progress of navigation tended to reveal its spherical nature, and when its isolation, with its incontestable proofs, was recognized, this sphericity was admitted as a natural corollary of that isolation and of the circular motion of the celestial spheres around the supposed central globe.

The terrestrial globe being from that time recognized as isolated, to move it was no longer difficult.  Formerly, when the sky was looked upon as a dome crowning the massive and unlimited Earth, the very idea of supposing it to be in motion would have been not only absurd but untenable.  But from the time we could see it in our minds, placed like a globe in the centre of celestial motion, the idea of imagining that perhaps this globe could revolve on itself, so as to avoid obliging the whole sky and the immense universe to perform this daily task, might come naturally into  a thinker’s mind; and indeed we see the hypothesis of the daily rotation of the terrestrial sphere coming to light in ancient civilizations, among the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Indians, etc.  It is sufficient to read a few chapters of Ptolemy, Plutarch, or Surya-Siddhanta for an account of these conjectures.  But this new hypothesis, although it had been prepared for by the first one, was none the less bold, and contrary to the feelings inspired by the direct contemplation of Nature.  Thoughtful mankind was obliged to wait until the sixteenth century, or, to speak more correctly, until the seventeenth century, to learn our planet’s true position in the universe, and to know by supported proofs that it has a double movement- daily about itself, and yearly about the Sun.  From that time only, from the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, has real astronomy existed.

One Of The Moons Of Mars

A brilliant and remarkable synthesis of astronomical knowledge.  Burroughs frequently mentions his debt to Flammarion while I have yet to see where he refers to Percival Lowell.  Lowell, himself visited Flammarion at Juvisy where he, it would seem, learned from the master.

We have seen that in 1908 The Chicago Tribune recapitulated Flammarion’s vision of Mars and not Lowell’s on its pages with illustrations.  Burroughs said that he based his vision of Mars on Flammarion and adapted to more correct knowledge when it appeared.

It seems clear that Burroughs was fully exposed to the paranormal/Theosophical viewpoints borrowing only what he found useful while rejecting the rest while very like believing none of it.  Like Flammarion he accords telepathic powers to Martians but they are not effective with the Earthman, John Carter.

As the magical world of the fairies of the first Romantic period had metamorphosed into the pseudo-scientific paranormal Flammarion too has metamorphosed his magical longings into a scientific framework while accepting modern scientific astronomy.  However he still confuses the two because of the longing for personality immortality.  He accords full scientific values to the Society For Psychic Research because they seem to follow rigorous scientific methods yet the unconfirmed anecdotes they rely on he accepts as attested facts while they aren’t.  It’s odd that with his trained mind he couldn’t see the fallacy.

And then while being a very able astronomer he merely decides that all the planets in the universe are inhabitable and then populates them.  Thus he believes that Mars as a fact is fully peopled with flora and fauna like Earth’s but more exotic and spiritual.

He imagines a nearly infinite variety of life, that is human like intelligent life when in fact to this date all planets but Earth are barren of life.  Venus isn’t even watery.  What a blow that truth was.

Burroughs combined this wonderful fantastic fairyland displaced from Earth with evolution to imagine a fantastic array of life forms both on Earth and other planets, even beyond the farthest star.’

Both men were neo-Romantics although Flammarion having been born earlier was more heavily influenced by the first Romantic period while the much younger Burroughs was more acclimated to the scientific.  By the time he began to write autos, planes, telephones and electricity had already transformed the world while radio and television were just round the corner.   Talk about action at a distance and telepathy. God, Skype.

It was a wonderful time when all things were possible if improbable.  Truly, astronomy and psychology would be he cornerstones of the Brave New World that awaits.  Will it be Utopian or Dystopian?

Who Is The Mysterious John Carter?

Who Is The Mysterious John Carter?

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs- The Man With The Plan

http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/wnu1.htm#ARTICLES

 

There are nine wise men who control the destiny of the world and I am on a first name basis with each of them.  Sworn to secrecy I cannot reveal the names of these Unknown Masters.  No Wiki-leaks here.  Due to the upcoming movie concerning doings under the moons of Mars first revealed by the adept Edgar Rice Burroughs beginning in 1912 I have been advised that it is thought expedient to reveal who John Carter really is.

