The near future.
A mysterious explosion has destroyed the television network.
A group of five wealthy trustees are arguing in a dimly lit parlor of a bed and breakfast House in Savannah, GA.
They are very slick, fast talking Yankee businessmen.
They have a mysterious connection to the event.
They are gathered around the CEO who seems to have a bit more insight into their dilemma.
Above his head is a television screen with snow on it.
The initial shot begins with the snowy screen filling the vision.
The vision slowly zooms out.
The men are looking at the screen periodically while they talk.
CEO
Dreams are the Commodities of the Information Age.
And television is the new marketplace...
The possibility of another world.
Can't you people see it?
---------
The men have serious looks on their face.
---------
TRUSTEE 1
There was an explosion.
Television.
---------
He flicks his hands up.
---------
Gone. Unbelievable.
CEO
Yes. From what we can gather.
At the conclusion of the State of the Union Address.
Amidst the mayhem of applause,
BOOM!
TRUSTEE 2
A short circuit.
A scrambling of the airwaves.
Some force apparently jamming any efforts at repair.
A state of chaotic Emergency.
TRUSTEE 3
But what exactly does that have to do with us?
--------
CEO shakes his head.
--------
CEO
Everything.
They traced the explosion to our theme park here in Savannah.
That is why I called you all here on such short notice.
TRUSTEE 4
Island of the Old South.
-------
Shakes from reverie.
-------
Wait a minute.
What about the investment?
TRUSTEE 3
300 million.
Sky high.
TRUSTEE 2
Forget about that now.
We’ve got to figure out what happened.
Speculation is that he was part of a terrorist network.
TRUSTEE 1
How many people died in the explosion?
TRUSTEE 4
No one knows anything for sure.
TRUSTEE 3
He knows.
-------
He looks at the CEO.
--------
CEO
You’re not gonna believe this one.
TRUSTEE 2
The plans had been laid for at least a year.
TRUSTEE 4
About the explosion...
TRUSTEE 3
Yes, what was it exactly?
CEO
You know the signature ride he designed
As an advertisement of Uncle Sam’s Amusement in Georgia?
THE LEVIATHAN.
The new project.
It was part of the investment.
Remember?
TRUSTEE 4
Yes. On the Island of the Old South...
--------
His voice has a mock wistful tone.
--------
Under the Moonlight And Magnolias
of the old Harralee Plantation...
South of Savannah.
TRUSTEE 1
Brainwash Billboards for tourists.
TRUSTEE 2
I believe something bigger is at stake.
The Veil has been ripped.
There is a force...a feeling...
It’s a goddamn revolution.
TRUSTEE 4
But what in the hell does that mean?
CEO
It has to do with his extraordinary claim...
And our refusal to work with him.
TRUSTEE 3
The ride. You were talking about the ride...
CEO
Yes, the ride, a roller coaster.
THE LEVIATHAN.
TRUSTEE 2
Why did he choose that name?
CEO
It’s complicated.
It was supposed to be a big monster, dragon contraption with its tail in its mouth.
The Ouroborus, an ancient alchemical symbol of the eternal space/time continuum
Apparently,It is also a paradoxical metaphor of the hellish spirit of self-devouring, the gnashing of teeth, and the burning away of the dross, the transmutation of base metals into gold.
Half of it was above the ground.
There was a big Uncle Sam face with a grimacing laugh and serpentine tongue that you rode through as you went underground.
You were supposed to be riding on the tail.
TRUSTEE 3
Crazy.
TRUSTEE 4
He advertised it as THE DERAILED RIDE.
It was supposed to be a subterranean journey through Space and Time.
CEO
The virtuality was made to seem real through sensory deprivation techniques.
It was supposed to appear that the mind had been derailed from the body.
And it had been thoroughly checked.
TRUSTEE 2
But what does that have to do with Television?
CEO
Television is a working model of the human Imagination.
It operates on the same principles, same fundamental frequency patterns.
Television is an artificial imagination.
The more people watch it, the more they are relieved from having to conduct and generate substance in their own imaginations..
TRUSTEE 1
It is the ideal advertising vehicle. Television is a direct medium for translating a visual demand into the brain stuff of humans.
CEO
The physical brain is curvy and can hold a lot more data than it currently does.
Television facilitates the transfer of larger amounts of audiovisual information.
TRUSTEE 3
I don’t see the connection.
CEO
Multiple channels, multiple worlds, coexisting simultaneously.
The electrical waves that produce images and sounds in the mind are very similar to the electrical waves that produce images and sounds on a screen.
Electromagnetic energy.
Television is a vision of the imagination.
TRUSTEE 4
Or a reflection.
TRUSTEE 1
Therefore it can be used to sell anything that can be visualized.
TRUSTEE 3
To anyone who is watching.
TRUSTEE 2
He understood that connection?
CEO
Yes. Very intimately.
He understood how to turn the process around.
The possibility of transducing a person into an electrical wave frequency that could travel at light Speed, right back into the very airwaves themselves.
TRUSTEE 4
To reveal the power of the individual human transmitter.
TRUSTEE 1
To challenge the corporate hegemony of the American television network.
TRUSTEE 3
That was the goal.
TRUSTEE 2
But how did he do it?
CEO
By controlling all of the elements in an artificial environment, And isolating and amplifying a particular frequency until...
TRUSTEE 1
The reversal.
Amusement Park theory.
Instead of bringing the plastic realm into the real world as television does...
We take them out of the real and into the plastic fantastic...into the dream world.
CEO
Dreams are the commodities of the Information Age.
TRUSTEE 2
The basic machinery is in all of our parks.
CEO
He just took it further.
--------
Trustee 4 has a glazed look on his face.
--------
TRUSTEE 4
Island of the Old South...
TRUSTEE 3
What was his frequency?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Channel 8: Old South Savannah Parlor - PAST
April 20, 1861
Savannah gentlemen have gathered together to determine a course of action.
Eight days ago, General Beauregard ordered the bombardment of Ft. Sumter.
Seven days ago, the United States Army surrendered the fort.
Five days ago, Lincoln has made his famous request for 75,000 troops “to put down these unlawful combinations too large to be suppressed by ordinary means...”
And just yesterday, he ordered a blockade of all Southern ports.
This is the atmosphere of deliberation: tense, arrogant, excited, brash, anxious.
Gentleman 1
The storm is coming.
Gentleman 2
But surely it will be clear to the whole world who is in the right!
Gentleman 3
No, it won’t at all be clear.
Lincoln is using Sumter as a pretext to initiate an aggressive invasion and Conquest.
When they overwhelm us with force, they will then bribe the Africans and try to say that the whole thing was done in the name of freedom.
Gentleman 1
This signals the death of the old Republic.
------------
He pours a drink.
------------
Gentleman 3
The decline of Western Civilization.
Gentleman 4
We have no Industry! We have no Navy! We have no Machine!
We can’t defend ourselves unless we can turn that cotton into
manufactured war materials.
Gentleman 1
The Serpent has been loosed to tighten around our throats.
Gentleman 2
But those people cannot hold the field like we can.
He pulls a gun.
Gentleman 3
Nor can they ride.
---------
He smiles but with a degree of resignation.
These merits only seem consolatory.
One gentleman turns to the window, which looks out into a garden with a fountain.
----------
Gentleman 5
All we really have, gentlemen, is the will to fight.
The will to resist.
Gentleman 1
And the will to remember.
------------
They all raise their glasses.
Savannah gentlemen have gathered together to determine a course of action.
Eight days ago, General Beauregard ordered the bombardment of Ft. Sumter.
Seven days ago, the United States Army surrendered the fort.
Five days ago, Lincoln has made his famous request for 75,000 troops “to put down these unlawful combinations too large to be suppressed by ordinary means...”
And just yesterday, he ordered a blockade of all Southern ports.
This is the atmosphere of deliberation: tense, arrogant, excited, brash, anxious.
Gentleman 1
The storm is coming.
Gentleman 2
But surely it will be clear to the whole world who is in the right!
Gentleman 3
No, it won’t at all be clear.
Lincoln is using Sumter as a pretext to initiate an aggressive invasion and Conquest.
When they overwhelm us with force, they will then bribe the Africans and try to say that the whole thing was done in the name of freedom.
Gentleman 1
This signals the death of the old Republic.
------------
He pours a drink.
------------
Gentleman 3
The decline of Western Civilization.
Gentleman 4
We have no Industry! We have no Navy! We have no Machine!
We can’t defend ourselves unless we can turn that cotton into
manufactured war materials.
Gentleman 1
The Serpent has been loosed to tighten around our throats.
Gentleman 2
But those people cannot hold the field like we can.
He pulls a gun.
Gentleman 3
Nor can they ride.
---------
He smiles but with a degree of resignation.
These merits only seem consolatory.
One gentleman turns to the window, which looks out into a garden with a fountain.
----------
Gentleman 5
All we really have, gentlemen, is the will to fight.
The will to resist.
Gentleman 1
And the will to remember.
------------
They all raise their glasses.
Snake Oil Medicine 1: Secret ESP+ Control
Your mind navel is the one inch long astral channel outside between your navel and your silver cord.
You yourself can NEVER hope to seize hold of or use the magic key to ESP+ Control unless you can absolutely put all doubts of it out of your mind. Fortunately, it so happens that your physical body possesses a secret proved ability which can put all lurking doubts out of your conscious mind and enable you to acquire secret ESP+ Control.
This secret proved quality is the integrative flexibility of your central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord).
With the integrative flexibility of your CNS you can suddenly change any thought or impression you receive into the very opposite one instantly.
Stop it before it reaches the brain at Nerve Gap One.
Exterminate the thought that you don't want your brain to receive.
To prevent that from happening, the instant your lurking doubts tear loose in your conscious mind, implant the very opposite thought - the absolute conviction that your astral body can perform at once any miracle you ask of it.
When you project your absorbed ESP+ Control back into your astral body to perform something miraculous for you, your brain automatically synthesizes the very chemical transmitter agent it needs to project the right astral force and form which your astral body needs to project the right astral force and form which your astral body needs to convert that desired miracle into a reality, provided you accompany the projection with the successive inhibitory-excitatory sub-trance.
Step 1 - Fill yourself with a fierce rage at all doubts against the reality of supernatural power. Get so angry at them that you tremble like a wild animal about to counterattack its worst tormentor. Your brain will instantly fill itself with serotonin and with a variety of adrenergic substances and will prevent all such conscious and subconscious mind impressions from devitalizing your ESP+ Control.
Step 2 - Fill yourself with an overwhelming conviction that the miracle power you wish to acquire CAN be acquired: that you merely have to command the miracle to become a reality and it WILL. The chemical kingdom of your brain will automatically secrete the appropriate unknown chemical (call it "X") which it needs to project the right astral force and form necessary for your astral body to convert that desired miracle into a reality.
There are Secret Power-Paks to consider as well. These are concealed dynamite within:
1) sensory nerves - messages from body to spinal cord and brain
2) sympathetic nerves - fighting nerves
3) parasympathetic nerves - loving nerves
With the exception of sensory nerves and sympathetic nerves - practically all of the nerves between your body and CNS are cholinergic (which liberate acetylcholine).
Acetylcholine facilitates the transmission of any message.
The basic difference between the commonplace and the miraculous is that the commonplace adds to and subtracts from, while the miraculous multiplies to and divides from.
MULTIDIV - The secret formula to climax miracle action.
By multiplying your own power and at the same time, dividing that of your "subject" to resist it, you acquire supernatural control over anything and everything you project it to.
Secret formula of the Multidiv:
1) multiplying the normal goal which you might otherwise attain, by infinite properties of it, or by infinite varieties of it, or by infinite combinations of properties and varieties of it.
And at the same time:
2) divide infinitely the normal time it could take to achieve your goal normally
You yourself can NEVER hope to seize hold of or use the magic key to ESP+ Control unless you can absolutely put all doubts of it out of your mind. Fortunately, it so happens that your physical body possesses a secret proved ability which can put all lurking doubts out of your conscious mind and enable you to acquire secret ESP+ Control.
This secret proved quality is the integrative flexibility of your central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord).
With the integrative flexibility of your CNS you can suddenly change any thought or impression you receive into the very opposite one instantly.
Stop it before it reaches the brain at Nerve Gap One.
Exterminate the thought that you don't want your brain to receive.
To prevent that from happening, the instant your lurking doubts tear loose in your conscious mind, implant the very opposite thought - the absolute conviction that your astral body can perform at once any miracle you ask of it.
When you project your absorbed ESP+ Control back into your astral body to perform something miraculous for you, your brain automatically synthesizes the very chemical transmitter agent it needs to project the right astral force and form which your astral body needs to project the right astral force and form which your astral body needs to convert that desired miracle into a reality, provided you accompany the projection with the successive inhibitory-excitatory sub-trance.
Step 1 - Fill yourself with a fierce rage at all doubts against the reality of supernatural power. Get so angry at them that you tremble like a wild animal about to counterattack its worst tormentor. Your brain will instantly fill itself with serotonin and with a variety of adrenergic substances and will prevent all such conscious and subconscious mind impressions from devitalizing your ESP+ Control.
Step 2 - Fill yourself with an overwhelming conviction that the miracle power you wish to acquire CAN be acquired: that you merely have to command the miracle to become a reality and it WILL. The chemical kingdom of your brain will automatically secrete the appropriate unknown chemical (call it "X") which it needs to project the right astral force and form necessary for your astral body to convert that desired miracle into a reality.
There are Secret Power-Paks to consider as well. These are concealed dynamite within:
1) sensory nerves - messages from body to spinal cord and brain
2) sympathetic nerves - fighting nerves
3) parasympathetic nerves - loving nerves
With the exception of sensory nerves and sympathetic nerves - practically all of the nerves between your body and CNS are cholinergic (which liberate acetylcholine).
Acetylcholine facilitates the transmission of any message.
The basic difference between the commonplace and the miraculous is that the commonplace adds to and subtracts from, while the miraculous multiplies to and divides from.
