the infinite shelf-life of self-esteem

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love -- because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone. ayn rand - the virtue of shellfish Don't ask what I was doing on the Quent Cordair um "Fine Art" site. I am, after all -- am I not? -- a culture critic. Suffice it to say that when I ran across the page for one Nick Gaetano, I immediately recognized the style as that of the cover art for the many popular (why?) books by Ayn Rand. I was right and wrong. It's not just in the style of. The paintings are, in fact, the original art for the covers of those books. Here's my favorite. Speaking of unbetrayed values, this one can be yours for $595. In addition to being art deco, I believe this work falls into the category of cultural artifacts that might be roughly categorized as triumphalist.

american sampler

if you can do it with music, why not with book covers? these (mostly) link to their actual sources, (all of) which are "studies" of the paranormal. but i think they'd be better as books about global politics. don't you?

i am having a near-death experience

Oh no. I just got my Namaste newsletter from Tupak Okra and... oh god this is terrible... he's moving in! Just down the road from where I live. Less than ten miles from here. Even worse, he thinks we are one. I know that he's one, but he should speak for himself. Here, from the "press kit," is the lovely Ananda complex. That's the Westin hotel on the right. I've gone here with my daughter, Selene, dangled my feet in the water, fed the ducks. Now it's going to be crawling with the absolute dregs of the Mystic Bourgeoisie. It's like what? Boulder wasn't bad enough? Now I know that, if there's a God, It hates me. The following are clips from the "press kit," along with a few interpolated remarks. I think you'll be able to tell which parts are mine and which parts are from the Ananda condo-bondage folks. LIFESTYLE AT ANANDA Namaste. Welcome to Ananda, Colorado’s premier wellness destination, a true home for relaxation, recreation and inspiration. There goes the neighborhood. Translated from ancient Sanskrit, Ananda means joyful bliss. Anyone breathing the crisp Rocky Mountain air, meditating in the abundant Colorado sunshine or enjoying Westminster’s open spaces knows how fortunate he or she is to own a part of it. Translated from ancient Sanskrit, Westminster means strip mall with a 24-screen multiplex -- a great place to boot up a little crank on a Saturday night at Ricky's All Day Grill, discover the open space between your ears. Cop a blissful part of that scene, motherfucker! Inspired by the colors and textures of Colorado’s high plains, Ananda is a collection of luxury residences, Colorado’s only Chopra Center & Spa, and retail space over-looking a calming lake and connected by tree lined pedestrian paths to the Westin Hotel and the Westminster Promenade. Ranging from the mid $200’s to over one million dollars, Ananda’s executive studios and dramatic one, two, and three bedroom floor plans capture the spirit of the Rocky Mountains with soulful spaces, appealing atmospheres and inspired lifestyles balanced with services, amenities and recreation. Yeah, the place'll make you feel like a million bucks -- lighter. But hey, what's money when your spiritual well being is at stake? What are you, some sort of crass materialist? Just look at this pure whiteblond Aryan Brahman caste woman communing with Nature. She's getting her needs met simply by premeditating her next move in the Now. In an inner, holistic kind of way, she is watching the detectives. She's filing her nails as they're dragging the lake... And you? All you can think about is money. Or how much you'd like to light up her chakras with your serpent power. You should be ashamed of yourself. The Rocky Mountain Chopra Center and Spa is designed to heal, renew and invigorate your mind, body and soul by infusing a soothing environment with a highly trained staff of therapists and trainers. Good. I'm going to need a highly trained staff of therapists once these bastards move in. The blending of medicine, psychology, and philosophy, the centuries-old Ayurvedic techniques used at the Rocky Mountain Chopra Center and Spa help you identify your optimal mind and body balance. Smoke lots of cigarettes and eat as many cheeseburgers as possible. Am I getting warmer? Anyway, it goes on... So I'll just leave you with this suitable for framing portrait of Mr. Wonderful himself...

every aspect of the design of the rocky mountain chopra center and spa will encourage you to explore your true nature, which is infinite, miraculous, and whole. i invite you to join us at the center and experience the ocean of peace, harmony, and love that lies deep within your being. ~ Deepak Chopra

ayn randroids and the pagan pecking order

A savvy reader alerted me to this fabulous (in more ways than one) chart of "who looks down on whom" in the postmodern pagan hierarchy. My favorite entry by far is the Ayn Randroids, as pictured here. In FAQ-style, the author writes: 4. How come I'm down at the bottom of the hierarchy? It might be because society despises you which fact I am merely observing (e.g., Otherkin), or it may be because I, personally, despise you (e.g. white people who claim to be reincarnated American Indian priestesses) and society ought to despise you. The graphic is large and requires panning around the screen unless you have a very large display, but it's worth the effort. Highly recommended. (btw, Otherkin was a new one on me.) In keeping with both the foregoing and the season, the graphic in the right column links to Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween. The incident at Salem began in the winter of 1691, when a niece and daughter of the Salem pastor Samuel Parris began to exhibit bizarre behavior. After frightening themselves with with forbidden fortune-telling games, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris became subject to fits of babbling accompanied by strange physical contortions Other girls became similarly afflicted, and soon the hysterical children were accusing neighbors and acquaintances of witchcraft. And, as Kurt Vonnegut might say, so it goes... As he might also say: welcome to the monkey house.