Elipsis being the favored mode of action of the Nine rather than just give the info straight out I have been given a list of web sites, articles and books from which Carter’s identity may be deduced leaving some room for error on my part from which Carter’s identity may be deduced.  Given the nature of the material, much of which I had already read that I have always thought rather fanciful I can’t guarantee that I have succeeded in determining J.C.’s true identity.  If I have failed in this great trust placed in me by the Nine I lay the blame at their feet for having made an erroneus choice but it is possible that, as a result of such a possible failure, I may not be heard from again.

Burroughs, who seems to have known the true identity of Carter, whose books were part of the package given to me, as if I hadn’t already read them many times, gives us a clue in that Carter was at least one thousand years old and had enjoyed many identities over the centuries.  Actually with a little invention I may be able to whiff this past the Nine.

Amongst the papers entrusted to me was the web address of the French Wold Newton Universe which I abbreviate FWNU.  As this site intelligently summarizes a thousand years of history I found it an invaluable resource but just because I’m relying on the FWNU doesn’t mean I’m lazy; I’ve already read the other stuff:  the Greek myths, Homer, Grave’s White Goddess, the Bible, De Santillana, Eco and a host of others, besides which I have to use the sources the Nine supplied.

It will be necessary to begin our search with the Knights Templar and the Crusades.  It is quite possible that J.C. by whatever identity he may have been known is co-existent with the First Hominid Predecessor.  For all we know he was present at the creation, among the artists  who painted the caves at Lascaux or he may even have had an intimate acquaintance with the Via Dolorosa; but, that might merely be relying on the coincidence of initials.  We have no reliable or even quasi-reliable records that far back.

We will have to content ourselves with beginning at the Crusades.  The historical figure who claims an ancient pedigree is the Count de St. Germain.  He makes his appearance under that name in revolutionary France.  As the name he uses then is demonstrably French we have to assume that over the centuries he has been known under many, many names, many guises, many roles as the concept French is of fairly recent origin.  He was perhaps one of the nine who formed the Knights Templar, a very secretive group.  The Crusades changed the course of European society just as the Templars were the first catalysts of that change.  While Templar history is in the hands of those sympathetic to them who find them wholly admirable I who should be among those sympathsizers have a lurking suspicion that the Order was wholly sinister.  Who else, I ask you, would recruit in taverns haunted by criminals and excommunicants?  What building material was this?

The Templars ostensible purpose, good reason as opposed to real reason, for existence was that they were to protect pilgrims to the so-called Holy Land but, once created, they lost interest in such a worthy cause.  Perhaps they were created for a much more subversive and less worthy purpose.  The Templars are frequently linked with another band of ‘holy’ soldiers, the Assassins of Alamut in Persia.  Who were the Assassins?  The FWNU:  Will There Be Light Tomorrow, Part I:

The word “assassins” is usually linked to hashish, and the name of the group is sometimes spelled “hashishins,” because of their alleged use of the drug to keep their fearsome warriors properly motivated…What is not widely known is that, in fact, the name “Assassins” derives from the word “Assass,” meaning “Guardians,” or “Protectors,” for the Assassins were in reality the Islamic Soldier Monks in charge of the protection of the Holy Land.  “Assassins” in Arabic signifies “quardians,” and some commentators have considered this the true origin of the word: “Guardians of the secrets’” – Arkan Daraul, Secret Societies.

If the Assassins had secrets to protect and/or disseminate then they might easily have swayed the minds of a group of simple unsophisticated Nordic warriors.  Once swayed then their role would have been to form a fifth column in Europe in alliance with the Assassins to subvert the Church and State which is exactly what the Templars were doing.  Thus though the Moslems had been defeated and thrust back by Charles Martel the Templars would be internal allies to achieve the Moslem conquest not unlike the Liberal undermining in favor of the Moslems in the West today.    Wheels within wheels, plans within plans.  There undoubtedly was constant communication between the two groups for well over a hundred years until the Mongols of Ghengis Khan stormed Alamut putting an end to the Assassins c. +1260.  An unforseen event.  It was then only a few decades later that Philip Lebel of France terminated the career of the Templars launching Europe on the period of confusion that terminated with the murder of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

From the wreckage of the Templars, for they were only wrecked not destroyed, came great criminal organizations such as the Commora, the Carbonara and the Mafia.  All these elements combined to create the revolution in France during which the Compte de St. Germain  and the extra sinister Caligliostro, who might have been the same,  appeared and who in all possiblility emigrated to America to become…John Carter.

