the unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to
believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush
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Having authored (along with Doc and David) a rather popular manifesto myself, I was immediately interested when I just now stumbled across Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Library Journal says:
Caws performs an important service here with this anthology of artistic, literary, and cultural manifestos. The collection brings together for the first time over 200 manifestos, translated by various hands. It begins with English, French, Swiss, Russian, and Irish statements on Symbolism and extends to recent postmodernist declarations. The anthology includes famous manifestos on Cubism, Futurism in its various manifestations, Fauvism, Dada, Vorticism, and Surrealism, as well as more offbeat movements, such as Nowism, Thingism, Letterism, Giorgio de Chirico's Scuola Metafisica, and Kurt Schwitters's Cow Manifesto. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern art, aesthetics, and culture,
I wonder if, with the likes of Eckhart Tolle and his ilk, we aren't experiencing a resurgence of Nowism. Personally, I'd rather it was Cowism. But I have to admit, never having encountered Kurt Schwitters before now, I've never read the Cow Manifesto. Off to look for that one now...
This one's a bit dense, lots of German, and I didn't recognize the names in the first half either. But stick with it. Slog on and you'll surely catch the drift...
In his autobiography Max Halbe wrote that Friedrichshagen was a state of mind rather than a place. If this was so, then Ascona, a tiny community on the Swiss side of Lake Maggiore, must also be considered as part of the Friedrichshagen mindscape. Ascona offered Wilhelmine reformers a lakeland idyll even more attractive than the Müggelsee, and a much better climate, but in the 1900s its transient population were still recognizably Friedrichshagener. Some, such as Mühsam, and Else Lasker-Schüle, flitted between the two. For others, such as Henri Oedenkoven and Ida Hofmann, Ascona became a home for some twenty years. Oedenkoven, a wealthy Belgian, and Hofmann established a natural health sanatorium, Monte Verità, near the village in 1900. Their regime was strictly vegetarian and abstinent, with plenty of sun, fresh air and water, together with generous helpings of Wagner's Parsifal. At various times it attracted the likes of Hermann Hesse, D.H. Lawrence, Max Weber, and C.G. Jung, as well as a succession of Naturmenschen -- longhaired, barelegged, sandal-wearing "seekers after truth" -- who passed through the small community, which became the "semi-official meeting place for all Europe's spiritual rebels."
Are you tracking on the covers as this thing continues to unfold? I won't be able to do this in the published book. And they're not just there for the pretty pictures. But look at the pictures. Check the dates. Click through and read the fine print, between the lines: The Cult of Health and Beauty... Imperialism... Race. Re-scan those emphasis-mine names in the passage above. Do you see what's going on here? Sure you do. A story is unfolding, like a face emerging from a London fog. Too close for comfort, devil cross your grave. You only wish this was ancient history.
Nietzche, Eliade, Yeats, A. Huxley, the artist formerly known as Schickelgruber. What's past is personal, eternal return. Brave old world come round again at last. And baby gonna party like it's 1939.
We commenced research where modern conjecture closes its faithless wings.
And with us, those were the common elements of science which the sages of to-day
disdain as wild chimeras, or despair of as unfathomable mysteries.
If what you know about Edward Bulwer-Lytton is that there's a bad-writing contest named after him, then what you know is next to nothing. In his day, he was more popular than Dickens, with whom he was closely contemporaneous. He had a huge influence on Madame Blavatsky (her favorite novelist, she said), and I would argue (though I've never seen it said), on the alchemical speculations of C.G. Jung. Given the influence of these latter luminaries on the shifting and shifty realities of our present -- an influence veiled in historical shadow, occult in the original sense -- few understand the continuing impact of a bad science fiction writer's second-rate dreams on the dark and stormy world we've inherited from all three by virtual default.
With that the old gentleman condescended to enter into a very interesting, and, as it seemed to me, a very erudite relation of the tenets of the Rosicrucians, some of whom, he asserted, still existed, and still prosecuted, in august secrecy, their profound researches into natural science and occult philosophy.
Zanoni ~ Bulwer-Lytton
The allure of that occult philosophy was too much for Blavatsky to resist. Not that she was an unwitting dupe. Ever the brilliant mystic side-show barker, she knew an opportunity when she saw one. By 1875, coincidentally the year Carl Jung was born, she had founded the full three-ring Theosophical Society in New York, and the psychic fever that generated worldwide was a major driver of the occult revival into which G.I. Gurdjieff -- three years Jung's senior -- first emerged in fin-de-siècle Russia. None of these later developments were unrelated or took place in a vacuum. And the Gurdjieff phenomenon was but one among many.