MULTIDIV - The secret formula to climax miracle action.
By multiplying your own power and at the same time, dividing that of your "subject" to resist it, you acquire supernatural control over anything and everything you project it to.
Secret formula of the Multidiv:
1) multiplying the normal goal which you might otherwise attain, by infinite properties of it, or by infinite varieties of it, or by infinite combinations of properties and varieties of it.
And at the same time:
2) divide infinitely the normal time it could take to achieve your goal normally
WAYS OF ACCELERATED COMPLETION
The reason for war on earth lies not in the behaviour of human beings, but in the necessity for a particular substance which can only be produced in one of two ways; either by the conscious and intentional activity of people, or by their death. It follows that if people will not produce this substance intentionally, then deaths - and especially premature deaths - have to be increased on earth. War becomes inevitable on this account. This notion implies that wars are the consequences of man's failure to perform his cosmic duties, and on account of this failure, conditions arise that make war inevitable. Or if not war, the premature dying of people has to be brought about. Since, according to this theory, the required substance is liberated by some kind of death, the result can presumably be obtained by an enormous increase in the world's population such as has occurred during the present century - 'feeding the moon' (73).
Man must perform a certain duty for which he exists on the earth, or else be compelled to live and die in such a way that the results will be obtained from him willy-nilly, in spite of himself.
Intentional actions, performed for a rightful end, result in a certain substance being released. One part of that substance goes into the performance of the action; one part of the energy becomes available for this purpose, whatever it is; and the third part of the energy becomes available for the perfection, the inner development and spiritualization of the person himself. Human life should be so organized that this transformation of energy is really consciously undertaken by a sufficient number of people, and only in that way can the hazards of human life be averted...(74).
...There is both a possibility and a need for a limited number of people to follow what are called the WAYS OF ACCELERATED COMPLETION. These ways take different forms: some are connected with religion and others are not, but they all have in common the need for a more exactly and more personally regulated work of transformation than is possible by following rules or commandments formulated for the guidance of all and therefore of necessity very general and often vague. Among the WAYS OF ACCELERATED COMPLETION is one called the Fourth Way which is characterized by the fulfillment of all ordinary life obligations, coupled with a very exactly regulated and very intensive personal work.
This requires the highest degree of intelligence, adaptability and inner freedom in those who direct it; for they have to create conditions that enable the Duty of Transformation to be performed without neglect of the obligations common to all men and women(78).
The Work - MAGNUM OPUS - refers to the invisible world which has to be perpetually created in order that it should be. And it is that that we are called to if we are destined for accelerated completion. In order to enter that world, we have to earn the right to be in it, and for that we have to bring to it something made by ourselves. The first and simplest thing we can bring is our own capacity for work; our own capacity for transforming energy, and therefore for participating in the Creation. This can afterwards be converted into specific forms of creativity, according to objective needs and our own subjective powers.
There is no doubt that the Fourth Way is the direct application of the principle of creativity in life. That is why I called it non-causal. It always has to start without an antecedent cause. It is a spontaneous call from beyond that makes this possible...let me just say this simply, that there is a Work to be done, and that some people have the feeling that their life is not complete unless they are participating in that Work...(81-82)
- John G. Bennet. from Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma. Samuel Weiser, 1973. Maryland
Man must perform a certain duty for which he exists on the earth, or else be compelled to live and die in such a way that the results will be obtained from him willy-nilly, in spite of himself.
Intentional actions, performed for a rightful end, result in a certain substance being released. One part of that substance goes into the performance of the action; one part of the energy becomes available for this purpose, whatever it is; and the third part of the energy becomes available for the perfection, the inner development and spiritualization of the person himself. Human life should be so organized that this transformation of energy is really consciously undertaken by a sufficient number of people, and only in that way can the hazards of human life be averted...(74).
...There is both a possibility and a need for a limited number of people to follow what are called the WAYS OF ACCELERATED COMPLETION. These ways take different forms: some are connected with religion and others are not, but they all have in common the need for a more exactly and more personally regulated work of transformation than is possible by following rules or commandments formulated for the guidance of all and therefore of necessity very general and often vague. Among the WAYS OF ACCELERATED COMPLETION is one called the Fourth Way which is characterized by the fulfillment of all ordinary life obligations, coupled with a very exactly regulated and very intensive personal work.
This requires the highest degree of intelligence, adaptability and inner freedom in those who direct it; for they have to create conditions that enable the Duty of Transformation to be performed without neglect of the obligations common to all men and women(78).
The Work - MAGNUM OPUS - refers to the invisible world which has to be perpetually created in order that it should be. And it is that that we are called to if we are destined for accelerated completion. In order to enter that world, we have to earn the right to be in it, and for that we have to bring to it something made by ourselves. The first and simplest thing we can bring is our own capacity for work; our own capacity for transforming energy, and therefore for participating in the Creation. This can afterwards be converted into specific forms of creativity, according to objective needs and our own subjective powers.
There is no doubt that the Fourth Way is the direct application of the principle of creativity in life. That is why I called it non-causal. It always has to start without an antecedent cause. It is a spontaneous call from beyond that makes this possible...let me just say this simply, that there is a Work to be done, and that some people have the feeling that their life is not complete unless they are participating in that Work...(81-82)
- John G. Bennet. from Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma. Samuel Weiser, 1973. Maryland
Monday, July 27, 2009
The Lost Cause of Western Civilization
The South must be defended in historical terms as it was entitled to be defended. Some true and commanding image of its past must be restored. But that alone would not be enough. The issues that still divided North and South must be examined and faced...Behind the sensationalism (of the Northern Press) was a deeper hostility, a more thoroughgoing animus. What lay back of it was something broader than sectional disagreement or political or economic rivalry.
It was the total design of the attack that we had to discover, and above all the premises on which that design was based, and the end that it had in view.
Evidently, the thinking of Calhoun and his contemporaries had not gone deep enough into the premises of the Great Debate. The quarrel over slavery and the western lands had somehow obscured more vital issues. The South had fought in a good cause, but the world could always be made to think it fought for the wrong reasons. We did not want to make that same mistake again.
What was the South's cause in the 1920's? It was still a good cause, we thought, but how could it be stated? It was something more than the cause of the South against the North.
It was Agrarianism vs. Industrialism
It was Civilized society versus the new barbarism of science and technology controlled and directed by the modern power state.
In this sense, the cause of the South was and is the CAUSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION itself.
-Donald Davidson
It was the total design of the attack that we had to discover, and above all the premises on which that design was based, and the end that it had in view.
Evidently, the thinking of Calhoun and his contemporaries had not gone deep enough into the premises of the Great Debate. The quarrel over slavery and the western lands had somehow obscured more vital issues. The South had fought in a good cause, but the world could always be made to think it fought for the wrong reasons. We did not want to make that same mistake again.
What was the South's cause in the 1920's? It was still a good cause, we thought, but how could it be stated? It was something more than the cause of the South against the North.
It was Agrarianism vs. Industrialism
It was Civilized society versus the new barbarism of science and technology controlled and directed by the modern power state.
In this sense, the cause of the South was and is the CAUSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION itself.
-Donald Davidson
Tristram versus Lancelot
...And at that time Merlin prophesied that in that same place should fight two the best knights that ever were in Arthur's days, and the best lovers. So when Sir Tristram came to the tomb where Lanceor and his lady were buried he looked about him after Sir Palomides. Then was he ware of a seemly knight came riding against him all in white...And then they dressed their shields and spears, and came together with all their might of their horses; and they met so fiercely that both their horses and their knights fell to the earth, and as fast as they might, avoided their horses, and put their shields afore them, and they struck together with bright swords, as men that were of might, and either wounded other wonderly sore, that the blood ran out upon the grass. And thus they fought the space of four hours, that never one would speak to the other one word, and of thier harness, they had hewn off many pieces.
-Sir Thomas Malory, Le Mort d' Arthur, Book X, Chapter 5
-Sir Thomas Malory, Le Mort d' Arthur, Book X, Chapter 5
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
the last bulwark against socialist revolution
Could the South rise again?
Ransom did not know. But he felt confident that the southern, not the 'American' or progressive, way of life enjoyed the sanction of history and the blessing of God. - 45
The typical Southerner never believed that the sole responsibility of a man lay in the work that he performed, nor did he think that his value could be measured by his material prosperity. His business seemed to be rather to envelop both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence. - 47
To deliver the United States from its gross economic miscalculations, Ransom hoped to agitate a counterrevolution that would reinstate a traditional agrarian way of life, freed from the burdens of international commerce. - 52
Agrarians were the last free men in America...The social relations of an agrarian community were personal, moral, and neighborly, not perfunctory, juridicial, and economic...The old fashioned agrarian economy was, by nature, inefficient, its proprietors savoring the privileged liberty to work or ot and in their ample spare time to read or doze, to hunt, to fish, or to contemplate the splendor of creation. - 53
Perhaps the greatest advantage of the agrarian way of life was the restraint it imposed on human ambition. - 56
Amid the anarchy ensuing in the wake of revolution, bedeviled citizens would clamor for the reimposition of order and would listen to anyone who promised to deliver...
The American people, already obedient and disciplined through long familiarity with the industrialist regime, would surrender their integrity, responsibility, and independence in exchange for assurances of economic prosperity and social peace.
The backward, agrarian South thus stood as the last bulwark against socialist revolution, postponing indefinitely the communist millenium.
"Farmers are bad medicine for Marxists."
Communism naturally proceeded from corporate capitalism, and both threatened the agrarian South. Southern civilization rested on a tradition of local independence, and southerners defied the concentrated power of the corporation and the state, whether dominated by capitalists or communists. - 57
Southerners were devoted to leisure, and leisure was the prerequisite for aesthetic experience.
The South may have been impoverished, but the region and its people possessed a secret spiritual wealth that empowered them to take their stand against the machine. - 58
Nature is an object both for knowledge and to use; the latter disposition of nature includes that knowledge of it which is peculiarly scientific, and sometimes it is so impervious as to preempt all possibility of the former.
The Agrarians could not be both patriots and poets, unless they were content to write bad poetry. - 63
Tate intended his program not only to conceive a distinctly southern literary and intellectual tradition but to articulate a complete world view that would form the basis of a southern conservative movement.
"Our intentions would be two and they would look contradictory; to have our literature created by persons of philosophical capacity; and to have its pure forms without taint of explicit philosophy." - John Crowe Ransom
Ransom wanted an 'American' academy of letters, not Southern - "To establish a southern academy would bring the Agrarian, at least those who composed poetry, into dangerous proximity to the patriotic fervor that threatened to dissolve their poetic sensibilities."
Artists and writers who had accommodated themselves to industrial capitalism could retreat from the rough world of economics and politics into the isolated enclave of the liberal arts college, where art, literature, and criticism flourished. Although these delicate souls lived economically and politically in the world of mass production and mass consumption, they could somehow live intellectually and spiritually according to the ancient Western tradition of letters which was founded upon the land. -64
Human beings lived in a fallen world of their own making...they had to recognize that their very survival depended on the use and even exploitation of men and nature - Men in modern society could not return to the original state of human purity, simplicity, and innocence, but they could seek salvation from their fallen state by adopting the means of repentance at hand.
Art returned modern men to their originall innocence. This vicarious and formal transformation compensated human beings for their sense of alienation from nature, from each other, from themselves, and from God without requiring them to abandon what Ransom called the 'forward economy.'
[Ideally] the division of labor liberated man from drudgery and hardship through technological innovation...
Specialization of labor also enhanced the freedom to pursue artistic projecs. No longer constrained to produce for themselves the essentials of life, men possessed of literary and artistic genius could devote their time to the contemplation and creation of beauty...With the disapearance of art, modern men would lose the one means of renewal, revitalization, and redemption available to them, the one means of defying the worst ravages of an industrialized world.
Upon the division of labor, therefore, rested not only the production of goods but the creation of art. By freeing writers and artists, the divisions of labor directly supported their vocation...For the artist or writer, the pursuit of his vocation was worth any adversity or affliction.
The Underlying goal of the Agrarian movement - the attempt to fashion a humane way of life in the modern world.
For John Crowe Ransom tools became poetry and criticism rather than politics and economics. - 68
In Allen Tate's view, art and culture could not flourish or even survive without revelation...The value of art lay in illuminating the contradictory nature of the human condition. Men were finite creatures who aspired to transcend their finitude.
The proper role for writers, Tate thought, was not to incite political revolution, excite religious revival, or inspire social reform but to explain the consequences of ignoring the conditions under which God permitted life on earth.
Tate devoted his entire career as a poet and an essayist to challenging the one-dimensional view of man that rejected the transcendent dimension of human existence and suggested that all human problems were subject to human, i.e. political, scientific, or technological solutions. The modern man of letters, according to Tate, could not propose alternatives or provide solutions...the writer could not construct a social, political, or spiritual order that would hold chaos at bay.
The modern man of letters, according to Tate, had the responsibility to reject the spiritual conditions of modern man.
"The secular has forgotten that hell exists, because they have lost the language to describe it."
Hence the principal duty of the man of letters was to revitalize and protect a language that depicted the complexity and mystery; the joy and agony, of the human condition. If men of letters did not call attention to sin and its wages, Tate feared, modern men would confidently deny them, for man lived under the barbarous disability of believing that the evils they could not name, did not exist. The poet had to identify and define those aspects of the human condition that the others could not discern. He must detail not his enemies' hell, but his own. -70
He [man of letters] has to render the image of man as he is in his time, which without the man of letters, would not otherwise be known. What modern literature has taught us is not merely that the man of letters has not participated fully in the action of society; it has taught us that nobody else has either. It is a fearful lesson...
