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Somewhere (in my garage, I think), I have a copy of Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. I need to look at it again. Maybe this time I could understand what she was on about, my previous efforts in that direction having always ended with me going, "Why did I buy this damn book, anyway?" Today I know: because God wanted me to read it.
I also know I shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but if I could afford it, I'd buy this other Mary Douglas volume strictly on the strength of the following graphic. From what little I can glean, I guess the idea is that one big class of things people find risky, what they really fear, are various kinds of pollution and environmental toxins. Which is to say impurities. But that the purity that's being guarded (if not truly protected) by such fears might be something deeper. Hidden. Masked, you could say.
[L. Ron] Hubbard put forward his ideas about Niacin in a book called All About Radiation. He claimed to have discovered that large doses of vitamins could both alleviate and prevent radiation sickness. He marketed this anti-radiation mixture in the form of a tablet, calling it "Dianazene." 21,000 such tablets were seized and destroyed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1958.
There's also Moral Purity and Persecution in History by Barrington Moore Jr., and it looks as if he has some insightful (inciteful? I always forget) things to say about purity. However, the reviews seem to indicate that he blames monotheistic religions for too much. Me, I think it's a crime to leave out The Mystic East in a work of this type. I mean, can you spell P-U-J-A? Not to mention, more generally, purification rites.
Ritual purification is a feature of many religions. The aim of these rituals is to remove specifically defined uncleanliness prior to a particular type of activity, and especially prior to the worship of a deity. This ritual uncleanliness is not however identical with ordinary physical impurity, such as dirt stains; nevertheless, all body fluids are generally considered ritually unclean, and some religions have special treatment of semen and menses, which are viewed as particularly unclean.
America has a deep Puritan heritage, but few have Clue One what that means. I don't. Despite any number of books by Perry Miller and Sacvan Berkovitch lying about the place. I'm not sure, but I think it might have something to do with the odd fraction in this...
However, by far the greatest invocation of purity involves the spiritual risks and dangers of sex (Lord, I'm coming home to you). For one example among thousands, see And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity.
OK, now we're getting somewhere. Hmmm, let's see. What else have we got in this vein? How about...
Oh wait... How did that last one get in there? Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking. But while we're at it, let's dip in and see what's up with this unwelcome intruder. Here the author is discussing Lester F. Ward (1841 - 1913), who, as Wikipedia helpfully informs us, was no less than the first president of the American Sociological Association. Just imagine! The author notes Ward's view that...
White racial purity was an impossibility; miscegenation a social inevitability. Yet Ward wrote in support of whites' double standard with regard to miscegenation, condoning sexual intercourse between white men and black women as advantageous to blacks, while castigating and forbidding sexual intercourse between black men and white women. For the purposes of evolutionary progress, according to Ward, sexual intercourse need only occur between men of the conquering race (white men) and women of the conquered race (black women).
Yeah well, I suppose this must all seem totally arbitrary, huh? But here's how I got to those books and links (up to but not including Angelfood McSpade). Pay close attention here, OK? First, here's an equally white cover, wherein we return from simple and possibly ideology-free interior decorating to something more spiritualized. Note, for instance, the carefully chosen title term "sanctuary."
Get rid of the the dirt, the pollution, the poisons, the toxins, the horrid and unforgivable blackness of racial and sexual sin! Another popular term for this sort of detox is "cleansing," as in...
Of course, it would be utterly wrongheaded to associate this sort of cleansing -- ridding the pristine Godly self of invisible sub-molecular dangers and unspeakably spiritual quantum risks -- with the completely unrelated idea of ethnic cleansing.
...from which, boys being boys and all, let's crib a couple quotes anyway. Just for the hell of it.
p. 33:
This search for 'oneness' also very often goes along with a headlong quest for 'purity'. This is another theme of the imaginaire that 'toughens' the identitarian process and impels it more inexorably toward an episode of mass violence. To define oneself as 'pure' in fact implies categorizing some 'other' as impure. The accusation of impurity constitutes a universal accusation against the population one is going to massacre. Purity already implies a requirement of cleanliness as opposed to another catalogued as 'dirty', perceived as rubbish. Purity also contains an appeal to the sacred: the need for purification falls within the province of religion, and constitutes a powerful springboard for unleashing a purgative violence. These clichés -- pure-impure, cleanliness-dirtiness, whiteness-blackness -- seem terribly crude to us. Their binary structures mirror however the elementary functioning of the human psyche in times of crisis.
p. 56:
In the 1920s [Alfred] Rosenberg became a kind of guardian of the general doctrine (Weltanschauung) of National-Socialism, propagating through his writings profound personal convictions about the reality of a Judeo-Masonic world conspiracy. His masterwork, The Myth of the Twentieth Century [: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age], published in 1930 (thus three years before Hitler came to power), was to become the second Nazi 'bible' after Mein Kampf. This book, which had taken him years to prepare, is deeply inspired by the racist theories of the Count of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain. The myths of Rosenberg are based above all else on the mystique of the purity of Aryan blood which, under the sign of the Swastika, sparked off a worldwide spiritual revolution: that of 'the awakening of the Aryan soul'.
And so in closing let me say: Axe not for whom de tocsin toll. It Tolle for thee, Eckhart.
Pseudologia fantastica, mythomania, or pathological lying, is one of several terms applied by psychiatrists to the behaviour of habitual or compulsive lying. It was first described in the medical literature in 1891.
I ended the last one (Liar Liar 3: The Myth of Myth) by saying: "Lying turns out to be a central theme and major mode for the Mystic Bourgeoisie, even if they call it their 'Mythic Journey,' which is where we'll pick it up next time." Those of you who actually click on the links, know that that one went to Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling by Sam Keen. Ring a fire in your belly? No? Well, there's Sam on the right, looking for all the world like Quasimodo, the old bell-ringer himself. Say hello to the folks, Sam, you old fraud. Are you ready for your close-up?
OK, let's start with this clip from the intro to your interview at EnlightenNext (formerly What Is Enlightenment? magazine) Issue #16, Fall–Winter 1999; issue theme: "How Free Do We Really Want to Be?"
...[Keen] has authored over a dozen books and has for years been a prominent figure in the American human potential movement. It was through his experiences leading workshops at Esalen Institute, as a contributing editor for Psychology Today, and as cofounder of a men's group called SPERM (Society for the Protection and Encouragement of Righteous Manhood) that he began to formulate many of the ideas that would fill the pages of his books.
Which explains why those pages tend to stick together.
In the middle of an interview that is so cranky and boring at the same time that your ears might start to bleed, Keen says something that sounds as if it might actually be true.