was emanuel swedenborg smoking crack?

Despite my sensational headline, the controversy is really over whether Swedenborg was schizophrenic or perhaps had temporal lobe epilepsy. The alternative view -- that he was actually talking to angels, demons and the dearly departed -- seems delusional in itself. But hey, maybe that's just me. The following is from the British Journal of Psychiatry (1994: 165: 690­691), as reproduced on the Swedenborg Digital Library: Henry Maudsley (1869) wrote a controversial pathography of Swedenborg, proposing that his religious mystical experiences were psychotic in origin. This provoked violent criticism of himself and an angry response from Swedenborg's disciples. When a new edition of his Pathology of Mind appeared in 1895, all reference to Swedenborg's psychosis, present in the previous edition of 1879, had been omitted; Maudsley had presumably submitted to the pressures of Swedenborg's followers. . . . Swedenborg never proselytized his beliefs, although his writings about his unique experiences in the spirit world were, after his death, responsible for the foundation of the Church of the New Jerusalem, which was established in London in 1780. His teachings have appealed to a distinguished group of followers, such as Blake, Balzac, Baudelaire, Emerson, Strindberg and Yeats. There is much more debate at that site on the question of Swedenborg's madness. If you're interested, go to Swedenborg and His Revelation: An Anthology, then page down to "Part II. The Insanity Question (from a special issue of The New Philosophy 1998;101: (whole number))." Despite much pushback among that crowd, I'm going with my gut DSM-IV diagnosis: Mad as a Hatter, with Barking-at-the-Moon Psychotic Episodes. But Swedenborg was not atypical of his era -- or of ours, come to think of it. In Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, author Adam Zamoyski writes (pp. 52-53): One thing that could not be banned, or even stemmed, was the ovine rush to find a new belief-system. People sought either a purer or a more essential form of Christianity, or some cosmic system of absolute truth from which all religions purportedly descended. They followed a variety of teachers such as the mysterious Martines de Pasquallys, who started up the fellowship of the 'Elect Cohens' and wrote a treatise on 'reintegration.' He preached a perverted form of Christian dogma, with frequent recourse to the symbolism of numbers, and asserted, amongst other things, that the Earth is triangular in shape. Another whose teachings drew in seekers after truth was the mystic philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborgian societies sprang up in many countries in the 1780s, including one in Moscow whose members called themselves 'children of the New Jerusalem ', and one in Berlin some of whose members claimed to witness people rising from the dead in large numbers. Some flocked to rosicrucianism or theosophy. or to one of the many other sects that sprang up, almost in proportion as the Catholic monastic orders were dissolved in the name of Enlightenment. Those seeking the elixir of life, the secret of the alchemists, the kabbalistic key or some such panacea were drawn into alchemy, hermeticism, necromancy, cosmosophy, chiromancy and a whole gamut of sorcery. There was much juggling with magic numbers, deciphering of the Bible with the use of equations, substituting of values and numbers for musical notes or colours, developing theories from the alleged 'moral planes' in the structure of the Pyramids and like nonsense. Occultism rubbed shoulders with pseudo-science, dressed up in the fashion of the day -- be it Gothic, Hellenic or Oriental. This was a rich hunting-ground for charlatans such as the Sicilian Giuseppe Balsamo, alias Count Cagliostro, who ranged across Europe making and losing fortunes, bedding the most desirable and befuddling the most respected, flogging love-philtres and elixirs of eternal youth. Barely more reputable was the Austrian doctor Friedrich Anton Mesmer, whose theory of 'animal magnetism' and claims of healing powers thralled fashionable Paris. People as self-regarding as Lafayette sat for hours in bubbling vats filled with dubious chemicals, holding hands in a dimmed interior with plenty of mirrors and soft music, while Mesmer drifted about dressed as a children's-party magician, waving a wand over his victims. We'll have much more to say about Mesmer, who is looking increasingly core to our slowly unfolding story. Stay tuned...

