on the road to sham-ba-la...

coming january 2006 So that's pretty exciting. There are so many myths about the hollow earth, aka Arktos. Here's one of the many, in this case brought to you by the... person who wrote The Celestine Prophecy, so you know it's got to be good... "...the narrator makes an imaginary journey to Tibet in search of Shambhala (also known as Shangri-La)" ~ Publishers Weekly But as usual, it wasn't all wonderfulness in the underground. Bulwer-Lytton (don't laugh; he was more popular than Dickens) introduced some disturbing elements in The Coming Race. Like race. Not to mention (but what the hell, let's) VRIL... These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call 'atmospheric magnetism,' they can influence the variations of temperature -- in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. Madame Blavatsky, noted mystic & romantic plagiarist herself, was a big fan of Bulwer-Lytton. She ripped off a whole raft of this stuff. And how about those subterranean Morlocks in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine? Not to mention (again) Dr. Moreau's little band of miscreants. "Not to go on all fours, that is the Law. Are we not men?" Well, no, as it turns out. We are devo. things get a bit out of control Now, as mentioned last week (if you've been following our little matinee serial) the keyword for this fear of devolution is degeneration, as in: theory of. And while looking for something else tonight (god only knows), what should I stumble across but the following abstract on PubMed... Mental Retardation 1995 Feb;33(1):1-9. The beast in man: degenerationism and mental retardation, 1900-1920. Gelb SA School of Education, University of San Diego, CA 92110. It is widely believed that the eugenics movement was largely responsible for the turn of the century perception that individuals with mental retardation were a social menace. However, that explanation fails to account for the vast corpus of 19th century degeneration theory, which, in the Progressive era, became the lens through which mental retardation was viewed. In this paper I have described the chain of theological and scientific reasoning that led to the linkage of mental retardation with the evolutionary "mark of the beast," a development that not only helped fuel the notorious myth of the "menace of the feeble-minded" but also cast a long shadow into this century. Something atavistic, dark and dangerous, lurks in the mind, in the recurrent nightmares of the imagined collective unconscious. Through the murk and the mystification, a picture begins to emerge. It is not pretty. And it is not yet "history" . . .

lost continents & the hollow earth the polar myth in science, symbolism, and nazi survival sacred path of the warrior wash away my troubles, wash away my pain... freud: the uncanny

A car burns near a residential building in Strasbourg's northern suburb of Cronenbourg November 7, 2005. Rioters shot at police and torched more than 1,400 cars in the worst violence since unrest erupted in France's poor suburbs 11 days ago
REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

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