So much of my approach is the effort to go beyond mythology to autobiography, to take my own story and the uniqueness of my own situation, my own gifts and my own wounds, with a kind of ultimate seriousness.
Interesting that he distances himself from both gender issues ("get over it") and Jung ("I don't like Jungianism -- just like I detest the idea of archetypes."). He made a bundle on the former, and invokes Jung -- as does his mentor Campbell -- whenever he finds it convenient, which is often. For instance, on Keen's current website, in a directory inexplicably titled...
...in the section on "Your Life, Your Story: Composing an Autobiography," right after where he says that human beings are "biomythic animals," there's this...
Carl Jung once said that the most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living? In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the author/ities, of our own lives.
Too right. You probably didn't know this about me, but I have totally reinvented myself as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
The photo of Keen, above, comes from Yoga Journal November-December issue, 1994, pp. 114-116. (btw, monster kudos to Google for putting magazine archives online!) The article is titled "What My Book Is Not About," the book in question being Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening The Spirit In Everyday Life. This appears opposite a cheesy ad for two Deepak Chopra books: Restful Sleep and Perfect Weight. Evidently, things the book is not about include angels, UFOs, miracles, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, self-esteem, and "prophesy" [sic].
It is not even about what my dear friend Joseph Campbell talks about in Hero's Journey, where he writes that we go into the forest where it is the darkest, and each goes alone, since It would be a shame to go in a group.
A shame, yes how true. But note that Keen has cleverly touched on all the magic hot buttons that readers of Yoga Journal in 1994 -- and perhaps even more so today -- are most likely to care about.
After devoting at least half the article to such disclaimers, Keen then says, well OK, he can tell us a little about what the book is about. "The book is in some ways about forming a spiritual bullshit detector," he writes. But only in some ways, right, Sam? Because if your intended audience had working bullshit detectors, they'd never read your crap in the first place. So: moderation in all things. A little detecting, a little bullshit. A little detecting, a little more bullshit. Rinse and repeat.
Defining the quest to unlock spirituality as "the reverse of the religious pilgrimage," bestselling author Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly) nonetheless sets out immediately to blend Eastern and Western religious traditions with philosophy, psychology and autobiography. The result is a New Age-ish "now-and-then spiritual journey" whose indirect path may result in confusion for questers seeking less amorphous guidance.
But Publishers Weekly clearly doesn't get it. On your mythic journey, indirection is the path; amorphous confusion the shining goal.
In the opening bars of Your Mythic Journey, we learn two salient facts. First (p. iii), the book was published by Jeremy P. Tarcher, who was responsible for more New Age books than Jesus Christ, Buddha and Lao Tzu, combined. (btw, Tarcher was married to Shari Lewis, so it's possible that the ontological devolution we've been exploring here, lo these many years now, was a plot hatched by Lambchop. After all, ask yourself: is this the real life or is this just fantasy?)
Second (p. iv), it is dedicated to Joseph Campbell, whose name will appear again and again in such books. Such books being those about how to make the lesser argument appear the greater. The lesser being the random-ass concatenation of cruel jokes and unconscionable misjudgments that constitute your personal history. The greater being the same set of raw materials magically reformulated into the shining saga of a hero or goddess able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, patch up the crack in the Liberty Bell, or fearlessly lead a locust-horde of God-fearing White People Westward. You go, girl!
John Gast's 1872 painting, American Progress, is but one reminder that America is no stranger to heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses got up to serve the interests of the prevailing ideological drift. A bit further back, we have the glee of Henry David Thoreau that his family took its name from that of a Norse god.
Your personal mythology is the loom on which you weave the raw materials of daily experience into a coherent story. You live your life from within this mythology, drawing to yourself the characters and creating the scenes that correspond with its guiding theme.
There is no end of references to the power of mythic hogwash. But as this is the fourth installment of the "Liar Liar" series, perhaps at this point I should back up and talk about why all this is important. Why I think it's important.
In my previous post (Liar Liar 3: The Myth of Myth), I suggested that the powerful attraction of Jung -- Eliade depended on him, as did Campbell and so many others since -- is based not just on his notions about archetypes and the collective unconscious, but on something much more seductive that those two constructs enable: "individuation."
By individuation, Jung meant the creation of a real Self (he usually capitalized it) balanced between individual subjectivity -- the waking personal conscious -- and the Collective Unconscious (he capitalized that too) -- a transpersonal layer of racially acquired experience. (Yes, the reference to race is problematic -- as has been Jung's entire theory, for the same reason.)
Henry David Thoreau, who was wrong about so many things, was right when he said most people lead lives of quiet desperation. At least some of the time. I have felt that way. You have felt that way. Let us not talk falsely now. And the desperation is to get out of the terrible suffocation of being imprisoned within a miniscule inarticulate repetitive and hugely boring subjectivity. There must be some way out of here.
By the way, dropping allusions to Dylan here is more germane than you might guess. His song, "All Along the Watchtower," is based on one of the most obscure prophets of the Old Testament...
I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.
And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
In brief, word on the street was that some ill-intentioned horde of barbarians was bearing down on some minor king's minor kingdom in some long forgotten desert where more recent barbarities are now making headlines. So this king asked God what to do. Should I stay or should I go sorta thing. And God, in His ineffable effing way, said hang loose, King, I'll get back to you. Put sentries on your watchtowers and I'll send you a sign.
Except He never did.
For this reason, Sunday sermons based on the book of Habakkuk tend to get rather convoluted rather quickly. Two riders were approaching. Or they weren't. Or... well, let's kick around what God might have been thinking.
A favorite human pastime.
Which brings us back to Jung. And to the larger context within which Jung, by his own occasional admission, was embedded: gnosticism. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that some scholars in the field of Religious Studies have suggested that gnosticism is such a vague and historically slippery concept that it has no real meaning at all. See for instance, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton University Press, 1996). As a class, the Mystic Bourgeoisie has constructed itself of just such nebulous and ultimately meaningless categories. So what else is new?
The gnostic category Jung gave us was the capital-S Self, and a method by which it could "shop" itself together, i.e., individuation. Think a sort of spiritual Photoshopping. Think rag and bone shop of the heart.
The shop window is the collective unconscious, another questionable category, but let's let that one slide too. Think Macy's windows at Christmastime in New York, the lights, the snow, the tinkling sublunary music of the spheres. Everyone in love, everything sorta magical. Sorta mythic.
Kinda like a drug. Like ecstasy maybe. Like whatever drives away quiet desperation. Take only as directed.
And here are the directions. Stroll up and down looking at the pretty archetypes in the shop windows. The Empress, the Goddess, the Good Witch of the East, the oracle@delphi. But of course, not all are so pretty. There's the Warrior, the King, the Sorcerer, the Magician. Those are for the boys. And don't worry, if you're lesbian, there's Sappho, if you're gay, there's Pan. And so on. Point being: something for everyone and not half boring! Not in the least desperate. In fact, when you get right down to it, really rather Sacred.