It is in the occult category of subterranean or Shambhala-Agartha literature in which Bulwer-Lytton’s name frequently arises. Bulwer-Lytton had a profound effect on events of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He had a passion for occult studies, and used his knowledge of the occult as the basis for several of his novels, including Zanoni (1842), A Strange Story (1862) and The Coming Race (1871) (all available, by the way, from the Gutenberg Project). His work strongly influenced Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophy spiritualist movement in the late nineteenth century, and the Nazi movement of the early twentieth century. I shall present a number of quotes from the following four sources, describing this influence: The King of the World by Réné Guénon; Shambhala by Victoria LePage; The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke; and Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival by Joscelyn Godwin.
In an epilogue of sorts to Zanoni, Bulwer-Lytton writes:
Were we not so divinely charmed with "Faust," and "Hamlet," and "Prometheus," so ardently carried on by the interest of the story told to the common understanding, we should trouble ourselves little with the types in each which all of us can detect, --none of us can elucidate; none elucidate, for the essence of type is mystery. We behold the figure, we cannot lift the veil.
For "types" in the above, try reading "archetypes," and ask yourself, as I've been doing, whether, in addition to Madame B, Jung also read that passage. And whether, drawn by this essence of mystery, he decided then and there -- or thereabouts -- to lift the veil.
Somewhat miraculously, given the circumstances, I recall a scene from over 25 years ago. I was drinking heavily (it was never light) at some Buddhist bash in Denver -- a birthday party for Trungpa Rinpoche -- and talking to Shambhala Publications' publisher Samuel Bercholz.
"Sam, I want to write a book," I said.
"Yeah? And what would your book be about?" he asked.
That threw me. Having been on semi-permanent vacation for so long, I hadn't really thought about it much. Five years later I got sober and I've been thinking about it ever since.
I posted a couple new things to Amazon today. Rather than reproduce them here, the following links will take you to the um gallery. The first, a Listmania enumeration, is called:
In keeping with the general tenor of that last one, I'm pleased to be able to present the following brilliant bit of social commentary from The Head Lemur. That link explains more. Sort of. And if you're not like way deep into the tech scene, it may help to know that O'Reilly has published a very successful series of Head First books. As it says on that page: "Learning isn't something that just happens to you. It's something you do."
The table below is a somewhat modified version of an Amazon Listmania list I recently put together. This cast of characters is only partial at present. However, it does give some sense of the rogues and miscreants with which Mystic Bourgeoisie (the book) will deal.
Below the graphical portion of our program is a more complete timeline, with the dramatis personae linked to their corresponding Wikipedia pages. If you read through all the links in this post, you will be ABD-qualified for your Ph.D. in Bunkum and High Weirdness.
Let's kick this one off with an assessment by John Michell, author of The New View Over Atlantis -- that's a view over the book's cover there below. Keep two things in mind here; he is neither 1) the John Mitchell who got busted in the Nixon thing, nor 2) Edgar Mitchell, the NASA astronaut turned New Age whackjob who founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. No. He's the other New Age whackjob who got leyed in 1969 and hasn't stopped talking about it since.
Evola looks beyond man-made systems to the eternal principles in creation and human society. The truth, as he sees it, is so totally at odds with the present way of thinking that it shocks the modern mind.
That's called out as a blurb on the Amazon page for Evola's Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist. Personally, I'd never heard of Michell before reading that quote, but being curious, I clicked over to The New View Over Atlantis -- the old view presumably having been the book's first incarnation in 1969. I mean, whoever he was, Atlantis is always good for laughs -- and more important to my present purposes, a surefire magnet for the kind of game I'm tracking. I'm glad I went and looked.
Turns out the book is not so much about Atlantis as it is about ancient astronomers, "ley lines," and Stonehenge. But hey, why quibble? More interesting to me were the links I dug up to some of his other work, including a book called Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist. Following is a longish passage from that book, but it says more about Julius Evola than I could convey in as many words. We'll return to Evola more than once -- and we've mentioned him already in these previous installments:
For now, try wrapping your head around this "defense" of Evola by a man beloved of many New Age types, who clearly sees himself as continuing the "Tradition" (a sort of code word also discussed in one or more of the above listed posts). This is from pp. 146-47 of Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist, a page or two into a chapter titled "A Rad-Trad Englishman and an Italian." Michell has just described a vision of the good life held by one
William Corbett (1763-1835). He continues...