Tate scorned the idea of the retreat of men of letters into some safe haven -72
Donald Davidson desired to return mind to the service of a society of myth and tradition. to that end, he attempted to reconstitute the ancient community of the pagan tribe and to resurrect it in the modern South. Davidson scorned the modern products of mind - science, technology, and industry - and declared that the best way to end the crisis of modernity was to cultivate piety for the southern tradition. He discovered his image of the modern man of letters not, like Tate, in the besieged figure of the medieval clerk who depicted the sources of tension in and the hope for redemption from, the human condition but in the heroic figure of the bard who sang the glories of his people and who recalled for them their origin, their identity, and their destiny.
The authority of the man of letters as bard became, for Davidson, the instrument through which the South would assert its redemptive power. -73
Poetry thus captured a reality that science ignored. Individualist, particular, contingent, and unpredictable, poetry defied the restrictive logic of science that insisted on abstraction, analysis...
Poetry reconstituted the "world's body" by acknowledging the fullness and complexity of the world of actual things - a fullness and complexity that remained concealed from the scientific understanding.
Poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perception and memories...poetry confirmed that the world was not merely logical or functional, not utterly subject to the preoccupations of human intellect and will.
Poetry had the advantage of being apolitical, or remaining untainted by the half-truths of ideology. The truth of poetry was the truth of life. - 84
-Mark Malvasi, from The Unregenerate South
Ransom did not know. But he felt confident that the southern, not the 'American' or progressive, way of life enjoyed the sanction of history and the blessing of God. - 45
The typical Southerner never believed that the sole responsibility of a man lay in the work that he performed, nor did he think that his value could be measured by his material prosperity. His business seemed to be rather to envelop both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence. - 47
To deliver the United States from its gross economic miscalculations, Ransom hoped to agitate a counterrevolution that would reinstate a traditional agrarian way of life, freed from the burdens of international commerce. - 52
Agrarians were the last free men in America...The social relations of an agrarian community were personal, moral, and neighborly, not perfunctory, juridicial, and economic...The old fashioned agrarian economy was, by nature, inefficient, its proprietors savoring the privileged liberty to work or ot and in their ample spare time to read or doze, to hunt, to fish, or to contemplate the splendor of creation. - 53
Perhaps the greatest advantage of the agrarian way of life was the restraint it imposed on human ambition. - 56
Amid the anarchy ensuing in the wake of revolution, bedeviled citizens would clamor for the reimposition of order and would listen to anyone who promised to deliver...
The American people, already obedient and disciplined through long familiarity with the industrialist regime, would surrender their integrity, responsibility, and independence in exchange for assurances of economic prosperity and social peace.
The backward, agrarian South thus stood as the last bulwark against socialist revolution, postponing indefinitely the communist millenium.
"Farmers are bad medicine for Marxists."
Communism naturally proceeded from corporate capitalism, and both threatened the agrarian South. Southern civilization rested on a tradition of local independence, and southerners defied the concentrated power of the corporation and the state, whether dominated by capitalists or communists. - 57
Southerners were devoted to leisure, and leisure was the prerequisite for aesthetic experience.
The South may have been impoverished, but the region and its people possessed a secret spiritual wealth that empowered them to take their stand against the machine. - 58
Nature is an object both for knowledge and to use; the latter disposition of nature includes that knowledge of it which is peculiarly scientific, and sometimes it is so impervious as to preempt all possibility of the former.
The Agrarians could not be both patriots and poets, unless they were content to write bad poetry. - 63
Tate intended his program not only to conceive a distinctly southern literary and intellectual tradition but to articulate a complete world view that would form the basis of a southern conservative movement.
"Our intentions would be two and they would look contradictory; to have our literature created by persons of philosophical capacity; and to have its pure forms without taint of explicit philosophy." - John Crowe Ransom
Ransom wanted an 'American' academy of letters, not Southern - "To establish a southern academy would bring the Agrarian, at least those who composed poetry, into dangerous proximity to the patriotic fervor that threatened to dissolve their poetic sensibilities."
Artists and writers who had accommodated themselves to industrial capitalism could retreat from the rough world of economics and politics into the isolated enclave of the liberal arts college, where art, literature, and criticism flourished. Although these delicate souls lived economically and politically in the world of mass production and mass consumption, they could somehow live intellectually and spiritually according to the ancient Western tradition of letters which was founded upon the land. -64
Human beings lived in a fallen world of their own making...they had to recognize that their very survival depended on the use and even exploitation of men and nature - Men in modern society could not return to the original state of human purity, simplicity, and innocence, but they could seek salvation from their fallen state by adopting the means of repentance at hand.
Art returned modern men to their originall innocence. This vicarious and formal transformation compensated human beings for their sense of alienation from nature, from each other, from themselves, and from God without requiring them to abandon what Ransom called the 'forward economy.'
[Ideally] the division of labor liberated man from drudgery and hardship through technological innovation...
Specialization of labor also enhanced the freedom to pursue artistic projecs. No longer constrained to produce for themselves the essentials of life, men possessed of literary and artistic genius could devote their time to the contemplation and creation of beauty...With the disapearance of art, modern men would lose the one means of renewal, revitalization, and redemption available to them, the one means of defying the worst ravages of an industrialized world.
Upon the division of labor, therefore, rested not only the production of goods but the creation of art. By freeing writers and artists, the divisions of labor directly supported their vocation...For the artist or writer, the pursuit of his vocation was worth any adversity or affliction.
The Underlying goal of the Agrarian movement - the attempt to fashion a humane way of life in the modern world.
For John Crowe Ransom tools became poetry and criticism rather than politics and economics. - 68
In Allen Tate's view, art and culture could not flourish or even survive without revelation...The value of art lay in illuminating the contradictory nature of the human condition. Men were finite creatures who aspired to transcend their finitude.
The proper role for writers, Tate thought, was not to incite political revolution, excite religious revival, or inspire social reform but to explain the consequences of ignoring the conditions under which God permitted life on earth.
Tate devoted his entire career as a poet and an essayist to challenging the one-dimensional view of man that rejected the transcendent dimension of human existence and suggested that all human problems were subject to human, i.e. political, scientific, or technological solutions. The modern man of letters, according to Tate, could not propose alternatives or provide solutions...the writer could not construct a social, political, or spiritual order that would hold chaos at bay.
The modern man of letters, according to Tate, had the responsibility to reject the spiritual conditions of modern man.
"The secular has forgotten that hell exists, because they have lost the language to describe it."
Hence the principal duty of the man of letters was to revitalize and protect a language that depicted the complexity and mystery; the joy and agony, of the human condition. If men of letters did not call attention to sin and its wages, Tate feared, modern men would confidently deny them, for man lived under the barbarous disability of believing that the evils they could not name, did not exist. The poet had to identify and define those aspects of the human condition that the others could not discern. He must detail not his enemies' hell, but his own. -70
He [man of letters] has to render the image of man as he is in his time, which without the man of letters, would not otherwise be known. What modern literature has taught us is not merely that the man of letters has not participated fully in the action of society; it has taught us that nobody else has either. It is a fearful lesson...
Tate scorned the idea of the retreat of men of letters into some safe haven -72
Donald Davidson desired to return mind to the service of a society of myth and tradition. to that end, he attempted to reconstitute the ancient community of the pagan tribe and to resurrect it in the modern South. Davidson scorned the modern products of mind - science, technology, and industry - and declared that the best way to end the crisis of modernity was to cultivate piety for the southern tradition. He discovered his image of the modern man of letters not, like Tate, in the besieged figure of the medieval clerk who depicted the sources of tension in and the hope for redemption from, the human condition but in the heroic figure of the bard who sang the glories of his people and who recalled for them their origin, their identity, and their destiny.
The authority of the man of letters as bard became, for Davidson, the instrument through which the South would assert its redemptive power. -73
Poetry thus captured a reality that science ignored. Individualist, particular, contingent, and unpredictable, poetry defied the restrictive logic of science that insisted on abstraction, analysis...
Poetry reconstituted the "world's body" by acknowledging the fullness and complexity of the world of actual things - a fullness and complexity that remained concealed from the scientific understanding.
Poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perception and memories...poetry confirmed that the world was not merely logical or functional, not utterly subject to the preoccupations of human intellect and will.
Poetry had the advantage of being apolitical, or remaining untainted by the half-truths of ideology. The truth of poetry was the truth of life. - 84
-Mark Malvasi, from The Unregenerate South
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
necessity of returning to the land
We have been taught by Jefferson's struggles with Hamilton, by Calhoun's with Webster, and in the woods at Shiloh or along the ravines of Fort Donelson where the long hunter's rifle spoke defiance to the more accelerated Springfields, that the triumph of industry, commerce, trade, brings misfortune to those who live on the land.
It is a war to the death between technology and the ordinary functions of living. The rights to these human functions are the natural rights of man, and they are threatened now, in the twentieth, not in the eighteenth century, for the first time. Unless man asserts and defends them he is doomed...
The answer lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practised by most of the people.
-Andrew Nelson Lytle, from The Hind Tit in I'll Take My Stand
It is a war to the death between technology and the ordinary functions of living. The rights to these human functions are the natural rights of man, and they are threatened now, in the twentieth, not in the eighteenth century, for the first time. Unless man asserts and defends them he is doomed...
The answer lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practised by most of the people.
-Andrew Nelson Lytle, from The Hind Tit in I'll Take My Stand
Spear of Destiny
The basic concept behind all magical practice is a belief in a correspondence between the Universe and Man, that is, between Macrocosm and Microcosm. The Western Mind grounded in materialism finds such thinking totally unscientific and can get no further than a belief in the existence of ghosts. -161
The Adepts of Ritual Magic, both white and black, seek an expansion of consciousness, in what they call the 'astral light' of the planetary spheres. The purpose of their magical rites is to channel the cosmic forces or to awaken these powers from the depths of their own being. And as an aid to the fulfillment of this purpose a whole range of signs, symbols, colours, and shapes are used as part of the rituals in order to guide the magician to communication with those particular powers he seeks to serve.
The next great principle of Western Magic is the belief that the properly trained human will is, quite literally, capable of anything...
The motivating power, then, in all magical operations, is the trained will of the magician - lights, colours, circles, triangles, perfumes - are merely aids to concentrating the will of the magician into a blazing stream of pure energy. -193
The Nazi Party rightly scorned the Christian Church for their insistence that Christianity is superior to all other religions because it was entirely free from all Mythology. They correctly assessed that the strictured and unimaginative theology of contemporary Churchmen, dominated by a pathetic mixture of cartesian intellect and superstitious faith in dogma, was totally incapable of comprehending how the Christianity of the Grail and the Revelation is the very climax and fulfillment of all mythology. -261
The unique aspect of Rudolf Steiner's way to knowledge of spiritual realities rests in the fact that he revered the traditional initiation procedures hitherto practised by all Eastern and Western occult systems. -271
on Jesus...
The succession of miraculous deeds and events described in the Gospels indicating the ever-developing extent to which Christ had united himself with the elements of the Earth and penetrated the psyche and body of Jesus.
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?...
The Spirit of the Universe had contracted in sacrificial deed into a total identification with the body of fallen man, experiencing the confines of human consciousness fettered to a mortal brain. The God of Love had entered the utter isolation of three-dimensional consciousness to conquer death and reanimate the dying earth existence, in order to lead mankind back to a full citizenship in the Macrocosm and the fulfillment of a cosmic destiny.
Christ came to lead the ego-consciousness of the Jews, and thereafter of all mankind, beyond the limited and prejudiced loyalties of family, tribe, and race.
-Trevor Ravenscroft
The Adepts of Ritual Magic, both white and black, seek an expansion of consciousness, in what they call the 'astral light' of the planetary spheres. The purpose of their magical rites is to channel the cosmic forces or to awaken these powers from the depths of their own being. And as an aid to the fulfillment of this purpose a whole range of signs, symbols, colours, and shapes are used as part of the rituals in order to guide the magician to communication with those particular powers he seeks to serve.
The next great principle of Western Magic is the belief that the properly trained human will is, quite literally, capable of anything...
The motivating power, then, in all magical operations, is the trained will of the magician - lights, colours, circles, triangles, perfumes - are merely aids to concentrating the will of the magician into a blazing stream of pure energy. -193
The Nazi Party rightly scorned the Christian Church for their insistence that Christianity is superior to all other religions because it was entirely free from all Mythology. They correctly assessed that the strictured and unimaginative theology of contemporary Churchmen, dominated by a pathetic mixture of cartesian intellect and superstitious faith in dogma, was totally incapable of comprehending how the Christianity of the Grail and the Revelation is the very climax and fulfillment of all mythology. -261
The unique aspect of Rudolf Steiner's way to knowledge of spiritual realities rests in the fact that he revered the traditional initiation procedures hitherto practised by all Eastern and Western occult systems. -271
on Jesus...
The succession of miraculous deeds and events described in the Gospels indicating the ever-developing extent to which Christ had united himself with the elements of the Earth and penetrated the psyche and body of Jesus.
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?...
The Spirit of the Universe had contracted in sacrificial deed into a total identification with the body of fallen man, experiencing the confines of human consciousness fettered to a mortal brain. The God of Love had entered the utter isolation of three-dimensional consciousness to conquer death and reanimate the dying earth existence, in order to lead mankind back to a full citizenship in the Macrocosm and the fulfillment of a cosmic destiny.
Christ came to lead the ego-consciousness of the Jews, and thereafter of all mankind, beyond the limited and prejudiced loyalties of family, tribe, and race.
-Trevor Ravenscroft
remarks on the Southern Religion
The Long View is, in brief, the Cosmopolitan destroyer of Tradition. Or, put otherwise, since the Christian myth is a vegetation rite, varying only in some details from countless other vegetative myths, there is no reason to prefer Christ to Adonis.
The Short View holds that the whole Christ and the whole Adonis are sufficiently differentiated in their respective qualities, and that our tradition compels us to choose more than that half of Christ which is Adonis and to take the whole, separate, and unique Christ.
Tradition is not simply a fact, but a fact that must be constantly defended. -162
It has always seemed a scandal to us that Scholasticism should try to make rational all those unique qualities of the horse which are spirits and myths and symbols.