And who wouldn't want to trade in their ho-hum subjectivity for a gung-ho archetypicality or two?
Actually, Jung himself warned about this. He warned of psychic inflation, infection, of "invasion" from the unconscious. Sounds dire, doesn't it? Like "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," like "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Aba Gort. Klaatu barada nikto!
Jung wasn't kidding, though. He had first-hand experience of such invasions and possessions. Serious business. No laughing matter.
But note also how close such warnings sound to those of the side-show barker. Ladies and Gentlemen, don't get too close! This Beast from the Dark Jungles of Africa will shock you. It will challenge your most cherished beliefs! Don't come inside unless you are sound of body and pure of heart! Only for the brave, courageous and bold!
Such "warnings" sell a lot of tickets.
So you step right up and buy yours for the Gnostic Individuation ride. Show your girl you're no chicken, dammit. Show that guy you're no dum-dum!
I weep for you.
Because yes, life is boring a lot of the time. Not as exciting as you thought it'd be. The wife, the kids. The husband, the job. Is that all there is? Midway on life's journey, your desperation boils over, and no Virgil in sight. Because Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again. Yeah, that's it, that's probably why.
Virgil Kane is the name
and I served on the Danville train...
Or wait. Corn in the fields... Maybe Virgil reincarnated as Carlos Castaneda or Don Miguel Ruiz or Sri Aurobindo or Ram Dass or Deepak Chopra. Listen to the rice as the wind blows 'cross the water... One-a those foreigners with the funny names. One-a them vaguely Oriental types. King Harvest will surely come!
You're individuating now, baby! See? All you needed was a little help, a little expert direction. A Guide, a Guru, a Master.
Step right up.
Stroll by the window displays. Pick yourself a cool archetype, a knowing goddess, a fearless champion. And rework the story of your life so it works out that that's really you. The real you. The realer than real you. Your True Self.
Ta-da!
You're on your mythic journey now, just like Sam Keen promised. You got your mythic image, just like Joe Campbell said. You're a Hero, a Heroine.
Or maybe you're on a particularly addictive form of heroin. Maybe you're shitting yourself blind.
Mystic Bourgeoisie is a history of professional liars, side-show barkers who, for hundreds of years, have promised to help you find a more mythical, mystical story for your life. A deeper meaning. A higher purpose. A better soundtrack.
Scarecrow and a yellow moon
and pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town.
King Harvest has surely come.
Although I'm starting this one with Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, my aim here is not (overtly) political. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, my aim is truth. But nota bene: I do not mean any sort of philosophical or metaphysical capital-T Truth, but rather the plain vanilla garden variety opposite of myth.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and their now innumerable wannabe emulators, the general half-educated public tends to have quite an inflated view of capital-M Myth these days. However, it is worth recalling that the word can also refer to something that just flat-out ain't so.
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary includes these bits in its definition of myth:
an unfounded or false notion
a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, includes these alternative semantics:
a fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology
a fictitious story, person, or thing
Author Will Bunch shows how the "Reagan Myth" -- created posthumously by GOP spin doctors -- fits these negative senses of the word. But long before he went all POTUS on us, Ronnie was already a built-from-a-kit product of "modern" -- really, then only barely nascent -- public relations and advertising. Clearly, such myth makers have a long and hoary (so to speak) history in both political and commercial arenas.
When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.
No worries, though: there's a brand new book on self presentation, published just last year. In this updated case, the presentations are in PowerPoint. And of course, the whole discussion has been "spiritualized." For instance, on page 145 of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, we are told that...
It also doesn't hurt to have the Helvetica Neue UltraLight font in your bag of tricks. Plus a copy of the DSM-IV-TR, which includes this diagnostic criterion for Narcissistic Personality Disorder...
As only hinted in Liar Liar 2, we are back in the world of self as brand manipulation, of identity as infinitely moveable advertising feast. That is to say, back in the special, high-status, high-quality, sophisticated, important and above all spiritual realm of capital-M Myth. And we should therefore not be in the least surprised at this juncture to re-encounter kindly old Father Jung, replete with his archetypes and the collective unconscious, ready to assist with contemporary branding initiatives.
The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales. The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths).
Note a couple of things here. First, "hypothesized by Freud." Hold that thought. Second, re Jung, "a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist." Note the passive voice. Note especially that this is felt as a feeling, an inkling, perhaps a belief -- or a hunch, a conjecture, a shot in the dark. Perhaps Jung simply took a wild ass guess. Finally, note well, highlight, underline, and set off in neon spots the bit about...
conscious elaboration (in myths)
Up until around the time of Jung's death in 1961, Freud had won the depth psychology sweeps hands-down. Psychoanalysis had beat out Analytical Psychology by any and every measure that could be applied to determine things like cultural popularity, number of clients and gross take.
However, with the advent of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s -- thanks largely to their importation and wide distribution by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (but that's another story) -- the inherent spookiness of Jung's crypto-occultism was a better fit with the return of a hallucinatory Zeitgeist. That the '60s were in fact a return to the cultural milieu of fin-de-siecle northern Europe is a major premise of this blog (soon to be a Major Motion Picture) -- and thus a return to Jung's roots, as partially unpacked in Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G. Jung's Psychology (Amazon). Later, the women's movement (with substantial help from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson) debunked Freud's "seduction theory," thus tilting the scales still further, if by default, in favor the Jungian persuasion.
We're getting a bit far afield with this detour, but it's worth noting that in the often dramatic cultural competition between Freud and Jung, the latter -- amazingly, hare-and-tortoise-wise -- won! While neither man's theory of the mind has ever been scientifically proven, Jung's ideas are certainly more "far out," trending toward the arcane, the inexplicably mysterious, even the occult.
It is one of the supreme ironies of the century just past -- which kicked off in 1900 with the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams -- that psychoanalysis is today almost universally considered passe, while nearly anything invoking Jung is taken by many as absolute gospel. Try telling a woman she is suffering from penis envy, and she'll slap your face and walk away. Rightly so. But mention archetypes, alchemy, Gnosticism, or "synchronicity," and chances are good she'll hang on your every word for the entire evening. What's wrong with this picture?
That's the question Mystic Bourgeoisie returns to again and again. In the present case, what's wrong is what's right. For many, the powerful attraction of Jung is that his numinous musings enable a mythic reconfiguration of the Self -- the favorite subject, bar none, of the Mystically Beatified. This is what Jung called "individuation." The Wikipedia discussion of this topic points to a hopelessly confused ("Individuation is the process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious, for the purpose of self-actualization." BZZZZT! WRONG!), but entirely typical source on a site called soultherapynow.com...