Names and dates in this underworld milieu can never be taken as certain.  As the FWNU points out it is clear that Cagliostro left for America after 1795 or at about the same time Edgar Allan Poe was handed the mysterious manuscript detailing the adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym.  We’re slipping into the realm of pure fiction here but suppose that Poe did get the story from someone and suppose that someone was merely posing as Cagliostro or St. Germain, probably the same person in two identities.  Still fantistic but not impossible.

However contrary to Man’s desire nobody lives forever so at some point Cagliostro has to die but before he does he finds the Virginian John Carter and instructs him in this pious fraud to keep the tradition going.  Now, it is clear that whether or not someone gave Burroughs a manuscript which he at least claimed happened in the case of John Clayton he writes of John Carter in the tradition of the Great Conspiracy that had its roots in the Crusades.

Burroughs may very well have been self-indoctrinated in the Traditions as many of us are, however Burroughs was learned in several matters not least of which was psychology by his brothers’ partner, Lew Sweetser.

Sweetser along with the Burroughs Boys was graduated from Yale University which we know is the home of the prominent occult organization the Skull and Bones Club.  The Skull and Bones takes its emblem from the pirates of the Caribbean.  Their banner was a corruption of the black and white Beauceant banner of the Templars.  It is generally thought that the excaping French Templars, or a portion of them, fled to Scotland.  After 1492 when the Spanish gold fleets of his Most Catholic Majesty, the Defender of the Faith, the King of Spain began their runs, the Templars set sail for the New World to prey on the treasure fleets to avenge themselves on Church and Throne.

I have seen no record that Lew Sweetser was in the Skull and Bones but if he was or aspired to, if the Skull and Bones have any secrets which they obviously do, Sweetser may have become privy to some and whether intentionally or inadvertantly he probably imparted some to young Burroughs.  At the very least, in educating young Burroughs as he obviously did he would have given him his outlook or point of view.  Young Burroughs was at an impressionable age.

 

This point of view was reinforced by all of Burroughs’ reading.  That reading was more heavily occult and revolutionary than is usually supposed.  By 1912 when he began writing ERB was fully versed in the underground French literature in translation of the day.  There doesn’t seem to be a reference to Balzac although he must have read something but maybe not.  He did read Eugene Sue, one of the early nineteenth century writers, a veritable mad man.  Sue’s The Mysteries Of Paris was in his library while I’m relatively certain he read Sue’s Wandering Jew also.  Between

A Boy Named Sue

those two books his mind would have been ripped apart and reassembled as was mine for instance.  He read Dumas, Three Musketeers and Count Of Monte Cristo for sure and probably The Man In The Iron Mask.  He plowed through Victor Hugo’s sewer epic, Les Miserables.  He devoured whatever was translated of Jules Verne.  Verne’s works were firmly implanted in his mind: From Earth To The Moon and Mysterious Island absolutely filled his mind.  Paul Feval and

E.A. Poe, obviously under mental stress

Emile Gaboriau weren’t translated as yet so these very important crime/revolutionary writers missed him.  They write much more directly at what Sue, Dumas, Hugo and Verne imply.  But, all four of those guys are powerful writers dealing with life in a very direct way.  Edgar Allan Poe, another prime influence of Burroughs, 1808-1849 seems to have been influenced by the early bunch of French writers, probably Balzac and some writers less well known but earlier than Feval and the rest.  Poe may be the most astounding writer of all in the French school although its hard to top Sue.  I shudder while I write his name.    And then it is impossible to know what magazine and newspaer articles about such topics Burroughs may have read.  His age was a magazine and newspaper age.

 

Cagliostro

And, of course, Burroughs read a full slate of English and American writers not least the detective stories of Conan Doyle and many others.  One should not overlook George W.M. Reynolds incredible ten volume novel The Mysteries Of The Court Of London which is found in ERB’s library.  An amazing 5000 page novel.

All of this reading seemed to come together in the John Carter Martian Trilogy.  Burroughs never again wrote anything quite like it.  One could remember that one doesn’t have to be fully conscious of what one is writing.  One is caught up in the sweep of intellectual currents developing themes whose antecedents began long before so that one is merely developing the themes.