By making Reason, Science, or Nature an instrument of defense for the protection of the other than reasonable, the other than natural, it [the Western Church] performed a tremendous feat of spiritual unity, and the only kind of unity that the Western mind is capable of.
The Western Church established a system of quantity for the protection of quality, but it was always the danger that quantity would revolt from servitude and suppress its master; the danger that it would apply its genius to a field more favorable to spectacular success.
Nature began to see the practical possibilities of knowing herself. The symbol and the myth meant that nature was largely an inviolable whole; once the symbol and the myth were proved to be not natural facts, but unnatural fictions that fitted into no logical series tolerable to the rational mind, nature became simply a workable half. -164
The South, as a political atmosphere formed by the eighteenth century, did not realize it's genius in time, but continued to defend itself on the political terms of the North; and thus, waiting too long, it let its powerful rival gain the ascendancy. Its religious impulse was inarticulate simply because it tried to encompass its destiny within the terms of Protestantism, in origin, a non-agrarian and trading religion; hardly a religion at all, but a result of secular ambition.
The Southern politicians could merely quote scripture to defend slavery, while they defended their society as a whole with the catchwords of eighteenth century politics. And that is why the South separated from the North too late, and thus lost its cause.
Because the South never created a fitting religion, the social structure of the south began grievously to break down two generations after the Civil War; for the social structure depends on the economic structure, and economic conviction is the secular image of religion. No nation is ever simply and unequivocally beaten in war, nor was the South. But the South shows signs of defeat, and this is due to its lack of a religion which would make her special secular system the inevitable and permanently natural one.
-Allen Tate, Remarks on the Southern Religion, from I'll Take My Stand
The Short View holds that the whole Christ and the whole Adonis are sufficiently differentiated in their respective qualities, and that our tradition compels us to choose more than that half of Christ which is Adonis and to take the whole, separate, and unique Christ.
Tradition is not simply a fact, but a fact that must be constantly defended. -162
It has always seemed a scandal to us that Scholasticism should try to make rational all those unique qualities of the horse which are spirits and myths and symbols.
By making Reason, Science, or Nature an instrument of defense for the protection of the other than reasonable, the other than natural, it [the Western Church] performed a tremendous feat of spiritual unity, and the only kind of unity that the Western mind is capable of.
The Western Church established a system of quantity for the protection of quality, but it was always the danger that quantity would revolt from servitude and suppress its master; the danger that it would apply its genius to a field more favorable to spectacular success.
Nature began to see the practical possibilities of knowing herself. The symbol and the myth meant that nature was largely an inviolable whole; once the symbol and the myth were proved to be not natural facts, but unnatural fictions that fitted into no logical series tolerable to the rational mind, nature became simply a workable half. -164
The South, as a political atmosphere formed by the eighteenth century, did not realize it's genius in time, but continued to defend itself on the political terms of the North; and thus, waiting too long, it let its powerful rival gain the ascendancy. Its religious impulse was inarticulate simply because it tried to encompass its destiny within the terms of Protestantism, in origin, a non-agrarian and trading religion; hardly a religion at all, but a result of secular ambition.
The Southern politicians could merely quote scripture to defend slavery, while they defended their society as a whole with the catchwords of eighteenth century politics. And that is why the South separated from the North too late, and thus lost its cause.
Because the South never created a fitting religion, the social structure of the south began grievously to break down two generations after the Civil War; for the social structure depends on the economic structure, and economic conviction is the secular image of religion. No nation is ever simply and unequivocally beaten in war, nor was the South. But the South shows signs of defeat, and this is due to its lack of a religion which would make her special secular system the inevitable and permanently natural one.
-Allen Tate, Remarks on the Southern Religion, from I'll Take My Stand
The Doctrine of Newness
The South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country(3).
The good life depends on leisure, but leisure depends on an establishment, and the establishment depends on a prevailing magnaminity which scorns personal advancement at the expense of the free activity of the mind(10).
I believe there is possible no deep sense of beauty, no heroism of conduct, and no sublimity of religion, which is not informed by the humble sense of man's precarious position in the universe.
'Progress' and 'Service' are not European slogans, they are Americanisms. We alone have devoted our lives to ideals which are admirable within their proper limits, but which expose us to slavery when pursued without critical intelligence...
His business [that of the Southern gentleman] seemed rather to envelop both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence(12).
Industrialism is a program under which men, using the latest scientific paraphernalia, sacrifice comfort, leisure, and the enjoyment of life to win Pyrrhic victories from nature at points of no strategic importance(15).
Is our New World to be dedicated forever to the doctrine of 'Newness'?
-John Crowe Ransom, from the 'Statement of Principles' in the book "I'll Take My Stand"
The good life depends on leisure, but leisure depends on an establishment, and the establishment depends on a prevailing magnaminity which scorns personal advancement at the expense of the free activity of the mind(10).
I believe there is possible no deep sense of beauty, no heroism of conduct, and no sublimity of religion, which is not informed by the humble sense of man's precarious position in the universe.
'Progress' and 'Service' are not European slogans, they are Americanisms. We alone have devoted our lives to ideals which are admirable within their proper limits, but which expose us to slavery when pursued without critical intelligence...
His business [that of the Southern gentleman] seemed rather to envelop both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence(12).
Industrialism is a program under which men, using the latest scientific paraphernalia, sacrifice comfort, leisure, and the enjoyment of life to win Pyrrhic victories from nature at points of no strategic importance(15).
Is our New World to be dedicated forever to the doctrine of 'Newness'?
-John Crowe Ransom, from the 'Statement of Principles' in the book "I'll Take My Stand"
Center everywhere/Circumference nowhere
But, young as the psychology of the unconscious process may be, it has nevertheless succeeded in establishing certain facts which are gradually gaining acceptance.
[Perhaps the most important point regards the] polaristic structure of the psyche, which it shares with all natural processes. Natural processes are phenomena of energy, constantly arising out of a "less probable state" of polar tension. This formula is of special significance for psychology, because the conscious mind is usually reluctant to see or admit the polarity of its own background, although it is precisely from there that it gets its energy.
Whereas the Christian belief is that man is freed from sin by the redemptory act of Christ, the alchemist was evidently of the opinion that the "restitution to the likeness of original and incorrupt nature had still to be accomplished by the art, and this can only mean that Christ's work of redemption was regarded as incomplete.
It is the moral task of alchemy to bring the feminine material background of the masculine psyche, seething with passions, into harmony with the principle of the spirit - truly a labor of Hercules.
God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
- Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctis
[Perhaps the most important point regards the] polaristic structure of the psyche, which it shares with all natural processes. Natural processes are phenomena of energy, constantly arising out of a "less probable state" of polar tension. This formula is of special significance for psychology, because the conscious mind is usually reluctant to see or admit the polarity of its own background, although it is precisely from there that it gets its energy.
Whereas the Christian belief is that man is freed from sin by the redemptory act of Christ, the alchemist was evidently of the opinion that the "restitution to the likeness of original and incorrupt nature had still to be accomplished by the art, and this can only mean that Christ's work of redemption was regarded as incomplete.
It is the moral task of alchemy to bring the feminine material background of the masculine psyche, seething with passions, into harmony with the principle of the spirit - truly a labor of Hercules.
God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
- Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctis
4 watersheds in the formation of the Western World
1)English Revolution - 1640s
2)French Revolution - 1789...
3)War Between the States - 1861-65
4)Russian Revolution - 1918
2)French Revolution - 1789...
3)War Between the States - 1861-65
4)Russian Revolution - 1918
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate.
For centuries Daedalus has represented the type of the artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bounds of social judgment, dedicated to the morals not of his time but of his art. He is the hero of the way of thought - singlehearted, courageous, and full of faith that the truth, as he finds it, shall make us free.
...the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves, where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world...
The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
catharsis - purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death.
This was the old function of the festival and mystery-plays.
The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time was the reality clothed in the apparition.
The universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation constitutes the experience of the tragic art.
Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
-Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
For centuries Daedalus has represented the type of the artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bounds of social judgment, dedicated to the morals not of his time but of his art. He is the hero of the way of thought - singlehearted, courageous, and full of faith that the truth, as he finds it, shall make us free.
...the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves, where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world...
The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
catharsis - purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death.
This was the old function of the festival and mystery-plays.
The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time was the reality clothed in the apparition.
The universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation constitutes the experience of the tragic art.
Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
-Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
Monday, July 20, 2009
The Golden Circle Video Game
Geode EM Field Detector
just for fun...
Story Overview/Background
Legend has it that during the Civil War in the United States in the 1860s, there was a secret antebellum organization in the South known as the Knights of the Golden Circle or KGC. This was an elite group of men who were determined to achieve independence for the South at any cost but were also dedicated to extending the South's dominion into Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. This area, including the eleven states of the Confederacy, comprised what became known as the Golden Circle. The center of the circle was Havana.
The war went badly for the Confederacy as the organization had ultimately expected. But for them the war was far from over. Their efforts went even further underground and were directed to the hoarding of precious metals, jewels, relics, etc. to finance the day when the South would rise again. In the years after the war, operatives began burying the treasure in various parts of the South. This was believed to be the safest method of preservation. This continued up until 1922.
It was said that the leaders of the Golden Circle utilized dark occult forces to secure worldly goods, affect international political movements, and to read the future. Their methods were believed unsound yet the technicalities were well-guarded. Many of them had been high-ranking Masonic leaders before their involvement and were familiar with esoteric symbolism which was used for magical purposes but also as signs to map hidden caches as well as the location of booby traps. These maps were also hidden. Certain members were appointed as sentinels of the treasure. The obligation was handed down through the generations.
Conflict
The game begins in the year 2012.
The United States is currently undergoing a series of internal crises. Overpopulation, enormous debt, terrorism, wars abroad, and a vicious devouring factionalism have threatened the integrity of the Union once again. The streets are full of violence and rioting. Special interest groups representing dozens of minorities have formed exclusive cells that no longer recognize US authority. Militia groups have begun appearing in rural communities all over the country. Intelligence organizations financed by both the federal government and private corporations are trying to reestablish security at the expense of one another. Every man is for himself. There is a race to consolidate natural resources and money. It is a time of absolute chaos.
Rush Bayzer is an international treasure hunter who calls no place home. He was an orphan, adopted by a military family that lived all over the world. He has accumulated a considerable personal fortune in his own endeavors which up until now have predominantly involved the excavation of ancient viking treasure and artifacts in Scandinavia. His stock in precious metals has enabled him to avoid the inflation which has bankrupted so many.
Recently, several jars containing gold coins worth close to a million dollars, were discovered right outside Ft. Smith, Arkansas. These findings were published and suggestions were made that this was in connection to the lost hoard of the KGC. Bounty hunters from all over the world began immediatley converging on the Southeastern United States, hoping to secure more of the rumored booty.
Rush makes immediate plans to join the search, thrilled at the opportunity for new adventure. He begins outfitting himself with the latest in treasure hunting technology.
No one realizes, though, the extent of the peril involved.
Character Game
The treasure hunting world of today tends to attract extraordinary figures. As a subject for character development, it has multifarious possibilities because of the diverse disciplines that are engaged in the pursuit. There are scholars, scientists, writers, criminals, soldiers, as well as adventure seeking cowboys, who have vested interests in excavating some aspect of the past believed to be valuable for various reasons. The conflict between these different personalities and the institutions/corporations/governments etc that they represent, will make up the dramatic conflict of the game
The subject also conjoins multiple periods of time which enables the player to explore more than one world. There is the world of the surface and then there is the world beneath the surface or under the skin. It is at the convergence of these worlds that interesting stories are developed. By utilizing the past as well as the future, the certain and the possible are able to fertilize one another. If a game exists only in the imagination or in the future, then too often it becomes outlandish fantasy. If it exists only in the past, it either fulfills what has already taken place or it alters history which is just as fantastic. But if there are aspects or clues from an identifiable past that have been brought through the present and developed into believable speculations, then the story is more engaging.
It is also important to recognize that the classic treasure hunter always becomes associated with the environment of his excavation. The example of Indiania Jones is forever identified with Nazi Germany. Rush Bayzer is a treasure hunter that will be forever associated with his escapades across the American South, which has never been used, to my knowledge, for an international treasure hunt.
The marketing potential for such a character is already well established. Besides Indiana Jones, there is also Lara Croft and dozens of others.
Genre
The Golden Circle is an Action/adventure RPG in the postmodern surrealist genre that takes place in the American South. While set in the near future, the real environment of the game is in the interaction with the Civil War era South and the Western frontier up to the end of the 19th century, which in many ways was a continuance of the war's violence. For example, Jesse James was supposedly a high-ranking member of the KGC whose robbing expeditions in Oklahoma and Arkansas added untold millions to the hidden coffers. The line of adventure continues through Mexico, Central America, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean. This is, of course, the supposed sphere of the Golden Circle.
This interaction between the near future and the past is accomplished in a unique way. In all of the older Southern cities there has been an enormous interest in historic preservation which has led to an increasingly profitable tourism industry. The cities have begun to recreate the look of the antebellum South for visitors who want a glimpse of the Past. This has not only affected the architecture but also the dress of the native population. Everyone has essentially become a reenactor. The effect is similar to an Amusement Park and the line between the past and the present is blurred. By 2012 this has been taken to a radical extreme.
Nuclear Energy and nanotechnology have afforded enormous downsizing opportunities so there is none of this ugly urban sprawl or industrial clutter. But with this technology, it is difficult to know who is really in control or who is watching who because of enhanced surveillance capacities.
The point is that all of the technology of the future is at hand but the world appears more like it did in the 1860s. This liberates the weapon/ equipment restrictions of the 19th century. So there are visible places where technology peaks through, and the current crisis has resulted in a severe cultural schizophrenia and a war between the past and the present. This amusement park is dangerous.