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience (Jung, 1989b, p. 294). It is the goal of our psychological development and in metaphysical terms amounts to God's incarnation (Jung, p. 157). Individuation is the central concept and purpose of Jung’s Analytical Psychology (Jung, 1989a, p. 209)...
References
Jung, C. G. (1962). Symbols of Transformation: An analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia (Vol. 2, R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). New York: Harper & Brothers.
Jung, C. G. (1989a). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Rev. ed., C. Winston & R. Winston, Trans.) (A. Jaffe, Ed.). New York: Random House, Inc.
Jung, C. G. (1989b). Psychology and Religion: West and East (2nd ed., R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I have no serious doubts as to whether Jung said those things, in a general sort of way, or even verbatim -- though it's impossible to know from the clip and the references. For instance, Google finds "Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience" only on that soultherapynow.com site. And what "(Jung, p. 157)" might conceivably refer to is left as an exercise for the reader. But this sort of thing gets uncritically passed around the net, and does reflect the popular grasp of all things Jungian, i.e., "our psychological development" = "God's incarnation." w00t!
I shall restrain myself from even mentioning Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut, an excursus into deeply ignorant ideas about "healthy narcissism," of which we know there is no such fucking thing. When I hear the names Jung and Kohut together, I reach for both my revolvers.
At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. When his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he puts on -- and this seems to be the typical case -- then for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the 'realness' of what is presented.
Emphasis mine, of course, as I count myself firmly ensconced among "the socially disgruntled," and with -- as I keep trying to demonstrate here -- damn good reason!
With that in mind, let's turn back to brands. Specifically, to brands and archetypes. More specifically still to Building Brands and Believers: How to Connect with Consumers Using Archetypes (Wiley, 2003), the cover of which is graced with the Signs of the Zodiac -- which I suppose are being offered as brand serving suggestions. Rather than rant at you further at this point, let's just look at a bit of the Table of Contents, shall we?
SECTION II The Mythic Connection
Chapter 5. Archetypes: The Source Code
Chapter 6. Making Modern Mythology
SECTION III Mythic Profiles
Chapter 7. Mythic Profile: The Ultimate Strength
Chapter 8. Mythic Profile: The Siren
Chapter 9. Mythic Profile: The Hero
Chapter 10. Mythic Profile: The Anti-Hero
Chapter 11. Mythic Profile: The Creator
Chapter 12. Mythic Profile: The Change Master
Chapter 13. Mythic Profile: The Powerbroker
Chapter 14. Mythic Profile: The Wise Old Man
Chapter 15. Mythic Profile: The Loyalist
Chapter 16. Mythic Profile: The Mother of Goodness
Chapter 17. Mythic Profile: The Little Trickster
Chapter 18. Mythic Profile: The Enigma
Chapter 19. Mythic Figures in Combination and in
Local Cultures
SECTION IV Harnessing Archetypes
Chapter 20. Managing the Intangible
Chapter 21. Improving Consumer Connections
Now, from the sound of that, combined with the cluelessly lurid cover art, you might be forgiven for thinking the author to be yet another New Age no-brainer on bad drugs. However, while I frame no hypothesis as to his actual IQ, get a load of this official "About the Author" clip...
Kent Wertime is a veteran of the international advertising and communications industry. His career to date has included executive positions in New York, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore. Kent has worked with dozens of blue-chip multinational clients, covering a wide range of product categories. He is also an experienced writer and lecturer whose articles and professional commentary appear frequently in the Asian press, including the Asian Wall Street Journal, Media, CNN, and CNBC. Currently, Kent is the CEO of OgilvyInteractive Asia, the Interactive division of the Ogilvy & Mather Group.
If you don't find that at least vaguely horrifying, try this blurb from no less a light than Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University...
Kent Wertime successfully argues that while products are becoming more alike, brands can avoid "commoditization" by drawing on the rich language of archetypes to tap into more unconscious and emotional levels that influence consumer perception and preference.
We are now fully through the looking glass. That wasn't very painful, now was it? Unless you object to Global Economy by Ouija Board. Unless you thought rationality was still intact among the much vaunted spoils of some fondly imagined Age of Enlightenment 1.0. Unless you thought "New Age" was merely something involving tinfoil hats and crystal gazing in Sedona, AZ.
But oh, it gets so much richer! In How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), author Douglas B. Holt -- the L’Oreal Chair of Marketing at Oxford University, so he should know! -- "shows how iconic brands create 'identity myths' that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change."
Don't you feel soothed already, just reading that? Can you handle a little more? This is from p. 39...
Targeting myth markets can be a complicated task, for they don't stand still. In fact, myth markets are routinely destabilized by cultural disruptions: Symbolic earthquakes pulse through society, shattering the value of existing myth markets and spurring the creation of new ones. Iconic brands not only target the most appropriate myth market; they are also sensitive to cultural disruptions, shifting their target when opportunity strikes. Successful iconic brands leap nimbly across cultural disruptions by deciphering the new myth markets created by the disruption and homing in on a new target.
Sounds pretty freakin impressive, no? Until you read the next sentence: "One especially agile iconic brand has been Mountain Dew."
In the preface, Holt tells a story about an ad for Diet Coke that used the Cheap Trick song, I Want You To Want Me. He describes the voiceover by Renée Zellweger about some loser flossing his teeth in the apartment across the alleyway or some such bullshit. The details are supremely unimportant, trust me. Then the author tells us...
this ad touched me because Diet Coke had grabbed familiar cultural source material and used it to tell a story about manhood, a story I wanted to believe in. The story tells us that guys caught up in frivolous pop music, guys so immersed in their music that they find spiritual moments in the most mundane of tasks, are endearing, even cool in a way.
That was when the projectile vomiting set in.
When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term 'sincere' for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance. It should be understood that the cynic, with all his professional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasures from his masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that he can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously.
This was going to be a lot longer, but it's too long already. So I guess there'll be a Liar Liar 4, and maybe even a Liar Liar 5. Lying turns out to be a central theme and major mode for the Mystic Bourgeoisie, even if they call it their "Mythic Journey," which is where we'll pick it up next time.
We live in a spiritual economy. There is a
marketplace for worldviews and communities as
well as goods and services. There are both
consumers and producers of belief systems and
community. And the laws of supply and demand
apply as much in the spiritual exchange as
they do in the economic. Where the economic
and spiritual marketplaces differ, however,
is that in the former, demand can rise and
fall. In the spiritual marketplace demand is
pretty constant. There is always a need to
belong and make meaning. They are the
essentials of the human condition after all.