It comes as a shock to be reminded how closely this picture resembles the ideal images of fascism. But there is a world of difference between the gross literalism and inhumanity of a totalitarian system and the high idealism of a radical traditionalist. That difference was emphasized by Julius Evola (1898-1974), the Italian rad-trad philosopher. Though idolised by Mussolini, he was fiercely critical of the Fascist system -- and of man-made systems generally. He rejected Darwin, and the entirety of modern, secular thinking, in favor of the traditional, classical world-view. Like Socrates, he perceived a divine order in Creation, and he acknowledged a tradition, based upon that order and passed down from the great civilizations of antiquity. The old tradition, and the virtues of honesty, justice, courage, piety and noble conduct associated with it, were the main elements in Evola's reactionary revolution.
In 1951 he was arrested and brought to trial in Rome for "glorifying Fascism." The prosecutor made a farce of the proceedings by refusing to specify objectionable passages in Evola's writings, saying it was a question of his tone or "general spirit." The trial collapsed and Evola was fully acquitted.
Most of us are familiar with that sort of accusation -- against one's tone, attitude or general spirit. Bullies and witch-hunters are always on the lookout for fascism, racism, sexism, elitism, loyalism, religious sentiments or whatever is considered most incorrect at the time. In Evola they find their ideal victim. In his most powerful book, Revolt Against the Modern World, he spoke of manliness, mystical sovereignty and legitimate authority. He spoke also about occult politics and the collusions between democrats and demagogues to effeminise society and dumb it down. Inevitably, he brought in the Jews, associating the Jewish mentality with materialism. That makes him, if you like, an anti-Semite. But he was not speaking racially, or against the Jewish tradition which he respected. His reference was to a state of mind, occurring in Jews and Gentiles alike: the state of mind that is reflected in the chaos of the modern world.
Allow me to say that that makes him an anti-Semite even if you don't like.
I'll have more up here soon about Evola and his many pals and well wishers, including Mircea Eliade, Alain de Benoist, and the ever fascinating Miguel "Nazi UFOs from Antarctica" Serrano.
Stay tuned...
I know I've been hard on the poor New Agers here. Perhaps I've been too tough. Do I think these people are Nazis? No, of course not. I don't think they're bright enough to be Nazis, but that's just my personal opinion. Other people have different opinions, naturally. Which is what makes this a great country. (If you live in some other country, hey, your loss.) Anyway, I thought maybe it was time to let the other side have its say. So below, absolutely verbatim, are the title slugs of some hugely positive reviews of a handful of books I wouldn't stoop to wipe my ass with. Do I agree with them? No way. (Well, only with the last one.) Please understand I'm only doing this so no one will be able to say I'm biased.
You can't sift through the kind of stuff I've been sifting through for the past couple years without finding at least some stuff like this. The clip below is from a page I just came across while looking for Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni on The Internet Sacred Text Archive. This file is called UFO's and the Occult Reich, and I encourage you to go read it there instead of here, though even then you won't get the full sense of it. Because here's the thing: unless the page is entirely black and the modem is hiccuping at 1200 baud and all the lights are out and there's maybe someone lurking outside trying to get in (you're too stoned to be sure), it's just not possible to reproduce the feeling.
Schauberger and his son lived in the United States for a short time after the war, where he was reported to be working on a top secret UFO project in Texas for the US Government.
Reports of Aryan looking saucer pilots are many. Long haired blond folks that speak German. It is interesting to note that the so-called "venusian" saucer design of contactees all look like German saucer designs.
The Thule Society is still alive in the minds of neo-Nazi (Fourth Reich) occultists.
There is a booklet going around that reports to be the secret log of Admiral Richard Byrd. In 1978, copies were sent out by the Hollow Earth Research Society in Ontario, Canada.
Ivan Boyes, its director, claims that "after the war, the allies discovered that over 2,000 scientists from Germany and Italy had vanished along with almost a million people to the Land beyond the pole.
This is apparently what Admiral Byrd's expedition was all about. To hunt them down. The domain of the Arianni.
The "Flugelrads" (wingwheels) were noted in the secret log as being sent to the surface world to investigate the first nuclear explosions.