Thus Burroughs was part of the breaking up of the Semito-Aryan mythology of say -2000 to +1000 which was accentuated by the first of the three major blows to Man’s self-confidence picked out by Freud- the place of the Earth in the Universe.  Once it was understood that Earth was merely one lone planet spinning in a Universe that if not thought boundless in his time was understood to be more extensive than mythological heaven.  The old mythology crubled to the ground, the old gods of the Semitic religions had their teeth pulled, their knees crushed, in other words, they lost their power to command.

Jules Verne

Now, it is often asserted that there is no mythology to replace the old mythology, that science has destroyed the concept.  This is not true.  The Templars began a new mythology, while Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler forwarded it when they discovered or revealed  that the Earth was a point in a surrounding universe.   Thus, if the Earth is not the center of the universe with God in his heaven above it then Man can penetrate this boundless space.  This is where John Carter enters the mythology of the Scientific Era.

The idea of traveling in space according to the FWNU was almost immediately written in a story by Kepler himself.  While this is a sort of change of venue travel in the upper spheres has a long history predating Kepler.  To cite only two examples there is Jacob’s Ladder on which Jacob was said to ascend to the heavens or, in other words, space.  Mohammed is said to have mounted his horse and risen to the Seventh Heaven, way up there in the ideas of the time,  where he conversed face to face with God, or in Moslem terms,  Allah.  So, now that space became open it isn’t unusual that Kepler immediately translated the old mythology into scientific terms.  So while a magic carpet may have served Gullivar Jones if fails as science.

Thus from Kepler to Burroughs the tales of space travel and the complexity of methods increases.

Camille Flammarion

With the development of astronomy, that is space, the concept of Time developed apace.  The Earthly year had already been adequately measured so now the conquest of the Earth day, hour, minute and seconds- eventually nanoseconds- began.  Thus Time and Space became one word, timeandspace.  Along with rocketry came the fantasy of the Time Machine, the time traveler.  As we know Burroughs was an expert on both, having some very well developed ideas about Time.  Rather than being a merely frivolous romanticist then it can be seen that Burroughs was trying to work out the central problems of his times.  to a very large extent, he did.  In a literary sense, then, Burroughs is the equal of Freud and Einstein.  Hence his writing style is odd.  He is trying to convey ideas he is struggling to understand, not unlike Freud and Einstein.  While Freud is considered a literary stylist I find him barely comprehensible, not at all clear.

As the FWNU points out, while John Carter takes his place in space travel in the 1860s his amanuensis, Burroughs, only published Carter’s exploits from 1912 to 1914.

Burroughs himself completely distorts the facts as he claims he himself was born c. 1855 in the Trilogy while we know he was actually born twenty years later in 1875.  He could not possibly have known Carter as a child and been his ‘favorite nephew.’  Why he would tell such a transparent falsehood isn’t clear.  Even when Carter made his second vanishing in 1888 Burroughs would have been entering his teen years while being in Illinois rather than living on the Hudson in the State of New York.  Does he think we’re stupid?  Perhaps he is concealing his real sources.

Even though the issue is somewhat clouded because of the lapse of time between the historical events and Burroughs’ publication of them only in 1912, one thing is clear, John Carter is the Lord Of Time And Space.  As Burroughs recounts Carter’s words claimed to be to him in the prologue to the Gods Of Mars:

I have learned the secret, nephew, and I may traverse the trackless void at my will, coming and going between the countless planets as I list…

Carter’s achievement is of great import because it means that he has become one with the gods.  he has joined the heavenly pantheon with the added advantage that he can move equally freely between the spiritual and the temporal.  Not even the Great Gods can do that.  Although he has the secret he doesn’t choose to divulge it to his ‘favorite nephew’ who we know did not possess this occult secret.

It is interesting in light of Carter’s achievement to pay some attention to the Urania Book that was received by another Chicagoan.  Why Chicago was selected to be the center of revelation at this time isn’t known.  The book of Urania is a massive volume giving the details of the celestial organization of the gods dispersed throughout the universe of which Carter must have been familiar although he didn’t impart that knowledge to his nephew.  Fortunately that vast organization was related by the Uranians.