In a later chapter called "Self-Liberation Through Consumerism" -- the section is titled "Heinz Kohut and the Valorization of Narcissism: The Self Takes Center Stage" -- Cushman talks about Kohut's "self psychology" and theory of narcissism, writing (p. 270) that Kohut confused appearance for essence, that is, taking culturally conditioned psychological dynamics for universal human truths. He says that Kohut
...saw the whole mid- to late twentieth-century clearing -- the appearance of emptiness, confusion, isolation, the commodification of human life -- and called it essence. By doing so he reified the given, gave it a scientific justification, and encouraged its continuation. Ultimately, this is the source of his limitation, and ours as well.
And there's this a page later...
......self structure is both built (through psychologically taking in and metabolizing the parent's qualities) and liberated (through the unfolding plan of the nuclear self). The consumer language in [Kohut's] formulation should be obvious. The two characteristic elements of twentieth-century American consumerism -- individual salvation through the consuming of commodities and the liberation of the enchanted interior -- are clearly evident.
Relationships Are Tools
Other people are viewed as objects or tools in the quest for distinction, and the narcissistic patient expends a great deal of mental energy comparing him- or herself and judging the worth of others. If others have the potential to advance the narcissist in some way, they will be idealized and pursued. If others are perceived as ordinary or inferior, they will he dismissed, or perhaps exploited for some gain, then discarded.
You know what I'm thinking? No, of course not. That's why I write this stuff. To tell you. And what I'm thinking right now, as I track down references to C. Wright Mills and Ralph Waldo Emerson (more about them later on), only to find myself, via Google, thinking about the same stuff six years ago... what I'm thinking now is that maybe it's time for certain parts of Entropy Gradient Reversals to come together with certain parts of Mystic Bourgeoisie. Since we've lately been getting so personal and all. I mean, it's all coming from the same source, my attempts at diversionary prestidigitation notwithstanding.
So here. This is cryptic as hell, hell being perhaps merely a form of cryptomnesia. And more on that later, too. In the meantime...
Sunday, April 13, 2003Border Patrol
coyote moon, half high, half full,
girl on the radio singing no one
could ever compare to you. middle
of the night, I'm out of cigarettes.
all day reading Alice Miller. not
reading really. what I do. tracking
something down.
two days ago I bought this first
edition. not that I collect the
things. not for their dates of
publication anyway. I got a coffee
and walked back to where I'd read
those first few pages a year and
change ago.
and funny thing, it was a different
book. Prisoners of Childhood it was
called in 1981 when this all started,
just now noticing. that fits. nothing
else does. not really. not well. the
receipt I found in the other one says
01-27-02. sitting in this same spot
that day outside of starbucks on the
mall I said oh my god, this is me.
well of course it was. and everyone
else. what marketing genius.
back then I'd been thinking about
C. Wright Mills. about voice. about
anything but the moon. thinking that
he'd said the sociological imagination
flowered where biography intersected
history.
but in the Drama of the Gifted Child,
Alice Miller says in those first few
pages, first paragraph in fact, that
biography is all that counts, and not
all that abstract intellectual stuff.
it's all we have, she says, to protect
us from mental illness. I'm quoting.
for the personal history of our
childhood defines, for each of us,
she says, our own truth. your truth
my truth his truth her truth.
and this truth, though different for
each, so different that it takes a
boatload of empathy to get it, is that
each of us was abused raped sodomized
beaten. left for dead. but nobody wants
to hear about your truth because of
this secret conspiracy of nasty old-boy
psychoanalysts to hush it all up, like
Freud with his drives and instincts.
Eros was bad enough, but how about
Thanatos, she says. and now how do you
like your blue eyed boy, Mr. Death?
but here's the weird thing. in the
first edition, she says I'm not going
to talk a lot about narcissism. then
does. at length. by that name. on and
on. however, by the new improved second
edition, the word doesn't appear at
all except in a brief retelling of
the story of Narcissus and Echo, which
just sort of sits there, disconnected.
split off and out of place.
she doesn't like Melanie Klein or
Kernberg she says, with their over harsh
views about darkness and pathology. she
does like Kohut, though, who deep sixed
all that nonsense about drives and said
no, instead it was all the self, evolving
naturally, coming to its own realization.
it's own truth, you could say.
but tell me something Alice, honey, where
does all that abusive aggression come from
then? when the true self blooms in the
gentle listening of someone as enlightened
as yourself (no other authors are cited),
is it all just perfect niceness after that?
and nobody anymore wants a piece of your
action?
and tell me another thing before you go.
what happened to all those references to
narcissism, leaving us with our little
personal stories but no common history,
no imagination, except for an undriven
darkness that, in truth, does not exist?
and why no mention of solipsism, leaving
me with your truth, the revised expanded
second edition, and me with this coyote
moon, half high, half empty. girl on the
radio, interrupted.
10:22 AM | link |
I once knew a woman, or thought I did, who told me the following story. We were in bed together at the time, which is to say, it was an intimate moment, not an oh-by-the-way sort of thing. The story was meant to convey something deeply meaningful, and she told it that way.
Once, she said, she was walking home at night, and a car pulled up alongside her. The driver offered her a ride, and naively, she got in. As soon as she did, all the locks clicked shut and she instantly knew he was planning to rape and quite possibly kill her. Panic washed over her. But then, just as suddenly, she was enveloped by a feeling of deep calm. Not knowing why she did it, she reached over and touched the man's arm. "Don't worry," she said. "I won't hurt you."
As soon as she said this the doors unlocked and the man roughly shoved her out. Then, without a single word, he drove away.
I was stunned by this story, deeply moved. What incredible insight, intuition. What courage. My amazing lover, what a woman! In a couple of my books, I wrote: "I'm a motherfucker, baby, your mind my sky, your eyes my fire." Click the link. Read between the lines. It wasn't a casual relationship.
But as George Harrison warned us, while his guitar gently wept, all things must pass. Yes, yes, how true. Yet, not being George Harrison, nor of his Hindoo-cum-faux-Boodist persuasion about The Impermanence and such as, things didn't pass all that smoothly.
Sometimes you look back on your life and wish you'd made different choices. For me, the road not taken entailed a sawed-off and a life stretch in Florence. Ah well, maybe George was right. What good is it now to cry over might-have-beens?
OK, so I passed on my one real opportunity for interpersonal mayhem. But that didn't mean I, you know, moved on. I am morally and philosophically opposed to moving on. This blog is living proof. This blog is all about asking what happened? What went wrong? This blog is about answering the sort of questions most people never think to pose, opting instead for a wistful and comforting sense of remorse and personal guilt. To quote from the final movement of Repo Man...