Game Play
The game mechanics revolve around Rush Bayzer's search for the lost hoard of the KGC. Utilizing contacts in the Treasure hunting world, he obtains information as to the whereabouts of the various buried treasures. The game's progression revolves around different missions in and around cities and islands within the circumference of the Golden Circle to obtain this treasure and to discover the secret plans of the Knights of the Golden Circle. The object is not to save the world or to secure the Union. Rush Bayzer is self-interested and he doesn't give a flip for politics, he just wants the thrill of the hunt and the treasure at the end of the rainbow. He is also amoral, beyond good and evil, because he is driven by the necessity of survival. He will lie, cheat, steal, and kill, if necessary. But he also doesn't realize that there are deeper connections between his lineage and the actual KGC itself. Part of the mystery of the game is discovering Rush Bayzer's parentage.
His enemies vary between other treasure hunters, government operatives, corporate schemers, and the sentinels of the KGC. In each of these groups, there may be allies of various sorts.
A lot of the action and progression of the game depends upon the player's ability to decipher maps and codes and to avoid traps and obtain keys to sealed off passages. It will combine classic first person and third person shooter traditions in games like Halo and Return to Castle Wolfenstein with the more reflective and strategic PC games such as Myst.
Key Features
The key feature of the game is the novel environment in which the treasure hunt takes place. Video game development has not even touched the areas around which this revolves. There is a rich history in the South. It is a region haunted by ghosts and legends, good and evil, and beautiful landscapes. These elements provide a fertile ground for the classic treasure hunt that already has an established popularity. This game, if done right, will sell.
There have been a few books on the KGC as well as a plethora of references in old newspapers as well as websites circulating recent articles between contemporary treasure hunters.
Interest in the Civil War is clearly evident as there are over 50,000 books that have been published about the war since 1865.
Technical Challenges
The primary technical challenge is the seamless blending required in joining the two different periods of the future and past together in a believable and interesting way. The lore and the hardware is already there.
Target Machine
The target machine is the Microsoft's XBOX console or the highest bidder...
Target Market
With this game, I would like to attract history buffs and an adult group that has up until now been largely untapped. I see the game as ultimately having more mature themes with violence that will also require more adept strategizing. The group I am seeking will already have a developed taste or appreciation for the intrigues of American History.
At the same time, I want it to involve hard core action.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Pistis Sophia II - Power Wisdom
Blessed be the one who defeats the Dragon and takes possession of the Golden Fleece.
Sophia is the objective reasoning of the being, the Awakened Consciousness.
Lucifer [viewed properly - as Light Bringer/Morning Star], integrated with ourselves, converts us into Archangels.
TO SOMA HELIAKON = body of Gold of the Solar Man
Whosoever possesses the Philosophical Stone, the Red Carbuncle, is married with Pistis Sophia [Power Wisdom].
LUX IN TENEBRIS LUCET = The Light shines in Darkness
The initiate illumined by Sophia looks toward the Height. He observes from the Chaos, and from the midst of the obscurity he awaits with infinite longing for his pair, for his Walkyria (Valkyrie), for his spiritual soul.
However, he suffers because she has not yet arrived. The Walkyria, the beautiful Helen, the Buddhi, is like a fine and transparent glass of alabaster through which the Flame of Prayna burns.
To integrate oneself with the Walkyria, to be completely betrothed with the beautiful Helen, is only possible by means of resurrection.
The initiate must remain impassible before praise and calumny.
The initiate feels as though he is a poor, unfortunate one, with a broken heart. Yet, the salvation of the profound Intimate Being raises him, stimulates him, and keeps him straight on the real path.
Whoever possesses the Mercury of the Wise can create within himself the superior existential bodies of the Being.
The interior God of each one of us is what counts.
Only our interior God can save us from all disgrace.
The intimate God is our resistance and our hope, our strength and our reality.
The soul often fades, but if the Father fortifies us, we will be victorious.
-Samael
(If we understand this, we can perhaps also grasp the sense of those legends that speak of mysterious rulers who "always" exist and have never died (shades of the Emperor sleeping beneath the Kyffhauser mountain!). Such rulers can be rediscovered only when one achieves spiritual completeness and awakens a quality in oneself like that of a metal that suddenly feels "the magnet," finds the magnet and irrestibly orients itself and moves towards it. FOR NOW WE MUST RESTRICT OURSELVES TO THIS HINT. A comprehensive explanation of legends of that sort, which come to us from the most ancient Aryan source, would take us too far... - Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World)
Sophia is the objective reasoning of the being, the Awakened Consciousness.
Lucifer [viewed properly - as Light Bringer/Morning Star], integrated with ourselves, converts us into Archangels.
TO SOMA HELIAKON = body of Gold of the Solar Man
Whosoever possesses the Philosophical Stone, the Red Carbuncle, is married with Pistis Sophia [Power Wisdom].
LUX IN TENEBRIS LUCET = The Light shines in Darkness
The initiate illumined by Sophia looks toward the Height. He observes from the Chaos, and from the midst of the obscurity he awaits with infinite longing for his pair, for his Walkyria (Valkyrie), for his spiritual soul.
However, he suffers because she has not yet arrived. The Walkyria, the beautiful Helen, the Buddhi, is like a fine and transparent glass of alabaster through which the Flame of Prayna burns.
To integrate oneself with the Walkyria, to be completely betrothed with the beautiful Helen, is only possible by means of resurrection.
The initiate must remain impassible before praise and calumny.
The initiate feels as though he is a poor, unfortunate one, with a broken heart. Yet, the salvation of the profound Intimate Being raises him, stimulates him, and keeps him straight on the real path.
Whoever possesses the Mercury of the Wise can create within himself the superior existential bodies of the Being.
The interior God of each one of us is what counts.
Only our interior God can save us from all disgrace.
The intimate God is our resistance and our hope, our strength and our reality.
The soul often fades, but if the Father fortifies us, we will be victorious.
-Samael
(If we understand this, we can perhaps also grasp the sense of those legends that speak of mysterious rulers who "always" exist and have never died (shades of the Emperor sleeping beneath the Kyffhauser mountain!). Such rulers can be rediscovered only when one achieves spiritual completeness and awakens a quality in oneself like that of a metal that suddenly feels "the magnet," finds the magnet and irrestibly orients itself and moves towards it. FOR NOW WE MUST RESTRICT OURSELVES TO THIS HINT. A comprehensive explanation of legends of that sort, which come to us from the most ancient Aryan source, would take us too far... - Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World)
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The Agrarian Movement - 1
In the earliest days of the Agrarian movement, Ransom, Tate, and Davidson, each in his own way, envisioned the South as a redemptive community on a divine mission within the vast drama of history. For them, being Southern constituted a spiritual identity. They recognized Prometheus, Faust, and Satan as the summary figures of modernity and offered the image of the southern patriarch - pious, unselfconscious, conservative, even reactionary - as a moral alternative. The old Southern gentleman yielded to his tradition and to his God.
-Mark Malvasi
-Mark Malvasi
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Importance of the Evil Principle
All antiquity solved the enigma of the existence of Evil, by supposing the existence of a Principle of Evil, of Demons, fallen Angels, an Ahriman, a Typhon, a Siva, a Loki, or a Satan, that, first falling themselves, and plunged in misery and darkness tempted man to his fall, and brought sin into the world. All believed in a future life, to be attained by purification and trials; in a state or successive states of reward and punishment; and in a Mediator or Redeemer, by whom the Evil Principle was to be overcome, and the Supreme Deity reconciled to his creatures. The belief was general, that He was to be born of a Virgin, and suffer a painful death.
Brahmans exterminated the Buddhists...But their blood fertilized the new doctrine, which produced a new society under the name of Gymnosophists; and a large number, fleeing to Ireland, planted their doctrine there, and there erected the round towers, some of which still stand solid and unshaken as at first, visible monuments of the remotest ages.
Man had fallen, but not by the tempting of the the serpent. For, with the Phoenicians, the serpent was deemed to partake of the divine nature...He was deemed to be immortal, unless slain by violence, becoming young again in his old age, by entering into and consuming himself. Hence the serpent in a circle, holding his tail in his mouth, was an emblem of eternity...
But he may rise again, by following the teachings of Heavenly Wisdom, and the Angels whom God commissions to aid him in escaping from the entanglement of the body; and by fighting bravely against Evil, the existence of which God has allowed solely to furnish him with the means of exercising his free will(281).
The degree of Rose teaches three things; - the unity, immutability, and goodness of God; the immortality of the Soul, and the ultimate defeat and extinction of evil and wrong and sorrow, by a Redeemer or Messiah, yet to come, if he has not already appeared.
The "X" was the sign of the Creative Wisdom or Logos, the Son of God.
Plato says, "He expresses him upon the Universe in the figure of the letter X. The next Power to the Supreme God was decussated or figured in the shape of this Cross on the Universe.
-Albert Pike, from Morals and Dogma (Knight of the Rose Croix)
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Digital Rose
And you will be a creative god of the world; because you have conceived a Non-existent Flower. You have given a meaning to your flower...
RA - DISK OF THE DAY - Hymn to the SUN
Homage to you who is the perfect RA of each day, who rises each morning without respite, and who is the Kephri burdened with work. We have your rays in our eyes and are not able to perceive them. The most pure gold is not comparable to your splendour. Carver whom you carved yourself, you have cast your own body, O sculptor who has never been sculpted. You who are alone in your species, you who travel over the heights of eternity, and under whose image are the ways of millions, such is your splendor, such is the splendor of the firmament; your colors are more brilliant than its colors. When in navigating you traverse the heavens, all men contemplate you; you continue (under the earth as well) hidden to their eyes. You present yourself in the morning as a daily task. The navigation of your barque is impeccable, under your Majesty. In a short day you devour a space of millions of hundreds of thousands of miles. Each day for you is but a moment, and after travelling through it, you retire. In the same way you accomplish the hours of the night. You carry out this course without respite from your efforts. All eyes see by your grace; and they cease to see when your majesty is retired. You put beings in movement in order to emerge. Your rays create the morning; they open the eyes that awaken. You lie down in the regions of Manu, and at the same instant they sleep as if they were dead. Homage to you, DISK OF THE DAY (Aten), who has created humans and who has given them life. Grand falcon of speckled plumage who has come in order to raise himself up by his own means, appearing of his own accord without being put into the world, Horus the Elder who is in the middle of celestial Nut, for whom gestures are made at the rising as at the setting...Founder of what produces the ground Khnum, Amun of the humans, who carries along with him the inhabitants of the Two Lands, from the greatest to the smallest. Beneficent mother of the Gods and of men, patient and untiring worker when he makes them in incalculable number. Valiant herdsman who leads his beasts; their shelter, he who gives them life. He who hurries, he who runs, he who accomplishes his revolutions, Kephri of the illustrious birth, raising his perfection in the belly of celestial Nut; giving light to the Two Lands from his DISK (Aten), the primordial of the Two Lands, who created himself and who saw himself while he was creating himself. Unique master, who reaches the extremity of the earths each day, viewed by those who circle on them, emerging as a figure who contemplates from on high what passes during the day. He composes the seasons with months, sets the atmosphere ablaze to his liking, makes the freshness of the air to his liking. He causes the human body to extend or to retract. The whole earth gesticulates...
-from the Temple of Man
-from the Temple of Man
Thursday, July 9, 2009
The Doctrine of Awakening - 5
..."knowledge" produces detachment only in the case of a particular race of spirit, of that which in a special sense we have called "heroic" and which is not unconnected with the theory of the bodhisattva. Only in those in whom this race survives and who wish it, can the spectacle of universal contingency be the principle of awakening, can it determine the choice of the vocations, can it arouse the reaction that follows from "No, I want no more of it," from "This does not belong to me, I am not this, this is not my self" extended to all states of samsaric existence. The work, then, has one single justification: it must be done, that is to say, for the noble and heroic spirit there is no other alternative. KATAM KARANIYAM - "that which has to be done has been done" - this is the universally recurring formula that refers to the Ariya who have destroyed the asava and achieved awakening...
This is the scheme. The Buddha repeatedly makes his questioner recognize that the bases of common personality-materiality, feeling, perception, the formations, consciousness - are changeable, impermanent, and nonsubstantial be considered thus: "This is mine, this am I, this is my self?" The answer is always the same - as if it were perfectly natural and obvious - "Certainly not, Lord." The conclusion is more or less of this type: "All matter, all feeling, all perception, all formations, all consciousness, past, present, or future, internal or external, gross or subtle, low or high, far or near, all should be considered, in conformity with reality and with perfect wisdom, thus: "This is not mine, this am I not, this is not my self.' Thus considering, the wise, noble disciple does not identify himself with materiality, does not identify himself with feeling, does not identify himself with the formations, does not identify himself with consciousness. Not identifying himself, he is detached. Being detached, he is freed."
The Aryan "renunciation" is fundamentally based on a will for the unconditioned considered also as liberty and power.
Renounce what does not belong to you.
One of the more common descriptions of an ascetic is that he is a man who, having broken each and every bond, is free. The ascetic is one who avoids the snare, as does a wild beast, and so does not fall into the power of the hunter, but "can go where he will" - while the others, those who are subject to craving, "can be called lost, ruined, fallen into the power of harm." The ascetic is one who has gained mastery over himself, who "has his heart in his power, and is not himself in the power of his heart." He is the master of his thoughts. "Whatever he thought he desires, that thought will he think, whatever thought he does not desire, that thought will he not think." As a perfectly tamed elephant, led by his mahout, will go in any direction; as an expert charioteer, with a chariot ready on good ground at a crossroad and harnessed to a thoroughbred tema, can guide the chariot where he wishes; or as a king or a prince with a chest full of clothes, may freely choose the garment that most pleases him for the morning, the afternoon, or the evening - so the ascetic can direct his mind and his being toward one state or another with perfect freedom.
Here are a few more similes: the ascetic is like a man burdened with debts, yet he not only pays them off but manages to gain a surplus on which to build his own life; or he is like a man enfeebled by disease, his body without strength, but who succeeds in removing the disease and regaining his strength; or, he is like a slave, dependent on others, but who is able to free himself from his slavery and feel master of himself, independent of others, a free man who can go where he will; or, again, he is like a man travelling through desert places, full of snares and dangers, who yet arrives safe and sound at his destination without losing anything.