on one occasion when the interior heaven was opened to me and i was talking to the angels there i was allowed to observe the following activities... emanuel swedenborg arcana coelestia heaven & hell

narcissism in the news

Maureen Dowd talks to Publishers Weekly -- an interview with Dermot McEvoy about her new book, Are Men Necessary?, and other matters. "My thesis is that feminism is dead," she says. "That it's been trumped by narcissism and materialism, which are much more important 'isms' in the 21st century." I wonder whether the interview took place before or after Publishers Weekly panned Men: "intermittently entertaining, but neither sharp enough nor sustained enough to work as a book." Me, I frame no hypothesis. But I like the quote. And I love the cover!

it's not easy being green

Libertarian National Socialist Green Party This site lists a fair number of books whose themes and authors I've written about here. I've selected some of these books below. While not saying anything definitive about their content or their author's intentions, the fact that they are recommended under the sign of the swastika -- however "green" -- speaks volumes. Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics), Juan Mascaro (Editor), Thomas Wyatt (Paperback - May 1962) Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, Meister Eckhart, M. O. Walshe (Editor) (Paperback - August 1993) Martin Luther and the Jews, Bishop Martin Sasse (Paperback) The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit, Julius Evola, Guido Stucco (Translator) (Paperback - November 1996) Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Paperback - October 1989) The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, Julius Evola, H. E. Musson (Paperback - April 1996) Civilization in Transition (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10), Carl Gustav Jung, Michael Fordham (Editor) (Hardcover) Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Paperback - October 2000) The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art, Julius Evola, E.E. Rehmus (Translator) (Paperback - September 1994) Man and His Symbols, Carl Gustav Jung (Mass Market Paperback - June 1997) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Gustav Jung, Aniela Jaffe (Paperback - June 1989) Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler (Hardcover) The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation by the Taoist Master Alfred Huang, Alfred Huang (Translator) (Hardcover - May 1998) Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition, Laozi, et al (Hardcover - August 2001) The Politics of Ecstasy, Timothy Leary, et al (Paperback - October 1998) Witchcraft: Magic and Alchemy, Emile Angelo Grillot De Givry, et al (Paperback - June 1971) The History of Magic and the Occult, Kurt Seligmann (Hardcover - August 1997) The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Editor) (Paperback - June 1997) Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, Julius Evola, et al (Paperback) Occult Underground, James Webb (Paperback - August 1988) Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley Imperium, by F.P. Yockey [hyperlinks and graphics added]

fiction into fact

What did Madame Blavatsky and Indiana Jones have in common? full text online From the Gothic Labyrinth... Although today known for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which awards prizes for bad opening sentences (Paul Clifford is the novel that opens It was a dark and stormy night) Bulwer-Lytton was, in his lifetime, arguably the most successful and influential novelist in England. Wagner based an opera on his novel Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes. After reading Rienzi, Poe wrote: There may be men now living who possess the power of Bulwer -- but it is quite evident that very few have made that power so palpably manifest. Indeed we know of none. The opera also had a profound effect on the young Adolf Hitler. In that hour it began, he was to say later. The Coming Race, an early science-fiction work, with its superman race the Vril-ya, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilization of the world, spawned an occult secret society known as Vril Society or Luminous Lodge. The Vril Society's philosophy and swastika symbol were absorbed by the Nazi party.

resistance is futile

see the Amazon list... “white spirituality” mystical, antisemitic, fascist, nazi e.g., respectively: Meister Eckhart, Jacob Elon Conner, Julius Evola, Savitri Devi & Alfred Rosenberg this sort of grouping recurs repeatedly. it is not an accident.

"...a man who created a 'hieroglyphic' language, reimagined the genesis story, influenced blake, balzac, strindberg, and yeats, and authored a number of anonymous works that put the swedish clergy of his day on high alert."

eternal selvation

I've been thinking about designer identities. I suppose that's another way to look at Maslow's "self-actualization" -- which he actually actualized out of his ass. But I guess some sort of design is better than defaulting to whatever cultural mold (in whichever sense) happens to shape or grow on you. However, hmmm... what would it take for it to be intelligent design? Would we need to assume godlike powers? (Here's where weak hearts and high horses conspire.) If so, would the demand for such powers of identity creation -- or find-your-own-story identity theft -- help to explain the hot NewAge++ pursuit of spiritual puissance? Of course. Else would we not be suffering under the Oprah, Chopra, Tolle & Eckert plague of siddhi-slickers. I'm not sure if The Designed Self offers any real insight on this score. Maybe. But this bit from the publisher makes me wonder... Perpetual self-experimentation, constantly reinforced by the media, came to encompass everything from career choice to hair color to body shape to gender identity. In compelling clinical stories, Strenger introduces us to patients for whom the absence of any sense of cultural continuity with their parents' generation was exemplified by embrace of a "Nobrow" culture, which rejected the very distinction between "genuine" and popular culture. And we meet patients for whom the project of shaping the self had simply become another variant of an "extreme game" aiming at chronically high excitement. Fake people blow, agreed. But this sounds dishearteningly like yet more hand-wringing re mere anarchy loosed. Genuine? Popular? Extreme? Haven't we already been over the part about the steenkin badges? Ah, some days I wonder what's the fucking use. It's not just Mona Lisa had the highway blues. these improprieties shout out << to those IMproPRieTies <<