Girlfriend: "Don't just go! What about our relationship?"
Otto: "Huh?"
Girlfriend: "What about our relationship?"
Otto: "Fuck that!"
Girlfriend: "You shit!"
That movie helped me a great deal at a difficult time.
Then time moved on of course, even if I did not, and one day in a local used bookstore I found an old paperback copy of Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce. The first edition was published in 1977, three or four years before I first met the woman who told me the story recounted above. Keep in mind that she told me that story during our second go-round circa 2000-2002, and that I knew this was a book she'd read before our first tour, you might say, in 1981. Not only read, but studied carefully. And talked about. I have a good memory for lovers and books.
So I bought Magical Child and brought it back to my lair. During the worst months of the worst depression I've ever lived through (and there was some non-trivial question pending at the time as to whether I would), it sat unread in a stack on my coffee table, which was already spilling over with books like Severe Personality Disorders and the complete series of Essential Papers in Psychoanalysis. They say that, when you break up, you learn so much about yourself. Well fuckin-A, they got that right! Here's a picture of me during those dark days, doing my best to look sane and harmless...
One day, maybe six months later, I picked up that battered copy of Magical Child. Hmmm, I thought idly, I wonder. Now, I don't read in the usual linear way, and there was no way in hell I was going to slog through all of Joseph Chilton Pearce's honeyed prose, so soon, I was nearly done with the damn thing.
Then I hit the passage that begins on page 225. What with The Healing and all, it has taken me something like six years to get around to copying it out as Exhibit A in a case that was never tried. I hope you enjoy it even a fraction as much as I did at the time. Picture me sitting there for an hour afterwards with my mouth hanging open and a dumbstruck look on my face.
A remarkable woman in her early thirties, formerly an actress, now working for a doctorate in psychology, related the following incident at a seminar.
As she was approaching her apartment in New York City late one evening, a car suddenly pulled up, and she was yanked into the front seat between two young men, a knife point immediately jabbing at her throat, all in the wink of an eye. The two young men immediately began babbling at her, their speech sporadic and half incoherent, that they were taking her out to New Jersey and were going to rape and kill her. They demanded that she tell them how it felt to be getting ready to die. It dawned on her that they meant it, that they were in a state of high agitation and had all the earmarks of intense fear and anger. They shook physically, the knife point at her throat jogging little stabs.
After an initial panic, realization of the futility of her position and a calm acceptance of her death swept over her. She replied to their frenzied questions calmly and earnestly. Now that she had accepted her death, her focus clarified and shifted. She became increasingly intrigued over the young men's fear and almost total lack of physical control. An odd maternal concern over them began to dominate her thoughts. She asked them about themselves, although they only insisted, like broken records, that she tell them what it felt like to be getting ready to die. She told them that she was sorry she had to die because she was young but that she understood perfectly well what the rape-kidnap laws were and realized why they would have to kill her. But what, she asked them, were they so afraid of? Why were they shaking so?
It was a strange conversation as they drove the thirty-odd miles out into a desolate, deserted part of the Jersey tidewater region. The men grew exasperated, confused. and more belligerent, all but pleading that she tell them how it felt to be getting ready to die. She prodded them with gentle, spontaneous, and utterly sincere questions about themselves and about why, knowing they had to do as they must do, they were so afraid. She assured them that all was well, that they did not have to be concerned on her account.
They arrived at a place that seemed familiar to them and in the dim light pointed out to her several mounds they claimed to be previous victims. Demanding that she tell them how it felt to be the next, they stripped her and threw her to the ground, both now whimpering and making strange noises. Looking up at the boy mounted over her, she dimly sensed a contorted and broken face. Compassion filled her anew, and she put her hands up, cradled his cheeks in her palms, and said quietly, "It's all right. You don't have to be afraid."
At this, the young man collapsed into a heap, overcome with great, wracking sobs, shaking uncontrollably in the spasm of wild grief. The other man sat pounding the ground and shouting, "What is it? What is it? What's gone wrong?" Then he, too, burst into the same strange, grief-stricken sobs.
It was some time before they quieted enough that she could speak to them and say quietly, "Boys, we may as well go home." Without a word, only their continued sobbing, they drove her back to the city. At the first subway, she suggested they let her out, which they did. She told us she had $300 in her purse, but they had given no thought to money. On impulse, she asked them would they lend her the money for the subway, which they did. She turned her back to them, started down the steps, heard them drive away, put her money in the turnstile, walked through, and fainted dead away. When she was questioned by the policeman who revived her, she replied, "If I told you, you'd never believe me."
well let me tell you about the way she looked
the way she acted and the color of her hair
her voice was soft and cool
her eyes were clear and bright
but she's not there
In May of last year, in a post called I Can Get It For You Wholesale, I begged you (yes you, The Valued Readers) to buy me what I was then calling The Library of World Bullshit. This is a series of books including...
No sooner had I posted that than I got my wish! This is all fully documented in a post unaccountably titled 300: Prepare for Glory. These days, given the state of The Economy, I am begging for food, not books, but I did want to share the wealth by alerting you to a site I found while slumming the nether reaches of the web yesterday. Click the graphic below and be amazed!
One assumes that's a photo of author/editor Tom Butler-Bowdon, and not a male model, but no matter. Point is, if you click on it, you will be treated to many substantial excerpts from these valuable and informative books. In an interview with some unspecified interrogator, Butler-Bowdon says:
While Christians may view Goddess worship as the work of the devil, its adherents find in it a beautiful and complete expression of the sacred feminine power.
Not being a Christian myself, I don't view Goddesses worship as the "work of the devil" -- unless it is that infamous devil in the details. Let's explore some of those, shall we?
In aid of said exploration, I'm going to share a very cool pop-culture research trick with you here. And make no mistake, it's in popular culture that these ideas really take root and play out, not in the realm of academic scholarship. So here's the trick. If you go to Zinio.com, you'll see a search box at the top of the page. As Zinio sells electronically delivered magazine subscriptions, most people would reasonably think to enter the name of a magazine. But as Zinio apparently indexes the full text of all its 900+ magazines, you can search for anything. For instance, searching on "goddess" I found the following...
...A home that is happy, welcoming and healthy is the goal of this goddess. Annette Gardner and Anne Nash of 21st Century Goddess work with goddess energy, offering themed parties and trips to sacred sites...
And you can even embed riffy graphical links to the full article in your blog, like so.
So how cool is that? But the ultracool thing is, your query will even turn up stuff in the advertising -- the sine qua non of pop culture. My "goddess" query found, among many other hits, this...
Expanding on the ad at the top of the right page, we get...
“Here at Fertile Goddess we believe in the
inspirational connection between real women and the
bountiful power and wisdom of ancient fertility
goddesses....