As Burroughs was left more or less on his own on that score by Carter it is evident that Burroughs must have fleshed out Carter’s bare announcement of having discovered the ‘secret’ of traversing interstellar space by hints from the famed French explorer of space Camille Flammarion.  That author discusses outer space in several profound works chief of which are The Plurality Of Inhabited Worlds, The Inhabitants Of Other Worlds, Imaginary And Real Worlds and Lands In The Sky.  It is to be noted also that rather than taking his information on the nature of Mars from the American Percival Lowell Burroughs took it from the Frenchman, Camille Flammarion.  Lowell and Flammarion were in close communication so it is probable that Lowell’s inspiration was taken from Flammarion.  Burroughs speaks of Flammarion many times even going so far as to say he formed his early ideas on him but he never mentions Lowell.  Unfortunately Flammarion’s information on Mars turned out to be more inspired than factual.  Let us hope his ideas on interplanetary space are more sound.  But then he is a pioneer and the lay of the land always looks different to the first comers than the settlers who become familiar with it.  Cartographers so to speak.  Geographers, that sort of thing.

At any rate the transition from the old astrology to the new astronomy, from myth to science, was achieved through the medium of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  There should a BB and AB, before and after Burroughs.  Thus with the publication of A Princess of Mars in 1912 world history entered a new phase.  The centuries after Keplers’ space epic culminated with Burroughs in 1912 when he more or less perfected the new mythology as far as the heavens were concerned.

Nor was Burroughs finished when Carter using the ‘secret’ transported himself to Mars the second time.  One is inclined to believe that Carter stumbled on the secret before the cave in Arizona or else was selected by the Celestial Organization to receive it.  The latter would have been impossible for a naive earthling like Burroughs to understand so Carter probably chose to say he discovered the secret.

Burroughs himself who was undoubtedly chosen as the conduit to the New Mythology was immediately recognized as the avatar of the New Mythology as nearly all other mythographers began to develop the ideas in Burroughs framework.  His knowledge which was itself almost miraculous seems as though it must have been divinely imparted.  Perhaps the two concusssions he received before 1900 rearranged his synapses so that he could intellectually go where no man had gone before.  He celebrates the memory of these two concussions by beating a steady tattoo on the skull of Tarzan.

Having organized the way in which inter-stellar planetary travel was to be perceived Burroughs set out to create the man-god of the New Age on earth, the second aspect of the trinity, John Clayton otherwise known as Tarzan Of The Apes.  Burroughs retained the JC initials linking Jesus Christ, John Carter and John Clayton as so many have noted although those three are not the Trinity in question- the three in one, one in three.  One must beware of the so-called revolutionaries who with their inability to understand common sense deride the triple aspect of mankind as faulty arithmetic.  In the course of evolution it would seem that  they failed to acquire the advanced intelligence gene.

Three of Burroughs’ most formative years were spent at Harvard Latin School in Chicago where he developed his classical knowledge and fell in love with classical mythology.

Thus, as the mythological god of heaven was Zeus to whom John Carter corresponds, John Clayton, or Tarzan corresponds to the terrestrial god, Poseidon or, perhaps more accurately to the son of Zeus, the great man-god Heracles.  Burroughs often refers to Tarzan as the Heracles of the jungle so perhaps he shoved Poseidon aside in favor of the son of Zeus.  This leaves only the realm of the underworld ruled by Pluto or Hades in Classical Mythology which Burroughs renamed Pelucidar and placed at the center of the Earth.  He doesn’t seem to have felt the need for a ruler of that particular realm.  Thus while the three realms exist in his mythology the trinity seems to be curiously truncated by one but perhaps I’m missing something.

Thus Burroughs updated the Trinity.  It might be coincidence or maybe it was destiny but Burroughs was chosen to transit the bases of the New Mythology at the first glimmer of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  Was he conscious of his role as the Man of Destiny?  While he could never be sure he undoubtedly hoped the Light was shining on him.

Although obscure this move shows a very astute religious understanding.  If one wishes to supplant a religion the wise idea is to appropriate the forms of symbols, shrines and ideas and replace their content with your own.  Catholicism did this with Greek and German sites and Jewish and Moslem religions are attempting the same with Christian and or Western sites, symbols and ideas now.  There is an eternal religious war.  For instance Jews have instituted the new Jewish holiday Hannukah in opposition to the Western Christmas which in itself contains the superposition of the Christian religion on pagan sites.  While shining the light on their Hannukah they make vicious attacks on Christmas trying to have it outlawed.  Christmas celebrants are thus being nudged to embrace Hannukah at which time they will be left in peace to celebrate their Christmas under the guise of Hannukah.  In the time honored manner Christianity will have been superseded, in this case by a lesser religious faith.  Undoubtedly they will be happy with an eight day celebration rather than a one.   A little bribery works well.