To complete the list of what a noble spirit regards as valuable, let us remember these other epithets of the Awakened One: "he who has laid down the burden," "the unshackled one," "the unhooked one," "the escaped one," "the unhinger," "the remover of the arrow," "the leveller of the trench," "he who escapes from the whirlwind,"
It is thus that "the noble sons moved by confidence" recognize their vocation and come to apprehend the "Aryan quest": "Thus, O disciples, a man, himself subject to birth, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without birth, the incomparable safety, extinction; himself subject to decay, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without decay, the incomparable saftey, extinction; himself subject to death, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without death, the incomparable safety, extinction; himself subject to pain and to agitation, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without pain the without-agitation, the incomparable safety, extinction; himself subject to stain, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without stain, the incomparable safety, extinction. This, O disciples, is the Aryan quest.'(80)
-Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening
This is the scheme. The Buddha repeatedly makes his questioner recognize that the bases of common personality-materiality, feeling, perception, the formations, consciousness - are changeable, impermanent, and nonsubstantial be considered thus: "This is mine, this am I, this is my self?" The answer is always the same - as if it were perfectly natural and obvious - "Certainly not, Lord." The conclusion is more or less of this type: "All matter, all feeling, all perception, all formations, all consciousness, past, present, or future, internal or external, gross or subtle, low or high, far or near, all should be considered, in conformity with reality and with perfect wisdom, thus: "This is not mine, this am I not, this is not my self.' Thus considering, the wise, noble disciple does not identify himself with materiality, does not identify himself with feeling, does not identify himself with the formations, does not identify himself with consciousness. Not identifying himself, he is detached. Being detached, he is freed."
The Aryan "renunciation" is fundamentally based on a will for the unconditioned considered also as liberty and power.
Renounce what does not belong to you.
One of the more common descriptions of an ascetic is that he is a man who, having broken each and every bond, is free. The ascetic is one who avoids the snare, as does a wild beast, and so does not fall into the power of the hunter, but "can go where he will" - while the others, those who are subject to craving, "can be called lost, ruined, fallen into the power of harm." The ascetic is one who has gained mastery over himself, who "has his heart in his power, and is not himself in the power of his heart." He is the master of his thoughts. "Whatever he thought he desires, that thought will he think, whatever thought he does not desire, that thought will he not think." As a perfectly tamed elephant, led by his mahout, will go in any direction; as an expert charioteer, with a chariot ready on good ground at a crossroad and harnessed to a thoroughbred tema, can guide the chariot where he wishes; or as a king or a prince with a chest full of clothes, may freely choose the garment that most pleases him for the morning, the afternoon, or the evening - so the ascetic can direct his mind and his being toward one state or another with perfect freedom.
Here are a few more similes: the ascetic is like a man burdened with debts, yet he not only pays them off but manages to gain a surplus on which to build his own life; or he is like a man enfeebled by disease, his body without strength, but who succeeds in removing the disease and regaining his strength; or, he is like a slave, dependent on others, but who is able to free himself from his slavery and feel master of himself, independent of others, a free man who can go where he will; or, again, he is like a man travelling through desert places, full of snares and dangers, who yet arrives safe and sound at his destination without losing anything.
To complete the list of what a noble spirit regards as valuable, let us remember these other epithets of the Awakened One: "he who has laid down the burden," "the unshackled one," "the unhooked one," "the escaped one," "the unhinger," "the remover of the arrow," "the leveller of the trench," "he who escapes from the whirlwind,"
It is thus that "the noble sons moved by confidence" recognize their vocation and come to apprehend the "Aryan quest": "Thus, O disciples, a man, himself subject to birth, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without birth, the incomparable safety, extinction; himself subject to decay, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without decay, the incomparable saftey, extinction; himself subject to death, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without death, the incomparable safety, extinction; himself subject to pain and to agitation, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without pain the without-agitation, the incomparable safety, extinction; himself subject to stain, observing the misery of this law of nature, seeks that which is without stain, the incomparable safety, extinction. This, O disciples, is the Aryan quest.'(80)
-Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening
NBF 6
In October, after Forrest was formally elected Colonel and Parson Kelly the major, the battalion reported first to Colonel Heiman at Dover, TN and then up to General Tilghman in Hopkinsville, KY.
This point had now become the outpost of the main body at Bowling Green.
The Confederate strategy in the West was to secure Kentucky for the South with the Ohio River as the northern boundary, a river that was wide and easily defended.
At this juncture, nothing startling happened to Colonel Forrest and his men. He made several reconnaissances in force, captured a richly laden transport, and hardened his men by long marches in severe weather, in the course of which these raw recruits, unaccustomed to such exposure and many of them weakened by camp diseases, suffered greatly. He lessened complaint, however, by sharing their hardships with them.
On these forays, his green soldiers learned one very certain thing, that it was his single will, impervious to argument, appeal, or threat, which was ever to be the governing impulse in their movements. Everything necessary to supply their wants, to make them comfortable, he was quick to do. But he would not change his plans – not to please them, at least. The command
grumbled, but when the work was achieved, it took pride in the achievement. The sooner soldiers learn they have a commander who intends to command, the sooner are they able to get down to the serious business of fighting. " -40
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company
This point had now become the outpost of the main body at Bowling Green.
The Confederate strategy in the West was to secure Kentucky for the South with the Ohio River as the northern boundary, a river that was wide and easily defended.
At this juncture, nothing startling happened to Colonel Forrest and his men. He made several reconnaissances in force, captured a richly laden transport, and hardened his men by long marches in severe weather, in the course of which these raw recruits, unaccustomed to such exposure and many of them weakened by camp diseases, suffered greatly. He lessened complaint, however, by sharing their hardships with them.
On these forays, his green soldiers learned one very certain thing, that it was his single will, impervious to argument, appeal, or threat, which was ever to be the governing impulse in their movements. Everything necessary to supply their wants, to make them comfortable, he was quick to do. But he would not change his plans – not to please them, at least. The command
grumbled, but when the work was achieved, it took pride in the achievement. The sooner soldiers learn they have a commander who intends to command, the sooner are they able to get down to the serious business of fighting. " -40
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company
NBF 5
"This Union is a lie! The American Union is an imposture – a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. I am for its overthrow! Up with the flag of disunion!"
These are the words of William Lloyd Garrison, the father of the abolition societies, who publicly, on the fourth day of July, inaugurated his movement by giving the Constitution of the United States to the flames.
So long as Garrison's disciples attempted purely political action on the question of abolition, they received a pitiably small hearing from the great body of American people. Garrison was burned in effigy all over the Northern states, and his radical followers bent on the destruction of the Union were informed very realistically with tar and feathers that the Union must stick together. This was in the days when Calhoun spoke for the South, Webster for the North, and Henry Clay for the West.
The abolitionists, by themselves, might have gone on for some time without effecting their ends; but unfortunately for the Union, after the dissolution of the Whig Party, the old Federalist-Hamiltonian element looked around for new allies. It was now more important than ever to destroy the rights of the states and form a powerful central government, for so long as the states remained autonomous, industrial capital was effectively controlled. Calhoun had whipped them out on the tariff and Andrew Jackson on the Federal bank. The cotton states were, therefore, able to sell their staple as free men bartering with other free men. But this new class of Hamiltonian-Industrialists growing up, particularly in Pennsylvania, was not willing to make a fair profit on their machines; and so long as the Southern states remained powerful and uncontrolled, they had to be content with such an arrangement.
If the South could be broken politically, it could be forced into a position of economic serfdom, depending on those who would control this strongly centralized government. The Black Republican Party was formed towards this end. William H. Seward, one-time Governor of New York, was its inspiration. He saw that the abolitionists had, by their thirty-year education of the popular mind, created a general antagonism in the North against the South and, over large areas, a great hatred; and he determined to use this to gain power for himself and his industrial supporters.
Since the Constitution recognized property in slaves, Mr. Seward made his first attack on this compact, but not as the abolitionists had attacked it. They did not dispute the constitutional guarantees; but admitting them, advised the disruption of the compact. Mr. Seward was more subtle. He began to institute a policy which would destroy the Union in fact but keep it in name and physical appearance. "You answer that the Constitution," he says, "recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply that the constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations."
For the people to abrogate their articles of agreement in favor of the law of nature and of nations was for them to place their destiny in the hands of the party in power, which would interpret this very general law in the light of its interests.
It was this kind of argument that frightened old Calhoun and caused him to urge secession, which was thereupon soberly considered at the Nashville Convention of 1850. The Southern states did not heed his warning, for their strong emotional attachment to the Union clouded the force of Calhoun's logic. He could not teach them that the purpose of the Union was to sustain their independence, and that this was now possible only in a Southern Union, since the commercial and industrial states had upset the balance of power in their favor.
Calhoun saw that as time went on there would be less and less that was common between the two sections, and that any union to be actual must be a union of common interests, or a union of interests of equal power. This was no longer so. There was, as Mr. Seward announced, "an irrepressible conflict" between the two sections. He pretended that the conflict was a moral matter of slavery, but this was for strategic reasons. Nobody knew better than he that it was the conflict between a people living almost entirely on the land and a people loyal to a commercial and fast-growing industrialism which demanded that the duty of the citizen must be not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but a willing consumption of the produce of Northern manufacture.
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company
These are the words of William Lloyd Garrison, the father of the abolition societies, who publicly, on the fourth day of July, inaugurated his movement by giving the Constitution of the United States to the flames.
So long as Garrison's disciples attempted purely political action on the question of abolition, they received a pitiably small hearing from the great body of American people. Garrison was burned in effigy all over the Northern states, and his radical followers bent on the destruction of the Union were informed very realistically with tar and feathers that the Union must stick together. This was in the days when Calhoun spoke for the South, Webster for the North, and Henry Clay for the West.
The abolitionists, by themselves, might have gone on for some time without effecting their ends; but unfortunately for the Union, after the dissolution of the Whig Party, the old Federalist-Hamiltonian element looked around for new allies. It was now more important than ever to destroy the rights of the states and form a powerful central government, for so long as the states remained autonomous, industrial capital was effectively controlled. Calhoun had whipped them out on the tariff and Andrew Jackson on the Federal bank. The cotton states were, therefore, able to sell their staple as free men bartering with other free men. But this new class of Hamiltonian-Industrialists growing up, particularly in Pennsylvania, was not willing to make a fair profit on their machines; and so long as the Southern states remained powerful and uncontrolled, they had to be content with such an arrangement.
If the South could be broken politically, it could be forced into a position of economic serfdom, depending on those who would control this strongly centralized government. The Black Republican Party was formed towards this end. William H. Seward, one-time Governor of New York, was its inspiration. He saw that the abolitionists had, by their thirty-year education of the popular mind, created a general antagonism in the North against the South and, over large areas, a great hatred; and he determined to use this to gain power for himself and his industrial supporters.
Since the Constitution recognized property in slaves, Mr. Seward made his first attack on this compact, but not as the abolitionists had attacked it. They did not dispute the constitutional guarantees; but admitting them, advised the disruption of the compact. Mr. Seward was more subtle. He began to institute a policy which would destroy the Union in fact but keep it in name and physical appearance. "You answer that the Constitution," he says, "recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply that the constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations."
For the people to abrogate their articles of agreement in favor of the law of nature and of nations was for them to place their destiny in the hands of the party in power, which would interpret this very general law in the light of its interests.
It was this kind of argument that frightened old Calhoun and caused him to urge secession, which was thereupon soberly considered at the Nashville Convention of 1850. The Southern states did not heed his warning, for their strong emotional attachment to the Union clouded the force of Calhoun's logic. He could not teach them that the purpose of the Union was to sustain their independence, and that this was now possible only in a Southern Union, since the commercial and industrial states had upset the balance of power in their favor.
Calhoun saw that as time went on there would be less and less that was common between the two sections, and that any union to be actual must be a union of common interests, or a union of interests of equal power. This was no longer so. There was, as Mr. Seward announced, "an irrepressible conflict" between the two sections. He pretended that the conflict was a moral matter of slavery, but this was for strategic reasons. Nobody knew better than he that it was the conflict between a people living almost entirely on the land and a people loyal to a commercial and fast-growing industrialism which demanded that the duty of the citizen must be not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but a willing consumption of the produce of Northern manufacture.
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company
NBF 4
Bedford Forrest had risen from obscurity, like the majority of Southern leaders, like Davis himself; but there was no cotton snobbery in his make-up. He showed that his stock was strongenough to stand the responsibility of large properties. Instead of using his influence to get a commision, he enlisted as a private in White's Tennessee Mounted Rifles. This was in June, 1861.
A few days after his enlistment, certain citizens of Memphis made a trip to Nashville and convinced Governor Harris and General Polk, the bishop who had laid aside his vestments for the sword, that the ranks was no place for Forrest. The result of their trip was the commission of Lieutenant-Colonel, and the authority to raise a battalion of mounted rangers.
He began its organization at once. He scattered his agents through Mississippi, North Alabama, Middle and West Tennessee. Bedford himself set out for Kentucky. This state's neutral position made it a recruiting ground for both governments. Bedford realized that it was not only an excellent place to secure equipment, but that every man he brought out of the state would weaken by so much the enemy's armies.
On July 20, he bought out of his own purse 500 Colt's navy pistols, 100 saddles, and other equipment. But after he had made the purchases, he found it would be a serious matter to get them out. He was a suspect, and he had overheard the Hon. J.J. Crittenden say he ought to be arrested. Fortunately, word was brought him at Louisville that a company was being organized for his regiment in Meade County. He went there and found the Boone Rangers, some ninety strong, under Captain Frank Overton.