These were the model T's of the German saucer design. Do we have a myth in the making? So ... Admiral Byrd goes back and tells the Pentagon and the President what he has seen. They order him to be silent.
It seems that the inner earth cavern civilizations and the lands inside the earth have been a part of the occult/military secret for a long time.
later note: If you want to check out the amazing -- and hugely amusing -- range of Hollow Earth literature, click over to this excellent listmania list by an Amazon reader: Hollow Earth **Madness** -- and while you're there, vote that puppy up!
I've been meaning to write this one for quite a while now, so here goes. It has to do with the amazing tools available online for scholarly research. For instance, try this search for "occult revival" on Google Books. Do you have any idea how long a search like that used to take when the only tools were paper-based card catalogs in physical libraries? Not to knock libraries, but the answer could be literally: a lifetime.
Note that "occult revival" is not just some random pairing of words. The phrase is a term of art in studies of 19th century intellectual history. I didn't know this a year ago -- even though I'd probably come across the phrase many times in my reading. The way I learned this what you might call "specialized language" was through some really dumb software on Amazon that looks for what the company calls SIPs: statistically improbable phrases.
I should explain that by "really dumb," I don't mean bad. SIPs are incredibly useful. As I said, they're how I learned that "occult revival" was a phrase in common use among certain scholars -- and critically, that those scholars had written books I would very likely want to read. What I mean by dumb is that the software doesn't know squat about occultism, revived or otherwise, or anything whatsoever about the 19th century.
The first clue to how SIPs work lies in the word "statistically." We're not talking some sort of AI here (not, at any rate, the sort that used to make insupportable claims to "natural language understanding"). Instead, these are mindless number crunching algorithms, and in this case the "numbers" they crunch are digital representations of words. What they look for is something computational linguists call co-occurrence.
The second clue lies in the fact that certain words co-occur all the time. Think of clichés. Here's a handful grabbed off a page cleverly titled Clichés: Avoid Them Like The Plague.
ballpark figure
calm before the storm
dead as a doornail
fear and loathing [thanks Hunter!]
it was a dark and stormy night [thanks Bulwer!]
Clichés are statistically probable phrases. Which is why they don't convey much. I'll spare you a long digression here on the information theory of entropy, but trust me, it's germane. Now, if you had some way to do it -- say a huge corpus of text data and a super-slick co-occurrence algorithm or two -- you could identify such nearly meaningless phrases "simply" by tallying how many times they... um... occurred. And here's the dumb-but-good part: you could do this without needing clue one about meaning.
Happily for us, giant text corpuses and slick search algorithms are just the sorts of things that companies like Google and Amazon happen to have lying about. And if you can identify clichés, you can also identify non-clichés -- call them Statistically Improbable Phrases.
As it turns out, the phrase "occult revival" doesn't occur anywhere near as frequently as, say, "Hot enough for you?" or "Have a nice day!" But it does occur. And it recurs in certain types of books -- often enough to be statistically significant. In fact, this recurrence defines, in some dimension, what this class of books is "about." More precisely, the algorithm creates that class on the fly. And when you see a part of that class laid out, as below, a lightbulb can go off. It did for me.
This is called -- get ready for a rare technical term here -- learning.
No, not machine learning. Human learning. As in, you come away from the experience with more understanding than you had going in. And as I said at the start of this, it could take a lifetime to acquire this sort of knowledge using pre-digital research methods. Yeah, yeah, maybe that sort of hard work would make us more deeply knowledgeable, but look: some of us are born amateurs and dilettantes (see my discussion in Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices) and we don't have enough lifetimes to waste getting PhDs in all the specialized areas we might want to know something about. Do we? No, we do not. And besides, universities cost too damn much and they're full of arrogant motherjumpers who think they know it all, when the truth is, very damn few know even half of it.
Uh... please to forgive the little rant there. Call it my postmodern manifesto. But perhaps this has all been a bit too abstract. Here, let's have an example. I yanked the following off Amazon and tinkered a bit with the URLs, all of which now should work (they do in my browser, anyway; got Firefox?). Be sure to experiment a bit with the extra cool pull-down references (right after the little arrowheads).
"... narcotics Nature/Great Nature/the Common Mother negative emotions New Work New Work terminology `nitrogen' nonentity/nothingness/nullity number/numerology obedience observation see SELF-OBSERVATION obyvatel occult/occult revival Octaves, Law of see LAW OF OCTAVES; LAW OF SEVEN oral tradition/oral transmission ..."