this is what salvation must be like after a while... ~ dylan visions of johanna

damage

why does the doctor have no face? stones - sister morphine only later can you even see it sitting there alone on its own line singular isolated a fact drained of color affect affection not bothering to try to avoid it anymore why? she said you will find yourself asking that over and over but why? and I see that but why? until you stop asking stop wondering stop caring how much or how little the pain and then without warning what you've been praying for begging for dying for happens it's gone just like that nothing left nothing left to remember you by nothing left nothing right nothing wrong nothing doing but you know you are changed and you know you will never be the same as... you falter you try to remember as what? there was something on the tip of your tongue on the edge of morning once... seal (william orbit mix) - crazy

cross cultural

I just reviewed this book on Amazon. OK, so I admit I was cross. And not very cultural... a little matter of marketing, October 19, 2005 Reviewer: Christopher Locke (Boulder, CO) - See all reviews I'm giving this book 4 stars, as that's the current rating, and I don't want to drag the authors' work down with these remarks. Having said that, one might think that a book that "examines the role of culture in interpreting and explaining behaviors that resemble personality disorders but are, instead, normative to a given culture" deserves a chance to be read by practitioners in non-"given" -- presumably non-white, presumably non-wealthy -- cultures. This is not going to happen at Wiley's list price of $126.50. Which is a shame, in more ways than one. Perhaps such inequities could be some sort of clue to "Borderline Personality Disorder" as manifested outside our squeaky clean upper middle class suburbs, where people think nothing of shelling out 100+ bucks for a textbook. You think? [mad-dog emphasis added] For less serious fare, you might enjoy my review of The Flying Saucers Are Real (page down a bit). And while I'm at it, why not throw in this "So You'd Like To..." guide: 8. protect yourself from the Mystic Bourgeoisie by Chris Locke 136 of 150 people found this guide helpful. Read 1,312 times. The problem with this last one is that it's a magnet for every New Age piece of trash on the site. You'll see what I mean if you go there and check the right column. This guide hit #1 across all of Amazon the second day it was up, but has since fallen to #8. Some of the folks it attracts (see drek-magnet, above) don't seem to take kindly to my views and/or attitude, and they vote the page unhelpful. And so: namastes out the yin-yang? Don't go there! Otherwise, please do visit and click the button. Thnx.

a myss is as good as a mile

a cool-cash flash - click & learn truth in advertising Caroline Myss talks about channeling George Washington. No, really, you are gonna love these videos! She gets a short circuit in her muladhara chakra and channels her own fundament. Which reminds me of the old Jim Kweskin Jug Band song. Maestro... Washington at Valley Forge Bitter cold but up spoke George Said vo-doe-de-o, vo-doe-de-o, doe Crazy words, crazy tune All that George could croon and swoon Was vo-doe-de-o, vo-doe-de-o, doe On his ukulele, daily He would strum Beedle um bum Dancing, prancing And then he'd holler "Red Hot Mama!"

become completely autonomous!