Returning, he and two friends were able, from time to time, to carry the pistols under their linen dusters to a livery stable, whence they were subsequently taken to a Mr. Garrison's farm as so many bags of potatoes. The saddles were ordered to a tannery three miles out as so much leather. Here a detachment of Overton's troops appeared after dusk with wagons and hastily moved the freight southward, taking up the pistols as they marched toward the mouth of Salt River. Lieutenant-Colonel Forrest, so soon as his orders were given, mounted his horse and rode leisurely in the opposite direction. On the outskirts of Louisville he quickly changed his course, circled the town and joined the cavalcade by picking up the tracks the wagons had made.
Pushing on toward Brandenburg, he found the Boone Rangers ready to take the field. So he left the same day, marching for Clarksville, Tennessee, by way of Bowling Green. The rumor soon reached him that two companies of Home Guards were waiting at Munfordsville to contest his march.
Following the Boone Rangers were many fathers and kin who wanted to stay by as long as possible. Bedford lined these up with the Rangers, under the Confederate flag, as a train passed by for Munfordsville. So imposing was the array that the passengers, when they arrived at the town, reported a regiment advancing. When the "regiment" arrived, the main force of the Home Guards had dispersed.
He arrived without mishap in Memphis the first of August, and in six or eight weeks he had raised eight companies, 650 rank and file. Parson D.C. Kelly persuaded the Alabama companies to join his command. (Critter 36-37)
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company
A few days after his enlistment, certain citizens of Memphis made a trip to Nashville and convinced Governor Harris and General Polk, the bishop who had laid aside his vestments for the sword, that the ranks was no place for Forrest. The result of their trip was the commission of Lieutenant-Colonel, and the authority to raise a battalion of mounted rangers.
He began its organization at once. He scattered his agents through Mississippi, North Alabama, Middle and West Tennessee. Bedford himself set out for Kentucky. This state's neutral position made it a recruiting ground for both governments. Bedford realized that it was not only an excellent place to secure equipment, but that every man he brought out of the state would weaken by so much the enemy's armies.
On July 20, he bought out of his own purse 500 Colt's navy pistols, 100 saddles, and other equipment. But after he had made the purchases, he found it would be a serious matter to get them out. He was a suspect, and he had overheard the Hon. J.J. Crittenden say he ought to be arrested. Fortunately, word was brought him at Louisville that a company was being organized for his regiment in Meade County. He went there and found the Boone Rangers, some ninety strong, under Captain Frank Overton.
Returning, he and two friends were able, from time to time, to carry the pistols under their linen dusters to a livery stable, whence they were subsequently taken to a Mr. Garrison's farm as so many bags of potatoes. The saddles were ordered to a tannery three miles out as so much leather. Here a detachment of Overton's troops appeared after dusk with wagons and hastily moved the freight southward, taking up the pistols as they marched toward the mouth of Salt River. Lieutenant-Colonel Forrest, so soon as his orders were given, mounted his horse and rode leisurely in the opposite direction. On the outskirts of Louisville he quickly changed his course, circled the town and joined the cavalcade by picking up the tracks the wagons had made.
Pushing on toward Brandenburg, he found the Boone Rangers ready to take the field. So he left the same day, marching for Clarksville, Tennessee, by way of Bowling Green. The rumor soon reached him that two companies of Home Guards were waiting at Munfordsville to contest his march.
Following the Boone Rangers were many fathers and kin who wanted to stay by as long as possible. Bedford lined these up with the Rangers, under the Confederate flag, as a train passed by for Munfordsville. So imposing was the array that the passengers, when they arrived at the town, reported a regiment advancing. When the "regiment" arrived, the main force of the Home Guards had dispersed.
He arrived without mishap in Memphis the first of August, and in six or eight weeks he had raised eight companies, 650 rank and file. Parson D.C. Kelly persuaded the Alabama companies to join his command. (Critter 36-37)
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company
NBF 3
These young men were without medieval visions. They were going out to fight because they had heard that the Yankees were coming down to tromp their fields and tear up their barns. They were the plain people, the freest people in the South, whom the cotton snobs referred to as the "pore white trash." And they were going away, leaving their steadings to their women-folks, to defend their particular way of life, although they would not have spoken of it in such flat terms. These men made up the largest body of people in the South. There were some four millions of them living in the hill country, on the borders of the plantations, and in the newly settled states like Arkansas and Missouri. The only difference between them and the cotton snobs was that of a generation or two, and the difference that the rich snobs were ashamed of their pioneer ancestry and they were not. Davis and his advisers made one great mistake that overshadowed all the othererrors of policy: they chose to rest the foundations of the Confederacy on cotton and not on the plain people.
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forest and his Critter Company
-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forest and his Critter Company
The Super Eye 1
...the fusion is now complete, the confusion perfect; nothing now distinguishes the functions of the weapon and the eye...the old ballistic projection has been succeeded by the projection of light, of the electronic eye, of the video missile...
in other words, war consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic, or other material victories as in appropriating the 'immateriality' of perceptual fields.
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema
Luminous Resurrection
All legends, all mythology and all myths, all founders of religion and all religions themselves look forward to their luminous resurrection, and the heroes are jostling at our doors to enter.
-Abel Gance
-Abel Gance
The Despair of Possibility
Possibility then appears to the self ever greater and greater, more and more things become possible, because nothing becomes actual. At last it is as if everything were possible ---but this is precisely when the abyss has swallowed up the self. Every possibility even would require some time to become actuality. But finally the time which should be available for actuality becomes shorter and shorter, everything becomes more instantaneous. Possibility becomes more and more intense - but only in the sense of possibility, not in the sense of actuality; for in the sense of actuality the meaning of intensity is that at least something of that which is possible becomes actual. At the instant something appears possible, and then a new possibility makes its appearance, at last this phantasmagoria moves so rapidly that it is as if everything were possible - and this is precisely the last moment, when the individual becomes himself a mirage.
-Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 1843
-Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 1843
The Fugitive/Agrarian Movement
The study was layered in smoke. There was a group of young men gathered around an old bearded mystic sitting in a large red velvet chair in the corner of the room. The year is 1924. The smoke was coming from some incense burning on a desk and also from the pipes of the young men which were periodically firing. The sweet tobacco smell mingled with the oriental scent. Strange combination. East and West. And there were old maps and pictures from around the world that suggested extensive personal wanderings and investigations.
It was dusk. They were inside a wooden house on a secluded corner in Nashville, Tennessee. The men were students at the local University. They were gathered around the mystic as if he were a magnet or as if they were children eagerly listening to a story from one of the elders. A miniature grandfather clock tick tocked heavily on the mantel above a smoldering fire in the hearth. He spoke to them.
“The “G” rune is very important for us.” He held up a card with an enormous “X” shape drawn on it.
“Recognize this one, I’m sure. This symbol is the precursor to the letter G for all indoeuropean languages. This is a key rune for passing through the realms. The name of the rune is GEBO and it symbolizes the interaction or intersection of the two opposite beams Divine and Human, Spiritual and Physical, Intellect and Instinct, High and Low, and the exchange of force between the various planes of existence. Thus, the “X”. The English cognate is GIFT and the relation is that the exchange of force is like the act of giving. You see there is much that is hidden in the language of which you are not aware. Words are powerful.”
He held up another card.
“The tarot correspondence is number six, The Lovers, the first archetypal example of exchange and polarity between opposites. This rune presides over the Alchemical Marriage and all Love mysteries.
But most importantly, this is the rune of Sacrifice. Sacrifice, though, does not mean to give something up. Sacrifice involves the transfer of power from one plane to another. The intellect sacrifices its body so that it can operate at a higher mental level. The boxer is physically stronger than the writer but the writer is the more powerful creature because mind directs body.”
At this he pointed to the Confederate Battle Flag hanging over the mantle.
“Another example. A man dies for his country not because he is selfless but because he recognizes greater value in the corporate community of his fellows and is willing to forego his personal gratification.”
Another picture.
“The Phoenix. The Eagle emerging from its own ashes. Sacrifice. A large sacrifice was made on your behalf. Not just one Christ, but hundreds of thousands of ancestors.You owe, gentlemen. You owe big. Something you must all keep in mind on a daily basis if ever you want to recapture the Lost Estate of the Fathers and not let their dream dissipate in vain while the Truth is manipulated by clever connivers with hidden agendas. You must remember this because to lose the proper interpretation of History is to resign your culture to an infamy it does not deserve. And it will only become harder to maintain the Truth. So a daily sacrifice for you young fugitives. Remember that you are building for future generations.
I have traveled the world and I will tell you gentlemen that there is nothing out there that surpasses the sacrifice of life to a noble cause. Remember that when the clever bastards try to corner you in liberal sophisms and Hegelian categories and polluted city logic. Remember what is concrete. What is real. The land. Your past. And the heroism of your Fathers. That is all that matters. The most exquisite palace in Shangri-La does not even compare.”
He held up the “X” again and then laughed as he looked over the crew, staring in awe at him. No one had ever shown them such a complex correspondence between symbols. They had not realized the depth of their own historical tradition, the power that apparently resided in such universal ideas, or the link between these esoteric glyphs and the mundane language with which they were familiar. If he was right, every sentence contained a potential word combination that could alter environments by facilitating emotional upheaval in a listener. How curious! If that were true, then the man of letters was the most powerful man of all, the fisher of men. And that was inspiration. For they were all writers.
They had brought their poems. And now each took a turn reading. The power of Words had taken on new meaning for them. After each poem had been read, there was a short discussion in which suggestions and criticisms would be made by everyone present. The conversations often dealt with the problems that these Southerners of the 1920s were beginning to see with the spread of industrialization and the marginalization of the small independent farmer. They saw another Northern invasion approaching in the guise of capitalists looking to exploit a land still trying to recover from its first rape.
The atheistic rule of the scientific mind and the subsequent specialization of labor and philosophy threatened to fragment the heritage of Western Civilization. T.S. Eliot was a favorite poet whose poems were often recited during these weekly meetings. They took his ‘Wasteland’ quite seriously. There was a drought in the Land of Milk and Honey and the King was sick.
Often, the old mystic would contribute from his vast store of Wisdom. He responded next to a poem that one of the young men had written about Percival, the Grail Knight, and how the Water was made to return to the Land. It was supposed to be an inaugural for the Water-Bearer of the Aquarian Age.
“Excellent poem. The Percival figure is also an interesting one. Another variant on the name is Parsifal. This is the version Richard Wagner used in his opera. Break Parsifal down. We are left with Pure Fool.”
He held up the Tarot Card numbered 0. On it was a young man poised to leap over the edge of a sheer cliff with a flower in his hand. There were no worries or cares in his glance and no apparent recognition of his precarious position.
“Odd? That the Pure Fool attains the Holy Grail and succeeds in ending the drought. Odd indeed. What is the point? Perhaps, that there is no point. The fool usually represents Creative inspiration, the driving force of all life, which always exists outside of the rational faculty, defies explanation, and does not require a logical defense. It is phenomenal. Just like God. Just like Love. Who would ever think of giving three reasons for being in Love? Love is foolish. It doesn’t succeed in this world. Or I guess I should rather say that it does not pay. For Love will triumph in the end."
It was dusk. They were inside a wooden house on a secluded corner in Nashville, Tennessee. The men were students at the local University. They were gathered around the mystic as if he were a magnet or as if they were children eagerly listening to a story from one of the elders. A miniature grandfather clock tick tocked heavily on the mantel above a smoldering fire in the hearth. He spoke to them.
“The “G” rune is very important for us.” He held up a card with an enormous “X” shape drawn on it.
“Recognize this one, I’m sure. This symbol is the precursor to the letter G for all indoeuropean languages. This is a key rune for passing through the realms. The name of the rune is GEBO and it symbolizes the interaction or intersection of the two opposite beams Divine and Human, Spiritual and Physical, Intellect and Instinct, High and Low, and the exchange of force between the various planes of existence. Thus, the “X”. The English cognate is GIFT and the relation is that the exchange of force is like the act of giving. You see there is much that is hidden in the language of which you are not aware. Words are powerful.”
He held up another card.
“The tarot correspondence is number six, The Lovers, the first archetypal example of exchange and polarity between opposites. This rune presides over the Alchemical Marriage and all Love mysteries.
But most importantly, this is the rune of Sacrifice. Sacrifice, though, does not mean to give something up. Sacrifice involves the transfer of power from one plane to another. The intellect sacrifices its body so that it can operate at a higher mental level. The boxer is physically stronger than the writer but the writer is the more powerful creature because mind directs body.”
At this he pointed to the Confederate Battle Flag hanging over the mantle.
“Another example. A man dies for his country not because he is selfless but because he recognizes greater value in the corporate community of his fellows and is willing to forego his personal gratification.”
Another picture.
“The Phoenix. The Eagle emerging from its own ashes. Sacrifice. A large sacrifice was made on your behalf. Not just one Christ, but hundreds of thousands of ancestors.You owe, gentlemen. You owe big. Something you must all keep in mind on a daily basis if ever you want to recapture the Lost Estate of the Fathers and not let their dream dissipate in vain while the Truth is manipulated by clever connivers with hidden agendas. You must remember this because to lose the proper interpretation of History is to resign your culture to an infamy it does not deserve. And it will only become harder to maintain the Truth. So a daily sacrifice for you young fugitives. Remember that you are building for future generations.
I have traveled the world and I will tell you gentlemen that there is nothing out there that surpasses the sacrifice of life to a noble cause. Remember that when the clever bastards try to corner you in liberal sophisms and Hegelian categories and polluted city logic. Remember what is concrete. What is real. The land. Your past. And the heroism of your Fathers. That is all that matters. The most exquisite palace in Shangri-La does not even compare.”
He held up the “X” again and then laughed as he looked over the crew, staring in awe at him. No one had ever shown them such a complex correspondence between symbols. They had not realized the depth of their own historical tradition, the power that apparently resided in such universal ideas, or the link between these esoteric glyphs and the mundane language with which they were familiar. If he was right, every sentence contained a potential word combination that could alter environments by facilitating emotional upheaval in a listener. How curious! If that were true, then the man of letters was the most powerful man of all, the fisher of men. And that was inspiration. For they were all writers.