"... Interest in the East arose not only from the empire-building aspirations of both Russia and Britain, but also from the occult revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The subject matter of Gurdjieff's autobiographical writings reflects these interests. The mythology ..."
"... around 1905, prepared Gurdjieff well for his arrival in pre-Revolutionary Russia, where Moscow and St Petersburg were centres of the occult revival. Gurdjieff arrived in Russia in about 1912, and began to form and teach his first groups of pupils in these ..."
"... The fire, which fuses all the powders in the retort, is conscience (Search: 40-3, 156; see also bodies; friction; occult/ occult revival). There is a special chemistry of alchemy that functions as the Law of Three. All substances function as conductors of ..."
"... it, and as he acts upon it he will act upon the man (Views, 1918: 211-12; see also magic/magician; occult/ occult revival). Physical and astral elements mix together to make a third substance, which forms an atmosphere around a man. Just as ..."
"... to imagine that he did not also know of these Western sources. (See also Wellbeloved 2001a, 2001b; laws: an overview; occult/occult revival). A prayer practice, newly termed `Kything', that aims for a spiritual entering into another person for the purpose of establishing ..."
"... GOOD AND EVIL through the occult revival of the late nineteenth century. Webb (1980: 524-5) suggests Anna Kingsford's `esoteric Christianity', a mix of alchemy and Gnosticism, as ..."
"... distant from God, who may be contacted only through a series of intermediaries (Voices: 159, 200, 164, 171-4; see also occult/occult revival). Further reading For the group as part of Sufi teaching, see Bennett 1976: 218-19; for an account of the Rope ..."
"... many references to hermetically sealed places and things in Tales, which can be read as indirect references to Hermeticism (see occult/occult revival). The three main branches of Hermeticism are alchemy, astrology and magic (see Taylor 2001: 231-2). Further reading For Russian Hermeticism, ..."
"... of which has its own memory and one of which can only be reached through hypnotism (Crabtree 1993). See also: occult/occult revival; New Work Further reading For Mesmerism in relation to Spiritualism and to Christian Science, see Webb 1971b; for Gurdjieff as ..."
"... known planets of antiquity, derived from Pythagoras, occurs in Western European occultism, especially during the Renaissance and the late nineteenth-century occult revival. Some of these probable sources for Gurdjieff's Laws of Seven and Three are explored by Webb (1980: 499-542). Blavatsky's eternal ..."
"... (Voices: 24, 29, 165). See also: love; telepathy; vampirism Further reading For the political, social and economic instability underlying the occult revival in Russia and France, see Webb 1971a, 1971b, 1976. For the occult in Russia, see Rosenthal 1997 and Young 1979; ..."
"... ORAL TRADITION, TURKIC another (Search: 201; see also occult/occult revival; secrecy/ silence). Gurdjieff writes that he collected oral information about hypnotism (Herald: 20). He also refers to the oral story-telling ..."
"... establishment values may lead to revolutionary underground movements , but can also result in adherence to underground occult groups (see occult/occult revival). Although his motives may have been different, the methods Gurdjieff used to teach his cosmological and psychological ideas have parallels ..."
"... exercise, pupils can pray to their ideal to help them guard what they have obtained (Voices: 186, 280). See also: occult/occult revival; stairway PREJUDICES Man has two kinds of prejudices: those of the essence and those of the personality (Views, 1924: 240). ..."
"... three. Contemporary man's chief failing is described in terms of missing psychic factors (see astrology; Herald of Coming Good; occult/ occult revival). There are strong links between the occult, psychology and psychoanalysis (see Webb 1976 for Freud's early connections with the occult). ..."
"... one point, all points will feel it. `Picture how what happens in one place happens everywhere' (Voices: 206-7). See also: occult/occult revival TERROR OF THE SITUATION, THE In Chapter 26 of Tales, Beelzebub tells of the teaching of Ashiata Shiemash, a Messenger ..."
"... of the internalised myth of the Fall. Both Blavatsky and Gurdjieff actively invited disparagement as charlatan gurus. See also: hypnosis/hypnotism; occult/occult revival Further reading On Theosophy, see Blavatsky (1988 [1888]); Ashish and Prem (1969); Ashish (1970); Carlson (1993); Washington (1993); Goodwyn (1994); ..."
If what you know about 
BAM........ do you know what to think?
20 references