There is numinous lunacy... and then there is luminous basoonacy. Or perhaps not. What does it all mean? Ah yes, the eternal question. We'd all like to know the answer, but such knowledge is not granted to just any old common ordinary mortal. And it's not very often that I run a press release verbatim. More like never. Especially not here. But I think you'll agree that this is an extra special press release. I don't know Jonathon Keats, but from the sound of this, I'd like to. I think. I know Paulina Borsook through her book -- Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech -- but I do so ever wish she'd get in touch. And now, the moment you've all been waiting for. May we have the envelope, please... Jonathon Keats at work in the office of the International Association for Divine Taxonomy. SF Gate photo by Jeanne Carstensen -------- Original Message -------- Subject:   Paulina Borsook suggested... Date:   Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:44:41 -0700 (PDT) From:   Jonathon Keats <jonathon_keats@yahoo.com> To:   clocke@panix.com Chris- Paulina Borsook thought the following project might be of interest to you. Please let me know if I can send any more information. -Jonathon For Immediate Release METRIC SYSTEM TO BE CUSTOMIZED FOR U.S. MARKET Conceptual Artist Offers Consumers Personalized Kilogram, Watt, Calorie... First Revolutionary Change to Weights and Measures Since 1793... Major Victory for Democracy in the 21st Century... SAN FRANCISCO - Following several years of highly-secretive privately-funded research, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats announces comprehensive improvements to the metric system, anticipated finally to make the meter a viable unit of measure in the United States. The system will be introduced to the public at Modernism Gallery, in San Francisco, on October 27, 2005. Mr. Keats will be available to provide expert calibration. "The metric system was developed in the 18th Century as an alternative to measurements based on the dimensions of kings' fingers and feet," explains Mr. Keats. "It was a decisive break from monarchy, but it wasn't decisive enough." The trouble is that one totalitarian system was replaced with another. "We did away with Louis XVI and Henry VIII, only to chain all measures, of everything in the universe, to the circumference of the Earth." More specifically, the standard meter is 1/10,000,000 of the quarter-meridian, redefined by the Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures (CGPM) in 1983 as the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458 of a second. What Mr. Keats has proposed is an approach as rigorously mathematical as the metric system, that will prioritize the individual rather than the planet. His modification is simple, yet the consequences are profound: Instead of using the earth's spin as the basis of time, he's elected to use people's heartbeat. "Galileo timed his experiments with his pulse," Keats notes. "If it was good enough for him, surely it's good enough for us." Mr. Keats's system makes everyone's clock personal. Because his own heart beats 1.1 times faster than the terrestrial second, for example, his day is a mere 21.816 terrestrial hours long, and his year is nearly 33 days shorter than you'd see on a calendar (except in leap year). From that, it's a straightforward calculation to derive the length of a personal meter, the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458 of a heartbeat. Mr. Keats's meter, for instance, is 0.909 meters international, or approximately 2.982 feet. The length of others' meters may differ. (For example, Mr. Keats recently determined that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark's meter is a more compact 0.833 meters international.) A liter is the volume equivalent to a cubic meter, a kilogram is the mass equivalent to a liter of water, and units including the watt and calorie can likewise be mathematically derived (as can conversions to imperial system units such as horsepower). In consultation with mathematics professor David Steinsaltz of Queen's University, Ontario, Mr. Keats has developed algorithms to facilitate the calculation of personal standards such as these. At Modernism Gallery, individuals will be invited to commission customized conversion tables, as well as engraved brass meter rods and clocks that beat at their heart rate. A member of the National Conference on Weights and Measures (NCWM), Mr. Keats will be on hand with stethoscope and adding machine to ensure that all measuring instruments and charts are accurate. "In this day and age, everyone has an iPod, and most people have TiVo," Mr. Keats argues. "Mass-customization is the cutting edge of democracy. By taking this personal approach to measurements -- to standards of time and space and energy and power -- we can each become completely autonomous." Mr. Keats is widely known for his rigorous approach to art. Most recently, he attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish, in collaboration with researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. He has also previously copyrighted his mind in the interest of attaining immortality (offering futures contracts on his brain to fund the operation), and petitioned Berkeley to pass a basic law of logic -- A=A -- a work commissioned by the city's annual Arts Festival. For more information, please see sample media coverage at the following URLs: God of the Flies - SF Weekly Sometimes people call my work absurd - KQED/Spark Project Aims At Genetically Engineered God - SFGate Engineering God in a Petri Dish - Wired News Identity Crisis: Turning Aristotle into Law - legalaffairs Aristotle's law petition confounds blase Berkeley - SFGate The man who sold his brain - BBC News He Thinks, Therefore He Sells - Wired News At SFMOMA, some words of wisdom on Eva Hesse - SFGate The Thinking Man's Art - SFGate . . . Modernism is located at 685 Market Street in San Francisco. The phone number is 415/541-0461. Gallery hours are 10:00 am to 5:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, see www.modernisminc.com/artists/Jonathon_KEATS/ or contact Mr. Keats directly at jonathon_keats@yahoo.com. # # #

"in this day and age, everyone has an ipod, and most people have tivo," mr. keats argues. "mass-customization is the cutting edge of democracy. by taking this personal approach to measurements -- to standards of time and space and energy and power -- we can each become completely autonomous."