From her days studying archaeology, [founder] Stacia
[Wells] knew that in many ancient cultures, abundance
was synonymous with fertility.”
I have emphasized "archeology" above because it plays into the rest of our story, which will serve to explain the particular brand of archeology Ms. Wells most likely studied.
I sometimes tire of people asking if my beat here on Mystic Bourgeoisie is not trivially marginal to mainstream American culture, and thus the world's. If you should entertain such misgivings, click that Newsweek / Washington Post link where you can read in Starhawk's mini-bio about how she "travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism," and posts stuff like this bit from Compassion Begins With Mother Earth...
Earth based spirituality covers such a wide spectrum of diverse religions and spiritual traditions, from indigenous traditions to modern NeoPagansim. We share no unified dogma, and no one person carries the authority to speak for all, certainly not me.
That would be the same Margot Adler who once told me, personally -- in front of a sizable audience -- that I was her kinda guy. No lie. At the time, which was April of 2000, we were both speaking on a panel at the University of Colorado's 52nd annual Conference on World Affairs. So you see, I've come a long way too, baby.
However, witches, druids, goddess-worshippers, and other pagans -- whether in America or elsewhere -- are no longer saying nice things about me. Not if they've ever read this blog. But let's get back to Starhawk and her latest documentary, which is about the archeologist Marija Gimbutas -- about whom I wrote back in June, 2006, in Yogis, Shapersons and Goddesses (if you didn't catch it the first time around, don't miss The Da Vinci Code movie review).
In 1974 she published a celebrated analysis of the figurines which had long been recognized as one of the most remarkable features of neolithic and Copper Age sites in south-eastern Europe. Following the collapse of general scholarly belief in a Great Goddess, she treated these as representations of individual deities and interpreted their symbolism -- elaborately and boldly -- according to a system which had been developed in its essentials by the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann, whom she acknowledged and praised.
Jung, of course, as we might have suspected. But continuing...
It was only in the late 1970s that feminist theory replaced Jungian psychology as her major conceptual tool, and this may not be unrelated to the fact that she taught in the University of California, Los Angeles.
Your...
...at this juncture would not be inappropriate.
A much fuller description of the Gimbutas debate is provided by an article in Lingua Franca (April/May 1997) by Lawrence Osborne. It's called...
And not all the naysayers are men, by a long shot. Quoting from the above...
Lotte Motz, an expert on Germanic mythology, argues that images of men and animals are just as prolific as goddess imagery in early European cultures.
Lauren Talalay at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, Michigan, claims that Gimbutas's work was as marred by gender bias as that of her Russian peers in the 1950s.
For many scholars, the Pokrovka warrior women serve as the final nail in Gimbutas's coffin, putting her male-marauder theory permanently to rest. "We have this macho myth about the so-called Kurgan nomads, that they were hierarchical warmongers and so forth," says Claudia Chang, an archaeologist at Sweet Briar College, who works on Kurgan graves in central Asia. "But in fact, as these recent excavations are showing, their kinship system often favored women and enabled them to enter the military and social elite."
What you see in the video on the Belili Productions website is the first minute and a half of this more complete YouTube video, which is the first part of Starhawk's documentary about Marija Gimbutas, "Signs Out of Time."
Olympia Dukakis (narrator): "What does the dance mean to the dancers? How do we measure the beliefs that set those feet in motion?"
Good questions, to which we will eventually loop around again.
Lord Colin Renfrew: "She felt she had a direct line to these things. So she felt to some extent that she could understand it in an intuitive way. I'd almost say a feminine way, but that might be... I might be criticized by some of your more critical viewers. But she had a very holistic approach to things."
James Harrod: "And that's why it was so creative. It was that cross-fertilization of ideas which enabled her to see things which other people hadn't seen."
Olympia Dukakis: "But artists, ecologists, feminists, contemporary goddess worshippers, and social thinkers were deeply inspired by her work."
Joan Marler: "When Marija began to publish her work on the symbolism of Old Europe it just happened to coincide with the second wave of feminism and the development of eco-feminism and sense of rediscovering the fact that we are connected with this Earth."
Ernestine Elster: "There were feminists who found in Marija's ideas the scientist who they had hoped would support their ideas that once God was a woman. And so she was borne aloft by, really, a lively group of women -- and pr... men too. And she never looked back." [note: the "pr..." elision was probably "probably" -- doncha think?]
Patricia Reis: "So the backlash against her I think was part of the backlash against feminism, because she got identified with feminism."
By the way, if you click on the names above, you'll find some... interesting background on these people.
The voiceover then refers to Gimbutas' home country: "Lithuania, where goddesses have never been forgotten." We'll come back to that shortly -- and with a vengeance.
But first note the interesting logic on display above: What many (including myself) believe to be a crackpot theory just happened to intersect with "second wave feminism" (there have been more waves than two, but we'll let that ride) and was accepted, adopted and championed by a whole herd of crackpots who were eagerly awaiting a crackpot with a Ph.D. in Archeology and a bunch of cracked pottery, who, and which, supported their own crackpot theories.
Urban also wrote Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Both books are published by the University of California Press, and Urban is Associate Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Whether because of or in spite of these credentials, he seems to know what he's talking about, and his books are a needed counterbalance to the plethora of absolute malarkey about "Tantric Sex" that is being spewed around these days by the ignorant loonies of the Mystic Bourgeoisie. He writes in Tantra (p. 2)...
As we can see on the shelves of any bookstore, Tantra pervades Western pop culture, appearing in an endless array of books, videos, and slick web sites. Indeed the phrase "American Tantra" is now even a registered trademark, representing a whole line of books, videos, and "ceremonial sensual" merchandise.
Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century -- from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones’s discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes. Considering the developments of the twentieth century, Arvidsson focuses on the adoption of Indo-European scholarship (or pseudoscholarship) by the Nazis and by Fascist Catholics.
While "Fascist Catholics" is certainly a show-stopper phrase, don't let it overshadow that reference to pseudoscholarship. Meanwhile, you can read the full review right here...
The reviewer, Michael Witzel (Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard), notes that 19th-century linguists Max Müller and Hermann Hirt had argued against drawing connections between language and race. He then continues...
I found this interesting note on p. 293 of Aryan Idols...
Marler (1997) stresses Gimbutas's strong Lithuanian identity and the traumatic consequences that the Polish and later the Russian Bolshevik occupation of Lithuania had for her and her educated family, who seem to have held liberal and romantic-nationalist values. As for many Lithuanians during the interwar period, the German army instead seemed like defenders of the Lithuanian culture.