They had brought their poems. And now each took a turn reading. The power of Words had taken on new meaning for them. After each poem had been read, there was a short discussion in which suggestions and criticisms would be made by everyone present. The conversations often dealt with the problems that these Southerners of the 1920s were beginning to see with the spread of industrialization and the marginalization of the small independent farmer. They saw another Northern invasion approaching in the guise of capitalists looking to exploit a land still trying to recover from its first rape.
The atheistic rule of the scientific mind and the subsequent specialization of labor and philosophy threatened to fragment the heritage of Western Civilization. T.S. Eliot was a favorite poet whose poems were often recited during these weekly meetings. They took his ‘Wasteland’ quite seriously. There was a drought in the Land of Milk and Honey and the King was sick.
Often, the old mystic would contribute from his vast store of Wisdom. He responded next to a poem that one of the young men had written about Percival, the Grail Knight, and how the Water was made to return to the Land. It was supposed to be an inaugural for the Water-Bearer of the Aquarian Age.
“Excellent poem. The Percival figure is also an interesting one. Another variant on the name is Parsifal. This is the version Richard Wagner used in his opera. Break Parsifal down. We are left with Pure Fool.”
He held up the Tarot Card numbered 0. On it was a young man poised to leap over the edge of a sheer cliff with a flower in his hand. There were no worries or cares in his glance and no apparent recognition of his precarious position.
“Odd? That the Pure Fool attains the Holy Grail and succeeds in ending the drought. Odd indeed. What is the point? Perhaps, that there is no point. The fool usually represents Creative inspiration, the driving force of all life, which always exists outside of the rational faculty, defies explanation, and does not require a logical defense. It is phenomenal. Just like God. Just like Love. Who would ever think of giving three reasons for being in Love? Love is foolish. It doesn’t succeed in this world. Or I guess I should rather say that it does not pay. For Love will triumph in the end."
Growing into a God form
As we climb away from our primitive promptings we shall become spiritualized after the fashion of the Gods we follow. We become what we believe in.
The whole problem was and is, one of using sex-energies on Inner levels so as to produce the most beneficent results among human souls, especially such sould that are in the delicate state of developing through the Mysteries themselves.
We survive by Spirit and Matter, but we evolve through Mind and Soul. Inspired by our Ideals, we grow into our Gods, for they are what we must become. They are real, incredibly potent Energies, evoking reflective responses in us which will eventually lead us to conscious life in states of being far beyond our present comprehension or means of motivated content.
-William Gray, Ladder of Lights
The whole problem was and is, one of using sex-energies on Inner levels so as to produce the most beneficent results among human souls, especially such sould that are in the delicate state of developing through the Mysteries themselves.
We survive by Spirit and Matter, but we evolve through Mind and Soul. Inspired by our Ideals, we grow into our Gods, for they are what we must become. They are real, incredibly potent Energies, evoking reflective responses in us which will eventually lead us to conscious life in states of being far beyond our present comprehension or means of motivated content.
-William Gray, Ladder of Lights
Mystical Qabalah
Polarity really means the flowing of force from a sphere of high pressure to a sphere of low pressure.
The great point we need to realize is that in the microcosmic Tree there is a flow down and up the positive and negative aspects of our own subjective levels of consciousness, whereby the spirit inspires mind, and mind directs the emotions, and the emotions form the etheric double, and the etheric double molds the physical vehicle which is the earth of the circuit.
The essence of the Magical Qabalah, which is the practical application of the Tree of Life, is to develop these magnetic circuits of the different levels, and so strengthen and reinforce the soul.
-Dion Fortune
The great point we need to realize is that in the microcosmic Tree there is a flow down and up the positive and negative aspects of our own subjective levels of consciousness, whereby the spirit inspires mind, and mind directs the emotions, and the emotions form the etheric double, and the etheric double molds the physical vehicle which is the earth of the circuit.
The essence of the Magical Qabalah, which is the practical application of the Tree of Life, is to develop these magnetic circuits of the different levels, and so strengthen and reinforce the soul.
-Dion Fortune
On Tristan
Tristan represents a new spiritual attitude in civilization that is capable of integrating the feminine side, Iseult the Blonde, in order to enrich and enlarge the collective consciousness.
The legend of Tristan draws a picture of Europe's tragic spiritual civilzation in those centuries of harsh and cool diplomacy and military readiness, of its unsuccessful attempts to introduce feminine elements into the male-dominated atmosphere. Failing such an attempt, as in Tristan and Iseult's story, moves Europe's civilization, since it touches collective sorrow.
Tristan's power in contemporary literature suggests that dealing with the feminine side is still problematic, in such a way that feminine qualities, such as sophistication, responsiveness to irrationality, communication with nature and the unconscious, are still not ideally developed.
-???
The legend of Tristan draws a picture of Europe's tragic spiritual civilzation in those centuries of harsh and cool diplomacy and military readiness, of its unsuccessful attempts to introduce feminine elements into the male-dominated atmosphere. Failing such an attempt, as in Tristan and Iseult's story, moves Europe's civilization, since it touches collective sorrow.
Tristan's power in contemporary literature suggests that dealing with the feminine side is still problematic, in such a way that feminine qualities, such as sophistication, responsiveness to irrationality, communication with nature and the unconscious, are still not ideally developed.
-???
It is later than you think...
Look at the red moon, now rising white over the trees. Perhaps we should go on? You seem to be eager and wide-eyed and really there is much more to cover.
I will, however, warn you. The truth is a terrible burden. Once you know it, once you see it for yourself, there is no going back. You must determine to openly fight or submit. You cannot hold it down. It screams for oxygen. It is a star that wants to shine. And there is nowhere left to run. You live in the luxury of ignorance now but know that you are denied the truth. You live in a fantasy realm. You who with your bright eyes would follow me have not yet seen what I have seen, heard what I have heard, known what I have known. And I have powerful eyes and powerful ears and a powerful voice that has reached deep into the gaping jaws of Leviathan. I return from the land of the dead to confront you with the awful truth. Breathing hot on my neck are the minions of hell. They will try to feast upon the fiber of our brain that the fathers worked so hard over the centuries to build. But we have tonight, you and I. We sit around this warm fire and we dream of a brighter day while the dark valley closes in upon us...
It was a long time before the spell wore off. It wasn't until I was floating over the 40,000 fathoms without a lifeline, with no money, no food, no method of transportation other than my two feet. I literally had nothing but an urge, the will to survive. That's when I noticed the seam. You see, that's the lie. That we live in a seamless world. We don't. I, John Blitz, saw the seam and broke through the veil to the other side...
I will, however, warn you. The truth is a terrible burden. Once you know it, once you see it for yourself, there is no going back. You must determine to openly fight or submit. You cannot hold it down. It screams for oxygen. It is a star that wants to shine. And there is nowhere left to run. You live in the luxury of ignorance now but know that you are denied the truth. You live in a fantasy realm. You who with your bright eyes would follow me have not yet seen what I have seen, heard what I have heard, known what I have known. And I have powerful eyes and powerful ears and a powerful voice that has reached deep into the gaping jaws of Leviathan. I return from the land of the dead to confront you with the awful truth. Breathing hot on my neck are the minions of hell. They will try to feast upon the fiber of our brain that the fathers worked so hard over the centuries to build. But we have tonight, you and I. We sit around this warm fire and we dream of a brighter day while the dark valley closes in upon us...
It was a long time before the spell wore off. It wasn't until I was floating over the 40,000 fathoms without a lifeline, with no money, no food, no method of transportation other than my two feet. I literally had nothing but an urge, the will to survive. That's when I noticed the seam. You see, that's the lie. That we live in a seamless world. We don't. I, John Blitz, saw the seam and broke through the veil to the other side...
Carpetbagger Professor 'still fighting the civil war'
On Thursday, June 17,2004, I attended the lecture given by a Dr. David Goldfield on his new book Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History at the Georgia Historical Society. I was surprised to hear of his good reputation because on the whole I found his remarks to be shallow, one-sided, self-righteous and subjective, all unbecoming traits in a Doctor of History. The thesis of Dr. Goldfield's book is that after the War Between the States, the white South, like other defeated peoples of the world, was and still is guilty of romanticizing its "Lost Cause," which according to him was originally an elaborate and quixotic myth fabricated to give them hope, enabling them to get through hard times then and now. The act of remembering brings the past into the present but this process inevitably alters the facts and is usually different from what actually went down. The dark reality of the matter, Dr. Goldfield explained to us all, is that despite the fact that Southerners fought bravely on the battlefield their cause was the worst in the history of civilization because they were defending slavery. That's what the war was really about. All this other fluff about states' rights, honor, nobility, and the purity of women that still plagues our section is nothing but a series of dangerous neuroses covering a guilty countenance that cannot face the truth.
Dr. Goldfield really didn't have anything new to say. We've been having this shoved down our throats for 150 years. People like him have been trying to make a profit from the race card ever since the War. A fairer and more objective appraisal might have added that the North has been just as guilty of romanticizing its cause. Dr. Goldfield's speech was a prime example. Wars aren't started for altruistic humanitarian reasons. They are started over clashing economic interests. There was no federal income tax before the war and 95% of federal revenue came from tariffs. When the South seceded, they dropped Lincoln's 47% tariff on all foreign goods to 10%. In my opinion, this is a more realistic cause of the war than any other. The North could not compete with that rate.
I would suggest furthermore that the victors also have the burden of justifying the use of aggressive force to the rest of the world especially when one's reputation honors the principle of government by consent which was blatantly disregarded in 1861 by the Lincoln administration. There was nothing in Dr. Goldfield's talk about the legitimate concerns that the South had about maintaining an equilibrium of power between the sections. It was all about slavery, Goldfield insisted, "just look at the speeches of the Southern leaders."
Sir, we know what is in those speeches. We've read them many times. You and your ilk, however, still cannot get it through your heads. No one is denying that slavery was an issue that North and South were arguing over. What the South was afraid of, though, was that if the North continued to gain power within the Union then increasingly decisions would be made with or without Southern support. The South was fighting for the right to handle its own problems, slavery included. What they didn't want was somebody such as yourself, coming down from the North or out of an academic ivory tower to con wistful romantic platitudes about the brotherhood of man without any real knowledge of the actual problem. The well documented corruption of the Grant administration after the War and the exploitation of both the white and black South during Reconstruction were clear testaments to antebellum southern concerns about losing control within the union.
Despite his 'inclusive' rhetoric, Dr. Goldfield represents forces that are inimical to not only the South's heroes but to American heroes as well. The slave issue is being used to castrate the founding generation of this country. He seemed glad that a school in New Orleans has discarded the name of George Washington for an African American and that a laser vision of Martin Luther King, Jr is now imposed over Robert E Lee on the side of Stone Mountain. Yet though we all have a holiday for Martin Luther King, no respect is accorded to General Lee, whose birthday falls on the same day. By choosing one, the other is apparently negated so I cannot see how his vision is any more embracing. I do know, though, that Dr. Goldfield enjoys the popular support of an academic establishment and that he gets paid to say what he says. Then it all makes sense.
We've known you for a long time, Dr. Goldfield. The face of Leviathan always wears a humanitarian mask. And I can promise you, sir, that as long as you "slick fellers from the city" continue to come down here with your half-baked theories and "dollah chasin'" ways, we in the South will 'still be fighting the war.'
Dr. Goldfield really didn't have anything new to say. We've been having this shoved down our throats for 150 years. People like him have been trying to make a profit from the race card ever since the War. A fairer and more objective appraisal might have added that the North has been just as guilty of romanticizing its cause. Dr. Goldfield's speech was a prime example. Wars aren't started for altruistic humanitarian reasons. They are started over clashing economic interests. There was no federal income tax before the war and 95% of federal revenue came from tariffs. When the South seceded, they dropped Lincoln's 47% tariff on all foreign goods to 10%. In my opinion, this is a more realistic cause of the war than any other. The North could not compete with that rate.
I would suggest furthermore that the victors also have the burden of justifying the use of aggressive force to the rest of the world especially when one's reputation honors the principle of government by consent which was blatantly disregarded in 1861 by the Lincoln administration. There was nothing in Dr. Goldfield's talk about the legitimate concerns that the South had about maintaining an equilibrium of power between the sections. It was all about slavery, Goldfield insisted, "just look at the speeches of the Southern leaders."
Sir, we know what is in those speeches. We've read them many times. You and your ilk, however, still cannot get it through your heads. No one is denying that slavery was an issue that North and South were arguing over. What the South was afraid of, though, was that if the North continued to gain power within the Union then increasingly decisions would be made with or without Southern support. The South was fighting for the right to handle its own problems, slavery included. What they didn't want was somebody such as yourself, coming down from the North or out of an academic ivory tower to con wistful romantic platitudes about the brotherhood of man without any real knowledge of the actual problem. The well documented corruption of the Grant administration after the War and the exploitation of both the white and black South during Reconstruction were clear testaments to antebellum southern concerns about losing control within the union.
Despite his 'inclusive' rhetoric, Dr. Goldfield represents forces that are inimical to not only the South's heroes but to American heroes as well. The slave issue is being used to castrate the founding generation of this country. He seemed glad that a school in New Orleans has discarded the name of George Washington for an African American and that a laser vision of Martin Luther King, Jr is now imposed over Robert E Lee on the side of Stone Mountain. Yet though we all have a holiday for Martin Luther King, no respect is accorded to General Lee, whose birthday falls on the same day. By choosing one, the other is apparently negated so I cannot see how his vision is any more embracing. I do know, though, that Dr. Goldfield enjoys the popular support of an academic establishment and that he gets paid to say what he says. Then it all makes sense.
We've known you for a long time, Dr. Goldfield. The face of Leviathan always wears a humanitarian mask. And I can promise you, sir, that as long as you "slick fellers from the city" continue to come down here with your half-baked theories and "dollah chasin'" ways, we in the South will 'still be fighting the war.'
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