ripoff artiste

published December 2000 published August 2004 In a review that 0 of 2 people apparently cared for, Amazon reader meads44 noted: My comments have only to do with the packaging of the book. Both in terms of its title and dustjacket design, it closely follows Roy Porter's brilliant 2000 book, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. Like Porter's study, Himmelfarb's includes a reproduction of Joseph Wright's Orrery (c. 1766). And like Porter's study, Himmelfarb's employs a red ground for the letters of the title and author. This is surely not a coincidence. Surely not. My vote will make it 1 out of 3 in favor of the observation. Perhaps not so btw, Himmelfarb is a leading neoconservative [oxymoron alert] intellectual whom The New Criterion, in reviewing the above book, called "one of today's most eminent practitioners of history." She was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2004 and cited "for her critical analysis of history, which has yielded insights into... the foundations of our culture." Indeed. Compare those covers once again. If this post seems out of place here, it is here because a theme of the book -- a grace-note perhaps, but nonetheless -- will be the inclination of the NewAge++ toward misdirection, as we see here, and outright plagiarism. It seems to have become A-OK with this crowd to appropriate anything they might have thought as their own. Which fits quite nicely, if you think about it, with claiming and colonizing already occupied countries.* Plus, it's worth noting that the NewAge++ are now available in all your favorite political flavors! * NOTE: Forgive me if I've already told you this, but I have a plan to claim the local Target store for the Queen of Spain. I figure if I can get an outlaw biker gang to back me up with stolen heavy construction equipment, I might be able to hold onto it long enough to make CNN. I'll spend the rest of my life in the slammer, sure, but imagine the cred... "What's he in for?" "Who that guy? Him and a bunch of berserker biker dudes claimed a Target store for the Queen of Spain." "Whoa! Far fuckin out."

surely not a coincidence

a taste of volunteer slavery - like white on rice

Here's an interesting piece from today's Atlanta Constitution... Campbell Coxe, a tall, sunburnt farmer, stepped up to the microphone. "This isn't whiiiite rice," he said, drawing out the "white" with an exaggerated accent. "This is a gourmet rice." Carolina Gold rice is that, and more. It's a grain with a past gilded in wealth and shadowed by slavery. Further down, the article mentions that ...the same boggy fields that aided rice cultivation helped doom it after the Civil War. Without slaves to work fields too soft for mechanical harvesting, the rice industry dwindled. A hurricane finished it off. Those hurricanes, huh? They seem to finish off all sorts of things. Is it just me, or does this revival of interest in Carolina Gold signal a larger nostalgia for those halcyon days of white mastery? I guess it's probably just me -- and a healthy market demand for pure and natural organic products. OK, sorry I said anything. I'll be quiet now.

the jung-eliade school

The historian of religions is in a better position than anyone to promote the knowledge of symbols... It is in the history of religions that we meet with the "archetypes," of which only approximate variants are dealt with by psychologists and literary critics.