So what have we got here so far? Archeology, Feminism, Indo-European languages, Hindu Tantra, The Goddess, The Four Noble Truths, Hour-Long Orgasms, Perfect Great Enlightenment, Total Utter Bullshit... As The Cars once said: it's all mixed up.
But maybe, just maybe, we can still extract some shred of sense out of this bubbling cauldron of newts' eyes and fenny snakes.
Something about the opening bars of that Starhawk/Gimbutas video made me uncomfortable. Dancing peasants happily cavorting around bonfires always give me a creepy feeling. They conjure up images of the carefree Wandervogelcirca 1900, about whom I've written elsewhere. (Click graphic for more.)
Point is, many of those kids, several decades after their youthful revels, were signing up with the Nazi Party.
So, on a hunch, I broke out of Starhawk's "Signs Out of Time" vid and googled "Lithuania Holocaust" -- without the quotes. And the first thing I found was a Wikipedia page called (predictably, but still I was floored) Holocaust in Lithuania. It says...
The Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Lithuania resulted in the near total destruction of Lithuanian Jews living in the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian territories... Out of approximately 208,000 to 210,000 Jews, an estimated 195,000 - 196,000 perished before the end of World War II (wider estimates are sometimes published)...
It has taken me several days to put this into the context that the balance of this post will attempt to present. This has already been long, I know, but I hope you'll bear with me to the bitter end. And it is bitter indeed.
On June 13, 1942, the commanding officer of Reserve Police Battalion 101 received orders to round up the Jews in the Polish town of Josefow and shoot all but the able-bodied males. Major Wilhelm Trapp, who wept over the order, gave his troops the extraordinary option of "excusing themselves" from the task. Of the 500 in the unit only a dozen did so, and the rest slaughtered 1500 women, children and old people. ...these ordinary men, mostly middle-aged working-class people from Hamburg, shot to death some 38,000 Polish Jews and sent 45,000 others to the Treblinka gas chambers. ...this short work... reveals how average Germans became mass murderers.
Refuting the widespread notion that those who carried out the genocide of Jews were primarily SS men or Nazi party members, he demonstrates that the perpetrators -- those who staffed and oversaw the concentration camps, slave labor camps, genocidal army units, police battalions, ghettos, death marches -- were, for the most part, ordinary German men and women: merchants, civil servants, academics, farmers, students, managers, skilled and unskilled workers. Rejecting the conventional view that the killers were slavishly carrying out orders under coercion, Goldhagen, assistant professor of government at Harvard, uses hitherto untapped primary sources, including the testimonies of the perpetrators themselves, to show that they killed Jews willingly, approvingly, even zealously.
A declaration issued after the war by the Lithuanian Jews in the American zone in Germany regarding "the guilt of the Lithuanian people in the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry" concludes: "The small places in the Lithuanian provinces, without any exception, were erased by the Lithuanians." This declaration actually sums up the events detailed in Lithuanian Jewry, the volume on the Holocaust: the handful of survivors of 220 Shtetles and small towns describe how the Jews in those places were killed. Their descriptions, in which the Germans are hardly mentioned, make it quite clear that Lithuanians perpetrated most of the torture and killing, generally without any German officials on the spot. Recent research confirms Jewish sources to a large extent. The German historian Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, in his research on the Einsatzgruppen, assumes that "possibly half or two-thirds" of Lithuanian Jews were killed by local units. It seems, then, that the part played by the Lithuanians was greater than the Germans could afford to admit in their reports to their headquarters.
...a group of Lithuanian "Activists," under the command of Germans who came from Shirvint, attacked the city. They ordered all Jewish males above the age of fourteen out to the streets. There armed Lithuanians were waiting and they took them under heavy guard to the District Council building. Council officials collected their papers, money and anything of value found on them.
In groups of fifty the Jews were taken to the Jewish cemetery. There, pits which were excavated by Soviet prisoners of war were ready. One hundred ninety-two of the prisoners were murdered by the Germans and the Lithuanian "Activists." They were shot at the edge of the pits.... The district governor and the council head were present at this mass execution. ...all those who participated were invited by the district governor and council head to a large banquet. The two thanked the Germans and the Lithuanians who participated in the mass slaughter for their efforts.
To make this even more real, try watching these YouTube videos:
Holocaust Testimony: Murder of the Jews of Lithuania
Dina Baitler, age seven, was brought to the forest of Ponary outside of the city of Vilna, Lithuania together with thousands of other Jews. From morning till night the Jews were lined up and shot into pits located in the forest.
Holocaust Survivor Describes Escape from Cattle Car
Born in 1930 in Kaunas, Lithuania, Kalman Perk was deported with his family to the Kovno ghetto in 1941. Hiding in a cellar in July 1944 to escape the impending liquidation of the ghetto, the family was forced to abandon their hiding place due to German-ignited fires in the ghetto. They were then loaded onto a cattle car and deported to the concentration camps.
Remember this? "Lithuania, where goddesses have never been forgotten."
So it wasn't just the Germans. And it wasn't just the men.
The representation of female perpetrators and their defence strategy in various Nazi trials is a largely neglected topic but played an important part in the collective strategy of denying any guilt. Accused women exploited their gender status by arguing that they had been exploited and had acted in subordinate positions as helpless assistants in a regime that was led by men. Furthermore, analyses of "courtroom culture" and "media representation" of trials show that female perpetrators were stereotyped and demonised as complete deviations from femininity and exceptional "female brutes", e.g., Ilse Koch, "the witch from Buchenwald", Carmen Maria Mory, "the devil" of Ravensbrück, or Herta Oberheuser, "the sadist of Ravensbrück". This discourse disguised the participation of a large number of women in Nazi crimes, and served to avoid a critical self-reflection on the past. In short, the picture of "unnatural femininity" and dehumanised creatures with unbridled sexuality allowed society to construct a counter-model of itself as normal and innocent.
I ended the last one (
You know what I'm thinking? No, of course not. That's why I write this stuff. To tell you. And what I'm thinking right now, as I track down references to C. Wright Mills and Ralph Waldo Emerson (more about them later on), only to find myself, via Google, thinking about the same stuff six years ago... what I'm thinking now is that maybe it's time for certain parts of Entropy Gradient Reversals to come together with certain parts of Mystic Bourgeoisie. Since we've lately been getting so personal and all. I mean, it's all coming from the same source, my attempts at diversionary prestidigitation notwithstanding.
. They say that, when you break up, you learn so much about yourself. Well fuckin-A, they got that right! Here's a picture of me during those dark days, doing my best to look sane and harmless...
Yeah, but hey, Newsweek, The Washington Post... you've sure got a bully pulpit! Though, granted, it's not as if there aren't plenty of other speakers for "earth based spirituality." For instance, also published in 1979, there's 