Thus Burroughs makes John Carter the Master of Time and Space in place of Jahweh or Allah.  When the scientific British conquered India and scoffed at the Hindu notion that the world rested on the back of the elephant as an impossibility the Hindu priests withdrew, worked it over in their minds and countered:  OK.  The world rests on the back of the tortoise.  The Hindus could not accept the negation of their religious beliefs.

So science made clear to Christians, Jews and and Moslems that there was no god and that instead of the earth nestling in an egg of seven heavens with god in the seventh and highest balanced by seven layers of hell beneath the flat earth and that space was in fact boundless and the earth occupied an infinitessimally small space in the universe, the Christians, Jews and Moslems retired to consider the problem then each gave a new solution based on God in heaven much as the Hindus switched from an elephant to a tortoise.  It is impossible to just switch the human mind from one system to another.  As Voltaire said:  No one ever willed himself an athiest.

Science is abstract while religion is visceral. so even those working in science retain their religious views.  The Christians said:  Alright then, if God didn’t create mankind what happened is that a comet brought life to Earth.  You see, Evolution or Creation must come from outside.  It is more comfortable to think that.  Thus nothing changed, life came from ‘above.’  As the space idea developed one had the spectacular Uranian religion develop where the entire universe becomes one huge revival camp while ‘visitors’ from outer space landed handing knowledge to dumb ox earthlings.   Knowledge wasn’t acquired bit by bit by humble earthlings but was given by superior aliens, i.e. God.  The Aliens then began to hover over Earth in flying saucers to monitor our activities until we were ‘ready’ to enter the congress of planets in a peaceful manner.  Like God they don’t interfere in our affairs.

Thus John Carter the man-god can replace both God in his heaven and space aliens and God will still be in his heaven and all right with the world.  Only the symbols will change which is as it must be.  As above, so below.  Following that religious formula Burroughs placed the avatar of primitiveness and sophistication, Tarzan, as overlord of Africa.  Tarzan remains a savage but is sometimes dressed in a tuxedo, even in the jungle.

How aware is this?  Currently certain groups are going into the very heart of darkness to haul Negroes out of the jungle, put them on airplanes which they may only have seen flying high above them and transporting them to the United States where these groups expect these primitives to get a job, eat frozen food, and flush the toilet none of which the primitives have any knowledge.  As is well known feral humans are incapable of transiting to human society.  The brain can only absorb so much and at such a rate.  This inability cannot be accelerated or changed.   Even well educated, supposedly sophisticated humans can’t make the transition from a magical religious mindset to a rational scientific one so what is to become of primitives?  Scientific thought has had no part in Chinese or Asian thought until very recently so how can these peoples be expected to abandon their essentially mythopoeic thought processes for a scientific  one?

So, while Burroughs was attempting to lead the way to an Aquarian scientific conception of the coming New Age he was wisely attempting to do the impossibhle:  Putting new wine in old bottles without bursting the bottles.  It may be impossible yet it has to be done.   The issue has now been complicated, probably irreparably, by the introduction of hundreds of millions of people into Western society for which the transition is a complete impossibility.  The enlightened Westerner will be swamped by those incapable of understanding whether it be their natural limitations or not.

In this global society the Aquarian religion must displace several antiquated thought systems.  The truth is obvious.  A palatable religion has to be packaged for the masses that will make them psychologically comfortable and an elite and priesthood who hopefully understand the issues who can keep society moving forward on an even keel.  Is this possible?  Even Burroughs could solve the problem only by continuing the institution of slavery.  Slavery permeates his entire work.

In our situation it is important to keep the religious warfare confined to the warring elites and away from the masses.

That means of course that the egalitarian character of the last two hundred years has come to an end.  Of course, the Semites put a period to that on 9/11.

The question then is who will wear the crown?  Burroughsian religious ideas must triumph.  The Carter-Clayton ideas must be put into action driving the three Semitic religions off the field as well as conquering the minds of the Asians and Africans.

Not as difficult as it may seem but it takes a steely determination so far shown only by the Jews and Moslems.  You have to know who you are, what you want and be prepared to deal with any obstacles as these two groups obviously are an do.  Know who you are and the superiority of your beliefs.  There is no longer any room for tolerance as with them.  Everything else out there is inferior, nothing can successfully slander our beliefs unless we permit it.

 

Beam Me Up, Scotty