~ Mircea Eliade
quoted in Religion after Religion

In the opening pages of the book quoted above, the author begins to unpack what he refers to as the "Jung-Eliade school of thought." He refers to "an 'illuminist' sense of scholarship as theosophy" that characterizes the work of Gershom Sholem (Judaic studies), Henry Corbin (Islamic studies), and our old pal Mircea Eliade (covering the entire mythic waterfront). Immediately following that, the author writes... This radical approach to the academy was (literally) underwritten by a Yale graduate, the philanthropist Paul Mellon. <churchlady>Now, isn't that interesting!</churchlady> Because yeah, we're talking the Paul Mellon of Carnegie-Mellon fame, who was also a major benefactor of Carl Jung. I just knew I was going to be able to work a couple of Robber Barons in here! Well, that's one. And we've already had* Henry Ford, in a slightly different (but is it, really?) context. [*Or soon will have, if I can extract the salient bits from my previous insanity in posts like stereoarchetypes of the collective unconscience and Henry Ford goes to Atlantis.] But why is it interesting -- maybe even important -- that Jung and Eliade form a "school of thought"? Because it is on this base that the brave new world of NewAge++ has been quietly, while we were sleeping, built. And it's a special world. For special people. In a word: elites. And why is that interesting? Allow me to quote from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions). And why is that interesting? Because it's one of the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder -- a special affliction of the spiritually arrogant and politically intolerant precursors and founders of the twisted NewAge++ madness that -- far from being hidden in little pockets of cute and harmless weirdness here and there -- is being broadcast via cable, movies, newspapers, bookstores, you name it, all over the planet. The New Colonialism. The New Manifest Destiny. Mircea Eliade -- the darling of sensitive New Age religiosity everywhere; and it is everywhere; look around -- was a Fascist. Not in a manner of speaking; with a capital F. The Poles' resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only yids are capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the Germans' sense of scruple. The Germans have no interest in the destruction of Romania. Only a pro-German government can save us.... What is happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are flooding into the country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate. ~ Mircea Eliade from a 1939 conversation recorded by Mihail Sebastian in his Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years (p. 238) Also openly Fascist was Julius Evola, one of Eliade's lifelong friends. Together with René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, this group constitutes the core of another little known but highly influential school of thought: Traditionalism (see Follow Your Shiny Bliss, right under the picture of the band, Oswald and the Decline of the Westettes). Here's another picture. Recognize either of these dudes? No, probably not. Chances are excellent that you've never even heard of Guénon or Schuon. Lucky you. But that doesn't mean you've escaped their surprisingly pervasive influence. Ever heard of Aldous Huxley? The Perennial Philosophy? Getting warmer. Here Huxley defines the philosophia perennis as... the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being -- the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. ~ Aldous Huxley The Perennial Philosophy, 1945 But it goes back further than Huxley... ...the teachings, however fragmentary and incomplete, contained in these volumes, belong neither to the Hindu, the Zoroastrian, the Chaldean, nor the Egyptian religion, neither to Buddhism, Islam, Judaism nor Christianity exclusively. The Secret Doctrine is the essence of all these. Sprung from it in their origins, the various religious schemes are now made to merge back into their original element, out of which every mystery and dogma has grown, developed, and become materialised. ~ H. P. Blavatsky The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy I, viii [NOTE: Both the above quotes are cited in "The Perennial Philosophy" by W.T.S. Thackara, Sunrise magazine, April/May 1984, Theosophical University Press] from the back cover of The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity (Library of Perennial Philosophy) To hazard an off-the-cuff answer to that last question, above, oh I dunno... freedom from irrational fear and superstition, the boot heel of spiritually rationalized entitlement, elitism and religious terrorism? Just guesses. Sound a bit too extreme? Let me introduce you to Harry Oldmeadow, a writer who has done much to promote awareness of Traditionalism. He's a major proponent, not a detractor, so the following passage carries a lot more weight than if someone like oh say myself were saying the same things (which, nota bene, I am)... Orientalism, Racial Theory and the Allure of Fascism Let us assemble a few now well-known facts, each of which, in isolation, may seem of little significance but which cumulatively suggest a problematic requiring the attention of anyone interested in our general subject. W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (and, to confuse the mix, Richard Wagner and Madame Blavatsky) were not only keen students of the Orient but were all anti-Semitic while Pound, notoriously, espoused the ideology of fascism. Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and Georges Dumézil, the doyen of Indo-European studies, were also anti-Semitic and were susceptible to the anti-modern appeal of extreme right wing political ideologies. A more overt and virulent form of "spiritualized" fascism can be found in the person and work of the Italian orientalist Julius Evola. Martin Heidegger publicly and theatrically aligned himself with the Nazi regime in the early 30s, and became an unabashed propagandist for Hitler's domestic and foreign policies. He was a Nazi informer and betrayed several Jewish friends and colleagues. Carl Jung evinced some enthusiasm for Nazism in its early years, discerning in it a hope of spiritual regeneration of Europe; there are also more than a few traces of anti-Semitism in his writings. (Unlike Heidegger, Jung was later implacably opposed to Nazism.) As George Steiner has observed, the "alpine priesthood" of Eranos was susceptible to a kind of conservative-romantic mysticism which was at least tinged with "Führer-politics." (p. 375) links added, emphasis in original After naming several more names today associated with New Age "spirituality," Oldmeadow continues... Let us consider two of these figures, Evola and Eliade, in a little more detail. Julius Evola, painter, philosopher, "disciple" of René Guénon, colleague of Mircea Eliade, orientalist and fascist ideologue, translated into Italian The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a poisonous anti-Semitic work whose authors included the racial ideologue of Nazism, Alfred Rosenberg. Evola claimed that this document, whether true or not, fitted the facts. (p. 376) ~ Harry Oldmeadow Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions (The Library of Perennial Philosophy) So OK, forget Schuon and Guénon for now. Chances are a lot better that you have heard of a guy named Huston Smith, whose book The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions has sold well over two and a half million copies. Note the nod to Tradition there. It's no accident. In a sort of sequel titled Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religions, Smith rails against science and related modern evils including "Darwinism." In Rational Mysticism, author John Horgan begins the book with a chapter on "Huston Smith's Perennial Philosophy." In April 1999, I traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to attend a meeting named, misleadingly, "Science and Consciousness." Held in a hotel modeled after a Mayan pyramid, the five-day conference was actually a New Age bazaar, serving up diverse products for boosting physical, mental, and spiritual energy.... I came to this meeting in part to steep myself in mysticism, New Age style. But a more important goal was meeting Huston Smith... a walking, talking embodiment of the perennial philosophy. (p.15) A few pages later, Horgan writes: ...Smith clearly cherishes his entheogenic experiences. His first took place on New Year's Day, 1961, in Newton, Massachusetts, at the home of Timothy Leary, then a Harvard psychology professor just beginning to investigate psychedelics. Leary gave Smith two capsules of mescaline. A few hours later Smith felt he was witnessing the reality described in the ancient Hindu Vedas and other mystical texts. He was seeing through the mundane reality around him to the ground of being, the clear light of the void underlying all things. No, he was stoned. He was tripping, dude. Now, let me be clear on this, as Nixon would say. In answer to Hendrix's quintessential queries -- are you experienced? have you ever been experienced? -- I can safely answer with a resounding yes. More times than I can count. It's been well over 20 years since I dropped, but I was there, yeah. I know what it feels like to be one of the beautiful people. And without taking anything away from that experience, without any attempt to reduce or belittle it, I can also say with some confidence that it is not something fundamentally removed from "mundane reality." The inherently gnostic aversion to "this world" is what brought these motherfuckers down. It was their way of making the psychedelic experience conceptually safe, colonizing it with "oriental" conceptualizations that tamed it, domesticated it, "spiritualized" it. My objection to these perennialist ex-hippie faux filosofers is not that they did drugs -- oh yeah, how shocking! -- but that, after doing all those drugs, they missed the boat. The perennialists hold that religious traditions differ only in their outer doctrinal, legal, liturgical, and institutional manifestations, which constitute the mere surface levels of religious and ethical experience. Hence, they maximize the similarities between the mystical and ethical cores of the world's religions. As a corollary, they minimize the importance of the differences and historical-cultural specificities of particular religious traditions. HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion p. 836, emphasis mine For instance, Horgan writes (in Rational Mysticism p. 46) that "some perennialists have been dismissive or even hostile to Judaism. Joseph Campbell, the celebrated mythologist, is a case in point." And Oldmeadow (in Journeys to the East p. 111) goes into far more detail on America's favorite PBS myth monger, preceding his remarks with this quote from Religion after Religion (p. 142): It is not an accident that a certain sort of post-Christianity, so-called New Age Religion, emerged during the Cold War. Religious intellectuals like the Historians of Religions [Eliade, Gershom Sholem, Henry Corbin] spearheaded a notion of religion that seemed to transcend denominational boundaries even as it presumed some kind of transcendent unity to world religions. The geopolitical antagonism of the Cold War, seemingly so constitutive of the age, stimulated at the same time what seemed like a planetary ecumenicism. This Eranos kind of public gnosis, popularized by Jung, Campbell, and Eliade, could espouse its identity, seriatim, with alchemy, shamanism, yoga, Templarism. Such a secularized esoterism, of course, is now familiar in its subsequent popularized forms as (tellingly) New Age Religion. Their characteristically promiscuous application of correspondences, often claimed as a Hermetic principle, underwrote a riot of analogies. Immediately following this quote, Oldmeadow writes -- and you might want to strap on your seat-belt for this last bit of today's ride: There is much in Campbell's work which is unattractive: a deep-seated animus towards and dismissal of the great Occidental monotheisms and more generally a hostility to institutionalized religion which is often treated in simplistic terms and in strident tone; a facile and tedious diffusionism often asserted with little or no scholarly support; a tendency to surrender to glib dichotomies which did little to mask his own prejudices; an inability to understand the ways in which his own American background limited his intellectual horizons; a sometimes sentimental and psychologistic reading of Vedantic monism (a common failing amongst self-styled American Vedantins!); an appropriation of mythic materials which, from one vantage point, might be seen as a form of cultural imperialism; an oscillation between the extremes of Orientalist romanticism and a recoil into Western prejudices (most clearly evidenced in his wildly fluctuating perceptions of Indian society -- his stereotypical misunderstanding of the caste system, for instance); the reduction of metaphysics to a purely psychic realm (a reduction more severe and more facile than we find in Jung, Zimmer or Eliade); a covert strain of anti-Semitism (more openly expressed in his personal life). One can see something of Campbell's simultaneous insight and myopia in a characteristic claim such as "religion is a misinterpretation of mythology." Then, too, there is something offensive in Campbell's collusion in the popular perception of him as a jnanin -- and here one is reminded of another highly talented popularizer who was all too often mistaken for a sage, Alan Watts. Other than that, one could argue in Campbell's favor that, well, at least Bill Moyers liked him. NOTE: I'm carving off the the still unfinished extra 2000+ words of this for a follow-on post. Otherwise it feels as if I'll never be done with this monster that I've been whittling away at for a month now. The second half will mostly be concerned with Carl Jung. Stay tuned...